T w e n t y S i d e d
Here we are. Halfway to fifty. That’s terrifying. Fifty is an age for old people. I can’t be old people. Can I? It’s right there in my last name: NOT OLD!
Last year I was worried I might have glaucoma. I finally got around to making that eye doctor appointment I talked about. It turns out I’m fine. I’ve just got a really goofy, non-standard optic nerve.
This wasn’t a bad year. I was nominated for a Hugo award, became a finalist, and then didn’t win. While a win would have been a nice boon, I’m thrilled any time recognition for my work reaches beyond this humble site.
I released Good Robot. It wasn’t a huge success, but it felt good to bring a project all the way to market. Also, I can now go around calling myself an indie game developer, and I’m told that’s really hip with the young people or whatever.
My oldest daughter RachelYou might recognize her as the one who edits the podcast. moved out this year. That’s a bit of an emotional gut-punch, but it’s gratifying to see someone I helped make turn into a capable, confident, motivated adult with goals and skills.
I lost my weekly column at The Escapist. I loved that gig. They were easy to work with and it paid well. A lot of you folks pitched in on Patreon to help soften the blow. Have I said thanks recently? No? Well thanks. I love being able to keep up with basic needs like food, shelter, broadband internet, and graphics hardware.
So goes another year for me. Also Happy Birthday to Stephen Fry, Hideo Kojima, and John Green.
Footnotes:
[1] You might recognize her as the one who edits the podcast.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Please Help I Can’t Stop Playing Cities: Skylines
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Hardware Review
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
Quakecon 2012 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Congrats! Have a good one, Shamus :)
Happy birthday, Shamus. (Side note: Chrome really wants to autocorrect your name. Apparently “Shamus” isn’t a valid English word. Really, with the amount I visit your site, it should recognize that one).
I used to go to EscapistMagazine.com, but your column eventually became the only thing I was interested in, so now I just come here. Thanks for keeping the site alive. I really enjoy your thoughtful and critical way of examining everything.
You can’t leave us hanging like that. What, pray tell, does it want to correct “Shamus” TO?
Shames? Slams? Smarmy? Spamhaus? Seamus? Samus? Shamoose? Shampoo?
It’s probably Shamoose (being the North American app that it is), but I wanted to be sure.
Edit: Yes, I could check myself, but where’s the fun in that?
Happy birthday, Shamus! Thanks for all the hard work you do to make this website the wonderful place it is!
Uh, Shamus, 25 is halfway to 50. You’re 9/10ths of the way to 50.
I understand you old guys have trouble with math sometimes.
Thanks for saying this. Because I was about to. :)
“You passed the halfway mark 20 years ago, dude…” :)
Right, but life begins at 40.
I can’t wait for life to begin.
“Right, but life begins at 40.”
And promptly ends at 41. You get one good year, make the most of it!
40 was when the aches and pains really started to set in.
It’s about the time you start reading all those articles about “I stopped eating X and I feel 100% better!” And you try it. AND IT ACTUALLY WORKS.
And then you’re like ZOMG I can never eat anything that tastes good ever again.
Yeah Shamus, I’m half way to 50, you’re half way to 90, happy birthday!
Did you go to KC, to take part in the ceremony?
If you did, I seem to have missed you completely (not surprising, there were quite a few people milling about).
Happy birthday, and many glad returns.
Happy Birthday, Shamus Old!
Your present took a while to arrange, but with a little elbow grease, I managed to take my internet down for two weeks and then not prepare today’s post on time. On the surface it might look like I didn’t have enough of a buffer, but in reality I was just ensuring your 45-year reflection got the prime spot it deserved. To preserve the surprise, I didn’t warn you about it.
Other gifts I got you:
-Didn’t send you a copy of the Fallout 4 expansion content
-Didn’t sing in any of the recent Spoiler Warning episodes very much
-I will be young forever
-Bought myself a burrito
No need to thank me. That’s just what friends are for.
