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It’s that time of year again. The end! Where everybody worth a salt shaker is supposed to reflect on this past year, the things that happened in it, and cast an outlook for the future. For me personally, it’s an opportunity to talk about stuff I did, stuff I didn’t talk about during the ‘real’ part of the year, and go on retrospective tangents. So without further preamble, let’s start this ramble!

Table of Contents:

Part 1-1: The Year The Internet Stopped Being Good

Whoo boy, this is gonna be a big one, as I have a lot of pent up and regurgitated fury to spew here. But first, I need to start by airing a grievance that I have been building up for quite some time. The way that certain people view, define, and use the internet. The internet is a series of complex systems that span across the entire world, connecting devices to data centers and unifying humanity in a way that, is still kind of boggling to imagine. It has affected the world at a comparable level to electricity, radio, or television, and it has been able to make humanity… so much more efficient.

Governments, companies, individuals, pretty much everyone relies on the internet. Even if someone is old, impoverished, or barely knows how to use a computer, they depend on the internet. Because the internet is not another layer of reality. It is not just a place. It is reality. It is everywhere. The internet is a vital tool for global trade, global communications, it is where almost everything intangible or informational is distributed, and is as much a part of our world as… roads.

People might look back on the 1980s as being similar to today, just with less people looking at their phones or staying home, but that is merely a superficial visual way of viewing the world. The way information is distributed, the way communication happens, is wildly different now, and people are able to do so, so much more. The internet is a tool to bring people together from across the world, learn virtually anything, enjoy an excessive amount of art, and create things without the same costs and barriers that existed in earlier eras.

The internet has united so many people. It allowed people who would have never so much as crossed paths in prior eras to become lifelong friends. It helped people find lifelong partners. And it served as the meeting grounds for innovators and creators of all forms to collaborate.

So… then why is the internet home to so much vile and negativity? Well, it’s the same reason why death threats were common before the internet via anonymous letters. Because the internet allows people to hide behind a mask, adopt a discardable identity, and vent their frustrations with no filter or fear of repercussions. Because when you open the doors to everybody, you will offer a platform to both the disenfranchised and oppressed, but also their oppressors. It’s why ‘free speech’ and ‘giving everybody a voice’ are ideals that should not be taken to their extreme.

…Also, human beings are programmed to fixate more on negative things, on problems, than things that function properly. So one of the easiest ways to get attention is to be a fucking prick.

Why is there a loneliness epidemic that is leaving people dissociated and longing for meaning? Because while people can be social and find friends on the internet, that requires being part of a community, finding a platform, and people who are willing to care for others enough to form a true connection. It requires work to do that, work to be open about oneself, and work from other people to provide the other end of that connection.

You might think that the major platforms would address this, help people accumulate meaningful connections, but if anything, they do the opposite. Platforms encourage people to be disingenuous, view every connection as a transaction, and conform to categories favored by complex algorithms that are beyond the comprehension of human beings. They are tools driven by people, by their conversations, by their creativity. While they originally served the role of a social good, that of a place that people could go to the internet to congregate, that is no longer the case. And… it hasn’t been for years.

While platforms claim they are meant to be points of discussion and discourse, they are ultimately driven by discord. By controversies, by outrage, by engagement in whatever form is possible, as it means they sell more ads, garner bigger metrics, and get more money. The users on these platforms also benefit from it, as the more fuss they can stir, the more their name is out there, the more they are known. And amassing money/clout/metrics is almost always their goal.

Major platforms dictate how people behave on them and what they do with them, but they almost always prioritize advertizer friendliness over artistry. Those running them are terrified of being locked out by the puritanical powers that be, so they comply with whatever demands they offer. These can be good, like saying no to child porn. Iffy, like saying no to every kind of porn. Stupid, like saying no to nudity. Or frustrating, like discouraging even innocuous words like death. All while doing nothing about all the White Supremacist and fascist shit on their platform, because old White dudes get all hard and soggy over that shit. They’d encourage that if they could!

And platforms that… are just getting shittier. Or, to use a word that people only really learned this year, social media platforms are undergoing the process of enshittification. They amassed a userbase, ran at a loss, and are now trying to abuse the people who came to rely on them in order to make money. They lure users in, fuck them over, and prevent them from leaving by being a primary platform for communication.

Twitter went from being the de facto global social media platform to a crumbling mess filled with fury and anger from all parties, driven by a man who should not be in control of anything half as complicated as a bakery. They broke features, locked basic things behind a payroll, and overcomplicated what should be a simple platform in favor of something that benefits the interests of their shareholders. Hell, the platform was so driven by this goal of screwing over other people, that they ditched their name for X. Or 𝕏 as I have been calling it, because X is one of the stupidest names for a product imaginable.

YouTube went from being a haven of video content, cataloging a mind boggling amount of information and artwork with a competent search, to something where I need to fight to find certain things. …Though, I actually do think their recommended algorithm is pretty alright. Well, not when it is recommending me part 17 of a random Let’s Play with 15 views. You just need to say no to certain channels and pluck the weeds of shit you don’t care about. It’s how I found these non-sex-offenders (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). (It’s gonna be so funny if one of them does wind up becoming a sex offender.)

But Google proper? Their search has gotten extra crappy. Which would not be a problem, but I don’t think there is an actually good search engine. Bing is bad in a different way, and Microsoft Rewards are an attention trap. As a self-respecting adult, I don’t want to use something called DuckDuckGo, because I’m not a preschooler. …Yet!

Reddit underwent a bad redesign, closed off their APIs, and was generally antagonistic toward users, which makes them bad. But they are still a damn-near essential part of searching for information due to their role as a public all-topic forum.

While Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok are… platforms that I have never used, so I have nothing to say about them.

Now, to some, these platforms are the internet, and that is due to how the internet was shifted by the rise of mobile users. A generation and genre of people I am wholly divorced from, as I just use my phone as a phone, authenticator, and video player when exercising.

The internet was not designed for phones, web pages did not display correctly, and rather than reinvent the internet, a lot of companies decided to launch apps instead, which changed how people engaged with the internet. They no longer used a general purpose browser as their primary means of interfacing with it, they used platforms.

Except… platforms are not the internet. They are just where a lot of stuff on the internet is held, and I think that is the core of the problem. The internet is too centralized, too based on platforms, and filled with too many of these large all-powerful entities. The internet… is supposed to be a tool to connect people, to improve their quality of life, and make the world as a whole… better. Make them more intelligent, more wise, and more efficient! But these platforms… run contrary to those ideas. They have a different interpretation of the internet. They view it as a place to accrue profit above all else. And they will pursue this profit, as that is their purpose as a corporation.

Going back to that comment on enshittification, the man who coined that term, Cory Doctorow, ended his formative essay on the subject— which I re-read before writing this— with the following statement:

“It’s too late to save TikTok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.”
Cory Doctorow – The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok

And that… that statement really sticks with me. …Except it misspells the concept that the rest of the article is discussing (how embarrassing) and is not quite as absolutist as I feel it should be.

To put my own spin on it:

There is no way to save a profit-driven social media platform. Once it becomes infected by enshittification, the only thing left is to cleanse it from the internet.
Natalie Neumann – This Article, Ya Doof!

The older I get, the more distrustful and hateful I get toward corporations. The more I want a government to seize and take control of the internet, to reign in and prevent corporate avarice from dictating the future of humanity. But, with the government ruled by the elites, the powerful, those with a vested interest in retaining the status quo ad infinitum, that option could lead to extreme disaster. So, what is the solution? Well… I would say it is to dissociate. To divest corporations of the control of the internet via collective ownership and a refusal to accept outside funding. To say goodbye to large for-profit platforms and make the internet what it always should have been.

A place not for corporations to generate value and harvest the work of others for increasing their perceived market value. A place home to actual value. A place not for profit, but for people. For creators. For developers. For IRS-deemed artistés.

But this world would only be possible if people go against the grain, go against the temptations of wealth and power, and pursue what they think is right. And not just a few people. It would require a lot of people to adopt a new way of viewing the internet. It will require them to… start paying for all the services they receive, to fund the communities they are a part of. Which… is where it all starts to fall apart, and for two reasons.

One… the internet is an expensive entity. It requires the maintenance of servers, data centers, storage, and things that have a real perceptible cost in the real world. Things that the internet service provider bills one pays… don’t cover. That’s just the costs of using a corporation’s data center and cables. It seems like magic, and is free in a variety of places… but it has a cost. Everything a computer does has a cost. And you know who owns these data centers needed to run the internet? Amazon, Microsoft, Google, those dillweeds. Sure, people wealthy enough to own a house could just run their own servers… but that’s not sustainable.

Two… people just don’t want to pay for the internet. They don’t want to pay a subscription fee for every website they visit. They don’t want to turn every act of browsing into a transaction they need to pay for. That sucks. That would make the internet fucking dreadful. And when you start talking about the way money is distributed across internet platforms, and start looking into companies like PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard… shit gets fucked.

The internet is something that should have been this vast, open source, and connected. But by letting private companies dictate how this new layer of the world should work, things will inevitably decline. And…

…

Enshittification is not something that happens just to social media companies. It is merely a feature of capitalism. It is not something going wrong, it is a plan being executed. This erosion will continue to happen… unless those with the most power are forced to change how it is wielded. It can only happen if the neoliberal theory that deregulation and a slim government will improve the lives of people is disproven as the hackneyed lie that it is, and always was.

The free market does not care about people. The free market will abuse, misuse, and destroy whatever it can if it makes it to make their profits a bit bigger. Profit is not a priority that makes the world a better place. And… the pursuit of profit is one of the most destructive forces humanity has ever made.

Akumako: “…Was this entire fucking thing just a way for you to shit-talk capitalism again?”

No. It was me discussing one of the myriad elements of the world that were devastated by the philosophical scourge of capitalism.

I normally push aside any claims that things are getting worse by highlighting how bad things were in the past. Mostly due to educational failings fueled by lobbyists, media that sanitizes the past, and wealthy fucks who really want to use their money to revise and reinterpret history. But… things are not in a good place, and as much as I want to think they will get better soon… I doubt that.

Why do I feel that way? Well… because bad shit just keeps going on in the world. The problems that need to be fixed aren’t getting fixed. And while the solutions seem somewhat clear to me… the powers that be just want to do as they always do. Try to ignore the fact that their systems hurt people. Try to forget that their normal brings suffering to others.

For as much as I can talk about the broader erosion of social platforms… I actually do think it is a good thing that social media is undergoing a slow collapse. Why? Because I think social media never should have been a thing to begin with.

Akumako: “Yo, Imma just lay out the definitions, because Natalie’s a certified dumb-fuck. She thought that social media sites were defined as ‘websites where people participate in social networking, conversation, and sharing of media, whether it be text, video, or audio.’ However, the actual definition of social media is so broad that it basically applied to every website where users can upload and share content. …Meaning basically any website that is not managed by a government or employer. A fucking booru counts as social media because people upload stuff to it… What Natalie is actually complaining about here are social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit— websites where the primary feature is ‘interfacing’ with other people. Yeah, she called it ‘interfacing’ instead of ‘interacting’ because she’s determined to ‘rep dat aspie stride, yo.’ Whatever that means.”

I think the internet and the ability for people across the world to communicate to each other in real time is one of the greatest accomplishments that humanity has ever accomplished. …But this global unrestrained communication thinghas one massive problem that has been made evident over the past decade. Before people were complaining about Twitter’s collapse, they were complaining about Twitter as being a bad place to talk to people, just in general. Before they were complaining about Twitter, they were complaining about Facebook. And for as much as some people opine about how the ‘golden age of connectivity is at its end’ I strongly disagree that there ever was a golden age to speak of.

Social networks, as a concept, have never been something sustainable, and they have never been even close to universally beneficial. For every boon it offered, these platforms came with a bane. For every artist who garnered a following on a platform and was able to fund their passions, there was another who was bullied or harassed. For every sight of injustice captured on film, someone spread some form of misinformation, tainting the eyes of others with deliberate lies. For every pleasant interaction, there was at least one negative one. And the sheer amount of energy, attention, and effort that were wasted over a manufactured controversy or poorly articulated statement… is frankly disgusting.

Why do I think this happens, and has always happened? Lots of reasons.

Social networks have given people a high level of anonymity, allowing them to avoid accountability under pseudonyms, create strawpeople who appear to be actual people, and reset their identity frequently.

Social networks reach, quite simply, too many people to be an effective communication tool, especially when there is no clear segregation or delimitation. Twitter had hundreds of millions of people in one murky ecosystem. Meanwhile, a platform like WhatsApp has two billion users, but there are so many walls that it does not feel like it. Because there is no way to interact with most other users.

The worst part of social networks is that not only does everybody get a voice, but everyone has the ability to talk to anyone else. An innocent mind might think that is fine, that being able to talk to anyone is a great boon and allows people to communicate. …But when it comes to comments, replies, and general communications between random strangers, there is more opportunity for something destructive than there is for something constructive. When everybody is in one room, every attempt at discourse devolves into discord.

In saying this, I agree that social networks fulfill a need… but it is a need that I believe was fulfilled before the rise of social networks. It was fulfilled by a website with developed communities. By dedicated forums where like-minded people could congregate. By managing and maintaining a series of bookmarks or RSS feeds that one could check regularly. By email. If people want to create things and share their thoughts, that’s what a blog is for. And you know what the best part of having a blog is? You get to talk about whatever you want to talk about, for as long as you want to talk about it, and chances are, you will be left alone to do your own thing.

Sure, some connections might be lost. Some information might stay obscure. And when you task the individual with preserving their work, it becomes far easier for things to get lost due to hosting costs and website builders changing their policies retroactively. It’s why so many geocity sites were erased. But you know what happens if someone nukes their social network accounts? They are straight up gone.

Also, I know that what I am talking about might sound like Discord to a certain extent, but Discord is a bastardization of what the internet was supposed to be, and what it should be. Discord is a place where information is buried and cluttered, rather than stored and organized. Everything good that a Discord does for preserving information would be better preserved via a website or wiki, and everything else is just a glorified forum or chat room.

The internet does not need social networks to function. And as I look at its current form… I think that the thing it promised, this idea of a collective and connected community of the entire world, is something that simply cannot exist. Is something that should not exist.

Akumako: “Um, you literally have Discord open for the majority of your waking hours—”

It’s a chatroom for my friends. An inbox for messages from people who prefer Discord over email. A place to get updates on translated TSF manga and the Dragalia Lost Revived project. All in addition to being a way to get progress notes regarding Press-Switch and re:Dreamer. Student Transfer has an RSS feed, so I keep everything but scenario releases muted. I would have fewer Discords, but Patreon won’t let me say no to joining them!

