January 2026
February 2026

People allegedly liked my Cohost compilation posts at the time and I think it's good to share sometimes. Though since this isn't Cohost anymore, I'm slow at looking at my RSS feed (these ain't even all from my RSS feed), and I hate looking at bsky, there's probably just going to be way fewer/smaller posts on these. Oh well.

Please comment with anything else you think was good, I am going to naturally miss a ton of stuff that simply doesn't reach me

Marathon, Reprise

Marathon's heroes and kits teach you that the primary mode of interaction with the world is not "exist as a person" but engage. There is no peaceful way to use a shoulder-mounted missile and, maybe more cynically, there is no good reason to assume that a gamer will look at a button with an ability and not just press it when given the chance. It's free. It has a cooldown, but in a game of punishing pertinence to its weaponry, these are the one thing you will always and forever have. You are given a language to speak with and it's not proximity chat. The game is not literally telling you to be hostile but how does it facilitate other venues? Does it make encounters less frequent, emphasizing how risky it would be to die after so much progress made? Does it provide you with gestures or signage to immediately show amnesty if you don't have a microphone plugged in? Are you given opportunities to organically work with other players as often as you're given opportunities to fight them?

'How can I be more creative?'

When I wake up in the morning I don't want to be a writer, I want to write. I don't care for the glittering prizes; I care about having written. Well, on a good day. On a bad day, I wake up wanting the sweet release of death, but if all of us were measured by our bad days, none of us would stand.

The Vibes of SimCity

And especially with SimCity 3000, you get such a dopamine hit from seeing huge plots develop with vibrant green, perfectly-manicured lawns that you happily ignore how much you're being rewarded for gentrification. It's so satisfying seeing these huge, glistening skyscrapers pop up in your downtown area that you don't concentrate on how much the abstraction favors Reagan-era economics.

Practicing Radical Acceptance Of The Fact That I Should Stop Radically Accepting Things

A lot of the conflict comes from the fact that people have difficult holding seemingly contradictory beliefs in their head. After all, it is difficult to square "I can't accept that this is the way my life is" with "I can't expect to get the results I want." You have to be able to hold both those true ideas in your head and find the will to keep acting, to keep creating and striving for a better world.

The 49MB Web Page

Viewability and time-on-page are very important metrics these days. Every hostile UX decision originates from this single fact. The longer you're trapped on the page, the higher the CPM the publisher can charge. Your frustration is the product. No wonder engineers and designers make every UX decision that optimizes for that. And you, the reader, are forced to interact, wait, click, scroll multiple times because of this optimization. Not only is it a step in the wrong direction, it is adversarial by design.

Is the re-sale of game items good for the consumer?

I could take a box of Labubus and sew them into a sweater to keep me warm in the winter if I really wanted to. They're made of real-world material. A kid could take their old Pokemon cards, make a papier-mâché mask, and use it for a school project. So, regardless of whether you like Labubus or Pokemon cards, you can at least say you're getting something substantial and real out of the transaction that you can use however you want.

🫧 On Bubbles

To start with: the whole "why are people talking about X and not Y?" argument is pretty moot when you're running a subscriber-funded website that is neither beholden to SEO nor advertisers. Like, if you want to talk about other games besides the major releases, you can just do that, y'know. Be the games media you want to see in the world.

games in the real world

There is a strain of paternalism common to some of the most established writers in games criticism remaining, one that regularly asserts that whatever rabble-rouser is troubling the discourse today is part of a normal cycle of people who are either thinking too hard, or not deeply enough. That their steady hand at the till is a sign of a correct approach, and the troublemakers fading as usual is a sign of this lesson being learned.

Metaphor: ReFantazio: quick notes about its Brazilian translation

Obviously, Brazil never went through the Middle Ages, because back then, nobody from Europe even knew Brazil existed, and the indigenous people in what's currently Brazilian territory were doing their own thing. After colonization, Portugal did create some titles, but Brazil, as a colony, was pretty much left to its own devices, so that didn't mean much. Like, yeah, someone from the other side of the ocean gave you a title, but what are you gonna do with it? It's not like there's any royalty to impress nearby or make alliances or whatever. Only after the Portuguese royal court moved to Brazil (while fleeing from Napoleon) and made Rio de Janeiro the empire's capital, titles kinda meant something, although the king was in so much debt that he gave titles away left and right for money. Still, those were Portuguese titles, not Brazilian.

More notes on rhyme

An example like foreseen also shows how you can semi-coin more handy words by shoving prepositions onto the fronts of other words: you can get away with something like forth-stride, say, or down-thrown. Probably. This sort of productive use of prepositions as suffixes on verbs seems to have been more common in Old English and Middle English than it is today.

make bad art

The best part about this sort of DIY ethos is it's viral. Making art appeals to some primal part of our beings; there is nothing that feels better than going out there and creating something, loudly and unapologetically. Art is play; art is expressing your soul; art is connection. And this is what makes what humans make valuable; not that it's more aesthetically pleasing than what the slop armies can produce, but because it is human. Every bad drawing, every shitty haiku, every poem that doesn't scan, every stupid melody we hum to our cats, is participating in the great conversation that has been ongoing since we started telling each other stories and painting in caves.

Forget Spreadsheets, I Wrote My Own Visual Game Script Editor

The traditional approach, in both professional localizations and fan translations, involves working in a spreadsheet with access to the original language and translation side by side. (In fan translations, it's not even rare to work by editing raw text files.) It’s not the most convenient or fun to be writing entirely within a spreadsheet though, especially when there are technical constraints to be thinking about. This game has a strict character limit per line and a maximum of three lines per text box, and I found myself wishing for a nice way to visualize how text will look in-game so I can ensure what I’m writing will actually look good in-game. A spreadsheet just wasn't going to cut it. But then, of course, I realized… I am a programmer. Why don’t I just write my own? So I did.

A Deadzone of living games Remake

So, releasing a videogame on Steam in 2026 isn't really just about making the game itself and trying to get games media to cover it. It involves an entire mountain of arcane systems and social norms you have to navigate, social systems you need to engage with, that only care about the engagement and not the content of said engagement and because it is so opaque, there's no way of knowing if your poor sales are because you made a mistake, or because you were just unlucky.