The Works of Egan

Updates from the Digital World: Adventure

2026-04-26T22:20:00Z

My journey back into the Digimon Card Game continues with another new deck! This is the first deck I've built fresh since last year, and it's one I've been really jonesing for since it popped up around BT21.

Adventure

I teased that I was thinking about it at the end of my last DCG post, and I decided to finally go for it! Adventure got a decent amount of support in the recent AD1 set with some new tamers, a new WarGreymon, MetalGarurumon, and finally an Omnimon with the Adventure trait, all of whom feature art from Our War Game (the middle part of the American Digimon The Movie, GIFs of which are all over this website), so they really got my ass.

Adventure is really fun because it's yet another example of the game being flexible enough to encourage a playstyle that vaguely mirrors the events of the anime. The name of the game with this deck is to play out as many dual-color tamers as possible, which will start to set off your level 4 and 5 and eventually level 6 Digimon's effects. All of your digimon of disparate colors with the Adventure trait are able to digivolve into each other, and the more tamers you have on board, the more quickly and easily they'll be able to climb that ladder and ping-pong effects off of each other. It's cool to be able to build a deck that runs just about every color in the game and have that be an asset.

Adventure is an archetype with a ton of synergy, a lot of strategic options, and a lot of different ways to fine-tune your build. Here's what I'm currently running:

4x ST21 Tsunomon
4x ST20 Biyomon
2x ST21 Palmon
2x ST20 Agumon
2x ST21 Gabumon
4x ST20 Birdramon
4x ST21 Togemon
2x BT21 Garurumon
2x ST20 Angewomon
2x ST21 Lillymon
2x ST20 MegaKabuterimon
2x BT21 MetalGreymon
2x AD1 WarGreymon
1x P-182 WarGreymon
2x AD1 MetalGarurumon
1x ST21 MetalGarurumon Ace
1x AD1 Omnimon
3x BT21 Tai Kamiya
3x AD1 Matt Ishida & T.K. Takaishi
3x AD1 Izzy Izumi & Tai Kamiya
2x ST21 Matt Ishida & T.K. Takaishi
2x ST20 Tai Kamiya & Izzy Izumi
2x ST20 Our Courage United

I mentioned last time that I was hopeful that AD1 prices would start to come down, and a lot of them did, but a lot of top-end cards, especially the new stuff outside of reprints are still pretty expensive. I had a solo day out a few weekends ago to scope out a nearby card shop, and they happened to have AD1 booster boxes in stock, so I splurged on one. I pulled an Omnimon, a MetalGarurumon, and a couple of tamers, so I took that as a sign. The booster box cost more than the single Omnimon I pulled is going for, but I probably wouldn't have just gone for building this deck if I hadn't pulled it. Funny how gambling tricks your brain.

After that, I grabbed the 2 Adventure starter decks from last year for pretty cheap just to have the full Adventure set and the special Scrambles that came in each, and then found the rest of the pieces as singles. It wasn't cheap all together, but I very seldom let myself splurge on anything, and this has been a really fun hobby to get into. And the idea of getting to run an Our War Game-themed deck absolutely rules.

In testing out the deck solo and on the DCGO so far, it's a really fun archetype that can really do some things, but you really need to know how to pilot it and pay close attention to the board state. I've made a lot of misplays while learning the deck where I'll digivolve into a level 4 expecting to get a free evo into a level 5, but I haven't set up 3 colors' worth of tamers, so it just sits there. Feels bad! Seems like it's almost always worth it to just give your opponent as much memory as is required to set up as many tamers as you can as early as possible. Tamers are very important to this deck! Hence why I'm running 13.

I got tempted away from playing Our Courage United in favor of Believe in Our Friendship at first, but now I'm back to thinking Our Courage is just an out and out better card. Believe searches up 1 card off the top 3 of your deck, and later gives you back 2 memory. Our Courage gives you 2 cards right there, and then gives you a response when/if your level 5s and 6s get bounced. This solves a big problem with the deck, which is that if you keep getting your stacks bounced/deleted, and/or start bricking on 3s and 4s, things can really slow down regardless of how many tamers you have set up. If you don't have what you need, you don't have it. Having a way to just play out another level 5 for free is huge in terms of keeping momentum, particularly because your level 5s are where the deck's Digimon effects start to pop off.

It seems like folks also like to run more copies of the AD1 WarGreymon, MetalGarurumon, and Omnimon. I'm mostly running what I run because of money, but I also feel like 2/2/1 is a good ratio for now. I wouldn't mind running 3 of each of the level 6s, but the Aces can be useful even if they're memory liabilities, and the Promo WarGreymon can be a good way to just put up a huge blocker, even if he doesn't come up much. And I feel like getting into your Omnimon isn't going to come up that much with this deck anyway, and everyone underneath him is pretty much able to handle things on their own. Maybe my opinion is skewed because of how few I run, but I feel like I haven't seen many games on youtube where Adventure Omni showed up. I could be wrong!

Other Decks

AD1 brought support for 2 of the other decks I've built, B/G Imperialdramon and Red Hybrid, some of which I've been able to grab, and I also made some tweaks to my Veemon Armor deck. Getting ALL the way back into this game!

For Imperialdramon, AD1 reprinted, among many other things, the BT16 Paildramon, which means he's no longer twenty-five goddamn dollars apiece, HALLELUJAH. I also grabbed the new AD1 Paildramon who gets immunity on evo and a free evo on attack, so I've finally plugged that deck's Paildramon weak spots. I was able to grab a few other things, like the promo Wormmon and BT3 Davis tamer, that make this deck almost complete and competitive. But the new AD1 Imperialdramon: Fighter Mode is ridiculous. It's so good, and absolutely necessary to make the deck viable, but it's way too expensive for me to even grab one at the moment. So this deck continues to be incomplete. One day!

Red Hybrid is another half-measure. The new triple-tamer is crazy good and super cheap, but you really need the new Aldamon to make the deck fast, and he's still pretty expensive, so this deck is stuck in limbo for the moment too. I don't really know what I want to make of it.

Veemon Armor is still just a fun, weird experiment. It can chip out a win if the opponent really has a bad day, and the Armor Purge is a fun way to frustrate and avoid removal, but it just doesn't have a lot more going for it. It might be cool to see this archetype get more support in the future, I'm curious what that could look like, but it just doesn't have a lot of gas at the moment.

Conclusion

AD1 brought a lot of good supoprt for the decks I like, it's just a shame so much of it is still so expensive. I can hope prices keep dropping, but we might be starting to level out where we're at, so a competitive Imperialdramon deck remains a pipe dream for the moment.

But I definitely don't regret making minor updates to everyone else in favor of going all in on Adventure this time around. It's such a fun deck. I love how it plays, I love the art and the aesthetic, and I love that a lot of it is now themed around the piece of Digimon media that I guess resonates with me most deeply.

Adventure is also the deck I'll be bringing with me when I go to my first ever locals event this Tuesday! It'll be my first time playing with other people in person. It's at a card shop that's just a couple of subway stops away, so it would be great if this could become a regular thing! I'm sure I'll report back with some thoughts. Wish me luck!

What Else Is On? April 17th, 2026

2026-04-17T18:00:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

I'm gonna be honest with you folks, I've had that job-hunting depression for the last few months, and simply have not had the spark or energy to blog all that much. I also haven't been reading all that much, as the unread count on my RSS reader will attest, so this may be a shorter edition.

Apologies for the lighter output as of late, I'll do my best to get some thoughts down about some of the other things I've been spending time on and enjoying, namely Marathon and the Digimon Card Game, but no promises. Sometimes you've gotta recognize you're in recharge mode and let the battery fill.

But enough about me, there's still plenty to see out there on the open web! Let's see what else is on!

🎵 Put This On

Get Down - They Might Be Giants

TMBG's latest studio album The World is to Dig was released this week, and wouldn't you know it, these old-timers have still got it. Bangers abound, the above track included. Well worth your hard-earned cash. Very excited to be seeing them live at the end of May!

📚 Read This

The Soft Serve Review - sweetfish

I always love everything Ayu does with their website, and this post is no exception. A review of several soft serve ice creams eaten on their recent trip to Japan, laid out very pleasingly. They all sound good, but my mouth was literally watering at the description of the wakame flavor.

i don't think We are owed a hobby - aenore

Learning how to do a thing is doing the thing. It's good to have to try and get good at something, or even just do a thing at all. You shouldn't just be able to do everything instantly.

Days Of The Week, Ranked From Best To Worst - Kotaku

I haven't followed Kotaku in a hot minute, but I did enjoy coming across this blog that is very much in the same vein as my Tomorrow starts at 4am post.

In 2026, The Nintendo 3DS Is A Better Value Than Ever - madeline blondeau

Many people are saying that you can very easily hack your 3DS and that it rules and the games are very good. They just keep saying this.

Podcast Canon looks back on 30 years of This American Life - AV Club

It's been ages since I actually listened to This American Life, but they really did set a standard for audio storytelling. Sounds like they're still going strong! Good for them! Chicago Public Media undefeated.

This Election Is Too Darn Important To Be Left To Merciful Salad Eaters - Defector

Great breakdown of just how fucking stupid and out of touch the Democratic establishment is, and also of a very particular style of profile about a powerful person that is constantly begging the question, "hey what the fuck are you talking about?"

The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here - Where's Your Ed At

Ed Zitron is frequently saying exactly what I need to hear someone in the media saying about AI: It doesn't work, it's not particularly good at even the things it can do, no one likes it, it doesn't meaningfully boost productivity, the finances don't make sense — that is to say, acknowledging reality. His writing is always beefy and pretty dense, but someone has to sift through the muck and make sense of it, and there's a lot to understand in order to get the full picture of what's going on here.

This particular piece digs into what makes the AI industry a financial bubble, what that means, and the context around it. What I love about pieces like this is that you can argue about the morals and values of making "AI" "art" until you're blue in the face, but you can't argue around the fact that this shit is fundamentally unprofitable. The brick wall won't move out of your way just because you want it to. Worth the deep dive when you have the time and wherewithal!

📺 Watch This

'TANG, BABY - Neil Cicierega

Neil's back, and he brought someone I literally haven't stopped thinking about since childhood: the Tang chimp(s).

SUPER NINTENDO WORLD 5th Anniversary Experience | Universal Studio Japan 🇯🇵 🎉 - Experience Japan

Okay so yeah Nintendo World looks fun, but this video really got me wondering about whether these types of youtubers are actually eating the food they show on camera. This is a channel we watch regularly, and I've never questioned this guy's ability to pack it away before, but if he's really eating everything he shows himself eating, then this man eats an entire (admittedly small-ish but still meant for more than one person) cake by himself.

Mrs. Apple‘s recipe — Apple pie - milin woolfelt

An adorable stop-motion animation of a felted woodland creature baking an apple pie in a cottage. My only comment is that I wish it took its time a bit more!

Busy Beavers Build Dam Ahead of Winter | Yellowstone - BBC Earth

And finally, take some time to marvel at the skill and ingenuity of beavers building a whole damn (heh) ecosystem.

🎮 Play This

Marathon - Bungie

$40 - PC, PS5, Xbox

I usually have a whole section of free browser games here, but I haven't been able to make time to see what's out there lately. But Marathon rules and you should check it out.

🌐 Some Good Websites

I Might as Well Explain the Joke

A website dedicated to telling the stories behind popular jokes in American history and culture, giving context to things you've heard a million times but have no idea as to their origin or context. It's really interesting stuff!

Window Swap

This is an oldie but a goodie that lets you click through random videos folks have submitted of the views from their windows. It's soothing and nice, and sort of gives me a feeling of what the internet could be.

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

Updates from the Digital World: Red Hybrid and Veemon Armor

2026-04-03T23:00:00Z

So it's been over a year since I last wrote about my foray into the Digimon Card Game, and while I did fall off for a while there, I have also been making moves!

In my last post, I had just built my first deck, a sort of compromised budget version of a blue-green Imperialdramon deck. I've since updated that deck in a lot of the ways I wrote about wanting to in that post, and we'll get to that later. For this post, I want to focus on two entirely new decks that I built last year, one of which I'm actually still excited about, and one which has some issues.

Red Hybrid

This is the deck I'm still excited about and enjoying. It's also gone through several versions since I first put it together, and is sort of still in flux and probably about to go through another update. Here's the decklist:

4x BT14 Koromon
4x BT21 Flamemon
4x BT17 Flamemon
2x BT18 Bokomon
2x BT7 Bokomon
4x BT21 Agunimon
2x BT18 Agunimon
4x BT21 BurningGreymon
2x BT17 BurningGreymon
4x BT21 Aldamon
2x BT7 Aldamon
2x P-185 EmperorGreymon
2x BT18 EmperorGreymon
1x BT18 Susanoomon Ace
3x BT21 Takuya Kanbara
3x BT18 Takuya Kanbara & Koji Minamoto
2x BT18 Tommy Himi
2x BT18 Zoe Orimoto
2x BT4 Atomic Inferno
2x BT18 Wind to Flame, Ice to Sword
1x BT18 Lord of Devastation and Rebirth

I initially got pulled into trying Red Hybrid because I thought the art for the BT18 Susanoomon Ace was very cool. Then I watched some gameplay videos, and thought the hybrid style of gameplay looked super fun and interesting. I think it's really neat that the DCG is flexible enough to support something so different, and that it's able to bend to the way things worked in a specific season of the anime. I didn't really like that season of the anime, but it's really fun to play in the card game!

The first version of this deck was much wider in its selection of digimon and number of colors to choose from; much more of an EmperorGreymon build, whereas the current version, which leans heavily on red cards and the support given in BT21, is more about going fast than making a big guy. In some ways, I think that makes this version more fun than the BT18 EmperorGreymon/Susanoomon version, which was a little slower and more about getting all of your pieces in order, which made it more prone to bricking.

I say the deck is still in flux because I'm honestly not married to some of the options in here, or even the number or variety of rookies I'm running. So I'm very happy to see some new support in the recently released AD1 set that I think hopefully make it a little more viable to run a wider gamut of colors and go for the full-on EmperorGreymon build while still keeping the speed and consistency of the BT21 version. I do like a deck that's built around getting a Big Guy on the field. Very curious to play around with those new cards (once they start coming down a little more in price)!

Overall, this might be my favorite deck to run so far, probably because it's the one I've had to compromise on the least to build. All of these cards were relatively inexpensive, even the BT21 cards when they were brand new, which made it easy to build up a large pool of cards I could play around with while trying to find just the right build for me.

Veemon Armor

I alluded to being less excited about this deck at the start of this post, and I'm definitely not as high on it as Red Hybrid, but honestly, in the writing of this post and looking into what other folks have built in this archetype since last year, I feel less bad about the deck I've built and my ability to fix it up a bit without breaking the bank. I think it's just not the best archetype out there, or capable of doing very much.

Here's the decklist:

4x BT16 DemiVeemon
4x BT21 Veemon
3x P-117 Veemon
3x BT12 Veemon
3x BT8 Veemon
4x BT21 Flamedramon
4x BT21 Lighdramon
4x BT21 Magnamon
2x ST17 Magnamon
2x BT13 Magnamon
1x BT8 Magnamon
4x BT21 Davis Motomiya
3x P-124 Davis Motomiya
4x BT21 Armor Digivolution
3x BT8 Fire Rocket
3x BT8 Armor Texture!
2x LM Blue Scramble
1x BT9 Awakening of the Golden Knight

It's a bit messy, especially at the top end. The "top end" for this deck being, uh, all the fuckin' Magnamons I have in there. I think I just wasn't sure what I wanted out of a Magnamon in this deck. There are a lot of Magnamons out there, and I certainly wasn't able to afford a Magnamon X (I'm still not), so I just kind of threw in a little bit of everything. I think if I focus up a little bit more, and with the support of a few more cards that have popped up since I stopped playing as often, and certainly since I stopped paying attention to this deck, it could be a little more consistent.

I was really, really excited by the possibility of an armor rush deck, and the support for that in BT21, and the new card art, and the low price of BT21 cards, but it kinda doesn't come together if you can't move fast enough, and I still suspect it would need some more expensive cards to even pretend to be competitive.

At the end of the day, though, that isn't what's most important to me here, and I don't want to be totally negative about this deck. I do still think it's a fun idea for an archetype. It's even more about going fast than Red Hybrid, insomuch as it's about getting a lot of little guys on the board, chipping away, not caring if they go down swinging, and in fact using the fact that they probably will go down to your advantage with Armor Purge and support from things like the Armor Digivolution option and BT21 Davis tamer.

I think this is a really cool spin on the idea of a rush deck, where your hoard of little guys dying is actually what sustains them and boomerangs them around to staying on the field and maybe making another guy. And I think that archetype fits neatly into the Veemon armor digivolution line. Idk, I just think it's neat!

Bonus: Imperialdramon updates

As I mentioned at the top of this post, I've also made some updates to my Imperialdramon deck, many of which I mentioned wanting to make in my previous DCG post. It's not super different, but I made the tiny changes that needed to be changed and that didn't cost an arm and a leg.

Namely, I removed the BT16 DemiVeemon in favor of 4 of the BT12 DemiVeemon, replaced the 2 ST9 Wormmon with 2 of the the green/purple Wormmon from BT16 that interacts with the trash, added some BT21 Lighdramon, and Paladin Mode Ace to have a Big Guy. I also pared down the number of level 6 Digimon a bit in favor of a few more Options like Ice Wall and Hammer Spark. I'm not too sure about all the options still, but they're at least nice potential security bombs, and there's always something this deck can do with more memory.

I feel like the deck has been sort of stagnating without being able to afford to add the BT16 Paildramon. It's just so good. I think with that guy, the new AD1 Paildramon, and maybe one or two other things, I'd feel much better about the state of things. It seems like the prices of the BT16 Paildramon are finally coming down thanks to the reprints in AD1. AD1 has also been hard to get hands on generally since launch, so we'll have to see where prices shake out once more copies hit the market.

Conclusion

I don't know why my enthusiasm seems to peak once a year in April with the release of a new set, but I still like this game! I still have fun thinking about it and trying to piece decks together and playing when I can. I still haven't played against other humans in the real world yet, but I'm hoping to break into that at a local place this year.

Aside from beefing up my current decks, I'm also really jonesing to try an Adventure deck. I think that'll be my next big build. Everything released for that archetype since the ST20 and ST21 starter decks has made playing Adventure look really fun, and clearly I'm a sucker for protagonist decks, so it's right up my street. Hopefully AD1 prices keep coming down enough for me to try Adventure Omni? One day I'll realize my dream of running an Omnimon deck.

Until next time, I'll be in the Digital World (staring at spreadsheets and wishing someone would hire me)!

Eganworks Logo Animation

2026-03-31T19:02:00Z

A new logo/wordmark animation I made for my portfolio website's header.

See more in my motion design gallery.

Jank Logo Animation

2026-03-31T19:01:00Z

Spec/practice work created with Jank's fantastic logo.

I really wanted this one to have more of a build-up or sequence of events rather than just animating on very simply. I was aiming for a sort of cable TV intro / glitchy aesthetic, and I'm happy with where everything landed.

Here's the video version:

Here's a version with some glitchy sound design:

Here are some stills I like:

See more in my motion design gallery.

Aftermath Logo Animation

2026-03-31T19:00:00Z

Spec/practice work made with Aftermath's logo.

Had I done some research and realized they were already using a similar animation, I might have done something different, but I'm still happy with the outcome.

See more in my motion design gallery.

What Else Is On? March 16th, 2026

2026-03-16T20:10:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

Finally emerging from my cave to post this month's What Else Is On! I've been a very busy little bee for the past few weeks in the job search mines, updating my portfolio, updating my resume, working on motion design projects, and luckily, getting a bunch of interviews.

All of that has left me with precious little blog energy, but I do have a solid collection of links to share for the month! So without further ado, let's see what else is on.

🎵 Put This On

Army - Ben Folds Five

I went and saw Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie last month having never seen Matt & Jay's previous work outside of Update Day, and I've been obsessed with this song, which I'd never heard before despite being a moderate Ben Folds fan, and which I now know features in the Nirvana the Band the Show webseries and Nirvanna the Band the Show TV series as closing credits music (and also features at greater length in the movie), ever since.

📚 Read This

The Waters of March - Laura Michet

Speaking of becoming obsessed with music featured in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, Laura Michet wrote about The Waters of March, a beautiful song that brings me to tears and caught me off guard at the end of NTBTSTM in a surprisingly touching way.

The Waters Are Already Muddy - InnerSpiral

In Alli's own words, "A vent in frustration about the state of the internet, but also hope." There's a lot in here that I think some folks might need to hear.

A thought about monstrous rich men online - Laura Michet

Back to Laura Michet with a post about how being forced to reckon with the fact that we all fucking hate them turned weird rich men into even more psychotic monsters.

The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk - The Intercept

Turn on the TV today, and you will drown in a sea of ads in which capitalists denounce capitalism. Think of the PNC Bank ads where parents sell their children’s naming rights a la sports stadiums for the money to raise them or the Robinhood ads where a white-haired older man, perhaps meant to evoke Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, curses the “men of means with their silver spoons eating up the financial favors of the one percent” from the deck of a yacht.

Prediction markets want to eat the news - The Verge

Everything is gambling now, and if we let it, it will devour our soul until there is nothing left.

I Traveled 800 Miles To Eat Breakfast, Lunch, And Pizza At Criss Angel’s Breakfast, Lunch, And Pizza - Defector

Hey let's take a lighter turn with the story of Libby Watson's journey to a restaurant opened by magician Criss Angel that is really called "Breakfast Lunch and Pizza."

Vilja: Emma’s Oblivion Mod That Sir Terry Pratchett Loved - Videodame

A downright charming interview with the creator of a number of mods for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, including her surprising collaboration with Terry Pratchett!

Dithering Part 1 - visualrambling

A really beautiful and informative visual exploration of how dithering works! Fascinating stuff!

A Dialogue with Austin Walker - Unwinnable

I somehow missed the fact that Austin Walker started another video game podcast last year, so shoutouts to this interview for bringing that to my attention. But it's also a really great conversation with someone whom I regard as maybe the smartest person in games journalism, or at least the person best equipped and best able (imho) to articulate the state of things in video games, games journalism, culture, politics, etc, and connect them all. I'm just a big fan of this guy.

I wish videogame culture would take more cues from readers - Jank

Very much agree with Graham Smith's sentiments here! Video games can often feel like a treadmill you need to keep up with at all costs, but there's a much richer history of work out there than just the latest thing, and it's worth exploring from different angles. There should be room for such things in modern games crit (once all the outlets stop dying and being sold for parts).

Three game devs climb a mountain - Jank

Really enjoyed this multi-part series covering Bennett Foddy, Holly Jencka, and Emeric Thoa's attempt to reach the apex of Peak. I would absolutely read more features like this!

the coolest apology i ever got - Joe Wintergreen

A fun personal story that sounds like something out of a movie. What do you mean this happened to you in real life.

The Good Old Hyperlink - Discard Pile

Praise for the most fundamental underpinning of the internet—and perhaps underappreciated nowadays—the hyperlink.

“This Is Not The Computer For You” - Sam Henri Gold

This post has really been making the rounds, but I wanted to share it here as well because it, perhaps unsurprisingly, resonated with me. Sometimes a cheap laptop that can't do everything you want it to is the perfect place for a kid to start.

Have a Fucking Website - Other Strangeness

if you are a business or an individual artist or creator, have a fucking website. “But-” fuck you, have a fucking website.

📺 Watch This

A thing we do - Rowley

A short animation about bein' friends and stuff.

The Power Of Selling Out: Your Customers As Political Capital - The Onion

The Onion is the most important comedic and cultural institution of our time.

A.I. Filmmaking Is Not The Future. It's a Grift. - Patrick (H) Willems

Great video from a few years back about what was wrong with the "AI Wes Anderson" craze, and why AI "art" is bullshit.

🎧 Listen To This

Personal Records: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie - NPR

Speaking of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie and its music: if you want to hear Matt Johnson & Jay McCarrol talk about the music that inspires them, featuring tracks both used in the movie and not, NPR kicked off a fun new show doing just that with those two.

Side Story

A new(ish) video game podcast from Austin Walker and a rotating panel of hosts from the Friends at the Table universe.

🎮 Play This

2025 - Thomas Colthurst

Free, Browser

This game is diabolical. It is of the devil. I curse friend of the site and oft-linked writer Laura Michet for ever blogging about it. The only instruction given is to make 45 groups of 45. You're left to figure out what the groups are and what's going on here. If you enjoy NYT's Connections, this is your punishment. Really took my mind off of interview anxiety last week though!

Seven Gates, We Deliver - Lawra Suits Clark

Free, Browser

A fun sort of memory game where you place things in a room and then need to remember where you put them and how to navigate to them without being able to see the room.

gradient.horse - Michail Rybakov

Free, Browser

Draw a horse and let 'em run!

list animals until failure - Vivian Rose

Free, Browser

List as many animals as you can think of until you can't.

🌐 Some Good Websites

Marathon Timeline

A really pretty, if still somewhat inscrutable (to me) timeline of events in the universe of Marathon, a new game from Bungie that I think is pretty darn good.

After the Beep

I'm surprised I haven't shared this already! After the Beep is an answering machine for the internet, featuring a real phone number you can call to anonymously leave a message that anyone can listen to. Can you find the message from yours truly? 👀

Oopsie Doodle

Love to find a gorgeous new personal website. Oopsie Doodle's got it all, and personality in spades.

🔗 Bonus Links

The Lie-In - Jank

A new weekly roundup of games writing from around the web, from the good folks at Jank!

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

New York City - February 23rd, 2026

2026-02-23T19:12:00Z

Damn, dudes, they done did it again. Back at it again at Krispy Kreme the way this city got frosted.

It started picking up yesterday afternoon while we were just finishing up at the laundromat, and then it just kept picking up. We went to bed to a LOT of snow, and then woke up to . . . I guess a fuckton? is the only way to describe such a massive overnight increase?

So you know what I did: I grabbed my 3DS and took some noisy, grainy shots. It's so bright out from the snow that a lot of them actually look pretty good!

I was initially upset that we were getting another big snowfall immediately after the last blanket of filthy snow had finally melted off to hell, but for today it's cozy and pretty.

Hey, why does snow have a smell? It's impossible to describe, but it has its own smell, like rain. It smells exactly the same here as when it would snow in Chicago.

The whole city is at a standstill, kids have a real actual snow day, folks are out shoveling the sidewalks, and we've been seeing people walking down the middle of the street and making snowballs all morning. We definitely want to take a little stroll today while it's still pristine and nice looking.

Enjoy your snow day, New York City!

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Shot on 3DS . . . Again!

2026-02-21T02:38:00Z

We made it back! As I mentioned in my previous 3DS photography post, we had intended to visit the Met for Lauren's birthday like we do every year, but screwed up the timing and ended up changing our plans. This week, we planned to make up for that and visit the Met for real this time. There's actually quite a story to this trip before I get to the photos, though, as once again, the universe conspired to stop us.

First, we planned to go out on Wednesday, mostly to work around the week's cooking schedule, so we wouldn't have to cook dinner when we got home tired from a day of walking around a big museum. Tuesday night, I looked up our route to the Met to make sure the trains were back to normal after some service changes last weekend. The trains were indeed back to normal, but we discovered something we'd never needed to know before: The Met is closed on Wednesdays.

So we changed plans again to go out Thursday. Luckily, we'd cooked enough on Tuesday to last three nights, so we wouldn't have to cook while hungry and exhausted. The Met is still only open until 5pm on Thursday, in contrast to their 9pm closing time on Fridays and Saturdays, but we wanted to leave a day of recovery before we go all the way back into Manhattan for some plans on Saturday, and I think part of me was hoping maybe it would be less crowded during the week. We also just wanted to get out already.

Thursday afternoon comes and we're ready to go. I'm getting things together for our trip out, and as I'm reaching for my water bottle, past the bouquet of flowers I got for Lauren for Valentine's Day, I get some pollen on my nice white sweater. I didn't think much of this at first, and just kind of joked about it to Lauren. "Hey honey I got pollen-ed" and all that. Then I discovered that actually pollen is kind of a pain in the ass and can leave some stubborn stains. Long story short, I changed sweaters and we left half an hour late.

The subway trip into Manhattan went pretty smoothly, we had some good train timing, but on the final leg, as we are 3 or 4 stops away from our destination station, we hear a message I don't think I've ever heard in my almost 9 years of living here: Someone has been struck by a train at our destination, and the train we're on is being rerouted. Terrible! Our being rerouted is obviously not the tragedy here, it's an awful thing to happen. But we do still need to find another way to the museum now.

So we hop off the train at Times Square. Our brief search for directions doesn't give us any alternate train routes to try, and we're already running late, so we call an Uber. It's expensive, and likely slower, having to deal with traffic, but we're so close and we want to get there, damn it! So we hop in a car and crawl through traffic for half an hour, and finally get to the Met at 3:30, with an hour and a half until closing. Not the amount of time we would have preferred, once again, but we still had a nice time once we were there.

We have Yet Again vowed to return sometime soon so that we can stay longer and relax into the full museum experience. Luckily, it (usually) costs literally $3 to get there (god bless the subway), and admission is pay-what-you-want for NYC residents, so it's not a huge expense to keep going. Honestly, we should take advantage of that fact more often!

Whew. Okay. Here are the shots I took on 3DS:

We made a beeline for the 19th and Early 20th Century European Paintings and Sculpture exhibit, because we wanted to see some impressionists. We weren't the only ones! The place was busy even close to closing time on a random Thursday, including at least one large guided group of tourists. It shouldn't be surprising that Van Gogh would be a major stop on their tour.

We started with Monet, though, as you can maybe tell from this very fuzzy view of one of his series of Water Lillies. An impressionist view of an impressionist painting, if you will.

I love Monet's flowers, but also his reflections are super impressive to me. You get that in this super shiny table in his Chrysanthemums here and also to greater effect in another painting later on.

Monet's The Path through the Irises, and a museum employee who appears to be checking his watch.

I'm posting these in the order they were shot to preserve the context in which I saw everything, and also to save some of the best for last, but anyway that's why we have some Van Gogh here. This is a far away view of his Roses and La Berceuse, from left to right. There's another in the background, but I can't quite make it out or remember what it is.

Van Gogh's Olive Trees. Hell yeah, gimme those Brush Strokes™.

Van Gogh's Wheat Field with Cypresses. This dude loved a wheat field, and I can't say I blame him if this is how he saw them. This one is so gorgeous in person. Van Gogh's work is so thick and shiny I just want to lick it. Love these clouds!

Monet's Poppy Fields near Argenteuil. I love these clouds too, and this bright spring/summer-y scene. Impressionism is so fucking cool, man. How did you do that.

Monet's View of Vétheuil. We've really been craving spring lately, so almost all of these paintings warranted a sigh and a line like, "you can really feel the warm breeze in this one" from us. This was one of them. Love that sky and the pops of red flowers in the field.

Monet's La Grenouillère. THIS is the piece whose reflections took me the fuck out. If you get close it's just fucking lines of color, but from afar it looks exactly like the ripples on a lake how do you DO that?? Fuck off.

Discovered I'm a big Monet fan this trip.

Georges Seurat's _Study for "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte"_. A tiny version of the one at the Art Institute of Chicago!

Paul Signac's Notre-Dame de la Garde (La Bonne Mère), Marseille. The colors in this one! The light! God damn! Looks like the box art for a 1998 computer game. I mean that in the best way possible, Mr. Signac, I'm very sorry. The light in this one is gorgeous.

Banks of Marble

2026-02-18T23:00:00Z

Your browser does not support the audio element.

I've travelled around this country
From shore to shining shore
It really made me wonder
The things I heard and saw

I saw the weary farmer
A-plowing sod and loam
I heard the auction hammer
Just a-knocking down his home

But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the farmer sweated for

I've seen the seamen standing
Idly by the shore
And I heard their bosses sayin'
"Got no work for you no more"

But the Banks are Made of Marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the seamen sweated for

I've seen the weary miner
Scrubbing coal dust from his back
And I've heard his children cryin'
Got no coal to heat the shack

BUT THE BANKS ARE MADE OF MARBLE
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the miner sweated for

I've seen my brothers working
Throughout this mighty land
I've prayed we'd get together
And together make a stand

Then we might own those banks of marble
With a guard at every door
And we would share those vaults of silver
That we have sweated for

Banks of Marble, Pete Seeger
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

Emphasis mine.

Tomorrow starts at 4 a.m.

2026-02-17T22:30:00Z

Alright, hear me out.

Midnight is too early to start "tomorrow." Most days, I'm still awake at midnight, and I think it's a perfectly reasonable time to still be awake. I'd like to be in bed or at least getting ready for bed at that time, but I'm not upset by any means to be awake. And if/when I'm awake at midnight on, say, Monday and talking about my plans for Tuesday, I'm still going to call Tuesday "tomorrow."

But I'm not so unreasonable as to think "tomorrow" can only start after one has gone to bed. Otherwise, we'd have roving gangs of never-sleepers claiming that Wednesday is still Monday for them because they haven't gone to sleep yet. At some point, perception has to give way to reality. The sun sets, the sun rises, and a new day is born.

I think the time at which it empirically becomes "tomorrow," or when "tomorrow" becomes "today," whichever you prefer, is 4 in the morning. At 4 a.m., I don't think anyone can claim it's not tomorrow yet. A lot of what follows may seem subjective, but this is a very silly and inconsequential opinion, so I don't care.

As I already mentioned, midnight is an absurd time to claim it's already "tomorrow." Late night TV shows are finishing up or entering their final blocks, people are still going to bed, it's a time to start winding things down. Why are you winding things down? To prepare for tomorrow, because it's still "today."

1 a.m. is also still "today." It's not so late that you've completely ruined your chances of having a decent night's sleep and a productive day, and it's a reasonable enough time that one could be considered to be "still out" or just getting home. You could finish a movie at 1 a.m., go to bed, and feel fine about it.

2 a.m. is getting there, but still not "tomorrow" in my book. This is the time where, if I'm still up and doing something, it's officially time to pack it in and get in bed as soon and as quickly as possible. But 2 a.m. is still night, it's not yet morning. 2 a.m. can be salvaged, you haven't completely fucked up just yet. It's still today.

3 a.m. is a danger zone. It's still late at night, but you're not going to have a good day tomorrow, but you can still squeak by. If you're not in bed yet, you are actively fucking up with every passing second.

4 a.m. is morning. It is now tomorrow. It's over for you. You have fucked up. Cafe workers are either on their way or are already preparing to open up for the day. Don't even bother going to bed. Put on a pot of coffee and accept your fate.

As you can see, this is a topic that depends very much on vibe, but also on a general sense of when people with early morning jobs start doing their thing. Very few people are probably starting up the day's work at 1, 2, or 3. By 4, dawn is approaching. Time to make the proverbial donuts.

The true crux of it for me, though, is the time at which we, as a society and individually, make the switch from "late at night" to "early in the morning." If something happens at 2 a.m., wouldn't you say it happened "in the middle of the night?" IMO, if it's not morning, it's not tomorrow.

This is how I landed on 4 a.m. as the new, proper delineator for "tomorrow." 3 a.m. is the middle of the night. 4 a.m. is early morning. If I have a flight at 3 a.m., I'm going to say it's late at night. 4 a.m. is the time at which I would start saying I have an "early flight." Because it's morning now.

Another good way of looking at this is to imagine your reaction to a friend telling you how late they were awake last night. For example:

"Yeah, I was up until 1 a.m. last night "

Aw man.

"I was up until 2 a.m. last night."

Geeeeeez.

"So I was up until 3 a.m. last night."

Oh shit.

"Man, I was up until 4 a.m. with this thing."

Fuuuuuuuck.

There's a lot to be conveyed in tone here, but hopefully what I'm getting at comes across.

So if we're talking about tomorrow at midnight, I'm gonna go ahead and keep calling it tomorrow. We're still awake, our brains haven't completely deteriorated yet. Tomorrow is still tomorrow.

At 4 a.m., when I've well and truly fucked up and my brain is a soup, then I will transition to calling tomorrow "today."

Brooklyn Museum, Shot on 3DS

2026-02-16T19:40:00Z

Yesterday, we went to the Brooklyn Museum for Lauren's birthday. We had initially intended to go to the Met, like we do most years for her birthday, but we noticed too late that the Met closes super early on Sunday (we're use to going on Saturdays, when they're open until 9), and with the trains being fucky in our neighborhood all weekend, we decided to pivot to a closer museum that would give us more time to walk around.

We still had a lot of fun, despite the last-minute change! We were just in the mood to calmly exist in a space with some cool art, and we got exactly that. I also brought my 3DS along both to hunt for Streetpasses (no dice) and add to my new hobby of shooting pictures with a 3DS in the year of our lord [Not 2013].

We spent most of our time wandering around the collection titled Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art.

As you'll see, shooting with the 3DS is actually a little tricky to get the hang of. The viewfinder doesn't actually show you the full image that you're capturing, so it can be tough to frame things up exactly as you'd like. Here's what I shot!

A wide shot of Fishing Boats, Gloucester by Jane Peterson.

A closer shot of Fishing Boats, Gloucester. Lauren and I both felt like we'd seen this painting on the cover of a textbook before, but we couldn't put our finger on it.

Lauren taking a photo of Niagara by Louis Rémy Mignot. The installation of this piece was very cool. Not only is the painting itself impressive, but they've also got a recording of a waterfall playing over a very directional speaker, so that you can really only hear it, or at least hear it best, when you're standing right in front of the painting, directly under the speaker.

A closer shot of Niagara.

Summer Showers by Martin Johnson Heade. I really liked the composition of this one, and the use of the darker storm clouds to frame the top of the painting. Also a great episode of Adventure Time.

A group of people gathered around the absolutely enormous and ridiculously detailed A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie by Albert Bierstadt. We had to take this one in in sections. So much to look at!

Cuban Landscape by George Biddle. Really loved the soft shapes and colors in this one.

The birthday girl and paparazzo. Didn't get the name of this particular installation!

That's all I shot on 3DS! We saw much more, and there's much more to see in this particular collection, but I like to keep these posts constrained to their 'shot on 3DS' stricture.

Tune in next time to find out if I'll ever recieve another Streetpass. Surely someone else in this city carries around a 3DS...

My Own Personal Amélie

2026-02-14T19:00:00Z

Ed. note: This post starts like another tech rant, but it gets quite sappy, I promise.

Instagram is hell. I hate being there, I hate using it. It's a mind-numbing time waster. It sucks.

I hate that it's algorithmically designed to keep me scrolling. I hate that it works on me. I hate that it's owned by Facebook. I hate its pivots to compete with other apps like Snapchat and TikTok. I hate its efforts to suppress "political content." Toe to tip, it's a shitty place that makes me feel bad.

I know they added a "following" feed a few years ago that gives you what all these apps should be, which is just a reverse-chronological feed of the people you're following without any inserted ads or reels. That's great. The hate goes deeper than that for me. I hate social media at large; what it's become and what it represents. I don't enjoy scrolling the Following feed. And I resent having to manually select it.

Lately, I've started using the App Limits feature on my iPhone to limit my combined usage of Instagram, Bluesky, and Mastodon to an hour a day. It's honestly been working really well. It's keeping me from scrolling all day, and keeping me mindful of how I'm using my time. I've even started to feel like an hour a day is too much!

But I haven't gone so far as to delete my account. This is for a lot of the same reasons I haven't deleted various other accounts for services I hate: There are still people I want to keep up with who are only posting there, it's a professional resource, it can still be a source of creative inspiration, I still find good artists there. I still get plenty out of it, I just don't enjoy the act of being there and getting drawn into a long scroll.

But the number one reason I haven't deleted my Instagram account is my girlfriend, Lauren. She spends a lot more time on Instagram than I do (not to drag her), and she's always sending me cute little posts and reels. New recipes to try, things to do in the city, cute comics and illustrations, and anything that makes her think of me. I send her things too! Just not nearly as much, especially as I'm trying to spend less time on social media.

Since I'm mostly not looking at Instagram during the day, and even less so lately, these reels pile up over the course of a day. This usually culminates with me remembering late at night that she sent me a bunch of stuff, and opening up our DM thread to get blasted by an incredible series of posts curated just for me.

A skilled artist making something intricate and beautiful, a series of photos from a beautiful part of Japan we'd like to visit, a new restaurant that just opened in Brooklyn, a cute picture of a beaver, a comic about a small animal having a nice day or overcoming a hardship, some dude doing something inadvisable, a dog who was rescued from a horrible situation and is happy now, a cute video of a beaver (we really love beavers), a piece of art that says something sappy about love.

And I sit there smiling, taking it all in, all of these things that were hand selected by the person I love to make me smile or laugh or just know that she's thinking of me. All of these beautiful things in the world, and beautiful aspects to life. And I can't help but feeling like I'm The Glass Man, and Amélie has just delivered a new video tape to help me experience the world outside my house.

The comparison doesn't work out 1:1, of course. I'm not confined to my house due to a physical condition, and Lauren isn't avoiding her own problems by helping others. She's also not in love with a Frenchman named Nino, at least I hope not. But the volume and variety of posts makes me think of that every time, and leaves me feeling like the blind man Amélie helps across the street.

So deep hatred of social media or no, I'll keep coming back to Instagram, if only to watch the tape my own personal Amelie has put together for me today. It's the best possible experience of the platform anyone could hope to have.

Happy Valentine's Day and Happy Birthday, Lauren! I love you!

Raspberry Cheesecake Brownies

2026-02-14T03:57:00Z

Lauren made us Raspberry Cheesecake Brownies for Valentine's Day with her signature homemade raspberry jam, and they turned out extremely good!

We each had a cheeky little piece last night while they were still cooling, and they were delicious. They were even better tonight having cooled in the fridge overnight.

I was already a big fan of cheesecake brownies, but the raspberry jam adds a nice tart element that builds on the already slightly tart cream cheese, and helps cut through all the sweet.

Lauren got the recipe from a blog called Sally's Baking Addiction, but she also likes to write the recipes she uses by hand in her recipe book, which I think is very nice and cute.

Here's her written recipe!

Link, Please!

2026-02-13T02:51:00Z

Reading Kyle Labriola's recent post, The Good Old Hyperlink—in which he lauds blogging for giving the writer the ability to throw in hyperlinks to add context, references, and credit wherever they want—got me thinking about one of my biggest pet peeves about the modern social internet. But where Kyle is coming from the angle of hyperlinks being a useful feature, I want to talk about the issues I have, ideologically, with the more link-hostile platforms.

I am, of course, also pro-hyperlink. I totally agree with everything Kyle says in his post. I love to liberally sprinkle links throughout my own posts whenever I want to refer to an old post, refer to another blogger's post like I just did above, and especially to share something new with people. That's something a lot of my writing and web work is built around. Heck, I built a whole damn site around doing just that. I believe hyperlinking is THE purpose of the internet. It's the reason the internet exists: to share information with each other.

So I take great issue with the fact that the app-centric, closed-platform world in which we currently find ourselves is extremely link-hostile.

The major social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Bluesky will let you post links (more than one, even!), but each one massively eats into your character limit, and the platform chooses just one link to feature in a big, post-sized embed that you can choose to eschew if you like. Maybe you can argue that this makes sense for these platforms, as they're focused on micro-blogging, and don't leave much space for context or nuance anyway.

Then there are platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which have never let users post links in the text of their posts. This restriction led to the rise of the phrase, "link in bio," meaning that if someone wanted to see the thing the poster was talking about, and would otherwise link to right in the post itself, they could click over to their bio, where the poster would have made their featured link the thing they were talking about. Or maybe their bio would feature a link to a Linktree or similar service, which takes the reader to an intermediary that lists a handful of links the poster would like to share. OR maybe the poster would have featured a link to one of those third-party services that recreates a user's Instagram grid, and lets them set a unique link for each post in their grid. Of course, all of this assumes the reader bothered to click over to your bio (they didn't).

Instagram started allowing links in stories only recently, and even then they're a little cumbersome and open in the in-app browser by default, so Meta can keep harvesting your data.

The real reason behind this aversion to links is, of course, engagement. If users are linking out to other websites, the people clicking those links are not spending as much time inside your app. The ideal endgame for every social platform is to keep users inside their app and their app only at all times. Maximum engagement means maximum time showing users ads and harvesting their data.

This is actually an old tale on the internet. The social apps may have perfected it, but they didn't start that fire. It's been raging ever since the idealism of an internet built for the free exchange of ideas ran headfirst into people wondering how they could use it to make money. Online publishers have been playing dirty with their link usage for decades, only linking to their own internal pages to keep people from leaving in order to serve them more ads, and linking to external sites only sparingly. And look, I get it, if you're trying to make a living as a publisher online, you've got to make money somehow. The adpocalypse was a net negative for online publishing.

But it drives me up a wall when I'm, for example, reading about a new video game, and the website I'm reading absolutely refuses to link to the game's website or store page, or only links out to it at the very bottom of the article, attached to a single word that I'm sure to miss several times while skimming, in favor of peppering the first few paragraphs with links to their other articles or internal wiki pages that I'm much more likely to absent-mindedly click, assuming that surely they'll connect me with the game being discussed.

Honestly, though, they're not the worst offenders. It may seem like a low bar, but at least they link out at all. And online publishing is a tough grind, especially now. At least if I'm reading something in a browser, I can just open a new tab and search for what I want to see.

Let's return instead to the social platforms, because they've done something much more evil than just try to maximize engagement. They've changed people's behavior.

At some point, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook all realized that, in the name of maximizing engagement, they could tune their algorithms to punish posts that linked to external sites, de-prioritizing them in users' feeds. Then they decided to be real cagey about whether they were doing that (presumably because people wouldn't like it if they knew they were), so people had to guess at whether they were doing this, and what the rules were. Artists and journalists noticed this first, as they rely on linking out to their work on social media to let their audiences know when there's something new to see from them. Elon Musk eventually just admitted that Twitter was doing this after he bought the place.

This led to much discussion about where and when and how you can and should use links. People became scared to post links in their main post, relegating them to replies and comments, forcing people to dig a little deeper if they wanted to find their work. It became the norm for so long that I still see people on Bluesky and Mastodon (which do not do this) leaving links to their new games or art or articles out of their lead post, and including it in a reply instead. I saw people doing that on freaking Cohost. Again, these platforms do not de-prioritize posts with links in them. But people have been punished for daring to link to external sources for so long that now they're scared to do so. Links have become taboo in their minds. Arbitrary and invisible platform rules changed their behavior against the very backbone of the internet, and against their best interests.

That is my major ideological, philosophical issue with these platforms: that they are so engagement hungry, so insular, and command such control over online culture, that they have poisoned people against the mighty hyperlink; against the simplest, most elegant, most open and free way to share things with other people.

This is one of the most horrible tricks the apps have pulled: convincing people that links are bad to post and hard to follow. They've created the idea that everything inside their app is easy to see and therefore good, and everything outside the app is hard and annoying to see and therefore bad. Links will get you punished, so stay here and build your identity inside our platform instead. Rely on us. Need us.

Links are not poison. Links are literally the internet. The internet is links. If we lose that, we lose a little more control, a little more freedom, and everything gets a little more closed off.

The web is beautiful, capitalism is evil, and these platforms should be ashamed. As has been made abundatly clear, however, no one feels shame in a mansion.

Here's to the open web, and its most fundamental component, the Good Old Hyperlink. If you'd like to share this post, you know what to do.

Phonopolis Demo!

2026-02-11T19:11:00Z

Amanita Design just released a demo for their upcoming game Phonopolis! Check it out for free on Steam.

Amanita are a studio known for making really beautiful point-and-click adventure games like Machinarium, Botanicula, and the Samorost series. I've been a big fan of their work since Machinarium, and I've been VERY excitedly awaiting Phonopolis since it was announced four years ago.

All of Amanita's games are exquisitely crafted, and Phonopolis looks to be no exception, with the integration of physical, hand-painted cardboard elements. There's a lovely little "behind the scenes" video showing some of that process included in the demo and on their YouTube channel. There's no mention of a longer doc showing the fullness of how the game was made, but I'd absolutely love to see one.

I've been a sucker for physical elements in video games for a long time, from State of Play's Lumino City to Might & Delight's The Blue Flamingo, which I wrote about not long ago. As a big fan of point-and-click adventure games, and Amanita's specifically, this is a big one for me.

Phonopolis will be out sometime this year!

New TMBG Album Preview!

2026-02-10T18:30:00Z

The machine that is They Might Be Giants refuses to stop. Yesterday, they released the above track, Wu-Tang, a preview from their upcoming studio album, whose name was also revealed: The World Is to Dig.

Along with the preview track and its lyrics, which are listed in the description of the above YouTube video as well as the track's tmbgshop page, TMBG also revealed the following image, which is probably part of the final album art to come:

I dig the new track! It's got that TMBG sound that I'm still not sick of. And I'm very excited for the new album, which is coming in April! It's somehow already been 5 years since their last one?

Somehow, after all these years, and all these albums, TMBG are possibly the only band that I listened to in college whose new work still has the sauce and hits the same.

Your child's online safety is not my fucking problem

2026-02-09T20:35:00Z

Today, Discord announced that they'll be the latest in a series of tech platforms to start requiring ID verification globally next month. All Discord users will be defaulted to a "teen-appropriate experience" until they prove they're adults by either taking a picture of their face to be scanned by AI (do not do this) or sending Discord a copy of their government ID (DO NOT DO THIS). Or, presumably, by paying for Nitro with their credit card (lmao).

Discord says this personal identifying information is "deleted quickly — in most cases, immediately after age confirmation." This is also what they said when they started rolling out age verification in Australia last year, before immediately having that information stolen in a data breach.

Per The Verge, the stolen data was purportedly only (only 🙄) "a 'small number' of images of government IDs from 'users who had appealed an age determination.'" Discord has also said that they've since changed third-party age-verification providers. First of all, why would I believe anything Discord says. Second of all, the best case scenario here is that you didn't bother to audit the company you'd chosen to collect some incredibly sensitive user data.

This is part of the latest push to put child locks on the internet under the guise of "safety." But age verification systems, especially those that require a government ID, would also have the side effect of tying your online activity to your actual, real identity. Which is a bad idea for several reasons I can think of off the top of my head!

I also have a hard time believing our government gives a shit about the safety of children at the moment!!!

The truth of the matter is that age-verification laws give the government and corporations way too much power over online speech at a time when the right is trying harder than ever to chill any speech or activity that falls outside their narrow, regressive view of what should be deemed "appropriate." See: that whole fracas over adult games on Steam.

I'm all for kids having a safe experience online. I did when I was a kid. But it wasn't because the government had thought-policed everyone into acting in a child-friendly manner. It was because my parents were aware of the risks of entering certain spaces (and to a degree, unfortunately, of existing in the world), and made sure I was too. When I was first allowed to use the internet, it was with slow, tentative steps. Once it was clear to my parents that I knew how to be safe, and it was clear to me that I could go to them if I ever felt unsafe, they took off the training wheels and trusted me to do the right thing.

Online safety, like every other aspect of a child's life, is the responsibility of their parents. It is very easy to police what your children see online if you'd like to. It took me literally five seconds to run a search for "online parental control tools," and I got tons of results, including this article from PCMag titled, "The Best Parental Control Software for 2026". The tools are easy to find and use. Fucking NetNanny still exists for crying out loud.

Not to mention that parental controls are baked into every major piece of tech hardware these days. Here's Apple's guide to iOS parental controls. Here's Google's guide to the same on Android. Here's a guide to setting up the same thing on Windows. Take a second to enable some settings if you're so goddamn worried.

I'm not going to submit to turning the internet into a police state when the alternative is for the parent of the imagined child in danger to just be a fucking parent. Talk to your kid, take an interest in their life, find out what they're up to, make it clear that you care about them. Being a parent means having some uncomfortable discussions. Do you tell them not to take candy from strangers? Or not to get in a stranger's car? Then you can handle this too. It isn't the responsibility of society at large to come child-friendly out of the box.

If all you're worried about is teens looking at porn, guess what? Teens are gonna look at porn. They will find a way. And it's gonna be fine. Where else are they going to learn about human sexuality, their dumbass parent who won't even talk to them about not chatting with randos?

I'm getting really sick of seeing congress buy into this shit every couple of years either because they're credulous dupes who believe that surely "protecting children" will be an easy win to market come election day, or because they also believe the rhetoric that the cultural regressives are pushing. Again, I do not believe one single member of congress or head of a corporation actually gives one solitary shit about the safety of children. At best, this is pearl-clutching cultural regression. At worst, it's speech-killing opportunism.

Of course big tech supports verification laws and changes to Section 230; they're the only platforms large enough to be able to afford the added burden, making it so that no small upstarts could ever gain enough traction to supplant them.

Of course EARN IT and STOP CSAM would undermine the end-to-end encryption relied on by sensitive groups like LGBTQ+ youth and those seeking abortion resources. Almost as if that's the actual point, or at least a nice little bonus for those who oppose such things.

What can you do about this? Plenty. Stop using Discord. Cancel your Nitro subscription and tell them why. Contact them about it, post about it, raise a fuss. Call your representatives about it. Email or fax if you must, but a phone call carries the most weight. Fight for the Future has set up a great site called badinternetbills.com to help keep you informed, give you ways to contact your reps, and help you know what to say.

This is a big moment for those who want to lock down the internet. Like SOPA over a decade ago, we can defeat them. But unlike with SOPA, the internet feels smaller and more fragmented. Algorithms have been tweaked to suppress political content, social media has consolidated and pivoted to content consumption, and the journalists and outlets that would have covered this kind of thing aggressively a decade ago have been laid off, harrassed out of the industry, bought and sold a dozen times and gutted for parts. I haven't seen a lot of people posting about this, especially not in normie spaces like Instagram.

But I've also seen something else over the past year or so. I've seen more people starting their own websites and newsletters. I've seen more journalists going independent with more and more reader-funded publications. I've seen people posting like hell in opposition to ICE. That "old" internet is still there, you're just being directed away from it, away from speaking up, away from solidarity with your fellow human beings.

Raising a fuss still works. Posting about it, talking about it, calling your representatives still works. Talking to the press works. People want to be informed, and want to inform others. That's something this administration would love to see continually eroded away.

If you want your child to be safe online, talk to them. Watch over and protect them like you should anywhere else. Don't make it my problem that you're too lazy to figure out how to protect them yourself. Every parent has a different idea of how to raise their child, and what they need "protection" from. Stop trying to force yours on the world.

Your child is none of my goddamn business, and I am none of yours.

Wishing I had a 'Thing'

2026-02-06T19:45:00Z

I am once again thinking about starting a Patreon. Freelance work continues to be slow, along with the job market, and a lot of my hobbies and media in which I work cost money (web hosting, software subscriptions, etc). They're not bleeding me dry, but it would be nice if those projects could sustain themselves, or even slip me some walkin' around money.

I'm not a huge creator by any means. I don't even have what could be considered a modest following online. But some of the things I work on have gathered a small, friendly audience, and there's always a chance someone out there would feel inclined to throw some support my way (no pressure obv).

It feels like just about the most frivolous thing I could do right now, amidst a sea of donation links for folks fighting ICE or trying to pay medical bills. And I know, we've all got our own stuff going on, and we still need to work and live and advocate for ourselves when we need to, and people can make their own decisions about what to contribute to, but still.

It also feels kinda depressing to think about having to promote myself on social media more aggressively to make sure I don't get lost in the algorithm. I used to want to be a full-time independent creator, and I guess part of me would still like that, but the part where you need to be your own social media manager and public advocate makes me want to go to sleep. Give me a 9-to-5 that lets me work on shit in my free time any day. But no one has been able to do that for me for more than six months at a time, so here we are!

All of these things are factors in my decision, but the big one I'm thinking about today is having a Thing. That one specific Thing you make as an artist that is concrete and clear and tangible, and is a Thing you can point to and say, "this is what you're contributing to."

I've never really had a Thing. I've always been more of a generalist and bopped around between various hobbies and media and styles. I don't put all of my energy into a comic or a webseries, or write a blog focused on one single topic. I run a couple of websites that all do different things, I make motion graphic art very sporadically and in different styles, I made a blog template I don't think anyone has used, and on my blog, I just write about my life and whatever else I feel like, I don't even really focus on video games enough for this to be a Video Game Blog. I used to make YouTube videos and I'd like to get into streaming. Is that anything?

Even when I was very active on YouTube, I couldn't pick a lane. I couldn't decide if I wanted to focus on comedy videos, vlogs, short films, documentaries, video essays, gaming, or explainers, so I just kind of made it all. You could argue that all of those things were developing my skills as an editor, and they were, but I don't feel like I was developing a signature style in any one direction.

People who are able to decide what they want to make, and push in a specific direction, are successful. Maybe not necessarily financially successful, but at least successful at making the thing they've decided to make, or in creating a coherent body of work. People supporting artists on Patreon want to contribute to the creation of one specific show, outlet, comic, series, or other artistic endeavor.

The thing is, I don't necessarily think you should have to pick! There are plenty of people who are good at doing more than one thing, and can successfully leverage those skills simultaneously. But it's a much harder sell asking people to generally support the strange collection of "stuff you do," rather than asking them to support a Thing They Like.

I don't really have a conclusion here other than being envious of artists who've found their Thing, know what they should be doing, or have at least been able to pick something to focus on. I kinda want to write, kinda want to animate, kinda want to edit, kinda want to make websites, kinda want to take pictures, etc, etc. That doesn't sound like an artist worthy of support, it kinda just sounds like Being A Person.

It's not that I think you can't or shouldn't find support on Patreon if you're this type of jack-of-all-trades like me, or that I wouldn't support someone like that if I liked what they were doing. It just feels like I would be a hard sell for me personally, and I'm not personally excited enough by what I'm doing or what I would have to show for myself on a platform like Patreon.

I know that a lot of success in art is pure chance, right place right time type stuff. And most artists don't set out to make a specific, popular thing, or set out to make the thing that ends up being popular, or ends up at least being a thing they want to continue to pursue. It just seems that way in hindsight. But it's damn frustrating to feel like you've got a lot of stuff in you and none of what you've pulled out so far is The Thing, or even A Thing.

Maybe it's because it's February, maybe it's this overcast Friday sky, or the state of the world, or the job hunt. This just kinda gets me down every once in a while. Especially when I'm not really working and I start to think about what else I have to offer that might allow me to support myself, or at least coast through the lean times a little more smoothly.

I've got a lot more going for myself than I think I do. I'm good enough at the things I do that people have stopped to like, comment, subscribe, etc. People read and comment on this blog. My work keeps getting me hired. It all just feels like a big morass of random happenings while you're in it. Maybe it just does until it doesn't.

I'm doing fine, and I'm going to be okay. I just wish I could find, focus on, and commit to A Thing. Not just so I could sell it on Patreon. But to have something resembling a direction, or a more coherent body of work. I'm just going to have to keep trying things until I find it 😤

My Favorite Runs From AGDQ 2026

2026-02-04T22:00:00Z

We're now a month past the most recent GDQ event, but I still wanted to put together a list of the runs I enjoyed the most. I had a really nice week decompressing from holiday travel with GDQ on in the background before any freelance work came my way, but as usual I wasn't able to catch everything.

Of the runs I was able to catch, here's what I liked the most:

Bat to the Heavens - 108%

I had never heard of this game before seeing this run, but it looks really cool! Kinda like Celeste if your movement was entirely dependent on swinging a baseball bat?

dlroW oiraM repuS - tixE 69

Ever wondered if it was possible to play Super Mario World backwards? Well, I don't know that I can recommend trying, but I can definitely recommend watching authorblues do it! The game isn't mirrored, he's playing every level backwards, running left from where the goal tape should be back to the start, and also in reverse order, from the Valley of Bowser to Yoshi's Island. Very fun to watch if you know SMW inside and out!

Sonic Adventure - Sonic's Story

I'm always gonna catch a Sonic run, and this one was particularly neat for being, I think, the first time showing off this particular run on an actual Dreamcast rather than playing the PC port. The commentators talk a little bit about why that matters for the run. SA is also just really fun to look at.

Fitness Boxing feat. HATSUNE MIKU - Heavyweight Difficulty Showcase

Take a load off and watch a guy get really sweaty while punching to the music with, of all people (people? Vocaloids?), Hatsune Miku. Gives what it promises!

Mario Kart World - All ? Panels

I was very excited to see this one, and it did not disappoint! It's legit mesmerizing to watch someone (seemingly) effortlessly chain together really precise movement in Mario Kart World, and accomplish in 30 minutes what I'm still not done with months after release. Couldn't take my eyes off the whole time.

Halo: Combat Evolved - Cursed Again — Any%

This is my designated "guys being dudes" run of the event. Come watch this guy play a really weird Halo mod where everything sucks, and his friends threw in some jokes for good measure, just to throw him off. It's the good kind of "these guys have known each other a long time," not the uncomfortable, alienating kind.

American Truck Simulator - Point-to-Point Race

This might be the run of the event. Everyone is in character, everyone is in sync, and everything goes off the rails almost immediately. Then they go off the rails in somehow even more unbelievable ways, before delivering the most picture-perfect finale possible for a run of its kind. This is art.

Richard Burns Rally - Rally Season

How do you follow up that Truck Sim run? How about with a rally sim where the driver is using a homemade driving wheel rig, with a VR headset on his head, and a real-life ARA Co-Driver on the couch, who at one point live-coaches the driver through a very difficult-looking course? This was another Can't-look-away run for me.

JokerShellOK - Kill the Koopalarve%

Love me some Kaizo! This hack is all about shell jumps and shell juggling and such. Exploiting shell stuff in SMW has always looked impossible to me. Shovda kills it as always.

Mario Kart 64 - VS Mode — 4 Player Match

4 players racing through all 16 MK64 courses with no CPUs and no shortcuts. Just good ~~clean~~ racing! Also they're all dressed as their characters, which is fun.

Super Metroid - GT Classic

I wasn't aware of GT Classic as a category for Super Metroid before this, but it makes for a neat run! Basically, there's a developer code in the game that lets you acquire a bunch of items before you'd otherwise have them, and it allows for strats that aren't possible in other categories. Otherwise, it's kinda just a nice, clean run of Super Metroid, which is really satisfying to watch!

Super Mario Bros. 2: Return to Subcon - Any%

A really fun-looking kaizo romhack of Mario 2, which I don't think I've seen! Great energy, great commentary. It's Mario Kaizo (Free Real Estate Face).

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - Any% (Blindfolded)

Watching Bubzia play video games blindfolded is always ridiculous. Love the moments where it looks like he's lost, but then he finds his way back to where he needs to be. The Majora boss fight is absolutely wild.

Chrono Trigger - Magus% (RNG Manip)

Really fun to see a run of Chrono Trigger and interesting that it's only a partial run, meaning they don't beat the game. I think it's neat to show off things like that, especially for RPGs where even the speedruns are long and hard to parse. Also just some great couch energy.

Super Mario 64 - 70 Star, 70 Person Relay

This had to be a nightmare to organize. 70 people completing one star each in SM64, and passing off the controller to the next person. What made this really fun to watch was the run's openness to people with all levels of familiarity with the game. There were the usual old hands up there stunting on 'em, but also some folks you could tell were trying really hard to do something they'd only recently learned to do specifically for this run. Both were equally praised! Every year, somehow, GDQ comes back looking like a more open and inclusive community than the last, and this run exemplified part of that.

Pokémon Emerald - Pick-My-Main

I'm not usually one for big, long RPG runs, or for staying all the way up until the end of GDQ. But I like Pokemon, I love Adef, and this sounded like a lot of fun. I'm so glad we stayed up, because this was a blast. Great running commentary from Adef as always, and a really neat premise. Also at one point, the smoke alarm goes off! That was wild. A really great closer that, for me, for once, was worth the length and the late hour.

What Else Is On? February 3rd, 2026

2026-02-03T21:15:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

Hey, welcome back! Time for some more links to cool stuff on the World Wide Web, if you're into that sort of thing.

If you have a couple of bucks to scrape together this month, consider helping out the people of Minnesota in their struggle against a violent federal occupation. Pretty fucked up stuff, if you ask me.

Leave your boots by the door, if you don't mind. It's still pretty slushy out there, and I don't want to get the links wet.

🎵 Put This On

They Might Beat Giygas (Mashup Album) - Shovelware

An outstanding mashup of They Might Be Giants music and the Earthbound soundtrack.

📚 Read This

Let It Go: Finishing games is optional - Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster

Great post from Kimimi arguing against the expectation that you must finish every game you start.

In The War On Protein, We Have Been Humiliatingly Defeated By Protein - Defector

Uncle Sam wants YOU (to drink a carton of whole milk at every meal).

Retro Gaming is a Playground for Billionaires and Fascists - LaserDyke's Laser Chronicles

This shit is so fucking depressing.

Google's AI Pricing Plan - Pluralistic

Here's one possible way Google could actually turn a profit off of an AI product, and uh... boy it sure sucks!

Under Pressure - Jenn Frank

I remember lugging all this stuff around in 2005: the stuff that mattered to me. It mattered, so it occupied space in a physical way.

When every tool or instrument is frictionlessly available on a phone, your priorities, the things you value, get flattened: everything ends up mattering the same amount, which is to say, nothing matters.

THREE FEET OF SNOW, MAN - quailblog

Been a helluva winter here in the US! Sharing for some really lovely animated GIFs of snow falling.

Consider Making 2026 the Year of the Personal Website! - The Virtual Moose

It's never too late! Having your own website is cool and fun!

The Clock - Aresluna

Memories of a Clock Ident shown between programs on Polish state television in the 1980s, lovingly recreated with JavaScript.

computer, Show Me Less Like This - Stillness.Digital

computer, show me the face of someone who just realized they forgot an important date. show me tears, show me stars.

📺 Watch This

How parachutes became a thing in gym class - Phil Edwards

Never knew how this came about, or even thought to wonder where it came from, but I remember it fondly!

🎮 Play This

Doors 95 - TommytheJerk

Free, Browser

Sokoban meets Portal in a Windows 95 aesthetic. 60 levels, with an editor coming soon!

Crossection - BryceSummer

Free, Browser

A combination twin-stick shooter / avoider game.

Bribe Artist - nik1oo

Free, Browser

Try to draw a counterfeit bill convincing enough to bribe the cops in 20 seconds.

A Nothingness - Gabriel Helfenstein

Free, Browser

A short, interactive horror story about finding a door in an alley.

halftimber - mattstark

Free, Browser

Build and furnish little half-timber houses, then walk around inside them!

🌐 Some Good Websites

How Many Apples Are You?

Type in your height, and find out how many apples tall you are! Plus, bonus apple facts!

Fictional Brands Archive

A collection of fictional brands found in movies, TV, and video games.

🔗 Bonus Links

linklog #006 - leaf litter

In this issue of leaf litter, a list of "very specific photo collections."

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

On Finishing (And Starting) Fewer Games

2026-02-02T23:00:00Z

Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster just published a post titled "Let It Go: Finishing games is optional", and boy did it hit home for me. It's a great post, and you should take a second to go read it for yourself. In it, Kimimi talks about the expectation that games should be finished once started, and how that's bullshit because games are entertainment, and if you're not having fun you should peace out.

For a long time now, I've had a file sitting in my drafts folder titled "Finish Fewer Games," and this is a great opportunity to finally expand on it! I've known for a while that something felt wrong with the way I play games, but I had trouble articulating what because there were just too many ways to look at it. Maybe it's that I play too many games, maybe it's that I don't finish enough, maybe it's that I feel the need to finish too many. But this is a good way to get into talking about it, and I feel like finishing fewer games is actually secretly the root of a lot of it.

I've written before about the concept of a 'backlog.' They're a topic of debate because they can be seen as turning games, which should be fun, into work or homework, or worse, into a checklist of things to complete simply for the sake of completion. I've written that I don't see my backlog that way, that I don't care if I ever start or finish all of the games on it, I just like having a record of games I want to play, more to remember what signals I'm interested in amongst the noise, if I ever have a free moment for them, than to keep a list of the games one "should" play.

That assertion still rings true for me, but I'm starting to wonder if having a backlog, or all of the record-keeping I do around my consumption of games doesn't harm my enjoyment in some way. Because at certain points, it does feel like consumption, and can contribute to decision paralysis. I want to change that.

I would describe the problem I have with playing games as feeling a sort of hurried compulsion, or always being aware that there's something else to play. There are so many games to play, and so many that I want to play, that it can feel impossible to know where I actually want to start, or whether I want to continue. Sometimes, contrary to the idea of allowing oneself to finish fewer games, I feel like I'm constantly hurrying myself along onto the next thing, and never allowing myself to stick with something I'm enjoying to see it through to the end. There's always something else to play, and I always feel the need to play it when it's fresh and new and in the zeitgeist.

There's a conflict in me between "you are never required to keep playing a game" and "I don't like how short my attention span feels." Between "you don't have to finish a game to have an opinion about it" and "if I never finish anything, I think I have a different problem."

I wrote in my GOTY post that the number of games that I wanted to play last year had me reexamining my relationship to consumption and games marketing, and I definitely think there's something to that. Following multiple big events every year filled with trailers for dozens of games I might want to play is not good for me, I think. I'm just always going to feel like I'm falling behind.

But maybe I only feel that way because I'm looking at games as things that need to be completed before moving on. I already don't finish every game I play, but I usually feel bad about it if I don't. In the long run, though, I don't feel anything about it. It's a game I had some fun with, and then wanted to move on from, why should I torture myself over that?

I've been looking at my issue with playing games from just one end: that I start or buy too many games, and end up playing too many at once and enjoying none of them. While it's probably true that starting too many games can be a problem for me, and feeling compelled to buy more games than I can handle at a given time is definitely a problem I'm working on, it's also true that feeling like I'm playing too many games at once could come from the other end: holding on to something that I'm not actually having fun with, and wanting to move on.

I've also been thinking about the question of whether or not to finish games from the perspective that when I was a kid, I only had one game to play at a time, played the absolute hell out of every single one, and had a blast doing it. That's true, but the lesson I've been taking from that is that I need to play fewer games, ideally one at a time, and finish them all. My girlfriend plays games this way, getting really into one at a time, and playing it all the way through, and I always envy her for it.

But there's a flipside to that perspective, which is that, while I did finish more games as a kid, and loved almost every one, the fact that I mostly only got one game at a time every once in a while meant that I had to naturally be choosier when picking the one game I was going to get to play for the next couple of months, and so I played more games that I liked, or that I knew I'd like. Of course I had a blast 100%-ing them, I was picking one game that I knew I'd like based on obsessively poring over reviews and marketing materials for weeks. And also, I was a kid! Just about everything was new and novel back then, I was still developing my taste.

And my girlfriend doesn't have the relationship to games that I have. For her, they're one of many ways to relax. I'm a sicko who reads the games press, follows online discourse, and generally likes to learn a lot about when and where and why and by whom a given game was made, and who harbors a desire to write about games and sharpen my critical faculties towards them. Neither of these are incorrect ways to interact with the medium, they're just going to naturally lead to different styles and habits of play.

So I'm realizing that I think I'm still holding on to a lot of ideas about plaing games that formed when I was younger, and maybe it's time for a reframing. It's not necessarily that I have access to too many games, it's that I don't have to stick to one game at a time anymore, and that starting a game doesn't have to be such a big deal because I don't have to finish it if I don't like it. There are plenty more fish in the sea. I need to try to learn to be okay with that.

Playing games as your main hobby as an adult can be hard. There used to be so much more time, and now there just isn't. There used to be so little money, and now there's at least a little more. Starting a new game used to be a big deal, and now I have a lot more going on in my life.

I think I need to have at least a little more discipline in sticking to what I'm playing, and not being swayed by marketing constantly. But I do also need to learn to let games go. To let games come and go! Putting a game down doesn't mean putting it down forever (Heck, right now I'm playing something I stopped playing last February). And playing more than one game at a time is fine if you're playing what you feel like playing and not biting off more than you can chew.

As for my backlog, and logging of games I'm playing, I still think they're useful, but maybe shouldn't feature so prominently. I might just take down my backlog page here on my blog. If all it's going to be, functionally, is a public monument to games I haven't played yet, then it becomes a statement of intent, which in a way makes it into work.

Whatever else is true, it is true that I need to calm the hell down about playing video games. And probably finish fewer of them.

Fumes

2026-02-02T01:00:00Z

For the past two weeks now, our apartment has smelled like (we think) paint fumes to varying degrees. We haven't done any painting ourselves, these are Mystery Fumes coming from Somewhere Else (likely our downstairs neighbor). It's been making it very hard to concentrate, and made the end of January particularly unproductive for us!

The smell is very clearly bad and not normal. It's definitely past smell and into fume territory. Lauren thinks it smells like a strong Sharpie, but I think it's more industrial than that, like spray paint or some kind of solvent. There's a sweetness to it, I guess? Maybe a metallic note? And a general sense that you shouldn't be breathing it.

We smell it most in our bedroom, and slightly less in parts of the living room and Lauren's studio. I'm pretty certain it's coming from our downstairs neighbor because if we shut all the windows and turn off our box fan, we can smell it coming up from the floor first. It smells the strongest if I crouch down next to my side of the bed. The only other places I smell it in the building are the stairwell and our downstairs neighbor's front door.

It started one night a few weeks back, when I started getting a whiff of something while lying in bed, and wondered to myself why it smelled like my dad (who used to work in a machine shop). It steadily grew over the next few days until eventually we started getting headaches and feeling woozy and sick until we opened the windows. This all came to a head the night after the big blizzard here in NYC (great timing). We were smelling it very strongly, and I was running around trying to find a happy medium between freezing cold and breathing poison. Had a nice little freakout that night!

And that's sort of been the tale of the past week. Leaving windows open during the coldest winter I've seen since leaving Chicago. Getting a strong whiff of fumes, feeling a big mix of worry and frustration and annoyance about it, and trying to figure out how best to mitigate it. Getting weird tastes in our mouths if we've been breathing it for too long. Going back and forth with our landlord about how to handle it. Trying not to spiral worrying if it's hurting our health long-term.

So this past week and change was very unproductive. I had a little freelance work come my way, and that was easy to tackle, but trying to focus on my own personal projects felt impossible. I had so many ideas for blog posts pop up, and had to just file them away. I pushed my GOTY post back probably a full week from when I originally intended to post it. The only thing I could focus on was my site redesign. I guess my brain saw it as more of a useful distraction, or a puzzle to be picked at, than work I needed to focus on. Still really happy with it!

At this point, I think we've settled on a pretty good solution that balances warmth with fresh air, but it still means we have to be colder than we'd like to be inside our home during a brutal cold snap. When I ran out to the store today, I think maybe I smelled it less in the stairwell and by our neighbor's door, and our current setup has me not smelling it super strongly in the apartment, so I'm allowing myself to feel hopeful that maybe it came from one inciting incident and is finally dying down. That may change by tomorrow! Or even later tonight! We shall see.

Anyway. That's what's going on with me. How are you?? 🥴

Mike's 2025 Games of the Year

2026-01-31T18:00:00Z

It's finally that time again! I really enjoyed not paying this list any mind over the holidays, but I don't think I ever want to leave posting one of these until March again, if only so I can allow my brain to move on to other things.

Way too many games came out this year! Looking at the list of games released in 2025 that I wanted to play has me reexamining my relationship to consumption and games marketing. I don't think it's good or enjoyable to try to follow every single game release and feel like you need to "keep up" with what's coming out. That's how you end up with a backlog.

That said, I did not buy many games this year, and also did not finish a lot of games. According to my last two every game posts, I finished about half as many games in 2025 as I did in 2024. It was a busy year, work-wise, but also a year of trying not to be tempted to buy games I wasn't going to immediately play, and also largely of locking in to longer games that took a lot of my time.

I usually number this list, and present it in reverse order, finishing with the game I liked most. This year, I'm turning both of those traditions on their heads by starting with the games I liked the most, and leaving things a little more nebulous. It's always hard to put these things in an exact order, and now I don't have to worry about whether I liked a game 7th or 8th most, it's just down there somewhere.

Without further ado, here are...

MIKE'S FAVORITE GAMES OF 2025

Skin Deep

Folks. We got a new Blendo game this year. I played a lot of really great games in 2025, but this has to take the cake. Skin Deep is such a tight, funny, brilliant culmination of everything else Blendo has made up to this point. It makes so many wonderful additions to the Blendo formula without losing any of their signature charm.

I already wrote about a lot of what I love about this game when it came out, but having now finished it, I can confirm that it continues to own. I'm still slowly making my way toward getting 100% of the achievements, and I'm sure I'll continue to play it again and again the way I did Quadrilateral Cowboy before it. It's a fun world to be in. This game just wants to "yes, and" the player whenever possible. It wants you to have fun. And fun you shall have.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles

I started the original FFT on PlayStation a few months before this remaster was released, after being gripped by some sort of office-rearranging, PlayStation-buying demon, but I only managed to get about three fourths of the way through, over around 40 hours (plenty of time to get well acquainted with the game) before The Ivalice Chronicles released.

I ended up switching over exclusively to my TIC playthrough because it's pretty and portable and features a number of quality-of-life updates that make things like grinding for JP less time-consuming. And they actually managed to update the visuals without making the classic pixel-art look smeary and awful!

I still haven't finished it (this boy is beefy), but as I wrote last year, The Ivalice Chronicles is without a doubt the best way to play Final Fantasy Tactics.

Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions

This was one of the first games I played in 2025, and it set such a delightfully upbeat tone. I wrote as much in my review last year! My love for the 3DS knows no bounds, so being able to crack it open every night and luxuriate in a big, bright, beautiful Mario RPG was a real treat. This is a remake of a game originally released on the GBA, and you can tell a lot of love was put into making it shine. I knew pretty quickly that I was playing something special, and that feeling carried all the way through to the credits.

I messed around with the extra Bowser's Minions story a little bit, but didn't take it very far. After a 25-ish hour RPG, I was ready to take a break, and it didn't really grab me. But the main game is a gem. Gorgeously detailed and cozy as heck. It's a must-play in my book.

System Shock (2023)

After playing, and mostly really liking, but ultimately falling off of System Shock (1994), I was cautiously excited to play the remake. There's a lot of room in that game for streamlining and modernization, but I could also see that being taken too far, or the old classic just not fitting today's sensibilities. But imo, this new System Shock hits the nail right on the head.

I feel like everything that needed updating was handled correctly, and that the core experience and soul of the original were left intact. It felt like the cruft I'd been rubbing against in the original had been cut away, and that left me free to enjoy playing the game.

I had a blast slowly creeping through Citadel Station, making notes on my map, and feeling constantly anxious about the amount and type of ammo I was carrying. And while I still haven't finished the remake, I absolutely intend to after a bit more time away.

Mario Kart World

For at least half of 2025, I had a full-time job keeping me alive and paid, and that allowed me to do something I've never done before in my life: buy a new video game console on launch day. It was a nice feeling, after stumbling around from freelance gig to freelance gig, just barely scraping together a living for five years.

Mario Kart World was a great game to launch the new Switch with. Lauren and I were very excited to spend the summer racing around this big new world as a cow on a motorcycle, and that's just what we did! It was great! We fell off after a couple of months, and I suspect that's largely because we expected to be able to drive around in the new Free Roam mode together, which you absolutely can not do in couch co-op. I guess I understand why from a technical standpoint, but it was a bummer. We still had fun trading off and racing each other in Grand Prix and Knockout Tour. The reveal of and experience racing on the new Rainbow Road were extremely sick.

And I still think Free Roam was a great addition. As someone who will boot up any game that features driving just to drive around and do nothing, I got a lot of enjoyment out of doing that while soothing Nintendo jams played in the background (this soundtrack owns). I also really dug the photo mode, which is super fast and easy to hop into at any time, and lets you play around with character poses and expressions, color filters, and a bunch of fun frames.

But outside of these new gimmicks, of course, the driving feels fantastic. It's Mario Kart. They've got that shit figured out. It's a good thing no other karting games came out that everyone collectively fawned over despite the fact that they feel like complete ass to play. That would be wild.

SteamWorld Dig 2

I continued my extremely enjoyable jaunt through the SteamWorld series last year, and I'm still loving it! Dig 2 follows up on Dig by doing basically the same thing, but slightly more and better. Which is plenty, considering how good Dig felt to play. I don't have much more to say about this one, they just really hit on a satisfying Metroidvania loop, and I really like this world and its characters. It was also fun to see them retroactively set up the world state seen in SteamWorld Heist. These are all extremely good games and you should check them out!

Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl

Etrian Odyssey was one of those post-GDQ whims where I was just in the mood to try out some random games I thought I might like. I probably saw someone posting about the series somewhere, and realized there were a ton of these things that I could load up on my 3DS. Clearly I liked it very much, because here we are!

I took one look at the series' dungeon mapping mechanic and knew I would click with it. If you're not familiar, one of the main mechanics of these games is the ability (and the need, really) to draw your own maps of the dungeons you're exploring on the DS/3DS's touch screen, from drawing walls to marking ground type and item placement. It absolutely rules! It's the perfect in-game implementation of the old-school practice of drawing your own paper maps for dungeon crawlers, and it's perfect for the DS/3DS form factor. I love a good map. It's a really satisfying way to catalog information for me. I actually got a similar satisfaction from exploring and understanding my space in System Shock! Interesting bit of symmetry in two of my GOTY picks there.

I actually started playing the original EO on DS, and then moved to EOU on 3DS because it's a little nicer to play. Also slightly nicer art and music. I think 3DS remakes are still undefeated in comparison to their originals in my experience. The updated "Untold" version on 3DS has a story mode, but I still played in classic mode because I heard the story mode wasn't very good, and classic mode lets you build and name your own team of characters. I had already grown attached to the team I'd built when I started the DS version, and I didn't want to abandon them. You can see their names listed in the screenshot above.

I ended up falling off somewhere around the 2nd Stratum (looks like there are 6) because a lot of the gameplay can be pretty repetitive, but it's a loop I still get a lot of satisfaction from in small chunks. Looking forward to trying the others in this series for comparison!

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

Boy, 2025 was a banner year for me not finishing games. I had a lot going on, it was a weird, busy year. I had a great time with Bomb Rush, but somewhere along the way, the flow just slowed to a halt. As I wrote last year, this game is chill and hangoutable as hell. Maybe that worked against me finishing it in some way. Maybe I got enough enjoyment out of hanging out and taking my time, completing side challenges and finding collectibles, that there wasn't enough gas in the tank to get all the way through the story. Even so, it was definitely still a highlight of my year. I think if I were looking for something I disliked about the game it would be the combat, but it's honestly not that outrageous and doesn't feature too prominently.

I genuinely enjoyed just slowly vibing my way through Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, and I think in a slower year, where my gaming habits were a little less all over the place, and there weren't so many goddamn games fighting for my attention, this one would've taken a lot more of my time. Maybe I'll get back to it! It does run super well on Switch 2, after all.

Proverbs

I found Proverbs through a Laura Michet blog post, which links to an RPS review, which offers this warning about the game: "I don't know if I should recommend Proverbs to you or warn you to steer clear and to avoid flowing away forever." That little cloud of intrigue was all I needed to check it out for myself. Well, that and being less and less busy at work, leading up to getting laid off.

I adore this game for its simplicity and its confidence in its premise. It's very "what you see is what you get." There are no unlocks, no cosmetics, no bonus music tracks, just the puzzle. As you complete more of the puzzle, more little pixellated guys come to populate the digital room in which the painting you're completing hangs, but that's about it. It's meant to be zen, focused on one single task. It's very old-school in that way, I think. Just you, the puzzle, the calm, quiet music, and the sounds of clicking the boxes.

Clicking into the ruleset of this very specific combination of minesweeper and sudoku, which very quickly took me from "I don't think this is for me" to "what time is it?" made this one of the most satisfying games I played this year.

Pan-Pan

Once again, I wrote a bit about my time with this game last year, so I'll try not to rehash too much of that, but suffice to say it was another case of waiting far too long to play a very short game that I ended up liking very much. It's a super simple adventure/puzzle game published by a team whose ethos and aesthetic I have very much enjoyed in the past, so it should have been a no-brainer when it came out. I'm glad I finally found the time to play it.

Honorable Mentions

A Short Hike

I finally got around to playing this this year! It was just as lovely and short as everyone always said it was!

Messenger

Extremely cool web game about delivering letters and running errands in a persistant world that you share with a handful of other real players. HOW is this just running in the browser? You gotta play it.

Sutte Hakkun

This game showed up on the SNES Swith Online service in 2025, and it's really neat! It's a puzzle platformer where you play as a little guy with a needle for a nose, and you can use that to inject color into blocks to imbue them with different properties, and interact with the world in some other interesting ways. Worth a play!

Yeah! You Want "Those Games," Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let's See You Clear Them! 1+2

These games came in clutch over the summer when we were worried about some medical stuff that turned out to be fine! Very good games for turning off your brain and avoiding anxieties for a bit.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf

I randomly got really into New Leaf again towards the end of the year. So much so that I got Lauren into it, and we were planning to visit each other's towns over Pretendo during our respective holiday travels despite the fact that we're always always too busy and tired and on different schedules to want to play video games together. And we never did! 🤷‍♂️

Missed Connections

The end of 2025 was simply too stacked to play everything. I've since bought all 3 of these games in end-of-year sales. Soon.

Sektori

Angeline Era

Stray Children

Conclusion

Hey, we made it through another year, and I made it through another one of these posts! I hope your year in gaming was better than your actual year. Wait holy shit no I don't.

I mean, chances are, at least here in the US, depending on your circumstances I guess.

IN ANY CASE, this is belated but still feels relevant for a post like this: I hope your 2026 is better than your 2025, no matter how it went for you personally. And I hope we all come out the other end a little better than we went in.

Blendo Merch!

2026-01-28T16:05:00Z

Blendo Games has opened a merch store!

As explained on Blendo's blog, the new store was opened in celebration of Atom Zombie Smasher's 15th anniversary, along with an update for the game on Steam and Itch.

I'm a huge fan of Blendo, as previously discussed, so I'm very excited to finally be able to display evidence of that fact on my body and possessions. Also, my birthday is coming up, so I particularly appreciate their timing in opening this store.

I'm not usually one to get wholeheartedly excited about merch, but Blendo is a teeny tiny game developer that's still out there just doing their thing, and making 'em as good as they ever have. They're one of my faves, and I'm happy to have another way to throw them some money to help them keep doing that for hopefully years to come.

The last decade has shown how easily good things are lost. When you find something you love, you've got to show it support and yell from the rooftops that other people should support it as well.

The designs they've opened the store with are great, but if Blendo are reading, I'd absolutely love a Bienjensu or "It's gotta be a Branki" sticker to throw on my stuff in the future 🙏

New Site Design!

2026-01-27T17:30:00Z

Hey blog fans! If you're reading this post in an RSS reader, you're gonna want to click through to the site, because this one's gotta be seen to be believed (what is this energy)!

I've been working on my 2025 GOTY list, and one day, as I sat down to write, my brain said, "hey this writing stuff is great and all, but what if we redesigned the entire site instead?" I was picking colors before the end of that sentence.

Seriously though, I've been feeling for a little while that it was about time to update the look of this blog, and I've been spending the last week-ish doing just that. I'm really happy with it!

I really loved the old Win98-inspired design, but I've been looking at it for almost two years now, and it was getting stale. I got to feeling like I wanted something a little more refined and mature to look at. Something a little more 2010s/Web 2.0-core. I think this new design is easier on the eyes, and even a little cozier! This is my home on the web, and I want to feel comfy while I'm here.

The big callouts of this new design are rounded corners, subtle shadows, separated sections, and updated colors. There's a new "Welcome" section at the top of the homepage, which is something I've wanted to add for a while but wasn't sure if it worked. I think it does! Feels like it adds a little bit of context and sets a friendly tone for anyone visiting.

I also added my favicon to the masthead, and changed the name of the All Posts page to simply "Blog." Feels a little more straightforward, and communicates that this site is more than a blog, even if it is primarily a blog.

I also also made a ton of tiny little updates and fixes too small and numerous to mention that either update the look of various elements of the site, add new functionality, update existing elements to better unify things, or fix visual or technical bugs that I only noticed while working on this redesign, including one pretty major thing that was pretty majorly broken purely by my own actions that I didn't notice for months! Web design!

I didn't change absolutely everything, but it's a nice, fresh coat of paint. Oh, and SOME PAGES MIGHT REQUIRE A REFRESH BEFORE THEY LOOK RIGHT.

I have to close by crediting some of the sites I drew inspiration from, including wavebeem, AURAMBLES, Idle Thumbs, Blendo Games, and the Team Fortress 2 website. Even if it's not immediately obvious how, they all provided valuable lessons and inspiration for the look I was trying to achieve.

Alright. Well. Now that that's done, I should probably get back to writing. Or maybe I'll just check the wattage of these lightbulbs real quick...

Criterion's Gift of Room Tone

2026-01-21T19:00:00Z

This is the first year I've been aware of it, but apparently every year, Criterion puts out a little "Gift of Room Tone" video for the holidays, cutting together the moment they pause to record room tone during all their interviews.

As they describe it:

Every holiday season, we like to put together a montage of footage from the end of our on-camera interviews with filmmakers, critics, and scholars, highlighting the moments when we capture “room tone”—the ambient sound that our editors need to create a seamless video.

As we look back on these meditative silences shared with our guests, we’re feeling grateful for the collaborations and friendships that sustain our work.

If you're not aware, "room tone" is a term used in production to describe the sound of the ambient noise of the room without anyone speaking or moving or making any other sounds. It's almost literally the sound of silence. This is necessary for the editors to be able to fill gaps, cover up noise, or smooth transitions between dialogue and other audio cuts.

I've never used it a ton in my own career as an editor (it just tends not to be a factor in the kinds of things I edit), but I adore the concept of room tone. The fact that the room itself has an ambient sound that needs capturing because, while you might not perceive it while it's there, you will most definitely notice its sudden absence. And the fact that every room is subtly different, but different enough that you can't just capture one "ideal" recording of room tone to use across all media. You need to capture the tone of the room that you're in at the moment the media you're shooting is being recorded, or it won't match. It's so organic, so human, so analog, and often indicative of final quality, or at least a care for the craft; to care even about the things that might not be perceived by the untrained ear.

This Criterion video has been sitting in my inbox since December 25th, and I'm so glad I finally watched it, because of all these thoughts and feelings that came bubbling up from it! I hope you enjoy it as well.

What Else Is On? January 11th, 2026

2026-01-11T18:05:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

Happy New Year, blog enjoyers!

This edition took a little longer to get to you because I used my holiday time for relaxing rather than working on projects (what a concept), and I'm letting myself ease into the year with a week spent watching Games Done Quick alongside starting my freelance work back up and getting back to running a house.

I hope your holidays were cozy and relaxing. I haven't had the chance, or really made it a priority, to read, watch, or even play a ton on the web in the past month and change, but I've at least got enough to recommend. Let's get into it!

🎵 Put This On

Improvisto! - Various Artists

This is a fun Jazz/Funk/Fusion compilation record I found in a record shop in Brooklyn last year. I was so taken with the cover art that I decided to animate it. It was weirdly hard to find the full album online!

📚 Read This

Bonne Maman advent calendar 2025 - wavebeem

This advent calendar kept rearing its head in various places this year for some reason, despite the fact that I didn't know it was a thing they did. Here's a fun writeup from Sage with some quick thoughts on each of this year's flavors!

the sweetfish.site 2025 advent calendar - sweetfish

Absolutely loved this 88x31 button advent calendar from Ayu. It's too late to see these revealed day by day, but now you can see 25 beautiful buttons, some of which I'm using on my website!

Let's Say You Won A Car On The Price Is Right, Here's What Happens Next - Jalopnik

I watched a lot of The Price is Right while visiting my parents for the holidays, and there was much discussion of what actually happens when you win a car. Judging by when this was published, I don't think I'm alone in that experience. This actually confirms a lot of what we thought!

Big Day - LMNT

Louie talks about his process making a recreation of a Tokyo Disney passbook for a Christmas present. Every detail of this thing is exquisite. Just a lovely thing to do.

Skin Deep was this year's reminder that it's a privilege to recognise a developer's handwriting - Eurogamer

This is a great description of why it was such a joy for me to play Skin Deep last year, after falling in love with Quadrilateral Cowboy and then tearing my way through the rest of Blendo's catalog. I haven't exactly been waiting for them to make an immersive sim, and I have a very different perspective on Quadrilateral Cowboy than the writer here, but I agree with the sentiment. I just adore Blendo's whole thing, and it's good to see someone being a bit of a sicko about them.

‘Lasagna Battery’: Why You Shouldn’t Bake Your Pasta Dish In a Steel Pan - Today

I did not know it was possible to accidentally make a battery out of a lasagna. I don't remember how or why this information crossed my path over the holidays, but I can't not include it here.

Net neutrality was back, until it wasn’t - The Verge

I've been following the saga of Net Neutrality since I was in high school. It's been such a stupid, protracted, partisan game of back-and-forth over something that should be common sense. Like a lot of things I guess! 🙃 Anyhow, this is a good look back at where things stand as of the past year.

Killing in the name of… nothing - The Verge

Great perspective on just how disconnected from and unprepared for the current societal moment the mainstream media is, and how vulnerable that makes it to manipulation and misinformation.

Notes about The Algorithm - mokkograd

"The Algorithm" (really various algorithms) aren't unknowable gods, they are a series of rulesets made by people with goals and points of view. We should talk about them as such, and push back against relinquishing our watcing, reading, listening, etc. habits to them.

📺 Watch This

This Old House: Carolina Comeback

The latest season of This Old House, a long-running home improvement and DIY series on PBS, covers the reconstruction projects of a handful of homes in Asheville, North Carolina in the aftermath of hurricane Helene.

We've only watched the first couple of episodes, but I can already tell it's a great season. A very informative and quite emotional watch!

Cursed Halo - Awesome Games Done Quick 2026

American Truck Simuator - Awesome Games Done Quick 2026

Richard Burns Rally - Awesome Games Done Quick 2026

GDQ just ended last night, and I'll have a full post of my recs after it ends, but here's a small collection of runs I enjoyed!

🎮 Play This

Antibody One - Blendo Games

$1, Windows

A very short, very cheap new game from Blendo! Fun AND educational!

Web Games of the Year - Museum of Screens

Free, Browser

I haven't had a ton of time to play web games in the past month, but Museum of Screens has you covered! Their 2025 roundup features a couple of games I've featured here before, and a few I've missed!

🌐 Some Good Websites

taquitos.net

The pre-eminent snack review site on the web. I can't believe I haven't featured them here before. They've been around for 26 years now, questing to eat every snack in the world. I love that the site still looks the way it does, and that the reviews are so quick and no-nonsense. Long may they reign.

Kimimi the Game-Eating She-Monster

I've been following Kimimi for a few years now, and while she's a well-known and accomplished games writer who surely doesn't need my plug to find readers, I caught up on a string of her posts recently, was struck by just how much I always enjoy her writing, and wanted to feature her site in case you're not familiar with her work!

The breadth of games she covers, and her prolific output are extremely aspirational for me. She's one of the best.

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

External links now open in a new tab!

2026-01-08T22:15:00Z

Personally, when I'm reading something on a website, and it links out to another site, I always prefer for that link to open in a new tab, so I don't lose my place on the first site, or forget where I was and what I was doing.

I've been wanting to figure out how to make my blog do this for years. It's not something that comes with 11ty (the static site generator I use to build my site) out of the box, so it wasn't immediately obvious to me how to do this. I finally went and found the answer, and it was dead simple.

The answer came to me via semasquare on GitHub (a link that should open in a new tab).

All you have to do is install their plugin with a terminal command:

https://github.com/semasquare/eleventy-external-links

Then paste some code into your eleventy.js file. First, this constant:

const externalLinks = require("@semasquare/eleventy-external-links");

Then the following under module.exports:

// Open external links in new tab
    eleventyConfig.addPlugin(externalLinks, {
        // Plugin defaults:
        extensions: [".html"],
        rules: [
            {
                name: "external links",
                regex: new RegExp("^(([a-z]+:)|(//))", "i"),
                target: "_blank",
                rel: "noopener"
            }
        ]
    });

And that's it! The plugin parses all of the links on your site, and adds target="_blank" to the ones that point away from your site.

So anything that links to another page of your site will load in the same tab, and anything that links to another site will open a new tab, leaving your site in the original tab.

Glad to finally have this working! It's been bugging me for a long time!

Got an HDMI to AV converter

2026-01-08T04:30:00Z

I got an HDMI to AV converter box for Christmas this year, and I finally started messing around with it! My main reason for wanting this thing was to hook up my PC to my CRT, which is now right next to my PC in my office.

It works like a charm! Text isn't super readable at smaller sizes no matter which aspect ratio I set the TV to, but that's not a huge deal. I wanted this setup mostly for playing video games, throwing on videos to create a cozy atmosphere, and potentially to shoot some retro TV effects with my DSLR.

Threw the Pokemon HeartGold run at AGDQ over there earlier today, and it was indeed very cozy.

I also hooked up my old Switch with a mini-dock, at it looks as delightfully weird as I was hoping. Everything looks a little squashed, because Switch games weren't meant to be displayed in 4:3, but Breath of the Wild music sounds just as delightful coming through ancient CRT speakers, if not more.

It's just a simple little box, and everything immediately worked, just plug-and-play. I figured it would, but like, that's nice. Love to have a thing just be like, yeah this is the thing this does.

Here's the link to the one I got on Newegg if you're interested!

Improvisto! Animated!

2026-01-06T17:00:00Z

Back in September of 2025, my girlfriend was getting a haircut in Williamsburg, and I was walking around looking for record shops. I wasn't looking for anything specific, just trying to kill time.

As I was flipping through albums in the first shop I wandered into, an album I'd never heard of caught my eye, and I decided that rather than looking for something to listen to, I could use this visit to look for design inspiration. So I snapped a picture.

The album is Improvisto!, a Latin/Jazz/Funk/Fusion compilation record from a label called Hitop. Immediately, I knew I wanted to play around with animating this cover. I just love the colors and shapes, it's so simple and playful. I took photos of a few more albums in a few more shops that day, but this was the standout.

I promptly got too busy to do anything with it, but over the holiday break, I had plenty of free time, and started tinkering.

I started messing around with a slow, steady animation, almost like the design is breathing. I knew I wanted the animation of each bar to be slightly offset rather than happening in tandem, and in experimenting with that, I found this sequence where the animation starts out offset, syncs up, desyncs, and then goes wild and takes so long to re-sync that I couldn't capture it in the length of my After Effects comp (if it ever re-syncs).

After realizing the wild version wouldn't make for a good gif since it wouldn't loop, I made this more uniform, perfectly looping version. I also realized I wanted the framerate posterized and jittery rather than buttery smooth. I wanted the animation to look old and analog, like moving scraps of paper.

Around this time, I started looking around for better reference images (there are shockingly few!), and I ended up at Discogs, where I found the above image.

This is actually the cover art for the CD release of this album. I was immediately taken with the smaller number of chunkier lines, and decided to pivot to this design instead (it's also fewer moving pieces to keep track of, but that was just a bonus).

I ended up buying the CD from a Discogs listing because I couldn't find the full album anywhere online, couldn't find any high-quality images of it, and no one seemed to have a ton of info about it in general!

To get to this point, since I knew I wanted more frantic, energetic motion than I was getting in my previous explorations, I spent some time building a completely different system of animation that would allow me to keyframe only the colorful dots, and have the black lines follow.

I achieved this by first parenting the lines to the dots at the top of each line. Then, I created duplicates of the longer lines, and used those as an inverse matte for the lines in each column, so that the mattes would block out the black lines when they overlapped. I aligned the top of these mattes with the bottom of each line, and parented them to each line's bottom dot. This way, with the top dot controlling the motion of the black line, and the bottom dot controlling the motion of the line's matte, all I needed to do was keyframe the dots, and their motion would create the illusion that the lines were stretching and shrinking.

I'm glad I took the time to develop this technique. Not having to worry about the motion of both the dots and the lines allowed me to work much faster going forward.

It's funny how much doing something as simple as offsetting the motion of each column changes how the animation feels. I like this so much more than the uniform motion. It feels so much more organic and alive, like the lines are responding to each other.

To get the final version, I decided I wanted to create some kind of "scene," where the design animates in, performs an animation cycle, then animates out. I love the bouncing-open animation I landed on for the beginning.

I initially intended to try to set the middle portion to music; this kind of motion just seemed perfect for a trumpet-y "bwah bwaaaah bwaah." The bars themselves look almost like trumpet keys playing music. In the end, this didn't work out. I never found a track on the album that fit what I was looking to do, using another piece of music felt like it missed the point, and I ultimately preferred it as a silent piece rather than a piece of multimedia with an audio track that could get annoying if looped over and over.

All in all, I'm really pleased with where this project took me, and where it ended up! I could easily see adapting this into a larger project where we're looking at a phone screen playing the album which then zooms in and starts animating, sort of a static-to-live kind of thing. But that started to smell like mission creep, and my holiday break was ending, so I decided to just be happy making this the thing that it was.

This was a really fun exercise that gave me both a brand new motion design piece and a new album to listen to! I've also got a great new excuse to visit more record shops.

You can see this piece and others on my Motion Design project page.

2026

2026-01-05T17:00:00Z

WE DID NOT GET SICK THIS YEAR!! FUCK YOU, WORLD!!!1!

2025 was a real whirlwind. I started the year expecting to start a big new full-time job that would solve all my problems and finally make everything okay. I did not get that job. Then I got a freelance version of that job instead. Then I finally got the actual job. Then I lost the job. Then I found some well-paying freelance work faster than I ever have before.

I made some decent money, but I had a ton of little expenses and two big trips that meant I still always felt behind. But I also got to finally go to the Good Dentist to fix a broken tooth and some of the shoddy work done by Bad Dentist. But I lost my job and insurance before we got to the two Big Tooth Problems in my mouth. But I finally got a new pair of glasses and had my first eye exam in six years.

I found a fun new hobby, but I lost momentum and fell away from it. I blogged the most I ever have, but got stopped by the busiest project I've ever undertaken that made me the most burnt-out I've ever been. I took an expensive trip to a friend's wedding, but remembered how nice it is to talk to people and hang out with friends, and had some of the most meaningful conversations of the year.

We're back to full fascism at the federal level, but saw the rise of a socialist mayoral candidate here in NYC.

In conclusion, 2025 was a year of contrasts.

In the midst of all of that turmoil, I had a few goals I was trying to accomplish, which I outlined in last year's post. Let's look back and see how I did.

In 2025 I wanted to...

Digitize family VHS tapes for real this time ✅

I finally made use of some of my non-working time this year, got all our tapes organized, put together a spreadsheet tracker, AND actually digitized some tapes. According to my handy new tracker, I'm now 41.8% of the way through. That's good progress!

Last year I wrote, "If I don't digitize at least one tape this year, I will have to write 1,000 words on why Sonic the Hedgehog is bad and stupid."

So, uh, crisis averted.

Watch more movies ✅

I actually, finally accomplished this goal. I watched both Dunes, a handful of movies on Halloween, one of the many Criterion blu-rays filling my shelves, and even saw the new Superman in a theater!

This is still far fewer movies than I'd like to be watching, but the fact that I managed to make myself sit on the couch and watch a blu-ray was honestly a major triumph. Hoping to carry this success into the new year.

Get some new/better furniture ❌

When I made this goal, I was expecting to start the aforementioned big new full-time job that would finally allow me to save up a nest egg and spend some big bucks on improving our lives.

That didn't happen right away, and then when it did happen, the money I was making turned out to be merely life-sustaining, and not Put Something Away Every Month money.

I coped by rearranging my office space, and I'm still really happy with that, but it's not new furniture.

Maybe this year!

Practice Japanese ❌

I simply did not do this, and no, the Japanese word of the day emails I get every morning do not count.

It's been so long since I fell off of Japanese lessons that it's going to be a pretty big undertaking to get back on that horse.

Exercise ❌

I really gotta boot up Ring Fit Adventure again or something, man.

Take more photos/Get back into film ✅

I still have a ton of film that I haven't developed, so I don't know that I totally "got back into film," but I did take my camera on a trip and shoot a couple of rolls with some new lenses, so that counts in my book!

Try new hobbies ✅

I checked this box early in the year by finally letting myself check out the Digimon Card Game. It was a ton of fun to learn and collect some cards and build some decks, but I never ended up finding a card shop to go to and play with other people in person, and I stopped keeping up with the game around halfway through the year. I recently poked my head back in to the community to see what's been going on, and got the bug to jump back in again! My quest to actually participate in some locals at a nearby card shop resumes!

I'm not sure whether I can say I tried any other new hobbies, but I tried out a few things that could be considered hobbies if I kept up with them: On the 3DS front, I tried making my own themes, and using it to take retro photos out in the world. I also got into retrogaming by buying a PS1 and starting Final Fantasy Tactics. That's about it, but not bad!

2025 Results: ✅✅❌❌❌✅✅

Just barely eked out an overall success! I will absolutely take it. One of those failures was more or less out of my control. As for the other two, I think I need to change my approach.

Now let's cast our gaze forward.

In 2026, I want to...

Finish digitizing family tapes

Made good progress on this last year! I'm very well set up now to keep moving on these. Unless I'm as busy as I was at the end of last year, I should be able to find a couple of hours a week to dedicate to a tape or two. I should really just get it done already.

Watch 5 Blu-Rays

Realizing that maybe I should set more concrete goals than just "do X more," so here's a number to shoot for. I was going to say 10, but I gotta be honest with myself. I know how long it took to get me to watch one. Five sounds achievable, though.

Re-familiarize myself with Kana

Again, something more concrete than "practice Japanese." I used to have all my Hiragana and Katakana down and could read words reasonably well a few years ago (even if I didn't know what they meant), but that muscle has gotten pretty weak. Maybe if I start here and see how easy it is to brush up on the basics, I'll do more.

Do 10 push-ups every day

Just having "exercise" on this list year after year was getting me nowhere, so let's try getting specific here too. I still want to bust Ring Fit Adventure back out, because I genuinely think that was a great way to work out, and I also want to take more walks with my girlfriend, but this is something simple that I can control, don't need to think too much about, just do once in the morning, and be done with.

I don't expect to actually do this every day, but "every day" is more aspirational than "most days," and if I only end up doing it most days, I'll still be happy.

Upgrade the apartment

Keeping this one vague because there's a bunch of stuff we want to do around the house—in the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, and my girlfriend's studio—and this way I can count any of it as a win. I don't know if I will have couch money this year. I would very much like to. We shall see.

Participate in Digimon TCG locals in-person

I like this game and I want to get over my social anxiety and play it with other people! There's a card shop pretty close to another spot we like to hang out that I just confirmed runs Digimon locals every Tuesday, so now I just have to go!

Develop my damn film rolls

It only gets more expensive the longer I wait and the more rolls I accumulate. Hopefully this goal turns out to have been low-hanging fruit? I have photos from last March still waiting to be revealed.

Those are my plans for the year! See you back here in 2027 (fake ass year) to see how things went!

Every Video Game I Played in 2025

2026-01-04T18:00:00Z

Every year, I make a note of each and every video game I play, even for just a few minutes, both on Backloggd and in my Hobonichi Techo.

I usually wait to post this until after I've posted my GOTY list for the year, but I haven't figured out my list yet for 2025, and this post takes much less effort. Also, happy AGDQ everyone!

Here's this year's list!

Games I finished in 2025 are bolded.

Games I have played previously (i.e. replays or continuations) are italicized.

KOTOR 2
MegaMan Battle Network 4: Red Sun
Digimon TCG Tutorial App
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions
Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D
Poochy & Yoshi's Wooly World
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky
Digimon World Re:Digitize Decode
Picross 3D: Round 2
Donkey Kong Country
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
Super Mario World
Super Mario Maker 3DS
Super Mario Maker 2
Picross e2
Picross e3
BIT.TRIP SAGA
Minecraft: New Nintendo 3DS Edition
Kirby: Planet Robobot
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection
Skin Deep (Demo)
Castle v. Castle (Demo)
Peripeteia (Demo)
Picross 3D
Digimon Story: Lost Evolution
Digimon Racing
Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth
Sutte Hakkun
Pacific Drive
Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog (Demo)
Pizza Tower
Dragon Quest XI S
Zelda: BOTW
Zelda: TOTK
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Keylocker
A Short Hike
Hoptix
Project RYME
Umurangi Generation
Pan-Pan
Fortnite
SteamWorld Dig 2
Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
Halo 3
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
Wilmot's Warehouse
Yeah! You Want "Those Games," Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let's See You Clear Them!
Yeah! You Want "Those Games," Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let's See You Clear Them! 2
Skin Deep
Last Call BBS
The Blue Flamingo
System Shock (2023)
Mario Kart World
F-Zero GX
Tactics Ogre: Reborn
Final Fantasy Tactics
Mario Golf: World Tour
Super Monkey Ball: Touch & Roll
Wii Sports Resort
Wakedas
Link-a-Pix Color
Etrian Odyssey
Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millenium Girl
Individualism
UFO 50
Timberborn
Peak
OlliOlli World
Proverbs
BlueJeweled
Stimulation Clicker
Tower Wizard
Into the Deep Web
CSS Clicker
Stealth Crossword
Don't Rank Cuomo
Cuomo and the Quest for Gracie Mansion
Duskers
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles
The Last Express
Egg
Supreme Commander 2
Demonschool
Animal Crossing: Wild World
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Kirby no Kirakira Kids
N++

10 games completed.

30 games replayed or continued from a previous year.

4 demos played.

58 games played fresh for the first time.

Til next year,

- Mike

2025 Blog in Review

2026-01-03T18:35:00Z

Howdy folks! I'm back from a blissful holiday spent allowing my brain to decompose into a soft ball of mush, and now I'm ready to blog! Another year has come and gone, which means it's time to look back and assess the previous year, and set goals for the year ahead.

First up, let's see how this year of blogging compares to last year.

As you can see, this year blew last year (and every other year) out of the fucking water. This was my biggest year yet for blogging, encompassing almost 40% of all of the blogging I've done since 2018.

I posted 112 posts in 2025, compared to 70 posts in 2024, which was my previous record high number of posts.

Let's dive a little deeper and look at the monthly breakdown:

Ok so right off the bat, it looks like we might have our culprit. Blaugust, the blogging event I participated in for the first time this year in which you attempt to blog every day in the month of August. I totally forgot about Blaugust, the end of the year was such a busy, wild ride.

But actually, when you look at the numbers, 2025 still beats 2024 even without August included 87 to 70. So while Blaugust is clearly the reason why 2025's number was as high as it was, the reason for achieving a new record high is really just a sustained effort to post semi-regularly.

I set myself a goal at the start of 2024 to try to blog at least once a month, and it gave me last year's record high and kept the blog alive after a few years of declining numbers. Cohost's demise certainly had something to do with that, but still.

That goal continues to be a really effective motivator for me, and with a small community/audience of readers and commenters, a built-in monthly roundup post in What Else Is On? (and a desire for that to not be the only thing I post in a month), as well as a constantly growing backlog of things I want to write about, the blog is looking healthy. It's all up from here, baby.

Speaking of audience, let's do something different from last year, and take a look at some analytics!

Before we do, I just want to say that THIS BLOG IS NOT ABOUT GROWTH. I don't care if anyone is reading at all. I've posted to the void before, and I'll do it long after I'm dead. But not everyone is going to leave a comment, or like the post on Bluesky or Mastodon, and it's nice to see that people are visiting.

ALSO, this website is not tracking you. I use a script from the privacy-focused analytics tracker GoatCounter to get a sense of how many people are looking at my website, and where they might have been redirected from. I have no idea who you people are.

Ok, let's look at the numbers.

Time to show just how harmless I am by revealing that I might not fully understand this information. I think this means that my blog saw 2,952 visits from 102 unique visitors? So 102 different people looked at my website 2,952 times this year? That seems pretty good, those are numbers!

Some of those were probably me, this tool has an IP-blocking feature you can use to filter yourself out, but it's not perfect.

Now let's take a look at things by page to see what was most popular.

My most popular page by far is my home page. So that's something. It maybe suggests that people are coming to my website from other places, taking one look at the home page, and then leaving. Or maybe there's a lot of me in there! I don't know, who cares!

My most popular posts this year were:

Kill Your Backlog, which got posted on a board somewhere, and which I have since updated a bunch in response to a follow-up post and moved my actual backlog list to its own page.
You Should Start a Blog, which got reposted in a few places by my blog friends, thank you blog friends.
And unfortunately, my review of Keylocker, which the game's dev reposted in a way-too-long thread complaining about negative "press," and which they described as "stepping on an ant" despite having literally one hundred times more followers than me. Something like 6 people had read it before they reposted it. A cursory search tells me they spend a lot of energy that they could be using to try and make a good video game on calling out anyone with anything negative to say. Weird!

Anyway, I'm glad people also enjoyed my post about this Grape-Nuts ad, my post about the Mystery McDonald's Arcade Machine (that I still haven't found), and my announcement post for My Cool Blog, a template for making websites with 11ty!

What will I do with this information? Nothing, I post what I want!

Hey, want some more proof that this tracking data is harmless? I have no idea where 48% of my traffic is coming from! Just a big ol' shrug. Oh well!

Pretty much a dead heat between the two major desktop and mobile operating systems, which is nice. I guess? Year of Linux on the desktop my ass.

No surprise in most of my audience being from the US, but some decent numbers from elsewhere! Looks like this is the number of visits, not visitors, and I'm not sure how reliable these numbers are, but it's neat to think I might have one dedicated reader in Cambodia. Maybe people are just using VPNs a lot? Maybe these are bots? No clue.

That pretty much does it for the look back! It was a good year for the blog, and I hope to make the next year as good or better.

My goals for this year are to continue posting at least once per month (not counting my WEIO posts, so I guess twice per month), to get out of my head more in terms of what I think a given post needs to be, and to clear out more drafts.

There's a lot I want to post this year, a few new things I want to try, and maybe even some structural updates if I have the time.

Thank you for reading, Happy New Year, and I'll see you around the blogosphere!

What a year this month has been

2025-12-26T04:47:00Z

Good god. What year is it? Things got very quiet here on the blog at the end of this year. Do I really need to do another "why I haven't been blogging" post? Alright. Let's recap.

After the flurry of posting brought on by Blaugust (which I literally completely forgot about), things slowly cooled off in September. Then I lost my job, and started working on some personal projects I'd had in the back of my mind for a while, namely What Else Is On? and My Cool Blog. After that, things got pretty quiet outside of the usual monthly What Else Is On? post.

The good news is that things got quiet here because I found some solid freelance work pretty quickly after losing my full-time gig, and rapidly got very busy.

For the first half of October, I was courting various freelance jobs that popped up when I came back on the market. I was also sort of out of commission for two weeks for two back-to-back trips, as documented in a previous post.

When I got back, I was normal busy for a while (just need to place this gun on the mantle for a second). I found the time to post about NYC's next mayor, make some personal art, and post a life update. The normal busy-ness lasted until around November 17th (say, what's the date of my last non-WEIO post?).

From the middle of November through the first week of December, I became embroiled in one of the most demanding and least organized projects I've yet experienced as an editor. I worked through three weekends in a row, around Thanksgiving, late into the night, pulling multiple 10–12 hour days in a row. I would leave my desk at night, go right to bed, wake up to Slack messages in the morning, and go right back to my desk. December 1st to the 8th was an 80–hour week.

My girlfriend started making my lunch and cooking us dinner by herself (both of which I ate at my desk) because I would keep saying that I was about to take a break, not take a break, and then end up eating lunch at 3 or 4pm. There was always one more little detail the client needed taken care of immediately, or a previous note they needed to contradict. I was stressed out of my freaking mind.

This probably sounds familiar to anyone who's worked a shitty, crunch-y schedule in some capacity. Maybe you've worked worse hours, and this doesn't sound so bad, but brother, I was a husk.

The week after we wrapped, I was shell-shocked. I was just relieved to finally be able to eat dinner with my girlfriend again. We also needed to go hang out at the botanic garden with some friends, meet up with my sister to exchange Christmas gifts (somehow I found time to buy people presents on time!!!!), jump through the bullshit hoops required to renew our marketplace healthcare before the deadline, and I needed to roll over my previous job's 401k before that deadline (I say "needed," but two of those things were very fun).

A week later, we were traveling for the holidays.

So here I am. In the middle of my holiday break. Mostly not blogging, even though blogging was what I most desperately wanted to do while I was busy (besides sleep, and eat, and exchange multiple sentences with my girlfriend). I meant to write this post about a week earlier so that a month prior to its posting would encompass more of the time I was super busy, and the title would make more sense.

But I mostly don't give a honk, because I'm enjoying doing nothing. I'm hanging out with my family, sleeping late, watching The Price is Right, riding around in a golf cart, and not doing a whole lot else. And loving it. I needed some time to do nothing, and let somebody else take the wheel for a bit.

I might have a few more posts before the end of the year, or I might not. I've been drained as hell, and I'm not going to force anything. Gotta let my creative juices build back up naturally. Of course, I'll have my annual GOTY and Every Game posts before too long. I'm sure once I've adequately rested, I'll come roaring back with all those other posts I've been wanting to finally get out. I've got quite the backlog!

I hope you've all been well out there in the blogosphere! I still have a lot of your posts to catch up on in my RSS reader. Wishing you all a nice relaxing holiday season!

Back with more soon!

What Else Is On? December 1st, 2025

2025-12-01T16:10:00Z

Time for another one of these already?? And I thought October went by quickly.

I've been so busy lately that I haven't had as much time to blog as I would like, despite my growing list of drafts. There are games I've been wanting to write about since June! I'm setting a goal to write about at least a few of those games in December as I lead up to my GOTY post. And not holding myself to a Jan 1st deadline for my GOTY list worked well last year, so it'll be up when it's up again this year!

I've got a decent number of links for this final WEIO of 2025. More than I thought I had, with how busy I've been, so that's nice!

Also a reminder that I'm now cross-posting these on their own site at whatelseison.net, along with a complete archive of every link I've ever shared in these posts! It feels far too early in the life of the site to start looking back, but I'm very happy with how it's gone so far and the response I've seen, and I'm glad it exists!

Now then, let's see what else is on...

🎵 Put This On

Dream merchant by tottomori

Dream merchant - tottomori

My girlfriend found this artist randomly on Pandora, and I was glad to discover they were on Bandcamp! It's very pleasant, dreamy, fantastical, and almost ambient music. You can really tell they've worked in and been inspired by video game music. In a good way!

📚 Read This

The rise of Whatever - Eevee

Extremely well-articulated post from Eevee tying “AI” to “content” and why the internet feels like it sucks. If you only read one of these links, make it this one. It's a longer read and well worth your time.

Don't trust the human slop telling you how much of the web is AI slop

Don't let your doomer brain blindly accept PR.

The Bad News Is There’s No More Money, But That’s Also The Good News - Alex Sujong Laughlin

A fascinating look at the state of the podcast industry from this year's Resonate podcast festival.

What’s left when the rich people lose interest is the work, and Resonate was a reminder of the best parts of that work.

To My Unmasked Friend in the Fifth Year of COVID - Anna Holmes

When "I can't blame them" isn't good enough anymore and you can, in fact, blame them.

Against 'Metroidbrania': a Landscape of Knowledge Games - Bruno Dias

and...

Database games - v buckenham

Bruno Dias and v buckenham in conversation, trying to define and rename a video game genre.

Why Do Ships Measure Speed In Knots? - Chino Ortiz

What Actually Happens If You Shift Into Reverse While Driving - Nishant Jayaram

Why Boeing Noses Are So Pointy And Airbus Noses Are So Round - Rohaan Sakrani

A trio of informative articles from Jalopnik. I saw each of these headlines and thought, "actually that's a good question." Maybe you will too! Regarding the Boeing one specifically, as a somewhat nervous flier, I've found it helpful over the years to learn more about aircraft where I can. Interesting stuff!

People filming themselves in nature - Laura Michet

Laura writes about thinking about the fact that when you watch a video of someone doing something alone, you know they had to set up the camera first to grab the shot, something I'm ALWAYS thinking about. Probably just because I work in video production. I think more people could benefit from thinking about where the camera is and how it got there when watching a video.

Huge Super Mario 64 Trick That Will Change Speedruns "Forever" Has Been Discovered - Alana Hagues

It's not everyday that a major new speedrunning trick is discovered for a game as big as SM64. This one looks like an absolute doozy.

The Top 10 Legendary GameFAQs Contributors - whowasphone404

If you've played a video game in the last 30-ish years, and gone looking for answers about it online, chances are you've crossed paths with one of the many silent heroes doing the thankless work of writing and posting guides to GameFAQs for free. This list pays tribute to some of those heroes.

3D Workers Island

A webcomic I discovered through Laura about a fictional online community investigating a harmless-looking screensaver in the 2000s. It's a fun look at what happens when the phenomenon of the human brain needing to see patterns where none exist meets the advent of online communities. I recommend checking out Laura's post for added context and further reading!

📺 Watch This

I Bought David Lynch’s Weird Coffee Maker - James Hoffmann

Does what it says on the tin. After his passing, David Lynch's estate auctioned off a bunch of his possessions, including a weird, old Italian coffee maker that it is unclear he ever used. James Hoffmann bought it and, perhaps inadvisably, tried it.

Kerokerokeroppi out of Soap - 부달조 BUDALJO

An artist who carves little guys out of soap. A fun and soothing watch. They've done a bunch of Sanrio characters, and also BMO from Adventure Time!

Cat 319D LN climbing onto rail car - Kyle Eastwood

An absolutely ancient video of a backhoe pushing itself up onto a rail car that made its way to my YouTube homepage this week. Wild stuff. I did not know a backhoe could do this.

🎮 Play This

Demonschool - Necrosoft Games

$24.99, PC, Mac, Linux, Switch, PS4/5, Xbox

Necrosoft's long-awaited tactics RPG about a bunch of misfits fighting demons and going to college is finally here! I don't feature a lot of paid games on this list if I can help it, but I like this team, and I hope this game does well!

❗ Stealing the rest of this month's recommendations from Michael Klamerus, who posts Indie Game Roundups with alarming regularity, and whose RSS feed should absolutely be in your reader if you care about following indie games!

Montsweeper - Spindley Q Frog

Free, Browser

A humorous combination of Minesweeper and the Monty Hall Problem.

Bubbled Bugs - Vicente Romero

Free, Browser

A fun take on a suika-like in which you drop colored balls into a box, but rather than combine, they shrink each other on contact. The object is to not overflow the box. Also there's an elixir and bugs, but you'll figure that out.

🌐 Some Good Websites

Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2025 Finalists

Wildlife photographers capture some beautiful moments. And then there's the rest (still beautiful in its own way).

Paint Toys

Take a break and doodle something with your mouse in this series of web toys from Toms Toys. Choose between Oil Paints, One Line, Paint with Text, and Paint like Mondrian. There's still nothing like zoning out for five minutes to make some lines and blobs on a canvas, particularly in this weird, busy, liminal holiday time. When you're done, you can save your masterpiece to share, use as a new wallpaper, or just admire.

The Useless Web

A great way to waste time and rediscover the magic of the web before social media poisoned it. Also a great resource for coming up with obscure, independent websites to recommend 👀

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

Why are they saying it like that?

2025-11-17T17:11:00Z

I meant to blog about this when this ad first released, and thought about burying it since it's been a while, but I just watched it again, and: Nope! Still bothers me!

Watch this ad for Digimon Story: Time Stranger. Do you notice anything strange about the way they're saying the title of the game? They're not saying "Digimon Story: Time Stranger." They're saying "Digimon STORY TIME Stranger." Or maybe "Digimon: Storytime Stranger." They're putting too much emphasis on "Story Time," or saying it as if it's "storytime," the time when you read someone a story.

It's a simple enough mistake to make, I guess, if you're unfamiliar with the game, or with the Digimon Story series. But don't you think, if you were shooting a commercial for a piece of media you were trying to get people to shell out $70 for, you would grab a second take and give the talent some direction about how to say the title of the thing?

BOTH of the people who say it on-camera get it wrong. They both say "Storytime Stranger." No one caught this in between shooting talent 1 and talent 2? And sure, I can imagine this was farmed out to a third party to produce, but no one along the chain noticed that discrepancy when they got dailies back? When they got R1 of the edit? When they delivered finals? The guy that says it at the end of the video gets it right, so clearly they know how it's supposed to be said! No one thought it would be a good idea to go back and grab pickups of the talent getting the name of the game right? Surely Bandai Namco has the money for that!

It just really irks me! It's baffling. I mean, I don't think I ever saw this ad shared on any other outlets, it only has 66k views (compared to 257k views for the story trailer on the same channel). It doesn't show up on iSpot, so I doubt it got any TV play. It seems like maybe they just shit it out to their YouTube channel and called it a day, and maybe this is why! It's a pretty half-assed execution on a pretty whatever idea for an ad. We're not even going to talk about the "Prophet Jeff" character. Come on.

This is unfortunately par for the course when it comes to english-language Digimon marketing media.

OctoVember Update

2025-11-14T20:24:00Z

Howdy! It's been a whirlwind of a couple of weeks. October positively melted away, and there's been a lot going on that I've wanted to blog about, so I figured it was time to just condense it all down, and put it all in one big Life Update Post. Taking a page out of Jenn Schiffer's book of Weekly Retros here to recap my very busy October (and some of November).

First up, we took our annual trip upstate to pick apples and peep some leafs, and it was lovely! We haven't actually picked any apples in years, but we come home with apples, so this is still our "Apple Picking Trip."

The weather was just about perfect, not too warm and not too chilly. Saw some beautiful scenery, hung out in the adorable little town we visit every year, filled a bag with fresh apples, and ate some incredible apple cider donuts. I took some shots with my film camera and a new lens I found in a thrift shop for five bucks last Christmas too, I'll try to post those when I get them developed!

The very next week, Lauren and I got to go to a friend's wedding out on Cape Cod! Neither of us had been before, and who knows if we ever will again! It was a really nice couple of days in a beautiful, peaceful place, and the wedding itself featured a sunset that just kept getting better.

Lauren and I had a great time seeing a lot of old friends again, had some surprisingly deep conversations, and both realized that, "oh yeah, hanging out with friends is really good!"

We also got to see stars! Here's a mediocre phone picture of them!

Before the ceremony, Lauren and I took an aimless little stroll that ended up leading us to the most adorable public library with an adorable frog mascot. We had a good chat about how it felt to connect with old friends, and to be around such creative people who were all doing so much. The last few years have been hard from many directions (money, jobs, ongoing pandemic), and have probably intensified our homebody tendencies, and this trip made us remember that it feels good to go places, do things, and especially to connect with friends.

Saw cormorants from the ferry on the way home!

I took a picture of this bag of chips we bought on Cape Cod partly because they were pretty good and I wanted to remember the name, and partly because I find the design with these five men on a fence very funny.

After we got back, my buddy (and one of the new grooms) invited me out to see The Muppets Take Scripthattan, a comedy script reading of The Muppets Take Manhattan, and it was very fun despite the fact that I don't think either of us has seen the movie! This is Paul F. Tompkins as Fozzy Bear, Erika Ishii as Rizzo the Rat, and John Hodgman as the guy who owns the diner they all go to.

PFT played a completely self-serious Fozzy and it killed. Marc Evan Jackson does a really good Kermit. And Nina West was an incredible Miss Piggy. I think she had five costume changes.

After all of that, Lauren finally got to make apple pie with the apples we brought back from our first trip!

I finally broke my habit of wanting to watch more movies but never watching movies and feeling really bad about it by sitting down and watching a damn movie. I went with For All Mankind, a documentary from the 80s about the Apollo program, made up primarily of footage shot by the astronauts aboard the spacecraft and on the moon. It was very cool! The guy who did not get to go down to the moon because he had to stay in the capsule Just In Case was very sad about it.

Lauren and I also had a little movie marathon for Halloween, which featured Twilight (woof), 2002's live-action Scooby-Doo (very fun), and Dune: Part 2 (boring).

Other Stuff

I'm still playing Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles and having a great time. I just caught up to where I'm at on PSX, and I feel kinda bad about passing it by, but I gotta finish this dang game! I kinda wanted to finish it all the way through on PSX first, but it's just so easy to play on Switch.

I'm trying desperately to both luxuriate in everything FFT has to offer and also rush to finish it because I already missed the release of Stray Children, the follow up to Moon, a game I really liked, and we're rapidly approaching the release of Demonschool, another game I'm very much looking forward to! Why did video game releases step on the gas this month? How do people play all these games?

It sure is hard for me to slow down and let games take their time, and to be okay with playing a game later if I'm still playing something else when it releases. Part of that I think comes from wanting to play things before GOTY so I can have an opinion and put it on my list. Another part comes from knowing how easy it is for games I want to play to get lost in the shuffle if I don't play them immediately while they're top of mind. Oh well!

Finally, this blog is being hosted on Neocities once again! I've been wanting to move back for a while because my old host was adding AI shit, I got sick of how long it took for them to build my site any time I made an update, and I stopped using the CMS that I moved to them for because it kinda sucks. Moving was very fast and easy and now it's done!

That's it for this update, sports fans! Thanks for reading, I hope you've been well, and I hope I'm posting more before the next WEIO!

Neocities on Floppy Disk

2025-11-06T22:34:00Z

For months, I'd been way too busy doing motion design full time to even think about working on any personal motion design projects. Now that I've started to have a little free time in between freelance projects, I'm starting to get back into it.

I've been thinking that a good way to practice and sharpen my skills would be to try out some motion rebrands of existing brands. I started by trying to imagine what it would look like if Neocities was a piece of website-building software distributed on floppy disks or some similarly ancient medium.

I mostly just wanted an excuse to try out Ben Mariott's dither technique. I think it turned out pretty good!

Here's a version with some audio:

You can see this project and others on my Motion Design page!

Hell Yeah, New York

2025-11-05T23:00:00Z

Hey, did you know it was possible to feel good about elections and about the candidate you voted for?

Did you know you could win an election by a large margin without taking oil money or supporting a genocide or throwing trans people to the wolves, but instead by talking to people and putting forth a platform of very clear policies that address people's material needs?

WHO'D A THUNK??!!?!

Anyway good job, New York. If you didn't stay up to watch Mamdani's victory speech like me, I highly recommend it! It feels good!

Also did you know the Gregory Brothers were still in the game?

This shit goes.

What Else Is On? November 1st, 2025

2025-11-01T18:37:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share. Want more WEIO? Check out whatelseison.net!

Welcome back to another monthly issue of What Else Is On? I've got a big, beefy post for you this month, chockablock full o' links. There's some Halloween-specific stuff in here, even though that was technically last month. I post these on or around the 1st of the month, and all the good Halloween stuff comes much closer to November 1st than October 1st. What can you do!

Besides, Halloween deserves a little more longevity than it normally gets. It's okay if spooky season extends into November in my book.

🎵 Put This On

Serene Reminder by The Fur.

Serene Reminder - The Fur

Fun, synth-y indie pop from a Taiwanese duo. Some really great album art for this and another of their albums, Town.

📚 Read This

Palestine Is Still Here - Jack Mirkinson

Two years of bombs (more still, now). And Palestine remains.

It's the Time of Monsters - Cat and Girl

A spooky Halloween issue of Cat and Girl! Frankenstein's lines in panels 5–8 really got me.

56 best Eric Adams quotes of all time - City & State NY

I'm gonna miss this stupid idiot. I mean, I'm not. But the man was a goldmine.

With a Friend like this, who needs enemies? - Victoria Song

In case you haven't seen this review by now. Unsurprisingly: this thing fucking sucks.

Zero to internet: your first website - HTML for people

More people should give HTML and making a website a shot. It shouldn't be gatekept or seem like an insurmountable thing to people. It just takes baby steps! Go make something simple!

How to help someone use a computer - Phil Agre

I've been guilty of being a condescending dick while helping people with computers before. Something I've tried to make a point of internalizing is that corporations hate you and the shit they make is stupid, especially when it comes to software, moreso now than ever. Fuck them. Not being a computer person is not a moral failing. This stuff sucks to interact with when you're not intimately familiar with it.

My old infocom transcripts - Andrew Plotkin

Not only do I love people sharing their specific tendencies, this tendency in particular speaks to me. This sounds like something I would have done. Like the most efficient version of taking game notes. Like writing speedrun instructions.

Abundance Reigns! - Nick Capozzoli

A really solid analysis of the conservative tendencies of video game culture and discourse.

In ‘Final Fantasy Tactics’, Throwing Rocks at Assholes Is Solidarity - James Whitbrook

In this house, we love and respect Throw Stone. And fuck Argath.

Fragments of Love - InnerSpiral

I adore Alli's writing. I adore Moon. You should read this. And you should play Moon.

‘One Battle After Another’ Isn’t Up For The Fight - Jason England

I haven't seen the movie myself yet, but I appreciate this perspective amid all the hype. And it gets at something I very often spot but have a hard time articulating, which is a frustrating lack of belief, substance, meaning, direction, and/or follow-through in liberal media and action. I particularly appreciated the writer's connection to the No Kings protests. To quote, "decades have been spent replacing collective, mass movement with the impotent and fundamentally capitalist politics of representation and empty symbolism."

NYC's Urban Textscape - The Pudding

A very cool analysis of all the words found on NYC streets, from signs to buses to graffiti.

Very Little News - Nicky Flowers

Nicky writes a tiny little newspaper (like physically tiny) that you can also read digitally, and I think it's rad!

📺 Watch This

FRUITHEAD - Mike Diva

The Gushers horror film we've all been asking for.

Cool Cartoons: Active Listening - Nicky Flowers

Did you know you can just make a cartoon if you want to?

The Monster Fuck (Part 7 - Hauntika) - Nick Wiger, Comedy Bang! Bang!

To all those who celebrate: Many hamburgers to you.

Competitive Model Plane Skydiving - Nace Valjavec

Take a second to watch this competitive model plan skydiving video that Laura found! The scale on these things is wild! The detail, the dedication! Love to see a bunch o' weirdos having a good time with their Thing.

15 After Effects Tricks You'll Wish You Knew Sooner - Ben Marriott

This won't pertain to everyone, and pardon the clickbait-y title (that's YouTube, baby), but Ben Marriott is the goddamn best in the biz, an After Effects master, and so good at explaining things. Also seasonally appropriate!

🎮 Play This

Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival - adamgryu

Free, Win/Mac/Linux

Carve pumpkins and hang around a spooky town as a little ghost! This game's servers spin up for a limited time every October, and shut back down 1–2 weeks after Halloween. There's still time to jump in do some carving!

Halloweener - Internet Janitor

Free, Browser

Another slightly-late Halloween recommendation! This one's sort of a character-creator where you make your own spooky monster hot dog.

Egg - Terry Cavanagh

Free, Browser

The creator of Super Hexagon and VVVVVV is back with a 3D platformer where you play as an egg. It's actually really beautiful and atmospheric; I love the retro graphics. Once you start getting the hang of how to make your egg jump, it's hard to stop!

Real Bird Fake Bird - Folly Studio

Free, Browser

A daily puzzle game about sorting the real from the fake, with new topics every day (it's not all about birds).

erebus - christine mi

Free, Browser

A text-based survival game about trying to survive the winter aboard a ship, the HMS Erebus, that finds itself stuck in the ice. Hunt, make merry, and try to stave off the inevitable.

mazegarden - mattstark

Free, Browser

A game about building and exploring mazes. Kind of like a level editor for that one Windows 95 screensaver!

Toward From - JohnLee Cooper

Free, Browser

I don't really know what's going on here, if I'm bad at it, or if I just don't get it. Compels me, though.

🌐 Some Good Websites

massgrave.dev

Oh shoot, I accidentally included this collection of scripts that lets you activate various Microsoft products without paying for them. Damn. Please don't click this link!

tv.garden

Watch local live TV channels from around the world for free!

Stream of a Stream

A selection of streams of actual, real-world streams (as in flowing water). "Calmly bubbling since 2021."

🔗 Bonus Links

leaf litter

This is an adorable collection of links that posts every couple of weeks with various themes for each issue. Love the presentation!

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

Introducing: My Cool Blog

2025-10-07T19:57:00Z

Hey I'm back again with another personal project that's been percolating for a while! Really putting this stint of unemployment to good use.

Ever since Cohost shut down last year, and a few of us former chosters started regularly espousing the wonders of building your own website, I've been wanting to make some sort of contribution to help make that a little easier for people. Because no matter how easy it actually is to make your own website, or how easy it seems to those of us who are more technologically inclined, it's almost impossible to know where to start if you've never done it before, and really easy to give up if you don't like what you're making and don't know how to fix it.

So for the past year-ish(?), I've been slowly plugging away at something to help folks who are curious about making their own thing, but might not know where to start, and I finally tightened up the scope to a more reasonable size, and got it ready to share. It's called:

My Cool Blog

My Cool Blog is a starter template for setting up simple personal websites and blogs with 11ty. It's just a couple of files and a guide on how to use them.

