Thank you

A story about the 4th of July, and what Crossplay has meant to me and my family.

The back of my youngest’s head, as she waits to get on a ride that she’s already been on a dozen times, because why not?

I want to tell you a story from last week. 

On Friday, we attended the local 4th festival. If you’ve followed my work, you know I’m a stickler about money. My superpower is an unending sense a giant hole could appear in my bank account on any given day, swallowing the ability to support my family. My grandmother, a child of world wars and alcoholic parents, grew up without much and spent her life being careful how she spent what she did have, even when times were good. This trait passed onto my mother, and for better and worse, me. 

I have yet to shake it.

I’ve stayed at jobs I didn’t enjoy, jobs that treated me poorly, and jobs that paid less than my worth because the checks kept showing up. The amount of money in that check meant less than knowing some amount was going to be there, because you can plan around the rest. My wife was always a good cook, but she became a great cook when our money was at its tightest living in Los Angeles, where I’d lost my job, and forced us to move in pursuit of a new one. She left her own job to make it all work, and we started from scratch in an expensive city. She learned how to make terrific meals on a strict budget, a skill that’s benefited our entire family in the years after.

(She is, at the very moment I’m writing this, prepping lunch upstairs. I’m very lucky.)

My longtime colleague Rob Zacny and I used to joke that two things were always true. One, on any given day, we could lose our jobs at VICE. Two, because they probably should have laid us off years ago, there was a good chance we’d still be there years later, still joking about being laid off. Both seemed likely for a long time, until it suddenly wasn’t. But I’d been prepping for the demise of VICE, and thus Waypoint, and thus my regular job for the last six years, for months. The company’s finances were bad, and so we started canceling streaming services, checking with Comcast to get our bill down, and pushing back the purchase of a cheap pool for the backyard. 

The buckling down proved prophetic.

When it was clear the end was coming, I told Rob that I was not interested in turning Waypoint into a Patreon, because the complicated taxes and fluctuating income went against my nature. I like stability and reliability, and maybe it was time for me to leave work like this behind. But at the time, I had severance (three months, baby!) coming, and agreed giving something a shot sounded exciting. If it didn’t work out, all good. 

Our bases—and important to me, my financial bases—were covered by the severance.

That severance disappeared into a financial black box the moment VICE went into bankruptcy, though my understanding is people in the first wave of layoffs should see it soon. (We were slightly later.) Mine hasn’t arrived yet, and I don’t know when it will!

This is a long version of saying a false sense of comfort pushed me to try something new: being uncomfortable. It resulted in the launch of Remap and Crossplay in the wake of Waypoint shutting down for good, during some hazy days in early June. 

What does this have to do with a 4th of July festival? Right, right.

The one time I let go of fiscal responsibility is special moments like vacations, or, say, attending a 4th of July festival. It’s a moment where I want to say yes to me, my wife, and my kids, a reward to all of us for the sacrifices and corner cutting that we do the rest of the year. There’s a very real world where, for plenty of good reasons, Remap and Crossplay don’t come together, or aren’t the successes anyone was hoping for. 

I do not live in that world. I have a new, wonderful job: working for you.

At the festival, I was able to tell my children yes to a bracelet for unlimited rides. I got overpriced beer for myself. I paid too much for a (eventually successful!) attempt at a stuffed animal for both kids. These are not extravagant purchases, but because of Remap and Crossplay, I didn’t have to stress. I’ve done my best to keep the tensions of the last few months out of my parenting and away from my kids, because growing up is hard enough on its own, and I’m so grateful to have arrived at this happy ending.

Ending is the wrong word. It feels like we’ve reached the end of the prologue, and I can start thinking about what comes next. I hope you like what Crossplay has been for the past month, and I hope you’re excited about what it can become in the future.

And most of all: thank you.

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Also:

• No mailbag this week. We’ll return to the mailbag next week, a feature that might get flipped on for all Crossplay subscribers going forward. I’ll come up with a more premium Q&A format for the people who are paying for the newsletter.

• I hope you had a good 4th of July, if you’re in the U.S.! We spent it at the beach, at the pool, and staying away from our devices. I didn’t play a single video game!

• Next week should have some cool Crossplay stories. I’m starting to write a week in advance, which lets me be more reactive to news that’d make sense for this.

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