This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: How To Do Time Management?!?
• TSF Showcase 2023-44 Megu Miruku [Megu Milk] – Kusaka Shiroi
• A Review of Swapped by the Magic Mirror by Gregor Daniels (Natalie Wanted to Do a TSF Showcase on This, But It Wasn’t Good Enough)
• TimeSplitters 4 Post-Cancelation Interview (Former Free Radical Devs Lays The Deets on TimeSplitters 4)
• The Type of Leak That Makes You An Insomniac… (Insomniac Games Subjected to Ransomware Attack and Leak)
• Pontificating Posse Logs (Scope Creep Vs. Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Part 5?)

---

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
How To Do Time Management?!?

Something that I have been struggling with as of late has been the act of properly managing my time. I want to get something substantial done every day, stay productive, and ultimately do the things I want to do. But as of late, I have been struggling to capture that feeling, and often feel like I am merely spinning my wheels without getting much done. Even after adopting a late night schedule so I can do some work before going to bed, even after funneling most of my hobbies into Natalie.TF. So why am I still struggling to get stuff done as quickly as I want to?

Part of it is the lack of regularity introduced by my boss’s eclectic work schedule, which he likes to frame as a positive thing, when, no, it just makes him a pain in the ass to deal with. I do not mind the work that I do for my job, but I need tasks to be assigned to me, as my work needs to be billed to clients. And my boss seems to forget that and assume I’m his partner, when I am not.

Part of it is because I generally do not like eating and writing at the same time. If I am working on something, like a tax return, or a spreadsheet, I can generally work and eat. I can technically write while eating, but then it can take me upwards of an hour to finish a meal. I am a notoriously slow eater, as I like to both thoroughly enjoy the flavor of my food, and chew it enough that it is easy to digest. Otherwise, I risk getting a stomachache or having a nasty poop. …But if I take over an hour to eat a meal, then that just screws up my food schedule. So if I’m not working, and I’m eating something, then I’m watching a video, reading something, browsing my sites, or proofreading something for Natalie.TF.

But another part of it are these little fixed events throughout my day. I wake up at 8:30 every day, where it takes me about an hour to fully wake up, do banking for my mother, and eat my breakfast— an apple and a pita with hummus. I habitually go on small breaks throughout the day, checking sites to clear my mind and satiate my dopamine desires. I do the dishes every night, sometime between 18:30 and 20:30 depending on my mother’s schedule. With the dishes taking me 15 to 30 minutes depending on the quantity. And I currently dedicate an hour to exercising and showering, generally between 22:00 and 23:30, depending on when my mother goes to bed. Afterwards, I get a snack, work on something for another hour or two, brush my teeth, and go to bed between 1:00 and 2:00.

Taking all of this into account, I should have roughly 12 possible productive hours a day. I think this is a fair figure, but it regularly doesn’t feel like I have that much time, and I struggle to understand why. 

Well, I think some of it has to do with how I do not account for socialization in this time frame, and times where my attention gets diverted. I get roped into shenanigans with Cassie and the crew pretty regularly. My mother has a habit of yanking me away to help her with something whenever I leave my room (like she’s subtly hinting that I should assemble a faux kitchenette in my bedroom). And I just sometimes get distracted by Discord’s red icon. 

By the way, why the HELL doesn’t the web version of Outlook have something like that? I am so SICK of relying on Windows Notifications for that thing, because Windows Notifications are TERRIBLE!

I’ve also just… struggled to get into the right mood lately. Why? Well, I’m in a different environment from before. I don’t have a window to look out of unless I want to see brick and glass. I am in a bigger room with a different layout, and one that is far warmer. While I have had a month to adapt to this, I had 29 years to get used to my old room. Sure, the furniture is all the same, but there is a certain openness and blandness that wasn’t there before. Maybe I need to get a painting or decorations to help me, or get rid of my shitty easy-to-break blinds and get a curtain I can open up to let in more potent daylight. Maybe I’m just not sleeping as well due to this new environment, making me feel more groggy or tired throughout the day. Or maybe I’m just fooling myself, and am merely on a downward trend where I am just getting less productive as I age out of my twenties.

It could be a dozen different things, and who knows if they can even be fixed!

