SKILL ISSUE: Communiqués & Kompromat 1
We got video game unionisation mentioned in parliament before GTA VI?!
Welcome to Skill Issue, the newsletter for the ravers, gamers, haters and the late-rendering textures. We know we’ve been absent, but we haven’t seen your latest issue out either tbh. What have you been doing? Being merry at least, we hope.
Well this time, we’re gonna just serve up one little slither of content for you. Yer average substack slop, really; vaguely personal, usually about a hot topic functioning between the level of a too-long tweet and a wistful and hopeful message scrawled on some dried plant husk from a deserted island, pushed into a bottle and thrown into the indifferent waves.
In fact, lets call these vertical slices something like Skill Issue: Communiqués and Kompromat. More room for one idea that may not fit into our usual smorgasbord. Not long enough for you to really start questioning everything, but long enough for everything to raise interesting questions. Expect more of this format as the tides of fate throw us ever off course and we are forced to rebrand shrinkflation as actually a good thing.
It does mean we are both free to post bits and bobs whenever we feel like now, which is what the original plan was, but the issue format is actually just too fun to put together with a mate, so it meant sitting on bits and cutting extra reviews. Anyway, the mainline S.I. will continue as long as we aren’t Irradiated, it may just continue to be published erratically. We hope you had a non-shit christmas, and if it was bad, it most probably was not your fault and you did as good as you could <3.
We’ll get to all the round up shite before 2026 (debatable) 👀 So as you mull over which of your presents to vinted first, here’s the first and last SI:CK of 2025 !
Spec Ops: Way Over the Line
As you unwrap the small reflections of your perceived personality this yule, spare a thought for your poor hobbies. Are hobbies doing okay ? It’s not just your lack of time to put into them, they seem to be growing further and further out of reach financially. Hobbies, much of which can be enjoyed for as close to free as you’re imagination allows are now captured by secondary financial markets. Adults have regressed into their make believe worlds and cardboard artefacts while the dwindling population of Children are sent to work in the Roblox mines, run a premier league troll account or operate a Minecraft server to pay for their parents card pack addiction.
Nowadays music demands a monthly fee, unless of course you listen to a radio like a quaint, subservient grub. Your personal algorhythm is much better than a DJ with twenty years of ongoing music discovery and defined tastes, not to mention worth every penny (those wrapped graphics aren’t going to prompt themselves)! Yes, maybe some of the artist are totally fake and some AI generated tracks may be maliciously uploaded under other artists names to leech streams. It's true, swathes of catalogues are ultimately owned by private equity now, and the artists who do exist and do make original music obviously don’t make any meaningful income from it, but at least you’re doing your part funding the future BRICS NATO conflict.
DJs now, by and large, learn digitally through controllers or the cheapest rung of “CD”J capable boxes, not through belt drives and a bag for life full of eurotrance and Tijuana brass compilations. Instead of incentivising younger people to pick up records, chuck em around, figure out what (not) to do with them, labels by and large justify printing records by creating coloured, embossed and double priced special editions – meant to be treated as object first.
Your regular dance 12’ are regularly well over a tenner each now, rap albums often £50+ new. No more 3 for £10 days or even 2 for 15. We can only hope that the over printed house and techno of the 2000-2016 era will eventually reach the hands of budding gen alphas before they are encased by Aoki and his goons and auctioned off to a randomly picked boredape holder.
Music making and its performance is shielded by the fact that those truly compelled to create will find a way, often the lack of equipment or institutional knowledge is the actual reason they’re worth listening to in the first place. There is always a mentor out there with *some* access to something, plus lone wolf tinkerers willing to revive discarded bits and bobs. That’s the good stuff anyway.
But for those trying to regularly watch your favourite artists is a pursuit now only for the totally insane (“always was 🔫” etc.). We have covered the monopolistic practices that plague the industry many times here but we’re now unironically at the point of having to use TOR to book tickets. Ticketmaster has recently made users sign a ‘no class action lawsuit’ clause before buying tickets, surely it can’t get worse? Live Nation’s CEO begs to differ, recently quoted saying tickets are still ‘underpriced’ after rising 32% in 5 years. The post covid yearning to experience things in a crowd has been well and truly rinsed already and prices are not coming down.
Take the price of supporting a top-flight team. As premier league teams revenues have exploded due to increased international television rights, so has the price to see your team play, creating the perverse scenario where a lowlife in Cincinnati (you heard me, Aaron) can watch every single match live on TV (not possible here) for a fraction of the cost if a fan here bought and in bids to attract the always lucrative jetset crowd aka Aaron Moitié-Moitié, match days have often become unrecognizable experiences for people used to Bovril and a fist fight at full time. Fireworks, light shows, loaded chili fries - the yankification of football is almost complete. Alan Shearer twitches in a corner mumbling about xG’s, we’ve lost.
Sports fans are as captive an audience as you can hope for, the most dependable cash cow willing to watch and spend on a woeful team as much as winners, and forever being squeezed for it as a reward. Kits being split into ‘fan’ and ‘match day’ tiers guaranteed to have caused tears and overdrafts on Christmas. Lower leagues do a lot better at encouraging young people into the sport or supporting, but are not immune from this international financing fuckries.
