an image of a calendar, overlaid with the word 'february', along with some smoochy lips and a heart

February 2021 Wrapup!

February is over, my Twitter avatar is going to change, and our Smoochy Month is past! Back to regular posting tomorrow, but let’s give you a reminder of what happened this month and what you may have missed!

What did we get in the Game Pile? This Smooch Month’s game roundup was Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, Arcade Spirits, Monster Prom and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Its the nature of Smooch Month that the Game Pile is a special struggle, but I hope that this gives you an interesting variety to read – particularly, I’m very proud of the Arcade Spirits review. It is huge, and it’s thorough and I think it touches on some ideas I struggle with as a critic of the genre. Some angst about my place in the world, you know?

It also involved me considering via the Leather Goddesses that next year, I should write about procedural rhetoric and do articles examining other Game Pile games based on their romances. After all, it’s not like when I wrote about Mass Effect I ever spoke about how those romances felt to me.

Story Pile wound up being very anime this month. No idea why, but it means that we got Story Pile videos on Always Be My Maybe, a funny romcom movie with a killer cameo and hilarious ending rap track, Haikyuu, an anime that deserves attention for its dedication towards making a range of boy characters who are actually romantically interesting, Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun, and The Quintessential Quintuplets.

Other articles we have this month include a piece explaining hyperreality in fandom, in Akane Tendo, Baudrillard’s Tsundere, something directing you to go exploring for a new form of creative work you can check out and maybe even make with Smoochy Audio Plays, I waded into the tedious form of ‘what if we act like the answer isn’t obvious’ with Why Do Movies Have Sex Scenes?, and I considered some ways to depict romances in games with ‘Ship’ Building. I also wrote about some things I like in Media, being Yandere characters, the ship Tatsuhime from Bleach, and how much I enjoy being mad at Buffy the Vampire Slayer for doing a bad job with a trope I like.

There, that’s some reading for you if you wonder what I hope you noticed at the end of the month.

Next up, here’s this month’s T-Shirt, which is an attempt to make a nice candy-heart themed shirt with some messges that I think are nice, and sweet, and maybe the kind of thing you can give someone.

 

Personally, I am pretty happy with this month. I was worried that January would be a frantic burst of energy thanks to a rollover of a date, but this February was the recommencement of things like PhD meetings and University planning. That meant that I was weaving workloads together, and while yes, there have been days where I’ve been exhausted and just dealing with life in this situation, I’m still hitting goals and meeting obligations. Some days, not much gets done, but enough does get done. That I’m happy with.

Another small thing is a friend told me they had to quit a game we played, because it was proving too much of a problem with their productivity and mental health. It was a bummer, but I was able to tell them that I would miss them, but I would always rather they leave and do what’s best for them rather than them spend their time feeling bad about wasting time they weren’t enjoying spending. I hope we find another way to keep spending time together, but if we don’t, we don’t, and that’s okay.

I also had a lot of fun this month hanging out with a couple of friends on discord. It’s just been a time to actually use this mic setup, watching friends play games while I do written work around them.

oh and there’s a flag thread.