Today's CS:GO drama: A thread.

First, esports is really facing some long term problems with journalists that blur the line with being influencers too, a terrible trend. You have people who have never done actual reporting essentially being "the news" for fans. This trend has created a process defecit. You get more engagement on Twitter from posting a screenshot and a statement than you do from posting an article. People want junk food content. There's a gap between the podcast and Tik Tok generation.

Going to continue detailing my decade in esports but had a few people say "don't do it on Twitter... It's not the format for it. Write an article." Fuck that. This is a way to get content to my followers HERE. I'm already up to my neck in articles anyway. OWL fans gonna love me. So around 2014 I was working on building up my own brand anyway. I was becoming a regular on podcasts and shows so I started my own, an esports phone-in called Trash Talk. Here's a clip from a very early show.

OK, went full boomer and tagged in so many people I'm going to start part 2 of my decade in esports in a separate thread. This will be the stuff really want to know: Starcraft years and onward. It was basically make or break for me and it very nearly was the latter. So, for the sake of web traffic Cadred had pivoted to including Starcraft 2. As this tweet from 2010 should show, just for a bit of trivia, I was one of the first English speaking reviews of the game. I stayed awake for 36 hours to achieve that.

https://twitter.com/penta_sports/status/19978200559

OK. My decade in esports. A wild ride, highs and lows, insanity on all sides and the brutal reality of trying to balance being the conscience of a growing industry with no oversight while trying to make just enough money to survive. Let's kick this shit off and lose followers. 2010 was my first ever editor-in-chief job. After being a features editor for a while at Cadred, an esports website owned by @heavenmedia , the two staff members who ran the site basically didn't want to do it anymore. It was dead man's shoes but fuck it, it was real money.

Honestly, while I wanted to believe it wouldn't happen, the Conservative landslide makes total sense when you look at the big issues Labour got wrong in the crunch period of their campaign. You don't need to be a political genius to understand why this happened. First up, the anti-Semitism within Labour was outrageously never dealt with. You had Labour councillors tweeting conspiracy theories and claims that Jewish people were involved in Satanic rites. Horrifying stuff you'd expect from the far right.

Think we figured out why she deleted her entire tweet history... As an editor can you explain why it was OK for your journalist to repeatedly publicly insult someone who would go on to be the subject of an article smearing them using guilt by association? Hardly impartial is it? And on it goes...

Key takeaways from my investigation so far: SteelSeries state that they were simply approached by a marketing campaign (FCB Chicago) and agreed to be part of an event. They believe that their name was all over the website source code as they were one of the first to agree. SteelSeries consider the campaign to have been so damaging to their brand they are currently in discussions about what action they take next as they believe the marketers "misrepresented" the level of SteelSeries involvement.

It's weird that despite supposedly being in the unassailable, privileged position, ever since the first moment I achieved anything in esports and became "someone" there's always been people trying to take it away from me. It's been this way since 2005 if you can believe it. Back then I was a blogger, doing work on a now defunct site. I started producing the first 3000+ word articles that Counter-Strike had written about it as well as starting the first "gossip column" about the scene. As you can imagine I was called an "outsider" and a hack.