Magic the Gathering tip: if a dating app tells you there’s hot singles in your area don’t believe them. i followed their instructions and there were no cards only many sexy women who desire me.
DEAR READER
Sade Olutola

if i look back, i am lost
Keni
wallacepolsom

ellievsbear
cherry valley forever
we're not kids anymore.
will byers stan first human second
Mike Driver
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

#extradirty

No title available
occasionally subtle
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
$LAYYYTER

Love Begins
trying on a metaphor

Discoholic 🪩

Andulka

seen from Tunisia
seen from France
seen from TĂĽrkiye

seen from United States
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seen from United States
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seen from United States
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seen from Syria
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seen from United States

seen from France

seen from China
seen from Ecuador
seen from Pakistan

seen from Malaysia
@revenantkioku
Magic the Gathering tip: if a dating app tells you there’s hot singles in your area don’t believe them. i followed their instructions and there were no cards only many sexy women who desire me.
Aside from the original Lorwyn five, which planeswalker character(s) do you think is most beloved by the players?
Let’s ask.
Which is the planeswalker you most belove?
Saheeli, by far.
The Dark, a spoiler-free game review
When game designer/developer Eric Koziol announced the release of The Dark on Twitter, he wrote, “Get your graph paper ready!” He wasn’t kidding. The Dark is an old-school styled dungeon crawler with a twist – upon entering the dungeon, a “whisper enters your ears” and blinds your hero. Instead of the typical first-person perspective, you see nothing but a black screen.
The controls are simple: use arrow keys to move forward or change direction. There’s a button for attacking and a button for using a healing herb. That’s it.
I played my first few attempts by blindly stumbling around the dungeon. Take a step forward, hear the sounds of a monster pounding on the hero, press the attack button until it stops. Keep moving forward until I hear a “thud”. Guess I have to turn now. I quickly found myself completely lost (and completely dead).
I dug through my drawer to find an old notebook full of graph paper. I used to practice writing out Hiragana and Katakana tables in it every morning. After the nostalgia trip, I flipped to a blank sheet. I picked a square in the middle of the sheet, about three quarters of the way down and wrote an “S” in it. That is where the dungeon starts. Now the game can begin for real.
Staring at that lonely “S” in the middle of a sea of grid squares made me appreciate the “blindness” concept in a different way. The hero really has no idea what is around him. He could be in the middle of a large, underground colosseum; or he could be trapped in a dungeon cell the size of a single grid square. The grid is a way of visualizing the unknown, but, until you start to fill it out, the hero’s world is nothing but the unknown.
Being an old-school crawler, you move in just four directions. I move forward. A monster. Kill it. Write an “M” on the grid cell adjacent to my “S”. I keep moving forward until I hear that “thump”. A wall. I draw a line at the top of a grid cell. I turn, and then proceed to walk and write until I die. I start over, but this time I am not facing a complete unknown. There’s that monster right in front of me. There’s that wall a little further up.
Speaking of walls, I have never been so happy to run into so many walls. You step into a new grid cell, but you don’t really know what’s around you unless you turn around and try walking in other directions. Really, it’s those fruitless “thumps” that flesh out the map more than anything else.
In addition to monsters and walls, there are various items scattered throughout the dungeon. If I have one complaint about the game, it is the items. To be blunt: I don’t know what they are. I know where they are all located, but I have no idea what it is the hero is picking up. This was the only part of the game where I felt the “sound-only” mechanic fell short.
I can honestly say I’ve never played a game the same way I played this one: one hand on the keyboard, one hand on a pencil, and head looking down at a piece of graphing paper. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until I started to write up my thoughts on the game after a few more plays. I made a note that the game should tell you what the items are when you pick them up, only to note shortly afterward that, maybe it does, and I just never looked up to read it! (It doesn’t, though).
It’s a short game, probably an hour or two of content depending on how you play it. I’m guessing Eric had a gameplay idea and just ran with it. If that’s the case, I’d say it succeeds. It feels like a short, complete game rather than a tech demo or prototype.
I am most intrigued by the idea of having to draw out your own visuals for a game. I have played older games where taking notes / making maps is essential to winning, but never something like this where it’s all you’ve got. I don’t know how else the concept could be applied, but I do wonder if Eric had any other ideas in his head that didn’t make it into the game.
The programmer in me says he should make a version with procedurally generated dungeons. Give me a code that acts as the random seed so that I can replay the same dungeon until I beat it. Something like that. I can replay the game to a certain extent now (to see how fast I can beat it, etc.), but I can’t replay the whole “map making” part of it, and now I have a craving for that.
All in all, The Dark is a short game with a unique mechanic that makes it 100% worth the time investment. You have nothing to lose but a sheet of graph paper.
