This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: Humdrum Holiday and Flaccid Festivities
- Natalie’s Latest Story Idea She Will Never Pursue (Project: Trillionaire Re;Start)
- PANIC MODE is ON! (Natalie Is Running Out of Time!)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Humdrum Holiday and Flaccid Festivities
Let’s see… what can I talk about this week? Because this week was a deadzone of news, everybody was busy with the holidays, and I was busy with the 2024 Ramble that I should have finished last week, but The Wotch delayed me. In fact, I have been so dang busy with everything that I have not had time to dig through my TSF backlog, organize my files, or… masturbate for the past month! Meaning that… oh shit! I accidentally, almost, did a No Nut Month!
Yeah, this was not planned or anything, but I just did not wind up masturbating for a full month, as I have not encountered anything that I found to be sufficiently hot. All because I was too busy playing NaNoWriMo with TSF comics!
Akumako: “Just because you write 50k words in a month, that doesn’t mean it’s NaNoWriMo. Besides, people hate that organization—”
It’s a vibe, not an organization. Anybody who claims otherwise is a damn narc. And you know what we do with narcs?
Akumako: “Shoot dat mothafucker like the dog they was?”
Yeeeeah!
Akumako: “But have you really been too busy for that? I’ll admit that you have put out a bunch of crap this month, but how is that different from normal?”
It has a lot to do with my own mental bandwidth and what I am choosing to focus on. When writing Verde’s Doohickey 2.0, there was a deluge of stuff that was getting me all hot and bothered, because I was writing a story that I thought was hot as hell! But I’m not crazy enough to get hot and bothered by The Wotch! Or the upcoming TSF Showcase example. I am treating the work as a piece of art, and put my lower brain by the side. But my novels? Those are art, but they are my art, so I tend to view them differently. I’m just doing what I want to do, what I like, so it is important to use both my upper brain and my lower brain if I wish to achieve A New Kind of Sexy! It’s a silly distinction, but I’m not fixin’ to change it. If I do, I might just kill off my sexual desires, for real.
Akumako: “…Did you have a nice Christmas?”
Eh, it was so-so. My paternal side was MIA due to an illness, while my maternal side was a very low-key get-together with Chinese food that I gorged on, because if you give me some cashew chicken, it will be gone in three hours.
I have not had a great Christmas since I was a little kid. Because while I care for my extended family, I lack much of a connection to them. Plus, I do not really thrive in the environment of being around a bunch of people significantly older than me by 15 to 55 years. I am great at chatting with close friends, but there is a massive gap when talking to family members, as I simply do not know what they like, where the bounds are, or any of that crap. But if somebody knows about Natalie.TF? Then yeah, it’s like you peered into my mind, read my diary, and took a whizz in my shrubs. Because that’s good for the soil and keeps bad critters away.
Akumako: “Are you just oblivious to how things like that sound? You started that paragraph by talking about Christmas and ended it by talking about having somebody piss in your mind’s garden.”
Nah, I am very cognisant of how I appear before others and how I am presenting myself. I just think that embracing my weirder quirks makes me more endearing. Otherwise, I am someone who leads a very dull and humdrum life. Not that I would actually want that to change. I did what I wanted, and now I just need to make the things I wanna make.
Akumako: “And then you’ll die?”
I’ll die, but make a statement out of it, like a real socialist!
Natalie’s Latest Story Idea She Will Never Pursue
(Project: Trillionaire Re;Start)
So… this week is an absolute deadzone of news. Nothing was announced, there’s no news I want to talk about, so here’s something different. Here’s an idea that I came up with this past Saturday while doing boring crypto organizational work.
The financial world of the 21st century has been home to both crises and collapses, but also incredible opportunities that have allowed people to turn modest wealth into something extraordinary. There exists a cultural narrative that those who achieved extraordinary wealth, those who became billionaires, are somehow special, but I have always believed they were merely lucky. People in the right place, at the right time, with the right ambitious and right psychotic personality type to become a leader.
