This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: Tax Xtender 2025!
- The Tariff Wars Continue (Divest From America and Let Her Rot)
- Nintendo $witch 2 Much $$$$$$ (Because Everybody Else is Talking About It!)
- More Mild Musings About Live Services (If Only to Pad This Rundown)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Tax Xtender 2025!
Going into this week, my boss and I had over 70 tax returns we had to extend or otherwise finish, and the fact that we had that much, as a team of two, is frankly appalling to me. As tax accountants, our clients come to us to make sense of a convoluted and overly complex system by asking questions, gathering information, and informing them or any liability they owe to the state and Federal governments. We have a responsibility to address our clients in a timely manner, and to communicate with all of them. Though they also have a responsibility to communicate with us and not just wait until a week before the deadline before giving us anything. (The older I get, the more I detest chronic procrastination.)
That being said, I am also fucking pissed that we did not finish half of our clients yet. Only about 80 out of 180. How? Just… how is that possible? I am nearly at 700 hours worked this year, in 3.5 months, and am a pretty dang efficient worker. Well, except for when my boss is in charge and makes me watch him write emails or faff about. What was I doing in those 700 hours? Bouncing between over a hundred different clients. One of them ate up 88 hours, the next two were both 23.75 hours, and admin time was over 120 hours, because some things I just could not bill, and they had to go somewhere.
I am deeply frustrated by this state of affairs, as I feel I have this responsibility being thrust on me, when I never asked for this. I was brought into this job as a part-timer projected to work 1,200 hours a year, and while that was roughly the case for 2023 and 2024, this year has been drastically different, and worse, because my boss chose to expand the practice by 25% without adding any more people. It’s still just the two of us. There is a finite limit to how much two people can achieve without at least one of them ruining their lives via crunch, and we have definitely reached that point.
I have tried to explain this to my boss, but he is an old man, and while I hate to stereotype… older people are simply more predetermined to accept bespoke inefficiencies as ‘just the way things are.’ Their minds having solidified and grown rigid beyond the point of actively wanting to change their ways, and believing that things will go a certain way because ‘that’s what happened before.’ Which is, frankly, an ideology that is leading to the degradation of the world, and represents many of the worst trends being enacted by Boomer Oligarchs. It’s one of the many reasons why I want to stop working with old people and start working with people my age. Seriously, I don’t know how common this is, but in my decade of working, I have spent less than 5% of my time with co-workers who are within ten years of my age.
Working under these conditions, almost exclusively with people considerably older than me, has really warped my perception of what work is and how work structure can be. I have only ever been a glorified assistant to a boss who approves everything I do. Taking orders, reporting on matters to address, and asking my bosses to address things as I awaited the next morsel of work. This is pretty typical for most workers, who are lower on the totem pole, but the more I encounter these efficiencies in my current field of work, the more I wonder if this is really the best approach. If I should just say fuck it and move onto being an independent full-service tax accountant who does everything. Plenty have done it before, right?
Well, yes, but I am also someone with a particular skill set. I am highly proficient in certain respects, but I lack certain ‘universal’ skills. I am not much of a researcher. I lack the same sociability factor that many accountants rely upon. I am a stark introvert. I stammer a lot and trip over my words. And while I am able to verbally convey my ideas to clients, I lack the human connection that many direct to customer service folks thrive on.
I flourish in my specialties and with someone to look over my work and to bounce ideas between. But if I were to do these things on my own, I know I would become wrought with paranoia and concern regarding any number of things. I do not want to switch to being a sole practitioner, but I am also becoming increasingly skeptical and unkind to anything that purports to be an institution, as I do not want to be shit outta luck.
Firstly, because I do not want to leave my clients in the hands of someone incompetent. And secondly, I don’t want to be out of a way to make money. I don’t want to be responsible for everything, but I also do not want to let people down and cost them money while failing to provide them with their agreed upon services. …Also, I’m not a CPA, so I cannot attract the same business as my boss. I’m just a dang Enrolled Agent. And I don’t want to sacrifice the year plus needed to become a CPA. I only have like 30 more productive years in my life, and I want to spend them making things.
The Tariff Wars Continue
(Divest From America and Let Her Rot)
If you have been parsing the general news, you have almost certainly heard about how US president Donald Trump enacted a deeply moronic and misdirected tariff policy. One that sent the financial market into a free-fall the likes of which has not been seen since the start of the global pandemic. The S&P 500, which had been declining from its all-time high in February, lost over 13% of its value. Nasdaq, major stocks, and other metrics for market analysis underwent similar declines, and even after Trump backed down his nonsensical tariffs with another extension, while tripling down his tariffs on China, boosting them to an obscene 150%. A move that, very well, could usher in another global recession.
