It really depends on what kinds of games you want to play. The AAA industry is largely a mess these days, but it’s not like those are the only games that exist.

I built my PC on a modest budget several years ago, and it’s still overkill for my favorite 2D indie games. Setting up Steam shouldn’t be difficult, nor should downloading from itch.io.

I bought a Switch 2 at launch, and that’s pretty much just plug and play.

Emulation is a bit more tinker-y to set up, but it’s really not too hard to get a nice library of classics at your fingertips.

Caught up on Spy x Family S3. This was the comfort food show I needed after a rough week at work.

Frieren S2 is finally here, and I don’t even need to say anything more. It’s Frieren.

I have a bit of a soft spot for representations of disability in media, so The Invisible Man and his Soon-to-Be Wife caught my attention. I’d heard that the mangaka worked closely with a local school for the visually impaired to research the depiction of a blind MC, and it definitely looks like she did her homework. Adorably sweet and fluffy, might give me diabetes.

Also started on Legendary Gambler Tetsuya (2000). First hand and I’m already complaining that they can somehow make complete reads just a few turns in with so little visible information on the table. But this is how every mahjong anime/manga goes, it’s an entirely different game when characters can draw whatever tile the author wants them to draw, so fine fine I’ll suspend my disbelief. But then you have the whole bit about them improperly shuffling and then keeping track of tiles that got flipped over, and that’s driving me wild because they simply shouldn’t be getting away with not shuffling correctly. You never put a face-up tile in your wall, flip it back over and gently reshuffle a bit more. Call the other players out if they do this. Can’t even use the fiction excuse for that one, just no.

Trying to convince people I know to join the Fediverse is like, well, it’s a lot like trying to convince people to switch to Linux. They’re not gonna do it and I’ll look like a jackass if I talk about it too much.

If there was an easy way to grow this platform overnight, we’d be doing it. Reality is there’s no shortcut, all we can do is continue building community with the people who are here and hope that we see some slow and steady incremental growth.

I primarily used reddit for niche hobbies and fandoms that have no equivalent here. Small userbase * niche special interest = I might possibly be the only person on this platform who’s into some of my hyperfixations.

With a large enough critical mass, more users can hopefully mean more shared interests to talk about.

No, he loves pingas. Smh fake fan learn the lore.

Violet Evergarden: The Movie. My heart sank when I realized exactly where this was going, after all of her character development that’s the ending they decided to undermine it all with.

Can you clarify what you mean by ‘authentically “modern leftist”’? There are a lot of people on this platform who identify as leftists, but I have no idea what you mean by 'authentically “modern leftist” here. I can’t answer your question because I’m not even sure what you’re really asking.

Posting such a vaguely defined question from a brand new account with no post history feels rather trollish.

He might have to fight Outkast for it.

Loved the game, so this is a pleasant surprise to find out about.

I would prefer to have it come from someone who… is not Andrew Yang.

Mamdani won by focusing his campaign on the most pressing issue to voters today: affordability. The cost of living keeps going up, wages stay the same, and everybody’s scared and frustrated looking for someone to promise they can do something about it. And he had answers.

In increasingly uncertain times, we can win voters over by appealing to their fears and frustrations and promising change that will directly address their needs. This is, in a way, how Trump won. He told voters, “I know you’re upset and scared in a changing world. Well it’s the immigrants’ fault, it’s trans people’s fault, it’s whatever target I tell you to hate next’s fault, and when I own the libs, I’ll bring the price of eggs down.”

Of course you and I both know Trump was full of shit. But as long it sounded like he was addressing their fears, the most frightened people struggling to make ends meet latched onto whatever false hope he gave them. And I believe we can win people back by speaking to those same fears, but this time we offer real solutions.

However, there is a very important catch. Do not ever say the word ‘socialism’. The legacy of McCarthyism has ensured that that word is still political suicide on the national stage today. You can get away with it in a city as deeply blue as NYC, but not in a general election.

But it’s really only the word that’s the problem, not the ideas behind it. People really are fed up with capitalism, they just don’t know that that’s really what they’re fed up with. And as long as you avoid the word, I think you’d be surprised what you can get people to agree with.

Look at Obama in 2008. He ran his campaign on universal healthcare as his main issue, knowing that healthcare in America is a major problem voters wanted addressed. Detractors called it socialized medicine, but as long as he never said that word himself, voters just understood that he was offering change and they wanted to try change. They were fed up enough with American healthcare that red scare tactics didn’t stop them from considering change.

I believe a viable next step that could work in 2028 could be to campaign on universal basic income. The job market is becoming increasingly unstable, especially with the AI bubble. People fresh out of college can’t get jobs because everything that claims to be entry level wants three years of experience, and they can’t get that experience because they don’t have experience. We’re coming to a point where it’s time to rethink one of the fundamental flaws of capitalism, that everyone must work or else they starve and die, as this is about to break when too many people lose their jobs. But don’t use the c-word, don’t use the s-word, just talk about UBI as its own issue and I think people will warm up to the idea.

About as weird as calling Nihon “Japan”.

This is still a digital transaction that has to go through a third party. Whoever runs this kind of barcode kiosk system would still wield the exact same kind of power that Mastercard and Visa do.

I’d drop the deus ex machina from Clannad and just let the tragic ending be the ending.

I miss my old Motorola Droid 2. I don’t need a thinner phone, give me that slider form factor.

This is the tricky part of representation, and it goes beyond just Barbie here. How do you represent an autistic character without just having them turn to the camera and tell the audience, “I, [character name], am officially and canonically autistic”? That often feels ham-fisted and shallow, pandering even, but anything less than that and you’ll have endless debates over whether a character that could be read as autistic-coded but never explicitly says it out loud counts or not.

Don’t ever be fooled into thinking corporations are your friend, or that anything they do doesn’t have selfish motives behind it. But we can acknowledge that being seen as a profitable demographic worth marketing to is… something. It is a sign of social progress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnrLOug3u6s

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is pretty much THE peak of the last decade or so. And now’s the perfect time to catch up with season two premiering in a few days.

Apocalypse Hotel for AOTY 2025. If I can convince you to just take my word and go into this one blind I think you’ll enjoy it even more.

If you liked Bocchi and Spy x Family and want more goofball comedies, try Kaguya-sama: Love is War, Dungeon Meshi, and CITY: The Animation.

Watched This Monster Wants to Eat Me. Started off very strong, the premise had me hooked, but it sorta felt like too many episodes were going by with no real development. S1 ending felt kinda anticlimactic, and it sounds like I’ll be waiting a while for any kind of resolution.