Me, 11:08 a.m.: behaving like a perfectly rational and sane person

Me, 11:09 a.m.: “Maybe I should redesign my site.”

Friend of the site herzogzwei—who regularly shares their entertaining thrifting discoveries—posted something of a puzzler last night that I’ve been unable to stop thinking about. The object in question is this printed hooded sweatshirt, which is just… a masterpiece, really, is the only word that adequately describes this thing:

A detail that is not particularly easy to notice here (on account of the huge-ass lion’s head that demands your attention) is that the text on the right simply reads “The”. This is because, as they go on to demonstrate, the pocket on the front of the sweatshirt has been sewn on over the rest of the text:

I spent a good portion of my evening tossing theories around in my head about how such a thing could possibly happen. Because it’s not like they just haphazardly slapped a pocket on over the print. After all, the lion is printed on the pocket just fine. It reached the point where I was analyzing the design of thing, wondering if a bunch of shirts were manufactured with just “The King” half of the print before some executive had the brilliant idea to add the lion photo to the other side. I justified this on the grounds that—above the “The King” text—is a logo-like image of a lion, unreasonably positioned less than an inch away from the photo lion’s nose.

“No competent designer would create this,” I told myself, foolishly clinging to the hope that any amount of skill went into the production of this item. Then I realized the bottom hem was sewn on backwards, with the lion print on the opposite side. I really put too much faith into our species sometimes.

After digging deeper, I may have found the answer.

Which, of course—and really, this is kind of my fault for entirely forgetting why I’ve withdrawn from the internet into the safety of Skep’s Place—is online marketplaces like Amazon and Temu hosting all these shapeless, ethically dubious foreign sellers who can cheaply turn out the tackiest, low-quality shit for Americans, who love to buy tacky, low-quality shit. We can’t help ourselves. This isn’t even a phenomenon borne of the internet era; the moment we figured out how to print ink onto a t-shirt at the cost of pennies, this kind of lowbrow, oftentimes copyright-infringing junk has been sold to the masses via flea markets and county fairs.

(You know, the sorts of places where you would buy the stickers of Calvin mischievously peeing on your choice of automobile logo, which I have definitely complained about before. Not only were these not licensed, but some knockoff artist had to have drawn the illustration because Calvin is never depicted urinating in the strips, gleefully or otherwise. And, in fact, this is a complete mischaracterization—he’s not malicious, but simply self-serving. But I digress.)

The interesting thing about these sorts of wares (as sold in aforementioned flea markets and county fairs) is that memes would spread in product form. I recall one year, the stalls at my local fairgrounds were all peddling their own WWJD bracelets and lanyards and other low-effort items; the next, it was graphic tees with dark humor and implicit threats themed around Osama bin Laden (our attention spans back then were much longer than they are now so they were able to keep this one going for years).

I mention all this because this playbook is clearly still in use. A rudimentary search will turn up a number of designs of varying quality from different sites and sellers that are all far too similar to be mere happenstance:

I’ve seen the text read “Love Lion” on multiple designs, which is the best version because it makes no sense and is therefore the funniest of the bunch.

Oh, but in case you’re worried this shirt is a little too subtle on its own, you can also get it in a tracksuit:

Digging a little deeper—and factoring in the exact version of the pattern, as well as its having been printed on a non-zip hoodie—I was only able to find two sources that might have sold the exact garment that herzogzwei shared: a third-party shop on Temu called BloomD ThreadsKKM, and a website that may or may not be named VikingX.

BloomD ThreadsKKM, for the purposes of this essay, is not particularly interesting, but if you’re in need of a fun way to spend an afternoon, I would recommend scrolling through the offerings of any of these companies offering shirts with outrageously bad prints poorly superimposed onto unsuspecting models. Here’s a couple that got some laughs out of me:

The second shop is a standalone website, which can be viewed at shirts.woocodex.com. No, this URL does not match the “VikingX” branding, nor does it match the “Email Us” domain (salesgen.io), nor does it match the section on the home page that addresses the question, “IS amastyle.net LEGIT?” (remember kids, if you ask if it’s a scam they’re legally required to tell you). Don’t worry about any of that though, because this site is GREAT. Let me tell you about some of the fun things it has!

