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2009, for me and my family, was the year of Redbox, and I remember Redbox as a savior when my life was otherwise in a pretty rough shape. Right at the start of the year, my parents lost their house, quite suddenly after months of money problems I was only vaguely aware of. We moved all our stuff, as much as could fit, into my grandparents’ basement and now we started a brand-new life of living in a pretty nice house that was way too small for six people. My parents became increasingly estranged. My grandparents became increasingly overbearing. I

There’s a lot of weird movies that made me cry. Or tear up, anyway. I’m not a big crier, and in fact on occasion I’ve had to watch movies specifically to coerce myself into getting those waterworks going. A full-on blubbering mess is extremely rare, though–it’s usually just a few sniffles and a couple face wipes away. But what movies trigger my tears can sometimes be a little off. Of course, I cry at all the appropriate Pixar movies. Toy Story 3 ruined me, and Inside Out came real dang close to pushing me over the edge. Coco made me

I’m a real big fan of Puzzmo lately, and it’s made me excited about the future of daily games and newspaper-style games. Everyone remembers the whole word puzzle craze back in 2022. Everyone was playing the same puzzle every day, and then a thousand billion variants and copycats came about. Most of them faded away since then, but thankfully still automated and updating daily. But the energy is still there and thanks to Wordle I think people are finally starting to figure out what makes daily games tick. Puzzmo is just the first one to really succeed in my opinion.

Hey, I just wanted to tell y’all about Yuri Kissaten, my new game studio. Yuri Kissaten is all about making video games about girls who love girls, with content that’s cute, funny, romantic, heart-provoking, and everything in between. Maybe even cool sometimes. Our mascot is named Oomfie. Please treat her well and respect her. Yuri Kissaten’s debut game will release very soon, and it’s called Love is in the Airship. I’ve been hard at work on this thing for a while now! It’s a silly lesbian dating sim set on a cruise ship in the sky. Here’s the first character

It’s time for our long-awaited article on Komiya Tomokazu Pokemon Card art! My Pokemon card art spotlights are very popular and give me lots of ad revenue, so of course I will do more. This man’s been a source of controversy. Huge hate from weird forum children. He even admits in an interview that he’s not a universally beloved artist in the fandom. Well, I’m here to set the record straight. Komiya’s art is wonderful! In fact, I think people who don’t like this art lack a certain joy in their lives. That or they just haven’t stopped to really

Please, Amtrak, be more ambitious. There’s some good updates recently on the Amtrak expansion front. The long-awaited Atlanta-Chattanooga-Memphis (and Nashville) line(s) are currently under development, and they’ll probably be ready in just a few years barring any major disasters. The tracks have already been built. The trains already exist. The funding is here. All they’ve got to do is go through regulations, figure out scheduling, and build the stations. It’s really exciting for me because the Atlanta-Chattanooga corridor has been one of the best most obvious spots for transit expansion in the whole Southeast. High traffic, an explosion in suburban

I’m gonna give you some dirty secrets of blogging. I’m writing this right after my post about offline mobile games, which I think was a pretty weird ramble that didn’t have too much to say. But it was pretty long regardless! Well, one of the dirty secrets of blogging is that a whole lot of my posts are, genuinely, just some rambling. No thesis, no bigger stuff, it’s just me finding a topic, doing some research, and presenting that research to you. Usually I don’t take a firm side, or the firm side I started with slips away. Is that

So, from my last post decrying the box office of summer 2024, there’s a good as heck update. June is shaping up to be a huge improvement over May, thanks to exactly what I was talking about. Actual quality releases, just plain good movies audiences want to see, all bunched together and lifting each other up. This weekend saw the gargantuan release of Inside Out 2, the first $150+ million opening since Barbie last year. It was so big that it helped a lot of the movies underneath as well. Bad Boys 4, Planet of the Apes, Garfield, and even

I’ve been thinking lately about offline mobile game rereleases. There’s so many live service games, giant content mines that churn out stuff for years on end to keep people playing and to entice more microtransactions, more ad revenue. But then, inevitably, the time comes when the game stops making money, when microtransactions dry up and server costs are too high. So then the game gets shut down and you’re left with nothing. But, in this age of massive developer layoffs (nearly 30,000 people since 2022), it seems really silly to just let all these games rot in silence, to let

Today I’m going to introduce you to Kusube Aya Pokemon card art. She has made Pokemon card art for over 20 years, and recently passed over 120 cards! That’s a ton! Of course, Kusube Aya is also famous for a few Pokemon children’s books, themed like this: And here we get one of Kusube’s main artistic themes… Cute darkness. Especially with Gengar, Kusube Aya Pokemon Card Art is enormously fun. So, for this article, I’ll focus entirely on Kusube’s art for the dark, ghostly, spooky characters. She’s done plenty of art for cute or cool characters, but this is the

The biggest movie flops of the 2010s… A dubious honor if there ever was one. These movies belong to an exclusive club of financial losers so big they put everyone else to shame. Some video game can bomb studios out of business. Some TV shows will get canned so hard they put huge crews out of work. Comics and books and Youtube channels can all lose companies a ton of cash. But none of it measures up to the sheer amount of money a big old disaster movie can annihilate off a studio’s profits. Every year, there are literally dozens

I will give you a blog post of epic proportions this week. The amount of epic proportions here are, frankly, sublime and gargantuan. But enough with the pointless filler. Time to get into the meat. You’re here for links, and so am I. Only I’m dishing the links and you’re eating. Put down that spoon and get out a shovel. You’re gonna need a bigger utensil to hold all this. Gilgamesh is Based? The first link of the week is just Gilgamesh. Like, the poem. Have you read it? One of the oldest works of fiction on the planet, and

I found myself in the pit of absolute boredom yesterday, and not by choice. My phone’s broken, and the replacement isn’t here. So I have no internet, no messaging, no music, no games. While I’m in transit or away from a computer, then, I only have my paper Hobonichi Techo and my wonderful Rakuten Kobo e-reader by my side. Only, yesterday had a huge rainstorm coming down. When I was about to head home from work, I decided to leave my paper notebook behind and just take the Kobo. It has a clunky note-taking app anyway if something really important

