Hey, remember when Windows 10 was going to be the last version of Windows? Well, Microsoft has different ideas. I’ve spent a few days fiddling about with Windows 11’s release preview — the same thing that’ll be offered to millions of PCs from October 5th — across a powerful gaming-focussed desktop and a 2-in-1 laptop-tablet hybrid that weighs less than half a kilo.

The short of it is that it’s very good, and that it’s pretty polished; let’s have a chat about how it is to look at, use, and touch.

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Modern Design, With Compromises

After an agonising two-year wait, the Eurovision Song Contest has rolled around again, with the Dutch hosts putting together an incredible display despite having a pretty rough hand dealt to them.

With a Eurovision hangover in full swing, it's time to talk about the real winners and losers of this international institution.

Winner: Italy

The first semi-final of the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest is just over a month away, and as the artists go full steam ahead recording their postcards and back-up recordings it's time to do what any good Eurovision-loving blogger-type person would do and make a listicle.

Last year, I talked about every single Eurovision entry -- all 41 songs!! -- and then the contest got cancelled, which left a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth. So let's keep it nice and simple this year: here's the four Eurovision songs I can't get out of my head, for your listening and reading pleasure.

And hey, if you like the idea of stuff like this hitting your inbox, why not subscribe? I talk about the stuff I'm into at least twice a month, and it's all designed to be a nice easy read.

March has been a pretty awful month, all things considered. As I write this we’re marking a year since the start of Britain’s first national lockdown (we’re currently still in our third), and as I mentioned in my last non-article update, this has not been a great month personally.

While I’m off work — and in theory can devote more time to these pieces — it’s also my partner’s birthday, and my periods off work on annual leave are spread thinly through the year, so my focus will be elsewhere.

There are things I’ve enjoyed this month, and I’m definitely going to write about them. Thing is, they’re basically all Eurovision things, and they’re better suited to some pieces I have in the pipeline for what I’m loosely describing as Eurovision season — that’s most of my pieces coming up through to mid-May, when the contest itself actually happens.

While I’m here — if you have particularly strong feelings on whether Three Things should drop in your inbox at the end of a month or the beginning of a new month, reply to this email or leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.

It’s Eurovision season, baby! 401 competing songs are headed to Rotterdam this May, even if the artists themselves might not be. To properly kick off Good Screen’s Eurovision Season, I’m answering questions about Eurovision — some of which I’ve come up with, and some of which are from my lovely Twitter followers.

Let the questions about the Eurovision Song Contest begin!

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Content Warning: This newsletter discusses the recent murder of Sarah Everard.

The last time I saw her, I had to walk my hairdresser to her car.

“Thank you for doing this for me,” she said, squeezing me in as her last appointment before a prolonged national lockdown. “It's just that there was an incident recently right outside here the other day, where this man grabbed an old lady to the point where she fell down.

“He said he was just asking her for something and she hadn't heard him but it shook her, and it really scared me. I've asked my other half to be here at the end of the day since then but he can’t be here this time.”

The day after this month’s Three Things went live, I found out that a friend and former Demon Media colleague had quite suddenly passed away. It’s been a lot to process, as death tends to be, and it’s meant that my brain has been basically anywhere other than on these silly little emails.

In short, you can expect there to be a gap in publishing for a bit while I a) carry on processing things while doing my full-time job for which I’m paid and b) figure out what I can actually motivate myself to write.

When I’m back in the writing zone, I do actually have some ideas! I’ve recently finished Disco Elysium and have ~thoughts~ about it.

I also want to get the ball rolling on some Eurovision pieces as we reach the point where there are 41 competing songs ready to go — a lot is different about Eurovision this year, but I appreciate there are Americans (and people who don’t hyperfocus on annual pan-European event television) in my audience, so I’m probably going to start with a brief explainer. If you have questions about it that you think I’d be good at answering, reply to this email or leave a comment.

February sure came and went, didn’t it? I was going to write a whole thing about the Big Things™ that happened in February but we’re hitting the part where nothing sticks in my mind anymore, so let’s just get to the Three Things.

Drag Race UK, Season 2

TV • BBC iPlayer (UK); WOW Presents Plus (Everywhere Else)

Let's preface this with a reminder that RuPaul is, basically, awful. I can't call Drag Race UK a Three Things Thing without acknowledging his persistent transphobia, the whole fracking thing, and the fact that he's never picked a plus-sized queen as a winner in 13 seasons of Drag Race US1.

