It's hard to say goodbye. So Silent Hill, but maybe also to Australia, parts of which clearly overlap.
It is weird to have done a fifteen hour flight so many times that it just… melts away, but that's how many times I've done it. This has been my eleventh trip over there, and each time you do it, you have to do this flight twice. I realize that is sort of obvious, but I'm just saying: I have more experience with this amount of flight than most people probably do and it's just background radiation now. The way down, I took a hit off Dabe's UFO 50 and immediately felt the effects. The way back, I got back into Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, which is my first time playing the series and I'm really enjoying it. There's a lot about it that just… has no interest in appealing to a broad audience. It's a truly unapologetic cultural product, which means there's a ton of information for the foreign observer hidden inside its assumptions. Anyway, I got hooked on a minigame inside it called Miss Match, which is a kind of dating app rhythm game thing. If you "succeed" typically you're being catfished in some way, but once it went into a fucking FMV of an actual woman in a bathing suit looking at me and telling me things. I don't know if I was scandalized exactly. Maybe. Alright, I might have been semi-scandalized. But I didn't expect a real video and I didn't expect to feel observed while watching it! I had to shut it off to break eye contact.
I was pretty hooked on the game, and looking at the save dates I put it down for nine and a half months after that. But it was still on the Steam Deck, and it works great on there, so I got back in on the plane. I was worried that I wouldn't remember what was going on, but as soon as I started playing again I woke up on some kind of dilapidated resort island and I had to work hard with my new friends to restore its coveted five star rating from the tourism board. After a couple days working there a dolphin named Dolphine showed up at the beach to take me back to Hawaii if I wanted to go. I stayed there for another month of in-game time and essentially built a city on the island, and came back with more money than I think is required to beat the game. By the time I was done doing this, I was home somehow. Thanks, videogames!
(CW)TB out.