Akumako: “What about 𝕏?”

I stopped using it months ago. It was a great place to get some great art and some funny gags… but screw it, I’ve got enough, and after using it for over a decade, I’m not paying for TweetDeck.

Akumako: “Don’t you PAY for YouTube?”

YouTube is the de facto site for online video. As far as I am concerned, it is not meant to be socially driven. It is merely an interface to watch videos based on channels, subscriptions, and the whims of the algorithm, which recommends things to you. If YouTube closed off the comments sections and did not allow users to chat in live streams, would it still be social media? Probably not. So I am going to say it is NOT a social network.

Akumako: “You still use DeviantArt and Pixiv—”

They’re glorified RSS feeds, blogs, download interfaces in addition to serving as image repositories. I know they can be considered social media, but if you could take out the comment feature of a website and still be left with something functional and useful… then it isn’t social media.

Akumako: “Okay, but how the hell is a forum not a social network by your stupid-ass pocket definition? They seem to match the definition pretty fucking well.”

The difference between a Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr versus a forum is that forums tend to be small and close-knit, rather than vast and sprawling. Comparing them is like saying that 40,000 people attending a major sporting event is just like a group of 6 people getting together for a book club. They are both social gatherings, after all. But if you tried to say that they were basically the same thing… nobody sane would buy that argument.

Akumako: “…Is the long and short of this that you think that major multi-million user platforms are a bad thing?”

No, not really. I mean, I consider YouTube to be such an indispensable part of that internet that, if it were to go down, you may as well shut down the whole thing. I just don’t think those users should be able to talk to each other. They should be able to share and create whatever they like, but I think communications on most platforms— especially YouTube— should be limited to direct messages. If people have something to say, they can just say it on their own darn blogs, on their own darn channels.

However, that would take too much effort… so most people would not even bother! Which is good! While preserving thoughts on something is important, we don’t need everything to be written down. That is not what preservation is actually about.

Akumako: “Do… Do you just want to get rid of the ability to leave comments on things?”

Yes, absolutely. I love getting comments, but most comment sections are generally so worthless, I’m willing to throw out the good with the bad. Comments should be a privilege, not a right, and I think they should only be visible after being moderated, or closed entirely. For things where there is less risk of people being shitfucks, then sure, leave it open. I doubt anybody is going to say anything that bad on an Archive.org listing of Spanish PC games from 1996. But as a general rule, on most major websites… turn that shit off, and replace it with a way to DM the creators instead. Free speech is a right, but that doesn’t mean you can whip out a soapbox and talk about the divine birthright of the Homo Caucasoid at a Burger King!

Akumako: “…You are such a weird fuck with what you value and desire.”

YES!

Part 1-3: Post-Pandemic Pandemonium

This is a modified version of an image from @RupertMyers, taken by @noahberger3884.

Okay, that internet bit went on for way too long, but I have a thought tendrils that I couldn’t weave into it.

The internet is an intrinsic part of this world. The world is currently recovering from a ‘reset moment’ after the pandemic upheaved so much of the world, exposed so many problems, and… just fucked up a lot of people for life. I’m not just talking about the people who are suffering from long COVID and seemingly permanent health issues. I’m talking about the children whose school life was decimated by it.. The people whose social skills were atrophied. The people whose jobs were lost. And those whose savings got wrecked by rampant inflation.

People— except for the super wealthy— were all fucked over by the pandemic. And despite being ‘officially’ reduced to the endemic, much of the world left behind is changed. People are more uncertain, more fearful of the state of the world, and desire to find security in whatever way possible. They want wealth, they want reassurance, and that has given way to a market of people and movements that prey upon these people.

Charismatic grifters who swindle people out of their money only to offer bad advice or advice that will only go to harm them. Multi-level marketing stunts that lure people in with false promises and force them to form what is, for most practical purposes, a capitalist cult where wealth is slurped upwards. Alternative investment platforms that promise insane yields that teeter into outright insanity, ranging from cryptocurrency, to NTFs, to the MOASS evangelists.

Now, I get the appeal. I have seen people go from working from paycheck to paycheck become Bitcoin millionaires and I’ve reported their income to IRS. But… that just isn’t how wealth works in 99% of instances. If you want to make money… you need to be born with it, get stupidly lucky, live with people to minimize your living expenses, exploit a weakness in a pivotal moment, or work your ass off.

Should things be this way? FUCK NO! This system is a piece of shit and I want to see it be demolished and replaced by something better. And if there is ever a time when things will change, when the old order will crumble, it should be now. It needs to be now. Because, at the rate things are currently going… I dunno where the world is going to be by the end of the decade. Revolution could come fast, shit could trod along this ineffective normal, or things could go to shit and people could be duped into a revolution that benefits the few and leads to abject suffering for the rest.

…The phrase “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” is a load of bullshit. It should be “there is no ethical way to exist under capitalism, so you should make like a White and wrought death to all who oppose you!”

The more I learn about the history of the world, the more convinced I am that revolutions are not only possible, but a good thing. And if just a few thousand people with conviction want to do something, they can change the world. It might not be for the better, definitely not at first, but sometimes it is a requirement for society and nations to grow.

Akumako: “Natalie, sometimes… I just wish you would shut the fuck up. You don’t know how to say the quiet part quiet, and always want to jump to the extremes in a way that makes you seem like an unreasonable individual, like an active shooter waiting to happen. And the fact that I am forced to listen to all of these unfiltered thoughts all the time… it makes me wish you were dead.”

Fuck you too, little devil girl. Fuck you too!

Part 1-4: The Israel Palestine Conflict

Okay, let’s get the utter nasty shit out of the way next. While I do have a platform to talk about whatever with my Rundowns, I typically do not comment on actually important issues. I do not keep up with mainstream news as much as I should. I do not want to further dilute the games and TSF centric nature of Rundowns with modern political stuff— I’m happy with the current balance of 20% oil and 80% water. It’s good for yer teeth!

And I often do not have much to say about bigger conflicts other than killing civilians and common folks is deplorable, it is disgusting when governments continue to fail their people, and stealing/destroying homes is… bad.

However, in this outspoken world, people are not supposed to remain quiet on these things, as silence is apparently compliance and sides must be— wait, no, that’s fucking stupid. Just because you can say something does not mean you should, and that entire idea is the result of people being too online and too opinionated. Anyway, let me… let me just talk about the Israel Palestine conflict for a bit. Ahem…

The Israeli government is responsible for a large number of human rights abuses, has killed thousands of children, and has been engaging in ethnic cleansing for decades. What they are doing is genocide. They are using their western-supported military might to kill Palestinians, and are being forgiven of their crimes by various Western governments and media outlets, because it benefits the western nations to be allies with a country like Israel. Because they are a White nation located in the Middle East, and the world depends on the oil extracted from that region.

In saying that, I do not mean to ignore or undermine the terrorists within the Palestinian population, who have engaged in assorted heinous acts. However, it is important to recognize the sense of scale here, as the Palestinians are a heavily oppressed population within their historic homeland, and most want to simply live their lives in peace. They have been repeatedly promised that things would get better, but after over 70 years of waiting, Israel is still trying to claim as much control over this region as possible.

In saying these things, there are two things that I wish to clarify. One, my problem with this conflict is that common, everyday people are dying. That innocent children are being bombed and left to die in rubble. And that infrastructure, the stuff that helps people sustain their lives, is being carelessly demolished. Two, I have nothing against Israeli citizens. Most of them are just people trying to live their lives and most who have harsh right-wing beliefs have them due to indoctrination by the most powerful.

What I ultimately want from this conflict is the same thing I want from every conflict. Peace. Finally create the independent nation of Palestine from the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Find a way where the two groups living in this tiny smaller-than-a-state bushel of land can live together without fighting each other all the time.

I don’t care about anything else so long as these people find a compromise between them and can actually live in peace. Division breeds discontent, oppression breeds resistance, and what is going on here… will keep on happening, keep on persisting, unless the Israeli government learns to respect the Palestinians as humans worthy of the same rights as their own citizens.

…Or, if the Israeli government wants to continue down their warpath, they could pull a fucking Weiss Vice: Glory Unto Genocide, where they systematically round up the Palestinians and kill them.

…With Weiss Vice, I was intentionally trying to make that story the most ludicrous display of White Supremacy and ethnic cleansing possible. But with all the shit that I’ve seen from the Israeli military, I wouldn’t put it past them. With every news story I hear about them, the more they remind me of a White Supremacist state, and my fictional White Empire.

Akumako: “…Natalie, you just straight up should not accuse Jewish people of genocide like that.”

I am not accusing them of anything. I am taking in information, observing trends, and seeing potential futures. I would LOVE for them to prove me wrong, but, at their current trajectory… I don’t think that’s going to happen. The Israeli military wanted this to happen. It’s why they turned the Gaza Strip into… basically a prison. A prison where people had nothing to do, nothing to aspire to, for decades, which led to a massive population boom, which only led to further poverty, making their already limited resources ever more scarce. The people there are basically being groomed by the Israeli government into becoming terrorists with conditions like that.

Also, I am not talking about people. I am talking about the powerful. Power comes with responsibility, and those who refuse to acknowledge it, those who abuse it, should not have power. And, depending on how egregious their actions are… should neither be given the privilege to live or the right to be remembered.

Akumako: “…The fuck does that mean?”

It means that those who commit crimes, who do bad things… should not be allowed to live in infamy. The fact that the orchestrator of some of the most heinous acts in human history is also one of the most well known and recognizable people in the world is, quite frankly, disgusting.

I strongly believe in the principles of rehabilitation, of redeeming people who did terrible things and making them see the error of their ways. To me, that forgiveness is tantamount for any halfway decent society. However, there is a nebulous threshold that, once one crosses it, they have forfeited their humanity. When one is responsible for untold suffering, they should be given the harshest punishment imaginable. The cauterization of their limbs, the seizure of their assets, and denial of any care as they are left to rot in a desert, destined to be forgotten and reduced to something nameless.

Akumako: “Is this your mask off moment or something?”

Honey, there was never a mask to begin with.

Part 1-5: The Large-Scale Computing Conundrum

So, one of the biggest points of contention and concern throughout 2023 was the subject of AI. AI generated artwork was a hot topic even in 2022, but 2023 was the year where it really kicked off with the rapid advancements made with AI tech. I have talked about these things throughout the year across various Rundowns, but most of those were early in this year. After a spike in interest and popularity in March/April of 2023, things have fallen more into the background, but my core thoughts on the concept have remained largely unchanged. Though, there is some added nuance.

I think large-scale computing, the act of having a computer automate and perform tasks for a person, or find information that someone is looking for, is a genuinely wonderful concept. It is amazing what people can do with computers these days, and I think it should be celebrated. However, I do not view AI generated media or text as being of the same creative worth or merit as something made by a human. It is merely something generated based on a large database, taking various disparate elements and bashing them together to create something that resembles the data it is trained on. Also, that data is all taken without the consent of the creators, which I have more mixed thoughts on.

If it is wrong to have these large scale computers scrape the internet for data and images without permission, then how should permission be granted? Should sites like DeviantArt and ArtStation update their terms and conditions, so people’s art could be sold to AI companies? If you post text on a public forum, then is that text the property of the forum or the poster, and who has the right to distribute it for training data? If the issue is one of consent, then who should give consent, should there be compensation, and how could this consent model be enforced?

Can this reference data truly be considered something different than a human artist using a collection of references they didn’t pay for, which every artist does? If an artist sees a piece of art by someone else, and makes something inspired by that a few weeks/months later, how is that different from an AI referencing its dataset? Where is the line to be made between these two things? Should it just be illegal for a machine to do something that humans do and have done for centuries?

And with regards to the legality of using AI artwork… that is a slippery slope argument, as how do you know AI artwork was used? Is it okay to reference it? Existing plagiarism rules provide plenty of examples for what is and is not considered plagiarism, so should referencing or using AI generated works be subjected to that? Should it be possible for a company to sell the AI equivalent of a sound library— a collection of text, images, or audio, and have that be used as the training data for AI? Is it considered transformative if a human then edits the output generated from the AI?

AI is a nightmare when it comes to a lot of things… but I still believe it to be a powerful and useful tool. I still look at the Copilot demonstrations Microsoft released back in March and think they could do wonders to make workers more productive and organized by eliminating the need for ‘shit work.’ I think generated artwork has immense potential in helping creators communicate with artists in the form of references, or to help a non-artist better determine what they want from a skilled IRS-deemed artisté. I think the sheer randomness and weirdness of a lot of AI generated content is actually a great boon, as it simply thinks in a way different from a human being. But above all else, I think AI should ONLY ever be seen as a tool. An AI looks through the internet, through its dataset, to assemble something that, per its large-scale models, seems to match the prompts given to it. That is not creating, that is regurgitation. That is just generating or assembling something.

But let’s cut the general stuff and get into the specifics.

I think AI chatbots are a conceptually great way to uncover information or find answers to questions that might not be the most readily answerable by searching for them. But the results got so bad a few months ago, that I just gave up on using them to find anything I wanted. It just still wasn’t as good or reliable as Google search. Let’s just say, Google never gaslit me, while Bing chat has— multiple times in fact. And when it does get things right, they’re things I could have already found just by searching for them.

I think AI writing is actually quite useful for more formal writing, even if all it does is load up a template. It gives people the structure, the general voice, and can help them power through initial steps by giving them something to work off of and trim down. While for creative writing… it is just wildly inconsistent. I have seen and been able to get chat prompts to generate some truly unhinged stuff that— in my opinion— goes against the idea that an AI cannot be creative or make something new. But 90% of the time, it returns something bland, something that tries to be inoffensive, and just does not match what I want.

I like to test this by having an AI come up with body swap stories, as some have been vivid enough to be masturbation worthy (which does not mean good). Other times the AI gets hung up on the familiar and recycles the same wording, cliche, or formatting. It’s just inconsistent and makes me think it has limited use cases in anything beyond personal enjoyment of talking to a computer. …Or maybe its current incarnation just needs to have the limiters removed. I guess I should’ve fucked around with AI Dungeon back when it was good. Just like Trigger and CaptainCaption!

