• 15 Posts
  • 1.26K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle







  • I used to work in my grandfather’s farm in rural Mexico when I was a kid and it was nice seeing all the wildlife. There were giant metallic green beetles, natural water springs cheerily bubbled across dirt roads, wild tamarind trees offered free fruit, and tadpoles swam in whatever puddles would form after some rain. Thirty years later, the dirt roads have been paved over, the frogs are gone, the natural springs were drained, and large swaths of ugly brick walled properties have destroyed the land and scenery around it.

    It’s devastating to see the natural beauty we once coexisted with disappear to create a suburban hell scape.





  • There are way more factors at play here rather than a simple wage hike. The war in Ukraine caused a global shortage of wheat and a few other staple crops and fertilizer. The oil embargo on Russia also caused gas prices to climb even further.

    Climate change has also quietly eroded some of the world’s farmland causing a bit more food scarcity. Japan for instance recently couldn’t produce enough rice to feed everyone which caused it to import it for the first time in a long while. I got to see this first hand with some ramen shops no longer being seen as “affordable” due to their bowls climbing above 1000 yen.

    In the US we had the bird flu wiping out a huge amount of eggs and chicken, there was even a time when I’d see a 1 dollar surcharge on my local restaurant for any dish that uses them. The consolidation of the restaurant wholesale food market by Sysco and US Foods is also creating a chokehold on their prices. Trump’s fiscal and international trade policies have wrecked a lot of the economy causing huge spikes in inflation too. Besides that we have plain old corporate greed with them taking advantage of all this as a smokescreen to crank up the cost of their food.


  • I didn’t get to finish Lost Odyssey due to my 360 red-ringing. It’s a shame too because the story was one of the saddest since FF IX. It really explores the idea that immortality isn’t all that great when everyone you know and love will eventually die and leave you with just memories, but then end up losing those memories too which ends up being half blessing and curse. The industrial setting a la FF VI was just gorgeous with one of Uematsu’s best ever scores going off in the background. The character designs were pretty great overall too with Jansen being one of my favorite JRPG characters because of his dry witty remarks no matter what the situation is.

    Everything about the game hit just right and felt like it was a proper FF title in all but name. It hurt to know Mistwalker Studios barely did anything worthwhile after that for a long while until Fantasian.