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posted: 2025-10-16

Voltage's Quarter 3 Media Report of 2025

Greetings once again to you, parties with a vested interest in exactly me. I’m glad to see you’ve returned to read my third quarterly update of this year, 2025. This report covers the goings-on from the start of July through the end of September, which means that there are some things that I’m doing now that are not included here because, like, I started them in October, y’know? Those will go in the final quarterly report. I have some talking points about some games and other media I’ve played and finished that I haven’t already written about at length here1 on this website. As is the reality of writing about one’s life in a way that is meant to be informative while affording a glimpsed into my beautifully unique perspective, this work will be incomplete. There are plenty of things I should probably include here about which I have simply forgotten. If I don’t have notes on the experience, it has been lost.

Oh well.

Let’s talk about some games.


Games

Games are fun, I like games. Between the start of July and the end of September I rolled credits on fourteen games (most of them very small games). I started a lot more than fourteen games, thanks to my recent purchase of an Anbernic RG35XXSP, which has yet to disappoint me2. Yes, it is truly a perfect time to be a games enthusiast with just enough money to emulate everything up to the Wii U.

Here’s just a subset of the games I played this quarter, specifically the ones I bothered to record here in my database.

I’ll talk about this database more a bit later, but suffice it to say, I’ve got a lot of games I’ve tried out here.


And yes, I am going to talk about Hundred Line.


The Switch Two

Yes, the Nintendo Switch Two. I’ve got one. My wife also has one (but she didn’t it until after October came around so we’re not going to talk about that). My wife got my a Switch Two for my birthday this year, which was awfully kind of her. I have used it to play Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team, primarily.

I see the Switch Two as an investment. It has been a great machine to finish playing through Dragon Quest III HD-2D, what with its visual upgrades. It’s hard to appreciate how low of a resolution 720p is a handheld Switch One until you upgrade to the 1080p Switch Two, and you see every single wrinkle of the Archfiend Baramos’s leathery skin. But I asked for a Switch Two because I wanted to have the access to Nintendo’s future titles. I know Nintendo ain’t my friend, I don’t like the 80 dollar price tag on games I could once buy for 60 dollars, I won’t be buying any indie games on the platform that I can’t otherwise buy on Steam. I am embracing my Nintendo + PC gamer lifestyle and loving it. So when the good stuff exclusive to Nintendo comes out on Nintendo consoles, I’ll grab it But I’ll be exhibiting a bit more discretion as I go; I do not want to reward a corporation for practices I do not like. I’m optimistic there’ll be positive returns, though I’m also the guy who has a 3DS Ambassador Certificate, so don’t take my word as a reason why you should buy one yourself.


How I Spend My Sunday Afternoons

I am a fan of the Minnesota Vikings, so naturally, my standards for what I consider to be “meaningful entertainment” are quite low. Still, I am captivated by the hype of my football team amassing new talent, promising a thrilling season of triumphs over the enemy on the gridiron. They get me hook, line and sinker, every single time. Every year I sit down to watch my favorite team, and then have heart palpitations for three hours and thirty minutes, before my favorite team either wins or loses. Last year they somehow managed to win fourteen of their seventeen games, not considering how that made me feel throughout the process. They never ask me if I’m having a good time, they just go and find new ways to disappoint me. And then sometimes, they win it in the last five seconds of the game on some bullshit and I go into the following week feeling ecstatic 3.

They’ve done this every year since I could first know to care, before I knew what all the stats in the newspaper actually meant. They would ruin me, make me miserable as I watched or listened to heartbreak over heartbreak. How did I do it? How do I do it? I’ve hinged a non-trivial fraction of my identity on being a fan of the Minnesota Vikings, when they win, I win, when they lose, I lose. I lose all the time.

My dad has the right idea of how to watch these football games. He’ll come home from church eat lunch, and put the game on as he eats. Assuming he doesn’t have anything better to do, he’ll watch the first quarter of the game, start dozing by the start of the second quarter, and be sound asleep in a Sunday afternoon nap by halftime. He’ll usually wake up halfway through the fourth quarter, at which point he can make a judgement call. If the Vikings are winning, he’ll stick around to watch them win. If the Vikings are losing, he’ll turn the game off and go do some yardwork or something. In his words “It’s not like I missed anything important”. One day, I will feel this way. But that can only start when I can let myself take naps on the weekend. We won’t go into the details of why I don’t let myself take naps here today, but needless to say, I expect to be growing into his actions as I too enter my sixties.