---

TSF Showcase 2023-44
Megu Miruku [Megu Milk] – Kusaka Shiroi

Coming in as yet another request from Natalie.TF’s very own Cassandra Wright, we have a short-lived TSF ecchi school rom-com named… Mega Milk? Sorry, no, it’s Megu Miruku. …But the publisher obviously knew what they were doing with this title. 

The comic follows 15-year-old Meguru Inaba as his friend, Shou Shubusawa, makes a carelessly worded wish to an angel, Moa Suzuki, that results in Meguru transforming into a busty girl. With no obvious way to undo this transformation, the two begin their first day of high school, where they reunite with their mutual childhood friend, Souko Takashina. They try to hide the truth around her, but Souko has a suggestive collision with Meguru, kissing him, and transforms him into a boy. With everybody thoroughly confused, Moa explains that Meguru will transform between a boy and a girl whenever he is kissed by a girl, but if he ever does “ecchi things” he will be stuck in that form forever. And by ecchi things, the comic really means SEX!

One would assume this would lead to a dual life mechanic where Meguru switches between male and female form regularly, just like in Ranma ½. …But you’d be wrong, as Meguru stays a girl from chapter two until the very end of the 15 chapter comic, barring three panels where he is transformed back into a boy. …So, does that make Meguru a trans girl or some other edge case that warrants she/her pronouns? Well, the unofficial English translation has other characters use he/him pronouns. Meguru says they have the heart of a man. They are called Meguru-kun. And they use the Japanese pronoun ore to refer to themself. Meaning… they’re a boy, I guess.

So, what exactly is the hook of Megu Miruku? What makes it different from the scattering of manga that belong to this same loosely defined sub-sub-genre? Well, honestly, not a ton. Every 30 to 45 page chapter follows an episodic story as the ensemble of characters go through familiar, if cliche situations. Taking Meguru to the underwear shop. Meguru and Shou going out on a mock date to allegedly mess with a distant friend of theirs. Chapters that pair Meguru with another character for the majority of the duration to explore their relationship as they address some minor conflict. It’s all fairly typical stuff of the general rom-com genre and its loosely defined era, is all littered with the type of suggestive content that makes me think that I really should not be reading this. I mean, these girls are literally half my age. I’m old enough to be their parent.

Normally, a work like this would bounce right off me. I’d zone out while reading, get bored, and move onto something with more texture. However, I not only diligently read through Megu Miruku, but… I actually liked it quite a bit. Why is that? Well, a lot of reasons. 

The storylines themselves have enough room to feel like complete narratives, rather than loosely themed excuses for ecchi shenanigans. You wind up learning something about the central characters in every chapter, building them up into something endearing. There are more than enough characters, so the dynamics never really gets too trite and boring. And the series… knows what it wants to be and is proud of it.

While Megu Miruku is indeed an ecchi series, it is one without a truly lurid air to it. When something sexy happens, it is presented with a layer of comedy. Either things are exaggerated to an absurd degree, or the entire scene is part of a prolonged punchline. It has a lot of stuff that is, pretty shamelessly, meant to be sexy and sexual, but it rarely ever presents it as something humiliating or embarrassing for its characters.

Meguru’s tits pop out so many times that they don’t care when it happens, and while he is often drawn in compromising positions, these are offset by how casual and confident he is in his body. He still has the heart of a boy, so he likes seeing boobs, and knows that the boys around him like seeing boobs, so what’s there to be upset about? Nothing! Because everybody got to see some boobs!

And when the girls are subjected to a similar level of sexualization, it is presented with a similar degree of levity. Like when Meguru and the girls all go to the lingerie shop together and have a tops off party in the changing room. Or when they get their shirts torn open by a magical dodgeball blessed by Moa’s angel powers. When these scenes are viewed in isolation… It’s a bunch of pervy bullshit. But when together, it’s just part of a sex comedy. And you know what genre works really well with TSF, and has for nearly 50 years? Sex comedy.

Though, I’m burying the lead by not highlighting how none of this would work if not for Meguru himself. Meguru is a beans-for-brains busty bunny-themed bimbo. They are clearly designed to strike an elusive balance between cute and sexy with his extreme proportions and adorable face. They are brash, childish, spunky as all hell, loyal as a dog, always willing to help out a friend, and never dissuaded by any roadblock. …Except for maybe love, but that’s true for most 15-year-olds. While his type of character is by no means unique, he sets the tone for the rest of the comic, and as a character, he’s just excellently executed.

