they should invent a sobriety that doesn’t suck, and a heartache that goes away with a Tums-like tablet

Reunion is the worst Life is Strange has ever been. But this is what you wanted. www.avclub.com/life-is-stra...

they know i’ve spent almost two hours paying bills and dealing with the atrocities of American insurance companies 🫣 i hate being an adult

every day i wake up and i swear vengeance against the scourge of learned helplessness that plagues trans people. may one day we be fully cleansed of this disease, but that day will not arise until we the afflicted choose to eradicate it by firmly taking hold of the scouring flame into our own hands.

there was some relitigation about Lost Records: Rage & Bloom — a messy game i love and am disappointed with in equal measure — last week, and not a single soul mentioned “How to Get to Heaven from Belfast,” a delightful mystery-comedy show that’s hitting in ways Lost Records couldn’t.

honored and flabbergasted to have my Consume Me essay in @midimyers.com’s Mothership weekly round up, between PAPER and 404Media. thank you so much for reading, and if you guys are looking for more personal essay like this, i may have already sent something into your inbox :)

when i tell you this is literally the plot point in Mockingjay that made everyone, including Katniss, despise Gale

The last queer bookstore in Manhattan - the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ movement - is at risk of shutting down

oh its tdov. i am here being trans and making my silly little games as always. i love being trans, except for the people who hate me for no reason

Trans Day of Visibility Ain't Enough We're Dying Out Here and Needs Jobs

For Transgender Day of Visibility, I would like YOU to VISUALIZE my WEBSITE www.stopcar.ing

Edited the poem I wrote for Trans Day of Remembrance to be a bit more hopeful for Trans Day of Visibility/Mira Bellwhether Day. go hug a trans person you love. buy them a pizza or a snack or a drink. solidarity is strongest in the everyday.

i think “there’s no ethical consumption of X thing” is overused because the real work isn’t only boycotting or guilting: it’s in making enjoying the thing embarrassing only losers play Halo on Game Pass. only freaks still love Harry Potter. only callous fools get Starbucks/McDonald’s. for shame!

seeing this come to life over time has been a gift. micaela is the strongest personal essayist i know, and this is no exception. an incredible, painful piece. stop caring continues to be the home of the field's best work.

for my Stop Caring debut, a deeply personal piece about 2000s diet culture and the ways Consume Me abandons its disordered players. this piece really has my heart and soul in it. it wasn’t easy to write, and it’s not an easy read, but it’s important. extremely grateful to Artemis for the home 💜

New Stop Caring essay is live. @dietdeitz.bsky.social joins the site to write about Consume Me, Wii Fit, fast food, diet culture, and eating disorders. A really poignant personal essay that weaves in a potent critical analysis of Consume Me. www.stopcar.ing/a-consumer-c...

I know I keep circling back to this, but I don't think k a lot of well-meaning people realise how much it rankles when the response to Harry Potter funding trans genocide is a focus on "what to read instead to be a Good Person" rather than, I dunno, more directly helping combat the trans genocide.

very happy to introduce The Spider-Man Complex: a new letter series between me and @dietdeitz.bsky.social on our time with spider-man 2, new york, and the selfless, self-destructive spider-men in our heads 🕸️ please give it a read 💜 ashlikeadragon.bearblog.dev/the-spider-m...

hey, so i finally listened to what so many friends advised/asked me to and opened a ko-fi 💜 consider supporting if you like my writing and would like to help me out! ko-fi.com/ashlikeadragon

I really think to make great morally ambiguous art (which we always need more of!), the artist must have some sense of morality of their own, whatever that might be, then accept that few audience members will necessarily notice or appreciate that.

if you work for the Harry Potter property at all, you’re doing a moral wrong, but sure there’s a spectrum. John Lithgow, Nick Frost, Matt Berry — bad greedy people. Employee at Universal hitting rollercoaster buttons — cog in corrupt machine. let’s stop relitigating this monthly, okay?

oh so HBO cast a cis kid to play Lev in the next season of The Last of Us. i’m just tired at this point, man. didn’t we do this already with Cillian Murphy? there has to be a transmasc teenager who could’ve done the role. at this point it isn’t even cruel: it’s just lazy.

