And now it's personal...

You weren't using that 401K, were you?

In response to the President's voter mandated tanking of the global economy, Nintendo has announced that they'll be delaying preorders for the just-unveiled Switch 2. They were due to start taking--huh? Wait, you mean to say that the narrow election victory in which most voters voted for someone other than a convicted felon wasn't a mandate to fire federal workers, wipe out trillions of dollars of stock values and reduce America's standing on the world stage to slightly above North Korea? But...but, why would he say it was unless...oh...oh no.

You don't suppose he doesn't know what he's doing, do you? Like, that he has no idea and is just flailing, lurching from one bad move to the next heedless of the chaos and lasting damage he's causing? I ask because he's famously bad at business. And president-ing. And didn't we go through this last time? And it sucked?

Or maybe he's just out golfing...hey, does he think stocks work like
golf scores? Like, the lower the better? That might explain a lot...

What? I'm not wrong. I'll stop calling
them dumb when they stop acting dumb.

Now look, as someone who reached adulthood in the late nineties and early two-thousands, I was at no point under the delusion that I would be able to retire. So, in many ways the disastrous financial consequences of half the country's (the dumb half, there I said it) President of choice aren't particularly shocking to me. The entire trajectory of my life has seen a steady decline in the likelihood of home ownership, financial security, and not dying under a mountain of medical debt, set against the worst wealth inequality since the Gilded Age.

Pictured: the stock marker being
liberated of thousands of points.

But at least we had video games, right? Soothing, escapist video games...Well, about that. Nintendo has announced that they'll be delaying the pre-orders for the Switch 2, the follow-up to their successful handheld gaming console, that they announced on Wednesday. Remember Wednesday? "Liberation Day?" They need to asses the impact of Trump's tariffs. You know, those things his supporters thought China was going to pay for? Because they literally don't know the meaning of the word "tariff." (see above, and again, I'm not sorry).

Hey, cheer up buddy.
At least we're not woke, amiright?

The Switch 2 was already going to cost four-hundred and fifty dollars of money. An obscene amount, sure, but reasonable when you factor in how much distraction we're going to need during the next few years. Oh, and it's actually five-hundred, if you want Mario Kart, which, obviously. And the tariff is going to increase that even more. Because consumers pay for tariffs...like we kept trying to tell the dumbs, but they're more interested in Hunter Biden's laptop and throwing themselves between protestors and Tesla dealerships. 

Anyway, to be clear, I'm more concerned (in no particular order) about the arbitrary and illegal deportations, the attacks on trans and queer rights, the racism, the misogyny, the climate, Federal agencies, Federal workers, but that's the beauty of being a millennial (fine, xennial): I have can have a nervous breakdown about more than one thing at a time. 

So let's turn that debilitating anxiety into positive action! And posters!

Today in Tilt-shift teases:

It is with a sense of great shame that I have to admit that I just got taken in by an April Fool's prank. A video game-related April Fool's prank. Specifically this:

Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger are catnip to nerds of a certain age.

Or, if you're younger than I, I don't
know, Taylor Swift? Is she still cool?

You clearly live a rich, full life with many outdoors activities, so I'll explain. Davidvinc RPGs is a channel devoted to role playing video games, usually of the classic Japanese variety. Today's video was entitled Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger in HD2D?! So I clicked. To an outsider, that title is inscrutable, but know that it leads one to believe that there'd been an announcement of HD2D remakes of two super-popular JRPG's of the 1990's. They're to the xennial micro generation what The Eagles are to Boomers.

I kind of had the sense that--huh? Right, HD2D is this recent aesthetic trend in gaming that combines pixel art with a faux tilt-shift effect, so everything looks like an animated diorama. As a style it's slightly twee, but those of us who sip from the chalice of nostalgia for video games we playing in middle school love it. Love it. 

"Put it in my veins."

-adults who were indoor kids in the 90's

YouTuber David Vincent: as adept
with kettlebells as he is pleasant lies

Anyway, as I'm watching this video of alleged footage from the aforementioned remakes, I'm waiting for David, the gaming/gym enthusiast to say something about how it's fan-art, or an unofficial mod, or something, but he doesn't. The footage isn't wholly convincing, but as it went on and no disclaimer was forthcoming, I found myself thinking that perhaps it was legit. I wanted it to be so. For a moment, I allowed myself to believe it. And then it dawned on me what day it was. What's more, I should have known better. After all, April Fool's Day pranks and video games have a long history. A history I've witnessed firsthand: in 1992, the now defunct gaming magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly published a trick that supposedly unlocked a secret boss in Street Fighter II. A prank that lives in infamy too this day. 

And it worked. Untold numbers of kids around the country dumped untold dollars worth of quarters into arcade machines in a vain attempt to fight mythical, and in fact apocraphyl, Sheng Long. But not me, I was on to them and clocked this as fake. Yet here I am today, more than three decades older and none the wiser, for I am now the fool. An April's fool at that. The ignominy of it all!

In retrospect, it's a pretty convincing hoax. So much so, that I'm beginning to
question if I was a particularly astute tween, or just one with serious trust issues.