I had a lot of fun memories with the bright color scheme for Burnout 3: Takedown. Plus the controls felt great, and weren’t compromised simply because I upgraded to a faster car.

Wreckfest (2018) is my most favorite recent game. It had a combination arcade and simulation feel, because the controls were simple and the driving experience felt exactly like driving a rusty old car ready to get crumpled again.

I like dogs that get to know me over years, and small dogs. Unfortunately I get few opportunities to do so authentically (many of them I got to know as a child are deceased today), as I don’t like to be approached by random dogs because I believe they are thinking I have food.

I didn’t like the fact that my old apartment allowed dogs (I would leave the elevator whenever one showed up, seclusion and dogs don’t go well together). But I always smiled whenever I got a, relatively frequent, reply-all email from management about disciplining people whose dogs used the grass (or elevator, one time) as a toilet.

When I visit a new country I always take a look at what mildly iconic retro items it maintains that I don’t find back home, for example the KiHa 40 trains in rural Japan, or the old Citroen cars in France, or the BBC microcomputers in the UK, among others.

In Kyūshū I saw a supermarket have out a public rotary dial telephone. It was in a relatively new supermarket. The supermarket even published diagrams instructing people on how to use a rotary dial, right next to the phone, as well as a recently-printed label for taxi phone numbers on the phone itself, to demonstrate that these almost-obsolete devices still had utility in 2018.