Samantha Puc's Blog, page 3

Game Thoughts: Princess Peach: Showtime! Is Breezy & Delightful

If you haven’t played Princess Peach: Showtime! yet, my only question is: Do you hate having fun?

I’m generally terrible at platformers but I absolutely adore the Super Mario games. In the last two years, I’ve come to love them even more because I play them with my partners, one of whom has played them all their life and the other of whom is in a similar boat to me: we’ve played them, but we’re not particularly good at them. In multiplayer games, we rely on each other to get through; in solo game...

Shalene Gupta’s The Cycle Highlights the World-Shattering Impact of PMDD

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It’s Not Monsterism, It’s PMDD

In 2017, an acquaintance who eventually became my boss posted on social media about being diagnosed with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD). She described it as having extreme anxiety and panic symptoms the week leading up to her period, all of which disappeared the moment she started bleeding. The post lingered in t...

Books I Read (and Loved) in Winter 2024

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Every year, I set both a quantitative reading goal and a qualitative reading goal. For example: This year, I want to read at least 75 books and I want to read more nonfiction than I did in 2023. As a person who writes professionally about books, I often meet the quantitative goal, but not the qualitative. Looking at my “for work” TBR (which is so long, oh no), I think I might actually meet both goals this year. My “for pleasur...

In Case You Missed It: Changing It Up

If you’ve been following my work for at least the last year, you’ve likely seen me say that I don’t plan to start a newsletter. I’ve tried several times and fallen off within months if not weeks. But since August of last year, I’ve been editing The Nonbinarian Book Bike newsletter, and putting it together every month is a blast. It’s different from having a personal newsletter in that the organization relies on me to send it out each month, and I’m reporting to someone other than myself about th...

I Broke My Glasses

In mid-January, my glasses broke. I pinched the frame of one lens between my left thumb and forefinger, as usual, while I firmly scrubbed at the other lens with a microfiber cloth using my right thumb, forefinger, and second finger. After just one or two swirls of the cloth, the bridge snapped, banishing a tiny scrap of plastic to the ether and leaving one lens clenched in each hand. I gasped, stunned, and stared at the gap where the bridge of my glasses had been a whole piece just seconds ago. ...

Game Thoughts: Stray

In 2022, developer BlueTwelve Studio and publisher Annapurna Interactive released Stray, an immersive, sci-fi roleplaying game in which the player takes on the roll of a young, orange tabby cat who lives in a grown-over structure with their three siblings. While exploring one morning, the cat falls into a walled-in city, which has been sealed off for centuries to prevent “contamination” from the Outside (capitalized in the game, as “the Outside” is considered by most to be a myth). At first, the...

Unpacking 2023

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Once upon a time, I always made sure to write an end-of-year blog post that included my favorite media and memories from that year. I felt pressured to do it for the sake of chronicling things that mattered to me during the year, and I felt pressured to share it as part of my online presence. Now, I still feel compelled to write a “wrap-up” of sorts, but I feel less compelled to write long, meandering paragraphs about the year...

Books I Read (and Loved) in Winter 2023

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S.A.D. rears its ugly head again, but the holiday spirit and anticipation of a visit with a dear friend are making things much, much easier than they would be otherwise. I’ve been somewhat cocooned since the end of summer due to surgery, recovery, holiday planning, work, and sorting through some major life changes. More on some of that later, but for now, I want to focus on one of the things that’s brought me a ton of joy: boo...

Books I Read (and Loved) in Summer 2023

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Although I didn’t hit a “reading slump” this summer—far from it—I read in big, fast chunks with long lulls in between. Rather than do monthly posts for the last three months with just one or two books each, I opted to combine them all into one big summer post, both for the sake of simplicity and to provide as many book blurbs as possible for these strange, hot, nebulous months.

Summer was weird for me. I started it in recovery ...

In Case You Missed It: Summer Swelter

Ahoy there! Wondering where I’ve been? Frankly, so am I.

In case you missed the last post in this series (see what I did there?), here’s the drill: Rather than making a newsletter I know I won’t keep up with or spreading myself thin across every social media platform that isn’t Instagram, occasionally you’ll see a post just like this rounding up my recent work, links to pieces that have been occupying my brain, comics and art I like, and basically whatever else I want to share. My goal with each ...