Cryptocurrency is one of the worst inventions of the 21st century. I am ashamed to share an industry with this exploitative grift. It has failed to be a useful currency, invented a new class of internet abuse, further enriched the rich, wasted staggering amounts of electricity, hastened climate change, ruined hundreds of otherwise promising projects, provided a climate for hundreds of scams to flourish, created shortages and price hikes for consumer hardware, and injected perverse incentives into technology everywhere. Fuck cryptocurrency.

A person who grew up in an environment that didn’t acknowledge these realities has no need of these melodies. In other words, it is a hallucinogen inducing a nightmare that will not end — that is the music that a certain magazine’s panel review called “hard to enjoy listening to”.

sometimes I worry about the ways that a lack of accessible helpful mental healthcare intersects with personality test culture to create a thing where everyone is dying to self-diagnose based on hearsa...

In 2019, I made a painful decision. But to the algorithms that drive Facebook, Pinterest, and a million other apps, I'm forever getting married.

In reality, Tokimeki Memorial is a titan in Japanese game history in its own right, its reach similarly vast and persistent across decades. If those N64 classics helped define how games in more established genres would play and control as the industry embraced polygons, Tokimeki Memorial helped expand what games could be about outright, demonstrating how to apply existing technology and design techniques to enrich the gameplay experience and infuse it with more personal significance, often with tools as simple as the human voice. It’s no exaggeration to say, then, that it stands as not only one of Konami’s most important games and not even simply one of the biggest games released in the 1990s, but one of the most vital Japanese games ever made. Foreign audiences may only just now be widely beginning to warm up to some of its ideas as its progeny attain even greater heights in its wake. But in Japan, they’ve been informing video games this entire time, 25 years and counting. That they’re now making a mark overseas at long last speaks to the universal power belying them and the continuing relevance of one simple, radical belief: that love belongs in video games, too.