Okay, but is there any story to this comic? Do the characters ever grow? Well… sort of, I guess. Meguru is timid about having a female body for the first four chapters, but by chapter five, they have flat out stopped being bothered by it. There is an effort to make a minor character (who probably should have been cut) more relevant with a spotlight chapter and she becomes less shy after that chapter, I guess. But the most development weirdly goes to Shou and his family backstory.

Shou lives with Meguru, where he works part-time as an assistant for Meguru’s lewd milf of a mother, who also happens to be an overworked mangaka. Why he lives with them is not acknowledged early on, but later chapters explain Shou’s messy family life, curious relationship to his younger half-sister, Shiori, and… he kind of becomes the main character. His story is exaggerated in spots, but it is played straight, and does not feel inappropriate. If anything, it is a welcomed bit of drama that warrants a tone shift to break up Meguru’s carefree adventures.

This leads to the final three chapters, which aim to wrap up the story in a semi-fulfilling manner. They build upon the dense romantic tension between Meguru, Shou, and Souka while reminding Meguru that they can decide if they want to continue living as a boy or a girl. This ‘arc’ is still filled with goofy suggestive hijinks, but it shows the writer is capable of addressing more serious matters, and begins to veer into the predicted yet satisfying conclusion. …Only to then say NAH! I don’t want to spoil it, because it is hilarious in a half-assed last minute sorta way, but I’ll just say it ends the way a lot more TSF stories should. With MORE TSF and a denial of permanence!

I’m actually surprised how much I enjoyed Megu Miruku. It’s consistently funny. Its shameless ecchi-ness somehow managed to be a boon rather than a bane. It has so much creative energy that it feels like the author just cracked the surface come the last chapter. The artwork is both lively and adorable, filled with screenshot worthy moments. And just by reading it, I can tell the creator was confident in what they were doing, even if it probably didn’t work out as well as they probably wanted.

Overall, I would say it is a pretty fun comic, but as a TSF story, it is a bit light. Despite being… very boyish, Meguru does not always feel like a TSF protagonist. He mostly reads as a sexually confident yet bimbo-brained girl so boyish they use ore or boku instead of watashi. Or, to lift a term provided by the unofficial translation, just an easy bake ore-woman. 

On that note, I should comment on the English translation, because it is… odd. The first of three volumes was translated by an amateur group whose grammar, formatting, spelling, and general professionalism were all, well, shit. They translated a chapter in comic sans as a joke, plastered a watermark for Batoto over it, and have a lot of crude notes throughout their work. I normally don’t talk about fan translations, but I think it’s unfortunate this comic is sorta stuck with something so rough. It’s readable, but the group roankun did a vastly better job. …Well, aside from their curious decision to censor the word bitch and horny while having characters refer to Shou as a “normalfag.” Oh, pre-2016 4chan-filled anime culture…

Anyway, Megu Miruku is a pretty good rom-com with some TSF flavoring. Not quite a lost gem or anything of the sort, but a curiosity I’m glad I read through and got to share here.

---

A Review of Swapped by the Magic Mirror by Gregor Daniels
(Natalie Wanted to Do a TSF Showcase on This, But It Wasn’t Good Enough)

Hey, this is a TSF story but not a TSF showcase? What’s the deal with that? Well, I typically reserve TSF Showcase to things that I find interesting in some way shape or form. And while Swapped by the Magic Mirror by Gregor Daniels has interesting elements to it, it’s also emblematic of several problems I have with… how some people write things.

The novella follows Bryon, an 18-year-old kid from Ohio moving into a new house with his mom after his parents got divorced. As he settles into his new home, he finds a mysterious mirror in what is to be his bedroom and quickly discovers that it is not just a mirror, but a portal through time! It sends him to Los Angeles in the year 1984 in the ‘female equivalent’ of his lanky male body, meaning he is now a hot skinny lady. He gawks over various bits of 80s iconography, is left befuddled by the whole thing, but ultimately chooses to investigate this mirror further with the aid of his girlfriend, Cassie. Who I’m just going to call Daniels’s Cassie to avoid messing with my Cassie’s head.

The two quickly determine that the magic mirror transforms them into their opposite sex selves as they cross through it, and there is a sliding time scale. So time passes faster in 1984 than it does in 2023. Or maybe 2024, since they are awfully quick to describe the time shift as “forty years.” 

