I’m going to remove the dates from the titles of these kinds of posts going forward and just increment a counter on them instead.

• Happy Juneteenth!!
• This last week was kind of a blur. I should start keeping better notes on what I did during the week for these posts. Whenever I’m documenting the things that I do in some way (either through a blog format like this or in a journal) I feel like I remember more of my day-to-day activities. It makes the week feel a little less routine and a little more special.
• I’m still playing Shadow of the Colossus. I’m on the 12th colossus right now. This game is really cool, and I’m going to finish it, but the controls can be pretty frustrating at times. The 11th colossus was annoying.
• Saturday was a good day. My girlfriend and I went to a gathering at a friend’s house; this friend had baked a (delicious) chocolate cheesecake and was celebrating her recent engagement. After that, we hung out with some other friends and watched the 2017 Wonder Woman movie (because we’ve been going through all of the DC movies in chronological order). It was worse than we remembered.
• I’m doing Art Fight after all and working on some last minute refs and updates, hehehee. I’m on Team Tragedy.

Links

• Also shared on Tumblr: I discovered yesterday that the FE fan site Fire Emblem Wars of Dragons has a full scan of The Art of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I’ve seen scans of individual pages around, but never a full scan of the entire book in one place. For non-FE:3H fans: this is a big deal to me because it’s difficult to get a copy of this book, and it has a lot of cool concept art for the game that you can’t find anywhere else.
• I linked a review of the manga Cocoon last week. It’s also getting an anime adaptation.
• Please, Steal My Culture by baraho from Manifesto Jam 2026. A very blunt essay about how you should get over your fear of accidentally appropriating someone’s culture, and instead embrace cultural exchange to reduce white western homogeneity in media. I enjoyed reading this, but I’d be interested in hearing what people from different cultures think of it.
• Obscurity is a Curation Problem by Kastel, also for Manifesto Jam 2026. An essay about how “obscurity” is a side effect of the mainstream’s failure to curate (and in 2026, “the mainstream” is basically “the algorithm”). I’m not sure if I understood the entire essay, but I agree that a) we’re too dependent on algorithms to pick the media we engage with, and I think this is a problem because these algorithms aren’t intended to foster discussion or community and instead prioritize engagement with the platform for engagement’s sake; b) there is a learned helplessness in this (everyone complains about how we only use the same, like, 5 websites, but they don’t want to branch out) and we need to go out and find more curators ourselves.
• In the comments of the above, Farfama linked his site Exhibit Play, which groups games into niche topics (Lesbian Bullet Hell, for example, which I will be checking out)
• The Wii’s Horrifying Stalker: (CW body horror, jumpscares, blood) a video I enjoyed about the Nintendo Wii game Calling, and how it uses the Wii Message Board system to send creepy messages to the player. I love stuff like this that’s totally unique to the medium or platform. The crumpled, dirty letters from the horror game on the sterile Wii UI made me uneasy.
• Two Van Gogh sunflower paintings and the events that transpired between them (CW for self-harm; it’s Van Gogh)
• the girly wellness aesthetic as a white supremacist dog whistle
• Chile turned to China for an undersea cable. The U.S. said no
• A Juneteenth Treatise: or, Thoughts on Isekai’s Slavery Problem (content warnings at the top of the article). I haven’t read/watched enough isekai to be aware that it often included chattel slavery, so this was enlightening to read. I’m not sure how to feel about JK Haru, but this made me interested in at least reading the first volume to see how it approaches the relevant topics.
• Ditch the term “wholesome” and consider using “nurturing” instead. I liked this for two reasons: first, I agree that “nurturing” is a better term because it’s describing the relationship the player character has to things in the game; and second, this reframing of the nurturing game as a kind of power fantasy is really insightful:

Nurturing describes the relationship that the player has with things, people, communities, and creatures in many different cozy or “wholesome” games. It also illuminates the power fantas[ies] that a lot of these games are actually fulfilling […] which are gendered and socially bounded in a way that makes them permissible for femme people to pursue. The fantasy of being a family head whom everyone relies on, the person who can solve everyone’s problems and is rewarded obediently every time with gratitude and love… that is a form of power that many, many people desire!