This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Natalie Has Become a Witch!
• Doom Spending and Financial Paranoid (Buy Assets and Invest in Stonks)
• Lawsuit Updates! (Palworld and The Crew Are Making Legal Waves)
• Hideaki Itsuno Joins LightSpeed Japan Studio! (Tencent’s Consumption Continues!)
• The GOG Preservation Program is Go! (GOG’s Fancy New Sticker and Promise)
• Tequila Works Announces Insolvency (Tequila Works Is All Outta Booze)
• Natalie Muses About The Success of Lollipop Chainsaw RePop (Lollipop Shadows of the Damned Chainsaw)
• Warcraft: Remastered and Warcraft II: Remastered Announced (Pulled Outta and Polished From The Vault!)
• Embracer Sells Easybrain to Miniclip for $1.2 Billion (The Unembrace Continues)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Natalie Has Become a Witch!

Tomorrow, November 18, 2024, I shall ascend from this coil and achieve my evolved form. I shall no longer be restrained by such typical human limitations. For on that day, I shall turn 30, and for living a life of non-religious celibacy, the order of the world shall reward me by bestowing upon me the gifts of the magi. I shall cease to be a mere woman, and I shall become… A witch! Mwahahahahaha!

Akumako: “Wait, what does becoming a witch have to do with you turning XXX?”

Elementary, my dear Akumako! You see, there is an ancient legend of yore that if one avoids sex by the time they reach 30, they shall gain magical power. And with these powers, I shall be able to make all my dreams fantasies!

Akumako: “You really believe that?”

No! But I have always thought that was a funny little joke. Virginity does not actually mean anything beyond a psychological level— and I guess, vaguely, on a physical level for hymen-havers. But it is a silly concept used mostly by men to exert control on others in order to maintain a rigid hierarchy. I’m asexual, not interested in ever having sex with anyone, and haven’t even gotten close, because I’m aromantic too. So, over a decade ago, I just convinced myself that I would go my entire life without meeting those related silly ‘life goals.’

Akumako: “Okay, but why are you a witch? Isn’t the urban legend supposed to say you’ll become a wizard?”

Hell no! Wizards are bullshit! There are only witches, warlocks, sorcerers, sorceresses, sages, mages, magi, and a bunch of other terms, but not wizards. That’s a Klan term.

Akumako: “What?”

Grand wizards, fool!

Akumako: “…So, what’s it like being almost 30?”

I get sore more often than I would prefer. I probably need to implement a proper stretching routine instead of just sitting around all day and then sitting on an exercise bike. I have met many major ‘life goals’ such as buying a house (and currently working down a $220k mortgage). Getting my Master’s degree. Getting a stable job where I have a valuable specialization. And achieving the financial advice goal of putting away more than a year’s worth of my salary into my retirement accounts. (Thanks index funds.)

By good fortune and coming from a background of fiscally conservative dual-income parents (my folks were powdered milk poor growing up), I have managed to achieve many archetypical ‘life goals’. This is something many people my age cannot say, as the specters of stagnant wages, the housing crisis, and student loans have relentlessly haunted them, and I try to stay humble knowing this fact.

However, I also cannot help but look at my current situation with more than a modicum of fear. For while I am able to pay my bills and share expenses with my mother, I have a very bad outlook for the future. I view basically every facet of my life as being under threat as a highly volatile and destructive political regime reaching over the horizon, and I am forced to rationalize how likely genocide is. Nothing is certain. This election showed me that nobody actually knows what is going to happen, no matter how smart they are, and now I am just a damn mess of anxiety.

It all makes me wish that I was going to become an actual witch, as then I would have powers to try and make things better. Alas, I’m someone with so many minute problems that I couldn’t even aim a gun straight. So what hope do I have to facilitate change? Instead, all I could realistically do is stock up on assets, invest in the stock market, and brace myself for the worse, while deliberating if I should pay absurd rates for medication I need to stay stable.

Akumako: “This is going to be a thing for the next four-fucking-years, ain’t it?”

Eyup!

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Doom Spending and Financial Paranoid
(Buy Assets and Invest in Stonks)

Hey, you know what has me feeling scared as shit, almost as the prospect of being denied the ability to buy medication I need to live, or being killed by men who arrive at my door one day? The economy! 

