Hello! I’ve been off Twitter for a bit over a month now, and while it’s been great for my mental health it’s sort of jammed the part of my brain that could habitually post. I’ve been meaning to do this as a sort of “oh hey, I don’t tweet about things anymore, here’s what I like in an email instead” kind of thing for a couple of weeks but it’s just not quite come until now, right at the end of the month, for reasons I will absolutely not unpack in your inbox.
Anyway. Good Content was a thing I tried in my sporadic Substacks last year, and this year I’m going to do what I can to make them a more regular thing. Think of this as a #content diary, if you will, that’ll help future Avery remember what they liked eleven months down the line. Let’s start, shall we?
The Last of Us
I don’t think I should be impressed by The Last of Us. Naughty Dog’s thrice-released PlayStation game was something I loved ten years ago precisely because it felt like a high-budget TV show you could play, and for better or worse the show’s first two episodes have been a pretty faithful beat-for-beat recreation of the game.
But I am impressed, damnit. Maybe it’s because video game adaptations have been middling at best, but The Last of Us leaps over that low bar, with a fantastic cast and a clear understanding of the tension that comes both with enemy encounters and straight up surviving the post-apocalypse. As I write this I’m only two episodes in, but it has me desperate for new episodes in a way no TV show in a long time has.
The Last of Us airs on Mondays in the UK, and is available wherever you get HBO
Vampire Survivors
This game passed me by until it hit other, better people’s 2022 Game of the Year lists, and I grabbed it on New Year’s Eve, passing it to my friends and to Markus. There’s something delicious about these kinds of games, of which Hades was the last one to really grab me; super straightforward to get into, super difficult to master, and incredibly satisfying when all the pieces fit together.
The title pretty much explains the gameplay; you have to survive vampires for 30 minutes, auto-attacking enemies with randomly picked weapons you level up as you go along. There’s lots of room for experimentation with your builds, and the coins you earn in game can be used to tilt the balance of the game in your favour (or further against you, if you’re into that sort of thing).
There’s not really such a thing as a single run of Vampire Survivors; once it gets you, it takes hold and you start to crave it. Oh wait I see what they did there-
Vampire Survivors is on iOS and Android, Steam, and Xbox Game Pass
The Great Pottery Throwdown
I grew up near Stoke-on-Trent, a city colloquially known as the Potteries for its history as the one-time centre of the ceramic world. It’s also where The Great Pottery Throwdown was filmed, and my parents were incredibly pleased to remind me of this when I watched it with them on a Christmas visit.
It is basically just The Great British Bake Off for pottery, but while its parent show has been going through a rough patch recently, Throwdown is a lot cosier, a little slower, and its judges (particularly the ever-weeping Keith Brymer-Jones) are keen to appreciate their contestants’ makes as works of art.
It is also kinda lovely to know that the site of several school trips for young Avery is now the home of an incredibly cosy TV series. It’s a small world, I guess.
The Great Pottery Throwdown streams on All 4 in the UK
January’s Playlist
I’ve been a bit up in my feelings this month, and that really shows in the January Good Screen playlist. Glaswegian sadboy Joesef - who I saw live when he supported Rina Sawayama in October - dropped a banger with his debut album Permanent Damage, and Arlo Parks’ first song from her follow-up to Collapsed in Sunbeams has me very excited.
Plus, y’know, it’s me, and I’ve been keeping an eye on some of the early Eurovision picks. It impresses me that Ukraine managed to hold a national selection this year — they did it in a Metro station! — but their winner, TVORCHI’s Heart of Steel, is a solid entry by the sort-of hosts. Here’s hoping I can find a way to see them in Liverpool…