Rundown (3/16/2025) Work This Sucker to Death

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Work This Sucker to Death
• The Saudis Really Did Buy Pokémon Go… (Niantic Games Acquired by Scopely, Subsidiary of Saudi Arabia d.b.a. Savvy Games Group)
• Another Excuse to Dunk on Roblox (As a Reminder, Natalie is Anti-Roblox)
• Microsoft, Stop With The AI Gaming Nonsense (Microsoft Announces Copilot for Gaming)
• Silent Hill f Formally Revealed (And It Looks Pretty Darn Good!)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Work This Sucker to Death

Normally, I hope that I am able to just come up with something for these Rundown Preamble Rambles, and most of the time, I am. However, my work schedule has just been demoralizing and soul-crunching the past few weeks. And when I’m not working, I’m either recovering or reading about how America is falling apart. Now, there has been an ongoing dialogue between my boss and I about how I have been the one initiating the long hours I work— and I have— however, I kind of need to. As a tax accountant, I have a professional personal responsibility to these people. I am supposed to provide them with quality and prompt service as I help them organize their tax situations, minimize their liability. …And clean up the messes they have accumulated over the past year, or few years in the case with our new clients.

I lack a separation between work and home that most people do, as I do taxes, have 8+ hour long Zoom meetings, and do Koinly reconciliations on the same computer I do everything else on. Yes, including that! My email is open all hours of the day, meaning I am notified whenever… well, notifications are broken and stopped playing a sound five months ago— thanks Microsoft— but work is always a click away. My boss has been adding more and more clients over time, loading us up with 180 unique clients, as opposed to the 143 we amassed addressed last year. All of which is in addition to the 15 ‘side activities’ that were left unaddressed during December. He claims that it’s because clients have not been proactive about contacting us, but we are simply going to miss the deadlines on things.

I don’t care if someone is a Chinese national living in Australia who has better shit to worry about. I don’t care if someone is at a rehab facility in America II: Genocide Harder. And if a client has prevented us from filing a return for three years because they are a liar who is trying to cheat his family out of their rightful inheritance, they should not be a client. I do not care if you knew his mother. Run your business like a business! If someone is not paying you, and is just being a pike up your ass, fuck ’em!

Oh, and whenever I bring this up— the fact that we have so many clients and lack the capacity to serve them, he just makes it sound like it’s my problem.

“It’s busy season” he says when I have worked overtime for seven weeks this year so far. For the record, I only did overtime twice last year. Once leading in March, and once in October. I have already worked an extra 100 hours than I did as of March 31, 2024, and the month is only halfway over.

If I say that we are taking on too many clients— again, we have 37 new clients— a 25% increase— he shoots back on how the practice is small for a ‘sole practitioner.’ Often going on about how he used to manage 300 clients. Forgetting that, he was at a big company back then, the returns were generally simpler and not crypto returns, he was 15 years younger— not a self-described “senile old man”— and he had more than one person working under him. I am the only regular employee he has, and two or three people can do more things than one person.

I ask to take weekends off after racking up overtime during the week, and he gives me shit for not wanting to work on weekends, even after praising me for putting up barriers. Yes, god forbid that I want to hang out and watch anime with my friends once a week. How selfish of me.

And what makes it all the worse is the way that he likes to praise me for being so efficient and fast with my work. Well, if I’m so fucking great, then explain to me why I am drowning in work? Why we have only gotten 20% of our returns out the door, a month before the first big deadline? Why is the company is over $70,000 in debt? Because my only expenses are payroll, insurance, software, and basic office supplies. I could rally off the BULLSHIT that is lining the income statement, but I want to maintain some confidentiality.

Now, there is an argument that one can always extend returns, that estimates can be filed, and it is impossible to get everything done by April 15th. That is true, but also FUCK OFF! You want to know what I did every day I got home from school as a kid? I sat my ass on the floor, turned on the TV, and did homework while watching TV, before anything else. In life, you should not procrastinate shit, wait until later, and should always do things when it is in your hand. Because then IT’S FUCKING DONE! You don’t need to worry about it anymore! You can move onto something else! And the only things I regret in my life if when I didn’t do something, when I put things off. To tell me to just wait it out and do it later is NOT how I have lived my life, and not how I’m going to live my life. Do you think I’d have a pussy or house if I had that slovenly conviction? HELL NO!

