Rundown (4/20/2025) I Did the Taxes. Now I Go to Bread.

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: I Did The Taxes. Now I Go To Bread.
• Mario Kart DWT – Direct World Tour (Because Nintendo Needs A Win…)
• More Mild Musings About Pokémon – April 2025 Ver. (Natalie Needs to Buff Up This Rundown Somehow!)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
I Did The Taxes. Now I Go To Bread.

Header image comes from FanterFane. I did not request it from them, but I WISH I did.

After 700 hours of hard work, I finally finished the first tax season of 2025, and… I don’t even know what to say now. I am frustrated, tired, angry, and filled with uncertainty not only for the rest of the year given the excess of things that still need to be done. Estates, amendments, crypto trades for… two dozen clients? (DAMN IT!) And so many piddly little things that must be completed within the next six months. And I hate knowing that there are so many things to do, as I am ultimately responsible for the majority of work that goes into them, yet I do not have access to the means to finalize them. That will depend on both the clients and the whims of my boss, who is the reason why our two-person operation is so swamped with work.

I SHOULD like my job, as I am getting paid to fill out documents, solve basic financial puzzles, and ultimately helping people comply with a system. But when paired with the stress of getting everything done, with needing to manage so many people, it’s enough to fill me with dread. Because this is a process that I do not have control of, and one that I feel so, so much anxiety over. Because if I don’t get things done, I’m not just losing money for my company, I am potentially fucking up someone’s life. And I cannot allow that to happen.

…Also, I do not view myself as a tax collector. These people come to me for help with their taxes, as they want to protect themselves from the IRS and US government. I do what I can to minimize their taxes with tax planning and by making estimates. If clients do not like their bill, and do not want to pay IRS, then okay. That is their prerogative. My responsibility ends with filing the damn return and writing a formal letter to IRS if they go barking for more information.

However, that was merely one of the big three stressors that were weighing down on me during this tax season. The second being the first 90 days of the second Trump administration and with it, the destruction of a liberal democracy as fascist wannabe dictator has taken control. Seeing government institutions get raided and ransacked, career civil servants getting maliciously sacked and deprived of their profession by virtue of vibes and the infallible judgment of a chatbot. Witnessing attempt after attempt to limit people’s freedoms.

But it all pales into comparison to what this week brought. Unambiguous confirmation that the Trump administration believes itself to have the right to disappear an Americans for thought crimes. And send them to a forever prison in El Salvador where they will be relentlessly tortured and deprived of identity for the rest of their lives. All with no trial, no court order, with men in masks abducting people off the streets of major cities in broad daylight. And if the American Gestapo gets the wrong guy then there is zero recourse.

I am not being hyperbolic, I am not exaggerating, that is literally what is happening right now, and that is somehow beyond even my most extreme definition of fascism. Admittedly, they did not kill the man sent to El Salvador, and the teenager abducted ‘by mistake’ was removed from detention, but the fact that there was even a concern that both would be killed is deeply telling. America has fallen, and my only hope is that this is a dark chapter. That this keeps happening, and the outrage eventually billows until Americans have no choice but to resist and demand their stolen rights by any means necessary. (God do I love that phrase.)

The courts are being ignored. Congress is led by a party of sycophants who view themselves as extensions of their Führer, with the opposing party being lousy with spineless corporate ass-suckers whose biggest point of contention appears to be an insufficient level of bureaucracy. It all makes me never want to leave my house. And I sure as shit don’t have the money or broad skill set to warrant a green card anywhere else. Not that I could ever leave my mother alone in this burgeoning Hellscape. Actually, no. That is too generous. At least Hell has some class and dignity.

The third, and least, stressor is the fact that I have been unable to make any significant progress on my novels so far this year. My free time has been consumed by TSF Showcases and Rundowns, and when I encountered the opportunity to do something more, I have been frequently too exhausted and demoralized to begin a long-term project. Sure, I did create a 40k word outline and spruce up the World Information for Verde’s Doohickey 2.0, but I’m not even sure if I should be doing that next, or just jump to Psycho Shatter 2000 for some Y2K nostalgia binging.