Now, this is not a particularly unique takeaway from the results of the election. Doom spending is a trend. But with the proposed tariff nonsense, I am fully expecting the price of everything to rise dramatically. For inflation to go bonkers yet again, and for all the economic ills of the post-pandemic period to get worse. As such, I am looking at my finances with a careful eye, thinking of what big ticket purchases I want to make before they become 50% more expensive in 4 years. Meaning things I don’t need now… but things I would rather get now, instead of at some nebulous later time.

• A new Euro style bungie chair, as my current one has some wear and tear ($200)
• Replacement monitors for my two ASUS VS239H-P, one of which is nearly a decade old ($100 to $150 x 2)
• I got a Linus recommended NAS kit for $200 (it will arrive from China in two months), but I need at least two 4TB NVME SSDs to make use of it ($250 x 2)
• While my 2021 pre-built computer (it was the pandemic, GPU prices were crazy) is good for now, I might want to buy better RAM ($50) and possibly a better CPU, as my Ryzen 5600X is not the most powerful thing. (Actually, my motherboard does NOT support Zen 4, so the best I can really do is a 5900X for $230, but that would be a minor upgrade at best.)

Just from the things I listed prices for, that is… basically $1,200 after taxes? …Huh. And to make matters worse in December, I have my biannual (every two years) $500 WordPress business plan fee to pay. That all amounts to a LOT of expenses. Hell, I didn’t even mention getting a laptop, which I might need if I need to fill up one car and flee to rural Ontario. But I also know that I can afford all this.

My take-home pay at the end of this year (after taxes and insurance), across both my main job and side gigs, should be over $50,000. And I’m getting a nice raise in 2025, along with a big bonus in six months, so 2025 should be over $56,000. My monthly fixed expenses (mortgage and assessments) are $2,700 a month, but that will be about $3,000 come 2025 (it’s a special assessment year). This leaves me with well over $1,000 a month that I can spend on things, and everything I don’t spend, I save.

And I do have money. My current assets— meaning cash, securities, CDs, stocks, and my retirement accounts— have a valuation of over $145,000. $88,000 in my Roth, already taxed, retirement accounts, $25,000 in my Series I bonds, $21,000 in cash (mostly savings), $10,000 in a CD, and about $1,000 in an investment account. Not the most balanced portfolio out there, but I am sure that many people around the world are looking at this and thinking ‘damn bitch, how the fuck did you make all this money?’

Well, the funny thing about that is… I would have way more if I was as frugal with my belongings as I should be. I eliminated my savings after getting FFS in 2017 for $30,000. I spent over $12,000 to help that cunt in Colombia. And I have a bad habit of offering my friends money, because I want them to have nice things. Like furniture. Or to visit me as part of a vacation. But to be more direct, I did this wonderful thing called work from home, living with my parents until I was 29, and have my mother handle my groceries and utilities costs.

I know that I can afford to buy all the things that I want… but I have trained myself to become afraid of buying things I do not need. So I am stuck in this nightmarish predicament where I WANT to stock up on everything and hold up in my home during the next four years of hellish devolution. However, I am also paranoid about whether or not I can stay in this country, and wondering if I should invest my money instead. And this indecision… just makes it hard for me to sleep at night. 

…Also, I still have about $1,200 in bonds that my parents bought for me when I was a wee babe. I gotta cash those and send them straight into an index fund! Gotta get the money, dollah dollah bills y’all!

My main hope, upon hearing about the plans for this new administration, is that it winds up being horribly inefficient and unable to do anything, because stupid people are being put in positions of power. And stupid people are generally bad at getting things done.

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Lawsuit Updates!
(Palworld and The Crew Are Making Legal Waves)

In lighter news, let’s talk about two lawsuits! The first is a minor update to the Nintendo v. Pocketpair lawsuit announced back in September, as Pocketpair has disclosed certain details of their lawsuit. Namely, the patents that it involves, all of which were filed years before Palworld released, and Nintendo’s desired outcomes:

• Patent No. 7545191
  • Original Filing Date: 2021-12-22
  • Patent Application Date: 2024-07-30
  • Patent Registration Date: 2024-08-27
• Patent No. 7493117
  • Original Filing Date: 2021-12-22
  • Patent Application Date: 2024-02-26
  • Patent Registration Date: 2024-05-22
• Patent No. 7528390
  • Original Filing Date: 2021-12-22
  • Patent Application Date: 2024-03-05
  • Patent Registration Date: 2024-07-26

As for what they want, it is quite simple. They want two 5 million yen (basically $65,000, which is nothing) payments made to both Nintendo and The Pokémon Company International and an injunction against Palworld. Meaning they want to prevent Pocketpair from selling the game. While the fees are both nothing in the grand scheme of things, the threat of removing Palworld from sale is a real one, but I doubt that would solve the problem. Palworld has already been played by tens of millions of people, and they will retain access to the game going forward. 