I decided on a template for 11ty for a couple of reasons. First of all, that's the static site generator that I use to build all my websites, so it's what I know. It also makes your site super easy to maintain and takes a lot of the pain out of making a website from scratch. To me, it's the ideal combination of completely owning your own site, and not having to do a lot of the tedious work that comes along with such an endeavor.

The idea behind My Cool Blog is that it guides you through the short and sweet 11ty setup, you drag and drop a folder into your website's project folder, edit some text, and then you have a website that's pretty much ready to put online, complete with a simple way to make blog posts, and a working RSS feed.

It's not the prettiest thing in the world, and it's not full of all kinds of fancy bells and whistles. It's meant to be a jumping-off point for you to make whatever kind of website you want; dead simple and super lightweight.

As I was getting ready to release My Cool Blog to the world, I actually used it to set up my other latest web project, What Else Is On?, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much easier it made the process of getting a new site up and running from scratch. With the bones of the site set up for me, I was able to focus on the actual design and content of the site instead of getting bogged down in all the initial setup.

That's exactly what I was hoping for. Now that I know My Cool Blog is a tool that I find helpful and want to keep using, I know it's ready to help others.

At the top, I mentioned tightening up the scope of this thing in order to just get it out. My initial plan was to bundle this template with a much larger and more comprehensive guide that walked through all of the finer details, from the 11ty folder structure, to exactly how different elements of the template work, why you need them, and how to change them. On top of all of that, I was also planning to create a video guide where I walk through the setup of a new website myself, because I always find video tutorials helpful.

I ended up axing all of that for the time being, because it was a ton of work that was stopping me from just putting out a version that was good enough to use, but I'd still like to explore all of that at some point, the video tutorial sooner than later. People will absolutely be able to figure things out as-is, but I feel that you can never have too much explanation when you're trying something new, and more people would probably benefit from more explanation.

My Cool Blog is available for free on Itch, but if you have a couple of bucks to throw my way for it, I'd certainly appreciate them!

Introducing: What Else Is On?

2025-10-01T16:01:00Z

If you've been watching my feed closely, you might've thought I forgot about the September edition of What Else Is On, my monthly link roundup series.

If you're a normal person: What Else Is On? is a recurring series of link roundup posts that I post here on my blog at the end of every month.

Well, I didn't forget. I've been spending the last week and a half since I lost my job dealing with that the only way I know how: by furiously building a new website. It's called...

WHATELSEISON.NET

What Else Is On? is now a website dedicated exclusively to sharing cool things to read, watch, play, listen to, and other good websites to visit.

I decided to build the new site because I felt that the style and format of WEIO were strong enough to stand on their own, and because I think a curated link roundup with a stated ethos warrants its own home and feed, without people also having to subscribe to every little thing I post on my blog. In short, I thought it sounded like a cool idea.

You can read more about that ethos on the new site's About page.

I'm still going to post new issues of WEIO here on the blog, and I'm going to keep it monthly. It's a good cadence to keep without making it too much work.

I also felt that moving from the end of the month to the first of the month would keep the site feeling fresher longer, so as not to have, for example, a post called "September 2025" on the homepage for the entire month of October. Hence why I skipped over September and went right to October.

There's a little more to the October 1st launch date, beyond the fact that I seemingly love to build and launch things in a panicked rush. It's also the one-year anniversary of Cohost going read-only, and I thought it would be an apt time to put something into the world that is focused on the good parts of the web: people's endless capacity for creativity and expression, and the ability to share it easily and instantly.

I can't do anything to bring back Cohost, and that's okay. I can't moderate a big community, and I certainly wouldn't want to try to run a social media site. But I can create a little static site that tries once a month to remind people that there's a lot of good stuff out there, and you can find it, and you can share it, and you don't have to be tethered to a corporate platform to experience the best the web has to offer.

I'm trying to make sure it feels like a site that's about lifting up the practice of sharing links (in addition to actually sharing links), rather than building a brand or a platform that captures people, which is the opposite of the point of What Else Is On? It's a site that you go to with the specific intention of leaving it.

The site's Archive features a good chunk of the WEIO backlog from here on my blog, and the Links page features every link shared in every issue, organized by category, as well as links to other sites I like that also share links!

I've also opened an email address where people can submit links to be included in future issues on the Support page. We'll see how much it gets used, or how well I'm able to read and vet everything that comes through, or if it ends up making the project feel too much like work, but it felt like a fun way to open it up to the potential audience.

I've been thinking about this as a potential project for a good while now, and I'm really excited for it to actually exist. It was fun to design and get up and running.

And I really love What Else Is On! I'm by no means the first or only person to discover the concept of a link roundup, and I really don't want it to seem like I think I am. I just really enjoy the act of curation, and putting my little touches on every issue in the series.

Right out of college, I had an email newsletter whose stated purpose was to keep people informed about what I was working on (I had a youtube and a patreon at the time). But it also had a section called "Get Rec'd," in which I (and eventually others) recommended different pieces of media we were enjoying at the moment. It was easily my favorite thing about the newsletter, and the part that got the most effort and attention. I just realized that in creating What Else Is On, I was just doing that again. I guess I just really like sharing things!

In any case, check out the site, which again is called...

WHATELSEISON.NET

...let me know what you think, submit something to be featured if you want (no hard feelings if I don't), and please let me know if anything is broken!

In the meantime, thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

What Else Is On? October 1st, 2025

2025-10-01T16:00:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

Hey, I bet you thought I forgot about the September edition of What Else Is On?, didn't you? Quite the opposite! In fact, for the past week and a half, I've been working on building a brand new website entirely dedicated to What Else Is On! Check it out at whatelseison.net!

In order to support that project, I felt it would be best to move What Else Is On? from the end of each month to the start of each month, to keep the site feeling fresh all month. In order to accomplish that, I had to skip September.

I really hope you like the new site. Please complement me on its design, branding, and admirable mission statement. I will of course continue cross-posting What Else Is On? here on my blog!

You can read more about the new site in today's announcement.

Without further ado, let's see what else is on!

🎵 Put This On

Laugh It Off / The Ballad of the Contemptible Loser by Nicky Flowers

Laugh It Off / The Ballad of the Contemptible Loser - Nicky Flowers

Every year, Nicky Flowers puts out a "Summer Single," which is a single they release in the summer. Since we're still in the process of saying goodbye to summer here in the October issue, it felt appropriate to include it. Nicky does all kinds of cool stuff on the web. You might know them from their Wii Shop Remix. Check 'em out!

📚 Read This

Every site needs a Links Page / Why linking matters - melonking

This is exactly the principle upon which this site is founded! A good website contains plenty of links to places that are not that website!

Making - esoterictriangle

Seth describes exactly what I love most about these Mr. Rogers segments when I think back on them. Fred was out to humanize and dignify labor, and that's precisely what the point should have been.

The GTA6 of Indie Games doesn’t exist - AURAMBLES

Aura tackles the concept of a "GTA6 of Indie Games" in the wake of the announcement and release of Silksong, and why that moniker and those economics don't really apply to indie games.

mgs3 and photorealisming the painterly game - joe wintergreen internet zone

Fascinating read from Joe here pondering the purpose of a graphical upgrade in a video game for its own sake.

A Long Train of Abuses - LMNT

Saying "violence is never justified" as a citizen of the empire that controls the world is... well, it's something.

Americans rallied for Jimmy Kimmel. Do the same for Mario Guevara - Seth Stern, Freedom of the Press Foundation

This is exactly the reason the Trump administration adopts a "flood the zone" strategy of omni-crisis. People only have the capacity to pay attention to or be angry or vocal about so much, so things inevitably slip through the cracks of each individual person's attention. And then on top of that, when a headline like this comes along, and someone tries to make people aware of the thing they didn't notice, it ends up sounding like high-horse Twitter chiding, even though it's true. People either get fatigued and stop paying attention, or get fatigued and turn on the people telling them about yet another horrible thing. But the horrible thing is still real and happening. You can't let yourself look away, but you can't let yourself burn out.

The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh - Cory Doctorow

I haven't gotten around to reading any of Ed Zitron's past few gargantuan essays, but this is the next best thing. A pretty concise and readable summary of what is (probably) coming when the investor class finally gets tired of being lied to.

Paper of Record - Cat and Girl

Cat and Girl is a top-two comic for me these days. Especially when they just come right out and say it.

As Square Enix release Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles on PC, I renew my demand for my mate Richie to return the PSP copy I lent him 15 years ago - Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, RPS

This is the kind of post I love to see on a blog, and must praise it when I see it.

📺 Watch This

Chrono Trigger Character Art - Square Enix

Last month, Square Enix uploaded some close-up footage of Akira Toriyama's original character art for Chrono Trigger to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Apparently, the video is promoting a social media contest to win a piece of art, but it's also just very nice to look at!

Steamed Hams but it's a Critically Acclaimed Feature Film - Tyrone Deise

Just when you think this meme has run its course. This thing is 43 goddamn minutes long!

why you shouldn'T live in a game - smudgebap

Great video essay here about Katamari, Mario Kart, and hanging out in a video game.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Intro Animated with Mario Paint by Mike Matei - Cinemassacre

Gives what it promises. An incredible bit of animation in an incredibly restrictive medium. Even includes a bit at the end where the creator explains his process!

deathface the horsey - Mummy Joe

A cute animation about a girl who befriends a horse.

Sounds good - Rowley

Two friends spend time together without saying a word.

🎮 Play This

Messenger - abeto

Free, Browser

Probably the most impressive free browser game I've ever shared? Walk around a gorgeous 3D world and help deliver messages to people. Also there are other actual players walking around playing the game with you, and you can emote to them. Very cute!

Cascadence - Mors

Free, Browser

Part of the Falling Block Jam that took place on Itch last month, this is a really neat and vibey Tetris clone in which you're trying to match blocks of the same color in 4-block quads.

Found via Museum of Screens

I'm Not a Robot - Neal Agarwal

Free, Browser

Complete Captcha-like challenges to prove you're not a robot. I got as far as drawing a circle before giving up.

The Password Game - Neal Agarwal

Free, Browser

Another cheeky little joke game from Neal that I hadn't seen before (or maybe blotted out of my memory). Create a password for an account that follows more and more draconian rules.

🌐 Some Good Websites

Fat Bear Week 2025 - explore.org

If you've never encountered Fat Bear Week before, I'm honored to get to introduce it to you. Voting has ended, and we have our winner!

PBS

Gonna get on my soapbox a bit for this one.

In addition to being in danger of shutting down after the federal government pulled money out of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS feels worth spotlighting because of the incredible amount of quality programming available. Not only can you watch your local PBS station live on their website, but you can also access a metric ton of series relating to cooking, home improvement, documentaries, drama, and so much more.

My recommendation is to start with America's Test Kitchen, Cook's Country, This Old House, and Masterpiece, and go from there. There's also something to be said for just throwing on the live feed, and discovering shows you think you might like by total happenstance!

Independent, public media is something we cannot let die. But also, it's just nice stuff to watch! For just $5/month, you can support your local PBS station, and get access to more outstanding television than you could ever hope to watch. You don't know how good TV can be until you've watched PBS.

🔗 Bonus Links

The Checkout Counter, September 2025 - sweetfish.site

Ayu also posted a new edition of her monthly roundup today! Always a great read!

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles

2025-09-30T20:10:00Z

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, the long-awaited remaster / re-release of Final Fantasy Tactics is finally out today! My Best Buy pre-order of the Switch version ended up showing up on Saturday (another reason to love physical releases), so I've had a couple of days to check it out and form some early impressions. I'm by no means an expert on FFT, but I've put just over 40 hours into the original on PSX over the past three months, so I have thoughts!

First, let me join the chorus of those singing the praises of The Ivalice Chronicles' presentation. The inclusion of a "Classic Edition" alongside the new "Enhanced Edition," nice QOL features like a timeline in battle and the ability to undo movement, and some truly impeccable voice acting all make this feel like a release that was handled with care and thoughtfully modernized.

Having played Tactics Ogre: Reborn, which in a lot of ways felt a bit like a test run for the future re-release of FFT we all knew was coming, I was very curious to see how Square would handle the visuals, especially as the character sprites from the original FFT are so iconic and beloved. In Tactics Ogre: Reborn, all of the original pixel art was smoothed over with a filter that ended up making everything look a little muddy. Not terrible, but just a little too smooth. And look, I get it. Having grown up playing games on CRTs, and having been specifically playing the original FFT on a PSX hooked up to a CRT, I can tell you that pixel art that was designed for the natural softening of a CRT screen does not look the same—and in my opinion, does not look as good—on a sharp, modern, hi-res display. So the desire for some artificial smoothing is understandable.

It's a bit of apples and oranges, because one game was originally released on the SNES, and the other on the PSX, but to my eye, the smoothing used for The Ivalice Chronicles looks much more restrained and natural than Tactics Ogre: Reborn. The higher pixel count of the sprites themselves is probably saving them a bit here, but it ends up looking like they found a very happy middle ground between smooth and sharp that I think looks very good. There is, however, a sort of tilt-shift focal effect on top of everything, that you can luckily turn off. You can find it under "Focal Effect" in the settings menu, and you can set it to "Always On," "Off for Battles," or "Always Off." I love me some tilt-shift, and I'm not an HD-2D hater or anything, but I really don't feel that it adds anything here.

Back to the topic of things looking very good, there's also a brand new opening cinematic rendered in a really pretty 3D-for-2D style that evokes the game's original character and concept art. After digging into the Events menu in the Chronicle, which is how you keep track of characters, places, events, and all the proper nouns of the world (there are many), I discovered that certain scenes of the game's plot are also animated in this new style, which I think are only viewable through this menu? I could be wrong, but be sure not to miss it, they're really nice looking!

The Ivalice Chronicles' Enhanced Edition makes a lot of updates to the UI to help get across more information during battles, and otherwise smooth-over and modernize other elements like unit management and story tracking. These are mostly nice, but there are a few places where I miss the friction of the PSX version, and at least one place where they've added new friction where there was none before.

For instance, in the PSX version, when encoutering a battle, you would first be taken to the squad selection screen, where you would pick and arrange the members of your team that you wanted to bring to a given fight. After confirming your selection, you'd be shown the name of the battlefield upon which you were about to fight, which would be shown for a good beat, before fading off with the music. There'd be a moment of silence while the battle loaded, and then you'd be there. In the new Enhanced Edition, you're taken to the battle map straight away, and get to place your units directly on the map. In a way this is nice, as you weren't able to see before exactly where on the map your units would appear, but in my experience, this was rarely a major hindrance. The new order of things feels too rushed, and doesn't give the unit selection screen's music enough time to breathe.

The old version felt like it was setting the stage for each fight in a really effective way, with a place for everything and everything in its place. The unit selection screen, and the music that accompanies it, with its "ding-dang-dong" introduction is a time to get your head in the game, and re-familiarize yourself with your units. A liminal space between the map and the battle area in which you could take a breath and prepare to transition from one kind of play (managing units, equipment, and information in various menus) to another (isometric tactical combat). It was slower and more frictive, but it felt like that friction had a purpose, both mechanically and narratively.

One other, slightly more nit-picky detail is that in the Classic Edition, which presents the PSX original as-is with the PSP's War of the Lions translation, the menu on the map screen is shown in the center of the screen rather than the top left, and without its heading of "Menu." Again, this is a minor thing, but it just felt ugly and clumsy to me. Maybe this is how things looked in the PSP version? I truly have no idea. But it was noticeable to me because FFT is a game I consider to have some really great presentation and menu design.

The one place I've noticed things being made a little more fiddly in comparison with the original is in the game's shops. In the original, when going to a shop to outfit your squad with new equipment, you can enter the "Fitting Room," and flip through each member of your squad, giving them each new pieces to try on to see how they affect their stats, and watching the total price of everything you have equipped go up and down as you add and remove pieces. When you're done, you pay the lump sum for everything at once. In the new Enhanced Edition, you can still enter the fitting room to try things on, and even choose to see the optimal set of gear for each unit, just as you could in the original, but you now have to pay for each unit's equipment one at a time, rather than all at once. You're not able to select items to purchase for one unit, and then flip over to another unit to select items for them.

To me, this makes it more difficult to weigh which pieces of equipment you most want to spend your limited resources on, because it removes the chance for you to see the total amount you'd be spending on your ideal loadout, realize it's more than you want to spend, and go back and remove the less important things from your "cart." It's an odd choice in a game where most every QOL update is made in the name of speed and efficiency. I was able to speed through a shopping trip in the original by prioritizing the things I really needed, and this new system just slows me down. I suppose time will tell how much this actually affects things in the long run, and whether updates to the economy necessitate pinching pennies at all in the Enhanced Edition, but it still seems strange to slow things down in this way.

One big update that I really like is the way information is presented on the new map screen. Battlegrounds are rendered as simple dots, while settlements are given larger, more city-shaped outlines, making it easier to tell them apart and get a lay of the land. Mousing over each location shows its name and a short description in the bottom left of the screen, objective markers are placed atop locations that will progress the story, and a persistent objective is displayed in the top right of the screen, telling you what you need to do next. On top of all of that, you can press a button to view a list of locations filtered by Settlements, Battlegrounds, and Miscellaneous. Most helpfully of all, the list of Settlements shows which types of weapons, armor, accessories, and items are available in the shop, something I was always forgetting and having to hunt around for in the original.

Finally, one tiny detail I love, that I noticed while I was writing this, is that you can access the main menu in the Enhanced Edition by pressing whatever button sits where the triangle button would be on your given controller. At least, I assume this is the case, since it's accessbile by pressing the X button on Switch. I love this because the main menu is introduced, and listed in the UI, as being accessible via the Start button. But having put 40 hours into the original, I've gotten used to pressing the triangle button to access the menu on PSX. The option isn't listed anywhere in the Enhanced Edition, and it doesn't really matter all that much, it's a tiny thing, they just let you do it. Maybe because they knew hardcore fans would be expecting to access the menu via triangle, maybe because the developers themselves kept trying to access the menu that way, maybe there was just one really vocal person on the team who wouldn't shut the fuck up about accessing the menu using the triangle button. Whatever the reason, I think it's nice. It feels like a subtle little way of indulging players who might not even realize they still have that bit of muscle memory.

Overall, my impression of The Ivalice Chronicles is extremely positive so far. They've made changes where things could be smoother, and reverent to the source material everywhere else. The inclusion of the Classic Edition as a completely separate game you can pop into at any time is really nice to have, both for anyone who wants that experience, and just as a historical document on modern hardware (though it isn't exactly the same as the PSX release). Square have done an incredible job of updating this game for modern hardware and sensibilities, while still being respectful of the game's beloved original release. If you've always wanted to play this game, or you just want to relive a classic, this is probably the perfect way to do so.

Why Hasn't Digimon Story: Time Stranger Been Announced for Switch Yet?

2025-09-20T20:40:00Z

Digimon Story: Time Stranger was announced back in February for PC, Xbox, and PS5. I assumed at the time that Bandai Namco were holding back a Switch announcement until the Switch 2 was properly revealed in April, but we're now 2 weeks away from the game's October 3rd release, and . . . still nothing.

An EAN database listing popped up in July, seemingly confirming that the game would indeed be getting a Switch 2 version, but then . . . nothing.

Digimon Expo '25 started last night/this morning, during which there were new looks at Time Stranger, and which would have been a good opportunity to announce a Switch 2 version of the game. But no, still nothing.

We've officially entered what I'm calling "the confusion zone." Because it feels like this game should be a no-brainer Switch 2 release (the EAN listing theoretically confirms that), but this also now feels way too close to the release date to announce a new platform in time for people to become aware of it and/or interested in buying it.

So for me, it feels like they will probably release this game on Switch 2 at some point in the future, after the initial release. Maybe because the Switch 2 version isn't ready yet, or got started too late? Maybe the creation of a listing is merely a statement of intent, and doesn't indicate that the game is imminently ready for sale? Maybe I'm dead wrong, and they'll shadow-drop the game on Switch 2 day-of, but that seems like a wild thing to do with a game with an already-announced release date.

I've been watching the lead-up to the release of this thing, really strongly assuming that it would be announced for Switch 2 at some point, because again, it feels like such a no-brainer for a game like this, and so many other Digimon games, including the previous Digimon Story game, are already on Switch. But at this point, my assumption has to be that it's not ready yet, and will be announced at some point post-release.

Which is a shame, because I want to play the game, and I want to play it on Switch. It's unclear at this point whether Bandai Namco have considered this.

Quite rude, imo.

The Brokenwood Mysteries

2025-09-18T21:43:00Z

Since I started donating to PBS, Lauren and I have gotten really into streaming shows through their website and app during dinner and before bed. Last week, we were flipping through their live channels after watching the second half of The Most Beautiful Places in Chicago, and we happened upon a promo for a murder mystery show the following night at 8.

It looked... fine (complimentary). The visual quality was a step below some of the bigger-budget shows you'll see on PBS, the acting seemed so-so, and the general vibe was like, "yeah someone's dead, but don't worry about it." Cozy and definitely very autumnal. Lauren and I locked eyes as soon as the promo ended, and I immediately knew that show was exactly the vibe we were looking for. We decided to come back at 8 the next night to see if we were right.

We tuned in to watch season 5, episode 2 of The Brokenwood Mysteries, a detective comedy-drama series from New Zealand, live on WLIW, with absolutely no context, and we had the most fun we've had with a TV show in quite some time.

The show follows Detective Senior Sergeant Mike Shepherd, a grizzled, middle-aged detective from the big city who loves country music, his classic car, and being divorced, DC Kristin Sims, his young assistant who doesn't like any of those things, and to a lesser extent the comic relief characters of DC Sam Breen, whose actor used to play a Power Ranger and looks like it, and Dr. Gina Kadinsky, the Russian medical examiner, played by a Romanian actress, who is there to make jokes about Russia, and not get anyone else's jokes about New Zealand (with you there, Gina).

Our hunch about the show being "just fine," was pretty much dead on. It's not that it's a bad show, or badly made, it's just that it's an early 2010s network detective dramedy. The acting, writing, and production value are all about what you'd expect of that kind of thing. It would feel right at home next to Monk and the like. It's not necessarily going to knock anybody's socks off, but it's good for what it is. And we don't watch things ironically, we're having a genuinely good time.

The mysteries are well-constructed, suitably twisty, and fun to try to untangle over a big bowl of soup. And maybe it's just when the episodes we've seen so far were shot, but the show really does have an autumnal vibe. Colors on the trees and mist in the air. Good, cozy detective stuff. We finished the first season last night (don't get too excited, it's from New Zealand, there are only 4 episodes in a season), and we're stoked to start the second tonight.

You, too, can enjoy The Brokenwood Mysteries, Fridays at 8pm Eastern on WLIW 21, Long Island's PBS affiliate, or online anytime at pbs.org with a PBS Passport subscription.

Thinking About The Concept of a Backlog

2025-09-17T20:00:00Z

Last month, someone found and posted my Kill Your Backlog post to some bootleg Canadian version of Reddit, and some folks (including the OP) thought it was a good or at least interesting idea. But a handful of people left comments about how they can’t imagine how and why someone would buy a game and not play it, or why someone would treat their games like work/homework, and while I think it's possible those people are just young and don't know what it’s like to have either the money to buy more than one game at a time or real responsibilities that stop you from playing video games for more than 30-60 mins at a time most of the time, or maybe they're one of those weirdo normies who only plays like one game a year, I also guess I don’t really think about a “backlog” the same way other people do when first presented with the idea. And it really got me thinking about what my concept of a backlog actually is, what purpose it serves for me, and whether the KYB method even fits with how I think about my backlog.

I don't think of my backlog as a list of tasks to complete because I think I have to. It's a list of games I want to play for some particular reason. There are plenty of games in my various libraries that I bought on a whim for a song or in a bundle, that I never played, and that I look at and think “actually I don’t give a shit about that.” That stuff doesn't count as part of what I consider my backlog. Everything on my list is something I want to go and dedicate time to experiencing for its own specific reason. The scales of those reasons vary wildly from game to game, but there's always a reason.

Maybe I’m interested in exploring a particular genre more deeply, or I want to see what a follow-up or precursor to another game has to say in context and/or conversation with that other game and/or its contemporaries. I guess it can be sort of an academic study for me sometimes, purely because that’s how I think about things.

Not everything gives me some incredible epiphany that results in a thousand or more words on my blog (in fact most do not), and I have games that I just enjoy playing because games are fun and I’m not thinking that deeply about it, but I am very interested in experiencing as much as I can (as long as there's some interest in it for me) and seeing what I make of it, whether it’s as simple as seeing what all the fuss is about, or seeing how a game relates to others I’ve played, how it handles a genre, how it translates certain ideas to gameplay, etc, etc, etc.

There are games in my backlog that I bought in bundles and sales, but they're only in my backlog because I think there's something to get out of them. Not because I bought them and I feel bad or have some kind of completionist complex. Again, there are plenty of games I've bought, been given, or likely got for free somewhere like EGS that I have no intention of ever playing, and that doesn't bother me. That's not what my backlog is.

And for that matter, it doesn't bother me that I will probably never clear all of the games from my backlog. It will continue to grow with the years, and I'll almost certainly die having never played something that I wanted to play. That's fine. Playing games and having played them isn't my life's work or raison d'être. Having a backlog is just a good way for me to remind myself of what I want to one day play. Because there's a lot I want to play! But it also isn't just a wishlist, my backlog is still made up of games that I've purchased, or otherwise have immediate access to.

Why am I not playing these games as soon as I buy them? A lot of reasons! Maybe I was in the middle of another game, and by the time I was finished, yet another game had come out, or I just wasn't in the mood to play the game I bought in-between the two. Maybe I got really busy at work and was too exhausted to feel like picking up something new. Maybe I wasn't busy enough at work and got too depressed to feel like picking up something new. Maybe another game came out and blindsided me for a month and the other got left by the wayside. Maybe I randomly decided I wanted to rearrange my home office to leave room for my old CRT and then I bought a PS1 out of nowhere and now I'm playing with that. Maybe I stopped feeling like playing video games because one of my other hobbies was popping off and by the time I came back to games I was looking for something else. Or a big weird one that should be the subject of its own post: I was waiting for the right time and it hasn't come yet.

There are one million reasons not to do something. Between work, sleep, chores, bodily maintenance, interpersonal relationships, and other obligations, I sometimes have less than an hour a day to dedicate to one single hobby. Sometimes it's video games. There are approximately 8 trillion video games released every week. Some of them were released when I was four. Sometimes I realize I'm ankle-deep in seven games at once, two of which are 40–60-hour RPGs, one of which is actually a collection of 50 games, I have exactly 45 minutes of free time ahead of me, and I don't know which way is up, so I just scroll social media until it's time for bed.

Alright, but why am I buying games in the first place if I'm not ready to play them right then and there? A lot of reasons! Most of them are, "I thought I would play this right away, but then I didn't, and time kept moving forward." Others include: "there was a sale and the shiny thing tricked me," "it was my birthday and I had to ask for something," and "I wanted a little treat." I'm a human being and one of my special interests is video games. I have a lot of them. And not enough time to play them all. Mystery solved.

I think the popular concept of a backlog is simply "games I have purchased but haven't played yet," and the setup of the KYB method, and the intro to my post, are very much along those lines. Clearly, that isn't the idea of a backlog that I subscribe to, and I haven't actually carried out the KYB method of crossing games off my list in a while, so I've been wondering whether this method and presentation of my backlog is even something I still find useful. The method of playing something for 20 minutes to allow yourself to move on from it does seem antithetical to everything I've laid out about putting games in my backlog with a purpose. But there are some games, mostly older games, that I know will demand more of me than I'm willing to give, and/or that I just want a taste of out of academic curiosity, because of their importance to the history of a specific genre or game history as a whole. For those games, I think this method of diving in briefly and recording some thoughts could still work well. There are games that I'm curious about, but that I don't necessarily think will light my world on fire. I still want to play those games, and sometimes I need a way to make me play those games.

I'm not forcing myself to adhere to any one method of playing games or another, and the KYB method also works as a way to trick yourself into opening the door to what may end up being a longer experience. If I boot up a game intending to play it for 20 minutes, and end up loving it so much that I play the whole thing, then great!

I think there's still something to the method even if it isn't how I go about playing every game on my list. It's a good way to get me to actually play a game rather than sit around waiting to not be playing any other games (which won't happen), or for the "timing to be right" (which also won't happen). My biggest problem with games, and having a lot of games that I want to play, is actually starting one. The KYB method gives my brain a way to interrupt itself and just play a goddamn game.

I also think I might retool the way I add games to this particular list. Previously, I only considered a game a part of my backlog if I had bought it an arbitrary amount of time after which I could say I "never ended up playing it." I think it might make more sense and be more helpful to

Why do I feel the need to even have the concept of a backlog, and to catalog and list and write about things in this way? I don't know! That's just how I've always been! Who cares!

I like it this way. If you would not like it this way, then great. Don't do it. Who cares!

I think people hear the word "backlog," and think "requirement" or "compulsion," but that's not what it is for me. Maybe it is a compulsion, I certainly have compulsive tendencies, I don't know. For me, a backlog is a list of things I want or have been meaning to play. I just like to keep track of that sort of thing, because I do actually want to get around to these things one day. If I don't, fine. Life is busy, and there are more important things. But I'd still like to.

And I understand that there are people out there for whom games are just games, but that ain’t me. I'm built different (incorrectly). Maybe some people think this way of going about things is weird because it’s not how they do things, or they don't like thinking deeply about the media they engage with, or because it seems like it's making a lot of work out of something that should be fun, and I'm not getting paid to do that work. I don’t know what to tell you, man. I don’t get paid to be alive, but I keep waking up.

Thanks for making me think so much about all of this, random comments that made me kinda mad! Enjoy life with your normal* brains and reasonable amount of video games!

UFO 50: Games 21–30

2025-09-16T18:00:00Z

Nine months after the last post in this series, we finally got a Switch port, so I'm playing UFO 50 again! The one thing keeping me from playing this game more was it being trapped on PC, so it's been nice to be able to finally play in bed and on the go.

It's so funny to get to find out just how right my assumption was, that I would enjoy these games much more on Switch. My initial reaction to UFO 50 was fairly lukewarm, and soured a bit over time, whereas I'm finding that I have so much more patience and appreciation for some of these games on Switch.

I've also been working on the dual feelings that A) I need to get through these games so I can hurry up and write about them, and B) that I need to play each of these games to completion, or at least a "good enough amount" in order to form an opinion on them, both of which just make me resent them all. I was originally going to post this a week earlier, but I made myself stop and take a breath and enjoy the games I was enjoying, and cast aside the ones I wasn't, and I started having a better time. What a concept.

Let's pick back up where we left off!

Game 21: Waldorf's Journey

I really dig this one! First of all, that title screen is adorable.

The idea here is that you're a walrus trying to carefully dial-in the timing, angle, and power of your jumps to traverse a series of increasingly precarious platforms suspended over a big death pit. If you miss a platform, you can also hold the jump button to flutter your little walrus flippers and hover for a bit, which is very funny to watch.

There are checkpoints that give you birds (puffins?) that will save you from exactly one fall and bring you back to the origin point of your last jump, seashells that you can spend on items to help you on your journey, and fish to eat to refill your flutter gauge.

I really like that there's an indicator in the corner of the screen showing you what percentage of the level you've completed. Knowing how close I'd gotten each run really kept me pushing forward.

Seems like there are some additional challenges to complete once you reach the end, but I'm content just having finally made it for now. This is a fun one to come back to when you have a second to kill!

Game 22: Porgy

I don't get Porgy. It's like a roguelike RPG situation, where you're piloting this submarine around the ocean to get parts to let you dive further from your base, and there are enemies and whatnot, and I just don't care.

Not for me!

Game 23: Onion Delivery

Fuck Onion Delivery.

Alright, I'll give it some more than that. Game controls like ass, and I know that's the point, but on the other hand I'm going to die one day.

Game 24: Caramel Caramel

I like this one well enough, but I cannot get past the first level or figure out exactly how I'm supposed to be using the camera mechanic. I always dug a good autoscrolling shmup, so I keep coming back to this one, I just can't really get a handle on it yet.

Game 25: Party House

Banger. Really fun conceit surrounding some simple mechanics that keeps me coming back no matter how many times I fuck up.

You're throwing a house party. Each guest that arrives is chosen randomly from your rolodex of friends, and can give you Popularity (Pop), Money, Trouble, or some combo thereof. Once the house fills up, the party ends, and you tally up your Pop and Money, which you can then spend on new rolodex entries (Pop) and expanding your house (Money) so that you can invite more people per party. If too many Troublemakers show up, the cops come and end the party early, and you don't collect any of the accumulated Pop or Money from that party.

On top of that engine, there's an overarching goal that you're trying to reach in a certain number of "days," like inviting 4 of a certain person to the house in one party (again, who shows up at the door next is random, though there are a few invitees with abilities to help you with that).

It's a lot of fun, and pretty quick to get through a run once you know what you're doing.

Game 26: Hot Foot

Dodgeball with all kinds of extra video game stuff. Not for me.

Game 27: Divers

I haven't taken this one for very many spins, but it really hasn't done much for me. It's kind of an underwater RPG where you equip different weapons and I want to fall asleep just typing about it, I'm sorry I don't care about this one.

Game 28: Rail Heist

Rail Heist is sick. You're a bandit boarding a train and trying to make off with the loot before your timer runs out. You have a handful of different abilities at your disposal that are each their own level of "somewhat fiddly," and a limited time in which to use them each turn before it's time for the lawmen to move around for a bit.

You can jump, punch, pick up and throw objects, punch through walls, crouch, and roll. You can also take the time to load your gun, and either fire it at will, or leave it loaded to shoot on sight if any lawmen get too close during their turn. The lawmen can do the same.

Each level is a nice, bite-size little puzzle to unravel, and it's very satisfying once you finally do.

Game 29: Vainger

Vainger is basically "what if VVVVVV was Metroid," and there's nothing wrong with that! Having a good time with this one! It's a fun take on a Metroid-like.

It's got all the usual hallmarks of a Metroid, with powerups gating progression and a maze of interconnected rooms, but the level design and platforming itself is really fun to interact with because you can flip your gravity at any time and stand on the ceiling, and there's some really fun and satisfying design around that.

You have three lives, or "clones," per run, losing one of which will start you from the start of whichever room you died in. Losing all three will give you a Game Over and pop you back to your last save point.

I'm realizing now that I haven't come across any health-restoring item drops between save points, and I think that's the right call for this game.

Vainger good!

Game 30: Rock On! Island

I haven't played a ton of this one, but I actually like it quite a bit. This is a fun little tower defense game, in which you place and upgrade cavemen to fight increasingly difficult waves of dinosaurs and other beasts as they traverse a set path toward your home.

I'm not a tower defense sicko, but I have been known to enjoy them when they cross my path. I can't say a ton about the depth present in Rock On! Island, but I've really enjoyed it when I've given it my time so far!

Conclusion

A good crop of games here, I've marked 5 out of this batch of 10 as faves!

UFO 50 continues to elicit interesting feelings about collections, backlogs, completion, etc, all of which is waiting to be explored in further posts. I'm not fully picking up what it or many of the games contained within are putting down, but I'm slowly coming to grips with the idea that I don't have to, and in fact should not.

Two more batches of ten to go! See you in the next one!

Blaugust in Review

2025-09-02T17:21:00Z

Well that was fun! I blogged 25 out of 31 days in August. My longest streak was 9 days in a row. Not too shabby! My only goals were to blog as much as possible, and knock out as many old drafts that I've had kicking around for months as I could. I'm happy to claim success on both counts!

All in all, I don't think I want or am ready to continue blogging daily, but part of me did really like it. It was nice to set a goal of participating in this thing as much as possible, with a clear endpoint, and put my time and energy into it. I think if I was better at managing my free time, or maybe more willing to be more strict about how I spend my free time, I would be able to keep this up, but that's just not the best way for me to relax and unwind.

Forcing yourself to blog every day when you're not in practice is not fun, and I definitely had some nights at the beginning of this challenge where I was forcing myself to get something out because I wanted to. I gave up a lot of free time I could have been using to get through the games I'm in the middle of, or any number of other things, but at the same time, this is something I wanted to do, and I almost always felt good about how I spent my time after getting something up. There's a difference between forcing yourself to do something and pushing through the desire to be lazy despite wanting to do something.

What really helped me get in the flow later in the month was creating a buffer. This is something a lot of successful daily-or-very-often bloggers do, and it works like a charm. Witholding shorter, easier posts (like those Florida photo posts) to create a queue was a great way to get ahead. Once I had a few days' buffer that I could use to catch up on bigger drafts, or just feel less like I was drowning, the month got a lot easier.

Whether or not I ever achieve Blogging Enlightenment, I do think I'd like to keep blogging more regularly to keep flexing that muscle. Ideally at least once a week, maybe more. I still have a TON of drafts to get through, and sometimes I really do need to force myself to do something I actually want to do if I'm going to get it done. Letting the muscles atrophy for a few weeks, and then trying to jump back in is no way to keep in practice. Work is work, and I won't always feel like doing it after a whole day of Other Work, but there's still a different feeling to personal creative work where you're the boss, and don't have to answer to anyone, and you're doing it purely because it brings you creative fulfillment, and you want to.

All in all, this month taught me that while blogging everyday/extremely often takes work, I can do it, and it can even be enjoyable! I don't know that it sounds particularly fun to try to keep it going at the moment, but maybe I'll work up to it! Or maybe having a big burst of blogging energy contained to one month out of the year is best, in which case I will definitely be doing this again next year.

So I hope you enjoyed having lots of posts from me in your RSS readers, and thank you very much to anyone who left a comment! As always, a comment on my blog is worth 1000x more than any social engagement will ever mean to me.

What Else Is On? August 31st, 2025

2025-08-31T20:40:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

Hello again, link fans! It's the final day of Blaugust! I hope you've been enjoying my many posts, and if you've been participating, then I hope it's gone the best it could for you! If you haven't been following, I just followed curiousquail's lead and set up a blaugust tag to collect all of this month's posts in one place for posterity!

Before we get started, I have a request: I'm starting to run low on anime GIFs of people using computers for my 'What Else Is On?' posts. I haven't gone out and searched for more on my own yet, but I thought it might be fun to solicit suggestions from the blogosphere if you have any! Throw your links down in the comments, or wherever you prefer to communicate with me!

Now then, what else is on?

🎵 PUT THIS ON

Disturbance At The Heron House - R.E.M.

Seeing as this was the month I got into R.E.M., it seemed fitting to use one of their tracks for this month's WEIO. This is one of my faves that I discovered this month, on what is probably my favorite album of theirs. A solid, mid-album sleeper hit.

Anyway, R.E.M. are great. Highly recommend checking out their lengthy discography.

📚 READ THIS

Just A Tip - Defector

A good bundle of assorted life tips from our friends at Defector!

Take My Hand - Jay Castello, Unwinnable

A lovely write-up of a journey to the top of Nobody Is Mad At You Mountain in Peak.

Good recipes - Megan Carnes

A collection of some good vegetarian recipes that I mostly want to save for myself, but also I love when people share their cooking discoveries/faves/triumphs!

Chicago is good - Megan Carnes

More from Megan here, and I'm definitely biased in my inclusion of this one, but I can confirm that Chicago owns.

Very busy today with traditions and rituals - Laura Michet

It feels very, very good to share a symbolic action with other people. It feels very good to share, and it feels great to teach people to participate.

Yeah! On this blog, we love and support silly little traditions and rituals.

The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work - Jason Koebler, 404 Media

Great, clear-eyed reporting from Jason Koebler on the devil's bargain some in the media are striking, either in the hopes of surviving Google Zero, or in a blind, investor-minded pursuit of Shiny Thing.

No, posting alone won't save Palestine but you should do it anyway - the Tangent Space

Don't give up before you start. And don't give in to false narratives and bad-faith arguments before you open your mouth.

As AOL bins dial-up for good, it's impossible to fully state the impact it had on gaming and the internet - but we've tried - Eurogamer

A fun look back at some gaming-themed dial-up stories.

if you love it, download it - erysdren

And finally, a reminder and a guide from erysdren that the things you love won't be around forever. Download that shit.

📺 WATCH THIS

Defunctland After Dark: That Helicopter Thing at Chuck E. Cheese

We just recently watched this more casual video from Defunctland of Kevin Perjurer trying to find out more about that helicopter thing that used to be at Chuck E. Cheese, and it's a lot of fun to see his process, hear him get excited in real time, and watch him try not to get sidetracked by various details. I think he puts out more of this sort of thing on the Defunctland patreon, which is a compelling selling point!

Let's Figure Out Some Animal Crackers - Nicky Flowers

Just a great video from Nicky, showing off and trying to identify some pretty fucked up looking animal crackers.

Ice Cream Truck (ASMR Animation) - hayang

Had a few of these ASMR animations of a cat doing various activities, and they're nice to watch and very cute! Some of them get kinda weird because ASMR YouTube is kinda weird, but this one is nice.

🎮 PLAY THIS

ArchaeOS - ill omens

Free, Browser

I don't fully understand this one, so I'll crib from Weird Fucking Games' description: "Interpret the meaning of three sets of objects in this contemplative experience with a retro yet mysterious feel."

Mysterious it is! And you get a little printable zine of your interpretations at the end! Takes about a minute to complete.

Portal Panic - ill omens

Free, Browser

Another by ill omens! This one, I understand. It's a puzzle platformer in which you need to touch the pink runes in the right order, connecting them with a magic thread as you do, and then loop back to the first one you touched without crossing over the thread in order to open the portal to the next level.

I'm making it sound more complex than it is, you'll get it as soon as you start playing, and it's quite fun!

individualism in the dead-internet age: an anti-big tech asset flip shovelware r̶a̶n̶t̶ manifesto - alienmelon

Free, Browser

A powerful personal history and manifesto about the individualism inherent to early software, and the creation it enabled, in contrast to today's increasingly locked-down and user-hostile reality.

You really gotta walk through this thing. Takes about 20 minutes.

🌐 ONE GOOD WEBSITE

DrawAFish.com

Draw a fish!

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

Switch 2 Thoughts

2025-08-30T16:48:00Z

I've had the Switch 2 since launch week, and I have thoughts!

The eShop

They did it. They fixed it. It just runs well now. Everything loads quickly, you can scroll without stutter. It's good.

I also understand a little better Nintendo's reasoning for not having music in the eShop, because all videos autoplay with sound when hovering over a game's listing. Which is a terrible decision, imo, and still a bullshit reason for not having shop music, but I at least understand what they meant now.

Screenshots

The screenshot experience has been improved in two ways:

First, you can finally just send that shit to your phone via an app. No more QR code bullshit. There's a limit of I think 100 screenshots at a time that will be held in the app, but hey, that's a lot of screenshots.

Second, I really like that when you take a screenshot on Switch 2, and the "Screenshot Taken" dialogue pops up in the corner, you can press the home button, and it will just take you right to that screenshot. And then if you press the home button again, it takes you right back to the game. Nice to have this process streamlined! Feels very thoughtful.

Storage

256GB to start with is so so so much better than the 32GB of the Switch. But with lots of games being much bigger these days, that will still probably fill up faster than you expect.

Virtual Game Cards

This is a little tough to explain if you don't already know what it means. Basically, Nintendo is taking all of your digital games and treating them like a physical game card in the sense that they can only be "loaded" on one system at a time, which was sort of already the case, but now you can move them between systems and loan them to people.

I am of two minds about this. On one hand, it creates a little extra unnecessary faff when you're just trying to play a game on a secondary Switch, like if you have a Switch hooked up to a TV and a Switch Lite to play on the go (in bed). On the other hand, they have made it so that you can now loan out your digital games to a member of your family group.

For example, I own Breath of the Wild physically, but bought the DLC digitally. For the longest time, my girlfriend wanted to play the BOTW DLC on her account but couldn't because fucking Nintendo fucking separates those things out arbitrarily and gates them like that if you haven't given them their pound of flesh. And she couldn't play on my account because there's only one save file, and it would've wiped mine out. SO SHE JUST COULDN'T PLAY THE DLC.

Extremely stupid! So now I can loan her the DLC and she can play it without having to buy it. And yeah, she should just be able to do that because we live in the same home and share a Switch and she should be able to just play any digital game I buy without the fucking cops showing up, and yeah, I should be able to "loan" her my digital games indefinitely like I would be able to with a physical game, rather than whatever arbitrary time limit Nintendo imposes, after which time I need to go and re-loan it to her.

But it's fucking something I guess. You know? Like give me something.

Performance

I mean this varies from game to game, but everything I've played is buttery smooth. The new 60FPS versions of BOTW and TOTK are great. Actually, my girlfriend who has played hundreds of hours of both games at 30FPS played the Switch 2 versions and was immediately like, "I don't like this," so your mileage may vary.

But all the menus, UI, and shop are super snappy and smooth. Switch 1 games I've played are super smooth. Switch 2 versions of Switch 1 games and Mario Kart World (the only proper Switch 2 game I've played) run super smoothly. And the new GameCube emulator runs great as well. Speaking of...

GameCube Games in NSO

Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers now get access to GameCube games on Switch 2! At launch, the only games available were Wind Waker, Soulcalibur 2, and F-Zero GX, though they've since added Chibi-Robo, which I was very excited to finally play!

Everything runs well, and I'm looking forward to Nintendo adding more games.

The Screen

The screen is so beautiful. Colors are so saturated and poppy. It gets so bright and vibrant. Looking at it makes me want to play games on it. The people online who complain about it not being an OLED are losers and freaks with no life. You really care that something is an LCD and not an OLED? Go outside once.

However, I will say that certain Switch 1 games that were not designed with this screen in mind, or haven't been updated to take advantage of its resolution, look a little fuzzy in handheld mode. It's by no means a deal-breaker, but just know that a lot of your old games will not look their best in handheld mode.

The Kickstand

It's not a piece of shit now. They thought about it for more than two seconds and made a kickstand that isn't a piece of shit. It's great.

The Joy-Cons

I really like how they feel! They're bigger, they feel better in my hands, I love the magnets, and the sticks definitely feel smoother. Seems like they didn't do anything to prevent stick drift from coming back, so that will probably still be a recurring, annoying, expensive issue, but time will tell.

The Dock

You would think there's not much to say about the dock because it's just a piece of plastic that connects the thing to a TV. But the first thing I noticed when slotting the Switch 2 into the new dock is that there's weirdly a lot of play between the Switch 2 and the front and back of the dock. Maybe this is to prevent scratching the screen when docking and un-docking? But it's weird, like you can wobble the console back and forth while it's sitting in there. Feels loose and unsteady. Just a strange detail in a console experience where everything else feels pretty tight and considered.

Conclusions

Switch 2 good! I like it! It's very big, so I don't really like holding it for a long time, my Switch Lite is still the GOAT in that regard, but that screen is goddamn gorgeous. And everything I've played runs like a dream on it.

I haven't played it much since falling off of Mario Kart World (an excellent game that will get its own post at some point) about a month or so after launch, but I haven't been playing much of anything in that time, really, so that might be a me thing. I've had a lot going on lately, and I haven't been able to stick with a game for a bit for some reason.

There's also the small matter of it still feeling like there aren't a ton of games for this thing. I mean, you can play pretty much any Switch 1 game on it, and all of NSO, but when you buy a new console, you want a lot of exciting new experiences that take advantage of all that the new thing has to offer. This is something that will naturally be alleviated over time, though, so I look forward to a new crop of Switch 2 games to get excited about.

This CD Is Brought To You By...

2025-08-29T15:36:00Z

While doing research for my AOL memories post, I was hit by a lightning bolt in the form of the above video.

This promo would play in front of our copies of both Carmen Sandiego: Word Detective, and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? that came in various boxes of cereal in the year 2000. It was a wild time. CD-ROM games came in cereal boxes, gold paved the streets, single-income families could afford modest houses, etc.

This man's voice saying "This CD is brought to you by" is my fucking Manchurian Candidate activation phrase. I've heard him say this approximately one million times. We got sucha kick out of the guy jumping off the cliff and the reverberating "ow" that we would wait for that bit to play before skipping to the game. We played these games so much, especially Carmen Sandiego: Word Detective. That game owns. The art and animation is insane.

I never knew what Lightdog was as a kid, because even then I would skip past the ads as soon as I could in order to get to the game (I don't think we ever made it far enough to even see the Pfizer ad). Apparently, it was a "family-friendly" filtered internet service. So basically the future we're currently headed towards.

They struck a deal with General Mills to bundle CD-ROMs inside cereal boxes with an ad, their launcher, and a full version of a game. As far as I can tell, other available games included Clue, Monopoly Junior, and Lego Creator. It doesn't seem like the promotion was terribly successful, because Lightdog went belly-up the following year. At least, I'm pretty sure they did. I remember reading that somewhere when I was writing my AOL post, and now I can't find a damn thing about Lightdog anywhere. Which doesn't disprove that possibility...

Anyway, I just had to share this because it hit me like a ton of bricks. The comments for this on YouTube were full of people just saying "Carmen Sandiego" or "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire." I just had to save it and host it myself for posterity. Anyone else remember this?

Memories of AOL

2025-08-28T21:53:00Z

This month, AOL announced (or didn't, I think someone just found it on their webite) that they're discontinuing their dial-up service on September 30, 2025. For folks of a certain age, AOL is synonymous with a very specific era of the internet, and with an absolute overabundance of compact discs offering increasing amounts of hours of free access to it.

I am one of those folks, and I thought it would be fun to share some memories I have of that time.

Those Damn CDs

There was a time in America when you couldn't spit without hitting an AOL Free Trial CD. They came with other software, they came in the mail, they came in gosh darn cereal boxes. In one sense, they were a plague, and certainly a massive waste. But for two kids whose parents had finally introduced a computer to the household, and who desperately wanted to see what the internet had to offer, the promise of 1000 Free Hours (along with vague assurances that it would help us with our homework) really helped us plead our case. Besides, with so many of these discs around, I don't think we actually paid for internet access for years.

Lego Brick Game

One of my first memories of using the internet was to visit the Lego website, because I was very young, loved Legos, and couldn't think of anything else to look for on the web yet. You can still view a version of what the site looked like around then via the Wayback Machine.

My favorite thing to do was play a game simply called "Brick Game," for which you needed to be a member of the Lego "Web Club" (which is what they called a free online account). This is a standout memory for me because Brick Game was a competitive game that you would play against another person from somewhere else in the world, and I can still remember my parents being amazed by that fact.

Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice

Get ready to see a comment from my sister on this post, because I think THE memory of the early internet for both of us is, for some reason, trying to watch the intro to The Powerpuff Girls, presumably on the Cartoon Network website.

I can still remember watching the stupid white progress bar on the stupid old QuickTime Player plugin, as it loaded second by second over the course of what could have easily been 15 minutes. We would start playing, hit the buffer wall, it would buffer another second, and we would restart from the beginning.

"Sugar, sp–" Buffering

"Sugar, spice, an–" Buffering

OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

I don't think we ever got to watch the full video because it would've taken too long, and we got bored, but now a good chunk of that intro is burned into my brain forever:

"Sugar. Spice. And everything nice. These were the ingredients chosen to create the perfect little girls. But Professor Utonium accidentally added an extra ingredient...Chemical X! ::explosion:: Thus, the Powerpuff Girls were born! Using their awesome super powers, Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup..." something something truth and justice? That's where it gets foggy.

iWon

I don't know why I remember this, but I distinctly remember my mom and aunt using a website called iWon. I looked it up, and it sounds like it was probably a scam, but seemingly not in any hugely detrimental way. Maybe more of a sham, then.

My understanding is that you would sign up for an account, and then be entered into a chance to win money (for charities(?) and possibly also yourself(?)) by clicking on links and playing online games. This is the same generation that told us Wikipedia was not a real source. Adults didn't know shit about shit.

Fansites

While I was putzing around the Lego website, my sister was getting down to business scoping out anime fansites to print out Digimon and Sailor Moon screenshots from. I visited these sites too, after my sister found them, but she was the heavier user. She had binders full of screenshots and fanfiction and the like.

The two that I can still put names to were Lelola and DigiTenka. Lelola was a general anime fansite, while DigiTenka, as you may have guessed, was dedicated to Digimon. Incredibly, Lelola is still online, seemingly owned and operated by the same person who started it back in the day. The old Lelola is gone (though you can still find it on the Wayback Machine), replaced with a very sweet message from the owner, and it appears they use the domain as their personal site. That rules.

I couldn't find any info on DigiTenka, but in researching this section, I also remembered DigiExperience.com. This was another Digimon fansite that was apparently an affiliate of Lelola, which would explain how we found it.

MaMaMedia

I don't have a ton of memories of using the site itself, but I remember being absolutely inundated with commercials for MaMaMedia.com during after-school and Saturday-morning TV. It was supposed to be some kind of edutainment thing, but mostly what keeps MaMaMedia in my head (apart from the name being fun to say, and also easy to confuse with Macromedia) was the weird repetitive music that played on the site.

Again, I couldn't have been there more than a handful of times, but the music imprinted on me for some reason. I haven't been able to find it anywhere, and it wasn't in any of the commercials. I don't know quite how to describe it except that it was very of its time, and I can only imagine it coming from small, crappy, beige computer speakers.

Flash Nonsense

Our foray into the world of Flash animations and games peaked a little bit later than what I remember as the AOL Years, but it was definitely in there. It all started for us when our cousin took us down to his basement and showed us The Demented Cartoon Movie, now available on YouTube. That was a world-shaker for me. That era of my life can reasonably be split into before and after seeing TDCM. It made me want to make things. It (and other things) made me want to learn Flash. It may be, in some small way, responsible for the fact that I am a motion designer today. Wild.

But there were plenty of others out there. Sites like MiniClip, StupidVideos, and the inimitable DancingBush.com (thank god this was archived, I still get this music in my head) provided hours of entertainment. I can remember more than one sleepover at my friend Alex's house where we spent all night looking at absolute nonsense on his parents' Gateway PC until the wee hours together. Good times.

AOL Keywords

This isn't so much a specific memory, but AOL Keywords were everywhere for a time. Before Google, it was a little harder to find things on the web. So AOL created a simple way to type in a word or phrase, and find the website you were looking for.

I don't remember ever using them myself, but for the longest time, I remember TV shows saying "use AOL Keyword: XYZ" as a way to find them on the web, rather than sharing their actual URL. "Use AOL Keyword: PBSKids" was a big one. I guess people thought URLs would be too hard for normal people to grasp, and there was no good way to reliably find the thing you were looking for on the web just yet.

This is more memories than I expected to dredge up! My early computer use in the AOL era was more about playing games and poking around the operating system itself than it was about surfing the web. I feel like my internet use didn't really take off until a little while after the AOL boom. But the memories I do have are clear as crystal (obviously), and I'll always look back fondly on this era and the "You've Got Mail" of it all.

You can take the person out of the 1000-hour free trial, but you can't take the ::horrific modem noises:: out of the person.

VSCodium: What Constitutes an Alternative?

2025-08-27T21:50:00Z

I'm trying to remove what few Microsoft products I use from my life, since they're definitely materially supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza, and the BDS movement has broadened their boycott of the company. I don't have an Xbox, I don't subscribe to Game Pass, I don't use Office or OneDrive. I don't pay Microsoft for anything at all, actually. But I want to stop using their products, paid or not, where I can. And unfortunately, they're currently a big part of the process of making this blog work, in the form of Visual Studio Code and GitHub.

But they don't have to be! The great thing about having a static site is that it's just a collection of files that I can take just about anywhere and use any number of tools to turn those files into a website.

GitHub is a problem for another day. I mainly use it because it hooks into my web host Netlify in a way that makes updating my site and publishing posts really easy. I see people talking about Codeberg right now, but I would have to reassess the rest of my posting workflow in order to use it, I think. But again, that's for another day.

Today, I want to post about an alternative to VSCode, Microsoft's free code editor that I've been using to build my website and write blog posts for a few years now. I gave it a shot back when I was first building this version of my website because the person whose tutorial I followed was using it, and I ended up really liking it. The fact that it combines an editor, file explorer, and terminal all in one place just makes my specific workflow a lot faster and more enjoyable.

The first, best-looking alternative I found, and the one I'm using right now, is VSCodium, an open-source version of VSCode.

I initially envisioned this post as a review of VSCodium, because I expected to go through some sort of a trial period with VSCodium, and to have lots to say about what makes it different, and what I like or dislike about it, but it hit me with a bit of an anti-climax because it's exactly the same as VSCode. It looks the same, it acts the same. It's actually, literally just VSCode.

On VSCodium's website, under the "Why Does This Exist" heading, they say the following:

Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.

Followed by this quote from a VSCode maintainer:

When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.

When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license

So VSCodium is literally the same program as VSCode, just with all of Microsoft's tracking garbage stripped out (or rather, never added). Which is great! But then that got me thinking, is that enough to make it a new tool? Does that move it far enough away from Microsoft for my purposes?

The underlying VSCode code is still developed and supported by Microsoft, even though it's technically open-source and anyone can contribute, and yada yada. If you were trying to remove Google from your life, would switching from Chrome to Chromium accomplish that?

I don't really have a conclusion here! I really like VSCodium as a piece of software, because it's literally the same piece of software I already really liked, just without a bunch of stuff I wasn't using and didn't want. But at the same time...it's the same piece of software, no? I don't really know enough about the world of software development to know if VSCodium is far enough removed from Microsoft to matter here.

I also don't think this is a huge deal, or that this particular piece of software is a major point of pressure for the BDS movement, so I'm not agonizing over it, but I thought it would be an interesting question to pose, and good to post about even though I'm sure everyone in my sphere is aware of the Microsoft boycott.

I think where I come down on VSCodium in particular is "it's probably fine?" But there are also plenty of other fish in this particular sea. I really like the trappings of VSCode/VSCodium, but I'm sure there are other free & open source options out there that are just as good. And there's nothing keeping me from just firing up Notepad++ and a cmd window instead.

Some Guys I Saw At "Rusty Place"

2025-08-26T21:50:00Z

The cavalcade of Florida backlog posts continues! I think this should be my last.

The day I acquired The Cool Spot Phone, we also visited an outdoor garden decoration type place that my folks just call "Rusty Place," because it's full of metal outdoor decorations, and many of them are somewhat rusty. You'll see, I'm sure.

But many of these decorations were also 100% certified Cool (or at least Weird) Guys. These are those guys.

Nice, normal animals + plants

The Cursed Zone

Standouts for me are the frogs playing ladybug checkers, any and all turtles, the manatee, big giraffe, and cactuses. I love the shark wearing sunglasses. The pumpkin face haunts my dreams.

New Keeb

2025-08-25T21:30:00Z

After writing about my last keyboard driving me nuts, I decided I should just splurge on a really nice new one while I have a job and (some) money, especially since it's a tool I use all day every day.

After looking around a bit, I settled on the Keychron Q1 Max in Shell White, with Gateron Jupiter Red switches. I even found that my local MicroCenter, which is just a few short stops away on my subway line, had the exact model with the switches I wanted in stock for $30 cheaper than it's currently listed for on the Keychron website! That MicroCenter has a pretty nice keyboard section, so I was able to go in and try out the board before committing to a purchase. It's so nice to have a brick and mortar computer store to go to!

It's a 75%, which is a little bit bigger than the KBDCraft board I'd been using, and a little smaller than the Varmilo I retreated to when the KBDCraft started to drive me nuts. It's kinda nice to have a function row again, but I'm so used to the escape key being a row lower that I keep instinctively hitting the tilde key, which is very funny. Muscle memory is a hell of a thing. There's also a nice little knob that controls volume by default, but can apparently be programmed to do other things, though I haven't tried to do that yet.

It seems pretty easy to customize, though, so I can set up some of the shortcuts and macros I got used to with my last board. It's also got a Win/Mac switch, which activates some different layers with different shortcuts on Windows and Mac, which is really nice, since I work on a Mac, and use a Windows PC for personal stuff.

It can be used either wired or wirelessly over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, but I'm a wireless hater (apart from headphones most of the time), so I'll be using it exclusively wired. I didn't get this nice coiled cable for nothing. Of course, I've since found this other nice coiled cable. It never ends, folks.

The stock caps are pretty nice, and very readable. I like the font and accent colors. But I've got a new set of caps coming that I bought myself for my birthday this year that I'm very excited about. It's a set called "Motif" by Akuko Labs, and I have no idea when it's shipping. It's apparently still in production.

So far, after a weekend and now one full day of work, I like the new keeb very much! It's a little louder and clickier than my previous board, but not in an obnoxious way. It's pleasantly thok-y. It's also extremely heavy, or at least much heavier than any board I've had in the past. Its body is all metal, and feels super sturdy and well-built. This feels like a board I'll be using for years and years.

If you have the means, and you need a new tool that you use every single day, buy yourself the nice thing. It's worth it every time.

Good Clouds - Florida Edition

2025-08-24T16:23:00Z

Continuing the theme of clearing out draft ideas I've been meaning to post since the start of the year, let's take a look at some cool clouds I saw while I was visiting my folks down in Florida for the holidays!

For all of its political faults, Florida's actual natural environment and big ol' sky are very cool and fun to observe.

The ride from the airport featured this great cloud shelf. That streak in the top left is a reflection from the car window, not anything actually cool.

Got to see this incredible sunset our first night!

Birds!

A wider shot of this patchy, web-like formation.

The sunset just got more and more impressive the longer we watched.

Tighter shot of that crazy solar-flare-lookin' cloud.

Pink streaks feat. contrail.

The moon! And a planet of some sort I think! Jupiter?

Bonus pic feat. ducks!

Bonus bonus pic of actual visible stars at night!

No It Doesn't

2025-08-22T02:00:00Z

Hey, can we stop it with this? How long have toilet paper companies been insisting that we're actually buying X times more rolls than we actually are? I feel like it's been decades, and it's bullshit.

Can we all agree that the "Mega" size of toilet paper roll that most brands sell is now just the normal size of toilet paper roll? I don't know that I've seen a toilet paper roll small enough that three of it could be considered one of these "Mega" rolls at any point in the last ten years.

Maybe this ratio was true at one point, but it isn't anymore. No one has seen a toilet paper roll that small since the Carter administration. These nine rolls do not equal 36 of anything, they equal themselves, and no amount of marketing will make me less mad that they cost fifteen American dollars.

The Cool Spot Phone

2025-08-21T02:40:00Z

Been meaning to blog about this guy since January goddamn first.

I found him in an antique shop in Florida while visiting my folks for the holidays, and was equal parts enamored and confounded. Why does this object exist? I had to have him.

He was a little pricey, and I didn't have my full-time job yet at the time, so I let him go. But I kept thinking about him, and talking about him to my family. After being suddenly confronted with his existence, who could ever stop thinking about him? So my folks very kindly offered to take me back and buy him for me.

I, of course, have a history with Mr. Cool Spot, having played his video game for the Sega Genesis endlessly as a kid. It's actually a pretty good game! My sister and I still try to bust it out every Thanksgiving as a tradition. I also made an animation of him as a motion design exercise a few years back.

But I had no idea this phone existed. I have so many unanswered questions. Why was this made? Who manufactured it? Where was it available? Was it made available for general purchase, or was it the prize for some sort of contest?

I searched around, but I haven't had any luck in finding any answers. Another mystery. Part of me hopes that one day the phone—still disconnected for lack of a phone jack in our apartment—will ring, and some otherworldly voice—perhaps Mr. 7UP, perhaps Cool Spot himself—will whisper to me the answers.

Until such a time, we've given him pride of place on the passthrough between our kitchen and living room, perfectly covering my girlfriend's face whenever she stands at the counter and tries to talk to me.

I was also thinking of trying to get him working with some kind of phone-jack-to-bluetooth solution, but I never settled on the right one, and never felt like justifying the expense. I'll make that happen one day, just for the novelty of finally getting to answer it and see if it still works.

Do you have any answers about the Cool Spot phone? Call in now to help shrink Mike's Growing List of Weird Mysteries.

My Keyboard Is Driving Me Nuts

2025-08-19T19:10:00Z

In 2023, I needed a new keyboard. I'd been using my Varmilo VA87M for almost five years, and the things that I didn't love about it were starting to irk me. I was turning 30, and my girlfriend wanted to get me something special and symoblic. When we found the KBDCraft Kit Adam, a keyboard whose case you built out of Legos, it seemed perfect. It combined my love of mechanical keyboards and Legos, it would fill a need in my life as something I would use constantly every day, it had positive reviews, and it wasn't too pricey. I did not yet know just how much a keyboard could irk me.

I guess I'm writing this as a sort of belated review of the KBDCraft Kit Adam. I haven't seen anyone anywhere write anything negative about this keyboard apart from a slight bow in the Lego case, and I haven't seen anyone anywhere share my specific issues with this thing. My assumption is that the people buying and reviewing the board on YouTube and such are hobbyists who put it together for fun, and then move on to another board without using it for a prolonged amount of time. Or they're buying it for a kid who doesn't use it a lot or just tosses it aside when it stops working.

In any case, I've been putting up with this thing for a long time, and I can't put up with it any more. I busted out my old Varmilo again to write this post because a person can only be pushed so far.

The KBDCraft Kit Adam, at least the model I have, has an egregious issue with registering key presses. It double-presses keys, it drops presses, it fails to register keys I'm holding (shift, etc.), it does it all, baby!

Herre are a coule of lilnes written with the KBDCraft Kit Adam keyboard, without any editing, to illustrate my point. The quick brown fox jumps over the llazy dog. See, sometimes it only does it every once in a while, but then it'll fuck up a whole big thing I'm trying to type to a coworker and I want to throw it out the window. Back to the Varmilo now.

This is why I've put up with the KBDCraft for so long. Sometimes it's fine! And then sometimes you get a line of text with doubled or tripled letters, missing letters, extra spaces, missing spaces, and missing capitals and/or punctuation all in one! And now the back and forth between fine and extremely fucked up has finally pushed me too far.

I've tried everything I can to troubleshoot the issue on my end. Unplugging and plugging it back in does nothing. I tried plugging it directly into my computer in case the USB switcher/hub I'm using was the issue. It was not.

The only solution I found that seemed to help at all was cleaning it. And when I say cleaning it, I don't mean giving it a blast of compressed air and moving along with my day. I mean removing every keycap, giving it a brush and a blow, and then removing every switch (usually I'd just remove the problem switches, usually T, R, L, M, Shift, Space, and Backspace, but more pop up), and giving each switch and the board a good blast of air and a wipe to check for debris.

After that whole song and dance, the board would be back to normal for an amount of time that has lessened every time I've done it. First it was fine for a few weeks, then one week, then a few days, then a day, then a few hours. This is not a real solution. How many fucking times do I have to take this thing apart?

The fact that this would solve things for a time led me to believe that maybe there was an issue with the PCB or the switches themselves, but when I reached out to the company via their contact form, I receieved no reply. And I sure as shit am not going to spend any money on a new board or switches when I don't know that they won't shit the bed in a few months' time.

So it's finally time to move on. And that's a real shame, because despite its issues, I really love this keyboard! I love that, since it's made of legally-but-not-functionally-distinct Lego bricks, I can customize it with new bricks if I want! And I can stick minifigures along the back of it if I want! It's such a fun idea for a board. And I actually love the switches it comes with. They have a great, clacky, Lego-ish sound to them, and they feel great to type on. I really like using the damn thing, and it just won't let me!

So let this be a warning to anyone who might stumble upon this blog post while looking up the KBDCraft Kit Adam, or other KBDCraft models (though I cannot speak to those specifically). You should steer clear of these boards. They're fun to put together, and the switches sound and feel great, but after a while, it might just stop working well. And that sucks.

I really wish I could find a way to fix it, or make myself put up with the issues, or any way to keep using it. But it might just be a piece of junk at the end of the day. My hackles were raised by the fact that KBDCraft are using the names and imagery of Evangelion and including Minecraft figures with their products, despite definitely not having the rights to either of those properties (seriously, what is going on there?), and maybe I should've trusted my gut on that. Not that I'm a big copyright guy or anything, but like, it feels sus to begin with.

Ah well. On to the next board.

Can Anyone Help Me Find This McDonald's Arcade Machine?

2025-08-19T01:57:00Z

The other night before bed, I suddenly remembered an arcade machine that used to be at our local McDonald's growing up, and I haven't been able to find evidence of it anywhere.

I know there used to be machines for actual video games, like SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, Dreamcast, GameCube, because that's all that's been coming up in my search, but I don't remember ever seeing or playing those machines.

The machine I remember was fairly unremarkable, if memory serves. I believe it was white, with rounded edges, a square CRT screen, and three(?) big, round buttons in front of it. I think the screen might have been a touch screen? I've included an illustration of what I remember it looking like above.

Rather than play any video games, it was a sort of digital coloring page. I'm pretty sure you would touch the screen to select which area to color, and then press one of the buttons to pick a color.

It either had Grimace and Birdie on the machine itself, or Grimace and Birdie were on the coloring page on the screen.

I could be wrong about some of the details, this would have been probably 27 or 28 years ago, so mid-90s. But I'm certain it was a coloring page, and that's what I can't find anywhere. It definitely didn't have any controllers coming out of it, just the big, embedded buttons.

Does anyone else remember this? Can anyone recommend a good resource for finding something like this? Any info would be much appreciated. I'll report back with any breakthroughs.

Fixed My Date Issue!

2025-08-17T22:00:00Z

Remember when I mentioned that I had an issue with dates and times not displaying correctly on my blog and in my RSS feed? I just pushed an update that should fix all that!

The long and short is that I was telling Eleventy that my time zone was UTC, when in fact it is UTC-4. This produced some wacky results, namely that my blog would parse a given post's UTC-4 date/time into the correct date up until 8pm. If I set the post's time to 8pm or later, it would display as being published tomorrow. And if I wrote the date/time in UTC, it would always display the correct date on my blog, but the time of publication in my RSS feed would be off.

I figured this had to have a simple fix somewhere, and wouldn't you know it, all I had to do was change one little setting from utc to utc-4.

But then all the posts that had been written before a certain date (before I moved to Eleventy and gave new posts dates in their frontmatter) showed their date of publication as one day earlier than before.

So I had to manually update the dates and times of around 160-ish posts. It took a second, but it wasn't so bad. Copy, paste, change some numbers, next. And that's what I get for not bothering to look into this issue for like three years.

I haven't seen a hundred or so posts pop back into my RSS reader, so I don't think I catastrophically fucked anything up, either! A constant fear.

Anyway, no one knew about this but me, and you shouldn't notice any changes whatsoever! WebDev!

My Favorite Public Media

2025-08-16T21:54:00Z

Hearing that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a name I've heard in front of public television programming my entire life, will officially shut down at the end of September broke my heart. I knew the current administration had public media on the chopping block, I guess I just didn't expect such an immediate, material consequence.

That's part of the problem with the times in which we find ourselves, isn't it? An assumption or desire from the opposition that no matter what happens, things will at least probably continue to be sort of okay for a little while. Things have inertia, the government moves slowly, and any actions they take will take a while to ripple out and affect people. And that's just not true right now. Things can and do turn on a dime. The government gets to take big swings, but only when fascists are in power and those big swings benefit billionaires.

But anyway.

This week, I finally made donations to WTTW, my local PBS station when I was growing up in Chicago, and WDCB, the listener-funded Chicago Jazz station I've written about before. I love public media, particularly Chicago public media, with my whole heart, and I want to see it weather this storm and continue for a long time to come.

We never had cable growing up, and while I also grew up on KidsWB and The Simpsons and whatnot, PBS was always there in the background, showing me kindness, culture, and a slower, calmer, more intentional way to produce media. So I thought in the wake of all of this, I'd talk about some of my favorite public media stations, shows, memories, and what I continue to love about public media today.

WTTW

The Chicagoland area's local PBS affiliate and "Window To The World." Home to originals like Check, Please! and Chicago Tonight, and ubiquitous personalities like Geoffrey Baer. No joke, I just got sucked into watching 20 minutes of Baer's 2009 documentary The Foods of Chicago: A Delicious History while writing this.

It's hard to describe what's special about WTTW without falling back on "I grew up with it," and maybe that's all it is. I'm sure I'd be just as fond of any other station in any other city, had it been a large part of my childhood. But WTTW did a great job of teaching me about the city I lived in near as a kid, and taught me to be proud of being a Chicagoan. It did that by teaching local history, creating local culture, and without putting other places down or resorting to petty rivalries.

WYCC

WYCC was the Chicago area's secondary PBS affiliate, operated by the City Colleges of Chicago, which we could get over the air as long as the weather was good. I mostly remember WYCC, channel 20, as WTTW channel 11's boring counterpart—when we heard the words "Pritzker Military Library," we knew it was time to flip around—and for being fuzzy. But WYCC is also where I first saw Bob Ross' The Joy of Painting, and for that, I owe it a debt of gratitude. WYCC went off the air for the third, and probably final time, in 2022.

Create

Create TV was a later addition to the public television canon, after the transition to digital signals opened up the prospect of sub-channels, and gifted us with a total of 4 PBS channels at one point. Create is a craft and DIY-focused channel that also features programming on, to quote their website, "food, travel, home & garden, arts & crafts, fitness and other lifestyle interests."

I loved when Create came along, because we were much more likely to see one of our favorite food or home improvement shows like America's Test Kitchen or This Old House there, where it didn't have to compete with news and other local programming. I also adore the simplicity of their station IDs, promos, and graphics package, none of which have changed since I was in high school. Their interstitials that feature nothing but some animated version of their logo and some jazzy, scat-singing are a balm on my soul.

This is from a channel in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but the main content is all the same.

PBS Kids

Of course, as a kid, I lived for the PBS Kids programming block. Sesame Street, Cyberchase, Clifford, Word Girl, Between the Lions, Zoboomafoo, it was bangers all the way down. Arthur, who continues to be a source of memes for aging millennials everywhere, will always be top-tier for me. That show owned. My sister and I continue to watch the holiday special Arthur's Perfect Christmas every year. And of course, there was Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which I think about often, and which I truly believe touched my soul on a deep level as a child. Fred Rogers was a special man, and he could not have done what he did the way that he did it anywhere other than on public television.

This Old House

Alright, let's highlight a couple of the shows themselves, shall we? This Old House is a unique home-improvement/DIY show, in that each season of the show follows a single project to restore or otherwise fix up an old house, often with some historical significance and/or restrictions. Spending an entire season on one house lets them slow down and focus on individual elements and techniques, as well as showcase local craftspeople, materials, and other culture and color.

The show is hosted, as it has been for years, by a group of master craftspeople in the areas of carpentry, plumbing, landscaping, HVAC, electrical systems, and more. It's a real celebration of the trades, and it's always a joy to watch an expert make something complex look easy while explaining what they're doing.

The show's spinoff, Ask This Old House, is focused more on helping viewers with individual home-improvement problems and DIY projects. It's hosted by all the same experts as the main show, and different segments feature a given member of the team visiting a viewer and helping them with a problem they've written in about. The viewers' issues run the gamut, and nothing is too simple to ask for help with. Everything is an educational opportunity. You'll often get to see Tom Silva, a general contractor who's been with the show since the 80s, patiently helping someone who looks like they're never touched a hammer before with something as simple as replacing a door handle, and explaining what to do, what not to do, and why along the way.

America's Test Kitchen

America's Test Kitchen is a cooking show that also incorporates science and product reviews. Their main MO is developing "fail-proof" recipes that create the ideal version of a given dish every time. Each cooking segment walks through the recipe, including what choices they've made about ingredients, amounts, and techniques, and the reasons behind each of those decisions. The result is an extremely educational experience after which you know much more about the dish, and about cooking in general than you did before, and feel like you could absolutely make what was just shown.

There are also segments focusing specifically on the science of a particular area of cooking, as well as my two favorite segments: equipment reviews with Adam Reid, and food and snack reviews with Jack Bishop. The latter two feature the host blind-testing several variations on a piece of equipment or snack food, while Adam or Jack talks about the differences between each variation or brand, and what their group of testers/tasters liked and disliked about each. At the end, they reveal which brands were which, and which brands the test group liked best and why.

The show used to be hosted by Chris Kimball when I was growing up, but he had some kind of falling out with the production over rights or money, and went to start his own thing, Christopher Kimball's Milk Street, which also airs on public television, and is also good. Nowadays, it's co-hosted by Bridget Lancaster and Julia Collin Davison, who are both great hosts with great camera presence and chemistry, who easily embody the show's calm, confident energy. America's Test Kitchen also has a spinoff called Cook's Country, which focuses on regional American home cooking recipes. Both shows are some of the coziest things you can put on a television.

It's impossible to quantify the impact public media, and specifically PBS has had on my life, from connecting with my dad over science shows like Nova and rebroadcasts of Monty Python's Flying Circus, to the familiar experience of my dad excitedly flipping on Nature, while my mom fled the room to avoid watching some animal eat another animal, to watching some incredible music performances on Austin City Limits.

Historical documentaries on American Experience, biographies on American Masters, independent films on Image Union (RIP), watching David Tennant on Doctor Who for the first time, the list just goes on and on and on. I owe so many fond memories to public television.

To me, it's important to fund public television because not only is it important to provide people with programming that is educational, informational, and culturally enriching, but it's also important to be able to produce media that is not for profit, and therefore not beholden to the same metrics as for-profit television, both to show that that sort of thing is possible, and to show people that we can have nice things. TV doesn't have to be loud, and fast, and competitive, and combative. It can be calm, and slow, and quiet, and it can teach you something. You can come away from a TV show feeling like a better person than you were before.

When I think about what public television, and public media at large provides, I think of two things. First, I think of them as media's public parks and third spaces. Places to go that don't want to take advantage of you or charge you for being there, but recognize that people need places to go and breathe and feel like human beings, and be treated with dignity. And second, I think about this quote from an interview with Fred Rogers:

I'm very concerned that our society is much more interested in information than wonder. In noise rather than silence. How do we do that? [...] How do we encourage reflection?

He goes on to hope that the book he's promoting will do just that, before concluding, "Oh my, this is a noisy world."

The world has only gotten noisier since then, and public media is still one of the few places I know I can go to consider a better world, and engage in quiet reflection for a while. With any luck, it will outlive the current rise of fascism, and continue to stand against the noise long into the future.

Fuck Am I Supposed To Do With All This Labo?

2025-08-15T21:30:00Z

Hey, here's one that's been percolating in my mind for too long now:

Remember Nintendo Labo? It was that series of weird, inventive kits that Nintendo put out early on in the Switch's lifecycle that had you crafting peripherals out of cardboard and doing some really cool and interesting and very Nintendo things with the Switch. That was a fun idea, and it was fun to play with for a bit, particularly the piano.

But, uh...

What do I do with all of that now?

This is a question that's been haunting me for years now, because the novelty of Labo wore off fairly quickly, and now it's all just sitting up on the highest shelf of my office, taunting me. Any time I look up at my shelves from my desk, hey, there it all is!

I would feel bad just throwing away or recycling it, obviously. It's perfectly good cardboard! It's hardly been used! It's not like a pizza box that got all grease stained or whatever. But I'm definitely never going to play with any of it again, and it takes up so much damn space.

Maybe my best bet would be to break it all down and reuse the cardboard for something else? Maybe a hobby I just recently thought about trying out? But I also haven't bothered to bring it down and go through that process either in the past 7 years (7 years???).

Anybody want some Labo?

Getting Into R.E.M.

2025-08-14T21:30:00Z

A couple of months ago, an R.E.M. song came up somewhere that made me realize that I really like R.E.M. but have never listened to a full album of theirs or, therefore, most of their music. I like a lot of their more popular songs, but their full catalog has always been a blind spot of mine.

This week I finally engaged in that time-honored tradition of downloading the entire discography of a band you're interested in. It's been a while since I've done that! After an evening with my good friends SoulSeek, VSDC Free Audio Converter, and Mp3tag, I found myself the proud owner of a shitton of new music.

Today at work, I listened to:

Didn't expect to blow through that many in a day, but I had a lot of uninterrupted headphone time today, and this is very listenable stuff! It's a good sign when you keep saying to yourself, "yeah sure, I'll roll into the next album!"

Really enjoying my journey through this discography so far. I liked Chronic Town a lot more than I expected to for whatever reason (I think I was expecting it to be slower), and that set me up in a positive attitude to just keep plowing through. It's been fun to hear the band start to find what I, as a very casual listener, consider Their Sound™ over time.

Music acquires its staying power over time, so time will tell how deep the roots grow, and to what degree this stuff sticks around in my rotation, but it's fertile soil for sure.

But my initial gut feeling that this band would be right up my alley was correct. I'm hearing a lot of my other favorite bands in here—some Smiths, some Pixies, some Modest Mouse—and it continues my particular taste for, as my girlfriend puts it, "guys with specific vocal styles."

Music! Have you tried this stuff? Highly recommend remembering a band you think you might secretly love and going all in on finding out what their deal is. Very rewarding.

Watch This Guy Make Stuff Out Of Cardboard

2025-08-13T21:48:00Z

This video showed up in my YouTube algorithm the other night, and it really scratched an itch in my brain. I love watching no-commentary crafting videos, but it's been a while since I've found a new channel to follow.

This person's videos are realy nicely shot, apart from the usual complaints I have as a person who works with video professionally (for the love of god, turn off auto-focus and don't attach the camera to your work surface), and the final products are beautiful. The lines are so crisp, and everything is measured so precisely and tightly! They've clearly been honing these skills for a long time and know what they're doing. It's very satisfying to watch.

The simple box above was the first video I was recommended, and I watched on a whim because the box looked nice, but I really got pulled in when the first video ended and I was recommended this next video:

Look at that shit! It's got little drawers and a pull-out pen holder! The seam of the join is so clean! It closes with hidden magnets!

So there you go, there's your recommended viewing for the evening.

These videos also got me thinking about trying this craft out for myself. I've been in search of a physical, tactile hobby for a while now, and I used to love making things out of cardboard as a kid. We never got Game Boys as kids, so I made cardboard Game Boys. I made PETs from MegaMan Battle Network out of cardboard. My dad was always bringing sheets of cardboard home from work for me to cut up and make "inventions" with.

I think it sounds like fun! I just need a few tools and a good box to get started, really. Pretty low barrier to entry. If I end up diving into the deep end, and accidentally cover my apartment in cardboard, I'll be sure to report back!

Six Hours at the Airport

2025-08-11T21:43:00Z

My girlfriend and I thought we were in for an easy ride yesterday. An hour and a half at the airport, an hour and a half in the air, maybe an hour on the BQE, and we'd be home from our weekend trip. Then, standing at the gate for our flight home to NYC, we heard the gate agent announce, "We're ready to start boarding this flight to Miami."

The group of people we were standing with all looked at each other. Miami? Did she say Miami?

She did.

We double-checked our boarding passes. They still showed the current time and gate, and no changes had been announced in the airport. We checked the flight board. No change there either. One of the other passengers announced that her husband was tracking the incoming flight that would take us back to New York, and texted her that it was delayed. That made sense, but why hadn't the airline informed us of the delay? I still don't know!

Eventually, everyone got a gate change notification, and we made our way to the new gate. The boarding and departure times hadn't changed, but there didn't apppear to be a plane at the new gate, and we were already past our boarding time.

I should point out that thanks to a combination of push notifications and FlightAware, we, the prospective passengers, were consistently 10–15 minutes ahead of all official announcements over the airport PA. Which was mostly funny, but it did pile a bit more frustration onto the situation since the natural response to almost everything that came over the loudspeaker was "we know!"

After a while, our departure time was finally changed, confirming what we already assumed. But it had been changed to a time too close to our current time to be believed. This was another theme of the night. Multiple incremental delays that we knew couldn't be accurate based on the state of reality. Don't try to tell me we're leaving at 10:15, it's 10:00 now, and there's no crew on the plane!

A little over an hour into our delay, we got some real information from the gate agent. Apparently, a passenger on the incoming flight had broken one of the seats on the plane, and they needed to call maintenance in to look at the seat and either fix it, remove it, or determine that they can't do either and find us a replacement plane.

I still have no idea how the seat was broken, which part was broken, to what degree, whether it was an accident, or any other information of that nature. The only snippet I was able to overhear was when a man in a yellow safety vest came out of the jet bridge and said to the gate agent, "there's pieces everywhere."

After overhearing that, we finally got an actual delay of a few hours. Then the gate agent told us, after maybe 30–60 minutes of assuming people were working on the plane, that maintenance hadn't even arrived yet. That's about the time I acknowledged that we were in this for the long haul, and might not be getting home at all. I called our car service to make sure they knew we were delayed (my folks found a local car service the last time they came to visit that charges flat rates to the three major airports, and is half the price of an Uber), and we got up to look for some food. Our original plan had been to either put on a pot of mac & cheese at home, or find something at LaGuardia, and that wouldn't be happening now.

Luckily, in the midst of all of this, we had some excellent people-watching opportunities available to us. The airport is always a goldmine for this sort of thing, and these weary travellers were no exception.

I think the first guy we noticed was the middle-aged man with messy gray hair and sunglasses, bopping to the tunes in his headphones and rhythmically whipping around a light-up yo-yo. It was almost immediately clear to us that he was practicing a craft; filling his free time by rehearsing. We managed to suss out that he was travelling with his wife and children, whom he brought donuts at one point. He spoke extremely fast and bluntly.

The woman who had announced the update from her husband who was tracking the plane earlier was super chill, and switched between reading something on an e-reader and commiserating with the other passengers whenever she could. She was frustrated that she could've been spending more time with her daughter instead of waiting on the airport. A real mom-type. We later saved her a walk by letting her know all the restaurants downstairs were closed, and she let us know that the airline is required to give you a meal voucher for any delay over three hours.

There was a young man across from us who I couldn't tell much about, but at one point he was making a phone call while the rest of us got a notification that we'd now be delayed until 11pm. When he got off the phone and saw the update, he called the person back with a sort of "lol nevermind" sort of tone. He also inexplicably got upgraded to first class, which the mom-type congratulated him for. She then told a story about a time she was travelling with her daughter and got upgraded to first class, and gave the seat to her daughter because she was going through a tough time.

There was a couple that we got to observe the entire arc of a fight/argument of. They kept making big, dramatic gestures. From what little we overheard, it sounded like His mom had said something to Her that neither of them liked, He wanted to call his mom to defend Her, and She didn't want him to say anything. They looked in good shape by the end of the night.

There were two little girls with waaaaaaay more energy than their mom and grandma could handle. They were good and quiet most of the time we were there, but the later it got, they couldn't stand it anymore, and started running around and riding their suitcases like vehicles, which honestly looked like fun. They weren't disruptive, just being kids in their own little kid world.

There was the only other person in a mask that I remember, who at one point went up to the desk to ask why they couldn't just upgrade the person in the seat that had been broken to first class, or put them in another seat. I didn't hear the answer, but it's a fair question! Maybe the flight was full. Maybe the way the seat had been broken made it unsafe to fly with.

And last, but certainly not least, two young girls—couldn't have been older than early 20s—who seemed to be in the best spirits the entire time. They were practicing dances with each other, eating snacks, chatting up the crew and the captain when he arrived, showing them things on their phones, and just making everyone who interacted with them smile. Real "we're young extroverts on a trip by ourselves, anything that happens is fun" vibes. The two pretty, popular girls at school who are also somehow extremely friendly. It cannot be understated the degree to which it kept our spirits up to look over at those two having fun the whole time.

All of these little vignettes played out like a movie in my head. It was like an Agatha Christie novel with a colorful cast of characters, or a bottle episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor cheerily gets to know each of the side characters he's trapped with before they're inevitably picked off one by one.

When we finally boarded the plane at 11pm, six hours after we arrived at the airport, it was like a little bittersweet epilogue as we walked past all these people we'd gotten to know an infinitesimal fraction of, no longer acknowledging each other, already mentally moving on to the next chapter that should've started hours ago.

Stray Thoughts for a Travel Day

2025-08-07T14:44:00Z

Getting on a plane in about 6 hours from the time I started writing this, and not taking my laptop where I'm going, so not expecting to blog for the next few days. Wanted to get something out this morning while I have a minute.

Realizing now that feed readers that pick this post up will inevitably show the wrong time of posting because I still don't have that fully figured out on my end. Oh well. You don't get to know my assassination coordinates OR assassination schedule!
I finally took the time last night to catch up on all the unread posts that have been sitting in my RSS reader, in some cases since June! I fully cleaned out the "Blogs" folder. Y'all have been posting some great stuff! I expect to share some of it at the end of the month, if not sooner.
Nintendo announced that UFO 50 is coming to Switch today! I didn't fully click with that game, as evidenced by my still-unfinished review series, but I also found myself constantly wishing it were available on something other than my computer. So maybe a change of venue will help! It's certainly worth another grab for some of that music.
Really been missing Cohost lately. Some weird sadness hit me from out of nowhere in the last week, and I didn't fully know what it was at first because I've got a lot going on between a lot of dental work, upcoming travel, weird sleep, and possibly losing my job soon (no I haven't talked about that yet, it's not a sure thing, we just might be having layoffs, what else is fuckin new), but I think it might be Cohost, or at least all of those things AND Cohost. The time of year certainly fits, it's almost been a year. And this feeling I'm getting feels exactly like this time last year (when I was also about to lose my last job 🙃), so that's gotta be it. It's wild how often a number of people I follow, including myself, will periodically just post "i miss cohost." That was a special little website, and I loved hanging out there.
UFO 50 was one of the last things I remember people really getting excited about on Cohost before the big sadness and blog exodus. It'll probably always be connected to that time for me, it's got bittersweet vibes for sure. Maybe that means I'll never fully get into it because it feels too sad lol, and that's not fair to the game, but these things happen! Things just line up and get attached sometimes, brains are weird.
On a lighter note, I'm really enjoying blogging more often again! It really feels like my brain went into sleep mode for most of the summer; I think I was overworked. Just felt disconnected from everything. So blogging again, and finally reading my backlog of blogs, has really helped me push that feeling off. I love this little blog community, whether you come from Cohost or not. I love getting comments, and leaving comments, and getting new things to read, no matter how worried you might be that no one wants to read them. I truly feel that boring life shit is some of the best stuff to read on the internet. Maybe I'll blog more about that.
I've been feeling really downbeat about the Way Things Are, obviously, and boy... Real human connection and curation and solidarity against the bad things, and sharing good things and information and ways to fight back, and acknowledging that the bad things exist and are bad, really is the proper medicine for that particular ailment. It feels easy to get small and sad, but it feels so much better to get big and loud.

I think that's about all I've got for right now! We've still got to take out the trash, water the plants, unplug things, and try to get some lunch in. And double and triple check that I've packed everything, despite being a light packer.

As always, thanks for reading! And thanks for writing!

Lil Guys Pages

2025-08-06T17:20:00Z

A few 'What Else Is Ons' ago in February, I linked to this video from Shing Yin Khor about the importance of making little guys. And somehow, I still have not shared my own little guys in the form of what I call the "Lil Guys Pages" in my notebook. I could swear I shared these on Cohost at some point, but I just took a quick glance through my archive, and apprently not! It's time to put that right.

I don't draw super often, but I always loved to draw as a kid. I'm sure this is a pretty universal experience, what little kid doesn't like to draw? The handful of times that my illustrator girlfriend has gotten me to try my hand at traditional art has provided, in my estimation, mixed results. But more recently, she bought me a fountain pen, and I discovered that I really enjoyed doodling lil guys.

These are those guys:

My goal here was just to fill the space with as many different guys and shapes and things as I could fit and think of. Didn't think about it too hard, didn't try to make it look professional, just thought of a thing that would be fun to draw, and tried to get it down as best I could. And that's what it's all about, man! Just playing and having fun making some wacky little guys!

After doodling this first page of guys, I picked up a pack of highlighters, and tried my hand at using those to add some color to my doodles:

That admittedly didn't go very far! Drawing is still not my preferred way to spend my time, but when I remember that it's a thing I can do, and I'm in the mood for it, there's something very gratifying and soothing to the soul about putting a thing on paper and being able to touch it.

I made this Snoopy page for my girlfriend, who loves Snoopy. It made her cry when I showed it to her. I think it had also been a hard week for her when I drew this. But she really loves Snoopy.

Finally, I dedicated a page to thtis one particular Lil Guy, who my girlfriend was obsessed with from my first lil guys page, and who I think I named Long John? I have no record of that, but it sounds right, and he's my lil guy. Please enjoy his big hat, little boots, and the fact that he is just a head.

Those are all of my lil guys for now! I hope one day to remember that pens and paper exist long enough to create many more.

Valve Founder Gabe Newell Just Bought a Superyacht...

2025-08-05T21:20:00Z

LET ME FINISH...

...Company.

[Source: Valve founder Gabe Newell just purchased a superyacht company - The Verge]

Idk, I thought it was a ~~good~~ joke when I thought of it on the toilet yesterday. Ain't all gonna be winners.

I guess eventually all billionaires are naturally called to the sea to die. Maybe when Gabe gets orca'd, we'll finally get HL3. Maybe he drops it like loot from a Diablo boss.

Imagine having enough money to buy a company that makes superyachts and thinking that's the best way to use it.

Ah well.

Pushed an RSS Feed Update

2025-08-04T21:30:00Z

I made a change to some of the syntax of my RSS feed, and I don't think it broke anything, but let me know if anything looks weird!

What happened was, I randomly decided to see how my RSS feed looks in NetNewsWire, an RSS reader that I like but do not use, and found that it was all fucked up. All of my posts were out of order, and all listed today, the date and time of my adding the feed to NNW, as the time and date of publication.

Something was clearly wrong somewhere, but my feed looks fine in every other reader I've tested, so I figured it was an issue specific to NetNewsWire. I fired off a quick masto/bsky post asking for advice, and friend of the blog Caoimhe jumped in and [email protected]/114972121015855111">immediately figured out what the problem was.

She threw my feed in W3C's RSS feed validator tool (a thing I should've just done in the first place), and showed me that my feed was using a weird amalgam of RSS and Atom syntax. Almost as if it had been pieced together from the results of four or five different Google searches at 2am by a person who is very much not a web developer! She figured that this was probably something that most feed readers were more permissive of, and NNW is just more strict.

Luckily, thanks to Caoimhe showing me exactly what the problem was, and 11ty making these kinds of changes very simple, I only had to change one or two tiny things in the file that generates my feed.xml, and I was good to go!

The W3C feed validator now shows my feed as valid, and NetNewsWire now shows my posts in chronological order.

Thank you Caoimhe for replying to me immediately and being dead on with your assessment of things!

Changing something major like the site's RSS feed is scary, so again, I don't think anything broke, but please let me know if some new weird thing I didn't anticipate is happening!

Ten Year Old Pizza Ratings

2025-08-03T14:10:00Z

Anybody want to know how I felt about certain brands of frozen pizza in 2015? Well then, have I got a treat for you!

I was scrolling back through my camera roll a couple of months ago, as you do, and I came across this pizza chart my sister and I put together ten years ago. I completely forgot about this.

We were living together in our first apartment, and frozen pizza featured heavily in the meal rotation. I guess one of our first "we're adults and we can do this if we want to" activities was to buy a different frozen pizza with our groceries every week, and try to determine which one we liked best. So of course, and this should tell you all you need to know about our personality types, we made a spreadsheet.

We came up with a very simple grading system, with individual scores for each pizza's cheese, sauce, and crust on a scale of 1 to 10. We then combined those scores to get an overall score out of 30. On the above chart, my scores are next to "MP," and my sister's are next to "MK." I still like this system! Yes, we only ate cheese pizzas. We were never topping people, and I'm a vegetarian, but I also feel that this makes for a cleaner comparison.

I find it very funny that the winner, according to our scores was (checks notes) our own homemade pizza. Why did we include that? Just to toot our own horns? To whom, ourselves? And I don't remember Vito & Nick's II selling frozen pizzas, but a quick search confirms that this was and still is the case!

I also find it funny that I rated Totino's the lowest of all pizzas, yet I still think of it constantly and would literally kill to eat that trash pie again. They stopped making cheese pizza at some point in the last few years, and I miss it terribly. It sucks so good, dude.

So if we disqualify our own pizza, which we absolutely should, it looks like my winner was Screamin' Sicilian, and my sister's winner was Connie's. I no longer remember how either of these pizzas taste, so. That's just kind of Information, I guess.

I do, however, remember that Screamin' Sicilian used to include a cardboard moustache on the box that you could cut out and affix to your face by shoving some really uncomfortable cardboard tabs up your nose. But at least it made you look cool as hell:

I love that we did this, these are fond memories. And I would actually love to recreate this ranking in today times, despite the fact that I have eaten maybe three frozen pizzas in the last eight years. New York, baby! I want pizza, I grabba slice! But I've definitely seen Screamin' Sicilian in my local grocery store, so I could always go back and jog my memory.

In any case, if I'm remembered for nothing else, let me be remembered for this: Home Run Inn can go to HELL.

Blaugust!

2025-08-02T13:45:00Z

Yesterday, I mentioned that I've decided to participate in Blaugust. What the hell does that mean and why am I doing it?

Blaugust is a month-long community blogging event in which those participating try to blog every day in the month of August. I only just found out about it a couple of days ago, and it sounds like a good way to try to get my brain back in a blogging mood.

I'm not going to hold myself to any strict requirements, I'm not going to follow any specific prompts, and I'm definitely not going to post every single day; I'm too busy and tired for that. I know I will miss days no matter how much I attempt to orient all my free time around blogging, and I don't want to do that.

I'm going to think of this more as a bit of background motivation, a reason to take a look at the ol' drafts list and see what I can get myself to finally cross out. An ongoing event is always a good excuse and a good motivator to do a thing. I feel like I've fallen away from blogging a bit over the past two months (though, looking back, that appears to not really be the case, it's been a weird blur of a summer), and Blaugust feels like the kind of gentle push I need to put blogging closer to the front of my mind.

So I wouldn't necessarily expect a big influx of new posts from me this month—though if that does happen, then hooray—but at the very least I'll hopefully be lighting up your RSS reader a bit more often than I have this past month.

It's not too late to participate in Blaugust if you'd like to! There doesn't need to be any special structure to it, even a single post will do. Sometimes it's fun just to participate in a thing.

New York City - August 1st, 2025

2025-08-01T20:30:00Z

There's gotta be at least one of these days every year. A day where I open the windows, feel the breeze, and think, "oh thank god."

The high today was 74 degrees fahrenheit. The high yesterday was 88. The day before that was in the 90s. So today felt fantastic. Out of curiosity, I went and looked up the last time I wrote about a day like this, and it was last August. Lol right on time!

It's so funny how much these "False Falls" improve my mood whenever they come around. Even though I know there's still more hellish weather to come. Even if I'm not in a bad mood, per se, the summer heat is just so oppressive that I feel incredible when it finally breaks for a second. Even the light looks nicer when it's cool out.

Today's feeling was a bit dampened by the fact that I haven't been feeling super great lately. Not sure if I'm coming down with something, or it's just stress or what. I've just felt very tired, my eyes are dry, my throat is scratchy, and I've had that vaguely dizzy head cold feeling all week.

Maybe I'm just overworked. I have been crazy busy at work for a while, and one of my current projects requires an inordinant amount of rotoscoping that is slowly driving me mad. If you know, you know.

But despite all that, it was gorgeous today. I didn't get out to enjoy it because I feel sort of like a deflated beach ball, but having the windows open and finally wearing long pants again was reward enough.

Also hey, I'm going to try participating in Blaugust! This is day one of hopefully several. Maybe I'll write more about that tomorrow.

What Else Is On? July 30th, 2025

2025-07-30T11:08:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

Ah man. Haven't blogged much since the last edition of WEIO! I continue to be busy and tired and not at my computer in the evenings. I've either been just next to my computer playing Final Fantasy Tactics on my CRT, or in bed playing Etrian Odyssey Untold on my 3DS, which are both much better places to be after a long day at work.

I've been thinking about participating in Blaugust — in which you post to your blog every day in August — to rectify that and help me to actually write my way through a growing list of drafts, but I also have a couple days of travel coming up during which I will probably not have my laptop and definitely not feel like writing, so we'll see.

Now then, what else is on?

🎵 PUT THIS ON

JOEPO～DOWN TOWN (う・わ・さ・に・な・り・た・い)

Digging into my list of posts I've enjoyed from Morning Music, an excellent blog you should absolutely add to your RSS reader.

This is the opening track from a J-Pop compilation from the 80s that frames the songs in the compilation as all being played on the same fictional radio station. It's a cute idea!

Read the original post on Morning Music here!

📚 READ THIS

Yearning for Meaning: Maddy Thorson’s Super Mario World Romhacks and the Metamodernist Impulse - Unwinnable

Really beautiful analysis of Maddy Thorson’s SMW romhacks, their message, and the context in which they exist.

A Responsibility to the Industry - LMNT

Good blog from Louie about Liquid Glass and the history of Apple's design decisions.

Let’s make up fantasy consoles for fun - Blueberry Lemonade

Just a fun thought experiment from Kyle! I loved this element of the framing of both Last Call BBS and UFO 50.

I belong in a museum - Laura Michet

Laura discovers the, uh, interesting way games as an art form and games writing as a profession are being sold to the general public at the American Writers Museum in Chicago.

a list of worker-owned publications - birzeblog

Alyaza shares a list of cooperative and worker-owned publications. A good thing to have as it becomes abundantly clear that if we want quality critical and journalistic writing, we're going to have to pay for it ourselves.

📺 WATCH THIS

I haven't had time to watch any of the high-brow content I usually post here, so this month, you're getting some of the trash I actually regularly watch.

Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World - All 31 Short Movies

A series of stop-motion shorts that were produced for the Yoshi Theater mode in Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World, the 3DS port of Yoshi's Woolly World. I don't remember why I sought these out, but it did make me play some Woolly World again. I love that these shorts exist, and I love this game.

Marc Summers Slowly Loses His Mind!

This genre of YouTube video really gets me. Maybe it's played already, maybe it's low-hanging fruit, but a really good one of these still requires effort. It's fun. Having watched a bunch of old episodes of Unwrapped with my girlfriend who grew up watching the show, this one hit.

Springfield Rally Championship

I'm always going to go for a good Simpsons meme (if that's not your thing, maybe skip to the next section). I love everything about this particular version: the bang-up rotoscope job, the incorporation of the game's audio into the dialogue of the scene, Homer's stupid face as he jams to the radio, and it doesn't overstay its welcome.

Simpsons Golf But It's Neo Turf Masters

My buddy Zac sent this to me maybe 12 hours after it showed up in my recommended feed because we'd been talking about golf games, and said it looked like something I could've made. High praise. My favorite thing about this one is maybe the continued use of the power meter at the end.

Steamed Hams but it's Mega Man Battle Network

And finally, a 7-year-old video that I can't believe I didn't come across during the original Steamed Hams renaissance, since it feels laser-targeted at me specifically. Mega Man Battle Network is a big, formative series for me, and one I've written a fair bit about (though somehow not enough). There are so many little tidbits in here that show a level of understanding of these games that really made me chuckle.

🎮 PLAY THIS

Cuomo and the Quest for Gracie Mansion

Free, Browser

I know I had a game very much like this in the last installment, but I haven't had time to play many free browser games lately, this one just showed up and is quite funny, and I live here, damnit!

Protect Queer Creators and Sex Workers

Not a game, but hey, while we're in the section where I usually post a couple of Itch.io links, consider spending some time throwing your ire towards some feckless payment processors who are slowly strangling the internet via that time-tested medium of Wholesome Christian Values. This is a really great guide compiling who to talk to, where to find them, and what to say. There are also some resources if you don't know what this is in reference to.

🌐 ONE GOOD WEBSITE

wttr.in

An ASCII weather report in your browser. I just think it's neat!
Via Jenn Schiffer.

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

Office Space Refresh

2025-07-24T14:00:00Z

Good god, what year is it? I blink and another month goes by. So much to blog about, so little time. This has been such a busy, exhausting summer. Which is why it felt so nice to take a few days off at the start of this month, watch some GDQ, and move some furniture around.

Every GDQ is guaranteed to fill me with some sort of feral game-frenzy and send me zooming off in a direction in which I didn't necessarily expect to zoom. This year, SGDQ was the catalyst for a chain-reaction that was already in progress:

I bought a Switch 2, which made me think about GameCube (because Nintendo added GameCube games to the Switch Online service for Switch 2), and got me playing Tactics Ogre Reborn again. Thinking about GameCube games made me go fish out my actual GameCube from my closet and play around with it a bit. Playing Tactics Ogre Reborn got me hungry for the upcoming remaster of Final Fantasy Tactics (though, let's be honest, I've been hungry for that since its announcement earlier this summer). Then I threw all those things in a big soup pot and thought, "what if I could sate my hunger now, with yet a more magnificent meal?"

"Wouldn't it be so cozy," I thought, "if in the coming Autumn, you could snuggle up with a hot cup of cocoa while the dulcet tones of Final Fantasy Tactics, played on an original Sony PlayStation, emanated from the speakers of your childhood CRT TV?"

So I dusted off my eBay account and spent one very sweaty day moving very heavy furniture and tidying my office space. Who am I to defy a frenzied vision? And now I have a PlayStation and Finals Fantasy VII, VIII, IX, Tactics, and Anthology. This was all surprisingly inexpensive. And I can also hook up and play my GameCube and Dreamcast if I like!

This is the best, most recent BEFORE photo I could find lmao.

AFTER.

AFTER from another angle.

If it's not easy to tell what all I did because you don't spend all day living here and staring at all this, I moved my desk closer to the window, moved the black shelf with all my camera junk closer to the wall, and slotted the CRT in between them. I also cleared out all my video production gear because I haven't been a YouTube/production guy in a small lifetime, and cleaned up and re-organized some other bits and bobs.

I'm really happy with the change! The layout feels more open and inviting, I really like having my old TV out here, and it feels so much nicer and tidier to have cleared away a bunch of junk that had just been sitting out here for years.

I had originally planned to have my CRT out here next to my desk when my sister and I first moved to NYC eight years ago, but I ultimately decided it would be cooler to put it in the closet of what was then my bedroom, so I could open up the door to a secret retro gaming cave whenever I wanted to play. It was a neat idea in theory, but I only did this a handful of times. And that room is now my girlfriend's art studio, so I'm never in there!

So the TV that I've had since I was maybe 11 or 12 and very wisely lugged across the country is now back in its rightful place out in the open. Shoutouts to this lovely end-table/cabinet/drawer thing that used to be my aunt and uncle's as well. The cabinet part is perfectly GameCube/Dreamcast-sized, and the pull-out drawer part features a CD rack that's perfect for storing the jewel cases of disc-based games (though sadly, not the double-wide cases of lengthy JRPGs).

The PlayStation and all the games I bought are all in impeccable condition. The PSX was a refurb job someone had cleaned up with all the cables, a controller, and a memory card included, and the games were sold as a lot that I'm frankly shocked I won the auction for, and they look like they've never been played. The discs are almost totally scratch-free, the manuals are in great shape, and some of them even had parts of the original case-sealing sticker on them. I truly got these things for a steal. I will cherish them. I cannot wait to replay FF7, and finally play 8 and 9. Anthology (which contains PSX ports of FF5 and 6) was a nice to have, tbh, but people really seem to like 6, and this seems like a nice version!

I've already started playing Tactics, and I adore it. I've known I would ever since watching Chia's entire playthough of the game on Remap almost exactly two years ago now. That soundtrack is imprinted on my brain. The spritework is unmatched. It's just an exquisitely made video game.

You: "Where were you on January 6th?" Me: "Sweegy Woods."

For the last few weeks, my girlfriend and I have been having "tactics nights," where I play FF Tactics on my CRT, and she plays Fire Emblem on the big TV behind me, and we stay up a little too late because neither of us is very good at prying ourselves away from a good video game. There has been much discussion of getting me a beanbag chair so I can game in something comfier than my desk chair, and also of big soft blankets and cocoa. It's going to be a cozy autumn indeed.

I said when I wrote my summer games post that the Switch 2 would likely throw a wrench in my plans to play certain games this summer. I just didn't expect that wrench to be, "actually I'm buying a PlayStation."

Comments Are Back!

2025-07-06T16:11:00Z

Keen-eyed fans of the blog will have noticed that for a while there, it wasn't possible to leave a comment under one of my posts. Either you tried to comment, and it was never approved, or there simply wasn't a box in which to type a comment.

This has been fixed! Comments are once again open!

Here's what happened. If you remember my post "Comment Conundrum" from a few months ago, this will all have been entirely predictable to you.

Basically, the comment service I was using (Cusdis) imposed a monthly limit of 100 comments per month on its free plan. Totally reasonable, I figured I would never hit 100 comments in a month. And I was right! But there was a bug preventing that limit from resetting from month to month, and that comment service is no longer being actively supported. So the number of comments on my site just kept climbing toward the 100 comment limit.

I figured that once the number hit 100, folks would be prevented from commenting on my site. I was right.

I figured that I had plenty of time to find an alternative and migrate before hitting the limit. I was wrong.

I looked around at alternatives, and none had a simple way for me to move all of my comments over so I could cut Cusdis loose without losing all 100 of the very nice comments people have left on my blog. Of the alternatives I looked into, I don't think any of them supported imports from something other than Wordpress or Disqus. And Cusdis doesn't even have an export feature, so I was going to have to try and figure out some horrible, jerry-rigged solution anyway.

I was too busy to do that, so I ran out of time!

In the end, I landed on HTMLCommentBox as my new comment provider because they offer a free version for personal sites, their presentation is pretty customizable with CSS, and they don't require that would-be commenters create an account or log in with their Gmail or whatever. I can understand that being a security/spam concern, but it isn't for me, and I'd rather people experienced the least friction possible when going to leave a comment.

So yay, comments are back. However.

I was never able to import all my old comments to my new provider in any way (I'd saved them all to a spreadsheet in the hopes of...idk, something something CSV?), so I have a sort of half-and-half implentation on the site right now. I've got the new comment box set up for people to post comments going forward, but I've also still got the old comment service in there with its comment box hidden, so that I can still display all the old comments.

It's a decent enough (if inelegant) stopgap for now, but I don't want to have things implemented this way forever. I don't like calling on both of these scripts when my site is loaded, it's messy. And I don't want to rely on Cusdis being around forever, since it will probably go down without warning at some point. I need to move the old comments. But there's a new annoyance:

The only way to get the old comments into the new system is to sit down and copy/paste them all individually myself. This isn't too huge an undertaking, there are only 100 of them, it'll take a few hours max. The issue is that all the old comments will now have new timestamps. I'm almost certain no one would ever notice or care about this other than myself, but it's a little annoying!

As I type this all out, I'm realizing I literally don't have an alternative, and it doesn't seem like such a big deal. What else would I do? Just lose all these comments? Reach out to the new comment service that I'm using for free and hope they'll give me some special treatment to edit some comment timestamps? On my little personal blog that maybe six people read?

So I'm good with my half-in-half-out implementation for now, it got me to a point where people can actually post comments again. But next, I'll find some time here and there to start migrating comments over, new timestamps and all. It'll be a bit of a shame to lose some history in the dates that people actually posted these, but I'd rather have them than not.

Anyway. All of this is to say: You can now post comments on my blog again.

Would You Like to Enable 2FA?

2025-06-30T10:16:00Z

2FA deez nuts.

Editor's note: I read "2FA" as "toofa" in my head.

What Else Is On? June 29th, 2025

2025-06-29T21:48:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

Been a while! My last blog post was way back at the beginning of June, and the 2.5 weeks since then have felt like an eternity and a blur. Long story short, work picked way the hell back up, and I got extremely busy. Which is good!

If all goes well, I'm planning to take a few days off soon, because I can do that now, so hopefully I can catch up on some post drafts I've had jotted down.

I haven't had a ton of time or presence of mind this month to read and save things as diligently as past months, but here's what I've got!

🎵 PUT THIS ON

Neon White OST 1 - The Wicked Heart by Machine Girl

Neon White OST - Machine Girl

Neon White took over my summer three years ago, and joined the pantheon of "games I think about at least once a year at a certain time." It's a summer game for me now, which means at some point each summer, I think to myself, "oh shit, remember Neon White?" Good game. Anyway, the music still absolutely slaps, and really helped me lock in and get a shit-ton of work done over the past two weeks. Thanks, Machine Girl!

📚 READ THIS

Solidarity Forever - Unwinnable

All the good outlets keep ~~dying~~ being murdered by private equity and consolidation. The only way we can stop it is together.

Take Your Time – Chrono Trigger - Pixpen

Sam Howitt discusses the little things that make Chrono Trigger feel alive.

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry - The Verge

I mean that's kind of the whole thing, yeah. Good.

GOG lays out the business case for robust game preservation - Game Developer

I really like buying games on GOG, y'all. I keep waiting for the heel turn that inevitably comes from all capitalist endeavors, and CDPR certainly don't have squeaky-clean hands, but they seem to be making some genuinely good moves with GOG lately.

Fez Notes Fixed Me - Talking Videogames, With Robots

You don't have to like something, but you don't have to hate something to not like it. And sometimes you find that what you like instead is watching other people enjoy a thing you do not enjoy yourself.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 didn’t invent Final Frenchtasy or the J'RPG: the newly dubbed subgenre has a long and complicated history - PCGamer

I had no idea that PAL regions were more or less iced out of a whole generation of RPGs. I haven't played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 just yet, but this is still a really interesting exploration of the evolution of the genre across that regional divide.

Ancestra actually says a lot about the current state of AI-generated videos - The Verge

Every creative person who gets themselves involved with a "Gen-AI" project inevitably ends up sounding like a mark. It was inevitable that these companies would figure out that indie filmmakers would be an easy avenue for laundering their bullshit by claiming it let them do things they wouldn't have otherwise been able to do with a tiny budget. They always end up saying, "this didn't take anyone's job away" while describing the work that could have been done by real people, and then eventually someone teases out of them tidbits that imply that the tech barely worked, and they had to spend a ton of time fixing the shit it spit out anyway.

It's late and I'm tired, and I work in a creative field where people are constantly trying to shove this shit down my throat as the future of everything and no one can give me a single use case where it would actually do anything for me. So idk, fuck this shit.

📺 WATCH THIS

'Somebody needs to do it' - Taylor Lorenz

Taylor Lorenz is one of the only large-ish online personalities/journalists that makes me feel sane. The way she speaks about the ongoing pandemic, the collective trauma it caused/continues to cause, and the ways in which and reasons for which capital moved to trick everyone into ignoring it is refreshing. Anyway, this video is about something else, but it's also about that, and it's very good.

🎮 PLAY THIS

Don't Rank Cuomo - Robert Yang

Free, Browser

A surprisingly challenging game about not ranking Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for NYC mayor (which he has since lost spectacularly).

The Duke - Zaatar Cafe

Free, Browser

Fun little card stacking game about making sandwiches.

🌐 ONE GOOD WEBSITE

251 Huff Hollow Rd, Newport, TN - Zillow

I don't have a good website this month, but this Zillow listing someone just shared is quite the journey.

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

Mike's Summer Games 2025

2025-06-11T15:07:00Z

Ok, so twice before, in 2021 and last year, I have written out a big list of games I want to play in summer. Summer has major video game vibes to me, probably because that's all I would do in summer as a kid when I had nothing but time. It's when we get all the big E3-like announcements, we get a GDQ, and it's just all about sitting inside in the air conditioning playing video games to me.

In past summer games posts, I have framed my list of games as goals to accomplish, summer reading, homework to be done. And then I've posted a follow-up to review how I did, and usually talk about how I "failed" by not playing what I said I would or finishing what I wanted to finish.

No more. Video games are not my job, they are for fun. So I'm still writing up a big list of games I want to play this summer, but I'm not setting any goals, and I won't be following up to grade myself. I just get hit with a big wave of games I want to play whenever summer rolls around, and I think it's fun to put together a list of what the vibe is, and talk about everything I want to play over my non-existent summer vacation and why.

I don't know why, it just happens! And I like it. Video games and summer go together for me like this, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that feeling. And I think it's fun to share and get excited about playing a bunch of things in summer.

Okay. With that out of the way, here are...

MIKE'S SUMMER VIDEO GAME PLANS 2K25

System Shock (2023)

I've already kicked things off with the 2023 remake of System Shock, and I'm having a fantastic time. As far as I remember, I believe I am now past the point where I gave up on the original System Shock. I've been trying to write more often and consistently about the games I play this year, and I'm very excited to write about this one!

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

Still plugging along on Bomb Rush! My recent post and that mod video I found have me newly excited about diving back in after a brief break. Also curious to see how it performs on Switch 2!

Pacific Drive

I gave this an hour of my time a few months back at the recommendation of a friend, and I really enjoyed that hour! I got sucked into some other things since then, but I still want to go back and see if I'm interested in going the distance with it.

Timberborn

My girlfriend and I love beavers. This came about due to a combination of Instagram videos and love for the Pokemon Bidoof. So this game is very much of interest to me. It's been a while since I last dove into a city builder, and that feels like a fun summer evening vibe!

This game has been on my radar as an "I'll buy it when it leaves Early Access" game for a while, but seeing as it's been a number of years, and those updates keep coming with no 1.0 release in sight (apparently the beavers can use ziplines now), I figured I might as well dive in.

Cataclismo

Speaking of building, this is an interesting-looking take on the Tower Defense & RTS genres that I've had my eye on since launch. A friend of mine grabbed it on Steam, and we share a family library, so I definitely want to find an evening to give it a look.

Blue Prince

Ditto the Steam Family Library situation for this one, and I mean I just have to check it out. Everyone's talking about it, and I'm genuinely curious if it will click for me after vaguely talking about it with some friends.

Expedition 33: Clair Obscur

I really don't know anything about this game other than it's an RPG, it's French, and it got some positive coverage. Friend of mine told me to keep it that way, so I guess I'll find out more when I dive in!

Dredge

Another friend recommendation, not sure if I'll give this one my time since I'm not really feeling a pull, but it's probably worth an hour or so to give it a shot.

Black Mesa

Don't know if I'll actually play this, I'm not a huge HL1 guy, but I got it for free on Steam. Could be an interesting follow-up to the new System Shock!

To a T

Started this with my girlfriend, and not sure if it has staying power for us yet, but we've only played the opening chapter, and it's very cute.

Decade

Grabbed on Steam at the same time as To a T based on a handful of reviews and scuttlebutt, and haven't checked it out yet. Determined to curb even the smallest instance of buying a thing and never playing it. It sounds weird and interesting!

Poco

A cute-looking and free Point-and-Click Adventure game I found via one of Michael Klamerus' game roundups.

Summer House

Grabbed this last year and put it on my list of summer games. I'm weirdly determined not to let it slip through the cracks for some reason even though I'm not sure I get a lot out of these "build your own X" kind of games.

Zed

Grabbed this before it was pulled from digital storefronts, sounds like the team were sunsetting it for reasons I'm not 100% clear on. I know nothing about it except that it's a very pretty-looking first-person Adventure game. Also found via Michael I believe!

Thief (any/all)

I'm on a bit of an Immersive Sim kick at the moment, moving from Skin Deep right into the System Shock remake. I absolutely love this genre of games, I have all of the Thief games (Thieves?) in my GOG library, having just grabbed the 2014 entry for super cheap, and I keep meaning to do a deep dive on the rich lineage of Immersive Sims from System Shock on (and I've been accomplishing this very slowly, having now played every Deus Ex), so maybe it'll be time! That's just how much fun I'm having with the new System Shock!

Dishonored 2 & Death of the Outsider

These have been on my backlog list for a good long time, and what with me being on the aforementioned Immersive Sim kick, it would be fun to jump into these next. Having said all this, these are all big games, and I'm nowhere near finished with System Shock, so it's doubtful that I could cram them all into summer without actually taking three months off of work. Which I believe is frowned upon for some reason.

Prey

Ditto the above. If anything, this might be the most fun choice to follow up System Shock with. Or it might be too same-y! Time will tell.

Deathloop

I just grabbed this guy for free on Epic, so if my tour through the history of Immersive Sims takes its turn down Arkane lane, this would dovetail in nicely.

Steam Next Fest

I've got a good handful of demos downloaded that I want to try and spend some time with, and I'll write up a little post if and when I do!

Mario Kart World

I've got a hot, fresh Switch 2 shipping soon, so I fully expect these largely PC-centric plans to be upended to some degree. First time I've ever bought a console at launch!

That's the extent of my summer plans for now! It's probably too much as-is, hence why I'm not giving myself any goals or deadlines this year. I'm just going to follow the fun, and do my best to check out some of the things I bought for cheap on a whim.

If any of you have specific summer game plans, traditions, or recommendations, I'd love to hear about them!

Games I Liked From Not-E3 2025

2025-06-10T11:10:00Z

Boy, there sure are a lot of not-E3 presentations nowadays. I don't watch these things as religiously as I used to, and I rely a lot more on word of mouth from friends and people I follow whose tastes I like. Generally, I figure, if something seems good, I'll see someone somewhere talking about it. So here I am being a part of that!

Here's what I liked:

Big Walk

New game from House House (Untitled Goose Game) about walking and talking with your friends, exploring a big world, taking on some challenges, and just hanging out, man.

1000 Deaths

3D platformer that looks weird as hell. You kinda just have to look at it.

Last Flag

5v5 Capture the Flag hero shooter. No idea if it will be any good or if I will even play it since I'm not a big hero shooter guy, but this feels like an interesting take on a game we used to get more of, and the aesthetic is kind of fun. Gives me vague TF2 vibes.

Never's End

Tactics RPG that looks like Final Fantasy Tactics by way of Into the Breach. Cool art style.

Esoteric Ebb

Disco Elysium-ish CRPG with a cool art style. Don't know much more beyond that, it's one of a few I added to my list at first sight based on art style and vibes.

Snap & Grab

Puzzle-y heist game about a fashion photographer who is secretly casing the joint and then pulling off heists. EXTREMELY stylish. Feels like a good couch game.

Sword of the Sea

Another very pretty adventure game from some of the folks who made Journey and The Pathless. Maybe this will be the first of those games I actually play!

Possesor(s)

Gorgeous action-adventure platformer from the Hyper Light Drifter folks.

Please Watch the Artwork

"Night surveillance at the museum but the paintings are alive." Couldn't ask for a better, more succinct description.

Relooted

Side-scrolling heist extraction game about reclaiming real, actual African artifacts from Western museums. Love the premise, and love that they chose to use real artifacts.

Thick as Thieves

PvPvE immersive stealth game from a team led by Warren Spector. Very curious to see how this actually plays out.

Drywall Eating Simulator

Ever get so sick of your co-workers that you simply have to bash your head against the wall and eat your way through it?

Is This Seat Taken?

A logic puzzle game about putting things and people where they want/need to be. Looks cute!

Ambroise Niflette & the Gleaned Bell

Adorable stop-motion-inspired detective game. Everything looks like miniatures, and you know I love that, even if they're not real.

Formula Legends

I mean you know I'm an F1 guy. Cute looking arcade racer. Curious how it handles!

The Guardian of Nature

Lovely-looking hand-drawn adventure game about exploring and preserving nature. Looks like an early-access/episodic affair, and episode one is out now!

Lego Voyagers

2-player co-op game in which you are a Lego brick. Very cute trailer. I want to play this with my girlfriend.

Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles

This game does not need my bump, but I am very excited it's finally real. Can't wait to play FFT for the first time.

Five Year Blogaversary

2025-06-08T15:25:00Z

Well what do you know! I completely missed a major milestone for this blog! It's been five years as of last month!

I know there are posts from more than five years ago on here, but they were few and far between back then, and I consider 2020 to be the true start of this blog and my blogging era.

On May 8th, 2020, I opened Blogger for the first time and started posting about turnip prices on me & my girlfriend's Animal Crossing island, pizza, F1, technology, capitalism, games, and whatever else popped into my head. The first 'What Else Is On?' was posted May 10th, 2020!

You can still see that original incarnation of the blog here because preservation is important.

I've moved around and changed names a few times since then, but I still consider this to be the same blog I started in 2020. It's very much the same ethos under different names. Every version shares a throughline.

It's been a very fun project to keep going without worrying about numbers or trying to make it into a "side-hustle." I don't know if theraputic is the right word, but it's definitely been good for my brain to clear out the cruft of thoughts and ideas that build up, and make myself articulate them in ways that others might understand, or at least in a way that makes sense to me.

Thank you to everyone who has read and blogged alongside me these past few years, particularly since the death of Cohost. Eggbug forever, etc. It's an honor to be in your RSS reader whether you came from there or not.

So here's to five more years of posting whatever I feel like at any given time! Hope you wanted something to read!

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk Is Severely Hangoutable

2025-06-06T15:10:00Z

I mentioned in a recent 'What Else Is On?' that I finally got to playing Bomb Rush Cyberfunk because of this video about hub worlds and chill hangs in video games. Well, I've been playing on and off for about a month and a half, and I have some thoughts. I'm not finished with the game, but I also think I'll be taking my time and not finishing it any time soon, so I want to share all of this while it's fresh.

So first of all, I'm playing on Switch, and the performance is great. I was worried I would mind a 30fps cap, but I really don't. It looks and feels great. And there's actually an "Unleash the Beast" mode in the main menu which uncaps the framerate, and that feels great too. You'll hit 60fps most of the time with it turned on, with some drops here and there. I've been switching it on and off to suit my mood, but mostly playing with it on. 60fps definitely feels nicer for this kind of game, but not life-or-death necessary.

Now here comes the obligatory paragraph about how, holy hell, this game oozes style. I don't think I need to rehash this point too much, I'm sure it's the first, most obvious point you can glean from looking at it for a few seconds. Team Reptile set their sights on the classic Jet Set Radio, and while my opinion counts for nothing since I never played JSR, it sure looks to me like they didn't miss. I love this art style. It's some real "we used to make video games" shit.

The music is great, too. Real chill and vibey. But not too chill. Sometimes you gotta get your blood up to go for that Big Air. And I like the decision to leave different playlists out in the world as collectibles, in addition to giving each area its own playlist of tracks.

Speaking of collectibles, I really like Bomb Rush's approach to and amount of collectibles that I've seen so far. You've got 3 alternate outfits to find for each character, new types of graffiti, new board, skate, and bike designs, and the aforementioned playlists. I think that's it? And while the game does go out of its way to show you where certain collectibles are, and give you a hint about how you might go about collecting them (which I like), it does not actually give two shits if you pick them up or not. This is a game about chilling the hell out and doing whatever you want, right to its core.

To that point, I've actually not been making a ton of progress, or at least not making it super quickly, because the skating is just too damn good. I literally keep forgetting to advance the story because I just want to hang out and skate around these levels. That rules! Honestly the highest praise I could heap upon a game like Bomb Rush. This is another reason why I wanted to jump in and write this up now, because I can feel that I want to take my time with this game, take some breaks, and come back whenever I want to chill and skate.

Another thing I love is that your in-game menu that contains your level map, music, graffiti recipes, and more, is a flip phone that pops up in the bottom left corner of the screen. I love that you can keep skating with it open, and that you can even keep browsing through it while skating. Not only is it handy, but it feels like it adds an extra air of cool to the character of your skaters. Like these people are so good at what they do, they can page through their phones while doing it.

I was really hoping there would be a photo mode in Bomb Rush, and there sort of is. After a certain point, you unlock a camera app on your phone, which you can use to take vertical, flip phone-style shots of the world, as well as selfies, with a handful of filters to choose from. It's not as robust as the photo modes you'll find in some other games, but like many other aspects of this game, it fits the world. Everything seems to be geared, first and foremost, toward giving you the experience that you are skating around and having a chill time with your friends in this world. And you can always use the Switch or Steam screenshot buttons.

If I had to level any criticism at the game, I would say that the combat isn't the most fun. The instances where it pops up are luckily pretty spread out and minimal so far, but it can get a little tedious and awkward, and I'd really rather just be skating. But I get it, there's a story to be told.

Also, one could argue that for a skating game, there doesn't seem to be that great a variety of tricks to perform. When I'm grinding down a rail, pulling off tricks to build my combo, and I realize that all I'm really doing is hitting A-X-Y over and over, I realize I'm kinda just button mashing without any rhyme or reason. It's not that there aren't distinct tricks to perform, but there isn't any reason that I can see to perform one over another, or not just spam one trick over and over.

However, this argument misses the point somewhat. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk just isn't that type of skating game. It's not about spending an afternoon trying to pull off a Christ Air for big points. Rather, the focus is more on movement and flow. Satisfaction in Bomb Rush comes from successfully traversing a particularly challenging—for lack of a better term—obstacle course. I'll show you what I mean:

I feel like it reflects well on Team Reptile's design choices that I'm not having to think about a series of tricks in a moment like this, and just focusing on pulling it off instead.

However, I did just come across a video running down a handful of mods that the Bomb Rush community has been putting out and holy shit what. Looks like some folks really were itching for some more variety of motion, and uh, they sure made it happen! It's heartening to find that there's such a creative community around this game two years past release, and that the game ended up being what looks like a really fun and robust platform for so much wild shit.

This is a really special game, from toe to tip. Every level looks sick, and cohesive, and visually dense, and unique. I adore the use of color in this game. Team Reptile weren't afraid to go bright and bold, and we really need more of that. All of this, and all the little things, and the lighting, and the sound design, and the overall chill vibe and tone of the game, really make every space—from the dense cityscape of Millenium Square, to the sea and sky of Brink Terminal and Pyramid Island—feel like a hangout. You don't need to be skating and grinding and building that combo constantly. You can stop and chill, smell the roses, take a selfie, breakdance for a second, put the controller down and just vibe to the tunes and ambience IRL.

You and your crew are trying to make a name for yourselves, but there's no urgency to that objective. It'll come.

I'm really loving Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. I've been away from it for a bit, but it's got great summer vibes, so I know it'll be in my rotation over the next few months. And I'm still enjoying it on Switch, but I might need to grab it on PC just to check out this wild mod scene. I'll report back if I end up going full sicko mode and figure out how the hell to wave jump.

Keylocker Doesn't Quite Click

2025-06-05T10:00:00Z

Keylocker was brought to my attention late last year in a "best overlooked indies of 2024" list, which earned it a spot on my "Missed Connections" list in my annual GOTY post. Reviews were mixed, but the game looked pretty, and I found the idea of a "stylish 6 or 7 out of 10" compelling.

I got an eShop gift card for Christmas, and decided to use it to take a chance on this game without spending my own money. This was ultimately a good decision because now I get to say, "at least I didn't spend my own money on this." That's perhaps a bit harsh, but I unfortunately did not have a good time with Keylocker.

Let's start on a more positive note: it really is stylish as hell. The character portraits, a lot of the UI design, and especially the intro cutscene, are absolutely gorgeous. For the first 30-ish minutes of my time with Keylocker, I was bought the hell in and feeling good about giving this thing a shot.

The level of detail in every character portrait is a thing of beauty.

I especially love the way this scene at the end of the intro/tutorial transitions into the title card. Great stuff.

Love this shift in perspective.

But after that first 30-ish minutes, things started to fall apart pretty fast. A lot of the world proper is empty and flat and boring to look at, movement feels a bit wonky, the dialogue is whatever, the story is not substantial enough to keep me interested, and the menus and UI are actually a bit difficult to parse at times. I know I just said the UI was gorgeous, but there's style and there's usability. Keylocker chose just one of those.

The font choice and slant weren't my fave. I have no idea what most of these terms mean. I was frequently picking up items that I had no idea what to do with or where to find.

And then there's the combat. The combat was a point of contention in the few reviews I read, with at least one of them saying that once it clicked, it was a high point of the game for them. It never really clicked for me. I see what they're going for, it's not that I felt lost or didn't understand what to do, I just think it's bad. The combat system is turn-based, grid-based, and relies on timed inputs for attack and defense. There's nothing wrong with any of this on paper, but the execution felt, to me, finicky and overly punitive. Timings felt unclear and inconsistent, button presses lacked the weight needed to telegraph that you did the thing correctly, and it just felt overly player-hostile to me. Sometimes more enemies would show up inexplicably and it's like come on man just let me get through this. By the end of my time with the game, I was praying for each encounter to end.

It's a neat narrative setup, it's just a shame there's so much friction bewteen you and it.

That's pretty much my experience of Keylocker. It's all too much and not enough. Style over substance. Coming apart at the seams. If the story had at least been more interesting, I could've tried to power through a little more, but there's just not enough there. I like the general premise of the game (everyone is robots, music is illegal, and also generates electricity), but there wasn't enough connective tissue in what I played to give me a sense of what was going on, what I was really doing, or why I should care.

In the realm of "stylish but flawed," things need to hit just right in order to thread that particular needle. Keylocker just doesn't for me.

The Blue Flamingo

2025-06-04T14:16:00Z

I don't remember exactly why, but I found myself perusing game developer Might & Delight's website recently, and noticed an early game of theirs I'd never heard of: The Blue Flamingo.

I've been a somewhat distant fan of Might & Delight for a while. I'm a big fan of their first game, Pid, I was very excited about what they were trying to do with their "TMORPG" (Tiny Multiplayer Online RPG) Book of Travels, I just recently enjoyed playing Pan-Pan (which they published), and I've always loved their overall branding and aesthetic.

I say a distant fan because until earlier this year, Pid and Book of Travels were the only games of theirs I had played. I haven't played Shelter or any of its sequels or spin-offs, which seems to have become their flagship series over the years (it's just never seemed like my kind of thing), and their Point & Click Adventure game Tiny Echo is still in my backlog. I've secretly been wanting them to make more games that look and sound like Pid this whole time.

I've also been in a sort of "good old days" / Indie Boom mood lately, since Skin Deep made me want to revisit Quadrilateral Cowboy, which made me want to revisit Atom Zombie Smasher.

So when I stumbled upon The Blue Flamingo, saw that it was a very small and simple game that utilizes a physical, hand-made background, with music that sounds a lot like Pid, a game whose soundtrack I adore, and saw that you can inexplicably get the game for half price through Humble, I jumped on it. Here are some thoughts.

For starters, The Blue Flamingo is a top-down shoot-em-up, in which you fly the titular Blue Flamingo through a series of levels made up entirely of hand-built models. The team basically built a long, rectangular strip of terrain, and shot it from directly overhead in a long, slow pan that acts as the auto-scroll of each level. It's kinda brilliant.

And man. I am so about this presentation. I love a game with hand-made elements. That shit is always going to get my ass. I loved it in Lumino City, I cannot wait to see Amanita give us their take with Phonopolis, and I love the look of it here. As far as I can tell, they only made one background and filmed it multiple times under different lighting, once for daylight and once for night. But that's honestly fine for what this game is. It looks like a Wes Anderson movie, and I love it.

The Blue Flamingo is very up-front about the fact that it's a small endeavor. It's relatively cheap, and it's clear to me from the marketing materials available that this is Might & Delight just trying a thing that they really want to make. Here's a quote from the game's Steam page:

Experience a bite-sized shoot 'em up game created entirely with handmade models. A 32-foot long handcrafted model was built for the game, along with countless props and assets that were filmed and photographed. All the effects, rocket flares and explosions were created with firecrackers and pyrotechnics.

So the fact that they didn't go big and spend their life savings filling warehouses with multiple handcrafted level backgrounds is understandable to me. This is a small project with limited scope, possibly even a proof of concept that they decided to just push out into the world.

I mentioned the soundtrack already, and it's super short at just three tracks, but any amount of Retro Family tracks in this style that I can get my hands on feels like a win. I just really like this easy, breezy, jazzy style of theirs. It's a vibe. I also love that the length of each track times out exactly to the length of the level it belongs to. It really speaks to the idea that this is M&D trying a thing, to me.

At the end of the day, that's kind of all this game can be: an experiment. It's a very pretty one, and one that I'm glad was undertaken, but it's not one that lends itself to much gameplay variety. There's just the one level, lit the two ways, and yes, enemies vary level to level and things get harder as you go, making it sort of a retro-style endurance kind of thing, but that's about it.

But given the constraints of production, and limited scope of what M&D is doing here, a shoot-em-up was the perfect genre in which to conduct this experiment. Shmups, as a genre, tend to be a lot of the same thing over and over. Not always in a bad way, and you can of course play with that in the ways you can play with any genre, but the staples of scrolling background, enemies coming at you, moving a ship around, and shooting are nice and simple, and a pretty safe way to make something fun on a budget, especially with a handcrafted and photographed world. Andrea Love certainly seems to have thought so for her game Feltopia.

I would almost be interested to see a version of this game with some kind of roguelike-style meta-progression that allowed you to keep upgrades between runs or something. I'm not a big roguelike guy, so that feels a little hypocritical of me to write, but I just feel like some kind of connective tissue between runs might keep me coming back a little longer.

But that's not the kind of game this is. Again, it's clearly a very small experiment that Might & Delight wanted to put out as more or less an art project. And that's great! I'm happy for that to exist. I'm not expecting to play this game too much more after writing this, and I'm not here to recommend it as some overlooked gem. But looking at its visuals, and listening to its soundtrack, I still find it compelling.