Memorial Day box office 2024… A weekend that will live in infamy. Due to lingering COVID after-effects, the streaming wars peetering out, and the 2023 strikes, Hollywood is in a really bad place right now. We’re coming to the end of what might be the worst May box office ever, topping off with the worst Memorial Day holiday weekend, probably ever. Click here for the Memorial Day box office 2024 chart. It’s not just that Furiosa and Garfield both massively underperformed–just $25 million each instead of the $50m or $70m they would have made in the pre-pandemic era. It’s that

For this week’s Link Scoop, it’s Only Video Games Edition. I’d like to curate you a fantastic selection of some of the best writing on video games I’ve found in recent months. Also some odd curios. I’ll start off with a bang in this Only Video Games Edition of Link Scoop: Bowser’s (Dead (?)) Wife The lore, the mystery, the intrigue… I actually was completely unaware of the Flurrie fan theory until now. Weird for someone whose entire livelihood was once staked on trawling the Mario Wiki to find material for jokes. If I knew, I absolutely would have included

My phone screen is breaking and I have no idea why. (The image pictured is someone else’s, but a very accurate depiction of my phone screen breaking right now.) I have the worst luck with smart phones. You already know this, probably. My dear sweet child, my Samsung Galaxy Flip Z, has crapped out on me and I feel very doubtful this is something I can get repaired. It’s been just under three years since I got the thing, about 33 months. From my 2021 article on the subject, that means it’s right at tied for the longest I’ve ever

Here’s my case for why the Switch will become the next Game Boy. Everyone’s been hyping up the Switch Pro, Switch 2, next Nintendo console, honestly since like 2019. And it’s been imminently coming honestly since like 2020. I’m a little tired of it, even if I made my own Switch 2 ideas post months back. … The Game Boy lasted a VERY LONG TIME. Despite being underpowered on release in 1989, it went strong until 1998 (!!!) before the Game Boy Color supplanted it. And backwards-compatible games still got made. The last native Game Boy game came out in

Another blog, another spotlight, this time on Kizuki Sumiyoshi. She’s yet another long-time artist, but one with an absurdly interesting artistic path. She’s an absurdly good artist even outside Pokemon. But her mainstay artist status means we can follow her career with tons and tons of cards. So let’s give Kizuki Sumiyoshi a warm Pokewelcome for the latest card art spotlight. Her first set was Team Rocket (the fourth set if your memory is dry). And she came out swinging, with a bunch of Pokemon cards with really different styles. I like how different these cards are. To an untrained

I don’t work as well under pressure as I thought. Or maybe I do, but only when it’s imminent, when I have to complete something and there’s no room for error. Or maybe I used to, and I’m slowly getting worse. It’s crazy how much I used pressure to dictate my entire life in high school, university, even beyond. A serial procrastinator, I started most major assignments at school the night before they were due. Sometimes I’d be so stressed out I’d go to sleep early, wake up at 2am or 3am, and do it all the morning of. My

Welcome to another entry in the world-famous Link Scoop series, the ninth one of those in fact. I’ve published quite a few blog posts in the last week or so. One of them got super popular out of nowhere. These other two are better, though: Anyway, here’s some links I scooped up for you. Remember When They Made that Movie 9 in 2009? The ninth movie to come out on 9/9/9 was a movie called 9. I saw it with my whole family, and honestly it may have been the final movie I ever did that with. Oops. Remember When

Another Pokemon Card Art article, this time on Nishida Atsuko. Another artwork titan there since the beginning–she literally designed Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Charmander, Vaporeon, and several other wonderful characters. She worked at Game Freak until recently and has been credited as a designer on every single generation. Absolutely incredible stuff. She’s also famous for lots of non-Pokemon work, including the video game Hometown Story, and the mascots for, uh, whatever the heck Organ Rooms is. It’s all just as cute as you might expect. But this isn’t about an artist’s whole career! Only the Pokemon! And we have tons of

I seem to have had a massive viewership spike in the past couple days…. OK, just from the past two days, my recent JET Program blog post has already become the #1 post on the site. Well, the #1 post since the server switch reset the stats, but I think it’d still be about #5 behind stuff like the Web Fiction Directory and that Curtains post. In two days! Looks like someone linked it on Reddit and it got a bunch of buzz. An actual conversation came from it, too! I don’t appreciate the people who hurl weirdly harsh insults

I have dealt with Micro USB for over a decade now. And I’m almost at my wit’s end with this thing’s zombie-like afterlife. Just like that famous SMBC comic, older USB ports are infamous for their hard-to-insert nature, the fiddly design, and, in the cell phone era, all those stupid adapters. Micro USB was the smallest you could get and still work pretty decently. It’s all I ever knew for many many years. It sucked, but I never knew anything better. And then the innovations came. First came Apple’s lightning cables and all the endless frustrations with those. Then came

I’m writing this short post about time management from the gym shower room. Hopefully not holding up anyone waiting oops Did you even know you could post from WordPress on your personal server using the WordPress app? Kinda epic! Anyway, I’m making progress on my Reiwa 6 resolutions, one month in, but it’s been mildly exhausting to do it all. Starting at new workplaces I’ll almost certainly leave by the end of the school year. Falling into entirely new routines… Adjusting has been really hard. My commute went from 15 minutes to 75, for one. No more waking up at

I’ve been working for a while on a proposal for how to fix the JET Programme. And here it is! First, I’ll talk about the biggest problems the organization faces, and then various ideas to reform and reorient it so that we can finally start progressing things. If you don’t know, the JET Programme is a project by the Japanese government. It’s run since the 1980s and is still going very strong today. Foreign university graduates from (mostly) English-speaking countries apply through their consulates to assistant teach English in Japan! Those accepted are placed in various schools across the country,