By for now, here in my late-twenties, I have found my distraction: Fire Emblem Fates. Like I said: I’m a Minnesota Vikings fan, my standards for what I consider to be “meaningful entertainment” are quite low.

If you can believe it, my “burn time” 4 on a 3DS Fire Emblem game tends to be around 3-4 hours. I first played Fire Emblem Awakening on stream where I played the game with friends in a VC, with sessions lasting the exact same amount of time as a football game. These session took place once a week, hey, also like football! It’s amusing to me how well this mode of play translated from one context to another. Yes, I am no longer performing, but my attention is as equally divided. No longer do I have to worry about one of my friends saying something really stupid, now I can watch my favorite football team do so instead!

Fire Emblem Fates is fun. I’m allowed to say something is fun because fun is a subjective experience. Fire Emblem Fates is more fun than watching Carson Wentz throw an interception. Fire Emblem Fates is more fun than watching J.J. McCarthy get sacked six times. Fire Emblem Fates is NOT as fun as watching Isaiah Rodgers return both a fumble and an interception back for touchdown in a routing of the Cincinnati Bengals, 48-10, the largest margin of victory the Vikings have cleared since the 1970's 5. Fire Emblem Fates has routs too! Though I find these routs aren’t all that difficult. This may be because I am playing the Birthright Route on Hard-Casual. I find that this difficulty setting is perfect for learning the systems of the game while still affording myself a little kindness in the event that I get distracted by, say, Justin Jefferson doing something cool. I intend to play conquest on Normal-Classic after this, once I have an idea of what the hell a “Rat Spirit” even is.

It helps too that Fates - Birthright is, well, only so compelling. I admit I am only nine hours and ten chapters into what I expect is a route that is nearly triple this total play time. Wearing my “immersion goggles”, I admit that the choice to choose between nature and nurture is difficult. The scenes shortly after making my decision stung more than I anticipated, given my otherwise aloof approach to the happenings of the tale. But I must remove these rosy goggles and look at the first six chapters with a bit of a squint. I don’t know how I would do it better, but I would think that more time spent with each side of the party might have given me a little more pause when making my selection. That is, I did not feel bad about turning my back on Nohr because I was told that these people loved me, rather than shown it. But maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I was too busy appreciating just how awesome Jordan Mason is as a running back.

I’m not treating Fire Emblem Fates with respect, but I don’t mind here. Fire Emblem Fates can’t tell me that I’m being mean to it. Fire Emblem Fates is a distraction for me. It’s a fun distraction, too! I could be something boring as a distraction like fold my laundry, but instead I’m making my anime chess pieces kiss as they destroy opposing armies. Now this is a Sunday afternoon.


Vividlope

Vividlope is a video game where you are tasked with turning every tile from one color to another by walking on it. The premise isn’t anything new to video games, but Vividlope takes this idea and runs with it all across its non-Euclidean geometry. Some levels are simple three-dimensional solids, while others can be described topologically as a simple plane that has been bent about. The challenge, then comes with planning how to most efficiently navigate along the surface of these shapes while dodging the various pink obstacles that cross your path. You might get powerups that can damage these foes while simultaneously turning over the colors of the tiles as well, giving you a plenty good reason to swing your hammer onto the various curvilinear surfaces.

Vividlope is a game to play while waiting for your wife to come home from work, or a game to play while your wife does the dishes because you made dinner, or a game to play with your wife watching as you talk about whatever crosses your mind. Vividlope keeps your hands and brain just busy enough to both pass the time and the conversation while still being engaging enough to occupy at least fifty percent of your focus. It is, as they say in the business, “something to do”. It is a game that asks you to clean your Klein Bottle-shaped room while smashing pink rats with your comically large hammer as efficiently as possible while your wife asks you how you feel about the world 6.

