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Friday Fun Thread for June 19, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Video game thread

What are you playing this week?

I uninstalled Slay the Spire 1 and 2. I realized that the games (mainly sts2) took up a lot of time and capacity due to my need to play optimally, without giving me much joy in return.

Started and finished a Civ V game instead. I got around 30 wonders, because I was playing on a more relaxed difficulty than usual.

Tried out The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales (demo) briefly. Dismayed to find it has no ultrawide support. And they call it HD-2D yet all the characters are pixel art style. Might play it in 16:9 on my TV at some polnt. They've priced it very highly, and it has denuvo, so I might wait for a deep discount further down the road.

I played and beat 1000xResist. Or rather, I watched and completed it, given it's very much a visual novel with limited interactivity or game elements. Good story though. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it from a motte point of view is that it might be the best example of a good "woke" game with a big focus on themes like motherhood, immigration + assimilation, the inevitable sad lesbians, and, as much as I hate the term, 'intergenerational trauma'.

I didn't fully buy into those themes, mostly because I have a bit too much familiarity and found it hard to believe (you're telling me a Chinese family found it hard to settle in 2030s Vancouver, really? I could have bought the high school bully angle if it were all mainlanders attacking the Hong Kong ren instead of a story 25 years out of date), but they did a good job at marrying those themes into what was a fairly classic sci-fi story and world.

If anything, the major weakness in the story was not the woke aspects, but their attempt to shoehorn in an anti-authoritarian message with Chinese characteristics in the second half, when none of it made any sense within the world they had built.