Rundown (9/21/2025) The Right To Self-Murk!

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: The Right To Self-Murk!
• Chat-a-lie The Talk-A-Lot (Natalie Has Been Too Busy Talking to Friends to Write)
• Learn About Sound Novels, Please! (Another Bowl of Lentils Banger Just Dropped)
• Microsoft Raises Xbox Prices Again (Divest From These Genocide Enabling Bastards!)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
The Right To Self-Murk!

Let’s see, it’s Wednesday, and I am just getting started on this week’s Rundown, so… what to talk about this week?

…I know! Let’s talk about suicide!

Akumako: “Thank god we’re not monetized…”

So, the trigger for this topic is watching a ‘doing the dishes background noise’ video about the Pokémon anime series, where the creator commented to his audience of, presumably Americans, that suicide is a crime. This struck me as an odd thing to say because… suicide is not a crime. But I do find the idea of viewing suicide as a crime, as an inherently bad thing, to be… questionable.

Akumako: “You’re gonna get your feet all cut up walking on those eggshells.”

Okay, okay, let me just get the prerequisite disclaimer out of the way so I can have a proper discussion. Suicide is, often, a bad thing. It is a small tragedy whenever a young person takes their life because they think they’re shit, ain’t ever gonna amount to shit, and will live their lives doing nothing more than eat, sleep, and shit. Assisting a young person in suicide is generally a bad thing, as it is enabling them to make a decision that prevents them from doing anything going forward. And as someone who was a suicidal teenager, I am glad that I lacked the conviction to go through with it, as I would have missed out on so much good shit!

Akumako: “And bad shit.”

Yeah, but most of that bad shit is happening to other people. However, I find that public discussions about suicide fail to understand the instances where suicide is a necessary, just, or agreeable thing to do. The go-to example is the subject of people choosing suicide after their medical condition changes. People who get into accidents, are left disabled, brain-dead, or unable to communicate with others. This has been its own little pro-choice or anti-choice debate in America for decades, and it stems from the same puritanical belief system that humans are not truly autonomous. That Gods/kings/capitalists are the ones who should control the world, for they ‘built’ it after all, not the laborers who, you know, literally built it!

However, in recent years, there has been a rise in countries, or states, that offer physician-assisted suicide, allowing people who don’t want to live anymore, due to health reasons, to die in relative peace. It is a form of suicide, one that is becoming common as it is becoming available to more people, and is becoming culturally understood as a ‘thing you can do.’ Which is good for people who get old and get chronic pain. I have been to retirement homes and rode paratransit for a few years, and… yeah, I could tell that some of these people were just waiting to die. They had no hope left in their lives and virtually no potential to improve their lives. They would kill themselves… if they felt they were allowed to.

As a tax accountant who works for a man on the cusp of his seventies, the topic of when and how to die comes up fairly often with my clients. People need to make sure they have enough money, or else they will die. People need to make sure their quality of life is maintained, because what is the point of living to 103 if you don’t know who you are, cannot move, and don’t know what a tree is? And they want to make sure that they leave enough behind to their children. Something that is steadily becoming less of a thing as working class Boomers are drained of their savings by a ruthlessly overpriced American medical industrial complex.

Which brings me to a topic that I have been musing on for a while. Not for myself— you folks are stuck with me for at least another thirty years. But for a lot of people who realize the systems of America are broken and want to help other people by creating generational wealth. I call it Suicide Wealth Maxxing, or Suicidemaxxing for short!

Akumako: “Natalie, sometimes I wish you were dead so we didn’t need to do this dog and pony malarkey every week.”

The core idea behind Suicidemaxxing is ensuring that someone dies while leaving behind as much money as possible to whomever. Their kids, their siblings, their spouse, a local charity, a school, their local town that is bleeding money, or the American Nazi Federation, also known as the GOP.

Akumako: “You are just asking them to come after you at this point, aren’t you?”

I don’t have a quarter of enough notoriety to be on any of their lists! And I love it! The obscure life is a good life!

So, how does one ensure that they are leaving behind enough for their estate and whatever shape or form that can be? Well, the first step is to invest in stuff. Specifically real estate, where the power of depreciation, step-up in basis upon death, and the $250,000 sale of home exclusion all work to basically erase any potential gain on the selling of real estate after death. Regular investment accounts holding onto stocks and financial instruments are another good choice, but I am personally a huge fan of Self-directed ROTH independent retirement accounts in particular. These are broken tools where you can throw money in, invest it, and keep it there for decades, never paying a penny on any interest, dividends, or realized gains you experience. Meaning anything stored in a Roth IRA and taken out is, upon death, not subject to any tax, period! It’s almost like wealthy people made this legal so they could preserve their wealth!