“Vividlope is a game that evokes the feeling of games from the Sega Dreamcast” he says, having never actually owned a Sega Dreamcast. Still, it wouldn’t be all that out of place in terms of aesthetics 7 . I mean, there’s a giant rotating cube against a light-colored electronica background in the opening moments of the game. When was the last time you’ve seen any kind of video game present this presumed understanding of what futuristic technology might look like? Never mind that all the characters are built out of simple, disconnected two-dimensional polygons. My favorite parts have to the the Cerise and Ecru interludes, wherein the primary characters have a little comical interaction. These scenes aren’t terribly complicated, but never fail to elicit a chuckle. And I love that in these scenes, while their words are presented in text boxes, Cerise and Ecru say nothing but “Mi mi mi mi”. It’s just so cute! It makes me smile!

The soundtrack by Baycun and ViRiX Dreamcore is what ultimately what lodges Vividlope so high up on my “personal favorite games tier list”. It’s the music, dude. It’s the music that makes me lament that I had to play this (and all future games) generally sober. Do me a favor and give Vividlope a Friday evening, and see how it is. Tell me about even, maybe. Maybe if you get to the stage where “Vividvastness” plays, you might tell me if the experience was as ethereal as it was for me, sober.

I enjoyed Vividlope quite a bit. Quite a bit is my passive midwestern American way of saying “I really enjoyed this game to the point where it is in the third tier (of more than fifteen tiers) of my favorite video games ranking”. Give it a spin, I am glad I did!


The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy


The most difficult

choice was choosing how to talk

about Hundred Line



What? Was my haiku not enough? Were you not satisfied with the lack of comprehensive discussion? Well much like The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, my haiku is what you make of it. You are responsible for finding meaning here in my self-indulgent creation.


The Cult of Takumi Route

I want to talk about the Cult of Takumi, but I also really don’t want to rob you, the reader of the experience of playing this specific route. As such, I will keep things rather vague, only use proper nouns when absolutely necessary, and will be using visuals sparingly (trust me, this is for your own good if you’re reading this in public). If you have any inclinations of playing this game one day, I encourage you to do so, now! yes, close the tab and read this visual novel instead. Experience the art first hand rather than get the experience secondhand through my recounting of my own experience.

Okay, enough about that. You can just jump to the next section too. That’s fine with me.


So then, The “Cult of Takumi” Route. The route that was written in two weeks because Kodaka was running out of time 8. The route with the fabled CG, yes, that one. The rumors surrounding that CG must be canonized in the fandom history of Hundred Line. People were losing their minds about the possibility of a gay sex CG in their new Kodaka game. People who saw Nagito Komaeda 9 in ultra Despair Girls and thought “yeah that’s the good stuff” had learned of a new holy grail hidden within the labyrinthine storylines of Kodaka’s newest game.


I was not looking for the gay sex CG, it found me. Somehow.


Not to be confused with the Yuri zone


It all started on a Friday night. My lovely wife and I were playing our evening episodes of Hundred Line, as we often do, and we reached the single three-option juncture along the “Second Story” Line. We made a decision there that seemed appropriate given our cast and the context, and what we were left with was the strangest Friday night in recent memory.

To put this route into perspective, at this point in the game, Takumi, our wonderful protagonist, is doubting his ability to be an effective leader for the group, especially after his recent decision at the junction. Enter Yugamu Omokage, resident assassin and chemical expert. Yugamu offers Takumi some experimental medicine which will cause his body to secrete a kind of invisible pheromones that will attract those with cryptoglobin 10 coursing through their veins (i.e. everyone in the cast save for one particular classmate, Takumi’s general love interest, Nozomi). Takumi takes these meds and the change is noticeable as early as the following morning. Everyone is smitten with him. They want to hang out with him. They want to spend time with him alone. They want to have his children. They aren’t gay, but they would be for Takumi. They want to get naked in front of him to “be closer to him”. They slip more of these meds into his food so that the medication never wears off and they can love him forever.