Today I finished my third time reading the book Unsouled. And that’s really weird. I don’t reread books often. I can probably count on two hands the number of books I’ve read twice. Three times? Only The Great Gatsby, which I’ve read about five times, and now Unsouled by Will Wight. First book in the Cradle series. I gotta tell you. I LOVE this book. Unsouled is, in my opinion, the closest thing to a perfect pilot episode you’ll ever get in a fantasy book. The conceit of a fundamentally powerless character who still wins, still defeats his foes? I

I had no idea that Star War the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West had an official dub. But it does! And you can watch it on Youtube! That’s right, the almighty Disney corporation hasn’t even taken it down off Youtube after all these years. I have seen clips of the original bad subtitled version for many years across the internet, but I had no idea there was a Backstroke of the West dub, one that apparently came out almost a decade ago. It’s as unhinged and nonsensical as you’d expect. If you know a little Chinese, you can also

Go turn over a delivery truck or something. I knew someone once who got arrested on May Day in a group who got drunk and tried driving somewhere (oops don’t drink and drive). I also found out just now that there is an Animorphs reading list, as if it’s an anime with filler arcs and stuff like that. The extreme prevalence of huge franchises with community-led reading lists is a good sign of the power of crowdsourced information. I love that we can develop a deeper appreciation for these megaseries but be guided through the timewasting trashy parts. Although I

I’m going to introduce you to my public domain acceleration plan, which may be excessive and not even cost-effective, but I still want to put it out there. What is the problem with public domain now? The public domain is extremely important. Vital to art and history and culture. And the United States has a public domain that’s extremely archaic and falling well behind. Currently, art up to the 1970s is stuck, waiting up to 95 years before it enters the public domain. And anything since then won’t enter until seventy years after the creator’s death, or ninety years for

I want to tell you all about Baba Yukiko and her Pokemon card artwork. I don’t think this is an artist who gets even remotely enough praise for a distinct and very cool art style honed through decades of work. She got her start early on in the Pokemon world, illustrating at least one of the picture books, and starting on the card game in the Neo series. Let’s get a look at some of these awesome cards and learn why Baba Yukiko is a great Pokemon artist. You can see here, a distinctive, sort of sketchy, abstract style right

It’s been a long time coming since the last Link Scoop. I know you’re there with your shovels ready, staring at the dirst with uncomfortably eager eyes. I can tell you now… Your patience has paid off. Along with this long time coming event, here’s some complementary links! The Twisted Tale of the Real Mickey Mouse A tale of truth and theft. Spotty Bulbear Minecraft Skin The only Minecraft mod made just for me. What if we got married in Animal Crossing… And on the island of Lesbos These two are living the dream… The world of themed novelty popcorn

There’s a primordial, deep desire behind all those Out of Context videos on Youtube lately. You know the ones. Compilations of quick scenes, or cut-up single moments that make you laugh or your eyes bulge in confusion. Dudes make entire Youtube careers out of these out of context videos. No matter whether or not you’ve seen the source material being context-stripped, these things still work. Because humans just have a real fondness for this sort of thing. For someone who’s never seen a piece of media, and watches the out of context videos for it, the main purpose is confusion.

I told you I wouldn’t do New Year’s Resolutions this year, so here’s my Reiwa 6 Resolutions instead. As I mentioned before, I’ve soured on January 1st as a goal-setting time. It’s a busy holiday period. It’s smack-dab in the middle of the doldrums of winter. How can we realistically set goals for ourselves in such a weird and inopportune time? For me, starting new habits when I’m facing seasonal affective issues because it gets dark at 3 PM is kinda unthinkable. And yet, for years and years and years, I tried that out. Especially since I started using Hobonichi

Sorry for being quiet online lately; I’m paralyzed by stress too much to do anything. That’s right; I didn’t stop posting blogs because I got lazy. No, I had a real nice streak going in February. It made me feel nice to start new blog series like Word Essays, or a new fun project like the 250 World War II Movie Challenge. Then it all came to a crashing halt because I’ve been so paralyzed by stress I can’t focus long enough to continue any of it. I’ll write about this last month again another time. Once it’s all passed.

Today I’m going to talk about villain redemption in Dragon Ball. It’s a really simple formula, something the comic did over and over again. But it just worked. Yamcha was a dirty misogynistic thief, but after a beating from Goku and friends he eventually became a hero. Tenshinhan was a rude haughty antagonist in the World Martial Arts Tournament who soon became a steadfast ally. Piccolo was a literal demon made of evil incarnate and also an inspiring adoptive father to poor lonely Gohan. Vegeta massacred planets and still somehow morphed into a grumpy father. Villains like Buu and Beerus

When you think old Pokemon cards, your first image is probably Arita Mitsuhiro, but your second is probably Kinebuchi Keiji. He’s the subject of today’s Pokemon Card Art Spotlight! This guy made some of the most foundational, important aspects of the entire Pokemon Trading Card Game. He designed the energy cards. Did most of the early 3D cards. Gave the franchise that pre-rendered CG vibe that gives people of a certain age mega-nostalgia every time they see it. Get ready for some nostalgia here. Because we’re about to examine some Kinebuchi Keiji cards! Ugh, just instant nostalgia every time I

Can you believe Craven was the guy’s real name? I’m of course talking about Wes Craven, the horror icon, the director and writer who launched entire franchises, who revolutionized the slasher genre not once, not twice, but three whole times. But I haven’t actually watched any of his films beyond one curio. Kinda weird and crazy, but somehow I’ve never gotten into Scream, Elm Street, Music of the Heart, any of that horrific stuff. Only the first Swamp thing movie way back in the day. I guess you could say, then, I’m not really craving Craven. But I’m sure he’s

