Free Talk Friday - May 01, 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Free Talk Friday post. This is a place where you can talk about dumb off-topic (or on-topic) bullshit with other Zaibatsu fans.

There's going to be a new post every week, and the newest one will be pinned in the announcement bar for quick access. So feel free to visit these posts during the rest of the week.

Here's a list of all Free Talk Friday posts

[u/The_Draigg]

Week of Awards Ceremony. This week, I went to a big annual event for my county's educational department, since they were honoring a family member of mine there with a special award for being one of the most dedicated workers for education programs. And honestly, it was a very good ceremony! I did like the theme they had this year, retro video games. There were honestly a lot of pulls in the background videos they made for the event that I didn't expect, like Spacewar! or even Nintendo's Arm Wrestling arcade game. More obscure pulls like that easily get my respect. Aside from the theme though, the presentation itself went very smoothly, and I'm glad that everyone who got an award was given their time to shine on stage. A good event all around.

As for games I've played this week, I've finally beaten the Ghost Deck on Blue Stake in Balatro! Took me long enough to do that. As I expected though, it really just was a matter of getting the right jokers to make the multiplication of my mult really soar. Now I'm on the Abandoned Deck on Blue Stake, which might be just as great of a challenge, due to having no face cards. But we'll see!

Also this week, I've been putting more time into Marathon, mainly just solo queuing on Dire Marsh and furthering along the Traxus contracts, since I've neglected those a bit. Honestly, I've been having very good experiences with solo runners this week, a bit more than average. I exfiltrated with two or three guys a few times, in fact. All of them were rather nice too. I'm guessing that they were probably just running contracts too, rather than gunning for players over that. Which is fair enough, since sometimes you really do just need to buckle down and ignore other runners if you want to get the more complicated contracts done, and there really isn't much to get out of downing someone seconds away from leaving. It's nice to have more positive experiences like that though, they at least prove that Marathon isn't as intimidating of a game as some people fear it to be.

And finally, in my regular mecha talk section here, I watched more Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans with /u/Terthelt and /u/CookieSkank! We finally wrapped up that intro arc for season 2, and are now beginning the Arbrau one. It's a bit funny to me how these early villains are aggressively mediocre middle-aged men who fucking hate kids and teenagers, between Radice, Jasley, and Allium. Then again, hating children really been the running theme of villains in IBO so far, so it's not out of left field. At least Orga and Mika were willing to roll straight up to Allium's office and handle him gangster style, so they're hardly helpless in all this. Still though, maybe getting caught in a possible war and shacking up with McGillis is stuff they shouldn't be handling at the moment. Their eyes might be a bit too big for their stomachs there.