I dare not spoil the conclusion of this route, as I do not intend to spoil what it feels like to play the most shocking route of the game. But trust me when I say that this is the route that defines Hundred Line for me. It slips into the realm of pink films and eroge in such a way that I cannot reasonably advise anyone who I don’t already know to be a bit of a freak (non-pejorative) to play this game, lest they stumble upon this route as the first story branch they play after clearing their first 100 days 11. It’s a different beast from the sexploitation found in some of Kodaka’s other works (see Mikan Tsumiki); rather than being played for laughs, the Cult of Takumi Route takes its ideas of pheromone-induced obsession to a conclusion that would kill anyone’s theoretical arousal 12.

It is a genuinely unsettling and troubling experience that I am amazed is in a video game like this. You can play this on your Nintendo Switch, though supposedly some of the graphics on this route are censored there. Not so on the PC release!


If you understand the context of these images, then good for you.


My wife and I went into this route having no idea what to expect, and were left with this morbid curiosity. We couldn’t take our eyes away from what this video game was doing, with the way that each successive scene showed us more skin and submission to a supposed scion of a saint or something. What a bonding experience!

This is all in a game that was advertised in a Nintendo Direct. Hell yeah dude.

I love Hundred Line. It makes me optimistic for the future of visual novels. As of writing we have completed 25 endings and have played the game for more than 126 hours. Five whole days of our life have been spent playing Hundred Line together.

I don’t know if we’re going to do Danganronpa 2 × 2 when it comes out. Then again, we do have a poster of Nagito Komaeda 13 in our living room, so who knows.


Other Rapid Fires


Books

The Long Walk

My wife and I went and saw Sinners, an excellent movie that I would absolutely recommend, one fine weekend afternoon this summer. During the previews, there was a captivating glimpse into a movie titled “The Long Walk”. The preview noted that this was a movie based on a novel by Stephen King, and given the history of these kinds of movies, I figured, it would be best to read the book before even considering watching the film. Still, the premise intrigued me: boys walk along an empty stretch of road until they can no longer walk at least 4 miles per hour. If one of the boys fall below the speed floor, he gets a warning. After three warnings in an hour, the slow boy is shot. The walk continues indefinitely. The last boy standing wins.

Wins what?

What, does it matter?

I found the audiobook of The Long Walk written by Richard Bachmann just before we left for the fourth of July weekend, and listened to it on the plane as I played Balatro while also on at least 5 mg of methylphenidate 14. I listened as the narrator began the frank story, pulling out every single character voice he could to carry the one man show. But I know how hard it is to do all these kinds of voices. I have played the audiobook narration game to get by. I know how taxing it can be. I have the utmost respect for the narrator, Kirby Heyborne, for making the story one that could be listened to- doing so is NOT an easy task. the next time you think you’re hot stuff, you try reading an entire book aloud, verbatim.

The Long Walk was a great read, though I wasn’t very smart about how I listened to it. Would you believe it if I told you that listening to a book about boys experiencing cramps in their thighs and twists in their ankles made a six-mile run in late July one of my least favorite running experiences in a very long time? The descriptions of the pain these boys experience while walking exacerbated my own aches even when walking to and from the lab each day. I grew acutely aware of my walking pace, noticing how firm the running shoes I was now using as daily tennis shoes were compared to when I first got them. This hardly dampened my enjoyment of The Long Walk, but it reminded me that I should probably get a new pair of shoes for myself.


Strange Houses and Strange Pictures



Two books by Uketsu, very fun reads. I’m rebuilding my reading muscles slowly but surely, and these were books that I actually read, not listened to, read. I don’t think ther’es a difference between the two necessarily. A blind person might still be able to experience literature through listening, a deaf person might be able to experience sound by through touch. Sensory stimulation might imply a different experience, but this is the magic of being human, is it not? Regardless, I wanted to get more practice in using my eyes to process the letters on a page, to observe how the methods of pacing a story might be done by letting my inner monologue read the story to me.