Now, I don’t need to refresh people on why tariffs are bad, but these figures are so extreme and wild that I foresee this leading to the widespread closure of thousands of businesses. Thus leading into a new era of economic turmoil that will affect the world, but mostly America and Americans, as they suddenly become priced out of everything. Millions of jobs would be lost, and corporations will take advantage of the situation to buy up just about everything they possibly can. Namely homes, because there’s already a housing crisis. And under capitalism, where there’s a crisis, there’s profit!
I foresee this to leading to millions of Trump supporters waking up to the truth. That they elected a spiteful, moronic, and wannabe dictator as a president, but being too aimless and unmotivated to do jack shit but get angry.
I foresee the weak-willed and those devoted to norms ultimately caving under this pressure and letting the mad king do as he pleases, despite the booming urges to fight this state-sponsored economic terrorism.
I foresee China issuing a massive retaliation against the United States that will worsen all relationships with the current and former global superpower for decades to come. Thus leading China and Europe to pursue a closer relationship, leaving the United States in the lurch, where it belongs for allowing this to happen.
I foresee this leading to mass incarceration of a new wave of unhoused and impoverished people, leading into a boon in the Slavery Industry. Also known as the Prison-industrial Complex. And leading to State-to-State human trafficking as the Trump administration sells their most deplored citizens to a Concentration Camp in El Salvador. They already have actually, selling them off for life imprisonment while seemingly being unable to get them back. …No, I am not making that shit up.
I foresee institutions caving, falling apart, and at least getting near collapse. Social Security, FDIC, or Treasury itself folding would all lead to a massive bank run, small companies losing all their money over night, and people being kicked onto the street, where they can be captured and deported for quick cash. Seriously, ICE could just start grabbing unhoused people off the streets of major cities, and it would not even be an escalation.
And I foresee this all leading to the deaths of at least 6 million of Americans as aid cracks down, laws are broken, and tax dollars for medical care are stolen to fund the American Gestapo, also known as ICE. Why 6 million? Because the world is too cruel to not make that parallel. Musk would probably even call it ‘epic’ because he has the mental capacity of a 9-year-old internet user in 2006 who was raised by his Klansman grandfather.
In such dire times, I feel it is necessary to have some advice for people, and my advice is rather simple. Return to cash and take advantage of declining gold prices while you can, as gold is gold. Invest in non-US currencies, as Trump is stupid enough to manufacture an extra $50 trillion US dollars in a single month. And buy a gun. Progressive Americans need to rearm themselves and resort to violence if they continue to be met with violence. Because violence is required to win a war. If you continue to comply and do not start shooting Nazis in the face when they break into your house, they will round you up, load you into gas chambers, or just burn you alive.
Personally, I bailed out of my risky stuff on Monday and lost pretty much all the gains I experienced in my IRA this past year, bringing it down from its high of 68k to just under 60k. That is not good, and I missed out on the upswing in the market on Wednesday, but I was unwilling to take that risk. My 401(k) underwent similar declines and pivots to cash, but it’s still a solid $23k, and I plan on transferring everything to my IRA next week. Just so I have more control of my finances and don’t need to log into as many accounts.
Also, I am a strong advocate for self-directed IRAs over 401(k)s, and would encourage those who are comfortable with financial management to make the transition. Just so you have more control. And I will use this control to buy Euro, Swiss Francs, gold, and other stable currencies, because I cannot take this aggressive flip-flopping anymore. Misery is the point, and after all these delays and lies, I am starting to straight up not believe that these tariffs will actually go into effect.
On an unrelated note, later this month, or maybe next month, I am going to buy a gun. Because if an ICE agent tries to break into my house, with the intent to abduct me from my home, I will exercise my right to shoot him in the face. And if his buddy shoots me afterwards, at least I killed a Nazi before I died. My deceased Polish and German Great Grandmothers, both of whom were teenagers living in America during WWII, would be proud.
Otherwise, I won’t use the bloody thing. So don’t worry, Alphabet Soup Gang.
Nintendo $witch 2 Much $$$$$$
(Because Everybody Else is Talking About It!)
This week has been relatively quiet in gaming, so let’s talk about the Switch 2. Because hoy boy have people been getting upset about this. Well, not the Switch 2 itself. I have not heard a single bad thing about any of the major games shown in the Direct. Everybody seems plenty excited about the first year library they announced. After all, Mario Kart Tour, Donkey Kong, Metroid Prime 4, Kirby Air Riders, Pokémon Legends Z-A, and Hyrule Warriors 3 feels like it is missing something, but it’s a darn solid launch line-up. It’s missing a certain something, but that could probably be fulfilled by Yoshi’s Woolly World or something. (Actually, a re-release of Xenoblade 2 that runs in 1080p with the standalone expansion and all DLC would be dope!) Instead, people are far less concerned with the games, and far more concerned with the costs.