Bryon realizes that his past alter ego, Brittney, is an erotic model and strips for a photoshoot for some 80s rag. He and Daniels’s Cassie go on a date where they see Ghostbusters. And the two decide to follow the advice of every time traveler and buy some Apple stock. By making these routine visits to the past, they start to warm up to the era, even for all its flaws, but because this story needed more conflict and chaos, the magic mirror is destroyed in a storm. Bryon tries to repair it with glue— because teens can be dumb like that— but it doesn’t work and Bryon is left crestfallen over the loss of such a magical tool.

…And then reality warps a few months later, transforming Bryon’s home into a facsimile of the LA apartment, him into his alter ego, and doing the same for Daniels’s Cassie. They have no idea why this happened, or why it took about two months, but there’s nothing they can do to change things, so the best thing they can do is accept it. Which, in a piece of ‘transgender erotica’ like this, means having sex with each other, accepting their new genders via sex. It’s familiar, but it works. A short while later, during a Christmas epilogue, the two are seen comfortable with their new lives and names, Brittney and Casey, and remind each other that they can use their future knowledge to make mad cash. Which… isn’t wrong. That is a time traveler trope for a good reason. 

Gosh, someone really should write “I Went Back in Time 50 Years And Used My Financial Foresight To Become The Richest Man On Earth.” It would be a good opportunity for someone to flex their finance degree, before mucking it all up with grandma incest.

Anyway, Swapped by the Magic Mirror is a completely functional story from an outline perspective, and has a pretty neat premise, being both a direct reality-changing TSF story and one with some time travel thrown in. Usually these involve possessing or embodying an ancestor, but this one ditches that element and tries to put more emphasis on it being a period piece through the eyes of a modern young person.

I like the idea… but the whole premise quickly gets mucked up by a lack of… personality. 

The world of published fiction is a strange one, as while a novel is the most blank canvas a writer can imagine, a lot of published works tend to be very technical with their goals and purposes. They focus on familiar dynamics, popular tropes or ideas, and are often written as entries within a designated genre. References tend to be bland, cliché observations rather than anything that sparks the imagination or teaches someone something. A lot of characters are meant to represent archetypes, so it is easier for the reader to immediately know who they are. 

I understand this is a more economic decision, as the less thought that needs to be put into characters makes it easier to write from a mechanical sense, but to me, it defeats the point of writing and reading. To be confronted with something new, informative, interesting, etc. 

Needless to say, I have issues with both of this story’s characters, as neither Bryon or Daniels’s Cassie are afforded much… character. Bryon is meant to be a typical everyman, which is to say a heteronormative White guy. He is curious, sheepish about being seen as a woman sexually, has a supportive girlfriend, likes money, likes movies, and likes stuff modern male youths like. Daniels’s Cassie takes to being a guy immediately, allowing her to serve as the dominant force in their relationship as the two slowly adhere to their new socially accepted gender roles. But I don’t get much of a feel for her as a person outside of her structural purpose.

The two, naturally, make various comments while acclimating to their new era, with the story regularly reminding the reader of the myriad changes. Aesthetic differences with homes, different car designs, different fashion, different technology, and different fixations. The story regularly reminds the reader of these differences, but it does so by fixating on blasé references, focusing on what is remembered as being popular, rather than aspiring toward anything more specific. 

Everybody is smoking, because 80s. They hear discussions about AIDS, Ghostbusters, and Ronald Raegan within a few minutes on a taxi radio, because 80s. They go see Ghosbusters together because it was the highest grossing film of 1984. Bryon is excited to watch Star Wars on television, specifically just calling it Star Wars because he prefers the original non-specialized version. Because he was born in 2005 and definitely grew up with the original versions. 

There is a general disinterest in pursuing the decade beyond these superficial details, and despite his age, Bryon does not really act like a zoomer going back to this era. He is not really baffled by anything despite being a child of the smartphone generation. He calls the TV antenna ‘rabbit-ears’ like he’s a 60-year-old man. He has a very ’90s kid’ reaction to the idea of porno magazines, rather than wondering how people got off to mere pictures. He is weirdly not disgusted by the quality of a tiny tube TV, when the gulf of quality between that and a tablet screen is quite severe. And he apparently knows how to use a rotary phone, which… is just unrealistic. I’m a decade older than him and I’d have no idea how to use one of those things.

