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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2024

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  • I’m a huge fan of Nobuyuki Fukumoto’s work.

    Akagi is the best series that I can’t actually recommend, because if you don’t know anything about Mahjong it will be completely incomprehensible. Or if you do know anything about Mahjong, you’ve already read it and didn’t need me to recommend it to you. Akagi is peak, but only for a very specific niche audience.

    Kaiji is the one I can recommend. Kaiji gets conned by shady loan sharks and forced to gamble his way out of crippling debt, playing all kinds of bizarre games with high stakes. It’s the same style of intense psychological warfare, but, like, accessible to the average reader.

    He’s written a lot of other great stuff, and most of it is more Mahjong, but those are the big two from him.



  • No, I can’t say I’ve regularly seen that as a problem, at least not any moreso than other online spaces.

    Communication is a two-way street. If one person fails to understand what you’re trying to say, that may be their fault. But if nobody seems to understand what you’re trying to say, if this is happening to you regularly enough that you have to ask this kind of question, maybe you’re not being clear enough.

    As others have pointed out, text cannot carry tone, facial expressions, or other nuances that can picked up on with in-person conversations. When communicating through text, it’s important to keep that in mind and work within the limitations of text in order to be clear. Communicating effectively is a skill that takes effort to improve at.

    Full disclosure that I do not know you and I don’t want to accuse you of anything, but this sounds like the kind of question that has a story behind it. If you do feel like this is a frequent problem for you, I think you should try to look inward.











  • Fighting games: I’m a solid upper-intermediate player in most of the games I play. I’ve got a few tournament wins under my belt for smaller local brackets. At majors, I usually go 2-2 or 3-2, consistently finishing in the top half. Best I’ve ever done in a large bracket was 9th in Them’s Fightin’ Herds at Combo Breaker 2022.

    Riichi Mahjong: Master 1 on MajSoul, 7th Dan on Riichi City. Our local club runs a seasonal league where I took 2nd last season and am currently ranked 4th this season, though with IRL games the sample size is a bit small. I know I have a lot to improve on still, my deal-in rate is akin to repeatedly putting my hand on a hot stove.

    Versus puzzle games: Retired out of spite for the sad state of the competitive scene today, but I used to be the top Puyo Puyo player in my state, peaked at a 2700 rating back then. That is a big fish in a small pond though, top Japanese players are so far ahead of us because barely anyone in the west ever took this game seriously. Which leads into the long rant about why I called it quits… I’ve dabbled in a lot of other games as well, but when it comes to competitive scenes everything else is even more nonexistent than Puyo. There are a lot of games I can call myself good at just by default.