*Shamus Olde!
You’re welcome.
Happy Birthday Ye Olde Shamoose.
Great, now I have to return this non-copy of the fallout 4 expansion content. Just couldn’t limit yourself to one gift, huh Rutskarn? Does your generosity know no bounds?
So, now I’m curious. Is Shamus…
* More than 2 Rutskarns old?
* Exactly two Rutskarns old?
* Less than two Rutskarns old?
Place ya bets, place ya bets…
Edit: Grr…stupid “s” in my name!
Rutskarn was, I think, born in 1991, meaning that Shamus is slightly less than 2 Rutskarns old.
So he’s actually getting younger. Shamus, this is the math you should be using. We’re all getting younger in units of Rutskarn.
I don’t remember how, but at one point I deduced that Rutskarn is a year younger than I am; I’m currently 25, so he’s probably around 0.5 Shamuses old.
Is he a Rutskarn + a Mumbles old?
Shamus hasn’t been a Rutskarn plus a Mumbles since he was 35 back in 2006. Mumbles would have been 20 and Rutskarn would have been 15. I believe this was at least a couple of years before they met.
This is based on something Mumbles recently said on Spoiler Warning plus the comment above about Rutskarn’s birth year.
I had a little more detail but I don’t know how much info its cool to post about the Diecast. I understand saying something on a podcast is a little safer than putting something in text.
All of this is great information, but the *real* question is how many Sids long the room happens to be… Or perhaps how many Rutskarns. That may be acceptable. :-P
African or European Sids?
I’m a few years less-old than Shamus, but I’ve decided to steal a march and go ahead and self-describe as ‘old’ from here-on-in.
There are plenty of benefits – you’re entitled to at least a modicum of respect whether earned or not, for reasons which I suspect are underexamined.
Youngsters have to listen to your long rambling tales which don’t go anywhere, and help out with any heavy things that need to be over there.
You get to say things like, “In my day…,” in tones which suggest you had personal involvement in and deserve partial credit for whatever rose-tintery you are rambling about.
And if you get bored – doesn’t matter where you are! – you can just take a nap…
Anyway, in Shamus’ case the respect is of course fully & richly deserved, so happy birthday, Young man!
My tales have been rambling for years! :P
I’m slightly younger than Rutskarn, and yet I still feel old because I freaking hate most of the new memes. What the hell is that caveman spongebob? Why is Harambe still a thing?
I’ve been self-describing as “an old man” since I was 16 and that was just over one Rutskarn ago.
Happy birthday, Shamus! Just wait, when you finally hit 50 I’m going to find some way of getting a bunch of other fans together and all singing YMCA for you*.
Young man! There’s no need to feel down, I said
young man! Pick yourself off the ground
Just to really twist the knife on how old you will be, and already are. Happy birthday!
*I realistically won’t be able to do this, but dammit, it’s a fun thought.
Fun fact: Students in college right now have never heard of YMCA.
I don’t believe you. They still play that stuff before junior high sports games and other similar events where the music is played by older people.
Except that most of the “older people” doing stuff like that are, themselves, young enough to have never really paid much attention to YMCA, because the group was before their time. It was, for them, just a thing that “old people” would play at sporting events and school dances while they were growing up. Lacking much emotional connection to it from their own upbringing, they are therefore far less likely to inflict it on a subsequent generation. Keep in mind that someone Shamus’ age – 45 – was only 7-8 years old when YMCA was released. Most people don’t start paying attention to current pop music very much until they’re 12-14, which means the youngest people who heard that song new on the radio and cared are now pushing 50.
I’m sure it still crops up sometimes, either when the person running the music actually did grow up in the 70s themselves or has a retro taste in music, but it’s fading into the rearview mirror at this point.
I see college students in Rush, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin T-shirts from time to time, so they are still definitely aware of some 70’s era music.
Those three are super groups, whereas YMCA was a bit of a one hit wonder, BUT its a one hit wonder that’s appeared in all sorts of pop culture references since then.