But the worst part about all of this is that this job has started to just consume my life. I don’t get the time to work on the things I love, those that I am passionate about, and I spend each day in a frenzy, hoping to do as much as I could before it ends. Because I don’t know what tomorrow will bring— when work stops or starts— and unless I am proactive, then I’m not doing my job properly.

Oh, and because I am so busy, I am left spending a lot of time watching video content in order to entertain me as I engage in monotonous work. Some fun stuff, but a lot of videos about how the nation is being ravaged by private companies and billionaires. All while nobody does anything about it, and other people counter this with content whose message is that ‘you should stop watching this and do something.’

Well fuck you, you presumptuous dog rapist. Sorry that I have the audacity to watch something on my second screen while working in my direct service job for a sole practitioner rather than another Capital-C Corporation. Or that I am watching something while exercising, because I work a job where I sit at my desk all day. I’m sure they really need me to volunteer at the all-night food bank an hour train ride away, at 22:00, after I worked for 10 to 12 hours. I supported your fucking charities. I make calls to my deep blue representatives when I have the chance during business hours. Now leave me, a disabled autistic trans woman, the fuck alone! Or do you ‘expect’ me to buy a gun and start enacting my Second Amendment right by staging a one woman assault on [REDACTED]? You know what that would result in? Another dead trans women and another reason for The Right to think up more dog whistle for we must genocide all faggots for god, race, and nation.

Akumako: “For the record, ‘god, race, and nation’ is a KKK slogan.”

KKK, Nazis, The Right, White Supremacist— distinction without a difference. I’d kill them all if I could, but I am a fundamentally weak person.

Akumako: “…How did you go from bitching about your job to talking about Nazis?”

Because the Nazis were born in America, and we are in the midst of their true homecoming. It always comes back to the fucking Nazis.

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The Saudis Really Did Buy Pokémon Go…
(Niantic Games Acquired by Scopely, Subsidiary of Saudi Arabia d.b.a. Savvy Games Group)

A few weeks ago, I talked about rumors that Saudi Arabia’s Scopely was planning on acquiring the games division of Niantic, the developers of Pokémon Go (2016). …And also Pikmin Bloom (2021). I identified this as something that Nintendo probably did not want to happen, given the continued popularity of Pokémon Go and Suadi Arabia’s less than favorable international relationship. Though, as someone who is unfortunately kind of stuck in the United States, I guess I’m not one to talk. Screw it, I’m just going to say I’m an Illinoisian. Or a Skokier. Or a Cook Countian.

I thought that this would result in some retaliatory action from Nintendo, such as divesting the Pokémon Go team or terminating their contract unless they get their way. But nope. Scopely is ponying up $3.5 billion for Niantic, and that’s it. Niantic presents this as just a new opportunity for them, never mentioning Saudi Arabia d.b.a. Savvy Games Group, and hoping that the brand-conscious masses just gloss over the connections that define this business decision. While Pokémon Go;s official page makes this seem like no big deal and only a positive change. You know, like when they rolled out that garbage character creator that ruined the established art style. Which is unfortunate, as I am sure that many will just shrug off this news. They will not realize that their global location data is now in the hands of an established evil of a monarchy with a history of human rights abuses. Including the persecution of queer people! Hope you enjoy giving them your location data!

This is why it is important to follow the money on companies who own others, and fortunately you can get pretty far just bopping around Wikipedia. …Or by reaching my Rundowns, as I try to stay on the up and up about major acquisitions, as it is important to chronicle the fall of a free market as fewer and fewer oliga-somethings control things and make the world less democratic through the power of lobbying and money, the tool of inequality.

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Another Excuse to Dunk on Roblox
(As a Reminder, Natalie is Anti-Roblox)

Okay, this was a pretty slow news week for video games, beyond some Humble Games showcase— which is surprising, because they fired all of their staff last year. But nothing there really caught my eye, as I like discussing games from IPs or developers with legacies, as there is more to say. With random indie games, my reaction is either ‘oh, that looks quite nice, I think I will wishlist that to buy when it is $7 in 3 years.’ or ‘not for me, but I wish you the best, mate.’ I don’t get to play games nowadays, so what would you expect me to say?