I think that AI images… are actually a lot of fun to screw around with, but incapable of being of a professional quality due to the sheer limitations of being a generated image. Unlike text— which computers were made to edit and alter as one of their primary and most commonly used functions— you can’t really edit these things. Most artwork is saved across various layers, AI art just produces a single layer image, and for a professional artist… it is often just faster to do things from scratch. It is often easier to treat the AI generated work as merely a reference to glance at. Which… is probably the best use case for AI images. For people to quickly visualize an idea for the purpose of references. Beyond that though… AI simply cannot match the quality of a professional, and the more common AI generated artwork becomes, the more people will be able to spot it.

I actually got curious about AI image generators while writing this and decided to try making some AI generated covers for my novels. I just used a basic description, relishing in the randomness of DALLE-3 (which was not the best choice, but it was the easiest). Looking at the results, I actually think some of the design concepts featured here are interesting or look cool conceptually. But I can tell it is just lifting the design of something else based on matching words. It can also be super inconsistent with how it interprets prompts.

Ai generated audio is something I have not really messed with aside from some super early character text-to-speech software from… 2019 or so. However, my thoughts on it are a bit more… mixed. I think AI generated music is fine for reference purposes, and I don’t really have a problem with people using AI generated song covers and the like for entertainment purposes. Is it done without consent? Yes. But a lot of online entertainment is made without consent, like the entirety of meme culture. Otherwise… there is a stupid amount of music out there to listen to, and if you think you’ve seen everything, you’re dead wrong. If someone wants to use music for something… just pay a musician a couple sandwiches to make you a song, hit up a royalty free site, or check out an open source audio library. There are so many musicians out there and their rates feel like THEFT!

Oh, but the big question when it comes to AI audio is not music, but rather voices. I love voice actors. I adore the way they can elevate a character and bring them to life. And for as much as I treat voice acting as a privilege… I wish every line of dialogue from nearly every game could be voice acted. This does not happen due to cost and time constraints… but what if there was a way to automate it, what if there was a way to turn text, turn a script, into audio, into speech? …Wait, that’s not AI, that’s just text-to-speech, except a bit more sophisticated and customizable.

Yeah, this is where I get into the murky area with AI voice acting, because to me, it is just a better version of text-to-speech, and I freaking love text to speech. It is one of the best editing tools there is. It gets a bad rep because most default text-to-speech sounds… terrible, but there is an entire industry built around selling and licensing text-to-speech programs of different voice profiles. (Shout out to my old fling Australian Nicole and voice of the nebbys, Ireland Emily.)

What is the fundamental difference between this and AI voices? Well, AI voices tend to be a bit more sophisticated and customizable, I suppose. But I think it is more how they are used.

If you want TTS voice packs, you need to buy them and/or license them. AI voices can be used under subscription plans, but those ones are sourced by paying people a (presumably) fair wage, not unlike how things worked for TTS voices for decades. The actual problem with AI voices is consent. People are taking existing voice profiles of others and using them to create an AI profile that sounds like another person. …And they have gotten really convincing. This might be fine for character voices, shits, giggles, and memes. But… I worry that it is going to be used to harm innocent people… and be used for monetary gain.

I have zero issues with a voice actor creating an AI voice package and selling it for a royalty-free project-based license or via a subscription. It is their voice, and they have the right to monetize it. But if every voice actor is required to provide something similar, for every job they do, and the studio has the right to use their voice, even after they die, then the topic has completely changed. AI or not, those terms are predatory, terrible, and represent an obscene level of control on behalf of the client. …But that’s something movie studios think they should have the right to, because they’re filled with insane people like that. (Okay, some stipulations were added with the SAG-AFTRA agreement, but not enough.)

Going back to my earlier point, I consider AI voices to be something… far different than AI images, if only because AI images are trained on a library of millions of images from millions of artists. Meanwhile, AI voices tend to be far more narrow in scope (as far as I am aware). They might have a general vocal profile, but it is more conceivable to break them down into something that can be licensed. Unlike AI images, which… even if an artist drew 1,000 illustrations, that simply is not enough.

As for AI voice changers? I think voice changers have always been a super cool idea— I am trans after all. So of course I think a more ‘sophisticated’ version of that would be a cooler idea, help protect people’s identities, and let them play around with different voices. …And I guess it could be used to help a lone voice actor, or a creator who is voicing their own work, pretend to be multiple characters/people. It would help more things be voiced, be good for accessibility, and be very budget conscious.

Okay, okay, I’ve been going down deep dives into AI and my thoughts on the matter, when they all could be far more succinctly summarized, but I wanted to explain my thought process. However, there is one thing that needs to be highlighted, as it is arguably the biggest problem with AI.

God, these are such shit when you look at them closely… but when you only glance at them, they’re cool as fuck, yo!

AI has the ability to fake video, audio, and spread misinformation on a level beyond anything seen in human history. It can be used to manipulate people into believing a false narrative— fabricate events that never happened, and deceive those without the time, energy, or skepticism needed to investigate the matter further.

This stuff terrifies me, and no matter how much some say that no reasonable person could be fooled by AI generated content… it keeps getting better, keeps on improving. People are so burdened by information, they cannot look at everything critically. And while savvy people might be able to spot AI generated lies for what they are… could you do that on a blurry phone screen? Could your parents spot this? Can children— in general— spot what is real and what was generated?

I don’t want to offer any absolutes in saying that AI will be a major factor in the 2024 US presidential election… but it probably will be. A few months back, I saw an AI generated video of Biden declaring war on Russia, and while it was blurry and low resolution… it looked natural to me. Since then, and throughout 2024, it will only get easier to make actual fake news and fabricate reality.

I know this artwork is flawed and bullshit, but GOD DAMN do I love some elements of these mockup covers…

Akumako: “Hey Nat, you’re 2,000 words into this section, but you haven’t actually talked about the artist stuff surrounding AI!”

Well, I left those out, as they are pretty shut and dry. I love artists, think they should be paid, but also do not seriously think AI generated content, in and of itself, would be enough to replace actual people. People like artists, and I don’t think people would be fine with things that are ‘good enough.’ Otherwise, people would not be talking about how fatigued they are with the Marvel Cinematic Universe or how many public high-profile box office bombs have hurt the film industry. If people are dumb slugs willing to buy products when promoted and settled for good enough, why aren’t they doing that?

If they used AI generated content instead… production costs might go way down, to, say, 10% of what they currently are. But marketing costs wouldn’t really budge. And revenue would go down to… probably less than 50$ of what it otherwise would be. Because it would look worse, it would sound worse, it would have a worse script, and everything would be worse.

Film, as a medium, is sustainable in its current state, without AI. And if AI were to replace what is already there, it would just languish further. AI cannot save an industry. It can aid it, and it could lead to its downfall. People crave quality and uniqueness, and ‘good enough’ simply will not be good enough for people. People are fickle, they are demanding, and if you bombard them with familiar creatively devoid sludge… they will eventually see it for what it is.

Akumako: “What about games?”

I strongly support properly licensed and sourced AI generated assets as a part of game development. For decades, games have relied on asset packs, texture packs, sound effect packs, and other forms of licensed products. If you could take these licensed products, and mix them with AI, to make the process of generating assets, animations, and filling in the details to help eliminate ‘shit work,’ that’d be nifty. Also, depending on how broad your definition is, you could consider procedural generation, just in general, to be a form of AI being used in games. But do I want the entire world to be designed by an AI? No. Do I want AI designed enemies? No. Do I want AI to make a story and lore? Hell no!

AI cannot make games— they simply cannot, as games are too hard to make— but if developers can use AI to make the act of game development easier… then yeah, go for it. Game development is too hard to not automate the shit work.

Akumako: “What about the legal stuff?”

Um… I always struggled to understand the legal system, as the terminology sucks and it is clearly not a modern system, so I sorta hate it on that front. I only managed to get A’s in both of my law classes because I was only graded on three open notes tests per semester.

Akumako: “No, dumbass, I am talking about the law policing and controlling AI!”

Ah, right. I have a far below average level of trust in the legal system, just as a concept, to properly dispense justice. The more I learn about the injustices of the world over the past 200 or so years, the more convinced I am that the legal system is at best a neutral force and at worst a tool for genocide. Laws are made by lobbyists and the powerful. I abide by them for the sake of making my life easiest and I use them to further my own gains and support my beliefs. But when I disagree with them, fuck ’em.

When it comes to AI, the legal situation is going to be a complete shitshow. At best, it will force copyright law to come out of the closet and decide if it wants to support independent creators or the corporate masters who rule the world. At worst, it will offer no solutions, so corporations will just pretend that they can and argue that AI can be copyrighted so long as the results are tied to an IP they own.

In other words, I have precious little faith in the law policing AI, because the law doesn’t even understand the internet in general…

Akumako: “Alright, that looks to be everything on the topic list. You were pretty sloppy with your execution, but I guess this is a pretty complex topic… Are ya done now?”

Yes, Bae. I’m done.

Part 2-1: Gamindustri Rundown – The Best Year & The Worst Year

2023 is a year of extremes in the world of gaming. It was a year home to a slew of titles that managed to achieve the trifecta of critical, commercial, and communal success. Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur’s Gate 3, the Resident Evil 4 remake, Pikmin 4, Street Fighter VI, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, the Dead Space remake, Alan Wake II, Hi-Fi Rush, Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, Final Fantasy XVI, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, the list goes on.

For game-likers, there was no shortage of great titles to play spaced out throughout this year, and the industry had seemingly recovered from the perils of the pandemic. Not only did the next generation of consoles come into their own with multiple showpiece titles, but even people on hardware that was 6 to 10 years old were given no shortage of stellar games to play.

Admittedly, there were a few all-around duds worth a mention. Redfall and The Lord of the Rings: Gollum are among the big ones. Others just did not have the impact people thought they would have, like Starfield. But viewing and ranking a year by the sheer number of good, impactful games released during it? It’s up there with 2007, 2011, and 2017. …I say as someone who did not play any of the critically acclaimed games released this year.

However… 2023 was a freaking terrible time to be a game developer, and the industry was filled with such rampant bullcrap.

I did not really bring this up in my Rundowns, but layoffs have been hitting the industry like a damn storm. Over 10,000 jobs were lost by December 17, 2023, which is kind of a misleading number, as it only counts employees, not contractors whose work contract ended. Game developers are highly skilled and passionate people, willing to take a considerable pay cut in order to use their valuable skills to make games. But when it comes time to issue raises or bonuses, or when the financial forecast is looking negative, executives cut their jobs, cut off their livelihoods, and leave them to find a new career. All in a broader sector that has seen exponentially more layoffs.

One of the only bad things about the loss of a collective singular social media platform that united the world, like Twitter did, is that it is harder for people to share niche creators and allow them to bubble up to the surface. Which is and has only gone to hurt independent developers, who rely on people sharing their work to make a living doing what they do. And I don’t mean acclaimed independent games, I mean the real indies. The 99%!

Unity decided to engage in… what I think may very well be one of the most painful disruptions in the entire history of video games (1, 2). For over a decade, Unity has been the go-to easiest-to-use engine for developers making games for mobile and console. It was used for some of the biggest games of the past decade, and it was used by solo developers making hobbyist projects. An almost frightening amount of games/developers use Unity, and while it has its problems, it was seen as worth dealing with them for access to their matured toolsets. It made game development easier for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people.

…But then they fucked it all up. Their original runtime fee agreement was such a wretched idea, such a terrible violation of trust, that I don’t think the company should exist. And while their new agreement of revenue share with their newer licenses is nowhere near as bad… it’s still fucking shit that just makes it harder for developers to make games. Because after a blunder like that scale, it becomes impossible to trust them. Not now, and not unless the entire company is rebuilt, which it won’t be.

Like I said before, they had it, they lost it, and now, they’ll never get it back again. Hit me up one last time, you hip pieces of shit!

Nintendo killed off their Wii U and 3DS eShops, which helped exacerbate the growing preservation issue that is devastating the industry and making piracy the only reasonable way to enjoy 87% of games more than 13 years old. And the Xbox 360 storefront is going to shut down on July 29, 2024, so that number is only going to go up! I would be upset about this, but I cannot even be disappointed in these folks at this point. Because, as corporations, they are supposed to kill that which does not make them money. But, fortunately, preservation efforts from dedicated individuals have become pretty fucking robust over the past few years.

Those with the rights to preserve gaming are not not fulfilling their responsibilities and because of that… fuck ’em. Just fuck ’em and do your own thing! It’s not a crime if the system is shit!

I could go on, but those, and the acquisitions, were the biggest stories to me this year, and my conclusion about all of this is rather… bitter. This industry is dysfunctional, cruel, and unsustainable. It is run by people who prioritize profit over art and humans by several orders of magnitude.

However, even in an industry lousy with problems… developers will still produce good games. Players will be able to enjoy good games. And if you really want to enjoy video games… just ignore the news.

I know that is frowned upon these days, but… if someone reads bad news, what does that do for them? What should it do for them? Because while it might be erotic to imagine that someone reading bad news will be proactive and try to change the world, dedicating themself to a cause… that’s not how it works. Most of the time, it will just bum them out, as most people don’t look at horrifying odds and misfortune and think about how they can help out. Most people are too focused on dealing with their own struggles. It is hard enough trying to make money for living costs, trying to find time for personal enjoyment, and dealing with the growing wave of anxiety affecting way too many young people.

I know I don’t want to do anything more serious than vote or make a few hundred bucks in donations. I’m busy enough just working my job, writing my stuff, and have a financial chain around my neck on account of my $225,000 mortgage. To implicitly say that I’m being a fucklo for bitching about this stuff and not joining my local socialist organization, protesting, or helping out at a soup kitchen is… just being a cunt.

Akumako: “Natalie, put your pseudo-pussy back in your pants. You’re getting your gross piss-colored discharge all over the strawman again.”

Fiiiine!

Also, saying this was a bad year for the industry is also… a really weird way to put it, as industry is often judged based on the results of financials, and from that perspective, this wasn’t a bad year. Not at all. The actual financials will take a few months to be collated and reviewed, but the industry— the publishers— the big companies— made loads of money. People bought a bunch of games. A bunch of costs were cut by… cutting jobs. And people purchased a large amount of hardware. For ‘the industry’ it was a good year. But for the people working within the industry, this year was fucking dreadful! The industry is not people, people are not the industry, but the industry cannot exist without people.

Part 2-2: The Acquisition Rundown

2022 was a momentous year for the games industry, as there were so, so many acquisitions that it was scary. I tried to catalog the bigger ones, and I am still in awe of that list. However, 2023 also marked the end of the ‘era of free money’ with its low interest rates and an ample amount of funding from investors. As such, it is not too surprising that things took a considerable downturn… but it’s still a lot.