Birmingham City [currently 9th in the championship at time of writing] are pitching to build the incredible late-stage edifice [above], perfectly conveying the complete lack of modern landmarks or signifiers by repurposing the brick chimneys that Dibnah took such care bringing down. The stacks now funneling the interlinked clouds of contactless cards to self-service terminals, powering the club and thus the stadium. Elsewhere, the American owners of Sheffield United thought it would be a good idea to propose a merger with the currently ownerless, bottom of the table and bitterly hated local rival Sheffield Wednesday. Well, at least Preston are above Wrexham in the Championship.
Other hobbies aren’t so sheltered from rising costs. Comics right now are going through a massive industry upheaval and publishers are grappling with the fact that kids in general don’t give a fuck about comics any more. It can’t be that comics haven’t given a fuck about kids since maybe the 90s, no it is the children who are wrong.
The comic boom in the 90s seemingly froze its target market in place, leading to a constant peddling of 80s & 90s storylines and heroes, not just in comics but seemingly all of the western male psyche. Major tie ins and reboots in both DC and Marvel more and more reached towards lofty intellectual tones and grounded or dour themes, fine and all but what we’re left with is a market that has shed any idea of being a large print business, instead of trying to expand readership, they instead incentivize the secondary market through limited cover prints and variants.
This with the rise in comic graders like CGC, graded or slabbed comic books has lead to a massive boom and bust situation, one which has recently seen the historically de facto comic distributor Diamond distribution go bankrupt, with publishers such a dynamite and omni press being owed millions in lost product and payments. Three new distribution streams have appeared now, publishers crave the market buzz of a special event to justify bigger and subsequent print runs, and shops needs hype around these upcoming events or new number one issues to keep afloat (and also buy all the issues they had to purchase in order to unlock one 1:500 ratio cover variant to sell on ebay) and this all leaves readers trying to catch up with which number one should you begin with and what parts of stories and events are cannon or matter at all even out of the seventeen tie-ins that are required for the complete collected story, and as is the case with many variants which feature no one from the story inside, “What the fuck am I even reading?”.
That’s not to mention the cover prices. Long gone are even the days of £2 comics, they also are approaching 5-7 per issue (more for special issues), making keeping up with multiple runs (pull lists being historically the life blood of a lot of shops) practically impossible to people in low paid jobs, let alone younger people. The next craze is the ‘blind bag’ where the comic book is contained in a sealed bag (pokemon style) so you’re not sure which special variant you get (so you may as well buy five!).
There are digital or ‘infinite’ comics on the marvel app, which are definitely aimed squarely at getting the younger audience drawn into the medium, but it’s obvious with the vertical layout and scrolling action used to read them, they aint trying to convert them to the paper funny books. As we have mentioned on SI before, DC are making strides with the DC compact formats, their sales steadily growing and demand soaring with the incredibly popular new Absolute DC universe . Contrary to popular thinking people still want to read books, but companies want the guaranteed bucks of a dwindling, and terminally ageing speculators. Some stories will just have to wait until found in a bargain bin.
Maybe the nucleus of all this rampant speculation is the fact that many people in finance and venture capital may themselves have been children at one point, and a lot of millennial people in finance will have fond memories of the toys and music and cards of their youth. Moreso even than financial products, Cards - specifically Sports, Magic, and Pokemon - are the grandaddies of all this recent speculation explosion. Card games are rife with the sort of speculation that would make a 450 year old dutch vampire weep, and have instilled a zealous pursuit of first edition shiny’s into the generation who reached adulthood as the myth of money was first totally exposed.
Pokemon card release days cause black Friday type random encounter fights between Amazon Drop ship bro’s and botnet resellers, neither parties even open packs and mostly sell to tik-tok Slop-Jocks who spend 8hours ripping packs open for people to like and pay for. Not much fucking *playing* going on ! In fact, playing with the card in any way completely destroys the value of the card. People are routinely flipping memecoin money and storing it into unopened boxes of Pokémon cards as the returns are more stable (a totally insane, but factual sentence to say). This is 21st century gains my boy, not a game to be enjoyed with friends !
With the release of 34 variants of Diary of a Showgirl [with at least eight vinyl variants] Former 4channer and billionaire music lawyer Taylor Swift not only unlocked a new exploit to obliterate the chart competition on launch day with her Gotta Catch’em all collection, but has no doubt ushered in an era of trading card vinyl. Everything is gambling now, even buying an album. We are already in the perverse situation where the bloated modern #streamingfirst albums are put out on vinyl missing half the tracks, the Carter VI from earlier this year being an especially egregious example.
I wonder how pissed off artists like Beyonce are when their team tells them that a load of her carefully crafted tracks are going to be cut from the physical record. Do they even give a fuck? We can’t be far away from hearing about the new ‘incomplete’ album from El Kestrelss, a Pitchfork and Halliburton backed acoustic psychobilly act, With a tracklist over 100 songs but only 10 included per-record and sealed in a blindbag printed with only its metacritic rating, fans are compelled to keep buying the record until the track they like is on the release.