So, instead I’ll just use this as an opportunity to poo-poo on Roblox again. Not because I think it is a bad creation tool or game in and of itself. I think it is a wonderful thing in theory. But I loathe it as a business enterprise. Financially, it is poorly managed and filled with people building tools that people are not using. It pays developers peanuts compared to what the corporation rakes in. It is home to one of the most egregious uses of scrip in the modern world. Well, outside of cryptocurrency, which is just pretend money that people are convinced have value. Except for the stuff that is backed to the dollar or real assets.

I could go on about the game, but the actual topic at hand is a BBC interview with the CEO of Roblox Corporation, Dave Baszucki, where he started peddling the same ‘not our fault’ excuses that CEOs always give. Rather than taking responsibility and committing money and funding to make the game better, to shed its bad reputation, he said that the company is doing everything they can. And that if parents are concerned, they should just not let their children play the game. To which I have to say… no, that’s not how reality works, buddy.

Baszucki, and the thousands of people whose lives he holds in his small, fickle hands, successfully made a game that is broadly and culturally designed to be a part of every child’s life. They want every child in the developed world to play Roblox and spend a bit of their parents’ money on it. They have designed this game around this goal, their business is reliant on growing markets, and either Baszucki knows that children are pressuring others to play Roblox, or he’s a toilet-head— full of pee-pee and bloody stools!

Yes, I believe that parents have a responsibility to look after and raise their children. They should not just sit them in front of a TV or tablet and assume they will raise themselves. People will spend the next century trying to figure out how to properly raise children in this ever-shifting digital landscape, but the most surefire way to raise them is to be informed, be aware, and be involved. However, that is not an excuse to not make spaces designed for children safe and accommodating. Or, at the very least, not a place that can be described as an X-Rated Pedophile Hellscape. Roblox exploits children. Its content moderation is a joke. It is incredibly easy for them to encounter unambiguously adult content, and it teachers them to gamble on a digital stock market.

Back in my day, I got around to some dirty places on the internet. Finding Newgrounds when I was 10 exposed me to oodles of (TV-14) sex and violence that was locked behind age gates. I found a treasure trove of clips from body swap pornos on YouTube, but with the naughty bits cut out, when I was 13. (Don’t bother looking for them, they are gone now.) And I stumbled onto Paheal Rule 63 before I knew what menstruation was.

Akumako: “If I had a nickel for every time you mentioned Paheal Rule 63, I’d have five nickels. …Which would be enough to unlock a cart at the grocery store, but not much else.”

Yeah, and now the site is just gone!

Akumako: “What about Paheal Rule 34?”

I’m not going to that X-rated pedophile hellscape! Do you have any idea how much anime child porn those places have nowadays? I don’t want that shit! And back when I was a kid, I only used that place to see pictures of fully clothed cute/hot anime women who were based on guys or animals! I tolerated the horse fucking, I did not enjoy it!

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Microsoft, Stop With The AI Gaming Nonsense
(Microsoft Announces Copilot for Gaming)

…Microsoft, just stop. Like I said a few weeks ago, people do not need or want any AI gaming malarkey. There are too many games on the market, too little time, and if you actually looked at the broader industry, you would realize that your main goal should be to net yourself another Minecraft level super game. And you know why Minecraft has endured for 16 years? Because it was a creative passion project made by people who wanted to make a good game that prioritized exploration, creation, and collaboration with others.

They have the resources needed to moneybag big innovations and to have teams across the whole company developing potential hits. And even if it does not work, it would be something to sell as part of their subscription service. They could do just about whatever they want in the gaming scene. With Call of Duty and Candy Crush now under their control, they could dominate so much of the industry in so many ways. But noooo, instead they have a mandate from their AI division to try shoving AI into things to see if they can make money magic happen, when nobody really wants it.

This past week, Microsoft has revealed Copilot for Gaming, and this… this just boils my broth something fierce, because it is such a needless feature. Copilot for Gaming, much like Copilot for Windows, is just a search engine that returns one result rather than a series of results, formatted as a chat log. The general idea is that this will use the ‘power’ of AI to help people play a game and look up information on how to do things or get past a certain section. As if people have not been looking up information just fine using search engines for the past 20+ years.