Like I said last week, I think the $450 price tag is just fine, as I’m not going to fuss over a $50 difference in a product that I was always expecting to cost $400 at a minimum. Tech is expensive, manufacturing is expensive, the value of the dollar has declined, and the bigger the device, the more it costs to make. Though, the extra $100 price tag for non-Japan regions is pretty scummy, not gonna lie.
Still, assuming it was a quality machine, I would be willing to suck up the costs, especially if Nintendo expressed some form of generosity to new buyers and early adopters. Such as including a three month trial for Nintendo Switch Online Plus— a $12 value— and including the Welcome Tour game for free, instead of charging $10. But, ultimately, the thing about a console is that the price is a one-time transaction. The games though? Those are an issue.
Firstly, I was wrong when I said that physical games would cost up to $90. The cap appears to be $80, and at this point I have no idea if they are maintaining a difference between physical prices and digital prices. Secondly, this is Nintendo, and Nintendo games, at most, go on sale for 33% off. So these games will not be subject to the standard price decline that allows someone to pick up nearly every game they want when they are the lesser of $20 or 60% off. Which really is the key to gaming on a budget. Buy games at deep discounts!
If you want to buy Nintendo games, you may as well buy them new. If you want to be a Nintendork and be part of the conversation, you need to buy at least the big games and play through them. Meaning these games are also of communal importance for these online fans. Oh, and you also need to pay for online. This amounts to a $20 or $50 annual fee, and who’s to say when Nintendo will up that to $25 a year or $60 a year. They have been adding more content to it and avoided removing anything. …Except for some football game.
Doing some quick napkin math, assuming that a typical Nintendork buys approximately one game, and maybe some extras, every month, that would be about $80 a month, or $960 a year, or over $1,000 a year if you consider buying the real online subscription. For one avenue of entertainment, that’s a lot for most people. Hell, that’s a lot for me! The last time I spent that much on games in a year was when I bought my Switch. …Actually, that’s a lie. It was last year, when I bought approximately 90 games, backed a Kickstarter for over $100, and engaged in post-election retail therapy.
Extrapolating this information, including the $450 console, the $80 pro controller, a $100 512 GB MicroSD Express card, DLC, impulse purchases, and various other doodads, this image looks pretty dire. I can easily see a gold-star day one Nintendork spending $2,000 on a Switch 2 by June 2026. That seems like an expense that should be avoided and cut out of one’s life as they pursue cheaper options with comparable results. Especially in this time of economic precocity, where the global economy is in the hands of someone who will tank the global financial system on a lark.
While I have not seen anybody express this idea, I think this really gets at the heart of the financial vibe that people are upset about here. People are used to games costing a certain amount, and have had to deal with a bunch of price hikes in recent years. So seeing a family friendly brand like Nintendo turn on them with an example of… greed, just hurts them right in their pocketbook. It denies them access to their happy place unless they can work a third job, in this era where nobody is hiring.
Though, give it a year, and I’m sure that a 16-hours-a-day for $80 sweatshop will open up in a Republican-dominated district near you. Just one day of hard labor, and you get a Switch 2 game! …Before counting Federal and local income taxes, self-employment taxes for Social Security and Medicare, two programs that will be eradicated if the Trump administration has their way. Oh, and the sales tax on the product that depends on your county, reaching over 10% if you live in a high-tax county, like my home turf of Cook County. Where we are proud to pay an extra 10% on everything other than food and services, knowing it keeps out state out of bankruptcy! (God, Illinois needs to charge more than 4.95% on its state income tax.)
What I’m getting at is that America needs a value-added tax of 10% or higher applied to all goods (except for food and medicine), with proceeds going directly to the state where a good is sold. …And also people have every reason to be angry about the price. The Nintendo fandom has thrived in the past few years, prices for the Switch and its games have remained stagnant throughout its life, and people were complacent with this status quo. But now that it is changing. Everything is getting to be more expensive, glorified tech demos are being sold rather than offered as freebies, and glorified FPS and resolution upgrades, features that are free on PlayStation and Xbox, are being sold for an extra $20. Oh, and Breath of the Wild, a game that has sold over 32 million units, is being re-released for $70, without the $20 DLC expansion pack. They released this game 8 years ago… and are charging$90 for it.
