[The following blog contains mentions of child abuse and bullying.] I bought my first Nintendo system (the original NES) when I was thirteen years old, around the time of my life when the abuse I was dealing with, both at home and at school, was near its peak. Really, for the first twenty-five years of my life, save my first all-too-brief stint at college, I was constantly being told by nearly all the people around me that I would always be a colossal fuck-up, and…
One of the common refrains in this past week’s online discussions of the violent incident at the Oscars was just how much attention was being paid to the interactions between Chris Rock and Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith on the one hand, and how little attention was being paid to other issues that many people believe to be far more important. From global climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic to the humanitarian crisis in the Ukraine, every other news story that felt like it would…
Nintendo announces closure of Wii U and 3DS eShop (Yahoo! News) I used to carry mini-notebooks around to jot down ideas in, and I can still distinctly remember making a list of video games I wanted to buy at some point in the nineties. One of those games was Arcana, a dungeon-crawler JRPG for the Super Nintendo along the lines of Shining in the Darkness for the Sega Genesis. I’d rented Arcana a couple of times, and while it didn’t feel like anything particularly special…
As I’ve been looking to both improve my mental health and build my Twitch channel, one of the video games I’ve had my eyes on is Unpacking, a puzzle-style game where you unpack items from boxes to organize various living spaces. I’ve enjoyed puzzle games all my life, and the low-key nature of Unpacking definitely places it in the “cozy game” genre that I’ve been trying to play more of, to help me maximize the benefits of using video games to help me unwind from…
It’s been a month since I made affiliate status on my Twitch channel, i.e. got enough people watching that I can now make money on there through commercials and subscriptions and donations and such. I know that I’ll never make much money on there, and I’m okay with that because I want streaming to remain a hobby for me. My daily video game time is primarily for self-care, to give my mind a break from all the other things I’m working on, so for my…