NetEase acquired SkyBox Labs
Thunderful acquired Studio Fizbin
Behaviour Interactive acquired SockMonkey Games
Atari acquired Nightdive Studios
Devolver acquired Doinksoft
Savvy Games Group acquired Scopely
Sega Sammy acquired Rovio
Epic Games acquired Aquiris
Focus Entertainment acquired Dovetail Games
Sony acquired Firewalk Studio
Keywords Studios acquired Hardsuit Labs
Tencent acquired Lucid Games
Tencent acquired Techland
Tencent acquired Visual Arts and Key
Capcom acquired Swordcanes Studios Co., Ltd.
Rockstar Games acquired Cfx.re
Behavior acquired Codeglue
Sony Interactive Entertainment acquired Audeze
Tencent acquired Midoki
Microsoft FINALLY acquired Activision Blizzard King
Atari acquired Digital Eclipse
Devolver Digital acquired System Era Softworks
Sony acquired iSIZE
Annapurna Interactive acquired 24 Bit Games
Aonic acquired NDreams
Toge Productions acquired Mojiken Studio

This is by no means a cumulative list, as I only followed what I saw crop up on my news feeds. But I still think this trend of acquisitions is deeply concerning… and I don’t like how many times I see the name Tencent on that list. Which is to say, I see it.

Looking over what I said in 2022… my thoughts remain unchanged.

“I do not want the industry to become what it is rapidly shaping into. I do not want power to be consolidated. I do not want fewer and fewer people to have the ability to dictate what games are made. I want the world of gaming to be wide and vast, filled with oodles of different companies of varying sizes. Instead, these past few years, just the opposite has been happening, with studios folding into each other that it is hard to keep track of every one.”
Natalie Neumann, Natalie Rambles About 2022

However, the big acquisition this year was the finalization of Microsoft’s domination over a large sector of the games industry, as they are now in control of Activision Blizzard King. It is still too early to see how they will change the studio, if it will be incorporated as part of Microsoft’s broader culture. However… I kind of doubt it the more I think about it. ZeniMax is still ZeniMax despite being a Microsoft company, their blatant transphobia and corporate meddling and all.

Combined with the ever-constant rumors of EA being bought up or divided and sold off, I see the future of the AAA games industry being far smaller and more… corporatized one. In addition to one that really, really doesn’t want their shittier gambling to be regulated

Or, alternatively, all these acquisitions could lead to the entire bloody thing collapsing as too many eggs are put in too few baskets… Isn’t that right, Embracer?

Part 2-3: The Embracer Question

One of the most upsetting stories of this year was the abrupt fall of The Embracer Group. Over the past five years, I went from viewing them as a company that saved and preserved IPs to a glutton that aimed to consume and consolidate an obscene amount of the games industry. It is one thing to buy up obscure IP that nobody is doing anything with so games can be resold and relisted, it’s another to buy up over 50 studios.

However, if Embracer were just obsessed over consuming the industry, that would not necessarily be a problem. …It only becomes a problem when management screws with developers. Normally when I say that, I mean offering excessive oversight or telling developers to scrap things for something more marketable while encouraging them to crunch. But here… things got fucked big time.

Over the summer of 2023, I went through various states of understanding on what, in retrospect, is a pretty simple story. The Embracer Group saw an opportunity to work with Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games Group, and entered into a deal that would see $2 billion of funding over the next few years. The deal was worked on for a few months but, right before it was finalized, Savvy bailed on Embracer. Because Embracer was counting on this deal going through, they went into panic mode. People were laid off, studios were closed, games were canceled, and shit was just bad all around.

This caused a lot of people to sour on Embracer. One, for trusting the Saudis, and two, for making a move that, in retrospect, seems like a really bad idea. I think that is a somewhat harsh interpretation… but not a wrong one. While pretty quantifiably shitty, the Saudi royal family has money and pays their bills. …At least at the moment. They are not good people, but they are ones with power and establish deals with a lot of major governments. As a company, Embracer has a legal duty to grow and pursue opportunities that come up to them. Morals mean nothing when talking about billions of dollars, and Embracer had to at least entertain this idea. While it is easy to blame Embracer… the real ones to blame are the ones who bailed at the last minute.

This is just a shitty situation and one that sadly will only get worse as Embracer is forced to downsize themselves.

I think that is the operative word here. Forced. They are not laying off people because they want better financials, they are just trying to stay alive. And while I would like to tell them to fuck off for how they closed down Volition… I really cannot blame them, especially after hearing about problems that existed at the studio. People were leaving constantly, and it’s frankly a miracle Saints Row (2022) came out. …But the closure of Free Radical was a pretty low blow.

Akumako: “Fucking corporate apologist-ass-faggot-ass-bitch-ass-fag.”

What? Do you just want me to conform with the crowd and yell at the expansive company for being bad? Nu-uh, honey. I’d sooner bring up their 8chan AMA, because what the fuck even was that?

Part 2-4: Goodbye Game Collection, Hello Emulation

This past year, I boxed up and sold my childhood game collection. …Okay, that’s a lie. I was building that collection until I turned 22, where I stopped after buying Pokémon Ultra Moon. At that point, I was objectively an adult. I went to Retro Dimension at 7218 W Touhy in Chicago, where I sold over 130 games and 8 systems for a resounding… $2,200. Admittedly, that is roughly a third of the value of what these games are worth if sold individually. But when considering the convenience of just dropping them off at a store, I would say that was a perfectly fair price.

I no longer own any games for any system other than the 26 physical games I have for the Nintendo Switch. However, after Nintendo’s behavior this past year, I decided that I would not buy any more of their games. I started simmering prior to their closure of the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U eShops. A move that served as a significant blow to the state of game preservation due to the power of the Virtual Console. Then, I got angrier and bolder with my words, praising those who were preserving what Nintendo wouldn’t. And then I just said, enough was enough, fuck Nintendo into the ground.

“I will continue to pay $17 a year for Pokémon Home, which is offered by The Pokémon Company, not Nintendo, but for everything else… yeah, no, I’m done. I’m not buying any more games from Nintendo unless they undergo a dramatic change in their policies and behavior, and if I do want to play a game developed by Nintendo employees, I will just do so via emulation. The company does not respect itself, and it uses its excess capital to pursue destructive legal battles like this. As such, I will not give it any more money. Plain and simple. Once I can transfer my Pokémon Violet Pokédex to Pokémon Home, my Switch is going into my closet.”
Natalie Neumann, Rundown (4/30/2023) TSF Visual Novel Fiesta!

And you know what? …I actually lied about the closet thing. It took me a few months to move things around. I have not given Nintendo a dime since that statement, but I have been acquiring many of their games. Many games in general. And the end result is… THE COLLECTION!

Yes, hundreds upon hundreds of games, all nice and loaded into a single launcher, run by various emulators, all playable on the computer I do ~150 tax returns a year on.

Akumako: “You do your taxes on a remote computer, grandma!”

But I edit the PDFs, view source documents, and print everything via my computer! Ergo, I do them on my computer!

Akumako: “GARF!”

Now, have I been playing any of these games? Honestly, no, not really. I collected and downloaded them for the sake of accumulating a collection and having games readily available if I ever wanted to play them. Why? Well, partially because I worry about a future where one CANNOT readily access older games, and wanted to save what I could. Partially as a giant fuck you to every publisher who has not been porting forward their game catalog. Partially as a giant fuck you to the clunky interface of most emulation collections, rather than something more straight forward and uniform. Partially because I, like a good autistic folk, love collecting things, and wanted to have a giant collection I could point at. And partially as a personal preservation effort. I am not aiming to retain everything for any given system, but I want to retain access to nearly every game I care about on some level.

And you know what? I’m actually super glad that I just have this. The fact that I can play so many games through one interface (Playnite) brings me joy in and of itself, and I just like opening up and looking at this list. It is just so customizable, has so many resources, and lets me do deranged things. Like adding 60 Pokémon ROM hacks as part of a single game profile! Pr letting me launch every game with just two licks of my mouse! It’s a level of convenience that reminds me of when I first used Steam a decade ago, but in a format that just works for me a bit better.

I guess you could say I have something of a fixation on displays that shows uniform images in a nice grid format. Don’t get me wrong, I think Steam is a pretty great launcher for games, but it is not quite what I want…

Also, I still use Steam, Humble Bundle, GOG, and third parties from time to time to buy games, as I want to keep adding to this collection, but those are now pretty much the only games I will buy. At this point, I’m basically done with consoles. The older I get and the more hours I spend in front of my computer, the more arbitrary consoles feel. The more I dislike how they are static pieces of hardware with specific libraries, how they are closed ecosystems one cannot control without hacking. I understand that some people are really into owning or customizing various gadgets and gizmos… but I like to keep things simple. I have an iPhone and a Windows PC. That’s all I need.

…Though, I might buy a Anbernic RG35XX Plus, just as a reference for VD2.0.

Part 2-5: Ratings and the Search For Meaning

In a year with so many highly acclaimed titles, it should be no surprise that there were several waves of discourse about the metrics of game reviews. Trite questions like how should games be scored, what do review scores mean, or who should be allowed to give a game a score. All asked before some jackoff tries to deflate the conversation by saying that ‘you can’t summarize a complex opinion with a number.’ Which… no, you definitely can. If you have ever been to a hospital, if you have ever filled up a survey, you should know how to convert your feelings into numbers. It is a basic grade school level skill. Please. Shut the fuck up.

…Gosh, why does everything work on an ouroboros model?

Now, none of this discourse is new. It is about as old as gaming discourse itself. It dates back to when kids compared EGM and Edge review scores to see if a game was good. However, it is a deeply frustrating breed of discourse because… these people are looking for order in a disorderly system.

When assigning games a score, game publications follow a rubric. Or more specifically, they look at what each number represents in an internal document (if there is one), and assign a game a score based on that. But that rubric changes with the staff, changes as the reviews grow older and have their tastes change, and sometimes just gets overhauled. Every publication has a slightly different rubric, even if they appear to be the same 10 scale. And the idea that you can just take these numbers, average them out somehow, and get a valuable number is… wishful thinking.

Now, there is an argument that game reviewers— and all reviewers— should adopt a sort of universal standard, but… cue the XKCD comic about standards.

Standards are a great thing, as they make it easier to make sure that everybody is communicating in the same way. Implementing a standard in an established industry is incredibly difficult, as it first requires agreeing to a good scoring system, and people can’t even do that. Some say that a 5/10 is average. Others say it is a score that represents mediocrity almost exclusively. Others say that it is a failure, based on one’s school system.

…Okay, I wanted to talk about how the grading system varies by country, but most of them tend to view anything below 50% as a failure, and I think that’s fair as a grading system— anything’s better than a system from my middle school, where you had to get a 93% of higher to get an A. …How the hell did I get a 3.5/4.0 GPA for two years straight with that system?

Now, it is easy to criticize the system that is currently being used, but… people use it because it fulfills an established need. People need to be able to categorize, quantify, and organize games based on their perceived quality. There are simply too many games for there to NOT be a system like this in place. It is a tool to help customers determine if they should purchase a game. I know, for a fact, lots of people use Metacritic or Steam user reviews before they buy or wishlist something. It is a shorthand way to determine what games are ‘worth’ most people’s limited time.

There, quite simply, should be an aggregate score based on various qualified sources who weigh a game based on various metrics. Something more formal than Metacritic, and something that would hopefully have more nuance than just a number. Maybe, for as trite as this may be, a number that breaks down the game by various factors. So that a game with a great story but middling gameplay can have a high story score and an average gameplay score.

…Also, this number would not be objective, as there is no such thing as objectively good or bad art. If someone wants an objective game review, look up HowLongToBeat and a Digital Foundry video on its performance, because that’s about as objective as one could get. There are very few things in this world that are ‘objectively good’ and when something is as complex and inherently subjective as a video game… objectivity is straight up fantasy, yo.

Part 2-6: Natalie Discusses The State of Modern Gaming With ZXA Yungboi

ZXA Yungboi: “Gaming… has changed. What was once a bastion of creativity and quality has become rotten, diseased, and tainted. How did this happen? How did the greatest glimmer in our lives become something so pathetic it couldn’t even shine in a prism? Well, I do have a three hour video up discussing that in detail, but this troony bippler dragged me out here to discuss it in detail. I don’t know why I listened to ‘her.’ ‘She’ only has a few hundred readers a day, while I’m raking in a couple dozen bucks every month.”

Natalie: “Hey everybody, you might be familiar with my college friend here, ZXA Yungboi. A 23-year-old cishet White man— a veritable Angry Young Man— who makes video game videos on YouTube period com—”

ZXA Yungboi: “You can just call me a 23-year-old YouTuber and Gamer…”

Natalie: “Oh capital G, very fancy. So, Yungboi, we’re here to discuss your latest video The Era of Gaming Atrophy.”

ZXA Yungboi: “I actually changed the title, because people don’t know what the fuck atrophy means. It’s now called Creativity is Dead: The Erosion of Modern Gaming.”

Natalie: “Wow! Now that’s a title that really makes the body erotic. I watched the video in full, all 67 minutes of it, and have some… things I would like to discuss with you about it.”

ZXA Yungboi: “Sure. Glock, cock, aim, and shoot.”

Natalie: “Firstly, I notice that your definition of what gaming is happens to be rather narrow. You appear to mostly be interested in bigger western-developed AAA action game series. Especially Halo. In the three versions of the thumbnail you made, you always have Mister Chief right there—”

ZXA Yungboi: “Master! He is the Master Chief!”

Natalie: “Of course he is, sir. Now, I have to ask about your… preferences and tastes in gaming. Would you say those are the only genres or types of games you are interested in?”

ZXA Yungboi: “The titles that I highlighted holistically represent gaming of the modern era. They are the biggest, best selling, and most acclaimed titles for PC and consoles that target a massive market share and were gaming for millions of people. I know that there are other games people are into, but they’re not capital-G Gaming, if you know what I mean.”

Natalie: “…Okay, okay. You have your own private definition. Let’s pretend that Nintendo and indie games don’t exist. So… why do you think the decline in gaming happened, for all of my readers who might have not watched your videos.”

ZXA Yungboi: “They got greedy and lazy, started shipping broken projects instead of creating something finished— something good at launch. They pushed making things look good over playing good, and everything’s just the same old shit, nothing new, nothing interesting.”

