Attending the Chicago Critics Film Festival

I am writing and sending this to all of you to let you know that today, May 2nd, 2025, marks the beginning of this year’s Chicago Critics Film Festival, which I will be attending in full. If you hadn’t heard from my other social media updates: I've received special recognition as a "Writer to Watch" as part of the Chicago Film Critics Association & Rotten Tomatoes Emerging Critics Program this year. This is very exciting for me, to be recognized for my work and to get to attend the festival this year as a “recognized writer” of sorts. I will be seeing a lot of movies and hanging out with my fellow writers and critics from May 2-8. Like when I wrote about the films I saw at the Chicago International Film Festival last year, I will be doing the same for the Chicago Critics Film Festival and reporting back about my experience attending and all my favorite films I got to watch. Keep an eye on your inboxes soon after May 8th as you’ll be receiving another update from me soon.

I would be remiss to write about all this and not talk about some other things that have been on my mind. Yesterday, it was reported on Kotaku that the video game and culture website Polygon had been sold to Valnet and hit with massive layoffs. Giant Bomb was also simultaneously shuttered by its parent company Fandom. These are 2 of the biggest corners of the internet when it comes to games media, and as entertainment and arts media seems to break down everywhere, there is a loss I can’t even begin to predict or imagine.

Polygon was one of my favorite places to read when it came to film, tv, games, and culture broadly. Some of my favorite essays that are the bar I aspire to when it comes to thoughtful and imaginative writing about art and media came from talented writers and editors who contributed to Polygon. It was a place I actively hoped to get published at one day. I myself never got to write for Polygon, and now it feels that I likely never will. This is very small in the grand scheme of things, especially compared to the real loss that many are experiencing with the layoffs, but it’s to say that as both a writer and a reader I am incredibly saddened for everyone and for the state of things moving forward.

Moments like this have not been uncommon in the past few years. The creative arts and journalism/criticism spaces have not been an easy place to be recently. To be someone trying to make it as an artist/freelancer is to constantly be experiencing a swirl of emotions. On one hand, I received an amazing recognition from a program and am now excitedly attending a film festival (yippee! a moment of recognition that might prove useful to my life as a writer). On the other hand, one of the biggest sites doing great coverage of games and culture broadly is, for all intents and purposes, gone, which will make my life and the lives of all the other people doing this kind of work harder going forward. Things like this can make you feel like you discovered your creative passions a little too late when everything is going to hell in the end times.

While I still plan on freelancing and hope to get to write and do a lot of stuff in a lot of different spaces, I’ve also been thinking about the shape and consistency of what this newsletter should be. In the midst of the changing media landscape, and the growing relevance of blogging/newsletter culture on Substack and beyond, I do think committing more to this newsletter is a way forward. This is a fact that I have some resistance to. The thing I love about the pitching and writing process for other publications despite the extra effort required is the assurance that comes with an editor. There is a solace in knowing that another person, who reads thousands upon thousands of words and is in every right “an expert”, read your idea and first draft and thought it was worthy of consideration before being blasted out to the general public. They also help you further shape your idea and fix any embarrassing typos with their edits.

This is a luxury that blog/newsletter writers do not have. The nature of this form/genre of writing is mostly 1st drafts with more off the cuff writing and ideas that don’t always go the distance because they haven’t been tested. I recently read a great piece that called this newsletter style of writing essentially a different genre of “posting” like we all do on social media. This might sound negative to some, after all there is a lot of great writing that I’ve had the privilege of reading thanks to these blogging and newsletter platforms, but I don’t think this is an incorrect statement. A back and forth with an editor is pretty integral to most forms of writing, academic or otherwise.

None of this changes the ecosystem though. As that same piece points out: we’re all still posting on these platforms anyway, and there is seemingly some value that we are gaining from it. This is to say I think I want to try and write for this newsletter more in sometimes shorter, more off the cuff ways with ideas that I might not have necessarily completely figured out. My most recent essay for this newsletter was quite different from the stuff I usually write in that I brought in more of my personal experiences into it. I normally don’t write about my personal feelings, but rather prefer to construct arguments with research and evidence and the like. It’s rare that my anecdotal experience is actually the core of what I’m writing about instead of something of a flourish in a sentence or two to further articulate a point. I’m pretty happy with how that essay turned out, so perhaps I’ll do more of that: writing about more anecdotal experiences, feelings, and personal observations.

Summary:

• I’m attending the Chicago Critics Film Festival from May 2-8, and you can expect another newsletter update from me in your inbox soon with a recap of my experience and all my favorite films I saw.

• I’m also planning on writing more for this newsletter broadly, and hoping to try different ways of writing about things to see how that goes.

The last thing I’ll say is this: if you want to support my writing, the best thing you can do is share it. If you found something I wrote to be meaningful in any way, sharing it for other people to see and allowing my reader base to possibly grow is the most helpful thing you can do. This also goes for all the writers who are trying to figure out how to make it in the current media landscape, whether due to layoffs or otherwise. If you can financially or otherwise support a writer or independent publication’s work, I strongly encourage you to do so.

Here is a link to a site made by Kaylee Rowena that is a great resource for supporting the affected workers from the layoffs at Polygon, and also includes a list of independent/worker-owned media publications to support.