Hey y’all, it’s time for the Hobonichi Techo Edition of Link Scoop, and the first one since the servers got all changed over. Why Hobonichi Techo, the famous planner/diary book created by Shigesato Itoi? Because I got my new one this week! My New Hobonichi Techo for 2024 I’d been using the A5-size Cousin book since 2020 (for Americans, A5 size is like 2/3rds a letter size paper). But I wasn’t using the extra space as much this year, and I decided to increase portability and return to the A6 original size (A6 is half of A5). My favorite, money-wasting

Here in this post, I’m going to introduce you to my 25 favorite Pokemon illustration cards. I’ve already told you about my love for old Pokemon card art, to my disbelief about the sheer variety of alternate art recently, and my adoration for the recent trend of illustration rares. This time, though, I want to dig even deeper. I’m going to show off my very favorite Pokemon illustration cards and express just what moves me so much about each one. (They aren’t actually my Top 25; this isn’t actually a ranking thing. It’s just good clickbait to title the article

While I’m skeptical on some of the ridiculous gaudy ultra hyper rares in the Pokemon card game, I’m in love with Pokemon card illustration rares. This stuff is the best ever! Y’all know I love Pokemon card art, but this is another level. With a vastly expanded canvas and looser style guidelines, Pokemon’s artists are able to express some extremely interesting stuff. There’s no risk of crowding out space in the tiny panel. No risk of confusing players by showing too many background Pokemon–it’s all alternate art, so the stakes are lower, and creativity is higher. I’ve complained in recent

It’s interesting how much of our lives are stuck on the cloud. Some hard drive on a server rack in a data center in upstate New York or Atlanta, Georgia holds the keys to all our lives. Family photos, ebooks, pirated games, a few sensitive tax documents we shouldn’t be storing this way. Some of us don’t even keep files on our personal devices anymore. The hassle of transferring everything is a bigger problem than the privacy risk. It’s like that for me too, generally. The cloud is really useful. When I was twelve, my parents’ computer got reformatted. They

I like bears. Who doesn’t like bears? They’re great big majestic monsters. And for most of human history, they have been feared, despised, taboo to even speak about. Allegedly, some languages outright replaced the original word for bear with a euphemism for them. But then society progressed. Bears aren’t that dangerous anymore. Well, they’re dangerous, sure. Polar bears, at least, will still hunt humans. But we’re prepared for that stuff. They’re not like tigers that often actively seek out to harm people. Bears stay away at almost all costs and attack us to defend their kids. We’ve reduced their territory

So, as a tangent from my normal Pokemon Card Art Spotlights, where I feature various awesome artists and their best Pokemon cards, today I’d like to show off some Pokemon card alternate art. What is Pokemon card alternate art, you ask? Uh, simple. It’s when they make two versions of a card, and one of them looks completely different than the main one. They’re usually way more rare but also way more visually interesting. And, honestly, I gotta say, that’s really cool. It’s not always good. Sometimes it makes the basic versions feel like an artistic afterthought, even when they’re

I’m going to be introducing Word Essays, a new type of blog on this site. Sporadically with no schedule, I’m going to post short essays based on a random single word. I’ll use this random word generator and pick a word that comes up to ponder on. I’m introducing Word Essays partly because my friend wants me to write more generic blog topics to use as filler text for her RPG. But also partly because I want to flex my ability to write good stuff in a short space. My blogs often turn into extended rambles, and no I rarely

It is absolutely inconceivable to me that nobody has made modern Oz adaptations yet. Not in any meaningful way, at least. We got the 80s Return to Oz, a few cool comic books in the 00s, that awful Disney movie, and of course Wicked. But there’s never been a real attempt at a wholesale franchise. A whole new world using this rich, weird, pre-Tolkien fantasy series. Maybe it’s because there’s not enough cultural relevance these days? I’ve only read, I don’t know, three or four books, and not since middle school at least. Gen Z kids probably haven’t even seen

I gotta ask, what’s your favorite RPG city? It’s a time-honored tradition of RPGs to build out big cities, hubs for you to find quests, get worldbuilding exposition, and heal and equip your characters before going out for battle. “City” can be a big metropolis, or just a small village, as long as it’s fun to explore. (btw, I took the header picture from here) Almost no matter the type of RPG, there’s going to be some cities worth remembering. If you ask me what’s your favorite RPG city, my brain heads towards a few different answers. Mostly based on

There’s nothing more I love in a big story than aging characters in real time. Or, at least, close to real time. Everyone knows long franchises often get caught in a rut with characters aging. People love the characters as-is, so they’ll stay as-is for as long as possible. Comics have their famous floating timelines, where a teenager in 1960 will still be a teenager in 2020, and a World War II veteran in 1960 will be an Afghanistan veteran in 2020. Characters may age, but it’ll be so slow that a comic strip middle schooler in the 80s will

For some reason, in Japan, Zima is still here?! I made a post a while back about the last Zima. It was all poigniant and melancholy and following in the long line of posts I’ve made about websites and magazines and people all fading away. …But then I moved to Kyoto and found Zimas all over every supermarket and convenience store. Zimas ain’t gone at all. I don’t really understand why Zima is still here. They made such a big deal about it finally going away at the beginning of 2022. And by early 2023, I realized the truth that

I keep running into revolutionary whiners online, and honestly I think they’re one of the biggest problems in modern internet discussions. No matter whether it’s politics, advocacy, fandom, media news… The revolutionary whiners clog up discussion with naysaying and defeatist attitudes. It doesn’t matter if they’re right, left, centrist, or some label you have to google because it’s too vague-yet-specific–revolutionary whiners will be there. I’ll define a revolutionary whiner for you if you don’t know what I mean: Imagine you’re in a city council meeting, discussing a new transit funding proposal with a big group of citizens and city planners.