Here we are again. Two weeks out from the deadline for entry submissions, the BBC has finally announced that our representative in Rotterdam will be… the guy who was supposed to be our representative for the cancelled 2020 contest.

The news was met by disappointment among Eurovision fans on Twitter, and who could blame them? Just a week earlier, a send up of Eurovision on Drag Race UK — broadcast on the BBC, no less! — became not only a ratings hit, but an honest-to-god chart success for the winning group. When you're given a fun little Eurovision entrée produced by MNEK, it's a little disappointing to find out your main course is… uh, John Newman’s brother.

It’s been 24 years since the UK won Eurovision, and we’ve gone at least a decade without a song of any quality. It’s also increasingly obvious that Auntie Beeb doesn’t want to put the effort in; James Newman’s entries are the result of the BBC essentially outsourcing the song choice to BMG.

February 3rd, 2021 marks the 12th anniversary of the day I joined Twitter. When I saw Twitter’s tastefully-designed “12” in my notifications tab, I had one overriding thought, which I characteristically tweeted:

A Twitter anniversary is a terrible thing for me. I joined the service when I was 13 years old. For the sake of historical context, we were about two weeks into Barack Obama’s first presidential term, Gordon fucking Brown was still British Prime Minister, Netflix’s biggest business was DVD rentals, and the first pandemic of my lifetime—remember Swine Flu?—was still a few months out.

All of this means it’s the home of an embarassing amount of cringe-inducing teenage Tweets (highlights of which I collected into a thread here), but it’s also a platform that’s shaped my life — for better or worse.

What a month January was, eh? We had a lockdown, a failed coup, an inauguration, a little bit of screwing over the rich, and two concurrent transatlantic series of Drag Race. It somehow felt like three months and two weeks all at once.

So here’s an antidote to the mad dash of last month; Good Screen’s Three Things. This is, as the title would suggest, three things — not necessarily new or zeitgeist-y — that I liked from the month in Content™, and that I recommend you check out.

I’m hoping this becomes a regular thing, but I live for feedback; reply to this email or leave a comment if you think it works or you’d like to see something else.

Cyberpunk 2077 hasn’t become my most-played game on Steam by accident; I honestly, unironically enjoyed a lot of it. Night City is gorgeous, Keanu Reeves’ turn as Johnny Silverhand is honest-to-god fun, and the game’s side quests have the kind of depth you’d expect from the studio that created The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

At the same time, it’s hard to call it a good game. For this edition of Good Screen, I want to talk about the things that’re on my mind after 46 hours in Night City.

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When you think of iconic public service brands in Britain, there are probably two places your head goes: British Rail and the National Health Service. The arrows of indecision and blue-and-white NHS have been in use for decades, yet both feel modern, and fit in perfectly to the contexts we find them in; road signs, lanyards, ticketing. They’re the faces of British pioneers, of systems that are the envy of the world, and that (well, at least in one case) promote the kind of flag-waving patriotism that puts them into Olympic opening ceremonies.

It’s in doing this for the world of broadcasting that designer Martin Lambie-Nairn—the man behind the personality 2s, the BBC One balloon, O2’s bubbles, and the original idea for Spitting Image—became an icon of modern design. In the wake of his death on Christmas Day, I want to kick off Good Screen talking about the works that will outlive him — two new, public service icons: Channel 4 and the BBC.

So, I guess I’m doing this.

Good Screen is my attempt to try and write these kind of articles on a regular basis for the first time since my old games blog Blue Sun went dark. It’s kinda terrifying!

I’m looking to deliver a fresh dose of #content to your inboxes roughly twice a month, though we’ll see if that can be sustained. You should totally subscribe! You totally don’t have to though no pressure ahhhh

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Say it with me: This year has been garbage. Trash. The absolute worst. Terrible, no good, very bad. Historically awful. It can go to hell.

This has been the year we’ve been cooped up indoors, actively paid not to go to work, keeping two metres away from friends and family right when we want to bring them in for a hug, and dealing with the cancellation of everything from football to Eurovision to Christmas.

Usually I grace my Twitter followers with an end-of-year thread of my favourite pop culture; frankly, this year my brain has been too scrambled to easily think of lists of top games, TV shows, albums, and films.

Instead, I want to do something a little different; I want to take some time to reflect on what got me through the slow, agonising, exhausting march history will remember as 2020. I hope that wherever you are, you have a peaceful, relaxing Christmas and New Year.