If I were to guess based on vibes and the way their prior patent lawsuit against Colpol ended, Nintendo actually want to increase this fine during discovery for the lawsuit and switch from an injunction to a per-sale fee. They went from asking for $350,000 to getting about $30 million. However, it took half a decade to get there, and history does not always rhyme, so… who knows! That is the problem with looking into Japanese patent lawsuits as an American non-law business person.

However, I do know the US legal system a bit… and how it is abundantly pro-corporation, often viewing them as more important than humans. As such, whenever a corporate lawsuit in the name of preserving purchases, let alone art, is made, I tend to write it off as highly unlikely to succeed. That is the case for a class action lawsuit against Ubisoft for their delisting of The Crew (2014). And because this is a California case, and California passed that law requiring companies to disclose that people are merely buying, I am dubious about this resulting in anything more than a refreshed disclaimer. Assuming it results in anything at all. 

Though, something that has a far better chance of succeeding is Stop Killing Games, an initiative to have the EU pass legislation to prevent companies from killing their always-online games. I’ve talked about it a bunch before and… we really need more buzz to be made about this, as it’s been staggered in the 30% to 40% range for months now. Unfortunately, my European audience is tiny, and the movement really needs a wide variety of influencers of different languages to spread the word. French, Spanish, Italian, and more!

Also, Ross Scott of Stop Killing Games offered his own coverage of this lawsuit.

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Hideaki Itsuno Joins LightSpeed Japan Studio!
(Tencent’s Consumption Continues!)

The western world has largely been ignoring the global success of PUBG Mobile for a while, largely due to market/cultural differences. But it has made a shitload of money for both Krafton and one of its developers, LightSpeed Studio. A Chinese company that has expanded into becoming a worldwide cluster of studios and… they’re owned by Tencent! Of course! Of course it’s Tencent! It’s always Tencent! …Or NetEase!

Point is, LightSpeed Studio is launching a Japanese office, LightSpeed Japan Studio, and this new branch will be led by Hideaki Itsuno of Devil May Cry and Dragon’s Dogma fame. Which reflects a well-documented trend of acclaimed Japanese developers getting scouted by Chinese/Korean developers and put in charge of Japanese branches of their studios. However, this venture has yet to bear fruit due to the immense costs of time and money needed to produce AAA games nowadays. 

While I don’t like this trend, it is solely because I think Tencent and NetEase are too big and I do not trust them. I don’t want either to sink their teeth in the global games industry because they are horrifically massive and expansive companies that I do not want to have influence over the broader games industry. However, industry is gonna be industry and without enough outcry, there is little chance of any political movement being made. Plus, with the current trajectory of global politics… I expect to see expansions like this to become the least of people’s worries. Because we’re going to see companies throw around massive wads of cash to acquire assets and IP as currency valuations go through the wringer. …Again!

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The GOG Preservation Program is Go!
(GOG’s Fancy New Sticker and Promise)

Steam is such a ubiquitous part of the world of PC gaming that it is easy to overlook the good work and efforts of GOG, who in many respects represents a more pure approach to buying games. GOG is the leading storefront for DRM-free versions of PC games and a collection of older PC games that have been modified and improved to work on modern hardware. I highly admire their efforts and consider them to ultimately be the best way to buy games. …But I also only buy from them on occasion. The reasons why are simple. Steam games are often cheaper and Steam offers a better experience.

Steam is both a social platform— with a major Nazi problem— and a highly accessible resource, not just a way of launching games. Steam has community developed guides, easy to search forums, built-in features like screenshots, frame rate monitoring, controller support, and even game recording nowadays. It simply feels like a complete all-in-one experience, and while the application might not be as svelte as it used to be, for 90% of users, it represents an ideal PC gaming experience.