I am unfortunately publishing this a day too late for you to grab it on sale for two bucks on Steam, but I'm sure it'll be back there again sometime. Give it a gander, and maybe you'll also feel compelled to enter the lovely little world of Might & Delight.

SteamWorld Dig 2 (2017)

2025-06-03T13:05:00Z

SteamWorld Dig 2

Developer: Image & Form
Release Year: 2017
Genre(s): Platformer, action-adventure, metroidvania
Played On: Nintendo Switch
Date Played: 19 Apr, 2025

Man, I love these games. Ever since a Cohost post finally pushed me to check them out for myself, I've been so charmed and delighted by them. This is my fourth SteamWorld game, and I've really liked them all so far. It's such a great series.

SteamWorld Dig 2 is the series' first direct sequel, taking place before the previously released SteamWorld Heist, and immediately after SteamWorld Dig. You play as Dot, a character from the first game who would buy the resources you dug up underground whenever you returned to town. She's got a quest of her own now, in a fun and compelling connection back to the first game. You absolutely do not need to play the first game to understand or enjoy this one, but the original SteamWorld Dig is also fantastic and super short, so you may as well.

The SteamWorld Dig games are metroidvanias that see you delving deeper and deeper into the earth's crust to mine for minerals, returning to the surface to sell those minerals, spending your influx of cash on tools and upgrades to help you dig deeper, and repeating the cycle again and again. That cycle is—as is ideally the case in the best of these kinds of games—extremely gratifying on its own. Digging a path through the earth is super satisfying, the platforming feels nice and fluid despite being slightly floaty, and map discovery is inherently rewarding. It's always enticing to push your luck to try to dig as deep as you can and bring home as many minerals and gems as you can carry, and while you won't lose too much if you fall to misadventure, careful play will keep things moving along at a solid clip. Though, again, you really don't need to be all that conservative as these games are very forgiving and not super difficult. The array of tools and abilities at your disposal expands at a good clip, and each are a blast to discover and play around with.

I really enjoyed the new additions to the Steambot repertoire in Dig 2, like the Jet Engine and Hook Shot. I think a big part of what makes these games so compelling is that they're really good at putting together the most satisfying series and sequence of progress-gating upgrades. Not only are the tools themselves fun to use (who doesn't love a hook shot?), but oftentimes you'll buy a new upgrade expecting it to help you with X, only to realize it would also allow you to do Y and Z. There's a surprising amount of depth and side-quest-ish things to do in these games, even more so in the sequel, without making the game feel overwhelming or bloated.

I think that's the main thing that's left me feeling so refreshed and delighted after playing each SteamWorld Dig: they're the absolute perfect size for me. Sometimes big games with a million different quests and sidequests and tasks that demand 40 to 60 hours of my time can be exhausting and make me want to run away screaming. HowLongToBeat puts SteamWorld Dig's main story at 5 hours, and SteamWorld Dig 2's at 7.5 hours. Main + Extra is at 6.5 and 10 hours respectively. Those are totals I can get behind! That's a good week of playing for around an hour every night.

SteamWorld Dig 2 is a very pretty SteamWorld game as well. I always forget it came out in 2017, the same year as the Switch, because it still released on 3DS! That rules! I played Dig 2 on Switch, but I played the original on 3DS, and that was great, so I'm sure 2 would be an enjoyable experience as well.

The soundtrack is also a bop, particularly the theme of the town you return to after each foray into the underground. It's so crucial to get a theme like this right since you'll be hearing it constantly every 10–20 minutes or something. There were plenty of times I would get back to the surface, and then just hang out with the game paused and that track playing. It's a groove.

I had an absolute blast with SteamWorld Dig 2. This game and its predecessor both come very close to the platonic ideal of video games for me. Image & Form are clearly very good at making this sort of thing, and with other excellent entries in other genres, like SteamWorld Heist, great stewards of this world they've created. Which is why news of layoffs within the team (now under Thunderful) has been so disheartening. I'm not sure how many of the original SteamWorld team still remain, but I wish them the best, and hope this excellent series they've built can help them weather the industry's ongoing storms.

SteamWorld Dig 2 is available on Steam, GOG, Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, and 3DS.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016)

2025-05-31T12:12:00Z

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Developer: Eidos Montreal
Release Year: 2016
Genre(s): Immersive Sim, Action RPG, FPS, Stealth
Played On: PC
Date Played: 07 Sep, 2023

It's probably going to become a cliche at some point to start these posts with "this one has been in my Steam library for a long time," but, well, it has! According to Steam, I bought Deus Ex: Mankind Divided in June of 2018.

I actually have a super clear memory of this. I had just gotten my first big full-time job, bought a big, fancy MacBook Pro, and had a work trip coming up for some job orientation. I saw this game on sale, noticed it ran on Mac, and picked it up intending to play it into the wee hours in my hotel room. A perfect coincidence, and the perfect chance to finally play the follow-up to one of my faves.

I loaded it up on my MacBook, took the train up to Boston, spent all day in the office, got dinner and a delicious slice of Boston cream pie at the hotel restaurant, got back up to my room, got cozy, booted up the game, realized I was extremely tired, looked at the time, and knowing I had another full day in the office the next day, shut the game down and went to bed.

My perfect window closed. I didn't touch the game again for another five years.

Cut to: summer 2023. Cyberpunk 2077 is 50% off on GOG, and I finally decide to check it out for myself. I also pick up Deus Ex: Human Revolution because I like to slowly re-purchase games on GOG that I already own on Steam when they're super cheap because you, uh, don't actually own Steam games, and I want to have some of this shit forever.

Then I get an idea. They got all of them Deus Exes up there on GOG, and they're all cheap right now, and Cyberpunk kinda lives in that same thematic realm, so what if I spend the summer playing through all the Deus Ex games and Cyberpunk and see if anything comes of that?

So I grabbed up all the Deus Exes and promptly...played Human Revolution again because god help me, I love it. But then I rolled right into finally playing Mankind Divided, purportedly the purpose behind this post. Now that I've spent almost as long leading up to it as I took to actually play the game, let's talk about Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

There's no real significance to this image, it's just the only screenshot I have that isn't of something funny or stupid or a spoiler.

Moving right from Human Revolution to this game, from 2011 to 2016, was a little jarring at first. After spending 40-ish hours at 30fps with a distinct, extremely flat, but extremely readable art style, 60fps photorealism feels like jumping into a racing sim with all the assists turned off after a lifetime of playing MarioKart. Which is to say, it was a little jarring at first. But after getting my legs under me via the opening level, it was totally fine, and I eventually found myself wishing that Human Revolution felt this good to play.

I think my initial reaction and worry was that this was an abandonment of style in favor of Graphics, and that the game would just look like a lot of other games of its time, and it does to a certain degree, but I ultimately think it manages to carve out its own identity for the most part. After getting over this initial gut reaction, I was quickly reassured that Mankind Divided is in fact more of the Deus Ex I love, albeit with a fresh coat of paint. This is very much a game about infiltrating and mastering tight, authored spaces, and of course, upgrading your various superhuman abilities.

After reaching the game's main hub city and exploring for a bit, my second reaction was, "wow, this team really liked Dishonored, huh?" There's a lot more clambering onto the rooftops of a vaguely European city (at least in this game, you're literally supposed to be in Prague) and using that verticality and traversal to avoid, evade, or ambush the bad guys than in previous DX installments.

I know they came out in the same year, so it's probably just a coincidence/hindsight, but it feels like there's a little bit of IO Interactive's Hitman in there, too, with clearly communicated restricted zones that notify you when you're entering/leaving them (I loved this), as well as the ability to throw objects to create a distraction.

Eternal Growth is a fallacy built on the backs of the poor and serving only the rich. It is a finite world. There must be the concept of 'enough.'

Back to those superhuman upgrades: the augmentation system feels so clear and connected to your abilities in the world, as it did in Human Revolution. It had me actually planning out what I wanted to pick out next, and hotly anticipating my next Praxis Kit. The choice between burning 1 Praxis immediately or saving for a 2-Praxis upgrade was always tough. You're given just few enough of these upgrade points throughout the game that upgrades always felt like real choices that mattered and affected my play in major ways, and also allowed me to very specifically tailor the gameplay to my preference (i.e. taking the stealthy approach rather than going in guns blazing).

Mankind Divided adds some new "overclocked" augs, which are overpowered abilities that will also cause some kind of harm to you if you activate them. That sounds like a cool idea at first, adding an interesting risk/reward tradeoff to make the same old upgrade tree a little more spicy, but this risk is neutralized almost immediately via one of the game's story missions. You basically just go to the aug doctor and he's like okay you're good now, let 'er rip. So. Cool new powers I guess?

Crafting is also here. It's an attractive idea on paper, I guess. About as much as it is in any other game that doesn't really need it. I was so confused for the longest time about what I was picking up all of this generic Crafting Material for, and whether I needed to be looking for specific recipes to craft weapons and upgrades, and I don't remember where I landed on that. I don't think it ended up being a big part of my experience. But I think you can pretty much use crafting materials to just make whatever upgrades for each of your weapons, and you can equip all of them if you want? But you can also find silencers and shit out in the wild. I just know I made a note that I had a billion crafting parts and nothing to do with them.

Maybe I shouldn't have taken two years to write this.

Oh good, more crafting parts. Also very funny to run into this guy while playing the GOG version.

In any case, I preferred the restraint of Human Revolution, where you only get a few upgrade slots per weapon, you have to rely on finding upgrades out in the world, and you have to choose which upgrades to slot into your limited space.

Something that returns untouched, though, is all the granular detail that makes the world feel real. Posters, flyers, road signs, books, magazines, newspapers, album covers, radio and TV chatter, the little jingle that plays in every train station, all of it building the world through mundane little extras that don't contribute much to the plot, but make spaces feel lived in, and the world feel like it has history. Especially the radio and TV broadcasts that are not either Picus (the news) or that conspiracy radio show guy. Those other little in-between things don't feel dystopian in the way that the others do, which helps flesh out the world, and also creates that sense of dissonance you get in the real world—"normal" things continue when the world is burning.

I want to listen to "Who Cares Bob" by J.S. Sideburns so bad.

I had a really great time with Mankind Divided. It's right up there with (and maybe even above??) Human Revolution for me now. I really enjoyed continuing Adam Jensen's story, I loved playing with the new augmentations, I really loved exploring fake Prague and all its nooks and crannies, I liked the new characters and exploring Adam's relationships with them all, and I liked that you could start to see bits and pieces of the original Deus Ex's story start to show up (both this and Human Revolution are prequels to the original game).

The game ends pretty clearly, and now tragically, gesturing at a third game in the Adam Jensen saga, a game that will likely never come due to, among other things, Eidos getting Embraced. It was a pretty bittersweet feeling to finally play this game after so many years of putting it off, end up loving it, realize it ends on a cliffhanger of sorts, and then realize that story will never be resolved. The tragedy of media as a commodity!

Ah well. At least I got to have another adventure in this world, and this team got to make a bigger, better version of everything I loved about Human Revolution. I'm so glad I finally crossed this game off my list.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is available on Steam, GOG, Epic, Xbox, and PlayStation.

What Else Is On? May 26th, 2025

2025-05-26T17:23:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

Another month in the books! It's been warming up very slowly here in New York City, and I certainly don't mind. We've had some hot summers in the past few years, so Spring can take all the time it wants!

Inspired by some of the more frequent bloggers in my feed, I've been toying with the idea of daily blogging here and there, as you may have noticed. I enjoy it in principle, and in practice to a point, but I'm fickle with how I spend my free time, and I want to be very careful not to turn a thing I love into a chore, so who knows if it'll stick at any point. Either way, I've still got a big old backlog of blog topics in my notes app to write about!

But enough of that, what else is on?

🎵 PUT THIS ON

AQUARIUM CITY - Louie Zong

Louie's always a fave, and this has some real nice summer vibes as we cruise into the warm times.

📚 READ THIS

Support Your Favourite Radio Stations - Yaffle

I linked to this post in my WDCB post, but wanted to include it here on its own! Radio good!

Introducing: Make It Nice - Defector

An interior design advice column for people with normal budgets. I like the pitch on this, it's got good blog feel!

Journalism’s Slop Crisis Started Long Before That AI-Generated Summer Insert - Defector

Good, sad write up of the AI Sun Times thing, and the long, slow death of local journalism.

Why The Boeing 777X Won't Have Engine Chevrons - Jalopnik

Just a really fascinating explanation of engine chevrons, and why next-gen engines won't need them!

The Newark airport crisis is about to become everyone’s problem - The Verge

While we're talking about planes, here's a great explanation of what's going on with the situation at Newark airport, and how we got there.

Opinion: Arcade Fire’s Rotten Legacy - The Rover

Yeahhhh fuck this band. They've been washed for ages, and everything else that's happened since the allegations against Win Butler has been sickening and sad.

The Children Yearn for ‘Battlefront 3’ - Gizmodo

It. Is happening. Again.

📺 WATCH THIS

Behind The Scenes Of A Stop Motion Commerical For Nintendo's Paper Mario - Fstoppers

Gives what it promises. I love shit like this.
Via Supper Mario Broth.

🎮 PLAY THIS

Ꙩ - sirmilkman

Free, Browser

Fun, free 2D twin-stick-y shooter. Made in a day!

Stealth Crossword - ComputerJames

Free, Browser

Very funny mashup of a stealth game and a crossword puzzle.

🌐 ONE GOOD WEBSITE

Mac Themes Garden

Damien recently released this website showcasing themes made for old versions of Mac OS, based on a bot that I used to enjoy on Cohost, and currently enjoy on Bluesky! It's a fun scroll!

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

Office Day

2025-05-23T22:00:00Z

I went into an office for work yesterday for the first time in just over 5 years. My job started a sort of rotating trial of RTO starting this month, and this was the first week I didn't have an excuse not to go in, since the company finally sent me my laptop.

It was fine.

The office is in Times Square, but I can get there in about an hour, which isn't torture, and the train line I take has a station entrance/exit basically right in front of the building, so I don't have to walk a ton.

The office itself is very nice and modern. The bathrooms are nice, there's plenty of desk space, lots of meeting rooms and single-person meeting booths. Each desk has a gigantic curved monitor that was so wide it actually forced me to sit back in my chair to see all of it at once. The company I work at occupies three floors of the building, like entire floors, and they're all gigantic. I would post pictures, but I prefer not to give away my assassination coordinates.

The company is only asking for 1 day per week in the office for now, to gauge office usage and interest. And the day of the week is staggered by team, my team's days are Thursdays for example. This makes the office much less crowded, which is nice. It seemed pretty empty in there yesterday, but I only visited two of our three floors, so maybe the third was more crowded. I've heard certain areas can get more crowded than others.

The emptiness helped me feel a little better about being there, especially as my main concern with going back to an office is the ongoing Covid pandemic we're all ignoring. I wore a mask for most of the day, with the exceptions being lunch, one call I took from a solo booth that I wanted to show my face in, and approximately the last half-hour of my day, when there was no one within a good 20-foot radius of me. Knowing what I know about how viruses are transmitted and air circulates, I regret that last one, because I honestly just wanted to feel fucking normal for a bit, the absolute worst excuse for not wearing a mask.

I anticipated some questions and ridicule about wearing a mask all day—something absolutely no one else in the entire office was doing—but none came. I got some strange looks and double-takes from passersby, but that was about it. Only one person I actually know was in the office with me yesterday, and he seemed to give me a look when we first met, but didn't say anything, and we carried on talking like normal. So, fine!

But the fact that no one else I know from my team was in the office meant that I was just sitting alone the rest of the day. Which I can do at home, only more comfortably. When I first got in, I plopped down wherever I could, because I had an early deadline for a project I'd been waiting for all week. I tried and failed to locate my group after finishing that work, so set up shop somewhere else, and by the time I actually found them, I felt too awkward to move a second time.

I had some good chats with my boss about upcoming work and getting me a better laptop (they sent me a 5-year-old M1 MacBook Pro with 256GB of storage. To work on motion design. Come on) that probably wouldn't have happened online, but that was it. I'm sure some of my non-engagement comes down to my own existing social awkwardness and new unfamiliarity and apprehension around being in an office, and that's something that can fade with time. But I also think I just don't get anything from going into an office anymore.

I can do this job from absolutely anywhere. Without a commute, I can sleep an extra hour or more and have that much more leisure time in the evenings. I can eat my own snacks, use my own bathroom, not think about lunch until I'm hungry, change my clothes if I feel like it, always be available for package deliveries, walk right over to the couch the second after I clock out, and if I have some downtime, I can do the dishes, work on a personal project, or do anything else besides pretending to work.

I've tasted the sweet fruit of WFH, and that genie won't go back in the bottle. If I won't be fired for not showing up, why would I want to work from the office? I don't care how expensive your lease on this place is. I'm sure it's a pretty penny! But that's not my problem.

These RTO programs are always announced with an email describing that "special something" that you just can't get over Zoom. I've never been able to figure out what that special something was other than wasting time with idle chatter or pretending that I, too, think about my job to an unhealthy degree. I think the people missing that special something just might be psychopaths or require some intense deprogramming.

I'm not saying it's not nice to meet people in person. We're human beings, the brain likes that sort of thing most of the time. But I dunno, I wouldn't trade all that WFH stuff just to see you people.

And besides, we just don't live in the world we used to anymore. Sitting in a shared space and rawdogging each other's air comes with some different math than it used to. Covid is with us for the long haul now, and not even vaccination can guarantee that it won't enter your body and potentially cause some irreparable damage. It's not the cold or flu, it attacks your heart and brain. Every repeat infection damages your immune system and increases the likelihood of something life-threatening rearing its head. Vaccines are a fantastic way to ensure your outward symptoms are mild should you contract Covid, yes. But masking and avoiding it altogether are fantastic ways of ensuring it doesn't enter your body in the first place.

That's an aside I wish I didn't have to whip out, but here we are!

This became pretty rambly, so in conclusion I guess, my day in the office was ultimately fine but I think I'm good.

Thank you.

A Decision Is Made for Me: Pocket Shuts Down

2025-05-22T22:55:00Z

Well, that didn't take long. Almost exactly 2 months to the day since I blogged that I was thinking of leaving Pocket, Mozilla announced today that they're turning out the lights. Turns out I was the load-bearing user, sorry everyone!

Pocket definitely got less focused and more bloated under Mozilla's stewardship—hence my desire to leave for another service, but today's announcement still came as a shock, and I'll still miss it. It was one of the first new apps I can remember getting excited about using on my Nexus 7, and I'll always have that fond memory.

Mozilla has felt like it's in a weird place lately, from shoehorning AI into Firefox to publicly acknowledging the existential threat to its existence looming on the fringes of Google's ongoing antitrust trial. This feels like a company trying to get its house in order, packing a go bag in case they need to run for it. But that's just speculation and vibes. I hope I'm wrong, and I hope Mozilla—and especially Firefox—stick around for a very long time.

In any case, the fact remains that Pocket had been suffering from degraded service and lack of support for years. Since writing my earlier blog about deciding between Pocket and Instapaper, I dipped a toe into using Instapaper as my main read-later app, and never looked back. It's very nice. As of today, I'm a premium subscriber. The unfortunate lesson of this era of the web, and the world at large, is that if you want something to stick around, you have to give it your money.

My Second Least Favorite Windows Error

2025-05-21T18:06:00Z

This isn't going to become a series, I promise, but there's one more ridiculous Windows error I want to yell about for a second. Seen above, it is the "Destination Path Too Long" error, in which a given file name is too long for a given folder/file path to contain it. I've blurred the file name in this case because it's a work thing.

I didn't even know this was an issue until this year, when I started working on projects with lots of nested folders and files with very long names being passed back and forth between people largely working on Mac. The first time it popped up, I think I was the most confused I'd ever been while looking at a computer, and I occasionally read New York Times headlines.

What's going on here is that Windows will not allow a file path to be longer than 260 characters. It is the weirdest, most arbitrary-sounding limitation I've seen yet. "Destination Path Too Long" sounds like something you'd see on an older machine running Windows 3.1 or DOS. Why can't a modern computer running Windows 10 in 2025 accommodate file paths of any length?

When you run a web search for this error, a few suggestions come up. None of them work. I dug into the registry to try to fix this only to find that I'd already previously flipped the switch in question at an earlier date and apparently forgot about it. Probably because it didn't work, and then just never came up again.

So I did some more searching, and apparently certain programs have the 260-character limit hardcoded, including Windows Explorer. Which is what moots any fix I could attempt.

So why is this happening? Well, in searching around to blog about it, I finally found an answer. It turns out this is a holdover from some ancient Windows times, and it seems like it hasn't been updated because it might be a backward-compatibility issue. I'll let someone who seems to know much more than me explain from this stackoverflow thread:

Through API contract, Windows has guaranteed all applications that the standard file APIs will never return a path longer than 260 characters.

My application didn't declare the value of the constant MAX_PATH, the Windows API did. My application used that defined value.

My structure is correctly defined, and only allocates 592 bytes total. That means that i am only able to receive a filename that is less than 260 characters. Windows promised me that if i wrote my application correctly, my application would continue to work in the future.

If Windows were to allow filenames longer than 260 characters then my existing application (which used the correct API correctly) would fail.

For anyone calling for Microsoft to change the MAX_PATH constant, they first need to ensure that no existing application fails. For example, i still own and use a Windows application that was written to run on Windows 3.11. It still runs on 64-bit Windows 10. That is what backwards compatibility gets you.

Fair enough! I can get behind backward-compatibility as much as (probably more than) the next guy, but that's still no excuse for Microsoft just making this the user's problem. My only recourse in fixing this error is to change the file path by either shortening the file name, shortening the name of the containing folders, or both. Which is an absurd thing to ask me to stop and do in the middle of my workday.

So once again, fuck you and fix your shit, Microsoft! Give me back my free Solitaire! And trim those sideburns!

NEW VACUUM

2025-05-20T12:00:00Z

Yesterday was a big day in the Egan household. It was my birthday and Christmas all rolled into one. It was the day our new vacuum arrived.

We got our old vacuum in 2021. It was a Dyson V8, and it was quite nice to begin with. It was refurbished, so not too terribly expensive, and without any fancy bells and/or whistles, but it got the job done.

After just a few years, though, it started crapping out. And yes, looking back, there are things we could have and should have done to take better care of it, but some of it was out of our hands. We absolutely should have been cleaning the filter more often, and we definitely shouldn't have only used it in Max Power mode, but you live and you learn.

The worst things were the battery—which I replaced at the start of last year, and which nevertheless degraded (for a second time) to the point where it would not turn on for more than 5 seconds at a time (we counted)—and the rear HEPA filter, which would fly off in your face unless you held it in place with your thumb while vacuuming (this was straight up broken, some plastic piece failed beyond repair at some point).

It was getting to the point where I had to vacuum the rug in my (not very large) office space in 3 or 4 stages. So it was time to go. A new vacuum was the first thing on my list of things to buy when I got a full-time job. The checks keep clearing, so I went back to Mr. Dyson and put in an order on a brand-new model this time.

Work was slow in the afternoon, so I got right to work opening up my new toy. It's really pretty. It looks like a darn video game weapon. And it has a screen??

Here's a bit of a before image, with all the pieces of the new vacuum laid out atop my rug, which was desperate for a cleaning.

I didn't get an after of the rug, but this is how much dust filled the bin after vacuuming three rugs, the kitchen, and my girlfriend's studio. My office rug looked so much cleaner afterward, beyond just picking up the surface lint! I can't believe how much dust the old vac was missing!

After a test vac, it was time to dismantle this old man and take down the old charging dock. I have been dreaming of getting rid of this thing for so long! Good riddance!

I didn't take any photos of the re-mounting process, but I'm really happy with the result. I didn't do a stellar job mounting the previous dock, and I wanted to rectify that with this new one. I made sure my measurements and placement were just right, and gave the wall a little scrub. I found just the right drill bit for the anchor holes (15/64ths), and took extra care not to hammer them in too hard (a mistake I've made many times).

The new dock fits snugly against the wall, without any play or rotation at the top or bottom. It's perfect. And they've redesigned things on this new model of vacuum so that the battery accepts the charger at the bottom of the dock, making it so that you just need to drop the whole thing in from the top, rather than the convoluted up-swing-down motion of the previous dock.

They've also made it so the battery is only held in place with a push-button clip rather than a screw, which I really like. Makes it super easy to swap in a new one if you need. Seems like Dyson have created a system where you can be using one battery, have another charging in the dock while you vacuum, then when the battery you're using runs out, you can just swap in the one from the dock with a click and keep going. I dig it.

I really like this thing. I kept finding excuses to vacuum things around the house until the battery was depleted of the charge it shipped with. I grabbed the Dyson app, which contains a bunch of videos showing you how to use various attachments and modes, and clean the filters and things. They're also definitely trying to upsell you on some extra accessories, but also some of them look kinda nice. I am, sadly, the perfect mark for this sort of thing.

Oh, and about that screen. It's there to show you which modes you can switch between, but also shows you this breakdown of how many particles of a certain number of micrometers it's counting as it sucks them up. Which is wild and I can't decide if I want that information but I think maybe it's cool. That yellow bar on the left with the "5" represents the smallest particles. It was at 5 when I first fired it up. After vacuuming most of the rooms in our apartment, it is over 300 million.

So all in all, I'm very excited about our new vacuum. I didn't even show or tell about the attachment that uses a beam of green light to show you how dusty your floor is! I haven't even used the mopping "Submarine" attachment yet!

Man. I'm mostly just excited to be able to vacuum the rug for more than 5 seconds at a time now, but it's also fun to have all these shiny new toys to play with.

This is being in your 30s, kids. Look upon it and dispair!

What Should I Know About Mac?

2025-05-19T12:00:00Z

As I've blogged about before, I'm a Windows guy. Have been my whole life. But as a creative person, and someone who refuses to suffer underpowered, underspecced computers, Macs have always been a bit enticing.

I first used a Mac in college—the Communications Department had an editing lab full of them—and found them to be very slick and nice to use. In 2018, after landing my first big full-time job as a video editor at a tech startup, I bought myself my first Mac, a top-of-the-line 15-inch MacBook Pro, and got to work getting to know its ins and outs, and grabbing some popular utilities.

I still have that MacBook (I'm writing this blog post on it), and I've been using it a bit more often lately, after one of a handful of hiatuses in its use since I lost that tech job in 2020. Almost every time I use it, or quite often, I get to feeling like I still don't know MacOS very well. I consider myself a computer "power user," and I know Windows like the back of my hand, having used it from a very young age. So it's very noticeable to me when I realize I don't know how to do something or where to find something on Mac.

It's not something you can Google, exactly, it's just little edge cases or vague wonderings like, "where are the system files located and which ones can and/or absolutely should not be dug into for various purposes?" Or like, I just recently found out that under "Go" in the Finder menu, you can see the "Library" folder if you hold the Option key. What's up with that? I don't even know where to start or how to articulate my curiosity!

On Windows, I know where all the system files are, how to edit the registry, how to fix little problems and change settings to my liking. I know how to bend it to my will and fuck it up beyond recognition. How do I do that on Mac? Where does the juicy shit live? How do I get my hands dirty and change things?

Even after using one regularly for a few years, and being competent enough to use a Mac as a work machine, it still feels like being in another country or an alternate dimension to some degree.

So the question I'd like to pose in this blog post is: What should I know about Mac? What weird little intricacies are other folks aware of that might only come from a lifetime of use, having grown up using it, and having spent thousands of hours perusing forums?

And also: Are there any good places online where a person can learn these things from the perspective of a lifelong Windows user?

How do I change what this thing looks like? To what degree can I even do that? Are there any deep system settings I should know about? What do I not even know that I don't know?

I know a lot of this can only come from a lot of use over a long time, but I also feel like an important part of the process of getting to know an OS is digging through it while you're young enough to not care (or not know to care) that you could really fuck up and break some important shit. I'll never get to have that experience with Mac! So here I am.

Mac users, please share your favorite tips and tricks in the comments (bsky & masto are also fine)! Nothing is off limits, and nothing is too simple or stupid. I want it all.

My Least Favorite Windows Error

2025-05-18T18:20:00Z

I've been a Windows user since the late 90s. I grew up using Windows, I went to school using Windows, and I've worked on Windows for at least a decade now. So naturally, I've seen Windows pull plenty of shit that now drives me up a wall when I see it, either because it's been a problem for decades and still hasn't been fixed, or just because it's extremely annoying and inconvenient.

Today's entry concerns the former, and it's not so much a bug as it is something that could be handled more elegantly. I am speaking, of course, about that Windows classic: "The action can't be completed because the folder or a file in it is open in another program."

This is a variation on the more common, more simply worded, "The action can't be completed because the file is open in another program." They're the same error, I just happened to grab a screenshot of the folder flavor.

In my daily work as a motion designer, I'm constantly opening, closing, reorganizing, and generally moving around a lot of files. I'll often download a file to the desktop and open it there to take a quick look at it before moving it to the requisite subfolder in my team's necessarily labyrinthine project folder structure. Or I'll move one or more files to one subfolder and start using them, but then realize they need to be in another subfolder, and try to move them. Only to be met with this error.

This shit drives me nuts, on two levels. The first level mostly has to do with how it's worded. Or isn't worded. Here's the thing: Maybe this file I'm trying to move is open somewhere else. Great, cool, thank you for the heads up. But, uh... You're a computer, right? You have all kinds of information available to you at a moment's notice, and you can surface that information to the user upon request? Do I have that right?

SO HOW'S ABOUT TELLING ME IN WHICH PROGRAM THE FILE OR FOLDER IN QUESTION IS CURRENTLY IN USE.

That's what I hate. FILE IN USE. Cool. Where is the file in use? So I can close it and go about my business? This error is useless to me. Don't just tell me something is wrong, give me the information I need to remedy the situation.

It's like that scene from The Simpsons where they're trying to track down Mr. Burns' car, and the computer says, "Car gone," and they're like okay where has the car gone, and the computer just keeps yelling, "car gone! car gone!"

But the wording is only the tip of the iceberg, that would simply be irksome. What drives this error into the territory of infuriating is that it is constantly popping up when the file or folder in question is not open or in use in any discernible way that I can see.

Why can I not move this Photoshop file when Photoshop isn't open and I haven't imported it into After Effects? How about if I close all Adobe apps? Still no. It's synced in Dropbox, how about if I close Dropbox? Still no. Sometimes Backblaze just starts backing shit up on the desktop if I leave it there too long, how about if I stop Backblaze? Still no. I downloaded it in Firefox, how about if I close Firefox? Still no.

What is going on here?? Just tell me where it's open! Help me help you!!

At that point my options are to restart my fucking computer or just give up and try to remember to move it later. But if I import a Photoshop file into After Effects and then move the Photoshop file later, After Effects won't be able to find it, and I'll have to reconnect it, so just let me move it now and save me a different headache later! If it's not one thing, it's another.

In conclusion, computers were a mistake, and Microsoft should reassign whoever is in charge of finding new ways to inject "trending news" into the Start menu to fixing some of the dumb bullshit that's been littered throughout their operating system since the Clinton administration.

And while you're at it, give me back Solitaire.

WDCB 90.9 FM - 'Chicago's Home For Jazz'

2025-05-17T14:26:00Z

Reading Yaffle's post about listening to the radio a few weeks back got me thinking about one of my favorite on-again-off-again nighttime routines: listening to an internet stream of WDCB 90.9 FM, a public Jazz station that broadcasts from the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois—part of what is known to locals (and expats) as the nebulous "Chicagoland Area."

One of the best, most relaxing ways to close out my night is by climbing into bed, opening up my laptop, browsing the web, and vibing out to whatever's playing on WDCB. I've always loved Jazz, and most of it is instrumental, which makes it really easy to listen to while I'm doing something else like reading, writing a blog post (literally listening to it as I write this), or even just playing some Puzzmo or something.

Not only is the music played on WDCB really conducive to thinking and relaxing for me, but it also gives me that crucial presence that Yaffle talks about. There's something incredibly grounding about having a person cut in after every few songs to let you know a little something about what you just heard, do a quick station ID, or even just tell you what time it is. It reminds you that what you're listening to was picked out and is being played live by another person.

Listening to public radio is such a slow, comforting, enriching experience. And WDCB is a station that oozes character and history. It's been broadcasting since the 70s, and features a broad lineup of shows run by longtime volunteer DJs like Michelle Zeto, host of Jammin' Jazz: Jazz for the New Generation, and Scott 'Hambone' Hammer, host of Hambone's Blues Party.

It's particularly fun to listen to WDCB at night, because during the day, from 5am to 7pm, their programming is just a solid block of what they simply call 'DCB Jazz. After 7, all of WDCB's "real" shows start, and you get to hear from a series of DJs with their own quirky personalities, interests, and expertise. Everything lives under the umbrella of "Jazz and Blues," but this is where you really get to stretch that boudary a little bit, and dig into every little niche, era, and subgenre on offer.

Monday nights feature Ireland Tonight, which as you may guess plays a lot of traditional Celtic music. On Wednesdays, you can hear Jazz Organic, which exclusively features Jazz played on the Hammond B3 organ. Thursday nights give you Hambone's Blues Party, two hours of Blues and R&B, "broadcasting from the backseat of his black Cadillac parked on the corner of Jazz Avenue and Blues Boulevard." And on Fridays, you get one of my favorites, Jammin Jazz, featuring music from the cutting-edge of Modern Jazz.

Of course, all of this is a little more meaningful to me, having grown up and lived in the Chicagoland area for most of my life. All public media has a certain feel to it, but Chicago Public Media has a very specific, discernible feel to me. So it's lovely to be able to open an internet stream of WDCB and feel that whenever I want. Even though I love where I'm living now, I still like finding these little pockets of home where I can.

And since it's available online, I can invite you to give WDCB a listen for yourself! Check the schedule, see when something you might be interested is on, and even if you're not the biggest fan of Jazz, give it a listen! You might be pleasantly surprised, or you might at least find that you, too, enjoy the slow, calm, deliberate nature of listening to the radio.

Skin Deep Owns

2025-05-15T10:24:00Z

I don't know if this will be my full, proper review since I haven't finished the game yet, but it's already been two weeks since Skin Deep released, and I've gotta write a little something for it while it's still somewhat fresh in the zeitgeist.

I have a sort of hockey-stick-esque history with Blendo Games. I picked up Atom Zombie Smasher in one of the first Humble Bundles in either high school or college and apart from loving the soundtrack and digging the general vibe, I didn't think too much of it then. I remember Justin McElroy talking up Quadrilateral Cowboy upon its release in 2016, but I was depressed and broke and never checked it out. Then in 2020, I finally played QuadCow, and it became one of my favorite games of all time. I've replayed it several times since. Then I went back and played as many other Blendo games as I could get my hands on, and fell in love with their whole thing. Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving are both brilliant.

I've been meaning to write something about Quadrilateral Cowboy—first a video essay, then a blog post—for literally five years now, but I keep making it too big in my head.

So when Blendo announced a new game in partnership with Annapurna back in 2021, just a year after my awakening, I was pumped.

Four years later, and almost ten years since the last (non-VR) Blendo game was released, it's finally here. Blendo is back, and they're better than ever.

Skin Deep is an immersive first-person stealth game about saving cats from space pirates. You can crawl through vents, sneeze, spit, throw lighters at fuel lines, smash windows to vent rooms into open space, pick glass shards out of your feet, and defibrillate yourself if things get really hairy.

I'm 8 hours in, and I'm fucking charmed, folks. You can tell that this is Blendo Games firing on more cylinders than before, probably partly because of the (well-deserved) Annapurna cash, but it's still Blendo through and through. There's full voice acting (everyone is great), and your character model is more than a boxy papercraft figure (not that I would've minded), but it's not a game about pretty graphics. Aforementioned cash was spent on making a great Blendo game, and it's got their signature heart and soul in spades. All of my favorite sound effects are here (real ones know). There are shelves full of oddly-titled books (someone on the team is a Severance fan). And there are boxy, papercraft cats that stare unblinking into your soul.

It really feels like the perfect culmination of a lot of what Blendo has done in the past in a lot of ways, like they've been naturally building to this the whole time.

I know by now you can tell that I'm a fanboy, and this game was laser-targeted at me, but it's also really fucking fun. I love a good stealth game, and stalking around Skin Deep's spaceships trying to figure out the best (or funniest) way to take down a group of pirates is really scratching that itch for me. There's a level of freedom in how you're able to go about achieving your objective that's really satisfying, and reminds me of IO Interactive's trilogy of Hitman games in some ways.

Each level gives you a moment of "I'm not in here with them, they're in here with me" by the time you're down to your last few pirates that feels very good.

It's also exremely funny in a really restrained and understated way. Nina's voice actor gives some really great line reads. Like when you pick up a box of Dignity-brand deodorant, and she remarks, "I needed Dignity!" Or when you pick up a Branki Orbital Wrench, and zoom in to see that its label contains the slogan, "It's gotta be a Branki." Or when you're bleeding out and you hold the spacebar to defibrillate yourself and as the defibrillator activates, it plays a sound effect of a revving muscle car engine. That's the good stuff! That shit is so funny to me. I love it.

Sidenote: The game is written by Laura Michet, whom I've featured several times in What Else Is On! Laura I hope you see this and if so great job!

I'm so happy to be playing a brand new Blendo game, and to be having such a great time with it. I'm not sure how much I've got left to play through, but I already know I'm going to be replaying it when I'm done. I hope this post made you curious enough to grab it on Steam and give it a shot.

Who knows, you yourself could be about to fall head over heels for the wonderful world of Blendo!

Comment Conundrum

2025-05-04T14:10:00Z

I have a problem with my current comment provider, Cusdis. At the start of 2025, my blog friend Caoimhe wrote about a problem with her Cusdis implementation that I definitely would not have noticed on my own until it was too late.

Namely, as can be seen in this post's header image, Cusdis' free plan supports 100 comments per month. That's per month, mind you. But that allotment hasn't been resetting month to month. Comments are just continuously accumulating towards the cap.

This seems like a bug! So I went to report it and ask for help in all the normal places: their website, the Cusdis GitHub page, their Discord server. All the time noticing that I was following in Caoimhe's footsteps, and she had never received a response. Didn't bode well!

No one has written anything on the Cusdis website since 2023, no one replies on their GitHub page, no one (apart from other users looking for help) responds in their Discord server. I even pressed my luck and tried emailing the developer directly from an email I found on his website through some link diving. Nothing.

Ostensibly, Cusdis is a dead project. It's no longer being actively developed. And my comments keep piling up toward the 100-comment limit. Time to jump ship.

I should point out here that Cusdis does offer a $5/month plan which allows for unlimited comments, but why would I give money to a dead project that I have no guarantee will continue to be functional, and when I don't even know if that will solve my problem in the first place?

So I started hunting for alternatives. Folks, it is grim out there. I can only imagine how small the market for website comment providers is these days. But man oh man. They're either not free (which I get, and I may have to just bite the bullet on), they require self-hosting (no), or they're just kinda shitty in some way.

The only halfway-decent option I've been holding in my mind is HTMLCommentBox, which was recommended by friend of the blog fish. They use the free version on their site, and I think it looks great.

But after reaching out to the HTMLCommentBox people on their site and through email, it seems like there isn't a way to import comments from another service to HTMLCommentBox. So that sucks!

Oftentimes, a comment provider will have a way to import and export comments as a CSV or what have you, much like a lot of blog hosts, so that you can move everything over with names and dates and keep everything as it was.

HTMLCommentBox only offers movement of comments from one page to another within the HTMLCommentBox ecosystem. I don't know why I would need that, but sure.

So here we are, folks. I don't really know what to do. I've started archiving all the comments on my blog (just copy/pasting them from the Cusdis dashboard into a spreadsheet), but I have no place to put them for now.

I'm probably going to just have to look into some paid options instead, which is a little less unappealing to me now that I have job, I suppose.

Send me your recommendations if you have a (non-self hosted) comment provider you really like! But I guess, like, not too many. That comment ticker is still ticking up to doomsday, as it were.

Found a Job

2025-05-01T04:27:00Z

It actually happened, folks. The job that I wrote about hopefully getting back in January, and that I later wrote about not getting in March, actually came through.

I went through three rounds of interviews with this company in December of last year, and it really seemed like I was going to be able to start the year in a good financial place. In fact, I was told as much in January, and got to excitedly call my parents letting them know I would finally have The Good Insurance again and get to stop worrying about groceries so much.

Then I got a lot of radio silence for a few weeks. When I finally heard back, they were offering me freelance work. The HR person's hope was that they could get me in for freelance asap, and eventually convert me to full time. I didn't believe them, but I took the freelance because it was still a solid offer.

A little less than two months later—on April 1st, no less—the offer came through. The salary I wanted, great benefits, the works. Plus, I'd essentially gotten a trial run of working at this place, and now knew that I liked the work and the people!

So I got to call my parents again and tell them that this time I would definitely be getting The Good Insurance and get to stop worrying about groceries so much.

I started my new full-time job on April 16th, almost exactly five years to the day since I was laid off from my last full-time job (I'm choosing not to count the job that hired me in August of 2024 and fired me on Halloween because oops we can't pay you).

So the blog's been a little quieter in the last few weeks! I've been incredibly busy and more than a little stressed, but it's good. The source of the stress is internal rather than external, so that's at least better than the alternative. I'm still figuring out how to manage my time in this role. I got my first paycheck at my full-time salary today, and good god. It's been a long, harrowing journey.

My hope is that over time, I'll get better at a new type of time management and setting boundaries, and my work-life balance will start to stabilize. For now, I will absolutely take the financial stability.

But I've already put in for my first vacation time! Next week, my parents are in town, so I took the week off to hang out with them and gallavant around the city without having to think about work. Hopefully I'll be able to use some of that time to catch up on the many blog ideas I've banked in the last few weeks!

Til then, :sigh of relief:.

What Else Is On? April 30th, 2025

2025-04-30T23:50:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

Well hello there! Down to the wire for this one! I had meant to keep it brief after last month's absolute bonanza of links anyway, so the time constraint is good, I think. As you'll read elsewhere on the blog today, I've been so busy because I started a full-time job! You can read all about that in its own post, but for now: What Else Is On?

🎵 PUT THIS ON

NEW WORLD EP - Dan Curtin

A fun house album I found through Morning Music. Really goes places.

📚 READ THIS

404: The Internet You Tried to Remember Still Exists - Inner Spiral

This is what the year of the blog is all about: The Web is still there, you just gotta look for it.

No One Remembers Me, But That's Fine - Inner Spiral

Another great piece from Inner Spiral about Majora’s Mask, loops, and homes. I really want to play MM now.

a love letter to level editor icons - erysdren

Love me some old computer icons.

For Scale - The Verge

"Vietnam will never be close to being completely clear of bombs."

AI and the Rise of Mediocrity - Time

AI will only ever create mediocre works, mediocre tastes, mediocre culture, and mediocre people.

This blog is hosted on a Nintendo Wii - Alex Haydock

Extra Extra: Man Runs Blog On Wii.

📺 WATCH THIS

sonic adventure, bomb rush cyberfunk, and the power of hanging out - Down The Ladder

Great video essay on the hangoutability of video games, a topic that has been percolating in my mind often this year. Got me to play Bomb Rush Cyberfunk!

I Turned My Hayabusa EV into an F1 CAR FINALE! - Vasily Builds

Watch this guy turn an old cheese wedge of an electric car into a dragster.

🎮 PLAY THIS

Skin Deep - Steam

$19.99, PC

It's not every day we get a brand new Blendo game, and as a humongous fan of Quadrilateral Cowboy and the rest of the Blendo catalog, I've just gotta give them some free advertising here. This baby is out today, and I can't wait to get a second to play it!

CSS Clicker - lyra.horse

Free, Browser

Gotta have at least one free browser game in here, and this one's a doozy. My only notes on this one are "hoooooly shit" so I guess it was fun lol.

🌐 ONE GOOD WEBSITE

Pointclicking

A gallery from artist Jón Kristinsson of illustrations of point & click adventure games.

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

Free Blog Idea for 2008

2025-04-15T23:01:00Z

If bargain bins still existed, you could start a blog called Bin Playin'.

As in here's what I've been playing and it's all from the bargain bin.

And you just review the games you find in the bargain bin.

Well goodnight folks!

Pan-Pan (2016)

2025-04-14T13:41:00Z

Pan-Pan

Developer: Spelkraft
Release Year: 2016
Genre(s): Adventure
Played On: Nintendo Switch
Date Played: 12 Apr, 2025

I bought this game on Switch in 2019 and waited six years to play it for absolutely no reason. When I finally did this past weekend, I finished it in two nights, and came away absolutely charmed.

The short pitch is that you're a little guy whose hot-air-balloon space ship has crash-landed on a mysterious world, and now you need to explore and gather materials to help some other little guys repair your ship and send you on your way.

I would describe the overall aesthetic of Pan-Pan as (not to take anything away from its individuality with these comparisons) "Monument Valley meets twofold inc," which puts it extremely up my alley. Everything has a smooth, matte texture that gives it the feeling of either papercraft or a set of soft vinyl toys. The sound design is all bloops, bleeps, clicks, and other short, sharp, satisfying, and somehow comforting electronic noises.

Storytelling is all done environmentally, with characters only offering each other cheerful grunts and emoticons. I found the puzzles just complex enough to be satisfying, with most of the complexity coming from the interconnected nature of the world, in a "where do I take this item I just got" kind of way. One or two of them might have you scratching your head, but it's all very "take a break and you'll see it when you come back."

Pan-Pan is very simple, very short, and extremely chill. I had a lovely time exploring and solving this delightful little puzzle box.

Pan-Pan is available on Steam, Humble, iOS, and Switch.

System Shock 2 (1999)

2025-04-10T11:35:00Z

System Shock 2

Developer: Irrational Games
Release Year: 1999
Genre(s): FPS, RPG
Played On: PC
Date Played: 24 Aug, 2024

This was a pleasant surprise. I had just shelved the first System Shock—a game with plenty of particular quirks, some of which I liked, but which probably ultimately prevented me from going the distance with it—for good. This game felt like it had a similar vibe, with enough of its own thing going on, and with some improvements to controls and the like.

There's a pretty nice "learn by doing" tutorial at the start, which I really appreciated, as this game is introducing a number of new ideas that were not present in the original. It was nice to walk through a couple of gameplay scenarios in a safe environment to learn the ropes. More games should have stuff like this.

The opening sequence feels very "let's try doing in-engine storytelling in a video game," which is to say, very "Half Life just came out." The RPG systems feel like kind of a lot right out of the gate. Feels like maybe this game was pulled in a lot of directions during development and/or didn't know quite what it wanted to be.

I feel like you can also feel just a hint of what will eventually become BioShock in there, with the Psionic powers as predecessors to Plasmids/Vigors.

Having just put down the original System Shock, I remember being intrigued enough by this one's setup as to be interested in playing more. I don't know that I will, but I'm not opposed to the idea!

System Shock 2 is available on Steam, GOG, and Xbox.

Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003)

2025-04-09T10:36:00Z

Deus Ex: Invisible War

Developer: Ion Storm
Release Year: 2003
Genre(s): FPS, Immersive Sim
Played On: PC
Date Played: 23 Aug, 2024

I'm writing this a few months after the fact, so I might be a little hazy on the details, but my recollection is that having just completed a full playthrough of the first Deus Ex, this game looked bad and felt...bad.

You can just really tell this game was made for consoles in the early 2000s. Everything feels just a little too big, a little too slow, and spaces are a little too empty.

The aesthetic is kinda fun, but it all feels like a pretty big departure from its predecessor, and—having now played the entire series—quite the outlier overall.

There's not much more to say, I'm afraid. It didn't look great, run well, or interest me much. It's a 'no' from me.

Deus Ex: Invisible War is available on Steam and GOG.

Introducing the 'What Else Is On?' Archive

2025-04-08T16:30:00Z

UPDATE Oct 1, 2025: This project has since been deprecated and replaced with the all-new whatelseison.net

Very excited to announce that I took the afternoon to finally cobble together something I've been wanting to put up on the site for a while now:

The 'What Else Is On?' Archive

This is a big ol' list of everything I've ever shared in an issue of 'What Else Is On?,' helpfully organized by section and ordered reverse-chronologically.

I mostly built this for me, as a way to finally see whether or not I've already shared something in a previous issue if I'm unsure, but maybe it'll be fun or interesting or enlightening to you in some way!

Some of these links might have gotten broken along the way, it's been five years and these things happen. Apologies in advance if that's the case.

Enjoy!

Telling Lies (2019)

2025-04-08T12:00:00Z

Telling Lies

Developer: Half Mermaid
Release Year: 2019
Genre(s): FMV, Detective
Played On: PC
Date Played: 15 Sep, 2024

I started playing this one with my girlfriend last summer. She loved Her Story when I showed it to her a few years ago, and we had a blast playing Immortality together, so we were very excited about the prospect of playing "another one of these," as it were.

Unfortunately, it didn't take long to realize that it wasn't hitting like Sam Barlow and Half Mermaid's previous and following entries.

The vibe wasn't as strong, the story was too sprawling and not as compelling, we didn't love the performances, and we found it really annoying that you can't just start a clip from the beginning when you search, you have to manually hold the mouse button down to rewind. Felt like we were missing something.

We stuck with it for a second night, but ultimately decided that we weren't having fun, and put it down for good.

It's a shame! We really wanted to like it, but they can't all be hits!

Telling Lies is available on Steam, GOG, Mac, iOS, Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation.

A Short Hike (2019)

2025-04-07T16:48:00Z

Been a long time since I did one of these! I've been all over the place in terms of what video games I've been playing lately. I just haven't been able to land on anything for some reason. Work has been busier lately, so maybe it's just been harder to get stuck into something with less free time available.

In that case, I guess A Short Hike is exactly what I needed!

A Short Hike

Developer: Adam Robinson-Yu
Release Year: 2019
Genre(s): Adventure
Played On: PC
Date Played: 06 Apr, 2025

The top reason it's so embarrassing that I waited so long to play this game is that it's exactly as short as everyone (including the game itself) tells you it is. I spent just over an hour traversing this adorable little island, and I loved every minute of it.

There's just enough of a hook to pull you in and get you going, and from there you're pretty much set free to accomplish things as you like. And as small and short as this game is, it's teeming with life and personality. The island you're exploring is well-populated with chill little animals who are just doing their own thing, but always happy to lend a hand or share a hint.

I love A Short Hike's chunky pixel art and perpetual-summer color palette. The whole thing feels warm (well, most of the time, but you should see that for yourself), calm, and inviting. It's an instant, endless summer vacation distilled to its purest form and captured in a .EXE.

The immaculate vibes are further cemented by an exceptional soundtrack from Mark Sparling. The plucked guitars and serene piano melodies naturally evoke a carefree sense of peace and joy, reminiscent of a day at the beach or a Ghibli film. I loved it from the first note.

All in all, I'm glad I finally sat down to give this one a try. I knew I'd play it all the way through, since everyone said it was super short, but I didn't know how fond I'd be of this thing's vibe! I can definitely see giving it a replay from time to time when I need a little dose of summer vacation.

A Short Hike is available on itch.io, Epic, Steam, GOG, Switch, PS4, and Xbox One

There Had Better Be Music [UPDATE: Fuck Me, I Guess!]

2025-04-07T11:32:00Z

I was super busy last week when Nintendo finally revealed the Switch 2, and was thus too sleepy to blog about it. Since then, folks have found shots of the Switch 2's home screen (seen above) in various places, and it looks just as plain as the Switch home screen. I was always gonna post something about Switch 2, so let me say this:

The Nintendo Switch 2 had better have more than 2 goddamn themes, and the shop better play me some fucking music.

Moving from the WiiU + 3DS to the Switch, we went from shop music with extreme boppability, and a seemingly endless list of themes with which to customize the look and sounds of our homescreens, to absolutely fuck-all.

When I first bought a Switch in 2018, I remember spying the "Themes" section in the settings menu and thinking about what wonders must be right around the corner. I remember logging into the eShop and thinking surely they'll patch in some music (and fix the performance) in the future! It's Nintendo!

I should've known better. That was a full year after the Switch had released. We had gotten everything we were going to get. To this day, you can open up the Themes menu, marvel at its two (2) whole themes, white and black, and wonder if it exists purely to taunt us.

The Switch eShop is an abomination upon the earth, and should not be witnessed by human eyes. It cannot be witnessed by human ears because there isn't any fucking music. The people who brought you the iconic bops of the Nintendo Wii had nothing to contribute this time?

Could the underpowered hardware of the Switch not display the eShop and play music at the same time? Lord knows it can barely display the eShop in the first place. That being the case, I would argue that if your console can't load a shop that plays music, you should scrap the project and start over.

More and more, the Nintendo that made the Wii and the Nintendo that is making the Switch and Switch 2 feel like completely different entities. All I'm asking for is a sign that there's still a spark of whimsy alive in there.

Heck, at this point I'd settle for a sign that someone there believes the studies that say people buy more in a shop that plays music.

UPDATE 1:45PM: It has come to my attention that Nintendo confirmed in an interview with Polygon this morning that there will be no Switch 2 eShop music.

Ok fine, fuck me I guess.

The stated reason is that there are videos in the eShop now. So they don't want videos playing over the music or something?

Which, like...don't do that then?

The Nintendo eShop has had videos on it at least since the 3DS. The 3DS eShop had music. When you played a video in the 3DS eShop, the music would fade out, and then fade back in when the video ended. Ditto for the WiiU.

That just seems obvious, how on earth is this an excuse? What are you talking about?

Why don't you want music in the shop? Why are you depriving the people of what they want?

226 46th Street Kind Of Morning

2025-03-28T11:05:00Z

Sometimes you open the windows and birds are chirping, and the air is sweet, and the world wants you to listen to the Moon RPG soundtrack.

What Else Is On? March 25th, 2025

2025-03-25T18:00:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

Welcome back, folks! Hope everyone's March is treating them well, as the weather (hopefully) starts to warm up in your neck of the woods. Unless you're in the southern hemisphere, in which case I really hope it isn't warming up.

I must've read a lot this month, because this is a beefy one! Hope it's not too much! I'll keep my comments brief.

Hope you find something you enjoy!

🎵 PUT THIS ON

Border Down OST - YouTube

Stumbled across someone posting about this soundtrack to a Sega Dreamcast Shoot Em' Up I'd never heard of, and I was hooked from the jump. The first track goes through so many different phases, and the rest of the album rules as well. Absolute vibes.

📚 READ THIS

My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be? - Laurel Schwulst

A beautiful vision for the web, and a call to action to make your own little piece of it.

Why Personal Websites Matter More Than Ever - Joan Westenberg

Another great piece of writing about the web and making your own shit. If you only have time to read one manifesto about personal websites, make time for a second and read this and the above.

The Year Of The Blog - v buckenham

YEAR OF THE BLOG!!!!!!

Why I’m Blogging in 2025 - Luka Grafera

YEAR OF THE BLOGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!

We Will - Luka Grafera

Small process post for some of Luka's extremely cool oil paint + digital hand-lettered art.

The Digital Packrat Manifesto - Janus Rose

Fuck streaming. Save your own shit.

Cool Tool: Ghost House - v buckenham

Good post about a cool animation tool.

You Don’t Have To See Everything In The Museum - Kelsey McKinney

Going to a museum is not homework or a chore! Just stroll and see what you want!

What Felt Impossible Became Possible - Dan Sinker

Really cool piece of history. Never heard of this guy. Found via Jenn Schiffer.

Printercat - MSD

Loving the photo experiments MSD posts on quailblog. You can find more here!

The Loveliest Lies of All - Unwinnable

Loved this piece about Over the Garden Wall from Autumn! Found via Dante.

The Balatro Timeline - LocalThunk

LocalThunk wrote up a dev timeline of their work on Balatro! I wasn't sure I'd find this interesting, but it's really well written, and I found myself emotionally invested by the end.

The Most Mario Colors - Louie Mantia

An investigation into the colors used in Mario titles. Now this is blogging.

AI Isn’t Going to Save Us - Will Smith

Loving Will’s new newsletter. His latest issue left me with a bunch of interesting new tabs open.

MTA Subway Weekender - MTA

And finally, something I use every week in NYC. They asked to be shared in their last issue, so if you live in the city, and want to keep track of Subway changes on the weekends, this is an invaluable resource.

📺 WATCH THIS

90s Pickwick Tea Commercials - Yaffle

I love old commercials. I have my own catalog of faves that will never leave my brain. So it's always cool to see what lives in other folks' commercial canon, especially in countries outside the US.

Every Font is Free - Ok so...

Despite the clickbait title, I thought this was a fun little video essay.

🎮 PLAY THIS

Into the Deep Web - Jon Topielski

Free, Browser

Dice-rolly, Pokemon-esque RPG that takes place inside an old computer interface. Found via Weird Fucking Games.

Raddle - The Mystery League

Free, Browser

Daily word game in which you connect one word to another via a series of clues. Except the clues are out of order and unlabeled! So you have to figure out which clue applies to the current word, AND answer it to find the next word. It's fun! Found via What's Next?

CSS Puzzle Box - Blackle Mori

Free, Browser

The OG made its way back to me via Museum of Screens, so I had to include it. Originally posted to Cohost, a social website that let you fuck around with CSS in the post editor.

basilica - mattstark

Free, Browser

Chill for a second and make a lil basilica, why don't cha?

Balatro DS Port - Haynster

Free

Balatro on the DS! Not a browser game, and I haven't tested it out just yet, but seemed like a fun idea! Found via Nintendo Life.

🌐 SOME GOOD WEBSITES

roboshirts

Laura Michet shared this in a link roundup earlier this month, and I have to pass it along. It's a gallery of completely buckwild and busted t-shirt designs generated by an automated system of some kind. Some of the word combinations are very funny. I don't think this is AI, just bad computer generated graphics made for a spammy content farm product design site.

Reality on the Norm

A continuity of adventure games made by a community of adventure game likers in the early 2000s. I love that something like this has been around for so long and is still up. Really cool to watch the games increase in quality and scope as time goes on, from the screenshots alone. Found via Michael Klamerus.

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

I Don’t Need a Computer To Guess at What I Care About

2025-03-24T19:33:00Z

Apparently Apple is releasing an iOS update that turns on a new feature called Priority Notifications, which uses AI to guess which notifications you want to see more than others, and shows you those first.

Why are we doing this? Did anyone ask for this? Just how bad will this "AI" be at guessing what I want to see?

Pointless as it sounds, there are definitely some notifications I would rather see than others, and functionality that filters the signal from the noise could be really useful.

But is training a computer to guess incorrectly 60% of the time the best way to go about it? I kinda don't think so. So do you know what I did? I took 5 entire seconds, and thought up a much better (and cheaper, and easier) way to implement such a feature.

How much less time would it take, and how much more useful would it be, if Apple released a Priority Notifications feature that just let the user tell iOS which notifications they care about most, rather than guessing?

Just let me tick some boxes for which apps I care about most, set some contacts as important, and voila - job done.

Is that too close to existing functionality for just turning off notifications from certain apps? Maybe. Maybe that just highlights how unnecessary this is. Maybe just make the Notifications menu slightly easier to use.

What actually has legs though, is the contacts thing. Not all texts are created equal, for example, and I'd rather see that I have a new text from my mom than 4 political fundraising texts.

So just give me a menu that lets me set some contacts as "important" or "priority" or "family" or whatever, and this problem is solved.

Why must we constantly be inserting new ways for software to guess (always incorrectly) at what I want?

When was the last time a computer recommended something to you and you didn't immediately close whatever piece of UI it was using to do so?

When was the last time one of those prompts wasn't created purely out of the desire to waste more of your time for profit?

How about I tell you what I want to see and you shut the fuck up and show me that, robot?

Sorry if I get repetitive on this point, I'm just going to have to keep yelling about this same issue for a while.

I am begging the tech industry: Stop looking for imaginary nails to hit with your imaginary hammer.

Nobody goes to the movies knowing they want to see an action film, just not which one. Nobody is opening Adobe Acrobat wondering what fun new features they can try out, they just want to view a PDF.

Your software cannot solve life, life is not a problem to be solved or optimized to perfection.

Why don't you stop wasting both of our time and just make a computer that does what I tell it to do.

Why don't you just let me tell you the name of the movie I want to see?

Pocket v. Instapaper

2025-03-23T23:17:00Z

Pocket and Instapaper are both "read it later" apps—that is, services that can save and organize things you're reading on the web. Simply grab the URL, or share whatever you're reading to the service's app on your phone, and it'll be waiting for you when you're ready to read it.

They can save things other than just articles as well, but they're largely used for reading. Pocket even used to straight-up be called "Read It Later."

These aren't the only two services in the game, but they are, for my money, and to my knowledge, the oldest and the best. I heard the word Instapaper being thrown around on podcasts when the iPhone was still new and novel, and I've been using Pocket since 2012, probably because Instapaper only offered an iOS app, and the only device I had to experience the 2010s app boom was an Android-powered Nexus 7.

So as I mentioned, I've been using Pocket for close to 13 years now. I've even been paying for Pocket Premium, which grants access to full-text search of all of your saves, highlighting of articles, and, of greatest interest to me, a permanent library of everything you've saved, meaning even if a website goes down, you'll still have a snapshot of the page you saved—like having your own personal Internet Archive.

Always having been something of a preservationist, and wishing to fight against link rot in any way I can, that permanent library seemed like a great idea. But it is now at the center of the dilemma which I put before you today. You see:

Pocket isn't that good anymore.

When I first downloaded Pocket onto my tablet 13 years ago, it was fantastic. I could save things to read later while at home on WiFi, sync them to my tablet, and read them while I was out and away from the internet.

It had all the functionality of the web version, allowing you to tag, archive, and even bulk-edit stacks of articles at once. It also featured all of the reading options of the web version, such as font and background choice. Everything you'd ever need in a reading app. Job done.

Then, somewhere along the way, they started adding garbage. They started wanting to get into article recommendation (doubtless to keep you in the app longer), and eventually introduced a "Home" page, which is a feed of things you didn't ask to see and ways to find more, and which is of course the default page whenever you open the app, requiring you to tap the "Saves" button at the bottom of the screen to get to the only reason you downloaded this app in the first place.

I want to stop here a second and express my abject confusion at the concept of article recommendation in an app like this. What kind of brain dead idiot downloads a read later app but doesn't know what to read? I know what I'm here for, Pocket, get the fuck out of my way and show it to me.

I haven't even gotten to the worst part yet, which is that a few years ago, Pocket completely overhauled their mobile apps out of nowhere, completely stripping out basic functionality like bulk editing and reading options in the process.

At the time, I feel like they said this was part of some grand project to update the underlying code of the app and bring it up to date or somesuch, but that removed functionality would eventually, gradually return. This was either a lie, or some very poor planning took place at Pocket, because it's been multiple years and nothing—nothing—has changed.

There have also been other, smaller things which have been hard to quantify, like search being generally pretty ass, and occasionally breaking completely on the web, and items in the mobile app jumping around as you're scrolling through your list.

Little things that contribute to the slowly-simmering rage at the abandonment of users that Ed Zitron is always writing about.

Plenty of reasons to leave, and in most other cases, I likely would have by now. However:

What happens to my permanent library?

Remember when I said I'd been using Pocket for 13 years? That's a long old time on the internet. Plenty of time for links to rot, and beloved sites to be bled dry by private equity.

So if I were to leave Pocket for another service, one I'll perhaps get to writing about shortly, what would happen to all the archived web pages and snapshots of articles grabbed from now-dead links over the years? Would that data come with my account export? Or would it be lost to time the second I stopped paying for it?

I've been using Pocket for so long, and saving—I would estimate—thousands of articles in that time, that I don't even know what I would be losing at this point.

Pocket has an export feature that you can use to move your saved articles to another service, and that's great. But it only says that it includes "URLs and titles from your saves, archive, and favorites."

That sounds like my permanent library blows up if I stop paying. Is there no way to save it?

This is one of the major questions keeping me using Pocket for now, and it's one I haven't reached out about or properly looked into just yet, because, frankly, there's another problem:

I got a sweet deal on Pocket Premium.

Back on—I think—Black Friday of 2018, Pocket ran a promotion offering their usually $44.99/year Premium subscription for just $17.98/year.

Per year!!

And unlike other subscription promotions I've taken advantage of over the years (looking at you, Adobe), this one, uh, stuck. I'm still only paying 18 bucks per year for this subscription. I don't know if this was intended, but nobody tell Pocket.

But despite this low price, I still got the wanderin' eye last year because Pocket, like most other software providers these days, seem completely disinterested in improving their product, and hell-bent on ruining it in the name of engagement / growth / what-have-you.

So, to my delight and dismay, now being an iPhone user all those years later, I discovered:

Instapaper is really nice.

They actually have an Android app now, but that's ironically irrelevant to me.

The thing about Instapaper is that it's still just the thing it is. No extra bells and whistles, no discovery feeds, just a clean list of articles you've saved.

There's tagging, there are folders, all the hallmarks that make one of these apps easy to use and organize. And the app is gorgeous. It's so clean. It's just a list of shit you want to read. And it feels really nice. It's smooth where Pocket now feels janky and broken by comparison. The gestures you can use to archive, trash, tag, and move each item are really nice.

You can even bulk-edit items in your list to add multiple articles to a tag at a time, just like on the web! And like you used to be able to do in the Pocket app! Imagine!

There are only so many ways to describe that a thing is nice to use. What can I say, it's everything software used to be a decade ago. I desperately want to switch from Pocket to Instapaper and never look back.

But in addition to the Permanent Library issue, there are two other problems. First:

Instapaper Premium is expensive.

It's $60/year, compared to my ongoing $18/year deal for Pocket Premium.

Maybe not expensive, but not Eighteen Bucks. That kind of upcharge from an admittedly ridiculously low price is hard for me to justify.

But it features all the same goodies that Pocket Premium offers, like full-text search, annotations, and a permanent library of everything you save.

So I'm still stuck between a rock and a hard place with my permanent archive, but there's another issue:

AI bullshit.

You had to know this was coming, right?

In March of last year, the guy who makes Instapaper announced on his blog that he'd be returning to full-time development. I guess he'd been away for a while.

The important part of this post is where he says the following:

I’m looking forward to meeting and exceeding our customers’ expectations, getting my hands back into software full-time, exploring how to improve Instapaper with machine learning, and generally getting back to my roots.

Computer, enhance.

exploring how to improve Instapaper with machine learning

Fucking come on.

So just as I'm getting interested in jumping ship to this clearly superior product, the creator returns from a peaceful hiatus and announces his intent to start fucking around with AI.

Gotta love my luck.

And I mean, I don't expect Pocket to keep its hands clean either. They're owned and run by Mozilla, who've been peddling some sort of "responsible AI" nonsense for a few years.

Last April, Instapaper added "Summaries," a feature that, I guess, summarizes an article you were going to read anyway, and therefore already knew why, and therefore already knew what it was about.

This is honestly a pretty benign feature to introduce, and one that I can easily ignore. It's not like there's a chatbot asking what I want to read with a million annoying popups. But I don't know what is and isn't on the table, and I have no reason to trust this guy won't also be motivated by the same growth mindset bullshit the rest of the tech industry is, and slowly destroy this thing over time. I don't want to give him money to do that.

I just don't know who any of this shit is for besides imaginary losers who want to pretend they have done things! I mean I know the real answer is that it's really only "for" the people making it who want to prove that computer can do a thing. Like yeah, I guess computer can kind of do a thing some of the time. And? What is the utility here? None? Cool, why are you showing it to me?

Anyway.

This is where I'm at. The thing I've been using forever sucks now, but it's full of my stuff, and I don't know if I lose all of that if I leave. And the thing I want to start using is more expensive and adding AI features.

Real rock/hard place type shit.

I wasn't expecting to gain any real clarity by writing this, and I sure haven't. I moreso just wanted to document my dilemma.

I guess the alternative to all of this is to just burn it all down and start over. Just leave Pocket, don't worry about what's lost, and only use Instapaper's free version. A clean break. I probably won't do that, but idk.

$5/month is a hefty price to pay for something I have reservations about, but any price is too high to pay for a thing I've started to actively dislike.

No NY Mask Ban

2025-03-19T13:18:00Z

According to Gothamist, NY governor Kathy Hochul is once again trying to ban wearing masks in public, either because she thinks everyone wearing a mask is a potential criminal, she really doesn't want to think about how Covid continues to kill and disable millions of people, or because she really wants the fascist surveillance state to know exactly who is protesting genocide. Maybe all of the above!

This is an absurd proposal which would be a detriment to public health, push immunocompromised New Yorkers even further out of public life, and make me personally feel less safe when riding the subway.

So I decided to write to the governor using her website's contact form.

Here's what I said. If you're a fellow New Yorker, feel free to copy and send something similar.

Governor Hochul,

I'm a constituent from [NEIGHBORHOOD]. I wanted to write to you to oppose in the strongest possible terms any form of ban on masking in public. As Covid and other public health risks continue to circulate throughout the year, my family and I continue to wear masks to keep ourselves and others safe.

It is disheartening to see an act of public health, personal safety, and regard for my fellow New Yorkers used as a political scapegoat in an attempt to make people "feel" safe. Banning masks on public transit will not decrease crime, it will only increase infection and illness, turn subways and buses into a vector for viral spread, and signal to immunocompromised New Yorkers that they are not welcome on public transit.

I sincerely hope you will reconsider this approach to tackling subway crime by criminalizing public health, and instead consider solutions that treat the root causes of crime, such as mental health support and cost of living.

Thank you,
YOUR NAME

Birfday

2025-03-18T17:40:00Z

Yesterday was my birthday!

I am 32 now!

Had a very nice time going out to Brooklyn Museum on Saturday with Lauren and Mary. I recently decided that it's really nice just to go to a museum and wander around without it mattering how much you see or how long you're there, and NYC's pay-what-you-want pricing at certain museums for locals makes that very easy to justify.

It's nice just to be in a different space around a bunch of art you wouldn't otherwise be exposed to!

We got to see The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, which I'd never heard of or seen before. It's very impressive!

I loved these wild and colorful furniture pieces, especially the fuzzy mango wardrobe. I want to be inside it and never come out.

This is a piece called American Airlines by John Rombola. It reminds me of Jaques Tati's film Playtime in ways I can't fully explain. Maybe it's just the packaging of this Criterion box set?

Hey, that's the image from the top of the post! I love the shape of this radio, and I love its art deco fins. We need to start making more pointlessly ornate shit again.

I love a recreated interior in a museum. I loved this one so much that I didn't take note of whose interior it once was, only that it was the study of their Manhattan apartment. Damn.

On the way out, we found a blind-bag art vending machine that Lauren had seen on Instagram. It's a regular vending machine, but filled with bagged-up art prints instead of snacks. After perusing the displayed usernames, I picked one, and it did the thing that all vending machines always do and got caught on the rings right before dropping. Luckily, Mary also wanted one, so she punched in the same number I had, and both of ours dropped! We took stock of our spoils, and decided to swap becuase we each liked the other's better! This child absolutely stuffing themselves full of rice is the person I most aspire to be.

After the museum, we picked up dinner from my favorite pierogi place (not pictured, devoured too quickly), then cut in to the gorgeous chocolate raspberry birthday cake Lauren baked!

It is somehow even more delicious than it looks.

Then we went to the gift zone. I got:

A ton of film from my parents and my buddy Zac that I can't wait to try shooting...

The Digimon: The Movies blu-ray, also from my folks...

This really nice deck box and a couple packs of card sleeves from Lauren, which I've already started putting to use (both the box and the sleeves are extremely nice and well-made, so I'm happy to share the logo of this person's Etsy shop, which is also nicely embossed into the box itself)...

Aaaaaaaand JAKE (from Adventure Time). It's been a couple of months since I sent Mary the crochet pattern for this guy, so I completely forgot she was making him. He's SO much bigger than I was expecting for some reason, which is extremely good. He's like, actual Jake size.

He's supposed to be a recreation of that one scene from the show where he's sitting listening to a tape and just jamming, and I think the crochet version looks perfect.

On Sunday, we slept in, and I watched the first F1 race of the season. No pictures of that, but it was a blast. Happy for Norris and Albon, bummed for Ferrari. Hoping they get there. This is my Ferrari-Williams year, in terms of who I'm rooting for, so a mixed bag.

And then my actual birthday was pretty much just a Monday, but we had a nice sunset! I also finished some work early and got to spend some time fooling around with old Battlefront 2 (2005) mods.

We watched probably my favorite episode of Adventure Time, Jake the Brick, with dinner, and then I re-watched 2 episodes of Andor Season 1. On the TV, no less! This is rare because I'm usually just at my computer. So this was nice.

Here's a picture of some of the seasonally-appropriate kitchen towels we recently got from Laurens' mom to help break up the post a little more.

All in all, a very nice birthday! I got to do fun things and eat good food with people I like, and got some Things out of it, to boot! What more could you ask for?

I only thought a little bit about getting older and career and money stuff, all of which is nonsense.

It's getting warmer out, and Lauren and I took a sunny walk to a nearby cafe today for drinks and an almond croissant.

Feelin' good, feelin' birfday.

Finally Updated My Photography Page!

2025-03-11T17:30:00Z

!IMPORTANT SITE UPDATE!

I finally took the time to add the rest of my film scans from 2022 & 2023 to my Photography page!

See this beautful shot from Prospect Park, as well as many other shots of equal or lesser beauty from other places!

This means I'm all caught up on scanned film for now. I only shot 2 rolls in 2024, to my knowledge, and they're still sitting on my desk waiting to be developed & scanned.

~~Soon!~~ Eventually!

Nature

2025-03-11T13:20:00Z

Losers: Everything has a natural order that is rigid and defined.

Nature: Wheeeeeeee!

You Should Start a Blog

2025-03-07T15:40:00Z

This is it. This is the year. This is your sign. It's time to start a blog.

Many people are saying this, and now it's my turn.

Social media is not it. It is rotted through to the core. Inscrutable algorithms determine whether the things you share will be seen by the people who explicitly asked to see them, and twist our behavior into a funhouse mirror version of Being Online.

These places make a mockery of what the web used to be and feel like not so long ago. And all in the name of convenience. But being hidden from your friends, being unable to share links, being suppressed for saying words that are unfriendly to advertisers like "sex," "death," and "genocide," and being fed a constant stream of ads and recommended slop aren't terribly convenient.

With my audience, I know I'm probably preaching to the choir, but on the off-chance this breaches containment, I'm here to tell you that you can just leave.

You can start a blog and write whatever you want. It can be as many characters long as you want. It can look how you want. Anybody can read it. And it can be yours.

I think it's time. Blogs are back. Personal websites are back. The web is back. Delete your apps and cast off your chains!

How Do I Blog?

These days, it can be as simple or intricate as you want. Start simple if you're new to the idea, and then if you end up wanting more, just move!

Blogging services make it pretty easy to just export all your posts to someplace else. Another staple of the web, interoperability, that was taken away by social media.

You don't have to learn to code to make a blog! Though honestly, as a non-coder myself, I encourage it. Knowing how easy it is to create the internet is a powerful thing, but that's a topic for another post.

You also don't need to spend money if you don't want to! Lots of blogging platforms have a free option, and if you don't mind your URL being blogname.servicename.com, you don't even need your own domain!

Here are some existing sites and services on which you can make a blog!

The Plug & Play Options

Bear Blog

Barebones and simple as hell to start up! Free options, free themes, and an RSS feed. Sorted.

Wordpress

The classic. It's still around for a reason. Free plans, themes, and RSS taken care of for you. I'm not going to judge you just because the CEO is a weirdo.

Blogger

Still exists! Great if you're going for a certain look, but lacking in features.

Ghost

Pretty and modern, but no free option.

Tumblr

This counts! Tumblr occupies a weird in-between space between social media and blogging, but your Tumblr can have an RSS feed and its own domain, so you can absolutely make a blog on Tumblr.

The DIY Options

11ty

As far as I'm concerned, this is THE option for building your own website these days. Makes a lot of things trivial with templating, but requires the most effort to get up and running. Rewarding, but this is hard mode.
Friend of the blog Renkon has a great tutorial to help get you up and running.

Strawberry Starter

A simple blog template for 11ty. A great way to get started if 11ty itself is too daunting!

Zonelets

A simple, standalone website template that you can host anywhere. Great option for hosting on Neocities or something similar!

Literally just writing some HTML in notepad and putting it on a server somewhere

I mean, sure! That's all the internet is, anyway!

That's a lot of options, so go run wild, explore, and find what works for you!

But starting a blog is just one half of the equation, imo. Without social media, how will you read and be read by others?

RSS

RSS is a free and open protocol that lets people subscribe to your website, and get a post in their feed whenever it goes live! Maybe you remember this, maybe you're too young, but RSS never went away. It's literally the reason podcasts exist and can be listened to "in your podcast player of choice," as so many pod hosts remind us.

The way you follow RSS feeds is with an RSS reader. Google used to make one called Google Reader. It was great and its demise was either the cause of or a symptom of the current hellscape the web became.

There are all kinds of readers, but they all do the same thing: Accept links to websites' RSS feeds, and then show you posts from those feeds as they are updated. You can read in a web browser, on your phone, whatever.

Here are some good RSS readers:

Feedbin (Web, iOS, Android)
$50/year

My reader of choice, and the best imo. It's not free, but it's clean, doesn't try to jam ads or AI features in your face, and even gives you a burner email to use to subscribe to newsletters!

Feedly (Web, iOS, Android)
Free

This used to be my reader of choice because it's free, but they keep pulling wack shit with AI and other garbage no one wants. But it's free!

Inoreader (Web, iOS, Android)
Free

Another solid free option. I think they just started doing some AI bullshit, but check 'em out for yourself. Again, free.

Newsblur (Web, iOS, Android)
Free-ish

Looks like a pretty solid option, but their free version is limited in the number of feeds you can have and the number of stories shown from those feeds, so a paid version is pretty much required. It's only $3 per month though!

Reeder Classic (iOS, Mac)
$5 to own

This is my reader app of choice on my phone. Feedbin plugs right in and syncs everything I've read. Lots of standalone apps work this way, pulling in your feeds from another service. I just prefer the way it works to Feedbin's own app experience. It's very nice.

NetNewsWire (iOS, Mac)
Free

Really nice, totally free reader app for iOS and Mac. Included here because I love the name and I wish I liked it enough to use it over Reeder, but there you are.

Okay. That was a lot of information. But hopefully it's helpful to have a bunch of options to check out in one place like this if you're feeling like spinning up a blog of your own.

And if you are feeling like starting a blog or personal website of your own, remember this:

Do whatever you want

There is literally no pressure to blog a certain way or worry about formatting or what you should post or when. Just look around my site at some of the dumb shit I've posted!

It can be a personal journal, you can review movies, books, or games, you can write recipes. Or it can be all of that! Or none! Just post whatever you might post on social media, but with more room to spread out and add thoughts and feelings and context.

Your website exists for you to do anything and everything with. And if most of the time that's "nothing," fine! It'll be there when you want to interact with it.

It's nice to have a blog. It's nice to have a place that's your own, and that you can do anything you want with. I hope you start one, and follow some other blogs, and have a great time doing so.

Jan/Feb 2025 Photo Dump

2025-03-05T15:00:00Z

I've had this folder of random photos sitting on my desktop for weeks, so let's dump 'em!

Pokemon TCG Pocket

Pokemon TCG Pocket released a new set of packs, and after a few days of trying, I finally managed to pull the absolute boy from a Wonder Pick!

And then the other absolute boy from a regular pack!

And hey that's one thousand jpegs of Pokemon I've collected in this app! That's a big number.

Foodstuffs

Tried this melon soda from a Japanese grocery store we hadn't been to before! It was good! We actually tried two, but this is the only one I took a picture of because I liked the label.

Here's a package of cookies/crackers in a different Japanese grocery store that we didn't buy but thought was very cute.

Alright here it is, sickos. The Coke Oreos. They were heinous. Lauren said they tasted like Pine Sol. I ate a second one and immediately felt ill.

And this is just, like, a really good-looking lime. Lauren cut it open and was like, come check out this really good-looking lime!

Like a month ago, before egg prices went really bonkers, Lauren made a big egg & veggie bake thing for breakfast for us because I mentioned I wanted a savory protein thing for breakfast. But then I kept forgetting to eat it because I was on auto-pilot and just grabbing cereal every morning! So Lauren drew this little guy on the foil covering the dish in the fridge, and gave him our fridge magnet that is shaped like a carton of eggs to draw my eye!

It was very cute and worked like a charm! The egg bake was delicious, too.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon

This game continues to be adorable, and its characterization of Bidoof is no exception.

Updates From the Digital World - I Built a Deck!

2025-03-04T21:45:00Z

It's been over a month since my last Digimon Card Game post, so I figure it's time for an update. I spent most of that time waiting for cards in the mail!

In my previous post, I wrote about being excited about a possible full-time job and allowing myself to jump headfirst into an exciting new hobby. Well, unfortunately that job never materialized, and I spent the first two months of the year feeling like god's favorite punching bag instead. But I picked up some solid freelance work, and allowed myself a moderate leap into the game instead.

After my opening salvo of 4 starter decks and a booster box, I realized I already had way too many cards to house in my Digimon Box (he's more of a historical artifact at this point anyway), and if I was going to keep collecting, I was going to need some new storage.

I showed off some storage in my previous post, but it turned out to be not quite what I was looking for size-wise, and then I found this guy online. Wide enough to stack cards on their side, and with plenty of room for expansion!

I also cut down some index cards to use as dividers, so I could organize my bulk cards by level. Comes in handy when I'm trying to throw together random decks for testing!

I also went out into the world, found a card shop nearby, picked up some sleeves to keep my cards nice and easier to handle, and even talked to an honest-to-goodness human being about the game! Baby steps.

But back to the point at hand: I made my first proper deck! After playing a handful of test rounds against myself, it quickly became clear—and my subsequent dive into DCG YouTube confirmed this—that starter decks are not very good on their own. They're a good way to get up and running with a somewhat cohesive deck that's at least trying to do something, but they're full of filler cards, and you really need to buy two copies of any given deck if you're going to have a chance of making it work consistently.

So I set off in search of a deck that sounded fun and interesting, and that also wouldn't cost me one hundred American dollars. There were a lot of contenders, and lots of rules and synergies to try and internalize, and I still don't have a full grasp on everything that's out there in the current meta.

In the end, I found myself drawn to blue/green Imperialdramon, a deck based around Veemon & Wormmon's DNA Digivolution line from Season Two of the Digimon Adventure anime. I love that season and those characters, and it seemed like a fun and fast deck to play. Plus, I'd already bought a starter deck with some of the cards I'd need to put it together, and the booster box I'd bought was also themed around Season Two, and gave me some cards I could sub in if needed.

I did a lot of research on tcgplayer, and sites like digimoncard.io, digimoncard.dev, and digimoncard.app (sidenote, I think I like .app's presentation the best, but its deck-builder can be a little janky), and also watched a ton of YouTube videos profiling different decks.

I started zero-ing in on a build when I found some interviews with a player called Umblumb, who runs blue/green Imperial on the competitive circuit with great success, and who has a deep understanding of what this deck needs to do to be successful.

So I took all that in, and did what I always do when I need to organize information: I made a spreadsheet. What you see above is a comparison of the build I landed on with Umblumb's deck, a pie chart showing differences and similarities, a list of ordered cards and their status, and a list of possible future acquisitions.

I came to my own personal build pretty much by looking at Umblumb's deck and figuring out what I could substitute for the most expensive cards. As such, my build isn't super optimal against all possible matchups, but I'm still just doing this for fun, so I'm happy to just have something functional.

Before I talk any more about the deck, let's get to the actual profile. I'll post a higher-res photo of everything down here so you don't have to scroll all the way up to see it. And fair warning, a lot of what follows may not make a ton of sense if you don't play or aren't interested in the game. If not, feel free to skip to the bottom for a sense of closure. But if you are interested, here's what's in it, how it works, and what I would change:

Digi-Eggs:

3x BT-12 Demi-Veemon

2x BT-16 Demi-Veemon

Level 3:

4x BT-12 Veemon

4x BT-12 Wormmon

4x Promo Veemon

2x ST-9 Wormmon

Level 4:

4x BT-12 ExVeemon

1x ST-9 ExVeemon

3x BT-12 Stingmon

3x ST-9 Stingmon

1x BT-8 Lighdramon

Level 5:

4x BT-12 Paildramon

3x ST-9 Paildramon

Level 6:

2x ST-9 Imperialdramon: Dragon Mode

2x BT-16 Imperialdramon: Dragon Mode

2x BT-16 Imperialdramon: Fighter Mode Ace

1x BT-8 Imperialdramon: Fighter Mode

Tamers:

4x BT-16 Davis Motomiya & Ken Ichijouji

2x BT-8 Davis Motomiya & Ken Ichijouji

Options:

3x BT-17 Return to the Primogenitor

1x BT-8 Giga Death

So that's my budget blue/green Imperialdramon build. Once I stripped out all of the exorbitantly expensive cards from the more current/competitive builds, I was able to put this together on top of the cards I already had for about $30.

I've tested it out a good number of times against the starter decks and other random trash I was able to throw together from my bulk box, and lemme tell ya: the difference between a starter deck and something more purpose-built like this is night and day. This deck moves. If you start with the right hand, you can have a level 6 out by turn 2.

I've even taken this build for a spin on the DCGO (look it up), won a ton of bot matches, and won my first match against another person!

Now, a little about my choices, and what I would change if I could:

The 3/2 split on Digi-Eggs seemed like a good hedge at first, but having played a bit, I'm thinking of just running 4x BT-12 Demi-Veemon for the draw power. This deck is all about drawing cards, and I don't think I would miss the DP boost from the BT-16 Demi-Veemon. You're not going to see all of your eggs in this deck anyway.

The next substitution I will probably actually spend money on for this deck is to replace my 2x ST-9 Wormmon from the starter deck with a Promo Wormmon that can do some searching, and a BT-16 Green/Purple Wormmon that can Digivolve from the trash. ST-9 Wormmon at least has the End of Turn DNA Digivolution inheritable, but he's not doing anything else for me, and having a little extra search power as well as some protection against bricking if I have level 4s in the trash would be nice. Luckily, those are 2 super cheap cards, so not a huge deal to sub them in. I could maybe see throwing in a ModokiBetamon if you're worried about Mirage, but not strictly required for my purposes.

I'm pretty happy with my level 4s, especially the BT-12 ExVeemon and Stingmon. Being able to pass turn, get a free DNA digivolution at end of turn, then gain a memory off of each of them to keep turn is just so choice. And the ST-9s are nice if I'm bricked on level 3s and need to hard-play one of them to get into Paildramon. If anything, I might play around with adding a Togemogumon to have another blue/green combo for safety, but it doesn't seem crucial.

The next biggest change I would pay money for would be to sub in the BT-16 Paildramon for BT-12s. The source-stripping from the BT-12 is nice, and definitely still a good tech choice depending on the matchup, but the BT-16 just kicks so much ass. Being able to lock down the whole board, unsuspend when attacking, and have Partition to save your level 4s if he gets bounced makes him a whole lotta card. Alas, they're still around 20 bucks a pop, so I'm good for now.

Level 6s are pretty solid. I might try subbing in a BT-12 Fighter Mode for some more board control, but honestly the Ace might be more powerful. The BT-8 Fighter Mode that I'm running is really only in there because my only level 7 is a BT-8 Paladin Mode, and he doesn't really do anything for this deck. I could probably just take out the BT-8 Fighter for another option or tamer, but I also just really like his art, and kind of like the idea of a deck having one special mascot that you just like. Sometimes it's about the vibes. Maybe I just watched too much Yu-Gi-Oh as a kid. If I had the money, and had to take down a Purple Hybrid or something, I would swap in an EX-7 Hexeblaumon, but $35 is way too rich for my blood. I might also consider a BT-17 Paladin Mode Ace at some point.

I wouldn't change anything about my Tamers. The BT-16 Davis/Ken tamer is what makes this deck hum. It lets you play out a Veemon or Wormmon for free at the start of your turn. And if that Vee/Worm is one of your searchers? That's a free search, baby. Being able to claw back memory from a digivolution is extremely nice as well. Having a couple of those guys set up on board can really make things a cake walk. The BT-8 Davis/Ken was one of my budget subs, but I honestly really like having them there. If they're both on board, and I have blue and green Digimon, I gain 4 memory at the start of my turn. Having an extra unsuspend in my back pocket is something I'm still wrapping my head around, but it can also be extremely powerful if you get your order of operations right. I might try swapping those 2 for a pair of the BT-3 Davis for the memory-setting, and the extra search on play. Might be nice.

And finally, Options. Primogenitor lets you Digivolve into a level 5 or higher for 2 cost, essentially, which either means a super cheap, early level 6, or a cheap Digivolution to a Paildramon if you're bricked on level 4s and in a real bind. Giga Death is there as a Security bomb, or if you just really want to get rid of something. If I were to change anything, I might shift some things around to add an Ice Wall or a Memory Boost or Scramble, but the deck is pretty tight as is, and I don't think I would ditch a Primogenitor for any of those.

Skip here if you're bored

And there you have it! That's my first proper Digimon deck! This post was a lot of fun to write, and I'm glad I found an excuse to take a picture of my deck all laid out like in the videos I'm watching on YouTube 😝

And get a load of me talking strategy and meta and shit like I didn't just talk about how none of that ever appealed to me in a card game! I guess I just really, truly needed that game to be Digimon.

I'm still having a great time, even better now that I have a complete deck that I really love playing, and I'm watching and learning as much as I can. I'm really eating this shit up; new hobby well and truly unlocked.

I'm still only playing myself and on the DGCO a bit, but once I'm ready, I really want to try and seek out some locals/casuals in the area. I've done a little bit of searching, and it seems pretty hard to find, even in a city like New York. I'll keep looking. Some community would be nice.

As you may have seen in my spreadsheet, I've got plenty of other decks I'm interested in building, and I think I'm leaning toward a Red Hybrid Susanoomon build next. Watch this space!

Until then, thanks for joining me on my journey to let myself find the things I like and enjoy them. I hope you find something absolutely meaningless that brings you a lot of joy.

My Favorite Soundtrack From a Game That Will (Probably) Never Exist

2025-03-03T23:30:00Z

I was listening to some music at work today when one thing led to another, and I was once again reminded of Cryamore, a game that will probably never be released.

Back in the wild, heady days of 2012, Kickstarter was still emerging as a possible option for indie game funding. Devs were excited about being funded directly by the people who wanted to play their games, backers were excited about helping the games they wanted to play get made, and Kickstarter was excited about skimming a little off the top. The internet was busting down the walls of the establishment in what were then new and exciting ways.

I had just backed Mercenary Kings, a game by the fledgling Tribute Games, and was very excited about the next new indie game I could help make a reality. On January 26, 2013, Cryamore came across my desk, and I reached for my wallet.

It had gorgeous pixel art, a cool-looking world, and critically, previews of some absolutely gorgeous music by aivi & surasshu.

The first track in this playlist, Daybreak at Ghilcrest, is what sold it for me. It has such an impeccable, laid-back vibe, like a perfect day at the beach. And I don't even like the beach! I wanted to be walking around whatever world would be scored by such beautiful sounds. I still do!

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, and as these things sometimes go, Cryamore was not meant to be. It was the first game I backed on Kickstarter that would not be completed, but it would not be the last. I won't get into the whole history of what happened with this game's development, mostly because I don't know the whole story and it isn't mine to tell, but you can read through 12 years of Kickstarter updates if you're interested in trying to glean some of it.

After I started thinking about this game and its soundtrack again, I realized that this was probably my favorite soundtrack from a game that will (probably) never exist. Then I realized that that's a pretty unique category to have an entry for! I'm sure there are tons of unrealized projects that had great music that the devs and composers wish they could share, but this was a project that released demos of its soundtrack, which are still available to the public, despite not being anywhere near complete itself.

It's a weird and interesting situation to back a Kickstarter that fails. I've never been the type to complain about lazy devs or "stolen" money. I gave this project fifteen bucks 12 years ago. Far from a catastrophic loss.

Gamedev seems like hell. Indie gamedev seems like super hell. Kickstarter indie gamedev? I can only imagine. I certainly wouldn't want to put myself through that.

In fact, looking back, I almost feel like if the most I ever get out of this Kickstarter campaign is some bright, colorful art, some lovingly-animated sprites, and these few music tracks, then I already got my money's worth.

Does anyone else out there have a favorite soundtrack, piece of music, or other kind of art from a non-existent game?

When you thikn about it, the word "shotgun" is pretty funny

2025-03-01T13:21:00Z

What other kind of gun would it be?

Billionaire Has My Rent

2025-02-26T16:45:00Z

I made this in After Effects in April of last year, and just remembered that I never posted it anywhere.

I could probably work out some interesting way to give it motion, and maybe I will, but for now I think I'm happy enough with it as a static project.

Feel like this is probably a pretty relatable statement!

Consider This Grape-Nuts Ad

2025-02-25T11:39:00Z

I found this image saved in my phone. I have no idea where I found it. Someone probably shared it on Cohost.

There's so much to consider here. The beefy box of Grape-Nuts holding the man, apparently steadying him. The incredible type setting. The copy itself. The fact that the product's slogan appears to be, "There's a Reason."

It reads like it was written for Orson Welles by an alien.

Mm yes, I love to ingest the food elements Nature has stored up in wheat and barley. And I especially love when they combine, in the blood, with albumen to repair and build up my cells.

Thanks, Grape-Nuts!

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Shot on 3DS

2025-02-24T10:18:00Z

My girlfriend and I went to The Met this past weekend, and I brought my 3DS. I've been seeing more and more posts lately of people using their 3DS as a kind of retro digital camera, and I wanted to get in on the action, so here's what I shot!

A view of the "Arms and Armor" exhibit from the balcony of the "Musical Instruments" exhibit.

Lauren standing next to a LOT of cool old horns.

An incredible view of the sunset through the gigantic windows of the American Wing, which Lauren just happened to glimpse when someone opened the opaque doors of the Musical Instruments exhibit.

The 1st floor of the Charles Engelhard Court (what this room is called), with its many sculptures, and the American Wing Cafe beyond.

A view to the left of the previous shot, featuring a fountain, and some really beautiful (if currently blown out) stained glass windows.

A view to the right, featuring some more sculptures, a cool old lamppost, and (according to the Met website) the Neoclassical facade of the Branch Bank of the United States, originally located on Wall Street.

Here's a better shot of the bank facade, in vertical.

A selfie of me and Lauren! Mask up, folks!

The 3DS camera really struggled to capture the light of these stained glass windows. I futzed with some settings, and tried again...

This is a bit better! I really should have gotten closer and let the 3DS's aperture adjust, but I was a little shy by this point, even though there was another guy with a whole-ass video tape camera recording these.

This was a really fun exercise, and I definitely want to get more bold and try it again!

Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga Was the Perfect Start to My Year

2025-02-23T15:55:00Z

AGDQ always gets me in the mood to play whatever is being shown, and this year was no different. During Tonkotsu's run of Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, I was hit with a wave of DS nostalgia so strong that I had to get up and grab my 3DS before the run was over.

I was a big DS kid, and I'd always wanted to play the Mario & Luigi games from the first time I saw a commercial for Superstar Saga on TV in the early 2000s, but I never got around to actually playing one.

Tonkotsu's run was the final straw. I decided I needed to finally end the drought. But Partners in Time, the game being run, was the second game in the series, and I wanted to start from the beginning. I just happened to already have all of the Mario & Luigi games loaded up on my 3DS in anticipation of this day, so between runs, I booted up Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions, the 2017 remake of the original GBA release.

I was not expecting to fall this madly in love with the game. I expected to have a really good time with a game that many people hold in high regard. But my god, what a joy. From the very start, the characterization of the Bros. is... well, it's just about the most characterization we get of these two anywhere in the Mario canon! It's lovingly done, even when it's making jokes at Luigi's expense. The game does a great job of showing that these Bros. love each other, and are great friends. It really endeared these two to me.

One of the gimmicks that makes this series unique, and works perfectly with the idea of "Mario & Luigi" is having you control both brothers at the same time while walking around the overworld, with the A button making Mario jump or perform an action, and the B button for Luigi. It's a really clever way to design the game around both brothers as a package, while making sure that Mario doesn't steal the show as he so often does. Both Bros. are in the title, both Bros. are on the box, both Bros. are equals in gameplay.

And this splitting of the controls is taken advantage of in some realy clever ways across the duration of Superstar Saga. The Bros. acquire an ever-expanding array of skills throughout their journey that range from practical and classic to downright silly and extremely creative. At one point the Bros. fall down a pipe (as they've been known to do), and you're taught that the way to get back out is to hold A and B a the same time to make Mario & Luigi stand back to back, link arms, and put their feet up on opposite sides of the inside of the pipe, and then press Up to make them walk up out of the pipe. I smiled every single time I had to do this.

As is becoming a pattern with me and RPGs, I wasn't sure I would like the combat and ended up really loving it. Enemies are visible while walking around the overworld, so there are no truly random encounters, and jumping on an enemy rather than simply walking into them allows the brothers to start the encounter with a free attack. Likewise, being hit or touched from behind by an enemy on the overworld will allow the enemy an opportunity to do the same. It's a system that fits well into the world of Mario.

I really thought I would find the interruption of RPG-style battles annoying, but the battle system is a ton of fun. It's so bouncy and enjoyable, and the perfect middle ground between simple and varied. When you're fighting an old enemy from a previous area, and it's a much lower level than you, it's actually fun to stop and get to kill it in one hit. When you're fighting a new enemy that's at your level or above, it's fun to find its weaknesses, and suss out the strategy behind defeating it.

The plot is almost perfunctory to the gameplay outside of directing you to new areas and theaters of engagement, but not in a bad way. It's quick, snappy, goofy, and never self-serious. Likewise for the dialogue, which is extremely fun and well-written, and never overstays its welcome. This game knows how to take advantage of the fact that Mario games are always just, "the princess was kidnapped again," and make it a fun time.

One of my favorite recurring bits (seen above) is when a character called Prince Peasley shows up and tosses his long, blonde hair, which makes the screen go all glittery and bubbly, like he's Sailor goddamn Moon. It's hilarious every time.

Like any RPG worth its salt, the game is cozy as hell, and severely hangout-able. There's plenty of gear to collect, little sidequests to complete, puzzles, mini-games, and other secrets to pick away at. My favorite little side thing has to be visiting the Starbeans Cafe, a little coffee shop in Beanbean Castle Town. The vibes in that place—particularly in the 3DS remake—are so cozy and nice, and Professor E. Gadd from Luigi's Mansion shows up and gives you a special item whenever you brew a new blend of Bean Juice.

I wasn't sure whether to play the original GBA release or the 3DS remake at first, and I'm really glad I chose the remake. The updated art is gorgeous, with certain spaces (like the Starbeans Cafe) containing some really beautiful lighting that lends them an air of calm and coziness, and makes them feel like real, touchable places.

The remastered score is a delight to the ears. If you've read my reviews before, you know that a good soundtrack is very important to me. Some of these tracks are so chill and lovely that I could just sit and be in this world forever. Again, major hangout-ability.

All in all, I spent a breezy 23 hours with Superstar Saga over almost exactly one month. I've also played a little bit of the Bowser's Minions side-game that the remake added, which is a totally different experience to the main game. I don't know if I'll stick with it, though it's fun enough on its own, but I might do just about anything to keep hanging out in this world.

If you're at all curious about Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, I really can't recommend it enough. It's everything people say it is and more. And while I can't personally speak to the original GBA release, I get the feeling that any version of this game you play is going to be a good time. Just pick it up and enjoy!

What Else Is On? February 22nd, 2025

2025-02-22T11:17:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

Almost exactly a month on the dot since my last installment! Lmao I don't know why this is such a fixation for me when this is just for fun, it's just an arbitrary goal I guess.

Got a big old load of links for you this month, let's unload em!

🎵 PUT THIS ON

Found this track by complete happenstance as a sound bite on Instagram, searched up the album, and I love it. Check it out on Bandcamp!

📚 READ THIS

Resistance is not an emotion. - The Pervocracy

I've been searching for a way to articulate my feelings around and against the idea that one needs to be constantly aware of all the bad shit happening and feeling very bad about it or else they're not a good person. I don't know if this gets me there, but it gets me close.

On Existing Ethically - Shel Raphen

A post along the same lines as the above, though not entirely. This is a really great piece of writing from Shel examining the impulse and anxiety to always and only act ethically in a complex, interconnected, thoroughly compromised world.

Some All-Trades Jagoff - bcj

100% agree with this sentiment from bcj about apps that want to put all of your disparate internet things in the same place for easier consumption. Different web things have their own time and place, and shouldn't be shoved into one big feed.

Pluralistic is five - Pluralistic

Really enjoyed this blogaversary post from Cory Doctorow, which features some good words about attention, intention, curating your own experience, and not letting the algorithm drive.

Videogames Shouldn’t Be Work - Rob Rich

I've been meaning to write about No Man's Sky's Expeditions and how hit & miss they've been for me. This piece gets at a little bit of why I think they've felt that way.

A Life with Wii Sports - Quinn Quimby

Sometimes you need to hang out with a friend. Sometimes that friend is a video game.

2024 Year in Review - ribo zone

Holy shit what a beautiful website. You ever stumble upon a site so sick you just have to click around? And man, what a gorgeous way to lay out one of these posts.

Personal Blogs Are Great! - Michael Klamerus

Just a good sentiment from Michael here.

📺 WATCH THIS

MAKE LITTLE GUYS: a (very brief) manifesto - Shing Yin Khor

Little Guys are very important. Found via Shel.

I composed this piece based on the sound I got when I threw a basketball at an electone - Tucker

Says it all right there. I love this shit. Found via bcj

🎮 PLAY THIS

(These are all free games you can play in your browser)

Tower Wizard - Barribob

Fun idle/clicker game about being a wizard pondering your orb. Very pretty!

Dragonsweeper - Daniel Benmergui

This has been making the rounds, but maybe you haven't seen it. It's Minesweeper but as a dungeon-crawly RPG thing. Fun idea!

The Monster Inside Your Pocket - GalaxysWitch

What do Pokemon do while they're hanging out inside those balls? Found via Museum of Screens.

And You'll Miss It - qwook

WELP! This will make you cry, but it's very good! Also found via Museum of Screens

🌐 SOME GOOD WEBSITES

indieblog.page

A bookmarklet that sends you to random posts from personal blogs. Like Stumbleupon for the indieweb!

fruitsticker.de

A collection of 70,000+ fruit sticker designs (as in the little stickers on supermarket fruit) from 100+ countries.

Found via fish.

Everyone's a Syndicate

An embeddable RSS feed you can stick on your website to deliver posts from other sites you like!

Also found via fish.

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

Oh well okay then

2025-02-21T11:21:00Z

No more asteroid updates starting now.

[Source]

I Made a Custom MegaMan Battle Network 2 3DS Theme

2025-02-20T21:55:00Z

I've made no secret of my love for the 3DS, and I've been a vocal advocate of hacking your 3DS to give it new life and make it do cool shit. So it should come as no surprise that I've gone deeper still.

I've been playing my 3DS pretty much exclusively this year. Since returning from holiday travel, I've really only picked up my Switch to remake that one Mario Maker level. I don't really know why! I suppose it's partly because of AGDQ, partly being in a nostalgic mood, and partly that Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga is a damn good game.

I think it also has something to do with the 3DS having so much personality compared to everything else out there in game consoles, and in personal electronics more broadly. I've been thinking a lot lately about the personality, charm, personalization, and just plain fun that has been slowly sanded off of personal electronics over the years in the name of profit-seeking. Windows no longer refers to "My Computer," but "This Computer."

The 3DS is positively overflowing with personality. There are all sorts of bloop-y, cartoony sound effects all over the UI, every app right down to Settings has its own theme music, as well as a shorter stinger that plays upon simply hovering over its icon. There are drawing and messaging apps, the delight of seeing your friends' Miis, and the whole brilliant conceit of StreetPass.

And there are themes. There was once a whole shop brimming with themes that would change the background images, music, sound effects, colors, and all the little nooks and crannies of your 3DS' UI. Themes based around your favorite games, characters, colors, patterns, you name it. Or, well, not quite. There was, of course a limited list of themes. There were tons, for sure, but not infinite. And maybe there wasn't a theme for that one character no one seems to like but you. Or that one underappreciated game that definitely isn't getting a sequel. Or your favorite anime or movie, or fuck it, your dog! Yeah why not your dog!

So people figured out a way to make their own themes. Of course they did. Possibility breeds an imagining of further possibility. And that's the world I tiptoed into over the past few nights.

I get a lot of 3DS-themed posts on my Instagram Discover page, because algorithms are at least very effective at feeding you the same flavor of thing you've clicked on before, and one such post featured a person showing off how customized their 3DS was, including a custom theme.

I don't know how I've avoided the world of custom 3DS themes up to this point, but suffice to say I was intrigued. I looked into it, and it turns out, as with most user-created tools that a handful of people made on their lunch breaks, it's a little fiddly. But it exists, and it works, and that's goddamn wonderful.

The program you need to make your own themes is called Usagi 3DS Theme Editor.

Here's a sort of general knowledgebase of surface-level info about Usagi.

Here's a GBATemp Thread about how to use it.

And here's some extra stuff you'll need to plug in if you want to use custom sounds and music.

The one tutorial I saw a couple different people point to was this one from YouTube user Jurassicplayer, but it's almost 2 hours long.

They also have this tutorial specifically about using custom sounds, which was helpful because the program itself doesn't make it super clear how to do anything, least of all add sounds.

I don't think you really need a 2-hour YouTube video to figure out how to do this, just search around and you'll figure it out.

And it should go without saying, but you'll need to have hacked your 3DS before you can apply a custom theme like this.

Having chosen my subject, and after an hour or so of futzing with Usagi, I was well on my way:

I went with Battle Network 2 because it's the MMBN game I have the strongest connection to, and it has some of my favorite music and key art. I love the map of ACDC Area 1 that I'm using on the touch screen.

Here's a clearer preview image of the theme close up!

The UI colors were picked from screenshots of the game's menu and victory screen UI:

Once you get everything configured properly, the sounds you can customize are:

Moving the cursor
Opening a game
Closing a game
Something to do with a folder? (never quite figured this out)
3 different sounds to play on the different slides of a scrollable background
Background music

After figuring out the right hoops to jump through to make sounds happen, here's a little bit of my new custom theme in action:

Et voila! A few hours of toil, and now not only does my 3DS sound like MegaMan and feel a little more mine than I ever thought possible, but I've also got this knowledge now! And I can make even more themes if I want!

Here's a link to it on Theme Plaza if you're interested!

While I'm dredging up old GBA faves, a Boktai theme would be cool. And definitely a Digimon theme. Maybe with stills from the movie? I could make the background music Less Than Jake if I really wanted. My god, the power.

Anyway, I hope you found this inspiring or at least entertaining. Corporations go to a lot of trouble these days to make us think the things we buy don't belong to us, or that we aren't deserving of that ownership.

It doesn't cost anything but a little effort, and the effort of others working toward the same ends, to prove them wrong.

If You’re Going to Update Me on This Asteroid’s Impact Chances Every Other Goddamn Day, It Better Fucking Hit Us

2025-02-19T14:23:00Z

"It has a 1.2% chance of hitting us, oh now it's 1.7%, hey now it's 2.3%"

OKAY.

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO DO WITH THAT INFORMATION.

I HAVE A LOT OF OTHER THINGS GOING ON RIGHT NOW ACTUALLY SO I KIND OF CAN'T WITH THIS.

"It might hit the earth seven years from now."

GREAT. LET'S GET THERE FIRST, THEN YOU LET ME KNOW, YEAH?

Context in case you missed it.

That is all.

Ranking the 2025 F1 Liveries

2025-02-18T23:50:00Z

Formula 1's ten teams all revealed their liveries for this year at a big, glitzy event in London today instead of one at a time, sporadically throughout the month of February like usual.

I'm not a big fan of F1's recent leanings-in to spectacle and grandiosity, and I certainly didn't watch the thing live, but I don't hate having all ten teams show their cars in one place on one day. Makes it easier to write blogs like this!

Now that the cars are out there, it's time to rank these flying billboards from boring to bitchin'. With a big thank you to racefans.net, from which I am ripping most of these photos. Let's go:

10. Sauber

I hate this fucking car. I hate this stupid fucking green. I hate it a little less than I did last year, but it's still the worst of the bunch.

It looks like it drove through a cloud of flo-vis.

And what is this other Twilight-ass picture? What is that meant to evoke?

I don't want to have to look at this thing long enough to try to pretend to care.

9. Haas

Ok, so at least we're doing something here. My ranking is definitely heavily weighted toward doing something new, but it still has to look good.

I can't fully articulate why I don't like this. It looks like an F1 car from 2005. It looks like an industrial tool catalog. Which is at least fitting! I should probably like it for that!

The big American flag definitely loses it some points, despite being pretty funny. "Yes, we are the American team. Please ignore our Italian engine and French and British drivers. We build as much of our own chassis as is legally required."

8. Red Bull

We're entering the "yeah, sure" section of the list now. Look, the Red Bull livery is a perfectly fine racing car livery. But it's been the same shit for ages. It's dull and boring. The matte navy is now an eyesore to me.

I can't fully know how much of this is because of my feelings about the team itself, but I don't care about this car. I don't even hate it. I feel nothing looking at it.

7. Mercedes

This is last year's car, no? Did they change anything? I don't think they changed anything.

I mean, it's fine. I liked the all-black look a lot more than this black and silver compromise, with its little green toothpaste line squeezed across its length.

It's cool-ish. It's almost there. I just feel like something is holding it back, and I think it's that lump of dull grey they're trying to pass off as silver.

6. Aston Martin

I had this car much lower (that is, higher (that is, worse)) in my ranking at first. It's the same car as last year. I've seen this before and it didn't light my world on fire then.

But it's a damn fine looking car. I like the green. And I like the bright yellow accents.

It's nothing earth-shattering. But it's not hideous. There's just enough there to keep me interested. It's elegant and confident. At least more so than the Mercedes.

5. Williams

I keep flip-flopping this one with Aston because I realized they're still doing the Duracell battery on the air intake. It was cute at first, but now I think I hate it.

It's like somebody pitched an idea that was funny and cute enough for everybody to play ball with it when Duracell first signed on, but now Duracell absolutely will not let it go, and it's become a complete albatross for the design team.

"Oh wow, yeah this is totally fresh and sleek and modern, it's really— Oh right. We have to add that fucking battery again."

Williams needs to place higher in the championship purely so they can get their hands on a little more leverage in these sponsor meetings.

Anyway, it's a very pretty blue, and I think the Duracell battery at least works a little better than the silver/grey air intake of the Aston, so this guy wins.

4. Ferrari

I was going to put Ferrari lower down because from the front, I kinda hate this look. The pops of white and blue and the HP logos didn't work for me last year, and haven't grown on me since.

But from the back? I kinda love to watch this thing leave! That blue stripe on the rear wing with the IBM logo? That sorta does it for me!

I also don't really know how I feel about this shade of red. On one hand, it's sophisticated, on the other, it's tomato paste.

I suspect I'll revisit this list later in the year and regret placing Ferrari so high because they really need to get their shit together with these sponsored color blocks. But I'm a sucker for blue and white.

Really, putting this at number 4 is a testament to the dire state of this crop of liveries. I'm grasping for anything here. Somebody feed me, I'm so hungry. I hope we see some cool one-off liveries this year.

3. McLaren

This is a cool car! I continue to love the papaya color, I like the angular cuts of black across the body, I like this digital-ish font for the driver numbers, and I like that the Google Chrome logos on the wheels are a little more understated this year.

It's bright, it's confident, it's energetic. I like looking at this car. If I could give one note it might be less black, more color! Honestly, the black gives good contrast against the neon. But there could be less.

Also, points for finding such a matchy-matchy sponsor in MasterCard.

2. Alpine

The blue and pink didn't work for me at all last year, but for some reason this kinda hits?

I don't know if it's just the angles or the lighting, or if their designers finally got this mishmash to work, but the shiny, almost iridescent look of the blue, and the way the pink of the BWT logo really shines and strikes a contrast against it looks good to me!

Did Alpine have a matte car or a shiny one last year? I genuinely cannot remember. They should stick with shiny.

1. Racing Bulls

Finally, some good fucking food.

I love an all-white livery. It's bold. The closest we've come to this that I can remember was the one-off Germany 2018 Mercedes heritage livery, and even that was pretty half-assed.

The bold white here really works with the Red Bull red and yellow, the Visa blue, AND the Cash App green. I even like the sports team font for the driver numbers. It's somehow not a huge mess.

Good job, Scuderia Toro Rosso Alpha Tauri VCARB Racing Bulls! This will very likely be the only thing you win this year.

I also almost typed out their new name as "Raching Bulls," and y'know what? Slap a Rachel on those things, and they'd still look better than half the grid.

Streaks

2025-02-17T23:05:00Z

Posting about the new Digimon game coming out, and posting two days in a row, put me in the mood to try daily blogging again (I haven't done that since February/March 2021). I certainly have enough draft ideas in my notes app!

But then work finally came through with a vengeance, my week got extremely busy, and I was working until 9pm on Friday and I'm still exhausted.

Oops!

stg if I'm ever hurting for work, all I need to do is start to feel excited about dedicating time to a personal project, and poof, work shall appear to put a stop to that.

New Digimon Game!

2025-02-13T23:30:00Z

Bandai Namco announced a new Digimon game during Sony's State of Play livestream thing yesterday! Apparently the game's title leaked shortly before that, but I missed all of that, and I guess it was short-lived anyway, because... here it is!

It's called Digimon Story: Time Stranger, the latest entry in the Digimon Story series since Cyber Sleuth/Hacker's Memory. Fun name!

We don't seem to know much else about it apart from the fact that you'll collect and train Digimon and travel between the real and Digital worlds. Which, y'know, yeah.

There's also what little can be gleaned from the trailer that played during the State of Play stream:

The available screenshots look pretty cool! I like the mint green uniforms on the protagonists. And this art style in the key art is pretty sick. Game-wise, this seems like a pretty modest increase in graphical fidelity over previous games, nothing crazy here. Digimon has never really pushed any boundaries in that way.

This announcement is a great reminder that I never finished Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, or played Digimon World: Next Order!

I loved Cyber Sleuth, but it just got so tiresome after a while. There's so much filler. Hopefully this new game will take a different approach, but my hopes are not incredibly high tbh. I haven't played a Digimon game that I really loved as a game—separate from its Digimon identity—in, uh... uh-oh.

Have I ever really loved a Digimon game? Like have I ever wanted to play one of these things outside of the surface-level "hey, Digimon!" factor? I guess I played the heck out of the Digimon World DS games. But maybe that's just because I was a kid.

Well, maybe Time Stranger will finally break through and deliver something truly solid. Or maybe Next Order is really good and I just don't know!

In any case, I look forward to finding out more about this one sometime in 2025!

Only PS5, Xbox, and Steam so far. Hopefully they're just holding back a Switch version until the Switch 2 is fully a thing?

I Made a Mario Maker Level in 2025 if Anyone’s Still Into That

2025-02-12T23:15:00Z

For some reason, I've been getting back into Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS in the last week. Not entirely sure what spurred it on. Some combo of seeing it run on AGDQ a few weeks ago and just wanting to hear the sounds again, maybe.

In any case, I ended up making a level I liked enough that I wanted other people to be able to play it, but the 3DS servers are dead. So I popped into Super Mario Maker 2 on my Switch and remade the whole thing 1:1!

It's called "Dastardly Castle," and I'm quite proud of it.

The Course ID is CD8-7X2-2PG.

I also discovered an old level I made in 2016 that only exists in my 3DS Street Pass profile. I moved 3DS systems in like 2017, and Mario Maker doesn't like that, so it makes you wipe all your old data for some reason. So I don't have an edit-able copy of the level in my Coursebot, but for some reason it's allowed to persist as my Street Pass level?

That one's called "Puzzling Pipes," and if you want to play it you'll have to physically pass me on the street.

Mario Maker is good, and the 3DS still owns.

We Have To

2025-02-05T13:30:00Z

We have to run this building full of computers nonstop to solve made up math equations to generate strings of information that we can pretend are units of a currency which by all reasonable measures does not exist and cannot be exchanged for goods in any store but that some people will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to own on the off chance that it one day does exist or at least is worth more than they paid for it.

We have to.

We have to send people back to work to breathe a life-shortening virus that we still don't fully understand even though we have more than enough means to protect people.

We have to deny people life-saving medical care because they can't afford it.

We have to keep wages low.

We have to keep raising rents.

We have to take most of your money every year so that a billionaire doesn't have to go without.

We have to spend your money on a genocide.

We have to hand the government over to fascists peacefully.

We have to pretend everything is fine.

Our hand has been forced.

There's nothing we can do.

Our options are limited.

This is all set in stone.

Things just happen.

It's always been this way.

We have to.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New 88x31 Button!

2025-01-24T16:40:00Z

Updated a couple of branding things that you'll probably never notice on the website today, but the one big one I wanted to call attention to is the new 88x31 button I made this morning (Along with easily copy-pastable code to put it on your site)!

Here's a slightly larger version so you can see what's going on a little better:

There's also a still version available for those who prefer:

If you're pulling from my hosting, you're already good to go, but if you're hosting the button yourself, feel free to pull this new one and update!

My Favorite Runs From AGDQ 2025

2025-01-23T17:23:00Z

This year, AGDQ was perfectly situated for me, being set during the week immediately after I returned from holiday travel, and before any work would start coming my way. So I had nothing to do all week but sit back and catch as many speedruns as I wanted. It was beautiful.

I think I got to see pretty much everything that I wanted to, despite missing all of Awful Block overnight as usual. And this was a really solid event!

Here are the runs I liked the best, in the order they appeared on stream:

Portal 2 - Single Player No SLA

Fun early run. Big fan of seeing what weird shit folks can do with the Portal games.

Kirby Air Ride - City Trial Any%

Honestly wasn't too checked in to this one, but the game's a vibe. GameCube games just have a look.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker - Any%

Wild purely for the swim speed and hovering. This run keeps getting better every few years.

Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS - SMC Any% No Auto

3DS represent! I have a soft spot for SMM on 3DS, so this was cool to see. "No Auto" just means no autoscroller levels. Keeps things moving along.

Sonic Origins - Sonic & Knuckles - Amy & Tails, NG+

This blog is an Amy Rose respect zone, we love to see Amy Rose here folks.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Any% 2 Players 1 Controller

Any game played this way is absurd, but BOTW? They were so in sync, it simply has to be seen. The Blight fights!

Super Sheffy World 2: The Quest for 5 Shells - Kaizo SMW - 100%

Love me some Kaizo! I don't presonally need a lot of reason to watch a Kaizo run, but if you need something to grab onto, this one has a lot of cool shell tricks.

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster - Ending A NG

Love this stupid game despite never actually playing it myself. Good late night background noise vibe.

Sonic Lost World - Any% Wingless

Never played this game past the first level, but some of it actually looks really cool! And it's more Sonic!

Shadow Generations - Any%

Been keeping away from too much info about this game since I planned on playing it at some point, but I let myself watch the run and holy moly this game is pretty.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii - Any% While Playing Piano

This is less a traditional speedrun and more a showcase of multitasking and mental capacity. The runner is playing the game's BGM on piano with their hands, and playing the game with motion controllers strapped to their head and feet.

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze - Any% Original Mode

This one just had fun dinnertime on-our-way-to-the-million couch vibes. Sometimes the SpikeVegeta just hits, and Donkey Kong is a good time.

Fallout: New Vegas - All "Romances"

A wacky run in which the runner is romancing all possible NPCs. Fun couch that brings a good bit for counting how many NPCs have been romanced.

Superman 64 - Any%

The only Awful Block run I've gone back and watched the VOD of. Specifically notable for the donation incentive to choose the screen size, from 100% down to 20%. You can guess what the people chose.

Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time - Any%

This run gave me such intense DS nostalgia that I was playing Superstar Saga on my 3DS before it was over. And Tonkotsu is the absolute GOAT. Some real dexterity and reaction time being shown off here.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - All Dungeons

Still haven't actually finished this game, but what we saw of the run was a joy. Some really cool tricks and good explanation from the jump! Also the Spirit Temple quest in particular is fun to watch Done Quick.

Block Dude - Any%

Part speedrun, part goof, this is adef at some of his best. For some reason this wasn't part of the schedule, and could only be found on adef's VOD channel 🤷‍♂️. If you used a Ti-83 or Ti-84 graphing calculator back in the day, this will hit.

CHUNITHM LUMINOUS PLUS - Arcade Showcase

Rhythm game showcases are always impressive, but this one had some impeccable commentary from the team as they rotated in and out of gameplay, all the way from Singapore! Contender for the best remote run to date.

Fresh Hops - Kaizo SMW - 100%

More Kaizo! This one featured some faves from the Fatales community, and had good vibes all around.

Nintendo World Championships - Legendary Trial

Four runners race through a gauntlet of NES game slices. Like a video game decathlon. Is that the one where they have to do a bunch of different things? I think so.

PS1 Mystery Vs. Tournament - Tournament Finals

A fun addition to the GDQ roster as of last year. It's weird and a little messy, but if that's your bag, you'll love these PS1 games.

Tetris: The Grand Master - Multi Game Showcase

Watching Tetris played fast is possibly even more entrancing than just playing Tetris.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe - 48 Tracks (DLC), 200cc, No Items

I really love just a good, clean run of Mario Kart. Fun skips, good vibes, tons of tracks.

Kaizo Mario World 3 - 100%

It's more Kaizo!. These levels look particularly ridiculous and the house is packed.

jubeat copious APPEND - Showcase

Another rhythm showcase! This one is really unique. I mean they all are, but still. It's played on a grid of buttons rather than a touch screen or dance pad. And it's run by PangaeaPanga, whom I still think of as a Mario Maker runner!

Pokémon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire - Any% Race

I don't usually recommend hours-long Pokemon/RPG runs, but this one had great vibes. Perfect for throwing on in the background. And with a bonus incentive to go visit some secret lesbians, how could you miss it?

Elden Ring - DLC Lockout Bingo

This might be my run of the marathon. Lockout Bingo is such a fun concept. If you're unfamiliar: Two runners race to achieve various goals in Elden Ring, as laid out on a Bingo card. First one to a Bingo wins. But the Bingo squares are first-come, first-served, meaning you can block your opponent from achieving a Bingo.
Lots of great moments in this one. Action and tension throughout. Great finish.

Crazy Taxi with Live Backing Band - Showcase

Crazy Taxi is not often streamed because it contains copywritten music. One way around that? Have a live band play that music themselves.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - No Logic Randomizer

I'm not a huge OOT-head, but this one had some fun energy. And absolutely everything is randomized, including the music that plays in a given area. Also a fun glitch exhibition after the run!

What Else Is On? January 21st, 2025

2025-01-21T16:35:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

Hello again! I continue to be deathly allergic to posting one of these monthly. I truly meant to write one up for December, and I've been keeping good track of the things I want to share, but the holidays just came and snatched up all my time.

Honestly, maybe a bi-monthly cadence suits me better. Gives me more time to put together a worthwhile list, anyhow. In any case, enjoy these links!

🎵 PUT THIS ON

This is an album of really great jazz guitar. Light and plucky, really pleasant stuff. I found him by chance through one of my favorite artists, Louie Zong, and now I'm passing him on to you.

📚 READ THIS

Ruminating on an Antifascist Games Criticism — No Escape

Kaile Hultner asks what would an antifascist games crit movement would look like, and writes about the need to address the rot in one's own walls.

Don't call it a Substack. — Anil Dash

Don't cede the name of your work to the platform that wants to own it, and fuck Substack.

Dragon Quest Is Always Dragon Quest — Paste

Marc Normandin writes about the timeless magic of Dragon Quest.

"There comes a time when we all declare the war is over": Former PlayStation Studios boss Shawn Layden on the future of video game consoles — Eurogamer

A fun conversation about consoles, peak graphics, the length of modern games, and more. Part 2 of a longer interview.

My Beakman/Bill Nye story — Laura Michet

Hell yeah, Beakman.

Interesting link: check out Drew Struzan's portfolio website — Laura Michet

I know it's weird to link to a thing linking to a thing, but I really want to call out Laura's great "Interesting Link" series for being an endless source of joy and discovery.

Remap Recommends, Volume III — Remap

Including this purely for this quote from Cado:

"My recommendation to you is: give yourself space to return. As a culture, we can favor newness to a fault, but sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is to be retrospective. You can’t always move forward without taking stock of what you’ve left behind, so make sure to give yourself the space to do so when you need it. You never know when something old can still surprise you."

What would someone in the 90s do? — Blueberry Lemonade

💯

The thing about making the world a better place — House of Nettles

And finally, just a little encouragement from Natalie Weizenbaum.

📺 WATCH THIS

Let's Play On Tape — Nicky Flowers

Nicky plays a game captured through their VCR until the tape runs out. This is such a good idea. Love the look and the fast-forwarding-as-editing.

Homemade Shadow the Hedgehog using Soda cans — Minimaus Crafts

Does what it says on the can.

🎮 PLAY THIS

Stimulation Clicker — Neal Agarwal

This has been making the rounds on its own, but it is quite funny and requires only a moment of your time.

Bluejeweled — Brandon Hard

Another free browser game. This is hilarious from the jump. (Found through one of Michael Klamerus' excellent Indie Game Roundups)

keep warm and go — Komitsu

It's a free browser game trifecta! This one is adorable and takes 30 seconds max to click through. Also found via the above roundup.

🌐 ONE GOOD WEBSITE

JSKIDPIX

It's KidPix in your browser!

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

Allowing Myself to Get Into the Digimon Card Game

2025-01-20T21:30:00Z

After getting into Pokemon TCG Pocket and digging through The Digimon Box, I started thinking about the Digimon Card Game again. I've been seeing bits and pieces about it here and there over the past few years, and my interest in it has been growing very slowly.

Bandai rebooted the game in 2020 with all-new designs and rules and everything, and it's still going strong today in its current form, with many new card sets and rules added since. The more I read about it, the more interested I became. There was just one problem: I'm not a card game guy.

I tried with Magic: The Gathering back in college, but it didn't stick. It was too much of a money-suck, and I never fully engaged with it or cared about the "meta" or anything. And I felt a pull to play some Yu-Gi-Oh! again when I caught wind of a new video game version, but that faded after a few weeks.

I just couldn't get past the fact that I never have anyone to play with, you need to keep spending money to keep up with the latest cards, people I seek out to talk to about card games are usually way more into them than me, or really interested in the meta or optimizing deck builds, and frankly, people (especially dudes) who are into card games and hang around card shops tend to be...how to put this...a type of person I don't want to be or associate with.

And it's childish, right? It's so hard not to see a trading card game as just this silly childish thing that weirdos and nerds and actual children like, and that I should be above or grow out of.

There's also the whole gross culture of "grading" cards and locking them in weird prisons because they're worth a lot of money somehow, and buying and opening packs trying to make money on a "hit," and treating expensive cards as an investment that you sit on? That shit is so fucked up and stupid, man. If that's the kind of shit you're into card games for, you might literally be actually evil.

So anyway I wrote off card games. Until I started looking at Digimon again. And I felt a pull.

Then one day I wrote online about my plight (I think on Cohost?), i.e. wanting to get into the game but not having anyone to play with, and all my other issues listed above.

Someone commented suggesting that simply collecting the cards could be its own source of enjoyment. In my head, my gut reaction was something like, "that's so frivolous! What a waste of money!"

Months later, this metamorphosized into, "hey, yeah!"

So, after doing some research on pricing over the holidays, a ton of research about the different sets available on the official website after I got back, and asking my girlfriend multiple times if I was allowed to do this (just like, cosmically), I decided that actually, hey, what if I allowed myself to explore a fun new hobby and have a good time because I'm an adult and I can decide how to spend my money within reason.

I don't know why this was so hard for me.

But I ordered myself some damn cards.

I started with two starter decks, UlforceVeedramon (ST8) and Ultimate Ancient Dragon (ST9), and a booster box of the New Awakening set (BT08).

All of these are a bit older by now (relased in 2021/2022), but I wanted to start with Digimon that I like and care about, and being a little older, these sets are quite cheap now!

I went with a mix of starters and boosters because I knew I wanted both something pre-built that I could start playing with right away, and just a big ol' bunch of cards with which to start a big collection.

The UlforceVeedramon deck is built around, obviously, UlforceVeedramon and the Veedramon Digivolution line, which, you may remember from my post about The Digimon Box, was one of my faves as a kid.

The Ultimate Ancient Dragon deck is built around Imperialdramon, the DNA-digivolved Mega-level Digimon of the protagonists of Season 2 of the anime, and its Digivolution line, including Veemon, Wormmon, etc.

The New Awakening booster set is largely focused around Digimon and characters from Season 2 as well, which I knew would be the most exciting and fun for me to open. As I guessed, starting with Digimon and mechanics I recognize from my favorite season of the show has given me a good baseline to build upon.

Here's a bit of the booster opening experience that I documented as I went:

Some extra promo cards that came outside a booster pack, I think just for buying the whole box, two of which just happened to also be Veedramon-related! A good omen!

Managed to pull the set's Secret Rare Imperialdramon Paladin Mode in my very first draft. I also pulled an Imperialdramon Fighter Mode, which I was also hoping to see!

Since this first opening experience, I've also received the aforementioned starter decks, played a few games with myself, started augmenting those decks with some of my booster cards, and even started thinking up new builds with an online deck builder!

I'm having a ton of fun. I'm so glad I did this. And outside of collecting cards, I think the game itself is a lot of fun and really interesting! It turns out the one thing missing from all the other TCGs I tried to get into was Digimon! I actually give a shit about Digimon!

And of course, it's been really fun to get to see some old friends in their new incarnations:

I was right about the Seaon Two-themed set being the right one to start with for me. It was a lot easier for my brain to key into the rules and get excited about playing while looking at familiar faces.

And getting a big booster box was nice because it felt like Christmas morning getting to open all those packs, and sort of quenched my thirst for opening packs as well. It's nice to have a big old stack to pull from right away. I think I already have more of these cards than all the Digimon cards I ever had as a kid combined!

From here, now that I know I like this, I'm going all in on the accoutrements: a proper deck box, card sleeves to protect the decks I play with, some bigger and better storage than this $2 container I grabbed at Daiso (man, Daiso has so many cheap containers, it rules), and of course, more cards!

Like I said before, I've never been a meta guy when it comes to card games, and I don't see that changing here. I don't see myself getting super into optimizations outside of just wanting to try out different strategies. But for as much as I've played just by myself, and having watched some matches on YouTube, I could honestly see maybe working up to trying my hand at some local or regional events. Eventually. It could be fun!

I'm not going to let myself spend way too much on this, but with a proper new full-time job hopefully (yes, still just hopefully) right around the corner, I'm looking forward to allowing myself to indulge in a new hobby.

Oh! And of course I went back and added to an old tradition:

The Digimon Box

2025-01-17T19:45:00Z

I've been wanting to write this post since I started blogging again in 2020. Something finally knocked it loose.

Playing Pokémon TCG Pocket and reliving the joy of opening packs and building a card collection really got me jonesing to hold some physical cards. I remembered that I still have my meager childhood Pokémon card collection safely stored in a plastic baggy on the bottom shelf of my bookcase, next to my Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, and busted those out to thumb through.

Then I remembered The Digimon Box.

If you couldn't tell from my website, I was a Digimon kid growing up. Sometime around 2001–2002, I started keeping all of my precious Digimon memorabilia in an old shoebox. Well, it was a brand new shoebox then. Season Three of the anime had been out for a bit, and I wanted to style myself after the protagonist, Takato Matsuki, who kept his collection of Digimon cards in a shoebox.

My mom must have taken me shoe shopping at some point, and when we got home, I must have realized that I could turn the branding on the lid, TKS, into a sort of clumsy "TaKato'S" and add the word "Box." And bingo, that's Takato's Box, baby.

There's a label with a UPC on the side, but I can't find a date or anything. The bottom of the box carries a logo for Sears. Ask your parents.

Once I started storing my Digimon stuff in there, that was just where it went, and I've carried this box with me from place to place as carefully as I carry my childhood love for Digimon itself.

Opening this thing is a real trip, and I've been wanting to document everything I've got in here for a while. So let's do it.

On the lid, we have the aforementioned "Takato's Box" titling, and I've cleverly scratched out the words "shoes" and "the kids store," expertly masking the box's origins.

There are also a series of five hand-drawn "stickers" taped around the perimeter of the top of the lid, all of which depict a crude rendering of a graphic seen on Takato's D-Power Digivice in the first episode of the Digimon Tamers anime. I made these to tape over the display of a seemigly rare Pikachu virtual pet that I can now only find in this eBay listing and this Pinterest post. Not even Serebii seems to know about it. Our grandma gave it to us for Christmas one year, when we had already moved on from Pokémon to Digimon. Tragic.

Around the rim of the lid, I've written, "DIGIMON," and "AUTHORIZED DIGIMON PERSONNEL ONLY!!"

On the underside of the lid, I've written, "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE DIGITAL WORLD. PRODIGIOUS!" This is of course in reference to Izzy's catchphrase from the anime.

Peering inside, we can see many layers of neatly organized memorabilia, all Tetris-ed together to fit the confines of this box.

The first relic to remove from the stack is this ancient Finger Board manufactured for the McDonalds Corporation, its plastic yellowed by time.

This has nothing to do with Digimon, but it's a sign of the times for sure. These things were all the rage in the early 2000s. I had an actual brand-name Tech Deck as well, but I have no idea what happened to that.

The first piece of actual Digimon history is this boxed Starter Set for a now-defunct version of the Digimon Collectible Card Game from 2005. It's themed around the Royal Knights, so it contains some faves like Omnimon and Gallantmon. These are the only cards I own from this permutation of the game.

They're from an era that felt like a Digi-desert in terms of Digimon's place in the public consciousness. I remember being out shopping with my mom and seeing these hung up in the card section, and being hit with a wave of some emotion like, "hell yeah, Digimon's still out there." I don't think it was for an occassion of any kind, I think my mom was just nice enough to get them for me. They must have been deeply discounted (not to throw shade at my mom, rather Digimon, and especially the card game, was simply not very popular at this time).

I also had no idea who the Royal Knights were in Digimon lore. That was after my time. But I remember being very excited to learn that one of the Royal Knights was UlforceVeedramon, a Mega Digivolution of Veedramon, who I was a fan of as a little kid flipping through cards and trying to pick my own unique Digimon partner.

Next up, this custom deck box made from cardboard, packing tape, and some sticky velcro, which contains some Power Option cards from the original Digimon Card Game. At the top of the deck is the plastic Blue Card that came with the D-Power Digivice toy from Season Three of the anime, aka Digimon Tamers, as well as a homemade paper and cardboard version I made (in Microsoft Paint, if memory serves) before getting the real thing.

I completely forgot about all the little homemade elements like these that my sister and I made over the years, but I'm really glad I didn't throw the clearly inkjet-printed Blue Card away once I had the genuine article.

That's one layer peeled away! Let's see what's next.

This one's a doozy. This is a medal that my sister made for me (again, printed out from the computer) after one of our Digimon VHS tapes broke and I was able to fix it. We used to tape Digimon off of the TV to watch later, or maybe just for posterity, or maybe we're just mentally ill in a very specific way. Anyway, one summer we were watching one of our tapes back, and the end of the tape broke off from the spool after rewinding. I was able to open the tape up and re-tape the end of the tape (geez VHS, get some new nouns) to the spool so it could be played again.

The "president" that the text of the medal refers to is my sister. She was the president of our Digimon fan club. I was the vice president and—tell me if this surprises you—only other member.

It was a harrowing afternoon, but I was The Guy Who Fixes The Family's Technology from a young age. I was very proud of my abilities.

Next up, we have our first Digivice! And ironically, the last of the three I would receive as a child. We're digging backwards through time in a way here, like a fossil record.

This is the D-Tector digivice toy from Season Four of the anime, aka Digimon Frontier. This was admittedly where my sister and I started to fall off of Digimon. First, because Fox Kids dropped the anime from its lineup after Tamers ended and Fox Kids was ~~killed~~ rebranded to The Fox Box, forcing Frontier to broadcast on the UPN, which aired episodes sporadically and out of order. And second, because Frontier just didn't hit for us the way the previous three seasons had. Maybe the former had something to do with the latter. Who could say!

In any case, this was still an interesting and weird little toy. That little square on the top is a motion sensor that you could use to "scan" D-Codes, like on the show. In reality, the Digimon wiki tells me that this thing detected changes in light and turned that into binary code to determine what outcome to show the player. It was neat!

Oh here we go. My big stack of OG Digimon cards. Most of these come from a starter deck that will make an appearance later, but I opened some booster packs in my day as well! The design of these is so iconic, especially the illustrations and text on the front, but we'll get to that.