I played the Windows version of The Dark on Linux via Wine.
Get The Dark on itch.io
Eric Koziol is on Twitter at @revenantkioku
Drafting Unstable in Japan
“Do you speak Japanese?”
I often get this question when sitting down for a round of Magic. To be fair, it's often at Grand Prix events, which people travel around the world to play at, so yeah, there's a chance I don't speak the language, statistically speaking.
I like to joke back that I speak Japanese better than I play Magic.
Sometimes I read Japanese cards too fast even though I’m not familiar with the English card. Then I make a mistake. That happens in Pre-Releases sometimes. It's okay. It happens. It can be pretty bad for the board state, though.
So the tables have slightly turned with the release of Unstable, which is only in English. Everyone has their phones out with Japanese translations. Some of the translations aren't quite right, though. For example, one card gets flying as long as it is held above the battlefield. The Japanese translation said as long as it was raised above the battlefield. So people were putting the card on top of dice or deck boxes, which I don't think counts as being “held”, or at least it doesn't feel in spirit of the game. Especially since I saw a video of the guy who made the set holding the card in the air. So I’ll go with that interpretation.
Despite the language barriers, both drafts I played were fun.
As mostly a competitive player, it does bum me out a little that the cards I got are mostly worthless now, aside from the basic lands and tokens. Yet these were fun drafts. One was with complete strangers and one was with a group of people I've grown to know over the past year of playing Magic in Japan. Both were good times.
I’m sure @Gamespite can’t wait to play these Game Boy Color games for Game Boy Works.
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I mean… Déjà Vu I & II will probably not be painful…?
Déjà Vu 2 is kind of a hot pile. At least, the original version. I wonder if they made any tweaks to the GBC version to make it a bit more "sane" like they did to the NES releases of the MacVenture games.
Sennen Joou by matsumoto reiji
I love me some Leiji Matsumoto, but do ALL his stories involve short little goblin-man-children and willowy blonde women?
I was thinking "I read the entirety of Galaxy Express 999 and this doesn't seem familiar!"
He sure has a... "style".
“Tales from the Pit” #1427
The song pains me even in this delightful form.
Jesus II (Enix - PC98 - 1991)Â
Oh fuck, there's a Jesus 2?
Shouldn't all blocks be treated the same when it comes to rotation? As I understand it, with both BFZ and Shadows block leaving at the same time one will have been Standard legal for longer...which kind of sucks, doesn't it? Or am I missing something?
We can’t have blocks have the same time in Standard without having two rotation times which we’ve learned is unliked by a lot of players.
So the Spring and Summer sets are less valuable than the Fall and Winter?
“Tales from the Pit” #1391
Magic didn't really have characters like this last I played and I'm really loving it. I need the Chandra and Liliana Pop Vinyls.
THERE BE GENITALS.
This is way more compelling than the entirety of Jared Leto’s Joker.
Oh my god
Oh my GOD.
Holy moly… Batman.
Holy shit. After all that his alignment is "good".
In the Satellaview version of Wario’s Woods, Birdo is replaced by an unnamed human character. According to the manual, this is supposed to be the female player avatar from the Satellaview BIOS, depicted on the right.
Did Nintendo create the first ever OS-tan!?
I intended there to be a picture of Disk-kun here, but Tumblr/Wikipedia isn't handling external links and oh well, the joke wasn't that funny I guess?
Retronauts Episode 70: Final Fantasy I
Chris Kohler and Sam Claiborne join up for another single-game exploratory session, this time centered around the original Final Fantasy.
Ew, Red Mage.
Beta Testing
For the past few years I have been installing the beta versions of iOS on my phone. It's not a good idea. I know this. Anything could happen.
Last week when I was in BitSummit, my iPhone kept shutting down. Really, really hot. I run the beta software and I think "Well, it's not impossible that the beta is getting into some sort of crazy loop and over heating and shutting itself down, right?"
So when I got back home I scheduled a Genius Bar appointment and went to restore my iPhone to 9.3.2 just in case.
"Please input your password."
Squeeze me? I do not remember putting the encryption on my iPhone. Some quick searching turns up that there is an option for you to save that's password in the Keychain. Phew.
Of course, it's not in the Keychain.
Palms sweaty, I start typing. This password, that password. Nothing. I look through my notes files in case for some dumb reason I decided to write it down in there. Nothing. 1Password. Nothing. I'm fucked.
Except there is iCloud Backup. I can do that. I do instantly and spend the next few days trying to remember that damn encryption password. But I got nothing.
Bring it to the Apple Store. Software tests checks out. The Genuis squeezes my phone and sighs. She thinks the batter is getting fat. Brings it to the back room. I'm not the only one who has gained weight over the past year. Free new phone for me. Should increase the resell value in September, especially since my old one had a big chunk taken out of the bottom right corner when I dropped it.
Get my new phone. It's iOS 9.3.2. Of course. So here I sit in Osaka, typing away on my iPad Pro while my phone downloading beta software over Apple's WiFi, me praying my iCloud Backup will work.
Passwords, people. Be careful with passwords.
Finally got one!
(haven’t opened the box yet, worried my face might melt)
Dragon Warrior I-III
Pixel Artist: ta2nb
Source: deviantart.com (1) (2) (3)
Poor, poor Cannock.