Now that I think of it, there was a time a few years ago when I was running a lecture demo and I made an arm gesture sort of like a Y. I made an off hand joke about the YMCA and several students laughed (it seemed like a genuine laugh, rather than a laugh so you get good grades kind of laugh, but I guess you never know).
How could you forget “In the Navy”? The band was a two-hit wonder, thank you very much!
Granted I know both songs mostly from “I love the 70s”, school dances, and bar/bat mitzvahs. I would say YMCA’s one of those standards DJs tend to pull out to get people dancing, but the only place I go with any sort of DJ uses Tunak Tunak Tun because it is a geek bar and they know their audience. (It’s the male space goat dance from WoW, and also entertaining to dance to). They also use “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” but that’s more singing along then dancing and singing.
Anyway, Happy Belated B-Day Shamus! And yeah, I’m halfway to 70 so you’re halfway to 90. May there be many happy years to come!
I’m three years older than Shamus, and I can assure you that “YMCA” was a thing well into our twenties at least. The year I got married, it was a perennial at weddings for some reason. (It closed out ours and at least one of my cousins’.)
That said, I certainly can’t say if it’s persisted into the consciousness of millennials. (Did it ever feature on that powerful vector for 20th century pop, “Glee”?)
Never bet on college students knowing anything at all.
They always played it at my primary school discos, so there’s that.
Happy birthday. Best of luck to Rachel, as well! I lived with my parents through college and only ended up moving out on my own a few years ago, and I just remember this heady mix of terrifying what-on-earth-am-i-doing and exciting muahaha-i-can-do-what-i-want.
Come to think of it, I still feel that way sometimes, lol.
Ah, those heady days of I-can-eat-all-the-bacon-I-want and Oh-God-why-did-I-eat-all-that-bacon.
Happy birthday Shamus! Hope you’ll have a great day. And remember, in front of the horrific vastness of the universe, we’re all very, VERY young, so don’t worry!
Cheers!
Happy birthday!!!!
Congratulations! Enjoy the day, and all the best!
As long as you don’t start replacing every colour in the house and the wardrobe with beige, you can’t be that old. Happy birthday!
P.S.: You should check your Steam account. :)
Congratulations! One more down, many more to go.
Happy birthday! I’m glad to hear your various creations are doing well; I think creating cool stuff is one of the best purposes a human being can turn themselves to if they’re fortunate enough to get to do so.
Also TIL that I am actually not the only human being in the world that is nearsighted due to a weird-shaped optic nerve.
As every year, I’m surprised to be in such good company on my birthday. Then again, it IS the best date to be born on ;)
Cheers!
Oh, Shamus, we’ve all thought of you as a grump old man for a long time now. Sometimes I’m surprised you aren’t shouting at me to get off of my own lawn.
Happy Birthday!
I will be 35 in less than two weeks. I hope I will never outgrow enjoying video games, just like you :)
Happy birthday. To the 90 and beyond!
Happy birthday. And thanks for all the content from last year !
Shamus, I really want to say how much I appreciate keeping the site up and running for as long as you did (though I wasn’t on as long as a lot of people), and how much of an inspiration you are to me. Your articles along with the Spoiler Warning content helped get me thinking a lot more about game design, culture, and overall just expanded the meaning of gaming to me beyond just a simple hobby. I also wouldn’t have discovered how awful Fallout 3’s plot actually is if it weren’t for you.
Happy 45 to you. I look forward to the stuff you have to put out in the coming year.
Wow you do have the same birthday as Hideo Kojima.
I think this means something.
Half Life 3 Confirmed!
Spoiler Warning: Metal Gear Solid?
REGINAAAAAALD!
SHAUUUUUUUUMUS!
HIND D?!
Happy birthday Shamus! Thanks for all of the posts.