What about LEGO, i hear you weep. Definitely just about still a child’s toy but also the number one thing cohabiting couples use to decorate the boys nook. If your partner is in a cushty mid-tier email gig, and *NOT* home by 6.30 to fix his character positions on his Rivendell LEGO set, you may have cause to worry. LEGO has become the de facto stocking filler for 20-40 year olds and again in a chicken or egg scenario, it’s not really because we asked it to be? They sell dioramas now and kids famously think dioramas suck.
You spent how much on the LEGO Himeji Castle? Little Jasper doesn’t even understand the concept of Japan let alone appreciate late Sengoku architecture?? The new ‘Death Star’ is barely a death hoop, being a D.K. book single slice of the innards. Cool in a Polly Pocket kind of way but when I tell you it’s £800 who do you think is going to be fettling with this monstrosity? I’d be surprised if more than half of these ever leave their box.
The world is rapidly waking up to the fact that money is not entirely as real as we were always led to believe, some have known this for a while, mostly those people who spend a lot of time working out how to create more fictional money out of the money they theoretically have. They’re the ones buying up your hobbies, for a fair few decades now.
The smart money is on physical things. AI is increasingly muddying all digital waters with surface noise and vulnerabilities; many people want to bite on their golden nuggets again for themselves. Hobbies are largely people making fun out of nothing, an infinite fun glitch humans can opt into at any time. Hard to monetise imagination and spontaneity but damn it, why not give it a go. If hobbies can’t be monetized further than the purchase of the items you need to join in, the only lever to crank is the price of entry.
Gaming, ever at the forefront of taking the piss out of its biggest fans, has been perfecting the games as a service model over the last decade, making paying full price for broken, unfinished games not a last gasp tactic from a studio on the verge of bankruptcy, but a viable business model. If the game needs another two years but your burn-rate is through the roof, simply release the mess with big fanfare showing all the features that are two years away, and spend half the PR budget on scripting the perfect apology and a plausible roadmap (back to where the advertising had originally promised).
You don’t own your games, a feature which permeates music and video as well. How many different versions of Skyrim have you got? They’re all the same version, they just sit in a different box on a spreadsheet, unlocked when you plug in your WiiU to check on your infinite wheel of cheese save. The digital versions of games are exactly the same price as physical discs, despite the lack of shop margins, materials, or logistics. This is industry practice.
Skins spawn their own insidious aftermarkets, digital items are being hoarded and speculated on. The monthly game subscription has also absolutely gutted the physical industry, making it harder for midsized games to make a dent and harder for physical shops to survive at all, further silo’ing players into online rental ecosystems (..or back to piracy). Indie games, much like in the music space, universally struggle with the democratisation of self publishing, surviving solely on the potluck of viral streaming clips and online word of mouth campaigns to make any kind of impact or financial return.
This, for popular culture enjoyers of any stripe, is all on top of the fact that Adverts are being forced into many of the subscription models they already pay for. Spotify injects adds to premium subs. Same for Netflix. Same for Amazon. Samsung are injecting adverts in their smart fridges that are giving people nervous breakdowns, and Ford has patents for scanning passing billboards and beaming a small version of them to your car.
The only thing we can do is hope that the clamour for AI mean the gaze of Sauron’s market eye gets too preoccupied with building an extinction-level threat to care about our fun stuff. We can definitely hoard stuff for sure, keeping a nice collection of whatever it is you’re into is a pretty historically human thing to do. We have to stop replacing perfectly working kit, for next years models - we can surely hold out longer than their earning reports can. Or, if you still have some semblance of joy and spark left, find people to give your stuff to.
Never throw away fun old technology, give it to someone you know. I dunno, make a shared Plex server or something for your family and friends, introduce them to Full Metal Alchemist or whatever, you lovely gregarious mega weeb. Don’t fucking buy Abbey Road or Rubber Soul at big Tesco. If you’re going to buy special editions of records, buy from a local indie shop or at a gig obviously. Do NOT buy BOXES of ANY trading cards to put in a cupboard. FINISH YOUR GAMING BACKLOG! Support your local non-league team. Think twice about that next Livenation ticket, support a local venue instead and at least give the maybe not-so-terrible band playing a few songsworths of your precious time.
We should walk out of any shop that has introduced dynamic pricing, especially a Northern Quarter experience bar. Look after the things you want to keep, but also enjoy them, take them out to play/read otherwise you are only turning your room into a very niche, badly guarded vault. Never be afraid to talk about a hobby, they aren’t weird, it’s not your account pin. They are what make people interesting.
Hang on to what you truly want to pass down however, Chances are by the time people born today are grown, everything not personally inherited will only be available bugged and tracked via lease from the local G4S Leisure allocation branch, possibly already is. Feels a lot like the endgame. Start ticking off your fallout shelter library list because if we don’t blow ourselves up first, they may just stop making anything other than a completely virtual reality very soon. Yes, this all could stem from bitterness about trading in my Gamecube as a teen.
That’s it for now, folks. As ever, start with a half, always check behind waterfalls and:
CW - SI:CK1