• A Trending Collections section that shows three images of their viking-head logo (complete with on-hover animations) instead of any actual collections
• A blog containing a single “Welcome to Wordpress” post from 2021 (current date of writing: Spring 2026)
• Placeholder lorem ipsum text in a product’s Shipping & Manufacturing section
• 24/7 customer service between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m Monday through Friday, time zone unspecified
• An About page that starts “Here at” and then forgets to finish the sentence, presumably because they haven’t decided what name to use
• “MADE WITH 3000% PASSION”

I wholely recommend you take a poke around just for the experience.

Now, if forced to purchase one of the products offered by this website, I can honestly say I would pick the lion hoodie. This is because every single other item for sale is absolutely plastered in some of the cringiest Christian iconography I’ve ever seen.

Although the most bizarre of these is a shirt that blends these themes with American imagery and a tribute to… arborists. You do see these kinds of things on the internet—items that encourage you to rep your profession—but if these products aren’t completely interchangeable then there’s at least a few different options to pick from. Not here. Arborists are the only one. Did they just sell out of all the others, or what?

I’m under no delusions here; I realize this is the sort of site that more or less exists on the back of Facebook ads, needing only to provide a means for impulse purchasers to enter their credit card details, knowing that it doesn’t have to hold up under customer scrutiny because there won’t be any. And once you shell out $50 plus shipping, all they have to do is send you a product that maybe comes close to what you actually ordered—damn any sort of quality control, because even if the hem is backwards and the pocket is obscuring some text, sending it back will likely be so much of a hassle that you won’t bother. You’ll just chuck it in the thrift shop bin and make it somebody else’s problem.

Although… not always. In my deep-dive, I came across an Amazon review for one of these designs, written by somebody who was so delighted with his purchase and received so many compliments he felt compelled to show off his threads:

…Oh. Oh, damn. Okay, I actually kinda like this look.

The lion’s head pendant 100% makes this outfit. The shirt has transcended its tackiness and I’m here for it now.

Giovanni, if you happen to be out there reading this: I am glad you’re enjoying your hoodie, because you deserve it. It’s working for you, and if anybody could possibly deserve the title of “The King”, I’m hard-pressed to think of someone more fitting. Long may you reign, and thank you for proving me completely and utterly wrong about this damn shirt.

Nestled in the U-shaped nook formed by our front porch, walkway, and garage, lives an arborvitae. It was present when we moved in, and never should have been planted there, as it has far outgrown the space. There are a number of reasons why we haven’t removed it yet—lack of proper tools, not wanting to kill an otherwise fine plant, sheer laziness—but the most sentimental of these is that we’d be evicting a pair of doves that return to nest in the same exact branch multiple times a year.

I don’t know why they keep coming back here, because this shrub is right next to our front door. We have to be within a foot of this nest just to leave the house, and we’re walking by it multiple times a day. It feels like this by itself should be a deterrent to any animal trying to raise a family, and that’s assuming we’re simply passing by and not paying attention to it. But because we’re dumb bird-loving humans, we’re often compelled to poke our faces in and check on them. I know this freaks them out because they just sit there and stare back at us, not moving a muscle out of stone-cold terror, probably hoping beyond hope that we can’t actually see them if they stay perfectly still.

So if it was me, I feel like I wouldn’t keep coming back to this place where the giant scary humans ogle my cute, helpless offspring, but they do. Hell, the last batch of fledgelings just left a week or so ago and the parents are already back nesting. Why do they choose to do this to themselves?

Though… I guess now that I’m writing about it, it occurs to me there was that one time a few years ago where the nest fell out. I recovered it, stuck it in a deli container, wired it back into the arborvitae around the same spot, and put the chick back in safely. Maybe word got around that I’m not actually all that bad.

I doubt it, but you never know.

Since I’m already on the topic of puzzles, if you’re a regular puzzle-solver then I really have to recommend memorizing the entirety of Yakko’s Nations of the World song from Animaniacs. I didn’t do it for puzzles (I did it so I could bust it out at parties)(I have never done this), but boy when the crossword is looking for a country of a certain length and you only know the second letter is a, it really helps to be able to recite a list of them to see if any fit. You know, the brute-force method of solving.

Yes, the song is a bit outdated—you gotta watch out for Zaire in particular—but it’s still a great resource to have in your back pocket.

(Okay honestly I didn’t do it for parties. I did it because of this comic, for some reason.)

