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Today my wife texted me this, and then immediately called me to make sure I got it because it was “an urgent message”.

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ive been embroidering for nearly half my life and it still blows my mind how cheap it is as a hobby tbh. it can be as expensive as you want to make it, sure. I've definitely invested in nicer tools when I had the finances to do so. But relatively compared to other hobbies it's kinda nuts that a splurge on materials is like. 9 bucks for a pack of some of the fanciest needles you can buy. Silk thread for 6 dollars. The industry gold standard thread is the stuff already available at every single craft store in the USA. If you follow exacting patterns that require a lot of color changes it can add up, but those are often projects that require weeks or months of work. Let's say you had 50 color changes and the project uses most of each skein. That's months of hobby-ing right there, for about 50 dollars plus the cost of base materials which is under 10 dollars.

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Yesterday i watched Kpop Demon Hunters and I HAD TO draw Jinu, so i did☝️

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KPOP DEMON HUNTERS (2025) dir. Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans

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sorry, the strip peaked here

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KPOP DEMON HUNTERS (2025) dir. by Maggie Kang, Chris Appelhans

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#when you think of Tim McGraw #I hope you think of a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors…

the fucking Tim McGraw casting news for Mighty Nein has me spiraling. This was so outta left field if you gave me a million guesses I wouldn't have ever imagined him joining the show

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oh man, all my favorite disney princesses: Mulan, Moana, Tiana, Commander Riker...

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daily reminder that there is absolutely nothing normal about being expected to waste a majority of your life at a corporation to survive instead of indulging in better life experiences ✨

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SHOW ME WHAT'S UNDERNEATH, I'LL FIND YOUR HARMONY FEARLESS AND UNDEFINED, THIS IS WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE.

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living my best basic white bitch dreams

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It's very endearing to me how many people are willing to keep an eye on a video feed so they can push a button and let a fish in the Netherlands get to the other side of a dam.

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look i just need more people to talk about Sandrock with

I started playing My Time at Sandrock about two months ago. I'm a cozy game veteran (not to shameful-brag but I have over 1k hours in SDV on Steam alone -- sorry fellas, I'm taken) and I even played My Time at Portia for a couple hundred hours after it came out. (My review was always "it's fine, don't pay full price".) But I can't remember a game that has both simultaneously captivated me while also contributing to an overall improvement in the quality of my actual IRL life. (My actual in real life life, yes.)

Anyway here are way too many thoughts about why I love this game.

My Time at Sandrock fits the cozy gameplay loops we come to expect from the genre: you move to a new place, start out small, make some friends, gather a frankly alarming amount of raw materials, etc. But whereas games like Stardew Valley or Coral Island have that gameplay loop mostly centered around your farm (with some later quests to improve the community), Sandrock's gameplay feels more like an RPG: you get actual main story quests, it's just instead of killing a monster you have to construct a bridge. (Although you do sometimes kill monsters.) This does mean you can fail missions, but I never really felt any pressure to get them done in time.

The game does the expected nightly autosave while also allowing for manual saves. This means I have a built-in regular checkpoint to break the ADHD hyperfocus cycle: am I done playing for the day? Do I need to use the bathroom? With a regular RPG/MMORPG, there's literally nothing that'll feel like a stopping spot and I end up playing fewer hours of video games overall when I play a cozy game. But since there are manual saves as well, it also means that in a pinch I can just save wherever the hell I am and exit out.

The game has a desert setting which is absolutely breathtaking (pictures below), and one of the core mechanics is conserving water. This means that I've tricked my brain into taking a sip of water any time it's mentioned in the game. I did not know what it felt like to be properly hydrated.

Sandrock also feels more unique because the world really changes as you play. Yeah, I know you get the Community Center and the theater in Stardew, but the Community Center just results in Shane being unemployed and Clint being even MORE useless, and by the time the theater is out, I've basically maxed out whatever relationships I wanted to max out anyway. But in Sandrock, you literally build a bridge or fix up a railway station and then those changes persist in the game. It's not just big things -- I had a romance mission to make a stack of rocks (long story), and the stack of rocks persisted after that event. Even after I broke up with that character and fell for another person, that heart sculpture was just there.

And driving all these changes in the environment is a story that is ridiculously complex and unexpected, all set in a "cheery post-apocalyptic" world. And I DESPERATELY NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE PLOT WITH PEOPLE OK, I want someone to play through this game and then send me a DM with their reactions.

ok i've rambled enough, thank you for coming to my beth talk

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pop pop!  👊 💙

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