If the collectibles aren’t satisfying to obtain on their own, I don’t think putting an unlock behind them makes them retroactively better.

A good collectible is something like Strawberries in Celeste, each one requires you to take a more difficult path or do an additional screen. They’re fun to go for, and I think it actually would’ve detracted if some unlock made them feel like a required task rather than a bonus challenge.

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.

I imagine it’s something that could fetch a high price to the right buyer, but actually finding that buyer might not be trivial. How long would they be carrying around their own Kryptonite before they can pawn it off?

Also, one detail that did stand out to me here is the way Frieren seems a lot more casual about it, as someone with a much more academic interest in magic she views it as another novelty. But Fern seems a lot more genuinely terrified, as someone who feels like she needs magic to survive. She’s trembling when she can’t detect mana in the cave, and when Stark grabs her she starts fidgeting with her bracelet to try and calm her nerves.

And honestly, Fern being afraid is a good enough reason for Frieren and Stark not to push the matter any further.

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.

They shouldn’t be allowed onto the platform at all. Don’t verify them, ban them.

Peak, as expected.

I feel like the cave of mana-suppressing crystals could’ve been an arc unto itself. We just came off of an arc where Stark had to be sidelined, and in general we really haven’t seen all that much of a physical class’s role.

Loved the ED. I’m always a sucker for more doodle-y animation.

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.

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.