Over a year ago, I dropped my New York Times Games subscription and started getting my daily puzzle fill over at Puzzmo. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned Puzzmo—I used to include it on my bygone Links page—but something struck me recently. I’ve been doing their mini crossword every single day; usually it’s the first puzzle I knock out after opening the app. In contrast, I never did the NYT mini. The NYT mini was a bland affair, a basic 5x5 grid of words with no character to it whatsoever. Sure, I could complete it in under a minute, but even that little bit of time was not worth sacrificing to such a nothing experience.

I won’t claim that Puzzmo’s minis are my favorite puzzle on offer, but I will say they far outclass NYT in terms of inventiveness and personality. Lately they’ve introduced monthly “residencies”, where a single constructor handles all the minis for an entire month. Because they have to churn out 30 of the things, they tend to start to getting particularly creative by the end of the second week. It’s an incredibly smart idea.

And if you’re already on Puzzmo, maybe let’s follow each other. Need to see some names on the scoreboard who aren’t staff members.

Jim’s flight is abruptly interrupted when he spots a hunched, lurking figure darting from tree to tree in front of him. Mistaking it for an animal at first, he begins to wonder if he’d have better odds turning around and running back to the pirates than facing whatever this thing is.

But as he watches it, he realizes that it’s actually a human. This still doesn’t reassure him right away, since he’s heard stories of cannibals before; but then he realizes, “Wait, if it’s human, then I don’t have anything to worry about… because I have a gun!”

HOLD ON A SECOND. Jim has a gun??? When did Jim get a gun?! And more to the point: you couldn’t remember you had it when you watched Long John Silver gut a guy five minutes ago? Christ, he didn’t even know you were there; you could easily have shot him dead on the spot and solved this whole mess! You think any of the other pirates are going to fuck with “Mad” Jim Hawkins after he straight-up ices their boss???

Sheesh, kids man, you can’t trust a 14-year-old to do anything right.

Jim finds that the figure is a haggard, wild-looking man who introduces himself as Ben Gunn. We soon learn that he was part of Captain Flint’s crew when the treasure was buried, then later led his own team here to dig it back up. After many, many days spent failing to uncover it, though, the others got pissed and departed, leaving Ben marooned on this island the past three years.

It is at this point that Skep begins to wonder if he shouldn’t have chosen something other than Disney’s Treasure Planet as his jokey analog for this book, given that in the movie Ben is only introduced about 15 minutes from the end, where as here we haven’t even hit the halfway mark. He probably should have picked Muppet Treasure Island instead, except A) photoshopping fake googly eyes onto Muppets is even more redundant then photoshopping them onto cartoon characters, and B) he hasn’t actually seen it.

(Maybe once when I was young enough to not remember it.)

Ben, for his part, is understandably ecstatic to be able to “speak to a Christian” for the first time in three years and dreams of eating a “Christian diet”. His particular craving seems to be cheese, which is fair; if I’d spent three years living off of goats and oysters and grass, cheese might be the first thing I’d want too (not counting hamburgers, which haven’t been invented yet). I could interpret a lot of this “newfound piety” as being little more than a means of ingratiating himself with his saviors, especially since he’s been upfront about having worked with Flint in the past. On the other hand, I like to imagine that some friendly Ottoman explorers chanced by the island about ten months ago, but Ben was so hung up on his prejudices that he awkwardly declined a ride home with them, pretending to be quite comfortable here, actually.

Though Jim has a bit of difficulty understanding Ben’s manner of speaking (which has basically been Skep’s problem this entire book), he should, at least, return the castaway to the ship—and maybe put in a good word with Trelawney, given that Ben seems to be scared enough of Silver to take their side, and they’ll need as many deckhands as possible to make it home, anyhow. Ben even says he can provide Jim with a boat in order to slip around the pirates.

As they make plans, though, they’re interrupted by the great boom of a cannon firing, followed later by a volley of gunfire. Jim guesses that the fighting has started, and the two of them begin to race back to the shore.

Having left the pirates behind, Jim now has the freedom to appreciate his isolation in these unfamiliar surroundings, describing the sandy brush and twisty trees in great detail for the benefit of any future filmmakers doing a movie adaptation.

However, this peace doesn’t last very long, as he soon begins to hear a pair of voices arguing somewhere behind him. He figures that he’s already made the dumbass decision to come out here, so he might as well make himself useful and do a little spying.