The entire story is filled with these tiny specks of carelessness that just irk me. From recounting the myth that ‘historians don’t know how the Egyptians built the pyramids’ when, no, they do and have for years. Or stating that “in 1984 a single mom could make it on her own” while working as a waitress and paying down a mortgage. …In 1984, the mortgage interest rate was over 13%. Yeah, no, that’s just a lie. You are a LIAR Mr. Daniels!

I know the writer of this story is better than this and I at least assume he is older than me, so seeing the brazen way they handle a period piece like this is just upsetting. 

I’ve said before that part of the reason I don’t read a lot of TSF fiction is because my reaction is frequently “I could do that, but cooler.” And here… well, that sums up my thoughts pretty darn well. Swapped by the Magic Mirror has a great premise, but lacks both the effort and passion needed to be something worthwhile.

---

TimeSplitters 4 Post-Cancelation Interview
(Former Free Radical Devs Lays The Deets on TimeSplitters 4)

So, here’s something that came out awfully fast. After being shuttered two weeks ago, a former developer at the most recent incarnation of Free Radical anonymously conducted an interview with a Free Radical archive wiki. The interview is pretty brief, but it contains a few major takeaways. 

One, the game was not built upon previous work for the 2000s incarnation of TimeSplitters 4, despite much of the Free Radical team coming from Dambuster. Two, Free Radical was originally developing a TimeSplitters Battle Royale title, but it was supposedly just a ploy for TimeSplitters co-creator, Steve Ellis, to get the project greenlit. Three, in March 2023, the project transformed into a “[TimeSplitters 2] Remake with a few new/slightly changed levels and an alternate timeline story.” One that would feature levels from TimeSplitters 1, 2, and 3, along with some brand new sections.

The interviewee then continues to discuss the climate around Free Radical, and while there were problems they sound like fairly typical issues at major studios. Engine shifts are harder than they ought to be. Age-ism among staff, as Free Radical had some kids fresh outta school and some veterans from the 90s. And regular anxiety that everything they are working on will be abruptly destroyed. But just focusing on the three major points from the last paragraph… this closure really sucks.

TimeSplitters 4 has been on and off development so many times that the idea of just leaving the old production files in archives forever seems more than a little morbid. They could at least be used as a reference. The fact that the TimeSplitters only got greenlit because the creative leads lied about it being a battle royale… is just upsetting. Same with the fact that so much time and effort had to be put into this intentional developmental deadend. And knowing that the team had just started working on a proper TimeSplitters remake/compilation/alternate version thing… leaves me convinced that this series is just cursed. It only got revived by sacrificing its identity, and when it was doing exactly what people would’ve wanted, it was killed.

At this point, any remaster of the TimeSplitters series is a project tempting fate itself, and I think it might be best for this series… to just remain dormant, kept alive via emulation and fan creations.

…Also, the site hosting this interview has an utterly bonkers amount of development documents and explanations of the original Free Radical’s canceled games. It is a legitimately impressive archive… and is where I learned that there was a Star Wars Battlefront IV in development. With alternate path campaigns and Sith/Jedi versions of familiar characters. They even have links to the game design document for Star Wars: Battlefront (2004)!

HOW did I never know about this sort of thing? I did not grow up with the Battlefront games, and only played the second one for an hour in 2009, but hot damn do I love it when stuff like this is preserved.

---

The Type of Leak That Makes You An Insomniac…
(Insomniac Games Subjected to Ransomware Attack and Leak)

Next up, we have a ransomware leak of 1.67 terabytes of Insomniac Games internal documents. But before I begin, let me just lay out the differences between this type of leak and others.

A ransomware leak is a hack from an outside party that is done with the expressed purpose of harming a company. It is the result of someone stealing personal or sensitive information and threatening those affected to distribute it publicly unless they pay a designated fee. I do not generally consider copying digital information to be theft… but publishing private documents you do not have the rights to absolutely is. This information was sourced by awful people, and will inevitably hurt people as personal details find their way to those who wish to steal and do harm unto others. It is a horrible thing to happen to someone in general, and it happening a week before Christmas just makes everything all the worse.

Leaks of games that are coming out in a few years or were canceled are generally fun. Leaked general footage of titles can be more exciting than trailers. Footage and documents of early in development games is something that should be released more often, but can only be spread via leaks due to how secretive the industry chooses to be. And leaked footage for games that were canceled is vitally important for the preservation of the medium. 