Natalie: “Okay, and… when would you say gaming was good? Are you trying to say that there was a golden age, it has ended, and instead of going through a silver, bronze, or whatever age, we are just near the dark—”

ZXA Yungboi: “I thought I made this clear, but clearly, some people don’t fucking get it. The golden age of gaming was from the 80s to the first Xbox and PS2 generation— when 3D gaming became something actually good. The silver age was the Xbox 360 generation— a lot of baller-ass games, but the magic started getting lost. Come the PS4 generation, and… shit just wasn’t the same. Every year games were getting worse, filled with more bullshit and less creativity, just doing the same fucking thing over and over again. And you know why that is? It’s all because developers stopped caring about Gamers, they just want to waste our time with repetitive shit, shove loot boxes down our throats, while making boatloads of money. And because retards with too much fucking money keep falling for it, everything gets worse for everyone.”

Natalie: “…Golly, there are a bunch of things wrong with that statement. You do realize that developers… are the people who develop the games, right? They must adhere to the whims of their publisher, the one who releases the game, and the one who profits first. If a game has a lot of aggressive monetization, it’s not because the developers are greedy. It’s because the publishers, the executives, want to get money. Developers are lucky to get a bonus, and while some developers do share in profits… they are such a minority they are basically an outlier.”

ZXA Yungboi: “Developer, publisher— it doesn’t really matter. The point is that retards keep paying for microtransactions, loot boxes, battle passes— all that shit, and it makes gaming worse for everybody.”

Natalie: “And now we’re victim blaming… So, you think it is the fault of ‘people with too much money’ that gaming has such a rampant monetization problem?”

ZXA Yungboi: “Yeah, it’s obvious. Monetization got popular because people in MapleStory and shit kept paying way too much for cosmetics and showing them off. Developers saw this— publishers saw this— and decided to do the same thing.”

Natalie: “Okay, so… you think the only people who buy these things are those with a lot of money?”

ZXA Yungboi: “No, no, no! They just do most of it. They’re whales for a reason, because they have a lot of money, and publishers take it from them because they’re too fucking stupid not to spend it.”

Natalie: “Right… you do realize that having a gambling addiction does not make you a stupid person, right?”

ZXA Yungboi: “Nah, addicts are retarded. They got into it, so they should get out of it. Simple as that.”

Natalie: “…Woof. Let’s try another approach. Publishers choose to design games for monetization. The games are designed to funnel people into shops, and keep pushing purchase opportunities onto them. But despite these clear design decisions, is it the player’s fault if they buy anything?”

ZXA Yungboi: “Yes. You’re an adult, you need to make your own damn decisions.”

Natalie: “And what if someone is neurodivergent? Or has a mental condition prone to these things? What if someone reacts to flashy lights and cries to buy something… by buying it? Isn’t that exploiting them? And what if they are manipulated into spending more than they could afford?”

ZXA Yungboi: “Eh… I call that natural selection. If you’re retarded, you shouldn’t have money, you should just die.”

Natalie: “If I could end this interview, I would… So, going back to an earlier statement, talking about the ages of gaming… I will concede with you and say that you do have a point. Back in the 90s and 00s, people were able to create some incredibly innovative games based on what they, as a collective group of people, wanted to see. However… most of the games from back then were kinda shit. You cannot tell me that you looked at the entire library for a system like the NES, SNES, Genesis, Commodore 64, or anything else I could name, and say that even most of them were good. There were a lot of great games from that era… but there were also ones that were bland, boring, derivative, poorly crafted, or just not fun to play. You only remember the good ones because… those are the most memorable ones.”

ZXA Yungboi: “Alright, I might be hiding the crap, but it’s not about the crappy games, it’s about games that aim to do something, and do something. It’s about innovation, about making an impact, and here… shit, shooters have barely changed since Call of Duty 4.”

Natalie: “Well, why do you think that is? And don’t just spout the first thing that pops into your head. Why would games stop innovating in the way you described? Because I’d say that it’s actually pretty simple. Games are harder to make, require more people to make them, and if you want to make something, it’s better to point at an example, at an established norm, and build off of that. With scales this large, with budgets this high, it can be hard to innovate in the AAA sphere.”

Natalie: “Furthermore… games that are familiar, that are safe, that one can play without needing to learn how things control and how the system works are simply more accessible. It is easier to play a shooter if you are familiar with shooters, because they have similar systems, controls, and mechanics. The reason why so many open world or third-person action games are so similar is because it makes it easier for people to play them, and easier for development teams of hundreds to design around. Developers could try something that goes against the grain… but it is often faster, easier, and better received if something stays familiar.”

ZXA Yungboi: “Okay, okay, that bit about things getting standardized… I get that. It’s easier to do something someone else did than make something new from scratch. It’s the opposite of innovation. But why are games so hard to make? Why do they cost so much money? Why do they take so many people? Can’t just a few people make games these days? Aren’t the tools way better than they were before?”

Natalie: “You do have a point with that, but it is important to recognize two things. One, the reason why so many games came out so quickly back in the 80s and 90s is… because developers crunched. They worked 60 hour weeks to get games done and some slept at their desks. They were able to get more done in a shorter time, and while that might seem as a triumph, it wasn’t.”

Natalie: “Two, games nowadays are simply trying to do more than they were back in the 80s and 90s. Their systems are often more detailed and robust, with more moving parts. More time and polish is put into animations, models, visual assets, and features impossible on older hardware. Games need to launch for more SKUs and languages, which means more technical development and more testing and bug fixes are required before launch.”

Natalie: “Three, when the number of hands on a project increases, then communication falters, it becomes harder for people to work together, and people are more closely invested in their roles, not really talking to people from different departments, and often redoing work. Which is not really a flaw of any developers, but rather any organization with enough people.”

Natalie: “And if you are wondering about smaller titles, those either have developers who can only work on the titles part-time, or a reduced staff size, considerably less than developers behind comparable projects had in prior eras. Which is why indie games with an SNES like presentation don’t have SNES length dev cycles. …That, and all the other reasons.”

Natalie: “Four, high fidelity requirements. It takes a LOT of time and work to make games look as good as they do in the current era, and this not only takes time from artists and animators, but programmers and technical staff. You might think it’s as easy as dropping something in Unreal 5, but it really isn’t.”

ZXA Yungboi: “I guess that you do have a point, but that doesn’t defeat my point. That gaming is just… something that happens nowadays. The same old type of shit, over and over, churning one after the next, doing nothing to spice things up. Back in the 2000s, new games felt new, they did new things, and now… everything just feels like a prettier Xbox 360 game. And the games that I loved from back then… just aren’t here anymore. GTA went from a standby to something we don’t even see once a decade. Sports games aren’t good anymore. They just flat out aren’t. Halo went to shit for the third time in a row. It just sucks.”

Natalie: “Look… you do have a point. Over the past 20 years, certain games just stopped being made. Urban sandbox titles like GTA don’t really exist anymore aside from GTA. Good sports games like Sega’s 2K sports line, Tony Hawk, Skate, SSX, or NBA Street aren’t being made and cannot be played on modern systems.”

ZXA Yungboi: “But it’s more than that. It’s not just that things are gone, it’s that… everything was simpler back then. Good games were just good games, you didn’t have any of this monetization bullshit, all of this DLC, you just had the game. And the biggest games were the best games. They reviewed the best, they sold the best, and people liked them the best. Now… it’s like the bigger a game does, the more people just wind up hating it.”

Natalie: “Heh. So, you want to go back to an era where good games sold the best, and where AAA games were the best. Where games were just games you bought, had your fun with, and moved on from. You… want an era where critical, commercial, and communal acclaim are the same thing.”

ZXA Yungboi: “Yeah, of fucking course I do! Back then, people knew what the good games were, and you could trust a brand name to give you what you wanted.”

Natalie: “You are not wrong to want this, but this era you are mythologizing… never actually existed. Sometimes bad games sold well, sometimes good games sold poorly, and that is all generally brushed up by retroactive assessments and nostalgia. Don’t get me wrong, there were a bunch of great PS2 games, but a lot of them were obscure, barely known, and represented unique experiences that… I think it might be closer to what you actually want. You want gaming to be fresh, exciting, and focus on the fun. And if you cannot find that… I’m sorry, but you just are not looking in the right places. You need to stop being such a sensitive snowflake and venture outside of your comfort zone, because your comfort zone is hurting you.”

Natalie: “Go back and play games from your youth. Either hit up a thrift store or start emulating, because PCSX2 nightly is really freaking good these days. Try out some games in genres or series you aren’t familiar with to get a new experience. Look into the outwardly creative side of the industry and play some goldarn indie games! Or… just take a break from gaming. How much do you play in a given month?”

ZXA Yungboi: “…Like, over a hundred hours, I guess.”

Natalie: “Cool, now do something else with that time! I’m not telling you to stop forever, just take a break, switch up your life, and try to kick this sense of ennui in the ass! I… I don’t like you, but I also don’t want to see you angry, don’t want to see something you loved become a burden, and want you to fill your life with things you enjoy. You need to realize that there is something empty and unsatisfying and make the change you so desire. The change that you need.”

ZXA Yungboi: “The fuck do you even know— you barely even play games, let alone any of the ones I play!”

Natalie: “That’s true, but I understand the ennui that comes from being in your early twenties, not knowing what to do with your life, and feeling like something is deeply wrong and must be changed. Also, back when I was your age, young whippersnapper, I was playing about as many monthly hours of games as you were.”

ZXA Yungboi: “Is this the part where you start grooming me or some shit?”

Natalie: “Geez, a trans person tries to offer some basic life advice and you call it grooming… OF COURSE NOT! What I’m saying is that it is important to reassess your passions and interests during this pivotal point in your life, and… you do ultimately have a point with what you are saying.”

Natalie: “The push toward user engagement and monetization has indeed eroded many facets of the games industry and led to some quantifiably worse art. But the response is not to throw out everything and write it off as an entire entertainment medium that ‘fell off.’ That’s like saying movies are dead or dying because people got bored with a lot of blockbuster franchise fare after binging through them during the pandemic and after a series of underwhelming modern entries. When… film as a medium is not defined by big blockbuster franchise fare, and neither are games. If they seem bland, boring, or unpalatable, that’s a matter of taste, of preferences, and it is either the result of big corporations adhering too strictly to a model or formula, or people just developing a more nuanced taste.”

Natalie: “You do realize that, for decades, there have been people who simply are not interested in what ‘mainstream’ media has to offer and sought out something more obscure or creatively driven? This is not something new. The only thing new is the scale and the volume of the dissatisfaction. And why is this dissatisfaction so high now? Because the pandemic fucked up so many people’s brains— mine included!”

Natalie: “Not everything is attributable to the pandemic, but it caused downward trends to crash, and made things that already weren’t going well even worse.”

ZXA Yungboi: “…Okay, then just tell me what I’m supposed to do here?”

Natalie: “Right, I sorta said too much and buried the lead. Just try something new, expand your horizons. The world of gaming, and the world in general, have some major problems, and while people are more aware of that now than ever before, that does not mean that there is no way to attain happiness. It just means the happiness you pursue might be a bit different than what you imagined in the past. And… that’s okay.”

ZXA Yungboi: “…I mean, none of that defeats that point that a part of gaming that used to be good is now shit.”

Natalie: “…Yeah, I guess so, but also there are more games coming out than ever before, and if you have problems finding good games you like… that’s a you problem. I’m not going to recommend games for you, as we have different tastes. Just remember… you also don’t need to play modern games. You can just play shit you liked back in ’07. Well, unless you’re big into multiplayer, in which… yeah, you’re kinda fucked right there, Mister Chief, as multiplayer games are experiences that cannot be fully replicated.”

ZXA Yungboi: “Oh, so you’re actually agreeing with my points?”

Natalie: “No, I’m saying you have a point in some of your criticisms. I just think your nihilistic or— to use the parlance of your generation— ‘doomeristic’ perspective is not the right conclusion. …Also, your views on mental health are the most reactionary conservative shit that I’ve ever encountered in the flesh. Like, I don’t care if you call me a slur or whatever, but… the fuck dude?”

ZXA Yungboi: “I… might spend too much time on 4chan.”

Natalie: “Yep, as to be expected of a 23-year-old capital-G Gamer… Anyway, this is what happens when I keep on writing when I have no idea what my conclusion will be, but I think we produced something with some merit as a reaction to a trend that… started in 2022, not 2023. Huh… Anyway, thanks for stopping by ZXA Yungboi, but I’ve got some personal topics to run through!”

ZXA Yungboi: “Will I come back in future installments, or…”

Natalie: “No clue! But for now, I’m sending you back to Hell with Akumako, Tenko, Jerimiah Pepperoni, Max ’26 Inches’ Flare, and Callie Worschershire.”

ZXA Yungboi: “Wait, whaaaaaaaaa—”

With that, the tube opened up, sending ZXA Yungboi to Hell, where he would land in a dump truck full of spaghetti, cum, and horse cocks.

Natalie & Akumako: “Ain’t that something?“

Part 3-1: Transitioned: Natalie

I don’t think I truly came to terms with the fact that I wanted to transition until early 2015, but due to various work, school, and family issues, I delayed on starting my transition until May 18, 2016, when I came out to my mother. That might seem strange to a lot of trans femme folks, who tend to start HRT the DIY route. But despite some light transphobic rhetoric from my mother, I came out to her, and started HRT on June 23, 2016. Sonic The Hedgehog’s 25th anniversary!

From there, I spent a year and a half boymoding it while growing out my hair, not coming out to others until November 2017. I got my name changed on December 7, 2017, and went in for FFS on December 16, 2017— mere hours after taking a final. After this, I presented myself as female full time, and spent the ensuing few years trying to save up money, finish up school, and make super duper sure what I wanted to do with my genital situation. Also, I was tucking during that time because, unlike Clavi and Cassie, I’m not a little bitch who’s afraid of destroying her balls.

This continued until 2021 and 2022, when I went in for five sessions for genital electrolysis, and… boy was that a waste of time and money. As a redhead, my hair is notoriously stubborn and difficult to remove. Fortunately, it also means my facial hair is so fair and light, even against my ghastly pale skin, that I do not need facial electrolysis. …But the long and short of my electrolysis journey is pain, discomfort, and the most intense dysphoria I had ever felt in my entire fucking life.

I’m not sure what was worse. Having an Eastern European woman flop around my flaccid swelling cock as she plucks hairs out, all while the anesthetic only lasts 70% as long as it should. Or dealing with a set of cock and balls that grow two times their usual size for three days and can only be tamed with the power of ibuprofen, ointment, and an ice pack.