I never properly learned how to play the actual game, or at least not well. I never had anyone to play against, and, like I would eventually do with the Royal Knights starter deck several years later, I recall trying to play practice games against an imaginary opponent to try to see what it might feel like to play. That's maybe a little sad! I didn't mean for this post to be sad!

Regardless, I was never very good at getting into card games in a competitive way, and I was mostly content to collect and admire them as little pieces of Digimon art that I could hold and flip through.

Speaking of the front of the cards, here are some faves! I'm featuring Cantarumon here because he was one of the cards that was exclusive to Taco Bell, and I think that's funny. No idea how I ended up with him, we never ate at Taco Bell. I also have the Taco Bell Andromon!

Also featuring SaberLeomon and MetalEtemon because they're cool shiny Mega-level Digimon. And Jagamon because he's made of potatoes and all his attacks are potato-based, and I think that's great.

God, I adore the look of these original cards.

And here's where I got most of my cards in this series! Thank god I was so insistent about saving packaging as a kid, or I'd have nothing to post. I even still have the score wheels! Also, that's not a cool design at the top of the front of the box, that's just a super old and dried out rubber band that is now permanently fused in place.

I have no memory of where I got this set. Probably a Christmas or birthday thing?

I never did step up and enter the Duel Zone, but I cherished these cards, and always dreamed about doing just that. Just like the kids in this commercial:

These 15 seconds of broadcast television are burned into my brain. Except in my head, I always correct them to "I'm Champion, I'm Ultimate, I'm Mega," etc. I didn't remember them getting that wrong. It also, like any good toy/game commercial from the 90s, gave you absolutely nothing resembling a clear idea of how to actually play. It's all about vibes.

We've peeled away another layer now! Still plenty more memories to uncover.

Here we have the D-Power Digivice, the pair to the Blue Card seen earlier! This one featured a card-swiping mechanic to match the Tamers anime, and was also the first and only of the first four digivices to be able to connect to a computer!

It connected to a cable via a 3.5mm jack, and then connected to a computer via something us ancients called a "serial port." The Digivice came with a CD-ROM in the box, containing one of the jankiest games I have ever gotten my hands on. I think the idea was that you would transfer your Digimon and map progress over to the PC game, and then play some kind of fighting game to help train your Digimon?

I still have the CD around here somewhere, one sec...

Some of the time, it even worked!

It also had a wild, busted soundtrack that I still get pieces of in my head from time to time:

Yes, single tracks had multiple pieces of music fading into each other like that. I don't know what was up there. I'm so curious about the story of this thing's development.

The start of track 3 of this playlist, the one titled "1101," and the one right after it, are the ones I heard most often while playing, and the ones I still get in my head.

Moving on...

Here we have my attempt at constructing a proper deck! I don't know if it was any good, but it was mine. And yes, my deck box is an elementary school photo holder.

Let's talk about some faves:

Veemon and ExVeemon here are the only two cards I have from this updated set released in 2000. I'm pretty sure I got them from my cousin Kevin, who may or may not have been into the card game at the time, we certainly never played. I was probably still just slightly too young to be able to grok any of it.

I really like these updated card designs! I think the back looks cool while staying true to its roots, and these early 3D models are extremely 2000. I bet they were really proud of these. And they should be, man, I think they rule.

Back to the '99 design, and showing my love for Veedramon again (it'll come full circle at the end). This was the best I had to work with in terms of a digivolution line for Veedramon at the time, and I think I did pretty good!

The holographic AeroVeedramon was a prized possession.

The absolute boy. Of course.

And a complete digivolution line for Tentomon, all first editions from the Starter Set.

Does it bug (heh) me that HerculesKabuterimon is facing the opposite way from the rest of them, and that the "1st Edition" stamp is on the other side? A little, now that I've looked at it a lot!

The final incarnation of the card game represented in this box is the D-Tector card game! From what I can remember, it was a simplified sort of rock-paper-scissors game, which seems pretty ass.

It came out around the same time as the D-Tector digivice toy, and each of those codes at the top of the cards could be used to unlock that Digimon or some other effect on your D-Tector. Which is some kinda neat synergy I guess.

It featured more Digimon from Seasons Three and Four, Tamers and Frontier, as evidenced by the Beelzemon, Cyberdramon, and Justimon cards above.

That's another layer down! We're almost at the bottom. Only the most ancient and arcane relics remain...

Let's deal with this stack of cardboard and papers next.

First up, we have these handmade membership cards for my sister's and my Digimon fan club. My sister always made these herself (you can tell by the legible handwriting), so props to her! The pictures are pasted-on tracing paper, and the characters and partners on the backs are cut out from toy packages.

I of course always wanted to be the main protagonist boy, and she was usually one of the girls, except for Season Two when I'm reasonably sure she was Ken. The Club/Organization listed, D.S.F., was our fan club, the Digimon Society of Fans.

Also none of these phone numbers or email addresses are mine anymore, so go to town.

Character cards for the original Digidestined and their Digimon, some holographic cards of MetalGreymon and WereGarurumon that I always thought might be stickers and still can't really tell, and some tip cards and an index from the card game Starter Set.

This is pretty cool, it's a slide of a frame from Digimon: The Movie. This is Poromon flailing around in the water after one of Hawkmon's armor forms (maybe Halsemon?) gets got by Kerpymon and de-digivolves during the final battle at the end of the stapled-on Zero Two storyline.

No idea where I got it! Maybe a promo pack from seeing the movie? I know I have some cards that they gave out in theaters, so it's possible! Otherwise, maybe a magazine?

Here are some random cards from Men in Black and Galidor, respectively. Why are these in here? Just some other shows that were on at the same time, I suppose. I cannot bring myself to remove them now.

Man, Galidor was wild. The frog-looking guy's name was Euripides. Main dude's last name was fucking Bluetooth.

Anyway!

Up next, we have all the manuals from my digivices. The D-3 was always my favorite. Definitely the one I got the most into. I had Mega-level Digimon and beat the campaign on that one. I have fond memories of poring over that little paper manual.

Speaking of, I'm pretty sure I used to keep my D-3 in this box as well, but it became a desk item at some point. It's there right now, next to a Crest of Courage my sister got me:

And my D-Terminal became a fixture on my bookshelf.

Next, we have some Digimon Card Game booster pack wrappers, the oldest among them looking quite the worse for wear, despite living in a box under my bed, far removed from the rays of the sun. As well as some D-Tector card game rule sheets/play mats.

Ah, and at the bottom of the pile: the good shit.

This is my handmade "DemiVeedramon" card that I made when I was 6 or 7. It was my stab at creating a bespoke Rookie form for the aforementioned Veedramon, using the same naming convention as DemiVeemon/Veemon. I think I did a pretty good job with the design for a first grader!

I also really like the name Rainbow Cannon for an attack. 820 attack power probably seems pretty high for a Rookie, as that's almost double the highest attack power of his supposed Digivolved form, but seeing as he's my Digimon and I like him, it seems only fair.

These are very special. Any Digi-head worth their salt will recognize these bad boys as the Digimon Emperor's Dark Glasses. Season Two of the anime, Adventure Zero Two, was and probably still is the most important era of Digimon to me and my sister. It came at the right time, it was the first season we watched from start to finish in real time, and it just hit the hardest for us.

I don't remember if my sister made these or if I did, or what we specifically made them for. Probably just running around the house playing Digimon, as was our wont.

They look damn good! I'm pretty sure the lenses are made from the blue half of two separate pairs of 3D glasses. Clever!

That's just about it now! Just a few more things.

This is, of course, my Wile E. Coyote journal from when I was in Kindergarten. What does this have to do with Digimon, you ask? Literally nothing at all! I have a sneaking suspicion I put it in here because its hard cover made a good solid foundation for everything else.

It's locked for good reason, but let's take a peek inside...

Riveting. The computer game I'm referring to in the first entry is an old DOS game called The Treehouse, which you can check out on the Internet Archive at the link above.

What did I see on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood that made me stop writing?

Now to lock this shit back up because apparently I revisited this journal at the age of 13, and I'll be long dead before I let anybody read those pages.

I thought that was the end of the line, but under this bed of Post-It Notes, we have some Digimon sticker sheets, and...

A reeeeeally worn down Digimon pencil, and a super folded-up poster...

...which was actually two posters! Possibly also from the card game Starter Set, or some other toy.

And that's it!

I'm glad I finally took the time to go through all of this, document it photographically, and write down my thoughts and memories. Only took me five freakin' years!

Everything in this box is a cherished possession, a piece of one of the best parts of my childhood. I'll carry it with me as long as I live.

I can't believe this is the first and only post in my Digimon tag! I'll have to do something about that going forward.

Thanks for strolling down memory lane with me. Digimon is important to me in ways I don't know that I'll ever be able to fully explain. But I think sharing something like this might get close.

Started Playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky

2025-01-15T14:13:00Z

I would give my life for them.

Started Playing Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga

2025-01-13T22:49:00Z

Specifically, the 3DS remake.

So far I'm enjoying the writing very much.

Also the nonsense Italian M&L speak whenever they have dialogue.

New Year, New Techo

2025-01-13T19:40:00Z

As it has for the last five years, a new year means a new Hobonichi Techo planner for me. I think this is the first time I've been genuinely sad to say goodbye to a planner because I really loved this Mother 2/Earthbound cover so much. But I had the great idea to pair the new "Water Candle" colorway with this Sonic sticker my sister gave me ages ago that I never used for anything, and that's great too.

I went with an Original type in Japanese this year. I'm continually buying Japanese Techos in a vain attempt to force myself to practice Japanese. So far I'm really liking the Original for its built-in checklists at the top of each day, and its subtly divided pages.

Last year, as with most years, I stopped writing around April, and returned only sporadically after that, but I came back in full force for almost the entire month of December, and I've so far carried that forward every day up to this point.

Anyhow, I love these things! They're a fun way to keep track of the year. I've been meaning to post about mine since seeing this Quailblog post about getting a new Techo back in December, and I've since seen at least two other people I follow posting screenshots of theirs!

Good Techos to you all!

2025

2025-01-13T17:09:00Z

I had really hoped not to repeat the start of last year with a week or more of illness, but alas, my girlfriend once again brought something back from her holiday travels despite being extra careful, because everyone else has given up! Luckily, it doesn't seem to have been Covid, so we just had some annoying cold symptoms for a week.

It's almost laughable to me how off-the-rails last year went compared to how I thought things were going to go in December of 2023. I had a ton of really solid freelance work lined up right off the bat, and I was ready to make some financial decisions based on that.

Unfortunately, my tax bill wiped out my savings, the person who had been sending me my best freelance jobs went full-time, I faced my longest non-working period maybe since 2020, and the work that I did have took so long to pay out that it nullified any gains it might have made for me.

Then, when things were finally looking up and I landed a full-time job (albeit one without any benefits), they turned out to have overextended for the amount of work they had coming in, and had to lay off the bulk of their team, myself included, just two months after hiring me.

So looking back, my stance on lot of these goals is "how would I have ever done that, I was in survival mode all year."

As we head into the new year, I'm very pleased to say that I should be starting a much better full-time job very soon (expecting final approval of the offer any day now), but I remain wary and ready for the bottom to fall out at a moment's notice.

Will Mike finally be able to live his goddamn life without worrying about making rent 24/7??? Let's hold our breath and see!

And now, the recap:

In 2024, I wanted to...

Watch more movies ❌

Lmao. Watching movies is something I do not make time for anymore, and that being the case, starting to make time for it again is something that requires practice. I did not! There are a lot of reasons for this, from being too depressed, to putting my time into other hobbies, but I set the goal and simply did not follow through.

Work on our apartment (new furniture) ❌

This one is not my fault. I was all set to start looking at a new couch and maybe some other shelves and things for my girlfriend's studio and elsewhere in the apartment, but then all of a sudden I did not have any money, and the income I thought would go to savings and bettering my life went instead to staying alive and the ever-present What If The Next Two Months Don't Go So Good fund.

Enjoy the moment more ✅

It's hard for me to quantify if I accomplished this, but I'm giving myself a win here, because I definitely, consciously felt some personal growth in this area last year. Taking things in stride a little more, enjoying what I've got, not being so quick to anger, putting things in perspective, and taking to heart the idea that "life is not a series of waiting for things to be over." I genuinely think I'm doing better here.

Practice Japanese ❌

I didn't do it! Nothing more to say. I did not make the time and I am bad.

Work on imposter syndrome ✅

Major change in this department in 2024. I had to take on a little more responsibility in some areas, had to advocate for myself more, and just generally push myself (or got pushed) into areas where I had to believe in myself or perish. I put a lot of genuine work into my mental state, and also into other concrete tools like my portfolio, interview prep, and development of skills that went a long way toward boosting my confidence on their own.

Write more, smaller blogs ✅

CHECK.

Create art ✅

DOUBLE CHECK. I had a lot of fun working on silly little projects in After Effects, which was part cause/part effect of my push into motion design last year. Shoutout to Cohost for being a good place where people actually engaged with my art, which made me actually feel like posting and working on more.

Make friends/community ✅

Another shoutout to Cohost here. Partial credit I suppose, since I don't know that I'm more than acquaintances with anyone I met there, but it's something. As far as community, the death of Cohost/resulting blog explosion definitely put me in touch with a lot of like-minded people. I now have more people I feel like I can reach out to about things, and who have reached out to me, and we comment on each other's blogs! That all counts in my book.

Transfer family video tapes ❌

Good god, I've done nothing with these for years and if they rot in my possession I will never forgive myself.

Refresh my office space ❌

Like, kinda? I got a desk mat last Christmas, and that has felt very transformative on its own tbh. And I finally got a new mouse this Christmas, but that's about it. When I first conceived of this resolution, I feel like the spirit of it was more about rearranging furniture and such. So no, I did nothing like that.

2024 results: ❌❌✅❌✅✅✅✅❌❌

A dead heat between success and failure. I think that's pretty solid, especially considering the appalling conditions under which any of us have to do anything at all!

Despite the crushing blows of last year, I'm looking toward the new year with optimism (for my own personal life anyway hahahaha ohhhhh boy). Here's my list.

In 2025, I want to...

Digitize family VHS tapes for real this time

If I don't digitize at least one tape this year, I will have to write 1,000 words on why Sonic the Hedgehog is bad and stupid.

Watch more movies

I have so many blu-rays just waiting for me to play slightly fewer video games or something.

Get some new/better furniture

I will make better money this year, and I will be able to afford a new couch.

Practice Japanese

I have a lifetime subscription to WaniKani and zero excuses.

Exercise

I am at a crucial junction where if I don't move my body, things are going to start to get bad.

Take more photos/Get back into film

Hopefully making more money will allow this to happen!

Try new hobbies

I want to try exploring and figuring out more things that I like to do and allowing myself to do them. This is weirdly hard for me! But I'm already starting by getting into the Digimon Card Game!

Alright, that's all for now! I'll see you back here in a year to let you know how it all went!

Every Video Game I Played in 2024

2025-01-08T16:58:00Z

Every year, I make note of every game that I play, both in my Hobonichi Techo and on Backloggd. I just like it! I like being able to look back and remember what I was playing at a given time, or when I started or finished a given game. I don’t really do anything special with this information, apart from occasionally reviewing things on Backloggd, I just like having it.

In last year's post, I resolved to let myself relax the criteria under which I am allowed to record a game to this list. I have no memory of writing this, so I'm pretty sure I just went ahead and did this. I don't remember doing anything special this year.

In any case, here's everything I played this year!

Games I finished in 2024 are bolded.
Games I have played previously (i.e. replays) are italicized.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder
Spelunky 2
Patrick's Parabox
Tactics Ogre: Reborn
Risk of Rain Returns
Picross 3D: Round 2
Terraria
Minecraft
Nancy Drew: Tomb of the Lost Queen
Moon
30XX
Super Mario Sunshine
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Lethal Company
Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon
Kirby's Dream Course (SFC)
Doom (Switch)
Eastward: Octopia
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Alan Wake Remastered
Alan Wake's American Nightmare
Backyard Football
Control: AWE
Alan Wake 2
Balatro
Dragon Quest XI S
Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection
Motion Rec
Inscryption (Switch)
SimCity 3000 Unlimited
Quadrilateral Cowboy
SteamWorld Heist
Atom Zombie Smasher
Gravity Bone
Cryptmaster (Demo)
Children of the Sun
Pools
Greener Grass Awaits
Follow the Meaning (Demo)
Hauntii (Demo)
Angeline Era (Demo)
Genesis Noir
Hades II
The Mermaid Mask (Demo)
Animal Well
Dreamcore 95
Axiom Verge
Fez
Pyre
Cyberpunk 2077
Civilization V
Dorfromantik
Civilization VI (Switch)
OlliOlli
LXD Red Honey
Team Fortress 2
Chibi-Robo! Park Patrol
Katamari Damacy Reroll
Diddy Kong Racing DS
Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Evil Zone
Deep Rock Galactic
Noita
Master Key
Mario Kart DS
Pepper Grinder
No Man's Sky
Before the Green Moon
Toree's Panic Pack
Vividlope
Zachtronics Solitaire Collection
Deus Ex
Castaway
MegaMan Battle Network 4: Red Sun
Deus Ex 2
System Shock 2
Duskers
Star Trucker
Telling Lies
Fragrant Story
UFO 50
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
Star Wars: Empire at War/Forces of Corruption
Tinker
Pokemon TCG Pocket
Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics
Nancy Drew: The Captive Curse
ACA NeoGeo Big Tournament Golf
Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek
Nancy Drew: Treasure in a Royal Tower
Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water's Edge
Halo: CE
Halo 2
Stardew Valley
SteamWorld Heist 2
SteamWorld Dig (Switch)
Sanctum
The Swindle
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 (Switch)
Portal (Switch)

That's my list!

21 games completed

51 games replayed or continued from a previous year.

5 demos (I included demos this time).

49 games played fresh for the first time.

Til next year,

- Mike

Mike's 2024 Games of the Year

2025-01-06T17:00:00Z

Hello hello! Time once again to engage in the longest-running feature on this blog, my yearly Top Ten GOTY list!

I had a tougher financial time this year, so I wasn't able to be as fast and loose with buying video games as I would like, but I was still able to grab most of my most anticipated titles, and a few others that my Infallible Gamer Sense told me would be heavy hitters. This was a really solid year of games.

Without further ado, I give you...

MIKE'S FAVORITE GAMES OF 2024

10. SteamWorld Heist 2

The first Heist made it halfway up last year's list, and the only reason this one is sitting at number 10 is because I started it pretty recently, and haven't fully formed my thoughts about it just yet.

So far I really like it! It's a lot more of what I loved about the first game, with plenty of that SteamWorld charm, along with some fun and interesting additions like skill trees, multi-classing, and real-time submarine combat!

All of that has been great, and the bullet-bouncing tactical gameplay we're all here for feels exactly as satisfying as the previous outing. Thunderful have made something really cool here, that has so far lived up to the high regard in which I hold SteamWorld Heist.

I just wish the team itself had fared better, but alas, nothing is well in the games industry.

9. Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection

The classic Battlefront games are some of my all-time faves, and being released right around my birthday, this collection was laser-targeted at me. The original games aren't exactly inaccessible, but the prospect of playing them on Switch was too tantalizing to pass up.

It's pretty barebones as far as a collection of classic games goes, but honestly, all I needed this thing to do was put functional and reliable versions of these games in the palm of my hand.

At launch, there were quite a few bugs, though none that I experienced were all that intrusive, and tons of them were squashed very quickly afterwards. Kudos to the team at Aspyr for the turnaround on those.

This thing does exactly what it says on the tin, and exactly what I needed it to do, which is why it makes the list, but not very highly. Battlefront, for me is an in-and-out, quick-hit series of games. So while they'll never really exit my rotation, they won't stick around for very long stints, especially with no unique or exclusive goodies in this collection.

Still, it was very exciting to see this released, and I got to spend a good chunk of my year re-living some precious memories both on the big screen, and while comfy in bed. I will be playing these games forever.

8. UFO 50

We move now from one collection to another, but this time all the old games being collected are brand new. I wasn't super aware of UFO 50 too long before release, but it made an incredible impression when it arrived at my doorstep.

It's been super hard for me to pin down just how I feel about this game, mostly because I keep forgetting it exists. It's only available on PC, and I haven't been in a mood to sit at my PC for fun times as of late. If this game was on Switch, I probably would've gotten way deeper into it by now. It's just how I prefer to play most games!

But what I have played so far has been pretty sensational. UFO 50 offers an intriguing conceit on two fronts: fictionally, it presents a collection of 50 games from the history of a console that never existed. Non-fictionally, it presents a collection of 50 games from Derek Yu, creator of Spelunky, and his gamedev friends. Either way, my interest is plenty piqued.

I've played a little over half of the games in the collection so far (and written about two fifths), and I get the sense there's a bit more going on under the hood besides. That bit more has been some of the reason behind my mixed feelings for UFO 50. I really enjoy playing each of the games in their own right, and I love their presentation, but the prospect of picking apart potential secrets in each game, and potentially some overarching secrets in the collection as a whole puts a bit of a damper on the part I enjoy, and that I feel is enough on its own: just playing the games.

But I could be way off base! And besides, whether that ends up being the case or not, it doesn't change the fact that this is a really cool thing to play through, and I'm having a great time doing so. And to really frost this cake, it features possibly my favorite soundtrack of the year.

7. Alan Wake 2

This game was cool-looking enough, and generated enough hype last year through its Game Awards dance performance alone (only half-joking), that my girlfriend and I spent the beginning of the year playing through the rest of the series, and some DLC for sister-series Control, for the first time, just so we would be caught up enough to fully appreciate it.

Picking apart its component parts, I'm a little up and down on Alan Wake 2, but taken as a whole I love it and think it's really special. Looking back, I think what really made this game great for me was playing together with my girlfriend.

Having played a decent chunk of their games now, including their two most recent, I think I can pretty confidently say that I don't love Remedy's combat. It's consistently been a weak point for me in every Alan Wake game and Control. It feels like you're simultaneously moving through molasses and also on amphetamines. I don't know, it's the part where I turn off and wait for the rest of the game to show up.

Where Remedy games really shine, I think, is in their storytelling. The story, dialogue, characterization, cutscenes, and overall cinematic flare really do it for me. Which is good news, because it seems like this is the side of things Remedy is really leaning into.

Moving lights around with the Clicker to warp reality and uncover new clues and story bits never got old. And the Mind Place / Writer's Room stuff was, as someone who loves organizing information, very enjoyable, and really aesthetically pleasing.

Ultimately, I can forgive the combat for delivering the rest of this absolute gem to me, and while we still haven't finished our Final Draft replay or played any of the DLC, that's mostly down to my girlfriend and I not making the time or being in the same headspace to do any of that together just yet. We'll be back.

My rule of thumb for considering games for this list is if A) I consider a game to have been its own "era" of my year, and/or B) my lizard brain goes "fuck yeah" when I think back on my time with it. Alan Wake 2 easily clears both hurdles.

6. Pepper Grinder

Billed to me as "if Nintendo had never stopped making Game Boy Advance games," Pepper Grinder actually ended up striking me as a sort of spiritual successor or next-of-kin of some kind to Donkey Kong Country. And I love me some DKC.

Pepper Grinder was one of those games that I couldn't put down once I started playing it, and if the world made me put it down, then I couldn't stop thinking about it. I absolutely had to 100% this game. I drank it all down and gulped hard. I actually considered speedrunning this game at one point. It had me by the throat.

I adore the game's chunky GBA-ish art style, the punchy sound effects, and the handling of the platforming (and drilling) was tuned to near-perfection. My only complaint upon completing Pepper Grinder was that there wasn't any more Pepper Grinder to play, but honestly it was the perfect length to avoid overstaying its welcome.

And my only actual complaint is that I never remembered to type "game" after the title when searching for an image to use on my blog, which, well...

5. Civilization VI

This one really came out of nowhere. It's kind of a long story, and I wrote about it not too long ago, but a chance encounter with some autumnal hand soap and a summer eShop sale gave me some kind of Civ Madness(?), and I decided to roll the dice one more time on a game I'd previously written off.

I don't know, but this time, playing the game on Switch, and not playing with like six years of DLC turned on all at once, I finally had a good time with Civ 6. Such a good time, in fact, that it ate my entire summer and became my most played game on Switch all year, a fact that still surprises me.

I'll always have a lot of love and nostalgia for Civ 5, but now I know that I can love other Civs. I'm also shocked and impressed that a game like Civ can work so well on a handheld, and I'm more excited than ever to play Civ 7 (in approximately 2033, judging by my cadence).

4. Vividlope

I wrote about Vividlope back in August, and called it "like if Q-Bert was Super Monkey Ball." I still think that sounds right. I said pretty much everything I wanted to say about the game in that post back in August, so I'll just heap a little more praise on it here.

Looking back, what impresses me most about Vividlope is just how complex it really is, without ever requiring that you think about that complexity. The moment to moment gameplay remains pretty consistently simple across its many levels, but I had to spill _so much _ ink to fully explain how much is going on in this game at any given time.

You don't ever feel any of that! It's all flow, baby! It's so different yet so intuitive. I absolutely adore this game. Bangin' tunes, too. It's a complete package.

3. Tactics Ogre: Reborn

This is the only game in my top five that I haven't written about previously. It's also the only game I played all year long from literally January 1st onwards. I took some months-long breaks in there, but I kept coming back, and became fully re-engrossed each time I did.

I got Tactics Ogre: Reborn last Christmas, after Cado's Final Fantasy Tactics streams on Remap gave me the bug for This Sort Of Thing. I instantly knew it was exactly what I was looking for when the title of the first chapter appeared on-screen: "There is blood on my hands, how long till it lies on my heart?"

Fuck yes, dude, give me that long-winded JRPG bullshit and pump it directly into my veins.

I never played the original, but Reborn seems to be a great remaster. The only thing I'm not a huge fan of is that Square Enix has applied some sort of smoothing filter to the original pixel-art sprites, but it's honestly not too bad and doesn't distract from the whole.

Everything else is a joy to behold. The character portraits are gorgeous, the music is beautifully arranged, the pace of story beats is luxurious, and I just love a good tactics RPG. I don't think I've gotten really deep into one of these since Luminous Arc on the DS (shoutouts), and I'm having a blast.

2. Balatro

Balatro really showed up in February and stole the whole entire show right away. I wasn't sure about it at first, because the words "roguelike deckbuilder" make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, but I'm glad I pushed through.

Writing about the game in March, I called it "A Deckbuilder for People Who Hate Deckbuilders." I think I'd still stand by that if you put a gun to my head. Where Balatro really comes through is its simplicity, and the genius of adapting the already easily understood game of poker.

This all feels so obvious to write, because of how huge Balatro got, but it's much more than just hitting on the right combination of game mechanics. The sound design and animations are super satisfying. The music is hypnotic and chill and super catchy, yet I couldn't really hum it for you if I wanted to. And every pixel art card is really nice looking. The game's only been out a few months, and I already want to describe that joker design as "iconic."

All in all, it's not hard to see why the world has gone gaga for Balatro. And good on LocalThunk, the game's creator, for not making it a scammy nightmare. Otherwise, we'd all be in trouble.

1. Animal Well

This was a really tough list to put in order. There are a lot of games here that I fully loved, but I think Animal Well has to take the cake.

This is another game that was a bit of a surprise for me. As I wrote back in May, I got the sense that a lot of people were really looking forward to it and expecting it to be really good, and I couldn't really figure out why! It wasn't really on my radar as anything special.

I don't even remember who recommended it to me, or if it was anyone specific. I might have just been in need of something new to play when it released, and decided to take a chance on it!

Thank god I did. Like I said, there are a lot of games on this list that I loved, that grabbed me, that I spent dozens of hours playing this year, but Animal Well was a singular experience. I played it to completion over the course of five days in May while my parents were visiting, and played nothing else during that time.

The best way I can explain my experience with this game is to say that it made me feel the way video games used to make me feel as a kid, something precious few games have managed in my adult life. No others immediately come to mind.

Animal Well is such a perfect little world to explore and poke at; secrets and mysteries always compelling you forward. Its driving force is curiosity, setting up a million little puzzle moments that make you feel like a genius (or at least make you think Billy Basso is a genius).

Best of all, it made me want to crack open a notebook and take pen and paper notes to try and figure out a few of the deeper puzzles.

What I keep coming back to in thinking about Animal Well is that I always felt in conversation with the game. It was guiding me through its design every step of the way without ever actually telling me what to do. I truly felt like looking up a walkthrough would've ruined the experience, and I never felt the need to!

I'm sure smarter people than me could pick apart the design of this game and explain exactly what makes it so great, and they probably have. All I can tell you is that every time I think back on this game, I just kind of hold it in my mind for a second before thinking, "...fuck."

My Nintendo Switch tells me I spent a grand total of just 15 hours with Animal Well. I can safely say those were the best 15 hours I spent with a game this year. If you could only play one game released in 2024, I would suggest you make it Animal Well.

Honorable Mentions

Eastward Octopia

Octopia is an extremely cute expansion to a game that I liked a whole lot, that basically amounts to a sort of Stardew Valley clone. I don't at all mean that in a bad way! And besides, I feel like it does enough to differentiate itself with the emphasis it puts on cooking and recipe discovery, playing into John's characterization from the base game. It is once again gorgeous as the main game was before it (I love the style of all the new UI elements), and Joel Corelitz continues to bring his best in the soundtrack department. I had a ton of fun farming and cooking with John and Sam, and if you were a fan of the base game's particular brand of cozy quirkiness, you probably will too.

Castaway

As I wrote earlier this year, Castaway seems like it had a bit of a marketing problem that had people expecting more of a traditional Zelda-like, when that isn't quite what it's offering. The Zelda-like portion is more of a tutorial for its 50-level tower mode, which is the "real game." It's teeny-tiny, I wouldn't say it has a ton of replay value, but it's really cute and fun to spend a few hours with. If you know what you're getting, it's a good time.

Deep Rock Galactic

My friend Zac and I were looking for a new co-op game to play together for ages. We grabbed this on a whim, and had a really solid time a couple of weeks in a row. The gameplay is much more varied than we ever expected. Great game to shoot the shit over!

Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Having a really good time with this one, which is great, since it was such an ordeal to acquire it, but I'm mostly saving it for when my girlfriend can watch, and it keeps getting lost in the shuffle of other games!

Pokemon TCG Pocket

Good lord, I've written about so many of the games in this post. I'll be brief. They did it and they did it right. Opening packs feels so good.

Missed Connections

Metal Slug Tactics

I could never get a bead on whether it was any good, and now I'm not sure I'll bother finding out.

Tactical Breach Wizards

Came out during a time of year when money was very tight, so I ended up missing it. I'm sure I'll get to it.

Parking Garage Rally Circuit

Ditto above.

Sonic X Shadow Generations

Ditto above! 🙄

Keylocker

Looked really cool, but was always on the very outskirts of my interest. Didn't really start considering it in earnest until very recently. Thinking about picking it up in the holiday eShop sale!

Antonblast

Just came out too damn late in the year.

Conclusion

That does it for another year of GOTY-ing! Hope to see some of your lists around the ol' blogosphere!

And as always, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!

Happy New Year, folks!

2024 Blog in Review

2025-01-01T15:35:00Z

At the start of 2024, I set myself a goal to post to my blog at least once every month to keep things active. I had been posting less and less the previous two years, but I was reinvigorated by the prospect of building my own site, and I just wanted to see if I could keep things regular.

As you can tell by the chart at the top of this post, this was a big year for my blog. I ended up blogging more this year than any other year ever. I smashed my previous record from 2021, the year I wrote a blog every day for a little while, with almost twice as many posts.

I can see a lot of reasons for this. This was the year I moved my blog off of Wordpress and onto a website I built from scratch. I played a lot of good, interesting games worth writing about this year. I had a very up-and-down year work-wise, and so had a lot of free time. And of course, on October 1st, Cohost died, birthed a thousand new blogs, and really invigorated mine.

Let's drill down with another chart and see how I did with my aforementioned monthly goal:

I pretty handily accomplished my goal of blogging at least once each month, though May and July were squeakers with just one post apiece. And then after Cohost died, uh...wow. I really went for it, huh?

It's so funny how much of my year I can see in this chart. I started the year with covid, so there was a chunk taken out of January. Things chugged along well until tax time hit and sent the rest of my year into survival mode.

My parents visited in May, so not many blogs then. I'm not sure about July, maybe I was just depressed. I got a full-time job at the end of August, so fewer blogs in September. Then everything in October. Then at the end of October, I lost my full-time job, so still pretty high levels of blogging, tapering off in December with holidays and travel and such.

I think it's a good sign that this was my biggest blogging year ever, and my first thought is that I wish I had blogged more. I have so many more drafts filed away that I wish I could've worked on throughout the year, or at least pushed through in the last two months.

But we make the time we make for the things we want to do, and this year was still an absolute blockbuster. On one hand, I want to try to be more regimented about writing, but on the other, I don't want to force something I do for fun into something more job-shaped.

I'm eternally grateful to Cohost for the eyes it put on my blog, not for a love of big numbers, but because I now have a few people that I talk to every once in a while through blogging, in each other's comments, or on other social media.

In the new year, I guess I want to do even more! I don't expect to beat or even match this year's number, some unexpected circumstances really pushed it sky-high. But I definitely want to blog at least once every month again. And I want to try to figure out a way to not leave blogs I really want to write on the drafts pile for months.

In any case: good blog year! Here's to never figuring out whether I want to call them blogs or posts!

Thanks for reading and Happy New Year!

UFO 50: Games 11–20

2024-12-25T04:42:00Z

Been a little while since the last one of these, and to be honest, since I haven't been sitting at my computer for fun much lately, I keep forgetting this game exists! Still having a good time whenever I do remember it though!

Still wishing the game were on Switch, in which case I feel like I would not only remember it exists, but play it enough to actually get stuck in and put some real time into some of these games.

Since I haven't been doing this, these first impressions are still mostly pretty surface-level. I'll be interested to see how my impressions of these games and the collection as a whole change if and when it does come to Switch, and I bother to play for more than an hour at a time.

Alright, let's dig into the next batch of games!

Game 11: Kick Club

This one's pretty simple. You're a kid playing soccer, and you need to grab a soccer ball and kick it at some enemies to clear the screen and move on to the next before time runs out. That's about all there is to it, this one doesn't carry a lot of staying power for me, and I don't much care to see beyond that.

The design is very cute, though. I like the big soccer ball that envelopes you and moves you to the next screen, and I like that the items left behind by defeated enemies are little fast food items like fries and burgers and pizza.

What I really love is this title card. The type is so puffy, it's like a Humongous Entertainment game. And the little foot and impact marks on the second K are a delightful touch.

Simple fare to start here. I'm sure there's depth to be found within, but it's just not my kind of arcade game.

Game 12: Avianos

This one seemed inscrutable and weird until I accidentally lost an entire evening to it. It's a strategy/RTS sort of situation in which you take turns praying to different dinosaur gods as you build up an army.

There are two main phases to gameplay: First, you pick one of three available dino god to pray to, from a possible pool of five or six. There are more peaceful gods that help you produce more of the various currencies you need to buy and build things, gods that let you buy more units, and move them to attack your enemies and capture land, and everything in between.

Next, if you can move your units, and if you move them to a map square already occupied by the enemy, you fight. The actual fighting is pretty hands-off. You can choose from a few general stances for your army to take, but by and large, the computer is going to mash everyone together and see what happens. Certain units are more effective against others, and obviously there is strength in numbers.

It's a fun back and forth, and the art is great. I really love the character portraits for each dinosaur god, and the title screen is oozing character.

It's also mostly silent, which lends it an eerie-ness that I tend to feel with a lot of older games that go this route, yet also encourages a deep focus that draws you in.

So far, I've won one game on easy mode, and even that felt pretty sweet.

Game 13: Mooncat

This guy's a weird little freak of a game. It's hard to really know what's fully going on here without pouring dozens more hours into it, and just saying it's a platformer doesn't really do it justice.

The real standout feature here is the control scheme. It's hard to describe, but I'll do my best. Rather than the usual combo of d-pad to move and buttons to act, you move either left or right by pressing one of the d-pad buttons, and you move the opposite way by pressing one of the action buttons. Jumping is accomplished by holding the direction you're moving, and then holding and releasing one of the opposite direction's buttons. Hopefully that makes sense. You really wouldn't get just how weird this one feels by watching it.

I've finished one playthrough, beat the boss at the end of it, and my little menu cartridge is gold now, but I get the sense there's more than meets the eye here. That playthrough felt very short, and I still feel confused.

I'm certain there's more waiting behind multiple playthroughs. But at the same time, I'm starting to bristle at so many hidden secrets, and the enormity of what might be hidden in UFO 50 as a whole is starting to feel a little overwhelming.

The music in this one is great, and like a lot of others in this collection, nicely melancholy. They really hit the nail on the head with how sad a lot of older games tended to sound. What was up with that?

Game 14: Bushido Ball

I don't like Bushido Ball. You play as a ninja playing a game of tennis/Pong against another ninja. You have different abilities based on which ninja you choose to be.

But I don't care. I don't like the way it feels to play, and I'm not interested in trying to get better at it.

Game 15: Block Koala

Block Koala is cute and fun. The character designs are cute, and the story conceit is silly.

It's a block-pushing puzzle game, but I would hesitate to call it a sokoban. The name of the game is pushing blocks out of the way to carve a path to push a special block into a goal zone.

The blocks also have numbers on them, which has something to do with which blocks can push other blocks. I believe higher number blocks can push smaller or equal number blocks. And equal number blocks can, if pushed together against an immovable object or wall, combine into a higher number block.

I'm too fuckin' stupid to get very far in this one, because my brain just isn't gelling with the kinds of puzzles it's throwing at me, so I think I've hit a wall. What I got through was pretty nice, but I don't think the rest is for me.

Game 16: Camouflage

I love the setup for this game. You're a chameleon trying to get from point A to point B. There are big old frogs between those two points that want to eat you.

You can press a button to see the areas in which the frogs will eat you if you enter their eyeline. You can press another button to change your body to the color of the terrain you are currently standing on.

The idea is that you want to set up a sequence of color changes such that you avoid the gaze of the hungry frogs, and make it safely to the exit of each level.

I also found the opening cutscene hilarious, it's a great premise.

Unfortunately, I'm also too fuckin' stupid to get very far in this game, but I really like what it's doing. I respect it.

Game 17: Campanella

Campanella's pretty neat. You control a little flying saucer, and you need to sort of keep-the-balloon-in-the-air your way to the goal, avoiding any obstacles, enemies, and projectiles in your way.

It's the kind of game where I play the first two levels and go, "okay sure," because like, I get it. But that's about it.

Not much here for me to chew on!

Game 18: Golfaria

Man, I feel like either this one needs a lot more of my time in a different headspace, or it was just a major letdown.

I love a golf game, and I absolutely adore this title design. The shading, the shapes, the grassy fuzziness. It's perfect.

But the gameplay itself is... I don't know. I guess I was just expecting a more straightforward golf affair, whereas this seems to be a whole exploratory RPG situation with a story and everything, and I think I just need to come back and try to wrap my head around that another time.

I've heard this one is quite good if you give it some time, and I'm willing to believe that, I'm just not willing to put that time in right now. So for now, it's a bit baffling.

Game 19: The Big Bell Race

The Big Bell Race is just what if Campanella was a straight up race around a circuit. It reminds me a lot of the multiplayer versus mode in Sonic 3.

It's funny though, it really feels realistic that this would have been released after Campanella as a kind of "we also had this idea and want to reuse all of these assets" kind of thing. More trying to see what sticks than trying to build that Campanella brand.

I actually find this more fun than Campanella itself! But much like Campanella, there's not a ton here.

Game 20: Warptank

Warptank owns. Finally, here's our other banger of the group.

It's a sidescroller. You play as a tank. You move left and right. You can move up on walls if there's an angled block in front of a wall to act like a ramp. You can press one button to fire your weapon. You can press another button to warp to the ceiling/floor/wall directly opposite your current position at any time.

Levels are chosen from a hub world, and more areas are slowly unlocked as you complete each level. The levels aren't too long. There's generous checkpointing. Each level seems to introduce/hinge on a new mechanic or gimmick.

And the music absolutely fucks. For some reason, at least in the opening areas, this baby is blasting out premium jazz, hot and fresh out the kitchen. It's got a little stealthy spy thing going on in the melody. It absolutely rules.

I love Warptank and cannot wait to see how much more of it there is, and what else there is to it.

Conclusion

This second crop is maybe a little lighter on hits for me, but still a decent enough time with some very high highs. And I'm still quite charmed by the package as a whole, even if the prospect of a bunch of hidden secrets is starting to maybe bum me out and feel overwhelming.

But at the same time, why should it? That's me looking at things from a perspective where all of this stuff needs to be uncovered, and it totally doesn't! UFO 50 can be a game about finding the games that click with you, and going all in on those.

That's my perspective, but what does the game believe? Does it want and/or need me to uncover all of what it has to offer, even in the games I already know I don't like or care about, in order to see everything it wants to show me, or fully enjoy it?

That all remains to be seen. For now, I'm still having a good time with a neat little compilation of games from the fake past.

Back soon with ten more!

Civ 6 Finally Clicked for me on Switch

2024-12-24T04:50:00Z

In college, I got really into Sid Meier's Civilization V. It was my first Civ game. I got it in one of the early Steam sales, back when they were still big and exciting, and learned the ins and outs of the game through long, episodic Yogscast videos.

The sights, sounds, UI, VO, gameplay, and every other little detail of Civ V is baked into my brain and coated with a thick sheen of nostalgia. It's a very comforting game for me, and it's tied to a very comfy time in my life. It'll always be one of my faves.

So, in 2022, when autumn rolled around, and I was feeling in the mood for a cozy strategy game, I decided to finally check out the next game in the series, Civilization VI, originally released six years earlier in 2016.

I got it for a steal, just like its predecessor, including all the DLC and expansions. These Civ games always go on deep discount sooner or later. In total, I spent probably 20 bucks for what 2K claims is over $200 worth of game. I don't know why anyone buys these at full-price.

But when I opened it up, and tried to get up to speed with six years of updates, additions, and rule changes, it just didn't take. I really didn't like or understand the District system. There were Civics, and Dark Ages, and Climate Change. It was too much too fast.

After this experience, I wrote the game off as simply not being as good as Civ V. Or maybe it just wasn't for me. And that was fine.

But then this year, we busted out the fall soaps early, and something changed in my brain.

This probably requires some explanation. See, every once in a while, we order a handful of scented foaming soaps from a brand that hasn't paid me to mention them by name, so they can go to hell. It's just more fun to have a rotating cast of pleasant smells in the bathroom than your regular old hand soap. It's one of our few frivolous indulgences.

I am also personally very prone to attaching certain games or other media or times of year or eras of my life or literally anything else to certain smells. I don't remember if I've blogged about this before. I should.

One of those smells is called Crisp Morning Air. It's the best soap scent I've ever allowed into my life, and it is the essence of cozy fall times.

Cozy fall times make me want to play Civ! I guess! I dunno, I can't explain these things. I don't think it seems like that much of a leap, but I'm me, so how would I know?

Anyway, long story short, I was jonesin', and the Nintendo Switch eShop was having a summer sale. Civ 6 popped up on my screen and said, "Hey Mike. I know things didn't work out between us last time, but I think maybe things could be different if we both put in a little more effort. Also I know you've always preferred playing games on a handheld, and well... here I am."

It was kismet. The game had great reviews on Switch, and I was super curious to see how that would work. It also cost me just 34 cents with the Gold Points I had saved up, so. I kinda couldn't lose.

Crucially, I bought only the base game to start. I had been burned last time, so I didn't want to spend too much at once, or get in too deep. No DLC, and no rule-expanding, content-adding expansions. Just vanilla Civ 6.

I played through the tutorial. And it hit. I was laying in bed playing a game of Civ. I was learning a smaller number of new mechanics one by one. And before I knew it, I had completed my first game.

I played all the way through a few more games, decided I liked it enough to buy the DLC, and played through yet more games. I ended up having a great time! This game took over my summer and ended up being my most-played game of the year on Switch, according to the little wrap-up Nintendo sent me.

I played more Civ than Tactics Ogre, a game I've been chipping away at since last December!

I even went back to the game on PC as well, and gosh darn it, I'm a Civ 6 fan now! This game that I didn't like at first, and which made no sense to me, has actually become a new fave!

And while it probably seems obvious that what changed my tune on this game was being introduced to it gradually rather than all at once, I still think there's something to be said for playing it this way on Switch.

I've always preferred handhelds, specifically Nintendo handhelds. It just puts my brain in the right mode. And while I've also always been a PC gamer, these days—what with working from home and sitting at my computer for work 8 hours a day (minimum)—I find myself less and less inclined toward sitting at my computer to have fun.

I think the combination of not trying to jump into the deep end right away, in conjunction with playing on my Game Machine of Choice™ was the synergy I needed to finally open my heart to Civ 6.

I think it's really cool that this game that I never would've thought worked on Switch, that I always considered to be too much of a big, complex PC game to work on Switch, and that apparently Firaxis didn't even expect to be popular on Switch... ended up really working on Switch!

I guess it just goes to show you stuff.

Anyway, here's Baba Yetu:

Playing Both Sides

2024-12-13T21:27:00Z

The Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection released earlier this year, keeping my hit rate for predictions of this sort of thing at 100%. And while it suffered a few hiccups at launch, it was eventually patched to the point where it's now pretty much exactly what I expected/hoped for.

I've had a great time finally being able to play two of my favorite games of all time on Switch. And for some reason, playing on a console this way unlocked some memories that countless revisits on PC weren't enough to unlock previously.

I want to say it was 2004, when I was 11 years old. My mom had recently gotten a job after a long stint of being a stay-at-home mom, which meant I needed a place to go during school breaks that didn't line up with my older sister's school breaks. So I ended up walking over to our neighbor's house to hang out with their kids until my mom got home.

I probably would have been just fine staying home alone, but my mom has always been a worrier, and looking back, I'm glad I got out and got some socialization under my belt instead. Besides, the neighbor kids had an Xbox.

I played plenty of games growing up, mostly on SNES and Genesis, but those were hand-me-downs from family and friends. Video game consoles were too expensive for my parents, so that's all I had to work with for a good while. I think the only consoles they ever actually bought for me were a DS Lite, and then eventually a WiiU.

Nothing against my parents for this, it was purely about money. They bought me tons of games over the years, and were happy for me to save up my allowance to buy myself a new handheld. It's not like they ever bought themselves anything either! Game consoles are super expensive, and a new one is always just around the corner; I probably would have done the same.

It's for this reason that I was and remain largely a PC gamer, albeit with a preference for Nintendo handhelds where applicable.

But so the neighbor kids had an Xbox, which was unlike anything I would have otherwise had access to. It's an interesting experience playing on a friend's console, and being so far removed from what games are available to choose from. We played a lot of weird garbage on that thing, including at least one Shrek party game.

A quick search tells me it was probably Shrek Super Party, seen above.

I have a particular memory of the neighbor kids' dad walking in while we were playing a mini-game where the players, playing as various Shrek characters, are running, backs to the screen, across a rope bridge as it deteriorates. Said dad remarked that Donkey must be running so fast to try to get upwind of himself. End of memory. I don't know why my brain feels the need to hang onto that.

Luckily for me, the older neighbor kid, Matt, being a boy of a similar age, was as crazy about Star Wars as I was. So the bulk of what we played was Star Wars-related. Particularly—and I'm finally getting to it now—Star Wars Battlefront.

Being a kid during the prequel era was great. The most complex thought you had while watching those movies was "heck yeah," and each new release was surrounded by a constant flow of new video games.

Playing Battlefront with Matt was a blast. It became our go-to activity anytime we hung out and the TV was free. On days when my mom was working, I would show up before Matt was awake, and got to play on my own for a bit, trying to be as quiet as possible.

The first installment in the Battlefront series was pretty simple. There were two campaigns based on the events of the original trilogy and the first two prequel films respectively, a "Galactic Conquest" mode in which you tried to keep control of more planets than your opponent, and Instant Action.

Instant Action was the game, as far as we were concerned. It did what it said on the tin, just plopped you right into a match on a map of your choosing without any extra story or rules breaking up the action.

Boy, we really should have seen Fortnite coming from a thousand miles away.

Some of the maps in the Instant Action mode kept their special, true-to-the-movies objectives. These were the major set-pieces of the films that featured a simple objective that could be neatly mapped onto the game, like Hoth, with its shield generator that needed to be defended or destroyed depending on which side you played as, or Geonosis, with its perhaps less easily remembered objective of destroying the Techno Union ships.

Battlefront 1's Hoth map, as seen in the Classic Collection.

Hoth was pretty easy either way if you made a concerted effort, with AT-AT walkers making destruction trivial, and Snow Speeders mounting a somewhat finicky defense. Geonosis' Techno Union ships were pretty beefy, but if you had a Republic gunship and some patience, you could get the job done.

The one special objective we found pretty impossible as kids (and I can confirm is still super difficult as an adult), was trying to destroy the shield generator playing as the Rebellion on Endor.

The Empire's shield generator on Endor is contained in a tiny little bunker that needs to be infiltrated before any damage can be dealt. It's located at the farthest end of the map, acts as a permanent, un-capture-able spawn point for Imperial troops, and is surrounded by turrets and a few possible heavy-weapon-wielding vehicles. The Rebels don't get any heavy vehicles on that map, and none of the Empire's vehicles will fit inside the bunker.

It's a bit of a fortress, but actually, that isn't the greatest barrier to destroying the thing. The main issue is that, once you get inside the bunker, the shield generator has so much health that it's impossible to destroy it with just the ammo you're carrying, necessitating either a visit to an ammo droid (the only one of which is outside the bunker and surrounded by the enemy), or a respawn (which necessitates a long trek back from whence you came).

But it wasn't just that it was super difficult and took a long time. The hilarious part of all of this is that the fact that there was still a battle going on outside meant that the number one reason we didn't get to destroy the shield bunker was that the match had ended. The AI armies we were ignoring went on fighting their war and reached a conclusion before we were able to deal enough damage to the damn thing.

We tried over and over, finding the best class to play, weapons to use, the clearest path to the bunker without going out of bounds and being killed for "leaving the battlefield." We got close, and we might have even succeeded a couple of times, I don't remember. But it was hard.

"Destroy the shield bunker!"

So we turned to one of the best things you can do as a child or adult, and started playing the video game in an unintended way in order to complete a made up objective in our heads.

Sure, the game's announcer is repeatedly imploring you to "Destroy the shield bunker!" and that's probably the only reason we wanted to do it in the first place, but you don't get anything special for doing so. We just wanted to!

So instead of both of us playing as Rebels like usual, one of us would pick the Empire, camp out at the shield bunker, and start team-killing left and right. No matter how much you do this in Battlefront, the AI does not contain the ability to turn on you in return. They can only yell "Cut that out!" or "Watch your fire!"

It worked a treat! With free reign over the nearby ammo droid for reloads, and an extra set of hands, the shield bunker went down in no time. Objective complete.

Sometimes, since we were still technically playing on opposite sides, we would turn on each other, and it became about trying to win the match again. But a lot of the time, we would continue working towards a common goal. We kept doing this on other maps just for fun, picking opposite teams with one of us being a traitor/man on the inside, and working towards one team's victory.

I'm sure this style of play wasn't unique to us, but this memory just got me thinking what a fun twist it is to play this way. I always enjoyed it no matter which side I was on, it wasn't about tricking my friend into losing against me. It was like we had created a new class to play as, or a new game mode, where it was the two of us working together against the game itself, at once a game and a metagame.

These are the best moments with a video game, to me. When the game becomes a tool to facilitate one's own made up fun, or especially the made up fun of you and your friends. Adding extra constraints, making up stories where none exist, or to rationalize the way you feel like playing in the moment.

It's all well and good to play a game for its own sake. But engaging your imagination to have your own fun, make up a game of your own, and have a good time with those around you? That's the good shit.

The Girls Are Fightingggggg

2024-12-05T18:52:00Z

How long is too long for a Formula 1 season to go on? We may be finding out, because we're one weekend away from the end of the longest F1 season in history, and everyone in the paddock seems to be on a hair trigger and at each other's fucking throats.

People are leaving the FIA, the sport's governing body, like rats from a sinking ship, then coming right out and telling the media they were pushed out by their shitty boss.

Drivers are asking Ben Sulayem, president of the FIA, what the fuck is going on with all of the instability in his organization, and Ben Sulayem is telling them to mind their own damn business.

Esteban Ocon is leaving Alpine before the final race of the season so he can take part in post-season testing for Haas, and I genuinely can't tell who is at fault in that debacle.

But by far the most explosive boiling over of emotions has been the growing war of words between Max Verstappen and George Russell over one of the most meaningless penalties in recent memory.

It went like this.

During qualifying for the Qatar GP last weekend, Verstappen and Russell almost came together on track when a fast-moving Russell came upon a slow-moving Verstappen, and had to take avoiding action. I'll quote Autosport on the details:

On a build lap, Russell approached a slow Verstappen at Turn 12, and got onto the brakes to avoid contact with the Red Bull driver. He then dipped a wheel onto the gravel, before making his way past at Turn 13. He regarded this as "super dangerous" over the radio.

The stewards summoned both drivers to review the incident, and it was decreed that Verstappen had been driving outside of his delta and should be given a one-place grid drop for Sunday's race - which hands pole to Russell.

On race day, starting from P2, Verstappen immediately and easily passed Russell at turn 1 and went on to win the race. Job done, move on, right? Wrong!

Always willing to find the cloud behind every silver lining, and being terminally allergic to shutting the fuck up, Max did what he does best and threw a shit fit, saying he "lost all respect" for Russell for "trying to screw me over" in the stewards' meeting.

Christian Horner, Red Bull team principal, ever eager to slobber over anything that isn't his wife, was quick to jump to Max's defense and claim that Russell was "hysterical" in front of the stewards, and that was why Max got the world's tiniest penalty that he immediately neutralized.

This then prompted a response from Toto Wolff, team boss at Mercedes, who didn't much care for Horner's criticism of his driver, calling Horner a "yapping little terrier" with "always something to say."

Hooooo boy. I never thought I would say this about extremely wealthy people, but these folks need a vacation.

The hits kept coming this morning, when Russell revealed that after the meeting with the stewards that earned Verstappen his penalty, Max told him "I'll put you on your fucking head in the wall."

Which is an absolutely unacceptable thing to say when you're one of the 20 people in the world with access to the machinery to do just that. It's also an extremely childish way to act. Here's the rest of what he told Russell, according to Jalopnik:

Recounting the interaction, Russell said that Verstappen told him “I don’t know why you would want to screw me like this. I’m so disappointed in you. I was going to not even race you tomorrow, I was going to let you by, but now if I have to, I will purposely go out of my way to put you on your f****** head in the wall.”

These are the words of a sixth-grade bully! It feels so familiar to me! "I wasn't going to do X before this imaginary line I just made up was crossed, but now you're gonna get it."

You won that race! You already won the championship! What a loser!

Max has of course since doubled-down and called Russell a backstabber and a liar, because lord knows once you're in one of these fights you can't back down or put it to bed, certainly not when you're Max Verstappen.

This flavor of back and forth fighting through the media isn't uncommon in Formula 1. In addition to being ultra-competitive people competing against one another in a brutal sport, they're also routinely moving at speeds in excess of 200 MPH if and when they run afoul of each other. Tempers run high, adrenaline boils over, things are said, and it all gets repeated for a week.

But this doesn't feel like the usual grandstanding for the referees or the media, or even the result of a long and grueling season. It really just feels like George has put up with, and watched others put up with, Max's bullshit for long enough, and doesn't want to take it anymore.

From Autosport:

"People have been bullied by Max for years now, and you can't question his driving abilities. But he cannot deal with adversity whenever anything has gone against him.

"Jeddah '21, Brazil '21, he lashes out. Budapest this year, very first race, the car wasn't dominant, crashing into Lewis, slamming his team.

"I just don't know why other drivers have when they've been in this battle with him, just sort of made it so easy and just let it be," added Russell.

And from RaceFans:

“I’ve known Max for 12 years. I’ve respected him all of this time. But now I’ve lost respect for him.

“Because we’re all fighting on track and it’s never personal, now he’s made it personal. And someone needs to stand up to a bully like this. And so far, people have let him get away with murder.”

At the start of this season, I thought the big story was going to be the Christian Horner scandal, but that was swept under the rug so quickly my head still spins if I think about it too long.

Instead, at least in the latter half of the season, and certainly since Austria, the story has been about Verstappen's repeated meltdowns and childlike behavior whenever he's put under pressure.

And it feels like people are finally starting to wake up to the fact that this kid sucks and has been getting away with some real garbage both on and off the track. After the shit he pulled on Lando Norris in Mexico, the stewards finally decided to do something about it, and I started seeing writing about Verstappen that finally made me feel like we were all watching the same person.

If it were anybody else but Max, I'd be ready to put this all down to a long and exhausting season getting the better of someone. But Max keeps showing us who he is, and that he's unwilling to grow up and put this kind of behavior behind him.

Jalopnik wrote a better closer than I can think of here in their piece from today, Max Verstappen Is A Violent Bully And His Actions Are Going To Get Someone Killed:

Max has certainly earned a reputation for being overly aggressive, and one day his actions are likely to put someone’s fucking head in the wall. I hope he retires before that day comes.

Recreating the Neo Turf Masters "Next Hole" UI

2024-12-04T17:16:00Z

In the latest edition of my "What Else Is On?" link roundup, I mentioned that I finally played Big Tournament Golf, better known as Neo Turf Masters in North America, for the first time.

I'd seen it played on YouTube in various places over the years, but never actually put my own two hands on it. After watching the Remap crew play it on this year's Savepoint charity stream, and realizing it was a whopping $8 on Switch, I snapped it up.

I fell in love with the game's whole vibe pretty much immediately, from the dramatic anime intro, to the luscious soundtrack, to the classic, tinny arcade VO shouting "on the green!!"

One element that really grabbed ahold of my brain and refused to let go was the screen shown before each hole. It depicts a series of graphical representations of the topography of the next hole, along with some text informing the player of the simplest, most pressing information, shown over the chillest, most soothing retro arcade music imaginable.

The way each element flies in from opposite ends of the screen, scales-in from zero, and particularly the way the "Hole No. X" text writes-on and then grows an outline and a thick, opaque drop shadow really entranced me. To say nothing of the gradients! There's so much going on, and yet not very much at all. It's all so simple and juicy and perfect.

I had to try to recreate it. If not only as a fun motion design exercise, than also to exorcise it from my brain.

Here's the original, as created by the masters at SNK:

And here's my attempt at a recreation, with the same audio underneath:

The first thing you'll notice is that I wasn't able to find a close match for the "Hole No. X" font. Which is a shame, because that's a great font, but font-matching is tough, and try as I might, I wasn't able to find the original.

Failing that, I decided on something I thought carried a similar style and similar embellishments that looked fun to animate. I was a little quick and sloppy with the write-on animation, but I don't think it's noticeable in motion, and I'm happy with the result!

For the rest of the elements, it was tough to strike a balance between retro and modern. So much of what makes the original great is down to pixel art and the way it's being rendered. But since I'm not a pixel artist, I knew going in that my version would have a cleaner, more modern look, and I decided to mostly lean into that, and not force a faux-retro look with a ton of effects.

The only place I decided to go for a purposely retro look was in the background, which I posterized to give the gradient that banding effect you see in the original because the hardware couldn't create a seamless gradient. I love that look. It really ties everything together, and provides a solid foundation for the rest of the piece.

The hardest element was, of course, the largest: the big faux-3D rendering of the course in the middle of the screen. As these things go, I liked it more the more I saw it come together. Like its lower-res neighbor on the right, I just pulled in my reference layer, and went to town with the pen tool. From there, it was all about dialing in the right stroke width, getting the texture and shadow of the trees right, and finishing with effects on top.

I wasn't sure how to go about creating the gradient on the strip of extruded land at the bottom at first, but I eventually settled on just eyeballing a gradient fill with a bunch of points on it, and trying to position them where the light and shadows should fall.

This was the last thing I did, so I had all of the other elements in place, and had already pre-comped it so I could start playing around with effects and figuring out the final look. I worked on the gradient inside the pre-comp, so I was seeing it without the final effects applied at first. I wasn't sure about the way it looked, but when I backed out to the main comp and saw everything applied to the gradient, I had a genuine "oh shit" moment.

I had been thinking about posterizing this gradient to achieve the same banding as the background, and tie everything back to the retro aesthetic that way, but when I played around with it, I ended up liking this better! I'm really happy with the effect of that gradient.

All in all, this was a really fun exercise! Like all new projects, it taught me a little something new, and I had to push myself to figure out things I hadn't done before.

And I still absolutely adore what SNK achieved with this screen. I love how far back all the drop shadows are pushed, I love the smooth, linear motion of all the animations, and I love the way each element slowly fills out the screen one by one, with the three boxy elements leaving space for and framing the big, freeform shape of the course in the middle.

Finishing this project has me wanting to try tackling recreations of some other video game UI! Leave some of your faves in the comments, and maybe I'll give 'em a go!

You can find this piece and others on my Motion Design page.

Thanksgiving Plate

2024-11-30T23:55:00Z

Forgot to post a photo of the feast earlier this week!

This is also actually a photo of leftovers from the day after.

Our vegetarian menu for the last few years has been lasagna with homemade tomato sauce, the most delicious rosemary mashed potatoes you've ever had, glazed carrots, and roasted brussel sprouts.

Pro tip: I cut my slice of lasagna down the middle like that to help it heat through in the microwave.

Bonus: It kinda makes it look like a pair of pants.

Damn, True

2024-11-30T23:47:00Z

[Source]

What Else Is On? November 30th, 2024

2024-11-30T22:00:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

I've been wanting to start doing these roundups monthly since, well I guess since I started them in 2020 really, but especially now that I'm reading more blogs and have more fun stuff to share more often. As long as I can get to publishing this one tonight, I'll have just squeaked in under the wire.

It's not exactly difficult to put a roundup like this together, but it's been a hell of a month, I've been depressed, and haven't been blogging as much as I'd like as a result.

🎵 PUT THIS ON

Stealing again from Misty's excellent Morning Music blog, which continues to be a gift to all, for today's tunes.

📚 READ THIS

The Eephus Pitch, A Play Within A Play Within an MMO, and When Home Goes Read-Only — Days and Wonder

Aura hits a very specific feeling right on the head, in processing the loss of Cohost, something I think the people for whom that site was a beloved community will be doing for a while.

What We Still Have Right Now — Shel Raphen

US politics ahoy. This one was a bit of a balm in the aftermath, even if I fully expected the outcome we got.

Microsoft is basically discontinuing Windows. What will happen, then? — Bruno Dias

Great post from Bruno about Windows 10 reaching its end of life soon, and Windows 11 being untenable for various reasons.

📺 WATCH THIS

The process of making fake food. A 71-year-old craftsman who has been making fake food for 53 years. — YouTube

This is a very cool video of a very old dude who is very good at making fake food in a really cool way. Everything he makes looks delicious and real almost instantly, and he makes it look so effortless.

Always cool to watch a master of a very specific craft do their thing.

YATAGARASU: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master — Crunchyroll

People who can turn into ravens doing politics in medieval Japan. My girlfriend and I watched this series as it aired on Crunchroll, and it was a good time. It's either on hiatus now, or complete, so a great time to jump in! Not at all sure if it's getting more, but I hope so!

🎮 PLAY THIS

Good Writers are Perverts — itch.io

Freaks are cool, grow up.

ACA Neo Geo Big Tournament Golf — hamster

Finally played this for the first time this month. Even if you don't love golf games, you will have a good time with the vibes. I am obsessed with this game's UI.

🌐 SOME GOOD WEBSITES

Transparent Textures

How I Experience Web Today

Debutniverse

ytch.xyz

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

2024-11-28T12:41:00Z

I love the wild juxtapositions in this thing every year.

"Up next, it's the Jennie-O Turkey float, featuring a gigantic golden animatronic turkey!"

"Now, here to lip-sync to a medley of his greatest hits on this turkey float for some reason, it's six-time Grammy winner, T-Pain!"

Good. Thank you.

Thank You For Blogging

2024-11-19T15:05:00Z

Just wanted to post a little thank you to the feed for anyone reading who has also been keeping up their blogging.

I've been trying out the new kids on the social media block, mostly Bluesky, and I mostly don't like it! It's gotten way bigger in the past few weeks, and it just feels like Twitter 2 now, which sucks.

But then I flip over to my RSS reader, and there all of you are, writing about your various whatsits. Reading your little posts makes me feel so much better than scrolling through bsky or masto.

I hope I'm providing some of the same for anyone following.

My First Computer

2024-11-17T14:27:00Z

I'm sure every computer-liker remembers their first. I'm going to feel like a walking, talking "ever since I was a little girl I knew I wanted to be on the computer" meme while writing this, but it's true! It feels impossible to me not to develop a relationship of sorts with one of these things.

This isn't going to be about my First first computer, but my first non-Family Computer.

Of course, I remember each and every family computer we ever had as well, apart from the first, which was some sort of IBM something. A 286? 486? Not sure, but it ran DOS and Windows 3.1, and I mostly used it to play Monopoly and write terrible Digimon fanfic in Word.

I can't be 100% certain, because we no longer have the hardware on hand to confirm, but after that we almost certainly had an eMachines eTower 466id running Windows 98 (I remember thinking the blinking lights looked like grains of rice or orzo pasta), and then likely a Compaq Presario SR1630NX, which ran Windows XP. I don't remember it having an AMD processor or ATI Radeon integrated graphics, so this may not be the exact model, but it looked exactly like that.

But as I said, this post is not about those computers.

The first one I ever had all to myself was an MSI CR600 laptop, pictured above. It had a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, 320GB of storage, a dedicated Nvidia GeForce 8200M G graphics card, a combination CD/DVD drive, and a whole lotta heart.

It ran Windows Vista out of the box, but when I got it, it was being sold with a free offer to upgrade to Windows 7.

Microsoft had been running those "Windows Mojave" fake-out commercials where they show a bunch of people who hated Windows Vista a "new" version of Windows that they end up loving and then reveal that it was Vista all along.

Apparently that campaign didn't work so good (or maybe it did idk, there was always going to be a new version of Windows), because eventually those commercials started to give way to "Windows 7 was my idea" commercials.

I was very excited about Windows 7. I don't even completely know why, I just loved the look, the features sounded exciting, and maybe I was especially susceptible to marketing at that time. I ended up loving Windows 7. I still miss it to this day, but that's another blog.

Anyway.

It was 2010. I was a junior in high school, about to be a senior. I was just coming online in terms of being aware of consumer electronics, their coverage, their marketing (clearly). I was a PC gamer. I was a few years past my first graphics card installation in the family computer, performed so I could play the copy of KOTOR 2 I got for my birthday. And I was just starting to get into video editing and animation. I was ready for something of my own.

My family wasn't super well-off, so I did a lot of research trying to find the best possible intersection of price and specs. I landed on the MSI CR600. Not a big name by any means, but I honestly still think it was a great pick.

I was trying to remember exactly how I convinced my parents I needed this, and I think it was just a combination of showing interest in video post-production, the family computer not being able to handle the Adobe suite, and almost heading off to college. All of those things were true, I just kinda lucked out!

And I did do a lot of good work on this thing, both video and otherwise! I started a YouTube channel and made something like 500 videos on this laptop. I played around with After Effects, taught myself Premiere and Photoshop, and wrote a lot of essays. I wasn't (entirely) bullshitting my parents, this laptop is where I started to learn my craft.

It just so happened that the things that made a computer good for video editing also made it good for running video games. I didn't make those rules!

(Editor's Note: After finishing this post, I realized I have a vague memory of offering for this laptop to be both my Christmas and birthday presents that year. Young me drove a hard bargain. Definitely worth it.)

As I mentioned, I was a longtime PC gamer. We didn't get any consoles between the SNES and Game Boy Advance, so I had to do my gaming where I could. It started with Freddie Fish, Spy Fox, Pajama Sam, and LEGO Racers. I was also a big Star Wars fan. TIE Fighter led me to Battlefront, which led me to Empire at War, which led me to KOTOR.

I wolfed down both KOTOR games like a discerning pig at a gourmet trough. My love of Star Wars also intersected with my growing interest in video post-production and an emerging YouTube, both of which lead me straight to these lightsaber choreography videos, which briefly became my whole personality.

So when BioWare announced the development of The Old Republic, a Star Wars MMO that would encapsulate KOTOR 3, 4, 5, etc, with a trailer that was essentially a high-res, highly choreographed recreation of Space 9/11, I was psyched out of my fucking mind.

When I went with my parents to the local TigerDirect to pick out my new laptop, one of the first things I asked the computer sales guy, before even asking about the Adobe suite, was "will it run The Old Republic?"

His answer was something like "uhhhhh maybe?" Which was good enough for me!

I didn't end up playing The Old Republic when it came out because I didn't have the money for a $15/month subscription, but I played a ton of other games on that laptop.

I loaded up digital copies of KOTOR and Supreme Commander from a site called Direct2Drive (buying and downloading games over the internet was still a new idea, at least to me), I bought physical copies of the first two Halo games (before they became exclusive to Xbox for a while), and of course, it ran Battlefront and Empire at War like a dream.

That first summer with my new laptop was one of the best I can remember. I watched as much of GameSpot's E3 coverage as I could get my hands on. The indie boom was just starting. And I learned about Steam.

I spent dozens of hours playing Team Fortress 2 online. I came in just before the Engineer Update, if that means anything to you (Engineer was my favorite class to play). I caught up on Half-Life 2 and Portal. Minecraft started to emerge. Humble Bundles. Plants Vs. Zombies. Bastion. Trine. A tiny little pack-in game called Tinker.

My laptop's desktop as it was in May of 2010, with a million little shortcuts to games and other programs.

I loved finally having a computer of my very own. I took such pride in my stewardship of this thing. Installing my programs and games, placing my icons on the desktop just so. I wanted to take the very best care of it that I could.

I started reading some of the same websites I read today on that laptop. I used Google Reader until the very end on it. I started listening to podcasts on it. I sexted with people in other time zones on it. I set up Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, YouTube, Google+, and other accounts of increasingly dubious fates on that laptop.

It wouldn't be an understatement to say I started becoming a person on this laptop. It was my first fully private space, and that makes it special.

I've had some extra free time on my hands lately, and for the past week, that's meant delving into the past and digging out this laptop for old time's sake. I'm sentimental to a fault, so of course I still have it with me. It's in pristine condition and still runs like a champ.

But something has been bothering me about it for a few years. Back in 2016, I tried to install Windows 10 on it. God knows why, I was probably just bored. It didn't take.

It didn't brick the computer or anything, it reverted right back to Windows 7, but it wiped my hard drive in the process. I'm pretty good at backing things up because I'm scared of ever losing anything, and that computer had changed a lot in the 6 years since I got it, but I lost a lot of history in that moment. I lost the state of that laptop as it had been.

So this week, I don't even fully remember why, I pulled the old boy out of his dusty slumber (in the same messenger bag I used to carry him around campus in) and started trying to get him back to some semblance of his former self.

Luckily, as I said, I'm really sentimental, so I have pictures like the one above as a reference for how things used to be. I also still have all of the games I used to play back then. Boxes as well as CDs.

I've also come around to the idea of buying games on GOG over the past few years that I previously only "owned" on Steam, because, well. So now I have a lot of those old games for real and for good, with offline installers to boot.

I found out pretty shortly into this endeavor that Steam no longer supports Windows 7, and in fact will not even launch at all, so that's really come in handy!

After a few nights of transferring things back and forth from my main PC to my laptop (partly because Windows 7 is fully out of support and I was paranoid about getting it online at first, partly because the wifi and disk drive on this thing are pretty slow, and partly because I ran into an issue where the ancient browsers I installed for Historical Accuracy couldn't load anything with their ancient SSL certificates), I was most of the way back to where I wanted to get:

A few programs had to be substituted because they don't exist anymore, or I couldn't find them, or they aren't supported like Steam, but this is pretty damn good if I do say so myself. I'm certainly satisfied with it.

I was pleasantly surprised to find there are still ways to download old Windows Live programs like Movie Maker—the first piece of editing software I ever used—and fixes for games like Halo and Halo 2, whose servers went offline ages ago, rendering them otherwise inoperable.

It really feels like going home again, especially playing the original Halo. God, the hours I spent playing Slayer at Blood Gulch sitting in a rocking chair in my sister's room at midnight while Korean game shows played on some almost certainly defunct local TV channel, with my laptop on a cookie cooling rack on my lap because it got too hot. Good times.

And I absolutely adore this wallpaper from Windows 7's "Characters" theme. They used to do fun shit with Windows!

But there was one more thing I wanted to do. One more unfulfilled dream that needed achieving.

By the time The Old Republic went free-to-play, I was already onto my next computer. So this little guy never got to see the galaxy that I so pined for when I first got him.

A fresh install of the latest Firefox Extended Service Release version had fixed an issue with most things not being able to access the internet, so I grabbed an installer and fired it up.

I got an error.

It turned out it needed the latest version of Internet Explorer to be able to run the game's launcher, for whatever reason. I updated IE. The launcher launched.

I managed to log in and start the download process. The initial download is something like 40GB, which isn't a big deal for the big editing rig I built in 2022 plugged directly into our Fios connection, but is a taller order for this 14-year-old laptop.

I had to take drastic measures if I wanted this game to download before the wee hours. I unplugged the ethernet from my desktop. But I didn't want to disrupt the delicate ecosystem of cords that lives behind my desk by snaking this one around and pulling it all the way up to my laptop on top of my desk. So I did the next best thing.

I snaked it through the side and underneath my desk, and made my laptop a little cave in which to download his last new game.

This really did the trick! The download really started screaming, and in no time, it was through the main game as well as a few patches.

This was the moment of truth. I unplugged the ethernet and moved the laptop back to my desk. Less because of the gravity of the moment, and more because my back and knees were in a lot of pain. This laptop isn't the only thing that's gotten older.

I pressed the play button.

Nothing.

Again.

Nothing.

I started searching online, and found a few fixes. Check your network settings, allow the program through your firewall, install DirectX 9, install Microsoft C++ Redistributable something something.

None of them worked.

In my searching around about getting the game running on this laptop, I'd seen in passing a few articles about The Old Republic finally upgrading from 32-bit to 64-bit. My laptop runs 32-bit Windows.

I had been hopeful that maybe the devs had left in some ability to play the game on 32-bit systems, but it looks like the change was immediate and exclusive.

I dug into the game's folders, bypassing the launcher, and tried opening swtor.exe directly. It popped up an error message telling me in no uncertain terms that my version of Windows was incompatible with this software.

I just looked it up while writing this, and the 64-bit update was pushed in March of last year. After 14 years, I was just a year and a half too late to finally play this game on this laptop.

Nothing gold can stay, technology always moves on. It makes sense that an ongoing, online game would be the thing to fail. Frankly, considering the pace at which technology moves on from and buries its past, I'm a bit shocked that The Old Republic was one of the only failures during this project of mine.

I know Halo is a big game, but it gives me some kind of feeling (hope?) that someone else somewhere else is still interested in keeping it running on old hardware.

The only other game to completely fail to launch so far has been Minecraft, which is somewhat surprising, somewhat not. It's maybe the biggest game of all time, and is now owned by one of the biggest corporations of all time (Microsoft), and while I don't think of it as an online game, its launcher requires you to sign into your account (which is now required to be a Microsoft account), so it makes sense that you're limited to what is strictly speaking "allowed" and "legal" when it comes to running the game.

I haven't found a way thus far to run an older version of Minecraft, and even if I did, what would it sign into? Could it even connect to a server to run whatever checks it needs to? Have people developed workarounds to play these older versions? Almost certainly, right?

I'm going to keep hunting. I played Minecraft before it was big. I don't remember exactly when, but definitely before the InfDev version, if that means anything to you. It would be a big piece of this nostalgia puzzle to be able to play it on this laptop again.

I'm glad I finally did this. It's really nice to see my old laptop back to its former self. It's kinda cool that it can now exist as a kind of museum, or a window into a very specific time in my life that I can relive whenever I want. And it's been cool to finally find out the degree to which a project like this was possible! It turns out: extremely! This wasn't very hard at all!

It's so funny to reflect on the times and places in your life that forge the deepest bonds. I used this laptop as my one and only main computer for less time than my next computer, which I built in 2013, and yet I think of it more fondly.

Maybe it's the time in my life that it's tied to. 16, 17, 18, 19. Those are some intense, exciting ages.

Maybe it's the fact that it's a laptop. I've always preferred handhelds to gaming on a TV, so maybe that translates to computers as well. It's closer to you, it feels more personal.

Or maybe it really is just that it was my first computer.

It's probably a combination of all three.

Sometimes I wonder if all this sentimentality and nostalgia are bad for me. But I've always regretted getting rid of something I loved, and never once regretted saving something.

There's nothing wrong with a little nostalgia now and then, I think. It can be nice to take solace in the past for a bit, if it doesn't come at the expense of the present or the future.

I'll almost certainly get bored of installing and playing old games on this thing pretty soon, and then I'll forget about it again for a little while. But now it'll always be there, just as it was or thereabouts, until something goes truly, catastrophically wrong with its insides.

Waiting for me to feel 16 again for an hour or so, basking in the glow of my first computer.

Downstairs neighbors are moving out

2024-11-17T14:00:00Z

Why can't it be upstairs neighbors?

Pencil Animation Process

2024-11-15T14:59:00Z

This was originally a series of posts posted on Cohost from April 24–30, 2024.

pencil wip

Wed, Apr 24, 2024, 1:48 AM

trying to recreate a pencil my girlfriend made from paper for a collage.

laid out the basic design tonight, i'll tackle motion tomorrow

animation update

Wed, Apr 24, 2024, 11:54 PM

have a basic scene and a loop now. needs reframing, tightening up, and more scene elements.

further progress

Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 11:53 PM

cohost still doesn't support video, and this gif compressed the hell out of some of the details, but you get it.

tightened up some of the animation, added more elements to the loop to make it clear this is a pencil made of little paper scraps, and built a little looseleaf paper background that i'm very happy with.

i'm starting to feel like having the pencil draw just a line is a little boring, so we'll see if i go anywhere with that, or just call it done and move to the next thing!

might be done?

Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 9:18 PM

played around with the idea of adding more to the scene, but i think i'm happy with it as-is, and i'd rather be done and work on the next thing, so just tightened up some of the animations some more.

i'll give this one its own standalone post once i'm positive, and once i add the sound design i've been planning on finishing it with! it'll have to be an embed from somewhere else for that.

also this GIF quality is pretty dece, i think i'm getting better at figuring out what settings to use to post here.

i had a lot of fun posting as i went on this one! maybe i'll do that again!

✏ Pencil & Paper 📄

Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 9:38 PM

Final version with sound and music here.

Uh-Oh: Pokémon TCG Pocket is Really Good

2024-11-04T17:49:00Z

Last week, The Pokemon Company released its new Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket mobile game, made in partnership with Creatures and DeNA. I'm going to stop copy-pasting the é character now because it's tiresome.

It's a game all about opening packs of digital Pokemon cards, building your collection, creating decks, and amusingly last, but certainly not least, using your cards to actually play the Pokemon Trading Card Game.

I fully expected the game to feel really gross and scammy, but so far I haven't found that to be the case!

I also expected it to run really poorly for some reason. Probably because my only prior experience with a mobile Pokemon game is with Pokemon Go, which still runs like ass 8 years later. But this one is slick and buttery smooth!

They've clearly put a lot of work into the feeling and animation of opening a pack of cards, the main thing they want you to want to do. When you choose a pack to open, the top edge comes close to the screen so you can swipe a finger across and cut the foil yourself. It's very satisfying, I gotta hand it to 'em.

Pokemon TCG Pocket does a good job of throwing a bunch of card packs at you at the start, which makes sense, they're ultimately trying to get you so hooked on the feeling that you'll spend some real money on these fake cards.

But luckily, so far, they seem to be leaning more on a beautiful presentation and a slick, satisfying user experience to entice you to drain your wallet than on constant pop-ups and ads.

I never spend money on games like this, and I never will, and so far I don't feel like I'm missing out. I'm just kind of having a good, chill time collecting Pokemon cards and battling the CPU now and then.

This game was not on my radar at all, and I certainly wasn't expecting to actually like it, but god damn, it's got a good feel to it.

Pokemon TCG Pocket is free on Android and iOS, and if you want to be my friend, go right ahead and add me: 4971-2973-1339-4084

My BCJ Connections Guess

2024-11-04T17:25:00Z

As you may or may not have heard, The Union Representing NYT Games is on Strike, and would like you to not play their games until they get a fair contract.

To fill the void in the meantime, inimitable poster BCJ has created a Connections board of his own, linked above.

Here is my guess.

nil	nada	nothing	zip
hie	dash	rush	fly
button	cinch	clasp	snap
north	love	blue	lies

Row 1: Synonyms for 'zero.'

Row 2: Words meaning 'to go quickly.'

Row 3: Methods of closing/securing clothing.

Row 4: True ___

Check back tomorrow to see how I did!

UPDATE: Hell yeah.

Post Tags Are Live!

2024-11-04T14:43:00Z

Good news and bad news, folks. The bad news is that I've been laid off from the first full-time job I've had in four years just two short months after starting. The good news is I'll have a lot more time to work on the blog until the next thing comes along!

So in that vein, and following-up on the most-responded-to entry in my last To-Do List post, I'm happy to announce some new shit you can click on!

At the top of this post, sandwiched between the date of publication and the featured image, you should see a list of tags that you can click on to see other posts that I've filed under the same tag. It took a few days of experimentation, and a little trial-and-error, and I'm really happy with how it's looking!

My posts already had tags before this, but you couldn't see them, and I was only maintaining/linking to a handful of cherry-picked tags. Now you get everything!

In addition, there is a new Post Tags page, which features an auto-updating list of all tags used on the blog to date. You can find it under "All Posts" in the navbar, in the sidebar's sitemap, and on the All Posts page under "Browse by tag."

I also took the time to clean up the tags on all my posts, and implement 11ty's Zero Maintenance Tag Page functionality, so now I don't have to worry about creating those pages myself, and I can really start to let the tags fly!

I'm very excited about finally crossing this off my list! In testing, I've been having fun just clicking through chains of tag links and seeing which old posts show up. You can really whip around the site this way, feels like it really opened things up in just the way I was hoping it would!

In honor of this occasion, here are a few fun tags to check out that weren't previously listed on the site:

daily: From a stretch in early 2021 when I was trying to post something every day. It lasted only a couple of weeks, but I posted some fun, short nonsense as a result.
every game: Every year, usually as my first or second post of the new year, I post a list of every video game I played in the year prior.
paper: I've had a soft spot for this particular drawing app since long before I ever had an iPad. For a short while, I posted everything I drew with it in a given month. Maybe I'll do this again one day!
the before times: I first got back into blogging in 2020, so this is the tag I used for anything that had been ported over from before the pandemic.
turnips: Creation of this blog's first iteration in 2020 coincided with Animal Crossing mania, so I kept track of our island's turnip prices here for a while.

Big thanks to everyone who commented on my To-Do List post or on social media with advice on how to get this done, including Lex and Seth, and also to Sophie, aka localghost for making her blog's GitHub repository public for all to see and learn from!

Telling people where they can find me online

2024-11-02T13:59:00Z

We watched Spy Kids 3 on Halloween, and the best parts were Sylvester Stallone (clearly), Elijah Wood's 30 seconds (as expected), and the last 10 minutes when all the big names showed up.

Otherwise, pretty unwatchable.

Good Clouds From History

2024-10-29T20:46:00Z

Digging through old photos to find an answer to li's post last night just happened to unearth a treasure trove!

These are from June 2015, which would've been shortly after I got my DSLR. Turned out to be great timing, because I was able to get some nice shots of these mammatus clouds!

This next batch of shots, also from June 2015, isn't as impressive as big sky naturals, but they're still nice.

I particularly like the backlighting on the big cloud in the third photo.

I guess my fascination with photographing clouds is not a recent development!

Blog To-Dos

2024-10-29T20:08:00Z

I keep a small list of things I want to do with this blog on my changelog, but I honestly forget that exists most of the time, and it might be helpful to talk through some of this stuff as I go.

Okay actually, that reminded me that I wanted an easier way to access my to-do list, so I just added that to my nav and sidebar!

Alright, on with the post:

1. Dates on motion projects

This is the easiest thing to take care of. I could be doing it right now instead of writing this list. Soon!

2. Fix mobile CMS styling

I use a CMS called Decap so that I don't have to write posts in notepad or VSCode anymore. But it's not super friendly on mobile. And if I want this blog to be the first and foremost place I post to, that includes posting from my phone.

I found some responsive CSS on the Decap GitHub, but it really only half works. Some of the UI was being hidden after typing in the body text box, which I think I fixed now? But there's still the outstanding issue of not being able to click "Publish." Which, uh. That's pretty important.

So this is probably my most pressing task!

3. Tag lists on posts

I use tags on my posts, and I have pages that let you view posts by tag, so the natural, final piece of that puzzle is being able to see a list of tags that a post has been tagged with on the post itself.

I haven't implemented this yet because the way I have things set up in eleventy (my static site generator), every post gets tagged with the tag "post," in order to be able to call up the full collection of "posts" at various points on the site.

And I can't figure out how to display a list of tags on a post without including the "post" tag, which would show up on all posts, look clumsy, and not be useful.

I've looked around at some other eleventy users' sites, and it seems like there are other ways to set things up besides tagging every post with "post," so this might require a re-work of some of the guts of my site.

4. Automatic Tag Page Generation

Eleventy can automatically create pages for each tag you use on your posts, so you can just throw tags around and not worry about having to stand up a new page for each manually.

I haven't done this yet for two reasons. One is that this site has lived a few lives already, and the posts on it come from a lot of different sites over a period of seven years, so the tags used on each post really need to be cleaned up. If I were to just implement auto tag pages, it would create a bunch of garbage I don't want.

The other reason is that I kind of like having a small, curated list of tags that I control and decide what gets shown. I guess this is just reason one again from a different perspective, but still. All of this means it hasn't been a priority, but it might be nice. Might also be nice just for the sake of doing that cleanup.

5. Reblogging & Webmentions

Bundling these together under the umbrella of making the blog more social and interactive.

I mentioned this in my post answering li's post, but some folks have been playing around with reblogging each other and it seems neat.

This one requires the most work because I have no idea how any of it works. I've heard scuttlebutt about h-entry, and RSS reblogging methods like ReSShaRe, but haven't taken the time to read into any of it.

I had been looking into some way of implementing a "like" button in the waning days of Cohost, but honestly that desire has itself waned, since I never found an answer I liked, and I don't think that's something I even want here anymore.

Webmentions seem cool, but also look kinda messy when I've seen them on other sites, and I'm not sure how much use I would get out of them. But still worth looking into, I think. Some more interactivity in the blogosphere would be nice.

The biggest source of this stuff I've seen has been Natalie over at House of Nettles. Here are some links for future me (or you, if you're curious):

Reblogging posts with h-entry

How do I reblog from you, webmention style?

A Sociable Web

A Non-Technical Intro to Webmentions

And one to BlueTinge's blog, where they post about RSS trickery.

These will most likely be bigger projects down the road.

6. Cohost Archive

Once Cohost releases their post-rendering tool (I think they're still doing this?), it would be nice to give some old posts a home here, displayed in the same way they were displayed on Cohost.

I'm sure I could figure out a way to do this with some CSS and elbow grease, as I've seen some other folks displaying Cohost posts already, but it's also not a high priority.

This will probably also be a bigger project for someday.

7. Redesign?

In the fresh light of a post-cohost world, this blog has been around for a bit, and some of it is starting to feel a little stale. But at the same time, I really like how it looks and works, and that I was able to get it to this point, hence the question mark.

Still, these things are always shifting as we do, and I feel like given the time and energy, I'll eventually feel like tearing it down to the studs and building something from scratch.

FILE PHOTO

2024-10-28T23:16:00Z

I was sifting through old photos to find the shots in my Hancock post tonight, and came upon this gem.

Taken circa June 2015. No idea what's going on here or why I took it.

If I ever become important enough to have a Wikipedia page, this is the photo you have my permission to use.

Also: feet? On main? For free? I woulda cropped it out, but alas, it's funnier this way.

How High?

2024-10-28T22:18:00Z

Since the great post-cohost en-blog-ification, a couple of folks have been blogging about, and experimenting with, different ways of reblogging and sharing other people's posts in order to riff on or respond to them.

A few methods are more technical, and maybe I'll wade into that eventually, but for now something I like the idea of is just popping open an iframe to the post in question.

It's not the prettiest, but it gets the job done. And for lighter sites like li's here, it works great. Let's try it now.

li writes:

I really like the framing of "the highest floor of a building you have been on for a reason that is not 'going to a high floor in a building.'" Because there have been plenty of those, and it's an uninteresting answer.

The highest I've ever been in a building for a reason would, I think, be the 98th floor of the John Hancock Center in Chicago.

In 2015, fresh out of college, I was an intern at a video production agency called Big Shoulders Digital Video. Most of the work was boring behind-the-scenes stuff like driving equipment around or prepping boxes of Budweiser-branded wristbands for some live music event.

But one night, I was asked to PA for some old rich dude's retirement party that the agency had been hired to shoot on the 98th floor of the Hancock. So I did boring, behind-the-scenes stuff but up really high.

It was, in fact, a pretty boring night from what I remember, but I did get these shots of a foggy Chicago during the day, and Chicago all lit up at night:

So I got some cool shots and a story out of it!

From there, I think I missed my train back out to the 'burbs, and had to wait like two hours to catch the absolute LAST train to the 'burbs. I think my 3DS ran out of juice while I was waiting.

Feel free to sound off in the comments with your own answers to li's question, or go ahead and "reblog" me in any way you wish!

They Sure Were

2024-10-28T16:39:00Z

Two big, beautiful, and indeed outstanding penalties were given to Max Verstappen during this past weekend's Mexico City Grand Prix, and we, the audience were given not only a semblance of long-awaited justice, but also the delicious, mugshot-esque graphic posted above.

Catch me taping this image to traffic lights and lampposts all around town like a Lost Dog poster. Dropping it from a plane like wartime propaganda. Projecting it on the night sky like I'm looking for Batman.

Anyway here are some other people talking about it:

Max Verstappen Needs To Be Benched For His Dangerous Driving — Jalopnik

Max Verstappen Finally Punished For Driving Like Max Verstappen — Defector

No Man's Sky's New Expedition Reward Ship

2024-10-24T12:26:00Z

Hello Games: Our new Boundary Herald starship is "UFO-inspired."

Me: That's the Ebon Hawk.

This is not a complaint.

Fixing Cusdis Comments iFrame Display

2024-10-23T23:23:00Z

A few weeks ago, I suddenly noticed that my comments section wasn't displaying properly. Rather than displaying all of its text fields with approved comments underneath, everything was constrained to a small box with a scrollbar.

I use a service called Cusdis for comments, which can either be self-hosted or hosted on Cusdis's servers. I chose the latter because I'm Computers but not that Computers.

Here's a pic of how the comments section is supposed to look:

Now here's a pic of how it suddenly started looking:

The entirety of the usual comments section was contained within, but you had to scroll to see anything inside this tiny window.

I hadn't made any changes to the way comments are displayed on my side, so I assumed this was a change made on Cusdis's end?

When I searched around about it, I found that multiple people had reported the same problem on their GitHub page, but long before the problem popped up for me. So not sure what exactly went on here!

But if you're also using Cusdis for comments on your site, and you've also run into this issue: I have a fix.

Big thanks to this guide from MoxieCat on Cohost on how to change the styling of Cusdis comments. You don't have to mess with any styling for this fix, but it's a handy guide if you want to, and it got me pointed in the right direction.

First, grab the .js file Cusdis uses to generate the whole comment section from https://cusdis.com/js/cusdis.es.js (you can just right-click and save link as).

Cusdis points to this link in the script you paste onto your website to make comments show up:

<div id="cusdis_thread"
  data-host="https://cusdis.com"
  data-app-id="your unique app ID"
  data-page-id="PAGE_ID"
  data-page-url="PAGE_URL"
  data-page-title="PAGE_TITLE"
></div>
<script async defer src="https://cusdis.com/js/cusdis.es.js"></script>

You'll want to store that .js file somewhere on your website's server.

Edit the pasted script from above to point to the new version of the .js file you're now hosting on your server. Something like:

<div id="cusdis_thread"
  data-host="https://cusdis.com"
  data-app-id="your unique app ID"
  data-page-id="PAGE_ID"
  data-page-url="PAGE_URL"
  data-page-title="PAGE_TITLE"
></div>
<script async defer src="/YOUR-PATH-HERE/cusdis.es.js"></script>

Now for the actual fix. All you have to do is open up the .js file, and delete the following section of code:

function postMessage(event, data) {
  if (singleTonIframe) {
    singleTonIframe.contentWindow.postMessage(
      JSON.stringify({
        from: "cusdis",
        event,
        data
      })
    );
  }
}

If you don't want to be destructive, you can just comment it out by enclosing it in /**/, which is what I did:

Et voila! Your comments should be back to normal!

I don't know shit about Javascript, and I have little to no idea why this actually worked (which is why I commented out the portion in question rather than deleting it outright, just in case), but it did!

If you've been having this issue with your Cusdis comments, I hope this helps!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the newly functioning comments below. I don't know how much help I'll be because, again, no idea why this worked, but I'll do what I can!

Happy commenting!

Things I Liked at the Whitney

2024-10-20T21:49:00Z

This weekend, we went to the Whitney Museum of American Art with my girlfriend's parents. It was my first time there! Here are some things I liked:

The Views

There's a nice big terrace on the top and 6th floors, from which you get some great views of the city! These are from the roof.

Weichsel Beef: WHOLESALE fresh beef & lamb city cut.

Me: Girl, that is so true.

The Art

Hey this place has pictures too! The coolest thing we saw was Wanda Gág's World, an exhibit about artist, illustrator, and children’s book author Wanda Gág.

I had never heard of her before this, but my girlfriend, a children's book illustrator herself, was very excited for it.

For some reason, these are the only photos of the exhibit I took. Probably because I was so engrossed by the art itself!

I took a picture of specifically this corner of one of the displayed pieces because I read the artist's story on the wall, and then for some reason seeing her handwriting in pencil here made me emotional about the fact that "oh fuck, this was made by another actual person with specific ideas about art, living through their own situation a long time ago."

That's good art, baby!

Do yourself a favor and look up Wanda Gág! She has a really cool style. Nothing on the page is left empty, as if she's capturing every object's living, vibrating energy, or photons as they bounce off each surface.

Above is The Rose, by Jay DeFeo. Part painting, part sculpture, it's made from layers and layers of thick paint supported by wooden dowels, carved away into this shape. I loved the suggestion of light from the contrast between the darker material at the edge and the lighter material in the center, and also how its sculptural contours interacted with the actual light around it.

You can't get a sense of scale from this photo, but it weighs more than 1500 pounds, and was much, much taller than me.

This is an untitled piece by Manoucher Yektai. I want to touch and lick it.

And finally, this wall of paintings, particularly La Fortune by Man Ray, which I used as this post's header image, and No Passing, by Kay Sage.

Something about the flatness of the light and shapes, the bright colors, and the surreal subjects really spoke to me. They reminded me of early 3D computer art, though I couldn't put my finger on a specific example.

That's all I got photos of!

We would've loved to see more, particularly the exhibit about Alvin Ailey, but only so much museum can be fit into a day.

In any case, the Whitney is definitely worth a trip!

Ahhh, New York City in Fall

2024-10-19T11:03:00Z

I opened up the windows this morning, and last night's mysterious sewer smell had given way to the refreshing smell of asphalt.

Dat's da scent a da city, baybee! Ayyyy! Let's go Mets!

NOTE: I meant to post this yesterday, but posting from my phone is still not working. One day I will be able to quickly fire off every stupid thought directly to my website and then you'll be sorry.

NOTE NOTE: Turns out I can just not update the date section of a post, and it'll retain that as its "date posted." So now I know that works.

A big thing I miss about Cohost

2024-10-17T19:34:00Z

is having a big community of other people who still take Covid precautions.

Seeing people masked in photos, and just casually posting about the pandemic as a real, ongoing thing helped me feel a little less untethered from reality the past two years.

Despite New York City's Best Attempts, I Have Acquired The New Zelda

2024-10-15T23:48:00Z

I wasn't sure about the new Zelda game at first, until I saw people whose opinions I respect posting about how good it is.

At this point, I had a trip coming up (I went to upstate NY for apples and Fall Foliage), and I thought that if I got paid from some freelance work that had just wrapped up, I would buy it, start it, and have it to play on said trip.

For some reason, I don't usually like starting games while on the go. I like to be in the right headspace when I'm starting something new, and have something I've already set up and established to play when I'm out. I dunno!

I did not get paid from that freelance work before my trip. As of my writing this post, I still haven't been paid from that freelance work. So I didn't buy the game before my trip.

While on my trip, I got paid from my regular day job. Not as much as I'm supposed to be getting from that freelance work, and money I need to put toward staying alive and housed, but still money. And we made multiple trips to a nearby Target.

I was good. I did not buy the game on our trip.

Then came the trip back home. It's not a particularly long or difficult drive, but it's tiring nonetheless, especially since I only drive about once every ten months or so.

Now, the rental car place we use is right next to a really good sandwich shop, so I usually pick up a pair of sandwiches for lunch when picking up the car. This time, I guess the guy didn't hear me well enough through my mask, because when I picked up the car and got all the way home, I opened the bag of sandwiches to find only one sandwich: my girlfriend's. She ordered prosciutto, and I'm a vegetarian, so we couldn't share.

So I didn't get my special sandwich on the way out of town. No big deal, I could get it when I went back to drop the car off.

In the middle of our trip, I discovered that the subway would not be running in our neighborhood that weekend, so I'd need to take a shuttle bus part of the way back home. Nothing against buses, but they are not trains, and shuttle buses fill up fast when trying to meet subway demand. Now my trip back home would be a little more demanding.

At least I'd get a sandwich out of it.

After the drive back down from upstate, I was already quite tired when we stopped at our apartment to unload. I asked my girlfriend if I should stop at the GameStop right by the car rental place after I got my sandwich and get myself a little treat (for not destroying the rental car and killing us all in a fiery blaze, you see).

She told me to just buy the video game. I had earned it.

A short hop across the BQE later, I was four stories underground and one car lighter.

I rode the elevator back up to ground level, headed out to the street, glanced over at the sandwich shop, and They. Were. Closed.

On the drive over, I had briefly thought to myself, "you know, I'm pretty sure there's a reason I never get a sandwich on the way back home." Welp! No sandwich for me this year.

I was bummed, but decided I could just order from our favorite burrito place when I got home. And I had one more little treat up my sleeve anyway.

I walked around the corner to GameStop. I perused their shelf of Nintendo Switch titles. I walked up to the desk, and asked the young man, "do you have the new Zelda?"

"Nope."

"Ok thanks."

As I walked out, I heard the young woman at the register next to him ask, "We don't have it anywhere?" He replied in the negative again. At which point the man who had been talking to them when I came in said, "Man, y'all were empty before, but this is..."

It sure is! Burn in hell, GameStop! Sorry I wasn't in the market for a FunkoPop!

Both of my dreams now thoroughly crushed, I headed for the train. I had a long journey home ahead of me, and I was only getting hungrier.

Standing on the train platform, though, I thought to myself, "I mean... there's a Best Buy at Atlantic Avenue."

I searched up the new Zelda on the Best Buy website. It showed in stock at the Atlantic location. The train arrived.

I turned the idea over in my mind. I'd have to leave the station, find the Best Buy, find the game, check out, get back to the station, and wait for another train. I was tired. I was hungry. I had a seat.

But my girlfriend wasn't depending on me for dinner, she already had food.

When the doors opened at Atlantic Avenue, I stood.

What you need to understand about Atlantic Avenue, if you're not a regular rider of the MTA, is that it's a hellhole clusterfuck. That isn't entirely its fault, it just happens to be a major artery where multiple train lines converge.

It's also where the Barclays Center is located.

As I stepped off the train and made my way up and around and through the station, I saw more and more people wearing New York Liberty jerseys streaming toward me.

Unbeknownst to me, a women's basketball game had just let out. As I exited the station, I saw crowds of people crossing streets and bunching up on corners, and traffic cops directing the flow. This honestly didn't end up being the bother I thought it would, it's just some funny happenstance.

Once on the street, I found my way to the Best Buy. Not far from the station, but not close either. I probably could have found a better exit, but I'd never been to this BB before, and I was trying to be fast.

I rode the escalator up to the second floor and walked into the store. The place was cavernous. I looked around for the tell-tale Nintendo Red amongst the Best Buy Blue.

I found my mark and circled the kiosk a half-dozen times, my eyes searching wildly. It wasn't there. I couldn't believe my luck. The website said it was in stock.

I stood for a moment and remembered that since the game was new, it might be in a cage somewhere, or behind the register.

Walking slowly past the checkout line, I spotted it. I could taste victory. But there was one more hurdle to jump.

In front of me in line was a middle-aged couple buying a small tower of Apple products. The transaction did not appear to be going smoothly.

A good three feet behind them, leaning on the counter, was a younger man watching videos on his phone and guffawing. When I got close behind him in line, he made no attempt to move up or acknowledge that I existed or might want to know his place in line. I genuinely could not tell if he was with the people ahead, or waiting on his own.

After a few minutes, the people ahead asked him a question, and he broke from his reverie to move closer and answer them.

The couple hemmed and hawed over whether to pay the extra nine cents (not making that up) for a warranty on everything they were buying, and decided against. Then they fumbled around trying to fit their purchases into the woman's purse. Then the cashier informed them that the computer had glitched and he needed to start the transaction over.

They took their purchases out of the woman's purse, they all moved down to a new register, and the process repeated. I felt my soul leaving my body.

This time, the transaction was a success, and once they managed to get everything into their bags, it was my turn.

"Hi, can I just get the new Zelda?" I asked, pointing to it on the shelf behind the register.

"Which one?" The cashier asked.

"Top row, fourth from the left?"

The cashier put his hand on the second row.

"No, sorry, the top row?"

He eventually found his way to it and said he couldn't see it because of the glare. And yeah, sure, maybe, fair, but I had been at this way too long by this point.

He rang me up, I tapped my card, and then he started talking to his coworker about the people he'd just rang up before me (which I definitely also would have done), and then stood there holding the game in such a place in between the two of us that it was unclear to me if we were done here, while he ignored me and kept talking to his coworker.

I buffered for a while, and eventually the receipt printed. He finally handed me both without ever acknowledging my existence again. I don't want to sound like one of those people, and I certainly wouldn't ever want to work at this particular Best Buy in my life, but I was Hungry, so in my memory, this was very rude.

I did it. I had the goods. I walked past the security guard and stowed the game in my backpack.

In my mind at the time, the journey that followed was quite harrowing, but thinking back on it, I was just hungry and sweaty and tired, so everything seemed a few notches higher than reality.

I briskly made my way back to the subway, I got another seat, I rode as far as I was allowed, and switched to the free shuttle bus for the rest of the journey.

But the shuttle bus was absolutely packed, and I did not get a seat, and I was constantly in other people's way, and I didn't have the space or mental energy to order dinner on the ride, and people did start to get ornery when they thought the driver skipped a stop (I think they did), and that whole thing sucked about as much as I thought it would, but I got where I needed to go at no extra charge, and only a little slower than I probably would have otherwise.

I ordered dinner on the walk home, shuffled through our front door, and held the game aloft triumphantly.

I wish I could tell you that the game isn't very good, because I think that would be a funnier ending, but it's great! I like it a lot!

You fought well, New York City, but I deserved a little treat.

Took Eggbug To See Some Fall Colors

2024-10-15T11:10:00Z

This past weekend, my girlfriend, my sister, and I all took our yearly trip upstate to see some colors, acquire some apples and apple byproducts, and wander around a big Target.

My box of last-minute Cohost merch just happened to show up hours before we hit the road, so Eggbug got to come along.

I was hoping that stuff would show up sooner so I could try to affix my "Friend of Eggbug" patch to my jacket and parade them around that way, but this was good enough.

I didn't bring any cameras but my instant this year, because frankly carrying around one or more cameras and focusing on getting good shots can take me out of the moment, and that's not what I was looking for this year. We've also been here a good few years in a row now, and I have some nice shots already. Maybe next year I'll feel different!

For now, here's the only blurry, cropped, zoomed-in photo I was able to get of a raccoon as he ran away from my dumb ass for loudly rolling down the car window when I saw him:

Here's a nice cloud I saw at dinner the night we arrived:

We were big fans of these Cool Cats in the Halloween section of the big Target in town:

And I'll leave you with a series of photos of a Psyduck we found in the same Target:

UFO 50: Games 0–10

2024-10-08T20:27:00Z

I finally started playing UFO 50 this past weekend! It's the latest game from some of the folks who made Spelunky, and everyone who's been playing it has been raving about it since launch. Now I'm one of 'em!

Long story short, so far I’m loving it. My only complaint is that I wish it was on Switch. I want to play this thing in bed and on the train something fierce. I’m sure it’ll come in time!

The idea behind UFO 50 is that it's a historical collection of games released for a console that never existed. An alternate history, speculative fiction, call it what you will, I call it a great excuse to develop a ton of weird little games!

The games are presented in "chronological" order in the main menu, so that's the order in which I'll be writing them up here.

Game 0: UFO 50

The first game to talk about must, of course, be the one which contains all other games.

I really like the presentation! It's clean, it's cute, the menu music is absolutely boppin'. I like that all 50 games are presented to you at once, and that all are available to play from the jump, rather than unlocking as you go. The game's website says this is to encourage exploration and jumping around to whatever you feel like, and that's great. That feels right to me.

I also love all the interaction possible with each game "cart." You can access a menu of controls, story, history, and personal stats for each game, which adds a fun bit of flavor as well as being practical. You can also set games as favorites, and filter by those so you can easily get to your personal collection of bangers. And each time you choose a game to play for the first time, little digital cobwebs are brushed away from the cartridge, and it shines in full color. Adorable touch.

Game 1: Barbuta

A simple, brutal exploration game. Feels Metroid-y. Quiet, no music, just a low drone when moving to a new screen. Walk cycle is slow, jumps are tight.

Haven't played much! Died a lot! Feels like there's a lot to uncover.

Looking forward to busting out a pen and paper and spending a quiet, cozy day deciphering its secrets.

Game 2: Bug Hunter

Another quiet one, no music, but some great sound effects. Loving how quiet these games can be. Games used to be quiet! I know that was largely for technical constraints, but I think it was nice!

Anyway, Bug Hunter rules. Two games in, I hit my first banger.

You're a guy on a grid with some alien bugs. You have a series of move and attack actions. You're trying to collect cubes for upgrades. When you run out of actions, your turn ends, and any living bugs grow/evolve. If they evolve into an egg, you have to kill them next turn or its game over because the egg hatches and bugs overrun the world or whatever.

Good stuff! Great UI, solid loop. Really got a hook in me before I moved on. I'll be back for sure.

Game 3: Ninpek

Tough as heck auto-scrolling platformer.

You're a little ninja guy running through a field of enemies shooting projectiles at you. You have a double jump and a shuriken attack. The screen is always moving, so it can feel hectic when you first start. When you die, you briefly come back as an invincible ghost that can shoot projectiles before coming back as a real boy.

Not really my thing, but I can see it being fun to get good at! Fun music.

Game 4: Paint Chase

What if Rally-X was more like Splatoon? We're all asking this, I'm always loudly asking this. I'm not allowed back at the DMV for this very reason.

Well, my prayers have been answered, because that describes Paint Chase pretty well. And you know, I don't love it. I think it's a fun idea, I just don't love actually playing it.

You're driving a racecar that leaves blue paint behind it as it drives, and you need to cover as much of a given level in blue as you can before time runs out. But there are also rival vehicles painting the level pink in their wake. So it's all about management and cleanup in the end, and that just feels like work to me.

I do like that you can just straight up crash into the rival cars to destroy them, though, not even Rally-X allowed you to indulge in that particular action. It's nice and simple.

Game 5: Magic Garden

Magic Garden's a fave. Just look at those lesbians on the title screen!

You play as the girl on the left. You walk around your checkerboard of a garden, and little blobby guys called "Oppies" pop up, pink and blue ones. The pink ones, you can walk over to collect. The blue ones will kill you. When you walk over a designated area of the garden with your pink Oppies in tow, you can drop them off for points. Drop off enough, and you'll create a potion that, very Pac-Man Power Pill-esque, will turn the blue Oppies vulnerable, and allow you to kill them for points.

It's a good little play-until-you-lose situation! Cute music throughout, too!

Game 6: Mortol

You play as a guy who can do three different things besides run and jump: he can turn into a beautiful arrow and shoot himself forward until he sticks in the first wall he hits, acting as a platform for any who would come after him. He can explode like a bomb, which is self-explanatory. And he can turn into a stone block, crushing anything beneath him, and blocking the path of anything that encounters him.

I haven't gotten super far, and it's not totally grabbing me, but it's neat! I could see grabbing some snacks and just locking into a night of one really solid run.

Game 7: Velgress

You play as a little guy with a gun trying to jump his way up a long, vertical cave. There's a big row of spikes at the bottom of the screen, and they stay there as your view scrolls up with each jump, meaning that hitting the bottom of the screen always means death.

It's kind of like an inverted Downwell, which is fitting since I'm pretty sure the guy who made Downwell worked on this.

It's all about twitchy reactions and confident movement. It is not for me!

Game 8: Planet Zoldath

You're a spaceman exploring an alien world. You start with nothing, and collect equipment and the resources to use that equipment as you explore.

There's something a little inscrutable about it, like I don't know entirely what I'm doing. Not in a bad way, it just hasn't grabbed me yet.

But! Some really great, really chill, melancholy music accompanying you in your travels.

Game 9: Attactics

First of all, what a name. Just incredible work here. Try saying it. "Attactics." Wonderful. Incredible mouth feel.

Believe it or not, there's also a game here! And it rules!

You command an army of red guys against an army of blue guys on an 8x6 square battlefield flanked by two castles. Each side's guys spawn one at a time, and move one square forward at a time, at a set interval. Your objective is to get one of your guys across the field from your castle to the enemy castle. Do that three times (denoted by three flags on each castle), and you win the round. Let the enemy reach your castle three times, and you lose.

Since your guys move forward automatically, and you can't control when or where they spawn, the game is all about moving your guys laterally to meet their advancing foes, and/or exploit holes in the enemy's defences.

But you only have a small window of time to move your guys around before they advance, by which time it may be too late to fix their positioning.

It's great! This one is a fave for sure. I also love the art style, the guys are so big and blocky. There's a lot of detail on them compared to smaller sprites. Great music too!

Game 10: Devilition

Ending on a banger. This might be my favorite of the first 10.

You have an 8x8 square grid. Monsters you need to kill placed randomly throughout. A pair of villagers you need to save placed among the monsters. And an arsenal of chess-piece-like Little Guys to use to slay the monsters.

The game plays out in two phases: first, you place your little guys according to where their unique abilities will kill the most monsters. Then, you detonate just one of your Little Guys, and watch the chain reaction that plays out.

The name of the game here is, as I said, chain reactions. So you need to place your Little Guys where their attacks will hit not just a monster or two, but also at least one other Little Guy. Which will trigger that Little Guy's attack, and so on.

It really itches something in my brain to work my way backwards toward a Rube Goldberg machine of monster killing. It's really good.

As you make your way through, there are levels with stronger monsters that need to be hit multiple times to be killed, more villagers to save and avoid hitting, and tighter constraints on the number of Little Guys you can place. It gets pretty tough! Farthest I've been so far is level 8, but I've still only played one full run.

The music is this sort of repetitive, medieval number that really fits this mode of puzzle brain. The whole thing reminds me a little bit of Dungeons & Diagrams from Last Call BBS, just with more monster killing.

Conclusion

What I'm noticing so far is that I'm digging the more puzzle-y games more than the platformers, or the ones that aren't completely grok-able up front and require a little more of a time investment.

I'll do my best going forward to give those a fair shake, but at the same time, there's 50 of these things, and if something's not hitting, it's not hitting!

That's all for now! And hey, have you been playing UFO 50? What are some of your faves? Let me know!

I'll be back soon with the next 10!

Today's Clouds

2024-10-08T19:29:00Z

Did something I've been thinking about doing for a long time today: dusted off my old DSLR, charged the battery, and shot some clouds.

I discovered via film photography that I really love clouds, and I love taking pictures of them. So I'm going to do that more, and post the results here!

All of these were shot from the window next to my desk. When I saw something I liked, I leaned over, grabbed my camera, took a few shots, and went back to work.

Camera is a Canon 70D. Lens is a 55–250mm telephoto.

What Else Is On? October 6th, 2024

2024-10-06T23:50:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

I've been looking forward to this, the first edition of What Else Is On? since the closure of Cohost, because so many people have blogs now, and they've been sharing some cool things!

As always, though, let's start with some tunes:

🎵 PUT THIS ON

This track comes to me via Morning Music, an excellent blog by Misty De Méo, on which she posts what she's listening to over coffee each morning.

I've seen it in my YouTube recommended feed a few times, but never clicked on it. I'm glad it was finally recommended by a human!

📚 READ THIS

COVID Denialism & Disability Justice — Nex3

I couldn't stop wondering, why? Why would people do this, when all the evidence is there for them to see? Succumbing to the "COVID is over" propaganda campaign was part of it, sure, but there was too much overt cognitive dissonance in the way people spoke about the disease for that to be everything.

Been seeing this on a few people's link roundups already, but... there's a reason for that!

Mushrooms, Cows, Clouds, Gale — Halcyon Garden

Halcyon's blog is a collection of some extremely beautiful nature photography. They post once daily, and I'm always excited to scroll through a new entry.

This one is my favorite so far!

The Calm Before the Storm — Maddie does not drink nine coffees a day

Almost every store was closed today. The only things left running were big corporate: convenience stores and chain cafes. I stopped by a Louisa (Taiwan's Starbucks equivalent) and saw that there was only the barista inside.

I asked if she was going to be okay.

She shrugged. "I might sneakily gap it if I sell everything?"

I looked at the cabinet. There were only four things left: 3 bagels (matcha, hazelnut, and ube) and a piece of cake. No pun intended, but it really was a piece of cake what I needed to do next.

A really lovely, human story from Maddie. Always nice to read something and be left thinking about how everyone's people and that we can all take care of each other.

Indie Game Roundup (Oct. 4, 2024) — Virtual Moose

Michael posts a lot of different things on their blog, but I wanted to share this indie game roundup of theirs, because of how many new, weird, different, little games I found through it!

They also spearheaded a Cohost Blogroll project that looked like a massive undertaking, and I'm thankful someone undertook it, because so many gosh darn people started gosh darn blogs last month.

Nothing Doing #1 — Horse on VHS

A webcomic about, as the author puts it, "hating your job and loving your friends." I love the character designs and the careful use of color. I originally followed this comic on Cohost, and I'm happy to have added it to my lineup of new RSS feeds!

Linking #1 here even though you don't necessarily need to start at the start, but it's fun from the get-go!

There's also a print collection of the first 20 strips up for pre-order now!

Cat and Girl

Another webcomic I found on Cohost that has been a very fun follow! I love that their website archive goes back to the start of the strip in 1999! You can really see the art style evolve!

📺 WATCH THIS

Riding Japan's Fastest Bullet Train l HAYABUSA First Class Seat 🚄 — Experience Japan

My girlfriend and I have been watching a lot of Japan travel channels on YouTube lately (we plan to visit someday), but Experience Japan is our favorite. There's just a little extra humor and personality injected into his videos, without being obnoxious.

His videos range from different methods of travel (his ferry videos are fun), to street food, vending machines, different destinations, hotels, and so on.

Like a lot of other Japanese travel channels we've found, none of his videos feature a voiceover, opting to communicate through captions instead. This makes for a peaceful viewing experience, and allows us to add our own commentary without missing anything.

Give it a watch if you're curious!

🎮 PLAY THIS

UFO 50

I finally started playing UFO 50 this weekend, and it's as good as everyone says. A tidy little package of games from an alternate history, made for a console that never existed. It's a cute wrapper for a collection of really fun, snappy game snacks.

🌐 A GOOD WEBSITE

Sortition Social

Created by Blackle Mori, this site is a rotating collection of posts from various RSS feeds (and you can submit your own to be included). It's a kind of discovery site for new things to read outside your circle of blogs.

It updates once a day with a handful of new things to read from a random selection of submitted feeds. And of course, it has an RSS feed of its own, so you can get all of this delivered to the reader of your choice.

🌐 MORE GOOD WEBSITES

So many folks have been creating and updating personal sites in the post-Cohost times, and I just want to call out a few that are a joy to look at:

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

Bright Lights, Big City

2024-10-06T14:16:00Z

Been trying to be more conscious of taking photos lately, and it just so happens there were some pretty nice things to take photos of this weekend!

Above, you’ll see the Ferris wheel we stumbled upon on our way to the grocery store on Friday.

There was a whole little local fair going on in a parking lot, with more rides crammed in around the wheel.

The wheel was also absolutely whipping around much faster than I think I’ve seen one moving before, and all the kids on board were screaming their entire heads off.

This next shot also came about as a result of “just walkin’ by.”

My girlfriend and I were out on a little date to a local market/food hall, and just happened to be heading back to the subway at the right time to catch this light.

Gotta love golden hour. It really accentuated the yellow in this building! And I love the contrast with the clear blue sky behind.

While we were out, I won this onigiri hamster from a crane machine!

Got him on our fifth and final token.

Here’s a bonus shot of the author being rudely stared at by a person in a pink jacket.

This Post Has No Featured Image

2024-10-05T14:56:00Z

Hello.

This is sort of a test post to see if a feature is working, and I am sorry for that.

In my post about Post Hog, I talked about strange new ways of posting, including text-only posts (truly a modern marvel).

As of this post, and thanks to friend of the site Lex Feathers, text-only posting should be implemented on my site.

I wanted a way to post without requiring a featured image, but that would still display an image in the snippet on the Home and All Posts pages, because I still like the way things are displayed on the site, with an image for every post.

So now, basically what happens is, the site checks for a featured post image, and if there is one, displays that both on the post's page and in the preview snippet.

If it doesn't have a featured image, it displays only the post's text on the post page, and a default image in the snippet.

For now, because I think it's funny, the default image is this:

In the future, depending on how much I post like this, I might end up changing the home page from Recent Posts to Featured Posts, to ensure it doesn't end up piled high with Seele 01 jpegs.

I also tried to get cute and post this from my phone, but my CMS is still a little too janky on mobile, and ends up hiding the Save and Publish buttons when you start typing. Oops!

I'll see what I can do about that next.

EDIT: Changed the default image to something that better fits the theme of the blog. Sorry Seele!

This Blog Has a Number of New Features

2024-10-05T04:32:00Z

Over the past three weeks which have felt like approximately 12 hours, I put the manic energy brought on by Cohost Sadness into, like many people, website building.

It occurs to me that some people may only experience my website through an RSS reader, and so may not be aware of various site updates as they are pushed live.

Website updates also tend to feel like that clip from Parks & Rec where Adam Scott spends weeks working on a stop-motion animation, and he plays it and it's like half a second of footage and he's like oh god I thought there was more.

So please clap, I guess is what I'm saying.

Here are some of the things I've added lately:

Comments

I had comments on this blog once upon a time through a service called Disqus, which I eventually removed. Now comments are back through a new service called Cusdis (literally), so comment away!

Guestbook

This is just a fun little "hey why not?" and it's basically just a page with nothing on it but an open comment box, but hey. If you want to go write me a little message, now you can do that.

Some CMS Stuff You Won't See

One of the things about moving from social media to a blog, or just setting up a blog in general is that you have to make it easy to post or you simply won't post. These things make it a little easier to post.

All of this is invisible to you, but it was a lot of work and it's cool, so I'm listing it.

I found some extra styling in the comments of my CMS provider's GitHub page that make it play a little nicer on my phone, which it doesn't currently do out of the box.
I figured out how to make fields in my CMS optional (for slapping down a quick draft without a title, image, etc, or for posting without those things, should I want to do that).
I figured out how to make my CMS an installable PWA (progressive web app), which just means I can "install" the website to my phone's homescreen, and it will act like an app without any of the browser chrome getting in the way. This is nice because I can just tap on an icon and jump right to posting, like I would have with Cohost.

88x31 Buttons

Everyone started making these for their blogs as Cohost was ending at it was really nice and I love everyone who actually made one of these in the past few weeks.

I've been adding buttons both to my sidebar, in the "Friends" section, and on my Links page! Go find some good sites!

Ok thank you for reading

You are now free to move about the website.

How To Post

2024-10-03T22:25:00Z

After folks started moving to blogs from Cohost, it really struck me how unique everyone's blogging styles are, and it got me thinking about my own.

I've been thinking about blogging as a thing you do a certain way for so long: title, description, featured image, several paragraphs of carefully considered text.

It's no wonder this is the only mode I've considered. The era of personal blogging died shortly after Google Reader did, and once it was gone, all that was left to read over RSS was Professional Internet Writing that looked a lot like the above.

But now I'm following blogs going every which way. A lot of them are text-only, some of them don't even always use titles! They're literally just taking the way they would have posted a random thought on Cohost and plopping it on their blog.

Honestly, I want in!

I re-started my blogging journey in 2020 by just posting some fun, wacky shit. I used to post a daily Stalk Market price check from my Animal Crossing island for crying out loud!

Somewhere along the way, my posts started getting longer, and I wanted to make them look more professional, like some of the websites I read. I started aspiring towards a more disciplined mode of writing and Video Game Crit.

And that's fine, but I also got it in my head that that was the only way to post. That if I was going to post to my blog, it had to be for a purpose, it had to be a "piece." I had to sit down and really flesh out my thoughts and ideas like it was a term paper.

And yeah, sometimes I want to do that, if I'm writing about my experience playing a game or something, but I also have a HUGE list of ideas for blog posts that I plan to write "eventually" that I'm very much not posting because I think I don't have time to do it right. Because I think it has to be some level of "interesting" or "good" or "having a point."

I've forgotten the lesson of Post Hog.

If you weren't on Cohost, or you weren't aware, Post Hog was a Little Guy invented by Cohost user @harveyMILF.

One day that link will be dead, and that's very sad, so click it while you can. For everyone else, here's an image embed:

So I'm going to try to keep Post Hog in my heart going forward. Especially as I'm bristling against the likes of Mastodon and Bluesky and think that actually I'd just like to post on my blog, thanks.

I want to write shorter posts, sillier posts, pointless posts. There's no need for polish here. The only rules are the ones I set for myself.

I like the look of my blog as it is, with images featuring prominently in post snippets, but that may change! I don't know if I like the idea of writing a blog post without a title, but who knows! Watch this space!

It's been so incredibly exciting to see blogs popping up infused with the soul of Cohost—with the soul of Post Hog—and to watch people do strange new things with them. My eyes have been opened to a world of possibility I never dreamed of.

The blogosphere gained a lot of top-tier posters in the last weeks of September. I'll have a link roundup and a revamped Links page with some new folks to follow soon!

👨‍💻 Side By Side 👨‍🎨

2024-10-01T23:00:00Z

Trying out a new thing where I make an actual blog post when I put up a new motion design project rather than just sticking it on the Projects page and being quiet about it!

I started this project back in April and shelved it because I wasn't super happy with how it was turning out and just spent too much time looking at it. You know how it goes sometimes.

Then last night, I was going through my Cohost drafts trying to see if there was anything I wanted to post before The End, and I found an old version of this! I had completely forgotten about it!

It made me curious how far I had gotten with it, so I opened up the project file, and found that I actually really liked where it was at!

I was deep in the website building mines in April, both working on this site, and building Welcome to the Cyber World, my MMBN fansite that I made for the Critical Distance Fansite Jam.

So I wanted to make something celebrating the joy and creativity of the particular left-brain/right-brain cooperation present in using code to make what is essentially a piece of visual media.

It's called Side By Side because it was originally a horizontal piece with both windows sitting next to each other, but I found that to be too static, and the transition I landed on is more fun and dynamic. It also mirrors the actual experience of building a website, in that you often write the code not knowing 100% what the site will look like until you load it up in a browser!

Anyway, I couldn't think of a better name, and it still sort of applies in a left-brain/right-brain way.

I hope you like it! And if you do, feel free to peruse my gallery of Motion Design for more!

Revisiting Mike's Summer Games 2024

2024-09-24T22:01:00Z

It's officially, astronomically fall here in the northern hemisphere, so it's time to check back in on all the games I said I'd play over the summer!

This summer was an interesting one. I spent the bulk of it looking for a job and worried about money (not very conducive to playing games), but also not working very much (usually conducive to playing games). It feels like I wrote that blog post a thousand years ago.

In any case, here's what I hoped would happen, and the cold, hard reality of what did happen:

Games to finish

❌ Pyre - Well. Okay. Falling at the first hurdle. I don't know, man. I cannot make myself play this game. I've been meaning to finish it for like four years now, it might just be a wash at this point. I really love it, it's just that every session feels like a big commitment. I mainlined most of it at a very particular time (2020), and I might just have to leave it there. Who knows!

❌ Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - Fuckin' shit, alright listen. Here's the thing with this one. I couldn't decide whether I should play the ending with or without my girlfriend, and then whether I should finish it first or wait until she did, and then none of those things happened. Still want to see the end, though.

❌ Genesis Noir - I couldn't make myself care enough to see it through. It's reeeeeeeally pretty, but the gameplay is honestly kind of boring and monotonous. I might leave this one behind.

✅ SteamWorld Heist - But the fourth one stayed up! I actually managed to make myself finish a game on this list. A testament to the quality of SteamWorld Heist, I think! It was fantastic all the way through. Challenging yet breezy. I really wanted to finish this one before the sequel launched, which I did, and then I ended up not buying the sequel right away. There are too many games right now! August and September have been packed! But anyway, still a victory.

Games to put to bed

✅ Pools - Check! I'm good on this one. It was a pretty neat, spooky time. Just not for me, I think. Could be a good spooky season game, maybe I'll revisit it, but probably not.

✅ Children of the Sun - I actually ended up finishing this one! I knew I didn't have long to go, so I pushed through. It was fine! I think I like it more in retrospect than I did while playing it.

✅ System Shock - Yep, good on this one. I played a little bit more and decided, "you know what, I get it." Then I played through all of the original Deus Ex, the beginning of Deus Ex 2, and the beginning of System Shock 2, and yep. This one's in my rearview.

✅ Myst - Yeah, I think so. I might play a remake someday. It's cool, I love the vibes. I even took notes in my notebook while playing, and you gotta know I love that. But then I took a break for a few months, and when I tried to come back I was completely lost. So. That's okay. I had my Myst experience for now.

Games to fuck around in

✅ Cyberpunk 2077 - Fucked around, took some more photos, wasted some more time, drove all the heck over the place. I kinda just like slow-rolling this one and enjoying my time in the world. Maybe I'll finish it, maybe I won't. But it's staying on my hard drive.

❌ Summer House - There's literally nothing to this game, and I didn't even boot it up once to have a chill time and build some cute houses. Shame.

Games to start

❌ Lorelei and the Laser Eyes - I was going to play this one with my girlfriend, and we have both been too busy for that to happen, and also not feeling a game! That's more of a cozy fall thing for us, I think. So maybe soon.

❌ Prey - I don't really know what I was thinking with this one. I never ended up feeling like playing this. Which is fine! I dunno. I did end up playing all of Deus Ex, so maybe I was on to something! Back to the backlog it goes!

Wildcards

(Games I want to start, but haven't been feeling just yet)

✅ MegaMan Battle Network Legacy Collection Vol. 2 - I ended up being in the mood to start up Battle Network 4! It really just might be my least favorite entry. Just gotta push through to 5.

❌ LIVE A LIVE - UGH still not yet. I want to play it so bad, but it's gotta be the right time. It's soon, I can feel it. Fall is RPG season. It's soon.

***

And that was my summer in games! How'd I do? Not great, not terrible. I kinda wish I'd finished more games, but if I'm not feeling it, I'm not feeling it. And I'm trying to embrace the idea of not feeling like I need to finish games just because I start them. Sometimes enough is enough!

Speaking of: Thanks so much for reading! I'll be back with another game roundup soon. As I mentioned, it's been a jam-packed two months. Gotta try and catch up on some stuff.

'Til next time!

RIP Cohost

2024-09-17T20:26:00Z

One week ago, Cohost staff announced that the site would be shutting down at the end of the year, and shifting to read-only mode before that on October 1st.

I didn't blog about it here much, but I loved being on Cohost. It's the one social media platform I actually used after Twitter died, and I'm very sad it's going away. Sadder than I even expected, given it's been in a precarious place financially for a while.

From a design perspective, compared to all other social media, Cohost was a paradise. No numbers, no algorithm, no global feed, no discover page, and a lot of really useful ways to curate what shows up in your feed. Having a reverse-chronological feed of only the things I wanted to see from the people I asked to see them from has done wonders for my brain.

People were able to actually find my work and my posts on Cohost. I got likes, comments, and shares, I just couldn't tell you how many. Mostly, I just remember when people left nice comments or someone I thought was cool reposted my work. I never felt like I was posting to the entire world (bad) or to the void (acceptable but lonely).

Not being able to see how many people liked a post, or how many people are following you is genius. It totally takes you out of your head when posting, or considering what and whether to post, and you can't really get a sense of whether someone is a "Big Account" at a glance, or whether a post "did numbers" or "got ratio-ed."

I've already written a bunch about why I love using Cohost and why I'll miss it so much over on, well, Cohost, and so have lots of other people. Reading the news and seeing everyone in my feed react to it was like hitting a brick wall of realization that that place and the community of folks I follow and talk to is really important to me, and the idea of losing it was and is gutting.

Cohost has been a really nice place to hang out for a little while every day. It feels a little like the old internet. People show up to share big ideas, little jokes, recommendations, and incredible art. People show up just to be people. They come to share posts, not create "Content."

It also felt okay not to spend time there. Because it was entirely human-curated, and wasn't constantly trying to shove something new in your face to force engagement, it didn't feel frenzied like other social sites can. It felt like a small part of my life that I could come back to when I felt like it, rather than something that took it over. Like checking your email after coming home rather than spending your entire commute on your phone.

It wasn't perfect, and it wasn't all rosy, but Cohost did a lot right, and that hit for folks.

Amongst the outpouring of sadness at the site's impending demise, something that has been incredible to see is just how many people are—instead of, or in addition to moving to other social sites—building their own websites and blogs.

It's the most inspiring explosion of creativity and rejection of the corporate web I've ever seen, and it fills me with joy and hope. My RSS reader is full to bursting, and I can't wait to take the time to update my links page with all these new sites to follow.

And everyone's blogs look so cool! It's honestly got me rethinking the ways I want to blog here going forward! But I'll leave that for another post.

For now, I'll just say that I'm really going to miss Cohost. I'll be posting there from now until it is only carbon. After that, I'll still be here.

If you're a fellow friend of Eggbug, and you have a blog you'd like me to follow, please feel free to leave it in the comments below. Or you can just say hey.

Vividlope Is a Puzzle Platformer From a Better Time

2024-08-20T12:35:00Z

The moment you boot up Vividlope for the first time, you are transported to another era of video game history. A better era. One before micro-transactions and DLC character skins, where "online play" was a novel idea, and menu buttons bleeped with loud bloops to let you know they had been pressed. You can easily imagine its OST ringing out amid the din of a noisy arcade. It's got the vibes on lock.

I've been conceptualizing the gameplay of Vividlope in my head as, "like if Q-Bert was Super Monkey Ball." I think that's the clearest, most concise description I can offer. It has the touch-em-all-to-win color-changing tiles and enemy avoidance of Q-Bert, and the moving around a 3D shape suspended above an infinite skybox and Y2K arcade vibes of Super Monkey Ball. Throw in a few more mechanics, and that's Vividlope!

In case none of that made sense to you: Vividlope is a puzzle platformer in which you are a little guy running all over a big 3D shape that is divided into square tiles. When you walk over a tile, it changes color. In order to complete a level, you need to change all of its shape's tiles to the correct color.

Then comes the depth. There are enemies walking around every level that you need to avoid, items you can use to both defeat those enemies and change the color of a level's tiles, trap tiles that you need to jump over or otherwise be wary of, and level types where you can walk over tiles to turn them the color you want and also walk back over them to turn them back to the color you don't want.

Then come the Sweeteners, so called (by me) because they sweeten an already sweet pot, and take things to the next level. For instance, that gauge on the left side of all these screenshots. It increases while you're consistently moving over unchanged tiles and changing them to the right color. When you've increased the gauge enough, you get a little boost to your movement speed. Keep going, and you'll gain a defense boost that allows you to touch an enemy or hazard once without losing a life (in exchange for emptying the gauge). Keep going even more, and you'll max out your speed, which is communicated to you by a more high-pitched sound when walking over tiles (a nice touch). If you move over too many already-changed tiles, or stay still too long, or move too slowly, or touch an enemy or hazard, you'll lose all the progress on the gauge, your speed will reset, and you'll be vulnerable to enemies.

Then there's my favorite feature, which is that each level requires you to touch a different percentage of its tiles to be considered complete, and none of them (that I've seen so far) are 100% (yes, when I said you needed to touch all of a level's tiles to win before, I was half-lying in order to simplify a high-level explanation, it's called writing).

So in one level, you might need to touch 80% of all tiles in order to win, but rather than just end right away, once you've touched that 80% the level enters "Bonus Mode." All enemies are cleared from the board, and touching any previously touched tiles incurs a massive penalty to your speed gauge. Now, once your gauge runs out, the level immediately ends, and you get a rank based on your performance.

The reason I love this so much is that rather than take a hard stance of, "100% every level or perish," Vividlope's designers recognized that it's actually more fun and arcadey to leave that last little bit as a bonus for sickos and perfectionists, both giving an out to someone who might have already had their fill of what might have been a tough level, and making the very end of a level an extra challenge. It makes that last 20% or however much feel like a different level.

I also love that this percentage split ends up adding an extra strategic layer to gameplay. Many, many times, I have found myself entering a level's bonus phase, and the only remaining tiles are on the exact opposite end of the level. I would need to traverse too many already-touched tiles to reach them, so I just have to take the hit to my rank. Thereby, if you want to complete that bonus phase, you need to keep your route in mind, and make sure you're leaving yourself a viable path to any tiles you missed by the time the bonus phase rolls around. This becomes a real challenge in later levels when the shape you're traversing is a giant labyrinth covered in hazards to avoid.

This strikes me as a really elegant piece of design, because it feels good when I'm completely locked in and giving a level everything and I'm able to hit that 100%, and it also feels good when I reach the end of a particularly taxing level and I can just go, "oh who gives a shit," and walk across a couple of tiles to finish things off.

I've been pleasantly surprised with the pace at which Vividlope continues introducing new mechanics throughout the game's Story Mode. It introduces a lot of things up front (obviously), and then maybe once or twice per each of the game's 15-level worlds. There are new enemy types, new types of tiles, and other little twists to keep things interesting as you go.

You're also accruing some kind of currency in every level, which can be spent at a shop on the world map. You can buy different colors of your character's outfit—though these have no bearing on the gameplay—and also health and items that you can deploy inside a level by bringing up the item menu. This is super useful in later levels when it feels like item spawn rates have been turned way down, and enemy spawn rates turned way up, though activating a purchased weapon will lower the maximum rank you can achieve for that level. There isn't too much to say about this because you'll very quickly have enough money to buy out the whole store several times over.

Up top, I talked about Vividlope's arcadey, Y2K vibes being off the charts. A lot of that is wrought by a killer soundtrack from Baycun and ViRiX. Each track is distinct, but the whole remains cohesive. There are some chill Picross vibes, some faster Super Monkey Ball fare, there's some 3DS eShop in there, some Wii Sports for sure, it's got breakcore beats, and even some Daft Punk-y, house-y tracks. It's ten bucks on Bandcamp (the same price as the game), and it's worth every penny. My favorite track is still "Vividvoice," the first world's background track. It's just such a video game-y bop.

As for the visuals, again, Y2K to the max in font choice and beyond. The backgrounds are pretty without being distracting, and nice-looking enough to have warranted their own "BG Viewer" mode, which plays some chill music over whichever level background you'd like to stare at while getting drugs high with your friends.

Level action is readable even when ratcheting up the frantic chaos of "hey that's a lot of enemies." And the UI easily lets you know the status of a half-dozen mechanics at a glance. I especially love the Drop Queue–a thing I barely have time to look at but am glad it exists–which shows you how many more enemies will spawn before an item does, simultaneously confirming that, "yes, this is a lot of enemies," and "we promise an item is coming at some point." It's very funny while I'm sitting here writing, and maddening when I'm actually playing.

