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This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link. Let’s just get this out of the way to start: there are certainly video games with bad design. Horrid design, even. Systems that do not make any sense, or do not actually work together in concert, or that just kind of pile up to check off boxes and make a game sound deep and engaging when all that really happens is that the developers have made a slog.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link. Imagine, for a moment, that a game was developed by the designer of EarthBound, the director of the first four Dragon Quest games, a producer on the Zero Escape and Danganropa games, the founder of The Pokémon Company and Creatures Inc.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link. Licensed games can be a minefield, but there are classics within this territory, just like any other kind of game. Konami was one developer/publisher combo that had plenty of success with licensed titles a few decades back.

The future, most people would agree, is inherently unpredictable. Yet not all of it is: depending on the time scale of your prediction, some aspects of the future won’t change very much. The sun will still be rising in 100 years, for instance. The eventual fate of the sun, in several million years, is also quite predictable, because stars turn out not to be that complex: they’re mostly just big balls of plasma undergoing constant nuclear fusion.

I’m definitely a people person. (Shocker, I know.) What I mean is that I generally like people. I’m fascinated by what motivates them, love discovering (and sharing with them) their special spark, and enjoy learning what makes them tick. But I especially like my people. You know someone is your kinda people when you feel better after spending time together rather than depleted. (No thanks, energy vampires!) And I hadn’t realized how much I missed being around my people until recently when I was fortunate enough to get several doses in close succession.

This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. Here is a potentially familiar scene. You are exhausted after working a full day, the sort of day when you felt like your attention was drawn in 20 different directions, where you were ricocheting between obligations and meetings and running six minutes late to pick-up and realizing that if you didn’t put that load of laundry in the wash now, at 9 pm, the rest of the week could very well collapse in on itself.

Shooting is at a premium in the NBA. Gone are the days where teams play multiple lumbering bigs incapable of hitting from outside the paint, and for good reason. Shooting breathes space into offenses, opening up passing and drive lanes and significantly increasing the pressure opposing defenses feel when scrambling in rotation. Players that can’t shoot are becoming rarer and rarer, particularly among perimeter options. But several of the NBA’s top contenders have found smart ways to fit guards who are ineffective shooters into their rotations.

The aftershocks from the Pentagon’s 2020 decision to cut the five active-duty Special Forces groups’ main link to Joint Special Operations Command continue to reverberate, with the validation exercises for the groups’ rebranded counterterrorism companies’ new mission starting this summer. Prior to 2020, each group contained a company designed, trained and resourced to act as a back-up to JSOC’s special mission units, which conduct the United States’ most sensitive counterterrorism missions.

At the beginning of the month, I sketched out the toolkit for making low — or at least lower — proof cocktails: sherry, low-proof amari like Cynar, and other fortified wines like vermouth. We’ve already looked at the first two. So as we close out lower proof January, we’ll examine a cocktail built on a foundation of sweet vermouth.  It’s one of the most classic cocktails of them all: the Manhattan — but in reverse proportions.