There is now a new link in the sidebar titled “Archive”. This is a section of the website dedicated to hosting a bunch of the blog posts I made on my old blogs - one of the WordPress variety, the other my old Github Pages site.. I’m not fully intending to take those old addresses down just yet, but time will tell if I feel like nuking everything later down the line. Note that the archive isn’t home to everything I posted on the old sites - things like yearly retrospectives and old major tournament post-mortems didn’t make it over - but the majority of my writing is now hosted here, so it’s all in one place. Each post in the archive also has a short blurb at the beginning; a lot of them were chances for me to reflect on my opinions or writing style, and frankly, I can’t help but want to riff on some of the shit I’ve said in the past.
My first exposure to Brain Jar Games’ Dead as Disco was through a video where someone had replaced the player character’s model with Deadpool and set the ensuing gameplay to NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye”.
I can’t exactly tell you why that managed to pique my interest1, but it did. So here we are.
At time of writing, I’m almost done with the first day of 2026. The year that preceded it was a really weird one for me, with a lot of highs and lows, so I figure that maybe if I give it a kind of send-off then it can stay in the past.
Then again, maybe not. What is there to say, even? I spent the first quarter of 2025 recovering from damage that was at least 50% self-inflicted, only to spend the rest of the year learning that the damage was not nearly as extensive as I thought it was, that most people don’t care about what caused that damage (if they even know anything happened at all), and that basically everyone I care about is still happy to have me around. I have a stable job that pays me well enough to pay all my bills, I live in a new house, my husband is lined up to get top surgery in a couple weeks and I am surrounded by people who love me in all the ways I could ask for. Despite everything, my life is kind of fucking awesome.
This is a “lecture” (really more of a presentation) on approaches to literary translation, using an analysis of TV-Nihon’s translation of Kamen Rider Den-O as a jumping off point. This is all from a very “casually informed layperson” sort of perspective - I’m not an expert in any academic sense, but I think I know my way around the topics well enough to be able to not talk out of my ass. You’ll find the video and the accompanying lecture notes below.
Riot Games was always going to be fighting an uphill battle trying to win me over. I have never liked a single one of their games, I have zero investment in the characters or shared universe they’ve built off the back of League of Legends1, and their long-awaited entry into the fighting game space has been marred by all the problems associated with a decade-long development cycle that included at least one full rewrite of the game concept, as well as the future problems associated with free to play monetisation that will undoubtedly cause the game to slide off my brain as if it were coated in teflon.
In 1986, a man named Yu Suzuki, along with a small handful of developers at SEGA AM2, would release an arcade racing game called OutRun. Suzuki had previously made some fairly successful motorcycle racing games for SEGA by way of Hang-On and Enduro Racer, and with OutRun, he sought to create a racing game predicated primarily on allowing players to enjoy the experience of driving and, in his words, “feel superior”1. With incredible graphics for the time, a stellar soundtrack and shockingly well-realised driving physics, OutRun was a huge hit in arcades throughout the late 80s and even early 90s, and is one of the most influential and important games in the genre.