One Cool Thing

About This Episode

On episode 12 we meet Cara Ellison who chats to Hannah Nicklin about A Dictionary of Angels.

Cara Ellison is a Scottish designer and writer for videogames, who also writes for TV and comics. Before working in game dev, Cara was a journalist and worked in books, comics and radio. Her website explains that most of all she’s interested in expanding “ideas of what interactive entertainment can do, and who it is for.”

Liner Notes

• Linktree
• A Dictionary of Angels
• The Final Girls
• Cara’s website

One Cool Thing Production Credits

One Cool Thing is hosted by Die Gute Fabrik's Studio Lead Hannah Nicklin and is produced, edited and sound designed by Tom Whalley. Additional production and research by Úna-Minh Kavanagh and our theme music by Nick Ellis who can be found on Bandcamp as tenby.

Liner Notes

• Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain
• Eleanor Davis’ You & a Bike & a Road
• Hannah’s essay on Zwift under lockdown for New Rules 
• Mountain High: Europe’s 50 Greatest Cycle Climbs - Daniel Friebe & Pete Golding
• Zwift
• A Short Hike
• Stacklands
• Aran's Bike Trip
• Sokpop
• Skidlands

One Cool Thing Production Credits

One Cool Thing is hosted by Die Gute Fabrik's Studio Lead Hannah Nicklin and is produced, edited and sound designed by Tom Whalley. Additional production and research by Úna-Minh Kavanagh and our theme music by Nick Ellis who can be found on Bandcamp as tenby.

About This Episode

In episode 10 we meet Josie Giles who chats with Hannah Nicklin about the late Rachel Pollack's Unquenchable Fire.

Josie is a writer and performer from Orkney, who now lives in Leith, Edinburgh. You might have heard of her recently because her super cool verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia won the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction book of the year.

Liner Notes

• “How to Look at Art” by Lynda Barry 
• Making Comics by Lynda Barry 
• Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time 
• Rachel Pollack’s site:
• The Beatrix Gates
• Jessica Amanda Salmonson 
• Josie’s Website

One Cool Thing Production Credits

One Cool Thing is hosted by Die Gute Fabrik's Studio Lead Hannah Nicklin and is produced, edited and sound designed by Tom Whalley. Additional production and research by Úna-Minh Kavanagh and our theme music by Nick Ellis who can be found on Bandcamp as tenby.

About This Episode

In episode 9 we meet Moo Yu who chats with Hannah Nicklin about Legally Blonde.

Moo is a gameplay programmer with an extremely distinguished two decade long career. He’s worked on larger-scale games like LittleBigPlanet, Ratchet and Clank before moving on to smaller-scale indie games. Moo was the lead, and indeed only programmer on the super cool Knights and Bikes. His current game is being made under the name of Team Artichoke which hints at his motto ‘games with a little heart’.

Liner Notes

• Legally Blonde
• The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones
• Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat
• Moo’s Twitter
• Moo’s TikTok

One Cool Thing Production Credits

One Cool Thing is hosted by Die Gute Fabrik's Studio Lead Hannah Nicklin and is produced, edited and sound designed by Tom Whalley. Additional production and research by Úna-Minh Kavanagh and our theme music by Nick Ellis who can be found on Bandcamp as tenby.

About This Episode

In episode 8 we meet Kate Dollarhyde who chats with Hannah Nicklin about gardening.

Kate is a Nebula and GLAAD Media Award-winning game designer and writer of speculative fiction. She’s had short stories published in Fireside Fiction, Lackington’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other magazines and has also been the co-editor-in-chief of the speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons.

Liner Notes

• World War Z (book)
• Burnout (Nagowski sisters)
• Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
• The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow) 
• Pentiment
• Mutazione
• Twitter
• Instagram
• “The Three Sisters of Indigenous American Agriculture”
• Planet B podcast

One Cool Thing Production Credits

One Cool Thing is hosted by Die Gute Fabrik's Studio Lead Hannah Nicklin and is produced, edited and sound designed by Tom Whalley. Additional production and research by Úna-Minh Kavanagh and our theme music by Nick Ellis who can be found on Bandcamp as tenby.

About This Episode

On episode 7 we meet Kaitlin Tremblay who chats to Hannah Nicklin about found footage horror movies.

Kaitlin is a Toronto-based narrative designer and writer working all across the scale of games from writing on indie works like A Mortician’s Tale to working as a team lead narrative designer on Watchdogs Legion. They were also recently released an excellent looking book Collaborative Worldbuilding for Games. 