These are both incredibly good tools for investment, just in general, but there are two more pertinent matters to discuss with regards to Suicidemaxxing. Life insurance and social security. Life insurance is pretty simple. You pay annual premiums and, when you die, the beneficiaries gets the money. No worry about taxes or anything, they just get the money. If someone eschews savings or investments and just invested in a… $5 million life insurance policy their whole life, then that’s generational wealth right there! Though, most life insurance plans have a caveat for suicide and don’t cover it unless the plan has been upheld for a set amount of time. They’ve been bamboozled by Suicidemaxxers before.

The exact math, rates, and approved amount of a life insurance policy will vary from person to person, as insurance brokers love discriminating against people. I should know, I’m trans and have a corporate life insurance policy! Which is something of a rare thing nowadays, as corporations don’t want to keep employees around, let alone profit off of their deaths.

Social security, meanwhile, is something I have more mixed feelings about. As I have said before, someone could pay into social security their entire life, die at age 70, before retiring, and never see a speck of benefit from their money that they put into a national retirement plan. If they are single (and don’t have any young children) their family gets nothing. But if they retire at 70 and live to 100, they will get 30 years of monthly payments. So, you would think that social security is a good reason to not commit suicide, right? Hahahaha! Nah, you can exploit it!

There’s this little thing called Surviving Spouse Benefits, which gives a Suicidemaxxer’s spouse the Suicidemaxxer’s social security benefits. Though, a few criteria need to be met. To get the most benefits, they need to be married for at least a year, they need to reach retirement age, and they need to reach full retirement age, which is like 67 years old for old people nowadays. There are carve outs and rules for this, but to get the most benefit, you need to do hit these requirements.

So, the ideal scenario, is for someone to invest in property, an IRA, and life insurance, wait until they are retirement age. Then they can get married to a friend of a similar age with low earned income, start taking social security, ride out their seventies where productivity is a possibility. But once their productivity flaters, their brain becomes too mushy, or their body starts going to shite, then it’s time to DO A SUICIDE! Ideally a cool one, like liking themselves on fire ON STREAM or [REDACTED], destroying their enemy’s generational wealth, and their generations! Doing this would preserve the assets of the Suicidemaxxer and transfer them with virtually zero tax implications… so long as their estate is worth less than, I dunno, $10 million. But most people cannot even imagine $10 million.

Now, this is not an easy or simple get rich quick scheme. It requires deliberation, thought, and being in the right life position. Fortunately, a lot of people are approaching this life position. The Boomers are retiring, but they are winding up with far less money than they expected. If they want to just avoid seeing their country fall to fascism and give their children something substantial, they could do some creative estate planning. The husband, who is statistically going to die first, could take out a life insurance policy, kill himself and, in death, transfer his social security to his wife. This would allow her to reap the benefits of social security and cut down the cost of living by removing a person. Meanwhile, the life insurance proceeds could be arranged to skip down to the generation where they will do the most good.

One might look at this and ask why I’m not considering the value of the lives being destroyed in this process. To which I say… I live in America and am offering this advice specifically for Americans. And in America, human life has drastically less value than it does in other developed countries. The value in human life is based on the economic value that can be siphoned from it. Why are old people kept alive in America? Because it’s the humane thing to do? Hell no! It’s so private industries can benefit from social security while keeping old people cooped up in dirty rooms all day. Why is the incarceration rate like 10 times any other given country? Because states pay prisons to keep people in jail. Why is healthcare so expensive? Because America was built on debt peonage, and it still fucking is!

Recognizing how bad this system is and how poor older people’s quality of life in this country is— unless they are loaded— it’s hard for me to not look at this system and say you should not kill yourself for money. Because old people are treated as financial batteries for private industries, for the medical establishment, and the longer they live, the longer their value can be drained. But older people can avoid this process of being abused by systems by setting themselves free and passing down their wealth to their family. And that, that right there, is the highest and best form of Suicidemaxxing. Dedicate your shit life to make money, fucking kill yourself in a blaze of glory, and then use your money to fuel the lives of other people. Doing so, you can free them from the abusive capitalist rat race that the wealthy have forced them into.