As he sneaks up on the voices, Jim ducks under the brush as cover, somehow not making a ton of noise from rustling leaves in the process. Finally, he observes Silver pleading his case to a sailor named Tom, seemingly trying to convince him of something—to join him in the impending mutiny, it’s safe to assume—but Tom isn’t having it.

Suddenly, a scream echoes across the island. Tom is startled, but Silver is not; and when Tom asks what the sound was, Silver shrugs and says, guess that was probably our pal Alan then. Well, if that was the sound of Alan getting got (which seems likely), then Tom absolutely doesn’t want any part of it, and he turns to leave. As he does, Silver takes up his crutch and javelin-throws it at Tom with such velocity that Jim is sure the impact instantly broke the man’s back.

Personally, I’m not convinced that an average one-legged man could yeet a crutch so hard that it’d snap a spine, but I do at least see an opportunity here to make the Olympic Games more educational.

Whether Tom’s back is actually broken or not doesn’t end up mattering all that much in the end, because Silver takes the opportunity to shiv the man twice in the ribs, killing him on the spot (not descibed: Silver hopping over to him on one leg). Jim, who wasn’t exactly prepared to witness his first cold-blooded murder today, only comes to his senses when Silver blows a whistle to signal the others. Afraid for his life once again now that the pirates are clearly purging anybody who isn’t on their side, he hoofs it away once more, heading even deeper into the island to get away.

Jim describes the island as the Hispaniola nears, and… well, it kind of sucks, truth be told. It’s largely made up of gloomy trees and drab gray hills that give the impression of something sad, yet equally oppressive.

Speaking of oppressive, the muggy heat of the island quickly takes its toll on the men as they work to bring the ship into the bay where they’ll make their landing. The crew, who were previously content to maintain an air of mild-manneredness, grow so grouchy and resentful at the required toiling that Long John Silver has to dial up his usual charade of charismatic enthusiasm to undeniably uncanny levels in a desperate bid to keep his pirates in high enough spirits that they don’t begin to arouse suspicion of being potential mutineers. This is not wholly successful, and Jim notes that even if plot contrivance hadn’t placed him in the apple barrel, the captain certainly would have begun to grow wise at this point, making Skep wonder why we even bothered with the eavesdropping scene, anyway.

(I know, I know. It’s a cooler way to find out they’re pirates, despite how silly it all is in practice.)

Captain Smollett does realize how ugly this could turn—and how quickly it could do so. Still, Silver’s attempts to get his men to calm the hell down make it clear that he doesn’t want to launch a revolt just yet. So the captain devises a plan: he’ll offer the crew a chance to take the rowboats to shore, under the pretense of allowing them an evening of well-earned downtime for their hard day of work. Theoretically, this should allow Silver an opportunity to talk his men down out of earshot. Still, depending on how many sailors actually end up going ashore, the captain has a couple different contingencies:

• If everybody goes, that means our protagonists have control of the ship, and they can use that to their advantage and launch a preemptive defense when the pirates return.
• If nobody goes, they work under the assumption that the mutiny is imminent, and Smollett will barricade the loyalists in the cabin to make a last stand.
• If the count is split, well, no opportunity to do anything, but the men who went will come back cowed by Silver and unlikely to revolt immediately, so that’s a win anyway.

In the end, six men stay back at the ship—possibly planted by Silver, or possibly folks who see what’s developing and realize that there is a rather large leap between grumping about unpleasant work and actually overthrowing a ship’s captain.

As the rowboats prepare to set out, though, Jim gets the rather rash idea to go ashore and keep an eye on Silver’s crew. He tries to sneak onto one of the boats and hide himself from view, but hears Silver call out to him from across the water, and immediately begins to regret his decision. The moment his boat reaches land, Jim swings off a tree branch to shore and starts booking, with Silver’s shouts fading into the distance behind him.

So… Flea put out a jazz album.

Yes, that Flea. From the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I had to double-check too; I thought that surely there wasn’t any way. But here it is.

Even putting my opinions about the Chili Peppers aside (the only group I find more insufferable are the Beastie Boys), I decided I didn’t want anything to do with the album, because Flea is not a jazz player. The pivot seemed disingenuous, and I wasn’t going to bite.

Later, I happened upon this article from JazzTimes in defense of this album. This line in particular got me:

For my part, I think it’s brave for Flea to play [the trumpet], on live TV no less, absolutely knowing that jazz heads will crap on it. Because he felt a desire, a need, to express something there.

