We're excited about our expanding coverage these days. (For those still hanging on for ScrapBookingNerd though, we aren't making any promises.)

Conventional wisdom says news websites need to stick with links, commentary, and quickie blurbs, but we've been committed to original reporting from the start.

This week we went a step further and published two in-depth feature stories. We're excited about both pieces. (Click on either link to read them.)



From Sam Machkovech's in-deep feature on Seattle's flourishing, but fragmenting computer games industry:

The busy, nearly incestuous cluster of game makers and publishers around town seems like a utopia. Surely, for example, they must hang out on the weekends for barbecues, D&D all-nighters, and gaming brainstorming sessions.

But not if traffic over the bridge is a nightmare. I’m only half joking. Fragmentation is a major issue for local games development, and geography is perhaps its mildest symptom. The enterpriseseattle.org study from 2007 found that roughly 78 percent of the area’s game makers work outside Seattle city limits, clustering in the cities of Redmond, Bellevue, Renton, and Kirkland.

What the study didn’t mention is that these 100-plus studios in the region had not joined forces as an organization or lobby of any kind. There is no combined effort to conduct industry-wide events that focus on the Seattle area, whether as a celebration for fans or as a breeding ground specifically for developers. The cross-pollination that has bred the industry, unfortunately, is a weak scaffolding for any greater political or promotional efforts.

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And from Anand Balasubrhamanyan's poetry-packed feature on hot local hip-hop MC GMK and his minor-masterpiece Songs for Bloggers:

It’s only a community center show. It’s basically a gymnasium, complete with wobbly bleachers and a hardwood floor. It’s 2005, and a young GMK takes the stage at the Garfield Community Center. But GMK decides to perform not to where he is, but to where he wants to be. He imagines that he’s the headliner in a packed club. And he kills it: The show, the audience and, most importantly, reality.

Afterwards, while he’s packing up his equipment, a friend comes up to him in genuine awe and tells him, “’While you were up there, I turned around to see if there were more people because your show felt like it was for an arena, I was surprised there was just one row of people!’”

Meeting GMK it’s easy to see why he’d get that response; he has a fertile and charismatic imagination that allows him to set unique goals that aren’t tethered to the here and now.

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It’s always reaching a little too far, but GMK is such a force of bizzaro charm that you just want to follow him into the unstable tangle of ideas, knowing that the resulting mess will be beautiful.