The More Things Change...

Brendan Whalen

— 3 min read
A screenshot of the town square in Animal Crossing New Horizons with the text "What kind of "traveling musician" shows up in the same town every week and hangs out for 14+ hours?"
Answer: A drug dealer

One thing about a five year hiatus in the newsletter is that most of the things I was watching, reading, listening to, et cetera have ended or I've fallen off of them to the point where there isn't much to talk about. A major exception to that trend is Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which I was hooked on in May of 2020, and have reignited my relationship with over the past few months on my Switch 2.

Here's the last thing I wrote about AC:NH from the final Tinyletter newsletter:

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I won't bore you with details of my Animal Crossing adventures except to say that it's been immensely satisfying to watch others discover the simple joy of trying to get an obnoxious anthropomorphic ape to move out so an adorable and friendly anteater can move in. Most of my starting villagers were jocks, walking around talking about bulking up and how many reps they could do. The ones who have stayed have become corrupted by my preferred lazy goat and bear villagers. They now wander the cursed labyrinth I constructed, falling asleep on their feet and longing for the merciful release of being allowed to move out. They can't go fast enough for my liking.

Here's something from 5 full years before that, over a decade back in my Animal Crossing journey:

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Today is the two-year anniversary of me breaking down and buying a Nintendo 3DS because I couldn't stand not playing the new Animal Crossing game anymore. Animal Crossing is a series of games in which you live in a tiny bucolic town, a debt slave to a tyrannical tanuki who pushes increasingly gauche home improvements on you to keep you under his clawed heel. You're actually under no obligation to ever do anything. There's no ending, and the game takes place in real time, meaning that it will continue its narrative until the last time you turn your Nintendo off, never to play it again.

Which is all to say that, as a series, Animal Crossing has its hooks deep in me for the long haul, it would seem. In the time since I started playing the series, I have lived in four different cities, held jobs in at least 4 distinct fields, been through a pandemic, fires, floods, earthquakes, and lightning, and come out the other side reasonably intact, though still in debt to that fucking tanuki somehow.

One of the benefits of the new versions of Animal Crossing is that they include a mechanic that allows you to share images and video directly from the game, which is where I got the header for today's newsletter. I believe it actually may have been the final pic of the day previously, but since Tinyletter nuked all their hosted files, it no longer shows up when I look at that newsletter.

I do have years of screencaps and videos from my AC adventures, which I'll share with you here so you're caught up. If you're somehow also still playing this timesink, please reach out, especially if you have a good asking price on turnips.

One of my longstanding rituals for New Year's Eve was to play around midnight, when the villagers would celebrate by setting off fireworks and confetti poppers. They love to blow shit up, and would probably feel right at home in LA during the holidays

Animal Crossing screenshot featuring a character made up to look like Bane and the text "You merely adopted the island. I was born on it."
There was a long stretch of time where I made my character look like Bane from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. As you can see, I really leaned into it.
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After Jude passed I made him a little memorial garden on a quiet mesa near the back of my island. I promise not every post will include sad memories about my dead dog.

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Nintendo has strong content moderation features, but they cannot keep the message from reaching the people

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