Damn. I mean, I assume Flea has enough cred built up that he doesn’t really have to give a rat’s ass what the jazz community says about his work, but still.

Unsurprisingly, the album has a really solid bassline.

Big thanks to June over at Oopsie Doodle for being my April Fools’ “victim” this year. To be honest, I was a bit nervous riffing on her horoscopes; I don’t take much stock in astrology, but I do read June’s horoscopes because there’s this certain home-spun earnestness to them I can’t help but like. Ultimately, the respect I have for her horoscopes is why I wanted to spoof them. I knew writing fake ones would be fun, but I didn’t want my joke-y version to come across as mean-spirited or bullying, especially as she’s only been doing hers for a few months now. It’s a very fine line to walk; I even re-wrote one or two that I wasn’t absolutely convinced would play well. Thankfully, she seemed to approve. I’m glad you enjoyed the joke.

Hi all. Me again.

Uh, been making a few changes around here lately. Nothing big, but since I apparently feel the need to justify everything I do, let’s talk about them.

Replacing Links and Small Web Shoutout with Cheers

My links page needed updating; and anyway, I wasn’t satisfied with it (despite it being, like, my third revision). I didn’t want to work on it. I just wanted to banish it from my site so I never had to think about it again.

Then I remembered, oh. It’s my site. I can just… do that.

But I don’t want to stop linking to other people and sites entirely. Doing so is such a big part of what makes the small web community a community. You’re showing enthusiasm for what others make and helping expose their creativity to new audiences. This is one of our best aspects, and I don’t want to lose it.

I thought about this for a while before landing on Cheers; but once I had the idea, I knew it was the way to go. To me, it has two advantages:

1. It encourages context. It’s no longer just a hyperlink; now I can say what resonated with me. It’s a more personal recommendation, which is always going to be more impactful than a button on a wall.
2. It’s time-centric. Not “I like this”, but “I like this today”. That tells a greater story, I think. Everything on the internet is ephemeral, to some degree (except Skep’s Place, which is eternal). Ideas come and go. Just because my tastes change or something ceases to exist doesn’t invalidate what I felt at the time, and I think that’s a fact worth acknowledging.

Plus, like I joked about when I launched Cheers—most of my posts take multiple hours to write. It’s nice to be able to say something that doesn’t demand a huge time investment.

Anyway, I figured this setup sort of made Small Web Shoutoutcite> redundant; I can still do that here. But with context this time!

Discontinuing A Playdate With Skep

This was a great idea to get me to use my Playdate more. It still hasn’t entered my regular gaming rotation; more like, I go through phases where I’ll play a couple games, or I’ll ignore it.

Last year, though (especially following the release of Season 2), I hit a stretch where I was bouncing between games pretty quickly. Some of them I spent quite a bit of time with; others, much less so. Regardless, I came to one very obvious conclusion: I did not want to write a review every time I played a game.

Even still, since I was overwhelmed, I kinda stopped writing about any games (refer to previous comment about everything I write being an hours-long process). Time is a luxury, and I have spread myself too thin with so many different site sections. I intended to do a year-end recap of the games I’d played, but then my focus shifted to making the RSS site, and by the time I was ready to start writing again it was the end of March. And anyway, if I’m doing a recap of games I played… well, that may as well go into the Quarterly Game Reports at that point.

So A Playdate With Skep is being retired. I didn’t want to completely delete it, though, so I created a new site section for old stuff that is no longer a major focus for me. The Eleventy Conversion Project lives there now too, since that is really a product of its time (less than a year ago) and was essentially the equivalent of me live-tweeting my tech overhaul; it was never going to be my best work anyway.

So that’s what’s going on around here. Since I’m lacking any sort of outro today, let me reiterate that y’all are amazing for sticking with me. I’m sure you can tell that I’m having a ton of fun writing for you folks, and I hope you’re having just as much fun here as I am.

The “Year of the Time Sink” is continuing into 2026, apparently. Well, let’s do this (short) thing.

Mosaic of the Strange

This will be the third entry from the Mosaic series that I’ve highlighted, and represents a huge step up in scope from Mosaic of the Pharaohs. It would have been incredibly easy for the developer to pick up a niche player base and then keep cranking out the same game over and over with a fresh coat of paint each time. Instead, there’s now a story! Characters! Difficulty levels! A cool thing at the end I don’t want to spoil!

