Downtown COS fire ruins holidays for local biz, Fallout web series gets first trailer, so does Grand Theft Auto 6!
The Raven Express #6 - 12/8/23
In this issue of The Raven Express, I talk about the fire that’s derailed half a block of Downtown Colorado Springs business during the critical retail holiday, I chat about the struggle of being an internet creator and the debuts of some high-profile video game properties in new formats.
Fire ices holiday season for Downtown businesses
On Monday morning, a 3-alarm fire broke out at The Majestic Building (15 E. Bijou St.) in Downtown Colorado Springs. The flames sent smoke through the large crawl space shared between a number of businesses including ICONS night club, Taste of Jerusalem Cafe, a UPS Store and a pair of clothiers: The Local Honey Collective and Yobel, which houses The Look Up Gallery, a regular stop on my First Friday tours.
Media coverage was overwhelming and immediate, but the camera crews and fire trucks are now long gone. These businesses are now closed mere weeks before a vital shopping holiday (minus the seemingly non-plussed UPS Store that continued to plug away when TRE visited the building) with updates flowing from individual social media accounts. The Downtown Colorado Springs Partnership, among others, has been activated to help support these businesses with fundraiser events and over social media and I’m going to sort those out below so you can support these businesses as they cycle out ruined, smoke-damaged inventory and wrangle with insurance.
As someone who enjoys getting out and up-close with local art and artists, the news was sharp: I’d just seen The Lookup Gallery’s new exhibit, a collection of massive vibrant waterscapes by Ben Bires called Distortion that must now be repaired. (Clay Ross says that ZoneFive’s Jennifer Sexton, an art conservator, is going to evaluate whether they can be salvaged.) The entirety of Yobel’s inventory is lost, minus the jewelry which must now be cleaned, and the Rosses had expressed on Instagram that they are in a kind of “hurry up and wait” mode as they continue to sort things out.
Please follow these local businesses on social media as they chart their way back to normal. Potentially losing one’s livelihood during the holidays is a brutal situation.
Taste of Jerusalem Cafe: Facebook, Instagram
The Look Up Gallery: Facebook, Instagram
The Local Honey Collective: Facebook
Ahem, MEOW. Hey listen, you should subscribe to my dad’s newsletter. It’s FREE and if you wanna chip in a few bucks to help him out, it helps me out, too. Literally. CLICK AWAY, HUMANS! MEOWWWWWWW!
- Captain Kirby Jack Raven, a.k.a. What Are You Doing Over There?
The struggles of making a buck on the internet as a creative
Some More News is a bit of an acquired taste — they commentate on social issues in a format similar to The Daily Show, but with a bit more of a vulgar twist. Still, this week’s episode rang especially true now. I’d originally placed this at the tail of the newsletter in my Raven Recommends section, but considering the news above and the nature of this very newsletter, it felt pertinent to move it up the roster a bit.
Making money on the vast expanse of the internet without an existing following is difficult. It’s difficult in the real world as a freelancer too, but when you have to abide by a digital platform’s rules or the shape of viewer/listener/customer expectations (thanks, MrBeast), you have to compromise something creatively to make it up commercially. There’s a reason why so many internet publications — including this very one you’re reading — rely on regular and blatantly obvious call to actions to support it.
At the same time, being self-employed and relying on monthly micro-payments as an independent creator on the internet to get by, or as an analog freelancer in years past, carries nearly all of the penalties and advantages of starting up and running your own small business. As someone who has a Patreon and this Substack for monthly subscribers, then Venmo, Ko-Fi, Cash App and Buy Me A Coffee for one-off tips, the work required to ensure money keeps coming in is about as overwhelming as the work itself.
Not helping is the fact that it’s December, when nearly every charitable organization is breaking out their holiday pledge drives and individual calls for help can be drowned out by those large nonprofit campaigns. As Some More News rightfully puts it above: the creator economy is a very fragile thing indeed.