This is something GOG has continued to struggle with— offering a better service. They tried to unify launchers with GOG Galaxy, a utility for downloading GOG games and games of all other major game launchers. I remember being hyped up, but seldom actually referenced as a tool after release. They had this lovely little tool for users to import their Steam library into GOG, but that feature was deprecated after years of inactivity. And their latest approach seems to be store exclusive for older or forgotten game releases. Resident Evil’s PS1 trilogy, Silent Hill 4, Alpha Protocol (2010), John Woo’s Stranglehold (2007) and the best version of many older games. (Sometimes GOG gets exclusive patches for older games, no idea if this is some contractual agreement or rights holders being lazy.)

Honestly, their biggest boon is probably the exclusivity and access to older games that otherwise have rights or technical issues. …Which is basically what they were founded on. They used to be called Good Old Games for a reason. 

The actual story here is that, rather than actually changing what they are doing, GOG is changing their branding for these older titles. The GOG Preservation Program is effectively a stamp on titles where they went in and offering unique fixes to improve the games. Or basically a ‘best on GOG’ sticker.

From what I can gather, this basically means the original publishers have given GOG the right to perform technical support on these games, manage the updates themselves, and that… is an interesting approach. While the goal of many modern entertainment corporations is to amass IP and products they can sell on numerous storefronts and services, the whole maintenance thing is a big hurdle. 

With audio and video, the original files are what they are, and beyond routine transfers, there is not that much work that needs to be done to host them on new platforms. But games are far more complex. With older games, just throwing a ROM in an emulator is seen as good enough, but PC games do not work like that and require maintenance as Windows is always evolving. Most publishers lack the technical resources to run maintenance on dozens, if not hundreds, of games. However, GOG is run by a group of specialists and they are among the most equipped to keep these games alive. 

I would ask where the money in this is for them, but just pushing out new updates to old-ass games sold for cheap prices can be enough to generate buzz and sales. Sure, 30% on an $8 game isn’t much, but multiply it by a few hundred units, and it adds up to something. Though, not that much, and so little that these updates will remain exclusive to GOG. They could only come to Steam if Valve or the publisher paid GOG a commission or royalty for each copy sold. And that… that is just too much paperwork!

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Tequila Works Announces Insolvency
(Tequila Works Is All Outta Booze)

Most studio closures make complete sense considering the background of the studios, but this one really doesn’t. Tequila Works is a Spanish game developer who are probably best known for their time loop murder mystery game The Sexy Brutale and the gorgeous Team-Ico-like Rime. They have been steadily growing as an indie dev, accumulating accolades, but are now filing for bankruptcy. …What?

How the heck did they lose so much money they’re insolvent? In 2019, they launched a deal with Google to publish one of the few Stadia exclusives with the horror title Gylt. The same year they got Sony’s backing to make a darn Groundhog Day sequel for PS VR and other VR platforms. They received a significant investment from Tencent in 2022, and released Song of Nunu: A League of Legends Story in 2023. 

Did they just cut bad deals with these publishers? Did all three of their last games do poorly? I know that Song of Nunu still hasn’t come out on Xbox and PlayStation for some reason, but wouldn’t that be a publisher issue? No clue, but the higher ups have all left, leaving the staff to work without a guarantee of pay. Meaning that… the studio is probably done for.

It sucks when mid-sized, 70 person, indie studios like Tequila Works falter, as they are big enough to pursue wider ambitions, but small enough for everybody to be a team. I can only assume that something nefarious happened, as while the market can be brutal to developers of all sizes, this does not happen overnight. …Well, unless the publisher of their next game just goes kaput and they lose sight of all payment.

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Natalie Muses About The Success of Lollipop Chainsaw RePop
(Lollipop Shadows of the Damned Chainsaw)

I previously spoke negatively of the remaster of the 2012 cult classic Lollipop Chainsaw, entitled Lollipop Chainsaw RePop. I thought the visual and art direction changes were generally poor, due to how important the original’s lighting was, and my opinions seem to be mirrored with the wider consensus. That the original looks better and, despite clear effort from the developers at Dragami Games, is a better package. To the point where they should have just re-released the original with an uncapped frame rate and 4K resolution support, rather than spend more time and money on what is largely an inferior product. Sure, some of the gameplay changes might make the game better, as combat has never been Grasshopper’s forte, but the fact that the soundtrack was gutted is enough cause to write it off.