Yeah I didn’t like it.

I’m being somewhat hyperbolic, of course. I liked it okay (and I mean it, the ending was a fun surprise), but there were multiple elements that just didn’t land with me. Most notably was the theme; this time, the game was themed around things like conspiracies, unexplained phenomena, and other oddities; really, it makes no effort to hide the fact that it is love letter to The X-Files in every regard. But I’m far and away more Scully than Mulder, and a brief overview of the Dyatlov Pass incident isn’t as interesting a reward to me as, say, a lesser-known fact about daily life in ancient Egypt. The music follows suit, going for a minimalist, slightly eerie ambiance, which BOY is not fun to listen to for hours. I turned it off pretty quickly.

Lastly… part of the fun of the other games was solving a bunch of smaller pictures to make a big mural, and seeing it slowly fill in over time! That’s gone. Now each section represents a single self-contained “clue” spread out across a half-dozen locations. You’re still technically filling in parts of the scenery, but they’re isolated pieces, dotted all over the room. The driving motivator instead is the story of the two federal agents as they attempt to solve an uncanny murder in a small town. Sometimes they comment on the mysteries you read about after completing a section and speculate on how they might relate to the case, which at least is a decent way to tie these two elements together, even if much of this speculation is quickly forgotten.

I should also touch on the difficulty levels this entry added. Previously, while the game presented similarly to Minesweeper, you weren’t expected to do a lot of solving; you could really get into a rhythm of putting markers down, using this new information to put more markers down, repeat over and over. Getting stuck just meant not seeing where the next marker was supposed to go and hunting around to find it. This mode is still present here, but now there’s also a number of difficulty options to add in areas which require a bit of logic to guess where markers were to be placed. At first I thought “great, I love logic puzzles!” and set it to the maximum difficulty right away. However, I pretty quickly realized that, while I still had to hunt to figure out where to put a starting marker, spotting that location would no longer be obvious. I now needed to analyze every pattern of numbers as potentially a logic problem that may or may not get me into the flow state; but given that there might only be a single square I could start filling in, I’d be spending most of my time trying to find meaning where there wasn’t any.

…Which is keeping in with the “unsolved mysteries” theme I guess. How unintentionally fitting. I still reverted back to the old way of playing though.

Honestly, I’m impressed that the developer wanted to try all these new things and evolve their craft, and I really respect that drive. This isn’t a bad game by any means. It’s just not what I wanted, either. So it goes sometimes.

Cast n Chill

I was looking for idle games—something mildly interesting I could put on in the background on my remote days—and found this. It’s cool they give you the choice here; you can fish if you’d like, or you can sit back and let the game play itself. I did the latter; it’s mostly fine, but the AI regularly gets stuck where it’s clear the fish aren’t biting, and it never seems to want to reel in the line and try a different tactic. It’s also perfectly happy switching over the small rod all the time and catching the piddly fish when you want it to focus on lunkers to progress the game faster.

Of course, you can’t talk about this game without mentioning how nice it looks. I’ll touch on one interesting aspect I noticed: the background is made up of multiple layers and takes advantage of parallax scrolling (this is when layers scroll at different speeds to create the illusion of depth). Well, on rare occasions, a layer actually scrolls opposite the way you’d expect. The example I’m thinking of involves a mountain split up into layers for the top and base; when you move from left to right, the base moves left, but the top moves right. This changes the angle of the entire mountain, making it look like you actually went partially around it. I’d be surprised if this is the first game to do this, but it’s the first time I noticed it, and it’s a clever trick.

Oblivion: Remastered

All right, I think we’re about done with this saga. I finished the main quest, then moved on to Knights of the Nine, which is (marginally) better than I remember. Turns out paying attention to the lore helps sometimes, who knew. At this time I was still cheesing the magic system and finding new ways for my character to demonstrate her sheer power, and when it came time to fight Umaril the Unfeathered in the final confrontation, it was a complete wash. It was such a wash that I took him down with a couple casts of electric magic, which I later found out he was programmed to be completely immune to. Absolutely peak.

That put my character in a bit of a slump though, because once you’ve wiped out a demigod without breaking a sweat, what’s left? This turned out to be “switching over to my untrained hand-to-hand skill at level 30”, because the only thing more satisfying than destroying everything with magic would be destroying everything with your bare goddamn hands.