Story Mode is beefy, and will easily keep you coming back to try and max out your level ranks. After that, there's an Endless Mode for sickos whose only true language is now The Tiles.

All in all, Vividlope is an absolute joy. This is arcadey, pick-up-and-play video games at their best. Easy to pick up, difficult to master. All of that.

It's at once a callback and a whole new thing. It stands tall on the shoulders of all the puzzle platformers that came before and reaches for excellence. There isn't a single part of Vividlope that feels half-baked or under-thought. It feels like a complete package. At $10, it easily deserves a place in everyone's video game collection.

There simply aren't enough games like Vividlope in the world, but at least now there's one more.

Castaway is a Misunderstood Gem

2024-08-19T14:08:00Z

Last night, after being charmed by the piece of key art accompanying this post, and swayed by an $8 price tag, I grabbed Castaway on Switch. I've actually been looking forward to the game for about a month now, since seeing a preview on NintendoLife, and I was hopeful it would live up to the charm exuded by its art, screenshots, and trailer.

I'm going to preface the rest of this by pointing out that all of the game's marketing materials are very clear that this is a small, short game. The headline on its Switch eShop page reads, "A short & charming action-adventure game!" A section of the following paragraph reads, "Beat the 3 bosses in the concise and delightful 'Story Mode' to unlock the thrilling and addictive 'Survivor Mode.'" Sounds great, love it. Always down for a short game. For eight bucks, I wouldn't expect much more.

The game starts you in Story Mode, an extremely pretty, GBA-styled, Zelda-like adventure that is obviously inspired by Link's Awakening. You crash land on an island, wake up on the beach, grab your sword, and start your adventure. Just before grabbing your sword, you watch three pterodactyls carry off your two other tools—a pick-axe and a hookshot—as well as your little dog. This sets your expectations accordingly for the journey ahead.

Sword in hand, I dove in, and found exactly what I'd read on the tin. The Story Mode island is designed to point you just where you need to go, with little need for exploration, as each path is gated by obstacles that can only be overcome by one of your 3 items.

I had a great time with Story Mode, which lasted me about 30 minutes. The controls felt good for this type of game, the visuals are gorgeously chunky, and the music is fun and boppy. Before I knew it, I had acquired all of my tools, overcome every challenge, and was reunited with my little dog, an occasion for which you are rewarded with this adorable image:

Now, you may be thinking, "30 minutes? That sounds extremely short, even in terms of what is generally considered a 'short' game." And it seems like this is something of a sticking point for folks, if Steam reviews can be used as any kind of benchmark (average Steam reviews are currently Mixed at time of publication). And yes, 30 minutes is short, especially if you're expecting this to be a pure Zelda-like. But I was perfectly happy with my 30 minutes in Story Mode, and I think the reason why is a matter of perspective.

So the game starts you in what its store page calls "Story Mode," which, again, it specifically calls short, concise, and calls out the fact that it only contains 3 dungeons with 3 bosses. On the game's main menu, this is called "The Island," and right below it is a locked game mode called "The Tower." The game's store pages also made mention of this as a challenge dungeon which sees you leveling up different attributes as you try to climb to the top of the tower, floor by floor. You unlock The Tower by completing The Island, a.k.a. Story Mode.

Which is why, not too far into my adventure around the island, I stopped and thought, "Oh neat, this is the tutorial."

And I was right! Venturing around the island has you very quickly learning the ins and outs of gameplay, and learning to use each of your tools as you recover them one by one. Once you unlock The Tower, the game starts you off with all three of your tools because, well, you found them on The Island.

I think this is where some players are experiencing some kind of disconnect, that I think the game was trying its best to avoid, where they're assuming that Story Mode = An Entire Zelda Game, and that The Tower is just some side challenge they can ignore in favor of the story.

This isn't necessarily an unfair assumption to make, seeing as this is how a lot of games work, and especially games positioning themselves as Zelda-likes, which Castaway absolutely is. But it's also doing something different, and is trying to be as up-front about that as possible.

I don't think this is entirely players' fault; when you see something vaguely Zelda-shaped, you're going to come to it with certain expectations. But I also don't think it's the game's fault, because it was clearly trying pretty hard to let people know, "hey, this thing is short, and it's also something different."

Judging by the developer's social media posts, it sounds like they knew this game was going to be a hard sell for what it is, and that's a shame! The 30-minute story mode also falls well within Steam's 2-hour refund limit. It would really suck to see a game punished for showing admirable restraint for a change. I've played other Zelda-likes this year that tried to punch above their weight class and just did not have it. Maybe I'll write about Master Key next. But back to Castaway for now:

Meeting the game where it was coming from, I really enjoyed the idea of a tiny, Zelda-ish adventure as a tutorial/prologue/setup for a different type of game with plenty of replayability. The Island also features a number of different difficulty modes to accommodate different kinds of players, as well as a speedrun mode with an in-game timer. Taken all together, that's plenty of game for eight dollars! I'm more than happy to spend some more time with The Tower, and then move on to something else feeling like I've gotten my money's worth.

I think expecting a truly Zelda-sized adventure for the price of a sandwich—especially from an indie dev—is ludicrous, and speaks to a larger issue of gamers expecting to receive maximum gameplay for minimal cost. But that's an issue too big for this post.

Suffice to say that I'm seeing a lot of complaints in Steam reviews that boil down to, "there isn't a lot to chew on." Okay! True! Did there need to be? It's eight dollars, it's not going to be your next live-service forever-game. Spend an afternoon having some fun and move on with your life. If it's not for you, it's not for you, but gee whiz!

Taken as it is, Castaway is a lovely little game that looks great, feels great, plays great, and is trying something novel with its presentation. I think that's cool! If you think that sounds cool too, you should toss a few coins its way and give it a try.

Desperately Seeking Solitaire Update: Zachtronics Solitaire Collection on Mobile

2024-08-13T16:53:00Z

Last October, I blogged about my harrowing search for a good mobile solitaire game, which ended up being harder than I thought it would be. I dug through a lot of garbage until I eventually landed on Solitaire City, an excellent one-time purchase that runs well, and plays a staggering number of solitaire variants without showing any ads, pestering you for a monthly subscription, or stealing your personal information.

I'm happy to report that I'm still enjoying Solitaire City immensely! In fact, I'm currently hooked on one of its variants called Golf. However, I recently stumbled upon something that I missed in my initial search. Something so blatantly obvious, that I needed to blog about it both as penance, and to spread the news to any other solitaire seekers.

The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection is available on mobile.

I can't believe I missed this. I knew this game existed! I knew Zachtronics made quality solitaire games! It's in the very first paragraph of my original post! And I quote:

Earlier this year, I got back into Last Call BBS, Zachtronics' penultimate game release. Specifically, I got really into the most basic-ass game in the collection, Sawayama Solitaire, which is just 3-draw Klondike solitaire with some bangin' tunes.

Sawayama Solitaire was the whole reason I set out on this search in the first place! Also, "penultimate game release." I knew about the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection! In fact, I just dug back through my email, and I already owned the collection on PC by the time I wrote that blog!

For whatever reason, it never occurred to me that the game might come to mobile. It was even out on mobile when I wrote that blog, I just missed it.

I just got back into playing the ZSC on PC last week, and I was perusing the Zachtronics website for reasons I don't remember. When I saw the list of places the game is available, I sat up and said, "WHAT?" out loud, and then immediately bought it.

$4.99 on iOS and Android, you can't beat it. Eight impeccably designed, beautifully rendered solitaire variants plucked from Zachtronics history, there for the taking.

However, this revelation doesn't mean I've given up on Solitaire City, for one very good, very specific reason: the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection plays in landscape, whereas Solitaire City plays in portrait. I'm not a big fan of playing games horizontally on my phone. As a small phone owner, if I'm playing something on my phone, I'm usually in the middle of something else, and so I only want to use one hand.

The ZSC is also a little too tiny to squint at on my phone screen, especially since almost all of its games are rendered inside a little window atop a piece of background art. So Solitaire City is still safe on my phone.

On my iPad however, it's all Zachtronics all the time.

How I Listen to Music

2024-08-12T22:27:00Z

There are plenty of reasons to want to leave Spotify. The cost, artists not getting paid, platforming right-wing weirdos, whatever is happening here with smaller artists' tracks being pulled without warning, or just plain wanting to actually own the music you listen to.

I gave Spotify the boot more than 2 years ago now, and I'm still extremely pleased with the replacement I landed on, so I thought I would share it in case anyone was interested in doing the same.

When I was first looking for alternatives to Spotify, I knew I didn't just want to jump to another streaming service and pay rent for a bunch of music I would ultimately lose access to if I ever stopped paying. I wanted to own my music again. I wanted out.

So I started from where and how I wanted to listen to music, and worked backwards. I spend all day on a desktop Windows PC, so I needed a good desktop player. I have an iPhone, so whatever solution I found needed to be cross-platform. And there needed to be some easy way of connecting the two with as little friction as possible. Spotify is super simple, so there's no reason an alternative shouldn't be.

Here's what I wanted:

A music library that lives on my computer's hard drive.
A good desktop music player on PC.
The ability to play that music on my phone.

Here's where I ended up:

Desktop Music Player: iTunes

Luckily, Apple still maintains iTunes for Windows, and it works great. It's pretty much exactly as I remember it being on my family's Windows XP-running Compaq Presario. Which is to say that it's one of the few pieces of software that I use in 2024 that isn't loaded with garbage.

If you're on Mac, it's called Apple Music now, but it's the same thing.

Library Syncing Service: iTunes Match

This is the reason I picked iTunes in the first place. I wanted to pick iTunes because I genuinely think it's great, but the fact that this service exists solidified my choice.

iTunes Match does exactly what you'd think it would, and works exactly as you'd want it to. For $25 per YEAR, it syncs everything you add to your iTunes library to an iCloud account. That's it.

I happened upon iTunes Match while literally just searching around, thinking, "surely someone must offer a service that syncs my music library from my computer to my phone!" They do indeed. It was a little tough to actually find, so I'll link it here.

I cannot believe this service still exists, especially considering Apple's own Apple Music streaming subscription offering, but I have to imagine there's some old Apple exec who still swears by this thing and would be super pissed if they shut it down, so they just make it kind of hard to find.

Mobile Music Player: Apple Music

Did you know that Apple Music is still secretly iTunes on mobile as well? You don't have to pay for their streaming service.

Now, this isn't really a choice, since using iTunes Match requires you to use Apple Music, but I like the Apple Music interface, and they don't constantly bug you to subscribe to their streaming service, so that wasn't a problem for me.

Apple Music is also available on Android, so this should work regardless of what kind of phone you have, and you might not even need to own any Apple devices to make this work, but I can't confirm that for sure since I have an iPhone anyway.

Music Acquisition: SoulSeek

Do your own research, as Spotify's favorite podcaster would say.

Supporting Artists: Bandcamp

When I want to buy an album and support the artist with my money, I check to see if it's on Bandcamp. Bandcamp is a platform used by a lot of smaller artists that not only gives you the unlimited ability to download the actual files of anything you buy (in any format you like), but they also forgo their platform fees on the first Friday of every month, and give 100% of all sales to the artists.

When It's Not On Bandcamp: iTunes Store

Since I'm already using iTunes, what is probably still the biggest online music marketplace is a click away at all times. Apple being Apple, they're always going to take a cut of anything bought through their store, so this is always my last stop after checking Bandcamp (or even better, a band's own website).

Anything you buy here is of course added to your iTunes library, and therefore synced as well, but you also have access to the actual music files in your iTunes folder, which is a nice bonus.

Bonus Tools

This method might require some extra work if you're starting from scratch, so here are some tools I like that made the process much easier:

Mp3tag

Great way to edit the metadata of a big batch of files at once.
Free.

VSDC Free Audio Converter

Fast and easy way to convert one type of audio file to another.
Also free.

That's it.

This is my setup! I own my entire 128GB mp3 music library, it gets beautifully organized on my computer through iTunes, and for a little over $2/month, that entire library gets synced seamlessly to my phone to stream or download for offline listening.

And if I ever stop paying for iTunes Match, I still own my entire music library, I can still listen to it through iTunes or any other music player, and I can take it all to any other service that might pop up.

This works really well for me, and I'm really glad I went through with it. I never have to think about it, and it even saved me some money!

Maintaining a big mp3 library like this might seem like a nightmare to some people, and yeah, there might be a non-zero amount of work involved in getting it started. But it feels worth it to me to do a little extra work on the front end, and then own my music forever. Building a music library in any other medium takes time and effort and years of collection, experimentation, and changing taste. This is just the digital equivalent of that.

If you've been wanting to free yourself from having to pay rent to yet another streaming service, I hope this method looks like an easy way out for you!

Migrating to Netlify

2024-08-10T15:07:00Z

Believe it or not, this blog has moved yet again! Only this time, you shouldn't have noticed, and it shouldn't have impacted your reading experience in any way. As far as I can tell, even the RSS feed is totally intact.

This is a fantastic side effect of building this site myself: since the site is now essentially just a folder on my computer, I own the place from top to bottom, and can pick up and move between hosting platforms as I see fit. This was a key motivator in deciding to run things this way, and it's already bearing fruit!

Now then,

Why did I move?

When I first made the move to a static site, I talked a lot about how Neocities played a major part in my deciding to move. There's a freedom there, an openness, and an overt hearkening back to a slower, weirder era of the internet. I loved the place. I still love it!

But this site is first and foremost my blog. I want to write on it pretty often. And writing and updating a blog on Neocities was just a little too cumbersome. If I'm going to write somewhere, I want there to be as little friction as possible between typing the words and seeing them live on my website.

Building the site with 11ty (which I'm still doing, to be clear) made things one thousand times easier than doing everything manually, but throwing it up on Neocities left the process with some rough edges. I would write out my post in a markdown editor (Zettlr was great for this), throw that in VSCode when it was done, tweak any image paths or other media, run the build command, replace and/or delete the spare 404 page because of how Neocities handles their 404 pages, open up CyberDuck, copy over the relevant folders via WebDav, wait for the upload, and then my post would be live.

I did that for six months! It honestly wasn't that bad, but when you really just want to throw a post on the internet, it's a lot of steps. And having to remember exactly which pages would need updating (home page, all-posts page, tagged pages, feed xml, posts folder, images folder) was kind of annoying.

So I started looking at Netlify. They're another web host specializing in static sites, with some nifty features in that space. In truth, I'd been looking at them since deciding to start building my site in 11ty, because of this one very helpful tutorial by Kevin Powell.

Kevin sets up his 11ty tutorial blog on Netlify, and at the very end of the video, he shows how Netlify allows you to build your own custom CMS for your blog.

CMS is short for Content Management System, it's a fancy term for the editor you enter words and other information into when writing a blog. It's probably the majority of what we interact with on the internet when posting something somewhere. If you're putting something online, and you're looking at a graphical user interface, and not a command line, you're using a CMS.

Needless to say, this was very attractive to me, because it presented the possibility of maintaining all of the ease of posting something on WordPress while still taking total control of my blog. At the time, however, the pull of Neocities' ethos was too great, and I decided to move to where I was more familiar while I got more comfortable with 11ty.

Long story short, I'm comfortable with 11ty now, and Mikey want a CMS!

But actually, the biggest reason I finally decided to move was the thought of having to update my blog on the go. I don't travel very much, but I do spend the last few weeks of every year visiting my parents for the holidays, and I'm usually rushing to finish a GOTY post at that time. The prospect of trying to do that with my previous setup sounded like a nightmare.

I could travel with my laptop, but my laptop is huge and heavy, and I didn't have a ton of success trying to set up my 11ty workflow on Mac for some reason, so I'd have to setup another Windows partition (I used to have one for games, but I think I recently wiped it? I don't use my laptop a ton anymore) and edit from there, and just...

What if I just used my iPad to edit a blog from the web instead?

The Move

Before trying to move over my whole ass website, I set up a quick test blog in 11ty, and threw that on Netlify. I completely forgot to mention, because I only realized this after deciding to try it out, that Netlify has a free tier for small personal websites and blogs. So as long as your bandwidth, etc. stays under a certain threshold (which it almost certainly will in my case), your hosting is absolutely free. No extra charges for connecting a custom domain either. Nice!

If you're interested, I guess, you can still find my test blog online here. It's just a series of posts filled with placeholder text and little notes about what I'm testing.

There's also one more complication to the process of putting the site on Netlify, which is that my site had to be hosted on GitHub first. I don't actually know if this is a requirement, but it's what Kevin did in the aforementioned tutorial, and it works for me! It actually makes things really convenient.

Essentially, you just grab the GitHub Desktop app, and then whenever you make a change to the site, you just push an update from your local machine to the hosted site on GitHub. Then once your account is connected to Netlify, Netlify can grab that update from GitHub, and since Netlify is geared towards static site generators, it knows that my site is built with 11ty, so it will then build the site on its end, and throw the update online. Sounds complex, but I just have to push a button. Lovely.

When I was initially moving my blog to 11ty, I didn't want to go this route because I didn't want to be dependent on too many platforms, and I specifically didn't want to be dependent on GitHub. But now, having done it, it's not even that the convenience outweighs anything I might have been wary of, it's just that, having gone through the process, and understanding how all of this works, I don't feel like I've given up any control or ownership of my site. It just lives on a different service with more capabilities.

The process of moving my actual site hit a snag when I wasn't able to just upload the whole thing as-is to GitHub. I never figured out why, but it seemed like maybe it was too large of an initial upload? The connection kept timing out, and my internet is solid, so that's my best guess.

The only way around this I could see was to kinda sorta rebuild my website again. Which I didn't really want to do. But I also kind of did. Since the initial 11ty build, there have been things I would do differently, or that I would've liked to clean up. So I did that.

I started a fresh 11ty build, and then copied over as much as I could, piece by piece, until I had a somewhat cleaner version of the site up and running in a new project. 99% of the site is exactly the same, but the biggest piece of work was getting rid of an old folder of images from WordPress and manually copying over and re-linking each image to each blog post. I did this because I suspected that WordPress folder contained a lot of duplicates and otherwise unnecessary files, and I was right! In the end, I shrank the size of the site by something like 300MB. That's not nothing!

The CMS

Once I knew the site was up and running in the new place, and looking and functioning the same as before, I started building in the CMS.

This was actually super simple. I'm using a headless CMS called Decap, which actually used to be Netlify's own in-house CMS solution, simply called Netlify CMS.

All I had to do was create a few config files, change some settings on Netlify (probably the hardest part, since a lot of their menus are kind of confusing), and then suddenly my site had an admin panel I could log into to create and edit posts!

The editor itself is pretty barebones, but it's nice! It does exactly what I need it to do, and it's super customizable. There is literally a single config file I can edit to change which fields are offered (title, description, date, image, body, tags, etc.), and in what order they are displayed.

The post editor accepts either Rich Text or Markdown, so I can do convenient things like press ctrl+B to make something bold, or click a button to make a hyperlink, or I can code things in manually if and when I need to. There's also a rendered HTML post preview so I can see generally how things look and check links and things. It doesn't currently use any of my site's CSS, so it doesn't look how it will once it's published, but I'm looking into that. I think it might be possible.

However — and this is beautiful — this CMS also offers what it calls "Editorial Workflow," which just means you can save drafts of posts. This is really nice, and it does it by forking off a new branch of the site's code on GitHub, which not only seems really clever to me, but also allows the CMS to serve up a link to a private, unpublished preview of exactly what the post will look like on my actual site. This is something I loved having in the WordPress CMS, so it's incredible that I can still have it here.

And again, apart from the domain I was already paying for, this is all free. The web can be cool and good!

In Conclusion

So yeah, the TL;DR here is kind of just, "I did a bunch of things, and if I did it all right, you shouldn't notice anything." But it's cool for me! And if it's easier for me to write posts, I will probably write more.

I also like how the whole process of me starting and maintaining this blog, from Blogger to now, has kind of been a continued tale of trying things I'm uncomfortable with because they seem like they would be cool or nice or would make the site better. I've been having so much fun making this place better and better and more fun to keep up and interact with over the past four years.

And I'm just doing it for me! I could honestly give a shit if anyone else reads any of this. That feels great.

So maybe the conclusion here is: try new things if they seem cool. You might accidentally teach yourself a bunch of new skills along the way. That sounds a little more inspiring.

What Else Is On? August 9th, 2024

2024-08-09T18:39:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

🎵 PUT THIS ON
"Natsunandesu" - Happy End

📚 READ THIS

MetaFilter
This one's doubling as both a good read and a good website, but I wanted to give it top billing. I don't think I ever knew this website existed, but it feels as close to time-traveling back to 2003 as I think I'm going to get.

It's essentially just a list of interesting links from around the web, but get this: it's curated by human beings. What a concept! It looks like it's operating more or less as it has been since 2003, just text and links, and I kinda love it. It's so clean and chill. And the comments seem like they're usually pretty nice too.

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium
Paul Ford introduces the idea of "Why Wasn't I Consulted?" as a core driver of internet behavior and content, and y'know what? Fair! This is also how I discovered MetaFilter.

WordStar
A manifesto from an sf writer about this old, beloved DOS word processor. He's also hosted a complete backup of the program and its documentation. Found on MetaFilter!

📺 WATCH THIS

So Expensive | Business Insider
This is a series of videos in which BI flew around the world documenting really talented artisans crafting their wares, as an explanation for why said wares are so expensive. As usual, watching master craftspeople do their thing is really engrossing!
(Also found on MetaFilter! One MF poster described this as Mister Rogers narrating over the crayon factory but for adults.)

🎮 PLAY THIS

VIVIDLOPE - [Steam] [Switch] [Itch]
This has been out on Steam for a while, but it just came to Switch this week, so I snapped it up and it rules. Extreme Y2K vibes from the UI, sound design, and music. I've been conceptualizing it in my head as "like if Q-Bert was Super Monkey Ball," which I think is correct. Go watch a trailer, you'll get it right away.

Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 English Translation Patch
Hilltop released this translation patch for the second entry in the cult-classic series of Japanese summer vacation games late last year, but it only just showed up on my radar this month. The trailer for this project is also where I found the track at the top of this issue!

🌐 A GOOD WEBSITE

Game UI Database
Since I put MetaFilter at the top of the reading pile, I get to double dip on good websites. This does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a visual database of different UI elements from tons of games throughout history. It's by no means complete, but there are over 1,300 games to browse through as it stands. Very cool preservation project, and it's just fun to page through!

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

New York City - August 7th, 2024

2024-08-07T23:00:00Z

Today, the high temperature in New York City dropped below 75 degrees fahrenheit for the first time since probably May.

We turned off the air conditioner and opened the windows. A crisp, cool breeze blew in. I put on pants and a flannel and came back to life.

They call this a "False Fall," because we're forcast to head back to the 80s in a day or so. It's August, summer isn't dead yet.

But today was overcast with light rain all day. Dark in the apartment, but we only turned on our cozy ambient lights. Just the warm glow of my desk lamp and a string of lights from Target hung over the living room TV.

I haven't had much work lately, but I didn't mind today. I didn't listen to as many podcasts as usual, either. I just noticed the quiet, and tried to appreciate it while it was here.

Today, I took a Blender class I've had bookmarked for a week or two. Read some good websites I hadn't read before. Worked on the blog a bit. Listened to some music.

One leftover half of a box of mac & cheese for lunch, and a big bowl of pastina soup for dinner.

Today was slow and calm. It was lovely.

My Favorite Runs From SGDQ 2024

2024-07-24T22:00:00Z

Another GDQ has come and gone, and as always, I did my damnedest to watch as much of it as I possibly could. GDQ remains a bright spot of cozy fun in the world of video games, and something I can count on twice a year to make a week spent inside feel special.

Of the runs I was able to catch, here are the ones I liked best, in the order they appeared on stream:

Yoshi's Story - All Melons

Fun way to open the event, always happy to watch Yoshi eat a bunch o' melons.

Sonic Robo Blast 2 - Sonic All Emeralds

Argick self-commentates his way through a sick-looking Sonic fangame, and I can't decide which he was doing faster: playing or talking.

Spelunky - All Journal Entries

Actually an extremely cool way to see Spelunky played, that shows off just about everything the game has to offer.

Balatro - 3 Deck Random Seed, Skipless

Look, I just really like Balatro. It was a big thing this year, everyone in the crowd is into it, they made cool custom card skins for GDQ, let it have its moment while it's fresh.

Celeste Custom Maps: Monika's D-Sides - Dny%

The original Celeste was hard enough for me, so this looks bonkers. Also, we love to see queer people exuding joy and excellence.

Alan Wake 2 - Alan%

They do the dance.

Chibi-Robo! - 1v1 Lockout Bingo Race

I always love Jaxler's runs. The dude always runs some weird hidden gems and makes them look like a blast. Chibi-Robo is a bigger game than some of his usual runs, but this is still a blast and really made me want to give the game a try. Great vibes from this group.

Outer Wilds - 100% Base Game Shipless

They played the spaceship game without a spaceship.

Powerwash Simluator - 6 Players, SpongeBob DLC

This is, I think, the second time we've watched 6 people tag-team a series of power washing jobs on GDQ, and it's still some good, zany fun.

Super "Sonic Saves the World" World - Abridged%

Shoujo is GDQ royalty in this house. If she's got a run on the schedule, we're watching it. Another run full of trans women and queers having a good time together. Both the gameplay and the vibes are impeccable.

Kaizo Mario Galaxy - Showcase

Kaizo is, in my mind, usually reserved for 2D and retro games, so it was cool to see it applied to a more recent, 3D Mario game.

Mario Kart DS - 32 Tracks

MKDS was a major touchpoint for me, so this run was very cool to watch. Just a straight playthrough of all tracks, some really cool tricks, and great commentary from the runner and couch.

Halo 3 - 4p Co-op Legendary

The best possible version of "dudes rock" energy at a GDQ. Very approachable "friend group" energy, not too inside-jokey. Crack open a cold one with the boys.

Ken Griffey Jr. Presents MLB - Win a game

A dog played baseball and WON. WE'RE GONNA BE OKAY.

ANIMAL WELL - Any% No Flute Warps NMG

Another fave from this year getting absolutely wrecked. No warps or glitches means you get to see a good chunk of the game, as well.

Evil Zone - Tournament Finals

This was kind of a weird one, but apparently they hold a little informal tournament of this game every GDQ, and this year they decided to put the finals on stream. It was fun! And Evil Zone looks killer. I installed it on my 3DS immediately after watching this.

Super Mario World - Kaizo Relay Race

Love SMW. Love Kaizo. Love relay races. And Shoujo was there. A must-watch.

Pizza Tower - Any%, Noise, No Major Glitches

God damn this game looks incredible. Really fun Saturday-morning vibes.

Super Mario 64 Randomizer - 10 Star Blindfolded

Bubzia keeps raising the bar for blindfolded runs, and it's always impressive. Dude also has a very calm energy about him that's nice to watch.

Super Metroid - Any% Race

The classic. A straight up-and-down, no-frills race.

Super Mario Maker 2 - Troll Level Race

Two of the best Mario Maker players playing levels they've never seen before, made by some of the best troll level creators in the community. The desire to curse on stream became too great more than once, and who could blame them? This was a blast.

Kill Your Backlog

2024-06-06T17:05:00Z

We all have games we want to play, and not enough time to play them all. Like many people, I've acquired more games than I've played over the years, from Humble Bundles, Steam sales, folders full of ROMs, hacked consoles, and any number of other sources. Our libraries fill to the brim with games we tell ourselves we will one day play, but life gets in the way, and that day never comes.

The bigger problem, for me, then becomes actually getting yourself to play the damn things.

Enter Kill Your Backlog.

Kill Your Backlog is an idea I've adapted (read: stolen) from the Action Button Goblin Bunker Discord server. They used to hold these server-wide events that they called Murder Your Backlog. They stopped doing them a while back, and I was never very good at joining in on community events anyway, so I'm carrying this on for myself.

Here's how it works:

Pick a game from your backlog.
Play that game for 20 minutes.
If you like it, great!
If you don't like it, great!
Remove the game from your backlog.

It's a sound method, and one I've already used several times to get out of my own head, get over my decision fatigue, and actually play some games.

Once I complete this process, I'll write up a quick review of my time with each game, and move on with my life. I'll try to keep these pretty short, and not super in-depth. They'll mostly just be a way for me to catalog my thoughts on a game, and give it a nice send-off in my brain once I'm done with it.

I really want to get in the habit of doing this more often, especially on those nights when I'm not sure what I feel like playing. My hope is that by giving that hope and this method a home in this post, I can start to will that habit into existence.

Wish me luck.

Mike's Summer Games 2024

2024-06-06T17:00:00Z

Summer always puts in me a mood to play video games. Lots of video games. All different types of video games. Bust out of my shell and just try new things. Or return to old things! It's all about shaking things up, and getting myself out of a rut.

This summer feeling is a great way to try and get myself to pick away at some of my video game backlog. It's something I tried blogging about once before, and it didn't go so hot. It's a tale as old as time: I set out to play a certain list of games, and then wouldn't you know it: new games show up and I play those instead. Oops!

At the end of the day, there's no harm done, game are games, but I really would like to play the games I buy! A novel concept, I know! Perhaps I should consider buying fewer games. Perhaps.

Whether I'm able to stick to a plan this time or not, here's my plan for this year's Big Gaming Summer™:

Games to finish

Pyre - I played through about 75% of Pyre in 2020, and then stopped. I am going to finally see how it ends.
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - Just picked this back up after getting burned out by its hugeness months ago. I'm in a real game finishing mood right now, and I'm taking this big boy down!
Genesis Noir - Picked up a few weeks ago, going to finish it!
SteamWorld Heist - Gotta finish this one before the sequel comes out!

Games to put to bed

Pools - I want to jump back in one more time before deciding that I don't care to finish it.
Children of the Sun - Ditto the above, but I keep saying that and then being wowed by a new mechanic. I'll probably just finish it.
Myst - I started the original Myst last year, with handwritten notes and everything, and I still haven't decided if I want to see it through to the end. Either way, I'm crossing it off my list this summer.
System Shock - Happy to call it where I am, I think. I'll pop back in now and then until I get bored.

Games to fuck around in

Cyberpunk 2077 - Just jumped back in after a months-long hiatus. I would say I plan to finish the game, if only it weren't so fun to just fuck around and waste time in this world.
Summer House - Looks really pretty and chill, and I'll probably be sated after one sitting.

Games to start

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes - This is the next new game I'm starting!
Prey - Out of all the older games stuck in my backlog, I feel like I'm most likely to actually start this one soon.

Wildcards

(Games I want to start, but haven't been feeling just yet.)

MegaMan Battle Network Legacy Collection Vol. 2 - I really want to start my replays of Battle Networks 4, 5, and 6, but I need to be in the right mood.
LIVE A LIVE - I don't want to start a big, beefy Square RPG that I'm pretty sure I'll love until I'm ready to give it my undivided attention.

***

Those are all the games I plan to be actively playing/finishing this summer. But there are more games in my backlog. So, so many more. To start hacking away at those, I need a method.

The question of how to kill my backlog is a subject for another post...

Steam Demo Roundup: May 2024

2024-06-03T22:30:00Z

Every once in a while, Steam puts on an event it calls Next Fest, where a bunch of developers (largely indies) open up demos of their upcoming games. These are some of the demos I played:

SCHiM: You're a little shadow frog. You get from place to place by hopping into the shadows of objects and people around you. Been looking forward to this one for a while. Played only as much as I needed to realize it's as fun as I hoped.

Parking Garage Rally Circuit: Retro 3D Arcade Racer. All the racing takes place in parking garages. Drifting features heavily. Very fun, very simple, feels good to control.

Tiny Glade: Chill building/city creator. Like Townscaper, but more freeform and with a brush tool.

Gourdlets: Animal Crossing without the structure. Make a cute little island full of stuff for some cute little guys to bop around for absolutely no reason.

Angeline Era - Wow wow wow the vibes are off the charts. Please please download this one and give it five minutes of your time, you will fall in love with it.

Cryptmaster - Dungeon Crawler where you type words to do things. Some cool mechanical hooks playing into that. You can type stuff and the Cryptmaster will respond to it. Extremely cool premise, love the art, voice acting is top notch.

Hauntii - Twin-Stick Shooter Adventure. Don't think this is entirely up my street, but it's VERY pretty, and very cute.

Follow the Meaning - Really pretty point-and-click adventure game, colored pencil-like art style. Lovely music. Not sure about the vibes on this one. Didn't click with it despite loving the art. Real shame.

That's all for this roundup! Until next time!

More Like Animal Well Done

2024-05-20T17:00:00Z

Animal Well seemed to be on a lot of folks' "oh boy, here comes a good one" radar for some time before release. Or maybe it was just Danny O'Dwyer at Noclip, since he's the only person I can specifically remember being excited for it. In any case, I got the sense that a lot of people were bought in at the time of the game's announcement.

Not I! It looked to me like any one of a dozen other retro pixel art love letters to Old Games, and I was not in the mood for another one of those. It didn't seem like anything special. How wrong I was.

I've been in something of a video game rut lately, just sort of slowly making my way through Tactics Ogre: Reborn, a game I've been playing on and off since January. So when a bunch of cool-looking indie games dropped all at once this month, I was primed to dive into something, anything, new.

After trying out some demos on Steam, and grabbing a handful of games that had recently been recommended to me, I decided to pick up Animal Well on Switch. It did look pretty cool, after all, and if I was going to play a game like that anywhere, it would be on Switch in bed. Thank god I kept an open mind.

Animal Well is first and foremost a game about secrets. So thoroughly is it comprised of secrets that rather than talk about the game itself, I've spent about 250 words setting up my history with the game, and am probably going to spend much of the rest of this review talking about the limits of video game terminology, so as not to spoil too much.

I'm kidding, of course. Unless...

Animal Well is, in many ways, a Metroidvania. For the uninitiated, this is a real, actual genre of video game. It has its own category on Steam and everything. It's a term that people who play video games use to describe games that are a lot like Metroid games, Castlevania games, or both.

This is just the weird way video games have decided to talk about themselves. Film and literature have fantasy, sci-fi, romance, rom-com, drama, etc. Video games have "it's kinda like that game Rogue, you ever play that one?" Of course not. No one who ever played Rogue is still living.

It might be more accurate to describe Animal Well as a puzzle platformer, since it lacks the combat of a Metroid or Castlevania, instead being more akin to something like Fez. But at the same time, Metroidvania doesn't feel inaccurate because of the game's map discovery, item gating, and screen-by-screen camera movement. In that way, it feels very much like 2021's Axiom Verge 2, another game I liked very much, and which is definitely a Metroidvania.

No matter what you want to call it, Animal Well is a damn good game.

From start to finish, the one and only driving force of the game is curiosity. "What's over there? What is that thing? How does that work? How do I get there? What do I do with this?" The questions in your own head about how the world works and what you're supposed to do are the only things leading you on. There are no hints, no overt narrative conceits, and no explanations. It's just you, the game's mechanics, and the vibes.

This is, for me, an effective hook on its own, but it is made even more effective by the game's aforementioned vibes. The art and sound design create such a weird, spooky labyrinth, that you are compelled to explore deeper and learn more about just what the heck is up with this place.

I don't think I ever once got lost or stuck while exploring Animal Well's spooky caves. The map system is robust and easy to read, and every screen is unique and memorable. The game is also extremely good at communicating your long-term and short-term goals. When you first open the map screen and see nothing but four blinking icons spread out in various directions, you very naturally think, "I guess I'll start moving toward one of those until something happens." You'll figure out the rest!

I never felt the urge to look up the solution to a puzzle, not only because I didn't want to spoil the incredible experience of unfurling Animal Well for myself, but also because the unfurling just naturally happened the more I poked at it.

The game's items each bring something new to the table, and give you multiple interesting ways of interacting with the world that are entirely up to you to figure out, and extremely satisfying once you do.

A quick spoiler to illustrate my point:

When I realized you could jump on the disc after throwing it, and ride it as it flew through the air, purely because I threw it across a room once and thought, "it would be really cool if you could do that," I lost my goddamn mind.

Animal Well has me thinking I should check out more Metroidvanias, and my love of Axiom Verge 2 might make me do just that, but honestly, when I think about it, I just want more games like Animal Well. Take a Metroidvania, strip out the combat, and make it all about the exploration, puzzles, and secrets. A conversation between the player and an initially inscrutable clockwork world. That's what I want.

In delivering what I might only be able to describe as the platonic ideal of itself, Animal Well might just have given me more itch than scratch. But that's not such a bad problem to have.

Besides, I still have a lot more eggs to find...

Battle Network’s DenTown Area Shows Why Building Cities Around Cars Sucks

2024-04-16T16:15:00Z

This post was published simultaneously on Welcome to the Cyber World.

In the MegaMan Battle Network series, you spend most of your time running around the Cyber World and battling as MegaMan. But you'll also spend a good amount of time running around the Real World as his human operator, Lan.

While the Cyber World is often labyrinthine, with paths twisting around into dead ends, or looping back onto themselves, the Real World is mostly straightforward. There's lots of open space to move around, and clear landmarks to help orient yourself.

This is not the case in DenTown, a mid-to-late-game Real World area in the first MegaMan Battle Network game.

Lan travels to DenTown to save Mayl, who has essentially been trapped on the bus from Speed by the evil WWW organization. The solution to this scenario involves activating a series of crosswalk barriers in an attempt to stop the bus. The scenario itself is fine, but the area built around it is easily the most unpleasant to traverse in the entirety of this series.

DenTown is supposed to be a busy, metropolitan, downtown type of area, with tall buildings, busy streets, city blocks, and — crucially for our pedestrian protagonist — crosswalks. In order to introduce the mechanic that will eventually save Mayl from her Speed bus death trap, the crosswalks are made functional, complete with traffic that trades right-of-way with the player at predetermined intervals. As such, they bring with them one of the most annoying parts of living in a city that one could translate to a video game: waiting for your turn to use the street.

The crosswalks in DenTown aren't just lights. The game needs to make you wait, so it employs physical barriers that block the crosswalk when the traffic light is green to prevent pedestrians from crossing against the light, and which block the street when the traffic light turns red, to prevent any cars entering the crosswalk. This is a pretty cool idea on its own, and fits into MegaMan Battle Network's near-future aesthetic and occasional kid-friendly safety-mindedness.

But it also makes moving around this area a nightmare to navigate, because all of the points of interest are at the edges of the map, sequestered away from each other on different city blocks, and the only way to move between them is to wait to be let through these designated chokepoints.

Working in conjunction with these chokepoint crosswalks is the fact that everything in DenTown looks the same. The streets all look the same, the sidewalks and crosswalks are all the same, the buildings and shopfronts all look extremely similar.

DenTown also takes up (if memory serves) four separate screens. There are so few things to interact with for that amount of space, and they are all spread so far apart. I could not tell you on which block on which screen any given point of interest lies if you dangled my loved ones over a pit of lava. So the process of navigating DenTown becomes, for me, one of trial and error. Which is miserable.

For some reason, it is also extremely unclear where one screen ends and another begins. These games are usually very good at telegraphing to the player which edges of the screen will take you to the next screen. Again, not the case in DenTown. I am perpetually getting turned around.

One might argue that this is merely the game indulging in a fun inversion of formula, wherein a Real World area is made labyrinthine instead of its Cyber World counterpart. This is false. For one thing, this area's Cyber counterpart is still as twisty as other Cyber areas, and for another, the game's Cyber areas, labyrinthine though they may be, always communicate a pretty clear path forward. You might get a little lost in the Cyber World, but not like this.

This is, however, a perfect analogue for navigating your way around an unfamiliar car-centric space in our world. The reality of living in a modern city, at least from an American perspective (I suspect also from a Japanese perspective, given the game's provenance), is that the vast majority of public space is ceded to cars.

Pedestrians are guests on the road, forced onto the tiniest strips of unprotected walk, so that bigger and bigger internally-combusting monstrosities can drive and park wheresoever they please. If you make a wrong turn while walking and see the place you mean to be on the other side of the street, sorry buddy! Better find your way back to the nearest crosswalk and wait your turn!

Except, DenTown is actually a little worse than the reality in which we live because, from the top-down, isometric viewpoint of the Battle Network games, you can never see past the bounds of your GBA's screen. So if you don't know where you're going, you'll always be guessing and doubling back. At least in the real world, I can look into the distance for some kind of landmark to latch onto.

That said, if any significant portion of my time spent outside my house were as open and car-free as the rest of the areas in the Battle Network series are, I would live a truly blessed life. The world of Lan and MegaMan is utopian by comparison, thanks to this one metric alone. I would gladly take a couple of world-ending threats from the same old man and his gang of thugs if it came with a side of free rapid transit and walkable cities.

Hell, the Battle Network world is utopian based purely on the fact that everyone agrees that the bad guy is the bad guy, and tries to stop him. But that's a different blog post.

In terms of gameplay, DenTown is a slog. I hate being there. I had to look up a map every single time I went there. That is a wild thing to have to do for a Real World location in a MegaMan Battle Network game.

In terms of infrastructure critique, I say, why stop there? Let's dial it up and give the people something to talk about!

If they ever make another Battle Network game, it should feature one absolutely miserable chapter in which Lan (or his son, I guess) is stranded in a suburban town with no access to public transit of any kind, and has to rollerblade down a tiny strip of sidewalk, approximately 32 GBA screens long, to get to the nearest Thing To Do. It'll be a hit.

In conclusion, fuck cars. And fuck DenTown.

My Battle Network Story

2024-04-16T16:10:00Z

This post was originally published on Welcome to the Cyber World on 6th March, 2024.

In the summer of 2003, my family moved for the first time in my life. I was 10 years old. That's a tough time to have to leave the only home and school you've ever known.

Luckily, I managed to keep in touch with exactly one friend: my best friend at the time, Alex.

Sometime after we moved to our new house, I invited Alex over for a sleepover. Alex brought over the new hotness at the time: a bright red Game Boy Advance SP. That thing was beautiful.

As soon as bedtime came, and the lights went off, the GBA SP came out and showed off its signature feature: a backlit screen that let you play in the dark.

The game Alex had with him that day was MegaMan Battle Network 2.

He let me play a little of it. I don't remember where he was in the story, or if he'd beaten the game already (I didn't know enough about it at the time), but I remember we were running around the Koto area, looking for QuickMan.

After that, he very graciously let me start a new file to see the beginning and play the tutorial if I promised not to save, which was the etiquette at the time.

I marvelled at the brightly colored art, the smooth sprite animations, the snappy UI, the combination turn-based/real-time battle system.

And that music. Battle Network 2 still has my favorite music of the series.

Up to that point, I'd only ever owned two video game consoles: A Super Nintendo that was handed down from my aunt and uncle after my cousins outgrew it, and a Sega Genesis that my neighbors gave us after they bought their kids an N64.

I'd never had a handheld of my own, though I'd ocassionally borrowed Alex's Game Boy Color to play Pokemon Crystal. The only time I was ever happy to be in church on a Tuesday morning at my Catholic elementary school was on a day when Alex had agreed to loan me his GBC for the week, and I could watch the handoff from his mom to my mom.

Playing a tiny slice of Battle Network 2 on my bedroom floor in the dark, I felt the pull. I needed to find my way into this world.

In the fall, I went to my new school, and made some new friends.

Eventually, miraculously, my new friend Eric offered to sell me his old Glacier Blue Game Boy Advance (non-SP, so no backlit screen, but it would do) for $20.

I knew I could make that happen. There was plenty of lawn to mow.

I made the money, brought it to Eric, and the deal went down just before lunch. Almost immediately after our transaction, Eric asked for takesie-backsies. He had finally realized what I knew from the start: $20 for a GBA was a killer deal.

I said no. But he spent the next few months "renting" Game Boy games to me, so he got me back.

Sometime later, probably for Christmas, my parents presented me with a brand new, pristine, in-box copy of MegaMan Battle Network 2. I was ecstatic.

Something about this boxart just hits different for me. The colors, the character design, the composition, the warped green cyber grid in the background. I could stare at it for hours. Lan and MegaMan are brothers and best friends and they're my best friends.

Getting to play in this little world on my very own handheld that I wouldn't have to return to a friend for the first time was such a special experience. More personal than playing a console on a TV. This was my game.

I played non-stop. I NetBattled and traded with Alex over his Link Cable. We talked about the game over the phone to each other. We obsessed over secret areas and battle chip combinations with each other.

When I found my way into the WWW Area, it was a big deal.

From there, I became completely obsessed with the series. I made my own PETs out of cardboard, I drew fanart, I wrote fanfics. When the MegaMan NT Warrior anime came to KidsWB, I watched religiously. I asked for the Advanced PET toy for Christmas, and was so excited about it I peeked on my parents' pre-Christmas present stash for the first and only time in my life.

And Alex and I continued buying each new game in the series. We somehow both missed Battle Network 3, but never missed an entry after that, even into the series' evolution into Star Force on the DS. We always made sure to buy the opposite version from each other, to maximize our experience and trade version exclusives with each other.

In a very real way, those games kept our friendship alive. It's probable that we would have stayed friends anyway, but MegaMan Battle Network gave us a good, solid reason. Something common to bond over. It's impossible to tell the story of my experience of these games without telling the story of our friendship.

All in all, these games came around at just the right time in my life, and around just the right circumstances to become a big part of it.

I'll always love them for the excitement, the friendship, and the countless hours of fun they brought me.

Welcome to the Cyber World

2024-04-16T16:05:00Z

In my most recent post about (re)playing my way through the MegaMan Battle Network series, I said I'd been "thinking about Battle Network for reasons that will become clear later this month."

It is now later this month, and those reasons are Welcome to the Cyber World!

Welcome to the Cyber World is a fansite I built last month, dedicated to what I've recently realized is my all-time favorite series of games: MegaMan Battle Network.

Why did I do this? Last month, Critical Distance, one of my favorite places to find writing about video games, held a fansite jam inspired by Phil Salvador’s Final Fantasy VIII fansite, Final Fantasy VIII is the Best And If You Don’t Agree I Will Destroy You.

It sounded like fun, and coming off the high of learning 11ty and building this very blog from the ground up, I decided to throw my hat in the ring!

I wanted to keep it really simple and minimal, so it's mostly just a blog where I've written up some thoughts and other fun things relating to the BN games, but it also has an image gallery, some general info and resources about the games, and background music if you're visiting from a desktop browser!

Now that the jam is over, and Critical Distance has posted their roundup of entrants (they called my site "aesthetic AF"), AND since last Sunday, April 14th, was the 1-year anniversary of the release of the MegaMan Battle Network Legacy Collection, a game I liked quite a lot, I thought it would be fun to cross-post some of what I've written and will hopefully continue to write over there.

To that end, here on The Works of Egan, I've just published My Battle Network Story, a post about my history with the series, which I wrote and published during the fansite jam, and Battle Network’s DenTown Area Shows Why Building Cities Around Cars Sucks, which I ran out of time to write during the jam, and am publishing fresh today!

I've also added a 'mmbn' tag to the sidebar to collect all the Battle Network flavored writing I've been doing and will continue to do here. I gave it a little more flair than the other tag pages, in the spirit of the fansite.

I hope you'll take a second to check out Welcome to the Cyber World, read some of the other MMBN posts going up here today, and otherwise have a lovely day!

Reminder: Hack Your 3DS

2024-04-09T21:30:00Z

Earlier this week, on April 8th, Nintendo completed their slow-rolling shutdown of 3DS and WiiU support by turning off all Nintendo Network online functionality. As of now, it is no longer possible to play 3DS and WiiU games online through the Nintendo Network.

I've written about each step of Nintendo's progressive sunsetting of these platforms as they've come to pass, so this won't be new to any regular readers, but:

This is a perfect opportunity to once again ask you to hack your 3DS.

Despite Nintendo shutting down the eShop and game servers, it's still possible to hack your 3DS. It's also still easy, free, and safe.

If you have a computer (or even just a phone), an SD card, and of course a 3DS or 2DS, you have everything you need.

You don't have to do anything to the hardware, no soldering or whatnot. You don't even need to be particularly tech savvy! If you can follow instructions and put files in folders, you're halfway there.

I have a dedicated section on my Links page full of info to get you started hacking!

Loading up your 3DS with custom firmware (CFW) is a great way to extend its life, add new features, or to just mess around and have fun with it!

You can dump your 3DS and DS carts to play digital copies without lugging them around, load up a wide range of classic games through emulation, and sift through some weird homebrew projects folks have ported over, like Doom (of course), Wordle, and even a mostly working version of Sonic Mania!

One of my favorite CFW features is an app called Checkpoint, which lets you backup and restore save data. So once you dump a cartridge, or just load up a digital version, you can restore the save data from your cart, and keep playing from where you left off. If you ever want to save your digital progress to your physical cart, you can do that too!

The 3DS modding scene is super active, especially in the wake of Nintendo ending their support of the console, but it's also been around a long time, the 3DS itself being over 10 years old.

This means that not only are folks working on cool new projects like the Pretendo Network and SpotPass Archival Project, but it's also pretty easy to troubleshoot issues, and find answers to any CFW-related questions. If you run into an issue, chances are someone else has run into it and found a fix in the past ten years.

The 3DS has one of the best game libraries in history. Do yourself a favor and crack it open. You're guaranteed to find a few gems.

Net Neutrality Is Coming Back. For Now.

2024-04-05T21:00:00Z

On Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024, the FCC announced that it would vote on a proposal to restore net neutrality rules on April 25th.

After an extremely long ~~clownshow~~ delay in confirming a fifth commissioner, the democrats finally have a majority again, and therefore the votes to pass such a proposal.

Net neutrality used to be a pet issue of mine. Back in my YouTube days, I made countless vlogs trying to explain the concept, and why people should support or care about it in the first place.

For those unaware, net neutrality is a very simple principle. In essence, it is the idea that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Comcast and Verizon should not be allowed to prioritize any internet traffic above any other internet traffic.

The reason for this being the preservation of a level playing field, or competitive market, however you want to put it. Whether capitalism's almighty concept of fair competition ever truly exists under such a system is up for debate, but this isn't the place for that discussion.

For example, if Comcast started prioritizing network traffic to Netflix because of some deal the two struck, that would be against the principle of net neutrality. The idea being that now that Netflix is faster (or higher quality, or both), people are more likely to choose to watch things on Netflix rather than Hulu or some other upstart streaming service just trying to get off the ground. Comcast and Netflix would be stifling competition in the streaming market in this example.

It doesn't just have to be prioritization of traffic, either. There's another tactic that mobile carriers have been using for years called "zero-rating," in which they bundle some service for free with their mobile plan. Like if signing up for T-Mobile got you a free Spotify subscription.

This would either make customers of T-Mobile artificially more likely to use Spotify rather than a competitor like Apple Music or Tidal or whatever, OR make people who use Spotify more likely to switch to T-Mobile, not because Spotify or T-Mobile are functionally better than their competitors, but because they bought market priority through an exclusivity deal.

This becomes even more fraught in our increasingly vertically-integrated world, when a carrier prioritizes or zero-rates a service they own, like when, according to an FCC report, AT&T gave more favorable terms to DirectTV (which it owns) than to third-party services through its Sponsored Data program.

So net neutrality would outlaw all of that, it says that carriers, ISPs, the people providing the service, should not be allowed to use their position as carriers to influence a person's choice as to what they do with that service. It's a guiding principle for preserving the "neutrality" of Internet Service Providers in how and why people choose to access the sites and services they choose online.

It's more than that, too, because when the FCC talks about "restoring net neutrality," what they're actually talking about is reclassifying Internet Service Providers as "common carriers" under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, which would allow the FCC to more strongly scrutinize and regulate them, they way they do radio and television networks, and telephone companies. Which is right and good because internet access should be treated like the utility that it is. But when people say "net neutrality," they're usually talking about the principle of literally preserving neutrality.

I thought this was a good principle to support ten years ago, and I still think so now! Regardless of the fact that the modern internet seems to have coalesced around a small number of toxic sites and apps that everyone seems to hate that they can't stop using, I still believe that the true spirit and backbone of the internet is the ability to seek out, find, and use anything and everything equally, and the ability to create something with an equal opportunity of being seen as anything else.

So why have I been avoiding the topic for the past seven years? Because the back and forth got fucking exhausting. Because a lot of other, arguably worse shit started and continues to happen. And because the Trump FCC exposed this whole debacle for what it is: a political see-saw that will continually shift directions toward whichever party controls the White House.

The Obama FCC under Tom Wheeler successfully voted to adopt net neutrality and Title II reclassification in 2015, and the Trump FCC under Ajit Pai almost immediately reversed that action in 2017, after a particularly and blatantly corrupt period of "public comment," during which ISPs submitted millions of fake comments against net neutrality, pretending to be real people. Pai was also just generally a shitheel company man with a check from Verizon where his soul should have been, who made a mockery of every issue he touched with clownish unseriousness.

And this is just so indicative of the entire Way Things Are, politically, in the US. Every couple of election cycles, the public finally gets sick of Republicans being literally evil, and they hand Democrats complete control of every branch of the government. And then the Democrats do absolutely nothing with it, except and until maybe the very last minute. Then they lose control of the government because, well, they didn't do anything of note for 4–8 years, and Republicans, deciding to, you know, wield the power they've been given (imagine!), immediately undo any good the Democrats did do at the very last minute when they remembered they were the government and oh no here comes another 8 years of literal pure evil.

So. Yeah. It's exhausting. Just like everything else. It's also been really disillusioning to watch the internet of the 2010s give way to the internet of the 2020s. This place sucks shit. Social media has stagnated into mostly the same handful of gigantic platforms full of algorithmically-delivered ads, SEO chum, and hate speech, all of which are owned by idiot billionaires or billion-dollar corporations. Journalism is withering and dying right in front of our eyes, and no one has any idea how to stop it. And every platform seems hell-bent on chasing AI fad money rather than doing anything useful or interesting. The web has never felt smaller or more bleak.

I'm just not sure if good old net neutrality is still enough to break the cycle of shit the internet has been spiralling down for the past ten years. Increased regulation would definitely be good, but will it stick? Or will we be right back at square one when Trump possibly (inevitably, if you ask me) wins back the presidency?

In this case, what we truly need is for congress to pass a permanent reclassification of ISPs as Title II common carriers, so we can stop having the same fight every 4–8 years, and finally move forward.

There has been good movement in many areas in the past few years. Lina Khan at the FTC has been gesturing at doing something about Big Tech for a while, and the DOJ just launched a hot new lawsuit against Apple for monopolizing the smartphone market. The FCC finally has its 3rd Democrat, even if it isn't the one we wanted, and so can move forward on things like net neutrality and explanding broadband access. A growing labor movement, and a more worker-friendly NLRB is reminding workers of all stripes that they're getting a raw deal and should do something about it.

But when all that work, and all that momentum, can be undone with the flick of a pen? And has been over and over again? It's hard to keep that same energy.

I will applaud the return of net neutrality at the federal level the same way I applauded its arrival in 2015. Who knows, maybe this time it'll stick. ISPs certainly aren't more popular than they were ten years ago.

I still think the good fight is always worth fighting, no matter what. It's just that sometimes… Fuck, man. Y'know?

My Year of Battle Network (Vol. 1)

2024-04-02T16:10:00Z

As has been well documented in my 2023 GOTY post, I'm a big fan of the MegaMan Battle Network series. When Capcom released the MegaMan Battle Network Legacy Collection last year, and made a big deal about doing so, it was huge for me.

I was, of course, there on day one to pick up a physical copy of the game, and joyfully tore into it as soon as was humanly possible. I spent the rest of 2023 playing through Volume 1 of that collection, which contains the first 3 entries in the 6-game series, 2 of which I had never played before.

I had always meant to blog about my thoughts on each entry in the series as I went, but those blogs sadly never manifested, despite keeping notes on my playthroughs of each game.

Lately, I've been thinking about Battle Network for reasons that will become clear later this month, and I got to thinking about blogging about it again. It's frankly criminal that I haven't blogged much about a series of games that is so dear to me.

So I'm finally doing something about that, and posting my combined thoughts on playing through the first 3 games — the first volume of the Legacy Collection — over the course of a year. My Year of Battle Network.

And hey, if Capcom can break its collection into 2 volumes, so can I. The fact that I've been playing 1 volume per year really works out.

Let's get into it.

MegaMan Battle Network

Having come to this series through Battle Network 2, I was surprised to see just how much this first game felt like a rough draft. Not necessarily unfinished, just barebones. A "minimum viable product" of the series to come.

Of course, the game is "missing" some features that would become series staples, like Subchips, Style Changes, and a list of Program Advances in the Library, but it can be forgiven for all of these, as those concepts (save for Program Advances) just hadn't been developed yet, this being the first game and all.

Battles feel a bit sluggish compared to the game's sequels, and the MegaBuster takes eons to charge up, but these can also be chalked up to a first entry that doesn't have everything dialed in quite yet. There are other growing pains that I found more grating.

For starters, all of the indoor & outdoor music is the same in every location. Meaning every interior location shares a single track, and every exterior location shares another track. Which makes the game feel repetitive to the point of madness, especially coming from memories of a series with fun, robust soundtracks. Every location feels robbed of the chance to develop its own identity.

Level design also feels like it hasn't quite found its footing yet. Traversing some areas felt like more of a pain than it needed to be. The Dentown area is a perfect exemplar of this, with its sequestered sidewalks, forced traffic stops, and lack of any major landmarks. The place is a nightmare.

There were also a few graphical/UI elements whose implementation just felt clumsy to me, with some elements of the world being drawn over your character (like a PC's jack-in/jack-out points) in a way that felt like they would benefit from a more bespoke animation (which they would get in subsequent entries). The fact that the chip selection screen doesn't dim, desaturate, or otherwise low-light chips that cannot be used with your current selection feels like an even bigger oversight for the amount of clarity that feature brings to the series' battles in future games.

I hate to rag on this game so much, it's just that, having gotten my first impression of this series from this game's sequel, the things that stood out most to me were the omissions, for lack of a better term.

Otherwise, it's all just about there. It feels very much like a proof of concept in execution, but the baseline mechanics are there, ready to be improved and perfected as the series evolves.

The story is very thin and incredibly short, even by Battle Network standards, which in some ways makes it harder to recommend that any would-be fans skip it. This game does contain some story beats that are important to the series going forward, and it was cool to finally see those play out.

I definitely got something out of finally playing this series' first entry, but I don't know that I'd want to come back to it.

MegaMan Battle Network 2

Okay here we go. This is a game. To be fair, this was my entry point into the series, and I played this game endlessly as a kid, so there's a lot of nostalgia at play that is quite frankly impossible to decouple from my feelings about the game. But oh man, talk about an improvement.

Level design, battle mechanics, locations, music, art, everything is more fleshed out, and feels so much more complete than the first game.

Every location has its own music this time around, both inside and outside. Thank god.

And there are so many more locations to visit, both in and out of the Cyber World! Lan and MegaMan go on a veritable world tour of netbattling compared to the first game! And every location (again, Cyber World included) is so unique and varied. Every place has its own character and feeling, with enough space in the story to develop those things.

Style Changes bring some more variety and strategy to battles, not to mention some cool new looks for MegaMan.

The overall look, feel, and function of the game just feels so much more developed. The rough edges have been sanded down.

Everything in this game is, to me, the rock-solid, base-level, platonic ideal version of a MegaMan Battle Network game, from music to characters to world-feel to mechanics. It's not the flashiest or the prettiest, but it's a perfect foundation. This is where the series found its footing.

And it's got an outstanding post-game. This is where the series really started leaning in to secret areas, secret bosses, extra little story bits, and more to unlock after beating the main game. I still remember freaking out as a kid when I got my SSS License and found the WWW Area. Like I said, nostalgia, but it all still hit for me this time around, 20 years later.

Some other little tidbits from my playthrough: the hardest chips to find to complete my Library were DropDown (of course), and oddly enough PoisMask, because I needed a specific letter code for a Program Advance. These games are really weird about the ways they hand out different codes of chips.

Anyhow, in case it wasn't obvious enough, I had a great time replaying BN2. This remains the only Battle Network game I have 100% cleared. And this time, I finally did it without using a GameShark 😅

MegaMan Battle Network 3

Having finally played the first entry in the series, this was the last Battle Network game that I hadn't played yet. I didn't know what to expect from 3, outside of hearing that some people recommend it as the definitive Battle Network experience if you're only going to play one, and that this is where the series started splitting its releases into two versions (Blue and White in this case), Pokemon style.

While I still think BN2 tops this one for me, I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it! I mean, it's Battle Network, I was always going to like it to some degree, but you never know! Luckily, the series continued its upswing in quality after a rocky start.

From the jump (almost immediately, from a UI standpoint), I was surprised to see just how much of Battle Network 4 is in here. The Start Menu UI is exactly the same, save for the color.

The Navi Customizer also makes its debut here, as well as an early version of the counter system. In this game, landing a perfectly-timed counter hit on an enemy rewards you with some BugFrags on top of the usual battle reward. I thought this was super interesting! Cool way to hand out BugFrags!

Towards the end of my time with the game, I had kind of been plowing through because I could smell the end. Not totally detached from it, exactly, I was still invested in building my chip folder and Navi Customizer and such.

But there were some tedious missions that I was definitely just Getting Through, and I ended up really not loving Shadow Style (the new Style Change exclusive to the Blue Version), and I was stuck with it for a while, so. Y'know. These games like to make their final mission the most annoying.

And then I finished the game, and it hit me with this very emotional ending that made me realize that actually this game's story had been quite good, that I love this world and these characters, and that I'd been sort of bee-lining to the end without taking stock of everything.

Then it hit me that this was the last MMBN game that I hadn't already played as a child. I closed the loop without even realizing that I was closing it, or giving that moment any sort of forethought or reverence.

Again, it's not as if I was super detached and going through the motions, I was super invested in the final battles with Bass and Alpha, and found them quite fun to puzzle out! It's just that, while I knew I was heading towards the ending, I didn't realize it would end? You know that feeling? Does that make sense?

So I spent some more time with it, and checked out some of its endgame, just to give it more of the time I felt it deserved. I liked what I saw! That secret area is really neat!

Maybe one day I'll go back and dig through it all. By this time, the end of the year was closing in on me, and there were other games to play. In any case, it'll always be there waiting for me.

Anyway, in the cold light of morning, I realized that all means that I liked this game quite a bit! I'm interested to see where it ranks once it's solidified in my head over time, and once I've finished replaying the rest of the series!

In conclusion

I had an absolute blast getting to finally play the last two Battle Network games that I'd never had the chance to play as a kid. I can't believe how rough the first game seems, compared to even just the very next game in the series.

I'm delighted by how much I ended up liking 3, and also fascinated by how much of it feels like a test bed for features that appeared in 4, as well as some things that never reappeared (virus breeding). These things also cast 4 in a whole new light in some ways!

The Navi Customizer, the counter system, and the menu UI are bridges connecting two halves of a series that I always assumed, based on the change in its visual style, had made a clean break in design between 3 and 4. Fascinating!

This has been a very enjoyable journey so far, and I can't wait to see what new insights come from playing the games in Vol. 2, now that we're firmly in replay territory.

Until then!

Battle Network's Best Styles, Souls, and Crosses

2024-03-31T23:30:00Z

This post was originally published on Welcome to the Cyber World on 31st March, 2024.

Over the years, in all his various forms, MegaMan has been known for his ability to draw power from those around him to create new forms and abilities. The Battle Network series was no different, with the fact that MegaMan is a computer program this time around being the perfect way to introduce all kinds of ways to augment and upgrade his data.

From Battle Network 2 onwards, those powers came in the form of Style Changes, Soul Unisons, and Crosses. But not all forms of MegaMan are created equal. Some are sick as hell, while others are not.

With that in mind, I present to you a completely objective list of the best forms MegaMan has taken throughout the Battle Network series.

The Best Style Changes

Introduced in Battle Network 2, Style Changes give MegaMan elemental strengths and weaknesses and a number of unique abilities. Here's a list of my faves:

Heat Guts

Pros:

Big fist
Flamethrower
Big boost to Buster damage
No knockback animation, can take better advantage of i-frames

Cons:

Weak to Aqua

Wood Shield

Pros:

Starts battle with a barrier
Can also deploy a big shield that makes cool sounds at will
Being immune to Elec attack knockback rules
Tornado charge attack hits so many times

Cons:

Weak to Fire

Aqua Custom

Pros:

Overall air of coolness (is it the backpack?)
More chips on Custom screen

Cons:

Gets absolutely wrecked by Elec

Hub Style

Pros:

Lighter blue sprite looks nicer
Combines abilities of several styles
Lan and MegaMan are brothers 😭

Cons:

Halved HP

The Best Soul Unisons

Introduced in Battle Network 4, Soul Unisons take MegaMan back to his roots and allow him to take on the form and abilities of other NetNavis. These are the sickest:

Guts

Pros:

Looks like a Tonka dump truck
Built like a brick shithouse
Him punch big

Cons:

Lack of interesting attacks/abilities

Roll

Pros:

Pink
All chips recover 10% HP
Let the girl one do something cool for once
MegaMan.EXE canonically gay and trans once activated

Cons:

Roll Arrow kinda sucks shit

Search

Pros:

Buster Charge locks on to enemies and pierces Invisibility
Shuffle chips on the custom screen
MegaMan gets a little HUD visor and mic

Cons:

The military industrial complex is decidedly not cool

Colonel

Pros:

Cool sword
Cool sword attack
Change charge attack into any normal chip
Just an extremely sick look

Cons:

Doesn't get Colonel's cool cape

Proto

Pros:

Cool sword
ProtoMan is cool, I will admit

Cons:

Helmet looks kind of doofy, imo

Number

Pros:

Helmet turns into an electronic disco ball
Charge shot throws a Dice Bomb
10 chips on custom screen

Cons:

Dice Bomb looks cooler than it is powerful

Shadow

Pros:

We love a ninja
Poof out of harm's way and throw a shuriken
Charge sword chips to teleport behind an enemy and slash
Auto Float Shoes
Move faster
Long Sword charge attack

Cons:

Oh shit none??

Cross MegaMan

These aren't quite Souls or Crosses, and can only be obtained in special, secret ways. They're both extremely cool!

Bass Cross

Pros:

Look at him
It's Bass
Can be your little bottom screen buddy in Double Team DS
Just look up a video of his Hell's Rolling attack, that shit owns
Both Gold and Silver variants look cool

Cons:

Too cool? Nah jk

Sol Cross

Pros:

Fuck yeah Boktai
Solar Gun charge shot
Can be your little bottom screen buddy in Double Team DS
Interpretation of Django's aesthetic melded onto MegaMan looks incredibly sick
Another reason to bug your friends to play Boktai

Cons:

NONE. TAIIIIYOOOOOHHHHH!

The Best Crosses

Crosses were introduced in Battle Network 6 as a replacement for Soul Unisons. The major upshot to Crosses was that, unlike Souls, you didn't need to sacrifice a chip of a certain element to activate them.

I was never as hot on these as I was the design and function of Styles or Souls, but there are still a few with an undeniable cool factor.

Heat

Pros:

HeatMan is cool, he looks like a Zippo lighter
Cool character design, and effective translation from character to Cross
I like the fuel tubes, that's a nice touch

Cons:

Weak to Aqua

Elec

Pros:

Cool look, love the electrical thingies on his back even if I don't know what they are
Charge Elec chips to paralyze

Cons:

Weak to Wood

Tengu

Pros:

Very cool look
Saw him first in MegaMan & Bass, thought it was cool they finally included him in BN.

Cons:

Wind isn't a terribly cool element imo

Charge

Pros:

Honorable mention for being a train
More chips on the Custom screen
Charge Shot: Here He Comes

Cons:

Who the fuck is ChargeMan?

That's my list! Do you agree, do you disagree? Tough luck, this is my website!

Balatro: A Deckbuilder for People Who Hate Deckbuilders

2024-03-13T16:00:00Z

I'm not really a deckbuilder guy.

I had a brief stint with Magic the Gathering in college, but I didn't play a ton. I really just liked the idea of having some cool-looking cards to perform a weird little gaming ritual with, and I bounced once I realized what an absolute racket it was.

In the digital realm, I don't really gel with these kinds of games either. I've never been drawn to the immensely popular Slay the Spire. I played a bit of Klei's Griftlands a few years back, and found out that Klei can, in fact, make a game I don't like.

I'm just not interested in reading a small novel's worth of text per card and divining the esoteric ways in which they would optimally synergize. It makes my eyes glaze over, my brain just doesn't work that way.

Which is why I was so surprised back in 2021, when Inscryption really hit for me. I finally felt like I thought I would feel playing Magic, or any number of other TCG/CCGs.

I didn't realize why until I played Balatro, and had to once again figure out why a roguelike deckbuilder was hitting for me.

Balatro came out earlier this year, and instantly blew up. There were pieces about Balatro everywhere. People were streaming Balatro. People were Balatroposting.

After catching a stream, and being charmed by the game's pixel art and CRT aesthetics, I decided to pick it up on Switch. And now I, too, have fallen down a Balatro hole.

The mechanics of Balatro can more or less be boiled down to "poker solitaire." You start with a deck of 52 normal playing cards. Four suits, numbers 2–10, face cards, aces, the works.

The aim of the game is to play your way through a series of increasingly difficult rounds, called "blinds," by simply playing poker hands (Pair, Two Pair, Three of a Kind, etc), and racking up points to meet or exceed a target number of points.

This is a beautifully simple foundation to start from; satisfying and addictive in its own right. Then Balatro complicates things, and it becomes a video game.

Each blind ups the challenge by giving you a higher target score to hit. Every third blind is a "Boss Blind" that comes with some extra rule like, "Heart cards don't score this round," or "You can only play one type of hand." You're never going to hit those moving targets without beefing your cards or some other kind of advantage. This is where the modifiers come in.

After each blind, you win some cash, and a shop pops up. You can open packs of cards to add to your deck (here's the deckbuilding part) — some cards might have special abilities like earning extra points or an increased multiplier when played — there are tarot cards that can add effects to your existing cards or trigger other abilities, there are celestial cards that increase the base point values of certain poker hands, and much, much more.

But the name of the game in Balatro is Jokers. Literally, actually, "balatro" is latin for jester, fool, or joker.

Alongside your deck, you have space for up to five Jokers (usually, but that's not important here). Joker cards carry modifiers that trigger under various criteria to boost your scoring ability. As your run progresses, you gradually pick up more and more of these modifiers that let you slowly but surely break the game in your favor.

I had a run where I kept pulling cards that let me beef up Two Pair, so I made a bunch of strategic choices that let me just keep playing Two Pair to rack up a ridiculous amount of points. It was sick. I still lost, but it was sick.

Now wait a minute.

You might be thinking that all of this is starting to sound a bit complex, a bit like a roguelike deckbuilder. All these rules and card types and modifiers and multipliers and such.

But that's not the case at all. Because under the hood, it's all still just poker. Your deck is just playing cards.

The modifiers are all things like, "spades score higher," or "even numbers score higher," or "your multiplier increases when you discard." There are some more complex examples, but you never have to keep more in your head than poker and playing cards. And maybe some math, though honestly not really.

This is how Balatro got me, and how I suspect it's getting a lot of people. Basing the game on concepts that a lot of people will already have prior knowledge of lowers the barrier to entry massively.

I'm not going to understand cards that say shit like, "tap 1 land card to put 4 gremlin tokens on your gremlin mage, and then when he has 8 gremlin tokens, you can spend 6 gremlin tokens to untap 1 land card, unless Derek the Unholy is on the field, in which case—" stop it. I'm not a scientician over here.

3 of Clubs, I understand. "Threes give you more points now," I understand. There's a Joker card called "Ten Four" that, you guessed it, makes Fours and Tens score more points. It has a picture of a walkie-talkie on it. That's fun stuff.

Having Balatro as a second data point made me think back and re-analyze why I got along so well with Inscryption, a game that pretty explicitly models itself after Magic the Gathering.

It has creatures with attack and health points, it has card abilities like flying and deathtouch, it has sacrificing weaker creatures for stronger ones. That's Magic, baby! Or Yu-Gi-Oh, or Pokemon, or any other trading card game you want to compare it to. Why did I get drawn into Inscryption like I've gotten drawn into Balatro?

It all comes down to simplicity for me. Inscryption boils Magic down to its purest form, eschewing all the card text and esoteric conditions, and sticking to "big monster beats little monster," plus a few other easy-to-remember rules that can be communicated through simple symbols.

From there, it starts riffing with fun modifiers and mechanics that let you slowly but surely break the game in your favor. It's not about creating the most efficient, optimal combination of cards and abilities. It's about using the simple tools around you to build a perpetual motion machine strong enough to kill god. Which is to say, "Me make number go up."

This flavor of extremely simplified rouguelike deckbuilder is, so far, right up my alley. Balatro, in making one of these out of playing cards and poker hands, might just be the holy grail.

The Best MegaMan Battle Network Quotes (Part 1)

2024-03-07T22:30:00Z

This post was originally published on Welcome to the Cyber World on 7th March, 2024.

MegaMan Battle Network is a goofy series of games. Some of the writing is absolutely wild. This is a post to commemorate some of my faves from Battle Networks 1, 2, and 3.

I'm sticking to the first three because those are the ones I've played via the Legacy Collection on Switch so far, and so those are the only games of which I have screenshots.

Without further ado, here are my faves:

And of course, the ultimate:

Ranking the Battle Network Games

2024-03-07T21:30:00Z

This post was originally published on Welcome to the Cyber World on 7th March, 2024.

For the longest time, Battle Networks 1 and 3 remained blind spots in my time with the series. I don't know why I never went back and played those through emulation or grabbed some old carts. But now, thanks to the Legacy Collection, I have played those!

Ideally, I'd make this ranking after replaying all 6 games in the series, but I've only finished Volume 1 of the Legacy Collection so far, so I'll have to rely on my distant memories of Battle Networks 4–6.

Here we go, in reverse order, from least favorite to favorite:

6. Battle Network 1

Look, it's a first draft, it was always going to be down here. It just feels like small-scale proof of concept in so many ways compared to the games that followed.

The soundtrack is smaller and more repetitive, the battle system isn't all there yet, the locations are bland and annoying to navigate.

If I can mix some metaphors, the bones are there, but it's not quite done cooking.

5. Battle Network 4

Version played: Red Sun

It's entirely possible that I'm placing 4 so low on the list because I haven't played it in a while, but I also don't remember being super fond of it.

I don't love the locations, music, or story as much as any other game in the series. The whole game being a series of repetitive tournaments isn't the most exciting thing to begin with. Add on top of that the weird choice to require multiple playthroughs to acquire everything, and it all falls apart for me.

I seem to recall more than once being confused by which main menu option to choose to start my next playthrough but keep the previous playthrough's progress, and accidentally erasing all of that progress.

This is also the split point in the series where the audio and visuals change drastically, and I'm not sure how I feel about those changes. Why is MegaMan so tiny now? Really curious why those changes came about.

I'm not really looking forward to replaying this one in the Legacy Collection, but it does feature the series' first Boktai crossover, and a story that hews pretty close to that of the anime, so that's fun.

4. Battle Network 6

Version played: Cybeast Gregar

I honestly keep flip-flopping on whether to put 6 above or below 4. I'm putting it above for now because I like some of the music more, I think the battling might be more fun, the final final version of ProtoMan you get to fight in the post-game is cool, and for the emotional ending of the series.

Outside of that, I don't remember loving the story, I don't know how I feel about Lan randomly moving in literally the last game, the new characters in Lan's new town are pretty generic, and I don't remember liking any of the new navis (either enemies or the allies that you can Cross with).

Also, they're called Crosses now instead of Souls? Okay.

I dunno, I'm very hot and cold on this one from what I remember. Very curious to see how I end up feeling about this one and 4 after replaying them again.

3. Battle Network 3

Version played: Blue

I wasn't sure what to expect from 3, coming into it for the first time as an adult. But honestly, I was really pleasantly surprised.

At first, it seemed like a weird, in-between mashup of 2 and 4. It has the bigger character sprites of 2, and some of the same battle music, but some UI and mechanics that I recognized from 4, like the start menu and Navi Customizer.

But after playing, it's clear that 3 has a robust identity of its own. This is largely thanks to its story, which pulls in threads and characters from the previous two games, and hits some effective emotional beats. The world is also varied and fleshed out, with a sizable cast of new characters.

I didn't expect to get sucked into 3's post-game, but after the credits rolled, I wasn't ready to be done!

2. Battle Network 5

Version played: Team Colonel

I have such a soft spot for everything 5 is doing, and it's doing a lot.

Putting together a super team in a secret base is a cool and fun conceit. The set dressing for your base(s), and for the game as a whole this time around, is top notch.

Liberation Missions — big weird board games that play out over entire areas of the net, in which you liberate those areas one square at a time — add an extra layer of strategy, team management, and timing to the combat (achieving a 1-Turn Liberation is so satisfying).

Getting to play as other navis for the first time in the series, a final assault on the bad guy's hideout in a volcano, a deeper Boktai crossover featuring crosover multiplayer, a touching story exploring the histories of SciLab and the Hikari family, and of course an expansive post-game, the game has it all. I love every bit of it.

I love that 5 really goes for it in terms of trying new things, and all of those new things really work for me. The vibes are good, the music bangs, and this is even the entry in the series that got an early re-release on DS, so I can't be wrong in placing it so high.

1. Battle Network 2

I am absolutely, completely biased towards this game because it was my first and I played the absolute heck out of it. But it's really good! It's got a lot going for it!

The lack of Souls or Crosses limits the combat options, there aren't any Dark Chips, etc, etc. But to me, that just shows how solid the combat system is on its own, with tons of quality-of-life upgrades from the first game.

The navis are cool, the music rocks, the locations are fun, the progression is satisfying, the cyberworld is colorful and varied, and the endgame is jam-packed and fun to explore.

Everything in this game is, to me, the rock-solid, base-level, platonic ideal version, from music to characters to world-feel to mechanics. It's not the flashiest or prettiest, but it's a perfect foundation. This is where the series found its footing, and built from there.

It's the only MMBN game I've 100% cleared, and it will probably stay that way! I love this game.

Ephemera: Globe Trekker

2024-03-04T18:10:00Z

For the past week or so, out of absolutely nowhere, I've been getting this theme song in my head.

I keep periodically staring into the middle distance playing bits and pieces of it over and over, trying desperately to remember the name of the show it's from.

Finally, my brain churned up enough information for me to run a search for "Globe Trotter TV Shopw" (typo and all), which not only unearthed the fact that the Harlem Globetrotters had an animated series in the 70s, but was also enough to get me exactly what I was looking for: the IMDB page for Globe Trekker.

I don't know anything about this show other than it was a travel show in the 90s.

I just have a very specific memory of it being on TV at my grandparents' house as a very young kid, and eating White Castle chicken rings and crinkle cut fries.

I also found this other, slightly updated intro, whose visuals I feel like I have a clearer memory of, despite remembering the earlier theme song more clearly.

I also definitely remember this host.

Apparently, according to Wikipedia, the show was in production until 2010, and continued airing episodes until as recently as 2016. Which is wild to me.

I don't really have anything else to say except hey I found this, and the brain works in mysterious ways, and the opening theme kind of sounds like that one song that goes, "hold your head up, whoaaa, hold your head up, whoaaa."

🤷‍♂️

Bring Back Cheat Codes

2024-03-03T23:00:00Z

I was thinking about Sonic the Hedgehog 2 today. Not the movie sequel that I somehow still haven't seen, but the Sega Genesis game from 1992.

My experience of Sonic 2 was sort of stilted. I liked it enough, if not as much as the original Sonic the Hedgehog, and I was a capable enough player at the time to get through to Mystic Cave on a good run, but no further.

But I wanted to get further! I wanted to see what else the game had to offer, what final confrontation awaited Sonic and friends, and I didn't want to wait until I was more dextrous or just plain better at the game.

Yada yada yada, games were harder in my day, old man yells at cloud, I know. But whether or not that's actually true, home console games were still very much being influenced by their quarter-munching predecessors. They were still, on their face, unfeeling in a similar way.

Luckily, for as difficult and unforgiving as we tend to remember games of that era to be, there were cheat codes. If you knew the right combination of button presses and when to execute them, you had access to a whole host of ways to make a game easier.

It was thanks to the Level Select, Debug, and All Emeralds cheats that I eventually beat Sonic 2, and teared up watching a game's ending for the first time.

Whether the fact that cheats were so big at one time in gaming history lends credence to the idea that games back then actually were harder or less forgiving (and therefore made people feel the need to both create and use cheats), or whether they were just a fun addition at a time when games felt more free to be goofy, I don't know. I'm not here to deliberate that.

Cheats felt like a way to even the odds, tip the scales back in the player's favor. Or just to have some gosh darn fun for crying out loud!

Using the debug cheat in Sonic 2 to spawn in a million ring boxes or checkpoint lampposts was fun and silly and served no real purpose. Like a game! Like art! Who cares! Big head mode!

I started thinking about all this, ironically, because of Sonic Superstars, the latest entry in the Sonic franchise, and a supposed continuation of a supposedly ongoing renaissance of good 2D Sonic games (it's not).

This time around, I made it to the final boss just fine on my own (I'm almost 31 years old, and therefore a Big Boy), but the fight itself sucks.

Not only does the game require you to replay the entire level that leads up to the boss fight if you quit and come back later, but the fight is just tedious.

I don't like leaving games unfinished, especially when I'm so close to the end. I was thinking about how I just want to put a cap on this game and call it done, check it off the list, remove it from my brain already, and I realized, "I should be able to cheat my way to the end."

But I can't.

Cheat codes were a big part of video game culture for a while. They got passed around in rumors, published in magazines, catalogued online (long live gamefaqs), and even printed in a series of bespoke, cheat code-specific books at one point.

Eventually, gradually, cheats began to recede from video games. I don't really know enough about why to point to a reason for this, but I suspect it had to do with some unholy combination of a growing cult of purity around a game's "intended experience," some "are games art" discourse, and good old-fashioned difficulty gatekeeping.

"You're not a real gamer if you play on easy mode."

"You're only cheating yourself if you turn on assists."

Using cheats in a video game is stolen valor, actually.

Man, it's a game. If something isn't hitting for me and I want to move on, who cares?

Movies and TV shows have fast forward buttons. And Scene Select. And Wikipedia plot synopses. Get what you want and move on with your life.

Sometimes games are hard, or annoying, or poorly balanced, or just something you don't want to spend any more time beating your head against because you're going to die one day. And sometimes, you just want to be silly and goofy and have some fun!

Games these days just feel more rigid in what they will and won't allow a player to do.

We're finally starting to get some of this stuff back as Accessibility Options and Assist Modes, which is great. I was replaying Control recently, and I was reminded that if you're not gelling with the combat in that game, you can straight up turn on Invincibility and One-Hit Kills right from the menu at any time. That rules.

But it's still not terribly widespread. It shouldn't be a niche or "indie" thing to add these options to your game.

We should all feel more free to cheat our way through a game if we want. It doesn't matter. It's just a game.

Welcome to The Works of Egan

2024-02-25T20:10:00Z

Hello there! As you may have read over at Dream Avenue, I've decided to pack my bags and move platforms once again! Welcome to The Works of Egan!

This is going to be a pretty long post, so before we get too deep, let me just recommend that you grab this site's RSS feed to keep up with my posts. You can also follow the site on its Neocities page, and you can follow me in any of the places listed here.

So yes, the first point that needs addressing is that I've not only moved house, I've also changed names! Why The Works of Egan? Well, Egan is my name, and this site contains my Works.

It could be as simple as that, but it's also a play on my default username, Eganworks, which itself comes from a fake company name my cousin Kevin came up with when he and my sister and I were all making a fan-film sequel to Mister Roberts, a movie from the 50s featuring Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell, and Jack Lemmon, and you know what let's just go with the previous explanation.

While the site you're looking at may be new, theworksofegan.net has actually already existed in another form for a little while, as a sort of About Me / informal portfolio / what I'm up to right now sort of site. Just a little thing that grew out of wanting to build something here on Neocities.

I always felt a little weird about having that site exist separately from my blog, and I've always thought those two things would make a lot more sense sharing one space. And now those two great tastes are together at last! But I digress. If you're coming from Dream Avenue (my previous blog), it's a big change!

Again, you should remember to grab this site's RSS feed if you'd like to follow my blog posts that way, and haven't already done that. The old Dream Avenue feed will not be updated or ported over. You can use this link here!

If you're a loyal reader from a previous era of the blog, you'll be happy to find that I've ported over all of my previous posts, and put in a decent amount of work to make sure everything displays and behaves properly on the new site.

Please let me know if anything looks broken or weird!

So let's talk about this new site

I mentioned earlier that The Works of Egan has existed as my Personal Website for a while, and that I've now mushed it together with my blog. Which means that while my previous blog was just a blog, this site is so much more!

Outside of writing my silly little blogs, I'll also be using this site to keep track of other projects I'm working on, like motion graphics and film photography, share links to other places and things around the web that I think are worth sharing, or that I just don't want to forget, share what tools I use, what I'm playing right now, and all sorts of other information.

The sidebar on the right (or at the bottom of the page if you're on mobile) features a Site Map, which will give you a list of pages you'll find on the site and where they live in relation to each other, a list of other places to follow me, a list of other blogs I like, a list of tags you can filter my posts by, and some good old-fashioned 88x31 banner GIFs, because that's the aesthetic I'm going for here.

Each post features a section for comments at the bottom, powered by Disqus. There's a great guide on how to get ad-free Disqus comments for free on your small, non-commercial site here.

And site analytics are powered by Goat Counter, a free, privacy-minded analytics solution dedicated to de-Google-fying the web.

The site itself is hosted on Neocities — a wonderful hosting platform with the spirit of the Old Web — and built on 11ty, a static site generator that really was the final piece to the puzzle of building this place.

This website will never feature ads, trackers, pop-ups, or any other invasive or annoying features.

There's plenty more I'm planning on adding here post-launch, so stay tuned, click around, and if you like what you see or have any suggestions, thoughts, or ideas, don't hesitate to reach out in any way you see fit!

(There might even be a secret page or two waiting to be discovered 😉)

A bit of a manifesto

A personal website, as I see it, should be equal parts showcase and journal. It's online because I want to share it with the world, but it also exists for me, because I want it to.

I think keeping a personal website full of the things you like, are interested in, want to keep track of, don't want to forget, etc, is a great way to open yourself up to possible connections with others like you. But it's also important for it to be something that brings enjoyment to its creator first and foremost.

The web should feel more personal. More people should do this.

I decided to make this website, and move my whole blog here because I love writing and want to keep doing it, and because I want to share myself with the web and the cool people I meet there.

But also because I genuinely love and enjoy web design and development. It's just such a clear and logical and beautiful process to me, the way this code and these rules come together to create an interactive, visual whole that you can use to communicate parts of yourself to the world.

I'm adding my little square to the quilt, and helping to build The Internet: that shiny, mythical thing that captured my imagination as a child in the dial-up era.

You can read a little bit more of why I decided to make this move here.

Ok so what do I write about here?

Mostly video games, honestly! Some reviews, some insights, some listing what I'm playing now and want to play next, and some short, excited posting about games I'm nostalgic for coming to fresh platforms.

But I also post about my life, the blog, pizza, covid, Sonic the Hedgehog, New York, photography, and the occasional entry in a link roundup series that I call "What Else Is On?"

Not to mention my annual Game of the Year (GOTY) top ten lists, only one of which was three months late!

I don't keep to any kind of schedule (though there was a good stretch in 2021 where I blogged every day), and I'm always trying to write smaller and more often.

Some Blog History

2017 - This blog's life begins when I decide to start writing about moving to NYC on my Squarespace portfolio website, a topic which lasted all of two posts.

2018 - I remember my blog exists and start writing about using Paper, a drawing app I pined after for years and finally started using because I bought an iPad.

I also start my end-of-year GOTY list tradition.

2019 - I am too busy hating my job and enjoying the pre-Covid world to blog at all, except for my GOTY list.

2020 - Covid hits, I get laid off from my job, and a group of writers I follow on Twitter all start a blog on Blogger together during lockdown. I get the bug (the writing bug, not the other bug, that comes later).

The Go To Hell Space, this blog's second incarnation is born.

2021 - I briefly move The Go To Hell Space from Blogger to WordPress, blog almost every day for most of February, move back to Blogger, and change names again.

Dream Avenue, this blog's third incarnation is born. Less than a month later, I move back to WordPress.

My love for writing has truly been rekindled by this point.

2022 - Dream Avenue chugs along happily on WordPress as I get busier and busier with freelance work, but remain dedicated to The Craft.

I buy the Disco Elysium jacket, one year after telling myself I shouldn't.

I discover Neocities, and wonder if… But no… It isn't time yet.

2023 - My 2022 GOTY list balloons way out of control and I get bottlenecked on writing for a few months, but still manage to write some fun blogs after that.

I play DOOM for the first time, the year we both turn 30.

2024 - I discover a static site generator called 11ty that would make maintaining a blog on a site I build from scratch and host on Neocities one million times easier.

And here we are.

Conclusion

It's been a long journey getting here! My knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and now tiny bits of other languages in 11ty has grown immensely since I started. My high school self would think I'm really cool right now.

If you have a Neocities account yourself (and if not, just give it a shot!), you can follow this site's page here. If you like what I'm doing, you can even throw me a tip!

Thanks so much for stopping by my housewarming post!

Hope you wanted something to read.

Til next time!

What Else Is On? February 25th, 2024

2024-02-25T20:05:00Z

'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.

🎵 PUT THIS ON

📚 READ THIS

+This Website is Personal - Frills
Touching on something I've definitely felt in the past, Frills writes about eschewing professionalism and perfection, and keeping your website/blog personal to you.

+It Doesn't Have to Be Perfect - Nicky Flowers
A similar sentiment to Frills' post from Nicky Flowers, written appropriately succinctly.

+You Should Blog - keith.is
Similar succinct sentiments following our theme from Keith here, featuring some quick advice and great options for getting a blog going.

+Everyone Should Blog - Xandra
Some evangelizing from Xandra about trying to get more non-technical folks to make their own websites, the challenges involved, and about the saturation of personal websites from folks in the industry that just end up being about code.

+Where Have All the Websites Gone? - fromjason.xyz
Some philosophic waxing from Jason here about what's been happening to the web, and the scourge of the For You page.

+32-bit Cafe
A great resource for anyone looking to get into making their own website, with tons of reading, examples, guides, and links out to other resources.

📺 WATCH THIS

+What stationery can you get with a JetPens $25 Gift Card? - YouTube
Ok so this is basically a commercial for the office supply and stationery site JetPens, but I honestly love their YouTube channel so much. They bring so much passion and personality to their videos. JetPens is cool.

🎮 PLAY THIS

+CrossSkitch - itch.io
Just a simple little cross-stitch simulator with chill tunes and satisfying sound effects. Available to play for free in your browser!

🌐 A GOOD WEBSITE

+Free Online Picross - liouh.com
I stumbled upon this page while browsing through sites on Neocities (a great way to find cool shit). It's just a simple Picross generator that someone built. If you're feeling the bug and need to take a break with a quick puzzle, look no further!

Thanks for reading! Til next time! 👋

Leaving Wordpress

2024-02-25T20:00:00Z

Just about a month ago, I wrote that I was thinking about moving this blog off of WordPress and onto another platform. You may be able to guess where this is going, but I’ve spent the past few weeks thinking about it, and more importantly hard at work on a new website, and I’ve come to a conclusion.

This will be my final post on WordPress.

I’ll get into the long-winded explanation of why, and start waxing poetic about how I’ll miss this era of the blog in a moment, but I should get some of the important details out of the way before your eyes start glazing over.

First: This blog is moving to theworksofegan.net! By the time I post this, that move will be complete! You can go there right now!

Second: If you follow the Dream Avenue RSS feed, you will need to go follow the new blog’s RSS feed in order to keep receiving posts in your reader of choice! This blog’s feed will not port over! Head there now or use this link!

Alright, now that all the important housekeeping is out of the way:

What changed?

When I last wrote about this, I was still on the fence as to whether I actually wanted to move or not. WordPress is simple, painless, and still quite cheap. Why would I want to move?

The long and short of it is that, while I had some reservations about workflow and upkeep, I’ve been feeling the pull of building and maintaining my own website for a few years now, ever since discovering Neocities in 2022. Then I found some solutions that assuaged all of my reservations.

The major factor was 11ty (eleventy), which is what’s known as a static site generator. It’s a tool that lets you build and update good, old static HTML sites really quickly.

I was hesitant to give 11ty a try, at first. I was most comfortable building a site with just Notepad, some HTML, CSS, and an open tab of W3Schools to get me by. 11ty felt just a little too tech-y. I would have to download Visual Studio Code to use it (you don’t have to, but it makes it easier), and run terminal commands. All the people talking about it online sounded like… I dunno, tech people. I don’t trust tech people, I’m sorry. Maybe that’s a prejudice of mine. Maybe it’s trauma from working at a startup.

And besides that, I don’t really love running something like that without understanding how it works. I don’t like when part of the process is “don’t worry about it” (despite the fact that the whole selling point of a platform like WordPress is “don’t worry about it”).

I also questioned whether using something like 11ty went against the whole ethos of coding out a website yourself in Notepad. It’s slow and hard and looks unprofessional, but that’s the point.

Then I actually gave 11ty a try.

To my delight, I was able to port over the site I’d been building from scratch in Notepad pretty painlessly. Once I had that up and running, I was able to see that 11ty is really just a series of scripts that allows you to build a completely modular site on one end — making it super simple to update a ton of pages at once — and spits out static HTML on the other end.

And it can still look unprofessional on purpose 😎

Why 11ty? Why Neocities?

I found Neocities in 2022, when people were talking about where to go after Twitter, and instantly fell in love. It’s everything I think the web should be. People making completely personal, super weird, totally non-corporate websites and vibing. I built a small site there using a framework I found called Zonelets, and have felt the pull to move my blog there full-time ever since.

The only thing stopping me was that the act of running a blog this way — manually updating HTML files, manually updating an RSS feed — seemed completely tedious. There’s no way I would ever want to do that, no matter how much I love the ethos or aesthetic. There’s just too much getting in the way of the writing. It just can’t compare to opening a draft in WordPress, writing, and then pressing publish.

In fact, I tried running a mini-blog that way at my Neocities site for a little while, complete with a functioning RSS feed. Getting everything to work correctly was very rewarding, but the thought of doing it “at scale,” as they say, is exhausting.

So I went back and forth on that for almost two years, until I found 11ty and, as described above, made myself try it.

11ty solves all of the problems I would’ve had with manually updating my own website. It does this by letting you create templates for different parts of your site — like the header, footer, metadata, etc. — and then letting you call on those templates where you want them to appear on your site.

So for example, you can create a template file that contains all of the metadata in your <head> tag, so that you only have to update that one file if you need to change something.

I probably could have recreated some version of that myself, more or less, with some JavaScript and a lot of patience — my early Neocities site used JavaScript to pull up a list of recent posts, handle navigation links, etc. — but that .js file would’ve ballooned out of control and probably slowed my site way down. And it probably still couldn’t have done everything 11ty allows.

The magic of 11ty is that once you’ve created your modular, templated site, you tell it to run, and it spits everything out as HTML files. It writes all of those templated parts to the HTML files themselves.

So instead of changing a link, or a title, or whatnot on 4 or 5 or seventeen different pages, I can change it in one file, and 11ty will write that change out to all the places it needs to go.

Having to update one little thing in a million places is a pain I’ve felt often while working on The Boktai Database. I’ll probably be turning my attention to getting that up and running on 11ty next.

The real power of this setup is that you can put all of a page’s surrounding HTML elements in a template, tell that template where to put the contents of the page, and then each page that calls that template as a layout can contain only the content you want to care about (i.e. the words and media in a blog post).

And the best part is: I understand it all. I get what it’s doing and pretty much how it works. It’s not the hoity-toity tech thing I thought it was. There was a learning curve, and I had to open my mind to new things (I downloaded node.js 😱), but it’s still just building out a site with code the same as you would in Notepad, and getting the machine to interpret everything the way you want.

It might sound complex the way I’m describing it, but it’s actually really intuitive in practice, and does everything in pretty much the ways you would want it to if you wanted to make building your own static website a whole lot easier.

So to summarize, I get to have my cake and eat it too, with the complete control over design and self-built ethos I was craving, and the ease of updating and posting that I needed to make that happen.

Looking back

While I’m resolved to pack up and move out at this point, there are still things about blogging on WordPress that I love. I’m definitely going to miss this era when it ends.

It kind of feels like moving out of your parents’ house. I’m going to be responsible for everything, no one’s going to hold my hand. You all remember moving out of your parents’ house and having to make sure your RSS feed was functioning properly by yourself for the first time, right?

I started using WordPress to blog in February 2021, when I moved The Go To Hell Space for a spell, and started trying to blog every day. That was such a fun time. My girlfriend and I had just moved in together, and my unemployment insurance hadn’t yet run out, so I felt free to dedicate a ton of time to blogging.

Those daily blogs were a lot of fun. I really miss blogging that way sometimes, not being able to be too precious about things, just having to find a topic and get some thoughts down.

After that, I moved back to Blogger for some reason. I don’t remember why (maybe money?), and I definitely don’t remember when. But then I moved back to WordPress again. I completely forgot I flip-flopped like that. But I had tasted a proper blogging setup, and Blogger is… not that.

Those early, daily blogging days also saw a lot of people follow me here on WordPress, which I don’t think I knew was a thing. I don’t know how many of them were bots, or auto-follows just looking for a follow back, or folks who started a blog in quarantine and gave it up soon after. But it still felt nice to see people responding and interacting with my posts. I’ll miss that.

I’ll also miss opening my WordPress dashboard and being greeted by a bar graph of views, which has shown a non-zero number almost every day since I wrote about buying the Disco Elysium jacket. I don’t know how accurate any of those numbers were, but it was nice to see. Again, it’s nice to have some confirmation or suggestion that people might be reading my words.

All of this, and the fact that WordPress is so damn stable and easy to use, and is still independently owned and supported by the same folks, and open-source, and all of that, just made for a really great blogging experience. It’s no wonder I stuck around for so long.

But now it’s time to move on to something else. I’m ready to take full control of my own personal chunk of the Information Superhighway and build something weird and fun, and to be able to change it whenever and however I want.

As of the time this post is published, The Works of Egan is online and fully operational, so come take a look, pull the new feed into your reader, poke around a bit and get cozy. Because I may be moving, but I’m not going anywhere.

Hope you wanted something to read.

Onward!

I Never Tire of Being Right

2024-02-21T20:25:00Z

In their latest Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase, Nintendo announced that the good folks at Aspyr have read my blog, they've received my letters, and they've decided to acquiesce to my requests.

The original two Star Wars Battlefront games from the early 2000s are coming to Switch, baby! WITH online multiplayer! Just as I predicted/begged for!

First, I predict/manifest a Switch port of Knights of the Old Republic. And yeah, the KOTOR 2 Restored Content DLC thing fell through, but I never asked for that in the first place. Maybe it's a monkey's paw deal.

Now, I've manifested two more timeless Star Wars classics onto the Switch.

I simply do not miss when it comes to this very specific set of circumstances!

One might argue that it's been pretty clear for a long time that Aspyr is serious about porting as many classic, beloved Star Wars games as it can to as many platforms — particularly the Switch — as it can.

But I mean. I'm still right.

In any case, I just can't wait to once more...

boop boop boop boop, boop boop boop boop, bleedleep!

You know? You know.

Thinking About Another Blog Move

2024-01-24T16:00:00Z

Just as this blog began its life as The Go To Hell Space on Blogger before moving to these green pastures, I am once again contemplating another way of doing things.

I'm thinking about leaving WordPress. I really like it here, and I'm really glad I moved the blog here 3 years ago (wow), but I'm feeling a pull toward doing something different. After putting a lot of work and thought into it, I've decided to once again blog about it to help me decide once and for all. So here it is.

For the past 2-ish years, I've been getting really into building my own websites on a platform called Neocities. I've blogged about it before, it's where I'm building The Boktai Database. But that wasn't the first Neocities site I built. I've also been building and maintaining a personal site at theworksofegan.net, as part of an old-school idea of having a bespoke home on the web, independent of any social platforms. A place to post my projects, hobbies, media habits, links I want to share, etc.

The Works of Egan is built on top of a framework called Zonelets, which is basically a template comprised of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files for you to customize and make your own. It's meant as a really quick and easy way to get a custom site off the ground. It's great.

It's also specifically set up to allow you to easily create a blog. As I was first building my site, I didn't really have a need for the blogging functionality, and certainly didn't want the mess of having two blogs, so I played around with it to get the hang of it, then mostly disregarded it. I tried (and succeeded at) setting up my own RSS feed, mostly because I was curious and I find it fun to tinker with things like that, but that was about it.

But recently, I've been feeling disconnected from Dream Avenue here on WordPress, and more interested in developing my own site. I keep thinking about how much fun it's been, and how much control it gives me over the exact look and feel of my site.

I've been building a new version of my site that would encompass both what theworksofegan currently is, and also this blog, for about the past two weeks now. I'm extremely happy with the way it looks and works, and I've had a ton of fun making it from scratch.

WordPress themes just can't give me exactly what I'm looking for in every single area of design (at least not the free themes I'm willing to use, and the cheapest hosting tier I'm willing to pay for, but tbh I don't even know what level of customization a premium theme or Custom CSS integration would give me here), so I always end up feeling at least a little unfulfilled, and my blog feels like a tiny bit of a compromise.

But at the same time, so what? WordPress gives me a clean, stable, functional, distraction-free platform to write my silly little blogs, and it just works. I write my words, I click publish, and my post is live. I don't have to write an <a> tag every time I want to link to something. I don't have to think too hard about image formatting. I don't have to manually update my RSS feed, or every page I want my post to appear on. It all just goes.

The design compromises are so minor, so unimportant, that they can be forgiven in light of everything else WordPress affords me. By and large, I've been able to make a really nice looking blog that works on desktop and mobile from the jump, and looks and works about 90% of the way I want it to with very little effort.

But maybe I like the effort. Maybe I'm a little freak who wants to obsess over how many pixels of padding an unordered list should have in my sidebar. Maybe I could get the same amount of satisfaction from uploading a bunch of updated HTML files to Neocities as I get from pressing "Publish" on WordPress.

Maybe I've spent several nights in the last two weeks staying at my computer to work on a new version of my site instead of playing video games in bed because I like figuring out how to make the computer do the thing I see in my head. Maybe I prefer HTML + CSS to the WordPress block editor.

Who could say?

Now, as is often the case with decisions like this, it's time for

A PROS & CONS LIST

Option 1: Move to Neocities

Pros:

Complete control over layout, design, function, and feel.
I own it completely. The HTML files are mine.
"Oldweb" ethos of hand-coding your own website.
I enjoy making a site myself. Feels fun and fulfilling to figure things out.
Neocities is small and independent and I like their whole thing.
Join a community of like-minded people toiling away on their Y2K-ass little websites, with the ability to follow each other through Neocities
Save some money on domains.
I think I just want to.

Cons:

Writing blogs in HTML can get in the way of just writing.
Having to migrate all of my posts would be . . . a lot.
What if I stop enjoying doing everything manually?
Site loads on Neocities can be slower.

Option 2: Stay on WordPress

Pros:

Everything is already here. I don't have to do anything.
Extremely fast and easy to write a blog and publish it.
Things like tags and RSS are automatic.
I like the little bar graph of page views on my WP dashboard. Makes me feel like people are reading.
Some semblance of a community. Other bloggers have followed me on WordPress, and that's neat.
Gives me enough control over design and function to be happy.

Cons:

Not enough control over design.
Post composer can slow down when working on a long enough post, or one with more than just text.
I think I might just want a change.

Well. Okay. I'm not 100% sure where that leaves me. I think that's a more even split than I was expecting.

My main sticking point is that I absolutely love the site I'm building, but I love the act of writing on WordPress. Until I resolve that impasse, I'm stuck right back where I started.

I think my next step is to see if I can find a writing workflow that feels right on the new site. If I can find a way of writing that doesn't feel more tedious than it has to be, then I think I have my answer.

I may not have made a decision here today, but as always, the act of blogging it out was a helpful way to get all my thoughts out of my head and into a format I can make better sense of.

Please feel free to leave a comment if you'd like to weigh in, or if you have any thoughts or suggestions!

I will, of course, post again if I make a decision.

Every Video Game I Played in 2023

2024-01-20T16:00:00Z

Every year, I make note of every game that I play, both in my Hobonichi Techo and on Backloggd. I just like it! I like keeping track of and remembering things. I don’t really do anything special with this information, apart from occasionally reviewing things on Backloggd, I just like having it.

My rules for what I do or don’t record to the list have changed a few times over the years. Last year, I felt like I was too lax with my criteria for what made the list, so I resolved to tighten things up, and only record a game if I was earnestly playing it to finish it. I never really codified that rule in those words before, it was just sort of a vibe, which probably means it was a bad rule, but it meant I couldn’t write down just any old thing I was dipping into for a few minutes. Looking back through my list, I’m pretty sure I abandoned this rule fairly quickly, but it almost certainly still resulted in a shorter list. Unclear.

I no longer think this is the way to go. I think you can play a video game for a hot minute and get the idea, or get something out of it. I don’t think you need to have played a game from front to back in order to have “played” it, so why should I put some imaginary restriction on my list? Also, if the point of the list is recording and remembering, shouldn’t I want to record as much as possible? I think so.

That’s not what I did in 2023. But it’s what I’m doing in 2024 and going forward. I’m also going to try to keep my paper notes and Backloggd in closer parity this year, which I haven’t been doing. Expect the fruits of these decisions next year.

[Hold for applause]

Before we begin, here’s a quick key:

Games I completed in 2023 are bold.
Previously played games are italicized.

I played 69 games in 2023 (nice). Here they are:

Dome Keeper
Disco Elysium
Adaca
Filmechanism
Sonic Advance
Sonic Advance 2
Stalcraft
Hitman: Freelancer
Lego Racers
Steamworld Dig
Steamworld Heist
Final Fantasy VII Remake
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Phantom Brigade
Motorsport Manager
Terra Nil
Dragon Quest XI S
MegaMan Battle Network Legacy Collection
MegaMan Battle Network
MegaMan Battle Network 2
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
20 Minutes Till Dawn
System Shock: Enhanced Edition
The Ultimate Doom
Deus Ex
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Pyre
Hacknet
Nancy Drew: Alibi in Ashes
Last Call BBS
Xenonauts
Microsoft Tinker
SimCity 2000
Another World
Cogs
Zachtronics Solitaire Collection
Wolfenstein 3D
Doom II
Quake
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
MegaMan Battle Network 3: Blue
No Man’s Sky
Sea of Stars
F-Zero 99
F-Zero
Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull
Kirby’s Star Stacker
Dungeon Defenders 2
Nancy Drew: Sea of Darkness
Myst
Powerwash Simulator
Suika Game
TIE Fighter (1998)
Voxelgram
Nancy Drew: Warnings at Waverly Academy
Cyberpunk 2077
Super Mario Bros. Wonder
Subpar Pool
Umihara Kawase
Sonic Superstars
Digimon Survive
Risk of Rain Returns
Gubbins
Patrick’s Parabox
30XX
Steel Assault
Moon: Remix RPG Adventure
Tangle Tower
Tactics Ogre Reborn

That’s my list!

20 games completed.
19 games replayed or continued from a previous year.
47 games played fresh for the first time.

Til next year,

– Mike

2024

2024-01-17T16:00:00Z

Well, wouldn’t you know it, I actually managed to publish my big, year-ending GOTY list on time this year, setting me up for a punctual and productive year of blogging, and wham: I got covid.

So instead of spending the first week of the year after the holidays getting set up for the year ahead and doing some work on hobbies before actual work started back up, I spent the week sleeping on an air mattress in our spare room in an (ultimately futile) effort to try and avoid my girlfriend’s covid, and eventually convalescing my way through my own exciting bout of the sequel to SARS.

Luckily, I’m starting to feel better now, and work is still ramping up slowly, so I’ve got some time to blog!

I haven’t done one of these posts super regularly, but I’m feeling like doing one now! So join me in looking back and seeing if 2023 went according to plan, and setting up some plans for 2024!

In 2023, I wanted to…

Work on work discipline ✅

In 2022, I felt like I was a little too lax in terms of giving my work all of the effort and attention it deserved. I’ve spent the past 3–4 years building up a freelance editing career from the absolute zero of 2020, so it’s only natural that certain skills would need developing, especially working full-time freelance for the first time in my career. In 2023, I did a lot of work on making myself focus, but I also feel like it sort of happened naturally, as my work really picked up last year, and I started seeing a steady stream of challenging projects that sort of snapped me into place in terms of discipline. I would call this one a success!

Watch a movie every week ❌

For every success, there must also be a failure. Or at least, that’s what I’ll tell myself at several points throughout this post. Not only did I not watch a movie every week last year, I barely watched any movies at all. I’m kind of in a weird place with movies and visual media in general. It’s been hard for me to find the right time and space to watch something outside of whatever I’m watching with my girlfriend at dinner. Definitely want to take another swing at this one this year.

Stream on Twitch ❌

Another failure. Every once in a while I get it in my head that it would be a lot of fun to stream more games and try to amass some kind of following or community there. In practice, I often just don’t enjoy the act of streaming, whether folks are watching or not, and I think it might be time to give up on this dream. But who knows, never say never.

Move my shelves ✅

I’d left a bunch of shelves of my stuff still cluttering the walls of the room that was previously my bedroom, which became my girlfriend’s art studio when she moved in in 2021. Two years later, I finally moved them (and all of my stuff) into my office space!

Make homemade Pop-Tarts ❌

This was less an overarching resolution, and more of a thing we wanted to do, but so was the shelf thing, and I make the rules here. I guess this could also represent a desire to do more baking of a certain kind. We didn’t end up making pop-tarts or, I think, having much of a baking breakthrough, despite buying my girlfriend a stand mixer for her birthday, because we had a gas leak at the beginning of last year, which led to our gas being out for an entire month. That kind of put a damper on our excitement, and then we just got busy and didn’t make it a priority.

Write more, smaller blogs ❌

I don’t have to tell you this didn’t happen.

Write things down ✅

I don’t remember exactly what I was going for with this one, I write things down all the time. I have a blog, I journal in my Hobonichi Techo, what more could I want? That said, I have started using my phone’s Notes app a lot more for random thoughts and ideas, as well as just cracking open Notepad on PC. It really helps me stay in my thoughts rather than having to load up Notion and try to decide how to organize and format an idea before ever getting it down.

Practice Japanese ✅❌

Partial points for this one, I guess. I started strong again, but fell off as I got busy. I’ve had a really hard time keeping any kind of consistency in my studies. I think to a degree there’s just no substitute for taking a course in school. But I did sign up for a lifetime membership to WaniKani, a great website for learning kanji, and I haven’t lost any of my existing knowledge of hiragana or katakana, which I still enjoy struggling my way through whenever a bag of Japanese snacks or something similar crosses my path.

That’s my year in review! There was a lot of failure! But that’s to be expected when setting out to try to do things. You’re not going to be able to do everything. Sometimes, you won’t be able to do anything! The year has its own plans, and it’s not going to share them with you!

Alright then, let’s look forward with this year’s list.

In 2024, I want to…

Watch more movies.
Work on the apartment (new furniture).
Enjoy the moment more (journey v. destination).
Practice Japanese.
Work on imposter syndrome/second-guessing self.
Write more, smaller blogs.
Create art.
Make friends/community.
Finish transferring old family video tapes.
Office space refresh???

There’s a lot I want to tackle this year! Some repeats as well as some newcomers! You’ll just have to wait until next January to see how it all turns out.

See you then!

Mike's 2023 Games of the Year

2023-12-31T16:00:00Z

It’s time once again, folks! Time for me to look back and take stock of all the games I played this year, and make note of the standouts.

2023 was a year of high highs, but I would be remiss not to mention the horrific amount of turmoil in the games industry, with seemingly constant layoffs hitting studio after studio throughout the year, as Capital draws its purse strings tighter to better suit its needs. Capitalism continues to be a monstrous machine that must be dismantled. It is my sincere hope that all those just trying to eke out a living through their chosen art form can land on their feet somewhere else, or else find something new they can love that will better support them.

I didn’t play quite as many games this year as last year, though I still played a lot. However, one tradition I seem to be carrying forward from last year is being super busy right up until it’s time for me to travel for the holidays, leaving me precious little time to work on this list!

As a result, and as you may be able to tell by this year’s header image, I’m trying to go back to basics with this year’s roundup. I hope to god I post this one before the new year. Oh, also…

I PROMISE NOT TO MAKE THIS ONE SO LONG.

This may have been the Year of the Big Game for most folks, what with Baldur’s Gate 3, Armored Core 6, and Starfield all achieving long-awaited releases, but for me, it was the Year of the Big Games I Don’t Care About. I’ve never been interested in D&D’s mechanics or bland fantasy setting, I don’t really gel with FromSoft games, and while I’ve historically loved fiddly space games, I’m not the biggest Bethesda guy, and looking at Starfield makes me feel less than nothing.

So at the very least, this GOTY list should be fairly unique!

As ever, this list consists of games that I personally played in 2023, and not necessarily games that were released in 2023. I tend not to play enough current games in a year to put together a list like this, and besides, I’m not made of money.

Without further ado, here is…

MIKE’S FAVORITE GAMES OF 2023

10. Suika Game

One of the year’s most curious out-of-nowhere sensations just had to have a spot on my list, especially after it became my girlfriend’s and my go-to time killer and we started making up cute songs to go with the game’s singular, repetitive music track.

Suika Game is one of those rare indie releases whose simplicity proves just addictive enough to pierce the veil and enter the public consciousness. It looks at first blush like any number of shovelware games littering the Switch eShop, but it’s just polished enough to feel fully-formed, and any remaining flaws are papered over by charm.

What you see is what you get with Suika Game. I love it.

9. Terra Nil

I’d been eagerly awaiting Terra Nil since playing its demo in the 2022 Steam Next Fest. The full game turned out to be more of what I saw in the demo, pretty much exactly what I wanted, but little more.

There’s no fanfare for completion, and nothing waiting past the end, save for randomized replays and higher difficulty levels, but I can’t begrudge the game for giving exactly what it promises.

Terra Nil is a lovely, peaceful experience about saving and preserving our environment, which feels… extremely good to my soul. It also provides a real, satisfying challenge and requires strategic thinking without being too harsh or locking the player into fail states.

It was one of the loveliest experiences of my year.

8. Super Mario Bros. Wonder

I wasn’t expecting a total refresh of the 2D Mario series this year, but Nintendo really hit it out of the park. Only after seeing Wonder’s updated visuals and animations did some of what I never really liked about the New Super Mario Bros series stand out, and made me wonder (haha) what took them so long.

I haven’t spent a ton of time with the game just yet, as I’m playing through with my girlfriend rather than mainlining it all in single-player sessions (a route I think a lot of people are taking with this game), and honestly, the multiplayer in Wonder isn’t the friendliest it’s ever been in a Mario game, so I’ve got to dock it a few points.

But in a year that saw old rivals competing anew with the release of a brand new 2D Sonic game (which is, uh, not on this list…), Nintendo proved they’ve still got that old magic in spades.

7. Motorsport Manager

I’ve been an F1 fan and general motorsport lover for a long time, and Cado and Rob’s run on Motorsport Manager at Waypoint (RIP) got me jonesing to try my hand at running a team of my own. I poured a lot of time and fake money into Eganworks Racing this year. Reader, I ran it right into the ground.

Surprisingly, it was this failure that sucked me into MM even deeper than I expected. Because beyond that failure, rather than a Game Over screen, was the experience of fake losing my fake job, and being relegated to a lower racing series, forced to watch someone else run the team with my name on it, and tempted by the possibility of one day returning, or even better, grinding them into dust with the team that took me in.

Motorsport Manager’s long-haul approach to a career in motorsport really pleasantly surprised me, and kept me coming back when I would’ve been perfectly happy to walk away. That alone was a real highlight of my year in games.

6. Risk of Rain

This game gave me whiplash before I ever installed it. I loved the original Risk of Rain, and even its sequel, but the thought of a remaster gave me pause. The announcement screenshots looked gorgeous, but the original just came out not too long ago. Did we really need this? Then I remembered 2013 was ten years ago. Oops.

Just like Risk of Rain 2’s foray into 3D before it, Returns pleasantly surprised me by both feeling necessary and instantly proving that Hopoo and Gearbox had pulled it off.

The addition of characters, items, and abilities from RoR2, the extremely fun Providence Trials to play through between runs, and the fact that everything has been reworked into a cohesive whole rather than feeling cobbled together, proves Returns’s worth as a love letter to/definitive edition of some excellent roguelikes.

5. Steamworld Heist

2023 brought with it the demise of the Nintendo 3DS eShop, and was coincidentally also the year I decided to hack my 3DS, which I wholeheartedly recommend. As a result, I started sifting through some old classics that I never got around to in their heyday. I decided to finally give the Steamworld games a shot after seeing some high praise on Cohost, starting with Steamworld Dig, which was a joy.

But I really got hooked when I moved on to Heist, a 2D turn-based tactics game in the same universe as Dig. The writing is sharp, the mechanics are delectable, and it all just keeps moving you forward in a really satisfying and addictive way. The game has just enough going on without feeling bulky, the balance feels perfect.

Having played two of their games now, it really feels like the folks at Image & Form have a great feel for setting achievable goals and rising to meet them. I can’t wait to play Steamworld Dig 2.

4. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

How does one begin to talk about perhaps the most anticipated game of the year? They did it. They blew it out of the park. The new Fuse power is so fun and interesting. Ultrahand was an ingenious way to ensure countless social media posts. Not even mentioning The Depths in any of the game’s marketing materials? Inspired.

ToTK had some high expectations to meet. Breath of the Wild is a hard game to follow, even for the people that made it. I think they mostly met and exceeded those expectations.

It was sort of a bummer that Zelda was once again whisked away and unplayable, despite no evidence to the contrary before release, but I do think her story was genuinely cool this time around. I have yet to finish the game, so that may change, but what I’ve seen so far has been pretty sick.

What’s keeping me from gushing over this game the way I would have about BoTW is something that I’m not even sure is a fault of the game itself, which is that I think I might be over games of this size. There’s just so much to do and see, and while getting distracted by some delightful side quest felt novel in BoTW, here it just felt a little too overwhelming.

Looking back at the 100+ hours I spent with it, I know that I loved ToTK, want to finish it someday, and that it deserves this spot on my list. I just need time to recover from my open world burnout first.

3. Sea of Stars

I was ready to be disappointed in Sea of Stars from the jump. It bills itself as a spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger (an impossibly high bar to begin with), and it was also a game I backed on Kickstarter (my track record there is not great). However, after pushing through a somewhat awkwardly paced opening few hours, I grew to love it so much that it became one of two games I 100% completed this year.

The key to this enjoyment was to stop comparing it to Chrono Trigger. Nothing is ever going to be Chrono Trigger again. Sea of Stars’ weakest point is probably its story, and so holding the game to the standard of Chrono Trigger was always going to breed disappointment. Sea of Stars’ story is simple but effective, with more than enough to pull me forward to the end. And despite its relatively simple story, a lot of its characterization felt very strong. Liking the characters went a long way toward keeping me around.

What I really loved about Sea of Stars, and a big reason I bothered to 100% it, was having a robust but manageable amount of side stuff to do. It contains an addictive board game called Wheels, with new challengers in each new area of the map. There are collectible Rainbow Conches to find throughout the world, but there are only 60 of them, not 999, and most of them can be found in the course of simply playing through the story. There’s also a quiz master, which I’m sort of a sucker for in RPGs like this.

The fact that all of this side content gates the real final boss and true ending makes the fact that it all feels extremely doable all the more appreciated. I love a long, beefy RPG as much as the next guy, but come on. I have a life.

The combat is fun and just deep enough, the environmental puzzles are dead simple but still satisfying to execute, the world map and environment design are stunning, and the set pieces the game drops at key moments in the story were absolutely jaw-dropping.

In all, Sea of Stars is a wonderful addition to the RPG canon from an indie studio that hopefully has a long and bright future ahead of it.

2. Moon

From a brand new, classically-styled RPG, we move now to a port of an old game that billed itself as an “anti-RPG.” My girlfriend got me Moon for Christmas, and I meant to wait until the new year to play it. I’m so glad I didn’t, as it almost instantly rocketed to the top of this list based purely on how different it is. Hopefully that’s not just recency bias. Moon is absolutely doing the “don’t you feel bad for being the main character in a video game” thing, but it’s special because it’s thankfully so much more than that.

Moon could almost be better described as a puzzle game, its entire world one big enigma running on clockwork cycles that allows you to unravel more of it the more you solve. I love how elegant its main mechanic is. Basically, you come into the world with a limited amount of time to walk around and do things before you run out of energy and fall asleep, losing your progress. But the more puzzles you solve in the world (which take the form of slain monsters whose souls you need to save), the more your allotment of walking-around time grows, allowing you to do and see more before you need to find a bed to rest and save your progress.

And so the world reveals itself to you in this expanding radius of places you’re able to reach before passing out. It’s a really effective way of both parcelling things out at reasonable pace, and also making the player feel complete ownership over their own accomplishments.

Putting aside the mechanical, Moon is also dripping with character. It’s right up there with Earthbound in terms of delightful weirdness, from a talking bird who runs a travel agency, to a ghost who wants you to feed the people in the portrait hanging on the wall of a mansion their favorite foods. This game is setting a new bar for fantastical settings in video games for me.

I haven’t finished Moon yet, and I don’t know how much more awaits me, but I have a feeling I’m most of the way through at this point. Wherever else the game takes me from here, and however it ends up, I know I’ll always cherish my time with this unique little gem.

1. MegaMan Battle Network Legacy Collection

I enjoyed a lot of great, original, inventive games this year. But I need to let nostalgia win this time. See, MegaMan Battle Network games are my games. They’re the games I played at the most important, formative time of my life, on a handheld console that was mine alone. I love them dearly. And Capcom did an exceptional job in honoring their legacy.

First, Capcom got us hyped out of our minds by airing the old MegaMan NT Warrior anime in a marathon on Twitch and YouTube for a limited time leading up to the release of the game. Then, they gave the game a PET-like homescreen featuring a fully-animated MegaMan voiced by Andrew Francis, the original voice actor from the anime. They cleaned up all of the in-game text with a modern font, making it more readable on today’s screens. They added online functionality, making netbattling and chip library comparison (two integral parts of the experience of these games) possible on modern hardware. They used the original Japanese versions of the games as their base for all regions, restoring the Boktai 3 crossover that was cut from Battle Network 6 in regions outside of Japan (something important to me specifically). They added a way to access special battle chips and patch cards only available at in-person events around the time of the games’ original release.

They actually went back and fixed the god-forsaken music bug in Battle Network 6 that kept the danger music playing even after you’d cleared the game and defeated all the copybots (yes this does deserve its own graf, real ones know).

Pile all of this on top of the usual Legacy Collection trappings Capcom is becoming known for, like an art gallery, music player, and tons of screen resolution, wallpaper, and filter options, and you’ve got yourself one heck of a snapshot of the real, actual legacy of these games.

The six games in the series (ten if you count all versions) are split across two volumes. I’ve only played Volume 1 as of the posting of this blog, but I’ve definitely seen everything I need to see in order to place the collection firmly at the top of this year’s list. I had a blast playing Battle Networks 1 and 3 for the first time in my life, as well as 100% completing Battle Network 2 for the second time in my life, but the first time without using cheats.

The games themselves, of course, play exactly as they did when I was a kid. Everything has been preserved with the utmost care where preservation was possible and/or preferable, and where changes were made, they too were made with care and consideration for the original experience.

There isn’t anything I wish Capcom had done differently, or anything I can think to add. I simply couldn’t have asked for a better, more faithful celebration of a series of games that has meant so much to me. They did right by these games. For all these reasons and more, the MegaMan Battle Network Legacy Collection is my perfect 10 of 2023.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Patrick’s Parabox

Excellent puzzle game that I just came to a little too late in the year for it to make the list.

Phantom Brigade

Love the conceit for this one, but in practice it just didn’t grab me like I thought it would. A bit bland.

Puzzmo / Gubbins

Two new daily puzzle things popped up this year! Each is great for its own reasons, and worthy of a slot in your routine.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

FINALLY got around to playing this one after replaying Human Revolution and absolutely loved it. Shame Eidos never got to finish this trilogy.

Filmechanism

Started the year with this cute little puzzle platformer. As has happened with many puzzle games, I mainlined it until it got harder than I was interested in pursuing any further.

MISSED CONNECTIONS

Alan Wake II

Void Stranger

Cocoon

Trine 5

Pizza Tower

Thanks as always for reading! Feel free to leave me a comment about your own year in games! Til next year!

Desperately Seeking Solitaire

2023-10-28T16:00:00Z

Earlier this year, I got back into Last Call BBS, Zachtronics' penultimate game release. Specifically, I got really into the most basic-ass game in the collection, Sawayama Solitaire, which is just 3-draw Klondike solitaire with some bangin' tunes.

This brought me back to the good old days when computers (specifically Windows PCs) knew they were dumb machines and didn't try to guess your every move by invasively tracking you, or try to sell you some shit at every turn, and always shipped with a handful of free games, solitaire being chief among them.

You might be surprised to learn that this is no longer the case! Windows now ships with some paid subscription-based bullshit called Microsoft Solitaire & Casual Games, which I'll let speak for itself:

Yikes.

In my reverie, I thought up a seemingly simple task for myself: find a solitaire game for my phone. That way, I wouldn't have to boot up my Z5 Powerlance, or leave it running in the background, every time I wanted to grab a quick game of something simple in between work emails. And let's be honest, I wanted to play on the toilet.

Reader, if it had been as simple to find a normal-ass mobile solitaire game as I naively thought it would be, I might have instead written about how the point when PCs no longer came with simple, free games pre-installed was a sign of a grim turn in our relationship to consumer technology and its increasingly rent-seeking overlords.

Instead, you get this.

All I wanted was to play solitaire. I love Zach Gage games dearly, but I was not looking for a fun new take, just normal, boring, old solitaire. Otherwise, I had very few criteria. No ads, no XP bonuses, no maidens to save, no 10,000+ levels, no farming simulators (this is real), and if it has more than just Klondike (like Freecell or Spider for example), that would be a nice bonus.

I was of course prepared to pay for the privilege. After enjoying a very brief enlightened period in the early 2010s, the mobile game space quickly devolved into the ad-supported, free-to-play cesspool of nightmares we have today, so I understand the importance of paying for the things you want to see in the world. But I didn't want to pay for a subscription. Because, to reiterate, it's just fucking solitaire. The bar was so low, or so I thought.

After searching the word "solitaire" on the iOS app store, and wading through the truly shocking number of games that offer an experience other than Just Playing Solitaire, I curated a small list of what I guess I consider the least offensive options, which I will share including their developer name, since they were pretty much all titled some variation of just "Solitaire."

Microsoft Solitaire Collection

I'm sayin'

The big dog. The OG. Surely this should be the definitive solitaire experience. Or maybe you know better after reading the preceding few paragraphs. It includes many versions of solitaire, but it's filled with attention economy bullshit like XP and coins and events and all that garbage.

To cap it off, removing ads requires a recurring subscription payment of $1.99 per month, or $9.99 per year. Which is an absurd ask for, again, Just Some Solitaire.

MobilityWare - Solitaire

Ok, here we go. This appears to be mostly regular Solitaire. Furthermore, there appears to be an Apple Arcade version of this app, which I think still speaks to an app's and/or developer's quality.

However, this one also features levels and XP and daily challenges (please just be solitaire I'm begging you), and turning off ads requires a subscription that will run you, confusingly, either $1.99 per month, $4.99 every 3 months, or $9.99 every 12 months. Goodbye, MobilityWare!

Brainium - Solitaire: Classic Card Games

This one looks similarly clean and simple, as MobilityWare did, but it's functionality is somewhat limited. It only offers Klondike solitaire, which isn't a dealbreaker, but it also only lets you customize the back of cards, whereas other apps also let you customize the front, and I'm not a huge fan of the look of these cards.

All in all, this app is just fine, and might be an acceptable compromise, if it weren't for the fact that its ad-free version costs $11.99. Granted, it's not a subscription, and that's great. But it's a bit more than I'm looking to pay for solitaire. Especially in such a limited form.

Solitaire City

I might have overlooked Solitaire City had it not been recommended to me on Cohost. The splashscreen shows a copyright date of 2008, and it looks like it hasn't been updated since then. But this little guy has a lot going for him.

For starters, there are tons and tons of variants on offer here — 20 in all — most of which I've never even heard of. There are loads of customization options, including the background, card backs, and card fronts. There are leaderboards and achievements, but you can turn all of that off. There are no increasing levels, no XP to earn, no in-game currencies, and best of all, the ad-free version is a one-time purchase of $4.99.

We have a winner. I am officially a resident of Solitaire City.

In the months since going on this voyage, I've continued enjoying my time with Solitaire City. Nothing about the experience I was looking for has changed, it runs super smoothly, and I believe it has received at least one update in that time, so the developer hasn't abandoned it. Bonus points for not collecting any personal information, either (why would a solitaire app need to do that).

In the end, I found exactly what I was looking for, but good god. I was not prepared to go on such an odyssey to get it. Maybe that's naive in this day and age, but — one last time with feeling — IT'S JUST SOLITAIRE!!!

Human Revolution: The Square Deus Ex

2023-10-26T16:00:00Z

Earlier this year, after being drawn in by a sale on GOG, I decided it might be fun to fill in some of the gaps in my experience with the history of PC games. And, hot on the heels of an as-yet unfinished first playthrough of the original System Shock, I thought it sounded fun to play through the entire series of Deus Ex games.

I’d played half of the series in college (The original and Human Revolution), so I already knew I loved these games, and that this “challenge” shouldn’t end up feeling like a slog.

I had also originally planned to finish the series before the release of Cyberpunk 2077’s big 2.0 patch, and then experience that game for the first time in the context of a series that feels at least thematically similar, to see if anything came of that. That didn’t end up happening, partly because I was having such a great time playing Deus Ex games that I took too long! But I digress.

My journey through the series began, sort of accidentally, with 2011’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I had originally intended to play through the series in release order starting with the original Deus Ex, but two of my greatest flaws/fixations, nostalgia and tinkering with weird technical issues, conspired against me. However, this way of playing the series sort of also makes sense, because Human Revolution and its sequel are both prequels to the original game, so I guess I’m playing the games in timeline order now. Oops!

Anyhow, as I played my way through Human Revolution, I was struck by just how much I love the way this game looks. DXHR has such a unique, bespoke, and in my opinion, iconic art style that perfectly suits the corporate, dystopian, and technological themes of its world, and that, thinking back, has been a big part of my love for this game since its release.

Even moreso than the game’s signature gold tint, what sticks out to me as Human Revolution’s signature style is just how square everything is. This comes through most strikingly in the architecture and design of DXHR’s spaces, with lots of sharp angles, clean lines, and flat surfaces.

The sharp, angular offices of the Sarif Industries building.

Everything looks like it’s made of hard plastic sheets.

Even the train stations are clean and stark.

Every surface in a given space, from the floors and walls to the desks, boxes, crates, shelves, air conditioning units, and just about every other piece of set dressing you can set your sights on, is squared off, flat and clean. Everything ends up looking neat and orderly, even when a given area is supposed to be in shambles.

Cover up that fire with your finger, and that’s a very orderly little loading dock.

Even the obvious repetition of assets feeds into the clean, square aesthetic.

It isn’t just the design and shape language that makes the game feel this way, it’s also the lighting. Spaces and objects in Human Revolution all seem to be lit rather flatly and evenly. There’s very little contrast (at least at default settings), which is actually quite useful in a game in which you spend much of your time skulking in the shadows.

Every surface ends up looking like a hard, matte plastic material, which almost makes it feel like you’re playing with a bunch of action figures inside a massive playset. This not only adds to the square, stark, corporate feeling, it also (in my experience) renders all of the game’s environments eminently readable.

A very flat looking office plaza.

A very clean looking escalator.

Even the UI carries through this look of square or square-ish shapes with barely-rounded and often cut-off corners. In addition to generally tying everything together and helping it all feel cohesive and whole, this also makes every element of the UI feel neat and organized.

Even the game’s upgrade screen, which is too often rendered as the dreaded Skill Tree in other games, is instead presented as an orderly grid of squares organized by which part of the body they modify. Keeping with the flat design motif, all of the upgrades are available to choose immediately, rather than having some gated behind others, tree-style.

A place for everything, and everything in its place.

I mean, it was 2011, Windows Metro had just happened.

You spend a lot of time in Human Revolution exploring modern, corporate spaces, so it makes a lot of sense that the game would lean into this style of presenting its world. I’m just struck every time I re-play the game by how hard the dev team actually leaned in. It’s admirable, I think, and refreshing to see in the context of a modern games landscape filled with HDR, Ray-Tracing, and a fanatical desire for “realism” that just results in every game looking the same.

Granted, none of these techniques were in wide use, or largely even possible, in the time Human Revolution was released, but I think the point stands.

It’s all boxes, man.

This firm adherence to a distinct visual style also goes a long way toward setting the game’s tone and mood. The flat, even lighting remains a constant in exterior locations, where it always seems to be night. Leaning hard into this aesthetic seems a bit grimdark edgelord at first, but much like the original Deus Ex, which didn’t actually believe any of the conspiracy theories it was playing with, if you look a little harder, you’ll see the ways that this overarching, unrelenting style actually keeps things light and acknowledges that Deus Ex is goofy, and doesn’t have to take itself too seriously.

It’s not a comedy, and not exactly a satire, but it knows it’s fiction, it knows it’s a video game, and it’s not going to try and pretend otherwise in a pointless quest for realism.

It just always looks like this.

Does Jensen sleep during the day or something?

At its best, Deus Ex is all about offering up different styles of play and allowing the player to go all-in on exactly what they want. That doesn’t mean building an infinite open world and allowing you to climb every mountain, it just means building out expansive possibility spaces that allow the player to progress through the game’s authored, linear story and world in the way that they so choose.

It’s really cool that the folks making Human Revolution understood that, and realized that that allowed them the freedom to go ham on an honest-to-goodness art style in every single nook and cranny of the game. I didn’t even talk about the clothing!

Maybe it’s just that this game is from an era when big, new video games each had their own look, rather than just looking like a reconstituted slurry of everything else around them. Maybe I’ve already forgotten that.

Perhaps it’s just refreshing to encounter a AAA-style game with a distinguishable art style.

My Time With the Nintendo Switch Lite

2023-10-23T16:00:00Z

At the beginning of October, I finally pulled the trigger on something I've want to do for myself for a while, and bought a Switch Lite. We're reportedly nearing the end of the Switch's life, I know. This was not a practical or pragmatic choice, I just wanted the thing.

I wanted to buy myself a little treat for working so hard the past few months (I have been SWAMPED with freelance work), and I've been dreaming of playing my Switch games on this cute little blue guy with a real d-pad.

In terms of that dream, it's everything I hoped it would be. The moment I first picked it up, I was amazed at just how, well, light it was. Feels like I'm holding nothin' at all. The size is great, too. It's so much more comfortable to hold the Lite than it is a full-size Switch, even for shorter periods of time.

And I love the color. They really had my number when they added this shade of blue to the lineup.

What has been the biggest letdown, though, has been my discovery of the way Nintendo handles having two Switches on the same Nintendo account. Nintendo will allow you to use two Switches on your account, and even download and play all of the games you've bought from the eShop without a problem. You can't play games on your profile on both Switches at once, which, sure, but if you're just looking to use one Switch in one use case, and another Switch in another, this will work just fine.

The problem comes in when you try to play those games on your second Switch without an internet connection. As I found out, when registering a second Switch to your Nintendo account, you are required to designate one Switch as "primary," and any others as "secondary." The main difference being that a primary Switch can play downloaded games offline, and a secondary Switch needs to be online at all times to check if a given game is "available" to play (i.e. not being played on the primary). A secondary Switch can, of course, play any physical game cards you slot in regardless of internet connection, but you won't have access to any DLC you've purchased while offline.

This has created an interesting dilemma for me, as I bought my Switch lite thinking it would serve as the portable Switch that I would take with me to places without an internet connection, and my old Switch would become the stay-at-home Switch, remaining tethered to the TV. This made perfect sense in my mind, because the Switch Lite is unable to dock with a TV the way a normal Switch can (arguably removing the functionality that makes a Switch a Switch, but there you are).

