Consider this blog's Top 5 Most Hated TV Series List to be officially cancelled; even in the unlikely event I could find enough shows to warrant that list, even they couldn't top the absolute horror I have witnessed in the form of Pupa. So many have warned me to stay away, but my bloodlust got the better of me in this age of overly compassionate wusses infecting anime.

Proof we're in hell: I'm resorting to making Buzzfeed articles and ripping off better content creators than me. Anyways, I've been thinking about doing this for a while as a one-shot after watching a Kurtis Connor video on "fake deep memes": memes that SEEM deep until you think about it for more than 2 seconds (the professional term for this is "deepity").

So this has been an unbelievably anxious year. I don't even need to establish why, as that would take an entire weekend, excluding 8 hours of sleep between the 2 days, just to list all of it. So I'll try to not do any of that and instead focus on something a bit more traditional. You know how this works, but this year, I will do 2 things that're different: I will be including ties for certain entries, AND I will reinstate the Best Anime entry, albeit while providing no assurance that the latter will happen again.

RPGs took a massive punch to the gut several years ago after the 1-2 punch of the release of Anthem and revelations that acclaimed studio BioWare had exploited workers out of delusions of releasing the next big live-service money printer. Many took it badly. I, personally, have been attempting to find a suitable void-filler in terms of masters of epic, choice-based storytelling and polished gameplay.

(WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE SMILING FRIENDS EPISODE "SQUIM RETURNS". DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU'VE EITHER WATCHED IT OR DON'T CARE TO) I'm just gonna come out and say it: I LOVE Smiling Friends. The animation is unpredictable, the main characters play off each other amazingly, the voice cast does a great job at playing still characters in an insane world when they're not acting whole-hog insane without being annoying, I just LOVE that show.

This is an opinion piece from someone who's a bystander who happens to have some minor industry connections, so take everything you read here with a grain of salt. Though with that said, my opinions have made me unpopular with 2 game development groups, so maybe don't and instead consider me a truth-teller (preferably while interpreting that last part as a half-joke).

Whew, I should really stop with these endless hiatuses. Anyway, over the last few days, I've been learning much about concepts like ragebait and healthy skepticism and the notion of checking my own facts even with reliable sources. Between that and encouragement on my peers to let out parts of myself as part of my writing, I decided to come back here to do a little writing exercise to train myself in the subjects of doing my own research (moreso than usual).

Describe one positive change you have made in your life. The one positive change in my life I'm currently making right now: I am entirely cutting anything related to Meta Platforms out of my life. Facebook and all the other services owned by Meta are horrible, destructive environments that aren't even worth a strand of hair on my balls, let alone my time.

I've heard legends. Legends of a film so horrible, that it became an international phenomenon. A film whose director is shrouded in mystery, with only a few vague hints of his past, some of which may have been exaggerated or straight-up false. Tommy Wiseau's disasterpiece. The Room. Out of boredom and resentment towards our all-digital future, I wanted to see if the movie was even available on streaming.

Are there any activities or hobbies you've outgrown or lost interest in over time? I have not gamed as much in the past few years as I used to. You know those studies that say that 14% of home workout equipment bought in the UK has been gathering dust since the days of the pandemic? That's my gaming equipment. And in all fairness, it's super easy to be disenfranchised by this.

Where can you reduce clutter in your life? The first blog post of the year. Sorry if there's been a bit of a gap between posts. I felt a lot of the WordPress prompts were a bit personal. Anyway, if there are two places where I can reduce clutter, it would be my bedroom and my office/game room/mancave area. Both of them have the same issues: they may seem clean, but there's a lot of excess junk that I don't know where to put or what to do with, namely stuff I would indeed use so I can't throw out.

This year has been rough for all of us, from rising technocracies to falling democracies, to numerous celebrity deaths including, most recently, history's greatest monster Jimmy Carter (at least according to the people of Springfield). But I sadly don't have time to go over every horrible thing that happened this year, as I wish JibJab still would. This is a time for celebration.

Tell us one thing you hope people say about you. Yeah, bonus post. Be very afraid. Anyway, 2024 has been rough. I don't need to say why. It's been fairly obvious given the wars, backsliding democracies, climate change, social climate change, loss, etc. It's gotten so hard, yet I have spent the previous year talking and writing about how everything sucked, and yet I only wound up destroying numerous relationships and opportunities.

We've just passed one of the most underwhelming Game Awards in years, and we are approaching one of the darkest periods in history. With all the brokenness we've all faced or will face, it's good to remind people that in an age of media that try to stimulate emotions or encourage a false utopia of "equity", that we should all scale back and see a return of when games weren't afraid of kicking ass.

Do you ever see wild animals? No. I see pigeons and, in some places, the occasional squirrel, fox, and rabbit, but otherwise, I'm a city person. I live a very boring life. I can't even do my usual schpeel about how humans are the worst kind of wild animal on Earth since I feel like I've talked about that enough. …

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SEGA SOUND TEAM, Tomoya Ohtani, Merry Kirk-Holmes · Sonic Frontiers Original Soundtrack Stillness & Motion · Song · 2022