Stuff I liked in March 2026
As previous posts in the past weeks have indicated, this was not a good month in real life. I was at one point playing Rival Turf! to kill the pain. One of the bosses was a luchador in a business suit, and it was still bad.
The point is that I tried a good deal of entertainment this month to distract from real-life problems, and most of it didn't work out. Here are the brighter lights.
Playing: Tiny Bookshop is a book recommendation game. I'd heard about it elsewhere but finally pulled the trigger after reading about it from longtime Final Fantasy IV community stalwart Aywren's blog. You're running a mobile bookshop in a small seaside town, gathering stock from newspapers and garage sales, planning your daily destinations according to events around town, and adjusting your in-store selection by genre based on locals' tastes. You can decorate and paint your little shop (which can also affect your sales), as well as befriend some locals and help them through various personal quests and dilemmas.
There are three major points of recommendation. One is the game itself: recommending books is just a pleasant idea for a game. You're going to run across some questionable classification decisions, but it largely works. The day-by-day structure of the game, with each in-game business day lasting 10 to 15 minutes, also makes it perfect for short breaks from online work. The second is the art style; there's some really gorgeous palette work here, particularly as the light in your picturesque bookselling location changes over the course of the day. The third is the books you run across through your in-game stock; you're making recommendations from (with a few exceptions) real-life titles and short, effectively-written blurbs, which are effective in selling the books not only to your clientele but to you, the player. I checked out a good number of books featured in Tiny Bookshop, and while most didn't work out for me, it is a neat added real-life component of the gameplay experience.
There are some points of frustration: as mentioned, the rec system has some lapses; what's optional and what's non-negotiable in customers' requests isn't always clear; the game sometimes won't release useful equipment (i.e. additional shelves) until you buy unrelated cruft you don't want (and won't tell you this); and a couple of the locals eventually act in ways that overstep boundaries, but the game expects you just to go along with it. The retired local bookshop owner, who's friendly but overbearing in her advice, will pass her store onto you in the endgame win condition but wants a non-negotiable say in your subsequent business; the mean girl cafe owner outright hazes you in your bid to join the town BBB, demanding you stand by while she strews garbage around your shop and wallow in its stench for an entire day. I didn't accede to either demand, and as such, the game remains unfinished by me. But Tiny Bookshop's gameplay is unique, and despite these later-game lapses (which are not typical and don't mar the early and mid-game experience), the title's successful enough in what it does for most of its length that I'd give it a "check it out" - though you may be retiring the game a bit earlier than intended.
It also occurs to me that I should mention Link-a-Pix sooner or later. This is a grid-based visual logic picture puzzle where you connect pairs of endpoints with lines consisting of the designated number of squares, and the end result creates a big picture. It's not as fiddly as Picross - painting twisting lines instead of ticky-boxing individual squares feels more freewheeling - and it rewards experimentation better. I have the base game on my Switch, and the button controls only enhance the casual atmosphere. It's a great way to experience an alternative to Picross that satisfies the same logic buttons in a way.
I mention Link-a-Pix not only because it's good, but because I've had it for several years now - I bought it for about seven bucks - and it still has new puzzles in the tank. Hundreds of hours of entertainment for pennies on the hour. The only drawback is that you'll run out of five-to-20-minute puzzles fairly quickly and be left with a bunch of 45-to-60-minute ones, but there are DLC packs to remedy that. I've haven't had to touch DLC, though, to get near-neverending entertainment out of this. Excellent podcast game.
The monthly Dichotomy of Woman section:
Hello Kitty, in one of her many humanitarian efforts, celebrated the International Day of Happiness by baking confetti cake and spinning up birthday cake shakes. Oh, and wearing confetti outfits while standing next to a big confetti cake. Now, that's a holiday. (I missed the Holi-inspired Colorblaze Carnival due to real-life concerns, regrettably.)
My Sweet Piano also got into board games as party of a running storyline where she samples various hobbies and essentially reinvented Calvinball with tokens.
After praising the glimpse we got last month, I can't say I'm wholly positive on Dead by Daylight's Comeback sequel to its K-pop-inspired All-Kill chapter. Despite the triumph of the map, I'm not keen on much of the other content. I don't like the AI tech bro CEO survivor; I can't access the Webtoon they created for the chapter, but from what I'm hearing, I don't like its implications for the story they had set up with Yun-Jin and Trickster; I kinda don't like Trickster's new voice (too light, not as self-satisfied) or his new lines (too generic & focused on external validation metrics, not as self-satisfied); and while the gender-swapped AI Trickster evil K-Pop Demon Hunter skin (long story) is making many very happy, and I'm glad for that, it sets up a for-me disappointing scenario where I hear my boy's music in a match and think Yes, Finally but am left DisappointedManatRefrigerator.gif. But I can't deny Behaviour put a lot of effort into Comeback, and the aesthetic is first-rate (look at those colors!). And that map is a triumph.
