Hello! This looks a lil different, eh? That’s because this newsletter is now being delivered to you through beehiiv, instead of Buttondown. Buttondown was and is great! Very simple, straightforward, and easy to use. But, over time, I outgrew the pure newsletter software and wanted more of a one-stop shop for all the things I like and want to do. First and foremost, I needed somewhere to host all of my writing. Patreon has worked fine, but the reading experience there is sub-optimal to say the least and absolutely does not work better as more works are added (I also hate their app wtf is a home page!!). So, if I’m gonna move off of Patreon, then having optional paid subscriptions in this new thing would be nice, too. I was really starting to want a “brand name” as well. LotusLovesLotus is just my username, and it’s my username on, uh, everything, so it’s always been a bit awkward for it to serve my more professional life. Despite these ostensibly being my personal accounts, I couldn’t really use them all that personally or privately without feeling like I was crossing the streams in a way that distinctly did not work for either. And what good is having public-facing social media accounts anyways? The whole reason I started this newsletter was so that perennial social media refugees and/or haters would have somewhere to follow my work without needing any socials — let alone hopping back and forth between a few ships sinking at slightly variable rates.
Basically, I needed a website.
New From Me
https://dialedindie.net
Wow, there it is! My website! It looks totally okay! It has an archive and an RSS feed and everything! It went live only a few days ago but I think I’ve ironed out all of the big issues. Just about all of my independent writing is there in the archive, if you’re lookin for a trip down memory lane. I’m excited to fill the site out with more random writings as I’m wont to do, as well as reviews and roundups that’ll all build to a nice little oeuvre. Very excited to free myself of the completely self-imposed pressure of making everything I make A Big Thing instead of just whatever it needs to be!
I also mentioned optional paid subs… those aren’t a thing yet! I’m not sure if they ever will be, but it’s nice that that functionality is there. Even with my Patreon and Twitch subscriptions, I’ve never made anything really exclusive; just early. Monetizing stuff is no fun for anybody. With that said, I am gonna go ahead and quietly suspend monetization of the Patreon. Nothing’s been uploaded in ages, and I can’t imagine it’ll see much traffic on either end now that the site’s up. Beehiiv also has ad revenue options, but I don’t have any plans to use them (although admittedly I don’t know much about them). I play ads on Twitch despite not having control over what plays because they’re going to play anyways, so I may as well keep them to the schedule I prefer and get my $0.005 per viewer or whatever. Beehiiv, on the other hand, is totally optional and you select which advertisers to work with. Never say never, secure the bag, etc, but… eh.
Let’s talk about the other things — plural! — released alongside the website’s soft open. Firstly, the 2026 edition of my annual indie games video, 26 PC Games Coming in 2026, is out now! This is where I dropped the name of the website and got the first smattering of visitors from while I worked away at prettying it up. The video is basically 26 game trailers lightly edited together with a brief intro and outro by me. For more information about each game, I put together a companion piece to the video: the website’s first article! Later that day, I posted my, Dani’s, and Azalea’s top 10 k-pop songs of 2025. Normally, Azalea would join Dani and I to record an extra long podcast for the K-YOS feed, but… we haven’t recorded K-YOS in months now, and that’s because k-pop has sucked this year! We had to bring our usual top 25s alllll the way down to 10, and seriously reconsider how the podcast would work going forwards. I touch on that a bit in the article, but, suffice it to say, we will restrict ourselves to k-pop even less than before. Look forward to hearing from us again in a month or so!
I have also been on four (4) more episodes of VGBees since the previous newsletter was sent out last month! That’s because there’s one VGBees episode a week, and there are four full weeks in a month. Just some fun math trivia for you. The episodes are: Running Out of Stuff to Safely Say About Gen AI in Public, PEGI 16: Bad Language, Drugs, Discourse, Two Bucks is Free (Except When It’s Not), and Ubisoft Creative House Six: Earmarked for the Public Investment Fund.
Song of the Newsletter
Now here’s a treat! I’ve been following Jam2go, the developer of Kitten Burst and the upcoming GANGSTALK, for a minute now, and had somehow not realized that they get down like this! “Honeycrisp” is an electropop track with a decent helping of indie rock mixed in there, along with vocals provided by voicebank Kasane Teto. I’m really fond of Teto’s sound, and I adore the Crash Test Teto that Jam2go created for this music video. Her chopped-up vocals really complement the guitars on the bridge and gel this happy/sad track together perfectly before that final verse caps it all off.
News & Recommendations
Make a website! It’s fun! Paying for the domain was not that fun. But you don’t have to do that since sitebuilders like Neocities and WordPress are free!