Venthuffer is a series of monologues about the Steam Deck video game console. I realized in 2024 that I have become as much of a fan of this machine as I have for any piece of digital hardware since my years of deep identification with the Apple Macintosh, when I was much younger. This discovery surprised me a little, and I wanted a space to explore the reasons for it, out loud. Here it is.

I figure we’ll try for at least ten episodes, maybe ~~biweekly~~ weekly? Let’s see what happens.

The title of the show is prompted by this Kotaku article and related memes and media. I call the show an “audio zine” because that seems to fit its particular cut and size more than “podcast”. In some ways it is a follow-up to Jmac’s Arcade, another monologue project from earlier in the century.

“Halstrick” is the identity I’ve been using in digital spaces, and video-game spaces in particular, since the early 2020s. I made it my Steam profile name after I set up my first Steam Deck. (There might be at least one future episode about this.) It seemed apt to publish the series under this byline.

The cover artwork for Venthuffer is shared under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, and incorporates the image “Vapor vents in the street. New York City 2005” by Jorge Royan. The favicon was designed by Andrew Plotkin.