This all fills me with such despair that I want to do something. …But even the most optimistic scenario I can imagine involves me just making a psycho-ass of myself before one of the armed guards shoots me in the head. Which would just be ammunition for them to make being transgender a criminal offense, leading to a mass abduction of transgender people across the country as they are then sent to a prison where monsters rape them for 16 hours a day while they sell this shit on the dark web for Bitcoin. (CECOT probably has their own dark web abuse porn website where you need to pay in crypto to access it.) And I’m not going to do that to my trans girls. (I do not think the administration consciously knows trans men exist.)

Shit is bad, I am demotivated, and need some escape, so what am I going to do?

…Give $1,500 to charities after I get my damn tax refund, attend at least one town hall meeting to get more connected with my community, since it’s within walking distance, and spend the next few weeks taking it easy. …By taking CPE courses and playing the hottest video games on my radar.

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Mario Kart DWT – Direct World Tour
(Because Nintendo Needs A Win…)

Gosh dang did I NOT expect the Switch 2 rollout to be this negative. Years of hype, speculation, and bombast, all undermined by two factors. An egregious lack of transparency that allowed misinformation to spread wildly. And some of the most egregious pricing I have ever seen in my life.

The system’s pricing is acceptable on the face of it. It is more expensive than a cheapo PS5 model, and way more expensive than the loss leader Xbox Series S, yet I can understand how they reached that price, especially with the tariff threats that are just getting pathetic at this point. But the price is contentious when considering the fact that the Japanese version is, approximately $100 cheaper, and is region locked. Indicating that Nintendo is making a hefty profit on these things. I would understand if this version lacked a Dock or something, but as far as I can tell, it is the exact same hardware.

Meanwhile, the game pricing is just a sad mess. Games are getting variable pricing rather than a standard bump up to $70, opening the door to games that cost $80 for the basic package. Upgrades, rather than be complimentary, are often going to be paid upgrades, in a move that is just scummy and norm-defying. And they are charging $10 for a bloody tech demo. While the world is technically not in a global recession, that is mostly due to the literal definitions of a recession. While the stock market has done killer numbers, real people’s buying power has declined considerably. Everything got more expensive, their wages remained stagnant, and they are sick of big tech companies strapping them for cash. People were expecting that Nintendo would be transparent, if not balanced, with their pricing approach. But they were not, and they have spurred rampant distrust from their terminally online core.

The conversation shifted away from people being excited to buy the system or play the games to people being angry at the price of everything. Nintendo needs to refocus the conversation, do something about their perceived greed, and show that the games they are delivering are worth their price tags. To start this process, they offered a more detailed look at Mario Kart World with its own Nintendo Direct. How does it look? Pretty dang good.

The core competencies of the game were already revealed in the Direct and livestream footage earlier this month, and this just served as a more structured showcase. One that illustrated how there are over 144 different playable characters, including random staple Mario enemies and NPCs. Like Pokey, Penguin, Cow, and Snowman. All of whom are inspired choices. Though, that number warrants an asterisk, as it also includes different outfits for the staple Mario crew. Stylish outfits that are unlocked by hitting up drive-thru places scattered across the world and partaking in local cuisine. Because in Mario world, you are what you eat. (TF artists, if you don’t cook with this idea do magic TF drive-thru, I will be sorely disappointed.)

The traditional Grand Prix returns with some intermediary tracks to bridge the main four courses together. While the new Knockout Tour is a six-track elimination race across the whole Mario Kart ‘continent’, delivering the same basic thing, but with more pressure and a longer duration, which might be just enough to keep things spicy. A scattering of new power ups were introduced, like a shell that drops coins behind it, and an ice flower that stuns opponents, which at least offer more chaos to manage while racing. While the mechanical changes are geared primarily around giving movement options to players. Allowing them to charge up a jump to avoid obstacles, grind on rails for bonus speed and to access shortcuts, or race on walls. All of which are not unheard of and pretty lateral moves after the anti-gravity funsies of the last entry, but what really shakes things up is the ability to rewind time.