When I started writing this article for my Pokemon Card Art Spotlight series, it hadn’t hit me who Imakuni Tomoaki really was. My usual source for Pokemon card art, Pkmncards, doesn’t list Japan-only cards for some reason. So it was only when I searched the artist when I realized–holy crap this is THE Imakuni? One of the most hallowed, revered parts of Pokemon lore, Imakuni? is the personality of, well, Imakuni Tomoaki who is a crazy weird black suit wearing maniac. He’s got a lot of joke cards in the card game, weird songs (the Japanese Pokemon rap!), and live

Oh my stars and garters, there’s so many tourists in Japan right now!! It’s absolute lunacy every time I go anywhere! Part of it is that I moved to Kyoto. There’s brand-new tourists every day with their glassy-eyed mild jetlag looks wandering around stations and famous spots. But it’s not just here. Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Nara… It’s all the same. Even when I went on a two-day trip to Okayama in September, I still found plenty of tourists who seemed mildly confused to be here. Even now in cold winter, the streets are still crowded with people from all over

Oops it’s February and I’m wishing a new year to all the lovely Link Scoop followers out there. I’ve found a lot of weird or cool stuff on the internet for you, though, so you’re gonna be very excited for these next few scoops. Well, here we go with the Oops, It’s February edition of Link Scoop. Forget Palworld, Yakuza Is the New Pokemon I’ve always wanted to play the Yakuza (Like A Dragon) games, but I never had a Playstation in my youth and now I never have the time for these 50 hour stories. But the more I

There’s a new Discord logo to greet all the amazing users of the local community. I call it Quinlan²: Beyond Battle. Please celebrate my skills in paint.net as you gaze upon this new Discord logo.

Change your bookmarks for this site to http://beatricebaker.com please! Sometime in the next month, the current Quinlan Circle sites will all go down. They’re not disappearing, necessarily; all sites are backed up and on a new server. But, there is a high likelihood that many of them will disappear. I’ve been prepping a lot of new blog posts recently, but I haven’t posted any of them because of this server change thing. So, just in case, the new URL for this site will be http://beatricebaker.com from now on. Just replace the thedude3445.quinlancircle.com part on any page URL and you’ll get

Merry 3445mas, and a happy New 3445! As we close up the year and prepare to celebrate a very merry 3445mas, we have some early pre-3445 presents to open up. By presents I mean links. Ho ho ho. Hehehe. Hoo hoo hoo. A Christmas Short Story Tor.com, one of the best places for fantasy/sci-fi short stories on the internet, has published a new story titled “The Sound of Reindeer,” and you’ve got to read it. The description: Ada’s holiday trip to meet her girlfriend’s family becomes a bit more fraught than usual when she discovers the family’s unusual Christmas Eve

I’m too tired this time to add an SEO keyword in this article. Sorry! I’m lazy! So you won’t see a suspiciously repetitive phrase over and over. Or will you… Anyway, I’ve got links, and you’ve got eyeballs ready to view them. Open wide. Clickbait That Got Me: The Largest Athletes It’s been a LONG time since Outbrain got a click from me, but I had to give it props for the best clickbait title and thumbnail in a while. Something just triggered in my brain, like, hell yeah, I wanna see a ton of Large Athletes. These guys are

The frank truth is that the Internet Historian didn’t apologize when he plagiarized an entire article and was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in ad revenue as a reward. But his cult-like fandom has entered true tribalism mode to defend him nonetheless. To move on and forgive and forget and compartmentalize that this very successful, very rich creator is a thief and liar. The new Hbomberguy video on Youtube plagiarism doesn’t focus a ton on the Internet Historian; it’s just one section of many in the sprawling four-hour documentary. But it’s incredibly damning because it’s the one so far

It’s taboo to say these feared words, but I’ll admit that Civ is too long. Sometimes way too long. And unless you drastically alter your playstyle or use certain mods, it’s very difficult to get it shorter. A few weeks ago, I was really getting into the Tides of History podcast’s overview of the ancient world, and somehow that got me playing Civ VI one weekend night. If you know me, you know I love the Civilization series. Between the six games (I’ve only played 3-6, Revolution, and Beyond Earth), I’ve probably played a good 500 hours of this franchise.

I’ve found true love, and its name is… Link Scoop. Welcome to another addition of this blog series where I share with you the things I’ve been seeing on this here wide world of web. Considering I spend a majority of my waking hours interfacing with the internet on various backlit screens, I guess you can call that true love. Or true addiction. Anyway, you’re probably the same way, which is why you’re here. You need to consume more and more internet content, which is what Link Scoop is here to provide. Open wide. The Epic Heathcliff Slug Arc Heathcliff

I’m always on-and-off with projects, so I want to learn about steering creative obsessions in my life. It’s a huge struggle for me to stay focused on any project. I get obsessed with a project for a couple weeks, then it fades as other stuff takes over. Sometimes it can be as short as just a couple days, even. However, I have a brand-new hypothesis about TV shows that might change things. As you might have seen from my last post, the anime Do It Yourself!! was pretty good, but annoyed me in one specific way. That specific way is

It’s a pretty nice anime, but the Do It Yourself anime American character really annoys me in a few ways. This Fall 2022 anime came and went without a ton of fanfare, but it’s one of the very few original series that release each year. Not based on a book, manga, game, toy line, or anything else, just a straight-up story. It’s a clear Yuru Camp cash-in, trying to get a crossover audience with the classic Cute Girls Doing Cute Things shows. Most CGDCT shows are pretty heavily male audience due to anime stereotypes, but Yuru Camp was a fairly

I’ve got some Switch 2 ideas for you. Based on everyone else’s speculation, based on existing patents, based on the mood of the gaming world, I’m giving my idealized Nintendo Switch successor system. These aren’t predictions, per se. It’s my idealized-but-realistic version of Switch 2 ideas. Not going full-on dreamer here–there ain’t gonna be an official FPGA modular Nintendo console with a Wii disc drive add-on–but still probably cooler than the actual console will end up being. When I was sixteen, I accidentally predicted the Wii U and Switch weeks before the Wii U leaked, and my dreams of asymmetrical

