The 'official' Cohost for Gaming Hell, the retro game website with guts! Huge guts!!


iiotenki
@iiotenki

First, this isn't my final final post I'm going to run on here before the lockdown comes for us all. My inner writer would feel a little deflated if I left it at this, so I have one more sentimental post drafted that I'll run sometime within the next 24 hours or so. (I will also try to answer any remaining asks that get in before the deadline, but no promises! They will otherwise remain open until the shutdown, though, so speak now or forever hold your piece!) That said, I figured I should give those folks who are still here at least a bit more heads up about where you can find me next for the time being than the very last day of the site, so... here we are!

What am I doing next in general?

I'm still translating and localizing games from Japanese into English full-time! This year's been a bit of a bumpy one in terms of actual job steadiness, but things are finally beginning to mellow out and I've got some pretty exciting, beefy projects I hope to be able to eventually reveal within, let's say, the next 18 to 24 months. So even if I'm a little quieter in public at times, rest assured, I'm still toiling away in the Excel mines, bringing you the sorts of down to earth, genre-fluent localizations you've hopefully come to expect from me. (At least, I certainly do!)

In terms of my online activity beyond that, I'm... still figuring that out! To be quite honest, Cohost has weaned me off microblogging-style social media pretty much entirely. As it turns out, when you're a writer at heart, it gets old compacting your thoughts into bite-sized chunks purely out of obligation, or threading them when, maybe, just maybe you want to discuss something nuanced that takes a little more time and text to properly cover. I haven't entirely ruled out reemerging on one of the Twitter alternatives eventually because I really do cherish the community I've built up across my various accounts over the years and I love interacting with my regulars, both new and old! Even if I don't always talk to a lot of you, I genuinely do recognize a lot of you from your icons when I see you respond to myself and I will never, ever take for granted the fact that for over ten years now, so many of you have given me and my niche interests in Japanese game history the time of day. I want to keep that going somehow and will do my best to come up with a solution eventually that I'm comfortable with given the current climate elsewhere.

In short, I'm still going to be giving my job 110 percent and I'm still going to be advocating for Japanese games and their history in my own way, even if that advocacy may take some different shapes moving forward. I won't make any promises, but I've got some ambitions for how I want to spread the Good News about dating sims and the like and, y'know, I've got some people giving me their ear. Stay tuned. I might eventually pop up somewhere you least expect it. :eggbug-relieved:

Where can I be found next?

Okay, with that out of the way, let's get down to brass tacks and the brass tacks are... that because I was on semi-vacation in Tokyo for the last couple of weeks, I haven't had much time to hash out where I'm going to next. So, to make it simple, here are my current plans in three easy, digestible bullet points!

  • Blog! I've set up a Bear blog like a lot of other cool folks on here and it's got a cool domain: https://dateemups.com/! That's Date 'em Ups! As in the bit I'll never give up on! The shape and form of the blog is potentially subject to change; I really do eventually want something with proper community interaction and any suggestions on that end that won't be too burdensome in terms of moderations are highly welcome! But for the time being, it'll do just fine. It's got an RSS feed that I highly subscribe to and one of those cute little 88x31 buttons you can put on your own blog or site to link to it and network together like the old days! In terms of content, in the short term, I'll mainly be porting over the most pertinent longform posts from here so they have a permanent home, but will of course pepper in new stuff when I can. (And yes, I haven't forgotten about archiving the dating sim LPs. All in good time!)

  • Bluesky. Some of you have cheekily already figured this out, but yes, I've had a Bluesky account parked for some time. If you follow me, you can find it in my profile bio on here. To be absolutely clear, as of this writing, I do not intend to post there and it is entirely possible that I never will. You are welcome to follow it, but I will not make any promises whatsoever that I will do anything with it in the future and I will not, under any circumstance, respond to any public posts directed at that account while it remains in stasis, so please do not attempt to contact me that way. However, that being said, I know that some of you who don't already have any of my other contact info may want an easy way to get in touch privately, so, moving forward, I will try to keep an eye on any new followers and will follow back at my discretion. In practice, this will primarily apply to fellow localization, game dev, and media acquaintances. If I don't follow back, please don't take it personally! I probably like you just fine and am just being selective as a matter of organization!

