Hello everyone, and welcome to Indieventure’s very first Postcard! Our plan for these blog-style posts is to provide a casual brain dump of what Liam, Rebecca, and I (Rachel!) have been up to between episodes. Things we’ve been watching, playing, reading, and hyperfixating on. Whatever we feel like! It’s a cute lil’ postcard between episode adventures.
So yeah, we’ll probably be doing one of these every two weeks (??). We’ll see how it goes! BLOGGING. ONLINE. YAY!
Let’s goooooo!
Kyle MacLachlan in Desperate Housewives is a galactic-level slay
My bestie Chay and I have been watching Desperate Housewives each week (OH MY GOD IT’S SO GOOD, screaming, crying, throwing up, etc. etc.) and as Kyle MacLachlan fans, we’ve been enjoying Kyle’s campy, dramatic – but also super sincere! – performance as Orson Hodge.
HOWEVER, we were NOT ready for S4 EP4. Screenshots below. Enjoy.
God, I love that man.
Rachel
I ate an enormous Sopranos-themed Sandwich in Manchester, and my life will never be the same
Yolli and I have finally started watching The Sopranos, HBO’s seminal gangster drama that first aired in 1999. Prior to watching, I knew only two things about The Sopranos: The ending and Gabagool. Two seasons deep, both of these things remain a mystery to me. I have no idea how we get to that infamous finale, and (despite multiple characters shouting about it) I still don’t have a fucking clue what Gabagool is.
Until a recent trip to Manchester, that is! Alongside previous-guest Ed Thorn, we were scouring the city’s Northern Quarter for a spot of lunch that would keep us filled for our train journey home but wouldn’t destroy our guts. We eventually stumbled upon a sandwich place called Bada Bing, a trendy little establishment whose signature sandwich contained – would you believe it – Gabagool!
The sandwich was phenomenal. It was the size of a large baby and contained everything you’d want from a lunchtime sando. Pickles. Tomatoes. Three different types of meat. Enough mayonnaise to drown a rat. It was superb. As for the Gabagool? It’s just ham. Quite a disappointing revelation, but such is life.
Hilariously, it was only on the way out that I realised that the sandwich shop was themed after The Sopranos. Not only were the walls filled with Hanna-Barbera styled renditions of Sopranos characters, but the name itself – Bada Bing – is the name of the strip club that Tony and his crew operate as a front in the show.
Good sandwich. Cool place. I’m an idiot. What else is new?
Liam
Toilet humour delivers my favourite joke in The Sims 4
For largely positive real-life reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about bathroom renovations recently – primarily, those nifty toilets that have a sink above the cistern, a popular space-saving device in small Japanese homes and, increasingly (for similar reasons), prison cells.
You know you’re staring down the barrel of middle age when a Saturday morning sees you checking out the B&Q website and getting excited because it turns out the eco-friendly micro-bathroom toilet of your dreams would only set you back a couple of hundred quid. Of course, that’s if you’re happy to settle for the off-brand British-made economy model. Google Gemini once again intruded on a day that was going just fine without its input to inform me that I could import a real unit from Japan for anywhere between £500 and £5,000.
I think I can live without a five-grand toilet, especially when the space it’s bound to occupy is slightly smaller than the average built-in wardrobe. But it did get me thinking, as the minutiae of real life often does, about The Sims 4 – and in particular, the “Potty Mouth 2.0”, a talking toilet that was added in 2016’s City Living expansion pack.
The Potty Mouth 2.0 is perhaps one of TS4’s most interesting jokes. A Simlish-speaker approaching it for the first time will usually react with a combination of fascination, trepidation, and anxiety as every possible interaction is captioned only with a series of question marks until they dare to experiment with the toilet’s various functions, which include an automatically dispensed fragrance mist and (somehow, not sure I want to know specifics) a massager.
Friend-Of-The-Podcast Mick once (very briefly) lived in Japan and confirms that this is entirely accurate to the experience of using a hi-tech Japanese bathroom for the first time as someone who can’t read any of the instructions. It’s also, to the best of my (considerable, I flatter myself) knowledge, the only acknowledgement in the franchise that mutually incomprehensible languages canonically exist in Sims world. And it’s the sort of subtle-yet-cartoonish humour that helped make the franchise so beloved in its early iterations – and a nice reminder that those zany yet authentic slice-of-life moments are still present if you’re paying attention.
Rebecca
The Pitt is the best medical drama I’ve ever seen wtf
Okay, so I’ve not seen that many medical dramas unless you count every season of House – but honestly, I was only watching that for House x Wilson (if you know, you know) – but I had been hearing a lot about The Pitt and yeah, I can confirm IT’S REALLY GOOD.
