📝 The Dog Days

More bloggers have joined the weekly blog round-up party! Coffee and mojilove are gonna start doing this too, yessss. We should make some kind of webring. “Busy blogger squad holding each other accountable for weekly posts” or something. Or maybe not, I dunno!

I also managed to convince Daikon to make a blog, or rather, to let me make one for him. I’m going to be updating it with his essays whenever he writes them, which probably won’t be very frequently since he is so busy. There is an RSS feed so you can subscribe to it and get his updates whenever they go up!

# Summer Dungeons

Daikon and I are scrambling to get our booth ready for Tokyo Game Dungeon 3 on July 30 and Yokohama Game Dungeon on August 27! We printed out copies of the zine issues plus two different postcard designs. We also got polo shirts screened with the Nice Gear Games logo, and aprons with Indie Tsushin’s! Exciting stuff. Really looking forward to playing lots of Nice Disc with people who show up!

We’re also running a (late) summer sale on the first six issues of Indie Tsushin plus the special Indiepocalypse Presents: Indie Tsushin bundlezine. We hit our goal of $300 on the first day, which blows me away since I thought it would take all summer to get there. This really helps to cover our costs for the events plus pay for some ✨cool✨ behind-the-scenes stuff we’re working on.

# Stuff I’ve been playing

# Roadwarden

I’m replaying Roadwarden because it’s this month’s Adventure Game Club pick, and also because I still haven’t seen the good ending, or at least, a non-bad ending. I sort of want to stream this because it’s so gritty and cool, but then again most of it is just reading text which might not make for an entertaining stream? We’ll see.

This whole atmosphere of distrusting, fearful pockets of communities deep in a terrible wilderness is just so good. It’s not a game I can play for very long without getting exhausted, which I think shows how effective it is at evoking this intense feeling of dread and anguish during play. I really hope I can get a decent ending before the end of the month, eek.

# Theatrhythm Final Bar Line

I’ve finally pulled the trigger on this game. It was on sale on the Switch, and I could no longer resist the siren song. Much like the 3DS games, Final Bar Line has taken over my every waking moment. If I’m not playing it, I’m thinking about playing it. I’m not terribly interested in modern Final Fantasy, my last mainline series title was 13, but I will always leave room in my heart for a new Theatrhythm release. I’ll shake my fist at SE for dividing up all the DLC into these little packs at a fairly high price point though, yeesh.

Final Bar Line accidentally makes me nostalgic for the 3DS, though. The new improvements and additions are nice, but I miss little things like exchanging profile cards through StreetPass instead of connecting to people online to trade, or just drawing on the screen during the FMS stages instead of using the joystick to awkward trace the lines.

Otherwise, it’s just Theatrhythm again, but with, like, more. And that is totally fine by me.

# Stuff I’ve been reading

# Rikka Zine

I started reading Rikka Zine Vol.1 Shipping, edited by Terrie Hashimoto! It’s an anthology of SFF of writers primarily from places where English is not the majority language (15 from East Asia, 4 from Brazil), translated into both English and Japanese. I’m really enjoying my time with it so far, and will probably write more about all the stories at once when I’ve finished. I want to get that up maybe this weekend, but we’ll see…

# Will I Ever Be Good Enough?

I also finished reading Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing The Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers by Dr. Karyl McBride. I never really know how to talk about my feelings after reading these sorts of books, mostly because to talk about my relationship with these books is to talk about my relationships with family members, and in this case, my mother. I will say that while this book was personally a struggle to read at points, I did find some benefits from the exercises within.

That’s it for this week! See you again soon!