You might be thinking that the solution to this problem would be to make my new Switch Lite my primary Switch, and therefore able to play games on the go, and make my old Switch, which will always be connected to the internet by virtue of being left at home, my secondary. Indeed, that would solve this one particular facet of my dilemma. But this is Nintendo we're dealing with, so you know it's about to get Asinine and Draconian.

See, the other difference between a primary and a secondary Switch is that a primary Switch will allow other user profiles to play its games, while a secondary Switch, for whatever reason, will not. So if my stay-at-home, TV Switch is my secondary Switch, my girlfriend can no longer play any of the digital games in my library, unless she purchases them through her own Nintendo account. Granted, this would not be a great number of games, but it's an unnecessary expense, and a ridiculous reason to have to re-purchase a game you've been playing for years.

Where this gets even stickier and more confusing is with Animal Crossing. My girlfriend loves the little island we created together in 2020, and still visits occasionally. That's a game that I bought digitally, meaning if i made my Switch Lite my primary Switch, she would lose access to our shared island. But since Animal Crossing islands are tied to your physical Switch unless you manually transfer your data, that island wouldn't exist on my Switch Lite in this scenario.

So in order for my girlfriend to be able to continue to visit the island that she has put way more work and love into than I ever have, and that can only be accessed on this one Switch anyway, we would have to re-purchase the game. Nintendo, everyone.

Nintendo is so worried that someone somewhere might play a video game, that they continually make everything about their online offerings so much harder than it needs to be, or just outright burn their own history to the ground.

I would even accept this online requirement if it gave you just a little more leeway. For example, if you were allowed to play games offline, but were required to connect the console to the internet every 30 days, or hell, even every 24 hours would be better. Instead, Nintendo just pops up a little message saying, "you can't do that," and offers no recourse. Thank god I found this out in the comfort of my own home. Can you imagine how much longer this blog would be if I had been on the subway? On an airplane?? I'm letting Nintendo off easy, here.

For now, I'm resigned to simply re-purchasing the games my girlfriend wants to play on our TV Switch, and resolving to buy physical copies of games we might both want to play going forward. Until then, I'm keeping my Switch Lite as my secondary Switch, and simply using it at my desk or in bed. My plan is to have all this ironed out by the time I need to travel for the holidays.

It's a shame this little quirk has had to overshadow so much of this review, because I've genuinely fallen in love with the Switch Lite in every other way. I was always a handheld gamer growing up, so I love the smaller size, the lighter weight, and the real d-pad, and I don't miss the ability to play games on a TV. Especially since I have a second Switch for that when I want it.

If you're looking to buy your first Switch, or to replace your dock-able Switch, or you simply don't share your Switch with anyone else, the Switch Lite is a no-brainer for those looking for a Certified Little Guy to play some Nintendo games on. Otherwise, if you're in my situation, there are some unfortunate factors you'll have to weigh.

Playing Now/Playing Next: Aug 06, 2023

2023-08-06T16:00:00Z

Hey there, sports fans!

Now that I've finally finished the big Doom post I've been thinking about and working on for weeks, I thought it might be fun to blast off a short, quick blog just detailing what I'm playing right now, and what I plan to play next.

I also find it uselful to write these things down because I'm a weird nerd who likes Plans™, and I have too many thoughts kicking around in my head at any one time to remember everything without writing it down.

Maybe this'll become a series, maybe it won't!

Playing Now:

"Oh no, my neck blood!"

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut

Finishing up my first ever replay of DXHR! I was going to start through this whole series from the beginning, but then I got really nostalgic for Human Revolution and it just sucked me in!

Playing Next:

Wolfenstein 3D + Doom II

Playing these two in the wake of finishing up my thoughts on Doom, and wanting to see both where it came from and where it went. Luckily, all of this shit is on GOG to own DRM-free, and is constantly on sale for pennies.

Can't wait to find out what this guy's problem is.

Quake

Also very much in the wake of finishing Doom and wanting to see where things went from there (I have never played any of this shit! Wild!), but actually mostly because of a post I saw on Cohost about a cool-looking mod.

From There:

On PC:

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (restarting after falling off years ago)
Deus Ex (replay)
Deus Ex 2
System Shock: Enhanced Edition (finish)
Ultima Underworld
Cyberpunk 2077 (after the Phantom Liberty update drops)

On Switch:

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (finish)
MegaMan Battle Network 2 (finish 100%)
Dragon Quest XI S: Definitive Edition (I very foolishly started this right before Zelda dropped)
Sea of Stars (rel. Aug 29)

That's pretty much what I'm up to in games! All of this is subject to change based on my whims, of course, and I'm sure Sea of Stars is going to end up stealing the whole scene when it lands at the end of the month. Hopefully you'll see writing about several of the games on these lists on this very blog soon!

What have you been up to lately? What are your video game plans? Leave me a comment or don't goodbye!

On Playing Doom 30 Years Later

2023-08-05T16:00:00Z

In my senior year of college, I took a horror film class. At some point during the semester, while exploring the evolutionary stages of genre (primitive, classical, revisionist, and parodic), we watched John Carpenter's Halloween, a massively influential film in its time.

By the 2010s though, the horror genre specifically, and the media landscape more broadly, had already undergone several evolutionary stages having felt its influence. I distinctly remember a number of people (myself included) laughing and/or rolling their eyes at the film's ending because, while it clearly wanted the audience to feel unnerved, it felt obvious and overdone to us.

Having grown up absorbing a culture influenced in myriad ways by Carpenter's Halloween, when it came time to finally watch the thing that did the influencing, it felt like nothing special. I've never forgotten that experience, because it taught me a very important lesson about considering the context in which a piece of media was made. But I've also never forgotten what it felt like to think so little of something with such an outsized influence.

It was with this memory in mind that I started playing Doom — iD Software's seminal first-person shooter, released in 1993 for MS-DOS — for the first time in my life, just a few months prior to its 30th birthday, and a few months after mine.

Such is the weight of this lesson on my mind, that I let it shape my entire experience. It wasn't so much a worry that Doom might not hold up, and more a useful tactic to get me to open my mind a little bit more, and come at this experience from a slightly different angle than I otherwise might. After all, I was cracking open a history book, not booting up Mario Kart.

It seems to me now, though, that it's only natural to worry that an older game, especially one running on DOS, might not appeal to modern sensibilities. Games of a certain age naturally, visually telegraph their oldness in a way that is comparable to old black-and-white movies, but perhaps even more extreme. In any generation of film, a guy still looks like a guy onscreen. In various generations of video games, a guy can either look like a guy, a single square, or a cleverly arranged pattern of squares, based on the technical limitations of the time.

The farther back in time you go, the chunkier the graphics get, the greater the opportunity for a game to feel mechanically dated. Games have evolved, just like any other media, along with their enjoyers' sensibilities. Sure, graphics have changed, but also, control schemes have standardized, levels of friction and abstraction have ebbed and flowed, and we no longer have to throw in a handful of quarters every time we lose. Put plainly, we used to put up with a lot of bullshit that we don't anymore (and, frankly, vice versa, though that's neither here nor there).

So when firing up Doom for the first time (or System Shock, or Deus Ex, or Another World, or SimCity 2000), it's pertinent that I take the time to remind myself that I might have to put up with some bullshit. It's then my job to determine if that bullshit is worth it or not, separate the bullshit from what the game is trying to do, and in some cases, determine if the bullshit is good, actually.

In the case of Doom, the bullshit stems from the fact that it was not built for what we now call mouselook, a feature present in most modern 3D PC games, which allows the player to adjust their view (look around) by moving the mouse. Mouselook.

Instead, Doom is played with a keyboard-only control scheme, which takes some getting used to for someone who did not grow up interacting with games this way. The up and down arrow keys move the player forward and backward, while the left and right arrow keys turn your point of view to the left and right. Strafing is accomplished by pressing left and right while holding down the Alt key (or, as I later learned, by pressing the comma and period keys). Spacebar interacts. Ctrl shoots.

To quote Tim Rogers's Action Button review of Doom, "Playing Doom with just a keyboard sucks, until suddenly, it totally owns."

Opening myself to experiencing Doom on its own terms, meeting it halfway, allowed me to cast off any rose-tinted glasses I might have otherwise donned, and evaluate it honestly. Had I instead found a version of Doom with mouselook enabled, it would have felt like speedwalking around a museum's entryway exclaiming loudly, "So this is Doom! How quaint," rather than actually playing the game. I probably wouldn't have played for very long, either.

It helps, of course, that Doom's opening episode is quite elegantly designed. Playing on this antiquated control scheme never felt like a hindrance or barrier to a higher level of skill. In fact, the restricted nature of its controls was a boon to my getting up to speed with using them.

It's this idea of restriction and/or restraint that gets at part of why I think Doom has had such a lasting impression on the world of games. Because here's the thing about Doom: it is not interested in wasting your time. It may be constrained to simplicity by the technology of its generation, to some degree, but in hindsight, Doom feels like any number of modern games with all their extra bullshit sanded off.

Where does Doom keep all of its items for the player to pick up? Strewn all over the fucking floor. How do you pick up and use these items? By simply running over them.

Is this choice the result of a technical constraint? Probably. But it feels just as much like Doom doesn't want you looking at every little trinket on the ground and pressing the interact button to pick them up. It doesn't want you digging through crates and drawers for upgrades and health. Doom wants you either killing demons, or looking for more demons to kill. Or opening doors. Or looking for keycards to open doors. But mostly killing demons.

Doom gets so much right with so relatively little, and still feels good today, because it was frugal with its friction, and generous with its speed. It gets as far out of your way as it possibly can, so you can spend your time whipping around hell and wasting demons. And again, this may all be born out of necessity, but it really feels like its creators clearly understood what types and amounts of friction feel good, and which ones are cruft.

What Doom doesn't get quite as right is most of the game after E1. That is, everything after the levels that John Romero worked on. E1 is such a tight introduction to the game, and makes such a solid first impression, that everything after it feels kind of mid. I did not enjoy any of the (thankfully few) boss battles. And it sort of felt like the game had overstayed its welcome by the time E3 rolled around. Luckily, the game feels so good to play that, on the whole, I still feel positively about my time with it.

I didn't exactly set out to review Doom in this post, though I may have inadvertently stumbled into doing just that. It's a 30-year-old game widely considered to be a masterpiece and more-or-less the urtext of modern first-person shooters. What more could I possibly add to the conversation by playing it once, 30 years late? I moreso wanted to look back and analyze my personal experience with the game to see if there were any insights to be gleaned.

In doing so, I realized that what I really learned from my time with Doom has less to do with the game itself, and more to do with that lesson I learned back in my horror film class in college.

In using that lesson to put myself in a mindset of "cracking a history book," as I described it, and opening myself to meet Doom halfway, on its own terms, and looking for what it was trying to do and say, and what I can try and make of that, I was just describing media literacy.

That's not just a great way to get into an older game, it's a great frame of mind in which to experience any piece of media — even Mario Kart.

This mindset doesn't require an emotionless detachment, and neither precludes nor automatically implies enjoyment. It's just a great way to put a piece of media in context, and remember that art is made by people trying to say something, under a specific set of material conditions. From there, you just listen to your gut and try not to give in to astonishment.

I've spent the better part of the last decade wishing I was better at media criticism. I think I just gave myself a new tool to help exercise those muscles. All it took was trying to get myself in the right frame of mind to finally play Doom.

Smaller Blogs

2023-07-16T16:00:00Z

Note to self:

The answer to writing more is smaller blogs.

Care less about perfection, I'm not the fucking New York Times.

The NYT doesn't even care about perfection, have you seen the shit they run in that rag?

That's not my point, we're already getting off track.

Smaller blogs.

You don't have to publish every little thought that comes into your head. You shouldn't! Look at social media!

But just like.

Filing away drafts with the intention of one day "fleshing this out" is only going to get you more drafts.

Spend 20, 30, 60 minutes on an idea. Then hit publish.

It doesn't matter.

Or trash it!

It doesn't matter!

You want to write, so write!

You're not getting paid for this, you're not fucking Henry David Thoreau, just write down what you thought about Doom (1993) and move on with your life.

And no more blogging about blogging, alright? This is your only warning. I know where you live.

Heat Signature (2017)

2023-07-03T16:00:00Z

Heat Signature

Developer: Suspicious Developments
Release Year: 2017
Genre(s): Stealth, Action, Roguelike
Played on: PC
Date Played: 03 Jul, 2023

I picked up Heat Signature in some Steam sale or another because I was a big fan of Tom Francis & Suspicious Developments' previous game, Gunpoint.

In Heat Signature, you play as a space mercenary, taking jobs of varying difficulties for money you can use to upgrade your gear. Successfully complete enough jobs, and you'll be able to liberate the space station you're on from imperial control, and move on to another space station.

Each job has you flying your personal ship out to dock with another, bigger ship out in space, stealing an item or rescuing/assassinating a target, escaping to your ship in one piece, and flying back to the station you took the job from to collect your reward.

After docking with a ship, the game plays out very much like Hotline MIami: Top-down perspective, WASD to move, mouse to point your weapons, kill or be killed. A key difference in Heat Signature, though, is that you can pause the action at any time in order to plan your next move. This mostly really worked for me, because as much as I loved Hotline Miami, I was often frustrated by having to play a particular level over and over because I was still building up my twitch reflexes.

At the same time, though, this feature also feels like an addition made necessary by possibly my least favorite aspect of this game: its roguelike nature. This basically means your character permanently dies if you fail a mission, and you have to start over as another character without the arsenal your previous character had built up. In this context, being able to pause and plan your actions more carefully feels like an attempt to mitigate situations where you might just get completely blindsided by a mission, and have to reset your run because of it. This isn't a bad thing, mechanically, it's just that now that I'm thinking about it, it feels like I'm seeing the strings in a bad way.

It's a fun loop at first, and failure feels cheap, fun, and easy to recover from. But over time, it started to get old, and I just wanted to be able to work towards a goal without the ground crumbling beneath my feet.

Missions also started to feel pretty stale after not too long, and I began to wonder just how much more there really was to chew on past this initial 20-minute playthrough. Taking on missions at harder difficulties didn't help this feeling, either.

One mechanic I liked as an idea was that each character you play has their own unique overarching goal that they're working towards as you complete missions. It might be something like, to paraphrase the game's Steam page, rescuing their brother, stealing their old gun back, or getting revenge on their partner's killer. That sounds really neat on paper, but in practice, it's just another randomly generated task for your randomly generated character to eventually do for...some reason. It all just feels weightless and empty compared to how a more authored and purposeful experience might feel.

In the end, I felt like I had seen about as much as I needed to see from Heat Signature. It's a neat little loop, with some potential for goofy fun, but there just wasn't enough meat on those bones for me. I haven't historically been the biggest fan of roguelikes, either.

Still, I'm quite hopeful that Suspicious Developments' next game, Tactical Breach Wizards, will be able to hold me for longer than Heat Signature was able to.

The Nintendo 3DS and WiiU eShops are Dead

2023-03-28T16:00:00Z

Yesterday, March 27th, 2023, was the last day to buy something from Nintendo's 3DS and WiiU eShops. Opening the shops on those consoles now presents the user with a series of empty digital shelves. The 3DS eShop still displays its collection of "Nintendo Selects" for some reason, though all of the games' listings read, "This software is currently unavailable." At least the animations and music are still there.

Nintendo gave plenty of advance warning for this shutdown, but it's no less disheartening. The only legal way to access an entire generation of digital games, many of which are only playable on the 3DS and WiiU's very specific hardware form factors, has been wiped out for no good reason. Nintendo is a massive corporation. It's doubtful that keeping these services online was costing them any significant amount of money.

And even if it was, the profit-driven contempt for preservation that dominates the games industry has made it impossible to even start having a conversation about legally hosting old games in places like public libraries or historical foundations. Anyone should be upset that vast swathes of video game history can be so callously thrown away without a second thought given to what is being lost.

It's emblematic of the age we live in. The majority of most people's entertainment, especially video games, is delivered digitally. It's extremely convenient, but as we keep finding out, digital is not forever. Digital movies, music, and games can and have been de-listed from stores, meaning that unless you already bought them, you're out of luck. Subscriptions, as I think more people are realizing, are even more ephemeral, as you never actually own anything you're paying for. If you ever stop paying for it, or it suddenly shuts down, you're left with nothing.

The empty 3DS eShop.

I don't think it's overly nostalgic to want to hang on to the games you've played, and revisit them from time to time, the way an avid reader would their favorite books, or a cinephile their favorite movies. I don't want to view my favorite medium as disposable just because its stewards' only interest is ever-increasing profit.

All media is the same in that way: you experience it, it makes you feel something, and you carry it around with you. Video games have always had the unfortunate distinction of being inextricably tied to a wide range of extremely specific, extremely varied, and constantly evolving hardware.

The only existing solutions to the problem of decaying video game history are corporate profit motive, which only preserves the most profitable games, and only until they stop being profitable to port and re-release, or emulation, which is sort of understood as a thing people do all the time, but remains illegal. It is common practice for corporations to sue into oblivion anyone who might try to provide access to games that the corporations themselves have no interest in ever providing access to.

It's worth mentioning, though, that this problem has already started to come for the rest of our media. Spotify only stocks its shelves with the tracks publishers are willing to provide, and that stock can pulled as publishers' whims change. Streaming-only releases of movies and TV shows leave them vulnerable to digital decay. eBooks are tightly controlled via DRM that prevents readers from engaging in practices common to owning and using books, and prevents libraries from utilizing the true potential of digital media: its ability to be infinitely copied without degrading.

Luckily, where corporate disinterest in preserving video game history has failed, the will of the people to fill that void has once again prevailed, for now. For every new video game box that is released, there will inevitably be a dozen or more hackers willing to crack it open, learn how it ticks, and reverse-engineer a way for people to use it in ways unintended by its corporate owners.

The empty WiiU eShop.

Hacking one's 3DS and/or WiiU is extremely easy, and – with the ability to legally buy digital games gone, and the prices of physical games about to skyrocket (if they haven't already) – I would argue, imperative. If you have an internet connection and an SD card reader, you have everything you need to get started. Hacking your 3DS won't take longer than your lunch break.

No, go ahead, I can wait.

This is why I waited to write this post until after the shops were closed, and why I didn't write up a list of games to run and buy before they did. Just steal that shit, friend. Nintendo doesn't care about providing you a legal way to keep playing these games, so fuck 'em. Go google "hshop" and let your pirate flag fly.

Also, the 3DS (and especially the "New" 3DS) can run way more than just 3DS or DS games. This thing has the horsepower to emulate any previous Nintendo handheld, and just about any 8, 16, and sometimes even 32-bit console from years past. You can get Final Fantasy VII running on this thing, and it will be pretty okay.

With that said, let's break up this essay a bit with...

MIKE'S TOP TEN GAMES TO PLAY ON 3DS

Picross 3D: Round 2
The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
Chrono Trigger (a DS game, but still)
The SteamWorld series, especially Heist
Picross E (any/all)
Shovel Knight
Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D
Super Mario 3D Land
OlliOlli

I will admit that I have only scratched the surface of what the 3DS had to offer, and so parts of this list may seem pedestrian. But in my defense, the 3DS has one beefy catalogue. There are plenty of beefier lists out there for you to peruse at your leisure.

You might be wondering, if something like hShop can pop up to fill the void, why make a big stink about preservation? If the internet affords folks the freedom to set up their own elaborate systems of preserving games, why even ask for it from corporations in the first place?

The problem is legitimacy. The existence of hShop and anything else like it that might pop up will always be tenuous under current copyright law, with a sort of legal sword of Damocles hanging over its head. Nintendo is a notoriously litigious company, and the second they discover or decide they want any of these sites and services to stop existing, if they decide it's hurting their bottom line somehow, they'll bring the hammer down, and that method of "preservation" will be gone. That work will be wiped out overnight.

Also, things like hShop rely on free labor provided by normal people; fans who have day jobs and better things to do. If hShop gets nuked, that's a lot of time and labor lost, with nothing to show for it. That's hugely discouraging and disincentivizing (by design) for the people who built it the first time around. And if any of them do decide they actually want to spin up a replacement, it's almost guaranteed to be half as good at best. A community can only watch its work get wiped out so many times before deciding it isn't worth it, or the people with the means and ability to sustain it lose interest, get busy, or age out, and the institutional knowledge of how to do this technically illegal thing is lost.

Look it up.

What's the alternative, then? If we definitely want games preserved, and we definitely can't live with the current system, where do we go from here? The answer, for me, is loosening copyright law. This will almost certainly not happen in my lifetime, but I'm imagining a world where corporations get a scant few years to bleed their IP dry of every last drop of profit they can get for it, before that IP is released to the commons for people to do with it what they like. In this world, preservation of produced works would also be compulsory. If you're going to create something for people to enjoy, that thing needs to be able to be enjoyed in a consistent or comparable way indefinitely. If you can't or won't do that, then you need to make it available to people who can and will.

In this world, when Nintendo discontinues the 3DS, it loses its patent on that device, allowing anyone anywhere to replicate it exactly and sell it to anyone who might want one. It must also provide parts, schematics, and documentation to anyone who might want to repair their device or build a new one themselves. I'm sure this all sounds like pie in the sky stuff, but I genuinely don't think I'm asking for the moon here. Why should something disappear forever simply because a corporation doesn't want to make or maintain it anymore? If you're done with it, give it up, don't lock it in your mausoleum.

Until such a world comes, I'll make due with niche projects skirting the law until they can't anymore. Despite my earlier pessimism about the inherently tenuous nature of their existence, they honestly give me so much hope. That there are people out there willing to give their time and labor and expertise to a project because they think it's right or just because it's fun for them, is heartening to see. Even if it shouldn't have to be that way.

OPINION: The Street Sweeper Should Be Allowed to Eat Your Car

2023-03-20T16:00:00Z

The street sweeper. The highlight of any New Yorker's Thursday and/or Friday mid-morning to early afternoon. Maybe they do it other days and times in other neighborhoods, I don't know. The highlight of any city-liver's week, I'm sure. There's nothing better than watching a big truck with a big brush attached to it come by and slurp up all the trash, leaves, and other detritus that gathers in our gutters like so much dust on a bookshelf.

And there's nothing worse than watching that big truck have to weave around a couple of jerks who didn't get the memo, leaving that empty packet of mini Oreos and the Gatorade bottle full of what you're just going to keep telling yourself is lemon-lime Gatorade to clutter the spaces between your neighbor's cars for another week. During which time, of course, more debris will gather.

Why should the rest of us have to suffer a mound of unsightly, unsanitary trash just because one person forgot to move their car with everyone else, at the same time everyone has been moving theirs for, one assumes, eternity? I propose a better way.

The street sweeper is already out there clearing a path through any low-level street crud in its way. Why not simply supe-up what is clearly a successful, time-tested formula, and let that bad boy swallow the next Subaru that fails to honor its weekly sweepin' time?

I am confident that it would not take many uses of the Car Gobbler™ for people to sit up and take notice. Once everyone's aware of the stakes, you can bet those streets will be cleared out on time week in, as well as week out. It will not be a difficult policy update to communicate to the public. It's a pretty effective visual message on its own. Folks will not need to watch this thing munch on a Mazda more than one time in order to understand how it's going to be from now on.

Alternate-side parking will become self-enforcing overnight, once the Auto Eater™ hits the streets. Do you have any idea how many parking tickets that will cut down on? And it certainly isn't going to generate any paperwork of its own. When this thing feeds on a Fiat, it don't leave no evidence. Car? What car? I don't see any cars on this side of the street! Another successful street sweeping day!

This is not to mention the climate impact. There are too many cars on the road as it is. You want to expedite the process of removing some of those cars? We don't have any more time to try to get the American people interested in bikes, or to redesign our cities and towns in such a way that they are in any way traversable by human beings. Get this thing out there inhaling Impalas, scarfing Scions, and nibbling Nissans twice a week from 11am to 1pm. Suddenly we're not just cleaning up the streets, we're cleaning up the atmosphere. Boom, planet saved.

The Department of Sanitation will never have a job listing to operate this thing open for more than a week. I don't know a single living soul who wouldn't jump at the chance to get paid to devour a Dodge. It'll be the new "it" job. People will cheer them as they approach. They'll run screaming. They'll stand bemused as they think, "wait, but where does the car go?" It'll be a major event on par with the Superbowl every single week. Entire industries will pop up to follow this thing. Morning news will have a dedicated segment. It'll have its own reality show. There'll be YouTube channels and TikTok influencers following this thing like the McRib.

Look, maybe I'm getting high on my own supply here, but I'm not seeing a downside to this. You might think this is an uncouth, unfeeling opinion coming from someone who works from home and doesn't own a car. And that's true.

Anyway, this is my religion now, and I won't rest until I can run to the window every Thursday and Friday afternoon and watch this hot monstrosity dine on a Daimler, polish off a Porsche, put away a Pontiac, and chow down on a Chevy.

Just let the street sweeper eat a fucking car.

Put Battlefront on Switch

2023-03-16T16:00:00Z

Seeing as my previous plea/prediction/hope in this vein came true, right down to the announcement of some beyond-my-wildest-dreams Restored Content DLC for KOTOR 2 (though we've still yet to see that DLC), I've decided to push my luck.

While indulging my own nostalgia last week, I remembered that I still have my original installs and saves of Star Wars: Battlefront™(2004) and Star Wars: Battlefront II™(2005) saved on my backup drive. I then proceeded to fall down an all too familiar rabbit hole of mods for said games. Mid-rabbit hole fall, however, I realized that these two classic shooters had been glaringly omitted from prolific Star Wars video game port developer Aspyr's recent salvo of Nintendo Switch-flavored announcements.

In September of 2019, Aspyr released its Switch port of Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. In March of 2020, they released the game's predecessor, Jedi Academy. In June of 2020, Star Wars Episode I: Racer made its way to Switch. In April of 2021, they resurrected Republic Commando for the Switch. Finally, on November 11, 2021, my specific prayers were answered with the release of Knights of the Old Republic, with its sequel, Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, following in June of 2022. A Switch port of The Force Unleashed also arrived in the time between these two games, in April 2022.

Here's my new plea/prediction/hope: Aspyr should port both original Battlefront games to the Switch with fully functional online multiplayer.

Once again, Aspyr/EA/Disney, I've done your mockup work for you.

Obviously, we have a clear precedent of classic, popular Star Wars games finding a home on Switch. The most recent release from this drip-feed being less than a year ago also gives me hope that Aspyr aren't done yet. There is also precedent for Aspyr's ports including online multiplayer, with Jedi Academy supporting 16-person multiplayer on Switch.

There's also reason to believe that these two games in particular have not fallen out of contention for future releases, even though two new and entirely different (and much worse) games titled Star Wars Battlefront and Star Wars Battlefront II have been released in the nearly 20 years since the originals first came out. In 2019, just four short (okay, extremely long) years ago, and just two years after the release of NEW BF2, EA re-released both Battlefront (2004) and Battlefront II (2005) on Steam and GOG, with their multiplayer functionality intact.

Now, while I was correct in thinking that the KOTOR Switch releases were no-brainers and would be along shortly, there are a few reasons to believe this round of ports might not happen. While multiplayer survived in Jedi Academy's Switch port, the multiplayer modes of Jedi Knight II and Republic Commando did not. Aspyr has also had a rocky few years, internally. It's had a much bigger project on its hands than any of these ports for the last few years in the massive Knights of the Old Republic Remake for PS5. Aspyr was abruptly taken off this project in late 2022, apparently after their (reportedly very expensive) efforts failed to wow the folks at Sony.

There have also been major issues with at least one recent Star Wars port. Aspyr's Switch port of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords was released with a few game-breaking bugs, at least one of which made it impossible to complete the game until a patch was shipped several weeks later. Then there's the matter of KOTOR 2's previously announced Restored Content DLC, to which I alluded earlier, and which would have seen content that the game's original developer, Obsidian, had to cut in order to meet the game's release deadline, and which fans have spent untold hours modding back into the game. The news that a previously unfinished game was being made officially whole, without the need for mods, was a huge deal when it was announced. This DLC was originally slated for release in Q3 of 2022. This is still the stated release window on the game's FAQ page. It still has yet to be released as we approach Q2 2023.

It is conceivable that development of the KOTOR Remake, a much larger project than the studio is known for, required all of the developer's available resources, and ended up adversely affecting other projects at the company, such as the KOTOR 2 port. It is also conceivable that worsening material conditions in the games industry as a whole have hit Aspyr as well, causing a loss of forward momentum, and calling the development of future projects into question.

Whatever the reasons behind their recent turmoil, given Aspyr's history of speed and quality at cranking these things out, I'd still bet on them being able to jump back on the Star Wars port train and find success. Maybe whatever's going on with the KOTOR 2 DLC is the cork in the proverbial bottle, and once that's cleared, the studio can return to its list of "Star Wars Games to Port to Switch." And maybe the _Battlefront_s will be on that list.

Besides, I can't be the only one who wants to see this loading screen again:

Every Video Game I Played in 2022

2023-03-14T16:00:00Z

Amazingly, I finally finished my big, long Game of the Year wrap-up this week. So I figured whipping up another one of these would be a fun follow-up. There's just something satisfying about agonizing over one post for three months, only to turn around and finish another in one sitting.

This series (it's a series now) started as a post marking the games I'd Played in Quarantine So Far, but now it strikes me as sort of a fun companion piece to the annual beefy GOTY post. Remember 2020? Remember the concept of "quarantine?" Remember people doing their best to help each other in uncertain times? Quaint.

I also want to try to write smaller posts in an effort to write more this year, and this fits that bill.

I record this list in the back of my Hobonichi Techo as the year goes on, and now also on Backloggd! Which is a very cool website!

As was the case last year, a game gets recorded to my list IF:

It has not yet been recorded this year, AND...
- Is a new game I'm starting fresh, OR...
- Is an old game that I finished or otherwise made progress in.

Games I completed in 2022 are bold.
Previously played games are italicized.
(Platforms) are given in parentheses to differentiate where necessary.

I will also just say before starting the list, that I think this system is a bit too loose, as evidenced by the sheer number of games on this list that I didn't really spend a meaningful amount of time with. I'm tightening my criteria up this year, so that next year's list more accurately reflects how I spent my time.

I played 108 games in 2022. Here they are:

Umurangi Generation
Namco Museum (Switch)
Boktai 3
Unsighted
Death's Door
Chicory: A Colorful Tale
Pokémon Fire Red
Sable
Vampire Survivors
Pokémon Legends: Arceus
Box Boy!
Terraria (3DS)
Minecraft (3DS)
Picross e
Mario Golf (3DS)
Pokémon TCG (3DS)
Tetris (3DS)
Kirby's Pinball Land (3DS)
Kirby's Block Ball (3DS)
Plants vs. Zombies (3DS)
Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine (3DS)
Bust-a-Move Universe
Tetris Ultimate
Bit.Trip Saga
Digimon World Re:Digitize Decode
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (3DS)
Picross 3D: Round 2
Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D
Chrono Trigger
Tunic
Pokémon Crystal
Digimon Universe: App Monsters
Dragon Quest 1+2
Dragon Quest Monsters 2
Final Fantasy Adventure
Mini 4x4 GB Let's Go!
Star Communicator
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries
Knotwords
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX (GBC)
Steel Assault
Casual Birder
Whitewater Wipeout
Fortnite (PC + Switch)
Gunman Clive
Gunman Clive 2
Mighty Switch Force! 2
Crankin's Time Travel Adventure
Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World
Rhythm Heaven Megamix
Boogie Loops
Lost Your Marbles
Pick Pack Pup
Clubhouse Games
No Man's Sky (PC)
Adventure Time: Hey Ice King, Why'd You Steal Our Garbage?!
Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I Don't Know (3DS)
Adventure Time: Secret of the Nameless Kingdom (3DS)
Echoic Memory
Escape Simulator
Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Flipper Lifter
Demon Quest '85
Omaze
Poinpy
Zipper
Executive Golf DX
Hyper Meteor
ElecHead
Sonic Generations (3DS)
Saturday Edition
Star Sled
Questy Chess
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D
Last Call BBS
SpaceChem
Botanicula
Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate
Flotilla
TMNT: Shredder's Revenge
Neon White
Citizen Sleeper
In Other Waters
Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade
Digimon Survive
Civilization V
Civilization VI
Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX
IMMORTALITY
Splatoon 3
Dorfromantik
Eastward
Disco Elysium
Wizorb
No Man's Sky (Switch)
System Shock Enhanced
Stories Untold
Signalis
Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel
What Remains of Edith Finch
Sonic Frontiers
Pokémon Scarlet
Tetris DX
Pokémon Puzzle Challenge
Motorsport Manager
Pid (Switch)
Mr. Driller
Mixolumia

There you have it!

You can really tell when I learned how to hack my 3DS, and when I got my Playdate! It's a shame I didn't like the vast majority of those Playdate games. Again, as I said, this is far more games than should probably be on this list. Many of these entries were just me checking a game out for a bit, and then dipping. Next year will be tighter.

Until then!

Mike's 2022 Games of the Year

2023-03-11T16:00:00Z

Hey there, sports fans! I’m back once again to dig through another year of video games and see what gave me the most jollies!

I played a grand total of 105 video games in 2022, my highest total ever. There were a lot of super short one-offs in there to pad things out, but I also just allowed myself to go out on more limbs and try more things. I highly recommend it!

My full list of everything I played in 2022 will be out shortly after this post is done.

Without further ado, I give you…

MIKE’S FAVORITE GAMES OF 2022

Last Call BBS

I’m not a longtime fan of Zachtronics games, but the marketing for this one really grabbed me for some reason. Maybe I felt a responsibility to witness some kind of history, as Last Call BBS was announced as the studio’s final game. Or maybe it just looked cool!

Whatever the case, I ended up really digging Last Call‘s whole deal. I thought the way it used its presentation to hearken back to the (good/bad) old days of dial-up internet and slower technology was brilliant. And releasing the game as a collection of smaller puzzle games made it easy to bop around and find something I really gelled with. I liked all of them at least a little bit, but 20th Century Food Court, ChipWizard™ Professional, and Sawayama Solitaire were standouts for me.

Something about using their last game as an occasion to look back compelled me, too. To create a bygone world populated by their games, cast in amber. And it’s always nice to play another game that emulates the whirs and clicks and hums of old computer hardware.

Immortality

Immortality arrived on the scene to much fanfare as Sam Barlow and Half Mermaid Productions continue their slow, masterful rehabilitation of the FMV game. It’s also the first game of theirs I played at launch! I started playing with my girlfriend and my friend Zac one rainy night in Brooklyn when it had just started to thunder. It was pretty much the perfect way to start, and like Her Story before it, I was compelled from the jump to keep pushing forward and try to make sense of everything I was seeing. As someone who works in video post production, I also really connected to the game’s UI, or lack thereof. Playing on keyboard, scrubbing forward (and backward 😉) through film clips, I literally just felt like I was doing my job (in a good way).

Ultimately, the game ended up feeling a bit anticlimactic for me, and I reached a place where I wasn’t really sure if it had… ended? Like I’m pretty sure I learned what happened to everyone, but not why it matters. I’m still there. I haven’t found each and every last film clip, because that frankly seems sort of tedious, as a simple and intuitive way to do so has not presented itself, and I’m not even sure if going through that process would make a difference.

I really wanted to be blown away by Immortality, and in just about every way but the narrative, I was! Half Mermaid produced three entire films plus supplemental material for this game. That must’ve been a logistical nightmare! Not to mention the multi-layered performances required of the actors. And the experience of discovering and scrubbing through each new clip and eventually uncovering a hidden meta-narrative was one of my favorite overall interactions with a game this year. Immortality turned out to be more about the journey than the destination for me, but I do genuinely think more people should play it. It’s a pretty exquisite journey. And it’s basically everywhere. It’s on Netflix, for cryin’ out loud!

Umurangi Generation

As the very first game I played in 2022, and recency bias being what it is, Umurangi Generation was in real danger of being forgotten once GOTY time rolled around. But it really stuck with me! The tactility of snapping through the different lenses and settings of your camera to compose a shot was terribly satisfying. The chunky graphics, funky tunes, and interesting color palettes made each level feel unique, and the laundry list of things to discover, paired with a growing collection of camera hardware, kept me coming back until I’d seen it all.

Umurangi Generation also has a story to tell, which it does largely in the periphery, through level design, and the things going on around your character as you continue to take photos to tick off your checklist. By keeping the thing you’re doing the same (taking photos), but changing the material conditions under which you are doing them, the game also creates a really elegant meta-narrative about The Way Things Are, which has only continued to resonate more strongly in the years since its release.

But Umurangi is also really special to me because it is partly responsible for pushing me to finally try out a hobby I’ve been curious about for a long time: film photography. The fact that it made the act of taking photos feel so fun (and involved and fiddly) played no small part in my buying an old camera off eBay, and finally taking some shots of my own. If nothing else, I’ll always remember it for that.

Sonic Frontiers

Every new Sonic game is a coin flip, let’s be honest. Especially 3D Sonic games. It feels like the best outcome we in the Sonic community have gotten for years has been a coin that landed standing up on its edge. Over. And over. And a lot of tails. Not as in Miles Prower, but like… you get it.

Sonic Frontiers is the best 3D Sonic game in at least a decade. Maybe 2 if you’re not as generous. It’s not perfect. It still carries some of the cruft and jank we’ve come to expect from a new Sonic game. But it carries very little of it that I’ve seen so far. To continue the coin metaphor, this one is mostly facing up, but maybe leaning slightly against a wall.

I was wary of Sonic’s move to a Breath of the Wild-style open world, but it really works. It’s really satisfying to zip around the game’s islands as the Blue Blur. Sonic’s usual platforming acrobatics are satisfying and easy to pull off 90% of the time, and the game’s quick-hit Cyberspace levels, with their tight, authored, time-attack experiences, provide the perfect break from all the wide open spaces.

All that, and the fact that the very first island’s final boss battle is easily, for me, the best boss fight in any Sonic game, have me incredibly excited to finish this game, and even more excited for what comes next as Sonic Team build on and improve this new formula.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus

It’s so hard to believe this game actually came out in 2022. I double checked so many times. It feels like ages ago. But yes indeed: Game Freak released TWO entire Pokémon games this year, seemingly without ever asking if that would be a good idea. The functional state of these games would suggest “maybe no?” But then, the fact that both games appear to have “made bank,” as it were, suggests otherwise! So what do I know?

Arceus was a real roller coaster for me. I was really hot on it when it was first released, and for a good while after. But the game’s final chapter, with its pointless twists and, if you’ll pardon the expression, wet fart of a story, really soured my memory of the whole experience by the time I was done. I didn’t even bother to stick with it to seek out the “true ending.” I was extremely unprepared, then, for just how nostalgic I would get while watching a speedrun of Arceus at the end of AGDQ 2023 (this post has taken so long oh god). I decided to dip back in the following morning, and I can confirm that this game rules, actually. Especially in contrast to Pokémon Scarlet/Violet, which was released a mere 11 months later.

I’ve spilled a lot of ink on my other blog about the various things I liked about Pokémon Legends: Arceus, so I won’t go into too much more detail here. Suffice to say that, looking back, I think Game Freak was really onto something with most of what they tried in this game, and I really hope they get to carry it through to another installment. The focus on catching rather than battling, a complete overhaul to the way your Pokémon gain experience, the mostly hands-off open world approach, the pared down inventory, right down to the outstanding UI design. All of it made for a fun, chill, and truly interesting take on a franchise that has largely remained unchanged for decades.

It has some rough edges, and it ends up pulling some of its more interesting punches, but for me, it’s the better Pokémon game of 2022. Scarlet/Violet is just missing a lot of the little touches that made Arceus enjoyable to interact with. Understandably so, considering their relative closeness in development. I’m sure those teams weren’t talking to each other, and definitely didn’t have time to share notes. I really hope everyone working on those games gets a good long rest, first of all, and then comes back and combines everything that was great on both sides into something really special, and hopefully, uh… finished.

Chrono Trigger

Oh man. Where to even begin with Chrono Trigger? It’s one of those games whose name has loomed large in the back of my head as a thing I should really play one day, much like Final Fantasy VII. One of the big ones. A continuation of the informal “Mike Plays the Classics” trend of the last few years that has seen me play through heavy-hitters like EarthBound, Ocarina of Time, and of course, FF7. Despite this, however, I knew very little about Chrono Trigger before playing. I think I knew about the time travel. And that one of your friends is a frog. But beyond that, nothing terribly specific.

Having played it, I think that might be because Chrono Trigger is one of those stories that you need to experience to understand. It deals in what looks like some pretty generic fantasy & sci-fi fare on its face – a young boy gets pulled into an adventure he isn’t prepared for, and ends up traveling across time in order to save the kingdom and the very world itself – but what becomes clear as you actually play Chrono Trigger, is just how much care went into the game’s creation, such that it is always pulling you deeper into its narrative. I loved, for example, the way that the game’s time-hopping adventure – beyond being just a cool gimmick – allowed you to see your impact on the world across eras, or see a through-line between generations that no one with a normal lifespan or without access to time travel would get to see.

One of my favorite features that stood in stark contrast to other classic RPGs I’ve played, and further evidence of the care that went into this game, was its encounter design. Rather than opting for a random encounter system (where you’re walking through the world and suddenly, bang, an enemy appears), Chrono Trigger‘s enemies are visible out in the world, and can be found in the same locations every time you revisit an area. The player needs to physically walk into an enemy (or enter its battle radius) in order to initiate combat. This doesn’t mean battle is entirely avoidable, but it does mean that battle is often a choice, or at least something the player can anticipate and prepare for. The effect of this is twofold.

Firstly, a consistent placement of enemies creates what feels like a more authored experience, which both makes it feel as though battles are always taking place at just the right time in the story, and also makes sure you’re hitting just the right number of encounters to serve the narrative (so you aren’t, for example, getting bogged down by a ton of random encounters on your way to the next story beat and either forgetting what you’re doing or getting bored and quitting). Second, enemies being visible in the world not only allows for a narrative moment where the player and their party can scope things out as they enter an area and prepare, mentally or materially, for the battles to come, but it also creates situations in which an experienced player will know where to walk in order to avoid some number of battles in an area they’ve previously visited. This creates a sense in the player that they’re learning this world and its locations, and gives that knowledge a mechanical application, as well as a material reward. Not having to fight three or four low-level grunts in a row is a great reward, no matter how fun the game’s battle and technique systems are to interact with.

The game, of course, has two other things going for it that most other games do not: character art by the legendary Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball, Dragon Quest), and an absolutely perfect soundtrack by Yasunori Mitsuda. Previously a sound effects designer for Square, Mitsuda threatened to quit unless he was allowed to make some music as well. Dude was not messing around. Both bring the game’s world and narrative sparkling to life. I frequently found myself lingering on the overworld map for much longer than I intended, just to take in a few more bars of a new area’s music. Every track perfectly embodies and becomes the place and time it endeavors to describe.

And so, my love affair with big, long, narratives and classic RPGs at which I would’ve previously turned up my nose continues. Chrono Trigger easily earns its title as One Of The Classics, and likely a place in my heart as one of my all time favorites.

Citizen Sleeper

I took a chance on Citizen Sleeper based pretty much entirely on all the positive coverage it was getting, and the fact that its character illustrations are gorgeous. I’m so glad I did. What I found was a really beautiful, kind, and touching story of community, adopted home, and survival under overwhelming corporate oppression.

Citizen Sleeper is about getting inextricably caught in the webbing of a corporatocracy, and selling yourself, body and soul (literally), for a chance at the privilege of buying yourself back, paying off the debt of having to exist, and slowly, precariously, trying to build a home, a life, and a community, before your body gives up on you or the powers that be come to collect. It’s a game about just trying to Fucking Live. And it might just be the most hopeful game I played in 2022.

I love the way the game portions out your time, by giving you a number of dice – which you’ll spend trying to do things during the day – according to your degree of physical well-being. In Citizen Sleeper (and also in real life), your body, your physical fitness, is both a measurement of how much you can physically attempt to do in a given day, and also a ticking clock. “Fail” to take care of it, and you’ll both be less able to do things and a little closer to doing nothing. Citizen Sleeper implements this in a much more elegant, thoughtful, and thought-provoking way than any survival game with a hunger meter I’ve ever played.

Now, this isn’t a game about developing a grindset that will turn your side hustle into passive income. It’s a game in which the end goal is the equivalent of having just enough for rent each month. It’s about saving up your wages to eat at your favorite food stall, not just because the food is really good, but because the chef tells great stories and you want him to be able to make rent too. It’s about helping your friend set up a kitchen in their shitty little bar, and getting a free meal out of it. It’s about trying to afford or otherwise source the mythical drugs that keep your body from shutting down.

All in all, Citizen Sleeper is a game about carving out a little something shaped like happiness in the middle of an endless void. Not complacency, not complicity, just creating what joy you can while the wheel keeps turning. And comfortingly, it’s a game in which that is possible.

Neon White

Now here’s a game I did not see coming. Announced offhandedly on a Nintendo Direct I was half watching, I initially wrote Neon White off as some anime bullshit. Luckily, my friend Zac was extremely into that anime bullshit, and helped me see the light.

There’s a particular feeling you get from certain video games, when the gameplay is fairly simple but extremely satisfying at its foundation, and the penalty for failure is very low and/or short. I’m thinking of games like Super Meat Boy, where the platforming is perfectly tuned, and failure means instantly restarting the level, rather than having to endure lengthy death animations, game over screens, or being kicked out to an overworld map. Games like this keep you in this perfect flow state, where you can stay concentrated on your goal, and grind out your execution until you get things absolutely perfect. This feeling is extremely addictive for me.

Neon White is what you get when someone distills that feeling down to its purest form, packages it in an early-2000s Sega Dreamcast aesthetic, and pumps it directly into your veins. It’s what you get when you put Super Meat Boy in 3D, give him guns and sick acrobatic abilities, and make him listen to constantly-thumping, heartrate-elevating drum & bass tracks. It’s an order-of-operations brain teaser, crossed with Formula 1, poured inside a first-person shooter. It’s the digital incarnation of the idea of flow state. It is a manic, pulsing, pounding need to be faster. No thoughts, just reflexes. Pure execution. Building up your muscle memory to its zenith, and moving on to the next challenge.

I had an incredibly good time racing my way through Neon White‘s levels, an experience that is improved by an order of magnitude by having a friend or friends who have played or are also playing the game, who will then appear on your personal leaderboards to race against. Nothing lit a fire under my ass like seeing that Zac had shaved a tenth of a second off of my previously leading time. After speeding my way through 100% of the game (though there are still things left to do), I feel like I get a little bit of why speedrunners do what they do.

One final thought that hit me at some point during my playthrough, was that this is what Sonic games should be. It should be about speed and tight execution. It should be about what it feels like to be very fast. Neon White scratched that itch more consistently and thoroughly than any Sonic game ever has for me. Just food for thought. Sega, I await your call.

Tunic

This gorgeous game about a little fox has been a long time coming for me. I’d been following Tunic’s development since it was being called “Secret Legend.” So it was a real treat to learn that the game was finally going to be released the day before my birthday. March is probably my favorite time of year. Selfishly so, because of my birthday, but also because it’s usually when we get our first glimpses of spring. Things start to warm up, the world starts to wake up, and you get that certain smell on the breeze. I find it to be an invigorating time of year. It makes me want to play video games.

I was also having a root canal taken care of at this time, which meant lots of recovery time on the couch. Which meant plenty of time for video games.

So Tunic showed up at the perfect time for me to accept it into my heart, but it also delivered just the right vibes. The older I get, the more I’ve found value in collecting video game landscapes that feel nice to be in. Places that make me wish I could leap through the screen and just hang out there for a little while, taking in the sights and sounds. Little digital vacations. The opening area of Tunic (and several other lovely areas as well), with its lush greens, impossibly deep blues, satisfyingly polygonal shrubbery, and the intoxicating tunes of Lifeformed & Janice Kwan, has easily made that list. It’s the audio-visual equivalent of sitting in a warm sunbeam.

Of course, one cannot talk about Tunic without talking about secrets. This game is, at its heart, all about secrets, the history of secrets in video games, and how satisfying it can be to slowly suss out a game’s secrets all on your own, or with some gentle prodding. It’s hard to talk about secrets without giving too much away, so I’ll just say that when I bought Tunic, I didn’t realize that it would be so reverentially obsessed with old video game manuals that it would place an exquisitely crafted exploration of that very concept at its core. That mechanic was such a delight to discover, and I mean that in more ways than one!

Tunic is a puzzlebox waiting for you to find its center. It’s just meaty enough to keep you coming back for more. And it respects you enough to let you figure it all out for yourself.

Disco Elysium

This was always going to be the game at the top of my list, from the moment I decided to play it, whether I knew it or not. I suspected it. I bought a very expensive jacket because I could tell within an hour of starting that this game was special. Here we go. This is the big one.

Disco Elysium is ostensibly a game about being a cop and investigating a murder. It is also, more broadly, a game about being sad and thinking. That isn’t just my cheeky way of saying it’s about communism, though that is also true. Everything in this game is a conversation, is words, is interacting with thoughts and ideas in some way, whether you’re talking to another character, or to the different facets of your own brain. The in-game clock doesn’t move, time doesn’t pass, you aren’t allowed to do more things, if you aren’t either talking to someone, thinking, or reading. You have to be thinking to move forward. As far as Disco Elysium is concerned, words are actions. Words are thoughts that you’ve had, made manifest. Words are how you think. Words can comfort or cause harm, and one does those things with intent. To this point, the coolest, kindest person in the game, your partner in this investigation, Lt. Kim Kitsuragi, always chooses his words very carefully.

You play as a detective named Harry DuBois, though he doesn’t know that at the start. After a particularly thorough bender, and like many video game protagonists before him, Harry has lost his memory. But unlike many other protagonists, Harry has lost his memory. He hasn’t just forgotten who he is and what he’s doing, he’s forgotten what city he’s in, what country he’s in, what the world is, how the world works, what money is, what year it is, and what any of that means in context. This is, of course, a very convenient way to introduce the player to the world, but it’s also a great way to tell Harry’s story. And eventually to plant the seed of a larger meditation on memory and nostalgia that has haunted me for, at time of publication, three months. But that’s another blog post entirely.

Harry isn’t just another blank slate for the player to insert themselves into, he has a history, whether he remembers it or not, and revealing it piecemeal through the very relatable feeling (whether via blackout drinking or 3am anxiety thoughts) of, “oh fuck, I did that,” proves extremely effective. This is still a video game, and you’re in control of Harry’s words and deeds for the duration, but you’re not playing as yourself. You’re playing as Harry. Everyone’s Harry may be different, but this isn’t the 1:1 player-insert story that video games are so familiar with, and I love that. I want a story, I want constraints! I want to be made to consider other human beings’ lived experience, fictional or not, something that challenges me to think and to empathize with others – a task video games are uniquely suited to accomplish! Disco Elysium ticks that box with style and ease.

Morality in video games is largely very boring, bordering on non-existent, either letting the player take a milquetoast, middle of the road stance on everything – for the sake of not making anyone mad, or not closing off any potential sidequests or other “content” – or taking the BioWare path of, “do objectively good thing to get good points, or do objectively bad thing to get bad points.” Disco Elysium shows that it doesn’t have to be this way. This game knows that two things can be true at the same time, and knows how to depict that. It knows that people are complex, and that the status quo is sticky. It’s not about trying to “win” at morality. Mostly, the game just wants you to think about your impact on the world and the people around you. It, like life, will put you in situations, long after which you will wonder, “was that the right choice?” And like life, you may never know the answer.

Probably my favorite thing about this game is just how good it is at forcing you to roleplay. Disco affords the player an incredible degree of control over how Harry acts, what he says, what values he adheres to, right down to what he wears, but not without reckoning with his past to some degree, and not without comment from the game itself. If you try to play as milquetoast middle-of-the-road man who is just here to see the story and not ruffle any feathers, the game makes fun of you. It tells you you’re a spineless idiot. It begs you to pick a fucking side. This is a game screaming out that you need to have thoughts and opinions about the world around you, that neutrality is a lie, neutrality is complicity, neutrality is brain death, and everything is political. Games are more fun when you roleplay, and this one gives you a ton of room to do just that. So decide what kind of Harry you want to be, and lean in hard.

Disco Elysium is a game about a world in the aftermath of a failed communist revolution. The game is very open-ended, and outcomes change based on player choice, but that doesn’t mean the game doesn’t have a point of view, or anything of its own to say (this is the game whose creators thanked Marx and Engels when accepting their award for Best RPG at the 2019 Game Awards, after all). It’s just that sometimes, it doesn’t have an answer to its own questions, and that’s okay. Disco Elysium doesn’t contain the secret instructions for how to successfully build communism. It knows the state of the world, and it believes something needs to be done. It just doesn’t know exactly what that is. But it wants you to think about it. And it’s content to poke fun along the way – fairly so – at leftists who sit around arguing about who is the most correct about how to be a leftist.

Disco Elysium is easily the most profound game I have ever played. It has made me think more about myself, my world, my politics, my life, than any other. It’s willing to consider the contradictions between the imperative of doing the work necessary to build a better world, and wanting a joyful life for yourself and your loved ones. It has thoughts about the value of making art in a time of political turbulence (“In dark times, should the stars also go out?”). It’s about choosing, or not, to connect with people. Like life, you get more out of the game the more people you talk to, connect with, take an interest in, and help. And in those interactions, it can either lay you low or heal your weary soul.

It’s a game that people keep saying they haven’t stopped thinking about, years after playing. Wouldn’t you know it? It got me too.

Honorable Mentions

Signalis
Outstanding premise, style, and mechanics. Didn’t play enough, and didn’t hit the way it needed to.

Digimon Survive
The pitch on this game is weird, and I am looking forward to getting back to it.

What Remains of Edith Finch
Finally played this on the couch with my girlfriend over two nights, and loved it!

No Man’s Sky on Switch
The fact that this game actually runs on the Switch, and runs well, is a miracle.

TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge
Cowabunga!

Games I Missed and Want to Play

Kirby and the Forgotten Land

Return to Monkey Island

Pentiment

Norco

In Closing

If you read this down to the end, then you’re my favorite person and I love you! Also I have to apologize for how long this took. I normally grind myself into paste over the Christmas holiday trying to get one of these posted before 12am on January 1st. This time around, some circumstances made me decide to not do that. This is the result. I both hate how long it took me, and am happier with the outcome, having taken my time with it. I did not expect it to take 3 months. Oops!

That’s enough now, get outta here!

I Bought the Disco Elysium Jacket

2022-12-24T16:00:00Z

I suppose there's no point beating around the bush with this post, seeing as the title and header image give it all away. I did it, folks. This saga ended exactly where we all thought it would. I bought the fancy Disco Elysium jacket. And I love it.

I went with a small, based on the size chart on the ZA/UM Atelier website, and it fits perfectly. It's so comfy. It's like getting a hug from Kim Kitsuragi himself every time I put it on.

It's also the absolute warmest thing I own by far. When I'm wearing it, no matter the conditions, and no matter what else I'm wearing, my torso and arms are cozy and warm.

About a week and a half ago, I wore it with long underwear under my jeans, a heavy sweater, a scarf, mittens, and a knit hat, and I didn't even need to zip it up to stay warm on a cold NYC evening.

It is also, of course, the nicest, most well-made piece of clothing I now own. It's so thick and sturdy and solid. And yet, it's also extremely soft and inviting. The interior pockets came sewn shut, which I was not accustomed to, having never bought or owned something this nice before.

But alright, how did we get here? How did I overcome all of my doubts and questions about buying this jacket, which I originally shared on this blog about a year before I would receive mine in the mail?

Let's go back through and address each of them one by one:

"I still have not played Disco Elysium."

Well now I have. Easy.

"It costs $500."

It actually came out closer to $400. Checkmate.

"I am unemployed and living in Brooklyn, NY."

I'm still living in Brooklyn, NY, but I've spent the last year gainfully employed as a freelance video editor. The fact that I had such a good year (especially compared to last year, financially) was probably the biggest factor in my finally buying this jacket.

"How could I ever walk out of my house wearing that jacket and not either feel like or become the world’s biggest asshole?"

By feeling extremely cool instead.

"What would I do if it got dirty?"

Tag says "spot clean only."

"What if the second I stroll out of my apartment building with my brand new $500 video game jacket, a pigeon shits itself to death right on top of me, right there on the sidewalk? What then?"

Uh. It didn't. This is a ridiculous question.

"Worse than any of that, I can’t try the thing on, what if I got the wrong size? What if it didn’t fit quite right? What if I just didn’t like it? What if I never wore it, and it forever hung in my closet, doing nothing but having cost $500?"

I already said I got the exact right size. It fits like a glove. And I love the thing. I wear it all the time. I wore it to travel back to Chicago for the holidays. When I first got it, I sat wearing it at my desk while I was working. I don't want to take this thing off.

"What if I finally play the game and I don’t like it? Or worse, what if I think it’s just fine?"

I literally fell in love with DE within an hour of starting it.

"What if I specifically hate the character who wears this jacket (doesn’t seem likely, a lot of people online seem to love him)?"

Kim? Kim Kitsuragi? Lt. Kim Kitsuragi? That's who I was worried I wouldn't like? The most kind, understanding, patient, and effortlessly cool character in all of Disco Elysium? I would take a bullet for this man. I would jump in front of a speeding train for this man. I would fight Godzilla in single combat if he looked at Kim sideways. No, sorry, Kim's a gem, and I'm proud to wear his jacket.

"What if I got the jacket having never played the game, and then someone on the street recognized what I was wearing and started talking to me about how great this game I have never played is?"

I started the game shortly before ordering the jacket. I've put in around 45 hours now, and this has yet to happen. I think I'm good.

So there you go. Anxieties be damned, the fashions were just too strong. And of course, crucially, I had the money. I don't drink, smoke, or partake of any recreational drugs. I can treat myself every once in a while. Especially to an extremely well made jacket that I'll probably have for the rest of my life.

Literally me.

I'm glad I gave myself permission to buy this thing. Sometimes you just know when you're going to love something, and you just need to let yourself grab it because life is short.

Anyway, I just wrote this so I could make a "how it started, how it's going" meme of myself.

Heck Yeah, Pid Is Coming to Switch

2022-10-16T16:00:00Z

THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

I HAVE EMERGED FROM MY BLOG HOLE TO DO FREE PR FOR A VIDEO GAME.

PID IS COMING TO NINTENDO SWITCH.

THIS IS NOT A DAY I SAW COMING.

BECAUSE PID IS A VERY OBSCURE GAME FROM A VERY SMALL DEVELOPER.

BUT SOMEONE IN SOME BOARD ROOM SOMEWHERE MUST LOVE ME, SPECIFICALLY, BECAUSE

PID IS COMING TO NINTENDO SWITCH THIS FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18TH.

Alright listen, if you haven't heard of Pid, and I know you haven't, let me give you a quick rundown and hopefully convince you to purchase and fall in love with the game as deeply as I did back in the day.

Pid is a tiny little action platformer about a little boy who's trying to get home. Your main gimmick, apart from the usual platformer stuff like running and jumping, and some standard video game fare like bombs, is the ability to throw little pellets of light that stick to surfaces and create these anti-gravity pillars, kind of like reverse tractor beams, that let you reach higher heights, float across gaps and past enemies, and even affect objects in the world. I know, I know, you're already hooked, but where the game really shines is in its presentation.

The game has this storybook art style that makes it feel like you're playing through some beautiful book you read and loved as a kid, but forgot about. Every inch of the game's world and UI, right down to its menus, is some lovely combination of beautiful and functional.

And that soundtrack! This is the real kicker for me. It's the reason I fell in love with the game when it was released on Steam literally 10 years ago (woof) during the indie boom. As I type this, I'm realizing that a game's soundtrack is often the number one reason I come to love a game (warts and all, much of the time). I dunno, I guess I'm just a sucker for some good tunes. And Pid delivers a gorgeous collection of jazzy tunes from Retro Family that I still throw on all the time while I'm working.

I've actually blogged about Pid's soundtrack here before, while talking about one of my favorite musical motifs that I don't know the name of or if there is a name for it at all. My example was this, my favorite track from Pid's soundtrack:

In conclusion, play Pid. Please buy and play Pid. I don't care what you spend your money on most of the time, capitalism is a fucking grift. And I know the big new Pokémon game is coming out on literally the same day. But I love this tiny little Scandinavian video game studio, and I'm so happy they're still around making their weird little games. And I love Pid. Spare a thought for the little guy this Pokémon Day, and maybe you will too!

Why I Shut Down My Patreon

2022-10-02T16:00:00Z

I've been a Person Creating Things on the Internet for over ten years. For just under ten years, I've had a Patreon where folks who liked the things I made could throw me a couple of bucks to help keep me going. This week, after several months of deliberation, I shuttered that Patreon. I spent a lot of time talking about why I made this decision over on...well, my Patreon, but now that none of my posts are accessible anymore, I wanted to write something here for posterity, and to give me another place to unpack my reasoning.

Making videos for YouTube was always something I did in my free time. I was never big enough to be an influencer or be sponsored by Squarespace or anything like that. My following plateaued around 1500 subs a good while ago, and hasn't budged since. So unless I blew up at some point, I was always going to be beholden to just how much of my time was free. When I started out on YouTube in high school, that was most of my time. I had to be in school during the day, sure, but my evenings and nights were, barring homework, pure free time. College opened this up even more, as I had the freedom to schedule out my day almost however I wanted. These were times of great creative output for me. In 2012, I put a video on my channel almost every day of the year. 2013 was no slouch, either.

Now I'm almost 30. I'm a freelance video editor by day. By night, I'm very tired and want to relax. I don't have the time I once did to endlessly work on each and every video idea that came into my head. And over the past few years, I've found that actually, I have some other things that I want to use my free time for. I live with my girlfriend of four years now, and I want to hang out with her, cook dinner together, and go on dates on the weekends. I want to keep up with the latest video games, dig into my backlog, play with friends when I can, and maybe write something about my experiences therein. I just don't find making YouTube videos at the top of my list of things to do anymore. And I've spent the last few years learning that that's okay. It's not my job. It doesn't put bread on the table. It's just a thing I like to do. A thing I used to like to do more.

That's really the long and short of it. I've found steady work that I really like and takes up my time, and I'm not the same person I was in high school. Pretty big and obvious and valid reasons, I think!

There are some other, lesser reasons that fed into my decision, like the degree to which YouTube and the internet at large have changed since the early 2010s, the creation and evolution of the "creator economy," what it means to be a "creator" in this era of the internet, and how all of that has affected my relationship to my creativity over the last 12 years (I uploaded my first YT video in 2010).

There's also the fact that I never found a bigger following, which was something I definitely wanted at one point, and which I do not want anymore. Or that I never really found a niche or picked a static topic for my videos, which is probably part of the reason I never found a larger following. I never settled on "vlogging," or "gaming," or "short films," or what have you. I wanted to try and make a little bit of everything. I never had a plan, I was just making whatever I wanted to make in the moment. Which is fine! I had a lot of fun doing that! That was a very good and normal thing to do with my time on the internet. That I never achieved virality is not something to mourn. That shit may as well happen at random. And the people it does happen to, well, they don't always make it out the other end. That's fame, baby.

I still like making things. I still have a creative spark inside me that pushes me to put my thoughts and ideas into the world and onto the internet. Here I am doing it right now. I'm going to keep making whatever I want when the mood really strikes and I just can't stop myself. But I've decided that I need to change my relationship to that feeling for a while, by removing money from the equation.

Patreon was making me feel weird about making things. Like I was clinging to a really old idea about how and why I wanted to create, and who I wanted to create for. I have a job that I really like now. I make decent money from it. I don't need to keep chasing the idea that the silly things I put on the internet will or must one day pay my bills.

And so it was time for a change, time to take some time away. I want to remember what it feels like to create purely for the sake of the thing I want to make. I want to make things for me again. Things that maybe no one ever sees, that's fine. It's better, actually! Let me just be in my little room creating for creation's sake, writing for writing's sake, etc, and just have it be totally inconsequential. That sounds really nice.

All of it always was basically inconsequential, but now I'll have no illusions otherwise. And it is absolutely wild the degree to which that brings me peace. That's how I know this is the right move.

Maybe one day I'll come back to Patreon, either when I've found some specific, regularly recurring project worth presenting to people for funding, or when I've cleared my head a bit, and wrapped it around the idea of accepting money on a monthly basis for being a generally creative person, and not making anything specific on any specific timeline, and not feeling like I'm letting people down if I don't hit some imaginary deadlines.

Until then, I'll be here, and in all the usual places. Maybe a bit less. Maybe a lot less. But I'll be happier for it.

It's RPG Season, Baby

2022-09-29T16:00:00Z

Fall has finally, officially arrived in my neck of the woods, and you know what that means: It's time to throw on your thickest socks, your fuzziest sweater, your coziest blanket, grab a cup of something hot, and play some video games. But not just any video games. Only the biggest, longest, meatiest (oh my) games will do. I'm talking about my new best friend, Role-Playing Games.

RPGs are inherently cozy. Their slow pace, long stories, numerous characters that you will come to love with all of your heart, and (most often) classically heroic morals and story beats gradually envelope the player like a warm hug. They naturally lend themselves to longer play sessions, and some of their more repetitive aspects lull the player's brain switch into the much more cozy "off" position. They're the video game equivalent of sinking into a good book.

I used to feel very differently about RPGs, and particularly JRPGs. I looked at all of their most common aspects and, without ever playing more than 10 minutes of one, wrote them all off as boring. It never occurred to me that maybe I just hadn't found the right one for me, or that the RPG genre is vast and crosses over with many other genres to create games that I have definitely played and loved over the years (Megaman Battle Network, Pokémon, KOTOR, Luminous Arc)!

This perception cracked in 2020, when I played Earthbound for the first time, and was finally shattered in 2021, when I played Final Fantasy VII and fell madly in love. With it firmly in my rearview mirror, I played through all of Chrono Trigger this year. I am unstoppable.

Now that I've shed my ignorance, I'm free to enjoy this wonderful, many-faceted genre in all its glory. To this end, I have a list of potential new loves (we're still talking about RPGs, here) for the cozy season and beyond, most of which I intend to pick up at some point in time on the Nintendo Switch (the coziest console):

Final Fantasy VIII

This has seemed the most appropriate next step since finishing FF7 last year. It hails from the same PSX era as its predecessor, it has similar vibes, and word on the street is that it's pretty weird. Despite all of this, and a pretty small price tag on Switch, I have yet to actually buy the game. I'll feel that pull again one day!

Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition

Another natural follow-up to another classic RPG I've recently finished playing? That was also originally released on the PSX? And is also supposed to be very weird? AND was just remastered and released on Switch THIS YEAR? All of this and more makes Chrono Cross an easy candidate, but I think my Chrono vibes have passed for now. I'll have to catch this one later.

LIVE A LIVE

Just released on Switch in a gorgeous HD-2D remaster, LIVE A LIVE wasn't even on my radar prior to its announcement in a Nintendo Direct earlier this year, as it was previously only released in Japan on the SNES. It looks gorgeous. As a precursor project to Chrono Trigger, it's got the whole multiple storylines across time and space thing going on. But it was released at sort of a busy time for me, so I kind of missed the moment. I'll have to go back and chase that spark again another time.

Final Fantasy X/X-2 Remaster

I know this is a very Square/Enix-heavy list so far, but I just recently heard on a podcast that Final Fantasy X and/or X-2 are about a pop-idol who decides to form a mercenary company? And it's on Switch. So. On the list it goes.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

This game was released a while back, on other platforms, and garnered some pretty solid praise from a small handful of people in my social media circle. I overlooked it at the time, but now that it's out on Switch, and some of those people have posted renewed adoration for it, I think I've gotta add it to the list.

Star Ocean: First Departure R

I have no idea what's going on in this game, or if it will be any good at all. I saw it on the Switch eShop while mindlessly scrolling the sale section, and it sounds wild. Medieval knights get beamed into space and have space adventures or something. That sounds cool! But the older graphics and lesser familiarity have prevented me from jumping in thus far.

Moon

Moon is another one I hadn't heard of until its release on Switch. It's marketed as an "anti-RPG," which seems to mean it doesn't focus on combat or conquest, but instead on conversation and helping people. Seems neat! Also the art style is weird and different! I think I'll need to be in a particular frame of mind to finally give this a go. Eventually!

CrossCode

I remember being really excited about CrossCode at one point, but now I don't remember why, and that excitement has waned to such a degree that it almost doesn't exist anymore. I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if I'll like it. But here it remains. Because it looks kinda cool.

Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition

DQ XI S was almost the game I shattered my RPG dislike with, back in 2020. Austin Walker had just talked on Waypoint Radio about how it was his then-current cozy bedtime game, and Tim Rogers' video review for Kotaku really talked it up just as I was getting into his new Action Button Reviews series on YouTube. I played the demo on Switch (remember when games had demos? Demos rule, there should be more demos), and decided that yes, this game has extreme Cozy Potential. Then I waited for the game to go on sale because it's usually like $50 or something. It never did, so I played FF7 instead, and the rest is history.
UNTIL. This past summer. When it finally went slightly on sale. I jumped on it, and now it is mine. But I still haven't played it. DQ is a big, classic JRPG series, which I've decided makes it a prime candidate to sink into while staying with my parents for Christmas later this year.
So. Not yet.

Citizen Sleeper DLC

Just as I had finished playing Citizen Sleeper this year, developer Jump Over the Age announced a fresh pack of story DLC releasing within the month. I told myself I'd jump right back in as soon as it was out, but I never did. I'd gotten hooked on other things in the meantime, and maybe I wasn't ready to re-open a story that seemed like it had ended so well the first time.
There's no excuse for me to leave it on the sidelines forever, as it's FREE, but I don't know. It hasn't been time yet. Maybe soon.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade

FF7R is a big part of why I played the original FF7 in the first place. So many reviewers were talking about how it was doing such interesting things with the story and format, that I just got too curious. I had to play. But I knew I'd never get as much out of playing it as I would if I had played the original. Also I didn't have a PlayStation. So I played the original, and shortly after I finished, it came out on PC. A year later, most of the bugs were fixed and it went on sale. I bought it. Then in July, my girlfriend went out of town and I had a break from work in the same week, and I dove in headfirst.
This is the first game on this list that I have played! I fell off for a month or two after work picked back up, but I absolutely love it, and I'm still keen to see it through to the end. But it's not the game I'm feeling the strongest pull from this cozy season, so it may remain on the sidelines for a while longer still.

Digimon Survive

The next Digimon game has been a long time coming. And hopes for the next game in a series are always high, when the series has been...well...fine. After several delays, and a from-the-ground-up rework, it was finally released this year on all major platforms. I grabbed it on day one. I've played a fair bit of it, and I'm pretty sure I love it. That may be mostly nostalgia for my Digimon-heavy childhood talking, though it already far outshines the previous entry in the Digimon video game series, Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, which was, to me...very...okay.
I really have loved my time with the game's slow story and horror vibes, but I fell off when my work picked up and other games caught my fancy. It's still on my main rotation of Switch games, and I plan to get back to it in earnest this year, but not quite yet.
I do think that if the game had come out a bit later in the year, taken a few more months in development, it would've hit just right. Not because of any issues I've run into, but purely because the game's horror vibes and cozy slowness would've dovetailed perfectly into Fall and the Halloween season.
Soon, Digimon! Soon.

Eastward

I picked up Eastward last year, after patiently watching its development over seven years. I pretty well loved it! So much so, that it made #3 on my Top Ten Games of 2021. Despite some weird writing, and character design and characterization that leans a little too heavily on caricature and stereotype at times, I am endlessly enchanted by the game's art and music, and endeared toward its main characters, especially Sam. THEREFORE...
I've decided to use the start of this cozy season to finally finish this game that I love very much...

Disco Elysium

...so that I can start DISCO FUCKING ELYSIUM AYYYYYYYYYYY 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
I first bought Disco Elysium around the time it was first getting rave reviews, probably the first time it went on sale on Steam. I have not touched it since, and ever since it came out on Switch, I've been convinced that if I had it on Switch, I would actually play it, but I already owned it on PC, so I wouldn't let myself buy it again.
But that's dumb, so last week I finally let myself buy it on sale on Switch and I'm fucking stoked to finally play it.

So congrats Disco Elysium, you're my chosen cozy game this year. Possibly the first of several, depending on how quickly I finish you and how many other games are released this year that catch my fancy (looking at you, Pokémon Scarlet)!

I look forward to finally seeing how Eastward comes to a close, though it'll be sad to say goodbye to that game and its world. I think that's probably part of why I haven't finished it for so long! And I look even more forward to my upcoming revolutionary detective adventures in the city of Revachol that may or may not end with me buying a $500 jacket.

Do you have your own cozy RPG picks for Fall? Something old, something new, something you've replayed a thousand times? Share away!

What Else Is On? July 20th, 2022

2022-07-20T16:00:00Z

Hello and welcome to What Else is On?, a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I’ve been enjoying in the past month.

PUT THIS ON

First off, here's a track to throw on and vibe out to while you catch up on the below. This month, it's...
Garlic Jam, an album by blog favorite Louie Zong, made entirely in Warioware D.I.Y. for the Nintendo DS.

READ THIS

📚 Big Publishers Are Putting The Internet Archive On Trial [Motherboard]
Following the continuing trend of bad people doing bad things, some large corporations are trying to destroy an unquestionably good website.

📚 Who Cares About Continuity [Gawker]
Finally someone says it.

📚 Every Single English-Language SNES Manual Is Now Available Online [Kotaku]
A very cool project that I sure hope Nintendo doesn't try to kill!

WATCH THIS

📺 SGDQ 2022: Super Mario Maker 2 Blind Relay Race [YouTube]
Another Games Done Quick marathon has come and gone and raised an absurd amount of money for charity. Anytime GDQ throws Mario Maker on the schedule, you know it's gonna be a good time.

LISTEN TO THIS

🔊 A More Civilized Age [Podcast]
At the tail end of 2020, some of my favorite podcasters got together to make all my dreams come true and talk about Star Wars. AMCA bills itself as a Clone Wars podcast, and the main conceit is indeed the watching and/or rewatching of that cartoon series, but the hosts dive so much deeper than that. The show is both friendly to newcomers and satisfying for dumb nerds like myself. I love it.

PLAY THIS

I've been playing (and shockingly finishing) an absolute boatload of games lately, so here's a lightning round of everything I'm loving right now:

🕹️ Neon White [$25, PC/Switch]
A fast-paced 3D platforming shooter for leaderboard-chasing freaks.
⭐ 5/5

🕹️ Last Call BBS [$20, PC/Mac/Linux]
A love letter to a time when computers were new and exciting.
⭐ 4.5/5

🕹️ Citizen Sleeper [$20, PC/Switch/Xbox]
A dice-based RPG/Visual Novel about making a life in a precarious place.
⭐ 5/5

🕹️ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge [$25, PC/Switch/PS4/Xbox]
Reminded me of just how much I loved TMNT as a kid. Damn fun.
⭐ 4/5

🕹️ Poinpy ["Free", Netflix]
The creator of Downwell does it again. A mobile game that doesn't suck shit.
⭐ 4/5

ONE GOOD TWEET

I'm back to tweets this month because the post is already late, and I can't think of any websites.

This one lead to a thread of people's favorite things about one of my favorite games, Boktai, which celebrated its 19th birthday this past weekend!

LINK TO THREAD

Thanks for reading! Til next time 👋

What Else Is On? June 5th, 2022

2022-06-05T16:00:00Z

Hello and welcome to What Else is On?, a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I’ve been enjoying in the past month.

PUT THIS ON

First off, here's a track to throw on and vibe out to while you catch up on the below. This month, it's...
I'm Not So Sure, the first track off the album Earfood by the Roy Hargrove Quintet, in honor of the upcoming documentary about one of my favorite jazz musicians.

READ THIS

📚 Bees Are Fish, California Court Rules [Motherboard]
Corporations get creative in court to do evil shit all the time, so why not get creative in court to do good shit?

📚 Just Read Everything Aaron Gordon's Been Writing, Honestly [Motherboard]
Dude always writes bangers, and he's been on a roll lately.

📚 ANOTHER Guy Has Leaked Classified Military Documents On The SAME TANK GAME'S forums [Kotaku]
I can't believe this keeps happening. Can military dudes calm down for like two seconds? Or don't, this is very funny.

📚 U.S. ruling class unites: $40 billion for Ukraine war, nothing for workers [Liberation]
Love to live in a world held hostage by capital.

📚 Machinarium developer’s next game will be built with stunning 3D dioramas [Polygon]
I cannot wait for this.

📚 The last public payphone in NYC has been removed from Midtown [Gothamist]
RIP to an era.

WATCH THIS

📺 SPY x FAMILY [Crunchyroll]
This show is extremely cute, and has become our new nightly dinnertime watch.
A veteran spy is given his toughest assignment yet: pose as a loving husband and father in order to infiltrate an elite school to get close to a high-profile politician. He has the perfect cover, except his wife’s a deadly assassin and neither knows each other’s identity. But someone does: his adopted daughter who’s a telepath!

📺 Bowling Alley screens when you get a Strike [YouTube]
I can't stop thinking about this weird, 40-second video. The music. The animations. The lack of any logic. I want a 10-hour endless version of this. I want someone (me?) to make infinite versions until the sun expands.

LISTEN TO THIS

🔊 Better Call Saul Insider Podcast [Apple Podcasts]
I have FINALLY started watching the latest (and final) season of Better Call Saul, which means I can once more listen to this podcast! The cast and crew of this show are some truly lovely people, and it's a joy to listen to them talk through their thoughts, processes and ideas after watching each episode of the show.

PLAY THIS

🕹️ No Man's Sky [$59.99, Xbox, PS, PC]
Well, this six-year-old game has my ass again. Every once in a while, I dip back in to see what new and amazing features Hello Games have added, because they're still adding truly incredible shit to this game for free CONSTANTLY. Now that there's pirates and settlements and big space whales, they done got me again.
There's also a Switch port coming this summer! Can't wait to be able to play on a handheld and never be seen again!

SOME GOOD WEBSITES

It's important to remember that the internet is still more than just one or two social media sites that make you mad and anxious. The internet is full of websites that are fun, helpful, or just nice. These are some of those websites.

🖥️ PC Part Picker
This site is super helpful anytime I'm trying to put together a new PC build or figure out upgrades to my current setup. It's also a useful place to keep a list of all the parts currently in my PC, as I always forget exactly which components with which product codes are in there.

🖥️ PC-Builds Bottleneck Calculator
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this site alongside the previous link. Anytime I see a potential component I could upgrade in my PC, usually the processor or graphics card, I pop over here to make sure it would play nicely with everything I've got going on. Super handy!

Thanks for reading! Til next time 👋

The Boktai Database

2022-06-02T16:00:00Z

Almost exactly a month ago (I'm a day late writing this), I started a new project. Since May 1st, 2022, I've been building a fan/archival website dedicated to the video game series Boktai. Aside from a bootstrapped portfolio website that I made as part of a college course, this is the first website I've ever built from top to bottom in HTML almost entirely on my own. Some backstory:

For a couple of years now, I've been loosely planning out a documentary project around Boktai, a series of weird Game Boy Advance games made by Hideo Kojima. I've written about these games here before, if you want to know more about what they are and why I love them so much. I've been a fan of these games for almost 20 years now (yikes), and saw an opportunity to try and tell their story to an audience beyond the relatively small and dedicated fanbase the games still enjoy today, and to try my hand at collecting and presenting a fuller picture of them than I've seen anywhere else on the web.

This loose idea led me around in circles for a while, as I tried to decide on an angle to approach things from. Should it be a straightforward recap of the events of the series, telling the story of the games as it happened? Should it be a historical recounting of the games' development, release, reception, and afterlife? Should it be a deeper analysis of the games' world and timeline, looking at their themes and lore? Should it be a series containing all of these things? In the end, I couldn't decide. I still want to make something in that space, but I still don't know what that will be.

In part, my indecision was the result of a repeatedly stunted research process. By and large, I could only find bits and pieces about the Boktai series around the web. There's really only one solid wiki, and it is woefully incomplete and underdeveloped. This series just hasn't gotten the leave-no-stone-unturned treatment that other pop culture series have gotten from their online audiences and fandoms. This was, of course, part of the reason I wanted to start making something about Boktai in the first place, and so I found myself in a sort of ouroboros of pre-production. I would, more or less, look for information, not find it, and end up right back where I started with renewed resolve to save these games from being forgotten, but with even more work to do myself.

Finally, something broke the cycle. A certain rich dick decided to buy Twitter. Bear with me. His announcement prompted discussion of alternate online venues, which led to discussion of what made the internet so nice before social media, which led me to Neocities. Neocities is — if you're of a certain age — exactly what you think it might be. It's a revival of that good-old free website host of the AOL days of the internet, geocities. Neo-geocities. Neocities. If you've never heard of it, check it out. There's a good chance you'll become as enamored with some of the vibes people are creating there as I have.

We're almost there. Once on Neocities, just as I was about to give up and decide that I had neither the time nor interest required to build my own website or blog from scratch and stick with it in the long run, I stumbled upon a site called Distant Skies. It's a fan site for an old NES video game I've never heard of called Crystalis. It was at this point, looking at this fan site someone had dedicated to a video game from their childhood that made an impact on them, that I knew what I had to do. I would be the one to build the internet's greatest repository for all things Boktai. I would gather all of the available information about these games I could possibly get my hands on, organize it, and present it in as simple and beautiful a way as I could. I would build the website, the reference library about this game that I wish existed. And I would call it The Boktai Database.

Borrowing heavily from the design of Distant Skies (thanks to their Creative Commons licensing), I spent about a week in April figuring out the basic design of the website. I know I'm working on the right thing when I can't put it down. Once I got this idea in my head, I could not stop working on it. Morning, afternoon, and night, any free moment I had, I would pour into bringing the site online as soon as possible, in its earliest state of functionality. I bought a domain (boktai.info), made header and nav graphics in Photoshop, hyperlinked the pages together, edited CSS, and learned the syntax of Distant Skies' basic setup that would become the backbone of my new site.

On May 1st, 2022, I setup a paid Neocities account (for the extra storage and custom domain support), and uploaded my files. The Boktai Database (yes I'm going to link to it every time, I'm excited) was online. And my next project had just begun.

In the past month, I've added the beginnings of the games' story, locations, maps, and music. I've listed countless other sites and resources on the Links page. I've also gotten in touch with a group of Boktai-dedicated folks through Discord, who've massively helped my effort of saving and hosting (or linking to, as is appropriate) a number pieces of Boktai-related media and associated materials on the Media page that were released alongside the games, or that otherwise tells the story of these games as cultural objects in the world.

The Boktai Database has been massively rewarding to work on over the past month, and I'm only getting started. It's going to take a lot of time to finish a project of this size, and it may never be entirely "complete," but I hope one day it can stand as the place on the internet to find any and all Boktai-related information. And I really hope that one day it helps me finally make that documentary project.

The Moment I Fell in Love With Final Fantasy VII

2022-05-10T16:00:00Z

Last year, I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time, and it quickly became one of my favorite games of the year, and probably one of my favorites of all time. These things happen slowly, and as a result of many small moments added together, but one moment in particular stands out in my personal FF7 journey from "interest" to "love." I was just thinking about it again this week.

To set the stage a bit:

Early on in your (Cloud's) career as an eco-terrorist, your comrade Barret tells you time and again, "There ain't no gettin' offa this train." Meaning, among other things, once you start something, you've got to see it through to the end.

Throughout your travels around the world, on the run from the evil Shinra corporation, you discover some things about yourself that shake you to your core, and cause you to question everything you've ever known about your past, your world, who you thought you were, and what it even means to be.

At one point, you become separated from your group of comrades and friends. You lose yourself and retreat inward.

After much introspection and help from your childhood friend Tifa, you finally decide that it's the right thing to soldier on and continue fighting for the planet and the people you care about.

After returning to the group, you explain everything you've been through, and the decision you've come to.

And then...

A chorus of voices in unison, parroting their erstwhile leader's rallying cry, at once an inside joke among friends, a pledge of allegiance to what increasingly looks like a doomed cause, and a vote of confidence in you (Cloud), your return, and newfound resolve.

The gang leaves Cloud to plan the next move. He looks at the screen in front of him, stretches his body, and breathes out. He's back. And you're all going to do this thing.

It rules. The music swell really got me.

What Else Is On? May 1st, 2022

2022-05-01T16:00:00Z

Happy May Day, and welcome to What Else is On?, a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I’ve been enjoying in the past month. Solidarity forever! Enjoy!

PUT THIS ON

First off, here's a track to throw on and vibe out to while you catch up on the below. This month, it's...
the entirety of Takako Mamiya's album, Love Trip.

READ THIS

📚 Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Shares Some Facts [Gawker]
First off, in case you missed it, Scott Adams had some Fun Facts to share about himself and his seemingly very eventful life on Twitter, absolutely apropos of nothing. Paul F. Tompkins also tweeted a pretty fun sendup of the whole thing.

📚 Platforms Are Temporary, Community Is Forever [Motherboard]
Janus Rose writes about the inevitable decline and decay of online platforms, and the importance of forging connections offline.

📚 Mark Zuckerberg’s augmented reality [The Verge]
The Verge caught a glimpse of Meta(nee Facebook)'s roadmap for an eventual pair of AR glasses, and its vision for the future of the "metaverse." Spoiler: it sucks!

📚 The Itch Scratches Back [aromatasemebro]
A long, deep dive into the recent works of Tim Rogers generally, and his Tokimeki Memorial Review specifically, and a meditation on the ways criticism can and maybe should evolve as art continues to evolve.

WATCH THIS

📺 Clippy Gets Clipped [YouTube]
After the passing of Gilbert Gottfried this month, and folks were sharing their favorite memories, as they are wont to do, it came up that he had once voiced the former Microsoft Office "helper," Clippy. Thanks to the Internet Archive, and YouTube user Andrew Keeton, we have the proof.

📺 Cheese Garlic Bread with Honey Dip [YouTube]
In this month's cooking corner, it's another chill YouTube channel that I like to watch to relax. Delicious Day is always on some absolute shit, both with their recipes and in their English captions. This video WILL make you hungry.

📺 bonk [YouTube]
One last video in the watch corner this month, and it's a short one, just four seconds. Louie Zong is really getting good at Blender.

LISTEN TO THIS

🔊 Shift-F1 Podcast [Shift-F1]
It's Formula 1 season once more, and so I must recommend Shift-F1, a podcast about speedy racecars. Drew, Danny, and Rob post pre- and post-race episodes filled with news, analysis, and insight, all from an outsider/casual fan perspective. You don't need to know a ton, or anything at all about Formula 1, to start listening today, and having fun learning about these big, weird, fast cars.

🔊 Threedom [Earwolf]
Every Thursday, Paul F. Tompkins, Scott Aukerman, and Lauren Lapkus get together to talk about...whatever! I'm not usually a big fan of aimless, conversational podcasts without a stated theme or purpose, but I could listen to these three go on all day. The Pretzel Gang (you'll see) has an infectious best-friendly energy that keeps things moving, even when those things don't sound like much at all. It's one of my favorite podcasts, and always a day-one listen.

PLAY THIS

🕹️ Knotwords [Free/$11.99, iOS/Android/Steam]
It's not every month that we're graced with a new game from prolific mobile/word game creator Zach Gage. He has a reputation for making very simple and very well-designed games (mostly for mobile) that are both very fun and very hard to put down. Knotwords, a cross between a crossword puzzle, jigsaw puzzle, sudoku, and Wordle, is no exception.
Previous releases include Flipflop Solitaire, SpellTower, Really Bad Chess, Card of Darkness, and last year's impeccable take on sudoku, Good Sudoku. Knotwords is a worthy addition to this pantheon of outstanding mobile games.

🕹️ The Man Man [Free, Itch]
This is a free browser game in which you play as a serial killer known as The Man Man, who has no bones. Desperately wiggle towards your prey as you try to make something...anything...happen. It's QWOP for killing!

🕹️ Framed [Free, Web]
It's Wordle, but for movies. Guess movie titles from a series of increasingly easy-to-glean stills.

SOME GOOD WEBSITES

Recent Events at the Hellsite have been causing folks to seek out possible alternatives. One such alternative is Neocities, which has me imagining a world where we all go back to visiting a number of websites over the course of a day. In honor of this beautiful dream, I've decided to start sharing a different website that I like each month instead of a tweet.
To start, three recommendations (which is more than just one):

🖥️ Pokémon Booster Pack Simulator
Simulates the age-old joy of opening a new pack of Pokémon cards. Includes a surprising number of packs!

🖥️ Substack.net (not that one)
Contains a number of digital art exhibits. I recommend the Analog TV Simulation.

🖥️ districts & Hotline Cafe
Okay, this is two websites, and that's cheating, but these are both great ways to get started finding other fun sites across the neocities multiverse (neoverse?).

Thanks for reading! Til next time 👋

Analogue Pocket Review: I Love the Fancy Game Boy

2022-04-23T16:00:00Z

Well, it's here. It's real. The Analogue Pocket exists. And it's a really nice way to play Game Boy games.

The Pocket is the latest in a line of high-quality video game hardware releases from Analogue, a company that specializes in hyper-accurate hardware emulation via FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays). I don't know what that means either, but it sounds clever, and I'm told it matters for some reason.

In layman's terms, FPGA chips allow Analogue to design and program their machines to act — at a hardware level — as if they were a Super Nintendo, or a Sega Genesis, or in this case, a Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and/or Game Boy Advance. This is different from traditional software emulation, in which a piece of software does its best to imitate, or emulate the console in question across a range of different hardware.

The Pocket also supports games from the Sega Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Atari Lynx, and "more." Everything that isn't a Game Boy cartridge of some kind will need an extra adapter to slot in, however.

I've been using the Analogue Pocket for about three months now, and by and large, I love the thing. It's hard to play older games in a way that is both accurate and comfortable, and the Pocket manages both easily. Its lag-free, hardware-accurate gameplay experience will have you convinced you're playing on original hardware, and its big, beautiful, and crucially bright screen will remind you that, luckily, you're not.

Granted, the Pocket only plays physical game cartridges, and having to acquire physical copies of old games you might not already have is certainly not the easiest way to stroll down video game memory lane. But the Pocket does support playing through a Flash Cart, and the word on the street is that Analogue products usually receive — from mysterious sources that are definitely not Analogue themselves — jailbreaks and workarounds that allow the use of ROMs.

I've also found that there's a surprisingly robust community of people selling reproduction cartridges online. Whether that crosses some sort of authenticity line, as to how accurate an experience you're ultimately having — something which may matter to you if you're looking at the Pocket — is up to you to decide. Personally, I don't care as long as the game runs well, and as originally designed. If you see this as a stopgap solution while waiting for ROM support, you probably won't be bothered either.

Speaking of waiting for features, the Pocket is still missing many of the features Analogue promised with the announcement of their AnalogueOS. There's the Library feature, which promises to be "a reference level database to play, explore and share. A scholarly cataloging of the entirety of video game history." This has yet to materialize. There's the Memories feature, which will allow you to save and load Save States, and take and view screenshots while playing. This one gets a half-point, as Save States were added in beta in the most recent firmware update. But you aren't yet able to scroll through all of your Save States in a visual list, as Analogue promises you'll be able to, and the "Memories" option remains greyed out in the Pocket's menu. Maybe a quarter-point, then. Creating and sharing "Playlists," and a suite of tools and stats to track your playtime also have yet to appear as of the writing of this review.

That we're still waiting for AnalogueOS to unlock the full potential of what we were initially promised from the Pocket may be the most disappointing thing about the handheld. Every time I play a game on the Pocket, I find myself wishing I could take a screenshot of some moment or another. And every time I wonder when, if ever, this basic functionality will arrive. It's a real shame, and one that has made a device launch that was already so beset by delays and disappointment, into something of a meme. Woe to all those who were fool enough to buy this very expensive Game Boy.

In my experience, however, it hasn't all been woe. On the contrary, I genuinely love my Pocket, and I've been having a blast playing on it. Not because it delivered on every one of my wildest dreams, but because it's very good at being a fancy Game Boy.

With all of that out of the way, let's break the rest of this review into a few different categories that I feel it important to address. Here's how I feel about the following:

Build & Feel

The Pocket is nicely weighted, and its plastic has a nice, soft touch. The build quality feels top notch, very solid, and not at all creaky. It's nicely machined with no jagged edges, and nothing feeling "wonky." I absolutely love holding it. Early on, I found myself absent-mindedly playing with the Analogue logo that's inset into the back of the Pocket with my fingertips while playing, and I suddenly realized that I used to do that very same thing with the clip to the Game Boy Color's battery compartment whenever I borrowed it from my friend to play Pokémon. This thing feels so close to the real deal, it fooled my brain into an old childhood habit that I'd completely forgotten.

I wish I could browse the web on this thing. Answering emails would be a joy on the Pocket. I mean, probably not, and how would you type? I don't know. I can't explain those impulses, except to restate that I love holding this thing. Anyone want to invest in my revival of the PageBoy...?

All that said, on the flip side, the Pocket isn't exactly pocket-sized. While I feel it's just the right size to comfortably hold for a longer play session, it's a little too huge to tuck away in a pants pocket — or even a jacket pocket — for a stroll through the park or a morning commute, and will likely have to be stored in a bag, where you might be less inclined to pull it out for a quick game.

I'm also terrified of breaking it. Half of the front of the device is a big, beautiful pane of glass that I can just imagine hitting the deck and shattering into a thousand beautiful pieces. And while its build quality is good, and its construction feels solid, I wouldn't put my money on its angular plastic body in a match-up against sweet lady pavement.

Buttons

The four main face buttons (what you might think of as ABXY) are nicely clicky, and remind me of my old GBA's A and B buttons. They might even be a tad less mushy. The L and R shoulder buttons are dead ringers for the GBA SP's shoulder buttons, but (again) maybe a little nicer. Their placement feels right to me, and my fingers rest comfortably on them while playing. They are a bit close to the exposed cartridge in the back, but that hasn't caused me any problems. And we'll get to that.

The Start/Select/Analogue Menu buttons towards the bottom of the device are shallow and clicky and do what they need to do. They're all well within a thumb's reach of the other face buttons, and having the Analogue Menu button function as a modifier for some quick actions with the d-pad and volume buttons is a handy touch as well.

My least favorite buttons on the Pocket are its Volume Up, Volume Down, and Sleep/Wake/Power buttons. They're located on the left side of the device, around the middle of the display. The Power button is an oblong pill shape, accented in a nice mint green. The Volume Up/Down buttons sit just above the Power button in a sort of oblong-pill-split-in-half configuration, with Volume Up being the upper half of the pill, and Volume Down being the lower. This makes things rather aesthetically pleasing, but in this configuration the two pills feel identical. More than once, I have meant to change the Pocket's volume, but accidentally put it to sleep, or vice versa. This is not helped by the fact that pressing both volume buttons at once will mute the device. This could have been avoided by giving the power button a different texture, using a volume slider instead of buttons, or both. Sadly, Analogue chose form over function in this case.

D-pad

Yes, the D-pad deserves its own section, as it is apparently very difficult to make one that is any good these days. Luckily, Analogue had no such difficulty in shipping a d-pad that would feel right at home on the original hardware. It's tight and responsive, and hits a good center point between clicky and mushy. Right where a d-pad should be, in my opinion. In some cases, I have found myself accidentally moving in an adjacent direction while holding one side of the d-pad (for example, accidentally moving up or down while holding right). This could come down to how sensitive the pad is to moving in a diagonal direction, or even to my big, stupid fingers being much bigger and stupider now than when I was a kid. It's not a huge deal.

Cartridge Slot

The cartridge slot on the back of the device is fully uncovered, in contrast to an original Game Boy or Game Boy color, to allow for both the taller GB and GBC carts and their shorter GBA brethren. This is an interesting solution to a problem made more interesting by the Pocket's support for all those adapters I mentioned before, and I honestly don't know that I would've done it any differently. But it does lead to the feeling that your carts are a bit exposed and indeed, a nudge to the side of a cartridge will absolutely knock it out of place without much force. It isn't a move you're likely to make (intentionally) while playing, but there it is.

However, in my experience, and its kind of weird to say this, but this cartridge slot is also kind of a dream to use. Carts click into place with a really satisfying thok. Like they're solid and secure, but also landing on a cloud? It feels really good. The tolerance doesn't feel so tight that it's going to scratch or otherwise harm your carts, but not so loose that they'll fly right out. For a piece of third-party hardware, that's pretty big. It feels like Analogue spent exactly as much time as they needed getting the Pocket's acceptance of cartridges right.

Display

I have nothing but praise to heap upon this beautiful screen. It's gorgeous. It's big. It's extremely bright, if you want it to be. And it scales everything accurately and perfectly so that your old games won't look weird at the relatively high resolution of 1600x1440.

The included display modes are also great. For each of the original Game Boys, the Analogue can display games in either Analogue mode, which unleashes the full power of the display, or in a number of "Classic" modes that more closely resemble the original display of each console. They all look great. I'm currently playing through Pokémon Crystal in the Classic GBC LCD display mode, and it looks exactly how I remember it.

Analogue promised that games would look gorgeous on the Pocket, and they delivered.

UI

The Pocket's UI is relatively simple, especially while we're still waiting for AnalogueOS to add the bulk of its missing features, but it's functional and gets the job done. My biggest problem with the UI as it currently exists, is that messages like "sleep," "wake," and the little [+] and [-] icons that indicate an increase or decrease in volume respectively, are rendered on screen in a borderless white text that lays on top of whatever you're playing or viewing. In the Pocket's black-backgrounded menus, this is fine. But on top of games which, considering the era, may be mostly black and white, this seems like a poor choice. Even displayed over full color games, the indicators are nigh-impossible to see.

The volume indicators also annoyingly do not show you where, on a spectrum of low to high, your volume currently sits. This would be extremely helpful, considering the console's use of buttons rather than a slider for volume management. It's a very curious misstep in a console that otherwise mostly feels very considered, and from a company that prides itself on accuracy and attention to detail.

Nanoloop

Just breaking this out separately because I want to call out what a fun addition it was to throw in some music-making software as part of the OS. It was obviously added natively with musicians in mind, but for lowly gamers like me who just bought the Pocket to play some games, it's fun to jump in and try my hand at making some simple chiptune loops for a while. Apparently, you can also hook the Pocket up to all kinds of MIDI controllers or your computer and make some serious jams. That's neat!

All in all, I'm having a great time with the Pocket. It's a great way to play some old games that just...works. It feels great to hold, I'm actually excited to carry it with me on the train or to the laundromat, it runs extremely well. It does what it says on the tin, basically. Well, most of what it says on the tin. I'm still eagerly awaiting those final updates to AnalogueOS that will finally bring the Pocket in line with Analogue's grand ambitions.

Until then, I'll be making my way through Pokémon Crystal, Final Fantasy Tactics, the Mother 3 fan translation, Boktai of course, and any other carts that find their way into my home, as I'm now keen to seek more out. And you can be sure that no matter what I play on the Pocket next, it'll look damn gorgeous.

For Your Consideration: Raticate With No Teeth

2022-04-22T16:00:00Z

The other night, I was playing Pokémon Crystal in bed, when I came upon a Raticate. Looking upon his angry, buck-toothed visage, I began to wonder what this creature might look like absent its most defining feature.

Thereupon, I took to Adobe Photoshop and created the grim vision you see before you now.

Bereft of its enamel weapons, it yawps endlessly into the void.

Its cry carries from Ilex Forest to the Whirl Islands.

He's yelling.

This is my blog and I do what I want with it.

Please Let Me Change My Trainer Photo in Pokémon Legends: Arceus

2022-04-11T16:00:00Z

When you first boot up Pokémon Legends: Arceus, the game has you choose your starting character from a small pool of generic presets. This has been true of almost all mainline Pokémon games going back to the first choice between "Boy" and "Girl" in Pokémon Crystal. Even the more recent releases have chosen not to implement a more robust, custom character creator that one might expect from a modern RPG. The understanding, at least with modern Pokémon games, is that you'll be able to customize your character's hair, eyes, and clothes later on to suit your specific style.

This is also the case in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, a game that is, on most counts, the most modern re-imagining of Pokémon to date. However, something's missing. Actually, there's something there that never goes away. Your trainer photo. The photo of your character that shows up on the page that tracks your progress through the game. This is another staple that dates back to the series' roots. But where previous Pokémon games have given players the option to update their trainer photo as they update their character's looks, Pokémon Legends: Arceus' photo remains the same. For the entire game.

Check this post's header image again. That's not an early photo. I have completed this game, and my character still looks fresh off the dollar store shelf. That’s not me anymore. I look much cooler now.

So why doesn't my photo reflect that? Or, if it's not going to reflect that, why have it show up in enormous size every time I go to save the game? I don't even need the game to automatically update my photo whenever I change my look (even though that seems trivial). Previous games have allowed me to take a new trainer photo at designated times and places. So why not in this game?

Now perhaps, if you know a little something about this game, you may be thinking to yourself, "well, this game does take place in the past, so maybe photos weren't-" BUT LET ME STOP YOU RIGHT THERE.

What about this fool? Huh? What about this dude? His whole thing is that he takes pictures. Pictures of you. Pictures of you and your Pokémon, even. What about him, smart guy? If this guy's not going to let me update my goddamn Pokémon driver's license, then what's the point? Why have this big, dumb photo at all? Why bother putting in a whole guy and a whole building dedicated to the practice of photography if you're not going to let me use it to change the ugly-ass starting photo that you make me look at every single time I save the game, Game Freak??

There is precedent for this. It's in previous Pokémon games. There's already a photo guy in this one. I just. I don't know. It seems like a weird oversight.

What Else is On? April 3rd, 2022

2022-04-03T16:00:00Z

What Else is On? is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I’ve been enjoying.

PUT THIS ON

First off, here's a track to throw on and vibe out to while you catch up on the below. This month, it's...
Midnight Rendezvous by Casiopea

READ THIS

📚 USPS Decides Electric Trucks Are Good, Actually [Motherboard]
Enjoy some good news from Aaron Gordon about the USPS. It's worth checking out Aaron's entire 2022 USPS saga, especially 'Who Killed the Electric Mail Truck?' while you're there.

📚 A Cinderella Story: How Staten Island Amazon Workers Won Against the Multi-Billion-Dollar Company [The City]
This owns. Who's next?

📚 Paper at 10 [andy.works]
One of my favorite apps of all time, Paper, turned ten this year. One of its designers, Andrew Allen, took to his blog to recount the heady days of the early 2010s, and tell the story of how this simple drawing app came to be.

📚 Uh-Oh, Your Blood Is Full of Plastic [Gawker]
Welp! Whoops! Yikes! Oof! Eesh! Jeepers! Hoo boy! Golly!

WATCH THIS

📺 Answer in Progress [YouTube]
Answer in Progress is one of the channels that's been inspiring me to get back to making my own videos. Their energy and curiosity remind me of exactly why I started a YouTube channel. I promoted one of their videos in a previous What Else Is On, but this time I wanted to call out their channel in general. Take your pick, they're all good.

📺 How to Escape Your Creative Ruts [Sean Tucker]
Sean Tucker is a street photographer I found on YouTube after I started shooting film. His videos are very tight and professional. Gives great creative advice. This particular video contains his advice on, as you might guess, how to get past a creative rut.

LISTEN TO THIS

🔊 How Cool Ranch Doritos Got Cooler [Underunderstood]
This is a fun story about Doritos' change from "Cool Ranch" to "Cooler Ranch," and why no one at the company would talk about it. Underunderstood is a podcast about solving really niche mysteries and explaining the mundane. It's one of my faves. Here's a link to their "New? Start Here" page.

🔊 Loud Friends
As it happens, I also have a podcast with my friend Zac about...kind of whatever we feel like talking about? It's mostly for us, but you might enjoy it!

PLAY THIS

🕹️ Tunic [$29.99, PC + Xbox]
A very beautiful video game about secrets.

Thanks for reading! Til next time 👋

TUNIC: GOOD

2022-03-25T16:00:00Z

My birthday was last week (March 17th, St. Patrick's Day, I do accept PayPal), but it wasn't the only occasion worth celebrating, as it very nearly coincided with the release of TUNIC, which finally came to PC and Xbox on March 16th. I've been following this game since the start of its development 7 years ago. I remember when it was called Secret Legend, and at times simply, 'Cute Fox Game.' With its final, official release now as TUNIC, I excitedly grabbed the game on Steam the night before my 29th, eager to dig into this gorgeous world.

I've put in just over 10 hours, and folks, I love it. I'll go ahead and give that away right up front, I don't mean for this review to be exhaustive anyway. The game has absolutely captured me.

For starters, TUNIC is gorgeous. I love this art style. The look and feel of the world are beautiful, soft, and tactile. For me, this comes down to both some really effective, warm lighting that makes everything shine brightly on one side, and cast long, sharp shadows on the other, and also the quality of the game's textures. Each grassy expanse, rocky cliff, and empty ruin is covered in a sort of grainy, brushy texture that makes everything look...crunchy? For lack of a better term? Along with a little touch of tilt-shift focus, it all looks like a little diorama that you could reach out and touch.

What really solidifies my feeling on this game's aesthetics as "love," though, is the fact that the game also feels great to play. The movement and combat all feel really grounded, and nothing ever feels too floaty or detached from what you're seeing onscreen. It really feels like some careful consideration was put into the feeling of each button press and flick of a thumbstick, which really pulls me into the world that much easier, and that much further.

This was an issue I had with last year's Death's Door, which I also thought was gorgeous. I watched my girlfriend play through the entire game, and only personally played through a little bit myself, but what I did play felt like it could've used just a bit more time to cook. That game didn't run the smoothest to begin with (which may just be down to our playing on Switch), and every now and then a movement or dodge roll, or attack, or some other action would seem to just not quite line up with how my brain expected it to play out.

It's an issue that tends to pop up in a lot of smaller, and especially indie titles, and it can really spoil an otherwise great game for me. Luckily, this is not the case with TUNIC. It's been fine-tuned with the best of them.

Also of note is TUNIC's excellent soundtrack. Produced by Lifeformed (who also scored Dustforce, one of my favorite games and game soundtracks of all time) and Janice Kwan, the soundtrack is buzzing, ethereal, peaceful, mysterious, and a perfect fit for everything TUNIC is and more. Video game music is very important to me, as important a piece of the puzzle as graphics or controls. I'm not one of those people who can put on a podcast while playing a game, at least not with the vast majority of games I've played. The soundtrack is too much a part of the experience, and TUNIC's soundtrack does a great job of bringing me into that world, and putting my brain in the right state to press forward. Big Fez vibes here.

It's even joined the ranks of video game soundtracks that I've purchased and continue to listen to outside of playing the game itself. Not that that's much of an exclusive club. 'Video Game' is probably the most populous genre of music in my iTunes library.

Finally, if none of that has convinced you to run out and buy the game for yourself, or even sounds terribly exciting, I'd just like to talk about the core element that makes TUNIC such a special experience, and that is — speaking of Fez vibes — its dedication to secrets. This game is one big love letter to video game secrets, and the way games used to make you feel as a kid. There's hardly any story to speak of (at least not up front), there aren't any NPCs to talk to, no lore-heavy cutscenes, and even most of the game's text is in a made-up language that you don't know how to read.

The way that we used to learn about the world inside the cartridge was via the little full-color, illustrated paper instruction manuals that used to accompany them in their boxes. Much ink has been spilled over the loss of this lovely, old practice, so I'll not spill any more of my own here except to say that it absolutely ruled. TUNIC thinks so, too.

You see, TUNIC has its own full-color, illustrated instruction manual contained within the game itself, just a button press away, complete with a layout of controls, details about the world, movement and combat strategies, abilities you wouldn't otherwise know about, and — praise be — maps. But it doesn't give it to you all at once. You need to find each page (or sometimes a group of pages) individually throughout the game's world.

In this way, TUNIC gets to have its cake and eat it, too. The game can have its beautifully detailed homage to video game manuals of yore, laying out all the little things you might ever need or want to know about the world and how best to play in it, and it can also keep a sense of mystery by making you work for those little tidbits one by one, strategically placing them throughout the world such that a sort of pseudo-story is created by the sheer fact that you are learning new and sometimes revelatory information only when the game is ready for you to know it. It's kinda genius. And it makes me feel like a kid again. Maybe it's just nostalgia poisoning, but I think that's too cynical a take. It's really smart and lovely.

In closing, all those years spent developing this cute little fox game clearly paid off. Three cheers for developers taking the time they need to make their game everything they want it to be. I'm delighted that TUNIC is a good game in any sense at all. It made recovering from a root canal that much more bearable (this is almost turning 30). But for it to have turned out to be something so special, and refreshing, and different? Something so good I just had to write about it? Indeed, something that I didn't know I needed? That's GOTY material.

🦊

Jumping Headfirst into Film Photography

2022-03-23T16:00:00Z

At the beginning of this year, I made a post about all the things I wanted to do in 2022. Not resolutions, per se, but a list of things that I've been wanting to try out for a while, or otherwise wanted to get to. Sort of a fancy to-do list.

One of the items on that list was to purchase a film camera and finally get into analog photography. It's something I've been interested in for a long time, as someone who works in visual media, but never had both the time and money simultaneously required to really get into it. It always seemed a little too daunting.

This year, a combination of things - including playing through Umurangi Generation over the New Year's holiday - conspired to give me one big push toward finally letting myself try this thing that I always (correctly) assumed I'd fall in love with. So I decided to make it my birthday gift to myself.

After googling, "good beginner film camera," a few times, and filtering through my criteria to find something with manual controls, that was easy to use, shot 35mm film (the most common consumer film format), and that was under or around my budget of $200, I settled on what would become my first manual film camera.

I say first manual film camera, because, having grown up in the 90s, I remember when film was the first and only choice when it came to photography, and so my first film camera (full stop) was this little beauty:

This is the Jazz Jelly 207. The Blueberry model, of course. I forgot I still had it until I started writing this blog just now. I'm so glad I do. It's beautiful. I might actually start using it again, now that I have some film. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

What I settled on for my very first manual film camera, was the Olympus OM-1:

This pretty little number was made in 1973, when they apparently built things to last, because it's in absolutely pristine condition. This is no doubt due in part to the hard refurbishment work of the establishment from which I purchased it through eBay, but it genuinely looks like someone just had this thing sitting in a box somewhere for 50 years and never touched it. It's gorgeous.

(Shoutout to munakata_camera_jp on eBay, y'all are the real deal)

With my brand new old camera, and a couple old rolls of Lomography film in hand, both black and white and color negative, I set out into the rapidly warming March weather to do the damn thing.

Without further ado, here are my results. We'll start with my color photos, shot on Lomography 100 ISO Color Negative film (click to enlarge):

I'm so happy with how these turned out. Making the jump from digital to film, I was worried that the skills I'd already developed wouldn't translate in one of a hundred different ways, or maybe my instincts about how much light I needed would be off, and all my shots would turn out sort of muddy and disappointing. Not to mention the fact that I didn't even know if this camera worked! But happily, none of that turned out to be the case.

Some of that is due to the fact that I found a really helpful light metering app. Any time I'm unsure about how open or closed my aperture should be, or I move from indoors to outdoors, or vice versa, I can just hold up my phone to the scene I want to photograph, and the app will suggest the right settings. It's pretty foolproof.

As for the photos themselves, I really couldn't be more pleased with my first roll. I love the look of the grain. I love the way the shadows turn a little bit brown. I adore what this stock does with blues, especially the baby blue-greys of the fallout shelter wall and the corrugated metal fencing. I really love what happened with the shot of the pot on the stove, how the highlights all turned green under tungsten light. I don't know why that happened, but I love it!

This isn't everything I shot, obviously, there are 36 exposures to a standard roll of 35mm film, these are just the highlights. The rest is either too personal, too boring, or not very good. But the bad is good too, because it teaches you where the limit lies. That's what I was hoping to achieve with this first roll of film: not to start shooting all-timers from the outset, but to find the limit (to borrow a phrase from motorsport), and learn what I can and cannot do with this camera.

For instance, I learned that I cannot compensate for low lighting conditions by simply cranking down the shutter speed. Or I can, but I shouldn't expect the photo to be sharp, not if I'm shooting handheld. Shooting digitally, I could depend on Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) to save me in the end. Not here. This camera has no OIS. No camera would have OIS until 1994 (I think).

But let's move on now to the second roll I shot, which was a roll of Lomography Earl Grey 100 ISO Black & White film (again, click to enlarge):

Shooting black & white proved to be a completely different beast. I never regularly shot black & white on digital, so I was already on the back foot for shooting B&W film, and it really shows here.

The most successful shots in this batch, I feel, are the ones that show the greatest amount of contrast between light and shadow. The first shot of the cafe sign, the shots of the blinds and the sunlight on the door, and the final shot looking up at the corner of a building, are all good examples of this. Even the shot of the car works well since it's rendered so dark against a largely lighter background.

Other shots like the shrub in front of the window, the light on the striped backpack, and leaves of a bush, could all stand to be a bit more contrasty in my opinion. Some darker shadows, some brighter highlights, and things would pop.

My main takeaway from shooting B&W film for the first time is that you need to be constantly thinking about light and contrast. Creating focus on a subject when shooting color is easy, because it's much easier to compose a shot with color contrast in mind, at least for me. A yellow flower stands out from green leaves, a green door stands out from red bricks, etc. Shooting in B&W, you need to find a way to create contrasts in other ways, in order to make things stand out.

Obviously, art is subjective, and you can ultimately shoot however you like. These are just my personal thoughts of what to work on for next time.

All in all, I'm having an absolute blast shooting film, and I'm so glad I finally pushed myself to pick up a camera and try it. If you have the means, I highly recommend it.

It's a shame that film should be considered a dying medium, and so I'm grateful to companies like Lomography that are keeping things going by continuing to produce film, and experimenting with new cameras and formats. Now that I've caught the bug, I grabbed a few new stocks to shoot on, pictured below, and I can't wait to do so!

Even if you can't shell out for a fancy film camera, I think everyone should try their hand at photography more often. Take a walk around your neighborhood and try to compose some interesting shots with your phone. Pick out the shots you like and don't like, and learn some lessons for next time.

I find that walking around with my camera, seeking out the little details I've never noticed before, I start to see the world in a totally different way. And I think that's real neat.

Photos From a Walk: March 3rd, 2022

2022-03-06T16:00:00Z

On Thursday, March 3rd, 2022, I took a walk. Here are some photos I took on that walk.

What Else Is On? March 4th, 2022

2022-03-04T16:00:00Z

What Else is On? is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I’ve been enjoying.

📖 READ: Kotaku and Gizmodo Media Group workers strike [gamesindustry.biz]
This blog stands in solidarity with GMG Union members ✊
📖 READ: Man Who Lived in Small Apartment Owes Nintendo $14.5 Million [Motherboard]
Great piece from Motherboard that digs deeper into Gary Bowser's life and involvement (or lack of) with hacking group Team Xecutor than any of the "haha his name is Bowser" articles I've seen so far.
📖 READ: Saying Goodbye to My Childhood Friend Arthur [The Atlantic]
PBS Kids show Arthur was a big part of my childhood. It finally just ended after an impressive 25 year run.
📖 READ: Love, Nancy [Into the Spine]
A touching love letter to a series of classic games that have recently become very close to me.
📖 READ: Isabelle Galmiche: From Math Teacher To Rally Monte Carlo Winner [Jalopnik]
Incredible success story about someone in motorsport who does not eat, sleep, and breathe motorsport.
📺 WATCH: are mechanical keyboards worth it? [YouTube]
Fun video from Taha for Answer in Progress, exploring the wild world of mechanical keyboards, and why us weirdos like these things so much.
📺 WATCH: The latest IPCC report explained in under 7 minutes [YouTube]
The UN just put out another massive, scary climate report. This video from Miriam helps it feel less massive and scary.

And finally, a good twitter thread on Live A Live, which is getting a remake on Switch soon:

Thanks for reading! Til next time 👋

Nintendo Shutting Down 3DS & WiiU eShops

2022-02-16T16:00:00Z

In a move that has sadly been inevitable for some time, Nintendo announced late on Tuesday, February 15th, 2022, that they would begin the process of shutting down the eShops for both the 3DS and WiiU systems starting this year, and culminating in March of 2023, abandoning another console's history to the eBay aftermarket. They also set up a cutesy little Spotify Wrapped-esque website for the dying consoles, so that you can "bring back your gaming memories."

According to Nintendo, the timeline looks like this:

May 23, 2022 - It will no longer be possible to use a credit card to add funds to an account in Nintendo eShop on Wii U or the Nintendo 3DS family of systems.
August 29, 2022 - It will no longer be possible to use a Nintendo eShop Card to add funds to an account in Nintendo eShop on Wii U or the Nintendo 3DS family of systems.
"Late" March 2023 - It will no longer be possible to redeem download codes.

So if you wanted to get in any last minute purchases, don't go thinking you've got another whole year to do so. Credit card transactions shut down in just 3 short months, and all other transactions effectively shut down in August. After that point, it will no longer be possible to purchase 3DS or WiiU games from Nintendo. In a FAQ listing that Nintendo has since removed, they justified their decision thusly:

This has unfortunately become par for the course for older gaming systems with online shops. Sony backtracked from entirely shutting down its PS3 and Vita online shops (for now) after widespread backlash, but stopped accepting all card and PayPal transactions for those shops in October of last year. And of course, Nintendo themselves previously shut down the Wii Shop Channel back in 2019.

As more and more gaming companies, Nintendo included, pivot to subscription services, it's becoming harder and harder to purchase and outright own older games. Nintendo's excuse for shutting down the only place you can buy 3DS and WiiU games - and their respective Virtual Console offerings - at a reasonable price is essentially that they offer some retro games on Switch Online, so it's fine. As if that makes up for it. They just added EarthBound literally last week. My hopes for the gargantuan DS/3DS/WiiU library are not high.

This is to say nothing of the fact that 3DS and WiiU games are unique to their hardware form factors, and in most cases very difficult or annoying to emulate. Those eShops are the last best place to experience these specific pieces of gaming history in their original forms.

There are those who might argue that Nintendo can't just keep those servers running forever, since it most likely costs them An Amount of Money. But it probably does not cost anywhere near the ~$13 billion Nintendo has in cash on hand, though, so that's bullshit. Why are we so willing to accept that keeping these services on indefinitely, that preserving gaming history, is too much to ask of major corporations?

I can see two motivations behind Nintendo shutting down their eShops, taking for granted that any financial burden of keeping them on is entirely negligible:

1. They have a vested interest in taking these games off the market (and driving prices on eBay to unreasonable heights) so that they can, in a handful of years, reintroduce some of them on new hardware, either via re-releases and remasters, or through their subscription service.

2. They simply don't give a shit.

If option 1 is the case, then what about all the smaller titles that Nintendo doesn't deign to offer on their platform du jour in the future, or that fall through the cracks of IP ownership? This is tantamount to the destruction of a vibrant, 15-year period of gaming history for the sake of maybe making some more money off of nostalgia and/or the scarcity they are currently manufacturing. Which is not out of character for Nintendo (or any corporation), it just sucks shit.

Honestly, option 2 seems much more likely to me. Companies like Nintendo do not exist to think about the history they leave behind, they exist to squeeze every possible ounce of profit out of their employees, the art they create, and their customers. If the 3DS and WiiU eShops are not generating revenue at an acceptable threshold, then they are no longer useful to Nintendo, and they'll cut them loose no matter the cost of keeping their lights on because, at the end of the day, it is a cost.

As long as this is the way the games industry operates, without any mechanisms in place to preserve these games before the companies who own them decide to burn their own history books, we will lose things. And as long as companies like Nintendo and others continue to also employ a strategy of harsh legal penalties for anyone who tries to preserve their history for them, through emulation, homebrew, etc., many of the things that we lose will be lost permanently.

I'll leave you with some tweets, and a reminder that if you know where to look, there are other ways to, as Nintendo says, "bring back your gaming memories."

Reviewing the February 9th Nintendo Direct

2022-02-10T16:00:00Z

This week began like any other. Then suddenly, there was a Nintendo Direct. People proceeded to lose their shit over whatever wild, unconfirmed rumors and assumptions made it to Twitter's trending topics, setting themselves up for disappointment once more.

The Direct has come and gone now, and I took some very loose notes, so here's my very brief review of everything I remember and the release dates I bothered to write down:

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes
They made another Warriors game, and it looks like all the other ones. Congrats if you like those I guess.
Advance Wars 1+2 ReBoot Camp - April 8th
Still very excited for this! Looks like it's in good shape! Wouldn't expect this to get pushed again.
No Man's Sky!!!?!!?!?!?!? - Summer
Was not expecting this! I've been a big fan of NMS over the years, and I remember them mentioning an interest in the Switch at one point, but wow. Didn't see that coming. Not looking forward to seeing how this runs 😬
Mario Strikers Battle League
It's another Mario soccer. Neat! All the other Mario sports games on Switch seem to have been pretty whatever and received not very good support (see: Mario Golf), so I'll sit this one out.
Splatoon 3 - Salmon Run
There are kaiju now? Or something? Sure. I'll watch someone play this once, probably.
Front Mission - Summer
Ooh okay. This looks pretty sick. And people seem excited about this series. Never played myself, but I'm down.
Front Mission 2 - Eventually
See above.
Some Disney shit
I don't remember what this was. Enjoy, children and weirdos!
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed - 4/20 😎
Looks like this is a port of the Wii version? It doesn't look very good! Wasn't a terribly enjoyable game anyway, if memory serves. Star Wars games don't usually get a shrug from me, but 🤷‍♂️
AssCreed trio
The three games with Ezio are coming to Switch, so you can run to a marker and then find more markers to run to in handheld mode.
SD Gundam Battle Alliance
More mecha love? Alright. This looks like it could go either way for me. I probably won't pick this up unless I see the right kind of hype from the right people.
Chrono Cross Remaster - April 7th
Yo. I will play some fucking Chrono Cross. I have never played Chrono Trigger, but I will play this. FF7 has opened my eyes to the PSX era of JRPGs. I am ready. Also they're throwing in a text adventure called Radical Dreamers that was previously exclusive to the Satellaview? Weird! I like it!
Kirby ATE A CAR - March 25th
I was already gonna play this Kirby game, but I'm gonna play it even more now that the little boy can wrap his lips around a car and drive it with his mind while his little feets dangle behind him.
Baseball something
Now you can play it inside.
Kingdom Hearts
I tuned out, I don't know. Congratulations. Or I'm sorry that happened.
Klonoa
I don't know what this is! Seems like a cult following sort of thing. I'm not in that particular cult, but have a good time!
Portal Collection - this year
Oh neat, okay. I don't know anyone who hasn't played Portal, but this could be cool on Switch for sure. Wouldn't it be funny if Half-Life 3 was a Switch exclusive?
Live A Live HD2D - July 22nd
Never heard of this game but it looks rad! Give me more JRPGs, I'm ready to feast!
Nintendo Switch Sports - April 29th
Looks like Bad Wii Sports! Also there aren't enough of the sports! I won't play this!
Taiko no Tatsujin Rhythm Festival
Bang that drum.
Triangle Strategy Demo
Another demo. This time with more of the game in it. Is this... Is this game just a series of demos?
Cuphead DLC
I'm good on Cuphead, but it looks as nice as the base game did! Fleischer warts and all.
Metroid Dread free updates - Today, then April
1-hit KO mode coming free today (yesterday (Feb 9th)), then a "Rookie Mode" coming in April.
Earthbound on Switch Online FINALLY - Feb 9th
THANK YOU! Christ almighty, why did this take so long? More people should play this! Go play this!
ALSO MOTHER 1 - Feb 9th
Aw man! I'm so excited to finally play the first one of these! Released as "Earthbound Beginnings."
MarioKart Track DLC??
48 new tracks??? Released in packs over the course of the year??? $25 total??? Alright!
Xenoblade Chronicles again
There's a guy with a big sword and maybe some dragons. I don't know. They always end these things with some anime bullshit I'm not here for. Sorry to end on a downer.

1-Month Check-In

2022-02-09T16:00:00Z

Exactly one month ago, on January 9th, I posted a list of things I wanted to do in the new year. One month later, let's have a check-in and see how those things are going. To recap, here's the list:

In 2022, I want to…

Buy a film camera and get into analog photography
Try once more to play the guitar
Get back to learning Japanese
Cut a new editing reel
Make more videos
Write more

Buy a film camera and get into analog photography

Not yet! I've decided to give it a little more time to percolate while everything else in my life is settling, and have it be a thing I give myself for my birthday. I've already decided on what I think is the right model for me: the Olympus OM-1, and I'm watching several eBay auctions with increasing interest.

Try once more to play the guitar

So I did go and dig my guitar out of my closet. And I tuned it back up to the best of my ability (using a website that listens to your guitar for you). And I went and found some chords to practice. And looked up some old tabs for songs I used to play. And that's about it. It ended up just sitting a few inches from the closet it had been entombed in previously.

I think that might be it for guitar for now. I went and tried it, and felt all my curiosity and excitement about trying it again just drain out of me. So that's fine. I might just not have it in me to keep with it and that's okay.

Get back to learning Japanese

On the other hand, this has been going very well! I brushed back up on all my hiragana, finished learning those characters, and then I went and found an online course to keep up with! I went with japanesepod101.com, which seems decent enough, and they gave me a 30-day trial of their premium membership for $1, which I couldn't say no to.

Better yet, though, is that I've actually scheduled out an hour every weekday to stop what I'm working on and go practice some Japanese. Consistency is key when learning anything, but especially a new language. And it's going pretty great! I can feel old things from school coming back, and new things sinking in. I'm excited to keep this up!

Cut a new editing reel

Done!

Make more videos

Not just yet, but I'm working on it! I'm procrastinating from that very goal by writing this blog, actually!

Write more

Check ✅

What Else is On? February 6th, 2022

2022-02-06T16:00:00Z

What Else is On? is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I’ve been enjoying.

READ: This very sad Twitter thread of gaming regrets from Kate Gray [Twitter]
*It's fun sad, not sad sad. This thread is why I'm so sentimental & protective of my old games.
WATCH: Pinocchio: A True Story (2022 Movie) Official Trailer [YouTube]
*What the fuck is going on in this trailer. Listen to his VOICE. Why does the animation look like an early 2000s Canadian cartoon? Who knew a Pinocchio movie could have too much plot!
PLAY: Vampire Survivors [itch.io]
*2022's first "out of nowhere" indie hit. It's three bucks on Steam, Windows only, or you can play the beta for free in your browser at the link above.
PLAY: Steamed Hams: The Graphic Adventure [GameJolt]
*Some brave soul turned Steamed Hams into a playable point-and-click adventure game.
PLAY: BloodbornePSX [itch.io]
*That Bloodborne demake you've been waiting for is finally done. Also the only way you'll ever play this game on PC.

And finally, one good tweet (RIP Wordle):

Thanks for reading! Til next time 👋

BREAKING: Social Media Team Finally Relaxes Shoulders

2022-02-05T16:00:00Z

He's back 🙏

Pokémon Legends: Arceus' Pivot to the Pokédex Makes for a Chill Time

2022-02-03T16:00:00Z

A new Pokémon game came out last week, and it's got some serious Breath of the Wild vibes. I've been playing it with my girlfriend since the day after it launched (download servers were slammed the day of), and much like every other Pokémon game we've ever played, we're having a great time with it. Pokémon's universal appeal just won't die, even in a game that takes the series to such new and different places.

Of particular note in this installment is a greater focus on research and completing the Pokédex, and not so much on the fighting. Pokémon battles are still there, and they're as enjoyable as ever, but you can avoid them to a much greater degree than ever before, and with much less detriment to your team and your progress through the game.

This game's story sends you way back in time, before humans and Pokémon are used to coexisting, and so the name of the game — figuratively — is research. Humanity needs to figure out just what these things are before society can progress to the shining utopia based around dogfighting we all know and love. What this means in practice is that you need to get out there and catch some Pokémon — lots of them — and fill out the world's first ever Pokédex (which is kept on paper in this game because the past, it's very cute).

In previous games, you might wander through the tallgrass, catch one or two new friends, and fight the rest for experience. In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, you need as much data as you can get your hands on to learn as much about as many Pokémon as possible. Arceus' Pokédex entries don't become complete — i.e. fill in all known info about a Pokémon — after catching just one, as has been the series' standard. Instead, you're given quotas to fill, the most important and also simplest of which is of course catching. Which means you're basically catching Pokémon non-stop. And it's honestly so chill?

In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, wild Pokémon can be seen all around you, as opposed to surprising you as random encounters in the grass. Think Pokémon Sword/Shield's Wild Areas. But everywhere. And this time around, since this game is finally treating Pokémon like wild animals, you don't need to enter a battle encounter in order to catch them. This flips the formula on its head in a really interesting way, with the player assuming the role of hunter, and the Pokémon becoming the hunted. You spend a lot of your time crouching in the grass, waiting for Geodude or Teddiursa to turn their backs so you can chuck a ball and catch them unawares. Which is a vibe!

Instead of spending so much time stressed or annoyed at the idea of an encounter, I'm just quietly hanging out in some fields, walking around until I see a Pokémon, observing it for a bit, throwing a ball, catch, repeat. Sometimes the Pokémon will see you, or a catch will fail, and it'll either run away — which, fine — or it'll get pissed and start attacking you — which, honestly, also fine. All you have to do is throw out one of your partner Pokémon, which is almost certainly going to be more than capable of handling things, since all of your Pokémon gain experience whenever you catch a Pokémon, and either give it a tap before trying to catch it again, or take it down.

It's really interesting to see the series put Pokédex completion — something I never did in previous entries — front and center, and completely change its tried-and-true formula in the process. Putting less emphasis on battling, something a lot of people (myself included) would have said was integral to an enjoyable Pokémon experience, and shifting its weight to its other foot, so to speak, has opened up a completely new mode of play, and a completely new way of looking at a very familiar world and imagining yourself inside it.

It's also relaxing as hell. And just as hard to stop playing as ever. My hat's off to Game Freak on this one. They really stuck the landing.

Mercedes F1 Team Posting Worrying Amount of "Baby Come Back" Lewis Hamilton Photos During Off-season

2022-02-01T16:00:00Z

It's been a good month and a half since last year's Formula 1 season came to a close in Abu Dhabi — with Max Verstappen snatching the title away from Lewis Hamilton in what will surely go down in history as one of the most controversial and divisive last laps of all time — and Lewis Hamilton is nowhere to be seen.

He's only appeared in the media twice since, to my knowledge: once at the Mercedes F1 factory for their end-of-season celebration, and once at Windsor Castle to accept a knighthood from the royals they still have over there for some reason.

He's also been uncharacteristically silent on social media. On Instagram, his erstwhile platform of choice, he unfollowed every account he had been following prior to the season ender, and his most recent post remains this one, posted just after Qualifying, prior to the final race.

All this quiet hasn't given the official Mercedes F1 Instagram Team much to work with, in terms of content to repost and repackage. So things have gotten weird.

Ever since the very visible start of Lewis' social media blackout, I've noticed the vibe of Mercedes' Instagram turning... how to put this... like the photos you'd see posted by your uncle of all the good times he's having with his wife who definitely hasn't divorced him?

Like the photos a friend might post of the girlfriend who is definitely real and dating him despite the fact that they're never in any of the photos together?

It's getting very weird, is what I'm saying, very Weekend at Bernie's. "Lewis? Oh yeah, he's right here, say something, Lewis!"

Here, I present a list of increasingly desperate Lewis-centric posts made between last season's final race and the present day:

DEC 12, 2021: It all starts with disbelief, and of course a Twitter cross-post.

DEC 17, 2021: This one is an actual image of Lewis taken around the time it was posted. Don't get used to that! In time, this post will seem sadder than it did at time of posting. He's here, he's home, he's alright. Don't worry.

DEC 20, 2021: A repost from whoever takes photos of these sorts of things. The BBC? The AP? The queen herself? Who could say. I should note that the Mercedes account's tone towards Lewis is always like this. Wife Guy vibes 24/7.

JAN 02, 2022: Okay here we go. Old shot of Lewis in his race suit from the 2021 season. Vague caption about the incredible things he's achieved. This is the Instagram equivalent of putting up a cardboard standee in your bedroom. And as of this post, we are also firmly in the realm of the media starting to openly speculate on whether Lewis will be returning next season. But all's well at Merc!

JAN 05, 2022: Believe it or not, this post actually follows a trend of somewhat creepy photoshop/illustrations of Lewis in absurd, time-travelly situations. Here, his childhood self looks to a photo of his future accomplishments. It's already starting to feel like Mercedes think if they just positive-post about Lewis enough, he'll come out of his cave.

JAN 07, 2022: His birthday has come and gone, and still no word. That's alright, Mercedes are here to remind us that not only is Lewis an incredible driver who has nearly accomplished the impossible, he is their incredible driver who has nearly accomplished the impossible. Can't wait for 2022! Right? Right?

JAN 07, 2022: This might be my favorite. Exemplifies exactly what I'm trying to get across here. It's a double post their second post of the day, old pic (of course), nothing in the pic has much to do with anything, and an absolute nothing of a caption. What can they say, really? Just thinking about... him 🤩

JAN 07, 2022: Okay. Third post of the day. I think in some ways they can be forgiven for that, it is the guy's birthday. What's great about it is that, again, with nothing to share from the man himself, it's just, "hey everyone, thanks for coming to Lewis' birthday party. Lewis isn't here yet, but in the meantime, why don't we all talk about our favorite memories of him! I'm sure he'll be here in no time!"

JAN 11, 2022: Still nothing from Lewis. Remember these helmets, though? Pretty cool! What's that? You'd like to know if he'll still be racing for us next year, or if the way the last lap safety car rules were applied in such an uneven and unprecedented way that his hard-fought commanding lead in the most important and exciting race of the season was made meaningless has disillusioned him such that he's lost all faith in the sport he loves and worked his entire life to reach, and the incredible things he's achieved within it?

...Did you see the helmets?

JAN 17, 2022: I'm crazy about this one. Old 2021 promotional pic. Just smoldering into the camera. No caption whatsoever. Just love this guy. Can't wait for him to call me back. Thinking of you, boo!

JAN 19, 2022: New genre of Lewis post just dropped! Picture taken months ago being used in conjunction with a present-tense caption addressing something completely unrelated.

Just so we're clear, it's not that I think something nefarious is going on here. Mostly, it's just wild that the function of the Mercedes F1 team's social media in the off-season is just to remind people that they exist. Though, this may be the most relatable thing about them.

JAN 21, 2022: Happy National Hugging Day, Team!! I guess!!

JAN 22, 2022: Which was your favorite Lewis Hamilton win of 2021? Was it the one that was arguably stolen from him at the last second for no good reason? We'd ask Lewis, but his voicemail is full!

JAN 24, 2022: A video this time! Looking back at the start of Mercedes' Lewis era. Convenient, as it only requires archival footage. What an era it's been! Will it, uh... will it continue?

JAN 24, 2022: There's only one Lewis Hamilton. We've tagged him so that he knows exactly how we feel about him. Will he see that tag? That's, uh, you know... We... Well... He's... What a guy!!

JAN 26, 2022: Alright, that's enough (Sidenote: this is the point at which we should've known Wordle was dead). This is the post that finally pushed me to collect all of these together and shout at no one in particular: THIS IS SAD! THIS IS SO PATHETIC!

Look, I get it. It's hard to be a social media manager. It must be unbearable to be the social media manager for a global sports brand. You have to post something to remind people you exist constantly. So when you've got nothing to work with, you post what you've got.

As for Lewis, again, I sympathize. If what happened to him in Abu Dhabi happened to me, I'd also want to go away and not be seen or talked to for a while. Hell, I don't know that I'd be so stoic about it! So I fully support the guy. Do what you've gotta do. It's gotta be weird to have the whole world looking at you all the time and hanging on your every word.

And to be perfectly clear — if I didn't make it obvious enough — I am a Lewis Hamilton fan. I was rooting for him last season, I think he was robbed, and I will root for him next season should he decide to return. I want to see him fight for and win that record eighth Driver's Championship title. I think he can still do it, he's possibly the greatest driver to ever live. I really hope he decides to keep driving.

And if he doesn't? Well. Mercedes better find a hit word game they can fit GEORGE into.

Every Video Game I Played in 2021

2022-01-20T16:00:00Z

Last year, I posted a list of "Games I have played in quarantine (so far)," which is cute, looking back and imagining a time when I thought the pandemic might someday end. I thought it might be fun to post one of these lists again, but this time in the context of a concrete time frame that makes any sense at all: a calendar year.

This is a comprehensive game of every game I played during the course of 2021, as kept in my trusty Hobonichi Techo, and in accordance with my short but strict Rules of Recording. A game gets recorded if it meets these criteria:

Has not been recorded this year, AND
- Is a new game I am starting fresh, OR
- Is an old game I have made progress in

Before we begin, a small key:
Games I completed in 2021 are bold.
Previously played games are italicized.

