Games Reporter Matt Hughes Passes Away In Apparent Suicide
kotakucom:
By Jason Schreier
Matt Hughes, a freelancer who wrote about gaming for outlets like GamesRadar, Joystiq, and Mac|Life, passed away Tuesday in Commerce, Michigan.
On Tuesday, Hughes sent out an e-mail to several of the editors he had worked with at those sites. He said he would no longer be able to contribute or take on more freelance assignments because he would be dead.
Some of those editors thought he might be joking, or that some prankster had hacked his e-mail account. But GamesRadar editor Sophia Tong said in the e-mail thread that she had called up the police station in Hughes’s town and heard back that he had killed himself.
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So sad, and with such a chilling warning to his friends and colleagues. Phil Owens’ thoughts included:
But hiding doesn’t solve anything; rather, it creates more issues. As anyone who has dealt with depression can attest, being alone in your own head when a bad spell hits is the worst feeling in the world.
No one likes seeing the people they love hurt, and therefore no one likes talking about depression. It’s a bad cycle. I wish there were an easy solution.
UPDATE: When talking to someone about depression, please don’t note that it is something that the person will ultimately have to deal with themselves. It sounds profound, and might be close to the truth - successful therapy does require you to be honest with yourself and accept certain understandings - but it’s one of the most awful things to hear if you’re already struggling with feelings of hopelessness and negative thinking.It’s like being at the bottom of a deep pit and hearing the rescue workers above you shouting that you’ve got to use your own strength to pull yourself out of it.
Well, there’s probably a lot of — I’m not a woman so I’m thinking, if I’m a woman, why would I want to get — some of it has to do with economics. A lot has to do with economics. I don’t know, I have never — It’s a question I have never thought about.
Except you can’t show a topless woman on TV - and you can’t defibrillate a woman in a bra. So victims of heart attacks on TV are *always* male. Did you know that a woman having a heart attack is more likely to have back or jaw pain than chest or left arm pain? I didn’t - because I’ve never seen a woman having a heart attack. I’ve been trained in CPR and Advanced First Aid by the Red Cross over 15 times in my life, the videos and booklets always have a guy and say the same thing about clutching his chest and/or bicep.
And people laugh when I tell them women are still invisible in this world.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other involves orcs.
dcpierson:
This is a thing I don’t want to believe but sometimes do:
There was a “dinosaur” period of pop culture, when the original things were being made, the beautiful original things roaming the earth being appreciated for their own sakes. We are now in the “oil” period of pop culture, where we are…
A good point, but don’t forget about what came after the dinosaurs in the history of the Earth.
Oregon Secretary of State, Kate Brown, at the HRC Portland Bridges event. (Taken with Instagram at Cyan/PDX)
duolingo:
Our baby was born today. Like new parents, we’re beaming with excitement to announce that Duolingo is now open to the world. We know, we’re biased, but we think she’s a beauty. Over the past six months, hundreds of thousands of beta testers have helped us refine the service. Many waited for…
I love Duolingo a lot, and can’t wait for everyone to join me there.
It’s a great place to grow up [Los Angeles] as a creator because there’s no intellectual hierarchy. I remember going to a party in New York about 35 years ago. They all called me Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. I said, “You, ma’am, your name and phone number? And you, sir, your phone number? And you, sir?” And they said, “Why are you taking our phone numbers?” I said, “Because the night we land on the moon, you’re going to get called.” I was in London when we did. I called three of them, and when they answered I said, “Stupid son of a bitch,” and hung up.
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Ray Bradbury, quoted in Newsweek (November 1998)
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