Friend of the podcast Henry and I have been absolutely tearing our way through shows (Foundation S1? Meh. Too Much? Not enough. The Bear S4? Check, please.) but The Pitt is BUILT DIFFERENT. It’s got a great balance of hospital drama and personal drama, and it touches upon so many different topics about the American healthcare system. Also, each episode is an hour of a single 15-hour shift presented in real time. Episode one is 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM, episode two is 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM, and so on. Like, how 24 used to do it, but without Kiefer Sutherland shoving a towel down someone’s throat as a torture technique (wtf was up with that?? I was like 16 when I saw that, and it scarred me for life???).
I don’t think The Pitt is available on UK TV right now, but keep your peepers peeled for it when it eventually shows up.
Rachel
FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time is annoying as hell
I’m 25 hours into Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, an RPG that released back in May to high praise from players and press alike. In desperate need of a Switch 2 game after (finally) finishing The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom back in July, I decided to give it a try.
Less than an hour in, it became quickly, painfully apparent that Fantasy Life i is the most irritating video game I’ve played in years. Don’t get me wrong, the majority of its constituent parts are fine. The story is passable. The art style is cute, if a bit washed out and generic. Combat, gathering, and crafting are all enjoyable activities! But the sound. The sound.
For starters, the music is diabolical. If you were sent to hell for pirating Nintendo DS games, a demon would play this game’s soundtrack in your bedroom on a loop for all eternity. It’s a handheld-ass tracklist of woozy, plinky-plonky nonsense that raises my blood pressure and leaves me irritated for the rest of the day. But the worst culprit? The sound effects. Companion characters who accompany you on your quests have 2-3 lines of bland dialogue and will shout them repeatedly at you regardless of your activity or location. “Show me what you’ve got!” my carpenter pal screams for the 12th time in 30 seconds as I gently break some ore with a pickaxe. “I pray for your victory!” screeches my infantile paladin, as I pray for her swift and painful death in return.
But the worst bit? The sounds my own character makes every single time I press a button to perform one of the game’s many repeatable actions. I’ve tried two of the game’s voice presets, and both make the game sound like something I should be playing alone in a dark room while my fiancé is at the shops.
Here’s a short video of me fishing as an example:
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is very good (and the 15 hours I've spent with it so far have flown by) but it's easily the most irritating sounding game i've played in years. Just listen to the absolute state of this.
— Liam Richardson (@sevenoutoften.co.uk) August 19, 2025 at 10:13 PM
[image or embed]
Gotta say though, as a game? It rips! Very fun. Just make sure you play it with the sound turned off.
Liam
I finished TWD’s Clementine sequel comics, and it’s got me thinking about when franchises start to go in circles
First off: I’m not going to use this postcard to dunk on Tillie Walden’s graphic novel follow-up trilogy to Telltale’s The Walking Dead. I still don’t think continuing Clementine’s very obviously concluded story from the games was a particularly shrewd idea, either from an artistic or a fan-service perspective, but Walden writes cool queer comics with a unique art style that adapts really well to the world of TWD. She took a good commission from a big publisher when she saw it, did a great job within the restrictions she was given, and honestly? Good for her for securing that bag and then giving it her all.
I recently finished reading the final volume in the Clementine trilogy and overall found the whole production very enjoyable (a stance I don’t consider incompatible with the fact that, as a fan of the games, I’m still staunchly Team Louis). But I will admit that the ending felt a little underwhelming. Not only do we never learn exactly why Clem decided to abandon the home and family she’d found at the end of the games, but the graphic novels end with her… finding another home and family, without much introspection about what might make this time different. Which means that after all this wailing and gnashing of teeth and review bombing and the author getting literal death threats because fandom en masse tends to be awful, we’re left with a bit of a shaggy dog story that really wasn’t worth getting all that worked up about, no matter how much Skybound declared it canon to the games’ continuity. (In fact, I think its worth as an independent piece of fiction dramatically improves if you read it as a sidelong reimagining of everything post-Season 1 rather than as a strict sequel.)
I’m put in mind of last year’s Life is Strange: Double Exposure – a game I’m increasingly convinced only I actually liked – which was, after all, in much the same position: the beloved protagonist of a genre-defining modern adventure game returns with all the branches of her story neatly trimmed away; headcanons and fan forums promptly explode. The difference is that where Double Exposure took some wild leaps in an attempt to secure a future for its parent franchise, the Clementine trilogy essentially just looped back in a big circle. But both, evidently, failed in their primary objective of providing broadly marketable fan service. So who did it better? Honestly, probably some anonymous third-party creator who quietly dug in their heels and wrote something that wasn’t a direct sequel, no matter how loudly anyone asked them for one.
Rebecca
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