I generally like leaks, but ransomware leaks are just shitty. Also, I know I should call them hacks, but… it’s hard to do that when everyone else is calling them leaks.

Akumako: “So, without further ado, let’s dig right into the dank juices of these hacked delights! Sure, they might smell like piss and phlegm, but deets be deets!”

First, we have a lot of details about what projects Insomniac is planning. As many suspected, they are leveraging their relationship with Marvel and developing a whole lot of super hero titles. An earlier roadmap listed different titles, but the more recent roadmap has the following titles:

• Marvel’s Venom in Fall 2025
• Marvel’s Wolverine in Fall 2026
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 in Fall 2028
• A new Ratchet & Clank in Fall 2029
• Marvel’s X-Men in Fall 2030
• A new IP in 2031/2032

Marvel’s Venom, also known as Marvel’s Venom: Lethal Protector, is supposedly akin to the Spider-Man: Miles Morales for Spider-Man 2. An 8-10 hour standalone expansion featuring a playable Venom along with other “Spider-Heroes.” 

Marvel’s Wolverine got hit HARD with leaked concept art, development slides, robust development details, a full plot synopsis, mission summaries, video footage, voice cast, and a leaked PC build. As in, a graybox pre-alpha test build. I could go on, but as I kept digging, I just wound up regurgitating r/GamgingLeaksAndRumors.

There was a PowerPoint presentation for an online game called Spider-Man: The Great Web, but I sorta doubt that ever entered any form of development.

A rough projected staff allocation was revealed, showing what portion of Insomniac would be working on which title.

Sales data for various PC ports of Sony games were revealed, showing that titles like Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered sold 1.3 million units in its first six months, which is good. While Sackboy: A Big Adventure only sold 62,900 units in about four months, which is bad. (Maybe don’t sell 2 year old PS4 games for $60 on PC…)

Some information was leaked about Marvel’s Spider-Man 3— which probably just entered development— being a multi-part title with a… multiplayer component?

There was a presentation slide detailing a license agreement for Insomniac to develop X-Men games through 2035.

A planned rollout of a “3.0” upgrade to PlayStation Plus was detailed with some presentation slides. It focuses on expanding PS+ into a service for mobile and web-based applications, bundled alongside other services. Which… just makes me think that the end goal is for there to be 25 major billion-dollar corporate-owned subscription services. Services that are sold to people in bundles to obscure their true value and encourage accidental double dipping. Hell, you can’t even get a phone plan without having some subscriptions shoved down your throat these days…

And the biggest, most significant, leak of them all was lifetime sales figures for various first-party PlayStation titles. That sort of information should be made public, but it’s not!

---

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention how this hack also revealed a lot of information on how Insomniac has been planning for its future. Namely how they have dealt with the burdens of ballooning budgets and headcount limitations coming from Sony. Ethan Gach of Kotaku has a good write-up on this, highlighting the precarious economics of AAA game development, and I think this is an issue that has been existing for a very long time.

AAA games are expensive, but a lot of the costs come from art departments. From cinematics, detailed set pieces, and grand visuals meant to dazzle people. With every generation, with every passing year, the costs only grow. And with every generation, the tools keep getting better (generally speaking). If games kept the graphical quality expected of an Xbox 360 title, they would be cheaper to develop than ever before. But instead of preserving a baseline of graphical quality, the industry constantly pushed into new graphical trends, and taught the gaming audience to expect better graphics every few years.

I guess you could say that it generally becomes easier to develop games and achieve graphical feats over time. …But the perceived budget of game development keeps going up over time, as the scale and scope of games keeps getting bigger, leading more people to pour more money into projects as they vie for attention.

The Kotaku article highlights how despite its rousing launch success, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023) has yet to break even. While the standalone expansion, Marvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales (2020), had a reduced budget of a mere $90 million, but went on to sell over 10 million units and was very profitable. So, the solution would be to make shorter and smaller games, right? For AAA to be shorter-length high quality mid-sized experiences? Well, that sounds appealing, but I doubt that would be a true solution.

MSMMM was built on the foundation of a far more expensive title, so most of the work designing systems, modeling the city, and getting the base mechanics to work was already done. The title was the premiere launch title for PS5. It was the successor to a game that sold an excessive amount of units. It was a title within a highly popular intellectual property that benefited from the popularity of other Spider-Man media. It was a unique case that had so many things going for it that I do not consider it to be practical to be seen as a template.

