common-or-garden Mads 🦆

it's old enough to tie a bunch of balloons to and take on an adventure with a talking golden retriever and a boy scout

it's like a little medieval house that's been surrounded by a town and then a city and then skyscrapers and every time I do repairs to it I look at the things that've sprung up around it and go 'what the hell happened here'

there's one sequence in Drac that's already had three full rewrites and now I'm going back in for Rewrite Number Four. please let this be the last!! it was conceptualised before the rest of Drac was even a thing, too, so it's like. eight full years of taking shots at this particular sequence.

it's a tiny crab playing a saxophone

the tiny dungeon experience crab is so perfect. so beautiful. so charming.

Gankutsuou, Wolf's Rain, and Ergo Proxy for good throwbacks! Also idk if you have any interest in Fate but Fate/Zero is a solid standalone show with a fantastic dub.

I could not be more stoked to announce CONTINUE, a defiant, new games magazine that aims to celebrate and interrogate the culture, creativity and community of videogames. The Kickstarter is now live below. www.kickstarter.com/projects/con...

A dot beside Australia

I think I found it... land of the small white cloud

Conversation about Sappho from Home to Harlem

Conversation about Sappho from Home to Harlem

I'm reading Claude Mckay's Home to Harlem, because I really enjoyed Romance in Marseille, and it's fun how well this 1928 'guy feels out whether his new friend is cool with gay stuff' dialogue still holds up

hooray milestones though

you get a bunch of dorohedoro posts because i finished a big piece of work last night and i'm in the Cursed Zone today where i ought to give my brain some recovery time but i'm struggling to think of relaxing or fun activities. so the lizard is just bouncing around in there like a screensaver.

it's not that caiman and nikaido love gyoza, it's whether it's fair for them (not) to eat gyoza when they both live at the tension point between the worlds of humans and sorcerers. that's dorohedoro!

i get sooo mad when people boil the series down to 'it's violent but cosy' or 'really it's about making food and having friends' because it usually goes hand in hand with a gotcha about 'did you know? q hayashida is a woman', and dodges how the POINT is the tension between the food and the violence

dorohedoro uses its titular soul sludge as a signifier in a bunch of contexts (class, race, gender) and while i feel it didn't quite stick the landing on them, the way it explores the central tension of 'how do you reconcile success as a marginalised person with the suffering of your people' rules

there's a device called an 'empty signifier', which is something in fiction that can be read in a variety of different ways depending on the context it's put in. for instance, zombies can be a metaphor for consumerism, but they can also be metaphors for racism, collectivism, etc...

dorohedoro is beautiful because it's all about the question 'would you drink the liquefied souls of your angry ancestors to become a foot taller. you WILL become a vessel for their subsumed rage, but you WILL ALSO be really tall'

thank god!! i've been waiting for the big en fight to get animated for sooo long!!

as always

bsky.app/profile/madm...

Ai Coleman is horrified by Something

extremely sketchy-looking dissection lab

Ai Coleman jumps into a big pit

my One Fear with Dorohedoro s2 has been 'what if they have no budget and all the cool backstory sequences end up ugly' so the trailer opening with a bunch of beautiful shots from it has been so reassuring

or like, you're wearing a sexy dress, but it's literally taped on plus several layers of shapewear, so getting the sexy dress off again is a project of its own

a classic cosplay phenomenon is guys dating cosplayer girls because they're hoping to have sex with samus/zelda/whatever only to discover they're now the designated con baggage handler

traditionally, the costumes are too fragile and precious and also restrict mobility in an unsexy way a lot of the time. however with the rise of cheap online costume stores, there's now a more accessible source of costumes it would be okay to ruin, so it probably happens more these days?

new tag yourself just dropped

cloud, soldier 1st class, who was definitely at the nibelheim incident

you right now

I got the basic PAL version of it that had the difficulty turned up, and it was the game that really taught me to knuckle down and commit to learning a combat system even when it felt impossible. After that, finding a copy of the Special Edition with Vergil was such a great payoff!

difficult...!

honorary mentions: Misericorde (which wasn't an option), Metal Gear Solid 2/3/4 (couldn't pick a favourite of the three), and FFVII

van helsing, dark clothing and hat, shadowed face. background is inside church. text box: bless me, father, for i have sinned. icon is telling the player to press a to proceed.

van helsing, screenshot, game boy advance (2004) www.mobygames.com/game/66012/v...

Blood moon

moon's haunted!

It's Pickle!

Pickle!

there's one of these ginger ones in my local park and it has a beautiful pink iridescent stripe on its neck

I call it Pickle (because it reminds me of pickled ginger)

If any of you don't know the Melbourne Megagames crew and ever want an intro, let me know! Nellie and the other folks there all design games as well as running them, and they can probably help with resources on how to get started