Akumako: “I worry about you when you say shit like that.”

If I die, I’ll leave behind a good-ass estate for someone my age. Just need to work on a will or something… I know a couple people who would belong in it.

Akumako: “CIA fucks, don’t go after Natalie. She’s crazy, but harmless.”

I won’t even do any White men’s (financial) crimes! All my tax returns are legit and by-the-book!

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Chat-a-lie The Talk-A-Lot
(Natalie Has Been Too Busy Talking to Friends to Write)

Hey now! It’s time for my requisite tax season apology as my free time dries up and tax returns fill my plate.

Akumako: “Strangely, that has not happened yet, because your boss is an inefficient old man and gets too fatigued to work more than a few hours a day.”

Oh… then what have I been preoccupied with?

Akumako: “Other than FINALLY going through the final route of Hundred Line? You’ve just been on Discord chatting with your friends!”

Indeed I have and… this is something that I have such mixed feelings about. As I have mentioned in my progress logs, I have taken up the habit of chatting with a gaggle of Natalie.TF regular readers and commenters via Discord, talking to them about whatever. Their school days, life goals, creative endeavors, or random video game nonsense that I just love yapping about!

I love this little circle of friends I’ve accrued. As someone who, a decade ago, was actually friendless, I consider myself deeply fortunate to have accumulated over half a dozen people I would consider to be my friends. I am happy to talk to them, I know the importance of socialization, and it feels generally shitty to tell them not to talk to me because I’m busy. I will tell them that when I’m at work as, well, I need to work to live. But when I am just doing my own thang or playing video games? Pushing them off or aside would be rude. Hell, I felt bad when I had to go dark for a day and a half after the big Nintendo Direct last week.

Akumako: “Uh, okay, but what is your point here? Woe is me, I am too busy being social and talking to my friends to be as productive as I used to be?”

I mean, kinda? While I value being able to get things done, to release stuff, and to maintain a schedule, I also realize the vital importance of connection, of friends, of bonds. I have been ultimately prioritizing that over productivity, as… bonds are what makes us human. The power of bonds is something that I always go back to in my own creative works. It is a thematic through line in a huge portion of the things I love. And even if it is not an overt theme, everything is the result of people working together. People trying to make something, sharing their ideas and passions in order to make something more than anything they possibly could alone. Even solo creatives are building off of a lineage of things they love.

Or to phrase things more directly, it is my personal philosophy that one should be attentive to their family and friends, and I try to prioritize them.

Akumako: “But you do realize that you spend hours talking to them when you could average about 1,000 words per hour instead? Think about all the stuff you could’ve written if you embraced the hermit lifestyle!”

Oh, I know. Trust me, I know. But in order to write effectively, I need to focus, I need to have a clean plate, and do not like having odds and ends, messages waiting for reply, or things to do. I like to take care of writing and gaming after all my other ducks have been addressed, but sometimes that is hard because I do not have a second place in my life. It’s just my room. I have enough room for a second set up, where I can lock in, ignore the outside world, and just write. But I also don’t want that. I feel that I need to maintain awareness of what is going on, to keep track of things, to address them now, because so much of my life has been defined by this type of time management.

Trying to do school assignments right after they are assigned. Bopping around my old workplaces as the designated interdepartmental stuff do-er, avoiding sin-some idle time. Spending seven years working for a scatterbrain without any true schedule. I know I keep pressing this fact, but I hate how I do not know when I will begin work, what I will be working on, or when I will be done with work. Combined with my mother, who lives with me, constantly stressing out about her jobs, I feel like I have little choice but to always be on. I am always reacting, always taking care of some little thing, even as I let other unimportant stuff build up. Like my image archive filing. Or reading the things I buy, when they could be enjoyed in, like, 10 minutes.

Akumako: “It sounds like you just hate unpredictability in your life, yet you are unable to escape it.”

Uh, yeah, exactly. And with all of this fucking political bullshit that has bogged down this past decade, I just feel so, so warn down by this barrage of things vying for my attention. I wish that I just could have a designated time for things, be able to make an actual schedule, but such things are luxuries only available to people with enough money that they don’t need to worry about anything.

Akumako: “Would you work in an office if it meant you had a routine schedule?”

Uh… I’d rather not, as commuting is time wasted. Just working for a real company with a real schedule would be enough to fix that problem.