Over the past 25 years, there are oodles of regular schmucks who have, by falling on their ass in the right way and making good bets, become immensely powerful. It is a contemporary power fantasy in this world where money and power are practically one in the same. …And if somebody from the present, or near-future went back in time, I believe they could become the richest person in the world!
Sprinkling this idea into a staple literary genre, the Isekai, and this narrative can easily be given form. A character who was disenfranchised through misfortune, bad bets, corporate avarice, and other facets of life, is living in a relatable yet exaggerated capitalist dystopia. They lose their life through some means, and are resurrected in the past, in the body of a child of an impoverished family, seemingly destined to a life of destitution. However, the protagonist knows the ways of finance, knows what happens in this world, and will use their existing knowledge to bet, abuse, and use others for their own advantage. Because if they have another shot at life, they want to make a better world. But before they can do that, they feel they need to become the wealthiest person in history. They need to become the world’s first trillionaire!
The story would follow the financial market scandals and opportunities of the early 21st century. The Great Recession, the rise of cryptocurrency, the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial recession after 9/11. Highlighting how these represented times of hardship for the American people along with opportunities for the rich to get richer. It would explore high society and how rich people interact. The classist divide between new money and old money. The ways rich people will try to screw people over to horde wealth rather than share it. The American tax system and how people abuse it for their own gains. The incentivized avarice of corporate America as profits are placed above people. And the psychological dread that comes with making ‘billionaire decisions’ as the protagonist steadily loses sight of their humanity in their pursuits
Moral questions would be a big focus, in addition to teaching people about the dirty realities of finance by citing real events, almost real names, and real techniques. All before concluding in one of several ways. With the protagonist losing sight of their once existing virtues after decades of harsh decisions that drain them of humanity. Using their power to influence and effectively run the government, aiming to revolutionize the world with a public display, even if it kills them and their wealth. Or staging a classist revolution where they enact the demise of all billionaires and arrange for their death at the hands of the people.
Now, in order to write a story like this, one would need to thread the needle with heavy financial concepts and controversial historical analysis. Which would take time and care. It would need to be cognizant of the issues it is presenting, and want to be a distinctly anti-capitalist narrative while still being about someone pulling off an absurd greatest rags to riches using precognition. It would be a tricky story to write, would require a lot of research, but I think this idea has a good deal of potential, and could easily have other factors tacked onto it. Such as determining who the protagonist was originally and who they are now.
Now, why would I not want to write this? One, it would be long. Two, while I have a Master’s in Accounting, I am not the best with business language and terminology, so I know there would be errors unless I had a fact-checker. Three, I have other stuff to do. Four, I’m Natalie “TF” Neumann. If I am left to my devices, I would do dumb crap. Like give the protagonist access to a wise-cracking Skeets or Histoire analog to tell the protagonist what to do and be their confidant. And I’d call them something silly like Itzii and make them into a spider who peruses the web of history.
…And I would of course really want to make it a TSF story about a White dude who gets reincarnated as a Black girl. Because there would be so much drama and tension associated with that, as Black people are not allowed to be amongst the elite of the elite. And women are only allowed as the wives of the ultra-wealthy. Can you imagine how mad the American Nazi Klan would get if the wealthiest person in America was a Black woman? They already cannot stand the idea of Jewish billionaires!
PANIC MODE is ON!
(Natalie Is Running Out of Time!)
Shitty shitty shitbugs! Uh… It’s Thursday, I have an unedited almost 30,000 word essay going out on Monday, and while I managed to weasel my way out of work, I haven’t done jack bupkis for the header images either. As such, I need to find something to fill up this gap with. I originally wanted to check out a demo for a Japanese visual novel by Wasabi Panda (山葵パンダ) called… 早漏甥と不感症叔母さん、肉体交換物語 ~ or Sōrō oi to fukanshō obasan, nikutai kōkan monogatari ~ or A Body Swap Story Between a Prematurely Ejaculating Nephew and an Insensitive Auntie.