Despite being a novice at fisticuffs, with a bit of a magic boost she was still absolutely devastating as I entered into the Shivering Isles, which I’d purposefully held off doing as a sort of “save the best of last” kind of mentality. Before the remaster released, I’d told myself if I ever played Oblivion again, it would be just to experience Shivering Isles one more time. And finally, that time had come.

Anyway I did a couple quests and then decided I was finally bored and I didn’t want to play anymore.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy

I keep making the mistake of playing these games over the winter where I’m more liable in the evenings to start nodding off a few minutes after starting the game up.

It was time to jump back in and finish out the last episode of this trilogy, Spirit of Justice. And, um… boy I really started to notice some flaws. In general, it holds up about as well as previous Ace Attorney entries, although I have noticed more examples of the plot relying on dubious leaps of logic, or places where I want to argue about a piece of evidence way earlier than the story allows. I also don’t know if I’m just growing too familiar with these games or what, but I’m getting good at identifying the true culprit the moment they pop up on screen the first time. That’s probably not helping.

Still, I think the biggest offender here is that depending on how you count, we’re six titles in now, and we’ve accrued a whole bunch of fun friends that we’d love to spend some more time with, in what could be a series finale for all we know. So what do the designers decide to do? Split the party between two countries, introduce a whole bunch of new characters that eat up screen time, and then expect me to care about them when they’re intruding on the relationships I actually want to see. Hell, we finally get our OG Maya back after she’s been away for ten years, and up until the DLC content, she’s really only present for a single case! As the accused, so she’s not even around for the investigation parts! Absolutely unforgivable. Athena keeps getting sidelined when it’s time for the boys to advance The Plot™, and you can tell they just have no idea what to do with Trucy anymore because she spends most of her time off-screen “practicing magic” and literally nothing else—just like Maya, the only time she’s ever relevant is as a defendant.

Otherwise, game’s fine.

Everspace 2

Skep in 2023: “I took a break to play other games, but I want to get back into this one.” …Yikes.

Since it had been so long, I ended up starting a new game. I’m still playing it! I don’t have much more to say about it, I think; the space battles still don’t feel quite as exhilarating as I’d like, but they’re fun enough, and the team was very creative in coming up with areas to explore. And overall, a very polished experience! Hoping to wrap this up before too long.

Taria & Como

Well, now that I’m behind on Playdate reviews by a good half-dozen, it’s probably safe to admit to myself that I’m not actually going to write them. I guess I’ll start including Playdate games in the quarterly reports then.

The last few months, I’ve been picking at Taria & Como, which was included in Season 2. I’m surprised the Playdate hasn’t seen more platformers (or I’m just doing a good job of missing them). Rather than jumping around, though, the primary platforming mechanic is grappling and swinging, with the crank used to shorten or lengthen your rope. The controls feel a bit clunky to me, but I think a lot of that is just the limitation of the platform; the only improvement I would actually suggest would be letting me use the jump button to detach the grapple, instead of pressing Up.

Story-wise, it’s pretty heavy-handed in its critique of corporatized healthcare, but at least it uses this to humorous effect. It’s difficult to guess exactly how much of the game I’ve finished—maybe roughly half?—but I can definitely tell that a lot of care went into the game’s presentation, and so far they’ve done an excellent job integrating the down-to-earth characters with the unorthodox gameplay. I’m sure I’ll have more to say next time, but so far I’m quite optimistic about this one.

I know I usually have some idea what I’m going to tackle in the next quarter, but this time… man, who knows. I just started Unbeatable last night, so that. I also got Aerial_Knight’s DropShot when it released, but I haven’t spun it up yet, so I’d like to give that a go. And I’m sure folks are betting over on Polymarket about when Skep finally gets around to playing Expedition 33.

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I learned about Fourble, which makes podcasts from a list of .mp3 files. There’s a bunch already available, from old episodes of Just a Minute to a fan reading of Lord of the Rings with added music and sounds. It gives you a URL you can plug into your podcast app. If you want, you can even let it drip-feed you “episodes” at recurring intervals. Very clever.

via coleslaw

I received a very sweet email from Myrtletribe the other day; we met during the potluck last year, and she was wondering how I’d been. We’ve been chatting the past few days. Somehow, this has led to me image searching pictures of isopods, and I’m not even mad about it.