ETAO Podcast, Episode 106.
Russell Quinn has had a unique career as a technologist enabling stories, building the underlying systems for the ahead-of-its time McSweeney’s app, as well as for the equally-ahead-of-theirs, novel-adjacent multimedia projects The Silent History and The Pickle Index. He’s brought remarkably inventive and playful stories to the world, though not as a storyteller, exactly.
That is, until his current solo project Linda & Joan, which tells an intensely personal story about family, loss, and what people can do for each other when things get truly bad. (Given the subject matter, as I say in the intro, this episode does definitely come with a CONTENT WARNING for illness, death, and trauma). Here Russell talks about the desire to make something that is recognizably and definitively a game while still being as thoughtful as ever about form—and about the healing that can come with making art out of awful experiences.
You can wishlist Linda & Joan on Steam and Itch, get the “Four Months Earlier” prologue on Steam, Itch, and Apple, and check out the Zine Club and The Candle on the project’s website.
You can get “Nice Day for a Walk,” the song from “Four Months Earlier,” on Bandcamp
You can also follow Russell (and the project itself) on Twitter.
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• The Silent History and The Pickle Index are wonderful as well.
• Here’s that Miranda July piece that Russell worked on.
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“All The People Say (Season 4)” by Drew Messinger-Michaels.
“Nice Day for a Walk” by Jeremy Warmsley, from Linda & Joan Prologue: “Four Months Earlier.”
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Everybody's Talking at Once 