When I read “i’m halfway, and i’m 45” I thought “wow, that’s a really good life plan, to live up to 90)))
Happy birthday, mr. Young, may you be well in all sides of life!
Hope that you are really at a halfpoint of your life. Or maybe even earlier that halfpoint!
Happy birthday Shamus, and remember, there are always people older than you.
Unless you’re the oldest person in the world. Either way, you’ve got something worth celebrating.
Happy b-day Shamus. Hope it’s a good one!
Thank-you for all these years of content, I’m looking forward to all the years of content to come.
Happy Ding Day!
happy birthday dude, as a present i offer ways to make fallout 4 a little less shit, its amazing what happens when they let fans fix their horrible broken mess isnt it? you should totally use the two still alive for the playthrough, resurrection was apparently using stolen assets and got removed. just wish i knew what they were.
http://imgur.com/gallery/E1ypL
Happy birthday, Shamus! Comfort yourself with the knowledge that no matter how old you get, Jeff Green is still going to be the oldest man in the video game industry.
Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday Mr. Young! You’re an inspiring figure to me, showing me I never need to “grow up”* and stop enjoying video games. May you live to be asking “But what do they eat??” for another 45 years or more!
*I’m 27, so I probably wasn’t going to if I hadn’t already, but anyway! Still inspiring.
Happy birthday! The last time you posted on your birthday, I was still young but now I’ve heard songs from my high school years on an oldie station, so I’m definitely old, and clearly catching up to you.
Happy birthday Shamus!
Happy birthday Shamus! May you always have an interesting game in your Steam queue to try.
I present you wishes of an enjoyable spawning anniversary! This blog has provided me with consistent entertainment for years, so thank you for that.
Happy Birthday Sir!
Here’s hoping the next 45 years are even better!
Grats! What talent are you picking?
I’m pretty sure he gets a Feat for this one…
Happy birthday! I feel immensely proud of your daughter, even though I don’t know her. I’m like six years older than her and I still haven’t left my parents’ basement. That stuff is harder than it sounds, especially for millennials these days.
I hope you get cool presents and a satisfying-but-not-overlarge slice of cake.
Happy birthday, sir – you’re a nifty person. : )
Happy birthday, strange man from interwebs!
It’s weird to migrate here from The Escapist, but with Jim, Bob, and you hopping off that ship (whether voluntarily or as a result of downsizing) there’s not much reason to frequent there for me anymore. Yahtzee would make an exception if his content didn’t somehow eventually make it to YouTube like everyone else’s.
It’s quite apparent to me now how much influence internet personalities can develop. It’s also apparent how much boats like the Escapist can rise or drop depending on the tide of personalities’ followings swelling by.
The pages on here and YouTube load faster, so that’s nice.
Happy Birthday!
I hear 90 is the new 50, so you’ll be a Young for a while now…
Happy birthday, Shamus! Thanks for all your awesome content. :)
Ahh, I remember my heady days of being 45. Up at six to go to work, in bed around 11, quick trip to the bathroom at 2. Some how I still found time to put off doing anything. I’m hitting the big 29 for the 18th time this year, so I know the struggles you are about to face. Waking up, doing, going to bed. Stay strong, it only stays the same, more or less.
Oh yeah, Happy Birthday and thanks for the everythings you do hear.
The first time you hit 29, you really were 29, so that’s “for x=1, age=29” or 29+x-1… if we set x to 18, but take into account that you’re hitting the 18th time “later this year”, your current age is 29+x-2 = 29+18-2 = 45… So congrats on remember the heady days of being 45? :)
I turn 46 (for the first time) near the end of September, myself, so I’m actually sincerely congratulating you because I barely remember 45 and I’m still experiencing it :)
More likely I suck at math. Using your formula, x=19. I may have to own up to 47 in September, the math of staying under 30 is getting too hard.
On the other hand, my the 29th anniversary of my 29th birthday is still a party I look forward to throwing.
End of September is a good time to turn 46, I may do it again in a few years. You know, when 90 is the new 87?
