Hey hang on, this month normally fits nicely into the schedule with standard numbers! Who put an extra day in this Smooch Month? I guess that means that this year, the year is just a little extra smoochy! But those four weeks and an extra, they are past us and now it is time to reflect on what happened this month, and what I wrote.
If you check this blog periodically, you might have missed all sorts of interesting articles just because, you know, discoverability is hard.
For once I wasn’t completely hosed trying to come up with smoochy games for Smooch Month! I actually had other things that I think I’m going to bump to next year’s Smooch Month and they’ll be, like, still relevant, how cool is that?
- Dream Crush, a voting board game that makes that venerable game mechanic really interesting.
- Ouendan (Video), a video article on my beloved videogame Ouendan. This is an update and expansion of an older article. I made a flag transition in this one!
- Thirsty Sword Lesbians, a TTRPG about inclusivity that made me feel alienated in how reads and presents its player actions.
- Hinedere Beat, a lovely little parkour platformer that made me think about a lot of words I don’t use. This one winds up talking about the Nazis!
That’s not all though, because if you check the Talen and Fox playlist, you’ll find that we also played through The Secret of Monkey Island! We selected that one because, even as a 90s point and clicker, it still represented an interesting take on a character relationship, and a girl who is interested in a boy and it’s clear why.
There were also a bunch of story pile articles, talking about smoochy movies and anime!
- D.E.B.S., part of our Positronic Collection viewing. It’s a movie about silly spies, and it’s also actually factually about a queer couple!
- Tomo-Chan is a Girl, an extremely mid anime that I appreciate because of how much better it made other mediocre anime look!
- A Tail of Love, a Hallmark movie, with Fox as guest spot, which we’re happy to watch this time because it’s just boring and doesn’t feature dog theft.
- Insomniacs After School, an anime I really love about two people with a common, down to earth problem, and the way the world looks when you can share it with just one person.
That’s not all the articles you can read (or watch, or listen to!) here on press dot exe! I also wrote about a whole range of other topics, and I think these articles are worth a second look if you missed them!
As it was Smooch month, I wrote about a bunch of stuff relating to romance. I checked out some old media’s examples of that, like in the Transformers episode The Girl Who Loved Powerglide, or the Animorphs shipping couple of Tobias and Rachel in Can A Bird Love a Falcon. I feel like that joke is a little too subtle. I also reflected on a romantic anime of my youth, and how modern discourse are replicating old conversations with The Ranma 1/2 Subreddit is Repeating History, and that then built out idea space for a consideration of the commonality between Homestuck and Ranma 1/2 with Homestuck 1/2. And since we’re talking anime I reflected on how much I liked the anime Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie because of how it represented non-het, non-mono romance even though it absolutely does represent that with The Unhinged Performative Heteronormativity of Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie.
Rounding that out and with a slightly darker take, I also wrote about my experience observing fundamentalist churches interacting with some of the hardest experiences couples have with Fundie Divorce, and then reflected on the way we’ve been ‘told’ relationships should work with an article about the history of Remote Romance.
Finally, I spent some time on D&D related stuff, looking at Sanders and Danube from Cobrin’Seil as places who could represent Yuri, and the strange commonality of Love Potions as purchaseable devices and what that meant about the world and its economy. I also wrote 4e for Two, as an article about how you might want to arrange the game for a two player experience.
Also, if you’re a fan of my custom magic cards, I put out two articles about this year’s Magic The Gathering set Vox Maxima: cards and story.
This month I made a shirt that tried to wed my familiarity with overly ornate stained glass from Wealthy Church Members’ doors and high-up windows, and also my love for easy geometry.
If you want, you can get this design on a sticker, or a shirt!
February is the last month of summer here, and the weather has become more extreme. Hot days are hotter, and then they’re punctuated with heavy, rainy days. The humidity in my area is a constant part of summer days, because I’m near two bodies of water. The sun hits the water, the water fills the air and the temperature can’t get too high because of that. Means the weather report says ‘oh yeah it’s like 29 degrees’ and that’s not so bad but then you check and it’s 80-90% humidity. The result is now that weather forecasts in my area include the stat ‘feels like’ and that has hovered around the mid 30s pretty consistently.
It’s not like it’s the hottest place in the world — I can just imagine people assering ‘well it’s over 40 in’ — and I don’t care. What I care about is how not being able to sleep has messed with my everything. Sleeping and eating are the two things that I keep thinking about when it comes to this time – I don’t do things that involve cooking heavily in the oven, because of the weather and all, and sometimes I’m up until 3 in the morning just because I can’t sleep and then I spend that time being unhappily watching biblical documentaries. I guess in the context of food I’ve been eating a lot of lentils? I got that point where I stopped buying canned lentils and started buying dried lentils (in a mix) and just keeping a little tub of them in the fridge soaking in water so any time I want to make A Food, I will just grab some of the lentil mix and use that instead of like, minced meat or chicken.
I have however, spent every week of this month aggressively getting words into my literature review, which I glibly call to my friends ‘The Word Pit.’ Every week has had a section drafted, with the attempt to make a schedule that gets my production up to pace for when the semester starts. I feel good about this pace of change, and I feel good about getting this kind of progress going, but it does also mean that every day I feel like I wake up and I have to generate two piles of words and this blog is the much easier one to generate.
Friends have gone through some rough stuff this month. Not putting their stuff on the streets, but it’s happened and I’ve been trying to be there for my friends while also acknowledging that I need to generate a few thousand words a day for an incredibly important project.