The Enthusiast Weekly – October 3, 2025

Happy Friday! I hope your week has been good. We were very happy to pass our goal for the St. Jude campaign last weekend. I’m really looking forward to sharing the final number when it officially closes on Monday.

I have a busy weekend ahead. Over the past year or so we’ve been working with a creative agency — Yuzu Studios — on our visual work at Cortex Brand. They’ve really helped us level up our product photography and marketing design. They’re currently in London, and over the next five days we’re going to be shooting a lot of photos and videos of our products.

We’ve been planning this for a while, and I expect it to be a pretty full-on experience, but I genuinely love talking about all the tiny decisions that go into the things we make. I’m sure it’ll be an invigorating time.

We’ve even arranged a trip to our printer to film some production work on a restock of the Sidekick Pocket. I’m really excited for you all to see a bit of how that process works in the future.

Here are a couple of recommendations for things I’ve enjoyed this week:

• My co-host on The Pen Addict — Brad Dowdy — has released a really cool pen in collaboration with Retro 51. It’s based on a sneaker design he loves, created by Virgil Abloh and Serena Williams. I highly recommend reading the story of how it all came together. Brad really crushed this one — it looks fantastic.
• I’ve spent a few hours this week playing Hades II, and it’s a fantastic game. I loved the original, and this is a clear upgrade. My gaming time is extremely limited at the moment, and it’s killing me not to play more. I’ve been playing on my Switch 2, and it looks excellent.
• Speaking of the Switch 2, I bought the Dbrand Joy-Lock grips. I wasn’t interested in their full Killswitch system, but they sell the grips separately, and they’re a really comfortable way to make the Joy-Con better for handheld play.

Alright — I need to go fix my hair or something. Got to be camera ready!