there’s a lot wrong with that Helen Lewis Atlantic piece about Lindy West (who I had never heard of until today), but scaremongering about trans child care and coining “rapid-onset bisexuality” absolutely disqualifies you from identifying as left-wing. you’re just reactionary, girl. accept it.

you ever pick up a book from the 1800s and realize that writing has never been better than when George Eliot said, “…if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count to three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude.”

now you know as well as I do that getting bullied by beautiful trans women is one of life's greatest pleasures

I think this is disqualifying really; it fundamentally calls into question their ability to cover the field. If you want to know why games media sucks it's because it's filled with either grifters or... perhaps even worse.... cowards!

Between this and pushing Hogwarts Legacy, Digital Foundry is starting to sound like Gamergate and instead of worrying about the feelings of these grown boys for telling them they did a bad job I need the men in games media to tell their friends to look in the fucking mirror.

AI upscaling is when women look like Scarlett Johansson

trying to spend 2026 expanding my game taste, so what Square Enix game should i buy and why is it probably Nier Automata?

*taps internet microphone* After months of work, a project i've been coordinating for @literaryhub.bsky.social in conjunction with @maris.bsky.social is now live ... We've commissioned 13 reviews of books by LGBTQ folks not covered by the NYTBR under Pamela Paul ... lithub.com/what-was-los...

the only sex that i will appreciate is gay sex and i will hear no court opinions to the contrary. they should try appreciating some bitches

*wakes up from cryo sleep* woah, you’re telling me there’s a new magazine founded by some dudes? just some guys? and it wants to save games media? well gollygee count me in! how much could it cost? 10 dollars?

i hate it when my posts break containment, my words are for gamers, perverts and sickos ONLY

someone should really study how warm weather immediately fixes mental illness. someone should really get on that. how season weather affects your mood, maybe

hey this is one of my best friends books. she wrote it. sad i don’t remember her name. i should probably buy it. you should too!

i personally think it would be really cool if convention panels about Independent Games Media actually had diversity in Independent Games Media rather than the same few popular sites rotating speakers. real “triple-I” indie hours

“How many of these gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes?" June Jordan, 1984

It will never not be true that one of the best ways to improve as a writer or a critic is to read A Lot. And not just your field. Be curious. It's so beautiful to be able to make connections but also give yourself a broad base of connections to make!

Cat’s out of the bag: I reviewed Resident Evil Requiem. What did I think? Maybe give that there link a click and see for yourself: www.startmenu.co.uk/home/review-...

editors exist to keep writers from putting their foot in their mouths and hanging their ass out of their trousers. sometimes discourse can be avoided, y’know

i think editors are more important than writers

on the topic of embargoes, remember when TLOU II reviewers couldn’t write about Abby or the San Diego chapter? you can’t just “derive meaning from the whole” if you can’t discuss large, thematically resonant portions of a game.

arguably the most successful game exec, a man who tries to sue college papers and is in the Epstein files multiple times. weak ass man whose success relied on exploiting gamers and devs alike. let’s make more of him! (not Joshua’s point, i’m aware)

The humble tomato

this might be controversial but I love playing good video games and talking about them with my friends

i’m pretty sure i’m objectively correct when i (a former Nintendo magazine editor here) say: 1) A Link Between Worlds 2) The Wind Waker 3) Twilight Princess Botw/TotK are a solid number 4. will i return to them as much as these three? probably not! damn good games though

inspired by Jacob Geller’s half joking post and Patrick H Willems’ video on “Games as Cinema,” any chance anyone would let me explain why video games are actually books? anyone wanna pay me for this? i already wrote a good portion of this for my dissertation. let me put my masters to use, please!

i wanna remind everyone that Satya Nadella feeds podcasts he likes into Co-Pilot so he can “have a conversation” rather than listen, and has admitted to being unable to do his job without Co-Pilot’s help as a digital secretary. this man is the CEO of one of the largest tech companies ever.

art is so cool man

i find it funny (and upsetting) that the Obama-era ethos of hope falls apart with literally any scrutiny or thought — drone strikes and deportations happened en masse, Ferguson, Treyvon Martin — but it wasn’t *as* bad or blatant so people cling to it like some golden era of goodness