ANYWAY! Even if I had a designated schedule, I would still be talking to my world-spanning friends at oddball times depending on their schedules, going on tangents upon tangents. Because I like them, my friends are amongst my favorite people in the world. And talking to them, interacting with them, helps me grow as a person. …Also, specifically communicating with them via text also gives me excellent practice and opportunities to capture the ebb and flow of a conversation, as I am engaging in authentic human dialogue!

Akumako: “You’re just trying to justify spending hours harassing Skillet in your DMs.”

N-No. I just think that Skillet is an interesting person, full of comments and perspectives that I am not familiar with, while also being a truly excellent yapper for someone who is only XX years old. The same also goes for Ouran Nakagawa, who is truly impassioned about her current project, has a thorough understanding of a scattering of niche hyperfixations, and is committed to broadening herself in her own way. While Rain… I don’t have anything as punchy and succinct to describe our conversations, because they are truly all over the place. But as someone in a different country and of a different background, with a scattering of her own issues, and fixations, I am always interested in seeing her perspective.

I would not trade these conversations with pretty much anything, but if it seems I am getting more distracted these days, this is the reason. Because I went and made friends with the weirdos who read this freak site!

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Learn About Sound Novels, Please!
(Another Bowl of Lentils Banger Just Dropped)

Seeing as how this is a weirdly vacant week for gaming news, and a likely light spot between two jam-packed weeks, I do not want to spin off into more tangents about niche topics. Especially when somebody just made a two hour documentary doing just that for a topic I have a particular fondness for.

Readers of Natalie.TF Rundowns will know I have a deep love for Japanese game history, particularly for how genres I care for found their origin, and especially visual novels. Bowl of Lentils has been an incredible resource in broadening my understanding the medium’s history, and I have plugged their work over the past. But after two years spent in the lab, they have come back with what is probably their most compelling video yet, a documentary on the history of Chunsoft’s sound novels. No retelling of the genre’s history is complete without talking about Chunsoft’s influence, and while I knew a good bulk of the information already in this video, it offers a level of depth that I have not seen from a single source.

There are a lot of tidbits and stories within the video that I just love. But an underlying theme I want to highlight is how the documentary is, largely, the story of a genre being developed, and going on to inspire… so much. Much of any artistic medium’s history can be described as a person doing something that inspires a bunch of creatives, who inspire a bunch of creatives, who inspire a bunch of creatives. But I find video game history to be such an interesting medium to analyze because of how many layers go into the creation of a game. How not only story concepts and ideas have their own trends, but systems, mechanics, and formats can all be analyzed chronologically. How you can do through the history of any genre and say game Y took inspiration from game X with concept/mechanic Z.

This series of connections, a hierarchy of influence, reinforces the fact that games are made by… creatives and artists. People who want to make things similar to the things they love, but bigger, better, and with their own twist on it. But, because games localization was so skewed, because so many games did not lead the partial ancestral homeland of Japan, much of the history that is taken for granted has been locked away by language barriers for decades. And unless we acknowledge it now, unless we spread the word and do the research, it’s easy for this history to be lost.

The pioneers of the medium are old or dead, and we need to acknowledge them, to write this history, before it risks being lost. Much of the medium’s history has been lost already due to obscure releases, aging hardware, and a combination of digital and physical media rot. And while there are wonderful preservationists who are doing their part to maintain history, to repackage it to a broader audience, to making it publicly available, the industry has been lagging behind. Content to just follow market trends, to only explore the past when there is a profit motive, and allow the majority of games of the past to remain… in the past.

Also, I owe it to myself to play The Portopia Serial Murder Cases (1983) for the Famicom and Otogirisou (1992) for Super Famicom. I would also play Kamaitachi no Yoru (1994), but somebody needs to make a fan translation patch that doesn’t localize the Japanese-ness out of the game. Because, form what I have heard, games like those are the nexus and birthing grounds for many, many of my favorite games of all time.

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Microsoft Raises Xbox Prices Again
(Divest From These Genocide Enabling Bastards!)

I’ve been over how much I strongly dislike Microsoft for their practices and behaviors over the past year. I mean, them enabling and supporting genocide by making AI tools for war was one thing. But laying off thousands of people and destroying a brand, destroying American cultural history? That’s just utterly unacceptable! However, Microsoft is also on my shit list for setting a standard by raising the price of their Xbox Series line of systems in response to Trump’s tariffs. Which are effectively a way to impose additional taxes on American consumer by directly, or indirectly, raising the price of consumer goods and destroying small independent businesses.