…You ever just think about the Nintendo Selects line from past generations, where Nintendo would re-release hit games for $20? I remember. It was a great way to keep hold of the budget-minded customer, who might lack the ability to spend big, but could become a rampant fan of a series, helping to support it through word of mouth and engagement. Instead, Nintendo is looking at these people, and children from non-affluent families, and saying that they do not need them.
They are choosing to pursue the path of a luxury brand. Which is not what any Nintendo fan wants. It’s not what people in general want. They want quality, sure, but they want affordable quality, affordable comfort, and a brand that they can trust. People trusted Nintendo to do the right thing, price their products at an affordable rate, and viewing this all broadly, I would say they did not achieve that.
How do they fix this? Well, telling their customers to buy a Switch 1 if Switch 2 is too expensive is a real Don ‘Xbone’ Matrrick moment, so definitely not that. I say release the system as it is, go through its full holiday season, and if sales are lagging behind, give it a price drop to $400, cut the game prices down to $70, and offer early adopters bonuses. Like a digital copy of a first-party game, as it costs virtually nothing to provide a digital license, makes the customer feel like they are getting a good deal, and you can consider that to be another unit ‘sold’ if you wanna be cheeky. …Or maybe the wannabe dictator will try to impose 100% tariffs on every nation again, and ban foreign owned companies from operating in the United States. Nobody knows!
More Mild Musings About Live Services
(If Only to Pad This Rundown)
…Yeah, I probably should write something more for this Rundown. Even after I wrote 14k words last week for the Switch 2 reveal, I still wanna talk about something, and I have nothing to say about any of the indie reveals this past week that could not be summarized in a sentence. So let me try to fart out a topic that I have been musing over.
Something that has been irking me as of late is the sheer unbridled volume of games that are coming out, begging for attention, and often being met with a small fanbase of players. This offers a deluge of variety, makes the medium richer, and shows that more and more people are creating games as a career, a hobby, or a means of general creative expression.
However, this rise in the number of games being produced has been paired with the rise of easily accessible emulation, allowing people to play thousands of games from the past with virtually little cost. A boom in retro game reworks, revisions, and ports to modern computers, giving older titles newfound life. An established upper class of super games attracting millions of monthly active users that, for millions of people, may as well be the entirety of video games. And a pocket industry of always online titles that depend on a central server that will, inevitably, undergo end of service within the span of months to years,
This cluster of different experiences makes it hard to keep up with all the going-ons in gaming, makes specialization of interests a necessity, and makes it virtually impossible to obtain a holistic view of the medium. Because you cannot engage in all the latest hotness and the niche obscura, even if one were dedicating 80 hours a week to just gaming. Which would be extremely unhealthy. (I say as someone who is at her computer for about as long.) However, the best thing about digitally distributed media is that it stays around so long as somebody somewhere is keeping it on a publicly accessible website. Things can be delisted, sure, and media can easily become lost, but if something has a following, it will get picked up by someone, the links will circulate, it will live on, and the media will wait for you. Though, going back on the delisting bit, you may need to seek out an unauthorized copy to see it.
However, there is one exception to this general rule, and it is when games are running off of corporate-owned servers that they fully control. Players cannot play these games without these servers, and that makes them media that will not wait for anyone. It’s media that demands attention, because it could just stop and announce EOS any moment. It’s terrifying from a preservation perspective, but it also gives these games a skewed level of importance. If you play these games, then you are engaging in an experience that will one day become lost, only available via spotty archives. If you avoid them, you will never experience what they have to offer. And years after their release, these games will become mere artifacts. Remnants of something that was lost or destroyed. A thing that exists more in memories and fragments rather than a collective whole. Something that is not part of any sort of Video Gaming Canon, culturally dismissed as ‘not mattering.’
This is something that I think about a lot when I see news about live services, and look back at my time with the sub-medium. If someone sticks with an online game for its entire life, they have an experience that cannot be replicated. By playing an online-only game for a few hours, you gain a greater understanding of a game that you could not gather just by engaging with posthumous remnants. But it is also really easy to just dismiss these experiences, and insist that they just do not matter. That they are all designed around monetization, FOMO, time-wasting, compulsion, Skinner Boxes, gambling, and other things that make them lesser, sub-artistic, works. When… it is just wrong to dismiss the hard work and dedication of artists, designers, and game developers at large. The monetization, restrictions, and some design principles suck ass, but it’s also important to recognize that there is some value in them.
