Remember me? Ty Schalter?
It’s okay if you don’t; it’s been over two years since this “weekly journal of everything awesome” has actually gone out every week.
But in between the last two Gimmes Schalter, in May and July 2023, I registered FunFactorPod.com.
My fellow journalist, author, first-call critique partner and big homie Aidan Moher and I had been talking in a general way about doing something together for years, and in a specific we-should-do-a-podcast-about-old-video-game-magazines way for a little while, before I actually registered the dot com.
Inspired by Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri’s “If Books Could Kill,” and applying all the many lessons I learned from the failure of “Three & Out” to get traction, FunFactor is a thoughtful, critical, funny look back at the games media that—for better and worse—inspired us to do what we do.
I have to say, it’s been a pretty big two years for me, and everything awesome. My second of three kids graduated high school. We got a new dog, Desmo, who is in my wife’s frequent words “a perfect angel from heaven.”
I bought a Ford Mustang Mach-E, taking the EV plunge and becoming not just a car guy but a guy with a legitimately cool car for the first time in my life.
FiveThirtyEight shuttered its sports section (and eventually, the site entire), leaving me without a steady writing gig for the first time since 2010. And after a blissful, charmed 2023 season as a civilian Detroit Lions fan, I made my triumphant return to Lions coverage with a weekly column in the Pride of Detroit Direct premium newsletter (check out an unlocked article here).
PoD general manager Jeremy Reisman and I go way back to the very beginning of the Lions indie blogosphere; as friends, two-way mentor/mentees and (briefly) competitors in the Lions space it felt inevitable that some day I’d end up on staff. When he offered a great rate subsidized by direct reader subscriptions and, I quote, “total creative freedom,” I couldn’t say no.
Not only was 2024 another amazing Lions season to cover, but the newsletter then went well enough that SB Nation is keeping me around year-round. I’m at the tail end of a post-Super Bowl break, and will be coming back online with weekly columns soon!
I became kind of a big deal on Bluesky, thanks partly to my very early adoption but mostly thanks to Mina Kimes’s NFL Starter Pack. I now have more than double the followers I ever did on Twitter, and so much more of them see so much more of everything I post. It’s a godsend for creators trying to claw back some visibility in an anti-media world.
Oh. And, yeah.
The world went to shit.
Media, tech, video games, and video games media all suffered bloodbaths, with countless jobs and companies in all the many spheres of things I love and do getting obliterated (see: Eight, FiveThirty). The necrotic hatred and bigotry eating away at former Gimme Schalter subjects like X Dot Com, Substack, and J.K. Rowling from inside out completed its hideous transformation of all of them into Nazi zombies of their former selves.
I’m not even going to talk about Trump.
But amidst all of it, writers keep writing, talkers keep talking, artist keep arting, and creators keep creating.
SO: FunFactor.
Everything Awesome
Scott, an automotive journalist and trans woman, writes beautifully and devastatingly about the moment the dissonance between her life and her work became too loud to block out:
“In the other reality, this SUV is terrible. It is patently obvious that this machine is destroying the earth. The man buying it is insane. I am sane when I see this SUV as the waste that it is, and I am sane when I weep for the destruction of my people.As someone who left tech at 30 to become an NFL writer, then came back, and now exists in a weird semi-both-state, I felt many feelings for and with Brian (who’s been putting out pro-caliber work for very nearly two decades).
“50 Magic Cards About Everything And Nothing,” by Sam Gaglio at Rhystic Studies
Last summer, my kids got me into Magic: The Gathering, and as with all things when I get into them I get into them. Gaglio kindly spoke with me for my recent debut feature at Sherwood News on how Magic is replacing poker as the business world’s off-hours strategy game of choice; the way he sees both the game and its culture connects directly the Fascination center of my brain.
Writers like me talk—and write—a lot about escaping the walled gardens of Web 2.0 and rebuilding the Open Web by hand: Owning our domains, hosting, and content, connecting directly with our audiences (with newsletters like this one!), and using open-source tools like Bluesky over VC-owned (and, inevitably, -ruined) apps.
But communal tech tools need to work together. And the way we used to make sure that happened was with international standards—established and maintained by volunteers and non-profits.
When I was a baby IT engineer, I remember mocking people who yelled at whipper-snappers building websites to look good in Internet Explorer instead of according to the W3C Consortium standards.
“When IE has 92 percent market share,” I often snarked, “it is the standard.” But that was one of the first major battles lost of a war that ended up with everyone in the world seeing no content except that which an app or algorithm decided it would be profitable for them to see.
As we’re all looking for ways to rebuild the public commons, I encourage folks in the tech world to read this and consider lending their expertise to such orgs—and clout to their standards.
Two Old Gamers Review Old Video Game Magazine Reviews
Aidan and I got serious about FunFactor a few months ago, digging through our old magazine collections and browsing sites like Retromags.com and the Internet Archive (about which, as some of you may remember, I have complex feelings).
We reflected on how these magazines not only shaped our brains as consumers of media, but as consumers of critique, writing, and thinking. And with all the great inspiration we took from them about the kinds of media consumers and creators we wanted to be someday, we also took away a lot of dumb jokes and boob ads.
We talked with podders we know and admire currently doing the thing the way we want to do it—especially Eric and Chris from Retrograde Amnesia, who were extremely generous with their time and support.
Aidan started furiously upgrading his gear, while I brushed up on tools, platforms, and audience-growth strategies. We started recording, and learned many lessons not only about how one podcasts like a grownup in 2025, but about what kind of show we wanted to do.
Critically, Aidan found Millenium Falck, a retro-synth musician with a glorious website who immediately got the project and created not just a killer theme, but a bumper crop of transition tunes and interstitials.
When it came to partnering with a payment platform, Lauren (and the rest of the team) at Memberful were not only generous with their time and expertise, and patient over the last few months as we pulled the whole project together, but active partners in making absolutely sure this launch would be as successful as it could be.
Our families—and here I’m going to shout out my wife Kelly, who built most of the FunFactor website—were even more patient and supportive as we sank more and more time and money into a project for which we had no firm timeline or guarantee of success.
But we fired up social accounts and a Discord server that we’d been squatting on for a year. We reached out to friends and contacts who might help spread the word. We put the finishing touches on the first episode, and late Monday night we hit the GO button.
So far, so great.
On Day One, FunFactor got hundreds of listens and views, and hundreds of social-media followers.
I’m writing to you all on Day Two, and hoping you’ll add to those numbers.
Please, go to FunFactorPod.com and use the “Get The Show” menu to add us however you listen to podcasts. Take advantage of our two-week sale celebrating the triumphant return of Game Informer magazine, and subscribe quarterly or annually to our premium tiers for a ~20 percent discount!
We promise we’ll make it worth your while, with regular biweekly episodes, monthly guest episodes, and access to the members-only channels of our Discord.
If you dig what we do, leave a rating or review on the platform, or shout us out on Bluesky. We’re reading the best testimonials on the air!
Finally, thanks to all of you who didn’t just immediately unsubscribe from Gimme Schalter when you saw the email hit your inbox; double-extra mega thanks to all of you who’ve read this far, or supported anything I’ve done along the way.
I couldn’t have done it without you, and I hope I get to keep doing it—regardless of whatever “it” may be.