I only went through with it because I was under the impression that someone needed to go through genital electrolysis if they wanted genital surgery, when that’s a lie. If someone wants a pussy they can ram a bellend through, then that is the best option, as otherwise you have ingrown pussy hairs, and nobody wants that. But even then, there is a recovery process associated with a full depth vaginoplasty, which takes several months and requires expanding it with plastic ‘stents.’ Or at least that’s what I remember reading. They might be on some new shit nowadays…

Getting a pussy that can fuck is such a hassle filled with pain and exercise that I pretty much immediately decided that a zero depth option was better for me when I first learned about it. I’m asexual, so… I don’t need to accommodate business of any size. But even then, it was still an ordeal getting everything situated with the surgery. A lot of travel to a hospital an hour’s drive away, a lot of initial discomfort after the surgery. A lot of inability to do stuff, and about a week of my life that was just lost to being in a hospital. The hospital was great, but then I was shoved to an under-budgeted and understaffed nursing home that I went into just a few days before Christmas. It took me over an hour to get some acetaminophen (Tylenol) there. The food was catered to the palate of Polish people who immigrated to Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. Everything was dirty. And the tampons they gave me were plastic-filled bullshit.

From there, I spent almost two months mostly confined to my bed, avoiding my desk, to help my newly formed vagina heal, and having my mother help me apply my ointments and stuff. Fortunately, I was still able to do stuff— as you could tell by the fact I wrote Rundowns, reviews of Pokémon Violet and Cellular Shift, and TSF Series #016.

However, as of mid-February 2023… I was basically done, and the only things I needed to do was update my sex marker on my ID and my birth certificate. Now, I technically could have updated the sex market on my ID earlier, as Illinois is a civilized state where people can self-identify as their preferred gender for ID purposes. But… I didn’t get that memo, and it took me until August 2023 before I could go to Secretary of State to update that crap. While my birth certificate update was delayed by the fact I needed a notary. Now, you can get a notary just by going to a damn post office or bank, but I relied on my mother, and I’m still waiting on my updated birth certificate.

Whatever. The point is that the final bits of paperwork have been updated, my prescription has been stabilized (even though they never put me on progesterone, which is a bit weird), and I am past the transition phase. I am not post-everything, I am no longer transitioning, I am transitioned.

Akumako: “But doesn’t Chase still call you [DEADNAME] Neumann sometimes?”

It’s fucking Chase. They don’t know how to process paperwork.

This is all a fairly sobering thing for me, as… it took me over 7 years to get to this point. That is a really long time. That is the amount of time it takes for someone to go from finishing 5th grade to being an adult with a high school diploma (unless they get a premature GED at 16, like a cool cat).

And now that I have passed this point, what is my advice to the burgeoning next generation?

One, stay with your parents and make money while living at home, because transitioning is hella expensive. It cost me $30,000 for FFS with no insurance in 2017. Genital electrolysis— which I would not recommend— cost me about $8,000. Getting a zero depth vagina cost me just shy of $5,000, because I have ‘good’ American health insurance. And that is before factoring in the costs of travel, intermediary clothes as one finds their style, hormone costs, and therapy costs. Yes, therapy is required, because people cannot opt into getting some of this stuff without the consent of someone else— which is dumb, as that is not required for basically any other surgery.

Two, do your shit fast. I stalled on my transition for more financial reasons— and also the pandemic— but the sooner you get things done… the sooner you can get on with your life. That is way easier to say than to do, I get that… which is why I’m saying it without having done it.

Three, don’t expect too much. When I first started transitioning, there was a more prevalent expectation that HRT will not only make an AMAB look feminine, but also help them look cute/sexy depending on what direction they lean into. But after seeing so many more people transition and put less rigor into their presentation, I realize that was kind of bullshit. HRT can help AMAB people register along the feminine end of the culturally binarized gender spectrum, but it requires more presentational skills (fashion, makeup, poise) to enter the hot zone. That and, you know, genetics.

Instead, I say that a trans girl should never look at a cis girl as an attainable goal, as what good is a goal unless it’s attainable? Instead, look at other trans girls, see what they do, and try to aspire to that. Look at how they dress, how they sound, and how they present themselves. Because that is a likely preview of what you’d get with HRT and possibly surgeries. Well, unless you are a genetic anomaly. But even then, it won’t make you into an anime girl. You can only achieve that through Anime Replacement Therapy, also known as ART.

Okay, okay, but I haven’t addressed the pressing matter of what someone should do if they are not supported in their transition. By parents, by co-workers, or by friends. …And I do not have anything to say to those people, as I simply never experienced those problems.

…Yeah, that is a crummy answer, but any other one I could give would be disingenuous, as I haven’t had to deal with transphobia from anyone… aside from State Farm. They would not give me corporate life insurance because I’m trans.

Akumako: “Were they spooked you were gonna make like a faggot and join the 41% club!”

Yep, exactly! …Also, in case this is not completely clear, Akumako is basically my id or my superego depending on whatever role I feel like playing when discussing a particular topic. She says the shit that pops into my head that I know I shouldn’t say because it’s fucked up, but I also want to say because I’m a selfish little bitch.

Akumako: “I’m a switch bitch and the master of penetrations!”

Part 3-2: Enrolled Agent (of Chaos) Natalie

In 2019, I dropped over $2000 on a CPA preparation course with Becker. I was getting my Master’s in Accounting, and had every intention of becoming a Certified Public Accountant. I got started with the first part of the study program, and it was a struggle. I was greeted with a dearth of information that I filled across 40 pages of notes, but it still wasn’t enough to address the relentless volume of information they were asking of me. I was discouraged, confused why now I was struggling with something I excelled in. I mean, I was on the fucking Dean’s List in college. I got to wheel out my late 95-year-old great grandma to a celebration where I was told how I was such a good student.

…But then the pandemic happened while I was studying for the first part of the CPA exam. This meant I was working from home with my mother, helping her out with work more often, and was so beset by the sheer volume of crap going on in the year that I put studying on hold. Because she was poping her head into my room every hour and I couldn’t even take the tests if I wanted to!

Time passed, I started working as a salaried tax accountant, and rather than pursue a CPA license… I decided to say screw it, and get something far more attainable. An Enrolled Agent license, which meant I could file tax returns and represent people before the IRS. The two biggest things that a CPA can do!

With this goal in mind, I made my plans. I would take the three Enrolled Agent exams throughout the summer, one every month. I spent several hours every weekday studying for it, going through the dense documents describing the subject matter and dealing with some truly passive aggressive scoring systems. I learned a fair bit, developed a strong disdain for Surgent as a provider and producer of testing materials, and after three visits to One North LaSalle, I was done. …And then six weeks later, I got a piece of paper saying that I knew enough to sign tax returns for other people.

This is an incredibly useful skill for my professional career, makes me a far more valuable employee to any potential employer, and also means I will need to work to a slightly higher standard. All of which— except for the last one— are good things. And in order to keep the good times rolling, I just need to take a couple CPE courses (multiple choice tests) every year, and I’ll be golden!

I could potentially make even more money by having a piece of paper that says I am a Certified Public Accountant. And I still have the prepaid study program that I could use.

…But you know what? FUCK THAT!

It would take me 400 to 600 hours in order to take all parts of the CPA exam, but I don’t want to. I would rather spend those hours doing something I enjoy, rather than cramming information into my head. The pressure associated with needing to do so many exams— exams far more difficult than the ones I completed— with the threat that I might need to retake them, or worse, retake all of them after fucking up my law exam, is something I don’t want in my life.

Besides, a lot of the CPA review program is based on what I learned in school, and… it’s been too long. I’ve been out of school for four many years now, and I simply do not have the attention needed to study for something so long and abstract. I would rather do anything else!

Part 3-3: Big Homo(wner) Natalie

…So, I’m a homeowner. I bought a condo unit on October 17, 2023. I moved into it a month later on November 22, 2023. And now I am living in that condo with my mother. Prior to this, I was living in the same house for the first 29 years of my life. It painted my mental image of home, and it directly inspired the primary setting in several stories I’ve written. Though, most of the time I used the home of my former friend Matt (who I haven’t spoken to in a decade) because his childhood home more closely matches the typical two-story American household.

I previously recorded a sloppy home tour of my new place earlier this month and in the ensuing month, the place really hasn’t changed. It is still a pretty barren home that has a terrible echo due to how open its main rooms are connected, the relatively high ceilings, and a natural temperature of 25 degrees Celsius. But the more time I spend here, the less it feels like a hotel I’m spending an extended amount of time at and more like a home I will spend the… remainder of my life at. I mean, assuming America doesn’t go full genocide mode again…

I know it will change and get better over time, but my mother is insistent that we wait until the couch arrives in late January before we look into any further changes. Such as curtains and partitions to address the noise, additional furniture to fill in the space and make the place less auditorily frustrating. (My mother loves calling across the house for me or talking through my door, but also cannot hear/understand me unless we are in the same room. It’s a stupid dynamic.)

I am talking about the home itself, but part of what drew me to it in the first place was… its almost perfect location. My condo is so close to various shops and resources that I can do things independently. The grocery store is five minutes away, the pharmacy is only three, the post office is a short ten minute walk, and there are a bunch of other little shops I could visit. Combined with the ample access to public transit, things were looking good for me… but I somehow became more of a hermit than ever before.

My mother handles the shopping, as she always has, and because I work from home, I don’t have much reason to leave. She is more than happy to buy groceries on her own, I’ve always been a homebody, and I get my twenty minutes of exercise everyday thanks to YouTube and my exercise bike.

It’s a bit upsetting, as I enjoy the mundane simplicity of walking down a street to grab some food or other necessities, but… I also don’t mind spending my life locked up here. It’s pretty cozy.

Part 3-4: PokéManiac Natalie

So, this year began with me defiantly declaring “Bye Bye Pokémon” with my Pokémon Violet review, where I stated that “Pokémon Violet is a sad game. It is a game that does so many things wrong and takes so many steps backwards that I do not think it should exist.”

I still stand by that, think that the game is a below average title, and have not bought a new Pokémon game since then. (Though, I did buy some sitting cuties for Cassie.) However, this past year I have become more invested in Pokémon than I have been in a good while. I went through all 26 films in the series with Cassie as part of a marathon that I, mostly, loved. I started watching more PokéTubers, including some from people with downright distressing relationships with the series, undergoing a mental breakdown while extensively reviewing certain games. I started collecting Pokémon ROM hacks and fan games. I started working on a spreadsheet that I used to imagine a hypothetical Pokémon game that is only vaguely like the main games. And Pokémon simply has been filling my mind more than it has been for a good while.

Now, Pokémon is a constant in my life, so this uptick in obsession is not too surprising, especially given my age (I’m 29). But I do find this factoid to be a bit… concerning, as I pretty much know there is no way to properly satisfy myself. I have deep yet unique problems with a lot of the Pokémon series, but they are not the problems reflected by many members of the community. Due in part to their fixation on past titles, they do not seem to see the same fundamental issues with Pokémon that I do. I hate crap like natures, EVs, IVs, and while I can acknowledge the strategy of switching Pokémon in and out of set mode… I kind of just want Pokémon to become something else.

What do I mean by that? Um, lemme make a list!

No randomization of alteration of base stats beyond stat boosting items a la the seeds from Dragon Quest.
A 4 to 6 person party in combat.
A speed-up option for turn-based battles.
A Final Fantasy X or Grandia style turn order system.
Treating each Pokémon as a party member from a massive roster, rather than individualized creatures who can be duplicated.
Accessory slots and persistent party-wide upgrades instead of simple held items, either using a point system or something a la Solatorobo: Red the Hunter.
A universal naming convention for moves with clearly delimited tier-based structure that correspond to types and categories, rather than biology.
Multiple abilities per Pokémon, with self explanatory/standardized names.
An overworld with non-linear progression instead of an open world.
A character driven story with a limited cast of recurring characters, rather than a massive cast of characters who barely do anything.
A protagonist with their own agency who the player cannot control for story purposes.

Akumako: “Bitch, are you even talking about Pokémon at this point?.”

No, not really I guess. I just took out everything I didn’t like, and added stuff I did.

Also, my brain has been further contaminated by the fact that I started listening to Pokémon music. Not from the games, but a bunch of stuff from the anime, including the two licensed soundtracks for the first two movies. Which, for the record, are absolute bops, right up there with the Digimon the Movie soundtrack.

I love Pokémon dearly and truly, but, like everybody who loves Pokémon, I feel as if there is something deeply wrong with how the series is being managed. Unfortunately, if you get eight different Pokémon fans, randomly selected, and ask them what they want from Pokémon, you’ll get at least five different answers.

Some people want the series to backtrack to 2D and become a souped up GBA/DS game with gorgeous sprite art and pixel art. (Mostly because they like the games of that era.)

Some think games like Pokémon Legends and Scarlet and Violet were underdeveloped takes on a great idea, and want that to be built on with powerful hardware and reasonable development times.

Some want the games to emphasize and cater to competitive play, transforming Pokémon into an eSport.

Some are really big into making Pokémon games replayable and challenges, with Nuzlockes and mototype challenges, and want the main games to better cater to these ideas through the use of randomization.

Some want Pokémon mixed with a few mechanics from a scattering of games they like.

Some just want a Pokémon game that takes every feature they liked from every prior game and be this girthy, vast experience. Like one that combines all regions, all features, and all Pokémon into a singular mega game with such a scale that it is basically impossible to develop. …Unless you go back to GBA production values— Oh, now I get it…

Pokémon is a nightmare of a series in so, so many ways. The games are filled with contradictory design concepts in so many ways, and rather than refining the play experience based on good feedback, they keep pursuing innovation. Fans have been rallied into hating the developers, using bloated words like ‘incompetent’ while knowing nothing about how these games are actually developed.

The developers are put in a deeply unenviable position, largely dictated by the whims of executives and a mass media machine with a million moving parts. The deadlines for Pokémon games are becoming so obviously unreasonable that it’s a small miracle that they are as stable as they are. Yes, I just called Scarlet and Violet a miracle. It was buggy as hell at launch, but it worked.

Pokémon brings with it so much anxiety, dread, and so many brainworms that… I actually would recommend that anybody not already infected by Pokérus to just flat out stay away from the series. I vehemently disagree with the idea that this series ‘takes one step forward and two steps back’ but I will say that every new release is a frustration in some way, shape, or form, and after… a decade of this, I don’t see it stopping. Just… ever. Also, no, X and Y were not the ‘last good ones.’ I spent 300 hours in that game, and I consider it the most bland Pokémon game ever made.

