The Writings of Radio F Software: The Hits (2004 - 2014)

[Radio F Software]

I began writing comedy in 1995 as a sort of "coping mechanism" of dealing with all the bad video games I owned. I didn't come from a place of wealth so whenever my parents bought me a new video game chances are it was something from the bottom of the rack and not the latest Zelda. My friends and I would play these games over and over again laughing at their shortcomings and spinning tales and stories about the characters, probably about how "gay" they were or something because this was the mid-nineties and I was still pretty young. In a blog I posted a couple of weeks ago I went over the history of the comedy troupe Radio F including the things we produced from 1995 to 1999. The original group disbanded in 1999 but years later I'd adopt the name for my online projects including a humor website named "Radio F Software Headquarters". This was my place to post my writings on various subjects, mostly video games though.

 

RFSHQ was my first proper outlet for sharing my solo work after leaving the original Radio F in 1999. RFSHQ was a group effort that saw many featured writers but I kept to my own sections from 2004 to 2008. In 2009 I was a guest columnist on a friend's website that focused on MMO's and such. Between 2011 and 2012 I was briefly employed by VentureBeat as a games journalist. Also between 2010 and 2012 I maintained an independent blog called GatorAIDS. In 2014 I got together with some friends and we revived a project called Twilight Foundry and brought its website back online and I wrote articles there for only a few months because at the turn of 2015 I'd break off and pursue writing about BattleBots exclusively on my own project BattleBots Update. That leaves a scope of 2004 - 2014 as the years where I was active online as a variety/gaming columnist and in that decade I penned nearly 200 articles. All of them have been archived at TwilightFoundry.com though that website has been down for a while because I haven't been able to get a hold of the necessary people to help me put it back online.

 

Anyways I was checking Facebook today and one of those little "X years ago..." reminders popped up on my home page. It was a post from me talking about an article I had written for VentureBeat in 2012 making the reminder bubble "12 years ago". It doesn't feel like it's been that long.

 

I was quite proud of the article in question however so I dug up an archival link to the post and shared it on Facebook. Then I thought about sharing it here too since it's gaming-related and maybe someone here would appreciate it. It's an article about the 10 worst gaming peripherals I ever purchased. VentureBeat's editorial staff chopped the post down to six peripherals before they published it and they also rewrote several portions of the article presumably to clean up some of the cruder humor. That never sat well with me because I felt like they were changing my "voice". Because of this I took the original uncut version of the article and posted it to my own website. That article is the one I'd like to start this thread off with:

 

Shame is Plastic: 10 Gaming Peripherals of Dubious Quality (February 3, 2012)

I've got lots of articles in the archives so every once in a while I'll share another one here and tell a story about it. If "Storytime with RFS" sounds interesting to you I'm doing a similar thing in the entertainment forum with the show BattleBots where I post a cool video still and a link to the fight.