(I'm also playing the Blood Moon event and enjoy putting forth my favorite red-tinged fashions with everyone else, but I can never find the goddamn blood pumps on the map.)
Listening: I took the time to clear out a few LibriVox audiobooks from my backlog. If you're not familiar, it's a project dedicated to creating free audiobooks of public domain works through volunteer efforts. Sometimes, a book will have the same narrator from beginning to end; at other times, though, due to the nature of the project, there will be a variety of narrators, even differing from chapter to chapter.
One of those was H. G. Wells' The Time Machine. I cannot recommend The Time Machine itself. I *can* recommend the first few chapters of the Librivox recording of the book, which consist of a young (American) teenage reader attempting to give a dramatic, British reading of The Time Machine. He is really putting effort into the entertainment value of his reading, bless him. It is a bit hard-to-follow at points, because he is struggling mightily with the vocabulary (rhododendrons, for instance: "Rhodons." "Rhondras"), but that adds a bonus layer of active-listening puzzlecraft to the proceedings ("what did he mean by that?"), as well as to the charm. There is heart in the damn thing, which is more than some of the other narrators bring. The Time Machine is kind of a dumb novel, with wooden matches that last for literally 800,000 years and "oh, by the way, the Earth was later eaten by giant crabs," but there are good and prescient lines like the "I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been" bit that don't hit because the narrator is half-asleep. So thank you, Drama Teen, for your earnest effort.
Watching: I've been watching the usual - otzdarva, Game Grumps (who did Altered Beast and Golden Axe), supergreatfriend (continuing Sega CD with Jeopardy!) - but I'll take the time to endorse another Dead by Daylight streamer I watch, lilithomen.
He plays Blight, mostly - so much so that he's practically identified with the character in the community. I don't play Blight, and I don't, for whatever reason, cotton to watching Blight gameplay. I very much, though, cotton to lilithomen's commentary and stream interaction - he's strongly friendly and smart about the game, enthusiastic about horror, and has a good sense of humor. He's also remarkable in how he's able to take most everything that happens in the game in stride - he doesn't get mad when he's downed or loses a game (which is more than I can manage!), and he readily points out good plays by his opponents. He's one of the most even-tempered, emotionally-in-control people I've seen on the internet - a cool dude. I mentioned his main chara isn't for me, but he does have one day a week where he takes killer suggestions, and he does play a bit of survivor on occasion. He's a strong but friendly voice in the community.
(In addition to his gameplay, I'll recommend this video around 4:08, where he tierlists the various killer chase themes. I agree with his hot take about the Ghostface washing machine theme. I'm again impressed by how there is so much good music in the game, though.)
Reading: In Time Shelter, two Bulgarian scientists, one of whom may be the product of the other's imagination, set up a clinic for dementia and Alzheimer's patients stuck in the past by literally recreating the past - one floor per decade, creating a cozy world that doesn't challenge their conceptions. Their success leads them to be approached by heads of European state, who would like to turn back the clock on their entire nations and give their dissatisfied populaces a neverending taste of a glorious past.
I'm putting this on the list because I think it's a solid book that's About Things: what we lose when our memories fail us, gradually, as we age; how strongly certain memories define us; how we turn to memory when the outside world disappoints us, and how that can protect or atrophy our sense of self. It's the product of a smart yet thoughtful and compassionate mind. Much of it is tied up in WWII and Bulgaria's communist past, both in how individual lives were affected and how it shapes the nation's sense of self in the second half of the book. It sounds like unrelentingly sad material, but - though it is sad when appropriate - it's more contemplative than anything, more people coming to terms with things that have happened in their lives, and the scientist(s) thinking about how to make them comfortable.
I wish, though, that the author had continued with the more personal stories of the clinic residents rather than shifting to a more geopolitical bent in the second half. Not because of any NO POLITICS sentiment, and I understand what he's saying with people, both individually and in aggregate, retreating to the past when they're scared and how that links into fascism and the regression of society. I found the personal stories, though, more on-point and thoughtful, whereas the political story gets derailed with a country-by-country pan-European vote on which year to which to regress and the TENSION of whether one will vote for 1968, which the author holds is objectively the best year (which, uh, as an American, can't say I agree, buddy - but that's not really the point).
Anyhow: I haven't gotten a complete handle on this book, and I'm going to read it again. There's enough, though, of Interest and Substance here where my impression is overall positive. We'll see if that endures.
Translation Project: About to start new material and about where I expected to be, though that special work project I mentioned got extended through April and currently needs intense attention, so progress in the Translation Project Under Discussion is on hold for a week or two. However: there may be a new development in the translation project. I will update as news warrants. "The news is there may be news coming." I know. All around, the message is: let's hope this month's better.
Have some Christopher Cross. I had a yacht rock playlist on recently, and I subsequently tried to get into Cross's catalog, but I think my affection is primarily for this song:
