I had the pleasure of interviewing another writer from Yelling at Children, Ink_Sparrow. I sat down with them for around 20 minutes, and during that time we discussed a range of topics, from their writing to their childhood
Even though Sparrow has only been in Level Up since the start of this year, they have managed to write and publish two full articles, one about Spiderheck and another one about Stick It To The Stickman. When I asked if they felt proud of their first article, they said they were even though it took them three months to do it (mostly because of school break). Sparrow chose Level Up because they had to take an English elective, as well as a main English subject, and Level Up appealed to them. They also confirmed with me that they would be continuing with Level Up next year even though they said they didn’t enjoy the writing style akin to a journalist’s as they prefer their writing to have a more conversational or casual tone. When I asked what article they looked forward to writing the most, they told me about their current article, a deep dive into Deep Rock Galactic, and their experience with the game. In terms of pet peeves as a writer and an editor, Sparrow’s biggest one is articles that are under-researched, so much so that it leads to many articles about games that are knock-offs of another.
Sparrow was born on the 15th of February. The first thing they can remember was an accident during their 4th birthday when they fell and skinned their knee. “[I was] running down the driveway and woop! There I [went].” Their favourite childhood memory was when they were two. They were running around and ran straight into the foot of an upside-down table, splitting their lip. They didn’t lose any teeth during this incident but over the years, Sparrow has lost five teeth through surgery. Sparrow has one sister, and they casually recounted to me of when she had tried to stab them for not cleaning their room. “She’s in her rebellious phase. At least she thinks she’s being rebellious; she’s just being a pain in the ass.” When I asked if she thought stabbing was rebellious, they laughed “No, that happened when she was 8.”
Did someone say cat? Speaking of pets, Sparrow has one, a dog named Tilly. They previously had a dog called Daisy that unfortunately passed away due to disease. Another interesting memory they shared with me is when they were chosen to be the control for an allergy study as they thought they had no allergies. They ended up being allergic to nothing but the band used to track the test, made of silicone.
In terms of gaming, Sparrow’s favourite and only platform they like to game on is their laptop. They described their ideal game “hav[ing] mining elements of Deep Rock Galactic with the base building functions of Subnautica and the amount of chaos that results from Scrap Mechanic.” Their favourite genre of game is “swarm-shooters” because they enjoy the endless waves of enemies. Sparrow’s biggest pet peeve in gaming is games with in-app purchases, yet they are very fond of playing those crappy 3-D mobile games. They said that no-one in their family really introduced them to gaming, it was more online creators such as Preston Plays.
Three of Sparrow’s hobbies include playing with Lego, reading and gaming. Their dream job is either being a graphic designer, or a Bunning’s Café worker because “it’s chill.” But, Sparrow thinks that realistically they’ll probably end up doing something with architecture “since [he doesn’t] have that many morals, it would be pretty easy to make the most cramped apartments possible without infringing on any human rights.” Sparrow’s biggest fear is of heights and subesequentlyanything more than a meter and a half (their height) gives them slight nausea and a an impending sense of dread.
Moving on to questions more focused on school, I was able to learn that Sparrow’s favourite subject is tied between Reptiles and Graphic Design. What I found really interesting is when I asked them about what pathway they were thinking of choosing for the future, they said that they were most likely to go down a design path “because [Templestowe College] is like a skill tree, basically you need a portfolio of certain things to take certain classes.” Sparrow also plans to go to university, but only because of their parents’ insistence.
Sparrow most likely has ADHD. They found this out when their mum told them about it, “My mum just gave me a pamphlet with the symptoms of ADHD and I was just like tick, tick, tick, tick.” Sparrow also believes that there is a large chance they also have Autism as well as ADHD.
Overall, it has been very interesting to get to learn about Sparrow in a very deep way. I highly recommend checking out all of their articles, past, present or future.