Juneposting

02 Jul, 2026

I was supposed to write a new post last week but… I forgot. Now it's late at night, I'm a little bored, so I might as well.

I'm traveling tomorrow! Going to see friends and walk around, stay away from home and the internet for a change, that should be fun, more details when I'm back. It also means I don't want to start playing any game right now since I'm not gonna play anything for four or five days, and that's why I'm a little bored. "What about reading?" Not feeling like it, surprisingly. I'll read a chapter before going to bed, but now it's still 9 PM.

Speaking of which, I started Return of the King last week. It's incredible. The same virtues and vices that I saw in the first two books still apply, but specifically about this book is the siege of Gondor and the march of the Rohirrim. That's some good shit. Tolkien was nailing that apocapyptic feeling, and I was enraptured. Denethor is a top-tier guy as well, more than his depiction in the movies led me to believe — he still is a guy who sucks though, don't get me wrong.

The aforementioned vices are the unfortunate thing here. You know, it's very easy to see why racism is a frequent talking point with Tolkien's works. I know he himself wasn't a racist, based on everything I've heard about him, but, I assume, by virtue of assimilating a lot of ideas from his time, some passages are just very, very bad¹. Of course, the description of the orcs, the most famous example of what the problematic stuff is, isn't a good thing, but then every time he's describing the invading foreigners, it's also terrible. It's not frequent enough to ruin the story but also not sparse enough that it can be ignored: it is an essential part of the novels, unfortunately.

The frustrating thing is that in characters such as Denethor and Boromir, the "grandiose, pure, and proud" men who are defending their borders, you have them being portrayed in a negative light as the guys who most easily succumb to the One Ring despite believing they could control it. It's all very compelling, applicable as a critique to a specific kind of guy if you want to. So having that and then the unfortunate stuff is deeply upsetting.

Before reading the Return of the King I read Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. It's short so I don't want to get into detail — everyone should read it, I think —, but both the novel and its accompanying novella, Moonlight Shadow, were deeply affecting to me. I found its ideas about grief and happiness very touching, personally. It was also a very pleasant surprise, even if it's not the main subject of the book, to find a very sweet depiction of an older transgender woman. This 1987 novel understands gender transition (or actualization, maybe?) as an essential part of what we need to be happy and complete. Definitely one I'll be thinking about for a long time. For as much as I like genre fiction, sometimes it's so great to read something a bit more close to reality, you know.

Before Kitchen I read Beast in the Shadows by Edogawa Rampo. I'm just a little familiar with Rampo's work, but that's through adaptations. So this is the first of his novels that I read, and I had a very fun time. It's also short, and I feel like there's a critiquing edge to it that I can't quite specify. I mean, Rampo clearly references his own stories in the novel and has the main character, a writer, shitting all over them, in what I interpreted as a critique of the narrator's morality. But I don't have the specific context to know what, or whom, that critique could be directed to in real life, so that has been an unresolved thought I've been having. Regardless, it was a hell of a good time.

What lead me to Beast in Shadows was playing Disco Elysium, which put me in the mood for murder mysteries. I don't know if I even need to talk about DE at this point: everybody knows about how great it's supposed to be, and, indeed, it's just as good as everyone says it is. I talked about Norco before, and it reminded me of it somehow, not in form but in tone: deeply sad but in a way that's interesting rather than just depressing cause it's so real and raw. The game deserves to be considered an all-timer!

And after Disco Elysium I finally played through Sin & Punishment: Star Successor, the sequel of Sin and Punishment, the N64 rail shooter developed by Treasure that I played quite a bit. It's so incredibly good and satisfying to play, feels unbelievable sometimes. Maybe a bit too long, but playing a level a day is a perfect pace for a game like that.

I guess the last thing I should mention is that I rewatched both Ghost in the Shell movies by Mamoru Oshii, after re-reading the manga for the first time in… more than 10 years, probably. Now, I don't like the manga as much as I used to, although it's still a decent time, but those movies are just fantastic. GitS has been, weirdly enough, sort of a comfort movie for me, because I find that whole movie's vibe extremely relaxing. GitS 2: Innocence, on the other hand, wasn't one I quite knew how to appreciate until this recent rewatch. It is wonderful, very sad and haunting and beautiful, and nothing else looks like it. Batou is just a guy full of love, man… The kind of stuff to actually put tears in my eyes.

This ended up being just a media log, but I suppose that's fine. Not many thoughts to share this time around, I'm afraid. I can say, I have been very happy lately. I'm in a relationship now, and it's been making me feel good, which is how I think relationships should make you feel. I can only hope it'll stay that way.

Have a good weekend!