Smooch month draws to a close and with it we set aside our theme, to bound freely in the festival of stuff that is March.
I think of Smooch Month games as difficult to find, because while there’s a genre of games about smooching, they’re often incredibly boring and bad. Don’t worry, though, some of the options on that front have been bumped to Pride Month.
This month’s four Game Pile Articles were:
- Mass Effect’s Romances, where I look across three games for five characters
- Picking up the Pieces, a TTRPG about navigating a liminal moment
- Unpacking, a game I liked but I liked more that it made itself a game
- Returns, a short-form Twine narrative game about breakups and healing
I do like, looking at those four options, that none of them are really like one another. There’s a pair of videos examining very indie media, but there’s also a long-form article talking about a triple A game franchise, and a quirky indy darling. I like this, I like being able to use my platform to keep an interesting variety going. Again, watch that interesting variety die when we get to the Pride Month stuff, but we’ll get there.
Meanwhile, over in Story Pile, we had:
- Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku, an anime I watched in February last year and had to wait a full year to show off how much I loved it.
- Flip That Romance, where Fox and I watched an abysmal Hallmark Channel movie about house-flippers that promised to be ‘about romance.’
- Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku (?!), where oh wow, Wotakoi’s manga is also breathtakingly good too!
- To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, which will go up tomorrow, so you’ll find out then.
What about other articles you should check out? I personally really liked my article about Pricefield, the ship that drives the heart of the plot of Life Is Strange, at least as I give a crap about it. I wrote about how in 3rd Edition D&D, the idea of a ‘god of love’ seemed to be tied to ‘a boring weenus of a god who sucks,’ and I wrote about how in Cobrin’Seil, I’m going to treat half-orcs as a culture defined by love and responsibility. I found time for an article about how the discourse around The Twin Consorts in World of Warcraft is time-wasting bullshit modelled on, well, World of Warcraft. I also did a pair of articles on shipping couples in long form media, like Ranma 1/2 and Baldur’s Gate 2. Then on top of all of that I made an absolute doorbuster long form article about themes available to the four Knightly Orders of Cobrin’Seil. It wasn’t on theme, but when would it be?
I also did some work on brainstorming game designs, after my Camp Osum diary, and my first long-form diary about it went up last night.
The February Shirt design could either be another Did You Check The Subject Outline, but I instead opted to refine a design I’d already made that invoked the aesthetic of an old manga logo I liked. Chances are if you wear this anywhere but an anime con, nobody will recognise it.
If you need it explained, ‘tama’ is a common name for a cat. 5/10 is ‘Go/Ju’, and works out as the same as 1/2. The look is meant to evoke Ranma 1/2, while also invoking the word tamago (Japanese for ‘egg’). Basically, this is a shirt design for trans catgirls who got into anime and manga and genders because of 90s classic mainstream-enough-to-be-at-video-rental-stores-but-not-on-TV series Ranma 1/2.
It may sound strange, but the weather of summer has a pretty serious impact on me. When a day is too hot, I have a hard time working, a number of chores that require me to be out of the house don’t happen. You can’t hang the laundry outside without going outside. This year, Summer was not dreadfully severe, which is merciful. Part of the problem is that if it’s too hot, I have a hard time getting to sleep in a meaningful time, and I get woken up by the heat in the hottest part of the day.
I got my vaccine booster shot mid-month, and I don’t think it really affected me much. I do think it made me anxious checking for reactions, which reduced my work output through the whole week, which is a bit funny and also quite stupid.
I feel like the defining feeling of February has been fog. There have been humid days where the sun hasn’t been bright and I’ve still been slow and slack to get things done just because I am reluctant to even move. Cooking during summer? Whatever I can do as quickly as possible. And it’s been harder with shared space – recording audio is hard, playing around with video is hard.
I don’t like February.