I guess it’s just one of those months where I didn’t save links for this roundup.  Nonetheless, I will plug the Ace Journal Club’s discussion about why low sexual desire is considered a mental disorder.  And I have a single link:

Why Do You Always Kill Gods in JRPGs? | Moon Channel (video, 1:31 hours) – The short answer is that the evil god is capitalism.  This is a great video essay about the history of Japan, and how it’s interpreted through the metaphors of Japanese mythology.  Through this lens, Japanese history is a sequence of false gods, each rising and falling–from the Shogunate to Christianity to state Shinto, and now capitalism.  The game isn’t mentioned in the video, but it finally makes sense to me why Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is about a bunch of old immortals feeding on the life force of a populace doomed to die young–although I suppose that same story could have been written from an American perspective as well.