Yes, while playing any regular race, the player can reverse time to avoid obstacles or attempt sick time-saving tricks. This sounds overpowered, but while players are rewinding, every other player is still driving as per usual, meaning trying to correct one mistake could leave them in last place. It’s an interesting mechanic that could be beneficial or filled with rampant abuse depending on its exact limitations, but I’m glad they’re trying something unconventional.

Battle mode is back, both in the form of Balloon Battle and Coin Runners, which are set in their own bespoke arenas rather than whatever crap they tried in Mario Kart 8 (2014). Time trials and ghosts of other racers are still staples, which should not need to be stated, but you never know these days. The game will support fairly robust multiplayer modes, including 24 player races and 8 player local races, though the title seems to be excluded from the GameShare program. Meaning if you want to play with multiple people on multiple Switch 2s, you will need multiple copies of the game. A far cry from the glory days of Mario Kart DS (2005), but I kind of understand why. Because this is an open world game, and even with peer-to-peer data transfer speeds, transferring the data would just take too long. GameShare seems more like a level-based thing, and I’d imagine that Nintendo wants people to buy their marquee launch title. Maybe they’ll patch in GameShare at a later point?

On that note, I feel the need to highlight just how huge the world of this game appears to be, and how it is filled with consistent points of interest. Something that many open world game, particularly driving games, do not achieve. And rather than just be a big scattering of interesting set pieces, the world will be littered with mini-challenges. Or missions, since they are pretending this is a return of the standalone missions of Mario Kart DS (2005). (It’s not, it’s an evolution of Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild, but with motorcycles.) It should give the game some much needed variety and make exploration all the more enticing.

Mario Kart World ultimately looks like an excellent Mario Kart and a bold evolution of the series, but as the most expensive retail game in recent memory, it has a lot to live up to, and its success largely depend on the success of the Switch 2. If people are willing to buy it, if they can buy it, and how much they are able to broadcast their new purchase. Because with the collapse of X, née Twitter, the ability to share games has declined considerably, and I’m not sure how they can get the games in people’s eyes, rather than the price tags and hot takes. Maybe they need to partner with a lot of Influencers to show off these games, or maybe they just need to cast the die and pray for success. Nobody knows. Nobody knows anything in the modern era, except shit is bad and it will get worse.

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More Mild Musings About Pokémon – April 2025 Ver.
(Natalie Needs to Buff Up This Rundown Somehow!)

It’s a pretty light week in terms of gaming news I care to discuss, so I’m going to talk about Pokémon. Because as I have said before, it has weaseled itself into being my de facto happy space, and I invest too much mental bandwidth to it. So let’s talk about… something that I have noticed for a while, but I don’t believe I have articulated, yet explains a lot about people’s diverse relationship to Pokémon as a series. Specifically the mainline RPGs developed by Game Freak, as they are truly some of the most unique RPGs on the market, featuring a level of variety that virtually no other RPG has achieved.

• They are linear campaign-driven RPGs that can largely be played as titles with a defined beginning, middle, and end.
• They are open-ended games with a plethora of things to do, creatures to raise, and things to collect, offering a truly impressive amount of content for those who wish to complete a Pokédex. Thus making them a game where a full collector’s playthrough could be upwards of five times as long as a casual one.
• They are social games where the player has the ability to trade with others, working in unison to form robust collections. Seriously, how many games use multiplayer for trading on this level? …Aside from Animal Crossing and live services.
• They are multiplayer turn-based battle games where people can connect and battle with others across the world. With this element being “The Game” in the eyes of some. A stance I would take umbrage with, but is fair as… there really is no game with a competitive scene like Pokémon, for better or for worse. Plus, competetive Pokémon is arguably just a worse, less accessible, and prettier version of Showdown.
• They are the most widely replayed series of RPGs in existence, being home to a deluge of challenge runs, born from people’s fierce love of the games.

I think it is important to acknowledge these multitudinous factors, as it heavily skews how people perceive and play through these games, and how the games both are and are not good at catering to these many factors. Obviously, the majority of people who pick up a Pokémon game are going to have their fun with it and put it away after tackling the main campaign and brushing against various levels of side activities. Maybe a few battles with friends. But the series is not and has never been fixated on one experience over others, and often struggles to cater to all of these facets because… it’s hard. So hard that it’s frankly impressive that these games ship every few years, just in general.