You’ve made the mistake of assuming he’s hitting 29 for the 18th time for the 1st time.
Fair enough!
Happy Birthday, Shamus! :) Here’s to another happy, young 45 at least
Happy birthday, Shamus! The intertubes would not be the same without your presence. :)
I hope I don’t end up depressing you, but that Hugo Award thing has essentially been, for me, a rage-giving gift that keeps on giving. Because, you see, you didn’t just not win … you were “No Awarded”, which means, essentially, that voters decided that if the choice was between giving you that award and not giving out any award at all, then they’d rather give out no award at all. The only possible justification I think of for that happening is that since you were nominated on the “Puppy” slate, and they couldn’t be bothered to actually, you know, READ your work or look into your background, and so the anti-Puppies mustered their forces to vote “No Award” on that basis alone, regardless of the quality of your work or actual association with anyone.
Which is ironic, since the whole Puppy movement at least justifies itself on the basis that people nominate and vote on the basis of concerns that aren’t strict quality. Nice job proving the point.
My anger only grows when I read various anti-Puppy personages crowing about how well they sifted the wheat from the chaff, or how well they filtered out the Puppy cronies from those who weren’t, to which my immediate response is “SHAMUS YOUNG you cun … try doctor!”.
It was bad last year — they “No Awarded” JIM BUTCHER, of all people — but after this year if I see a work that has “Hugo Winner” or “Hugo Nominee” on it, I will not read it, buy it, or brake if I see it crossing the street. (Actual PEOPLE are excluded from that last part [grin]). Except for all of this year’s Best Novel works and the short stories I can find online, because I’m ticked off enough to read them and judge them objectively to see if we can trust ANYONE in this whole debacle.
It sucks that you had to get caught up in all of this mess, and it sucks that just as I was starting to get back into reading new works again I can’t trust anyone’s opinion due to this garbage.
Honestly, I have never followed the Awards or anything about them and only even knew that Shamus didn’t win because he mentioned it somewhere, but let me just say that it sounds kinda weird, creepy and somehow humorous that there is a “puppy”-movement (which I doubt has much to do with young, cute dogs).
While I’m not going near the Puppy debate, in the hopes of easing a bit of your rage I’ll point out that my category did indeed have a winner instead of a No Award. The award went to one Mike Glyer.
I knew that already. It doesn’t help, because the main causes of my rage are: 1) that the voters-that-be somehow decided that you suck for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual quality of your work, which clearly doesn’t suck and 2) the people who want to take credit for that keep crowing about how good they are at judging quality, when they actually aren’t. Mike Glyer may well be a great fan writer, but since I don’t know him and since I already know that they AT BEST didn’t bother to actually read you, I can’t trust that assessment.
But I don’t blame you for wanting to stay out of this whole politicking mess. I would too, except that a) a number of blogs that I read on both sides of the divide keep talking about it and b) I’m looking for reasonable, trustworthy sources on what new science fiction and fantasy might be worth picking up, and all potential sources of that keep proving themselves non-trustworthy.
It’s possible that the Hugos are on a permanent decline in mainstream relevance, though it’s also possible that this is just one of the many historic fannish civil wars that eventually pass. (The first Worldcon ejected one group over politics. The two New York fan groups that did it had their own falling out so severe that one had in its constitution that members couldn’t also be a member of the other.)
In 1955 the forgettable They’d Rather Be Right won best novel in a year that featured Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, Doc Smith’s Children of the Lens, Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword (which among other things was a significant D&D influence), and The Fellowship of the Ring. The Hugos recovered.
As someone who doesn’t share the Sad Puppies’ tastes, deplores the Rapid Puppies full stop, but found the performance of the Puppies’ opponents deeply unseemly (I was at the awards ceremony; there was actual hissing at Vox’s name and cheers for the No Awards), I’m hopeful that there’ll come a time when the winds shift again. I’m made somewhat more optimistic by the fact that the Business Meeting is full of voting and process nerds (if you miss Robert’s Rules of Order from your Model UN days, it’s the place to spend your con mornings!) whose desire to make slates more difficult is clearly tempered by a commitment to fairness.