Why? Because if you BREAK everything, then you can BUY everything! If people cannot buy groceries, they will HAVE to sell their home to real estate companies who set what the price of housing is across communities, and the world at large! It’s all about introducing a new era of debt peonage I tells ya! Don’t look at me like that! I’m SANE! SAAAANNNNEEEEE!

Anyway! The actual story is that the Xbox Series prices are going up.

The Xbox Series S originally cost $300 in 2020, maintained that price until May 2025, and will now cost $400, effective October 3, 2025.
The Xbox Series X originally cost $500 in 2020, maintained that price until May 2025, and will now cost $650, effective October 3, 2025.

The good news is that the latest stretch of price increases only affects the US, so other countries are safe, for now. Well, not safe. We are going through an attempted fascist takeover here, and other countries need to divest from the US ASAP if they want to stay safe and have any values, or else they will become just like America, but without the diversity. And that would be the worst.

Also, do not buy an Xbox. You’d be better off buying a $650 laptop compared to an Xbox.

Okay, that covers it. This was a last minute addition to a tiny Rundown, so I’m gonna take my leave. Bye~!

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Progress Report 2025-09-21

I don’t know why it has taken me twenty bloody years to listen to the Sonic Rush (2005) soundtrack in full like this, but goldarn. This shit fucks so hard that I can barely believe it was from a DS game, and it makes me salty about two things.

One, I have basically zero regrets about bottom surgery, but as I listened to this album, I kept thinking of how dope it would be to work a cock to this. Just jerking it in time with the beat, or at least the vague impression of it. Maybe this is some wack-ass paraphilia that I have, but I find music to highly enhance the masturbation experience. Particularly something with a beat that matches the rhythmic rubbing that one would ideally use while vigorously gyrating a hand while grasping their bits. Maybe this is because music became part of my masturbatory experience when I was a teenager. Or maybe I just focused way too much on the technique of jerking my six inches (if you use the most liberal measurement method). But when I hear certain songs, particularly more EDM flavored tracks like this, my mind things ‘this would be great music to masturbate to!’ …Sadly, I have not really masturbated to music much in the past 2.5 years. I’ve just done it in my bed, with a sheet and tissue, like a damn puritan afraid to touch themself.

Two, how the hell has Sega never made a Sonic the Hedgehog rhythm game? Sega has a dedicated rhythm game team. They made so many damn Hatsune Miku games that I consider Miku to be a Sega character, even though she isn’t. Something everybody can agree is that Sonic games tend to have pretty good music. And as a series in part about precise movements, fast speeds, memorization, and reaction times, a rhythm game is not even much of a genre shift. Sega has such a profound archive of music to use and remix, has so many ties to amazing composers, yet has just never decided to make a Sonic rhythm game, even though it would be amazing. Whether it be a ‘press button when color appears’ rhythm game, something more platformery like Harmo Knight (2012), or… no, not like Rhythm Thief & the Emperor’s Treasure (2012).

These ideas are why Sega should hire me as a consultant.

Akumako: “You literally just talked about jerking off to the Sonic Rush OST. Do you have any self-awareness?”

Oh, I am aware that I sound like the Archduchess of Nonsense, but I do not care. I’m weird, but I don’t give a shit anymore!

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2025-09-14: Played some Hundred Line, making strides in the Romance route, but then got distracted by Skillet and other chore-like matters.

2025-09-15: Finished the Romance route in Hundred Line, but also spent hours chatting to Skillet. I really like that girl, she’s fun!

2025-09-16: More Skillet and Ouran chatting occupied a good chunk of my free time. Wrote 600 words for the Hundred Line review, played for a bit more.

2025-09-17: Realized I had dinny bupkis for this Rundown, so I wrote some quick bits for 3,000 words. This is kinda a deadzone of gaming news this week. Next week should be busy with a State of Play and Tokyo Game Show.

2025-09-18: Made the header images, got to the lock in the Steady Fundamentals arc in Hundred Line, and decided I needed to skim through the Mystery route again, as it gets complicated.

2025-09-19: A little bit of work, a lotta chatting with Skillet ‘n’ da girls, more Hundred Line.

2025-09-20: Chore day, a little bit of work, some chatting with Skillet ‘n’ da girls, more Hundred Line. I think I can FINALLY finish writing/editing my review sometime next week, but it will not go live until 10/8/25 and 10/10/25. Because 9/30/25 is a TSF Showcase day, and I don’t want to spoil you people.

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