That being said, trying a lot is not an excuse for doing something poorly, and the balance of these myriad factors has always been contentious. From one-time events to rare chance encounters, to some of the most consistently questionable balancing, to an open world where there is a single accepted way to progress. Or how the series only gained the ability to support multiple save files with the Switch releases. Not because of the shift to read-only game cartridges, but because the Switch supports multiple users, and you can use that to play through a Pokémon game up to eight times before erasing a save file. A factoid that… I did not realize until I started writing this. So that’s how people get complete Pokedexes! They just play the game multiple times!

With the rising scale of these games and people’s frustrations growing more vocal, I truly wonder if future installments will narrow their focus more on what type of experience they offer. Pokémon Bank has already attempted to replace traditional trading, though there needs to be more coordination with new generation launches. Pokémon Champions is going to be the new online battle hub, hopefully freeing the mainline games of that burden. And after the messy multiplayer modes of Scarlet and Violet, I cannot tell if the next Pokémon game will double-down on co-op multiplayer or not. A feature that I don’t think more than 10% of all players used beyond evolving a Finizen. Balancing the remaining three tenants is something that Game Freak has struggled with since… ever. Though the problems became more pronounced after X and Y.

While X and Y had the most variety in its Pokédex, its general ease, gift Pokémon, and so forth made it one of the easiest games for challenge runs. Yet the story is… half-finished, and filled with interrupts from friends that are as developed as their teams. Sun and Moon had a ‘real RPG story’ but lacked any means of skipping it, making it one of the worst Pokémon games for replays. Particularly with micro-animations and transitions delaying the progression in a way the 2D games didn’t. It had great variety, but getting to the major landmarks has been a documented slog for people. The Let’s Go games were the first to really be designed for 100% completion with their Master Trainers and post-game unlocks that encouraged shiny hunting. Yet the game is dirt easy, and it suffers from subpar team building resources. If you finished the game with all three Kanto starters and the box starter, raise your hand! Raises hand.

Sword and Shield, and to a greater extent Scarlet and Violet, are games that I consider to have been designed around a lengthy post-game. Both featuring explorable environments where the player is expected to grind, farm, and collet ad infinitum. While their main campaigns… honestly feel like afterthoughts in some regards. With gimmicky gym challenges prior to the main battle. Non-gym encounters that either feel like diversions or roadblocks barely worth mentioning. And a lot of unskippable story that generally loses value the more times one sees it play out. …Yet they are the easiest games to do multiple runs in, by being on Switch.

…And I just realized that I basically wrote out the reasons why a lot of Pokémon diehards, or at least Content Creators™, tend to prefer the first five generations. Not because they were these stellar examples of game design, but they were more direct with their progression. Had stories that were more succinct and could more easily be mashed through. Mind you, I think that most of the encounter tables actually lead to pretty repetetive challenge runs and homogenous playthroughs, and that Game Freak did not start making good encounter tables until the 3D era. In X and Y, most routes had at least 6 unique encounters you could find, and the following games kept with this approach. I remember getting a Pokédex of over 30 Pokémon in Violet before I even got to the darn school. Compared that to a lot of the first five gens, and the encounter tables just seem anemic by comparison. …Though, I guess they really fixed this in Black 2 and White 2, when they doubled the Pokédex.

This should make the older games worse for challenge runs, but the familiarity factor and ease of emulating these games makes them the go-to choices. Plus, if one wants more variety, there are a plethora of tweaks and retoolings that inject more variety. Too much in many instances! (I still cannot believe it’s possible to get over 100 Pokémon in Radical Red before leaving Pewter. That’s just bonkers.)

So, what am I trying to say here? Eh… I guess that I find the prospect of balancing a Pokémon game to be fascinating. While the games are rife with things to criticize, and boy howdy do I like to yap about things in them that I think should be changed, I also understand the immense challenges they offer. Every change could have unintended consequences, and Game Freak is often forced to pursue the most conservative approach, as the games are subjected to such rigid time constraints. It’s an unpleasant cycle, and with the money still pouring on in, there is less incentive for those in power to fix it. …Just like with everything else in life!