(The somewhat overcomplicated and probably-useless-but-basically-neutral new voting schemes passed, with a sunset clause; the calls for some sort of Strong Leader who could throw out the “obvious” bad apples came to naught. More details available at http://www.rachelneumeier.com/2016/08/26/changes-to-the-hugo-awards-process/ )
Given that, political winds shift, feuds die (when’s the last time you saw a fight between the New Wave and the old guard?), and the awards may recover. Or the mandate of heaven may pass to the Dragon Awards or some other newcomer. Or finding the Good Stuff may go back to the old method of finding people who share your tastes talking about it, which in principle should be easier online than it was in the days of fanzines and monthly review columns in Analog.
(Though I grant there hasn’t been a reviewer as reliable as, say, Spider Robinson used to be in ages.)
You can read the detailed results here: http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2016HugoStatistics.pdf
The hugo voter base in general do not like slates, which did indeed taint Shamus’s position, it especially does not help that the slate in question generally is focused on the creator’s micropress that frankly does not produce very good work. The No Award mechanism is specifically there to prevent Hugos being awarded to works that the voters don’t think are worthy of the award.
It is also worth noting that Theodore Beale/Vox Day (the creator of the slate Shamus was on) managed to get himself nominated for Best Editor (Long Form) and ended up with viewer votes than nominees, a pretty remarkable achievement.
As for Best Fan Writer, Shamus’s category Shamus ended up coming 5th, with about 30 move votes than nominations. Unfortunately even if the voting population had considered his work hugo worthy there are 3 other fan writers there that were more popular with the voters, even the slate voters.
For example Morgan Holmes (who blogs for Vox Day’s micropress Castalia House) came 4th, Jeffro Johnson (who appears to write about RPGs) got significantly more votes despite writing more niche content less frequently. He certainly talked about them a lot more in his social media which probably helped him.
Finally of course there is Mike Glyer who was by far the winner (with more than 4 times Jeffro’s votes). It really isn’t much of a surprise he won, he has been active in SF circles much much longer and had already won 10 hugos for his Fanzine and Fan Writing. Frankly he is incredibly tough competition in a pool of relatively weak nominees.
EDIT:
Also regarding Jim Butcher he is undeniably a popular author, but that does not mean his work is always award worthy. I enjoyed The Aeronaut’s Windlass but it wouldn’t have made my list.
I don’t really want to — and don’t really think Shamus wants us to — clutter up this post with detailed Hugo discussion, so I’ll just say that I wouldn’t have had a problem if Shamus had finished last among all the nominees … as long as he finished above “No Award”. If you want to discuss this more — at the risk of looking like I’m plugging myself — I invite you to go to my blog and comment on one of the two angry posts I made there about it (it would have been three but I ran out of time).
Leaving out whatever politics are going on over there, this really bugged me.
“Either A happens, or B happens, but that didn’t happen.” These are writing awards, right? That was the best wording they could use?
Hey Shamus. I just wanted to say that your work is pretty damn great and has very much influenced me, in many different regards. Reading “How I learned” even helped me do my job as a teacher better and honestly, it has shown me that weirdos like us, even when we have made a fundamentally bad life-choice, can eventually find happiness and a good, productive life.
So thank you.
Dammit! I do all this grinding week in and week out and you’re still ahead! Maybe it’s the distraction that this site provides that is keeping me away from grinding just enough that I can’t catch up? Well either way, happy birthday, and a heartfelt thank you.
Jamey
HAPPY BORN DAY!
BUT HOW CAN YOU BE BORN EVERY YEAR AND BE 45?
Congratulations on surviving another trip around the sun. Hurray.
This is what I get for not checking my feeds yesterday. Happy (belated) birthday Shamus!