Liner Notes

• Kitty Horrorshow
• Vera Drake (dir: Mike Leigh)
• Collaborative Worldbuilding for Video Games
• Twitter
• Instagram
• General website
• Host (Rob Savage, 2020)
• The Blair Witch Project (1999, Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick)
• Cannibal Holocaust (1980, Ruggero Deodato)
• Inside (Playdead)
• Knock-Knock (Ice-Pick Lodge)
• The Medium (Bloober Team) 
• Stilstand 

One Cool Thing Production Credits

One Cool Thing is hosted by Die Gute Fabrik's Studio Lead Hannah Nicklin and is produced, edited and sound designed by Tom Whalley. Additional production and research by Úna-Minh Kavanagh and our theme music by Nick Ellis who can be found on Bandcamp as tenby.

About This Episode

In episode 6 we meet Nicole He who chats with Hannah Nicklin about Dipthyque’s L’ombre Dans l’Eau.

Nicole He is and independent game developer and creative technologist based in New York. As well as directing two whole unannounced video games right now, Nicole’s work as a creative technologist uses digital tech to explore questions of modern living through and with that tech.

Liner Notes

• Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: A Story of a Murderer
• Diptique’s L’Ombre dans l’Eau
• JORVIK Viking Centre viking scents
• Nicole’s website

One Cool Thing Production Credits

One Cool Thing is hosted by Die Gute Fabrik's Studio Lead Hannah Nicklin and is produced, edited and sound designed by Tom Whalley. Additional production and research by Úna-Minh Kavanagh and our theme music by Nick Ellis who can be found on Bandcamp as tenby.

About This Episode

In episode 5 of One Cool Thing we meet V Buckenham who chats to Hannah Nicklin about pottery.

V is an artist, curator, game designer and that space between games and tech and art which is sometimes called ‘creative technologist’.

Liner Notes

• Tom Armitage Technology as a Material
• Epicycles
• Sokpop’s sok-edit
• Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
• Downpour
• Website

V’s socials:

• Instagram
• Mastodon
• Cohost
• Twitter

One Cool Thing Production Credits

One Cool Thing is hosted by Die Gute Fabrik's Studio Lead Hannah Nicklin and is produced, edited and sound designed by Tom Whalley. Additional production and research by Úna-Minh Kavanagh and our theme music by Nick Ellis who can be found on Bandcamp as tenby.

About This Episode

In episode 4 we meet Jake Elliott of Cardboard Computer who chats to Hannah Nicklin about Christopher Strachey's "Love Letter Generator".

Jake is probably most well-known for being one-third of Cardboard Computer, who made the era-defining and extraordinarily ambitious Kentucky Route Zero series. But he’s also a musician, runs an excellent Patreon where he teaches and shares his practice as a writer-programmer, and he makes ‘artware’ - art made with and about software.

Liner Notes

• Bletchley Park’s museum website
• An article Christopher Strachey wrote in 1954, in which he discusses the Love-letters program, for the magazine "Encounter": 
• The Strachey article in Jacob Gaboury's "Queer History of Computing" series
• Jake stumbled through a quote from this essay also by Gaboury, from 2022: "the lack implicit in the future-oriented teleology of computation need never be repaired if we learn to love the lack, inhabiting that space in a way that does not feel shattering, dwelling in the gap between love and the letter."
• David Link is an artist & researcher who has explored Strachey's work in great detail in writing and in some incredible installation art.
• David Link's essay on "Love-letters"
• David Link on Strachey's "Draughts" program
• AdvX 2018 - Jon Ingold - Sparkling Dialogue: A Masterclass
• Jake’s Patreon

One Cool Thing Production Credits

One Cool Thing is hosted by Die Gute Fabrik's Studio Lead Hannah Nicklin and is produced, edited and sound designed by Tom Whalley. Additional production and research by Úna-Minh Kavanagh and our theme music by Nick Ellis who can be found on Bandcamp as tenby.

About This Episode

On episode 3 of One Cool Thing, we meet Halima Hassan one of our Die Gute Collaborators who chats with Hannah Nicklin about the importance of communities.

Halima was one of our game writing interns in 2022 and has since moved on from us to work with the game design collective ghosts as a lead writer, and in her newly minted game writing portfolio describes herself as being interested in telling stories that surprise, challenge, and deal in radical comfort.

Liner Notes

• The White Pube
• The Grannies
• Josie Giles
• Burnout - by Emily & Amelia Nagoski
• Halima’s portfolio
• Linktree
• The social account/person behind the self-care game jam Halima took part in, in the summer of 2021

One Cool Thing Production Credits

One Cool Thing is hosted by Die Gute Fabrik's Studio Lead Hannah Nicklin and is produced, edited and sound designed by Tom Whalley. Additional production and research by Úna-Minh Kavanagh and our theme music by Nick Ellis who can be found on Bandcamp as tenby.