…Anyway, Cassie and I are gonna work on a Ramble for the Pokémon Horizons anime next year. Here’s hoping it’s good!

Part 4: Natalie’s Too Old for Video Games (And She’s 50-Years-Old)

Something that my buddy Cassie (hi Cassie) has said to me several times this year is that I’m “too old for video games.” Which was paired with sister phrases like “Natalie doesn’t know what a video game is,” “Natalie has never played a video game in her life,” “Natalie, you’re 50-years-old and were brainwashed into thinking you liked video games.”

Now, Cassie just says this as a joke… but she does have a point, as I have spent increasingly little time playing video games, and when I do play them, I often am rather critical of them.

Video games lack the same allure to me. Not because I’m like former series protagonist ZXA Yungboi. But because I recognize that I only have a finite amount of time in this fine life, and I’d rather focus on creating things, instead of playing things. Now, I still do play things, as it’s good for my mental wellbeing and gives me inspiration, but I’ve gone from weekly game reviews to… whatever this is.

In 2023, I reviewed 11 games along with a triumphant(?) return to the rich world of Student Transfer scenarios with a total of… 9 reviews, technically.

This list naturally starts with… Pokémon Violet. A game that I was dreading prior to its release as it was looking to backtrack the various upgrades featured in Pokémon Legends Arceus. I went in with low, tempered expectations… and it still managed to disappoint the everloving crap out of me. The introduction is simply bizarrely devised. The premise of a Pokémon school goes woefully underutilized. The open world… is actually just a LIE, and the game is meant to be played in a linear fashion. Pokémon are so poorly distributed across the world that it makes the act of exploration feel like a chore. Quality of life features were cut to incorporate more arbitrary grinding simply to keep people playing the game for hundreds of hours. And… this is the only Pokémon game I consider to be a complete step backwards compared to its predecessor.

Cellular Shift Version 0.6.6 was the final release of a promising yet sloppy TSF visual novel that I checked out for research purposes, and found to be a fascinating game. However, it lacked a strong vision for what it wanted to be, and the end result is filled with disparate compelling elements that would need to be rewritten or reworked to be improved. However, the title was too much for its lone developer, Jacob Grant, who announced the game’s indefinite hiatus just a few days after my review. With that in mind… yeah, I would still only recommend this VN to TSF archeologists. Also, the developer just straight up deleted their Patreon creator page, Twitter, and Discord server. So… I guess they’re just gone.

Tax Heaven 3000 was a joke game from a collective of artists who wanted to make a dating sim about doing one’s taxes. As an idea… that’s freaking brilliant. And as a tax professional, it was right up my alley! Unfortunately, for as endearing the game is as a simple yet zany visual novel, it kind of sucks as tax preparation software, lacking the ability to perform even fairly basic functions that are more complex than a basic W-2 person. It gets an A for effort, but not much else.

Mice Tea is freaking DOPE! It took me forever to muster up the mustard to check out this game, but once I finally did, it did not disappoint. As a furry TF visual novel that does not shy away from its more animalistic angle, it is not for everyone, but for members of that niche— like me— it is darn near required reading. I love its small and thoroughly developed cast of characters. I love how every one of its four core routes offers something different, even if I’m not a fan of certain choices. I am still amazed at both the breadth and quality of art the developers managed to fit into such a niche game. And it represents a promising future for a new generation of high quality story-heavy transformation games. …By which I mean the developers are already working on not one, but two new TF visual novels… and they’re pretty dope too!

Little Noah: Scion of Paradise was a curious roguelike repackaging of a defunct mobile strategy game that, as a fan of another defunct Cygames game, I was immensely interested in. Overall, the game is a fine roguelike platformer. It is a bit too limited in its content, only featuring a handful of stages, a bit basic with its fixation on simple platforming and enemy gauntlets, and too fixated on offering hyper-challenging difficulty over unique content. But overall, it’s a solid foundation for what will hopefully be a series, and a game with enough meat on its bones to garner a few hours of fun.

re:Dreamer Version 0.15.0 is a game that brought me to tears several times, gave me a panic attack, and is comfortably within my top five games of all time. From its messy beginnings, the game has been refined and expanded into something both special and stellar. It is a game that takes a simple, even blasé premise, and interjects it with such a level of dedication and personality that it’s hard for me to accept that it exists. If you read Natalie.TF and haven’t played re:Dreamer yet, close this tab, download re:Dreamer, and you won’t be disappointed.

Class of ‘09: The Re-Up is the latest Max Fields joint, and… the dude doesn’t miss, and his shit consistently hits like a punch to the gut. Much like its 2021 predecessor, The Re-Up offers one of the rawest, shameless, and funniest experiences you could find from an English visual novel, largely in part due to a sharply honed script and an excellent voice cast. Admittedly, I think it is a bit of a step back from the first game in certain respects, but that’s what happens when you re-up. It might not be quite as good… but damn does that shit still hit hard as fuck, yo.

Palladium Version 0.0.4 is more of C.R.E.A.M.’s sweet French flavored treats, and offered a significant yet slightly underwhelming extension of what came before. If one has the stomach to sit through a sloppy ESL script, they will be met with a passionately written TSF story from a veteran with more than enough sprinkles of creativity to warrant a look. …I just hope that C.R.E.A.M. is still kicking. I haven’t seen him pop up online since May 2023 and I’m starting to get worried…

Celeste is a highly acclaimed super hard platformer that is highly popular with trans people. …But I thought it was often more annoying than rewarding, and didn’t really like it. NEXT!

Mega Man X DiVE Offline was a game I threw onto my radar the instant it was announced. I am deeply fascinated in how an online-only gacha game could be converted into an offline only game, so I looked at X DiVE Offline as a test subject for this concept… And it wasn’t successful Despite being free from the design limitations of live services, X DiVE Offline is a game that does roughly the bare minimum to become a palpable single-player offline title. It’s still grindy, has a baffling unlock system, and despite its ambition, its original creative indulgences fall flat due to a sloppy translation and a sloppily told story. As a generally preserved single-player conversion of a gacha game, it has some value… but not as a game that people would play for fun.

My Mad Scientist Roommate Turned Me Into Her Personal Robotic Battle Maiden?!? is a curious little game that honestly feels more like a hobby project from a growing game developer than a proper professional title. The game is rough in many ways, prioritizes function over being particularly brilliant, and is mostly noteworthy for delivering upon the writing qualities of its creator. It is very much a title meant for fans of games like Max’s Big Bust, and I think my biggest takeaway from this title is a newfound respect for its developer and his ambition.

Also, I played the following Student Transfer scenarios:
Valentine’s Lies by Choripan was DOPE.
Detachment by nerditalk was alright.
Axiomatic by Mimo was alright.
Remote Possibilities by EvilBlender was good, except for the underwhelming new stuff.
Magical Harem Plan DX by ChocMint was a solid proof of concept, but not much else.
Under Control by Smurfik was a scenario that made me feel that the writer should be working on something more weird and wild.
Eman Looc’s Possession Scroll by Darknost was DOPE except for when it was sorta middling and not my thing.
Yrammus Dar’s Ghost Hunt by Darknost was DOPE.
Why Can’t I Be Sayaka? by Darknost was great.

Part 5: The Cassie Section – Hi Cassie~!

Last year, I talked about how I made a positively lovely friend by the name of Cassandra Wright. Normally, my friendships don’t last very long, we drift apart, and we just sorta forget about each other over time. It’s just my personality, as I tend to be very individualistic with how I spend my time, and would happily spend my time alone, doing my own thing, without talking to others. …So know that it’s really weird when I manage to click with someone so well that I don’t go a day without talking to them in some capacity.

Why do I like Cassie so much as a person? Well… it’s a lot of things. She is someone who has been a diligent reader of Natalie.TF, so I feel that I can be myself around her, no filter. She’s told me a lot about herself, I’ve done the same, and that’s one of the easiest and best ways to form connections with others. She’s an adorable and funny person, so unafraid of being seen as childish or eccentric that I’d say she revels in it. From going on about how sleepy she is, to matching my pace as we indulge in cartoonish fantasies and antics. She’s always down for talking to me, and we often delve into this wackadoo comedy routine together. She is willing to collab with me, as seen with her (theoretically) recurring segment and the trinity of Rambles we wrote together. And while we do have some similar interests… she is also a considerably different person than me.

Cassie likes talking to people all day. Natalie can only walk for a few hours before getting tuckered out. Cassie is the empress of exhaustion and just wants to wait and nap away the days as she hopes things get better. Natalie is someone who tries to be productive every day, and is such a junky for this shit, she needs to log her daily progress. Cassie is a live service gal. Natalie is all about that single-player life, yo. Cassie is enamored by things that are light, fluffy, and cute, valuing the vibes, sound, and visuals of something heavily. While Natalie is the writer of Weiss Vice: Glory Unto Genocide!

But I actually think these differences are part of why I get along with Cassie so well. Because we’re both a pair of weirdos, but we’re weird in different yet complementary ways. It gives our relationship a healthy level of tension, and makes it fun to discuss things with her. Well, when she is not too sleepy, that is.

Also, Cassie is such a socialite that she roped me into being part of a whole gosh darn social circle. It’s only six people, but that’s a BIG deal for me, as it’s the biggest friend group I’ve been part of in my life! We’ve got a Canadian snake who Cassie calls her ‘daughterson.’ A Mexican trans girl named after a dog. A German firefighter who we keep trying to make into a raccoon, because we keep thinking everybody needs to be an animal for some reason. And Chari Shal of TSF translation fame, who pops her head in every now and then like a loving aunt! And you know what is the glue that keeps all of us together? Cassie!

Honestly, Cassie’s the best friend I could realistically ask for. I say realistic because if I could trade her for a live action Maxxie Flare, I would in a heartbeat. But girls that DOPE don’t exist in reality, so I’ll settle for Cassie.

Part 6: Natalie.TF Traffic Stats – 2023 Edition

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! It’s that time again! Time for the real meat and mostaccioli! It’s time for… THE STATS!!!

Fair warning, these are not TRUE year-end numbers, as I pulled this data on December 21, 2023. But it’s close enough for general analytical purposes! I’ve got oodles of ish to go over, so let’s get started with the biggest one. The annual stats!

…Wow, that is a shockingly consistent plateau! 2020 saw my viewership nearly double to 281,975, which further grew to 327,941 in 2021. Why? Student Transfer. The release history benefitted my metrics, and I was putting out Scenario reviews on the reg back then. But 2022 saw the total views go down to, 276,821. Which isn’t even a 2% decrease compared to 2020, so I’m just going to pretend it’s the same number.

Now, 2023 was a weird year. I was hot off the heels of the big rebrand to Natalie.TF on December 1, 2022, which I figured would result in some SEO tomfoolery and viewership decline. I did not have a new Student Transfer review to boost my readership, even though my lukewarm Version 7.0 review came out on December 1, 2022. But I was putting far more effort into Rundowns, steadily revising them into… Natalie’s weekly gaming and TSF variety show. I made standardized header images, eventually started using header images for each section, and introduced TSF Showcase as a recurring weekly segment.

I had no idea where things would wind up… but the annual traffic wound up being shockingly consistent. The YTD total of 267,545 is less than what I was showing last year, but I average at over 700 views a day, so… yeah, the difference between those figures is de minimis.

I would ask if this merely meant I had a stable and consistent readerbase— and I do, as indicated by my regular commenters. But I think that isn’t quite right, as my visitors actually went up from 71,409 to 78,070, representing an all-time high in annual visitors. Does that mean my audience is growing? Well, I guess so, and if I had to say where, I would have to say China.

I have no idea why I suddenly have a Chinese audience, as I would assume that Natalie.TF is banned in China. Taiwan is listed as its own country here, same with Hong Kong, so… Hello! Welcome! Thanks for checking out my stuff! I hope you’ve been enjoying the site, and I’ll continue writing stuff for you all come next year. I bitch about China’s government, almost as much as I bitch about America’s awful government, but China is a great land full of many possible friends. And friends… are nice.

Moving onto my monthly traffic… it’s been pretty consistent. There was a nice spike in June due largely to my latest re:Dreamer review and four other reviews I wrote. While November has just historically been a big month for me. I think it just has to do with a boost in general online traffic or something.

I also pulled my year in review and all-time annual insights. Both of which are interesting bits of information to have at my disposal, but I think my biggest surprise is that I posted half a million words. This is before posting this article, and two Rundowns, so… yeah, I broke half a million words this past year. But how? I did not release any novels after all, and I did not have another giant Dragalia Lost Ramble. But I did have three massive Rambles I did along with Cassie, so I cannot say that I wrote and published all of those words, as Cassie wrote about half of those articles.

The word count on these articles are 39,430 words, 10,392 words, and 21,821 words. So… Shit, I published over 70,000 words on movies this year? Now that’s something I never expected. I genuinely went several years from 2014 to 2022 without watching any movies.

Of these 71,643 words, I would say that Cassie wrote… about 40% of them, as I tended to be more thorough with my thoughts than her, so let’s just say she wrote 30,000 words, because I do not want to do a tally. That makes this total 485,939 word figure a bit less impressive, but considering I have also been working on a super-sized novel… I’m not gonna complain.

Also, I passed the 1.5 million view mark with 1,547,311. I would consider that to be an accomplishment, but my old masturbation factory, VD Captions, is still a million views ahead of it with 2,526,253 views. And I abandoned that shit 7 years ago! It’s bad enough that my shit still haunts Google Images, but I know Natalie.TF will always live in its shadow! …At least when it comes to metrics.

As for my all-time stats… Wow. You can really tell that I have lost the ability to be concise these days and how much novels add to the post count.

Okay, okay, but where are these views coming from, and what are people reading? Well, that’s pretty easy, both for the annual views and the 2023 views.

Student Transfer has continued to be the most popular topic on Natalie.TF, garnering 43.23% of my 2023 views, despite only releasing scenario reviews. And 46.59% of all views on Natalie.TF.

I love Student Transfer. I love how it has enabled so many creators over the years. And love how it helped create so much good TSF. It has led to the creation of basically every subsequent TSF visual novel of note, and I am happy that I am the gateway into this game for thousands of people.

However… Student Transfer has been on my radar since it was first a sparkle in Eliza Velasquez’s eye, way back in the summer of 2015. And in the ensuing eight years… I’ve been finding it hard to be as passionate about it. I enjoy it as something occasional, but I do not have as much passion for it as I feel I should, considering how much of my online identity is roped up in it.