Now, making AAA games more modest in their scope would make recouping costs easier. And I don’t think that customers are very adept at spotting the differences between a $150 million game and a $300 million game, let alone a $75 million game. However, while it would be good for the industry, for developers, and for gaming enthusiasts if for games to be made at smaller scales and for less money, it would not be good for certain companies. In a capitalist international system with barely any regulation, you cannot really facilitate any sort of widespread degrowth. There will always be a group of people who will go against this idea, and try to build something bigger and better than everyone else.

In order for this to work, customers would need to view no real difference between games of a ‘medium’ or ‘large’ budget, or be somehow trained to want something that can be found in smaller budgeted titles. A large number of people would need to grow widely fatigued with open worlds, prefer shorter experiences, or stop viewing games based on the amount of content they offer. 

In order for the system to change, either those in charge need to be convinced that there is a more profitable system, like they were with the industry pivot to live services. Or their current system needs to stop working. I would love for a future where gaming budgets seldom ever went over $100 million. That would lead to a number of more innovative and unique titles and would likely not result in a perceivable decline in fidelity or quality. It would just mean that publishers would need to budget projects better, not bigger.

…Cue the Sonic meme.

Blegh! Sorry for that tangent.

Anyway, this is a LOT of stuff, a boggling amount of stuff, but most are things that I do not particularly care too strongly about. I respect Insomniac for being a AAA studio that avoids crunch and focuses on tightly designed single-player titles, but I have never actually played one of their games. So most of this stuff isn’t too exciting to me personally, as much as I find it interesting as a follower of the industry.

How did this happen, how can other studios protect themselves, and as hacking tools get more sophisticated, what can be done to prevent this? Data security is a major concern, and I know for a fact that most people are BAD at it. (Especially older people.) 

Sadly, I lack any real answers and all I can really say is… it’s cool that some of this information is now public, but it straight up sucks for everybody at Insomniac.

---

Pontificating Posse Logs
(Scope Creep Vs. Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Part 5?)

So, a problem I have been running into with VD2.0 has been the issue of it having an overly large cast with no designated protagonist and being told across a series of 70+ days. This means that I need to not only write a story that has something interesting or relevant across every single day, but I also need to make sure I am dividing screen time amongst the cast. …While considering what they are doing in the interim.

If you give 20 people a body swapper, they are going to swap bodies around. A lot of parallel stories would go on within a single day, and as a writer, it is my job to imagine what these things would be and focus on the most interesting. I need to be mindful of what I am doing, otherwise the story will run into the problem of a character doing nothing for a week while the story focuses on other characters. 

What is the solution? Well, I could divide the chapters into two sections and follow multiple characters, which I have done several times before, with chapters 6-07, 6-13, and 6-16 all being divided into multiple parts to highlight many characters. But I also have things like the untold beach adventures that the Kurokawa family goes on in chapter 6-07, which are referenced, but not explored. I don’t think everything needs to be explored, but I need some way to catalog what everybody is doing.

As such, I have considered writing these summaries of what every non-featured character did on every day in their summer vacation. Basically treating them as paragraph-long diary entries. Just to give the reader some clue as to what they are up to, foreshadow future events in ‘main chapters’ and give myself a better understanding of these characters. Now, I am apprehensive of this, as even a 100 word summary per character could wind up being an extra 1,500 words per chapter… Or an extra 100,000 words. By all means, I should not be adding to the already disgustingly large word count to this story… but I think I might need to, at least as something internal that I could cut at a later time.

At this point I have accepted that VD2.0 was just a bad idea. It was too grand and too large. There is a reason that I have never seen anyone attempt writing a body swap story on this scale, and it’s a good reason. However, I have a vision in my head, and even if the end result is so weird, long, and random that nobody in the world actually reads through all of it… I do not care. I have a vision, a dream, and I’m gonna make this stupidly big novel even bigger and stupider!

Akumako: “Are you trying to make this bitch bigger than re:Dreamer or something?”

Nope! I just want it to be filled with stuff! Like you!

Also, I’m planning on calling these the Posse Logs, because it sounds sorta like paralogue, and is a throwback to Nari’s Log!

