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September 2026 media

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 21:53:49 -0400

Two of my most anticipated games of the year launched on the same day!

Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave: This might be the first Switch 2 exclusive that’s solidly connected with me, after only receiving glancing blows from the likes of Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza. There are so many systems here that it’s easy to succumb to choice paralysis, and players with a completionist bent may chafe at how thin and repetitive some of the weekly tasks can be (even more than its predecessor Three Houses, in my opinion). Luckily for me, those foibles align well enough with my gaming temperament that I’ve been having a great time regardless. I still have dozens of hours ahead of me, though…
Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter: I suspect the same temperament that makes Fortune’s Weave a good fit also explains my affinity for the Trails games. This is another remake of a game I’ve played twice before, but that hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm; I’m still excited every time I advance the plot and get my fresh batch of largely inconsequential NPC dialogue. And I’m especially glad that publisher GungHo took the criticisms on board and aligned their localization choices more closely with the XSEED and NISA releases. The only reason I haven’t completely rinsed this one yet is because I’ve given priority to Fire Emblem.

August 2026 media

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:46:32 -0400

Genshin Impact version 7.0: The initial goal in Genshin’s story was to visit each of the world’s seven nations; with this patch, we’ve arrived at the seventh. There is no chance that the game will end anytime soon given its continued success, but it does feel as though the story is reaching a climax. Perhaps this version, or the next, will resemble Destiny 2’s The Final Shape in retrospect: a satisfying enough narrative conclusion to provide an offramp for long-time players.
Hobonichi Techo 2027 Preview Forest: I’ve filled out a page of a Hobonichi planner every day for more than a decade now, and watching the new crop of covers and accessories roll in is still one of my favorite August traditions. Despite the increasing push towards big-name brand crossovers—this year features Hello Kitty, One Piece, and Moomin, among others—they’ve so far managed to evade the cynicism I feel towards similar trends in, say, Magic: The Gathering or Fortnite.
Arsenic and Old Lace: Working through more classics! Luckily filling in gaps in the film canon is not as terrifying a prospect as with a longer-form medium like video games, even if those gaps are numerous. The only Capra I’d seen before now was It’s a Wonderful Life so I don’t have enough context for any far-reaching claims, but this was a good one. Cary Grant’s hapless overwhelm was great, but it was Josephine Hull and Jean Adair as the Brewster sisters who really killed it, so to speak.

July 2026 media

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:58:03 -0400

Tokyo Xanadu: I’m continuing my Falcom run from last month by replaying this oddball in preparation for its sequel, Kyoto Xanadu. On paper it seems like a marriage of Falcom’s strengths; in practice the combat is not quite Ys-quality and the narrative not quite Trails-quality, and it’s all held back by a surprisingly mediocre localization. The bones are still good, but I suspect it’s for the best that Kyoto Xanadu is attempting something significantly different; Ys and Trails have already converged enough that there may not be room between them for a game like this.
Fargo: Yes, the original Coen brothers film from 1996, not the television show! I hadn’t seen it since catching bits and pieces on TV as a kid, so all I had were hazy memories of specific scenes. (The wood chipper scene is admittedly hard to forget.) Turns out it’s still good! Macy and McDormand are both tremendous, there’s a steady stream of Coen-brand jokes and other slapstick nonsense, and it’s fun to bask in the accents and the “Minnesota nice” vibes. I’m not surprised that they wanted to do more with the setting, even years later and with different characters; it feels like a rich vein.

June 2026 media

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 14:36:24 -0400

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.
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.

May 2026 media

Sun, 31 May 2026 23:53:35 -0400

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).

April 2026 media

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:53:40 -0400

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.

March 2026 media

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:22:43 -0400

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.

February 2026 media

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 21:13:24 -0400

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.”

January 2026 media

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 21:14:19 -0400

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.

December 2025 media

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:51:14 -0400

The New Yorker at 100: A recent Netflix documentary made for the preeminent (or rather preëminent) magazine’s centennial. The New Yorker is a relic in many ways—some interviewees valiantly argue that it’s not entirely old-fashioned—though in a time of crumbling institutions and cynical brand cashouts that actually doesn’t seem so bad. I found myself envious of a world where a great reported piece John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” or Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” could drive the national conversation. Who could do that now? Hell, who else even employs this many fact-checkers and copyeditors anymore?
‌How a Game Lives: This coffee table book features transcripts of ten Jacob Geller video essays, thousands of words of annotations, and an afterward for each from a guest contributor. What a pleasure to experience these again in a new format! Something is definitely lost in translation without the usual audiovisual context, but Geller writes with enough clarity that it’s less than you might think. I also benefited from being forced to attend to the words on the page rather than half-watching a YouTube video while I eat a bowl of cereal or whatever. They’re worth devoting attention to!