Letter from the Editor — July 2016

Greetings, and wel­come to the first is­sue of SuperNerdLand! I start­ed this out want­i­ng to catch you up on what’s been go­ing on around these parts, and in­tro­duce you to the new mag­a­zine for­mat for some of our con­tent. Then I no­ticed I was prac­ti­cal­ly rewrit­ing parts of my site news from yes­ter­day. So I say, go catch your­self up on that be­low. I’ll catch you on the oth­er side of the break!

Hello guys and gals! Little bit of a hol­i­day up­date for you this week­end. As every­one is off en­joy­ing cook­outs and fire­works, we are putting the fin­ish­ing touch­es on some­thing that we’ve talked about a lit­tle, but would like to an­nounce all formal-like!

But first a lit­tle bit of up­dates on the more per­son­al side. You may have no­ticed June was a tad more qui­et for us, not count­ing the amaz­ing folks at the Back Issues pod­cast putting out week­ly, and Mike with his ridicu­lous but hi­lar­i­ous OG-Chan. We’ve had con­trib­u­tors like my­self and Darrell mov­ing and work­ing more, folks tak­ing care of fam­i­ly and health is­sues, and just var­i­ous life stuff. We are all get­ting back in gear for sum­mer though, and part of it is the bit of change we are mak­ing to how we re­lease some of our content.

So what are we up to? Well, we are mov­ing some of our con­tent to a month­ly mag­a­zine style for­mat! There are quite a few rea­sons for this that I will touch on here, but go into more de­tail in our Letter from the Editor in our first issue.

We put on this show on a vol­un­teer ba­sis, so that also means work­ing out con­tent around work sched­ules, life stuff, health is­sues, etc. Being able to plan around a month­ly re­lease for­mat al­lows us to plot out qual­i­ty con­tent, and get more peo­ple on board. It also in­tro­duces dead­lines for peo­ple. Let’s face it, some peo­ple work bet­ter with hard dead­lines (my­self included).

We have also have ed­i­tors who were kind of just sit­ting on their thumbs when it came to work to edit due to how quick­ly I would just churn out folks ar­ti­cles when they came to me. Instead of both­er­ing any­one, I would nor­mal­ly just edit some­thing up in the morn­ing and re­lease it that day. Now we can ac­tu­al­ly work in the cou­ple of ed­i­tors we have that are ex­cit­ed to work on things.

And as we start to­get our bill pay­ing side of this op­er­a­tion up (an­oth­er thing for an­oth­er time) with our web ser­vices busi­ness that will fund SuperNerdLand, we can ac­tu­al­ly start bud­get­ing very well for month­ly is­sues when we build the bud­get for pay­ing con­trib­u­tors, com­mis­sion­ing art for cov­ers, etc.

And pure­ly from a geeky stand­point, I just plain en­joy push­ing a throw­back to en­thu­si­ast pe­ri­od­i­cals. When I’ve de­scribed SuperNerdLand to some peo­ple, I likened it to a fanzine of times past. We’re not the glossy, ma­chine bound, ad-filled mass mar­ket pub­li­ca­tions. We are the fanzine lov­ing­ly Xeroxed and sta­pled to­geth­er to send out to au­di­ence that ap­pre­ci­ates a no-BS, man on the ground, ap­proach to look­ing at an in­dus­try we all love.

Moving to a “web mag­a­zine” style for­mat for some of our con­tent is per­fect for our cur­rent state.

It’s not to say all of our con­tent will be slid­ing into a month­ly for­mat. We will still have more time­ly ar­ti­cles com­ing out when the top­ic is more hot — that just makes sense. We will also keep on with the twice week­ly re­leas­es of OG-Chan, and week­ly re­leas­es of the Back Issues pod­cast. Otherwise, we are go­ing to be pour­ing our nor­mal amount of ex­ces­sive love into the month­ly releases!