There is value and enjoyment to be found in just about any game, and the more live services grow and evolve over time, the more value can be found in them. Which is why… I just find their inevitable fate all the sadder. Because despite whatever diehard hardcore pundits may want to think, they are a vital part of modern gaming. And while not part of the single-player console player canon, they warrant as much respect and analysis. Maybe they could warrant that if they could be consistently repackaged and resolve as standalone titles, which would teach people that, once you get rid of all the crap, a lot of live services have oodles to enjoy. Instead, so many of them march to their inevitable demises, and leave behind nothing but broken hearts, fading memories, and a deluge of waste.
…What was the impetus for this? Oh, right. I played around six hours of Tribe Nine this past week. While they fixed a lot of my problems with the combat from the demo, and rebalanced some of its intro, for better or worse, it’s… a game that hates the fact that it has to be a gacha game. It so clearly just wants to be a standard RPG romp, yet it has these needless distractions. Gear systems, overly complex skills, copy-pasted dailies, UX elements lifted from MiHoYo games, and a party system that refuses to let the player play with or as the main characters. It has some real passion behind it between its characters, animation, story, vocal performances, and world at large. But I feel that these things will never be fully appreciated, even by fans of the creative team’s past work, because it is a temporary and finite game that, honestly, I do not see lasting more than two years.
The game deserves better, should have the ability to just stay around for years on end, yet once it’s gone, it will cease to be a game that can be played, and will instead become a thing that happened. Something only remembered by those curious enough to have experienced it. I HATE the fact that this is a state where artistically rich games are in, but there sadly is not much that can realistically be done here. It’s not like there is a President of Video Games who is forcing this to go through who could be removed with enough friends and firepower. And because corporations have been trying to mold humans into apathetic slugs, the fantasy of a broader consumer revolt is just that. A fantasy.
I see where the ‘divest from live service crowd’ are coming from, but I think that is fighting a battle that has already been lost. Online gaming won the war, it is the main format of gaming, and my only hope is that games get preserved after EOS. Sure, they would objectively not be the same game— at least they shouldn’t be— but a facsimile is better than nothing.
…Is that a good enough segment? Eh, screw it. I gotta go exercise now. Seeya next week!
Progress Report 2025-04-13
For context, I made Roth IRA contributions of $6,000 in January 2022 and $6,500 in January 2023. So I am still pretty happy with how my portfolio has done. Also, this is just my self-directed stuff. I could make IRA contributions, but I have a 401(k) that’s getting ~$500 added to it every month, and a mortgage I’m trying to pay down. I even tried to play it safe by switching to European stocks in mid-March, but noooooo!
2025-04-06: Had to do some digging around to figure out the next TSF Showcase subject, found it, read through it, and got 2,000 words in it. Shitty progress, as I had to do some busy season work scattered across the day, and spent the morning playing more Tribe Nine before accepting it just is not very good.
2025-04-07: 14 hour work day, maybe a bit more technically, worked form 11:30 (because my boss felt like sleeping in) until 3:30 in the morning.
2025-04-08: Wrote 1,800 words for the preamble and tariff bit. Wrote 1,700 words for TSF Showcase 2025-05. Today was not so busy, but I was so tired and worked up from the other day that I had to take a 2.5 hour nap in the evening.
2025-04-09: Wrote 1,400 word Nintendo bit, because I kept thinking about money after the tariff spike thanks to presidential market manipulation. Should have done more, but this workload combined with this rampant uncertainty surrounding everything is just making it hard for me to focus on things, as I see something about how the FDIC being possibly raided and abolished and I worry immensely.
2025-04-10: Edited the Rundown and wrote the 1,200 word live service bit.
2025-04-11: Wrapped the draft of TSF Showcase 2025-05, which was meant to just be a quick filler to supplement 2025-04 being 4,000 words instead of 5,000 words. Both of them wound up being 4,200 words. Oops! Would edit them, but I was not in the mood to edit text, so I decided to play ALL IN ABYSS: JUDGE THE FAKE! Really enjoying it so far, even though I swear they did something to the RNG and luck systems, in addition to making the game less of a power fantasy.
2025-04-12: Was busy with chores in the morning and work from the afternoon onwards. It’s crunch time. Management is a fuck. And I am going to have a looooong chat with my boss when this is all over. Also, I read Skinsuit Ellie Chapter 8, and it is peak TSF. Skinsuit Ellie is easily up there in my list of all-time favorite TSF comics, and at over 300 pages, I can’t really say that I’m sad to see it wrap up. It ended in a wonderful turn of fate. Honestly, this just makes me excited to see what Imp Underneath does next, because I know it’s gonna be DOPE! Will I do another TSF Showcase on it after doing my original one a few years ago? Probably not. Really, what I should do is go back and just update all of the prior TSF Showcases with extra information, extra sub-sections, and more tidbits, make them their own segments. But that would take too much time, and I just finished working a 56 hour week.