Playing Final Fantasy VIII (en français)

I will, perpetually, always need to replay Final Fantasy VIII. This is just a fact of life, an eternal truth. It's my favourite game, and I like to replay it fairly frequently. I know this thing inside out, so much so that I don't need the cues of a language I fully understand to play it - which is why I played it in German, back when I was vaguely studying that language.

You'll notice I'm playing the hideous and repulsive remaster this time around.

 

I've also briefly looked at it in Japanese (and I was surprised at how much I could understand, based predominantly on my kanji recognition, which at this point is... okay), but I didn't commit to that playthrough.

No, what it's time for, is to play Final Fantasy in French. Allons-y!

These experiments aren't really about understanding the text as much as enjoying the small linguistic differences and choices in translation. These little decisions are really fascinating to me - why is blizzara simply (glacier+) here?

I do get a little bit of a gauge on my ability to understand sentences, of course, but fundamentally I can't read French very well. I know enough vocabulary to get the gist of a lot of things, but the grammar really eludes me. That's because I like to pretend grammar isn't real and can't get me. But the unfortunate truth is that grammar gets me every day.

Nevertheless, it's a way of just sort of hanging out around a language. I don't really get what she's doing, but I'm watching her (the French language) do her thing.

The Frenchness comes out in interesting ways. The Trepies are now called Trèpistes. Balamb Garden is referred to as the B.G.U. (Balamb Garden Université). Characters keep saying "hum".

So true.

But my favourite thing about the French translation is its preference for literary allusion. Ifrit's attack is changed from Hellfire to Divine Comedie. Siren's attack is now named Andersen, for Hans Christian. Quezacotl is Golgotha, for some reason. Somehow, I feel as if these changes add a slightly more grounded feel to the game. It feels closer to the real world, but also a little bit darker and imbued with biblical horror. Diablos is Nosferatu. Wow.

A fun translation choice is that here, Rinoa's (or... Linoa's) dog-based limit break attacks are now all named after different dog breeds. Cute.

Beware: the dachshund attack.

And of course, we need to know what Seifer calls Zell on their way to Dollet. In English, it's chicken-wuss. In French, it's... blond hedgehog. Perfect.

I enjoy traversing this world in another language. It feels nice to wander Deling City in French. There's that big French archway, Nosferatu's in my brain, and I dreamed I was a clown.

This is how it should be. 

Please, touche pour descendre a l'arc de triomphe.

Toys (1992) is a Masterpiece

Toys is insane. In the best possible way, this freak's choice is a movie that requires the viewer's full attention. The dialogue is whip smart and searingly funny, but can be easily lost in the strange, foggy sort of atmosphere of the whole thing. Every scene feels massively unreal, as if the movie takes place inside a playset, which is of course, thematically on point, but can make it hard to follow.

The characters don't quite react as you'd expect normal people to, and the plot, while a fantastic exploration of the link between consumerism and militarism through the thoughtless representations of real-world violence and prejudice that can be common in play, is at times absurd to the point of nonsensical. This is what makes Toys great, but it's also what makes Toys a bit of a hard movie.

I remember watching it as a child and being completely unable to understand what was going on. Watching again now, I'm not surprised. Watching this movie is a bit like viewing a snowy landscape through greasepaper. The obscurity of everything has to be embraced. You don't watch Toys as much as you let Toys wash over you.

And that works well with the sheer spectacle of the visual design, and the creepy, clanky, synth glitter goodness of the soundtrack, which really reminds you that, oh my God, it's 1992. In one scene, we see an assembly line of joyful workers assembling various toys, and Tori Amos sings moodily, "I love my job". It's amazing.

Robin Williams is here, and he's great, but my personal favourite performance is from the inimitable Joan Cusack. She's like a fairy floating through it all. She sleeps in a duck-shaped bed. She wears a big, plastic, pink wig. And she is filled with such wonder and love and passion for the toys and machines in her father's crazy factory. You can't help but love her, and smile when she smiles. But, y'know, that's me with Joan Cusack in general. She's the best.