Let’s scoop harder with the new Link Scoop! I’ll provide you with all the stories from around the internet I’ve been discovering, and some fun bonus stuff here and there too. Cool stuff from this series of tubes we call home. So let’s scoop harder right into today’s links. Jet Force Gemini’s coming to Switch Online! In my massive Rareware Alternate History storyline, Jet Force Gemini played a pivotal bit part in keeping Rare and Nintendo together. I never actually played it that much! My family didn’t get a copy until I was in high school, and as a space

For movie box office, one thing that’s not talked about enough is movie studio market share. How many studios are releasing big movies? How many studios get a share of the pie? It’s always fluctuating, but there’s some concerning trends that could really impact the future of movies. And trends that can reassure us that a film apocalypse is not to come. So, I’ll do a little unscientific case study (sorry Stephen Follows, no science here) and look at five different years for movie studio market share. Look at the top movies, the biggest studios, and try to glean what’s

Welcome to Link Scoop, my brand-new… blog series? Newsletter? Whatever this is. Basically, the idea is simple. I give you some links–scoop up, as you might say–from across the internet. It WON’T be timely news-oriented stuff… usually. A mix of longer reads, videos, weird stuff, and whatever piques my interest. Hopefully it’ll pique yours too (then you can subscribe to my blog). Let’s begin the first-ever Link Scoop! Enjoy these assorted pieces of internet ephemera. An Art Collection of Tiny Things I love me some tiny objects, and I love me color-coordinated collections of old junk. This is both! A

I’ve been struggling with note taking workflow and my creative output for years. I’ve never found the right balance. Maybe soon I will. This is based on my 11/14/2023 Life Rambles post. I started rambling on there, then it got so long I spun it off into its own note taking workflow article! These are, basically, the segments of my note taking workflow: There’s not a good app for all of this stuff, and that’s OK. Purposefully separating different segments into different apps can be a healthy workflow. BUT… I want to have just a few, and right now I’m

Here’s my Life Rambles post for 11/14/2023, where I talk about various topics in my daily and creative life. For 11/14/2023, that is. As you know from my last post, I’m still trying to figure out what this thing might actually end up being. I’ve been emotionally kind of down the last couple days. In a real self-pity mood, which is the worst kind of mood for me to act irrationally. So I’m just keeping it down-low until pay day when I can blow all my money on, uh, paying bills I guess. Hopefully Christmas season will lift my spirits.

I’ve always wondered, what if Nintendo bought Rare in the Gamecube era? What would Nintendo’s dire sales for the Gamecube have been like? What would Nintendo be like today? That’s what I’m gonna write about today, in the form of an alternate history document. We can pretend some other universe had all this happen, and imagine the fallout side effects. Good and bad both. But of course, as an alternate universe story, I’m gonna make it kind of best-case scenario. It’s more fun that way. Introduction: Why I’m Writing About What if Nintendo Bought Rare (We’re not to the What

Welcome to another life rambles, where I post a few things about my life in short succession. Vacation Week I had to work my first-ever Saturday as a teacher. It was weird and messed with my internal schedule for a while after! But thanks to that, Monday was off. And then Friday was Culture Day, a national holiday. Tuesday was Halloween, and Thursday was my birthday. So I took 3 vacation days and had the whole span off, from 10/29 to 11/5. Eight days to do whatever the heck I wanted! …So probably 3.5 of these days were just me

I wrote a review of Lego Star Wars: Revenge of the Brick on Letterboxd and decided it was too nice for just that site. I’m reposting it here! I remember seeing an ad for Lego Star Wars: Revenge of the Brick in a magazine. If you knew ten-year-old me, this was an extremely very big deal. Star Wars Episode 3 was about to come out and I was absolutely ravenous for any piece of media connected to it. I watched the trailers incessantly, visited Starwars.com every single day, rewatched the Clone Wars microseries on Shockwave Flash player once a week,

They promised it wouldn’t happen like this, but it happened, and the world lost most 20th Century Fox adult blockbusters. It’s particularly disheartening when The Creator has just released under 20th Century Studios. It’s not doing very well at the box office… Not a disaster or anything, but it’s going to struggle to hit $150 million. Everyone complains about the lack of original movies made for adults, but then they never turn out for stuff like this. And each time it happens, Disney gets less and less interested in their $71 billion acquisition. My lamenting of 20th Century Fox adult

I’m experimenting with more general blogging, so here’s my first Life Rambles post. So here’s some short various rambles not long enough for a post of their own. Blog Structure Oh, first off, a meta-point about this very Life Rambles idea. As I said last week, I feel in flux about the current internet social networking age. But I’m still interested in writing stuff that’s more casual and not essay-like. I’m wondering about Mastodon and ActivityPub and if there’s a way to connect all this stuff together (I hear Tumblr and Threads will be integrated soon, for example). This Life

That’s right, I’m about to do a spiel on microblogging vs. normal blogging. (This article inspired me to write this.) First off, fuck Twitter, it sucks and it probably ruined more lives than any other social media platform in history. (Ruined lives in a metaphorical sense. Facebook ruined in a much more literal sense with actual civil wars.) But the appeal of microblogging is really there, honestly. I like the idea of being able to shoot off some three sentence thing and it not take up a whole post slot on my main site. There were a few months where

Well, I never expected it, but my watch strap broke this morning and changed up the rest of my day. I’ve only had my Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 for two years. The little plastic bits holding the metal connecty part were wearing out, and I knew it was a matter of time before I needed a new strap. And yet, I never thought to actually buy a replacement ahead of time. So when my watch strap broke this morning, I had to just go to work watchless. It’s not the end of the world. My workout this evening won’t be

I’ve just been made aware of this new site where you can search for progression fantasy books. It’s titled, conveniently, Progression Fantasy & LitRPG. The site is similar to that old Web Fiction Guide, where it’s a big listing of stories all across the internet. This time, though, it focuses purely on letting you search for progression fantasy books. Physical, ebook, and web fiction alike! It’s still new, but it already has hundreds and hundreds of listings. Even if you’re a megafan of the genre, you’re still bound to find a bunch more stories to read. It’s a much more

