Josh ⏭️ GDC!

Thank you!

A bearded man gives a talk in front of a GDC podium

A bearded man gives a talk in front of a GDC podium

Saying something very intense and impassioned, probably about Donald Duck

Ah, thank you! Hope you're having a good GDC!

Really enjoyed the GDC talk on the creative direction of Ghost of Yotei as somebody who both loves Ghost of Yotei and is attempting creative direction on a daily basis

Bringing Narrative to 'Disney Dreamlight Valley' | Agenda | GDC Festival of Gaming How do you create a world where Buzz Lightyear can live in harmony with Scar from The Lion King — without one trying to defeat the other? In this session, Josh Labelle, Creative Director of Disney Dre...

Reminder that on Monday, I'll be delivering a talk at GDC about narrative on Dreamlight Valley!

Swing by and hear all about:
- the challenges of creating a shared universe cozy game
- working with beloved IP
- narrative pipelines built for live content delivery

schedule.gdconf.com/session/brin...

Ah man, Pokopia's delightful. So many of those little very Nintendo moments where they just super elegantly guide you toward something or teach you something without it feeling like that's what they're doing. And the Pokemon are so cute.

I saw the Danish String Quartet perform tonight and when they did Ravel it made me float out of my body and right up through the ceiling.

Well- myself and a few of my peers were laid off this week.

Riot’s severance is generous, and I’ve got the opportunity to apply internally to a few roles, which I’m taking advantage of- and I’ve gotten some kind leads on external roles as well. I’ve got a little time to conduct a search.

I'm gutted to hear about the loss of Catherine O'Hara.

Dreamlight Valley is one of the only video games that she lent her voice to (quite possibly the first as well?) and we were all so incredibly excited to have her as our Sally.

What a career. Absolute legend.

shakespeare was on fire writing the history plays and im not afraid to say it. in henry IV part 2 the king laments that his son will take the throne and "commit the oldest sins the newest kinds of ways" which goes absolutely crazy

I'm so curious to see how they ride this sincerity/taking-the-piss line in the next few years. It's such an artistic knife edge -- you can see how there's peril in falling too far to either side.

There's a kind of fear that one might do something beautiful, which the artist must sabotage within the art itself. With Geese, it feels like their talent & range of influences is pushing the tension to a breaking point they genuinely don't know how to resolve & that is so artistically exciting.

I once had a kooky visual arts professor who looked at my end-of-semester work, shook her head solemnly, and told me I had a "complicated relationship with beauty" and should "take a dance class".

I feel like that complicated relationship with beauty is such an endemic trait I see in Gen Z artists.

Then another question comes up: is the impulse to sing in this way an artistic virtue of the work or is it a limiting affectation that he'll eventually shed? Or is it possible that what makes the music so interesting is the very fact that this is currently unresolved?

That tension feels connected to another - which is that Winter pretty obviously has a conventionally beautiful voice and is a technically skilled singer but uses his instrument in some extremely *weird* ways. Once you realize that, you're left with a question: why is he choosing to sing this way?

There's a very interesting tension in Geese/Cameron Winter of whether you become great artists by embodying the quirks of your generation or by transcending them and I like that the tension is so far genuinely unresolved; anyway that SNL performance rocked

George Harrison's vibe in the Beatles Anthology whenever Paul does something goofy is "ugh you're going to embarrass me in front of Bob Dylan and the other Traveling Wilburys"

Thanks, Luna! That's wonderful to hear. Truly made my day.

Cameron Winter - Live at St Matthias's Church, London, 24/04/2025 YouTube video by roustghoti

This live concert where the piano had a bunch of busted keys and Cameron Winter had to transpose a bunch of his songs into other keys on the fly and perform them that way is pretty amazing. I'm bullish on this guy being the real deal.

youtu.be/pUIj2pB_1S0?...

Bringing Narrative to 'Disney Dreamlight Valley' | Agenda | GDC Festival of Gaming TheGDC Festival of Gaming program blends expert insight with interactive formats designed to spark ideas, sharpen skills, and connect communities.

Pleased to share that I'll be giving a talk at GDC this year!

Looking forward to hopefully chat with some mutuals at my first GDC.

schedule.gdconf.com/session/brin...

One of the illustrations that Kirby did as a storyboard or concept art for a movie adaptation of Roger zelazni's novel Lord of Light which unfortunately the CIA while financing it to the extent of using this as an excuse to extract some Americans from revolutionary Iran I did not put enough money in to complete making the movie we have a huge structure with three domes on top they're a couple of canals leading up to this building there is a south Asian patina to this but also thoroughly jack Kirby science fiction Style

Lord of Light — Jack Kirby, 1978

Being a Canadian in Paris during what is apparently for them a fairly significant snowfall event has been a lot of fun. Snowball fights everywhere. People intentionally sliding down the icy streets of Montmartre. Dogs going apeshit trying to eat the snow.

Carrion crow atop a tomb

They make a wild contrast with the only other bird in the cemetery, jet black carrion crows

Apparently (at least according to the source I read) they've spread across most of Europe now but ALL of them originate from the two airport escapes in France which is bonkers

A parakeet eats berries in a tree in a cemetery

Today on a visit to Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, I learned that Paris not only has wild parakeets but they all seem to have originated from two incidents of pet parakeets escaping from the airport and that is extremely wild.

I love being on vacation in a different time zone because my brain does this weird magical thing where I think about the people I know back home and go: "Ha. For them, it is 5 o'clock. Anxious fools. They don't know that I am in the future where it is 11 o'clock and everything is fine."

The key thing is the coherence of those yesses/nos. To me this is where my home city of Toronto really fails. While I dearly love it and there's much to recommend it, it's said yes and no to a lot of things over the past 60 years that don't really add up to a cohesive experience walking around it.

I've only visited European cities a couple of times now, but each time I've been struck by how incredibly subtle design choices affect how you feel in a space, and most of those choices come down to what you say yes but mainly what you say no to.

The cover of Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited

It's pretty wild how much this album cover now just looks like a Gen Z bedroom pop album thumbnail on SoundCloud or something. The camera's not even much of a giveaway since it looks so aesthetically retro. Like I think you could trick a few people with this.

It's very good, but I bet almost every other season 6 and season 7 disc is in contention here.