I want to leave you as I nor­mal­ly do, with my heart felt thanks for join­ing us crazy peo­ple as we push our lit­tle ex­per­i­ment in qual­i­ty con­tent. I do feel com­pelled to apol­o­gize for the more qui­et month of con­tent, but I have to say… we are only get­ting started.

So we are gear­ing up for a great sec­ond half of 2016. I’m re­al­ly ex­cit­ed about be­ing able to work in more con­trib­u­tors and ed­i­tors with the month­ly is­sue based work­flow, and I’ve nev­er seen peo­ple so ex­cit­ed to edit articles!

While I still have you here, I want to men­tion a bit of de­tails on a cou­ple things.

First off is the idea of our “Pack-in” game with each is­sue. There are tons of full fea­tured free games on­line, as well as demos for amaz­ing games out there. Our goal here is to get a lit­tle fo­cus on the games we play that you can get for noth­ing. There is no agree­ments or part­ner­ships made by peo­ple, we won’t ever take mon­ey for fea­tur­ing a game here (so don’t even send the emails, PR peo­ple), and we are go­ing to avoid the games of peo­ple we know per­son­al­ly. This is pure­ly a way to high­light great free games or game demos for ti­tles that we en­joy ourselves.

The next thing I want to add a bit of de­tail on is the we plan to fund SuperNerdLand in the fu­ture. We are ded­i­cat­ed to pro­vid­ing a qual­i­ty, ad-free ex­pe­ri­ence for every­one. And we want to con­tin­ue that in the fu­ture, as well as grow. You can’t do that in a vac­u­um, and while we do ap­pre­ci­ate every­one who do­nates to us via Paypal or Patreon, it should­n’t be up to the au­di­ence to foot qual­i­ty con­tent and jour­nal­ism. Traditionally, news was some­thing fund­ed nom­i­nal­ly at a loss, and re­gard­ed as a pub­lic ser­vice. Just be­cause main­stream news has aban­doned this prin­ci­ple, does­n’t mean it can’t be ap­plied today.

So we are go­ing to be start­ing up a web ser­vices com­pa­ny (main­ly cen­tered around WordPress host­ing, de­vel­op­ment, and ser­vic­ing), as a way to start to fund SuperNerdLand for big­ger and bet­ter things in the fu­ture. A set amount of mon­ey gen­er­at­ed by the web busi­ness will fund SuperNerdLand, and that way we can grow and keep in­de­pen­dent do­ing what we love. When the busi­ness comes up, we are go­ing to put up a set of dis­clo­sure and re­cusal poli­cies for this. To give the short ver­sion, though, we will sim­ply re­cuse our­selves from cov­er­ing any­body we hap­pen to do web busi­ness with. We are also go­ing to fo­cus on clients that do not in­ter­sect with our ar­eas of cov­er­age, and will keep a no-cross wall be­tween what gen­er­ates mon­ey, and what gets cov­ered at SuperNerdLand.

This is­n’t the only way to fund qual­i­ty me­dia these days, but we feel it is one of the best ways for us to keep grow­ing while stay­ing in­de­pen­dent. We are here to serve you qual­i­ty con­tent, not serve as a mega­phone for PR. It’s not that PR, and PR folks are in­her­ent­ly bad. We just typ­i­cal­ly have dif­fer­ent job descriptors.

I’ll stop bor­ing you with site de­tails now, and let you get on with the rest of the great con­tent in SuperNerdLand Issue One! Stay ex­cel­lent out there everyone.

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Josh Bray

Josh has worked in IT for over 15 years. Graduated Broadcasting school in 2012 with a fo­cus on A/V pro­duc­tion. Amateur pho­tog­ra­ph­er with a pas­sion to make things work… by any means nec­es­sary. Editor-in-Chief and do-er of tech things at SuperNerdLand

Latest posts by Josh Bray (see all)

• Free Pack-in Game of the Month: Heidelberg 1693 — June 1, 2019
• Coming Down the Pike – June 2019 Game Releases — June 1, 2019
• Letter from the Editor (June 2019) — June 1, 2019