However, despite quietly releasing as a digital only title, costing $45, and getting its release date bumped from September 25 to September 12 on August 5, Lollipop Chainsaw RePop did… quite well. The developer’s CEO said that it sold over 100,000 units in its first week. And per a report by GameBiz, the title did so well that Dragami’s parent company had to revise their financial forecasts to show higher profits. Which is just wild! Because the original Lollipop Chainsaw was not a huge success, only selling 1.24 million units. Yet this subpar remaster still managed to break what I would consider to be optimistic expectations.

However, this struck me as a surprise, as I recall seeing some troglodyte say the game was not charting well with active Steam players, capping out at 989 players. Which I find to be an… interesting finding. I have spoken out against the trend of people highlighting Steam active players as representing a game’s success, and how it is a flawed metric to determine commercial success. Because in the world of packaged games, it is more important that a game is bought than it is played. 

I find this to be an interesting case study in that regard. Solely looking at this metric, it does seem like the game faltered or failed to find much of an audience. However, it is important to note the number of people who buy games and do not immediately play them, and how the PC market, while growing, does not encompass the whole market.

Also, this release also made me realize that my crystal ball is indeed broken. You see, Lollipop Chainsaw RePop coincidentally released just two months before Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered. Another late 360 console exclusive story-driven action game developed by Grasshopper that was delisted in the 2010s and accumulated a cult following. SotDHR cost only $25, was a far more faithful remaster, and was developed in-house, not by some company who somehow managed to secure the rights to the IP. Yet SotDHR only saw a peak Steam player count of 225 and has seen no sales figures announcements, in part because it came out two weeks ago, on October 31st. 

While the player count means little, this indicates that the game probably sold far fewer copies than RePop. Part of that can be attributed to the release window, as Q4 is often dominated by AAA releases, but even then, this may be an exponential differential. …Actually, maybe this is because fewer people know about SotD, because the game sold like dogshite when it came out, so fewer people can remember it fondly. …Despite having a comparable critical reception and general quality compared to Lollipop Chainsaw. Ugh. Market analysis is such a bother.

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Warcraft: Remastered and Warcraft II: Remastered Announced
(Pulled Outta and Polished From The Vault!)

Microsoft’s Activision’s Blizzard is a strange animal that I have absolutely zero history with, and such a strange history with the remasters of their prior titles. On one hand, they released Blizzard Arcade Collection (2021), a compilation of their early 2D titles that contained various versions of each of the five titles and their own definitive editions. Overall, a very strong re-release. 

They— more specifically a couple hundred people in Southeast Asia— also worked on Warcraft III: Reforged (2020), one of the worst remasters of all time. It was buggy, dramatically changed the look of the game, and both its online and user creation systems were busted at launch. It made records for people review bombing it on Metacritic, and not even critics were kind to it.

StarCraft: Remastered (2017) was a great faithful remaster with feedback from professional players. Diablo II: Resurrected (2021) was pretty dope, because it was made by Vicarious Visions before they were assimilated. And while World of Warcraft Classic is not a remaster per se, it basically is, and a lot of people prefer the old WoW than the busy, demanding, live service it grew into.

As such, any remaster they promise to do is going to be a wild offshoot of quality, and there are only two games left in their back catalog to remaster. 

Akumako: “The Death and Return of Superman (1994) and Justice League Task Force (1995)?”

No!

Akumako: “StarCraft II (2010) and Diablo (1997)?

Yes, they should do both of them, because I think it’d be funny if they rework StarCraft II to a console game. After all, StarCraft 64 was the definitive edition of the game, because of the objectively superior split screen feature. But no! I’m talking about Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995). A pair of classic, quality, and highly influential RTS titles that were sizable hits back in their day, but a footnote next to the success that Blizzard had from 1997 to 2004. While technically widely available for decades, neither saw much support from Blizzard… until now.

