Rundown (11/16/2025) Nurse Natalie and Comforting Cassie

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Nurse Natalie and Comforting Cassie
• State of Play Japan Edition (And Why It Is What It Is)
• The ARC Raiders Bit (Natalie Will Probably Regret This Rant, But Fuck It!)
• Valve Announced A Bunch of Steam Hardware (And Most of It Looks Cool!)
• Cassie’s Corner 2025-11 (Verbalising the V!)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Nurse Natalie and Comforting Cassie

Last week, I talked about the initial part of my journey to the UK. The plane ride, the bus ride, arriving at Cassie’s father’s house, and transporting over to an Airbnb for the next two weeks. And since then… things have been good for the most part.

Let’s start with the most interesting things of note. On Sunday, Cassie realized she needed to go to the hospital to get something checked out— a possible infection— and needed someone to take a swab to determine if there was something wrong with her. Ideally, this should have been a routine procedure, but the medical system of the UK is a bit… overly local. The UK healthcare system is built around local general practitioners (GPs) and the assumption that people won’t move or travel very often, and definitely won’t need to go to the doctor while out of town.

This was a problem as Cassie’s GP was several hours away, and she needed the swab taken right now. So she had to call around, get contradictory information, before eventually deciding to call her father and have him take her to a hospital near where we were staying. Which was a problem for several reasons.

1. None of us knew our way around this hospital and its many semi-connected buildings.
2. The UK’s emergency room equivalent, Accident & Emergency (A&E), is known for having people wait for hours to receive immediate care.
3. There are seemingly no equivalent to immediate/urgent care places At least none that her father was willing to take us to.
4. Cassie had limited mobility after getting bottom surgery, so she could not sit down in a chair, could only walk very slowly, and if she was going to lay in a car seat, it needed to be as stationary and horizontal as possible.

By the time we arrived at the hospital, Cassie was already all jostled up and hurting. She was on heavy-duty painkillers, but being driven around in her father’s old car, down the spaghetti-like roads of old England, while recovering from an intensive surgery, was a bit too much for her. She needed assistance, and it was my job to act as her companion as she navigated around this healthcare system, wearing only a T-shirt and sweats, only carrying her phone and ID. …Actually, I don’t think she even had her ID, because standardized IDs are not really a thing in England.

This could have been HELL, we could have been there for hours upon hours, but THANKFULLY we were quickly processed by A&E, redirected elsewhere, and given priority after the medical workers realized that Cassie could not sit down. When she finally saw a doctor, they were able to take the swab Cassie needed, but we could also tell that she was battle-damaged from the car ride. There was blood, there was pus, there looked to be a puncture of some sort, but she was not in a critical state. So the doctor took the swab, gave her a prescription for antibiotics, she called her father, and we were on our way back home

…Except we had to drive around a bunch to get to Tesco— the only pharmacy open after 18:00 on a Sunday—, while I sat in a godawful car seat with a hard headrest that fit squarely between my shoulder blades. There, for some reason, Cassie’s father sent me, the dumb American, to Tesco to grab her prescription while he did some shopping on his own. I wandered around looking for the pharmacy, got the drugs, and we finally headed back home. There, Cassie laid down, I prepared her some food, and after decompressing with some Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, she said that… she felt fine. Two intensive car rides and she felt fine. Did not make any sense to me, but if Cassie’s feeling fine, that’s good news for me.

…Then on Monday, I awoke to bad news again, as Cassie bled and got pus on her bed, where it seeped through the sheet, into the mattress protector. She was SUPPOSED to use a bed pad to prevent any fluids from seeping through the white sheets, but apparently the hospital said she would be fine using a towel. Which… no, that was stupid. Because this blood and discharge went through four layers!

So, what does Natalie, who has never lived alone, let alone cleaned up bloody sheets, do? She decided to wash that shit ASAP. This was a mistake. What you are SUPPOSED to do to clean up blood is use hydrogen peroxide, blot the stain with a paper towel, and remove it. I did not know this until I called my mother around noon— time zones are fun— spurring me to go to Boots and Superdrug to get some hydrogen peroxide. But apparently this common US chemical is a rarity in the UK, as I tried four pharmacies, and none of them had it. NOT A SINGLE ONE!

