The shelf stays open after midnight

Some of it came from other people. Mom got me The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter on Switch 2. Alyssa got me Xenosaga Episode II on PS2 and Quake on Switch. Grandma got me Silent Hill: Townfall on PS5 and Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave on Switch 2, both still en route, which feels appropriately unfinished for a birthday about unfinished feelings.

Those gifts aren't random. Mom knows Trails sits near the center of why I love JRPGs in the first place. Not just another new release, but one of the series that helped teach me why I love the genre in the first place. Alyssa didn't just buy me games I like. She bought the ones that finished things: Quake closes out a long boomer-shooter hunt on Switch, and Xenosaga II completes the trilogy on my shelf. Grandma went for Silent Hill, a franchise that has mattered to me across my whole collecting life even when it isn't what I spend most of my time playing, plus Fire Emblem for good measure. The people closest to me aren't just guessing at my taste. They're buying into the strange little internal logic of it. Which games finish a hunt. Which franchises still mean something even when they've drifted from my day-to-day queue. Which series still feel like home.

And then there was the self-inflicted half of the haul, which is where the joke starts.

Because apparently receiving thoughtful gifts was not enough. I also looked at my birthday and decided it was an excellent excuse to acquire Absolum on Switch 2, a Japanese import of the Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia Material and Design Works book, the NinNinDays Collection on Switch, and a small avalanche of PS2 games: Siren, Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana, 50 Cent: Bulletproof, Scarface: The World Is Yours, and Spawn: Armageddon.

Yes. Those last three are real, and yes, I wanted them. Not every purchase needs a thesis. Sometimes a weird old licensed game from the mid-2000s is just a weird old licensed game from the mid-2000s that ends up in your hands on your birthday, and you feel disproportionately pleased about it.

Looking at that whole pile afterward, the gifts and the self-inflicted mess together, I didn't feel like I'd completed some collector checklist. I felt like I was looking at a weirdly honest photograph of where I am right now. Not my career plan. Not my five-year outlook. Just the range of things I reach for when I have a little room to choose: a major Trails release, an older RPG that finally completes a trilogy, a classic shooter that closes a hunt, survival horror, obscure PS2 RPGs, crass early-2000s licensed games, modern Switch stuff, an intentionally odd little Switch collection, and a Japanese art book. I don't have a single prestige hierarchy for this stuff. I can care about Xenosaga and Atelier Iris and Siren while also being delighted to own 50 Cent: Bulletproof and Spawn: Armageddon. That doesn't resolve into a brand. It just resolves into me.

The Ar Tonelico book sits a little differently in the pile. It's not another game to clear. It's printed material around a game I've already fallen into. Character design, illustration, the visual identity surrounding the finished work. I've been caring more and more about that side of things: not only playing games, but paying attention to the production around them, the objects that survive beside the software. That impulse is part of why Bloodsoaked looks the way it does.

And that's where the contradiction starts to bother me, in a way I can't quite shake.

Because at twenty-seven, I feel more lost about my life in the broad, existential sense than I did when I was younger. That sounds dramatic when I write it down. It isn't meant to be. I don't mean I'm in crisis. I mean the big questions (where this is all going, what I'm supposed to be building toward, whether there's some eventual version of adulthood where the map finally gets handed over) feel less settled now, not more.

When I was younger, I think I assumed certainty would arrive eventually. Not overnight. Just… eventually. That somewhere between "trying things out" and "being a real adult," the picture would sharpen. Instead, the picture has gotten wider and fuzzier at the same time. Adulthood, it turns out, does not eventually hand you a map. It mostly hands you more hallway.

I don't have a grand plan neatly written down somewhere. I don't wake up every morning with a perfectly clear picture of the next decade. Some days that feels fine. Some days it feels like I'm wandering a building I somehow live in without ever having seen the floor plan.

And yet.

At the same time, and this is the part that keeps surprising me, I am more certain than ever about the things I genuinely love.

I'm clearer about my hobbies. Clearer about the kinds of games I want to spend time with. Clearer about the physical media I want on my shelf. Clearer about the strange, forgotten, overlooked art I'm drawn to, and why I keep circling back to it. That certainty didn't arrive as a manifesto. It arrived the slow way: through repetition, through preferences that refused to fade, through realizing I kept choosing the same kinds of things even when nobody was grading me on it. Through knowing which games finish a collection, which franchises still matter even when they aren't what I play most days, which genres I keep returning to, which physical objects I want to keep, and which corners of game art make me curious enough to import a book about them.

I don't need every hobby to be productive. I don't need collecting to be an investment strategy. I don't need my taste to impress anyone at a dinner table. I enjoy games as an art form. I enjoy physical media as something with weight and history, a little evidence that it existed outside a menu screen. I enjoy hunting down the things that catch my attention and giving them room simply because they did. That impulse doesn't always look sensible from the outside. I'm increasingly fine with that.

There's a particular humor to being twenty-seven and still getting extremely excited about an old game, a physical release, some half-forgotten thing most people will never think about twice. Part of me knows how that looks. Another part of me opens the case, looks at the disc or the cartridge or the booklet, and feels that dumb little spark anyway. I'm not trying to outgrow that. If anything, I'm starting to trust it more.

None of this is me arguing that collecting is objectively important, or that only certain kinds of media are worth caring about, or that anyone else should rearrange their life around plastic cases and art books. That's not the point. The point is smaller and more personal: these things make me happy in a way that feels increasingly specific, and increasingly hard to fake.

Bloodsoaked exists partly because of that.

This site has never really been about covering everything, or chasing whatever's currently loudest. It's been about keeping track of the things that stuck. Paying attention to art that might otherwise slip through the cracks. Writing down why a game, a film, a physical object mattered to me before the feeling got abstracted into nostalgia or algorithm sludge. It's a review outlet sometimes. It's a personal archive more often. It's also just me refusing to pretend that only culturally prestigious things are worth caring about.

I keep building this weird little publication because I care about the shelf. Because I care about the dust on it. Because I think there's something quietly meaningful about documenting the corners of media culture that made a home in your head, even if they never made anyone famous, even if they never become a "smart" use of your time.

So that's where twenty-seven finds me. Less certain about the big picture. More certain about the small one. A little melancholy about the missing map. A little amused that the clearest version of myself still shows up holding a new-old game and looking disproportionately pleased about it.

I may not know exactly what I'm doing with my life at twenty-seven. But I know what I like. And increasingly, I'm realizing that isn't nothing.

Until next time, Dakota