It was a long journey, and I had lots of fun here and made lots of memories, but I’m no longer active on this blog! You can find me on Twitter, Twitch, and Medium.
The queen loved the stars. She wanted to know everything about them, see them shining as brightly as they could. The king loved the queen. He would do anything to please her, and so he built an entire city dedicated to seeing and studying the stars; observatories were tasked day and night with intricate research. Lights flickered across the city, on and off, day and night. The queen loved visiting the city for the stars, as did many of their subjects, and it became a romantic city - her city - full of excitement and life. The city grew full of people chasing fame that on one of the queen’s famous trips, she was assassinated. The killer only wanted to be famous, to be known forever. The fear the killer had struck into the hearts of the people made the city a little darker.
And the brightest star saw the city, which had so intensely pointed its gaze upwards for years, slowly turn away. The star loved the city. She wanted to know everything about these people, who had adored the stars from afar despite knowing so little about them. So the star burned itself to shine even brighter than before, in hopes the people would feel what they had felt before, the curiosity and love that had enraptured them all. The king and his people saw the star burning so bright, brighter than any star had been before the queen had passed. The spiritual among them took it as the will of the queen herself, having ascended to new life. These ideas spurred a new excitement and the city grew vibrant once more. Thousands would make pilgrimmage whenever the king returned to the city, though his visits were less frequent without the queen by his side.
The star saw when the king would visit, and all the people would turn their gaze to the sky once more. Whenever the visits would slow, the star would burn itself even brighter hoping the king would return. But the king was unpredictable. Sometimes he came because he felt a love of the stars as the queen did. Other times he came for the people, who were made happy by the city’s royal festivities. Seldom he came simply because the stars had shone brighter. The king loved the people, and put their prosperity before his own on many an occasion.
The star had burned itself too often, vying for the constant attention of the king. Its existence was pain, a struggle to stay just as brilliant from day to day. The star did not have to live in pain, but it had chosen to for so long, and it felt guilty when it did not try to please the people. On the 12th anniversary of the queen’s passing, when the star felt it could go on no longer, it waited for the king’s visit. And when the king arrived and the city was more intently pointed skyward than ever before, the star burned everything it had left.
It was blinding, and the king ordered his people to look away for their safety. The city went completely dark for the first time since it had been built.
The night sky continued to blaze on for hours with the star’s light, for the star could not stop what it had begun. Greater than the pain of its existence and even greater than its blinding death, the star now felt the greatest pain of all. The king was not looking at her.
Tumble into the Abyss of 1980′s Japanese Graphic Adventure Gaming
I haven’t stopped raving about Japanese adventure games from the 80′s for the last couple of days. The trail of this madness is littered all over my twitter right now (no doubt making people wonder “who is this person, what have they done to Soycrates, and why will they not shut up about old games?”) but I thought I should collect/edit it here, in one space, perhaps to contain the wild beast and put it to rest for good. Come down the rabbit hole of PC-88 era fiction with me!
There was a huge boom of sci-fi, cyberpunk and detective graphic adventure games in Japan on the PC-8800 series that deserve to be seen and experienced by a Western audience, and it kills me so few of these have translations. I’ve been cataloging a good dozen of these games this week to search for them later on (and leaving my criteria of what deserves to be on the list loose, hoping not to cut any secret gems from my search), though I am likely to find that the majority of the games on my list have not yet, nor ever will be, translated for an English audience.
Some of these games were lucky enough to make the PC-console jump over to the Nintendo Famicom. But as the NES gained popularity in North America, it seems games like these had died off, become fringe, were judged not profitable for a global market perhaps. The force behind narrative-based adventure games that featured science fiction, mystery, thriller, and cyberpunk had arguably migrated from the interactive platform and into a safer environment of animation and manga.
Worldwide, the gaming market was drifting away from welcoming story-telling as a viable form of mainstream, profitable interactive entertainment: technology had pushed the boundaries of gaming far enough to enable what would become some of the most beloved action-platformer and shooter games of all time, such as Contra, Super Mario Bros, and Metroid. The 90′s would see the steady progression of platformers and the palpable rise of the First Person Shooter.