Based on my stats and metrics, I should be doing regular scenario reviews and should do something like an ultra mega review of all 1 million plus words of content in the base game. But… I don’t want to.

I’m a creator. While I love praising the work of others, analyzing it and highlighting where it succeeds and falters… I have my own stories to tell. I want to create my own catalog of work. And when given the choice, I will prioritize my stuff. I would rather treat something like ST as an occasional treat, rather than something I need to touch every month. …Just like how I treat the second and third biggest TSF visual novels on Natalie.TF.

Press-Switch, meanwhile, made up 10.93% of my views this year, and 8.61% of my lifetime views. The figures make sense, as Version 0.6a was released in October 2022, and was the first proper P-S release in three years. I think the figures for Press-Switch are far more healthy, and I’m happy to be able to boost this game so much. Even if the creator did show his ass by making a private matter public earlier this month. But that controversy has hopefully been buried.

re:Dreamer is still a fairly obscure TSF game compared to the other two, probably on account of its original pre-2021 introduction being so bad and a lack of finished routes. Which is a shame, as it is a lovely game, and probably my favorite of the three. Regardless it only made up a bit of my annual traffic at 2.46% and 1.82% of all-time views. I feel like I should do something to help CaptainCaption. I could make a re:Dreamer page, and I would even be open to CaptainCaption hosting their Friday Updates on Natalie.TF, preserving them in case Patreon goes to shit. …That would probably be a conflict of interest, but I already gave CaptainCaption $X,XXX, so can you really say I have any credibility when it comes to re:Dreamer?

Okay, now we are at the interesting stuff! The top 30 other posts. There’s a lot to go through, so I’m going to just rapid fire through them.

Home / Archives is always going to be the number one page, as it is the home page, as in Natalie.TF and all related non-post stuff. NEXT!

Natalie Rambles About Metamorphosis has proven to have legs due to the ensuing popularity of Metamorphosis, the lack of unique images of the comic, and the fact the post has 50 unique images. Come to think of it, it was a predecessor to TSF Showcase in a weird sense.

Class of ‘09 and Class of ‘09: The Re-Up are two visual novels that went viral on TikTok and other youth-centric social media platforms this September to November, and because I was one of the few people to review the games outside of Steam, these reviews did numbers. Either because people wanted to learn more about this game, or were just looking at screenshots. I’m glad that I could be a resource to these people, and if they actually read my thoughts on Max Fields’s work, then all the better!

Rundown (3/05/2023) Natalie Remembered SapphireFoxx is a weird one, as that Rundown was all over the place. I talked about game history with Final Fantasy Versus XIII. I ranked crypto tax platforms. I talked about one of the most prolific TSF creators in the past decade. I explained how to download Vimeo videos, mostly for my own future reference. I talked about the annual February Pokémon Presents. And I talked about how the Infinity trilogy of Never7, Ever17, and Remember11 are all supposedly being remade. …But I think people just flocked here because SapphireFoxx is a known entity.

Rundown (3/26/2023) One Year After Body Swap Terrorism Incident is DOPE! did well because it featured the word body swap in the title, had a weird title, and included a section on SapphireFoxx. Specifically about how I finished part of my personal archive project, but ran into a snag, as I don’t know what the best way to screen capture video is. …And I still don’t. Also, maybe talking about Tax Heaven 3000 helped.

Palladium Version 0.0.4 and 0.0.3 both did admirable numbers, which is nice to see, as I think that game is special and deserves some attention. Its Frenchy script makes it an acquired taste, but I admire C.R.E.A.M. as a writer, and like seeing him continue to pursue his ideas. Fortunately, they are still around, per the Student Transfer Discord, and are working on Version 0.0.5. So maybe I’ll get to review it next year!

Natalie Rambles About TSF and Natalie Rambles About TSF Comics have continued to do good numbers, so yay for that! I worked really hard on those and I’m glad that people are not only still reading them, but are reading both of them.

My About page actually did decent numbers this year, which is really quite… pleasant. That page has been around since day one, but hardly anybody winds up clicking on it, when I think it is important that people know who I am as a writer. Though, they might be able to gather that just from my writing. I do wear my personality on my face.

The Mice Tea review that I was hyping up for almost a year finally came out this year, and did pretty darn well. Not because of any major spikes, but it kept getting 130+ views per month, and I like it when reviews have long legs like that. It speaks to the number of people interested in the game, and I think Mice Tea is, indeed, a very special game that deserves your attention. I mean, assuming you can fuck wit da furries. And I am, objectively, a furry.

When I Woke Up, I Became A Bagel Girl review, the budget Korean anime I reviewed in January 2021, has continued to get views. That is a bit weird, but I am one of the only people on the public internet who reviewed it. Well, properly reviewed it.

Cellular Shift Version 0.6.6 Review saw a pretty respectable following for what is extensively a dead game. The creator, Jacob Grant, announced that the game was on an indefinite hiatus a few days after I published my review. Then his Patreon page went down some time later. Now, he’s pretty much disappeared, which is a shame. While the game itself was filled with shortcomings, it was the result of some serious ambition, and I was interested in seeing where its creator would grow from here. Even if he stopped doing TSF stuff. But… I guess he just stopped doing stuff period. At least the Itch.io is still up.

I am SO happy that Natalie Rambles About Dragalia Lost: THE FINAL managed to rack up nearly a thousand views. I spent a lot of time reflecting on this game, and was happy to put the game behind me… but not really. You see, that was a 2022 post, but in 2023, I released Dragalia Lost V3 Re;Works – A Mock Design Document. And I put WAY more effort into that… like, over 250 hours into fucking with a spreadsheet and making a 900 page PDF. But it only saw 62 views so far. I guess I should have plugged that on the Dragalia Lost Discord or Subreddit, but… I ain’t about that plugger life, dood!

Max’s Big Bust 2 – Max’s Bigger Bust Review continued to rack up a good number of views, which is good, as I really liked that game and think it offers some silly fun for TSF fans to enjoy. Also, look forward to a review of the canonical sequel to MBB2 next year. Help! I’m Turning Into A Mermaid!

P.D.A. – Personal Data Altercator Version 0.1 Review for some reason is still doing numbers. Even though I was WAY too generous for what amounted to vaporware. As in, the creator hasn’t said jack shit about the project since January 2021 as far as I can tell. How disappointing… This is why I never want to ship anything half-finished.

Akumako: “Except for Verde’s Doohickey 2.0!”

Bitch, I’ll rape you so hard you turn into bread!

Rundown (9/25-10/01) Dope Skinsuit Comic. BIG Inspiration. Inferior Official Distribution. Cracked over a thousand views. I guess it’s because I talked about a “dope skinsuit comic” and skinsuit/bodysuit fans are hungry.

Rundown (3/12/2023) Natalie Reviews The First “REAL TSF Manga” did well because of the title and the subject matter. I showed people an oldie, and 650 people responded. Not a ton, but do you know what you can do with 650 people?

Akumako: “Kill literally anyone on Earth?”

YEAH!

Tax Heaven 3000 Review did well because Tax Heaven 3000 was a niche game that people talked about in the abstract and before launch. But nobody actually reviewed it, especially not a tax accountant like me! I’m at the top of Google again, bay-bee!

…I should have just made this a top twenty, as all of the other ones are self-explanatory. I promised to talk about a TSF thing in the title, I delivered that good kangaroo shit, so it did better than usual numbers. Rundown (4/30/2023) TSF Visual Novel Fiesta!, Chromo XY Review, Rundown (3/19/2023) Natalie Watched A “TSF Playlist”, Natalie Rambles About TG, Rundown (6/25/2023) A Gray Day Is DOPE!, Rundown (10/16-10/22) Press-Switch v0.6a Is Out & Student Transfer v7.0 Is Coming Next Month, Rundown (5/21/2023) My re:Dreamer Panic Attack, and Rundown (11/20-11/26) Student Transfer Version 7.0 is Out!!!

Rundown (8/28-9/03) Cute Oppressed Lady Of Uniquely Remedial Styles should not have done as well as it did. The post’s title is a reference to the excellent C.O.L.O.U.R.S. by Fonzworth Bentley, and it uses the words ‘oppressed’ and ‘remedial.’ But I guess people were interested in Remedial Sex-Ed. And it is a good TF comic, if a bit weird with its priorities (just like my shit).

Side bar, but you cannot buy the full version of C.O.L.O.U.R.S. by Fonzworth Bentley these days. The official version has 8 tracks, and the full album has 17. That’s BULLSHIT!

This list also featured Natalie Neumann’s Novels, the page where I post my most earnest and personal works, the works I spend days and months on. I pride myself on these novels, and have grand plans to continue them… but it only saw a lifetime total of 2,644 views, despite being part of the header bar. Ugh. And this page was created back in 2013! I’d say I wanted a bigger audience and better numbers, but I got several times those numbers on Scribble Hub, and it didn’t mean jack bupkis to me!

Ugh… Shit like this really makes me want to move onto making visual novels, because then I’d get some ~~pussy~~ attention for my art!

Akumako: “How are you gonna have someone eat a sandwich with their dick in a visual novel?”

Life… finds a way!

Part 7: The Straight Dope on 2024!

Here is where I explain what I have planned for 2024 and announce the next big projects… but I already announced what that year will hold, so I’ll just recite the list of things I plan on doing, and when I plan on doing them.

1/1/2024 – TSF Showcase 2023 Compilation Part 1
1/2/2024 – TSF Showcase 2023 Compilation Part 2
1/3/2024 – TSF Showcase 2023 Compilation Part 3
Q1 2024 – Natalie & Cassie Ramble About ???
5/29/24 – Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp – Act 1
6/03/24 – re:Dreamer Review #5
6/15/24 – Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp – Act 2
Q2 2024 – Natalie & Cassie Ramble About ???
7/01/24 – Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp – Act 3
Q3 2024 – Natalie & Cassie Ramble About ???
11/05/24 – Psycho Shatter 1988 (Working Title)
11/18/24 – TSF Series #019: Suicide to Success
December 2025 – Student Transfer Scenario Reviews x 3
12/25/24 – Natalie Rambles About 2024
Q4 2024 – Natalie & Cassie Ramble About ???
TBD 2024 – FlipSwitch: Forbidden Sex Hex Review

If Student Transfer or Press-Switch see a release in 2024, you can expect me to put out something within two weeks. But beyond that… I don’t plan on doing much else!

Akumako: “…WHAT? Are you fucking kidding me, you little bitch? HOW is that all you have planned for 2024?!”

I need to write over 300,000 words of fiction throughout 2024, and edit over 500,000— that’s a lot of words! And while doing this, I plan on continuing to produce Rundowns and doing weekly TSF Showcases. Do you know how long those things can get? Very. Very long! I will be putting out PLENTY of content in 2024, including the Rambles Cassie and I write after we finish our time-honored tradition of a Sunday movie night. We just finished Star Wars, and will be moving onto more anime next! You’re gonna get over 600,000 words of content, and I won’t be taking any lip from anyone over a haul of that scale!

This Post Has 6 Comments

Charishal 12/29/2023 Reply

Thanks for all the great reviews, rundowns, stories and posts this year, Natalie! Looking forward to read more from you in 2024!
1. Natalie Neumann 12/29/2023 Reply
  
  And thank YOU for being such a diligent reader of my work, Chari. ^^
Cassie 12/31/2023 Reply

Snuggles
1. Natalie Neumann 12/31/2023 Reply
  
  Snugg-a-lou!
Zean 01/15/2024 Reply

Well…I guess I’m one of the Chinese audience for your website who contributes a lot to the stats. However, I’ve been in US since August so there could be a lot more new visitors. I’m also wondering why there is a sudden boost of Chinese audience. Maybe someone recommends your website on some Chinese forums? As for me, I find your website in 2019 because of Student Transfer and have been following it for about 5 years. Thank you for your great posts in 2023!
1. Natalie Neumann 01/15/2024 Reply
  
  Back during 2019, my Chinese readership was about 779 views… which is more than I would have expected. I’m sure that someone on a Chinese language site, probably a forum like you said, recommended me for something, or perhaps some of the images I posted were linked there. Honestly, I’m still surprised that Natalie.TF is even available in that country.
  …Wait, you’ve been following me for 5 years? Thank you so much! ^^
  It is one thing to look at statistics, but it is another to actually hear from someone who has been reading my works for so long! You just made my night with that! ♥

Natalie Rambles About 2023

Part 1-1: The Year The Internet Stopped Being Good

Part 1-3: Post-Pandemic Pandemonium

Part 1-4: The Israel Palestine Conflict

Part 1-5: The Large-Scale Computing Conundrum

Part 2-1: Gamindustri Rundown – The Best Year & The Worst Year

Part 2-2: The Acquisition Rundown

Part 2-3: The Embracer Question

Part 2-4: Goodbye Game Collection, Hello Emulation

Part 2-5: Ratings and the Search For Meaning

Part 2-6: Natalie Discusses The State of Modern Gaming With ZXA Yungboi

Part 3-1: Transitioned: Natalie

Part 3-2: Enrolled Agent (of Chaos) Natalie

Part 3-3: Big Homo(wner) Natalie

Part 3-4: PokéManiac Natalie

Part 4: Natalie’s Too Old for Video Games (And She’s 50-Years-Old)

Part 5: The Cassie Section – Hi Cassie~!

Part 6: Natalie.TF Traffic Stats – 2023 Edition

Part 7: The Straight Dope on 2024!

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This Post Has 6 Comments

Part 1-1: The Year The Internet Stopped Being Good

Part 1-2: Social Networks – Komm, süßer Tod

Part 1-3: Post-Pandemic Pandemonium

Part 1-4: The Israel Palestine Conflict

Part 1-5: The Large-Scale Computing Conundrum

Part 2-1: Gamindustri Rundown – The Best Year & The Worst Year

Part 2-2: The Acquisition Rundown

Part 2-3: The Embracer Question

Part 2-4: Goodbye Game Collection, Hello Emulation

Part 2-5: Ratings and the Search For Meaning

Part 2-6: Natalie Discusses The State of Modern Gaming With ZXA Yungboi

Part 3-1: Transitioned: Natalie

Part 3-2: Enrolled Agent (of Chaos) Natalie

Part 3-3: Big Homo(wner) Natalie

Part 3-4: PokéManiac Natalie

Part 4: Natalie’s Too Old for Video Games (And She’s 50-Years-Old)

Part 5: The Cassie Section – Hi Cassie~!

Part 6: Natalie.TF Traffic Stats – 2023 Edition

Part 7: The Straight Dope on 2024!

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This Post Has 6 Comments

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