I did not watch the embedded 30 minute video above, but the associated article has this little gem of an ideal use case. “One of the primary problems Kardar highlighted that Copilot for Gaming aims to solve for is time management; to help players spend less time on tasks (searching, downloading, updating) and more time on what they love – playing games.” Uh, what? Figuring something out is a primary goal of most games. Most modern games are designed to minimize the amount of friction or confusion that players encounter. With NPCs offering hints, splashes of yellow paint— an erotic favorite— markers, quest logs, careful lighting choices, or just regular-ass playtesting influencing level design. While some older titles are are bit too obtuse, those really only appeal to the people willing to do the work to understand them. Like, nobody is going to play Morrowind: The Elder Scrolls Part 3 (2002) in 2025 and not want/anticipate the Morrowind experience. Not that I would expect Microsoft to ever go back and configure cult classics like that to work with Copilot. So, really, what is the ideal use case? Learning how to make things in Minecraft, something every 9-year-old probably has memorized like they’re the damn multiplication table?

Now, there is one example where I think this AI Copilot assistant could be useful. Reminding the player what they were doing when they last played a game they put down for a few weeks/months/years. This is something most games are pretty bad at doing, and with so many games hitting the market, it is easy to lose track of where you were at, who characters are, and what you were doing. But do you really need an AI to do that? Sonic Team managed without it when making Sonic Adventure 2 in 2001 by having a person write a recap of the narrative. And any decent Fandom Wiki editor could write a SparkNotes version of what happens in a story-driven game. Hell, most major releases probably have a SparkNotes version of the narrative written at some point in development. Just use those!

For less narrative-driven games, why not just implement an activity log feature of some kind? I think that those are highly underrated/underused in games. I know that game publishers, and platform holders, collect loads of player data via modern games, so this seems like something that could be added as part of certification. Or maybe Microsoft themselves could do this, expanding the achievement system to creative progress logs based on variables it checks on a per game level.

Hell, the site Retro Achievements has added achievements, a form of progress markers and major game milestones, for literally over 10,000 retro games. This can be done, because some dedicated volunteers have already done it! Oh, but it would take years to do this properly, to make something stable, efficient, and future-proof, so instead let’s just bolt a fancy new toy onto something and call it a bold new feature!

…Wait, hold on, the idea of an AI assisting you while playing a game is not even a new idea! This is something that Google Stadia promised 6 years ago! No joke, when that failed streaming service was announced in 2019, Google said that the controller had a microphone so the player could ask for help if they were stuck in a game, and the service would load up a YouTube longplay or something to show you what to do. Now, that feature never came out, and Stadia is a dying memory on the grape vine of despair— thank Verde— but this is just picking up scraps from the Google Graveyard.

This entire project is just misdirected, trying to solve a problem that has already been solved. If you want to get better at games, hit up YouTube for tips ‘n’ trickz or hit up a fan Discord and ask for some pointers. People in game centric Discothèques generally LOVE training newbies, because they are kind like that, and sharing knowledge is a tried and true human condition. (Any human shaped object who refuses to share knowledge is not a human per the Lake Geneva Collective, they are cattle, so it is not a felony to kill them.) And if you want to save time doing a recreational activity, rethink your priorities. Because you sound like the sort of guy who watches video essays at 2x speed so that they can consume more content. Enjoy things, watch or listen to stuff when you’re cooking or exercising, but do not live to consume content. You’re a human being, and you owe it to yourself, and your mother, to be better than that.

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Silent Hill f Formally Revealed
(And It Looks Pretty Darn Good!)

Eh… this Rundown is still a bit svelte, so lemme try talk about something semi-positive, Silent Hill f!

Back in 2022 when Konami announced that they were going to revitalize the Silent Hill series, I was very skeptical. Typically, rebuilding an IP necessitates bringing it back in small doses and appeasing to long-time fans with ports. Instead, they started with a pretty garbage online web series, Silent Hill: Ascension. A short PT-style demo, entitled The Short Message, which was released as a PS5 exclusive for some reason. But hope was restored when Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 Remake (2024) was actually quite good. Sure, ride or die fans of the original don’t like it as much, and the game was hindered by being a bit too AAA scale and Resident Evil for its own good. However, it wasn’t the disaster people thought it would be. (Though, they should have included a version of the original game with the remake. The children yearn for HD PS2 games!)

