What I love about Spike Buffythevampireslayer is that he perfectly encapsulated everything great and terrible about the series and Whedon's writing in general. He's a lot of fun and adds a tremendous amount to the main cast and also his character is given some incredibly rapey stuff that's absolutely never addressed at all. He has a really compelling character arc where he overcomes his vampiric evil and becomes a true friend and ally to the protagonists, an arc that also completely undermines the entire premise of the other major vampire character's arc. I have a lot of affectionate nostalgia for the Spike era of Buffy in particular but I will absolutely not ever go back and watch it because I just can't stand everything that comes with.

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• Panel 1: A screen capture from Star Trek: Deep Space 9. Julian Bashir and Miles O'Brien sit at a table on DS9 with mugs of liquid in front of them. They both look Worf, offscreen.
• Panel 2: Bashir stares straight ahead while O'Brien continues looking at Worf.
• Panel 3: Both Bashir and O'Brien are looking at Worf again.
• Panel 4: Reaction shot of Worf looking nonplussed.

Misericorde/White Wool and Snow mod that adds a little counter in the corner that goes up every time Hedwig is caught naked

I have more time recorded on Civilization VI than any other game in my library. It's been my go-to game to play with Liz since it launched. Before that, I played nearly endless amounts of Civilization II and III, and plenty of IV, Alpha Centauri, and Beyond Earth as well. This is probably the single series of games I have maintained the most interest in across my whole life.

So, naturally, we pounced on the opportunity to pay some extra money up-front for guaranteed access to the first two Civ VII DLCs as well as a chance to play the game a week ahead of its official launch. Of course, these games are always a bit shaky at the beginning, before patches balance out uneven mechanics and DLC adds depth to places that are shallow in the base game. We went into this knowing that we'd need to keep our patience close at hand.

But patience alone wasn't enough to get us through the game as shipped. Civ VII is direly underbaked, missing critical user interface affordances at every turn―most of which have been established standards for generations of Civilization games!—and in some cases being so opaque as to be nearly unplayable. At the same time, it's incredibly ambitious, making major overhauls to the formula that are aimed at addressing flaws that one might consider inextricable from the 4X genre. The result is something that was bound to be polarizing even if it worked.

Dramatic Changes in Civilization VII

The moment-to-moment mechanics of Civ VII look familiar to anyone familiar with the franchise. You still have cities and units on a game board, which still uses the hexagonal tiles introduced in Civ V. You can build buildings in your cities, explore the map, work your way through parallel trees of technology and civics, and pursue either diplomacy or war with other nations you encounter. But the details of almost all these systems have been changed dramatically.

Improvements Without Builders

One of the earliest things one notices upon starting a game of Civ VII is that there's no equivalent to the Builder or Worker unit from previous games. Instead, tiles are improved as part of a city's growth. Each time a city gains a population, it can improve one tile, also growing its borders to include the adjacent tiles (if they aren't too far from the city center). Gone is the choice between mining or farming a grassy hill; each terrain type has exactly one improvement which is automatically applied. Later in the game, you can unlock "unique improvements" which further enhance improved tiles, but these must be built or purchased like buildings.

This immediately gestures at one of the game's core design goals: to mitigate the micromanagement that blossoms as the game wears on. Civ VI already took a gentler stand on this, moving from immortal Workers to Builders that have limited charges. But doing away with this unit type entirely means that the mid- to…

I don't generally think much of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney episode 5. Being written after the original trilogy, the plotting neither fits well into the arc of the rest of the game, nor can it affect the (already set in stone) plots of what comes after. A lot of what's compelling about the writing are the threads and evolving characterization across the cases, so without that animating force episode 5 has to fall back on overtly gimmicky one-off characters who just don't have that much depth.

But with all that said, it has done a remarkable job of making me feel a visceral repulsion at the antagonist. So, bravo for that.

Today we got an ice machine! Well, technically, we got an ice machine like seven years ago, when a local bar whose owner we befriended upgraded and wanted to offload their old one for cheap. But today we finally had a plumber in to hook the ice machine up! And now we've got lovely clear cubes^[1] that look incredibly nice in the glass. I'm looking forward to making some really lovely built drinks in the coming months.

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1. Cylinders. ↩︎

It completely baffles me that (continental) Europeans have such a strong desire for dubbed TV shows and movies. I can sort of see it for animation, since there's an inherent gap between the visuals and the audio and it's somewhat more likely to take place in a setting that's kinda unmoored from cultural context. But for live action it's totally befuddling. The language is an inextricable part of the world which the show creates, not to mention a crucial part of the actors' art and the rhythm of the scene! Drives me absolutely batty

I love when I send a commission artist a bunch of references and they end up reinterpreting a dress as a top or vice versa. My secret wardrobe that only exists in the fictional world.

goin' wild with my discord friends at 9pm gettin' twisted on choccy milk