After the sheets were finally done, I scrubbed the stain out with good old Ivory Soap— the sponsor of this week’s Rundown!

Do you kids ever walk into a water closer and find that their soap is gooey, dog-like, or generally not fit for human use? Well, you should have been proactive and wandered into this toilet hole with your very own bar of Ivory Soap! Yes, Ivory Soap, the legendary soap brand that made America what it is. Pure, simple, WHITE, and fit for any and all occasions. Need to wash your hands? Ivory Soap! Need to wash yo asshole? Ivory Soap! Your baby? Ivory Soap! You got a fussy guest who HATES the fruity smell of your hand soap and how it dries out their skin? Give them a bar of Ivory Soap to suck on! Ivory Soap! IT JUST FUCKING WORKS! It has worked for almost 150 FUCKING YEARS!

After washing, soaping, and washing the sheets again, I was able to get out most of the stain, but I am going to need to ask for forgiveness from the Airbnb owner for leaving a slight stain on their sheets. This ate up a LOT of time on Monday, as this was all new to me, as was using a European washing machine which… I don’t like because I don’t understand it. I only know cold and warm, what is all of this degrees crap, and why are there 16 different presets? Like, gee, you think that’s enough?

In fact, I think I just dislike all the appliances in the kitchen, except for the induction stove. I use them, but I think the American standards are just better. Especially the microwave. Though, I will say that the UK has better power outlets, as it is standard for every outlet to have an on/off switch to enable the flow of electricity. That is a smart design, an easy way to power off devices, and a way to avoid electrical arching as you remove things from the wall. So, you get points for that, UK… and for your walkable cities.

Aside from these two major hurdles in my journey, and some murkier elements of our Airbnb— I am a woman of high cleanliness standards— I have largely been enjoying my time with Cassie.

After a few rough nights, I have been sleeping soundly. Cassie is generally self-sufficient, content to just lie around on the sofa, and is able to walk around without issue. We are within walking distance of a little shopping center where I can go to a couple ‘express’ shops to get whatever necessities or food we need— particularly a small Sainsbury’s Local.

While I lack a desk, I have taken up using an armchair as my main chair, keeping my warm laptop on my lap, tying up whatever I could whenever I can, because I have self-imposed deadlines. And Cassie and I have come to a pretty good compromise with each other. She borrows my laptop to play her boat game in the morning or late at night. I cook and tidy up things. And we watch a LOT of Yu-Gi-Oh GX together, because it’s a reliable show that we both have nostalgia for, and holds up surprisingly well.

Overall, it has been good. Not ideal on any level— I’d rather Cassie be in her home, lying on her sofa, while I reside in a non-existent guest room. But after a turbulent start and some roadblocks, I think this trip has found some stable ground, and I think we can maintain this stability until I leave the morning of November 18th and return to America for a long, long time.

Not because I dislike the UK. I’m sure it would be a fun place to visit and bop around across if I had a travel guide who could leave the house for more than a few hours. But because I don’t actually like traveling. Which is not a surprise. I am a homebody, a box turtle, and like to be in my chair, at my desk, typing away at my computer. I’m 30-years-old and know that I like, thank you very much. Also, this trip has been stupid expensive. The Airbnb doubled my projected costs, and while the food here is not egregiously expensive, it feels bad paying nearly $4 for a single Cassie serving of strawberries. Food really is expensive everywhere, innit?

Let’s see, am I forgetting anything here? …No, I think that about covers it, so I may as well get on with the rest of the Rundown.

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State of Play Japan Edition
(And Why It Is What It Is)

The subtitles for this showcase sucked by the way. Trying to watch this on my phone was hell.

So, this past week one of the larger bushels of gaming news was clustered around a State of Play event that focused specifically on games from Japan, and other Asian countries. A novel concept that shows that modern PlayStation is still invested in Japanese games from Japanese developers, but the showcase itself was… pretty weak for a 40 minute affair. With the bulk of its duration being second trailers, DLC for months-old games, port announcements, and smaller independent titles that I believe were all previously announced in some way or form.

It all made for a muted showcase, and while State of Plays normally are rarely the hotbed for new reveals from established studios or franchises, this is still a curious choice. And I think I know the reason why that is. Quite simply, these sorts of direct multi-game showcases are ways to advertise games to millions of people. Those watching on Twitch, YouTube, mirrored streams hosted by commentators and gaming media publications. And what is one of the biggest problems facing modern games in the current social media landscape where retention is prioritized above all else? Getting people to know that your game exists and when it’s coming out.

