Yakuza: Like A Dragon has more to say about the real problem of structural cruelty towards the homeless inside 8 hours than Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a 'smart' game, had to say about its utterly fake problem of 'does having robot hands make you less human' in its entire runtime the virgin GTA: "haha lol hookers"

the chad Yakuza: "sex work exists in a twilight state between legality and illegality, a borderline existence wherein the desperate and exploited service a mainstream that simultaneously demands their service and destruction"

oh hey it's time for everybody's favorite infrequent feature, "Bea Talks About Weird Historical Weapons"

today's feature: GUNBLADES. no, really. yeah, so it turns out Final Fantasy 8 wasn't actually barking up the wrong tree, as melee weapons with integrated firearms aren't a particularly novel or even new idea. around the 16th and 17th centuries, sword-pistols got really, really popular among those who could afford them.

seeing a lot of people trying to go 'you were overreacting about that Heroforge thing, lol, nobody is gonna steal your OC' and that is not what that was about. it's about the fact that companies increasingly try to set legal precedent to claim access to your personal information. right now, in the world we live in, if I punch 'hamburger recipe' into Google, my PS4 will try to sell me buns. twitter has, multiple times, tried to push through TOS changes that require disclosure of increasingly large amounts of personal data, including your phone number.

latest Regular Car Reviews had a line like "a gesture made in bad taste is not necessarily the same as one made in bad faith" and I'm actually CHEWING on that one because it was made as an explicit point about 'can you enjoy good things made by genuinely terrible people' as someone who is a Car Liker one of the thorniest things to unpack is the extremely complicated and shitty legacy of car manufacturers. there's a lot of bad behavior even outside of the obvious smokescreening of environmental issues; most of them were, and are, run by racists

the way the Ishgard is handled is such a beautiful little snow globe of what a colonialism-driven Forever War does to a society's behavior even among those inclined towards goodwill and charity. the Holy See is obviously corrupt FROM THE OUTSIDE, but nobody inside sees it they don't have a reason to question it, even as it turns the apparatus of the state's defense against actual attack on anyone it deems inconvenient; their promotion of isolationism and xenophobia is a calculated choice on the part of the government

one thing I really like about Heavensward so far is that everything feels like it has room to BREATHE; ARR had this issue where it was simultaneously very busy, but also very compressed, it was just wall-to-wall 'OH NO A BIG DISASTER IS HAPPENING!' with no real pauses story arcs didn't really ever develop past 'stop them from summoning a Primal! oops they did it anyway, kill the Primal! yay, you killed the Primal, until it comes back for Hard Mode and you have to do it again!' and doing that same beat over and over got tiresome.

okay though but after having rewatched both Avatar and Legend of Korra recently, here is my actual issue with the former and why I like the latter so much more: I don't like that both structurally and spiritually, Aang is constantly rewarded for coasting on unearned power. Aang... never really has to confront anything about his behavior, his lack of discipline, his approach to life, or... fuckin' anything, actually. Whenever someone tries to tell him to stop goofing off, or is jealous of his inborn talent, it always turns out THEY'RE wrong.