June 2026 media
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The month of Ys: I’ve been gradually picking through my backlog of unplayed or unfinished titles from Nihon Falcom’s Ys series, and this month I got into a groove and hammered through four games in a row (!) to complete the set. Based on my rough sense of fandom preferences I think I’m lower on The Oath in Felghana and higher on The Ark of Napishtim than average. All have their sharp edges, and none of them reach the heights of my favorite Trails games, but I’ve broadly had a good time. I’ve actually rolled straight into replaying Ys VIII, still my favorite in the series (perhaps because it’s the most Trails-like), so maybe the month of Ys is on its way to becoming the summer of Ys.
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Will There Ever Be Another You: Man, no one writes like Patricia Lockwood. Following on from 2021’s already enigmatic No One Is Talking About This, an autofictional account of internet poisoning and grief, this sequel is even harder to pin down. I suppose you’d say it’s broadly about long COVID: the protagonist becomes ill in the opening scenes, and the structure of the book begins to unravel almost immediately. From then on, you’re in brain fog territory: confusion, murky insights, borderline incoherence. (“I wrote it insane and edited it sane,” Lockwood said in a New Yorker profile last year.) The effect is like catching glimpses of an oil painting through the dangling bits of its torn canvas.