I read Strange Houses first because I found it at Barnes and Noble and had read some discussion about it happening in some discord servers I frequent. The front cover mystified me. Here was presented a floorplan for a house, and supposedly this house had a “dark secret” of some kinds. Being the House of Leaves enjoyer that I am, I figured that this might be something similar. Thankfully, Strange Houses is rooted in real life far more than House of Leaves even begins to be, which made the experience of reading Strange Houses a lot more manageable at an airport. As I expected, the tiny little cavity in the floorplan was the culprit, though I shan’t say how or why. I enjoyed how each chapter in Strange Houses felt like its own little mystery; it’s clear that these stories were written by someone whose primary medium before this venture was making horror story videos on YouTube. Some of these mysteries may seem a little far-fetched and complicated for the sake of being complicated. In particular, the final chapter has a massive lore dump that I was not expecting and did not really process well the first time I read it. But the magic of reading a book is that I can go back and re-read it and re-read it I did, and I enjoyed it even more the second time around.

Strange Pictures, Uketsu’s first novel, was a little less compelling to me, but I still enjoyed it. I felt that the characters that we are initially introduced to felt like little more than stand-ins for the reader themselves, or a disinterested third party, that ultimately lacked any characterization. By the end of the novel, I realize that this was the point, these characters are decidedly NOT relevant to the story beyond to serve as a mechanism ot introduce the primary characters of the narrative. The story is told non-linearly, and it’s not until proper nouns are revealed that the puzzles pieces fall into place. In that way, I felt a chill go down my spine when I realized that the third chapter was all about a character I had already known, but I just hadn’t known their name. While I find some of the reveals of Strange Pictures a little hard to believe, this is still a very fun horror novel which I enjoyed reading while waiting for my physical therapy appointment.


Movies!

I watched some movies so that when I get pinged about posting my recent letterboxd watches, I’m not posting the same four films every week.


Friendship

Friendship, starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, among others, is a feature-length I Think You Should Leave sketch. The protagonist was written to be played by Tim Robinson, and it shows across its entire run time. As a person who doesn’t mind squirming in his seat at the natural awkwardness of this kind of absurd comedy, this movie was right up my alley. I mean, shit, the bit involving the toad is something I’m certain only I would find funny.

Friendship takes pride in its absurdity, eschewing the common sensibilities of broadly-appealing mainstream sensibility for an awkward but honest sense of identity. This ownership of “awkward honesty” exists both in Friendship’s characters and in its humor. Craig (Robinson), an awkward oaf of a character, finds a new sense in his beige life by spending time with his new, one-of-one, neighbor Austin (Rudd). It is, of course, a projection of Craig’s own insecurities. Austin is hardly a manic pixie dream boy. You’ll see what I mean if you give it a watch for yourself.

I don’t intend to spoil too many jokes, but I found it especially funny that the movie takes every chance to take potshots at Marvel movies. While the phrase “Marvel Movie” is never said, characters consistently talk about “going to seeing the new Marvel”, which is undoubtedly said this way to avoid any licensing issues. These references are always made by either boring or unlikable people, which only furthers the amusing association.

I loved the Conner O’Malley cameo too.

Go give this one a watch if you enjoy truckloads of absurdity in your humor. You and I will get along if you find the toad joke as funny as I do.


K-Pop Demon Hunters

I get why this one popped off. Beyond the massive cultural of Korean pop music, K-Pop Demon hunters makes excellent use of the animation medium to create a movie with a visual style that will no doubt be replicated by wannabes for years to come. That said, if I have to see one more gif of Bobby shimmying his shoulders back and forth being used as a social media reaction gif, I will be blocking the user on sight. I hate that as I was watching I could tell which exact frames were animated to be used for this exact giphy purpose. Furthermore, I hate that as I watching, I could pick out which exact songs were written explicitly to appeal to the remaining K-Pop holdouts in the United States. I feel very vindicated and validated in my general dislike of most of the songs by the news that one of the writers supposedly used generative AI to write “Soda Pop”, my least favorite song on the discography 15. Then again, in-universe the song was meant to be a broadly appealing, soulless and generative pop hit to amass large numbers of fans with little interest of being anything artistic, so I guess they hit the nail right on the head.