Back before Enix merged with SquareSoft, they were a pretty prominent publisher of this discarded genre(I’ve even previously written about one of these! It was an Enix sci-fi adventure game named Jesus: Dreadful Bio-Monster) although their acknowledgement of these games today - especially for the global market - is basically non-existent as they grew to focus on the RPG format for their games with story elements. Stories had not necessarily left gaming, as many who have played early RPGs will attest - but they had taken on an altogether different form, one interspersed between tactical combat rounds and item fetch quests than trees of dialogue and point-and-click era detective work.
One of the most popular examples of this kind of early adventure game - taking more cues from film than from RPG storytelling methods - comes from outside of Enix: none other than Konami’s cult classic Snatcher, written by Hideo Kojima. Snatcher - originally released in 1988 for the PC-8801 and MSX2 computers - was not released to an American audience until its port to the Sega CD in 1994, based on the 1992 remake for the TurboGrafx-16 SuperSystem. Snatcher is beloved now, especially by Kojima fact-finders and superfans, but the sale of the NA-available Sega CD version is considered to be a commercial failure. It is only speculation, although entirely possible, that this failure could have in part contributed to the diminished production of sci-fi inspired adventure games, being taken as a sign of the West’s disinterest in the graphic adventure game format.
Which is a crying shame, because this is in my humble opinion one of the most imaginative and wild eras of gaming. Think of the weirdest story and you’ll get weirder when you dive into a pool of 80′s graphic adventure games. For example…
In 1986, a JP software house (that joined SquareSoft the same year) produced a mystery-adventure game filled with Casablanca references, time travel, and murder. It stars reporter Jerry Randolph, who uses a time machine to track down the killer of her old friend’s scientist father. Pictured above in a field of green is Jerry herself, flanked by a time machine on her right and (what I presume is) the scientist on the left. The game is called Casablanca ni Ai o: Satsujin-sha wa Jikū o Koete, which with my best attempt tells me translates to Love of Casablanca: The Killer Across Space-Time or otherwise phrased Love of Casablanca: The Murderer Beyond Time and Space(While I have done translations of romanized japanese text from the 2015 FromSoft video game Bloodborne, I am very bad at this and bad at catching nuance).
Nevertheless, it does not follow any of the events of the film Casablanca despite so prominently featuring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman on the cover and in the title sequence. It’s genuinely just a time-travel murder mystery starring a female reporter as its protagonist. The game may even have its spot in progressive/feminist video game history annals: it released the same year as the very first Metroid game, often touted as one of the first playable female lead/protagonists in video games alongside Toby Masuyo (nicknamed ”Kissy”) from the 1985 shooter Baraduke. Jerry may easily be the first female protagonist outside of the sidescrolling platformer.
But with so many games that disappear into the fabric of history, just as many of these adventure games have, who’s to say?
As a journalist who has worked with gaming and eSports as a subject (though not exclusively), I want to recommend to other journalists one thing: when talking about the gamer public/majority opinion, e.g. “gamers were upset about x”, give examples of threads that support that.If you’re going to tell people that an opinion is widely accepted or something is believed by “a majority of gamers” you must give a timeline of that belief. Show different sources, different voices, different public figures who hold that belief. Show people believing it!
You can’t just assume an opinion is de facto accepted, and that acceptance is widely known. If you want to say something like “the majority of the x gamer community feels y” you either SHOW that belief or you admit you’re peddling stereotypes, lies, and exaggeration. Especially if it is something contentious. Generalizations may have their place, only for the sake of brevity on something seriously minor.
As you might recognize, this is in response to Eordogh’s @Forbes article concerning GG and lingering sentiments from the 2012-14 climate.My criticisms, as a fellow journalist, are not that the subject does not need to be discussed - it does, we need to be able to talk about this stuff without receiving death threats - but to have a better pulse on the consensus. The majority opinion is not what Eordogh purports. In the end, the article did no one good. It dredges up the anger of those who feel this criticism is shaky and unwarranted, pits one man against the world to “defend” TB’s “legacy”, and then just repeats he’s wrong without providing example. It made things worse for all sides.
