Who am I?
My name is Dan Golding. I do a few different things: by day, I’m an Associate Professor and Deputy Chair of Media and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology, in Australia. You can read more about that side of my life here. I’ve also written scholarly books on videogames and on Star Wars, the latter of which (Star Wars After Lucas, University of Minnesota Press 2019) was the first monograph on the Disney-era Star Wars films. I’ve published research on special effects, VR, videogames, and soundtracks.
By night, I’m a composer of music, most notably for games like Untitled Goose Game, Frog Detective, and Mars First Logistics. Here in Australia, I host Screen Sounds for ABC Classic, which means I get to talk about my favourite topic, film soundtracks, on the national broadcaster, and be their go-to John Williams obsessive. I also host concerts on stage for orchestras and have done so to crowds of thousands. You can read more about the various things I do here.
Welcome to Substack?
I’ve started this newsletter as an attempt to get away from one entirely toxic social media platform (shall we call it X?), and inadvertently might have stumbled onto another that’s just as bad. Ah. We live in an era of platform capitalism where anyone sufficiently empowered enough to make big bucks from the whole thing is likely to be diametrically opposed to any decent world view, I guess. I suspect like most, I will have an eye on the exit here (but exit where? This is surely the story of the internet over the last decade: every life raft is worse than the last).
I don’t plan on posting to any sort of schedule. Knowing me, it may be months between posts. I also most definitely do not plan on turning on paid subscriptions, which perhaps is one small consolation as there won’t be any money for this website’s ethically-dubious overlords to take a cut from.
In all, this will be a way for me to share things I’ve done with the world in an opt-in, non-280 characters, non-like and subscribe jazzhands sort of way. Just a hello—every so often. Despite everything I do, fundamentally, I like writing. It’ll be nice to have a little place to do that again.