In round 3 of me gushing about media I haven’t experienced, Cybernator seems so friggin’ cool. Recently, the game’s been rereleased on modern hardware, got a full SNES reprint (preorder it before November 5th), and it’s become the talk of the town for retro game enthusiasts. So, suddenly, I’ve encountered it a whole lot on the internet. It really makes me wanna play it. By the way, Cybernator is also called Assault Suits Valken. It got renamed for its first localization in the 90s, but the current IP holders have stuck with the original name. But Cybernator is way too

People ask me all the time where the Systemless Series Ebooks are, and I can tell you they’re all on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. That’s where they tend to be most of the time. Of course, I’ve been publishing this series since February 2020. Three and a half years spent with Eryk Solbourne, Francis Bacall, Delta Rafati, and absurd comedy stuff. I love these characters! The book finally finished this summer, and I’m very glad to be done with it just for all the stuff surrounding it. I’m not going to do a full project post-mortem right now, but the

How come there’s no Disney+ compilation movies yet? Or compilation movies for any of these big streaming series, really? I’m not necessarily arguing anything for artistic integrity. In fact, in some cases this flies in the face of it. But I’m a big proponent of stories expressing themselves in multiple mediums in different ways. And this is one way to present a story in a new way to a new audience. I say this because I’m a major film fan, as you might know from my Letterboxd. TV shows are a great medium, but it’s just not the same to

A friend shared this media squares template with me, so I made a version of it for myself. I filled in these squares with all the media that impacts me the most. As a human, as a nerd, as a creator… I’m not sure which. But these are all definitely incredibly influential on me and will do so for the rest of my life. The five biggest squares are the most important media to me, while the ones inside are less vital but still really big. I’ll list all my media squares off for your convenience, Clockwise starting from the

I listened to Decoder’s interview with Fandom CEO Perkins Miller, and it really enlightened things. Really showed me why his company is so awful. It’s a good interview; I recommend listening or reading the transcript. For about ten years, the quality of Wikia, later Fandom, has plummeted gradually until it’s become a site I actively avoid as much as possible. Slow, confusing layout, covered with ads, not well-maintained. When I search online and Fandom shows up as a top link, I scroll as much as I can to find something, anything I can click on that’s not Fandom. There’s tons

Here’s a short Writer Beware themed update to my Web Fiction Directory I’ve lightly maintained for a few years now. Anyway, I’ve had trouble keeping up with one important thing–which websites turn out to be scummy? Which ones offer really oppressive terms to their authors, and which ones have deceptive practices towards readers? If I find a website or app that gains a bad reputation, I’ll always remove it from the list. But I’m not super engaged with the web fiction community these days, so I’m worried some will fall through the cracks. Luckily, the Writer Beware website can help

It’s short notice, but if you’re free tonight, come attend this SAHcon 2023 event! The description goes: Join us tomorrow at 8 pm EST as we showcase over 30 fan-made projects, including games, MSPFA adventures, zines, and more! Everything is happening on our YouTube channel, and we’ll be opening up the SAHCon 2023 discord to let folks chat at 7 pm EST, one hour before the showcase! I’ll be there, so make sure to join the SAHcon 2023 event too. Even if it’ll be 7AM for me….. Time zones….. I’ll try really hard to actually make it EDIT: It’s here!

There’s too much I could write about for Michael Guy Bowman for one article. He’s one of my favorite music artists. A musician whose work been there for me through the past twelve years of my life, whose work has changed and grown alongside pivotal moments in my life. Honestly, I could write a whole book about Bowman’s music and comedy. Maybe I will someday. Probably not, but still. For now, I want to simply paint a picture of each Michael Guy Bowman solo album. Where I was in my life, how the music affected me, how it stuck with

Karkalicious is great. You heard it here folks, I’m staking my position right here like the bold op-ed writer I have always been meant to be. Karkalicious definition makes Terezi loco. No, I don’t do Kismesis. It’s simultaneously actually kind of interesting while also being embarrassing to massive cringe-worthy levels. The Homestuck fandom, and by extension all those huge fandoms from the early 2010s, were just so ambitious. Fan art and fan fiction everywhere, of course, as expected. But fan games, fan animations, fan albums… Entire websites essentially conquered by fan content from one or two specific franchises. You see

My new book of Madoka Magica Memories comes out on 4/27. Please preorder it! It’s a collection of essays about Madoka Magica, an anime greatly influential on my life and on pop culture as a whole. If you’ve enjoyed my 200+ blog posts, you’ll definitely enjoy this book too. Nonfiction is… difficult to get popular on Amazon, but if this book can reach 20 preorders, it will probably become #1 in some Amazon categories, which will show the book to users from around the world. That’s huge! So please support my writing if you have a chance! I can guarantee

I’m gonna start writing up daily (or semi-weekly) progress mini-blogs, just to talk about the stuff I did and totally just keep myself fully transparent. These blogs are going to be a bit too inconsequential for this website, though, so I’m going to put them over on my Tumblr account instead. That’s right. I’m using Tumblr more lately, mostly because it’s not that popular anymore and most of the intense toxicity moved onto Twitter and Reddit. It’s kind of nice and chilled-out these days. Follow the “progress mini-blogs” section of my Tumblr to keep track best. Anyway, I was reminiscing

The sad secret of blog archives is that the archives don’t seem to work like you think. They don’t really increase views over time like you’d sort of expect. And I think that’s more the reality of blogging in the 2020s and the crushing power of SEO, than anything. It’s kind of crazy, because it goes against my own internet viewing habits. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve randomly discovered some website with tons of articles. I came there just to read one, but then I ended up clicking through other links and now oops I’ve already