I realize that I’m giving off the impression that I don’t like this movie because it’s popular, so let me be clear: I think K-Pop Demon Hunters is a fun movie. I think that it once again demonstrates to the world that new animated movies will always be more interesting than rehashed stories recreated in a “live-action”. It presents the story beats of K-Dramas to audiences that would otherwise be watching yet another formulaic copaganda show, thus encouraging people to try something from a culture beyond their own. I admire that it manages to find a way to tell a story that can appeal to audiences of all kinds of ages. It’s a fun movie! I think it’ll stick around in the canon of animated film. But I don’t need to champion this movie. I enjoyed watching it, but I don’t expect to watch it again any time soon. I don’t play Fortnite, so I shouldn’t care about the characters being added to it, and yet I cannot not know these things unless I remove myself from the spaces in which I otherwise enjoy existing. So I guess I’m here in the purgatory of ambivalence and won’t be leaving anytime soon.


Fight Club

Oh my god, just kiss already.


The Long Walk

Oh my god, just kiss already.


Okay, but for real. Yes, after finishing the book, which I only started because I saw the preview for the movie, I went and saw the movie.

The Long Walk movie is a compelling adaptation of the novel that captures the brutality of the walk while adding a few new twists and turns to appeal to a wider audience. For one, the movie shrinks the crowd from 100 boys down to 50, and implies that each boy represents his home state. This change from the book was made likely to be more generally approachable to the canon of dystopian America movies in the same way that The Hunger Games forces two tributes from each district rather than 24 random teenagers. This decision to reduce to reduce the number of boys on the walk also allows the writers to accelerate the plot in a way that changes the pacing of the story to be more appropriate for a movie.

Not every change is for the better, however. In the process of consolidating characters from the novel into a single character, the movie warps certain characters into inconsistent versions of themselves. One particular character’s arc falls entirely flat as a result of these changes. It is almost as if the movie considered this character’s major reveal to be little more than an “duh” moment, before cutting their storyline short. Another character’s background is entirely changed to something that feels written to be both “the saddest story you ever heard”, and to imply the character is explicitly homosexual rather than ambiguously queer. While I have no problems with the latter change (and frankly welcome it as a means to make more authentic the connection between this character and another primary character in the story), the former change is quite lame. I suppose it was written this way to better contrast this other primary character’s background, which was also changed from the book to be more explicit (which makes the whole situation incredibly cheesy).

These changes confused me, someone who had read the book before watching the movie, but the changes ultimately made sense after watching the movie through. I believe that this is a movie that I will have to rewatch with a different perspective, as the conclusion of the film recontextualized these deviations from the novel in a way that only a subversive ending of an adaptation can. It’s pretty impressive that I was laid along the primrose path up until the end of the story when the movie decided that it would walk its own path. I can respect this decision, even if, with only a single watch, I think the novel’s story is much stronger.

Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson are excellent together. Their dynamic feels natural and every scene that centered about the two of them and their conversations was an absolute pleasure. Mark Hamill chews the scenery in a way that must have been quite satisfying for him. At the risk of saying “he looked like he was having fun up there”, I have to assume that to have a role that carries exactly zero Star Wars baggage must be nice for him. Roman Griffin Davis as Curly was a funny inclusion, almost like a meta joke. Or, at least, it was funny until we saw his jaw blown clean off from the execution gunshot no more than fifteen minutes into the movie.

All in all, I’d recommend you read the book and then watch the movie to see for yourself what you think. It’s one of the better Stephen King Richard Bachmann adaptations 16 you can watch.


Other Hobbies

Obsidian came out with “Bases”, a table view of file metadata. I have taken this opportunity to become the worst person on the face of the earth when it comes to game management.


Behold a glimpse into my tastes.


I have revamped my game ranking system. I used to use a numeric system where 100 was my favorite game, 0 was my least faovrite, and I slotted in games everywhere else. The issue with this system is that I was using the numbers as an ordering system rather than as a metric of preference. That goes against the notion of using numbers ina linear fashion and instead warranted something that had at least a second kind of "dimensionality" to it. If this doesn't make sense to you, please do not worry about it. Now I use an alphanumerical system where tiers are based first around letters and then ordered with numbers. Sega has ruined letter rankings, so let me explain that A is the highest tier, F is the sixth tier of more than fifteen tiers. A1 is my favorite game of all time. A8 is a higher tiering than B3, which is a higher tiering than B8. Tiering can be shared between many games. There is no limit on how many games can be in a tier, but if a natural divide appears in a tier, it can mitosis into two new tiers and shift everything else down one letter tiering. This method does not have to make sense to you, but I’ve found it’s shockingly accurate for me to describe a game this way. I can usually pinpoint which tier a game should be in before figuring out its numeric value, but even then, I can think “Okay, this is a low D game, let’s try D9”, and then I can adjust accordingly based on the neighbors in its vicinity.

