ultraman
Bonus: The boys and I were Big Friends in a New Jersey shopping mall at Ultraman Live
I can’t deny that Ultraman Live was a pretend superhero show for little tiny babies. It was also the coolest shit I ever saw in my life.
David Cabrera
Here’s what it’s like to run the Ridge Racer course for 20 hours
(My Switch says it's been 10+ hours, but I feel like it's been 40+. This could just be the time dilation of practice.) Like I've said, I’ve been really stuck on this year’s release of Ridge Racer in the Arcade Archives series.
The anime convention of the 2000s is alive at Anime NJ++, plus Keita Amemiya was there
I kind of forget that things are coming up, or that they happened two weeks ago, or indeed my position in space and time. So it was a last-minute thing when I asked my buddies if I could tag along with them to Anime NJ++, a very small convention
Yasuomi Umetsu's Virgin Punk: Clockwork Girl packs 35 minutes tight with exquisite, artisanal violence
Legendary animator Yasuomi Umetsu (Kite, Mezzo Forte) dreams of girl assassins blasting their way through massive, bloody action movie set-pieces. A craftsman and a perfectionist, he looks to create the platonic ideal of a popcorn form, flawless in every detail from the fluttering of a jacket, to the precise
video games
Road to Empress deftly uses the movie-game format to place you in Tang China and kill you, over and over again
If you’re of a certain age, games using live-action movie footage snap your brain to the “full motion video” fad of the 90s and the middling games that resulted from it. (Or Dragon's Lair, if you're a Gen-Xer.) I had a Sega CD
The English version of VTuber Kurono Senba's riichi mahjong hint book feeds a growing, but starved, niche
As evidenced by the tears of so many Like a Dragon series players, it’s kind of tough to learn riichi mahjong. In video game terms, riichi is a tutorial-required game. A few strict, inflexible, and complex rules shape the game’s strategy at its core; everything grows out
arcade games
The Weekly: 10/27/25
It is good of the developer to let us imagine what “catlike reflexes” would really be like.
video games
The Weekly 10/13/25: Virtua Fighter at TGS, Ridge Racer On Switch 2 - Friends, it's 1994 again
This has actually been nearly in the can from a while ago, but I took an actual nice long break– the real kind, where you don't look at anything, even if you finally got a good idea for a Kawaiikochans comic– last week. Also, the thing I came
anime
Spoiler Space: Turkey’s opening-credits shock had me speculating all season. Now that it’s over, I have an answer
(One of the things I really like about Turkey! is the way it doesn’t shy away from the “nasty, brutish and short” of ancient life, even though it’s at heart a “cute girls have fun” anime.)
The Weekly: Sept. 18th, 2025
This morning I watched Japan Railway Journal and thought about the impermanence of our social order. The Gamesoft Robo Fun Club is a solo labor of love that depends entirely on paid subscriptions from readers to exist. If you enjoyed this piece and you'd like to see more,
Sonic Racing Crossworlds beta is Mario Kart 8, not World, but for arcade sickos
It’s messed up that just a couple of newsletters ago I was tricked into referring to Mario Kart 8 as “perfect”, because I spent hours this past weekend playing an arcade racer that seems set on nitpicking Mario Kart 8 (not World!) and improving on its all of its
video games
The Weekly, Sep. 10, 2025
I’m going to try something new today. I find I don’t always get around to talking about the stuff that I enjoy— which would be fine, except at this newsletter it is kind of my job— without writing a very long piece that usually spends a lot of