I figured out how to play it with the help of LunaTranslator, which is some veritable black magic that pulls information directly from Google Translate. But I cannot risk being late for something else. Besides, this would be a perfect weird oddity to show off with a TSF Showcase in early January. I could even go on a tangent on how I tried using Textractor and JL to figure this out, JL was actually for wackos trying to learn the language of the Cadillac Divincus.
So, horny incest demo is out, and I need something to fill this orifice pronto!
Well, there were a bunch of source code leaks for Saints Row IV (2013), the Bungie Halo games, and Cave Story (2004). Which is buck wild, and something that makes me giddy.
One, because this gives people better tools for modding, upgrading, and building projects that spin off of these games. Two, because I am very much a fan of creative works being given back to the people in their fullest and rawest form, as that extends their life to something potentially infinite. Hell, do you think Doom (1993) would have the same modern cultural presence and modding scene it does without the source code being freely distributed? There are game devs who are younger than Doom making Doom-like games! Mind you, it is better if source code is released rather than leaked… but there would be a 0% chance of that ever happening with these games. Because Embracer sucks, Bungie’s management sucks, and Nicalis is run by an absolute dastard who should be prohibited from doing business.
However, I do not have anything to say beyond that, because I am in a rush. So, I’m just going to sign out for this extra smol 2,000 word Rundown, because I need to wrap up the Ramble. If this is disappointing to you… just wait a day!
Progress Report 2024-12-29
My mood right now.
Listen to the Space Pirate Mito soundtracks (part 1 and part 2) Cassie and I helped preserve earlier this year. I would have uploaded them to YouTube by now, but Cassie did not give me the high quality scans, as I don’t think she has a good enough scanner. And I don’t want a dirty phone pic!
2024-12-22: 5,900 words written for the 2024 Ramble, wrapping up part 1 and starting part 2. I should have worked more today, but fuck off! It’s the Sunday before Christmas and my brain was fried from staring at unreconciled crypto for 10+ hours this weekend.
2024-12-23: 4,300 words today. Still good progress. Still not done with the gaming segment, but I am getting there. I can do this, and I believe in myself! *Crumbles to dust*
2024-12-24: 5,300 words to wrap up the 10.5k gaming section.
2024-12-25: 5,800 words. The fun never ends! Just one and two halves of sections remain! Yes, I spent a bulk of my Christmas working on the 2024 Ramble! And I would’ve done more except I had a surprise Chinese takeout dinner with my grandma. Because Christmas, and my grandma’s favorite movie is A Christmas Story.
2024-12-26: Wrapped up the Rundown, wrote the 450 word apology, whipped up some quick images, did the statistical analysis and data gathering for the year-end traffic analysis. Wrote 3,900 words for the Ramble, wrapping it up! Then did some image editing stuff for the header images, without getting into the MAIN header image. At this point, I am ready to sleep for 10 hours…
2024-12-27: Did the last of the header images, including the BIG BOY end of year class reunion. Edited just shy of 15,000 words before I got BORED! Tomorrow I shall cross the road, since I managed to get off work and avoid a family outing
2024-12-28: Finished the 2024 Ramble, editing 15,500 words, and then I said screw it and just played Hades for an evening getting really close to ending a run before it pulled a round two on me. Tomorrow morning will be leftover work from my mother. Then Nyaruko with Cassie (I was WAY too critical toward that anime back in 2013). Then I hope to start reviewing the World Information for VD2.0 to address some mutations, or maybe start addressing the outline for Act 3.
I will say the problem/beauty of isekai is that because the genre is so over-saturated almost any idea kind of already has a similar bad execution of it (There’s already thousands of isekai that more focus on money and economy). Though I think your idea is pretty interesting and unique and I kind of want to read it now :)