Alongside a significant update to Warcraft III: Reforged, Microsoft’s Activision’s Blizzard announced and released Warcraft: Remastered and Warcraft II: Remastered. The titles feature “lovingly updated hand-painted artwork” that… looks like ass. They just drew over the original sprites in order to make the game look more modern, but in practice, they just make them look cheap, like that infamous Mega Man X mobile port from 13-ish years ago. Or Rockman Xover. I just don’t see the point in polishing up what is objectively a retro game by making it look like this. The animations are still the same, the world is still tile-based, and its artistic limitations are all the more obvious. Just replacing sprites with hand-drawn images does not make the game look like a playable cartoon! Thank goodness it’s just an option. If people want to waste years of their lives working on options that make games look worse, then may χ-tina bless them as they stew righteously in Bape Escape.

Akumako: “Don’t ask…”

However, this re-release also comes with bonuses like old concept art, uncompressed audio, widescreen support (you love to see it), modern controls and features, and even online play for Warcraft II. The project just debuted this past week, so it will take some time before people develop a consensus on it, but I want to iterate that this is, indeed, a good thing. I wish all developers with a back catalog like Microsoft’s Activision’s Blizzard were able to embark on projects like this. Old games are some of the best games around, and should be spruced up to keep the important stuff and get rid of the old software UX jank.

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Embracer Sells Easybrain to Miniclip for $1.2 Billion
(The Unembrace Continues)

The Embracer Group started as a plucky coalition of smaller studios and neglected IP, but grew into a giant mess so complex and clustered that it was basically doomed to fail, and it has. Almost 7 months ago, they announced that they were breaking up into smaller, more lean entities, but that is a messy process with a lot of paperwork, and they want to sell off companies in the process. One such company is the mobile game developer Easybrain, who Embracer bought back in February 2021 for a resounding $765 million. That is a lot of potatoes! But now they are selling them for $1.2 billion. So the simple-minded approach would dictate they made $435 million, with additional profit added or subtracted based on how well they did in that period. I could look that up, but I don’t really care!

Meanwhile, the buyer of Easybrain is none other than Miniclip, the publisher of Subway Surfers, a deluge of other successful mobile games. But most people of my micro-generation will probably remember them more for their flash game catalog during the 2000s. Which, like much of the old internet, has largely been cleansed by corporate avarice! 

Akumako: “♫And now it’s dead! It’s dead ‘cos they killed it! They’re happy that it’s dead!♫”

Easybrain makes simplistic puzzle games, so they are a perfect fit for Miniclip’s catalog, and this acquisition makes perfect sense as far as I am concerned. And since this is ultimately two companies trading around another, like a sandwich, I cannot get out my soapbox and decry the industry’s consolidation decay. 

Akumako: “That’s all, bitches! Onto the progress report~♪”

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Progress Report 2024-11-17

Blarg! I really hoped that this week would be more productive, but I have just not been in the right mindset to work on things as effectively as I wanted to. I think I’m just getting a bit fatigued from rushing out three TSF Showcases without a break. I gotta get back to my boiz and gurlz in Oransen!

Oh, and also, I found a new birthday song! I didn’t have one before— I had a semester’s over song that I listened to religiously while in school— but now I have a birthday song! It only starts halfway through, but that’s cool. The rest of the song is goody good in my booky book! (I will NEVER grow up, because adulthood is a myth made by bitter old fucks.)

2024-11-10: Wrote 4,000 words for TSF Showcase 2024-45. Would have started editing it, but I had movie night and spent a lot of time talking to friends on Disco.

2024-11-11: Was busy with work, then talking to Cassie some more, then edited and grabbed images for TSF Showcase 2024-45 before starting on TSF Showcase 2024-46.

2024-11-12: Wrote 2,100 words for the first three parts of the Rundown. Wound up busy with work from 12:00 to 00:00, barring dishes, showering, exercise, and getting passport photos. No progress made on TSF Showcase 2024-46.

2024-11-13: Wrote 2,100 words for segmented 5, 6, 7, and 8. Finished reading TSF Showcase 2024-46.

2024-11-14: Got this post all edited and ret-2-go. Started work on TSF Showcase 2024-46, getting 3,300 words in, covering part one of three.

2024-11-15: Woo! Wrote 4,200 words for TSF Showcase 2024-46! …Jeepers I need to stop making these things 6k words long as a minimum! It’s straight up untenable yo!

2024-11-16: Wrapped up TSF Showcase 2024-46, doing the editing and grabbing text snippets. I had a very bad night’s sleep because I was consumed by doom, so I was not feeling the most productive.