I played 87 video games in 2021. Here they all are.

The Crew 2
Lunar Knights
Super Mario 35
Teardown
Outer Wilds
Bit.Trip Runner
Stardew Valley
Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django
Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand
Hitman 2
Hitman 3
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Cyber Shadow
Picross S
Hades
Shin Bokura no Taiyō: Gyakushū no Sabata
Microsoft Tinker
Gravity Bone
Thirty Flights of Loving
Super Mario 3D World
Bowser's Fury
Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth
The Swindle
Hyper Light Drifter
Pyre
Valheim
Dragon's Dogma
Final Fantasy VII
Ring Fit Adventure
Stellaris
Later Alligator
F1 2020
Puzzle Bobble
No Man's Sky Expeditions
Fez
Control
Dishonored 2
The Sims 4
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution
Rocket League
Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle
Sonic Forces
Mario Golf: Super Rush
Sonic the Hedgehog
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Sonic Rush
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D
Sonic 3 & Knuckles
Mini Motorways
Megaman ZX
Megaman ZX Advent
Axiom Verge 2
Axiom Verge
Spelunky
Spelunky 2
Assetto Corsa
Metroid Fusion
Star Fox 2
Eastward
Invisible, Inc.
Book of Travels
Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower
Card of Darkness
Claphanz Golf
The Room 2
The Room
Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek
Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill
Metroid Dread
Nancy Drew: The Final Scene
Nancy Drew: The Scarlet Hand
Nancy Drew: Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake
The Big Con
Nancy Drew: The Haunted Carousel
Nancy Drew: Danger on Deception Island
Hypnospace Outlaw
Orwell
Return of the Obra Dinn
Nancy Drew: The Secret of Shadow Ranch
Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl
Duskers
Unpacking
Heat Signature
Inscryption
Animal Crossing New Horizons: Happy Home Paradise
Halo Infinite Multiplayer

I got a lot of good shots of Baby Mike photos while I was visiting my folks. Yes, I am going to milk them for all they're worth.

See you next year!

What Else is On? January 19th, 2022

2022-01-19T16:00:00Z

What Else is On? is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I've been enjoying.

READ: 20 Years Ago, Nintendo Had Plans To Bring Email, Internet Searching, And Live Streams To The Game Boy Color [Kotaku]
*It was called the PageBoy, and it looks incredible.
READ: A Poop Emoji NFT Shows That ‘Web3’ Is Actually Pretty Centralized [Motherboard]
*Another reason web3 hype and NFTs are bullshit.
WATCH: The Daily Solve [YouTube]
*Watching Chris Remo solve the NYT Crossword is both soothing and makes me feel like a simpleton.
PLAY: Wordle [powerlanguage.co.uk]
*Have you heard about Wordle? You must have. It's actually pretty fun!
LISTEN: WDCB Jazz 90.9fm [WDCB]
*Sometimes I listen to this Chicago jazz station, an old favorite of mine, just to get a taste of home, and it's a really good time.

Thanks for reading! Til next time 👋

Nostalgic for the Beginning

2022-01-17T16:00:00Z

Rolling over to the new year in 2022 meant reuniting with my girlfriend after traveling apart for the first time in two years, and then eventually both of us reuniting with our apartment and our normal life.

We moved in together last February, so this will technically be the first full year we live together. Going away and coming back to each other like this has me feeling nostalgic for those first days together. We'd already been living together for about a year at that point, but not at all in the same way.

She moved in with my sister and I at the start of the pandemic, at both my and my sister's invitation. Her living situation at that point was not great, and we agreed it would be better than her going back and forth between our place and hers during an uncertain time. It was hard, the three of us living together, but we got through it. And when we did, it really felt like starting fresh.

So I'm feeling nostalgic for that time, here at just about the one year anniversary. Those first few days and weeks were so much fun. Figuring out where furniture should go, figuring out our grocery list, what to cook, what to hang on the walls. The smell of wood from Ikea furniture, assembling a dresser, a nightstand, a kitchen island (our greatest purchase to date). Putting together our shared life, and then crashing on the couch with some YouTube or video games. Just pure domestic living. No worries. Like the world had given us a reprieve from having to be "productive citizens" for a bit. Like we didn't have to worry about finding work for a bit.

This isn't a melancholy nostalgia, or a "what I wouldn't give to have that back" sort of feeling. I'm so glad we got that special little bubble of time together. It's something we'll always have. Something I'll always cherish. I can't wait for what the next year of living together brings us. So far it's great, as it has been from the start.

Here's to that start.

A New Year

2022-01-10T16:00:00Z

It's so funny, the way turning the page of a calendar can mean anything. In the grand scheme of things, January 1st is just another step in the ceaseless march of time. And yet, the promise of a "new year" fills my heart and my brain with all sorts of new things I want to do. Makes me want to blog.

In 2022, I want to...

Buy a film camera and get into analog photography
Try once more to play the guitar
Get back to learning Japanese
Cut a new editing reel
Make more videos
Write more

I don't have any concrete systems in mind yet to keep me honest — which is fine, most of these are just for fun anyway. I just got back from a lengthy bout of holiday travel, so I'm not eager to thrust myself against any grindstones just yet. In fact, I'm planning to give myself the week to veg out, have fun, and not stick to any set schedule. Being unemployed has its perks.

In the case of writing more, specifically here on this blog, I — again — have no framework in mind, but I did really enjoy my time spent blogging every day at the start of 2021. I think trying to do that every day again would be biting off too much, especially with everything else I want to do, but maybe something along those lines. Maybe weekly?

Regardless of what I come up with, I'll try to write about it here. And hopefully all those other projects give me plenty to write about as well. And I'll try not to be too precious about any of it. Life's too short.

Especially when counted one New Year at a time.

Mike's 2021 Games of the Year

2021-12-31T16:00:00Z

Oh dang, dudes, they done did it again. Video games. They just keep on makin’ more, huh? And until I figure out how to break that witch’s curse, I’ll keep on playing ’em. I played a total of 87 games this year. Not finished, mind you, just played in some capacity, but that’s still a pretty good number, I think. It took a while to whittle down, as it always does, but I eventually landed on these ten games as my standouts from 2021. Not all of these were released in 2021, so bear that in mind. These are all games I played in 2021.

Incidentally, if find yourself missing the sound of my voice while reading these, I’ve also produced a 7-part video series this year, counting down from my Honorable Mentions right on down to my game of the year. Do check that out if you’re interested. It was a lot of work. I'll just embed it here.

Now then! Without further ado, I give you...

MIKE’S FAVORITE GAMES OF 2021

10. Hitman 3

IO Interactive’s follow-up to 2019’s excellent Hitman 2 ended up occupying a surprisingly marginal place in my mind between “great” and “just okay,” hence it’s spot at the bottom of this list. It hit a lot of the right notes, and carried a lot of momentum forward from the previous games in the trilogy, but it also took a gamble on some new mechanics and a sharper focus on story that, for me, fell a bit flat.

I went into the game with muted excitement. I loved IO’s previous 2 Hitman games, and had just finished Hitman 2 earlier that week, but had also read several reviews warning me of the things that I would eventually write into this GOTY roundup. The first of those things was a new digital camera item in Agent 47’s toolbelt. From the very first moments of Hitman 3‘s first mission, the game cries out to you, “Hey! Check out this camera item! Pretty cool, huh?” And while it’s neat to be able to use it to unlock some windows on a building in the moment, I was left feeling pretty lukewarm on the experience. Again and again, the game’s story missions remind you, Microsoft Clippy-like, that that fancy new camera of yours might just get you out of such-and-such jam. It’s a weirdly forced experience that runs completely counter to the previous games’ ethos of “use whatever you have however you want.”

Hitman 3 also featured a new focus on story, which also (to me) grated against the whole experience just a bit. While both Hitman and Hitman 2 hinted at story beats here and there, and featured lightly-animated cutscenes between missions, none of those games’ stories ever came at the expense of each level’s open, sandbox nature, which allowed you to assassinate targets in almost any way you could imagine. In contrast, and with the exception of a few more “classic” levels, Hitman 3 often felt as though it were on rails — a feeling that is made manifest in the final level, in which you are literally just walking through a train.

If it seems as though I’m only focusing on Hitman 3‘s negative aspects, I do so only because it’s so surprising that a game which should have represented a celebration of one of gaming’s most fun trilogies of the last five years fell so flat. I think IO got the better of itself in a few key areas that, while interesting and new, bogged down some of what makes their Hitman games so fun in the first place: a hands off approach, and a focus on the interactivity of its systems. I understand IO’s desire to finish the story they started injecting in the games back in 2016, and I truly like the characters they’ve written. I just feel like they painted themselves into a bit of a corner, as it all resulted in a game that felt shorter and emptier than its predecessors. It always feels like it’s about to get going. Then before you know it, you’re on that train.

I truly had a good time with Hitman 3. It’s still a solid entry in the series, if lacking some replayability for its forced story beats. It’s as fun as ever to traverse the game’s puzzle-box environments, which are also stunning to look at. A couple of stellar, standout maps keep the Hitman feeling alive (both China and Berlin come to mind). And from a certain point of view, it was nice to have a conclusion to the trilogy’s story, having played 1&2. IO have also continued updating the game and pumping in new content, none of which I have checked out yet. Maybe I should. I certainly wouldn’t mind another trip to the World of Assassination.

9. Mario Golf: Super Rush

From the outset, Mario Golf: Super Rush looks like a fun, bright, colorful golf outing, and in that respect, it truly gives what it promises. Here’s the important bit: the golf is good. It feels really good to swing a piece of… metal? wood? both? …at that little virtual ball, and hear that satisfying little thwack. And you might think well, there you are, job done, 10/10, perfect game. But. The problem with Mario Golf: Super Rush is that it doesn’t give you all that much… to do.

After this game’s announcement, a lot of people got really excited about the fact that it would purportedly contain some kind of campaign or story mode. Those people had all played the previous Game Boy Color or Game Boy Advance Mario Golf games, which had some kind of story or RPG mechanics. I never played those games myself, but I got excited because they got excited. Unfortunately, Mario Golf: Super Rush‘s story mode acts as little more than a tutorial for certain golfing mechanics. It’s very short, and even though it is, I never finished it. Because it’s boring.

Well, story mode is just one of many modes contained in this game, right? There must be more. The big draw of this game, of course, is Speed Golf. This is Super Rush, after all, so Speed Golf must inject some kind of excitement — fire — into into the experience of golf. Right?

I’m sorry, no, Speed Golf sucks.

In Speed Golf, you take a shot, your ball flies through the air, and then you take off running towards it. Your reward for this is that… you have run to it? I don’t know. For me, all this does is 1) Takes away the ability to see where your ball has landed, and consequently how your shot went, because it also removes the shot camera, and 2) You have to run after your ball! I’m playing a video game to not do that! And fair, this is a Mario game, there’s a little more going on here. There are Star Shots, and special dashes, and different ways that you can affect your opponent’s balls — blast them off the course, turn them into ice, etc. — but none of that does it for me. I don’t find that fun. I do not wish to inhabit the soul of the God of Tricks Loki himself and play little pranks on my golf friends. I just want to have a good time.

At this point, you might be wondering, “Mike, do you like this game? Why is this on your list?” Fair questions, which can be easily answered with the four simple words that can either mean prolonged life, or premature death, for any video game: It’s better with friends.

The highlights of my time with Mario Golf: Super Rush were easily the times that I was playing online, playing in the same room as my girlfriend, some of her friends, or best of all — and this is it, this is the reason why this game is on my list — when my friend Zac threw together some spreadsheets and put together an unofficial tournament for some of his friends.

One course, 18 holes, doesn’t matter how many people, Zac would set out a list of rules for what kind of clubs we could use, what kind of characters we could be, etc. We’d play through once per day, average out our scores, and at the end of the weekend, we would have a winner.

All of us playing, by the way, asynchronously. Not online together in one big party mode, all just on our own whenever we could. This should be in the game! Why is this not in the game? People have lives. I can’t always hop online for a four player, eight player, Party Time Jam Band™. Zac’s unofficial, slapdash, Google-Doc-spreadsheet-living tournament mode gave this game life for me. It was one of my favorite parts of the summer.

Eventually, as Zac stopped putting tournaments together, I stopped playing. I returned to it if, and only if, there was another tournament. There have been new characters added, and new maps updated, but I haven’t been back to check out most of that. I might, if I’m bored — I do have some plane rides coming up — but I also might not.

The golf feels good! I’m no golf game fanatic, but I’ve played my fair share of Kirby’s Dream Course in my time, and I can tell you that this is a very good-feeling golf game. So if you’re looking for a very good-feeling golf game, something you can play at a party with your friends, that everybody can get the hang of relatively quickly, Mario Golf: Super Rush is that game.

8. Ring Fit Adventure

I feel like everyone had their moment with Ring Fit last year, as the pandemic was still getting started and people were eager for a way to move around a little bit. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to try it last year due in part to supply issues. So this year, when a fresh batch of stock was available, my girlfriend and I, both starved for any kind of regular exercise, finally got a chance to try it out.

Much to our delight, it’s great! I had some misgivings about the blend of exercise with a cartoonish adventure, the worry being that it would come off a bit silly or maybe too childish. Happily, that is not the case! Every inch of this game is very much exercise and health focused, and that doesn’t get lost in translation when you also happen to be chasing down a big (buff) dragon. Any time the game asks you to do an exercise, it pops up a helpful little video showing you exactly how to do it, and do it right. These videos even pause the action if you’re in the middle of a battle to give you time to get things right. The adventure stuff is there to complement the workout, and the developers clearly recognized that learning the proper way to do a lunge is more important than gaining a level or defeating a monster.

Exercising with Ring Fit is novel at first — the game comes with a big plastic ring that you slot one of the joy-cons into, while the other gets strapped to your leg. You accomplish tasks in-game by running in place (detected by the joy-con strapped to your leg), and squeezing, stretching, and otherwise moving the ring around (detected by the ring joy-con). Luckily, the novelty fades away once you realize you’re in for an honest-to-goodness workout. My girlfriend and I stopped questioning the game’s methods pretty soon after we started playing. Suffice to say, we felt the burn.

Our time with Ring Fit Adventure lasted a good couple of months, and we really only stopped playing it daily when it got too hot in NYC to exercise, even with the AC blasting. I’ll never forget what a nice surprise this game was. It provided us with an effective workout routine that we wanted to come back to every day, and helped us learn how to exercise in a non-judgemental way. I know this is cliche, and I’m sure it’s exactly what Nintendo wants me to say, but it really did make working out fun.

7. Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Happy Home Paradise

Like it was for many people, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a big part of our 2020. I think we’ve played something like 400 hours at this point? Probably more. So when Nintendo revealed their Happy Home Paradise DLC, grabbing it was a no-brainer.

HHP puts you in the role of a “Paradise Planner.” Villagers hang out on the beach of an island resort, and you design vacation homes for them based on their loose specifications. One villager might want a cozy place to read a book. Another might want a place where they can DJ all night long. You pick out a home for them, and then get down to the meat of this DLC: designing the interior. And here’s where things get fun: upon entering the still-empty vacation home, you are presented with three items that fit the villager’s stated aesthetic. These are must-haves. Then, you’re given access to a list of other furniture that fits that aesthetic. And you get to just…place it. As much of it as you want, into infinity. Or at least until you hit the game’s item limit. If it sounds simple or obvious, that’s because it is.

These are not things you can do back on your home island in the base game. Back at home, you have to scrimp and save and toil away just to amass anything even remotely resembling an aesthetic. Almost two years in, my home still feels more like it’s inhabited by six different underpaid grad students than it does a home, much less an idealized, virtual one. Happy Home Paradise finally sets you free, within just the right set of constraints, to make what is unquestionably the best part of New Horizons — making perfect little dioramas — truly shine.

This perfect meeting point of freedom and constraint has already resulted in some of the coolest, most creative rooms I’ve ever bothered or wanted to bother to make in Animal Crossing. I made that little elephant a cozy place to read a book, I made that weird little penguin the perfect all-night rave house, and my girlfriend got so close to creating a perfect replica of Frasier’s apartment from Frasier that I can stand before you and swear on my life that I have seen the face of God. With Happy Home Paradise, Nintendo has proven that there is a mathematical formula for unlocking the creative potential of the mind, and they do know what it is.

By being forced to think differently about how to design a room, being constrained to what each villager wants in their house, but having my resources opened to infinity, I found myself effortlessly designing rooms I never would have designed for myself — either because it just wasn’t my taste or because I would never be able to find or buy all the items I want or need — and having a blast doing it.

6. Metroid Dread

It’s not every year that we get a new Metroid game to play with. Even less often do we get a proper entry in the mainline series — the last one being Metroid Fusion in 2002. So, with its official status as Metroid 5, and one half of the weight of the “metroidvania” genre upon its shoulders, Metroid Dread had some big shoes to fill. Luckily, Samus’ latest adventure in space fills those shoes with the accuracy of a Cinderella’s Foot.

Let’s get this stuff out of the way, Metroid Dread feels fantastic to play. Moving Samus around the world of ZDR is a fluid, dynamic love letter to the concept of “game feel.” Running, jumping, shooting, sliding, grabbing a ledge, turning on your heel to change directions, all of this is fast and buttery smooth. This is to say nothing of the joy of interacting with Samus’ further tools and upgrades as you discover them littered throughout the world. If you haven’t played a Metroid game since the SNES, you’re in for a real treat.

The story of Metroid Dread is perfectly passable. Honestly, in a game like this, I really don’t need too much narrative content as long as the mechanics are tight and fun to interact with. However, it was neat as a long-ish fan of the series, to see some more development of Samus and the galaxy she inhabits. The few interactions you have with your AI companion are sprinkled sparingly throughout, and not terribly long-winded, so the character doesn’t overstay their welcome. The majority of cutscenes I remember were wordless, often featuring Samus pulling off some badass finishing move after a boss encounter.

The world of Metroid Dread — we’re on the planet ZDR this time around — follows the conventions of previous Metroid worlds, and comes off feeling a bit disjointed for it. Progress is decently paced, and it’s actually pretty hard to get lost once you get into the swing of things, but I must admit to encountering a decent amount of frustration, particularly when returning to the game after time away, and a few instances of feeling entirely lost. By sticking to series conventions like elevators and trams that connect each area through lengthy loading screens, Dread ends up breaking its own momentum, and allowing a little too much room to forget what you’re doing and which way you should be going, especially on longer backtracking journeys. This is compounded by the unfortunate fact that a lot of the world just looks…the same. There were maybe one or two rooms where I thought, “oh wow, what a cool area,” but looking back, it’s a lot of stark metal hallways that give way to stark metal rooms.

It would’ve been cool to see Metroid Dread break away from its roots a little bit, and present a more open, continuous world, or perhaps introduce the ability to warp to different points on the map at will. There are a small number of “warp points” throughout ZDR that technically allow you to “teleport” across the world within the fiction of the game, but these amount to nothing more than glorified elevator rides, featuring loading screens of their own which entirely defeat the purpose. It’s also disappointing to see a series I remember having some truly memorable environmental art — and music, for that matter — be rendered so flatly on modern — if somewhat limited — hardware. It’s not that the game doesn’t look good, and it sounds just fine, it’s just that I don’t remember anything I saw, and none of its music is caught in my head.

Despite these (admittedly few) shortcomings, however, Metroid Dread came through as one of the best games I played this year, and one I’ll likely remember for years to come. This was my first time playing a new Metroid game at launch, which is arguably pretty special in itself. I cannot overstate how great this game feels to play, especially as you accrue more and more power-ups. It is an absolute pleasure to move about the world as a fully kitted-out Samus, and wipe the ever-loving floor with every alien you see. Honestly, talking about it here, and looking back on my time with it, I’d happily play Metroid Dread again! That’s not something I can say about every game on this list.

5. Unpacking

Unpacking is one of those unique games that is able to elevate a common, humble, human experience to its highest form, and provide that most special of experiences that only the medium of video games can. In so doing, the game is able to show us the life of another person — without ever showing the person themselves — so perfectly, through such a focused lens of shared experience, that we come to understand exactly the arc of their story.

Unpacking is a game about… well, it’s right there in the title. It’s a point and click game where you open up boxes, take out their contents, and place them in the environment. Most of us will move at least once in our lives. Many of us many more times than that. It really only takes one move to understand the unspoken language and ritual of putting everything in its place. After a handful of moves, you start to realize that someone could learn a lot about you by taking stock of when, and where, and how you’ve moved, but also the things you’ve taken with you, and the things you’ve left behind.

This is the conceit through which Unpacking operates. It all starts in a brightly colored bedroom, unpacking some art supplies, board games, and stuffed animals. Each level ends with a gold star once you’ve placed everything where it belongs, and we’re taken to the next era in the life of the game’s subject, some unnamed, unseen person, about which we will eventually know almost everything. The game won’t move on if something is a little too wrong, like a toaster in the bathroom, though you can turn this off if you just want to vibe or goof off.

I suppose if you were really trying, you could take each of these spaces on their own at face value, with no connection whatsoever, just to have a good time placing little objects in little drawers and cupboards. But that connective tissue is what makes Unpacking so special. The degree to which this game has hit upon the idea that continually unpacking a person’s life can convey not just simple facts like, “they are older now,” or “they like the color red,” but also accomplishments, mistakes, hopes, and dreams, made for a surprisingly moving (no pun intended) experience. The things we take with us, and the things we leave behind, and the things we don’t know that we have waiting for us, are all deeply personal. From start to finish, Unpacking subtly employs that very fact to great effect.

One of my favorite examples — spoilers for Unpacking here — is when you, the main character, this person whose things you’re unpacking, moves from college housing to what is clearly a romantic partner’s apartment. Previously, you’d been setting up a new place from scratch with only your own belongings to worry about. Here, the space you’re moving into is already inhabited. The challenge this time is not only finding a place for all of your things, but also working around everything they’ve already placed. You quickly find that not only are you not able to move their things to make a better space for both of you, but this person has not left you much space for your belongings in the first place. This leads to some pretty heartbreaking choices, like having to place your carefully framed diploma under the bed rather than display it proudly on the wall. In the following level, you’ve moved back into your childhood bedroom.

Every item and environment in Unpacking is rendered in exquisitely detailed pixel art. You’re able to spin items around to view them from multiple angles or place them just so, and everything seems to have just the right weight or chunkiness to it. Every stuffed animal looks huggable, every video game console sparks instant memories. Every animation, from the swing of a cabinet door to the roll of a drawer is smooth and satisfying. Clothing automatically folds and unfolds when being put in a drawer or hung in a closet, and rolled-up posters unfurl when being tacked to a wall. And each box you empty folds itself flat and disappears in a gratifying flourish.

What truly sells all of Unpacking‘s pleasingly convincing tactility, though, is its sound design. You might not notice it at first, and that would be the point, but spend enough time moving things from room to room and you’ll start to realize how many hundreds of hours must have gone into recording and getting each object and surface’s sound just right. Place a metal pan on a wooden floor, that’s one sound. Place a roll of toilet paper on a kitchen counter, that’s another sound. You get the idea. But what’s truly mind-boggling about Unpacking‘s sound design is that there are multiple sounds for every object and every surface depending on exactly where on that surface the object was placed. I saw one video going around Twitter of a player placing a can of air freshener on the lid of a toilet. The sound changed depending on what part of the toilet lid the can was placed on. Whoever did the incredible work of implementing all of that should be immediately given the Nobel Prize for Peace.

All of these elements come together beautifully in a game that, while only 3 or 4 hours long played right through, amount to something really special. I love that this game exists. And it’s one of my favorite games of the year.

4. Axiom Verge 2

Two metroidvanias enter, only one can win. And in a year where we actually got a brand new Metroid game, Axiom Verge 2 still comes out on top for me. Following up on 2015’s Axiom Verge with even more awe-inspiring pixel art, satisfying and inventive gameplay mechanics, and a whole new world to break wide open, Axiom Verge 2 came as a surprise release after being delayed twice, and a surprise favorite for me, after I fell off the first game all those years ago.

If you’ve never played or, like me, never finished the first Axiom Verge, worry not. Axiom Verge 2 is something of a prequel to the first game. I think? Honestly, it doesn’t matter. If there’s a story going on here, I truly could not explain it to you. There’s something about a lost research team and an ancient cataclysm. Basically just enough to make you go, “huh, okay,” in that way that makes it clear you’re actually thinking about what to make for dinner tomorrow night. And that’s fine! In my experience, you don’t come to an Axiom Verge game for the story. You do so because everything else is so incredibly tight and well designed.

The world of Axiom Verge 2 is constructed like one big puzzle that needs solving. The whole map is one open, continuous, 2D world, and you can run from end to end pretty early on if you like. But it won’t divulge all of its secrets quite as easily. Short cutscenes with major characters set objective markers on your map, giving you a loose direction to aim for, but progress is anything but linear, and the path forward is not always laid bare for you. Rather, Axiom Verge 2 simply says, “there’s a thing over here that you’ll need to get to in order to move the game forward,” and then sets you loose on the world to figure it out for yourself. This quickly gave me a real feeling of ownership and familiarity with the game’s world, as I combed its every nook and cranny. And it never felt boring, or like I was constantly butting up against dead ends, purely because there’s just so much to do and see across Axiom Verge 2‘s wide world.

Save points are peppered pretty generously throughout, which not only act as respawn points should you fall to one of the game’s weird robot monsters, but you can also instantly warp to any save point you’ve previously visited simply by selecting its icon on the map at any time. Therefore, even when you aren’t discovering hidden items and upgrades, exploration always feels like progress. Having one big open world rather than a more traditional Metroid-style world with sequestered areas connected by elevators and hallways (as was the case in the first Axiom Verge), plus the ability to fast travel at any time, made it so much more enjoyable to pick away at the game’s puzzle-box world. Whenever I had an inkling about a certain area, I could simply pop over, look around, and if I turned out to be wrong, I’d pop over to my next hunch. All of this paired with the ability to set custom markers on your map, plus the fact that the world map is set on a rigid grid of (x,y) coordinates, made for some of the best, most gratifying exploration I’ve yet experienced in a video game, and ensured that things didn’t grind to a halt in the endgame when you’ve see just about everything, but still need to find that last little piece.

The game’s myriad powers, items and upgrades are doled out at a solid clip that naturally coincides with new ways of traversing, exploring, and otherwise opening up the map, meaning you’re constantly having a-ha moments about how to get past that last obstacle you saw. At the same time, no one power-up ever felt like, “oh okay, I’ve got The Thing now, this world is mine.” Again, cracking this world open like an egg and drinking deep from its yolk is a singularly satisfying video game experience that is not to be missed.

Combat can be a bit of a slog, especially at first. The game starts you with only a pickaxe, meaning you’ll have to get up-close to fight any monsters you encounter. You’ll quickly realize that you’re better off avoiding bigger threats for a while and playing with your remote hacking mechanic to freeze foes in place or turn them into allies. If you do decide to play this game, and I obviously highly recommend that you do, just be aware that there’s a bit of a trial by fire that you need to push through at the beginning. Once you’re over that hump, you should feel right at home.

If you’re thinking about playing the first game before hopping into Axiom Verge 2, my recommendation is that you not do that. I went back and restarted Axiom Verge after finishing 2, and once again, I just couldn’t stick with it. Now, this could’ve been for a number of outside factors as well, and maybe one day I’ll finish it and change my tune. But I really feel like the sequel is where it’s at. You’re not missing anything by skipping ahead.

It’s hard to end this review because there’s just so much to gush over. Like when you first lose your body, and you get turned into a little bug drone thing, and you’re like ah man, I don’t want to be a little bug drone thing. But that little drone gets a grappling hook upgrade that feels better than anything else in the game up to that point, so by the time you get your body back, you’re like, no wait, I want to keep being the little bug drone! And then the game lets you be both!

Axiom Verge 2 pulled me in like almost no other game this year, and I was always excited to jump back in and play some more. It’s one of the very few games that I have ever 100% completed in both map exploration and item discovery. If I could wipe my mind and experience it again for the first time, I would.

3. Eastward

I remember seeing screenshots of Eastward on Tumblr in 2015. Images of decaying, intricately detailed cities rendered in some of the most gorgeous pixel art I’d ever seen. Game development takes a long time, though, and so in the intervening years, I forgot about it. Every once in a few years some new images or maybe eventually a trailer would pop up, and I’d briefly remember that I’m still waiting for this game. Until suddenly, like a firecracker in the night, like forgetting your own birthday, suddenly it’s there. Suddenly, I was able to slip into that beautiful world I’d first glimpsed six years ago. Time spent waiting for something can build up a lot of hype, which can lead to disappointment. I’ve experienced this many times with many games. But you know that’s not where we’re going, because we’ve reached the number three slot in my top ten games of 2021, and we’re talking about Eastward.

Let’s start at the start: this game is GORGEOUS. I haven’t seen a pixel art world crafted this lovingly…possibly ever. Paired together with some subtle lighting effects, every new space you enter is completely transportive. Forests are lush with bushes rustling, cities feel smoggy and alive with bustle. The only things better than Eastward‘s exterior environments are its interiors. Dank mines are dimly lit by rusty hanging lanterns, item shops glow brightly fluorescent, and at dusk, the sunset gleams through the window of an apartment living room such that I just… stood there for a while. It’s a feeling that hasn’t left me at any point while playing Eastward. This world is inviting, and warm, and cozy. It’s the kind of video game world that makes you want to take your shoes off and stay a while.

And while I had been primed to take in some stunning visuals upon glimpsing Eastward back 2015, I was woefully unprepared for its music. I won’t mince words. Eastward‘s soundtrack, composed by Joel Corelitz, is quite simply some of the best music I have ever heard in a video game. When you find out what my number two pick is, that’s really gonna mean something. It would be unfair to say that the game’s chiptune beats hearken back to your favorite action/adventure RPGs of yore, though any game playing in the pixel art/chiptune space must lean upon nostalgia in some capacity. To be asked to write music to pair with Eastward‘s sumptuous pixel art world is to be given an impossible task. It’s something I hadn’t given a second thought, and something that now, looking back, had I given it a second thought, would have seemed impossible. For Corelitz to deliver not only an album of exceptionally atmospheric, immersive, and grounding electronic chiptune music, but a soundtrack which blends so perfectly with its partner visuals as to be easily mistaken for twins born of the same womb is in a word: virtuosic. Perhaps that’s hindsight talking. But it’s really good music.

One of the areas in which I’ve actually managed to take umbrage with Eastward is its writing. A lot of people have criticized the game for being paced a bit more slowly than they expected, but personally I never felt that at all. However, Eastward is very clearly looking to imitate the SNES classic Earthbound in its writing, and that’s a tough act to follow. It’s hard to write a game that’s charmingly funny, and harder still to take a swing at the king. Eastward isn’t nearly as weird as Earthbound, at least not weird in the same way, not what I’ve played of it so far, but I can feel it trying to meet Earthbound‘s style of humor in places. A lot of the time, this manifests as what I suppose you would call “adult humor,” which just ends up feeling awkward and out of place. Luckily, the writing seems to more or less even out as the game progresses, and upon reaching the third major area, just past a very poorly written, and mercifully short, chapter spent in a village called Greenberg with a woman named Uva, it feels like it’s finally found its footing. Luckily, Eastward spends the majority of its time and words trying to be its own game, and is much better off for it.

When it isn’t wasting time trying harder than it ought to, Eastward has a pretty neat story and truly endearing characters. You play as both a man named John, and a little girl named Sam. According to the game’s intro cinematic, John found Sam floating in a mysterious tube in an abandoned laboratory, freed her, and took on the role of a kind of foster father. John is your typical silent video game protagonist, never saying a word on screen. Sam is energetic, mischievous, fun-loving, easily distracted, and probably the best-written child in a video game I’ve seen in a bit. The two of them live in a mining town underground, until Sam starts having dreams about the surface world. It’s clear from the outset that not everything is as it seems with Sam (remember how she was found in an abandoned lab?), though that has yet to be fully reckoned with in my playthrough. That storyline’s on a slow simmer. From there, it becomes a story about a growing group of adventurers riding the rails, and trying to outrun a dark cloud of death referred to as, “The Miasma,” which is understood to have more or less ended the world some time ago. I promise, it’s cozy.

In practice, you mostly control John while walking around towns and other peaceful areas, with Sam following in tow. Out in the game’s dungeons and other enemy-filled environs, you can choose to control the frying-pan-wielding John to engage in melee and other forms of traditional combat, or click a button to switch to Sam and use her latent magical abilities to freeze enemies in place and clear certain obstacles. Every so often, a dungeon will split the two along separate paths, with Sam clearing the way for John, and John clearing the way for Sam as you gradually shuffle them along towards a common goal. It’s a fun idea that mostly works out, but some of the combat is a touch clunky, which can result in some frustration. Most of the time, though, the game is so beautiful, its music so entrancing, and its animations — both the enemies’ and you own — are so smooth and fun to watch, that I simply do not see the clunk.

Eastward is a game I’ve been waiting for for a while, and that I never saw coming. Despite my few issues with its writing, it presents a truly fun, and seemingly quite beefy story about characters I’ve come to love. It manages to successfully blend a cozy, beautifully lit world, with a real sense of dread that everything you are enjoying could be wiped out at any second. I’ve made wallpapers of its art. I’ve thrown on its soundtrack while cooking dinner. Oh also, there’s an entire JRPG styled after Dragon Quest, called EarthBorn, inside the game. All the kids in every town rave about it, and you can play it wherever you find a glowing CRT television with a little console perched atop it. That’s wild!

I still haven’t finished Eastward. If I had to guess, I’d say I’m maybe a fourth of the way through? If this is how I feel after what is essentially an extended first impression, I can’t wait to see the impression it leaves me with when it’s over. In more ways than one, Eastward was worth the wait.

2. Final Fantasy VII

I have a confession to make. Prior to this year, I had never played any Final Fantasy game. I had written the whole series off at some point — I’d gotten the idea that they were long, dull, self-serious, and boring. And then early this year, after witnessing a year of hype over the Final Fantasy VII Remake, and in the interest of challenging beliefs that I hold for no discernible reason, I decided it was time.

I chose Final Fantasy VII partly because the remake sounds cool and seems like it does some genuinely interesting things, but also because ever since its original release in 1997, it has been — for a lot of people — the Final Fantasy game. The one of note. The one you should play. I wanted to know why. I picked up the game on Nintendo Switch, so I could play in bed — JRPGs are very good cozy time games. While perusing the Nintendo eShop page, I came across three interesting bullet points touting some “extra features” that had been added to the game: 3x speed mode, ability to turn battle encounters off, and battle enhancement mode. We’ll come back to those later.

For now, let’s cut right to the chase: why do people love Final Fantasy VII? People love Final Fantasy VII for its story. Final Fantasy VII is a globetrotting sci-fi fantasy epic about a group of eco-terrorists on the run from a corporation who owns a city that runs on the literal souls of the dead. Final Fantasy VII is a — conservatively — 50 to 60-hour HBO series about childhood sweethearts, climate change, corporate greed, war profiteering, betrayal, grief, self-realization, unethical resource extraction, what they mean when they tell you to never meet your heroes, and chocobo racing. To put it another way, it’s better than most seasons of TV.

Look, I’m not going to stand here and review Final Fantasy VII, a game that was released when I was four years old. What could I possibly say that hasn’t already been said by people who know much more? What I can do is tell you about my experience. And my experience of this game largely hinged on those three extra features I mentioned earlier. Seeing those three additions, and realizing what they would mean for my experience of this game, and by extension a series and genre I’d previously been unsure about, is what ultimately got me to click the “Buy” button.

I have another confession to make. I was lying when I said I’d never played any Final Fantasy game prior to this year, and when I said I held certain beliefs about Final Fantasy games for “no discernible reason.” Some time back in middle school or junior high, I don’t remember, I found out about emulators. Having been an indoor kid who followed video game news online, I knew about Final Fantasy, despite never having played the games. So one of the first games I loaded up in my shiny new Snes9x executable was Final Fantasy IV.

Final Fantasy IV starts, if I’m remembering correctly, with a lengthy cutscene aboard an airship. And so the very first emotion I experienced while playing a Final Fantasy game was boredom. By the time I arrived on a screen with which I could actually interact, I felt lost. When I hit my first monster encounter, I watched a pretty cool JPEG of a monster appear onscreen, and then tried to fumble my way through a series of menus I didn’t understand to try and make a battle happen. It’s so interesting to me now, recounting all of this, because by this time in my life, I had definitely played and enjoyed a Pokémon game. What was it that was so different? Anyway, that’s why I thought I didn’t like Final Fantasy games. I’m sorry for the obfuscation, but sometimes you gotta get from A to B.

It’s important that I explain that, because with that as my only prior experience with Final Fantasy — outside of watching one waste 7 goddamn hours of any number of GDQs — the prospect of speeding up the game and avoiding random encounters seemed like direct answers to my specific problems with Final Fantasy specifically and JRPGs in general.

So let’s run through those three options I mentioned and talk about why they’re great. First, the ability to speed up the game by 3x. At the press of a button, the game enters a kind of fast forward mode, and everything from animations to cutscenes to dialog speeds way up. This is great because sometimes things take a long time in RPGs. Sometimes the world map is really big and you don’t remember what that one town looks like. Rather than waste 25 minutes literally walking all over the planet trying to find it, or look up a walkthrough while trying not to spoil the story, I can click a button and turn into The Flash for a little bit.

Next, the ability to turn off random encounters. A lot of classic JRPGs feature random battle encounters, where you’ll be walking along, and suddenly, bang, you’re attacked. The idea being that, in-game, you ran into a monster or group of monsters. This gets old really fast for me. Especially if I’m lost, or even if I’m just trying to enjoy and stay in the game. By the time I’ve hit my third or fourth low-level monster in the space of 30-seconds, I’m about done. Being able to turn these off and on at will saved me a lot of grief.

And finally, “battle enhancement mode.” In my head, I always called this turning on “beef mode,” because it beefs up all of your characters in battle. What this means in practice in this game, is that everyone in your party has health and mana that recharges the instant they use any, and their Limit Break gauges fill every turn, allowing them to continually use their most powerful attacks.

Now, some folks might argue these options break the game or some kind of special holistic experience, and first of all shut up. But second of all, it actually feels like some great care and thought went into the design and inclusion of these options. For starters, the beef mode is limited in a few key ways, including that your health only refills after you lose it, meaning that if you’re dealt a one-hit killing blow, you’re still dead, and you don’t auto-revive. Your attacks don’t do 9999 damage, and you don’t magically avoid every attack levied against you. So you can’t just turn on beef mode and sprint to the end of the game, you still need to level yourself up along the curve the game intends. And while the ability to turn off random encounters saves you from having to fight the same level 1 rat or whatever 600 times, you cannot avoid any battles required to advance the story. So again, no beating the game at level 1.

You might think that this would all still leave you weirdly under-leveled or force you to grind a bunch. But again, I did not find that to be the case. The fact is, with all three of these options at my disposal, I really only chose to turn off random encounters in a handful of situations, like if I died before making it to a save point and had to run back through the area I’d just completed. In most cases, and especially once I was very familiar with battle strategy, I was content to simply turn on 3x speed mode, and burn through whatever little battles I had to. Or, if I was particularly bored, turn on both 3x speed mode and beef mode, and just get through it. The music that plays after a winning a battle is certainly worth hearing a few hundred times.

And here’s where we get to the bottom line. In the end, I found that I didn’t want or need to use these options most of the time, because Final Fantasy VII is a damn good game that’s really well designed. I’d still lobby for random encounters to be turned way the hell down, but regardless, Final Fantasy VII is just really fun. It turns out that the mechanics are really interesting and fun to pick at, and it’s fun to build up your squad with new items and abilities. A battle encounter can feel cinematic and weighty or it can feel like solving a puzzle or it can feel great when you absolutely crush a low level monster. It CAN feel like a slog, yes, but it often doesn’t. Final Fantasy VII pulls enough of its weight to make you not feel that way.

Also all of the music kicks complete ass. All of the characters are my children and I would die for them. And the story is so engrossing and well written. More than once, and this is coming from someone who previously derided Final Fantasy games, more than once this game made me gasp alound, or well up with actual tears.

My conclusion is this: I am not one of those people who devours 60-hour RPGs one after another. Maybe I am now, I don’t know. But if you, like me, have been keeping yourself from experiencing JRPGs — or anything in your life — because you assumed you wouldn’t like it, or that it wasn’t for you, or that you were above it: Take a risk, take a chance, make a change. And play Final Fantasy VII. It’s transcendent. And it’s my second-favorite thing I played in 2021.

1. Inscryption

Thank god for Inscryption. If it weren’t for this game, my GOTY list would’ve been so much harder to put in order. It didn’t take long for this game to rocket to the top of this list, and put all things in perspective for me. Inscryption is a game that knows itself so well it’s intimidating, it’s a masterclass in itself. Inscryption‘s developers’ understanding of competitive card games and card game mechanics is so complete as to dwarf my own understanding of almost anything by comparison. It’s terrifying, but it makes for a damn good game.

Look, Inscryption is hard to talk about if you’re trying to avoid spoilers, because there’s just so much going on in this game. If you want to avoid spoilers and play the game for yourself, which I absolutely think you should do, here’s my quick pitch:

You awaken in a dimly lit cabin, sitting at an old wooden table. Across from you, a pair of glowing eyes slowly opens. You’re dealt a hand of cards and made to play a game. You flip between one-on-one card battles, á la Magic: The Gathering, and moving a small wood carving along a crude map, as you progress through your captor’s game world. You can get up from the table and look around the cabin if you like, but you cannot leave. There are strange objects littered about — some that seem like puzzles, and some you don’t quite understand yet. Are you really trapped here? And are “you” even who you think you are?

If that’s enough for you, by all means, switch this video off now and play the game for yourself. You’re in for a ride. If you don’t care, or if you’ve seen it all for yourself, let’s talk about Inscryption.

SPOILERS AHOY

I so deeply respect when a game development team can portray its game as one thing in all of its marketing materials, all the while hiding the fact that the “game” everyone thinks they’re playing is but one of many, and that they aren’t merely playing a game, but bearing witness to an entire meta-narrative hidden within. Inscryption isn’t just an exceptional roguelike deckbuilder played in an immersive horror setting. It’s the answer to the question, “what if Frog Fractions wanted to kill you?”

The cabin section, or part one, is a perfectly paced, slow burn introduction to both the card game you’re playing, and the game of Inscryption itself. Failure is expected and intended here, with new rules and mechanics — and characters — being introduced after each death. Inscryption waits so long to drop its roguelike deckbuilder act, by which time you’ve already come to suspect that something is up. By then, the game has drawn you in so masterfully that only a true cynic’s desiccated corpse could resist the urge to press on.

The card game itself is beautifully designed — both visually and mechanically — with card values and abilities that are easy to grok, and tantalizing new deck-building possibilities between each match. The game and its story unfurl each other continuously, slowly picking away at the game’s veneer without ever tipping its hand (pun very much intended) as to what lies beyond. The cabin section is expertly constructed as such an all-encompassing prison, its climax and denouement are such satisfying payoffs in themselves, that while you have probably guessed by that point that there is more to the video game Inscryption that awaits you, you will likely be unprepared for the fact that not only is the video game Inscryption a video game inside the video game Inscryption, but also that you have only been playing with the tip of the card game Inscryption‘s iceberg.

Upon entering the 2D, pixel art version of Inscryption, you find that the card game you’d been playing in the cabin is only a small slice of the true Inscryption, and the full card game is at least four times bigger than you thought it was. The deck and rules that you’d bee playing with, revolving around beasts, blood, and bones, is one of four different flavors of cards available in the full Inscryption, alongside robots, zombies, and wizards. Robot cards require battery power to play, and can be powered up with electrical conduits, zombies generate bones when they die, allowing you to play more powerful zombies, and wizards rely on the presence of “Mox” cards on the board for their power, and in some cases to be summoned at all. And you aren’t limited to playing with only one pure set of these four, you can mix and match all you like, and you’re better off if you do. And every set’s mechanics gel with each other! Because the game is built on a solid foundation of attack power, health, and abilities, you can throw just about anything on top of that and still have an exceptional, easily understood card game. By the time you complete the 2D pixel art section and Inscryption reveals a third new version of the game, this time with robotic Scrybe P03 in charge, you’ve pretty well got your sea legs under you.

Inscryption is always doing something, whether that’s introducing a whole new mechanic for you to learn, or opening up yet another whole new video game for you to play through. The same goes for its characters. Inscryption introduces you to a handful of characters, with the Scrybes being the ones you’ll interact with the most. The Scrybes are the main characters of each deck, for lack of a better description. There’s Leshy, the one you play against in the cabin, who plays with beast cards, Grimora, who plays with zombies, Magnificus, who plays with wizards, and P03, who plays with robots (and is one himself). Each of them has their own special boss gimmicks — just as each of Leshy’s characters (the prospector, the angler, the trapper) has theirs in the cabin section — and each of them is also standing in for a different type of game developer, or tabletop GM, or one of the many types of specialized people who need to work together to make a video game. Leshy’s section is oozing with drama, embellishment, and immersive character work. Story is very important to Leshy. He’s a narrative designer. On the other hand, P03 fumbles over descriptions and seems to be making up character motivations for his bosses on the fly. He’s a pure mechanics guy. He’s also that guy in the card shop who calls out everyone’s misplays even though he keeps losing.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to spend much one-on-one time with either Magnificus or Grimora. Based on what we see in parts two and three, we might reasonably predict that this cycle would continue, with us resetting the game to 2D world, and another of the Scrybes taking over and GM-ing us through a new adventure. However, as we’ve also seen, Inscryption is not interested in being predictable, and the game chooses not to overstay its welcome rather than stretch things out beyond its third act, but this is a smart choice. The game’s fast-paced finale, a whirlwind of what could have been, hits you with a series of “holy shit” moments, and when the dust settles, I can almost guarantee you’ll be tempted to go back in.

There is so much more to Inscryption than I’ve mentioned — plenty that I’ve left out intentionally, and even more that I simply don’t know! I definitely didn’t see everything there is to see in this game. Don’t ask me how I know. Luckily, in the post-game, Inscryption makes one final design choice that arguably a lot of games could stand to adopt, and makes it easy for you to jump back in at different points in the story to keep hunting for more information, or just to play more of that goddamn good card game.

Honorable Mentions:

Book of Travels
Really gorgeous and calming take on an MMO from a team that knows how to set a vibe. Can’t wait to see more of this.

Sonic Forces
Fun, colorful joyride. Character creation is a fun addition, clothing options rule. Some of the same problems as all other 3D Sonic games.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D
I get why it’s a classic. 3D remake looks pretty, nice to play handheld.

Mini Motorways
Another beautifully minimal puzzler. Hooked me in ways Mini Metro didn’t. I love to watch the little cars go.

Bowser’s Fury
Great add-on to an already terrific game. Loved bouncing from biome to biome, riding on my dinosaur friend. Big Bowser Kaiju Battle is a good premise for a game.

Later Alligator
Delightful point & click adventure with gorgeous art & animation, hilarious writing, and boppin’ jams. Please play this game and please be nice to Pat.

The Swindle
Cool heist premise, great art, satisfying to grok, some issues with controls/hitboxes.

Sonic Rush
Just an outstanding 2D Sonic. Bangin’ tunes.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution
Solid Yu-Gi-Oh! game if you want to relive some nostalgia. None of the predatory mechanics from its mobile predecessors.

Duskers
Solid sci-fi, space, hacking, rouguelike game. Impeccable aesthetics. Can’t wait to explore this one more.

Orwell
Cool point & click narrative game, interesting gameplay, good writing. Want to check out the sequel!

Control
Incredible X-Files-esque supernatural horror sci-fi. Impeccable vibes. Superb cinematic storytelling. In love with the FMV. Wish I’d given it more time.

Games I Missed:

Loop Hero
Death’s Door
Sable
Toem
Steel Assault
Beast Breaker
BoomerangX
Garden Story
Griftlands
Unsighted
Solar Ash
Midnight Protocol
JETT: The Far Shore
Chicory: A Colorful Tale
Wildermyth
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

Alright, that does it for me! Woof. I’ve typed out enough already, so from here I’ll just say thanks for reading, and have a great 2022!

I Should Not Buy This Jacket

2021-10-27T16:00:00Z

I'm a 20-something, male-presenting American who loves video games. And I sure dress like it. Every morning, I grab a graphic tee from my t-shirt drawer and construct the day's uniform. I'm basically a cartoon character, wearing the same combination of articles over and over because it's just easier (and cheaper) to draw me that way. This has probably been true of me since... oh god, middle school? Maybe middle school.

Except, very recently, like within the last five years, I've started to discover that - get this - other clothes can look good on me. Not only that, but dressing like someone who is not perpetually 13 years old feels nice! Somewhere in your twenties, you start seeing clothes differently. You'll be out at a store, and something inside of you will say, "huh. That looks nice." You try it on, and it does look nice, on you, and you look nice in it. And from there, the hunt is on. And you may even develop...a Look.

Yes, yours truly has fully embraced fashion, in the way a 20-something, male-presenting American who loves video games does: by wearing some Other Things... Sometimes.

So this jacket.

In 2019, video game development studio ZA/UM released its smash hit RPG, Disco Elysium. It made the rounds through the games media, racking up top marks, eliciting lots of words, and taking home lots of awards. It even won game of the year at Geoff Keighley's The Game Awards, which I found surprising since it seemed like such a weird, niche game, and The Game Awards are the closest thing video game culture has to being "normie." I thought to myself, "I should play that!"

Smash cut to 2021. I'm sitting on the couch eating breakfast with my girlfriend, both of us scrolling Twitter. A photo crosses my timeline. I can no longer find the tweet containing the photo that first announced to me the existence of this jacket. So instead, here's another photo of it on the model from the Atelier ZA/UM website:

A flurry of thoughts and feelings flooded my brain. "Oh shit," I thought, "that's a nice jacket. That's a really nice jacket. And I think it's my style. And I think it might look good on me?"

That's when I knew I was in trouble.

As I found out from the next fifteen intense minutes of googling, the jacket was part of a limited run release of replica clothing from the 2019 game Disco Elysium by studio ZA/UM. The orange version that I continually find myself lusting over (they also sell one in black) is apparently something called "Kim's Aerostatic Pilot Jacket." I have no idea what that means because - and here we go - I still have not played Disco Elysium.

Aside from that one very big and very obvious reason not to buy this jacket, even though it looks very nice and would probably look very nice on me and you know what fuck the idea that I need to know what this jacket even means in the context of the game it's just a really nice piece of clothing...

If you check the store's listing, you'll find - well, actually you won't find the price on the store because it's always out of stock. They put them up in batches of like 15 every once in a while, maybe something like twice a year, so you'll never see the price on the site itself, you have to google around for that information as well. But if you do said googling around, you will eventually find that the asking price for this beautiful jacket is 400EUR. The conversion rate from Euros to US Dollars puts the price (at time of publication) around $464.43 American. That's a lot of scratch. That's not even including tax and shipping. That's going to be a $500 jacket at the very least. I can't buy a $500 jacket. It costs $500.

Fucking look at it.

But of course it does. Each one is individually hand sewn by literally a single seamstress in Estonia. By all accounts, she does incredible work. I hope she's living extraordinarily well. Look at how thick and soft the ribbing on the neck, sleeves, and waist looks. Look at the stitching on the interior of the jacket, in that gorgeous navy blue color that perfectly complements the orange.

Via u/post-buttwave on Reddit

These aren't even featured on the store website itself, I had to go to Reddit for these, but look at the attention paid to in-game details in the white patches that reveal some kind of logo and a map of the game world under light. Having played the game or not, I can appreciate me some attention to detail.

But no. I should not buy this jacket. I am unemployed and living in Brooklyn, NY. I need that money for rent and food and clothes with pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog on them. I can't wear this expensive, high-class jacket that costs more than a month of groceries. It comes from a store that uses the word 'atelier' for Christ's sake.

How could I ever walk out of my house wearing that jacket and not either feel like or become the world's biggest asshole? What would I do if it got dirty? What if the second I stroll out of my apartment building with my brand new $500 video game jacket, a pigeon shits itself to death right on top of me, right there on the sidewalk? What then?

Would I feel anything other than a sense that I'd gotten exactly what I deserved? Would that only be because I grew up in an Irish/Italian Catholic family? Would I have to spend the next eight to ten months of my life picking up the pieces of the person I thought I used to be? Or would I just get it dry cleaned?

Worse than any of that, I can't try the thing on, what if I got the wrong size? What if it didn't fit quite right? What if I just didn't like it? What if I never wore it, and it forever hung in my closet, doing nothing but having cost $500.

What if I finally play the game and I don't like it? Or worse, what if I think it's just fine? What if I specifically hate the character who wears this jacket (doesn't seem likely, a lot of people online seem to love him)? What if I got the jacket having never played the game, and then someone on the street recognized what I was wearing and started talking to me about how great this game I have never played is?

No. This is about more - much more - than not being able to afford the jacket. I am not ready for a jacket of this magnitude. Maybe one day I will be. And maybe they'll still be making it then. But until that day, I should not buy this jacket.

Well, Well, Well...

2021-10-22T16:00:00Z

Put your grubby hands back in the ground, Big F.

Over a year after announcing their acquisition of GIF-making-and-hosting site Giphy, Facebook has been slapped with a $70 million fine in relation to an ongoing investigation by UK regulators.

It seems that back in August, the country's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an antitrust probe into the tech giant's ongoing acquisition. It subsequently issued something called an initial enforcement order (IEO), which would freeze Facebook's Giphy integration in place, essentially forcing them to continue operating as separate entities as though they were not becoming one, until the investigation could be completed.

Well, surprising absolutely no one, Facebook fucked up. Apparently, the company was supposed to update the CMA on the ways it was complying with their IEO. Guess they didn't do that! The CMA is accusing Facebook of, “consciously refusing to report all the required information.” Thus, the $70M fine. The CMA's investigation is ongoing.

Now, granted, $70M is not a lot of money for Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg loses that much whenever he sweats. Unrelated question: can robots sweat yet? Someone ask Boston Dynamics for me. Still, it's always nice to see big corporations slapped with fines of any size. It just feels good. Do you think it's actually embarrassing for them? Or is having to pay for illegally dodging government investigations just considered part of the cost of business at this point?

In any case, I'm holding out hope that something actually happens with this Giphy case. They're the one big repository of GIFs - at least that I'm aware of - on the web, and it would be a shame to see them swallowed up. We're long overdue for a win in the antitrust column, and Facebook certainly hasn't been making many friends in the last... when's the last time anyone liked Facebook?

If the UK can make this thing happen, even I'll stand up and say thank you. The US congress previously expressed its own displeasure with the acquisition, but god knows they aren't getting anything done this decade.

Blogger v. WordPress

2021-10-18T16:00:00Z

When I’m working on a project, I tend to get stuck in the weeds of what might outwardly seem like some pretty inconsequential decisions. Should I post vlogs on my main channel, or start a new one? Should I post this thing to Patreon? Which theme should my blog have?

The answers to these questions elude me endlessly. I usually just end up chasing what feels right, until it doesn’t. Which is fine, you might think. None of these decisions matter all that much. I’m not the president of a country deciding whether to launch an arsenal of nukes, after all. But it is annoying!

As you might imagine, keeping a blog has been no exception. The main question I keep hemming and hawing over has been: Blogger or WordPress? I’ve used each at various points in this blog’s life, and I still haven’t come down firmly on one side or the other.

And so I’m using the medium itself to play out this continuing argument, in the hopes that maybe by posting it to the internet I’ll finally get somewhere.

Option 1: Blogger

The service I'm currently using, at time of publication. It's been around forever. Or at least since 1999. Here are some reasons I do and do not want to keep using it:

Pros:

Entirely free
- You don't have to pay a single red cent for any bit of Blogger's functionality. Granted, there isn't much, but that could also be a draw. There isn't too much going on here, and you get it all for free.
Able to use own domain without paying
- I wanted to call this out specifically because it's probably the main sticking point that has kept me from moving to WordPress. If I already own and pay for a domain, why should I have to pay another fee to connect that domain to my website?
Antiquated design
- Yes, this is a pro for me. When you build a blog on Blogger, it looks like a blog. You are instantly transported back to the heyday of RSS feeds and blogrolls and not being able to check your email on the toilet. Part of me loves that.
Barebones, simple
- Blogger doesn't have a lot of menus to dig through or extra services to offer. It's there to get out of your way and put words on the internet.

Cons:

Antiquated design
- Alright, so... while the retro aesthetic of Blogger appeals to me most of the time, it can also be kind of messy and hard to navigate. And even harder to build new functionality into. When you step into Blogger's time machine, you're greeted by the beauty of the web in 2003, but you're also constrained by its capabilities at the time.
Editor is kind of a pain in the ass
- Yeah, about those constraints. They really hit you where it hurts. When you're evaluating blogging platforms, having "I hate the thing you use to write blog posts" on the list might make it an obvious choice for a lot of people. It's hard to look away from this one, seeing as it's the main way you interface with the service.
- Text editing is wonky, sometimes line spacing doesn't turn out looking the way you'd expect, and embedding videos and images can be fiddly, too. It's a shame, but this is probably the biggest area where Blogger shows its age and limitations.
Limited theme and layout options
- This is tough to ding the platform for, because if you're just looking to make a blog-ass-blog, they've got you covered. But the number of ways you can edit and manipulate those themes and layouts is really limited. If you have a specific vision for your blog in your head, it can be difficult to achieve it with Blogger's library of themes and tools without some level of compromise.
- While it's true that there are still some third-party sources for Blogger themes, they're becoming fewer and farther between, and are also free much less often.
Difficult to tune without knowledge of HTML/CSS
- Of course, if you know some HTML and CSS, you might be okay. I, however, do not! I know the limited amount of HTML code that I think every Very Online person born before 1995 probably knows, but it's certainly not enough to bend a blogging platform to my will. If you want something centered and bold, though, I'm your guy.
Owned by Google
- It might seem silly, but this is a big one for me, for a lot of reasons, not all of them political. There's no avoiding the fact that Google is one of the world's biggest megacorps, and while that's definitely enough to give someone like me pause about using their service (especially such a clearly outdated one), there are reasons beyond their constant union busting and monopolizing of various web infrastructure that make this a con.
- Firstly, Google has endless resources, yet Blogger still looks and feels the way it does in 2021. That kinda shuts down any hope for some quality-of-life updates.
- And second, you might think, "well, since Google has more money than god, there's no reason they'd ever shut down a tiny service like Blogger, especially when they clearly don't devote many resources to it." Well. Maybe. But Google is also Google. Their track record for shutting down services out of the blue, beloved or no, speaks for itself.
- Not to mention the fact that when using a Google product, especially a free one, I cannot guarantee that my privacy or the privacy of my readers is being respected, or if I even own the things I'm publishing at the end of the day. That's a pretty high price to pay for aesthetics.
Lack of support
- So yes, those retro aesthetics I so love, while both beautiful and messy, are unfortunately also representative of the fact that Blogger just kind of stopped dead at some point, and it's pretty clear that it won't be updated or meaningfully supported anytime soon.
- This extends to updates to the way the service works and feels, and also the human element of supporting folks who have questions or issues they need addressed. Every time I've waded into the Blogger help forums, it's largely been a slog through post after post of someone asking a question, a reply asking for more info from them, followed by the post being locked and archived, meaning no one can ever respond. This is true of posts from mere months ago! To me, that says that if you choose to use Blogger, you're on your own.

Option 2: WordPress

Alright, who's our other contender? No spring chicken itself, WordPress has been around since 2003 and is seen as a cornerstone of the web, and the go-to for most people starting a blog or website. Its name is basically synonymous with blogging, even today. Here are my pros and cons:

Pros:

Plethora of themes
- There are a LOT of different WordPress themes at this point. They add more every year, and I think they've kept all or most of their old ones as well. Just a wealth of options, really.
Extremely customizable
- On top of having a lot of themes, each of them is really easy to customize to different needs. Do you want a sidebar? Great. You don't? Done. Should featured images show on every page? How about in a list? We don't have the specific block you're looking for? Here's a block that just straight up accepts HTML, make whatever you want. It's kinda great.
- There are still some restrictions, it's not like you're molding the very HTML of every site theme to your every specific need, but it offers more options than Blogger for sure.
Independently owned by Automattic, still owned by original founder
- Now this is great. WordPress was founded by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little in 2003. In 2005, Mullenweg founded parent company Automattic to encompass WordPress and other projects. And the story ends there.
- Automattic is still here. It's not secretly owned by Facebook or some other giant entity. The original founder is still here. That's all good for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being stability. It also speaks to the fact that WordPress has kind of just...been WordPress this whole time. They're just making a really solid blogging and site-building platform.
- They're not trying to deliver internet via balloons, they're not destroying democracy around the world, they're just making WordPress.
Lots of modern and antiquated style options
- Speaking of having themes galore, WordPress has me pretty much covered whether I still want to evoke those retro-blogging styles or update things to look a little more modern.
- Since they've kept all the old themes they've offered along the way, I'm able to create a blog that would look right at home on a tangerine iBook if that's how I'm feeling.
Currently developed/supported and frequently updated
- Hey here's a novel idea: a platform that's actively developed and supported by its creator! Wild stuff from WordPress here.
Open source, 5 star privacy rating from the EFF, supports positive causes
- Alright. Yeah. Automattic kinda seems like a great internet citizen. Companies are not moral, and are not people, but compared to Google...
- WordPress was actively against SOPA in the good ol' SOPA days (so was Google, to be fair), they've gotten a 5-star privacy rating from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, something Google will NEVER be able to claim, and the WordPress platform is open source. It was founded that way, and it's stayed that way all this time.
- Developing open source software means that anyone can dive into the code and use it to create their own thing if they want. By developing open source, you're not just enriching yourself with your own work, you're enriching the wider web community as well. That wins big points with me.

Cons:

Some features behind paywall
- WordPress offers some features (both ones that Blogger does and does not offer) exclusively to its paid tiers. Things like Google Analytics (see? you can't escape them!), site monetization, advanced video options, installing custom themes and plugins, and removing WordPress branding can cost anywhere from $4 to $45 per month.
- However, I don't really need or care about any of the more expensive features, it's understandable that more premium features would cost something, and in some ways it can be seen as a positive thing that WordPress serves things up in this way, allowing them to put more resources into supporting and improving the site as a whole.
- Do I sense the scales tipping?
Unable to use custom domain without paying for a higher tier
- This was the main reason beyond aesthetics that I switched back to Blogger. It just seems so weird and arbitrary that I should have to pay to use a domain that I already own and pay for!

So there you have it. The main crux out of all of these is, for me, the competing points of cost vs ownership. On one hand, Blogger is entirely free, up to the point of letting me use my own domain without having to pay for the privilege, whereas WordPress requires me to pay $50 a year in order to connect a domain, even one I already own. However, on the other hand, Blogger is owned by Google, one of the biggest tech behemoths in the world. One who has an unquestionable monopoly over the online ad market, owns a LOT of the big important internet things (YouTube, GMail, etc), is one half of the global smartphone duopoly, and makes frequent flubs in the areas of privacy, labor, and other social advocacy.

Automattic is a company that specializes in little sites that keep the internet free and vibrant. They make WordPress, the notes app Simplenote, and in recent years they’ve acquired Tumblr and even Pocket Casts, my favorite podcast app, and I truly feel like they're all in good hands. They seem like the better company, and while they would charge for a blog with a custom domain, you get what you pay for. In this era of internet history, that’s becoming more and more clear.

Well, dear reader, I think that settles it. I think in carrying out this little experiment in "blogging it out," so to speak, I've actually come to a decision. It's going to require an XML file and a good chunk of my time this week.

Blogger has that 2003 aesthetic that I love, and that was perfectly suited to The Go To Hell Space and quickly setting up a blog in the early 2020 pandemic era. But that just doesn't quite fit the ethos of Dream Avenue. And I can't in good conscience continue my blogging journey on the wrong side of the above pros & cons list any longer.

This will be my last post on Blogger. Hopefully you will not experience too much of an interruption in your ability to follow/read this blog. I'll do my best to avoid that. However, I'm confident that the blogging experience on WordPress will be better for both of us.

And who knows! Maybe the math in my brain will work out differently, and I'll be back in another year! What on earth is wrong with me.

Thanks for reading! Onward!

Book of Travels: Early Impressions

2021-10-12T16:00:00Z

Have you fallen out of love with MMOs in the past few years? Do you tire of the fetch quests, the stats, the buffs, the nerfs, and the busy UI? Do you perhaps tire of...all the other players? The folks at Swedish developer Might and Delight have been hard at work on those problems for more than two years now, and they think they've come up with something special.

Their answer to modern MMO malaise is Book of Travels, what M&D has taken to calling a TMORPG (Tiny Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game), and which - after a very successful Kickstarter campaign in the fall of 2019 - releases in Early Access today on Steam. I've been playing a very early, pre-Early Access version for the past week or so, and I've got some thoughts to share about the experience.

Full disclosure, the version of the game I've been playing was open only to people who'd backed the game on Kickstarter (which I did not), or made a late pledge on Backerkit (which I did).

Some of the most beautiful art I've ever seen in a game.

First thing's first: Book of Travels is gorgeous. Every piece of concept art has always oozed a particular, painterly charm, like you're looking through your best friend's sketchbook, and this style and beauty extends to the game as well. The painted world of the game's starting area, Braided Shore, stretches out around you in rich, vivid color, rippling and pulsing and moving as you do. Foreground elements seamlessly fade in and out as you walk in front of and behind them, revealing and obscuring the path beyond. It looks and feels as if your character is walking through a painting that's still being painted. It's a strong first impression that immediately places you in the mindset that Book of Travels is unlike any MMO you've ever set foot in before.

Talking of first impressions, BoT's character creation process is equally as striking and unique as what lays beyond. Rather than deeply customizing a digital avatar that changes on screen as you choose their physical characteristics, the game has you choose from a set of hand-crafted "Forms," which are not entirely analogous to classes in common MMO parlance, but do determine some mechanical traits that affect how your character engages with the world.

The Mosswalker, one of many possible character "Forms."

It's difficult to compare Book of Travels' character creation process to existing MMOs at all, because it's actually much closer to the experience you might have crafting an avatar in a tabletop RPG. This is because, unlike most MMOs, the process Might and Delight have set up eschews sliders and stat allocation in favor of free text fields and a limited palette of arcane choices whose effect on your character may not be immediately apparent. To put it another way: it's not about math, it's about the vibes.

In fact, that could easily be Book of Travels' back-of-box slogan. When Might and Delight set out to create their new game, a focus on vibes was the order of the day. Part of their initial Kickstarter description reads, "There is no overarching goal, no real beginning or end, and ultimately you are in charge of shaping your own journey." In this regard, M&D have hit the nail right on the head.

Contributing greatly to the game's impeccable vibes is the soundtrack. From the moment you hit the login screen, the music of Braided Shore beckons you to become lost inside its magical world. Not having a musical background myself, I feel somewhat ill equipped to describe what I'm hearing, but it sounds to me somewhat Middle Eastern, somewhat medieval in its inspiration. The result is at once an inspiring call to adventure, a serene invitation to nap beneath a tree, and a haunting ballad that will stay with you long after your first play session.

The world of Book of Travels, while currently limited due to its Early Access status, feels rich, if not entirely full (just yet). There are farmers tending fields, dockhands unloading trade shipments, and the requisite cast of merchants in each town you'll visit. But there are also lost cartographers, old men decrying the folly of today's youth, traveling mystics, lost languages, abandoned shrines, machines that may no longer be understood, and deeper in the woods, something darker. All of this works together wonderfully towards making the world of Braided Shore feel like a land with history. You've showed up very much in the middle of something, as any traveler might expect they would.

The current world map, with lands yet to come shrouded in darkness.

While the world's vibes are - like those of the game as a whole - extremely good, I must confess to a feeling that there isn't too terribly much to do just yet. Having said this, it's important to note that the game moves at a purposefully slow pace, I've only played about ten hours total so far, and some of my progress through the world has been hindered by the usual bugs that one should expect when playing a game in such an early phase of development. It's completely possible there is much more waiting for me just past the next town, but for now, in terms of content at least, the game still feels early.

Book of Travels' gameplay and UI, however, are a masterclass in simplicity, and I'd be more than happy if what we see of it today is the final version. It functions very much like a classic point-and-click adventure game. You point your mouse and left-click to walk, or right-click to run to your chosen spot. If you click on an interactive object, you'll interact with it. If you click on a person, you'll see options to talk to them, and if possible, trade with them. This simple mode of gameplay takes things pretty far. It turns out you don't need a high APM to be able to do some fun and interesting things in an online RPG. For instance, I've already traded for several different types of cheese, acquired a sweet purple shirt, completed some tasks for busy townsfolk, and learned to both read and fish!

Book of Travels' UI is a breath of fresh air.

The UI is similarly elegant. You don't have six different inscrutable hotkey bars, no guild menu, nowhere to purchase in-game currency, and no chat windows providing a constant, scrolling wall of racial slurs. In fact, in what might be their greatest innovation in the MMO space, Might and Delight have decided not to include any chat functionality whatsoever. Instead, should you happen upon another player (this is intended to be something that happens once in a great while), you have a number of emoji-like pictograms that you can use to try and communicate with those around you. The pictograms range from simple waves hello or goodbye, to different emotions, to simple references to things you might see in the world, like trains or boats.

For me, this lack of direct communication is the crux upon which Book of Travels achieves its core mission: to create a serene online RPG. You can play with others if you wish, and there are even certain tasks, called Endeavors, that you will often need other players to help you complete. But ultimately, Book of Travels is billed as a game of solitude. This is your story, your journey, your world to explore and to make something of your time within it. It's a game for looking inward as much as outward, if not more.

Two travelers meet in the woods and exchange a friendly wave.

Maybe you'll meet another person. Maybe you'll be able to communicate and connect. Maybe you'll work together to do something interesting or even transcendent. But at the end of the day, you'll go your separate ways, no doubt both still thinking about the time you met. And if you don't part ways, if you decide instead to travel together, then what a special connection you will have made.

In making Book of Travels an online game where other players are rare, a Tiny Multiplayer Online RPG, Might and Delight seeks to turn the very thing that makes an MMO an MMO - something we've all come to take for granted - into something once more novel, respectful, and cooperative. A nicer way of interacting with strangers online. They just may have succeeded. I can't wait to see how their next chapters unfold.

Book of Travels is available in Early Access on Steam for both PC and Mac.

Revisiting Mike's Big Juicy Summer Backlog

2021-10-02T16:00:00Z

Summer is finally dead. New York's string of 80-degree highs has broken. A thick blanket of clouds envelopes the sky. It is a time for sweaters and soup, mugs of tea and apple cider, warmth and coziness.

Fall is here, beckoning the world toward its yearly reverie. A chance to slow down, to contemplate. And as I do, I can't help but feel like I'm forgetting something. Like there was something I was supposed to do...

Oh. Right. My Big Juicy Summer Backlog. That list of games I was supposed to focus on all through the summer.

Well. Let's, uh... check in on how that went.

1. Rocket League (Switch)

I want to say I played maybe a dozen matches total. Maybe less. I think I fell off of this game in less than a week. Sorry, Rocket League! I guess this is a lesson to myself not to buy into a game purely for a Formula 1 tie-in.

2. XCOM 2 (Switch)

In my original post, I wrote that the Switch version of XCOM 2 was, "just convenient enough, and not quite shitty enough, to keep me playing." I'm here today to tell you that actually I'm an idiot because for all its portability, playing XCOM 2 on the Switch just sucks complete ass. I simply don't enjoy it. It's so slow. The only reason I stuck with it for so long is because I was chasing the way I thought this game should feel on the Switch. It does not feel that way. It sucks complete ass. And that is a shame. But I do not think I will be playing it on this console any time soon, if ever again.

3. Risk of Rain 2 (PC + Switch)

I was kind of expecting to play this a bunch with my friend Zac, as we'd played back to back weeks in the past. But then we both got busy and stopped playing video games together for a while! Oops! We just played this together for the first time since probably the beginning of summer just last week, and quickly switched over to Spelunky 2. So. Yeah. We still love RoR2, just haven't been feeling it. We've unlocked about everything there is to unlock, so not much left to do right now anyway.

4. Control (PC)

Okay, this one is a genuine shame. For a while, I was putting this one up on the TV after dinner and playing through it with my girlfriend (she wanted to watch the story), and then we sort of fell into other things. We started and finished all of Adventure Time, then got into Cowboy Bebop, then Evangelion. It's been a real ride. We should get back into Control, though. Or I should, at least. Would be a good spooky fall time.

5. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (PC)

I tried. I tried with this, I tried with Dishonored 2, I tried with Prey. It's just not where I was at. I wanted to say that I'm just not feeling immersive sims right now, but I think what it actually is — and this is truly the case for all of these PC games that I did not play — I just got really sick of sitting at my desk all the time. My desk is now where I do all of my work all day, and I'd just rather not come back here after dinner most nights if I can help it. And I can help it. So I did.

6. Prey (PC)

Again, I tried.

7. Nier: Automata (PC)

I briefly picked this game back up after being away for 2? 3? years. I quickly realized that I might just want to start over because I don't really know what's going on anymore. Then I realized the PC version of this game is kind of janky. Then I realized Square is working on a fix for its jank. So I decided to wait for that fix to come in and maybe start over then. And that's where we are.

8. No Man's Sky Expeditions (PC)

Alright. Finally, I can claim a victory on one of these. If you know me, you know this was the one game I was actually going to play. I'm currently in an "off again" period of my "on again, off again" cycle with this game, but back in the dead of summer, I did hop in and play through an entire expedition. Hello Games and BioWare worked together to put the Normandy from Mass Effect in the game as a reward for completing an expedition, so they forced my hand, really. It was...fine.

I should really recount my time with that particular expedition at length some time, but suffice to say, it was a pretty uneven experience, and it's probably the reason I'm off of NMS again for the time being. But I'll be back. They've since added customizable towns and the ability to ride big flying creatures. I'll be back.

9. Halo 3 & ODST (PC)

Boy. I simply did not play a lick of either of these games. I still haven't finished Halo 3, so I know I haven't touched ODST. And Steam says I haven't fired up the Master Chief Collection whatsoever since September of 2020. So there you go.

10. Pyre (PC)

I played a tiny bit more? I just really keep bouncing off of Pyre's late game. Or what I'm interpreting as the late game. I should push through, I just haven't. It's also one of those that I started in solitude at my PC during lockdown, so I don't really want to put it on the TV, and if I don't want to be at my desk all night...

11. Teardown (PC)

Another casualty of the great Desk Aversion. Not sure if gamepad controls have been added at this point, but it was still mouse & keyboard when I last played, so couch play is a no-go.

12. Star Wars Battlefront II (PC)

Lol, I played like two afternoons of matches and then peaced out. It's fine, and sometimes it's a vibe, but for the most part, it's just not the OG BF2, and I'm just not 12 anymore.

So there you have it! Largely a failure, you might say. But really, they're just video games. If I didn't feel like playing them, I didn't feel like playing them. Maybe one day I'll get back to Prey and the gang, but I'd rather I didn't force myself back to my desk every night just to fulfill some arbitrary goal. Would that really be the best way to enjoy those games?

In any case, I still had a fun summer staying inside as much as possible and playing video games. In fact, let's talk through what I did actually manage to play. Let's call it...

Mike's Real, Actual Summer Game Time (True)

1. Sonic Forces (Switch)

This game went on sale for like, five or ten bucks, and I couldn't pass it up. I'm so glad I didn't because I honestly had a blast with it. I am very publicly a Sonic Game Defender, and I'll absolutely go to bat for this game as well. It's burdened with a lot of the usual jank that most modern Sonic games tend to have, but despite that, it's still an exceedingly enjoyable One Of Those. The custom character stuff is actually pretty fun, and the best part — the part that no one told me about — is that you unlock new fashions for your OC at the end of every level and they all kick ass. 10/10

2. Mario Golf: Super Rush (Switch)

The new Mario Golf came barreling down the release pipeline like a freshly loosed cannonball and completely blindsided me. It's a pretty good time! There isn't too terribly much to do with it after making your way through the main mode and unlocking each of the game's courses, so it didn't totally swallow my whole life.

The best time I've had with it, though, are the little week-long tournaments my friend Zac has put together with a group of fellow Golf Heads. If you've got a group to play with, or compete against, this game becomes a gift that keeps on giving.

3. Sonic the Hedgehog 1, 2, 3 & Knuckles (Genesis)

At some point during the summer, I decided I wanted to start streaming my way through almost all of the Sonic the Hedgehog series. At least the mainline platformers. So I started doing that! I streamed my way through Sonics 1, 2, and 3 & Knuckles over on my Twitch channel. It was a good time! I had never beaten Sonic 3, and now I have! You can watch through the archives of those streams over on YouTube.

4. Sonic Rush (DS)

I really got hit with some kind of Sonic Fever at some point, which led me to buy used copies of Sonic Rush, Sonic Rush: Adventure, and Sonic Colors for the Nintendo DS from Gamestop. So now I have those. Sonic Rush is a good time! A really solid, classic platformer akin to the equally-excellent Sonic Advance series. I've almost finished the Sonic story, and I'm a good way through Blaze's story as well. I'm really looking forward to finishing that at some point and moving on to Sonic Rush: Adventure, which looks to be bigger and better, with 100% more adventure.

5. Zelda: Ocarina of Time (3DS)

I grabbed this on my 3DS sometime last year, and fell off just before the adult fire temple. That is, the fire temple you go to when Link is an adult. Because there's time travel in this game. Not that there is like an 18+ fire temple where the fire gives you a lap dance or whatever. Is that still a thing? I have never been to a strip club. Anyway, I finally beat this game for the first time in my life! It's very good!

6. Megaman ZX (Switch)

I had an extremely good time playing through what is probably one of my favorite games in this series, if not of my entire childhood. The Megaman Zero/ZX Legacy Collection does a great job of preserving the original, with plenty of nice little add-ons, like a full music player, different display options, a concept art gallery, and a bunch of different accessibility and gameplay modifiers. Great job, Capcom. I love this game.

7. Axiom Verge 2 (Switch)

This one came out of nowhere. It was one of those "and it's available...right now" moments of a Nintendo Indie Direct, which was a big surprise! I remember liking what little I played of the first one a few years back, so I grabbed it an mainlined it for a whole week. It's such a tight, satisfying little Metroid-like. Lots of combat and movement options that gradually open the world up to you in a way that just feels really good. Really exploration-heavy. Great music. I loved it.

8. Spelunky 1 & 2 (Switch)

And then. Finally. The holy grail. I have been waiting for the Spelunkies (but especially Spelunky 2) to come to Switch since I fell in love with 2 last summer. Spelunky 2 dominated a period of my 2020 so completely that anytime I hear the music of the game's first area, I begin to crave Peanut M&Ms. Don't ask.

Well, happily, I got to fall in love all over again on Switch. Spelunky is such a perfect fit for the Switch. It's the perfect game to pick up, play a run, die, and come back to later. I understand this is what made it such a big hit on something called a "Vita," whatever that is.

9. Metroid Fusion (GBA)

At the very end of summer, I finally completed a project I've been wanting to see through since, you guessed it, the summer of 2020. I built a little DIY gadget called a MintyPi, which is essentially a Raspberry Pi computer glued into an Altoids tin, with a bunch of bits and bobs stuck on that turn it into a little emulator-running Game Boy. I have a long list of GBA games that I've always wanted to play, and with Metroid Dread right around the corner, Fusion made it to the top of that list.

10. Eastward (Switch)

Eastward. Eastward, oh, Eastward. I've been following this game since before I moved out of my parents' house. Since I was still in college. A very long time. It finally got a release date this year, and very shortly after, actually released. It's here, it's real. And I'm really loving it. I'll have more to say soon, maybe before I finish it, because I have some thoughts. But right now, overall, I really love it. It's nice, it's cozy, and it's gorgeous. And I'm going to enjoy sinking all the way into it as we roll into fall.

This concludes our look back at Mike's Big Juicy Summer Backlog. A backlog that was not to be. One that may be completed someday, but this summer was not that day. Maybe one day when I'm not at my computer from morning to night, one day when I'm regularly leaving my house, I'll feel like getting back to all those delicious immersive sims.

But hopefully before that. Because let's be honest. I mean. Right? Come on. Like. Come on.

Welcome to Dream Avenue

2021-09-26T16:00:00Z

Hello there! It's been some time. Or maybe it's been no time at all. Time moves differently here on Dream Avenue.

You may remember this place under its previous name, The Go To Hell Space. That was a fun time, and a fun blog, but all things must eventually change.

Or maybe you don't remember this at all, and know me only as a video guy. Well:

I started blogging here during the initial 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. I wrote about anything that suited my fancy, from pizza to weather to Formula 1, and also - largely - video games.

Fun, spooky premises aside, it really has been a while since I last blogged here. My life has gotten both calmer and busier in 2021. I've been sinking into a nice little routine, and even getting some work here and there.

Recently, I started thinking about this blog again, and I decided that while I mostly liked what it was, it was time for a change. Here's why.

Blogging through lockdown taught me that I still really enjoy writing as much as I did in college, and while I may not ever write professionally, or have my work published anywhere of note, or even want any of that, there's still something here for me. It's a skill I'd like to continue to hone.

Furthermore, ever since I graduated college, a frighteningly long time ago, I've wanted to try and get better at something I consume constantly and really respect: media criticism.

I've always wanted to be able to quickly and cleanly organize my thoughts on a piece of media, and pull upon my academic background in order to ultimately have Something To Say about the games I play and movies I watch.

I'm also a video editor by trade, and I've been wanting to break into the world of video essays for a while now. This blog dovetails nicely with that, in that video essays are really just written essays that give you something to look at while listening. Writing more here will help me hone two skills at once.

However! Dream Avenue will not only be a space for video game writing and other media criticism and analysis. I also want to keep some of what made the previous iterations of this blog special. This is still my personal blog, after all, and if I want to write about pizza or the weather or whatever brand-spanking-new virus variant is wiping us all out, I'm going to do that.

So, to make a long story short, Dream Avenue is a fresh coat of paint on an old friend. It's the same old blog it used to be, just standing a little taller. And it's also a promise to myself, to try and keep improving some of the skills I'd like to be able to call upon to make better and better things.

I hope that sounds fun to you! And if not, who knows? You may be surprised.

If you're curious, you can learn a little more about where the name 'Dream Avenue' comes from and why I chose it on the new About page.

See you around the Avenue,

Mike

For My Friend Sonic, On His 30th Birthday

2021-06-24T16:00:00Z

I still remember the night we were gifted an old Sega Genesis in the late 90s by our neighbors who had just bought their kids an N64. It came with one game: Sonic the Hedgehog. It was the first video game I played at home on a console.

I remember playing those first three acts of Green Hill Zone endlessly until I understood how this thing worked, always getting stuck at the first boss battle, with Dr. Robotnik swinging that checkerboard ball back and forth. I remember getting home from school one day and one of my older sister's friends revealing that the secret was to hit Robotnik eight times.

Sonic is the game I was playing the first time an older family member asked me, "are you winning?"

Sonic the Hedgehog taught me video games.

I devoured the subsequent Sonics 2 and 3, asking my parents to rent them endlessly from the local Hollywood Video until they finally bought them for me when the store no longer wanted to stock Genesis games.

My friends and I played pretend Sonic on the playground in grammar school, making up our own characters, powers, storylines, and membership cards.

In middle school, an older cousin-in-law gave me their old Sega Dreamcast. It came with a handful of sports games. I mowed the lawn until I could go out and buy Sonic Adventure 2 from Game Crazy.

I'm two years younger than my little blue friend. I've seen him at his best, his worst, through everyone thinking he's a joke, through a rebound.

As an adult, I love Sonic not just because of all these memories, or the special place he holds as more or less the first video game I ever played. It's all of that and the fact that...well... he's the underdog. His games are weird. The Nintendo v. Sega mascot war didn't break his way. He's not as instantly and unquestionably beloved as Mario or Link or even Crash Bandicoot. Conversations about Sonic always come tinged with irony or sarcasm or caveats. It's important to me, for a lot of reasons, to love Sonic for who he is, despite the modern games' tendency towards jank, both perceived and actual.

Sega and Sonic may have lost out to Nintendo and Mario in some ways, but Sonic is still hugely popular. And as the perceived "second fiddle" to Mario, he can do much more interesting things than Mario can. People don't have the same expectations for Sonic games that they do for Mario.

Sonic has been in a band, he's been to space, he's fought genetic copies of himself, he's skated around a military base while listening to ska. He's a freedom fighter who loves chili dogs a lot and loves his friends more.

But I also unironically love Sonic for the same reason a lot of people are embarrassed by him: he always earnestly says what he believes, and always believes in the cheesy things like his friends and the power of goodness over evil. Sonic is always 100% no thoughts, head empty, running headlong into danger for what he believes in, for better or for worse.

Sonic isn't just about going fast, it's about what it feels like to go fast. It's freedom. It's truth. It's self-acceptance. It's unconditional love for yourself and those around you.

Sega could've changed Sonic any number of ways over the years. They have made minor changes to his look here and there, and he's certainly been in as wide a variety of games as Mario, but he's still Sonic. Sega could've rebranded, updated Sonic, made him edgier, but they didn't. They couldn't (That's why they made Shadow). Through a million and one different scenarios, planets, bad guys, good guys, whatever, Sonic is still just rolling around at the speed of sound all, "whoa-oh Eggman! Chili dogs!"

Sonic doesn't show off, doesn't criticize, he's just living by his own feelings. He won't give in, won't compromise, cuz he only has a steadfast heart of gold.

Sonic the Hedgehog is an invitation to look deep inside yourself, reckon with what you see, what others might not want to see, what might be embarrassing, and embrace it anyway.

At the end of the day, every time I look at him, calling back to me from those first video game memories, Sonic's message is this:

Open your heart, it's gonna be alright.

Panzer Paladin's True Retro Cred Lies in a Soundtrack That Never Gets Old

2021-06-17T16:00:00Z

Almost exactly one year ago, in the (literal) heat of the pandemic, one of my favorite indie game studios, Tribute Games, released their latest project: Panzer Paladin. The game is modeled after classic platformers like MegaMan, with an 8-bit graphical style to match. It was one of my favorite games of the year, despite not quite making my GOTY list.

Although, looking back with the wisdom of another year under my belt, maybe that was an oversight...

This morning, I opened up the Bandcamp app to check out their new update that lets you listen to your collection offline. Staring back at me from the top row of my library of albums was the soundtrack to Panzer Paladin. While I remember liking that game a lot, what I remember even more is that the soundtrack absolutely slaps. Hard.

This has been the case for most of Tribute's games, with recurring composer Patrice Bourgeault putting in some seriously heavy lifting in each release. With Panzer Paladin, it feels like his work has reached entirely new heights, and not just because almost every single track is a stone cold bop.

To me, the mark of good video game music is repeatability. I know this sounds foolish at first blush; all good music is repeatable. But video game music has something working against it that most music does not, which is of course the fact that you might die while playing the video game and have to start your current level - and therefore that level's music - over again.

If a video game's music is in any way still bearable after repeat deaths, that's a solid soundtrack. The fact that almost all of Panzer Paladin's level music still gets my head bopping after the fourth or fifth or sixth death, and in so doing relieves any frustration I might be feeling toward the game itself (or more accurately, my ability to play said game), is a towering achievement worthy of Sonic-The-Hedgehog-like levels of praise. And there are plenty of Sonic tracks that get old faster than I'd like.

When I went back and hit play on the Panzer Paladin soundtrack this morning, not only did I not want to stop listening even as it clashed with the music from the game of Animal Crossing New Horizons I had playing in the background (I am in fact still listening to it even as I write this post several hours later), but I was also hit with a wave of nostalgia not dissimilar to that which I feel from the classic game soundtracks of my childhood - Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, etc - for a game I played last year. And I didn't even play it for that long! I beat the game, yes, and got the "good ending" to boot, but it's a short game!

I knew that I loved this soundtrack at the time, hence my Bandcamp purchase, but the fact that these tunes are able to elicit such a response from deep in my soul, and actually make me want to revisit and maybe even replay the game to which they are attached says a lot. It legitimately made me rethink the way I feel about this game, and where I ranked it in my GOTY list last year.

I should mention, none of this is to diminish the other facets of the game in any way. Rather, the music pairs so perfectly with everything else going on - the tight platforming, the strong visual style, the extremely cool weapon system - wraps it all up in a beautiful bow, and takes it to a level it could not achieve on its own. A level of love and nostalgia befitting its retro style and inspiration.

This soundtrack owns. Looking back, I think it might even elevate Panzer Paladin to True Classic status in my mind. Maybe I'm wrong. But I'm really feeling like I missed a beat last year by not heaping upon this game the praise it is owed. Take a listen to this music and decide for yourself (and maybe buy it on Bandcamp while you're deciding):

(Personal faves: Tanzania, Scotland, Canals, Sky Gates)

Panzer Paladin (Original Game Soundtrack) by Patrice Bourgeault

Other titles for this post:
"Revisiting Panzer Paladin's Banging Soundtrack a Year Later"
"Oh No I Think I Loved Panzer Paladin and I Missed Out on Its Physical Edition"

Sonic 3 is Finally Getting a Modern Re-release

2021-06-03T16:00:00Z

Last week, Sega put out a whole big video presentation that they called "Sonic Central," showcasing all the various Sonic media being released this year and next for the best blue boy's 30th birthday celebration.

It was cute! And there were some solid announcements. Chief among them, that Sonic 3 will actually see the light of day again after a long absence from digital store shelves, as part of Sonic Origins, a new collection of classic Sonic games coming to modern platforms in 2022.

Yeah. You read that right. This is not just another bland return to the zones of Green Hill and Chemical Plant. Sonic 3 is in this thing. That's a big deal. And Sega clearly knows and is acknowledging that this is a big deal. Just look at that design. Sonic 3 is front and center, big and bold, loud and proud. And sure, this is also just the order in which these classics were released, but all design has meaning!

Sonic 3 hasn't been released (or re-released, if you prefer) on any platform since 2011. It was brought to the Sega Saturn in 1997 as part of Sonic Jam, as well as the PC in the Sonic & Knuckles Collection. It came to the GameCube in 2002, the PS2, Xbox, and Windows again in 2004, Wii Virtual Console in 2007, Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2009, DS in 2010, and Steam in 2011. And then...nothing.

Certified Y2K ready!

I longed to play the big 3 on my 3DS back in the day. I've longed to play it on my Switch ever since Sega started releasing old games under the SEGA AGES banner. But still there was silence. It was even missing from Sega's Genesis Mini. Their own dang hardware!

Ten years is a long time to go without the best game in any series. So why the holdup? Well, there's been no official word from top brass, of course, but according to a number of anecdotes from folks close to the situation, it has a lot to do with Michael Jackson. Or at least his estate.

Jackson not-so-famously worked on the soundtrack to Sonic 3, an arrangement that sort of fell apart after Jackson was reportedly unsatisfied with the way his music sounded on the Genesis. And then some other things happened with Mr. Jackson also. He is not listed in the game's credits.

Apparently though, and I obviously do not and will likely never know the score here, licensing of the game's music is what has prevented it from reappearing at various points throughout the past few decades.

In 2014, after working on ports of Sonic 1 & 2 for Android and iOS, some of the folks who would go on to make Sonic Mania proposed a port of Sonic 3. Sega did not move forward with the project, leading one of the developers involved to speculate that legal issues regarding the game's music were to blame.

And providing probably the clearest idea of the truth we'll get, in 2018, following the announcement of the Sega Genesis Mini, Polygon asked AtGames, the company working on the console with Sega, whether Sonic 3 would be included. According to Polygon, "AtGames replied that it wouldn’t be included because it 'has license issues with the music.'” Seems pretty cut and dry!

It remains to be seen whether Sega has indeed cleared whatever legal hurdles stood in its way and this incarnation of the blue blur's third adventure will be released in its full glory once more, or whether they've decided to sidestep the issue altogether and replace the tracks in question, as they did for the initial PC port in 1997. Though, I can't imagine they'd go the replacement route, since fans have been clamoring for a new port for round about a decade now, and this is the hedgehog's big 3-0. That would be pretty disappointing.

In any case, I'm thrilled to see that my personal favorite entry in the Sonic series will finally be making a comeback. I can't wait to get my hands on it once more, if only to play hours and hours of that damn "Collect the Spheres" bonus game. That thing is the devil, and I am easily tempted.

Good riddance, laundry tub

2021-05-27T16:00:00Z

At the start of quarantine, there was a lot of uncertainty as to just how long this thing would last. Perhaps that was naivete. No yeah, that was definitely naivete. But see, I own a lot of t-shirts. You know what, we'll get to that...

When everything locked down back in March and April of 2020, we lost a lot of things, everything changed, yadda yadda yadda. Possibly the most impactful loss of this nature for us was an easy way to wash our clothes. See, our apartment does not have a laundry machine on the premises. Not in our unit, and not in our building. So we, like many other people in this city, rely on a laundromat for this task.

Being suddenly unable to go out and sit inside a place for an hour or more meant that we had to seek alternatives. And in this living situation, the only alternative available to us is, well...see Figure A.

But see, I own a LOT of t-shirts. So there was a time, way, way back at the start of all of this, when I thought just maybe, I might be able to work my way through every last shirt I own, like Donkey Kong swinging from vine to vine above a swarm of bees, and outlast the deadly virus enveloping the world. I'd run out of underwear before things got back to normal, for sure, but I might not have to ever wash a shirt.

I want to say my supply of shirts lasted me until May.

Like I said, we had no idea.

And so, for the past year and change, once every week or so, we'd each find a time to sit in the bathtub and wash, rinse, and squeeze out our shirts, socks, and unmentionables. For a year we did this.

We've been very cautious. We didn't go back to restaurants when capacity opened back up, we didn't go back to the grocery store, we didn't get back on the subway. We've been very safe. You literally cannot be too careful during a global fucking pandemic.

But now we're vaccinated. We've got the good juice in our arms. The good juice that tells the bad dust not to kill us. And so, tomorrow afternoon, as I write this, we're going back. We're gathering up everything that has accumulated for a year, putting it in our laundry bags, and walking it all half a block over to our neighborhood laundry spot.

We're going to load it all into big machines. Big machines that Do It For You. We're going to watch it all get clean. And we're going to watch it all get - miraculously - dry. Right there before our eyes. I'll probably play some Switch.

It's been a weird, wild, arduous year of washing the same shit in slight variations over and over. There have been a lot of pruny hands, a lot of irritated skin, and a lot of what was certainly too-long exposure to detergents that were not made for human contact.

I will not miss any of it. I will not even miss the solitude it brought, sitting alone in the tub, listening to a podcast or Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense again. I will not miss wringing out every goddamn item until it became warped beyond recognition. I will not miss the drying racks that are bigger than you'd like in your living space, while simultaneously limiting the amount of clothing you can wash at one time.

And I will not miss our laundry tub.

I will sit back and watch the machine spin.

Mike's Big Juicy Summer Backlog

2021-05-26T16:00:00Z

Oh it's summer, folks. And to me, that means just one thing: stay inside and play video games.

I've always been an indoor kid. I'd much rather spend a beautiful sunny day on the couch with a controller in my hands than outside at the park or the beach. Not only have I always been a nerd and very into video games, I also just don't do well in the heat. My body just starts to shut down in anything hotter than 75 degrees. I don't want to be this way, but you've gotta dance with the hand you're dealt.

My summer video game excitement is a combination of this and the fact that summer is a big season for the video game world. E3 blasts a million new teasers, trailers, and gameplay demos into the world, all the major players host their own announcement extravaganzas, and there's always something exciting to read or watch.

And so it goes that every summer, I get very excited to play video games. This year is no different! After a quick one-two punch of 80-plus-degree days, I had a sudden shower epiphany that it is summer and I would like to play some video games, thank you very much. Thus, I quickly drew up a list of all the games I suddenly got the urge to play, most of which I've been meaning to play or finish for years. In my Notion database, I'm simply calling it "Mike's Summer Games List," but that isn't bombastic enough for the internet or for this blog, AND it contains enough older games that I've been sleeping on for it to be considered a backlog, so it shall now be officially known as...

Mike's Big Juicy Summer Backlog

Most of the games on my summer list can be found in the Steam screenshot above, but there are also some Switch games in there, so here's the full list, in no particular order:

1. Rocket League (Switch)

For me, any solid summer lineup needs a light, jump-in/jump-out game. Something you can play a match of, not get too deep into, and then move on. A quick snack when you don't feel like a triple-A meal. I think Rocket League on the Switch is going to be that game for me. After playing a tiny bit years ago, I've finally been pulled back in on Switch with the release of some Formula 1 skins. Because that's who I am now.

2. XCOM 2 (Switch)

I've got an 80+ hour file in XCOM 2 on PC with characters that I care deeply about, but at this point, I am all-in on Switch. The Switch port of this game is inferior to its PC counterpart in every imaginable way. It's slower, it looks worse, there is somehow more jank. But I can play it in bed. I can play it anywhere. And it doesn't take up my computer's hard drive space. It's just convenient enough, and not quite shitty enough, to keep me playing on the little guy.

XCOM 2, to me, is a summer game because it's about a group of friends (they're all friends in my head) uniting to take on something bigger than themselves. It's the ultimate road trip flick. And swear I will succeed on Switch where I failed on PC: by seeing this road trip through to the end. I'm not promising I'll finish it this summer, this is a beefy list. I'll be using it more as a once-in-a-while snack. It's more about a feeling here than a mission to experience the whole thing.

3. Risk of Rain 2 (PC + Switch)

The only game I'll be playing on multiple platforms! My friend Zac and I have a standing appointment to play this game together whenever we can, and it's great. We both loved the first RoR, so to us, this game is a miracle. It's just so much goddamn fun, and the fact that the folks at Hopoo Games so perfectly nailed the transition from 2D to 3D is awe-inspiring.

I'll be playing on PC with Zac, and playing on Switch in bed with a little stuffed elephant named Peanut when I just can't stop thinking about my next run.

4. Control (PC)

Okay. Here we go. This is our first big, beefy boy. This is one I started last summer, played about an hour of, and then fell off of because...I really don't know. Pandemic? This time around, I'm ready to go all the way. I'm going to start a new file, and play from start to finish on the couch with my girlfriend like it's a season of prestige TV. I can't wait.

5. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (PC)

This is another potential start-a-clean-file situation. I fell off of this guy a long time ago, as you might imagine, and I keep trying to fit in a restart here and there, but it just never makes the cut. I recently read a piece in Kotaku that talked about giving it a second chance, which, after the weird PR shit that happened around this game's release, and some of the questionable material in the game itself, it would be understandable to not want to do that. But I think I'm down. After loving Human Revolution and the original Deus Ex, I think it at least deserves another look from me.

6. Prey (PC)

Oh hey, it's another immersive sim I never have time for! Listen, immersive sims used to be 100% my shit. Then a lot of things changed. People stopped making them so much, I got a job, got very busy being a grown-up, and got more into small, run-based stuff. Well, things are different now, and I want to try digging back in.

Prey is one that should be totally up my alley - it's made by Arkane, it's weird sci-fi, it takes place in space - all things I love. Hopefully, this time it sticks, and I get to experience this game that, by all accounts, more people should have played.

7. NieR: Automata (PC)

Yet another big game, and I know I'm being ambitious here, but it's summer! It's Mike's Big Juicy Summer Backlog! I gotta go big! And so I'm going the biggest of all with this weird game that you have to play five times or something. Look, I really missed the train on Automata. I didn't have the money for it at release, I didn't have the time to devote to it when I eventually bought it, the combat is kinda weird, and the PC port is just meh.

After all the NieR: Replicant discourse this year, I'm feeling the hype once more, and hoping it propels me to finally playing through this game.

8. No Man's Sky Expeditions (PC)

If I'm ever not playing No Man's Sky, or planning to play No Man's Sky, you should just assume I'm dead at this point. Hello Games just added a bunch of new seasonal (weekly? monthly?) content in the form of Expeditions, and I need to check that out. The reward for the latest one is the actual Normandy from Mass Effect. So.

9. Halo 3 & ODST (PC)

I loved Halo 1&2 in high school. And then sadly that love stopped, because those were the only two games they decided to release on PC. So I just had to wonder about the ending to this story I'd become connected to, and lust after the jazzy moodiness of ODST, a game I've longed to play for over a decade now. Well, with the Master Chief Collection on Steam, NOW IS THE TIME.

10. Pyre (PC)

I am in this game's final stages. After finishing Hades (and watching my girlfriend finish more), I found myself really wanting to return to this other incredible world that Supergiant made, and find out what happens to everyone.

11. Teardown (PC)

We are firmly in the less ambitious wing of my list now. See? I've tempered all those big blockbusters with more little snacks!

Teardown is a game I picked up last year in early access and fell in love with. It's just delightful. In fact, it made my GOTY list. It's still in early access, but it's received a number of updates, including controller support, that I really want to check out. It's also just a good summer feel. Run around and blow stuff up. Sounds great.

12. Star Wars Battlefront II (PC)

More delicious candy here. Nice weather always makes me want to play some Star Wars, so it's always nice to have one in my summer rotation. This is just the latest incarnation of that beast. The great thing here is, I could be talking about either version of BF2. The new guy is always ultra-cheap and actually pretty fun now, besides being modern and gorgeous. And the old guy still holds up after all this time. I'll most likely be hopping into the new one as my between-meal snacking this summer, but you never know!

That's everything I'm planning on digging into this summer! Hopefully, I'm able to stick to my plan, and if so, I'll try to check back in here periodically to give updates on my summer game progress. Summer is here! Let's stay inside!

HOW DID I MISS THIS???!?

2021-05-24T16:00:00Z

I was recently listening to an episode of my new favorite podcast, A More Civilized Age, in which hosts Rob Zachny, Austin Walker, Natalie Watson, and Ali Acampora watch and critically discuss the Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series, when I was suddenly assaulted with a blockbuster piece of information I had somehow missed.

One of the hosts mentioned Knights of the Old Republic, the best Star Wars game of all time, and one which I have written about on this very blog. This prompted another host to reply, and I'm paraphrasing here, "Heh. Yeah. We'll get around to that when that remake comes out."

At first, I thought this was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the eventual possibility of a KOTOR remake. A herculean task tantamount to remaking the likes of Final Fantasy 7. The comparison would prove to be apt.

After another second or so, the hosts again made reference to a KOTOR remake, saying something to the effect of, "Yeah, when that remake drops, we should really get into that." At this point, with a second, more pointed allusion to a remade KOTOR, I became suspicious. Was this...was this actually a thing that was coming? Could it be real?

WELL, FOLKS...

This news broke a MONTH ago??? How did I miss this??? There's actually, literally, for sure going to be a remake of KOTOR at some point in the near future, and I didn't know about it??? What rift in space and time caused this lapse in my ability to keep abreast of Extremely Important News about one of my favorite games of all time???

We even know the developer working on the project - not BioWare, but Aspyr, the company responsible for porting KOTOR 1&2 and many other classic Star Wars games to modern platforms. As far as companies that are not BioWare that you'd want working on this project go, the choice of Aspyr bodes well. One can reasonably assume they're well acquainted with the ins and outs of this game by now. Possibly even more than the folks who originally made it!

In any case, however I missed it, I can now move on to being extremely excited for this. My great hope — and I assume this is within the realm of likelihood — is that it will be released on PC. If not at launch, then at some point soon after. Also, this definitely means the original is coming to Switch, yeah?

I mean that'd be a slam dunk release if I ever saw one. Maybe a few months before the release of the remake so folks can experience the original before the new one? Probably released alongside the announcement of the remake as a "here's something to chew on in the meantime?"

Oh yeah. It's all coming together now. It is all as I have foreseen. It's only a matter of time...

I Am Vaccinated

2021-05-21T16:00:00Z

It happened.

What seemed impossible, or at least impossibly far away, just one year ago has happened.

On April 6, 2020, I got word that I was being laid off, along with most of the people with whom I worked.

On April 6, 2021, I became eligible to make an appointment for a dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, which is, incredibly, not only extant, but also safe and effective.

On April 17, 2021, I received my first dose of a vaccine I hadn't dared to hope for just months earlier.

On May 8, 2021, this blog celebrated its one-year anniversary in its current incarnation, The Go To Hell Space.

On May 15, 2021, I received my second and final dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.

On May 29, 2021, it will have been 2 weeks since receiving my second dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, the period of time after which experts say you can be considered "fully vaccinated."

At this time, my body will have manufactured enough microscopic goo that I can once again feel safe going to the laundromat.

It's been such a weird, long year. So much of it blurs together. There were some pretty good parts, some just okay parts, and some really less than okay parts. A lot of things stayed the same, and a lot of things changed forever. In a lot of ways, it was just another year, albeit one where we all had to stop and stay in one place for a while and sometimes be hyper-aware of that reality.

All in all — and I really don't mean for this to be a "closing the loop" or "Covid is over" post because a lot of this year is going to be with us for a very long time still — it really could have been worse.

I got to stay inside all summer, which is my dream for every summer anyway. I got to start living with my partner. I got to see what life — such as it was in the past 12 months — was like beyond my job for a while. There was a lot of soul searching, a lot of figuring out what it is I want to do.

And I started a blog.

And I still like it.

So, while this thing was birthed out of the Covid Year, and while things might start to change back just a bit, I enjoyed writing before all this, and I'll keep enjoying it after.

So I'll be here.

Hope you wanted something to read.

-- Mike

REVIEW: My girlfriend saying 'my beefsteaks' anytime Zagreus says 'my keepsakes' in Hades

2021-05-14T16:00:00Z

My girlfriend started playing Hades earlier this year and it's great. I largely have NoClip's excellent documentary series to thank for this.

She's gotten really good at it, gotten extremely into the story and characters, and completed dozens of runs at this point. She's played through the game so many times now, in fact, that a good deal of the dialogue (outside of character conversations) has repeated several times.

One such piece of dialogue occurs whenever Zagreus, the player character, opens his trove of Keepsakes - precious items gifted to him by various other characters in order to aid him on his quest.

It isn't every time, but every couple of times, Zagreus will open the box of Keepsakes and say, "My keepsakes..." in a very ponderous tone of voice.

My girlfriend, who has heard this many, many times now, and is also very funny, has taken to saying, in the same ponderous, serious tone of voice, "My beefsteaks."

Here is my review:

Extremely good and gets me every time.
Her impression and delivery are spot on.
Is she referring to beefsteaks as in meat, or the big tomatoes?
It never occurred to me that it might be tomatoes until just now writing this.
It's fun to imagine that instead of a display case of precious items from his friends and family, Zagreus having just a big box full of either meats or big tomatoes.

Now you too, dear reader, have shared in the joy that is this delightful occurrence. Lauren, if you're reading this, I love you and your weird brain so much.

I missed blogging about the big boat getting stuck

2021-05-11T16:00:00Z

Hi. I haven't blogged in a little bit, and truly the greatest loss there is that I missed blogging about the big boat getting stuck.

If you either missed it when it was all anyone could talk about on Twitter for weeks or are now looking back from the future going oh yeahhhhhhhhhhhh, here's a quick summary:

Capitalists rely on global trade routes to make sure they're exploiting as many people in as many places on the planet as possible. They do this by taking things that people made in one place for the lowest possible labor cost and putting those things on boats in great quantities. Then they send those boats to where the people who want to buy those things on the boats for the greatest possible markup are. But Africa is too big to sail around. So at some point, we cut a big hole called the Suez Canal through it so boats could go. But it's not the biggest hole. And boats are real real big now. So one false move and, well...

So yeah, the big big boat got stuck in the big important hole. It just got wedged right in there. Just...BLOMP. Just on a big stupid diagonal. Couldn't move. Just before it got stuck, it sailed around and drew a penis in the ocean. And it ground global capitalism to a halt for a good fortnight! It was rad! It was rad and I missed it!

Except not really because it's still stuck there today, just for a different reason now.

See, Egypt - the country through which the big hole is dug - spent a lot of money trying to free the boat from the big watery hole, and now they want some reparations for that because the whole boat thing wasn't their fault in the first place.

And now they won't let the big boat leave the hole it is no longer stuck in.

Capitalism is fine, everyone! Nothing to see here! Everything working as intended. Good system.

New York City - March 12th, 2021

2021-03-12T16:00:00Z

3:15 PM. It's 68 degrees Fahrenheit. The first nice day we've felt in a while. All apartment windows open, breeze blowing through. Five days until my birthday.

It's been a day of cleaning after a week of being sick with colds. The apartment looks nice and tidy, with sunlight streaming in and turning the wood to gold.

The neighborhood is calm and peaceful. No horns or shouts can be heard.

Outside, a squirrel sits eating a nut on a fence, in that perfect squirrel-eating-a-nut pose, while a bird chirps unseen, over the sound of soothing accordion music playing through a distant speaker.

This is a good day.

Can you see him? He's perfect.

Some questions about a new Nintendo Switch

2021-03-04T16:00:00Z

So there's a new report in Bloomberg today alleging that Nintendo is planning to release a new Nintendo Switch model with a 7-inch OLED screen and 4K capabilities when connected to a TV by this holiday season. This is obviously big news, and news that many were expecting to hear during Nintendo's first big Direct of the year a few weeks back.

Whether or not this is true remains to be seen, though an outlet the size of Bloomberg likely wouldn't publish any run-of-the-mill rumor. But rumors of a new, more powerful Switch model have been out there for a good year at this point, and I have some questions about what happens when and if that day comes.

My questions are as follows:

Will the Joy-Cons be better?

There have been a number of well-publicized issues with the current Switch's wireless controllers basically since its original release in 2017. Drifting analog sticks, dropped inputs, desyncing, you name it. With an apparent focus on resolution for the New Switch, one would hope there would also come an increased focus on quality and longevity. At 80 bucks a pop for a complete new pair of 'Cons, it's frankly unacceptable that Nintendo has done so little to fix the issue in the time they've had to do so. The hope there would be that they've focused on New Joy-Con quality over fixing the mess they've already made, which...still majorly sucks. But at least it would be something?

Will I be able to easily transfer all my data to the new Switch?

This one's kind of a softball no-brainer, so I threw "easily" in there for a challenge. Doubtless, there will be many current Switch owners keen to upgrade to the new model, and it would be an enormous mistake on Nintendo's part not to include a process for transferring all your current games and save data over to the new guy. They had something similar in place for the 3DS family. The least they could do, then, is make it dead simple.

Will there be a recycling program in place for all the old Switches?

This seems unlikely, but I honestly cringe at the thought of what happens to hundreds of thousands of current-generation Switches when the new Switch comes out. Probably what largely happens to every other piece of consumer technology when a new model is released. But one can dream. In 2021, with climate change already fervently knocking on the door, and what we know about the growing problem of e-waste, it would be extremely irresponsible and unsightly for Nintendo to shrug their shoulders and let scores of these things be tossed into landfills. If you are reading this, I would hope you wouldn't simply throw your old Switch, or any piece of tech, away. You can always sell it, pass it on to someone you know who wants one, or better yet, donate it to a cause in need. Who knows, maybe the Great Old Switch Sell-Off will finally save GameStop.

Please don't make the new Zelda BOTW sequel exclusive to this new hardware?

Okay, this isn't a question, it's a solemn plea. I highly doubt Nintendo would do this for such a big title that was announced long before what one assumes will be a forthcoming official announcement of this new Switch, but this is also undoubtedly the opening of the window for games made exclusively for this new, more powerful hardware. Mark my words, within a year's time, there will be trailers for Switch games prefaced with "Only on Switch Pro," or whatever the new thing is called. It'll happen. It always happens. Maybe Nintendo will just really not want to fragment their software catalog in that way. But they'll probably want your Switch Pro money more.

I think that's all I've got in me for now, what about you? Any thoughts on a beefy new Nintendo Switch? Lemme know in the ol' comments section.

Jiminy Christmas, the Moonstruck house is for sale

2021-03-01T22:00:00Z

The problem with living in New York is that there's an abundance of incredibly beautiful places to live all around you at all times, but they all cost as much as a seat on a Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station.

*Googles*

Okay, maybe not, but it may as well be that much when you're a regular old working stiff, like the majority of the city's residents. And now there's a new rocket ship to ogle. According to Gothamist, 19 Cranberry Street in Brooklyn Heights has been listed for sale.

In all its four-story glory. Courtesy StreetEasy.

For anyone reading who is not a film buff or Italian or both, 19 Cranberry Street is the house from Moonstruck, the sublime 1987 comedy starring Cher and Nicolas Cage. In the movie, the house belongs to Cher's character's parents, and from what we see on screen, the place is gorgeous. Imagine owning multiple floors in New York City. Imagine owning a building. Imagine owning.

Sorry, got lost for a second there. But the building's portrayal onscreen, beautiful though it is, did not adequately prepare me for the full details of what is contained within those brick walls. According to the listing, this puppy has four stories, five bedrooms, three and a half baths, a garden, gated parking, marble fireplace mantles, a gym, a wine cellar, a professional wood-burning oven, a "substantial" butler's pantry, and it is furthermore described as stately and winsome! I'd just hope to god the kitchen looks the same as it did in the movie.

Do yourself a favor and check out the listing. Get lost in its hallways and staircases. Imagine yourself cooking on the "8-burner, 3-oven custom Lacanche range." Envision yourself with a butler. Hell, envision yourself as a butler. I'd buttle the fuck out of this place if it meant I could spend an amount of time in it.

None of that will change the fact that I will never in my entire life, up to and including the moment I die, have enough money to afford a single room of this building, much less the whole stately thing. I'll never be winsome.

Anybody want to go halvsies? Let's be realistic. Four-hundredth-sies?

It looks like Breath of the Wild

2021-03-01T16:00:00Z

The Pokémon Company shared previews of their upcoming releases in celebration of their iconic series of games' 25th anniversary this past Friday, and one announcement in particular has taken the internet, and especially the games press, by storm. Set up as the event's biggest announcement, Pokémon Legends: Arceus was shown at an early stage of development and billed as both a departure from the mainline series' conventions and a "new era" for Pokémon games as we know them.

If you're a fan of Pokémon, this is a huge deal. The structure of the mainline series of RPGs has remained largely the same for the past 25 years, save for a few additions and subtractions here and there in the last few installments. Pokémon Legends: Arceus looks like a very different experience, and that's great! It's not that the time-tested formula of previous Pokémon games wasn't still enjoyable. Some folks argue it's started to feel stale, and while I don't personally agree, fair is fair. It isn't necessarily that anything desperately needed to change, or that change is always good. Rather, change is interesting! And in the case of a longstanding series like Pokémon, which has gone largely unchanged for 2.5 decades, it allows us to see what else The Pokémon Company and Game Freak have up their sleeves. I'm sure there are people there who've been dying to try out something new with the world of Pokémon as much as some players have.

Interesting as this all sounds, though, some fans simply wished to point out that, hey, Pokémon Legends: Arceus kinda looks like Breath of the Wild. The thought of what the SEO on such a post might look like proved too mouth-watering for the games press to pass up. One by one, they all agreed. Yes. It looks like Breath of the Wild. Let's take a look.

GameSpot came in nice and early with their take: Pokemon Legends: Arceus Evokes Breath Of The Wild, And That's Thrilling. Right in the title too! In fact, they weren't the only outlet to stick those words right up top...

Polygon crashed the same party with The new open-world Pokémon has Breath of the Wild vibes.

Kotaku brought their signature snarky-cum-folksy bloggeriness to Hmm, That New Pokémon Game Sure Looks A Lot Like Breath Of The Wild. They even had the ingenuity to show that, yep, they used that shot:

That's the one.

Input came in hot with Game Freak finally realized the future of Pokémon is 'Breath of the Wild.' Ugh, finally. The company making this series of games for 25 years finally realized that a game from four years ago is their WHOLE FUTURE.

Vulture takes a piece of the action with Pokémon Is Getting the Breath of the Wild Treatment.

GamesRadar provides a little more context with their Pokemon Legends Arceus looks like Breath of the Wild set in Sinnoh history.

GameRant sneaks a peek at Kotaku's homework with Pokemon Legends Arceus Sure Does Look a Lot Like Breath of the Wild.

Even ScreenRant - that's right, the other rant - couldn't resist the siren song of SEO with Pokémon Legends: Arceus Confirms BOTW-Style Open World Game Leaks.

Newsweek still exists, so sure, why not type up 'Pokémon Legends Arceus' Announced, Brings 'Breath of the Wild'-Style Exploration in 2022.

iMore goes with a healthy mix of all of the above, serving up a GORP-style Pokémon Legends: Arceus looks like Breath of the Wild in ancient Sinnoh, coming early 2022.

That brings us to the end of the list of outlets that put the damn thing right in the damn title. You may notice some big names, or maybe your favorite outlet is missing from this list. Well, don't worry. Dig a little deeper, and no one is free from sin.

FanByte posted a roundup post under the seemingly innocent title, [ICYMI: Pokemon Presents Revisits the Series’ Past and Teases its Future](Pokemon Presents Revisits the Series’ Past and Teases its Future), but down at the bottom of the article, under the section about the announcement of the game in question, we find, of course: "It looks like a whole-ass Pokemon: Breath of the Wild."

The goddamn Washington Post came down from its high horse to write about some videoed games with their exaggerated ‘Pokémon Legends Arceus’ is the game mainline Pokémon fans have been begging for. Credit where it's due, I had to dig three paragraphs down to find, "The game appears to take aesthetic inspiration from “Breath of the Wild,” and is an entirely new story told in the Sinnoh region." But I did still find it.

And finally, bringing up the rear, the old soldier, Game Informer, trots on by with the wordy New Pokémon Game Is An Open-World Story Set In Feudal-Style Sinnoh Region, Pokémon Legends Arceus. They don't make it past the first sentence without describing the upcoming release as, "a title that takes a page from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild with a stunning open world set in the Sinnoh region."

The takeaway? One might argue that, wow, let's all be careful how we respond to major game announcements online, lest we multi-handedly give a newsroom something extra to crank out for their ad partners.

Perhaps.

But the real takeaway?

I mean.

Shit, it does kinda look like Breath of the Wild.

Okay, so KOTOR is definitely coming to Switch, yeah?

2021-02-28T16:00:00Z

This week, Aspyr - longtime handlers of porting Star Wars games to new platforms - announced that they will be bringing Star Wars: Republic Commando to PS4 and Switch on April 6th. It's just the latest in what is, at this point, a pretty long line of classic Star Wars games being brought to Switch. So...like...Knights of the Old Republic's gotta be on the way, right?

Disney started resurrecting Star Wars classics on the Nintendo Switch moneymaking train in September 2019 with Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, followed by its predecessor, Jedi Academy, in March of 2020. Soon after, they reaffirmed their push on the Switch with Star Wars Episode I: Racer in June. Now, with the announcement of Republic Commando's arrival on the platform, it feels like Disney and Aspyr are all in. They've shown that they are ready, willing, and able to get these old relics working on new hardware, and portable hardware at that! Surely, KOTOR, the Star Wars game with, if not the biggest following, then the loudest fans, MUST be on their timeline somewhere.

What's more, Aspyr have already proven their ability to port KOTOR to portable platforms with their excellent releases on iOS and Android. In fact, they released KOTOR II on mobile just a few scant months ago! They know people will still pay money to play these games. Combined with the awesome power of the Switch? The console everyone just wants every game to be released on already? Come on!

And with newly confirmed rumors that an all-new KOTOR game is indeed in the works, albeit outside of BioWare and EA, well... that would be a pretty great reason to re-release the series' previous installments on modern consoles, now wouldn't it? That is an admission to an understanding of the level of enthusiasm that still exists for these games. That, alongside their consistent push to put classic games on the Switch, and their recent announcement of Star Wars Hunters, a new multiplayer shooter coming to Switch later in 2021...shit, it's just a matter of time.

I've channeled all of my excitement into creating a mockup of just what that big announcement might look like. Disney... my professional email is in my pinned tweet.

PROFESSIONAL ARTIST'S RENDERING DO NOT STEAL

It's coming, alright. You can smell it on the wind. I just want to know when. Someone tell me when. Does anyone's uncle still work at Nintendo? Gimme that hookup.

Someone please do this to my skeleton

2021-02-25T16:00:00Z

My girlfriend and I have recently taken to watching videos of people restoring old things before bed. It started with knives, and has since made its way to old, rusty objects in general - largely old metal toys. The channels we enjoy feature no voiceover, or much sound at all, so they're easy to fall asleep to. This is maybe a bad habit, but honestly it's a pandemic and we sleep like babies so you do the math.

Last night, we found a video in which the object being restored was an old coin bank in the shape of a skeleton. It was very rusty and did not work. We can all relate. But the similarities do not end there! For it is now that I must remind you of the fact of which we were both suddenly made aware by the subject of this video: we've all got one of these things inside of us right now. They may not have a mouth for an eye, or eat coins through that eye-mouth (that we yet know of), but they're in there getting a free ride all the same.

The video in question

Now, one of the recurring steps in these videos is sandblasting. This involves taking all the individual pieces of the skeleton or firetruck or antique cash register into a big box and shooting sand at it so hard through a tube that all the rust gets scared and runs away. It is always exactly the same, and it is always the best part of the video. It looks really satisfying to do, like a pressure washer but for time.

Folks, I don't have to give you any more lead-in to what's coming. All the pieces are here for you. It's right there in the title. I'm here to confess to you that I want someone to unzip my skinsuit and blast away the cruft and crust that surely clings to my old, wet bones and give me back my youth. I am naught but 28 years old and already I crave such things. Surely, this process would be proceeded by some sort of Grandpa-Joe-esque musical number in which I engage in such strenuous activities as Standing and Sitting, but without the loud, concerning pops and crunches that now so often accompany them.

I guess the only thing left for me now is to make it my life's work to seek out and attain this forbidden process. Is this what the dark web is for? Don't answer, I'll check Dark Google.

The Swindle got me through a stressful moving process

2021-02-24T16:00:00Z

As I've mentioned on this blog a few times now, the month of February has been a month of moving. My sister moved out of the apartment we shared for almost four years, and my girlfriend moved in. If you have ever moved yourself or someone close to you, you know what an all-consuming beast it is. Moving is big and hard and stressful. No exceptions.

And so I was grateful to find a small, relatively simple little game with which to numb my brain to the outside world which had grown even more chaotic than it had been for the past year. That game was, and is, The Swindle, from Size Five Games.

I was first introduced to The Swindle somewhere in the middle of 2020, through one of Mark Brown's excellent Game Maker's Toolkit videos on YouTube. He spoke very highly of it, and the game's art style, gameplay, and especially its heist-pulling premise appealed to me. However, my video game "schedule," so to speak, was already full at the time, so I socked it away in my brain for a future date.

That future date materialized, as these things usually do, through a minor miracle of happenstance. After purchasing Super Mario 3D World upon its release on the Switch, I found myself with some extra Gold Points to spend (Nintendo gives you cash back for each purchase on the eShop for you to put towards future purchases, more or less). The very next morning, I awoke to a tweet from the developers of The Swindle - I do not remember if I follow them, or if it was retweeted onto my timeline, further adding to the happenstance - announcing that The Swindle - along with a number of their other games - was on sale on the Nintendo Switch eShop. So I popped over and grabbed myself a free copy of this game I'd been meaning to play, care of my newfound Gold Points. You truly love to see it.

This was February 13th, T-minus five days until The Move, and thus prime time for something simple, attractive, and run-based to take over my brain, allowing me to disengage from an increasingly stressful situation. I opened my mind and drank deep, and I have been mostly very pleased with the experience.

There's an extensive upgrade tree inside your airship

The Swindle is a sort of roguelike, RPG-like heist game that sees you making repeated attempts to break into and steal from increasingly complex procedurally generated buildings without being seen or, failing that, before the cops show up or you are killed by one of the game's many traps and robotic guards. You are given a 100-day timer to make your way through the city, gaining access to richer and richer districts, and preparing yourself to take on the final heist: stealing and destroying Scotland Yard's new artificial intelligence before it can be switched on to start making your life as a Steampunk Cyber-criminal untenable. Should you perish in your efforts, the character you came to know will be dead for good, and another of your criminal organization's ranks will take up the charge, with all the tools and abilities you had previously unlocked carrying over, and with the 100-day timer continuing to tick down. The catch being that longer-living criminals bring in bigger bonuses.

The game describes itself as a "Steampunk Cybercrime Caper." In practice, this means that things look satisfyingly "old-timey," every machine runs on steam, and you also hack computers, run programs, and fight robots. The art style and aesthetic on display here are really quite beautiful, with grungy airships, slapdash robots, glowing screens, and the smoky air of the industrial revolution all combining to form a solidly immersive world. The procgen nature of the game means that you'll need to actually "case the joint" each time you load into a new map, adding to that feeling of trying to pull off a heist that so many games try and fail to capture. The Swindle also has the balance of risk and reward down fairly well. If you trip an alarm, you can choose to risk a run-in with the police, or a guard on high alert, by staying to grab just a bit more loot. Either you'll die and lose all the loot you found in the first place along with your current thief, or you'll feel like you pulled off the crime of the century.

This smoky filter is something I could do without

I mentioned earlier that I've mostly enjoyed my time with The Swindle, and, unfortunately, there are some downs that come alongside the aforementioned ups. For instance, the game's onboarding leaves much to be desired. I genuinely don't know that I'd still be playing this game if I hadn't been introduced to it via YouTube video. After a cutscene explaining the game's narrative conceit, you're really chucked into the fire with little in the way of tutorialization. While I appreciate a "learn by doing" approach to game design, the harshness of the game's systems in regards to punishing failure left a bad taste in my mouth as a player just getting started. I would have appreciated perhaps just a bit more hand-holding as I learned just what was going on in this world.

There are also times where punishment feels just plain unearned. Some of this is down to what feels like sloppy collision and bugs that remain in the game a good six years after release. I've died in a pit of spikes after just barely missing a jump I felt I could make one too many times. And there are other times where I've died because...well, who knows why! Sometimes the action on screen is too busy or obscured by the sometimes-there, sometimes-not, always infuriating smoky blur effect layered atop the game to tell just what happened in the final moments before your death. It's moments like these - these "wait, what just happened?" moments that nearly spoil what is otherwise an extremely enjoyable roguelike, one that just manages to pull off one of my favorite - and one of the most elusive - themes in video games, that of the heist.

In those moments of disappointment, I can't help but keep thinking of Spelunky, another punishing roguelike. When I die in Spelunky, I never - not even once - think to myself, "that was not my fault." Spelunky is so tight and polished, and more importantly, so clear and communicative, that I am always aware of what happened, why it happened, and sure of the fact that the failure was mine. What I wouldn't give for The Swindle to copy Spelunky's excellent "here's why you died" screens after failing a run. Was it a bullet from a guard just off-screen? Or is there an element of the game - a new enemy's ability, or some other mechanic - that I am not aware of? I would love to know! Those latter questions - is there something I'm not understanding about the game - are where the game truly fails for me. The risk/reward put forth by the game's theme and punishing nature are worth much less for not clearly teaching the player why they failed than if it were better at doing that.

These failures are so frustrating only because it is very clear - at least to me, having played a dozen hours or so of this game - that The Swindle would be truly excellent, literally a world-class heist roguelike, if it just sanded down some of these rough edges. Unfortunately, six years out from release, it doesn't seem likely that this will happen. It's a real shame! Because The Swindle is a lot of goddamn fun!

Even with these "downs," the "ups" of The Swindle have been enough to keep me coming back for more. The long-tail 100-day countdown approach to roguelike design, as opposed to instantly being kicked back to the start, really lends itself well to the crime-ring heist narrative, and the gameplay loop of trying to grab enough loot from each new building to both upgrade your abilities and gain access to the next area before time runs out really makes you feel like a master thief put on the back foot by emerging technology.

It was incredibly nice to have a quick, run-based game without too terribly much to get invested in to just zone out with for a while in the midst of a big move. And honestly, even now that that's finished, I still can't stop thinking about my next run.

The Swindle is available on PC, Mac, PS3, PS4, Vita, Xbox One, WiiU, and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewing everything seen in the February 17th Nintendo Direct

2021-02-23T16:00:00Z

Because I don't want this to become a home improvement / apartment progress blog - even though that is what is currently consuming my every waking moment - here is a high-level review of everything Nintendo showed at their first full-length Direct in what feels like forever:

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 character in Smash

Review: I don't know who this anime girl is, why is this not Breath of the Wild 2?

Fall Guys on Switch this summer

Review: Fall Guys is a good game to play while zoning out talking to friends and I would get it on Switch if I didn't already have it on PC or if it was free.

Outer Wilds on Switch this summer

Review: Hell yes. Having just recently, finally finished this game, I am absolutely prepared to buy it again and play it in bed. I love Outer Wilds to death. Easily one of my favorite games of all time. Pumped for more folks to try it on Switch.

Samurai Warriors 5 on Switch this summer

Review: I don't know what this is. I saw it and tuned out. I think there are samurai.

Famicom Detective Club being localized

Review: Old games that never got localized getting localized is very good and cool in my book! I don't know what these games are, but I hope someone is excited about this.

Legend of Mana coming to Switch

Review: I am biased against the Mana series of games for reasons I do not remember or understand. I just see them and think, "man, fuck those games." Fuck those games I guess!

New Monster Hunter Rise trailer

Review: I switched tabs when this came on.

Mario Golf Super Rush

Review: HELLO. I would like to be the small red plumber man and his friends having fun on the golf course please. Pump that shit into my veins.

Capcom Arcade Stadium

Review: Neat!

Stubbs the Zombie

Review: This is where my girlfriend and I started making dinner, so I have no memory of this existing other than, "I am chopping broccoli right now and I don't care about this game."

Tales from the Borderlands

Review: Borderlands is a series of games that exists.

DC Super Hero Girls

Review: Looks like a bad mobile game. Girls deserve better games. Also girls don't need games that are Extremely For Girls, they can just...play games. I mean, I understand the need for and appeal of girly games, I just think th-

No More Heroes III

Review: This series feels like someone confused South Park for art.

Knockout City

Review: I don't remember this. I was probably still making dinner. Looking at this title makes me feel nothing.

Neon White

Review: Looked very stylish, and a friend of mine said they thought it seemed cool. Worth a second look, I think.

Miitopia on Switch

Review: I remember liking this on 3DS, and I think it's cool that a 3DS game is getting a modern re-release.

Mario items in Animal Crossing

Review: Adorable. Looking forward to it.

Project Triangle Strategy

Review: Down for a slick new tactics game! Downloaded the demo but have not played yet.

Star Wars Hunters

Review: I'm always excited for more Star Wars games, especially ones not made by EA. Maybe this one will prove I shouldn't be! A Star Wars multiplayer shooter sounds neat. It'll probably suck and I'll end up loving it for no reason. Remains to be seen!

World's End Club

Review: I think I thought this was a TWEWY thing and zoned out because I never played TWEWY. Is it a TWEWY thing? I still don't know.

Ninja Gaiden trilogy on Switch

Review: Ninja Gaiden games exist and people play them and I think they like them.

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity DLC

Review: If I had a money-making machine, I would also turn it on from time to time.

Skyward Sword HD on Switch

Review: Fuck this game.

Splatoon 3

Review: Sick. Yes. Absolutely. I played a bit of Splatoon 2 on Switch, and the series' vibes are frankly impeccable. Pumped for more. Good teaser.

That's all folks! What are you most excited about from this list? Anything you wanted to see but didn't? You know where to let me know.

To the blog that got away

2021-02-22T16:00:00Z

I had an idea for a post in the bathroom this morning.

I did not write it down.

What were you, phantom blog post idea?

Were you any good?

Did you have Cool Title potential?

I should have written you down immediately.

One day I’ll learn that lesson for the last time.

Whoa, now I’m accidentally thinking about mortality.

Oops!

But for real you should always write down an idea the second it pops into your head.

Don’t be like me.

Goodbye, blog post.

I may never get you back.

But I’ll still get up tomorrow.

And try again.

Apartment Progress

2021-02-21T16:00:00Z

Today long. Moved girlfriend in. Many trips. Back and forth much. Very tired. Not words good. Here photo essay:

Between the floorboards.

Artifacts.

Swans in the snow.

Kitchen-in-progress.

New friends.

Getting that fruit.

Process.

Pesto 😙👌

RUG!

Living-room-in-progress.

Studio-in-progress.

Bedroom-in-progress.

Cozy.

What Else Is On? February 19th, 2021

2021-02-19T16:00:00Z

Welp! Moving has me busy as hell, and actually made me miss my first day! That was to be expected, I suppose. Since I'm still in the thick of it, but don't want a double-miss on my record, how about we check in with what other folks are doing around the web?

Art Corner

Here's a really beautiful collection of illustrations, titled "Calendar for a small northern Russian city," that made its way across my desk via Behance:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/113132465/Calendar-for-a-small-northern-Russian-city

Weird good video game news

This truly wild piece from the AV Club about a once-in-a-lifetime cosmic phenomenon giving a Super Mario 64 speedrunner an unexpected edge really scratched a particular Weird Video Game News itch:
https://news.avclub.com/sorry-a-literal-cosmic-ion-ray-boost-to-your-super-mar-1846250037

Normal bad politics news

If you were wondering just how far left the Biden administration would lean...well, you're pretty naive I guess. Here's some shitty news about his continuation of shitty US foreign policy:
https://www.liberationnews.org/bidens-first-directive-to-the-war-machine/

Dispatch from the South Pole

Here's an incredible story about a guy who lost his wallet in Antarctica in the 60s and actually just got it back:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/us/paul-grisham-antarctica-lost-wallet.html

Chuckle Zone

And finally, here's a great post from The Hard Times that I found while searching for Boktai screenshots:
https://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/nasa-announces-that-you-wont-be-able-to-play-boktai-anymore-after-the-sun-dies/

That's it for me on this fine Saturday evening. I'm back to more moving tomorrow, bright and early. Here's hoping I have enough stamina to write a post as well.

Moving Day

2021-02-18T16:00:00Z

I’ve lived with my sister for my entire life. Almost 28 years.

Today was the last day we will have lived together.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, my sister is moving out. This was always going to happen, especially after I met my girlfriend. The pandemic came at exactly the wrong time, in that regard. The three of us lived together for almost a year - a situation that none of us wanted - and that accelerated things. We very much need our own spaces to be our own people.

Moving is a stressful thing, pandemic or not, hence why I’ve been posting later at night the past few days. I need to queue up a post for tomorrow as I write this, because tomorrow will probably be too draining.

Tomorrow is moving day.

The past year was full of ups and downs. That’s about as stupid and obvious a sentence as I could have written, but it’s true. I’ll look back fondly on the fun we all had together, and remember that the rougher times are why it’s good this is happening.

I’m really genuinely excited to move past the last year, and to live with my girlfriend. I’ve never lived with a partner before. But my sister has been my best friend and one of the most important people in my life for as long as I can remember, so I’m feeling wistful.

There’s so much I can’t wait to do and be and enjoy. And plenty that I’ll miss, as well. I think this move will strengthen all relationships involved.

Time to cut this off now. Lots to do tomorrow!

I also want to take a minute to thank all the folks who have followed and liked my posts in the past week or so. I really appreciate it, whether you’re bots or not. And if you’re not, I hope you like what you’ve been reading.

More to come!

Yes, Chicago thin crust

2021-02-17T16:00:00Z

As a person who is alive, I consider pizza to be very important to me. As a person who was born and raised in Chicago, and who is currently living in New York City, I find myself invested in the Pizza Discourse™️. And I know this has been said before, but I need to add my voice to the chorus.

Chicago pizza is not just deep dish. In fact, it is mostly not deep dish. And yet that is famously all we’re known for. I lived in the Chicago suburbs for 24 years. I didn’t eat a deep dish pizza until I was 23 years old. And I ate a hell of a lot of Chicago Pizza before that.

Chicago does thin crust. Yes. It’s true. I know, it’s hard to believe. Not only does Chicago do thin crust, they do a damn good thin crust. They do a thin crust that gives New York a run for its money eight days a week.

To reduce Chicago’s pizza identity to deep dish is to erase the hard and delicious work of classic Chicago pie-slingers like Aurelio’s, Ledo’s, Papa Joe’s, Chesdan’s, Barraco’s, and countless others giving their blood, sweat, and tears to the art that is Chicago thin crust pizza.

Having eaten deep dish pizza exactly once in my life, at a little place north of the city, whose name I cannot remember, I can honestly say I like it. It is delicious. But it is not what I mean when I say, “Chicago pizza.” Deep dish is not the Friday night delivery experience for most, if any, Chicago families. Deep dish is not even the most common night out, family-reunion-at-a-restaurant pizza experience in Chicago. 10 times out of 10, the pizza is thin. Deep dish pizza is an 11th time out of 10 experience. It’s an, “oh, so that’s deep dish!” experience. It is absolutely pizza. But it is absolutely not our only pizza.