Again, I recognize the folly of attempting to numerically categorize preferences. The difference here is that now I am focusing on making this list entirely based on my personal opinion of the game as a whole, even if it is not a game I happen to like in the way others do. I mainly want to make sense of the order of my favorite games at the top, more than trying to empirically determine the “best” and “worst” games. It makes sense to me, and that’s what counts. Alas, I may have to retire the chronology, I’ve already made it hard to find the plot here on this website.

But this means that I have gotten a very robust system for logging my own gaming experiences and notes on them in the process. it makes me feel very cool. I still use backloggd, but any game I would consider worth including in this dataset is now something I can just customize to appears exactly how I want.

Someone told me that makes me a nerd. I respond, “this is what pushed it over the edge?”. It’s my rock garden.


Vestibular Neuritis

The Sunday morning after showing a good friend of mine the masterpiece known as JIGGLY ZONE, I woke up dizzy. It was weird; yes, I had been drinking the night before, but I was more than sober enough to drive home. My world was spinning anti-clockwise, no matter where I looked. I felt sick to my stomach, like I had eaten something undercooked. I stumbled my way to the bathroom and dry-heaved, nothing coming up but my sense of anxiety. This was not normal. We got to the emergency room, where I sat in a wheelchair with a bucket in my lap, in the event that, somehow, something had magically made its way into my gut, and that the dizziness would force my body to expel it. Once I was taken in, they injected me with stuff that made me all warm and fuzzy at a moment’s notice and asked me to raise my hands above my head, smile, and push with my legs. I sat there, watching the world go by, thinking about how I had been triaged. Eventually another doctor came by and we repeated the process, raise my hands, smile, push with my legs.

“Did you hear any kind of loud bang before your symptoms arose?”

“No.”

“Did you feel any kind of sharp pain in your head at any point in the hours leading up to these symptoms?”

“No. Though I am prone to retinal migraines.”

“Did you experience any of those symptoms prior to these symptoms?”

“No.”

“Did you do anything out of the ordinary last night?”

I thought back to staring at the 72” television screen with JIGGLER jumping around. The bright pinks straining my eyes, the malevolent joy of tricking another victim into playing JIGGLY ZONE, the slight discomforting pressure behind my left ear, I gave it a good hard thinking of despite the liquid dripping into my arm.

“Just go and visit with some friends, nothing rowdy.”

“Well, it’s good that you’re in good spirits.”

The thought never crossed my mind that I shouldn’t have been in good spirits.

They discharged me before dinner, and I rested at home for the next forty-eight hours. It was annoying, in a way. I felt fine, I had stuff I needed to get done before it got to be too late. By Tuesday, I was saying to myself “I probably could go in if I wasn’t following the doctor’s orders”. This is before I went to physical therapy and found that the vertigo had severely thrown off my ability to track things with my eyes, had dramatically worsened my balance, and had done so without me even noticing. I’d get up in the middle of the night to drink some water from the bathroom tap, and in the process collide with three different walls if I didn’t extend my arms. I thought that everyone just “bumped around” in the dark, but no, as it is with my oddities in our human bodies, this was not a shared experience in the way I was experiencing it. I am over-reliant on my eyes for my balance, and this was worsened by what my Physical Therapist determined to be Vestibular Neuritis.

“Vestibular neuritis is an inner ear disorder that causes symptoms such as sudden, severe vertigo, dizziness, balance problems, nausea and vomiting. Experts believe that viral infections cause vestibular neuritis. Treatment typically involves managing symptoms or taking antiviral medications”17. The two ear infections I had had as a child finally decided to rear their ugly heads and ruin my day. These two evenst are the only source I can think of that would have been related to any kind of viral infection. I was healthy, I was feeling well. I had obtained my vaccinations, and seeing as I have had COVID more than once, I am certain that I did not have COVID. Thank God I didn’t have a stroke like the doctors were screening for.

