Hey Reader
Man, May is almost dead and we're bout to enter my least-liked/most-hated season: summer.
I’m sorry, but even someone who grew up spending most summers at the family beach house still fucking hates summer.
(Also: summers now are way more humid and disgusting than summers 20+ years ago. Fight me.)
Give me blue sky, bright sun, low 60s or high 50s. Yessss.
Speaking of weather and newsletters—heads-up that I might shift next week’s newsletter to Tuesday. I’m off for the holiday and thinking about doing my first car camping overnight to test the logistics of the setup I’ve got so far. Of course, I forgot to order the one bug screen I really wanted for the back window, but I’ve got the rest. Forecast looks solid enough to try it.
We shall see. But yeah, that’s your early warning.
💬 Reddits, Subreddits, and Mods—Oh My
For those not “in the Reddit know,” I mostly haunt two subreddits:
- /r/SurvivalGaming, which has 44k+ members and an equal amount of spam and low-effort posts.
- /r/HashtagSurvival, which—surprise!—is mine.
I used to just repost stuff there, but I’ve since wised up and now use it to highlight the decent stuff I find while sifting through the trash in /r/SurvivalGaming.
Anyway, apparently there was a subreddit called /r/SurvivalGames that threw in the towel a year or two ago and now just points traffic at /r/SurvivalGaming. I’m not sure why—SurvivalGames is clearly the better name—but maybe they wanted to restrict posts to game-only content?
Either way, I PM’d the inactive mod and asked for control of the subreddit… for nefarious purposes.
I was halfway successful: I got added as a mod, but I’m still #2 in the hierarchy.
(Go into more of that another day.)
I’ve been toying with structure ideas, and here’s where I landed:
Allowed Posts:
- Game Pitches – Devs introducing new or upcoming survival games
- Progress Updates – Devlogs, changelogs, features, etc.
- Announcements – Playtests, early access launches, major updates
- Screenshots/GIFs/Trailers – Only if tied to meaningful dev updates
- Official Community Threads – Bi-weekly or monthly, run by me
Banned or Redirected Content:
- “What game should I play?”
- “How do I survive X?”
- General gameplay help
- Memes
- Streamer/YouTuber spam
- AI-generated or stolen garbage
All of that can rot in peace over in /r/SurvivalGaming.
That’s the idea.
I wish the mod would hand over the subreddit completely—I’ll be fucking piiissseddddd if I put all this effort into it only to have it yanked when it’s finally doing well—but there’s not much I can do for now.
If you’re a Reddit person (especially active in /r/SurvivalGaming), hit reply and let me know your thoughts.
🔥 Content Drop Catch-Up
Most of this past week’s stuff went to Patreon, which got a long-overdue overhaul:
I cleaned up the tiers, shifted some benefits, and clarified what each one actually offers.
Your support—whether it’s Patreon, Ko-Fi, or gifted games—genuinely makes this possible. I appreciate the hell out of it.
Big highlight this week: I sat down with Romain from Derelicts for a quick Q&A.
He dropped some long-awaited updates after nearly 6 months of silence and gave a peek at what’s next. That’s live on the site now.
I also spent a chunk of the weekend ditching Trello and fully migrating over to Notion.
Moved over 50+ projects and ideas, using ToDoist on the side to stay on track and Grit to yell at me when I fall off. (I may put together a big behind-the-scenes “How I Actually Organize My Shit” post for the Basic AF tier later this week.)
On the Discord side, I also did a small backend cleanup—collapsed some excess roles and shifted the “Developer” tag into a Recognized Creator tag. (If you're in the Discord, please be sure to check Channels & Roles to make sure you're set up correctly!)
The goal: highlight creators/devs working in the survival space who are putting out good work and helping their communities without being weird about it.
🔎 Curation takes time. Sarcasm takes snacks.
If Hashtag Survival adds value to your inbox, you can help keep it going:
☕ Buy me a coffee
🛠 Support monthly on Patreon
🎮 GAMES
Nothing huge this week:
- REPO – Played this for the first time with my sister. It’s weird and hilarious. I got chased by some horrible ceiling creature and screamed loud enough that my wife was dying laughing in the other room.
THEN some ghost-man (Studio Ghibli ghost thing lookalike??) got dragged into my hiding spot by a tiny duck.
A duck.
Like a dick.
- Dick duck. 🦆
Lost Rift – Played for a few hours (the playtest ends today, I think). It’s early and rough—tons of bugs and jank. But more than that, it just feels… oddly generic?
Combat’s very...bad. If the big selling point is PvP “Expeditions” for loot, that combat loop needs serious work.
And I do not buy the whole “you can totally sneak in, loot, and extract without PvP” pitch.
Come on.
Have you met gamers? Have we no history of decades of pvp games and people with no life just sitting on top of important shit to murder folks? Have these people never met SPAWN CAMPERS? So, yea. My ass.
Okay, novel done! 👏🏻
I’ll be posting a two-week catch-up thread on the Hashtag subreddit either today or tomorrow — so if you want the info fast, that’s the place. (Otherwise, it’ll be in next week’s email.)
Random closing thought, courtesy of zoning out while YouTube ran wild:
What the hell happened to soulful sax solos in pop songs?
Like seriously. Bring back the sax. 🎷
—Jordan