The WHO’s mistakes in categorizing gaming-related addiction could mean damaging stigma of gamers, but we have to personally curate the conversation about gaming addiction ourselves AS gamers if we want to fix it.
…the most popular solution people offer to gaming addiction is just “go outside” which is not even the beginning of a rigorous solution to the problem. It’s right up there with just saying the sun is literal magic and will fix all of your problems. We’re offered magic instead of real solutions because we’re not even sure what we should do. We cannot ignore that few, if any of us, would know what to do if a friend or loved one’s life was seriously impacted by a gaming-related disorder.
As much as I hate to say it, I think as time passes DS3 is becoming my least favourite Soulsborne game. The other games have plenty of faults, but DS3 might feel the least inspired to me now. Now, I remember being pretty disappointed when DS2 came out, and I didn’t have that huge of a letdown with DS3, but I’m slowly breaking through those initial conceptions and developing longer lasting impressions.
I still enjoy it and love plenty of parts of DS3, so it’s not to say it fell there because I started disliking it. As mechanically boring and empty as I found DS2 (especially SOTFS), stylistically it took a lot of interesting risks, and followed through on those risks.
An example of how I think DS3 tried to do something weird and ethereal but backed out last second for whatever reason: Oceiros is SUPPOSED to be holding a baby. They didn’t bother to change or alter his model after they took the baby out. So now his pose looks… wrong?
We can make whatever lore excuse we want for Oceiros’ pose, like “oh the baby is invisible! how spooky!” but we gotta admit there’s just this WHOLE boss in DS3 whose aesthetic is based around sadly carrying a child and screeching about it. And they removed the centerpiece of that. I genuinely think Oceiros’ shouldn’t be in DS3 and he’s just used as boss-padding, a convenient transition between levels. And yeah, almost every other Soulsborne game has that! (Though I’m hard pressed to say exactly which boss in Bloodborne could be considered filler - they’re all pretty fantastic, and the ones that aren’t ranked as highly still don’t feel like they were just thrown in between levels. The Witches of Hemwick probably?)
A small part of me feels like they might have had to take Oceiros’ baby away because one of his animations is literally SLAMMING the baby into the ground, and someone told them they couldn’t do that. But hear me out
Q:why do so many on the left oppose pipelines if they're gonna create tons of high paying union jobs and create tons of revenue for the government to spend on programs?
Fact: The largest private sector union in Canada, Unifor, opposes the Kinder Morgan Pipeline expansion, because it will not create many jobs and will put many good paying jobs in BC at risk:
Also I have no idea where you are getting ‘high paying union jobs’ from? This pipeline project will create 50 permanent, direct jobs. The thousands of jobs touted by the company are all precarious, temporary construction jobs.
The friends I did have, I was kind of bad at communicating with. A very shy teenager, I fell into a lot of nerdy interests and never exactly knew how to express and share my interests with other people. I wanted the freedom to like things I knew weren’t exactly “mainstream” in the consciousness of teen girls without coming off as standoffish or trying too hard to be “not like the other girls”. This didn’t come off as intended, and more often than not I just chose to spend time alone, and came off like I didn’t want to have friends. I wanted people to like me, sure, but more than anything I wanted people to like the things I was into without having to market those things to them. I don’t like having to convince people to like something - either you do or you don’t, it won’t have any huge significance on your life whether you liked rock or rap, pink or blue, thriller or romance movies. Maybe I was just afraid to be enthusiastic about something that had a high chance of not impressing my friends.
One of the things I gravitated strongly towards was adult contemporary novels and classic novels, neither of which really resonated with my experiences as a teen girl in the 21st century, but both of which enthralled me and shaped my personality onward.