  • Twitter. My old handle is also viewable to followers in my profile. Exact same caveats as Bluesky apply and more. Under no circumstances do I plan to revive public posting on my Twitter account at this time and it officially continues to exist solely as a work DM inbox. If you don't have a Bluesky account, you may send a follow request there and if I recognize you from one of the above fields, chances are, I'll accept so that we can DM in the future if need be. Otherwise, the account will remain locked to everybody else, no exceptions. Again, nothing personal! Once things settle down, I will hopefully find a way to be a bit more publicly accessible again beyond the blog, but that's probably going to take some time, so sit tight!

TLDR

Follow my new blog! If I decide to officially open up shop on any other sites or services, that's where I'll announce it! And until I do, it's where you'll find me continuing to gush about dating sims and weird arcade boards I'm terrified of blowing up and all kinds of other fun stuff!

Thanks for everything, Cohost! Look out for that final blog post coming soon and either way, rest assured, this is by no means the last you'll see of me and I hope it's not the last I see of any of you, either! :eggbug-relieved:


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in reply to @iiotenki's post:

there's some people i followed here that i feel might just slip back beneath the waves and not show up again, but i'm not particularly worried about you post-cohost because it seems like you've really hit a groove with longform posts. for too long the people of this earth have wallowed in painful ignorance of refrain love ~ anata ni mitai ~ for the sony playstation tom, there is much to do. also is this game any good i'm just looking at the first thing with "love in the name on psx datacenter. one of the girls is a rollerblader with a shirt that says FUNK that has to count for something

i probably won't have as much opportunity to stay in touch with you, but then it's not like i posted a lot here anyway. as long as you have comments on i guess there's always an avenue for me to do bad joke drivebys :eggbug:

Refrain Love 1 is Just Okay. The dialogue is very perfunctory and the game makes the common early dating sim mistake of feeling like it has to have character stat mechanics to be considered legitimate because Tokimeki Memorial did it and look what Konami got out of that. There are interesting things it does in the periphery, but overall, it's nothing remarkable. By no means the worst of its vintage that I've played, but not an ever-cliche hidden gem in the genre, as it were.

Refrain Love 2, on the other hand, is a massive improvement, landing at that very fleeting time where the "adventure" in renai adventure meant it was an adventure game in the historical Japanese sense and not a visual novel. Much, much better dialogue on the whole voiced by a pretty star-studded cast (the guy who plays Yoshio in Tokimemo even gets a promotion to one of the main characters here, which is fun) and the stat system has been removed entirely. It's a game that requires a little patience for things to really get rolling and because there is some RNG involved in getting non-plot progression events to trigger, but overall, aside from a few eyebrow-raising scenes, it's something of a genre cult classic that I have a lot of fondness for.

Anyway, definitely still feel free to bug me my DM elsewhere or even my old work email address you've contacted me previously; I use a different one these days for new clients, but I still keep that old one up for legacy folks because I just can't be bothered to do that migration and try to get people to update corporate mailing lists and potentially lose future work in the process, ahaha. The stuff you commissioned me to work on earlier in my career remains some of my personal favorite stuff to land on my desk and I'll always be super grateful you entrusted that stuff to me. I wish I got to do stuff of that ilk a lot more often than I do and I still even occasionally cite that old Sunsoft retrospective to clients when I need to prove to them I'm good for more than just writing dialogue boxes in video games, ahaha. But yeah, don't be a stranger, you're always genuinely one of my favorite faces to see pop up in my notifications whenever you do have something to share and it's been a sincere pleasure both getting to know you and occasionally work with you over the years. :eggbug-relieved: