Just got told today that I'm no officially being let go a week from tomorrow. Just in time for the holidays! 🙃 Looking forward to being unemployed again! 🙃🙃🙃

I'm Aly! Most of what I do here is yap about video games, especially RPGs and otome VNs. And yap in general. I'm extremely passionate about localization, and I chase that passion as a freelance editor when not inundated by my boring day job. More about my work can be found at starlost.cc!

LRP - Tales of Berseria has one of the most bizarre drop-offs in localization quality I've ever seen. The core game has a mostly good loc until post-game where the translation and editing quality is dreadful and regularly inconsistent with voiced dialogue. Rly curious to see if it gets fixed.

Idk if Berseria's side quest translations ever got updated post-launch, but if not, hopefully Bandai fixes it for the remaster legendsoflocalization.com/articles/tal...

America's first ever esports champion was Rebecca Heineman, a trans woman. She went on to found some of your favorite video game studios and worked on your favorite video games. Next time you see somebody rail about 'woke' and 'DEI' Remember that. Remember her.

You can love someone you love even if you don't love yourself🏳️‍⚧️ But if you love yourself, you can love both yourself and the person you love. Your love becomes twofold. So take care of yourself. Your soul is beautiful.

What perfect album came out the year you turned 16? Only a contender for my favorite album of all time.

Rebecca was one of the founders of Interplay and programmed & designed for some of the most influential games of my youth, notably Bard's Tale I & III and Wasteland. She will be missed.

Re-upping this for no reason! www.theguardian.com/games/2025/n...

"Get his ass” Is so unreasonably funny to me. A huge win for the English language. Today's version of "seize him" imo

Anyone else notice that The Game Awards removed the Best Narrative category this year?

Damn, they might be cooking with this movie after all. This nails the aesthetic for Zelda, imo. Cautiously optimistic to see how this turns out!

Don't forget.

Nominations this year feel very centralized on a few games, not sure I like that Expedition 33 gets lumped in with other indie games when it got published by Kepler and had physical copies distributed by Bandai Namco.

I'm actually looking to pick up some more closed captioning/subtitle editing work to get me safely to the end of the month. If you are a content creator or work in other media, please leave a reply here if I can help you with this work, and I'll start DMs with you to talk about it some more!

Tidus and Yuna 🦋✨ #FFx

Colored her

Seeing Distant Worlds perform in Minneapolis tonight! This is my second time seeing them!

3 years ago today, Riot Games offered me a job making more money than I ever thought I’d make in my life. I had 19 interviews over 2.5 months to get it. Partner and I were moving to LA for it. I put in notice at my job and apartment. 2 weeks later they rescinded the offer due to “headcount issues”.

shulk back pain

What on earth is the sampling here? This article reads like they only got data for high-level staff with 10+ years of game dev exp. These numbers are laughably inaccurate. Another example of how GDC does not give a fuck about representing loc, QA, and other lesser-paid parts of game dev.

Not me reading that headline with my eyes glazed over. 😵‍💫 Lot of in-house loc jobs where you're lucky to break $50k, even at world famous pubs with top talent, all in a rental market where that ain't nearly enough. Of course it's $150k if you're GDC and surveying people in your own ecosystem lol

i am not only tapping the sign, i am screaming into the megaphone "PAY PEOPLE WHAT THEY'RE WORTH FOR THE WORK THEY DO. AND MAKE SURE THEY ARE CREDITED FOR SAID WORK"

credits that include the names of everyone who worked on the game at any point

🗣️📣 NEW BLOG POST ALERT! This week, I take a look at Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, a French animated film that has quickly become my favorite film of the year. I talk about what makes the film so special. www.derekexmachina.com/blog/2025/11...

Gabe and friends when they finished making the Steam Machine

Mood

In Super Mario Galaxy, the stars on the letters of the logo spell "u r mr gay", while for the movie it says "he mr gay". This is because you are watching Mario, not playing him.

I wish junior and mid-level workers weren't considered a liability by employers. It keeps all of us miserable.

The worst part about looking for game writing work is that there's literally no reason to hire me over the hundreds or thousands of great game writers that have shipped multiple games. So many writers looking for work objectively deserve it more than me.

“Don’t gather some of the most brilliant activists in the industry, treat us like crap, and then expect us to do nothing about it.” After the Game Awards cancelled its Future Class programme, @alyssamerc.bsky.social talked to its former honorees www.theguardian.com/games/2025/n...

If Kristen Stewart gets cast as Rosalina, this movie will be immensely peak.

Dang, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment is pretty fun.

🗣️📣 NEW BLOG POST ALERT! This week, I review Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and discuss what makes it a great modern JRPG as well as its shortcomings that result from its ambition. Spoilers in the review are tagged. Likes, comments, and reposts appreciated! www.derekexmachina.com/blog/2025/11...

BREAKING: The Supreme Court denied an attempt to challenge Obergefell v. Hodges, the case affirming marriage equality nationwide. Our freedom to marry remains the law of the land.

🗣️📣 NEW BLOG POST ALERT! This week, I review Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and discuss what makes it a great modern JRPG as well as its shortcomings that result from its ambition. Spoilers in the review are tagged. Likes, comments, and reposts appreciated! www.derekexmachina.com/blog/2025/11...

The Expedition 33 review is officially finished and will go up tomorrow morning!

Hilda doodle #VGenComm

My Expedition 33 review is almost 13,000 words so far and I'm not finished yet. I'm literally incapable of shutting the fuck up about video games.

Final Fantasy IX 25주년을 축하합니다! #FF9

Update: pushing this back to release on Monday. Writing it's going well so far, but it turns out that I have a lot more to say than I initially thought.

🕯️Manifesting 🕯️

Back when the internet was cool.

😎😎😎😎 GOOD THINGS CAN STILL HAPPEN 😎😎😎😎

I know it's been seven months, but I've now officially been rejected for the two dream job openings I was gunning for this year. I've gotten so many rejections this year, but these ones hurt the most.

Correction! The original credits are accessible from the main menu, and the original English localizers are still credited there as they were before. But the ones who worked on the remaster have been omitted from the remaster credits. (They still deserve to be credited alongside the LQA folks!)