Besides, fans will bitch like the bitches they be, but they will swallow their pride, morals, and gonads in order to play the next one, and spend their free time engaging with the IP. Even if they spend much of the interim poking away at fandom and the ilk, they will always return with dollars in tow.

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Progress Report 2025-04-20

I probably should say something about the UK Supreme Court ruling that there are only two sexes and transitioning between them is impossible, but what the hell do you expect me to say? These people are hateful, stupid, and dumb as all hell, having heard from zero trans people in making this objectively wrong declaration. It goes against the spirit of prior laws, and is fueled by hate for a group that powerful people have encouraged the masses to hate, because of their warped world views. It’s awful, it empowers bigots around the world, and so much of this rise in UK’s anti-trans rhetoric, which can be traced largely to Joanne Rowling. A wretched crone has continued to abuse her power solely to hurt people, while spreading rampant lies against my people. At this point, anybody engaging with her intellectual property is beyond ignorance and is just funding an anti-trans billionaire who is more than happy to decay her legacy. Because she’d not going to live to enjoy her legacy, but she is alive now, and is clearly enjoying the suffering she is directly contributing to.

I am concerned for all my trans folks in the UK, but particularly my best buddy Cassie, who I really hope gets the opportunity to leave before things get worse. Specifically, to Germany with her boyfriend. At this point, I want to schlep my ass with them to Germany. I don’t trust Europe to fully avoid fascism, but I trust them to be smarter than America. Well, aside from the UK, but they drink from the same brands of lead and aspestos juice as Americans.

Except the problem with me moving to Germany is threefold. One, I do not speak German. I tried learning it in high school, didn’t get that far, and don’t remember much, and I have a foundation that can be built upon if need be. But it would take years for me to become fluent. Two, I live with my mother and I do not want to force her to move. She’s a middle-aged White lady with zero online presence, so I do not think she would be a target for anything in America, but she is going to need my help in the coming years. Mostly with tech stuff and things that overwhelm her. She could adapt, make friends, learn some of the language, but she’s a Chicago Gal, and if she goes with me, then nobody would be there to take care of her mother. Three, I have a mortgage with $190k left to be paid, and even if I emptied my savings and retirement, I couldn’t pay it. Which means I would not be able to fund a move to another country and contribute the way I would want to. Guh. Maybe I should be greedier with my bonuses…

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2025-04-13: Played more All In Abyss, but that was it.

2025-04-14: I was too stressed out to do anything productive tonight, so I did not make any progress on anything. I was just doom spiraling after learning that the Trump administration thinks it can send people into forever torture prison for thought crimes.

2025-04-15: Wrote 900 word intro for this Rundown. Hate that these are getting so bitter, but what the fuck am I supposed to do? LIE? Also edited about 8,000 words of TSF Showcase 2025-04 and 2025-05. Wanted to grab some pics, but I was drained.

2025-04-16: Wrote 750 words on the Pokémon segment and the Mario Kart preamble. Also played more All In Abyss. So far the game is a 7/10 that would have been an 8.5/10 if it had more. More polish, more time, and more resources. Which is such a quintessential indie game problem. People do not talk about the 7/10 indie games by the way. Only the 8.5/10 and up bangers.

2025-04-17: Added 1,500 words to the Pokémon and Mario Kart segments. Went into the office to do some billing with my boss. Got woken up early by construction, and had to take a damn nap in the afternoon. Edited the Rundown for good measure.

2025-04-18: Wrapped up All in Abyss and not much else on this day off of mine. Gosh, do I miss having a full fucking day where I can just do whatever.

2025-04-19: Worked on the All in Abyss review. I knew most of what I wanted to say, but I like to give myself a day to just settle on my thoughts before doing the writing. Wrote 4,100 words. Tomorrow shall be the editing day. Will I let the review go live this month? …Yeah. I’ll shoot for Wednesday, right after TSF Tuesday. Yeah, two posts back-to-back! A rarity in these modern times. Also, started reading stuff for the MAY TSF Showcase, because why not?

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