People want dumb things from new Fallout series
Amazon took to CCXP last week to unveil their slate of new programming, including the first trailer for their 8-episode series based on the Fallout role-playing video games. (CCXP, for those unaware, as I certainly was since no other article bothered to explain, is the Brazilian counterpart to the culturally important San Diego Comic-Con, formerly called Comic Con Experience.)
I’ve been a big fan of Fallout’s nuclear-annihilation-meets-retro-future kitsch since it landed on shelves in a big box in 1997, but the track record since has been pretty sketchy. While I thought Fallout 3 was a bit of a slog and I couldn’t get into Fallout: New Vegas, I did love Fallout 4, which seems to be a key inspiration for the new Amazon series being developed by Jonathan Nolan (brother of director Christopher Nolan) and Lisa Joy, both of whom created Westworld for HBO.
All of this is to say that some people have very silly expectations of their pop media.
IGN reports that at a roundtable interview at CCXP, someone asked showrunner Graham Wagner if they’d be acknowledging the series reputation for being buggy and/or glitchy games, an artifact of Bethesda’s simulation-heavy chaos. Wagner was diplomatic in a very “yeah, like, maybe” way, but I honestly can’t believe he didn’t laugh said interviewer — whom IGN did not identify — out of the room entirely.
Fallout has come a very long way since it was assembled by a small crew in the offices at Interplay in the mid-90s. Back then, film and TV adaptations of video games were typically trash, but as filmmakers have emerged who grew up appreciating the unique strengths of narrative in video games, the quality of their adaptations has risen dramatically, as you can see in the trailer above.
I’m all for meta humor, absolutely, but the idea that such a high-profile and expensive effort would somehow need to incorporate some irrelevant artifact of Bethesda’s simulations — something that was relatively absent in the earlier Interplay games, or at least far less prolific — is cheap as hell. It’s beyond mean-spirited as this is an adaptation of Fallout as an IP, not just the games as Bethesda creations. It’s perhaps the cultural penalty of growing up on Family Guy, a milestone in comedic laziness and an artifact of millennials’ exposure to “OmG, RaNDoM HuMoR!1!!!” in the mid-00s.
To the offending reporter: I don’t know why you’d need to ask how many times the chef will spit into your soup, but the correct answer is zero.
Rockstar finally reveals Grand Theft Auto 6… on their own terms… kinda.
Just over a year ago, a 17-year old British hacker broke into Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar’s Slack server and nabbed an hour and a half of in-development footage, some a year old at that point, and uploaded it to the internet, exposing the game to the world for the very first time. The hacker then claimed to have the source code and blackmailed Rockstar into a ransom to not release it to the public.
The footage, complete with twitchy debug info floating on-screen, painted a sunny, fictional southern Florida (called Leonida) and an update of their own Vice City — their pseudonym for Miami — in which you played the Bonnie & Clyde-esque dual protagonists Lucia and Jason. UK coppers nicked the hacker, but Rockstar’s incredible secrecy around their game development invites a lot of attention — good and bad. Their last game, Red Dead Redemption 2, is now five years old. Their last Grand Theft Auto released over a decade ago.
It makes sense then that the first trailer for the game, one that Rockstar would finally debut on their own terms, was leaked a day before the scheduled reveal, forcing Rockstar’s hand. The game isn’t out until 2025 (!) for Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 consoles (then sometime after that for PC), but the trailer delivers an incredible vertical slice of what to expect from the game. The internet is filled with deep dives and frame by frame assessments at this point, but my advice would be to just soak it all in as presented.
There’s a long wait ahead.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
The Raven’s Recommendation
This is something I’ve munched on in the past week that I want to share with you.
This week’s recommendation is a bit of a cheat. The Downtown Colorado Springs Partnership invited me to Cacao Chemistry to sample various boutique candies on camera for their holiday promotional push for local businesses. At the Colorado Springs Indy, we produced short-form videos (TikToks or Reels, as the kids call them) called You Gonna Eat That? where I tried a bunch of interesting, mostly junk food. Naturally, this made me the perfect fit to try very salty, smoked licorice, chocolate truffles with “Pop Rocks” in them and double-decker truffles that look like Jetsons food pills. It was great! Go check it out and support local businesses if you’re in COS!