[pictured above, from left to right, top row first: coconut jelly lychee drink, red bean yokan, ginger lemon candies, mini almond cakes, variety mochi, seaweed and sesame dough twists]
Last year, I posted a few cool finds for vegan-friendly Japanese snacks. This year I’m expanding that list outside of Japan with to include all the awesome vegan candies and snacks you can find from Taiwan, China, Malaysia and elsewhere throughout east and south-east Asia. Check out my rounded-up selection of traditional and modern sweets, treats, savoury snacks, and drinks!
The ginger lemon candy (from Singapore) is almost always stocked at my local food market, and I love them! Ginger-spicy, lemon-chewy, and a gentle powdered sugar coating. I could eat these for the rest of my life.
The first two options are simple variations on a light pastry stuffed with winter melon, with a cute traditional Chinese tale behind them. Yuki & Love’s basic mochi are all vegan, so if green tea or peanut isn’t your jam, you can also check out the taro or black sesame varieties.
Chinese almond and walnut cakes are quite commonly vegan, consisting mainly of bean flour, sugar, vegetable oil, and nuts. They’re somewhat like a shortbread cookie in nature, but a little less sweet, less packed and more crumbly.
The Chimes hard toffees, hailing from malaysia, will be a welcome treat for those who’ve tried cocomels (the soft vegan caramels) but want a hard variety.
A lot of popular rose and coffee flavoured candies (hard and gummy) either contain gelatin or milk (or both!) so these are some particularly great finds. Not only that, but the roasted coffee candy reviews especially well as tasting like a real, intense cup of coffee! Both these flavours are a little more refined than your average soda or fruit gummy, so you can indulge without feeling like a kindergarten kid.
While my sweet tooth is bigger than my salty snack craving, I still absolutely love the intense variety of dried bean curd/tofu snacks there are on the market. Go take a look at the wulama meatball skewers and tell me you aren’t instantly hungry. I first tried these when I noticed the quirky mascot on the packaging, a lady after my own heart who seems to spend most of her time gaming or sleeping.
I tried the white peach soda recently, despite not being personally big on peach as a fruit. It is so delicious and gentle that I know I’m going to get it at least once a month from now on! The Mogu Mogu fruit drink comes with little chunks of coconut jelly in it, which will be familiar to those who already drink aloe or grass jelly drinks, but I’ve always found jelly bits in my drink to be a funny novelty, like the ramune soda bottles and their distinctive glass marble seal. Pocari Sweat is a huge Japanese brand of electrolyte drinks, and if you’re lucky you might even nab the strange jelly pack version of it. I’ll stick to the refreshing liquid version that helps me after a hangover!
If you have any favourites not on this list, feel free to reblog and add them!
I had pictures of books I borrowed from the library, and pictures of high school friends, and high school bands. I had pictures of the gravel road on the way to the corner store, and the sock monkeys we made when I was in the hospital, and the autographed Kim Thayil guitar up on the wall. I have photos of the city I don’t even remember taking. And you bet I had lots of pictures of my cat. I took pictures of the aftermath of the first D&D game I ever ran, and when you two played chess with the chess set given to me by my grandmother.
There’s blurry shots of the wee foster dog we took care of, and my bizarre Halloween costumes. The year I was a raven and went to an Edgar Allan Poe themed bar. Of the first things I ever 3D printed. The summer we were strolling along and I stopped to take a picture with a Darth Vader cosplayer. And just, I have to repeat, so many pictures of my cat. Who can blame me? He’s my best friend, and he’s a real cutie.
I have almost nothing of you. You liked it that way and I thought that didn’t bother me, until it did.
Your friendly local philosopher interested in ethics and the philosophy of science. Journalist and editor, amateur 3D designer and silly game maker.
My posts are about video games, veganism, ethics, journalism, Canadianisms, and life. I enjoy reading about environmentalism, transhumanism, Canadian politics, film and literature, video games, atheism, 3D design and printing, and Dungeons & Dragons. Current game faves are Overwatch and the Dark Souls series.