So, okay, how would I differentiate Chicago thin crust from any other thin crust? It varies, but there is certainly one attribute that remains constant: you must cut the pizza into squares. Circular pie, yes. Square pieces. The first time I ate a “slice” of triangular pizza was in New York City.

New York, I love you, I get what you’re going for, but square pieces are better than triangles. They serve different functions, I know, but taken at face value, square is clearly king.

Now, I recognize that I have only mentioned Chicago and New York in my pizza dissertation while many other places in this wide nation have their own pizzas. Let me assure you: I am not mentioning them on purpose. There are but two titans of pizza in this country worth mentioning at all, and I have mentioned them. I have been to California. I have not eaten their pizza, because I respect myself. I have been to St. Louis. I have not eaten their pizza either. Because I have a brain.

Alright. That’s all I got. Just needed to get all that off my pizza chest.

If you’re ever in the Chicago area, do yourself a favor, ride out to Orland Park, pop over to Papa Joe’s. Get their pizza. If you can’t do that, stop over in Tinley Park and go to Ed & Joe’s. They’ll do you up right. Lotta Joe’s in the pizza game out in Chicago. Not sure what’s up with that.

Chicago does more than just deep dish, okay? Okay.

A list of things I did today

2021-02-15T22:00:00Z

I was busy today doing things around the house, and wanted to spend Valentines Day evening with my girlfriend, so I have but a short, simple post for you on this Sunday.

Today, I...

Played Stardew Valley with breakfast

Just a small bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats and a glass of water. Today was my first time playing Stardew Valley since the new 1.5 update hit consoles this week. Willy's new boat looks cool, looking forward to repairing it.
My dinosaur laid an egg, and I made it into Dinosaur Mayonnaise so I can one day turn the old supermarket into a movie theater. What a sentence.

Showered

Today's shower podcast was Threedom, a podcast where comedians Paul F. Tompkins, Lauren Lapkus, and Scott Aukerman talk to each other. Highly recommended.

Just outstanding

Exchanged Valentine's Day gifts with my girlfriend

My Valentine's gift to her - an original 17-piece Magic Bullet set, complete with a photo of Mick and Mimi from our favorite infomercial on the box - has not arrived yet. USPS is still having a rough go of it.
Her Valentine's gift to me - a framed gouache painting of a banana she made - is outstanding, and will now hang in our bathroom forever.

Ate lunch

A leftover panini and waffle fries from our local diner. The waffle fries were way too crispy this time. Panini was good, though.

Tried a new flavor of Twix

My sister made a bodega trip to grab water bottles for the movers she has coming, and picked up the new cookies & cream Twix she's been getting Instagram ads for.
It is not as good as it looks. Too sweet, and not enough flavor.

Dusted with our new vacuum

Yesterday, I installed our new Dyson vacuum - my sister is taking the old one with her - and I love it. These folks make a good vacuum. I am obsessively vacuuming everything.

It's so big and so nice

Opened and installed our new TV

My sister is taking her old TV with her in the move, so I finally had a reason to upgrade. I very publicly hated that TV because it was tiny, shitty, and only 1366x768 in resolution.
What the hell kind of resolution is that.
The new TV is 40" and 1080p, thank you very much.
No, I did not look at 4K TVs, no one needs a 4K TV.
This one is beautiful, and everything looks extremely good on it.

Packed my sister's TV

Right in the new TV box, along with the old stand, remote, and some picture frames.

Continued playing Bowser's Fury, which is really quite good

Super Mario 3D World, possibly the best Mario game of all time, finally came to the Switch this week, along with a new expansion titled "Bowser's Fury."
It's sort of an open-ish-world cross between 3D World and Super Mario Odyssey.
It's extremely good.

Ordered fancy dinner from a nice local Italian restaurant

Gnocchi Pomodoro - with their housemade tomato sauce - for myself.
Gnocchi Bolognese for my girlfriend.
And 3 of their incredible Chocolate Lava Cakes.

Got the wrong thing, but ate it anyway

Instead of Gnocchi Pomodoro, they sent me gnocchi in vodka sauce.
I am not a huge fan of cream sauces.
This was in addition to being delivered 25 minutes late because it's Valentine's Day and I'm sure they were slammed.
All things considered, it wasn't bad.

Ate chocolate lava cake together

This made up for any and all wrongs.
Just sublime.

Nintendo, ya done it again

Played Super Mario 3D World with my girlfriend

She's never played before.
I played through on WiiU.
We started a new co-op file together.
It's extremely fun.

Wrote this blog

It's nothing much, but it's another post in the can.

I'm sorry, but this is horseshit

2021-02-15T16:00:00Z

Last week, Brent Hyder, President and "Chief People Officer" for software giant Salesforce published a post to the company's blog, titled "Creating a Best Workplace from Anywhere, for Everyone." Besides being exactly the kind of godawful nonsense word salad you might expect from a big tech company, it was probably the first major instance of one of our new corporate overlords finally saying the quiet part loud when it comes to labor, and our continually changing relationship to work in the time of COVID.

When the pandemic hit, anyone working a desk job was immediately plunged into an indefinite work-from-home (WFH) status. Numerous articles were published, framing the situation as a mass realization that much of what we do can be done from home. In reality, it was employers who were learning that WFH was a viable option for most, if not all of their employees, and sensing an opportunity.

WFH allows big corporations like Salesforce and Facebook to spend much less on fancy campuses and expensive office leases in New York and San Francisco, it's true. But on the individual level, something that each of us workers already knew became even more clear to employers: no one is working every minute of an 8-hour work day. With all of us stuck at home, in the middle of a pandemic, with other responsibilities to fulfill, there's plenty more for us to do than work, especially for people with children or others to care for.

One might optimistically think this could finally bring about the end of such antiquated ideas as the five-day workweek and eight-hour workday. People who work less and are paid more, it has been proven several times, are as, if not more, productive as those working 40 hours per week in our current system. Could this crisis finally deliver to us the utopia we have sought after for generations?

Well. Enter Brent Hyder and Salesforce and a book of Mad Libs. The line you're most likely to see quoted from this post is, "the 9-to-5 workday is dead; and the employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks." This sounds good enough on its head, but considering its source and context, something more insidious surely lurks between the lines.

Hyder's post talks about everything they've learned about how to support their workers during the pandemic, how flexible they've had to become, and so on and so forth. But just before the flashy "9-to-5 is dead" line, we get to the crux of what's really being called for: "As employers, we have an opportunity to create an even better workplace." Among the points given in service of this new opportunity, becoming "more connected to each other," and finding more "balance" between work and home stick out the most. As a whole, the post is about blurring the line between work and life.

The way Hyder in this post, and others in the tech sector elsewhere put it, this blurring is a natural occurrence, something that is purely a symptom of our new life in quarantine. An unintended consequence. Our lives have become simultaneously more complicated and less mobile, and work must therefore adapt to the situation.

Seen another way, employers obviously view the pandemic as yet another exciting way to steal from workers. We are not better off with a workplace that asks you to work whenever you're most easily available, rather than within a clear and constrained period of time. This is the start of work creeping into every singular second of our lives. This is employers realizing that earlier point - that no one works every minute of an 8-hour workday - and getting out ahead of what a mass realization of that might bring. This is big tech trying to sell you more work and spin it as freedom.

I worked at a tech startup here in New York for two years. I know how they think. It starts with somehting innocent enough, like checking your work email on the weekend. Lines like, "can you just take care of this quick task?" and "you know, you're paid a lot more here, and things like this are part of the trade off." I never asked for any of the three substantial raises I received during my time at this startup, and they were still used as a way of guilting me into working longer than I should have. Slack and other instant communication services are also used to further blur the line between online and offline, clocked-in and clocked-out.

This Salesforce post is the first offensive in a post-COVID crusade to take that toxic startup mentality, which has already gripped the labor market at large, to the next level. If the 9-to-5 is dead, what does that really mean for your work day? Your employer certainly isn't going to ask you to work less. Will you work during breakfast? Dinner? In the bathroom? What more time do you have?

If labor doesn't find the will and the power to push back against this now, it's easy to imagine a future where we're all permanently chained to our laptops and phones, never given set working hours as a false "concession," but always required to be online, just in case. Personally, I'd rather clock out at five and disappear from view of my employer until nine the next morning.

No, I'm sorry Salesforce, but this is horseshit.

Get Rec’d: The Repair Shop

2021-02-14T16:00:00Z

Several years ago, I had an email newsletter that I sent out weekly to monthly, and, incredibly, people who wanted to read it. At the end of every newsletter, I had a section called “Get Rec’d,” which collected my personal recommendations for different pieces of media for that week or month or what have you.

I’ve decided to bring that old tradition back on this here blog, and I’ve got something truly great with which to start.

If you’re a fan of The Great British Baking Show/Bake Off and its chill vibes, but - like me and my quarantine family - have completely run through every available season more than once, I must insist that you not sleep on The Repair Shop. It’s got all of the same calming energy, music, voiceover work, and shots of the British countryside as GBBO, but with none of the competition.

The structure of every episode of The Repair Shop is the same: one by one, three people bring in one cherished, broken item apiece, and one or more of the show’s specialized repair experts works on it over the course of the show’s 45 minute runtime.

During this time, we get some soothing voiceover from Robert Pugh, along with check-ins with each repair person from host and expert furniture restorer Jay Blades, as the show cuts between the three concurrent repairs-in-progress.

Before and after each repair, we also get some background information on each piece, its history, what it means to the family, and what usually turns out to be an emotional reaction to the reveal of the repaired item.

And uh...that’s pretty much it! It’s great. It’s so relaxing. It’s so hard to find a reality-type show that isn’t interested in injecting the kind of overwrought drama that most American and privately-produced shows are. This is one of those few. The show is clearly genuinely interested in both showcasing each repair expert’s skills, and the deep, emotional meaning that simple everyday objects can have for people, especially when they serve as a connection to loved ones.

The Repair Shop is currently streaming on Netflix, though it only has one season - season 3, oddly enough. I believe there may be more available through the BBC, but some VPN trickery may be required to connect to their iPlayer, depending on your point of origin.

If you’re looking for something cozy to watch to while away these last few cold winter months, I hope you’ll turn to The Repair Shop. And I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Til next time!

Is there a name for this style of guitar?

2021-02-12T14:59:00Z

Just a simple question for today. This has been poking at the back of my brain for a while now. Some time ago, I don't remember when, I started to recognize a certain type of guitar in music I like. So far I think I've only come across it in video game soundtracks. And I have no idea what it's called, or if it even has a name.

I only realized this when I first had the realization that, "hey, I like this stuff," and tried to think of how I would go about finding more of it. I have absolutely no idea how to classify it.

Let's get to the examples. First, "City Day," from the Pid soundtrack:

Hear that? Feel those vibes? It's nice, right?

This is off topic, but Pid is a really cool little action platformer from a developer called Might & Delight. Everybody should play Pid, Pid is really great.

Anyway. Next example. Maybe a little more universal: "Cyllage City" from the Pokemon X&Y soundtrack:

See? It's in there too. Nice chill beach vibes. I feel like it wants me to come hang out in this town for a weekend, eat at the same little diner/bar every day, and go antiquing.

Alright, last example I could find. This one's my earliest memory of this, I think: the menu music from Humongous Entertainment's Backyard Football:

God damn, that's good stuff. It really sounds like hanging out in a treehouse on a Saturday afternoon, writing up little binders of fake information for your kid world. I dunno. Maybe that's just me.

Those are all the examples I could rustle up at time of publication, unfortunately, but I think it's enough to create a profile. I just love that sound. It's so carefree. It's a summer breeze. It's a lazy day sitting in front of the old family computer. No responsibilities, no worries.

All I really concretely know about it, if I were to describe it to another person in words, is that it's electric guitar, it's kinda high-pitched, and it's very upbeat.

Does it conform to a specific genre? Is it a genre in itself? Is it just a certain style of playing? What is it called? What would I punch into Spotify? Or Google? Or AltaVista? How do I find this information? Am I being stupid?

Is there a name for this style of guitar?

Searching for the "correct" version of Kiki's Delivery Service

2021-02-11T16:00:00Z

My sister and I have a problem. You may already know what it is from the headline if you've looked into this at all yourself.

As kids in the late 90s/early 2000s, we watched Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service for the first time. If you haven't seen it, it's a lovely, enchanting film, much like Miyazaki's other works. I didn't let on to liking it so much as a kid, because it was a thing my sister liked, and I had to have my own things that I liked that were for me. If you're a younger sibling, you understand. But I've since come to consider it possibly one of my top three Studio Ghibli movies.

It's got a lot going for it beyond just raw nostalgia. The music is calm and sweet, the characters are lovable, Kiki's situation is entirely sympathetic. But in terms of said raw nostalgia, hoo boy does it pack a wallop for us nowadays. In particular - going back to the music - the tracks that play over the beginning and end credits. See, my sister and I grew up on the Americanized version of Kiki, which featured Sydney Forest's tracks, "Soaring" and "I'm Gonna Fly."

It has since come to my attention that people don't like this version, so I'm going to address that here: I don't care. I don't care that Sydney Forest's music is not authentic. I don't care that people don't like the amount of Phil Hartman in this version. I don't even care that the fact that Jiji talks again at the end of this version ruins the idea that Kiki is growing up. I'll readily admit that it does.

But this is my childhood version. To my sister and I, that version is Kiki's Delivery Service. And for a while, that was the (or at least a) version that could be found for sale here in the States. That was the version on the VHS we rented from Hollywood Video in Chicago Ridge, IL, and that same version was still available when my sister bought it on DVD years later. Up to that point, we had no idea another version of the film even existed.

Until. Many years later, after my sister and I moved out of our parents’ house and into an apartment together, I asked for - and received - a Blu-ray player for Christmas. Shortly after this, filled with future-minded upgraditude, while browsing the movie section of a Target together, I implored my sister to buy the Blu-ray copy of Kiki sitting on the shelf before us. She agreed. After all, it was a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack. Even when we eventually split up, and I took my Blu-ray player, she'd still be able to play the DVD copy.

The culprit

On our way home, a black cat jumped onto the hood of our car, started me dead in the eyes for three solid minutes, and then left. That was a lie. But if it had happened, it would have been what I would now refer to as The First Warning.

When we got home, we put the new copy of Kiki away on our movie shelf. My sister asked what we should do with the old DVD copy. I said we should get rid of it. No sense having two copies! No incredibly important reason to hang onto that old thing! This was our second chance to avert disaster.

We sold it for money at a Half Price Books.

We had not yet watched the new Blu-ray copy.

Some time later, when it finally came time to watch Kiki's Delivery Service (it always comes time), my sister discovered the awful truth: this version was different.

Not only was the opening music not Sydney Forest belting out the very soul of the 1990s, but many of the other bits we remember being there were not there. Jiji was different. He didn't talk at the end. And worst of all, the ending music was not Sydney Forest belting out the very soul of the 1990s.

That basically brings us to present day, and our current conundrum of how to get back that other version, "our" version of the film. Because, as any film buff will happily tell you, it can be extremely hard to find the version of a film you are looking for when there are two or more versions out there. And in the case of Kiki, it sounds like two different versions were even shown at time of release on a theater-to-theater basis. After some cursory googling, the answer still seems to be: 🤷‍♂️

Let's piece together the clues. The version we like, with Sydney Forest and a heaping helping of Phil Hartman, was for some stretch of time, sold on both VHS and DVD here in America. From my brief research, it sounds like the film was localized by both Disney and GKIDS. The Blu-ray we bought has a ton of "Presented by Disney" garbage plastered all over it, so maybe we want the GKIDS version? That's also unclear from my search, as it sounds like the latest GKIDS releases - including possibly the version currently available for sale, as seen here - used elements of the previous Disney release for their own re-release, and/or disappointed in other ways.

Now, if that were the whole story, I would be content to throw in the towel and assume that our version of the film was laid to rest at some point, and is no longer available, extant, or acknowledged, and try to find it through - ahem - other means. However! In January of last year, Netflix released 21 of Studio Ghibli's films for streaming around the world. Unfortunately for us, "around the world" did not include the US, so we despaired and then forgot about it. Until! Later that year, I finally got around to paying for a VPN subscription, and realized that a whole wide world of content was now open to us, including Ghibli on Netflix.

The very first thing we checked with this newfound power was whether or not their version of Kiki's Delivery Service was our version. The strongest possible reason I can think up in response to what we found is that it was done purely to confound us. The Netflix English version is our version. Sydney Forest. Talking Jiji. All of it.

The good stuff

Does this mean that this version has come back into acceptability? Is this the version currently being sold in English? Does this mean I should take the plunge on the version available at Best Buy? Or is this version now only available in the UK and elsewhere (we used a UK VPN to access the films on Netflix)?

Perhaps time will tell. I'll probably break and shell out for whatever Best Buy has, just to find out.

If you or someone you know has information on the whereabouts of this version of Kiki's Delivery Service, please comment below, and someone will respond to you shortly.

Thank you.

Games I have played in quarantine (so far)

2021-02-10T16:00:00Z

I started this draft back in June of 2020. I don't remember if I still thought this would end at some point, or if I had accepted that we're all just trapped in hell for the foreseeable future. In any case, I thought it might be interesting to see just how many games I've played (however briefly) over the course of all of this nonsense. Because if I wait to post this until it's all over...well, I've learned not to dream of such things.

For a couple of years now, I've been loosely keeping track of all the games I play in a year, both in Paper, my favorite iPad app, and now in my Hobonichi Techo. I call it either the Games Journal or Games List. It varies.

I've recently ironed out my concrete rules for adding something to the list, because I now have time for that level of faffery. And so I only add something to this list if:

I'm playing a new game for the first time.
I make actual progress in a game I'm returning to.
It's an old game I'm starting over on a new platform.

These rules ensure I don't drive myself up a wall adding some DS game I saw and went, "Oh yeah, what is that again?" and played for five minutes before turning off again. It should be a list of memorable experiences rather than just a catalogue of things I booted up.

Without further ado, then, here is every video game I've played since this all started. Duplicates have been removed, since this list spans two years (and therefore two lists). Games I returned to will be italicized, and games I've completed will be marked in bold.

Stellaris
Megaman Zero/ZX Legacy Collection
Animal Crossing New Horizons
Nancy Drew: The Silent Spy
Katamari Damaci Reroll
Dragon's Dogma
Vermintide
Type Dreams
Star Wars: Battlefront II (2017)
Control
Starcraft 2
Tonight We Riot
Cadence of Hyrule
XCOM 2
Clubhouse Games
Elite Dangerous
Supreme Commander 2
Beglitched
Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge
Desktop Goose
Powerwash Simulator
Quadrilateral Cowboy
The Flower Collectors
Atom Zombie Smasher
Project Cars
Halo: Combat Evolved
Halo 2
Halo 3
Pokemon Expansion
Pyre
Panzer Paladin
Her Story
Hitman 2 DLC
Zelda BOTW DLC
Good Sudoku
Hollow Knight
No Man's Sky
Risk of Rain 2
One Step From Eden
Megaman Battle Network 2
Earthbound
Hades
Super Mario Sunshine
Super Mario Galaxy
Townscaper
Spelunky 2
Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water's Edge
Nancy Drew: Warnings at Waverly Academy
Fall Guys
Teardown
Islanders
Star Wars: Squadrons
Shovel Knight: King of Cards
Jenny Leclue: Detectivu
Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D
Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek
Grindstone
Dicey Dungeons
Stardew Valley
The Crew 2
Lunar Knights
Super Mario 35
Outer Wilds
Bit.Trip Runner
Boktai 2
Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand
Hitman 3
The Old Republic
Cyber Shadow
Picross S
Boktai 3
Microsoft Tinker

There you have it! I didn't realize I'd played an even six dozen games since last March, but I'm glad it came out at such a clean number. Plenty of interesting things going on in this list! Like finally finding Microsoft Tinker and getting it to run on Windows 10 after so many years! I'll probably write about that at some point.

In any case, that was my first list post. I'm sure that ticks some sort of box.

Congratulations, I’ve Won

2021-02-09T16:00:00Z

In yesterday's post, I alluded to an eBay auction I accidentally won, and that that auction was partially responsible for rekindling my desire to learn Japanese. This is that story.

Before continuing, I highly recommend throwing on the Boktai 2 soundtrack as a reading companion. It'll become clear why later. Otherwise, read on...

In a literal sense, this story begins two weeks ago, in late January of 2021. In a narrative sense, it begins in the summer of 2003. Three important events occur in quick succession, changing my life forever, and leading me directly to an eBay auction in 2021.

First: After moving to a new town and a new school, I manage to keep in touch with my best friend Alex, who shows me his Game Boy Advance and Megaman Battle Network 2 for the first time at a sleepover. He lets me start a new file to try the game from the beginning if I promise not to save, as was best friend-ly etiquette in the early 2000s. I instantly fall in love with the game's Whole Vibe.

Second: One of my new friends from my new school, Eric, in a fit of capitalistic money-making-ness, offers to sell me his old Game Boy Advance for twenty American dollars. Smelling a deal, I immediately accept and enter a fugue state, doing what I assume was everything in my power to obtain the necessary twenty dollars. I still have no idea where my ten-year-old self got twenty dollars. I return to school. I have the twenty dollars. He has the lightly used translucent Glacier Blue Game Boy Advance. We do the deal. The seller's remorse washes over him like the hot air from a blast furnace. He asks for take-sy back-sies. I respond with whatever the ten-year-old version of "tough shit" was. Eric and I were those kinds of friends.

That very GBA, yellowed by its time in the sun.

Third: With Game Boy Advance in hand, and fresh love for the Megaman Battle Network series in heart, I asked for and, incredibly, received my very own copy of Megaman Battle Network 2 for my birthday. This was the beginning of a beautiful relationship, and I would go on to play most of the games in the Battle Network series, crucially leap-frogging Battle Network 3, and moving straight on to Battle Network 4 (specifically the Red Sun version), managing to score a used copy for a subsequent birthday.

With all the pieces in place, I was ready to receive my divine message from the cosmos. A few hours into Megaman Battle Network 4, your character and a friend go to an amusement park together. One of the attractions at this amusement park is a dark-room walkthrough themed after the story of 'Solar Boy Django,' a vampire hunter who fights the evil vampire Dracky with his trusty solar gun, Gun Del Sol, and Otenko, the spirit of the sun itself. I liked Solar Boy Django's character design and thought, "Wow. I'd like to play that game."

As the game progresses, you find that you're able to collect a battle chip (a collectible attack power that you can deploy in battle encounters) of Django's Gun Del Sol. And furthermore, there's an entire sidequest featuring Django and Otenko later on. All of this adds up to the feeling that there might be something more going on here, and a quick search of GameFAQs confirms that this is, indeed, a crossover with an existing, separate video game series. That series is called Boktai.

Boktai, short for Bokura no Taiyou (Our Sun), the series' name in Japan, follows the adventures of Solar Boy Django, vampire hunter and wielder of the Gun Del Sol. It is the game that those small interludes in Megaman Battle Network 4 made me hope existed. From a cynical point of view, that in-game commercial did its damn job. From my eleven-year-old point of view, I was psyched out of my damn mind. Because the more I learned about Boktai, beyond the fact that it was real and I could play it, the more my child brain salivated. And in actuality, the two game series (which are developed by two different video game juggernauts, Capcom and Konami) are connected not for purely cynical marketing reasons. It turns out that Boktai designer (and creator of the Metal Gear series) Hideo Kojima's son was just a huge fan of Battle Network. So Kojima reached out to Capcom and Keiji Inafune, and they just had fun with it. So that's actually a really nice story.

One day at my friend Alex's house, shortly after learning that this Boktai video game maybe might possibly exist, I made first contact. See, the small group of friends I knew through Alex were also huge fans of Battle Network, and had also sussed out the Boktai tie-in. But they were a step ahead of me. Alex had found and bought the game for our friend Joey for his birthday. Joey was there that day, playing his new copy of 'Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand' by the sliding glass door that led out onto Alex's house's deck. It's actually important that Joey was playing by the sliding glass door, and it's at this point that I should give a proper introduction to just how weird and interesting the Boktai games were.

Boktai, Bokura no Taiyou in Japan, is a series of stealth action RPGs for the Game Boy Advance from Hideo Kojima and Konami. You play as Solar Boy Django, vampire hunter and wielder of the solar gun, Gun Del Sol. You traverse through dungeons, fighting monsters, leveling up, collecting gear and loot, and defeating vampire bosses known as 'Immortals.' Up to this point in the description, it plays like many other games, apart from some really cool stealth mechanics because it's made by Hideo Kojima.

HOWEVER. In addition to the usual action RPG trappings, there is some uniqueness to the way you use your solar gun, solve puzzles, and interact with the world. See, Boktai isn't just a game about fighting with sunlight. Boktai requires sunlight to play.

Look at that weird ass cartridge. That little black square on the back? That's a solar sensor. Not a light sensor. It cannot be tricked with one of Edison's bedeviled lamps. It only detects the rays of the pure, shining sun. This is how you charge up your solar gun's battery (basically your mana, in video game terms, and in practice in future Boktai installments), and interact with the game in myriad other ways. You don't need to constantly be soaked in sunlight in order to play, you can play inside and at night, but certain puzzles and activities need sunlight. If you play for long enough without any sunlight, it even starts raining in-game. It's weird and gimmicky and, frankly, in my opinion, cool as shit.

Not only was it weird and different, but watching Joey play through a small section that day at Alex's house, it seemed like a very good game that I would like to play. The environments looked cool, the music was enticing, and you could customize the solar gun with different parts that you found around the world, each one clicking into place as you selected it with a soul-satisfying snap. My hunger grew. I must play this video game.

After begging for it for my next birthday, my prayers were answered. I just want to take a moment here to recognize what a herculean task I set for my parents. Find your son a weird, obscure Japanese video game that hardly anyone has ever even heard of, much less seen, in suburban Illinois, and also you don't know anything about video games. I have no idea how many game stores, both Stop and Crazy, they must have called. Why couldn't I have been a normal kid who wanted a Mario or a Zelda or a Madden? My parents managed to track down a copy at a GameStop somewhere, but not of the original Boktai I had watched Joey play, only of its sequel, 'Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django.' "Is that okay," my parents asked. I thought to myself, "There's two of these things? Sick!"

When the day arrived, and I held the strangely shaped cartridge in my hand at last, I eagerly popped it into my GBA, drank in the startup screen, and started a new file. After a cutscene and a brief tutorial section, tragedy struck. Mild spoilers for Boktai 2 here: one of the very first things to happen in this game is losing the Gun Del Sol. I looked on helplessly as the solar gun, the very crux of the first game, which I had assumed would be a series staple, and which looked like so much fun to play with, was stolen away by a mysterious figure. The Gun Del Sol, as it is seen in the first Boktai, does not feature in the second. You spend the entirety of the game fighting instead with swords, spears, and hammers. I will admit to a brief moment of disappointment.

Luckily, beyond that moment lay hours upon hours of well-implemented stealth-action-puzzle gameplay, incredible music, lovable characters, an interesting story, a quaint little town, magic, vampires, and the end of the world. I fell completely in love. From Saturday mornings spent pressed against my bedroom window, trying to get just one more bar of sun, to afternoons following the sunlight around our yard, and those cloudy midwestern winters when the game just got harder. I devoured it.

Funnily enough, a similar pattern would play out later, while asking for KOTOR for my birthday, but only being able to track down KOTOR 2. Sometimes the sequel is just better.

Eventually, probably for my next birthday or so, I would get my hands on the first game, and finally got to experience the solar gun-having game I lusted after to begin with. The two games are different in plenty of other ways, but I fell in love with the first just about as hard as I had the second. I have many fond memories of making my way through the final dungeon over the course of a sick day at home.

Having completed the two current games in the series, and having heard rumblings online about a third in Japan, I was eager to see what came next. The third Boktai game, 'Shin Bokura no Taiyou: Gyakushuu no Sabata,' was released in Japan on 28 July 2005. Django looked older in the marketing materials, maybe even TEENaged. You played with both the solar gun and swords. You could ride a motorcycle that was also a casket. Surely it was only a matter of time until it, like its brethren, was localized. So I waited. And I waited. But it was not to be. Boktai's popularity and sales outside Japan were not high enough for Konami to consider localizing it in English and releasing it stateside. It seemed my story with Solar Boy Django would remain incomplete.

In 2006, Konami released Lunar Knights in North America on the Nintendo DS, a localization of Boktai DS, which was more a reboot/spiritual successor than a direct sequel. I eagerly bought it (I was making lawn mowing money at this point), and played through the whole thing, but it never felt quite the same. I liked the game's jazzy soundtrack, but it never matched the height of its predecessor's Spaghetti Western-inspired score. The localized names of Aaron and Lucian instead of Django and Sabata, and the characters yelling "Sunlight!" and "Darkness!" instead of "Taiyoh!" and "Ankoku!" just felt off. I liked it well enough, and certainly played it to completion, but it wasn't the same. And learning that the game's crossover in Japan with Megaman Star Force, the DS successor to Battle Network, had been removed in the English version, despite Megaman Star Force being released in North America, didn't feel right either.

Years passed. I played other games. I returned to my Boktai cartridges occasionally, and continued to hold them in high regard, as I am a deeply sentimental and nostalgic person, but there remained a hole. I had been denied closure. And what was I going to do? Import a video game from a foreign country? I didn't know how to do that, and I likely didn't have the money. I was thirteen.

I'd found ROMs of Shinbok, as Boktai 3 came to be colloquially known, and there were even solar sensor patches being developed so that you could play the game on an emulator without the need for actual sunlight, and English translation patches were being worked on, so that English-speaking fans could finally enjoy the game they missed out on. I tried playing this way once or twice, but never made it further than the first dungeon. Emulators just aren't the same. Sometimes they're glitchy, sometimes they lose your save data, and they certainly ain't no translucent Arctic Blue Game Boy Advance.

Time took its tragic toll. The years marched ever onward. I graduated high school. I left my home, and graduated college. I left my city, my state, I got a job, I fell in love, I paid bills, I traveled internationally. I had a life. I am twenty-seven years old as I sit here having written that sentence, so no, under no circumstances should you take me seriously. But I did do all those things.

Then one day, I'm me. I'm browsing eBay for a Valentine's Day gift for my girlfriend. For whatever reason, out of the clear blue, I decide to search "Boktai." I get results. Used cartridges, new cartridges, Complete-In-Box games, Japanese guidebooks, and even custom cartridges that fans have made with solar sensor patches baked in.

This is the part we've been building towards for 2,200 words. The point of the whole thing. The part where I also see, on eBay dot com, listings for 'Shin Bokura no Taiyou: Gyakushuu no Sabata.' Shinbok. Boktai 3. Some of them are expensive. Some of them are not. 2021 Mike has a different idea of expensive than 2006 Mike. 2021 Mike has money. 2021 Mike remembers what it felt like to be 2006 Mike. It is almost 2021 Mike's birthday. So I roll the dice, thinking, "It's Boktai 3, and it's that cheap. Someone will outbid me and that will be that." I was drawing on lessons learned from bidding on an item that I wanted to get for my girlfriend. I had still failed to learn the lesson that brought me to this moment in the first place: I am possibly the only living human who cares this much about Boktai. That, it turned out, would not be that.

Twenty-four hours later, I was still the leading bid. And the next day. And the next. It started to sink in that, barring some 11th-hour, swoop-in bid from a Boktai superfan, I was going to win this auction. I started to feel guilty, especially after failing to secure the item I had been bidding on for my girlfriend. Here I was accidentally buying something for myself! But then I thought back. Back to everything you just read, all of which I have lived. And thinking of it as an early birthday present to myself, it seemed plenty reasonable. I continued watching the auction with muted excitement as the deadline crept closer.

On February 2nd, at 2:49 AM, fate smiled on me. The auction had ended. And my bid, the only bid, had won. The cold fact that had kept Shinbok from me all those years ago, that had kept it from coming stateside, that simply not enough people were interested, had allowed me to finally acquire it for myself.

In all its glory, fresh from Japan.

Two short days later (SOMEHOW - this thing came from Japan), I held it in my hands. A complete-in-box edition of Shin Bokura no Taiyou. Original box, manual, and cartridge. Each in extremely good condition. The long journey that started at the very roots of my personal handheld gaming history could finally end. I popped it into my Game Boy Advance, the same translucent Arctic Blue Game Boy Advance I bought off of Eric, on which I first played many of my favorite games of all time, including both previous Boktai games, and heard that beautiful sound:

Not only is everything in great condition, it works. The game works. And I can play it. It's mine.

We've reached the end now. There isn't much more to tell. I'm having a great time slowly playing through the game. There's a New Game+ mode awaiting my first completion, and items and unlockables only obtainable on multiple playthroughs of the game, so I'm going to be happily occupied with this thing for some time. The only "drawback" is, of course, that the game is in Japanese, hence my renewed effort to learn. On that front, things are going slowly, naturally, but well. I'm remembering some things I learned in high school, and I'm able to read some words in-game.

In truth, Boktai 3 isn't the only thing that made me want to learn Japanese again, I've been conspiring to do that for a few months now. But I've heard that having a video game, or some piece of media, to experience entirely in Japanese helps in learning the language. I'm starting to see some of that already, as I learn to recognize Hiragana and Katakana from words in menus and dialogue boxes. These games already mean so much to me, and if they help me learn another language as well, it'll be that much more special.

In closing: Chase your dreams. Check eBay. Your dreams might be on eBay. Just know your limit going in. Your eBay dreams are not a good reason to lose your house. But they are a great way to rekindle a childhood love, it turns out. I did not mean to actually win this eBay auction, but I do not regret it one iota. I cannot believe I have this object. And I'm so, so happy with it.

Three brothers, reunited.

On Discipline

2021-02-08T16:00:00Z

The process of becoming an adult is largely the process of getting better and better at maintaining what can reasonably be called "a life," which is itself largely a series of things you do regularly to fulfill an ever-expanding hierarchy of needs and, eventually, wants.

I am now firmly in my "late twenties." I've got the list of things I need to do to make sure I don't die Extremely Down. I've moved swiftly past the things I did not want to do as a teen and young adult because brushing your teeth is good for your health, having a made bed and a clean space makes me feel like an Interior Design Professional, and, fuck it, being responsible is just inherently satisfying.

As I feel I'm reaching the end of my list of things I am mostly obliged to do - having just signed a lease for an apartment which I will share with my long-term significant other, and being on the hook for a myriad of recurring bills - I've been starting to add more things to my regimen of Things I Do Regularly Just Because.

For one, I've been journaling every day. Last year, I bought a Hobonichi Techo because I wanted to try my hand at pen & paper organization. And also because they look cool. I found it to be not just helpful in keeping track of things I needed to do daily, but also soothing, centering, and insightful. Who knew putting all my thoughts and feelings in context and on paper would yield such results (lots of people is who).

My experiment in pen & papering last year was largely successful from January to April. You won't believe what happened next! Suffice to say I eventually rededicated myself to journaling daily later in the year, purchased a new 2021 Techo, and have marked every single one of this year's 39 days thus far.

One of many delicious veggie soups we've made.

I've also been cooking dinner with my girlfriend almost every night of the week for almost an entire year. When the entire world shut down due to the uncontrolled cloud of death circling the globe, my girlfriend moved in with my sister and I. One nice regularity to come of this situation, for my girlfriend and I, has been the opportunity and ability for the two of us to engage in the time-honored domestic ritual of cooking a meal together.

Every night around 5:30pm, we head to the kitchen, agree on a dish, and cook. It's one of the best parts of my day. I usually do the chopping, the grating, etc. She's better at flavors and technique and times and temperatures. But I do the cleaning, so it all evens out.

Finally, I've decided that this year, I want to start learning Japanese again. I took a semester of it in high school, and then it all just faded away. As a serial Liker of Video Games, I've always wanted to be able to read and understand Japanese, and as this desire has returned (partly due to an eBay auction that I accidentally won, which will almost certainly be the subject of a future blog post) and there is certainly no shortage of resources to get myself started, this is as good a time as any to jump back in with both feet. So I've started re-learning the Hiragana and Katakana bit by bit and quizzing myself every night.

This is an incomplete list of things I have started doing every day purely because I want to, or because they better me in some way, or for some other reason that is not "I'll die or smell bad if I don't." I'm sure there are about a thousand other little things that qualify, but these are the ones that come to mind immediately, and lists of three are tidy and easy to digest.

Now we come to the point.

I am here today to add another thing to the list, to lift another plate aloft and set it spinning. The chosen venue for this announcement is no mistake. In the words of Marshall "Global Village" McLuhan (how's that working out, Marshall?), "The medium is the message."

So here it is: I want to start writing every day.

This goes beyond the journaling of my day that I already do in my planner. I want to open this blog every day, stare down the empty page and blinking cursor, write something, and click 'Publish.'

I have no delusions as to the purpose or outcome of this exercise. The audience of this announcement is myself. I do not expect to gain a large following, nor any accolades, compensation, or even employment. My purpose is purely self-driven. I like writing. I like how it feels to publish a blog. I want to do it more often.

Perhaps in the course of this experiment, my skills will improve! This seems likely, given the observable correlation between practice and perfection. That's probably not true, though. I mean, perfection isn't, like, real. So. I certainly won't aim for that. But I think my gist is simple enough as to be reasonably assumed to be understood.

I like writing.

I was always told I was good at writing throughout my academic career, especially when I spent more time than the night before on whatever I was working on. In fact, most times, I didn't give nearly as much of a shit about what I was writing as I probably should have, and STILL got an honest-to-god, face-to-face compliment from my professor to the effect of, "Hey, kid, you're pretty good at this."

Writing also has a good amount of distance from - while still being adjacent to - the thing I want to do with my life: video production. It's just far enough to not quite feel like work, but still close enough that improving one will improve the other. Besides, writing is merely the first step in the process of producing a piece of video. Getting to stop there and call it finished feels like getting away with murder!

So here I am, back on The Go To Hell Space with a declaration of intent, of which I am almost certain to fall short. I can only hope my shortfalling comes later rather than sooner. My guidelines for this self-imposed challenge are slim to none. I can write about any topic, at any length, in any style. I just have to write something.

That brings me to the end of day one. The hardest part, as they say, is over.

I'll see you right back here tomorrow. I could have ended by saying, "I'll see you write back here tomorrow," but I didn't. These are the kinds of heroics and false-endings you can expect going forward. God bless you for reading even as far as the second sentence, honestly.

Goodbye now!

Mike's 2020 Games of the Year

2021-01-06T16:00:00Z

Oh good god it’s time once again. We actually made it through 2020. This is the time of year when I usually start to look back at the year and mull over all the things I did, the places I went, and the people I saw. I don’t think I’m alone in not wanting to look back at 2020, but rather sprint away from it as quickly as possible into the open arms of Anything Else. However, I do still find it fun to look back at the games that filled my time (even more of it this year, after being laid off), provided me some escape, and left me with fond memories and a desire to return to their worlds.

Here, then, is…

MIKE’S FAVORITE GAMES OF 2020:

No Man’s Sky Origins

Aw shit, here we go again. For the third year running, I simply could not pass up putting my forever game on the list. Not simply because I keep on playing it, but because the team at Hello Games keeps developing and releasing enormous free updates.

This year’s Origins update provided a new facelift for the game, among other improvements and additions, and so I was called back yet again. I’m not sure if it was the update, the unemployment, the pandemic, or some combination of them all, but what I found when I returned to the galaxy was a more inviting experience than in years previous. I was immediately propelled forward by a dozen or more objectives, and completed them one by one. I finally dug in and completed the story content added back in the Atlas Rises update, found my way to economic prosperity (cobalt flipping is your friend), found my dream ship, fully upgraded myself, my storage, and the storage of my ship, set up bases on a half dozen new planets, and got to work building out my main base with specialists and vehicles and a farm. And there are STILL so many things, like living alien ships and exo mechs(!!), that I haven’t even touched yet!

This is my game, y’all. And it is my sworn duty to appear before you once a year and gush over my other life in space. No Man’s Sky was among the first games this year to provide me with a true escape to another world that I just couldn’t tear myself away from. And I expect it will continue to do so again and again.

Elite Dangerous

Keeping to a theme, here. This was the year that I finally checked out Elite Dangerous, a game I always suspected was Extremely My Shit, but never made the plunge into. Well, there was no better year in which to plunge than 2020, and Extremely My Shit it was indeed.

I’ll say just a few things that will probably tell you a lot more about me, than they will the game: 1: I was very happy to find that I was able to map the game’s joystick controls to almost exactly the same flight controls as 1995 LucasArts classic TIE Fighter. And 2: When docking at a space station, the game plays Johann Strauss II’s “The Blue Danube.” That was about all I needed to first feel comfortable, and second fall in love.

The thing about Elite Dangerous is that it is very much a “find your own fun” kind of game, similar to No Man’s Sky, but even more hands-off. I like that a lot. If you come into Elite Dangerous looking for a swashbuckling adventure story, you will be disappointed. It isn’t everyone’s thing, but when the setting and the mode call out to me on their own, I love a game that doesn’t care what you do. Give me some systems to interact with if I feel like it, or if I find my way to them, and just let me be. Elite Dangerous is very confident in its systems, its setting, and its simulation in that way, and deservedly so.

On those nights when all I wanted to do was leave the planet, Elite Dangerous was there to perfectly, completely immerse me in exactly that fantasy. There are information packets to be delivered, pirates to fight off, a living to be made, and a galaxy to explore. I’m looking very much forward to my next chance to throttle up, plot a course, engage my Frame Shift Drive, and let the cold, calm galaxy melt my cares away.

Dicey Dungeons

Coming in right at the wire, I grabbed Dicey Dungeons in a sale the week before Christmas and it frankly blew me away. I slept on Dicey when it came out on PC because I knew a Switch port was coming, and I feel like I remember people generally liking it, but then it sort of faded from memory the way these things do. I feel like those initial discussions of the game did not do it justice. Dicey Dungeons is gorgeous and fun as hell right out of the gate.

There’s a solid blend of story and systems here, with some light setup before you dive into the game itself. Gameplay consists of walking around a simple, board-game-like map screen, and landing on either a battle, a shop, or an item. Shops allow you to buy new items. Items grant you new abilities to use in battle. And battles consist of turn-based dice rolls, where every item/weapon/ability you can use costs a certain number that you must roll. Each playable character (there are 6) also has their own innate special ability, called a Limit Break, that they can employ once a certain amount of damage is taken. Battles are quick and fun, with each of a character’s “episodes” taking around 10-15 minutes to complete.

What makes Dicey Dungeons so immediately fun is the way it puts all of its systems on display for you to see. It would be really easy to make a comparison to Into the Breach here, and honestly if you loved that game and are looking for a quick pitch on Dicey Dungeons, it’s Into the Breach but for RPG combat. It’s slick, it’s gorgeous, and the soundtrack Absolutely Slaps. This is a video-game-ass video game. If you pick it up, and I highly recommend that you do, you will not be disappointed.

Teardown

After seeing clips of this game in development on Twitter, I couldn’t wait for the chance to finally play it. Well, a shockingly short time after first seeing those tweets, Teardown released in early access on Steam. It’s a voxel-based heist puzzle game with gorgeous lighting, built around destructive environments and precision planning. It’s exactly the head-scratcher I needed on those days when all I wanted to do was close my browser, open my window, and yell.

Okay, so you know how in the IO Interactive Hitman games, a lot of the fun comes from the relationship between planning and execution? Well, that same relationship exists in Teardown. But whereas Hitman places importance on stealth, and encourages improvisation and owning your mistakes, Teardown is all about giving you a consequence-free planning and exploration phase, before finally popping things off and more or less having you try to execute the perfect heist speedrun.

To give an example, early in the game you are tasked with stealing art from some rich dude’s house (hell yeah). The complication here is that all of the relevant pieces are connected to an alarm system. So the minute you grab one of them, the alarm sounds and a countdown starts ticking. And to make matters worse, the pieces are all so far away from one another that there would be no way to grab everything you need and escape in the time provided by just running around the house grabbing art, even if you make use of the game’s many vehicles. As you might guess, this is where the tearing down comes in. In order to make your heist work, you need to first take the time to run around the map blowing holes in walls, placing vehicles in key locations, and otherwise carving an optimal path through the map with your sledgehammer and other tools in order to set the place up for the perfect run.

It’s a little bit Minecraft, a little bit Hitman, a little bit speedrun, and 100% the heist game I have been looking for. Even in its early state, it’s pretty meaty, and keeps managing to surprise me, including with a level involving a lightning storm that flips the whole formula on its head. I can’t wait to see where Early Access takes it from here.

Quadrilateral Cowboy

Super Mario World. TIE Fighter. Boktai. KOTOR. Every once in a while, I find a game that I can’t stop thinking about. A game whose world is so immersive, whose style is so attractive, whose gameplay is so natural and addictive, that I feel I could happily exist inside of it, as a part of it, for all time. I am so happy to report, after sleeping on it for five damn years, that Blendo Games’ Quadrilateral Cowboy is one of those games.

I’d been meaning to play QuadCow for years, but it took Itch.io‘s ‘Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality’ to finally put the game in my hands. Once I jumped in, I fell madly in love, it ate my entire brain, and the rest is history.

There is so much I want to say about this game. So much, that I’m currently planning a video essay about it that will hopefully see the light of day at some point. As small a game as QuadCow is, it’s got charm and character out the wazoo. Your arsenal of tools expands at such a clip that it’s impossible to get bored, something I’m not sure would even be possible without them, as the core mechanic of executing code on your deck is so darn satisfying.

If you’ve heard about the game, you’ve probably heard a pitch that is something along the lines of, “you’re a hacker, and you write code to solve puzzles,” but that surface-level description really does this game a disservice. That, on its own, could have been a fun game, but Quadrilateral Cowboy has so much to say on top of that, wordlessly, about camaraderie, rejection, failure, marginalization, living on the fringes of an uncaring society, and just trying to survive and have a chill time with your friends when you can. Some pretty relatable themes! The game conveys these themes effortlessly in its environments, and especially in the quiet asides between missions. Getting a quick glimpse of your friend’s tiny apartment when you come to pick them up for work grants such massive insight into not only their lives, but the wider world in which you exist.

The game is very good. And if nothing else, there’s an incredible amount of creativity on display here, from the story and characters, to the puzzle design, each new piece of equipment, and even the books and signage you find scattered around various environments.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is a really special experience. All these reasons and more earned it a spot on my 2020 list. I implore you to give it a try.

Spelunky 2

It feels like one of the themes of this year was people being excited for Spelunky 2, which has been coming for a while, and then Hades coming in and stealing its roguelike thunder. Which is a shame! Spelunky 2 is a very good game in its own right, and regardless of whether or not time is real anymore, it definitely feels like it occupied an “era” of my year.

The first Spelunky was one of the original indie darlings. It’s considered pretty mechanically perfect to this day, so to iterate on that must have been daunting. However, having played it, I’m glad Derek Yu had more to say in the language of Spelunky, because for whatever reason, I didn’t connect to the first game as deeply as the wider video game community. I never beat the game, never even got terribly far, and never discovered any of its many secrets (I might’ve found the Black Market once). A couple of months later, I was on to the next thing. The latter may eventually end up being the case with Spelunky 2 as well, but in terms of the impression it left on me at launch, I had a much clearer, more immediate connection to this game than its predecessor.

The sequel comes with all the modern trappings you might expect a decade later, from gorgeous visuals to even more stunning music to super fast load times, but there’s also, happily, plenty of new toys to play with as well. The addition of mounts – that is, animal friends that you can ride through the winding caves of the moon – has been a massive one. There are new challenges down there as well, and new risks to weigh against the rewards they propose. One you’ll encounter early on is the “Ghost Jar,” which contains a diamond worth big bucks, but when broken immediately spawns The Ghost, a slow-moving but massive enemy who usually shows up when you’ve spent too much time in a given level, can chase you through walls, and kills you with a single touch.

Like its predecessor, I haven’t yet completed Spelunky 2, and I certainly haven’t found all of its secrets, but I’ve enjoyed the ways in which it has shaken up its old formula, and I’ve generally had an easier time grasping its challenges and making my way through its world. Having said all that, I wouldn’t say it’s an easier game by any means, and there’s plenty to discover and puzzle out anew, even for returning players.

Spelunky 2 is more of the same in the best ways, and full of new stuff without any of that stuff feeling tacked-on. There’s a whole new Spelunky in town. And that feels great.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

It probably isn’t a surprise that the universal salve that is Animal Crossing makes this list. A lot of people were very excited about this game. Funnily enough, I was not one of them! I’d only ever played a little bit of New Leaf before this, and bounced off pretty hard, so I sort of wrote off the whole franchise as something that wasn’t for me.

Well, along comes March, with its brand spanking new pandemic, and working from home until further notice, and my girlfriend who is now staying with me thinks those trailers actually look pretty cute. So I buy it. And what happened? Well, it’s charming as all get-out, and I fell in love. And as I feared, my Stardew Valley farm fell to the wayside for the rest of the year (I’ve since been back in a big way after getting this guide as a Christmas gift).

But what made me fall in love with New Horizons was not just its promise of a breezy life on an island surrounded by adorable animal friends, but its inclusion of co-op in the form of island sharing. The fact that the game locks your Switch to just one island was a sticking point for a lot of people who didn’t necessarily want to share their island with the people with whom they share their Switch. For me, that just meant a quick and easy way to play with my girlfriend, who loves this game even more than I do. Neither of us had any meaningful prior experience or expectations going into New Horizons, so we were happy to figure it all out together.

Playing with my girlfriend on an island that is purely ours, with a few shops, our handpicked neighborhood of animal friends, tons of clothing and crafting options, seasonal events, and ways to surprise each other with gifts was one of my favorite things about this year. If it weren’t for her, I might not have bought this game in the first place, and I definitely would have fallen off of it by now. She still checks in every single day, and leaves presents outside my house, which is a better and more adorable reason to keep coming back than I think the game itself offers me. New Horizons makes it so easy for us to share this nice little world during a time when we feel so trapped. And – cliché as it may sound by now – that’s made it one of the brightest spots in the bleak darkness of 2020.

Hades

Yeah. I mean, yeah. Basically, if you’ve been at all aware of the games press’ collective explosion of praise for Hades, then everything you’ve already seen and heard is completely deserved. And if you haven’t…

Hades is an isometric roguelike dungeon crawler from possibly my favorite studio, Supergiant Games, creators of Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre. I have played and loved every Supergiant game to varying degrees, and I truly believe Hades is the best they’ve ever made. I just want to keep playing it.

It really feels like Hades has cracked some kind of mythical roguelike code of rewarding “failure” and incentivizing replay. Playing through a run, you meet new characters, which fills out part of their codex entry, pick new abilities, which fulfills fated prophecies, unlock new weapons, which allows new styles of play, collect items, which unlock new innate powers and other cosmetic changes to the House of Hades, and all along the way, you learn more of the overarching story: why your character, Zagreus, son of Hades, is so hellbent on leaving this historically very-hard-to-leave metaphysical realm.

It feels like the culmination of everything Supergiant has made and learned so far, and that’s no mistake. By their own admission, their style of game development is that every project is informed by the project that came before. Bastion’s contextual narrator is here, as is its collection of ever-unlocking weapons, power-ups, and difficulty boosters. The slowly revealed story and characters and isometric combat of Transistor is here, the ensemble cast of voice actors and grand, branching narrative of Pyre is here, and another powerful, perfect Darren Korb soundtrack plays over all. Hades not only combines, but elevates everything that came before it in true Supergiant fashion. It is the product of a team of artists in their prime.

So yes, everything you’ve heard about this game is true. Every piece of art, every character portrait, every background, is beautiful. Every track, from thumping battle beats to ambient in-betweens, is pure aural gold. Every hit, every kill, every win, and even every loss, feels extremely good. I love the story. I love the writing. I love every character. Even Theseus. He’s such a shithead! It just feels so good to experience this game. I want to be playing it right now.I think I’ll go do that when I’m done here.

Hades. It’s a goddamn force of nature. And you should play it.

Someone should keep an eye on these Supergiant folks. They might just be onto something.

EarthBound

When the New Nintendo 2DS XL came out, I excitedly upgraded from my 3DS XL because of the “New” line’s ability to play Super Nintendo Virtual Console games. This was during the last period in my life that I was unemployed. I grabbed and burned through SNES and Gameboy games whose look and feel and tone I had fallen in love with as a child, but lacked either the funds, the dexterity, or the mental acuity to finish. I finally got through A Link to the Past, before throwing myself into Super Metroid, completing the Mother Brain fight and harrowing escape I’d seen on so many GDQs. I lost dozens of hours to Kirby’s Dream Course. The next item on my list was EarthBound. Then I got a job. Shortly after, I bought myself a Switch, and my 2DS started collecting dust on a shelf.

Hard cut to 2020. After a long period of sinking into Animal Crossing, I realized I still had this gem sitting unfinished on my 2DS XL. It felt like a fitting time to return. When I booted up my old save, I realized I didn’t have a clue where I was or what I was doing. So I made a decision. I would start fresh. Play through all of EarthBound, start to finish, in 2020.

It seemed like a pretty tall order. Fit a big Nintendo JRPG, something I usually don’t have the patience for or interest in, into a single year. But this was EarthBound. Even before I ever played it, I knew it was different. Its art, marketing, and soundtrack just ooze this weird aesthetic that tells you the game is going to be something special.

Well, it’s sitting here on this list, so… I did it. This year, I did it. I experienced all of EarthBound. And reader, it lived up to the hype. From the moment I awoke to a knock at my front door to the end of the end credits, I was delighted, sometimes confused, sometimes frustrated, often surprised, and always enjoying it. I had downloaded a PDF of the official game guide that was included with the cartridge at release, because I know how obtuse old games used to be, and I figured I would need some help, but I didn’t want to rely on it too much. My method was basically to ignore it and play through the game on my own until I got very very stuck, or I was clearly finished with an area, and wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing anything interesting or important. I’m proud to say I was mostly able to complete this game for children unaided, and I would encourage this style of play if you’re looking to jump into this game for the first time.

I honestly don’t know how much I can say about EarthBound that hasn’t already been said in the 25 years since its North American release. The people making this game really knew what they wanted to make, how they wanted it to feel, and what they wanted it to say, and they went and achieved all that and then some.

I think my favorite thing about EarthBound, having finally finished it, is how earnest it is. It has its tongue-in-cheek and sarcastic moments, and I think it’s pretty well known for that kind of humor, but those moments are largely in service of the greater, earnest themes at play. Namely, that children are people with thoughts and ideas and aspirations that are worth listening to and encouraging, that a lot of adults, and often parents, are at best neglectful, and at worst abusive of their own children, and that capitalism sucks. That last one might be a reach, but shitty people only caring about money when they should care about something that actually matters is a recurring theme.

Listen, I don’t want to elevate praise to grandiosity by saying this is one of the best games of all time, because I don’t know what that means, and the game does show its age in places. Combat can be a bit of a slog at times, but the game honestly makes every effort to alleviate those issues with its dead-simple progression loops. When you battle, you get experience. When you get enough experience, you level up. When you level up, you get stronger. Oh, and when you get to the next town, buy the next, more powerful weapon. It’s basically as simple as that. The game really focuses on story over all else, in the best way.

If you’ve never experienced the colorful magic of EarthBound, I really think it’s worth playing. The story, setting, characters, art, and music all collide into an exceedingly lovely, and clearly lovingly crafted, whole. And it is, I think, mostly noob-friendly enough that any perceived intimidating qualities should be excised from your mind.

The experience of playing EarthBound is one that will stay with me for a long time to come, and one that really helped me through this heck year. I really hope you play it if you haven’t. And if you do, get ready for an instant memory! Look at the camera… Ready… Say, “fuzzy pickles!”

Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition

If the main theme of this list is “games that had the greatest impact on me in 2020,” then Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition must top that list. A long time coming since its Kickstarter in 2011 and the initial release of its first act in 2013, this complete edition marked the first time I ever played KRZ.

For those unaware, Kentucky Route Zero describes itself as “a magical realist adventure game about a secret highway running through the caves beneath Kentucky, and the mysterious folks who travel it.” The story is told in parts, five acts, with short interludes between each act.

TV Edition was released in late January 2020 alongside the game’s final act. I grabbed it on Switch as soon as it came out. My buddy Olly, who had been playing it bit by bit over the years, and was super stoked for the final act, was always telling me I should play it. So I was excited to finally have the chance to play the whole thing on Switch. I loved it from the jump. The way it reveled in quiet moments and spoke in poetry, the gorgeous visual design, the incredible cinematic wide shots.

The game’s purposeful slowness inspired in me a kind of reverent gameplay. I would play it in bed when I had a night to myself, on the train during an afternoon commute when the subway cars were less full, anytime I wanted a quiet moment in this world, and could dedicate enough time to becoming completely lost in the Zero’s twists and turns. But that was then.

Kentucky Route Zero has always been a game being constantly born into a changing world. Fitting, then, that I should start playing KRZ in a completely different world than the one in which I finally finished it. Somewhere around April or May (I think? Time is nothing), I finished up Act IV and the interlude that follows it, Un Pueblo de Nada. And then, I don’t know, time just got weird. Summer came and went, and brought with it a wave of new games to check out. Then it was Halloween. Then it was Thanksgiving. Then in December, I started thinking back through my year in games, and thinking about what I could finish or revisit. And so, in early December, after living through nine months of a pandemic, I played the final act.

I won’t spoil the final act, but suffice to say it hits different after your government grossly mishandles its response to a global pandemic, and is at best negligent and at worst abusive toward its citizens. But the finale was developed and released long before (wild how 1-2 months can be considered long) anyone knew what the year would hold. This is just one example of how the game’s overarching themes of debt, and the ways that capitalism – specifically late-stage American capitalism – literally and figuratively destroys people, make it both a perfect amber cast of the period during which it was developed, and an evergreen document that will seem to eerily apply to the present until we finally decide to change and staunch the bleeding. Kentucky Route Zero is not just an extremely good game, it is possibly the only game qualified to be named “Game of the Decade.”

And yet, despite its themes and its relevance, I would gladly play through it again. I probably will! Because the game is, again, despite its themes and its melancholy tone, a salve. It is kind. It is hopeful. It believes that this world and its people are worth fighting for, despite and because of their circumstances. Kentucky Route Zero is the friend that listens to you describing something fucked up that happened to you and says, “yeah, you’re right, that is fucked up,” and then maybe you start a band together. And that’s beautiful.

That’s it, that’s all I have to describe this game and my time with it before devolving into superlatives. This stirring, wandering, meandering, purpose-driven, beautiful game that bookended the worst year of my life. It is my game of the year. And if you haven’t given it your time yet, and if you do, it just might be yours, too.

That’s my list for the year! It was really hard to pare down to ten this year, so I wanted to briefly call out a few other games that provided joy this year, but got slightly edged out by the others:

Honorable Mentions:

Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics

Clubhouse Games came at a time when my roommates and I were really missing our usual New York City summer activity of…doing things. So having a big bundle of board games and bowling and darts that we could all gather ’round the TV and play together was really nice. A solid collection. Very chill. Highly recommended.

Panzer Paladin

The latest from another beloved indie developer, Tribute Games! It just barely didn’t make my top 10, but I had a really great time with it. Extremely good soundtrack, look it up. If you’re looking for a solid, straightforward retro platformer, look no further.

Townscaper

This was another Twitter find! There’s no real “game” here in the traditional sense. No tasks or objectives to complete. It’s really just a chill little tool for creating pretty-looking towns. My girlfriend, an illustrator, thought it might be cool as a way to design little towns as references for art pieces. If nothing else, though, it’s also just really nice to make some little towns.

Good Sudoku

Always gotta jump on a new release from Zac Gage. If you’re unfamiliar, the dude is the absolute king of good mobile games. Flipflop Solitaire, SpellTower, Typeshift, Pocket-Run Pool, Really Bad Chess, the list goes on and on. And they’re all bangers. So I was absolutely giddy when he released his take on Sudoku. Good Sudoku adds a bunch of tools that professional-level Sudoku players use in their own esoteric software, makes it all really friendly and easy to learn, and legit teaches you how to be better at Sudoku. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had playing Sudoku, and I feel much better at it than before.

The Flower Collectors

A narrative game in the style of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window? But with animal characters and fascist antagonists? I’m there. A really quick, really solid little mystery game. Fuck the cops, help your neighbors.

There were also plenty of games on my wishlist that I never quite got around to, but hope to play in the coming year:

Missed Connections:

Umurangi Generation
In Other Waters
Anodyne 2
Mutazione
Creaks
Carto
Noita
Carrion
The Solitaire Conspiracy

Did any of your favorites make my list? Any of the opposite? How was your year in video games? Tweet me or some such!

Until next year,

Mike

RIP 3DS, the Best Nintendo Handheld

2020-09-17T16:00:00Z

The reports started rolling in this morning. The king is finally dead. Nintendo's Japanese site has updated the listings of its 3DS family of consoles with an "Out Of Production" message. Their English site has seemingly scrubbed any mention of the 3DS from existence. Nine years after launch, and several years since anything major was last released for the console, they've finally stopped making the thing.

I'm not going to go through the whole X number sold song and dance or anything, I just want to talk about how goddamn good Nintendo's Last GameBoy was.

First, the hardware. The 3DS Family of Systems, as Nintendo came to call it as the catalog of sizes, shapes, and form factors grew over the years, was extremely varied and full of bangers. The weird, shiny, angular newness of the original that introduced us to the Circle Pad and assured us that clamshells were here to stay. The rounded edges and absolutely gargantuan screens of the XL. The pleasing "cake slice" design of the 2DS. And finally, the refined elegance of the New 3DS generation. Every 3DS I ever used was a joy to hold and play on.

The 3DS existed during a weird time in Nintendo history, carrying the unfortunate burden of being the handheld Yin to the home console Yang of the doomed WiiU. But the 3DS thrived despite this. Unlike the WiiU, which developers had No Idea what to do with, the 3DS, with its own weird gimmicks, was lovingly embraced, and skyrocketed to success. It even survived Nintendo's eventual realization that the big feature that this family of handhelds was named after, 3D, sucks actually. Because the genius of the 3DS all along was that its stereoscopic 3D was entirely optional. So they did learn something from the Virtual Boy!

As a result of its overwhelmingly positive reception, its floundering console counterpart, a nearly constant flood of new versions, colorways, and special editions, and backward compatibility with the original DS catalog, the 3DS boasts a game library of approximately six hundred gazillion extremely good games.

This is the real meat here. And it's why I still play my 3DS to this day. I have a Switch, I have a powerful PC, but I fucking love my 3DS. Or rather, my New Nintendo 2DS XL, to be exact. Some of the naming got out of hand toward the end there.

See, the 3DS' main claim to fame at launch was a new port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. So, uh...good start. Happily, that was not the only N64 game to receive a 3DS port. Majora's Mask soon joined its sister, StarFox 64 came along, not to mention the truly stellar Mario 64 port that was released on the DS years earlier.

But it wasn't all ports of first-generation 3D Nintendo games. A Link Between Worlds, the game that finally got me to buy a 3DS, came out in 2013 and remains one of the best Zelda games ever made. Super Mario 3D Land ranks up there with the best Mario games, far beyond its "Land" counterparts, there was a new Animal Crossing, countless Mario RPGs, like 47 Fire Emblems, a Smash Bros (!?), Kirby Planet Robobot, a new Mario Kart, SEVERAL new Pokémons. Even Donkey Kong Country RETURNED just to be on this thing. Those are just some of the first-party releases, and that list is already out of control.

Add on top of that the incredible third-party and indie support with games like Shovel Knight, The Binding of Isaac, the SteamWorld series, Terraria, Minecraft, Cave Story, OlliOlli, Azure Striker Gunvolt, Mighty Switch Force, and Gunman Clive, just to name a few.

Add on top of THAT the incredible number of Virtual Console releases from the NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and eventually (with the advent of the NEW 3DS generation) the Super NES. Even Game Gear got in on that shit. This is also where I mention the solid 2D Sonic ports that came to the system.

AND add on top of that the ports of WiiU games that made their way over when Nintendo finally had to accept that no one bought a WiiU, like Mario Maker (which was admittedly a flawed port), Yoshi's Wooly World, and Kirby's Extra Epic Yarn (originally a Wii game, but hey we'll take it).

Oh, and add on top of THAT the entire library of DS games, which was already enormous and stellar.

It is for these reasons and more that I not only think back on my 3DS with fondness and love, but continue to pick it up to this day. Where else can I start the day playing Mario Kart, pop out to continue my game of Earthbound, throw in a Megaman ZX cart, switch over to Pokemon Crystal, and wrap things up with Yoshi's Wooly World, all on the same console?

I played through some of my favorite games of all time on the 3DS. I came back to Pokémon after not playing a single generation since Crystal on the 3DS. I finally completed A Link to the Past and Super Metroid on the 3DS. I discovered and fell in love with Kirby's Dream Course on the 3DS. I discovered a ton of wonderful new games, and I can't wait to play more (I'm currently planning to finally play through Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask once I finish Earthbound).

The 3DS may have exited production, but it will never die.

Tonight We Riot: A Micro-Review

2020-05-22T16:00:00Z

It's really nice to have an unapologetically leftist game that knows who the bad guys are.

I can see this game acting as a blueprint, or a statement of intent. "These are the kinds of games we're interested in making and publishing, with these clear politics, and we're not afraid to do it and make those voices heard."

All that said, I did bounce off this game pretty quick. Though, I could see getting a little deeper into its simple systems with some prodding.

Workers Shoulder The Burden Of Bleeding Giants

2020-05-18T16:00:00Z

Uber has laid off 3,000 more employees this week, according to a new report by the Wall Street Journal. This is following another round of 3,700 layoffs just two weeks prior. Uber's business is down 80% in the time of COVID-19, and they're bleeding out.

But the blood isn't their own. Like every other company has and will continue to do, they'll happily sacrifice their workers to the cause of "staying afloat." The people at the top haven't felt the impacts of this crisis in the ways their workers have; they've made sure of that.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is foregoing his salary for the rest of the year, and let's all be sure to get out our golf claps for that, but I have a feeling he won't miss it too much. He isn't worrying about his healthcare coverage or applying for unemployment in extremely uncertain times. He certainly doesn't have to worry about making rent or buying groceries. He'll gladly play the part of the self-sacrificing Nice Guy Boss™ while throwing others to their doom to keep his place atop the pyramid.

I'm sure his company-wide email was full of apologetic but ultimately empty platitudes about the greater good and how much it pains him to have to let so many talented people go. It's something he had to do. His hand was forced. Poor guy.

It's a familiar song and dance: pity parties and marble busts for the ruling class, personal responsibility and scrappy bootstrap-pulling for the rest of us. Even in their report on this new wave of layoffs, the Wall Street Journal manages to swing it as "Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi attempt[ing] to steer the ride-hailing giant through the coronavirus pandemic." Oh captain, my captain.

Before you get too choked up though, you might be interested to note that Uber actually modeled what they called "an extreme edge case" back in March wherein they lost 80% of trip volume, the reality in which the company now finds itself. The result of that model? Uber comes out the other side of this year with "$4 billion in unrestricted cash, plus $2 billion in revolving credit," according to The Verge.

Thank goodness they haven't wasted any of that cash on their workers. Might've put them in a real bind.

What Else Is On? May 17th, 2020

2020-05-17T16:00:00Z

Hey. You made it. Chips are on the table, there's coke in the fridge if you want. This is Toby, he doesn't bite, but he does love people. You're not allergic, right? Pie'll be here in an hour. Feel free to put anything up on the ol' tube, no one else is here yet.

PowerWash Simulator is an oddly satisfying game that lets you clean filthy houses
Taylor Lyles, The Verge
"FuturLab decided to release an early demo on itch.io 'because frankly, we thought folks could do with a relaxing stress reliever right now!'”

Welcome To Danny DeVito Island
Zack Zwiezen, Kotaku
"Over on the Animal Crossing subreddit, B4SSOON explained that they had lost track of the hours they spent making this giant face."

There's a Mega Sale happening on the Epic Games Store
Me, Just Now
"I got Control for $20, and that's pretty damn good."

There's plenty more I could link here, but I like to keep this section fun, so this is all for this week. But hey, there's another week just around the corner!

Keep reading. Have a good one.

Acquisition Hell

2020-05-15T16:00:00Z

This morning, Facebook announced that they are buying Giphy, the popular internet GIF repository, with the intention of integrating it with Instagram. Which means it's only a matter of time before Facebook gets tired of their new toy and shuts them down for good, or maybe strip mines them for features before rebranding them to "InstaGIFs" or some horseshit.

I am so goddamn sick of this cycle of Capitalist plundering. It is a tale as old as time. Older than the internet, certainly. Many companies exist. Then one company gets richer than all the other companies and buys the other companies to "more deeply integrate with their features." Then there is only one company. Then that company shuts down those other companies' features for any one of a thousand reasons. Then there is only one company, and less good shit.

This isn't about Giphy, singularly. This is about the ongoing, as yet unaddressed outbreak of a particularly virulent strain of Capitalism afflicting the world. One that pats itself on the back for the number of choices it offers its consumers, while systematically removing those choices one by one.

We've seen this again and again in tech and on the web. Just ask Mailbox or Sunrise or Vine how business has been lately. Take a look at the bleak fucking wasteland of media production in this goddamn hell ass country.

This is a silly thing to complain about, given the hundred million other ways Capitalism is literally killing us. But it's emblematic of a larger problem with this way of doing things. The rich get richer, the big get bigger, power consolidation goes unchecked, workers get shafted.

I am tired of seeing the things I love destroyed because their existence becomes untenable outside of being absorbed by a mega-corporation. I am tired of having to live with a system that rewards people for doing new and interesting things by slowly beating those things into the same shape as everything else. And I am tired of having a government that sees this as a good and natural occurrence. Like the chrysalis from which a butterfly emerges, beautiful in its way.

Facebook has assured everyone that Giphy will continue to exist in its current form, and we can all keep using it as we have been, so we should all keep our shirts on and let history repeat itself. I'm sure they'll keep their word.

Fuck Facebook. Fuck Capitalism. Fuck a world that can't see a better way.

Sainz. To. Ferrari.

2020-05-14T16:00:00Z

Fuck yes, things are happening in Formula 1.

Following Sebastian Vettel's announcement that he would be parting ways with The Red Team™ at the end of this year, there was much speculation as to who would replace him at the storied Italian team, and how that would start changing the rest of the grid.

Luckily, we did not have to wait long for an answer to these questions. This morning, Ferrari announced that none other than the smooth operator himself, Carlos Sainz, Jr., will be joining the prancing horses for the 2021 season.

This rules. Sainz has proven himself to be a good goddamn driver, having propelled McLaren to 4th in the Constructors' Championship and himself to 6th in the Drivers' Championship last year. He also seems like a really solid dude, goofy and personable when he's able to be, but seriously dedicated to his calling of going very fast.

But what's that? SIKE, this is actually DOUBLE news because Sainz' announcement that he will be leaving McLaren has also led Daniel Ricciardo to announce that he is jumping ship once again! This time from Renault, where he landed after leaving his seat alongside Max Verstappen at Red Bull in 2018, to fill the (very briefly) vacant seat at McLaren.

Exciting moves all, and I for one cannot wait to see how Sainz performs in a real championship-contending car, and how his new partnership with Charles Leclerc shapes up. The next chapter in Daniel Ricciardo's saga of "I Really Want To Be A World Champion But Oops I Left the One Team That Could Have Gotten Me There So Now I'll Go Here I Guess," should be no doubt interesting as well. Especially with McLaren now positioned as a once more rising star on the grid.

No word yet on any decision from Sebastian Vettel. I personally wouldn't be too surprised if this turned out to be his exit from the sport, but this is a weird year. Who knows, maybe we'll end up with a Hamilton/Vettel pairing over at Mercedes. I'm not sure I see Seb settling for less. And is there room on the grid for another Kimi?

Personally, I'm just glad to have some F1 news to talk about besides race postponements. I didn't realize how much I'd been craving the excitement. Sports are good, actually.

Happy racing! 🏎

This week's turnips, Week of May 10th, 2021

2020-05-13T22:00:00Z

Wowee, I haven't blogged about these things in a while, huh? Well, that's not just because I've been away from the blog, it's also because I haven't engaged with Animal Crossing New Horizons' turnip market since sometime last summer. This is thanks both to betting big and striking it rich on an island I found on the Turnip Exchange, and simultaneously reaching a part of the game that effectively means I almost never have to pay for anything anymore.

I'm just good. I just have a house and I'm good. Imagine.

Well folks, I ended my long hiatus from a number of things this week when, driven by morbid curiosity and a vague jealousy that my girlfriend has amassed over 3million bells through diligent daily task-doing, while I continue to languish in near-poverty with just over a million, I dove back into the high-stakes game of turnip trading. Now I know how the capitalists feel: largely empty.

I'm happy - or, really kind of ambivalent, I guess - to report that my first time back in almost a year was a wild success. Aided by my longtime friend and confidant, turnipprophet.io, I returned to find my island's turnip market in an upswing, offering me a price high enough to dissuade me from the lengthy wait times of the Turnip Exchange.

Let's take a look at the numbers:

Purchase Price: 110

Monday Morning Price: 96

Monday Afternoon Price: 91

Tuesday Morning Price: 87

Tuesday Afternoon Price: 119

Wednesday Morning Price: 205

Wednesday Afternoon Price: 232 -SOLD-

Turnips Purchased: 4,000

Purchase Total: 440,000 Bells

Sell Total: 928,000 Bells

Total Profit: 488,000 Bells

Maybe not as big a score as I might have found on the Exchange, but honestly, I'm rich enough already. At this point, it was just a gamble for fun. Getting to keep the whole thing on my own island was icing on the cake.

Today's Turnips, May 13th 2020

2020-05-13T16:00:00Z

Folks, we've peaked. Small bumps on Monday and Tuesday gave way to what Turnip Prophet is projecting will be the final bump this week. This is the peak. It's time to sell.

Purchase Price: 101

Monday Morning Price: 63

Monday Afternoon Price: 102

Tuesday Morning Price: 121

Tuesday Afternoon Price: 174

Wednesday Morning Price: 177 -SOLD-

Turnips Purchased: 1,000

Purchase Total: 101,000 Bells

Sell Total: 177,000 Bells

Total Profit: 76,000 Bells

A successful turnip week on the island of Green Hill. May your markets be as generous to yourselves, if not more. See you next week!

This Weird Fuckin' T-Phone Rips

2020-05-12T16:00:00Z

There are no rules anymore. It's 2020. You know this.

If you've paid any attention to consumer tech in the past two years, you know that the companies that make phones have gotten both very rich and extremely bored, and so it is time to stunt on 'em.

Samsung has been folding its phones in half in both directions, Motorola saw that as an opportunity to bring back the Razr, and then there was whatever the fuck this is.

LG, meanwhile, has been coming at this whole thing sideways. Rather than develop and release what might turn out to be "just another" folding phone, they said "fuck it, how bout a phone that's TWO phones."

And now I am happy to report that they are at it again with this goddamn monstrosity.

You might look at this photo and think, "hey, that's just a scaled-up VCAST," and by god you'd be right. I think that's exactly what I love about this concept: at first blush, without that context, you might think it looks pretty cool (it does), but once you're past that, and you start imagining how you'd hold this thing, let alone how thick and heavy it would likely be, you can move on to the comedy of imagining someone dropping this weird, top-heavy hand-television right onto the subway tracks at rush hour.

I simultaneously feel so glad that this concept exists and that LG might make it, and 100% sure that no one should buy it and anyone who does is a complete tool. I want it to exist, but should it? That's what's so great about art: this image can exist without the need to ever make it real or practical or think about any of the physical logistics required of phone manufacturing and distribution.

But since we as a society don't value art or artists whatsoever beyond the ability of their work to generate profits for capital, at least there's this to look at.

I don't know that anything currently being toyed with by these corporations matches or exceeds the utility of a flat slab of glass, but I'm glad they're trying. Propel my ass directly into this weird future-tech.

This Afternoon's Turnips, May 11th 2020

2020-05-11T17:00:00Z

Purchase Price: 101

Monday Morning Price: 63

Monday Afternoon Price: 102

Oh yes, folks. 102. That tiny bump betrays a coming larger bump.

Happening this early in the week means it will probably be a smaller bump than might be otherwise possible, but after a few weeks of stinky trash prices, I will take what I can get.

Brace for impact tomorrow afternoon or sometime Wednesday.

How are your turnips doing?

Holy Shit, Sebastian Vettel is Leaving Ferrari

2020-05-11T16:00:00Z

Yeah that's right, I'm into Formula 1.

Things had been expected to get wild with drivers making moves as several high-profile contracts were set to expire at the end of this season, and trigger a wave of announcements that has come to be known to F1 fans as "silly season." That was before the entire planet was put on lockdown and the Formula 1 calendar put on pause.

Since everything has ground to a halt, there was a feeling around F1 that teams and drivers might consider this year a wash, and extend things as they are for another year (as the sport as a whole has decided to do for the upcoming technical regulation change), and re-evaluate after a proper season.

Yeah, guess not! Vettel's decision to vacate his seat at one of the most high-profile teams on the grid is sure to kick off quite the game of musical chairs as drivers try to make the move to a team that can give them a chance to win some races.

McLaren's Carlos Sainz, Jr. is already being named as a potential replacement for Vettel, which, in this writer's humble opinion, would be extremely cool. That Carlos is one smooth operator.

If, dear reader, you are not familiar with the ins and outs of Formula 1, earth's greatest sport, I must recommend to you the incredible Netflix documentary series, Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which has been a great jumping-on point for many a recent fan.
I would also throw in the Shift-F1 podcast which features some great inclusive coverage from some great blokes.

Alright, get back to your life.

[source]

This Morning's Turnips, May 11th 2020

2020-05-11T14:00:00Z

Here we go again, folks. Day one of a new turnip cycle. Nothing but raw hope and possibility.

I bought yesterday morning at a price of 101 Bells per turnip. I bought 1000 turnips, which has become my go-to amount for no other reason than I tend to have just the right amount of bells to buy that many come Sunday morning.

This morning, Timmy and Tommy offered to buy them at a price of 63 Bells per turnip. Of course this is low, but the first offer is never where you're going to sell, so this is more about taking the temperature of the coming week.

A low price can be a bad omen, but when the opening offer is this much lower than the purchase price (63 vs 101), you can reasonably expect at least one bump during the week.

My turnip calculating website of choice, turnipprophet.io, is telling me as much, and I'm just hopeful enough to believe it.

Good luck everyone, and may the turnips be in your favor 🧄

(I know this is garlic, there is still no turnip emoji)

What Else Is On? May 10th, 2020

2020-05-10T16:00:00Z

What Else Is On? is a collection of writing from elsewhere on the web that I thought was good this week.

Detroit Lions Use Animal Crossing To Reveal 2020 Schedule, Throw Shade
Mike Fahey, Kotaku
It seems that absolutely everyone is playing Animal Crossing and getting very creative and probably also going a little stir crazy?

Video Game MVP – The Douglas Fir
Emily Rose, RE:BIND
A study of the simple Douglas Fir, constant companion of the serene and the weird. And a look into why that is.

East Village Mainstay Veselka Reopens With A Takeout Menu Of All-Time Favorites
Scott Lynch, Gothamist
Nothing better happen to Veselka before I get there. God I miss being out in New York.

Only The 24 Hours Of Lemons Could Take Virtual Racing To Its Full Potential
Bradley Brownell, Jalopnik
Just wait til you get to the saxophone.

Games Criticism Is A Kindness
Heather Alexandra, (who is sadly leaving) Kotaku
This is an extremely articulate and well thought out piece from Heather Alexandra, an extremely talented writer who is saying her goodbyes at Kotaku this week and moving on to greener pastures. It simultaneously puts into words a lot of feelings I've had but haven't known how to express, and also has given me a lot to think about and internalize.

Wealth, shown to scale
Matt Korostoff, Github
A visual representation of how fucking rich a few people are and a pretty good example of how ~~killing~~ taxing them would immediately solve a lot of problems.

Happy reading! Til next week 👋

Thank God for the Friday Pie

2020-05-09T22:00:00Z

When my sister and I first moved to New York, I had one major goal above all else. Eat good pizza. Find my dream job? Maybe. Forge my own path in life? If it comes up. Feel as though I've come into my own as an adult and a human being? A nice-to-have.

New York is, of course, known for its pizza. This would surely not be a difficult task. Well let me tell you: it wasn't. Because most pizza here is better than fine. And we moved into an apartment like 30 feet away from an extremely good pizza place. This is not a story about that pizza place. Because it changed hands a few times and now it's kind of weird. Like they lost their "A" rating with the health department for a while and we didn't want to eat there anymore, and then when they got it back it felt weird to go back in, like "oh you just want to support us when we're definitely not cooking in proximity to rat feces." It's a whole thing.

Anyway yeah, this is about our second pizza place, three blocks down. We started ordering from them after we felt too uncomfortable going to our first love. And that's when we discovered our new favorite weekly ritual: the full tray grandma.

I had not had a grandma pizza before moving to New York. I'm from Chicago, I'm not sure it's made its way out there yet. Y'all, the people out here are on some wild pizza shit and I'm here for it. You can walk into any random corner joint and find no less than four types of 'za sitting under heat lamps and ready to go. It was in our random corner joint - the first one - that we discovered and fell in love with grandma pizza.

Grandma pizza is a little thicker than a thin crust pie; sauce and cheese intermingle rather than sit in a defined relationship of one on top of the other. Basil's there too, and they're ready to party. But what really makes it grandma is that it's square. It's made in a square pan. It's cut into squares. Chicagoans, I know you are no strangers to the square slices, you would love this, get on it.

Aftermath.

But back to my point. Ever since falling in love with our new place's pie, we just sort of slipped into a pattern of ordering a full tray grandma pie every Friday night. What started as a "should we do this...?" quickly turned into an expected weekly feature. It was one of our first regular New York things. A comforting punctuation mark on a long week of making this place our home.

You may be wondering when this becomes a coronavirus story, and I'm afraid it's now because hey holy shit everything is different and our lives look nothing like they did before. It's getting warm in New York City. Our phones are surfacing "On This Day" photos from just last year of us doing fun things outside. But we can't go to any of our favorite places, or see any of our favorite people.

But god damn it, our pizza place is open and delivering.

I know there will not be a normal after this. At least not for a long while. I know that a lot of people will want to sell us on the idea of "normal" and "after," and that a lot of people will want to buy. I also know that I don't want to see my favorite places wither and die because of this. And I know that this is fucking hard for everyone.

I don't know what it's worth to feel normal again, if just for an evening. Or if not normal, then at least comforted. But it's at least $22.95 plus tax and tip. Thank god for you, Friday pie.

I'm pretending it's summer today

2020-05-09T16:00:00Z

Hi, it's May 9th and it snowed last night. But it's sunny enough outside, so I'm pretending it's summer today.

Forgetting and pretending can be pretty useful and necessary acts of self-care from time to time, in small doses. Luckily, I'm very good at those things, so I'm doing myself a solid and pretending it's summer today.

My space heater is doing a lot of the heavy lifting on this one. It was chilly in my living room this morning, but this little baby has slowly but surely created the perfect temperature for my brain to not be entirely sure if the sound of the fan is the space heater heating up a cold apartment or a window AC unit cooling down a hot one. I was chilling here on the couch for maybe an hour before I even realized I was doing it, but I am 100% pretending it's summer today.

My trusty Vornado, a tower of warmth.

I'm doing all my usual summer things. First, you know I'm wearing a t-shirt. No sweaters in sight on this balmy day! Second, I'm reading about video games. Always tons of hot new reveals this time of year! It's the gamer's Christmas! Third, through the magic of the internet, I'm enjoying some live music festival I only heard about a minute ago on Twitter. You feeling these beats? Oh yeah, I'm definitely pretending it's summer today.

Not a sweater in sight, no sir.

I think perhaps later today I'll have some ice cream to further cool things down. I have a new game downloading on my Switch, Tonight We Riot, by Pixel Pushers Union 512. That's right. This summer? She's a Socialist Summer. Kill your boss! Fuck your landlord! Marry your bank! And then kill 'em!

Let's see, what else...uhh pizza! Gonna eat some leftover pizza for dinner tonight. Nothing more summer than pizza. Can't eat pizza in the cold, surely. Was that a chill? Better turn down that AC a few notches, heh heh. Yes, I'm pretending it's summer today, without a doubt.

I wasn't kidding about that music festival, Knower killed it.

Oh yo, I just remembered I've got a package coming today! Ordered some 3D printed parts for a big electronics project I'm undertaking. Getting mail is summer as shit, are you kidding me? Fuck yeah. All the doubts I never had have been squashed. The summer that was never off is back on! I might even play some Star Wars games in a bit (another thing I do in summer). Nothing on this earth can stop me from pretending it's summer today.

This Morning's Turnip Price, May 8th 2020

2020-05-08T17:00:00Z

Turnips in Animal Crossing are bought on Sunday at a fixed price, and their sale price fluctuates every morning and afternoon, all week.

My Stalk Market has been tanking all week. Steady decreases in price every day. This is the third time this has happened since Daisy Mae came to the island (I think. Time means nothing).

This morning was no different: 55 Bells.

A grim omen. The lack of any upward jump by Friday means only doom. A cold wind blows and my crops wither. My only hope now lies on the islands of my friends and internet strangers. I poured my savings into this wretched turnip machine. I must now beg for some relief, or perish.

I will check the price once more this afternoon. Hopes are not high.

Welcome to The Go To Hell Space

2020-05-08T16:00:00Z

Well, it finally happened. The novel coronavirus pandemic turned the world inside out, I lost my job, and I've been inside for almost two months straight, so I am starting a blog. To kick things off, I'll start by handling some obvious questions:

Q. Why is this blog called The Go To Hell Space?

A. A few years ago (the last time I was unemployed), I bought the domain "gotohell.space" because I thought it sounded funny. Then the other day I got excited by the idea of starting a blog, and I was like... well I already have this? And it sounded like a pretty good blog name. So the short answer is I don't know.

Q. Why are there so many posts here already and why do they seem to be written from the past?

A. I had a blog over on my website, eganworks.com, which functions as my portfolio (I'm a video editor). Recently I have been updating my website and my reel (remember how I lost my job?), and I realized hey maybe a blog doesn't belong here. So when I decided to break it off into its own thing, I didn't want to lose everything I'd already written, so I brought it all over. It's old and probably a little embarrassing! But that's kind of why I made this as a separate thing from my Professional Internet Presence: to be a little embarrassing.

Q. What kind of posts can I expect to read here?

A. It will definitely be an eclectic mix! But you can expect healthy doses of video games, technology, New York Thoughts™, pandemic themes, and socialism.

Q. Do I have to care about this if I know you?

A. I am more than happy to write to the void.

Alright cool, that takes care of the big stuff. Take a look around, read a little bit, subscribe in your favorite RSS reader (Feedly and Feedbin are good), and let me know how you're doing.

We're gonna get through this. I'm gonna write about how necessary and restorative our weekly pizza nights are now. We're all gonna play Animal Crossing and check out sometimes.

Happy Friday, I hope you wanted something to read.

- Mike

Brand Not Found

2020-01-17T16:00:00Z

Once in a great while in the constant hellscape that is capitalism, there appears something in which we can find joy: pirating your favorite show from your least favorite company, blocking every promoted tweet on your timeline to assert your dominance, and my personal favorite, websites whose domain names are that of brands, but which do not belong to the brands in question. The most famous example of this is nissan.com, which is owned by one Mr. Uzi Nissan, president of Nissan Computer Corp, who suffice to say will not be buying a Sentra any time soon.

My personal awakening to this particular joy, however, came to me while I was trying to order a salad from my favorite salad place near my office. Guessing at what would most likely get me where I was going, I erroneously typed “chopt.com” into my browser’s URL bar, expecting to be greeted by the appetizing vision of a bowl of leaves, but was instead presented with several listings of aquatic vehicles for sale. It was at this moment that I discovered that chopt.com, for whatever fantastic reason, had automatically redirected me to shipsales.com, a website I would have never known existed or thought to seek out otherwise.

Your one-stop shop for salads and croutons.

Your one-stop shop for sails and crews, tons!

This is a wonderful thing for one very obvious reason: it’s a very clear — and rare — example of a brand not being able to completely control a situation, a message, a person or persons, etc., for their own gain. And for the most mundane of reasons. Joe Blow bought the domain first. The complete domination of brands and corporations over our lives occupies a great deal of brain space in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty, and so there’s a sort of beautiful, anti-authoritarian joy in this simple denial of “getting that brand on lock.”

My favorite thing about chopt.com — that is, shipsales.com — however, is that unlike Mr. Nissan’s clear, vocal distaste for Nissan The Car Company and their desire for his domain, there is no visible reason why chopt.com should redirect to shipsales.com. Not only is there no clear connection to the name Chopt, but our seafaring friends are not even using the name as their main domain, it’s just a redirect. So what exactly is the story here? Is it a case of petty domain-squatting? Did the team at ShipSales partake of the chopped greens and judge them to be sub-par, forever dooming the choppers to a life of brand fragmentation?

Try it with your friends!

It is, of course, possible that this was a cynical ploy by an employee of ShipSales.com Inc trying to tap into the hot SEO of a company that, judging by the ShipSales web design, did not yet exist, figuring that anyone who would pay ten American dollars for a loose amalgam of wet vegetables would surely be in the market for some maritime leisure. But I really hope not. I prefer to believe in the beautiful mystery that is, on its better days, the internet. Like a ship passing slowly in the night. Calling to me. Beckoning me to the sea.

Perhaps one dreary day, when I’ve tired of my city life, and I attempt once more to make a healthy lunch choice, I’ll finally decide to cast off my workaday shackles, and drop a cool 5 mil on that 1989 Romanian Oil Tanker.

Mike's 2019 Games of the Year

2020-01-01T16:00:00Z

HELLO FRIENDS.

Another year falls to the march of time. So it’s time once again to look back at the games that came out in the past 12 months (the ones we had time to play, that is) and decide which audiovisual experiences deserve the title of “Game of the Year.”

I had the time and opportunity to play a lot of great games this year from all over the spectrum of genre, platform, and budget. These are the games released in the past year that I loved the most.

IT’S TIME FOR…

MY TOP TEN GAMES OF 2019:

10. Cyber Protocol

I stumbled upon this cool little arcade puzzle game while browsing through the Switch eShop. The art and the name caught my eye and the trailer reeled me in. Cyber Protocol’s visual style is incredibly strong, with its bright neon, chunky pixels, and VHS filters. Happily, it has a strong soundtrack to match, with thumping cyberpunk beats (that you can go and listen to on their own in the built-in music player) accompanying you on your chill day at the arcade. The sound design is extremely appealing as well, with bright blips and chonky blorps fitting perfectly with the techno-arcade nostalgia vibe the game is going for.

Basically, these three elements vibe together so well that the game’s goal of immersing the player in its desired aesthetic is easily achieved, and it feels very good to be in there.

If you’re looking for a story, look elsewhere. Cyber Protocol is only interested in one thing, and that is puzzle arcade gameplay. Each level is essentially a maze of traps, hazards, and Pac-man bits that you gobble up for points. But it’s not about finding the correct way out, rather the game offers you only one route to take, but challenges you to collect every last bit in each stage. The final catch here is that you do not have complete 1:1 control over your digital avatar. When you move in one direction, you continue moving in that direction until you hit a wall, no turning midway through your path.

All of this put together makes for an extremely enjoyable and challenging puzzle arcade game. Throw in the fact that it’s on Switch, making it easy to pick up and put down a stage at a time, and the fact that there seem to be TONS of levels, with new mechanics and obstacles introduced at a solid pace, and it’s a real no-brainer.

If you’re looking for something simple to while away the hours on Switch, I really can’t recommend Cyber Protocol enough.

9. Card of Darkness

Apple Arcade happened this year. And my initial skepticism slowly gave way to wonder as a slew of gorgeous, good-as-golden-age indie mobile games showed up seemingly out of thin air. While I still have some concerns about Apple Arcade and where it fits in the games-as-service narrative we find ourselves in, I have nevertheless found plenty to love in the games it has allowed some big-name creators to bring to life.

One such game is Card of Darkness, a joint project from indie mobile rockstar Zach Gage, and Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward. If you know anything about these two names, you know pretty much all you need to know about Card of Darkness.

CoD is a dungeon-diving card game that plays out like a sort of solitaire roguelike. Gage has certainly proven time and again he knows how to make a good card game and put in on your phone, and this is no exception. As the game’s protagonist, a wannabe adventurer, you fight your way through various dungeons comprised of a grid of cards. There are treasure cards, health-restoring potion cards, weapon cards, and (mostly) monster cards.

The aim of each level is to carve a path through the rows and rows of cards to the other side to either fight a boss, or collect a Card of Darkness, a modifier you can equip to affect the game in various ways. One card gives you extra health to start with, another increases the value of weapons that appear, and so on. These modifiers get appropriately more complex as the game goes on.

The catch of each level is that once you interact with a stack of cards, be that picking up a potion or defeating a monster, that stack is now “marked,” and you must interact with every card in that stack before you are allowed to leave the room. Therein lies the great strategic conflict of Card of Darkness. Do I pick up that potion and heal myself? Or will I be dooming myself to fight the strong monsters that may lie below it?

On top of all of this is some EXTREMELY Pendleton-Ward-ass art and music, and that’s beautiful.

My one and only complaint is that Card of Darkness is ONLY available with an Apple Arcade subscription. So if you want to play this game at any point in the foreseeable future, you’ll need to pay Apple five bucks a month in perpetuity. The flip side there is that you also gain access to tons of other great games (one more of which you will find further down this list), but I would still love to be able to just buy this game outright. It’s easily worth the entire cost of my subscription, if not more.

8. Risk of Rain 2

I have some very fond memories of the original, 2D Risk of Rain. And I was intrigued, but frankly a little worried, when Hopoo Games announced a follow up that would make the jump to 3D. Not that I didn’t trust Hopoo to design an excellent game, I just wasn’t sure that what excelled in 2D would excel in 3D. Luckily, I was wrong.

Not content to stand on the brilliant boldness of its incredible art style alone, Risk of Rain’s particular brand of roguelike gameplay fits beautifully in a 3D world. Traversal feels good, there’s a whole new roster of survivors with interesting new mechanics available that take full advantage of RoR2’s extra dimension, the available environments are well-varied, with more on the way all the time, and the breadth and depth of items on offer is as immense as ever, with many returning favorites and new additions.

Towering above all of this is the sheer amount of work it must have taken to not only design and render the same game in a whole new dimension in a way that felt similar enough to be understood by returning players, yet well-adapted to its fresh new digs, but also to create dynamic 3D animations of all playable characters and enemies. And of course, the hard work of…making the game go.

What I’m saying is this game is truly a monumental achievement for such a small, new team, and the fact that it’s fun is icing on the cake. The original Risk of Rain started life as a student project, and I couldn’t be happier that its success allowed the team at Hopoo to continue making games, especially such an impressive follow-up as this.

Risk of Rain 2 is out in Early Access on Steam and Switch. More content is continually being developed and added, and I can’t wait to see what comes next!

7. F1 2019

So this was the year I finally became an F1 guy. My dad has been a fan for years, but only ever got to watch sporadically because American broadcasting is weird. This year, I decided to get into it myself with a subscription to F1TV (that I of course share with my father) after watching the excellent Drive To Survive documentary series on Netflix, and listening to Waypoint Radio and eventually Shift-F1 (a podcast about speedy race cars).

It was only natural, therefore, that I also became an F1 video game guy. I had gotten the 2015 version in a Humble Bundle at some point, gave it a shot, and it hooked me. So I grabbed the 2018 version on sale and played that for most of the year. As in, I completed a full season of the career mode 😬

I did not expect the move to 2019 to be as big a change as it was. Right off the bat, it is EXTREMELY visually impressive, and DAMN smooth. I don’t know that that alone would have put this one on my list, but there are a number of other interesting changes that make 2019 a worthy upgrade.

For one, the addition of an abridged F2 season leading you into your F1 career lends some extra purpose to your endeavor, and introduces some rivals who graduate to F1 alongside yourself that you can share a personal connection with. It’s a cool gimmick that makes this F1 career mode more than just racing a bunch of rich and famous people.

At the same time I upgraded to F1 2019, I also…bought a racing wheel. Which is a lot. But this is who I am now I guess. Most people probably will not and should not buy a wheel, but suffice to say it feels very good, it makes this a whole new game in a whole new way, and it is much, much harder playing this way.

F1 2019 looks and feels as impressively smooth and beautiful as a top-tier racing game should. Codemasters, ya did it.

6. Link’s Awakening

I never had a GameBoy, Color or otherwise, as a kid, so I sort of missed this generation of games. The closest I got was playing through my friend’s copy of Pokémon Crystal on the GBC they let me borrow for a few weeks. And so I never experienced the original Link’s Awakening in its time, or ever went back to play it on the 3DS virtual console.

I decided to rectify that when this remaster was announced, and grabbed a digital copy on 3DS, but ultimately put it down before release. I’m really glad I did, because it made for a much better experience with this game. I played enough of the original to see what made it special, gain an appreciation for its classic visual style and music, and feel where it could be improved. But luckily, because I only got so far in the classic, everything still felt new in 2019’s Link’s Awakening. Every discovery was uncovered with fresh eyes.

This game is a magical little experience. I fell in love with its visual style from the first trailer, a bunch of cute little miniatures walking around a tilt-shifted model world like board game pieces come to life. The music was given the same level of care as well, with each theme and fanfare given a lovingly crafted orchestral update. Most often, a game’s music is what determines whether it sticks with me through the years, so that fact that I can literally hear the above screenshot speaks volumes.

On its journey over to Switch, the game picked up some performance hitches here and there that are frankly surprising to see in a Nintendo game, and particularly one that was clearly so meticulously and lovingly recreated. However, it never amounted to more than some brief frame rate slowdown for me, and never impacted gameplay.

Coming from the original, the improvements made in this release are, to say the least, a relief. With more buttons to work with than the original GameBoy, you won’t have to spend nearly as much time in the menu swapping between items. B is dedicated to the sword, ZL is a dedicated run button, ZR is a dedicated shield button, and X and Y act as TWO swappable item slots. This was the correct way to bring a game limited by the hardware of its time into the present day.

Link’s Awakening is a delightful game that I can easily recommend to anyone. It has effectively recaptured what made the original special while bringing things up to speed for a new generation. And I mean look at it!

5. No Man’s Sky Beyond

This really is the game that keeps on giving. 2019’s new update completely changed everything again, but this time in a way that makes the whole game feel much more refined and much more fully realized as an experience. The Beyond update added some multiplayer elements that I mostly haven’t touched (you can ignore this whole bit if you like, though it is quite cool), but the updates to the rest of the game are leaps and bounds ahead of what came before. Just take a look at this changelog 😱

This is a true 2.0 update. It is literally a whole new game. Literally. I cannot stress this enough. This is not the same game that I played last year. The dream of flying through space just…living…just doing anything you want finally feels attainable in Beyond. I haven’t gotten to a point where I just feel stuck on Beyond, and that is, in itself, a HUGE improvement. Also quests no longer just fail…or disappear…or reset for no discernible reason. Mostly.

No Man’s Sky is a game I desperately wanted to love at launch, and I chose to love it, warts and all. But I did not like it. You know what I mean? No Man’s Sky, post-Beyond update, is a game I really, truly like playing.

It’s incredible that Hello Games have continued to support No Man’s Sky post-launch with so many free updates that affect the game in truly transformative ways. They clearly want this game to be something special, they clearly have a vision for what it could be, and they want to keep trying to attain that perfect version. And boy that’s admirable. Because We The Fans certainly do not deserve that level of support free-of-charge. But they sure do keep me coming back. And I just keep loving No Man’s Sky.

Who knows, maybe it’ll make next year’s list too.

4. Pokémon Sword

I love Pokémon dearly. This installment came at a great time for me, releasing the same day I happened to have a transatlantic flight, so I was eager to lose myself in this world for a while. And reader, the world is good. Last gen left me a bit lukewarm in certain places (but not because of my team of perfect friends – shoutout to my Primarina, Penelope, who is my beautiful trans daughter and I love her), but Sword/Shield hit me in all the right ways.

First of all, this is the first ever Pokémon game you can play on a TV holy shit! That gave rise to my favorite activity of playing this on the couch with my girlfriend at night after work. She fell in love with the game too (because come on), and now she wants play through herself!

Getting back to the game though, there are a lot of quality of life improvements here, such as flying to places you’ve already been without learning Fly, the ability to remember old moves and rename pokémon at any pokémon center, portable access to your boxes, and the most important change: walking in a circle over and over makes you do a cool spin move.

It also, of course, just feels really nice and good, like a Pokémon game should. The dynamaxing stuff is cool, the story doesn’t really seem to matter too much, and the new Pokémon are all very good. The game is also extremely beautiful. It’s amazing for these old eyes to see a Pokémon game with this level of graphical fidelity. Not just obvious stuff like walking around a lush 3D world, but even the menus are goddamn gorgeous.

Folks, the game is good. And I can easily see myself sticking with this one beyond the endgame.

3. Untitled Goose Game

AT LAST. A game that lets me live out my ultimate fantasy of being an asshole goose. Your main interactions are Pick Up, Run, Flap, and of course, HONK. Your list of objectives? Fuck up as many people’s days as possible and then steal some shit. What more is there to say?

Everything about this game works. The stark art style, the vaguely Mister Rogers-esque piano music, the lack of UI, the fact that everyone hates you. This game knows to get out of your way and let you goose. 10/10.

It’s also extremely short, great for parties, extremely approachable for folks who don’t usually play games, and surprisingly chill for a game about being a horrible nuisance. There are no timers, no points, no XP, just a goose and a list of things to do. You are left to your own devices as to how each task is completed, and the game will never nudge you along because you’re playing “wrong.”

YOU are the horrible goose. And you decide what that means.

2. Tangle Tower

Coming in as a strong runner-up is SFB Games’ Tangle Tower. This really came out of nowhere for me. It’s not the kind of game I would take a chance on at first glance, but it was lauded on Waypoint Radio, and I had a free trial of Apple Arcade, so I gave it a shot. It nearly took the #1 spot on my list.

Tangle Tower is a point-and-click murder mystery; immaculately illustrated, gorgeously animated, impressively voice-acted, and with a bold and colorful soundtrack. Before we even get to the story or gameplay, the game is an absolute joy to experience. It’s just a perfectly delightful piece of art. I love every little bit of it.

The game’s mystery is a delight to unravel as well, through a series of suspect interviews, hidden object clue searches, and simple puzzle solving. There are some really neat mechanics around using the information you’ve gathered to start to piece things together, which the game largely lets you do yourself, which feels very satisfying. I truly feel as though I, the player, am in charge of this case.

I don’t want to say too much more here, because…well it’s a murder mystery, but also you really need to get engrossed in this thing for yourself. If you’re still on the fence, please please get a load of this SOUNDTRACK.

Tangle Tower is also on Steam and Switch, so you thankfully do not need Apple Arcade to experience it. Do yourself a favor and pick it up ASAP.

1. Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds starts like many games: with a quick, loosely hand-holding, yet elegant opening tutorial comprised mainly of walking around your town, talking to people who teach you about the world, and learning the game’s controls. As far as opening tutorials go, it does just the right amount of world-building without getting too bogged down in its own bullshit or wresting control from the player for a cutscene. And then everything changes completely. The game opens up. The solar system is yours to explore. And an ancient mystery lies waiting for you to unravel its secrets.

22 minutes later, the sun explodes, taking everything in the system, yourself included, with it. And then you wake up again.

Taken on their own, each element of Outer Wilds seems fairly simple. A bunch of different planets with different characteristics. A small ship with which to explore the solar system. Simple controls for yourself and your ship. There’s no inventory, and not many stats to worry about. Just oxygen, jetpack fuel, and health, all of which can be instantly refilled inside your ship.

But the way everything comes together, and the manner in which you are allowed to follow your own path and follow each planet’s clues, and rules, creates a grand sense that there’s always more out there, and lights in the player the fire of a clear and driving curiosity.

The 22 minute cycle is the perfect amount of time to get out there, learn something, find clues, wonder what it all means, die, and wake up once more, only to think, “maybe just one more cycle…”

This is a roguelike in which the “experience” you take with you when you die is the knowledge you’ve gained by exploring the solar system (a copy of all the important stuff is recorded in your ship’s onboard computer, so if you hate games that make you take notes, worry not). It’s perfection.

Thinking through my list of games this year, it became unavoidably clear that Outer Wilds deserved the top spot. There’s so much going on here that I love (and a lot I don’t want to give away). Every time I sit down to play, I learn something new that gives me that Civ-esque “just one more turn” feeling. It propels me endlessly forward through an intriguing space mystery, the conclusion of which I have yet to see. I can’t wait to discover more.

Everyone should play Outer Wilds. It’s such a special little thing. And it’s my game of the year.

---

And that’s the list, folks! Thanks for popping in for a read, and I’ll see you right back here next year for more of the same!

Did you play any of the games on this list? What did you think? Anything you loved that I didn’t feature here? Let me know in the comments below!

Happy New Year to you all! And happy gaming!

Mike's 2018 Games of the Year

2019-01-01T16:00:00Z

Hoo boy. Alright yeah I’ll do one of these. 2018 was my first year having a steady job, which meant I was able to buy video games and roughly keep up with the year’s releases! That said, this was also the year I bought a Switch and I’m in love with it, so this list will probably skew heavily in that direction.

Gonna try to keep the list to ten, in the interest of making myself make hard choices. Without further ado, and in no particular order, here’s…

MIKE'S FAVORITE GAMES OF 2018

Celeste was one of the first indies I grabbed on Switch, and apart from the feeling of the controls rocketing me back to those college nights playing TowerFall at my friend Dave’s house, I was immediately struck by the beauty and robustness of the pixel art and animation, but even moreso by that INCREDIBLE music. Celeste’s soundtrack is easily the best video game music of the year, if not all time. This game feels so goddamn incredible to play, and I know it’s earned a spot in my overall Top Ten Games, not just 2018. It’s perfect.

I played Into the Breach A TON on PC with my friend Zac in Chicago for our (usually) weekly video game nights. It was an absolute blast. Then, when it was announced that the game was out on Switch, I was in a hotel room in Los Angeles while traveling for work, and I jumped up and yelled as soon as I heard. Then I immediately started installing the game. I love Into the Breach, and I can’t wait to pump more time into it on the train forever.

Hollow Knight came out on PC last year, and like everyone else, I ignored it. But once I got my hands on a Switch, and with a hearty recommendation from my pal Olly, I finally grabbed it. It’s such a beautiful masterpiece, tonally and mechanically. Exploration is exciting and enticing, and the game leads you along nicely without any handholding. The art style is adorable, the tone is frightening, and I can’t get enough.

Hey, I wrote like 1,400 words on how great Moonlighter is, so I’m just gonna say: Yeah. It’s wonderful.

I didn’t get around to playing Mario’s latest adventure until I got a Switch this year, and as you may have heard, it’s such a delight! The music, the art, the pacing, the controls, the game feel, it all just comes together beautifully. Games like this are where the term “Nintendo Polish” comes from. There’s nothing better than dressing Mario up in a spacesuit and flinging him off towards the next moon.

This one comes in just in time! I grabbed the new Smash the weekend it was released, and played 20 hours basically non-stop from that point. There are some neat new features like the Spirit Board this time around, the conceit of which is pretty wonderful. But honestly, the prospect of EVERY character ever in a Smash Bros. game being playable, and the thought of how much work must have gone into this title, is a little too impressive and exciting to pass up. It’s Smash on the Switch. C’mon.

A lot of people hate No Man’s Sky. And that’s fine. I don’t get it, but it’s fine. But with this massive update, dubbed “Next,” the game’s options have been expanded, and the quality of life updates have smoothed over most of the corners I had minor issues with. When I went back to NMS for the Next update, I found myself streaming the game to my MacBook to play in bed for hours on end. I say, well done, Hello Games. They deserve it.

Dead Cells finally launched out of Early Access this year, and came to Switch! The two are a wonderful pair (something I will probably say about every game on the platform). The game’s pace and loop have such momentum to them, that any failure only propels you forward into the next run. All this, and of course I told myself that any game for which I purchased a physical special edition had to make the list 😬💖

Hey! Hey you! Go play this game! A cute little game about a rascally raccoon siccing his donut shop’s holes on people, Donut County is not only great, relaxing fun, it’s also impeccably written, from the dialogue to the little item descriptions you can read at the end of each level. The art is fantastic, the little musical cues are delightful, and it’s all over in just about 10 hours! It’s available on a ton of platforms, too! Even if you don’t like video games all that much, I can honestly promise you that you’ll love Donut County. Go forth and devour a town!

I bought this game on Switch when I already owned it on PC (of course, this is not the only game on this list for which this is true), played through both campaigns (the original and the Plus version addition), and played dozens of hours of its Blue Spheres bonus stage to make a video ridiculing myself. and furthermore I LOVE SONIC THE HEDGEHOG OF COURSE IT MADE THE LIST I LOVE YOU SONIC DID YOU HEAR ME HAVE YOU BEEN RECEIVING MY LETTERS CAN’T YOU SEE I’M IN LO—

SUCCESS! That’s my big ol’ games list of 2018! Let me know what you’re looking forward to playing in the new year, and how different your list looked this year! Happy gaming!

Putting Pencil to Paper: November 2018

2018-11-30T16:00:00Z

Paper by FiftyThree is a drawing and sketching app for iPad and iPhone, and one of my great loves in this life. Each month, I start a new Sketchbook in Paper and set its title as the current month. At the end of each month, I’ll post a retrospective here of everything I drew!

Nearing the end of my first year of sketching! Of course, I only started in September. A good variety this month, and a heavy video game theme, especially towards the end! Dive in and take a look for yourself…

A good start to the month, inspired by my finally acquiring a SNES Classic. The Super Nintendo will always have a special place in my heart, being my first (and for a while, ONLY) Nintendo console as a kid. I always loved the SNES’ boxart as well, and I tried my best to do it justice here.

Here’s an abstract piece I made to play around with Paper’s handling of “dotting” or “stippling,” which is something digital art applications have not handled well in my experience. It worked great, and I got a cool, upside-down mountain & moon scene out of it.

Well hey, here’s a good plug for my monthly email newsletter, the Eganworks Monthly. If you’d like to subscribe, here’s a LINK!

As you might imagine, there’s a story behind this one. My girlfriend and I were hanging out on the couch one night, and I wanted to draw something. So she gave me the prompt of, “What’s the difference between an ostrich and an emu?” As it turns out, ostriches are all big and feathery, and emus are robots who vape.

Gameboy pattern! Paper has a super simple copy/paste function that makes this kind of thing easy. It’s a cool way to make new wallpaper!

Another abstract piece, this time just to play with color. From a certain angle, I can see a mouse with a sack of money beating up a man in a hunting cap. See anything interesting?

This one’s probably the best pattern I’ve made so far. I took another crack at a Gameboy pattern, this time with the paint roller tool, which made for a much cleaner effect!

Kirby! He’s pink, he’s round, he’s shaped like a friend. And now he’s wallpaper!

More Kirby! This time, of the flying variety!

The video game hits just keep on rolling this month, with a character I used to draw a TON as a kid, Miles Prower, that is, Tails from Sonic the Hedgehog. I haven’t drawn Tails since the third or fourth grade, and yet all the muscle memory came flooding right back when I started drawing.

And here’s some more Sonic!

Aaaaaaaand some more Sonic… This one’s based on the Blue Sphere bonus game from Sonic 3 and Sonic Mania, which I played a ton of for this video.

And…well…look, you all know who I am. This one’s actually based on a Sonic tattoo design my buddy Olly came up with. If you’d like to see some of his work, he’s got an instagram just for that! Thanks for reading another edition of my monthly sketchbook roundup! If anyone out there has picked up Paper for themselves, I’d love to see what you’re up to!! Til next time! - Mike

Moonlighter Review

2018-11-25T16:00:00Z

The Nintendo Switch library has been growing like gangbusters lately. It seems like every week there’s a new game (or an old game made new) just waiting to be played in bed or on the subway. This month was no different, and after some pining, and the announcement of a Signature Edition, I decided to pick up Moonlighter, a new game from Digital Sun and 11 Bit Studios. And oh man does it have its hooks in me.

You play as Will, a young adventurer and owner of the Moonlighter, a shop through which you sell the items and artifacts you gather while diving through dungeons. The Moonlighter, and its hometown of Rynoka by extension, have fallen into a period of decreased popularity of late. No one is as interested in the store or the town as they once were. The promise of any riches to be had in the town’s mysterious dungeons has been overshadowed by their danger. And the greatest advocate for all these pieces, Pete, has been missing a long time.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

This is the world that you, the player, enter into when starting up Moonlighter. From there, it quickly becomes clear what your objectives are, how the game’s loops operate, and what degree of freedom you have in all this.

The game takes as close to a hands-off approach to explaining all this as it can, which is easily its greatest asset, as far as onboarding and momentum go. Moonlighter really wants to get out of your way and let you play Moonlighter, which is great because this is a great game, and an overbearing story or tutorial might get in the way of how fun and satisfying the gameplay loop can be.

Gameplay goes like this: You spend the daytime minding your shop, and at night you fight your way through the town’s dungeons, grabbing as much loot as you can along the way to put up for sale the next morning.

But thankfully, Moonlighter doesn’t force you into a schedule. You can split your time any way you want, or not at all! If you want to spend day and night inside iteration after iteration of Rynoka’s procedurally generated dungeons, feel free! But you’re going to need to afford some new gear if you want to survive, and you only have so much storage space. If you want to mind the shop a little more, that’s your prerogative! But you need to keep the shelves stocked in order to…you know…be a shop.

For me, this is where the genius of Moonlighter lies: its ability to make you want to spend your time doing different things. The need to sell things in your shop is balanced very well with the need to go adventuring.

Death in Moonlighter is tough but fair.

Now, adventuring seems like a pretty straightforward (and clearly Zelda-inspired) affair at first blush. But Moonlighter adds some extra flavor to this formula to elevate things and set itself apart. You’ve got some clever inventory management options up your sleeve by way of a magic mirror that lets you instantly sell off a piece of loot to the powers that be for a very low return. But the more important piece of kit is an amulet which gives you the ability to warp back to town (for a price) at a moment’s notice. This gives each dungeon-crawl a Dark Souls-esque feeling of, “oh shit, should I keep going, or bank what I have back in town?” Because the minute you die, you lose all but the 5 pieces of loot actually on your person. Everything in your backpack is gone.

Minding the shop, similarly, is a completely different, and equally deep game! After you bring back your evening’s loot to the shop to sell, things don’t stop for you there. You now need to figure out what prices to set for each of these items! And in order to do that, you need to watch your customers’ reactions, as well as an item’s overall popularity, which can change over time! Supply and demand and all that!

A summary sheet from a hard day’s shopkeeping.

Digital Sun clearly went to great lengths to not only make sure that shopkeeping was more than just the boring chore you have to take care of between dungeons, but also to elevate shopkeeping to a place of fun and importance on par with the dungeon-crawling, in order to meet the lofty goal of making Moonlighter more than just another Zelda-like. The shop, the game’s balance of your two roles, and the incredible gameplay and world they create together are what make Moonlighter come together in an incredibly satisfying way, and it’s something really special.

What’s even more special is what Moonlighter allows you to do with your newfound wealth, and how it plays to the game’s themes. Of course, you can put your hard-earned gold and loot towards more powerful weapons and armor, but beyond that…

In the middle of town is a bulletin board. There are two things on this board: First, you can purchase upgrades for your shop. Things like more display area, more storage, a nicer bed. But second, there is a list of people who would like to open shops of their own in town. And they need your help to get started.

The witch who runs the potion shop loves to read!

In this way, Moonlighter has you personally revitalize the town through your redistribution of your own wealth. These aren’t investments, you won’t be seeing returns on the money you put into these businesses, these are gifts. This is Will using his gain in the dungeons of Rynoka and with the patrons of his shop to lift others up with him.

And the game further incentivizes you to do so, in that these are weapon and armor shops, potion and enchantment shops, decoration shops, etc. Places selling things that you will need. There’s even a shop much like yours for some healthy competition! It sells everything you sell, and that’s actually great, because sometimes you won’t want to hunt down the single piece of loot you need to craft a new sword.

Where have I heard this before…?

In many clear and obviously deliberate ways, Moonlighter is mostly paying tribute to Zelda. It’s got the top-down dungeon look of the first Zelda down pat. And it even throws in an “It’s dangerous to go alone” for good measure. But in practice, the game reminds me more of one of my old favorites, Boktai 2.

My love of the Boktai series on Game Boy Advance went mostly unwatched on my YouTube channel (😭), but it is deep and firmly pointed at that second installment.

Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django stands in contrast to its predecessor by giving you a town to return to after each dungeon, rather than continually marching through a linear world. With each dungeon you complete in Boktai 2, you rescue another member of the town, and San Miguel, the legendary City of the Sun, gets a little brighter.

Moonlighter/Boktai inventory comparison.

The quaint little town of San Miguel.

But the similarities don’t end there for me! There’s also something about the sprites, the VERY GBA-ish art style, the inventory management, the way items look when being picked up, crafting weapons and armor and potions, and even the music in places!

The very same things that made Boktai 2 great, and that made it feel more and more like MY game and MY town as time went on, are making Moonlighter feel great to me in all the same ways, and I’m loving absolutely every minute of it.

Look at the detail in the getting-out-of-bed animation!

But even outside of my own points of reference, Moonlighter is clearly a labor of love. Every animation and piece of art is so carefully and beautifully crafted, and the soundtrack is so lovely I’ve taken to leaving the game on in the background while doing other things. My sister’s even started using the soundtrack (which is available on Spotify) to write to!

Moonlighter is more than the sum of its parts, and even more than the games it references, which it holds in loving reverence. Moonlighter is a masterpiece in its own right, that stands as much on its own mechanics as the shoulders of the giants that came before. It is not, I am finding, just a game worth playing. It’s a game worth loving.

I think you could love it, too.

Agreed.

Putting Pencil to Paper: October 2018

2018-11-11T16:00:00Z

Back again! This time, I actually managed to post within a few weeks of the month ending. I’m an absolute dynamo. Fewer sketches this month, but still going strong!

I’m writing to you this month from a coffee shop in Park Slope, Brooklyn. My sister is once again undertaking the challenge of National Novel Writing Month, so my girlfriend and myself are accompanying her around the city to various coffee shops to get some work done as well.

Also of note, I’ve crafted everything in this particular post entirely on my iPad, which is rather exciting! I of course drew everything in Paper, but I also exported the video of my sketchbook to Adobe Premiere Rush for editing, then to a browser-based GIF creation tool to bring you the image you see above, and I’m writing the whole thing in Squarespace’s surprisingly robust blogging app!

Alright, let’s get to it!

First up: Color! A very simple composition. Partially, I wanted to crack the seal on a new month without worrying about creating something “special” or terribly incredible. But I also wanted to play around with just blocking out some color and seeing how colors from this tool, a kind of paint roller, would interact with each other. I like it for its simplicity!

This one’s a pretty rough sketch of an incredible Boston Cream Pie I got at a hotel in Boston while I was traveling for work. My company put me up at this cute little hotel near our Boston office for a few days, and when I saw Boston Cream Pie on the menu, I just had to try it out. This sketch was the product of a wonderfully peaceful evening spent alone in the hotel restaurant, and in my room upstairs afterwards. I got off work, put on my coziest sweater, grabbed my iPad, and strolled down to the restaurant to read for a bit, and later make this sketch! It was quite nice.

This is my attempt at capturing the scene of that peaceful evening in the hotel restaurant. I don’t usually love hotel restaurants, but this place was so cute, and I was immediately comforted by the restaurant’s warmth and quiet ambiance. If you ever have a chance to stay at the Kendall Hotel in Cambridge, I highly recommend it.

On the train back from Boston, I wanted to try and roughly capture some of the sights going by. Firstly, the tight weave of trees rushing by, colors slowly changing in the early October night.

Another train sketch! This one isn’t based on anything I saw, it’s actually the result of fooling around with some of Paper’s tools. I was layering those blue and red and purple colors together, and noticed that when I erased a certain way, it created this sort of kite/bird shape! So I decided to turn it into a little landscape scene!

This one, I’m very happy with. As it got later on my train journey home, the sky over the woods speeding by turned into this incredible fiery dance that I just had to try and recreate. This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but that’s what art is for sometimes. Besides, I think this best communicates the beauty of the scene outside. It’s so much fun to play with colors and borders and blending in Paper.

Ah, so this...this is a special one. I drew this to commemorate the day FiftyThree, the company that created Paper, sent me one of their old Pencils for free! See, a few years ago (and before Apple ever had the idea), FiftyThree put out this incredible stylus called, simply, Pencil. It has this beautiful wooden body, with a shape like a carpenter’s pencil. And Pencil’s most impressive feature — one that no stylus before or since has managed to nail — was that you could flip it over to erase. No need to switch tools, no need for an awkward gesture, just flip the thing over and do what you’ve been trained to do your entire life.

Anyhow, I contacted FiftyThree on Twitter at one point, one thing led to another, and they ended up sending me a Pencil for free! In the original packaging and everything! The same old thing I’d been lusting after since I was a broke college kid watching tech reviews on The Verge. What a bunch of lovely folks ❤️

This is......I mean, it’s my October sketchbook, so. This is pretty self-explanatory, I feel.

This one is less self-explanatory. In fact, I’m not even sure how to explain it. It’s really just a doodle of a...vehicle? Machine? Beak Monster? Who knows! Sometimes you just want to draw something and all you have in mind is a general vibe or scene you’d like to get down, and that’s okay too!

This here is a sketch from a coffee shop local to our particular neighborhood of Brooklyn. I believe this was the day we went to meet my girlfriend to hang out for a bit and read/draw at this coffee shop, before heading home to make some kind of food. I thought we made cocoa, but Lauren disagrees, and we can’t remember what we actually did. But it was a good day! Among the coffee cups on the table, you’ll also notice my tote bag from Signal Problems, the best weekly newsletter about the NYC subway.

Ohhhhhh yes. Here we are. My best sketch of the month. Ever since I got my iPad and Paper, I’ve wanted to recreate this, my favorite view in New York City: riding the Q over the Manhattan Bridge. You get it all here: a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, views of both Brooklyn and Manhattan, a view over the water, and if you come at the right time of day (usually around rush hour), a beautiful sunset. I did my best here to capture it from memory. I also employed a technique that ended up working as well as I could’ve hoped — I used the blend technique that Paper has built in to blur the foreground and create a kind of depth-of-field effect, something I’m familiar with from my usual artistic outlet. I love this sketch very much.

Hey I also really love this one! This month’s sketchbook really closes out strong 💪 This is just a simple scene from a night at home after work. A mug of tea, the TV remote, and two beautiful neon Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons. The hardest thing about this sketch was all the buttons on the remote. Not only the act of drawing them all, that was actually the easy part, but because of the way Paper handles some colors and creates an artificial layer system based on luminance or something; I’m still not sure how this works. I wasn’t able to just draw the outlines and then add color below. The only color that will show up on top of black like this is a solid white, which also shows up over top of any outlines you’ve drawn, effectively erasing them. It’s just a quirk of a purposely limited tool. But it turned out really great! I’m glad I put in the extra effort to add color to those buttons!

Were you getting nervous, getting all the way through my sketchbook and not seeing any incredible art from Lauren in there? Well here it is! The closer! This ended up being the perfect, natural cover for the month’s sketchbook. It’s gorgeous! So much detail! The second “o” in October is an apple! Once again, Lauren’s art is a gift and a blessing, and you can find more of it on her instagram, @laurenheathart And so, dear reader, we come to the end of another monthly Paper sketchbook retrospective! A fair bit shorter than September, but there’s nothing wrong with that! September was a long one! Thanks very much for reading, and I hope that anything and everything you’ve seen here inspires you to, if not pick up Paper, then at least to pick up a pen or pencil or other tool or implement and get creative! Everyone has it in them. We don’t all have to be spreadsheets and numbers and words. We can be beautiful, too. Until next month! - Mike

Putting Pencil to Paper: September 2018

2018-09-30T16:00:00Z

Hello and welcome to the first edition of my monthly sketchbook retrospective! I’ve been pining after Paper, FiftyThree’s gorgeous sketching app for AGES. Just recently, I realized I have a good job and have money, and so I bought myself an iPad and installed Paper immediately!

I’ll be honest, as much as I wanted an iPad for Paper, there was still that little voice of doubt at the back of my mind: “Are you really going to draw more because of this?” I’m happy to report that, YES, I was going to draw more because of this, and that little voice can eat crow. Without further ado, let’s hop into some sketches!

Here it is, Paper sketch number one. You only get one chance at firsts in this life, and…well…I know. I nailed it. Look, it’s important to pick something simple when you’re just starting something new! It’s all part of learning the new tools and such! It’s also pretty wild that my first sketch was made on the 19th, and there are 27 more of these!

This one’s also very simple. Just a swooshy line with a cityscape on top. It’s close to some of the cool city drawings I’d seen in Paper’s promotional videos a few years ago, and I really wanted to feel like I was reaching back and touching that moment.

Number 3, and we’ve already reached a sketch not done by me! This is the first of a few sketches for which my girlfriend Lauren, who is an illustrator by trade, graced my canvas with her incredible talents. You can see her signature just there, LTH. The T stands for Talent.

Ooooooh brother, here we are! My absolute favorite sketch in my sketchbook. This one was also done by my girlfriend, and it’s the first in a series of mountain sketches she’s done since. I love everything about this. This colors, the composition, the shapes, the soft, cartoony feel. It’s extremely good. In fact, I love it so much, It’s currently my wallpaper on just about every electronic device I own! If you want to see more of Lauren’s art (including more mountains!) check her out on Instagram @laurenheathart!

This was the first thing I made on the train to work, to get over the awkward feeling of drawing in public during a bunch of other people’s commutes. It’s not great! But I made it!

My girlfriend introduced me to the concept of “blind contours,” which I where you draw something by looking only at your subject, never your drawing, and never lifting your pen. It’s a fun exercise! This particular blind contour is of my sister sitting across from me in one of our favorite pizza places.

And this is where I handed my iPad over for my sister to try. Truly the digital equivalent of that page in your notebook you use to test pens, in the best way. As you can see, she really felt out the breadth of options Paper’s tools afford you, yet stuck to a very purposeful color scheme.

Here, my sister, who shares my initials, tried for something more recognizable. See if you can guess what it is! What would Magritte have said?

This piece, titled “She’s Done,” was started by the artist as another test page, trying out these new digital tools. You’ll be surprised to learn, then, that it’s now worth over a billion million dollars.

Here’s a sketch I made of the stage at a Neko Case show at the Beacon Theater while we were waiting for the show to start. As I was finishing my drawing, my neighboring seat’s occupant, a middle-aged man in a sweater, arrived and complimented my efforts very highly.

Another mountain from Lauren! She drew this one on the subway, making it even more impressive.

The second of Lauren’s subway drawings. And a classic goof from My Brother, My Brother, and Me, a good good podcast.

eah, you guessed it, this is another one of my messes! Look, I like it. It reminds me of that thing we all did the first time we used Microsoft Paint, y’know? Where you draw a bunch of shapes with the shape tool and color them in with the paint bucket? Good times.

Okay. So. Lauren bought this tiny little plush penguin at the American Museum of Natural History. And she’s incredibly good at naming things. So she named this little guy Cashew. PERFECT. I looked after Cashew when Lauren was out of town one weekend, and I made this drawing to send to remind her of her sweet son 😊

The note at the bottom of this drawing reads, “Explaining football to Mary,” because I drew it to help explain football to Mary as I was explaining football to Mary.

This was my first attempt at recreating a photo I’ve taken. I took this photo (right) was taken at a nearby park in Brooklyn. I think I did…fine? Mostly I just wanted to play around and try some new techniques, like using the blend feature to create a cloudy sky. It kind of worked!

Remember Cashew? The little penguin from before? Yeah. So. While I was watching him for Lauren, I kind of decided he needed his own adventure comic. So this is that. He sets off on an adventure and takes a hot air balloon to NYC. Like a penguin do.

If you’re unfamiliar with It’s Alive, the video series from Bon Appetit magazine starring Test Kitchen Manager Brad Leone, you’re missing out. He makes a bunch of fermented stuff, hence the title…it’s all alive. He says “Who’s better than us?” all the time…he’s quite the character. You gotta watch this thing.

The subway! My first subway sketch! This is the interior of a car on the R train, the line I ride to and from work every day, recreated to the best of my artistic ability and memory (it’s actually slightly different, I messed up a few points, but that’s neither here nor there, this is ART, MAN).

I bought a big chunky stylus called the Cosmonaut from Studio Neat. So there you go.

I’m extremely proud of how everything in this drawing came out! I love the little ghost, I think that’s a damn fine recreation of a pedestal, and the apple is, well hey, it’s an apple. Drawn in preparation for the Spooky Apple Time™ in which we now find ourselves (or which is now ending, this post is super late whoops).

It’s my name. Not much else to say about this one. The fountain pen tool is fun to play with, alright?

Another blind contour! This time of Lauren, while we sat waiting for some takeout. I think this one’s pretty good! I looked at it to add the color, but everything else is above board!

I’m pretty fond of this one! This is a rendering of our entertainment center in our apartment. Some of the shading could use some work, but hey I’m no professional, this is all for fun. Can you spot the sad, dethroned WiiU, seated beneath its usurper?

Nintendo Switch! Everyone’s favorite console, and a great love of mine to be sure. I very much love this drawing as well, particularly, though it has nothing to do with the focal point of the piece, the way the white dots peek out of the yellow background. It’s big, colorful, chunky, and fun. A good time.

And finally, drawing number 26! This is a simple one, but the meaning behind it is mushy and gross! I was in Boston for work for a few days, and I drew this for Lauren after a video call one night. I know. Yeah. Okay, you can stop retching, it’s not that bad.

That does it for this month’s works! Hoo boy did this post go up late! I need to get started on the next one like now if I want it to go up before Christmas, I guess. Thanks for reading through all of these if that’s what you did! I enjoyed sharing my month of creativity, I think it’ll be a great way to keep me drawing in my free time. And I’m so so glad to finally be able to use Paper, that wonderful app that inspired so much creative excitement in me years and years ago.

See you next month!

- Mike

Pick a Pic: Nextbit Robin camera test

2017-09-07T16:00:00Z

This past month or so, my latest and greatest phone, Google’s Nexus 6P, started having battery issues. It’s lasted me about two years, so this wasn’t too distressing. Unfortunately, this is just the lifespan of a smartphone in my experience.

But every smartphone death is an opportunity for positive change, and in my case, I used that opportunity to snag my dream phone: The Nextbit Robin.

I’ve been an avid follower of all things tech for years now, and so I first became aware of the Robin’s existence when it launched on Kickstarter in 2015. The company behind it, Nextbit, was made up of some really talented designers from companies like HTC, who was fizzling at the time. Anyway, it was love at first sight. It became my Dream Phone.

Long story short: I didn’t need a phone when this one came out, when I did need a phone I went with the Nexus 6P, Nextbit got bought by Razer, the Robin went WAY down in price, and now here we are.

Now you know how my love and I found our way into each other’s arms. And that’s where my struggle begins: the camera.

The Nexbit Robin’s camera isn’t stellar. It isn’t total garbage, but coming from the Nexus 6P, it’s a downgrade. But I’m not about to drop a grand on a NEW new phone, and this is my DREAM PHONE in case I hadn’t mentioned it.

The first step in fixing my camera woes was easy: ditch the Nextbit camera app, which IS total garbage. There are plenty of other camera apps out there.

And here’s my question: Which do I choose?

I’ve run through a few and decided I’m not willing to pay for features like unlimited video recording because that is a human right and you deserve to go to prison.

I’ve essentially landed where I figured I would: Between the stock Google Camera, and Open Camera, an open source camera app.

The appeal of Open Camera, at first, was that unlike other camera apps that run on Robin, it has a baked-in HDR mode. HDR (High Dynamic Range) is something I swore by on my Nexus 6P. I left it on all the time, because everything it shot looked great. But Robin was not built with HDR in mind. Camera apps that feature HDR on other phones do not feature HDR on Robin.

Open Camera uses some software trickery to force its own kind of HDR, and it’s…pretty hit or miss. You’ll see what I mean.

At this point, I’m pretty sure I’m going with the stock Google Camera, it’s just more stable. Open Camera runs slow and has crashed on me a few times. But some of its HDR photos really do it for me. Let’s go to the tape…

This is with HDR...

...and this is without.

See, this is good. A little grainy, but a nicer range from light to shadow than the pic on the right. Let’s move on…

With HDR...

...and without.

Aaaaaaaaand here we see the problem. Open Camera may have a solution for HDR, but its noise reduction for the resulting image is lacking, if anything. Let’s take a look at a few more in a row…

HDR

No HDR

HDR

No HDR

In some instances, Open Camera’s HDR adds a nice little something, or even completely elevates the photo. In some instances, the two photos are nearly identical. And in some instances, Open Camera’s HDR photos are a muddy, noisy, overexposed mess.

I don’t really want to keep SEVERAL camera apps around for different shots. I’d rather have one go-to camera that I can whip out when I need to take a photo. And I don’t want to worry about the different ways the apps operate.

Maybe I’ll just shoot with VSCO or Lightroom…

What do you think?

I Hardly (K)New York: Brooklyn Bridge Park

2017-08-13T16:00:00Z

My sister works in publishing. They do something called "summer Fridays," which means they work a longer day Monday-Thursday, and then on Friday they only work until around noon. Sounds rad.

So yesterday, we took advantage of that and both went to hang out at Brooklyn Bridge Park. After Thursday's great views of Brooklyn and the two bridges, I wanted to hang out on the other side of the river and see those sweet, sweet Manhattan views.

It was, uh, real great. Breathtaking views of the Manhattan skyline, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty. Lots of folks out with their kids and families and friends, walking, biking, etc. There's a theme here, it's summer.

This day felt different from Thursday because there was a plan and a set destination. But it served the same purpose. I got to see some more of what's available in my new living space, I got out of my apartment & my neighborhood, and I got some great photos and footage.

Spending the day in full view of the Manhattan skyline, a thing we see constantly in movies and on TV, and which is now a thing I can ride the subway to whenever I want, I put into words more of what I want to do with these experiences: I want to destroy Awe.

Like, this place is beautiful as hell, and it's the biggest, most important city, and it's the center of the universe, so there's always going to be a little bit of awe in the background, and there should be!

But I don't necessarily want my first reaction to constantly be, "wow." I live here now, and I don't want to constantly feel like an out-of-towner or a tourist. Maybe that's not the best way to word it, there's nothing wrong with awe. We should all maybe live with a little more awe in our minds.

So I'll put it another way. When I lived in Chicago, and I would see the skyline represented somewhere, or on my way into & out of the city...wait, no I definitely felt awe. Shit.

But it was different! It was...pride. Y'know? It wasn't tourist-y awe, it was, "Hell yeah, Chicago" awe. That's what I'm working towards here.

So it's not so much that I want to destroy awe, I just want to peel the plastic off these views and experiences and move on to enjoying them and living in and around them in a deeper way. New York City is incredibly beautiful and awe-inspiring, and almost as cool as Chicago 😉.

I can't wait to look at this skyline like an old friend rather than an idol.

-- Mike

I Hardly (K)New York: Two Bridges

2017-08-11T16:00:00Z

I've been living in New York for a month and change. Everything at the apartment is pretty much settled, the initial shock of "shit, I live in New York City" has let up, and a feeling of normalcy is returning.

Now I'm at a point where life feels pretty stable and normal again, but I still don't really feel like I know this place! I don't quite feel connected. So, what I've decided I need to do is get around and just see New York City. Get to know it a little better.

See, what I think I'm missing is something I've taken for granted living in one place my entire life: A sense of place, an orientation. I don't want to see the city through Google Maps all the time, I want to know where I am. I want to gather the sights and information necessary for me to be able to step back and see everything in my mind. And that can only come with time and experience.

Today, I had my first date with New York City. I picked a place, got on the train, and just went. No specific destination, no specific Thing to do or see, just: The City. And so I found myself in the rather obviously named "Two Bridges" area. I wanted a place with a view, and I figured I'd get one from the river.

I was not wrong. The waterfront was shady and cool, which was more than welcome today. Plenty of folks out walking, running, biking, and even fishing, but it was by no means crowded.

All I can really say is that the day was a resounding success. I didn't set out to do anything; there was no immediate goal. I just wanted to go to a place I could see shit, take some photos, shoot some video, and head back home with this bundle of experiences.

I love this. I'm glad I did exactly what I wanted to do (nothing). And this is how I'm going to get to know this city.

-- Mike