---

Progress Report 2023-12-24

In perusing my TSF comic backlog a few hours to this post going live, I read Doppelgänger ni Kanojo mo Jinsei mo Ubawarete Bakunyuu JK ni Sareta Boku [My Doppelgänger Stole My Life and My Girlfriend, and Turns Me into a Buxom JK] by Yuukey. I go into these comics always hoping for gold, and with this one, I thought it was pretty good, but not substantial enough to warrant a TSF Showcase on it. However, I did want to show off this two page spread, as I think it is a wonderful visual depiction of a memory/reality rewrite. The use of dark fragmentary triangles for the lost life contrasted with the bright white sparkles in the other. The simplistic yet effective way it parallels basic life events while mirroring backgrounds, emphasizing that the only thing that changed was the protagonist and not the world itself. And the silly inclusion of a star iris on the female side. I like it!

2023-12-17: I spent the morning proofing/editing half of the 2023 Ramble and the afternoon/evening working on the Star Wars Ramble, watching The Rise of Skywalker with Cassie. Dreadful film, terrible film, a disgrace to everything that came before it. I got to the screencap grabbing phase, Cassie helped me with the sequel trilogy stuff, but I got sick of thinking about Star Wars at around midnight. So I switched to working on the 2023 Ramble, as I wanted to try getting that ret-2-go ASAP.

2023-12-18: I finished up stuff for the Star Wars Ramble and got the 2023 Ramble ret-2-go, barring the stat analysis section, which I’ll do on Friday. Wrote 1,500 words for VD2.0 CH 6-17 before realizing that I really should read the full outline of a chapter before I start writing it. Also, I wrote a 1,000 word World Entry for Ruby Blitz, because she is a major part of this chapter and her character was too ill defined for my liking. I was sleepy so I went to bed a little after 1:00.

2023-12-19: Read the first volume of the TSF Showcase subject for next week’s Rundown, wrote 1,500 words for this Rundown, and wrote 4,400 words for VD2.0 CH 6-17. Including a TG sequence! Considering I didn’t start working on VD2.0 until dinner time, that’s actually pretty good progress. I can’t wait until vacation, when I can try doubling it!

2023-12-20: Added 1,200 words to the Rundown. Wrote 3,100 words to wrap up VD2.0 CH 6-17, but realized that this story is becoming too unwieldy with its continuity, as there are 20+ stories going on at the same bloody time. I also realized that I forgot to go back to CH 6-03 to add a sex scene that I decided wouldn’t be excessive. I wrote 1,500 words for that after fucking up the structure and context initially.

2023-12-21: Finished the sex scene for CH 6-03 with an extra 650 words. A 2,000 word sex scene is NOT excessive. Especially when it’s a virgin buster duo. Afterwards, decided to polish off the 2023 Ramble with some cavegirl statistical analysis. Getting the stats, making the spreadsheet images, doing the analysis, writing it, and proofing it, took me a few hours, with the end result being 3,000 words. By then, it was too late to start writing again, so I began editing this Rundown.

2023-12-22: I had a bunch of video essays to watch, so I wound up playing FlipWitch for four hours. I realized I botched the side quest progression because of how floaty and strict the game’s jumps are, as I was supposed to get an upgrade that doubled the effectiveness of healing items, and I got fed up with its bad money distribution and hex edited in some extra cash. It’s not cheating. It’s playing smarter, not harder. If that is the principle people are supposed to abide by while working, then why the heck shouldn’t they abide by it when playing a damn video game? That being said, the game is still in need of some major QoL features with its map and side quests, and I think its movement is WAY too slippery.

I spent the evening doing some planning work for VD2.0, and deciding that I need some systematic way to determine when a character has a primary, secondary, or tertiary role in a chapter so I can better balance the story. Because I went 10+ days without MENTIONING some characters in my outline. FFS…

2023-12-23: I fulfilled my promise and watched Gremlins 2 with Cassie. I finished reading a manga she recommended, Judas by Suu Minazuki. I spent some time more going through the TSF comics I had in my backlog of stuff to read over the past few weeks. And I started working on the next chapter of VD2.0 before realizing that I really do need to write the Posse Logs to keep these characters straight. Keeping their voices consistent is hard enough…

---

Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp
Acts 1, 2, and 3 Progress Report:

Current Word Count: 185,288

Estimated Word Count: ~420,000

Total Chapters: 48

Chapters Outlined: 42

Chapters Drafted: 21

Chapters Edited: 0

Header Images Made: 0

Days Until Deadline: 157