If you weren't already lost in the great sauce of this movie by the half way point, the ending brings a great battle to fruition, in which essentially: a lot of toys are destroyed. Because they are "fighting". It's a moment of complete anarchy and chaos that strains against the edges of a movie already struggling to contain its own madness.

There's this sense of confinement to Toys. Almost every scene is in a claustrophobic, brightly coloured, meticulously decorated set. And then, in a dark room, all the toys die in a blaze of glory. Robin Williams is shouting and screaming. Explosions are going off. The sheer power of play and imagination beats opportunistic militarism. And it's so, so funny.

Four toy penguins out of five.

★★★★☆ 

Returning to Animal Crossing

The little animals in my Nintendo Switch have missed me dearly, or so they say. It has been quite some time since I've deigned to speak to them, but now, in January 2026, we have been given the gift of an enticing new update. So I must return to my island and see what's new.

Fine.

I stopped playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons some years ago because I'd essentially done it all. Every inch of my island was terraformed and bedazzled to perfection. Pink flowers and gnomes surrounded my little house, and I'd collected enough Nook Miles to last a lifetime. Back to the real world.

But what's this update all about? Did they add fights? Can you now physically brawl with your pig friends in this game? Of course not. They added a hotel.

There are some quality of life changes like improved crafting (you can make one thousand things at once now, you little manufacturer), but the main thing is: you get a hotel to decorate. This is situated at the end of that previously mysterious empty pier that sat lonely on the island, and that I plonked a harvest spread down onto, imagining it as a scenic, secluded picnic spot.

Here, the game gets into Happy Home Designer mode. This was a spin-off game on the 3DS that followed New Leaf, which had you decorating rooms to different animals' specifications. I didn't play it that much, but I liked the more task-focused gameplay. Here, that's tacked onto New Horizons, and here I am, decorating a new, child-themed room.

Lovely.

I'm only a few days into this (new rooms are allocated for you to decorate each day), but I already feel like I've exhausted the new stuff. Sure, it's fun to decorate a few rooms, but I've done it. And sure, it's nice to see hotel guests wandering the island, but they have little to say. All I get for my trouble is a new type of currency which I can redeem for stuff I don't care about. There is a hollowness to the experience. All these rooms, and nothing much to do with them.

I do like to see Resetti again, though. Maybe I'll employ his new services and wipe it all. Probably not though, because I'm attached to my gnome placement.

Don't touch my gnomes.

Duck World

Here are some more old photos from some beautiful Christmas in Scotland or other. I'm in the process of scanning a lot of the family photo collection at the moment, so I'll probably give you quite a few instalments of these.

Let's start it off real nice with this picture of me jumping all over my grandfather:

I must have entered terror mode. He was powerless to stop me. I regret nothing.

When I wasn't jumping on him, of course, he was sitting peacefully on that couch. With his daughter and her dog, Poppy.

Here's my grandma, at the other end of the room. Who knows what she's chuckling at.

Now for a detour. We must visit the ducks.

This was a park we used to visit all the time. Here I am, very much enjoying that duck attention, with my cousin in the background.

True bliss was attained in that duck park.

And then, eventually, we had to leave. Goodbye ducks. Farewell duck world. 

Drawing Every Picture on my Phone

There are too many images stored in my phone. This has been true for a long time, and I keep dreaming of some beautiful, immaculate, sudden way to exorcise them, to unleash them into the world and free up a big, delicious empty space in my phone.

That, clearly, is never going to happen, but I did come up with a fun way to turn this into an art project: what if I just drew them? What if I took every mundane but mysteriously undeletable image from my phone, and I drew a picture of it? That way I could collect them together, the picture and its copy, and present them, add them to a growing catalogue of phone ephemera.

These are my pictures, and I make them into new pictures, and in their copying they become displayable, twinned artefacts.

 

Here are three:

#1: A dog I saw in Edinburgh train station.

I had a delayed train. This thing was there.

 

#2. Fish and chips.

Dinner at Fred's, 4th of January. Yum!