However, there was one Silent Hill game that fans looked at and thought ‘oh, that will surely be the one good one.’ And that was Silent Hill f. A horror game set in rural 1960s Japan, written by Ryukishi07 of Higurashi and Umineko fame. Sure, the developer, NeoBards, is a largely unproven support studio, but they worked on more than a few big IPs and should have learned a thing or three on how to make a good game. (Actually, they were the listed co-developer on DRDR: Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster (2024). Neat.) Well, after a long wait, the game was given its first proper reveal trailer and… it looks quite good.

Narratively, it’s another entry in the ‘young girl going through some terrible shit’ end of the horror game spectrum. A teenager haunted by the death of her friend, whose familiar home becomes eerie and hostile, and who is confronted with own latent trauma. While I would typically side-eye a man to head a story like this, Ryukishi07 is one of the good ones. Though, what really stands out to me about the revealed footage is the art direction, particularity its flower motif and the unflattering, dreary overcast Japanese village that the game is set in.

It looks similar to the Japan™ most anime dorks like me are familiar with, but you can tell that spirits of the locals are low, money is tight, and modernity is clashing against long-standing tradition. The awkward placement of power lines, the untreated, or poorly treated, wood of the houses, and a series of narrow, almost claustrophobic, walkways that make it clear this place was never designed to facilitate horses, let alone cars. It’s a gasp of a dying era that lacks both the modernity and moe factor of Hinamizawa. Nah, this is full realism, and does a good job of it!

This grounded approach also carries over into the way it portrays something being tainted or contaminated with striking red flowers, beautiful in their detail but unnerving due to their resemblance to human flesh. For all the beauty that cultivated plants may offer, they are truly not that much different than a parasite. Just another organism vying to live with no regard for anything else, and if they had the capacity, they would feast on the flesh of humans. It’s an inspired, choice in my book.

Really, the only point of contention I could have with the title is how the series was originally supposed to be set in, specifically, America, and theoretically a single town named Silent Hill. But I don’t even think that diehards care that much about such petty details. Does it muddle the identity a bit? Sure. But why cut hairs about if it is more Silent Hill, Siren, or Fatal Frame? The people just want a good horror game!

No release window was given, but Silent Hill f will be released for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC.

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Progress Report 2025-03-16

Guess who listened to this song on loop 70 times in a single work day, slowly going insane as I enjoyed this bop? Me. Of course it would be me! I think Foamstars is not a great game— its contrast and color balancing hurts my eyes— but COT DAMN does it soundtrack slap some major ass! It takes some serious skill to make a song that is mostly just a bunch of country and city names into a fun song, but the dastards responsible for the OST managed it! And Square Enix actually officially released the DLC songs. So at least the music will be preserved after the game announces EOS in a few weeks/months.

I don’t mean to be demeaning, but it’s a primarily multiplayer title that I doubt more than a few hundred people are playing every week, despite getting a big marketing push to the core game-liker audience. I don’t ever like it when a game dies, but I kinda doubt that Square Enix would ever re-release the single player campaign or story content on its own. Would I play it then? Maybe! I’ll buy any re-packaging of a mobile game for a premium price tag, because I want to encourage it. But I don’t even like Splatoon beyond its visuals. (Sorry, but the gibberish vocals are worse than straight instrumentals. The game would be twice as appealing if it just had Japanese voice acting.)

2025-03-09: Stayed up until 3 AM working on TSF Showcase 2025-03, getting in 5,900 words after working in the morning and having five hours of anime with da girlz.

2025-03-10: Bossman had me work 11 hours and daylight savings time fucked my sleep schedule so well that I had to conk out and sleep for an hour in the middle of the day.

2025-03-11: Nothing again! Worked until 3:30 in the morning.

2025-03-12: Finally managed to get the time to write something, adding a 1,300 word intro about my job and how pissed I am. Because it is the only thing I could think of. Also, made the header image.

2025-03-13: Wrote 3,000 words for the Rundown, everything but The Mighty IntrO, then edited this fish, doing everything but the Roblox header, because I had to go to bread.

2025-03-14: Finished up TSF Showcase 2025-03 with another 700 words and edited 3,400 words. Will try to finish editing tomorrow and do the pictures on Sunday.

2025-03-15: Edited/rewrote about 11,000 words for TSF Showcase 2025-03. Wanted to start on the images, but it’s like 1 AM. Damn work kept me busy for most of the evening. Man, fuck crypto.

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