J. Martin

March 21, 2021

Sunday Comes Apace

Evidently, today isn’t Friday—I decided to push this newsletter’s regular release date to Sunday. To have more time to get stuff done, that’s one thing. As another, it feels better to let these little retrospectives not end the old week, but start the new one! In the U.S., Japan, Israel, and many other countries, Sunday is the first day of the week. Germany, I looked that up, switched from Sunday to Monday—or rather to “DIN 1355-1”—in 1976.

If you’re playing an RPG or action-adventure video game, and your character picks something up and suddenly becomes an immobile fixture of the landscape, chances are you’ve bumped into the game’s encumbrance rules. On some design aspects of these rules, which players love to hate, I wrote last week at between drafts.

A few months ago, I stopped posting to my Instagram account. I loved Instagram to death, but after it became a Facebook property, it was slowly but inexorably transformed into abject shit over the years. Its September 2020 update—“Photos of your friends and loved ones, replaced with nonsense”—was the straw that broke my back.

So today, please meet ocular drafts, my brand-new Flickr account! To which I will post new images regularly, and I already uploaded some older and newer non-Asia albums, from Formentera to Warszawa. You’re welcome to follow me there, and if you post images on Flickr yourself, I’ll be happy to follow you back!

Some other photographs I invite you to appreciate, not on Flickr, but on his own website, are this series of terrific images of Glasgow by Lyall Campbell. Check them out! (Spoiler: it rains so much, it could be the city in Se7en.)

Finally, in gaming news, the Taiwanese indie developer studio Red Candle Games opened its very own online store where you can buy Devotion, and also their very successful first game Detention. Why is that big news? Because this Taiwanese horror game was nuked by China from orbit for an in-game Xi/Winnie-the-Pooh fun reference, and even GOG yanked it from its store and then lied about the reasons.

Have a great week and, with the pandemic flaring up again, behave responsibly!
J.