 

#3. Fred walking ahead.

Also on the 4th. It snowed like crazy on this walk. We were buffeted. But that was long after this picture was taken.

*** 

Perhaps soon I will draw more of the pictures on my phone. I'm posting them on Tumblr with the tag #depomp for easy cataloguing. Until then, watch out! More pictures may accumulate (scary).

Movie-Watching Goals

I saw someone, a week into the beautiful new year, talk about trying to watch one movie per day for the whole year. 365 beautiful movies. The responses were mostly just people saying they were already pretty far behind for something like that - with the exception of one guy who had apparently already watched over forty films. How, I do not know.

As for me, well, we're just under two weeks in, and I have watched (at the time of writing) five. But it's possible that I could bridge the gap... it's feasible.

Wake Up Dead Man was one of my first watches of the year.

I've been thinking about smaller, more specific movie-watching goals. The Letterboxd end-of-year stats summary presents you with a most-watched actor and director, who for me, in 2025, were Catherine O'Hara (mostly for voice acting roles), and Jon Watts.

Jon Watts is the director of the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, and watching two of those was enough to put him at the top of my list. Suffice to say, I don't do a lot of watching-by-director. So I'd like to try and explore the films of particular actors and directors this year, and I have chosen my first targets.

Jessie Buckley, shot by Nathanial Goldberg for Elle. 

For my actor, it's Jessie Buckley. I love the projects she chooses, she just won a delicious Golden Globe, and there's something about her - I'm always excited to see her. She has become one of my absolute favourites in recent years, after I'm Thinking of Ending Things catapulted her into my heart, and then Women Talking solidified her place there. Plus, I want to read Hamnet and then watch that thing. I need to.

And for my director, it's going to be David Lean. He's a fascinating, big British director - the one behind Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge Over the River Kwai, and despite another film of his, Brief Encounter, being my absolute favourite film of all time, I've never seen any of his other stuff. He also made a documentary about salvaging Captain Cook's anchor, which is a really interesting deviation from the rest of his work. I shall be watching.

Another thing to consider is curation. I always find the Criterion Collection to be a really useful general seal of approval, since even if I don't like a Criterion-selected film, I pretty much always find it to be worth checking out, but I also had some luck with The Guardian's list of the best films of 2025.

 

I'll talk about three of them now.

1. Young Mothers

This is a very naturalistic, beautifully shot, vivid film that follows a group of teenage mothers who live in temporary support housing together. It's very stark and sad, but it also has these wonderful explorations of grief and anger and joy. A very rich, layered, lovable thing. 

 

2. 2000 Meters to Andriivka

A documentary about a Ukrainian counter-offensive mission, this is as moving and as harrowing as you would expect. It's striking to see the minute details of this mission, the incredibly fraught and slow progress the soldiers make, and their palpable but muted anguish. It is a crushing film, but it is beautiful. 

 

3. One Battle After Another

This is the freak option. A baffling movie in some respects, there's a unique sort of insane humour to a Paul Thomas Anderson venture, and there are some monumental one-shots. Every second of this movie feels like a fever. It shudders onward. It's amazing.

 

***

 

If I can get three more films this effective into me this year, I know I will be more powerful than ever. So I'm gonna watch another one, right now. 

The Alien, and Other Things

Here are some mysterious old film photographs from some Christmas or other at my grandfather's house. First, and possibly most importantly, the alien. From Toy Story. This was a very special character in our household. You could press on his tummy to make him say "ooooh". And that, people, is all you really need.

Here, you might wonder, what the hell is going on? Well, that's me standing on my uncle. He deserved it. I strongly remember being really passionate about that Mickey Mouse t-shirt. I loved that thing.

But did I love it more than these two huge multipacks of crisps? Some questions are hard to answer. 

Forget about me though, because it's time to see the cat. She's covered in Beanie Babies. It's normal for her.

Now we must see the journey of a whoopee cushion. First, it's in front of my uncle Steve's face.

But soon it has a peaceful rest on the couch. Relax now, whoopee cushion. You have done your duty.