Give us a Tellius remake, Nintendo, and I’ll stop complaining all the time about your stupid business tactics. Yes, I am that easy to please. There’s heavy, heavy rumors of a new Fire Emblem remake. In fact, data mining has exposed apparent proof of one. Everyone thinks it’s a remake of FE4, Genealogy of the Holy War, and… Uh, they’re probably right. But, if it’s not that, it’s abolutely a Tellius remake. Since the next game will release in probably 2024 and it’s probably FE4 remake, then we have a long way off until the Tellius remake. Especially when it

Watching movies with poor internet connections will eventually be a thing of the past. Now that the age of 4G is nearly past, it might come even faster than we ever realized. The 2020s are going to mark a transition in connectivity for the entire world. Soon, 4G will reach wide swathes of the planet (it’s already doing very well), and 5G is coming just as quickly. With 5G faster than anyone reasonably needs, with satellite internet finally viable and other really cool connectivity methods popping up, the world is going to see a huge boost this decade. In fact,

When grassroots campaigns succeed, like Operation Rainfall did, it can feel like people have moved mountains. Three great Wii RPGs actually got localized, actually got released thanks to a massive outpouring of fan demand. One of Nintendo’s biggest franchises only exists thanks to these fans, and we should never forget that. Giant soulless corporations actually responding, actually acceding to fervent demands… it’s insane when it actually happens. And Nintendo is the most surprising of them all! Nintendo, the company that STILL hasn’t released Mother 3 in English. Nintendo, the company that DMCAs fan content and shuts down tournaments. If we

I’m Jesse Monthly Blogger, bringing you blog posts every month, but I’m always too cool and never wanna write really short blogs because I love detailed huge stuff with impressive amounts of research, unlike that B. A. Baker kid who just writes lame rambles with not enough detail. I’ll never write a short blog post because I’m beneath that.

I found a lost Andrew Hussie comic. And I really want to find it. It’s kind of rare, and a byproduct of the early internet age. The MSPA fandom is extraordinarily blessed to have such fervent archivists. That’s the reason we can read ANY old Hussie comics, thanks to online archives like the ones I mentioned in this article. But as powerful as they are, some stuff was already lost before Homestuck became popular. Other stuff was lost because it was just too remote for most fans to discover in the first place. Archive.org is a godsend in many ways,

Y’all know how I desperately want Lucasfilm to bring back Star Wars Legends. I love it! I’m not the only one; the Star Wars EU subreddit has posts about it all the time. TheForce.net too. Well, I found a TikTokker guy talking about this very same thing I’ve always ranted about. The best way to bring back Star Wars Legends is through animated movies! Just in case TikTok doesn’t embed correctly, here’s the Youtube version too: . . People already love the cool varied animation styles brought in with the non-canon project Star Wars Visions: And fan films have shown

Dark Tower the movie. Geez. Man, can you even really think about how big a flop that film really was? Does anyone whatsoever discuss Dark Tower with their friends or family, even derisively? Just over five years since the movie came out, and it’s a completely lost footnote to the sands of pop culture time. In an era where brand IPs are more vital than ever, the long-gestating, incredibly hyped, star-powered first film to a major Stephen King franchise came and went like a generic studio programmer. It released on August 4th, 2017. The last weekend of July and first

After watching Modern Vintage Gamer’s video on the 3DS Homebrew experience a while back, I got inspired. I owned a Japanese New 3DS I got from a friend many years ago, but it did absolutely nothing but gather dust. So, one random day in February, I decided to make my move. I decided to set up 3DS Homebrew for the very first time. It was honestly extremely straightforward! I’m shocked. I tried to put homebrew on a Wii U a few months prior, and it was so much harder. I think I succeeded, but it took an entire day and

Madoka Magica came out 12 years ago, but this winter is especially important for me, because it’s my 10th anniversary with the series. Surprisingly, I haven’t posted about Madoka Magica much on this blog. I’ve never written an article about it in these 4 years, only a couple mentions such as here and here. Mostly offhand. But that’s probably because the sheer pressure of it all. Madoka Magica is my favorite TV show. A series that changed my life in extreme and positive ways. A fandom that unlocked so many hidden depths and so much fun stuff. Twelve years after

It’s the Problem Sleuth 15th anniversary today! Wow! Yep, the Brawl 15th anniversary just came literally yesterday. Isn’t it crazy that two pieces of media vital to my teenage years released 24 hours apart? Of course, Problem Sleuth was a much less direct piece of vitalness. I read it a little while it was popular and ongoing. But I didn’t read the whole thing until years later, probably June 2011 or so. The real vitalness is that it paved the way for Homestuck, which you may know was a bit of a hobby of mine… (Psssssst! Join the MSPA Reread

I’m about to make you feel ancient by talking about the Super Smash Bros. Brawl 15th anniversary. It doesn’t feel so long ago that I was a middle schooler avidly waking up each morning to check out updates on the Smash Dojo. It also feels like it’s been an absolute eternity. I think that’s what growing up feels like. Smash Bros has fallen way off my radar for absolute favorite gaming experiences, and none of them even made my Best Games of the 2010s list back when I wrote that at the end of 2019. But for a long time

Tiktok did it. It came in a flash—the realization that I, Beatrice Baker, had become an old person. And that was the moment that my Mom offhandedly mentioned downloading Tiktok. Watching it in her idle time. Being a fan of the app. I hadn’t even CONSIDERED downloading Tiktok in my whole life. I didn’t even get Vine, and that thing was super popular. Tiktok was just the replacement to musical.ly, famous solely for its horrific cringe compilations on Youtube. Or, at least, that’s what I thought. (trigger warning: this will destroy all but the most hardened cringe watchers) I get

I drank the last Zima I had. Now it’s all gone, maybe forever. Randomly, in my local supermarket back in May 2022, I found a bunch of Zimas in the discount food section. They were buried under all the chuuhais and highballs nobody wanted, just sitting there for me to enjoy. Zimas, and Zima Limes, too. Dozens of them, all half-off. I didn’t remember ever seeing them before, but I knew I had to seize the opportunity, and bought almost all of them. For less than 100 yen per can, too. All I knew about Zima was that it is