This stint with vestibular neuritis is not my last, most likely. I expect to have sudden bouts of vertigo every so often over the course of my life, at least now I have a name for it. The fear of the unknown is magnified when the unknown emanates from ourselves. Our bodies do strange things that we do not expect, and cannot control, leaving our minds to pick up the pieces. Not even a year ago I had the false positive lump for breast cancer growing on my chest, and now I had what could have been a lingering effect of a stroke. But it wasn’t cancer then, and it wasn’t a stroke now. It was just my body playing tricks on me, as it often seems to do these days. I don’t think that getting older is the reason that these things are happening to me, nor do I believe I ’m afflicted with some kind of curse. I think these things just happen to people. Their bodies act is ways that defy logic because bodies themselves are hardly logical. I mean, yes, they’re scientifically miraculous, but if you asked me how electrifying meat allowed us to escape this planet, well, I wouldn’t have the answers. For as much as I know my own body, I also don’t really know it at all. As much as I am aware of my family history of medical concerns, I still don’t know what will manifest in me over the course of my existence. My body probably doesn’t know either. They’re such strange things. I’m just glad I still have mine, even if sometimes my head decides to do something my mind otherwise objects to.

The video essayist, Lead Head has a video on this same kind of vertigo experience if you’d like another perspective.


I don’t have a didactic conclusion to this section. I just mean to say that I think I’m alright now, but I guess I’ll see what I’m up to a year from now. Thank God I have health insurance.


In Conclusion

This isn’t everything I’ve done over the last few months, but it’s pretty much the big stuff. I turned 27 too, that’s cool, I figure. I’m enjoying my 20s still, having a good time being alive and listening to the world.

I’m slowly but surely unplugging from many many places on the internet. I will be here because I can control what goes on this website, but I am one-by-one boarding up my old social media displays. I think it’s for the best given the state of things right now. I don’t want to be on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or LinkedIn, or Snapchat, or whatever, I want to be with people, not with their ghosts.

There’s plenty to look forward to with the end of this year. Speaking to you FROM Quarter 4, I can attest that there are things I can’t wait to talk about, but they’ll have to wait. I can’t tell you about an experience as I’m experiencing it, that wouldn’t be possible in this kind of medium. I do hope you’ll be back here in three months again to see how I’ve wrapped up 2025.



Footnotes!!

  1. See the Gato Roboto review for example.↩︎

  2. I even modded the system to have my own custom boot up screens, which have been fun to make every so often. Maybe I’ll show you them sometime.↩︎

  3. They’re the Komaeda Nagito of football in that way.↩︎

  4. The amount of time I am willing to sit around and play the game before starting to get “burnt out” by it.↩︎

  5. Shoutouts to the Maractus lolololol↩︎

  6. And you can answer as any Midwesterner would “It could be better.”↩︎

  7. Everyone knows what I mean by this, I’m a zoomer and I’m bad okay? I belong to a generation of “oh fruitioger aero this, corporate memphis that, dude i love the low-poly aesthetic, i lovem the 8-bit aesthetic, i love making mega man sprite fan edits”, type stupid bullshit and I don’t care.↩︎

  8. https://x.com/kazkodaka/status/1972136179010339168↩︎

  9. Oh hey there’s that name again↩︎

  10. the maigcal blood powers that allow all the characters to do cool shit like summon giant fucking swords.↩︎

  11. I will not discuss my experiences with Pink Films and eroge, but let the record show that I have seen a handful of pink films and have tried out a handful of eroge. They are not for me, but it is good that they exist.↩︎

  12. Unless you’re into this kind of thing, in which case, congrats! You’ve found the perfect route!↩︎

  13. Oh hey there’s that name again.↩︎

  14. Maybe not the best way to exist long-term but wow, that airplane ride flew by.↩︎

  15. https://kotaku.com/kpop-demon-hunters-soda-pop-ai-vince-chatgpt-soundtrack-2000626044↩︎

  16. Though for my money, nothing is coming close to Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining any time soon.↩︎

  17. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/15227-vestibular-neuritis↩︎