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Titanium Court: I admit I found the prerelease hype-building for Titanium Court to be a little insufferable; it was a lot of winking and nodding from the IGF crowd who wouldn’t even mention which game they were praising. Still, enough people whose opinions I value were into it for me to give it a whirl. And hey, it’s pretty neat! The gameplay is a clever hybrid of match-3 and tower defense, and the story wraps self-aware humor and ironic pageantry around a core of earnestness, like Undertale by way of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It may be the sort of game that’s more interesting than fun if match-3 and tower defense aren’t in your genre wheelhouse, but it definitely is interesting.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie: I don’t think I was hit by the full force of this movie—I hadn’t watched anything from these guys aside from the ubiquitous (in my circles) “update day” sketch, and I don’t have the Torontonian context to appreciate the local humor. Even so, I thought this was fantastic. It knows exactly how hard to lean on the fourth wall, how much to press on the awkward candid interactions, how far to take the Back to the Future parody without wearing out its welcome. For as goofy as it is on the surface, there’s a lot of careful craftsmanship here. It made me want to go back and check out the show (or perhaps shows).

Ichiko Aoba’s Across the Oceans 2026 Tour: I’ve mentioned on here before that if I can see a live Ichiko Aoba concert, I will. It’s taken me across the country, over the border into Canada, and now, appropriately enough given this tour’s title, across the ocean to London. It was a treat to see Aoba play with both the 12 Ensemble and with Taro Umebayashi, who helped compose, arrange, and produce her latest two albums. I followed London up with a couple more shows in California; I had previously seen Aoba open for Japanese Breakfast at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and less than three years later she was the headliner! Next time, though, I hope she comes back to the East Coast…

Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted: Olmsted is one of those names I seem to come across all the time since he’s touched so many parks I’ve visited—obviously Central Park in Manhattan, but also Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the Capitol Grounds in Washington, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, and on and on. I knew nothing about the man himself, though, so I picked up this biography by Justin Martin. It’s a good read, detailing both his work on major projects like Central Park and his surprisingly multifaceted personal life (I didn’t expect to learn that he was an abolitionist!). It’s made me interested in learning more about landscape architecture, and also in applying its practices to level design in video games as some folks do with theme park design.

They Are Still Being Shaken This Morning: This is a goofy teen romance manga series with one of my favorite twists of all time: the point-of-view characters are not the two naive high schoolers crushing on each other, but three strangers who ride the same morning train as them and obsessively dissect their progress in the group chat. It’s an absolute delight and I’m so glad it was picked up for an official localization, which just began this month. I only wish they had done something a bit less literal with that title; maybe it sounds good in Japanese but it’s a whole lot of nothing in English, and I suspect a lot of potential fans will pass over it as a result.

Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination: Another special exhibit at the MFA Boston, about gardens this time. In addition to seeing some of the usual MFA favorites in a new context—artists like Monet, Sargent, and Hokusai, who are well-represented in the collection—I enjoyed being surprised by some of this exhibit’s showstoppers, like the Qing dynasty landscape painting spread across a dozen hanging scrolls or the massive seventeen-foot Flemish tapestry. I’ve become much more of an art museum person over the past few years, and while I mostly enjoy revisiting favorite galleries and seeing the gradual tweaks over time, I’ve come to appreciate these temporary exhibits as well.

Xenoblade Chronicles X: This is the one Xenoblade I hadn’t touched yet, and I used the recent Switch 2 upgrade as an excuse to pull it out of the backlog. I’m dozens of hours in and still can’t quite decide how I feel about it! The evidence suggests I’m enjoying it well enough, but I can’t help but wish I liked it either more or less. If I liked it more, I’d feel better about the immense time commitment; if I liked it less, I might put it down in favor of something I’m not as ambivalent about. As it is, it’s just good enough for me to endure the joylessness of collecting n monster parts every so often. I may demote it to a back-burner game where I occasionally chip away at low-impact sidequests instead of the main thing I’m playing.

The Grand Budapest Hotel: Hey, you ever hear of this Wes Anderson guy? (I know, I’m late to the party here; I don’t watch a lot of movies.) What a ride! I’m almost afraid to make comparisons to other films for fear of sounding like that Boss Baby tweet, but it scratched a similar itch to O Brother, Where Art Thou? for me. I loved Fiennes as Gustave, and I could look at that hotel set forever. Great score from Alexandre Desplat as well. Will I be back for more? Sometimes I think “Maybe I’ll finally become a movie guy and watch through this director’s (or actor’s, or composer’s) filmography as an entry point,” and then I think “Well, I dunno; that’d take a long time,” and then I think “Wait a minute, I bet I spent more hours on video games this month than it would take to watch every movie that person has ever touched.”

The Legend of Heroes: Trails beyond the Horizon: We’ve enjoyed years of improbable wins in the overseas Trails fandom, from localizations of the niche spinoff titles to remakes with simultaneous worldwide release dates. Horizon, though, may represent the most improbable win of all: the international releases have somehow caught up to the Japanese ones. Nothing to sneeze at when we’ve been an entire decade behind at times! I’m loving the game itself, too—it’s an overindulgent mess but a wonderful one, like a sundae with too much hot fudge.

”The Lord of the Year” on Shelved by Genre: The literature podcast Shelved by Genre is talking through Tolkien for the entirety of 2026, from The Hobbit to The Silmarillion. It’s been a pleasure to read along thus far; the leisurely pace affords them time for taking long digressions or reading favorite passages aloud, and keeping up is a breeze. The premise of approaching the books as a “naive reader” is immediately stretched past the point of credulity, but I appreciate the approach—it’s refreshing to take the words at face value first and not lead with eyebrow-waggling allusions to what we know will come later.