This is something I have anecdotally noticed over the years. Due to a variety of factors, it is far harder for games to become populate everybody’s content feeds. It’s entirely possible for someone invested in games to barely hear about a game that sold over 5 million copies, because the information is not distributed like it used to be.

Social sharing features on consoles have been stripped after platforms closed off their APIs. The prevalence of ‘for you pages’ and curated algorithmic feeds discourages people from the whole sharing thing and even recognizing individual creators, with the idea of subscribing or following becoming increasingly passé. And with live services, you don’t need new games, you just need your game and the games your haphazardly arranged collection of friends like to play.

Frankly, I hate this current arrangement. It removes a necessary manual step of engaging and user choice in favor of endless scroll. It destroys my confidence and ability to broadly understand what the fuck is going on in Gamindustri. And I think game publishers hate it too. Because aside from influencer sponsorships and showcases like this, how the hell are you supposed to market a game in this climate? Ads, I guess? But in the modern internet… ads are for the poors, and if you do things right— do things like me— you basically never see any ads. Is that being a cheap-ass uBlock Wipr YouTube Premium moocher? Sure, but I don’t care!

Anyway! State of Play and showcases like this are primarily tools for publishers to sell games and DLC. Sony wants to maintain good relationships with major publishers, and minor ones, and for every transaction on PlayStation, they net a juicy fee. They want people buying games, want people bringing games to their platform, so they create showcases like this to garner pre-orders and whatever hype they can for new releases.

The actual announcements here have some oddities worth commenting on. Such as a bizarrely staggered PlayStation release for No Sleep For Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files. (Which I still need to play.) Because I guess this was just an exclusivity marketing deal with Nintendo. Or how Monster Hunter Wilds will go down in history as a game that utterly failed to maintain its userbase or momentum, due chiefly to a shoddy PC port and lacking pos-launch content pipeline. (Lots of PC releases are shoddy these days, from what I hear, and it’s frankly an embarrassment.) They showed off that Hollow Knight like Metroidvania from Pocketpair, which I’m sure went swimmingly after people gorged themselves on Silksong.

But the biggest bits of news, to me, were at the end of the showcase where Sony made a few choice announcements. First by announcing a PlayStation monitor with a DualShock 5 charging station—

Akumako: “It’s not a DualShock, it’s a DualSense!”

—DualShock 5 charging station for the luxury-seeking top 20% earners who value branding and aesthetics. …And those who like to cosplay as those who have money. It honestly seems like a natural extension of Sony’s move into the PC market, and I’m frankly surprised it took them this long to make a PlayStation branded monitor. Though, I could say the same with TVs.

But the biggest hardware announcement here was the unveiling of a budget version of the PS5 for Japan, the PlayStation 5 Digital Japanese Edition. You remember how Nintendo released a Japanese language only version of the Switch 2 for roughly $100 less than the original? …And how that pissed me right the hell off? Well, Sony wants to bolster PS5 sales in Japan. So they are releasing a 55,000 yen (~$360) version that can only be played in Japanese, down from the current price of 72,980 yen (~$475). Not because of any technical restriction or hardware change, but as a way to release the system in the Japanese market without scalpers selling them to an international audience.

From the perspective of a Japanese customer, this is a wonderful thing as it makes the premiere game console affordable after it underwent catastrophic price drops following the devaluation of the yen over the past five years. This is Sony’s way of appeasing the market specifically and keeping Japanese customers invested in big screen console gaming, rather than surrendering the market to Nintendo.

However, to an American and international audience, this kinda sucks. It shows that Sony has either decreased costs on production or are willing to take a loss on hardware sales in a key market. It makes the PS5 seem more expensive in other countries, because it is. And why are things this way? Because of Trump. Because of the fucking tariffs that have been yo-yo’d back and forth this entire year, increasing prices of daily essentials all so the government and imposing a de facto VAT tax without congressional approval. Which is so hella wrong I don’t know where to begin.

I am half-tempted to begin a tirade about recent American politics after this, the futility of the shutdown, and the geriatric dullards who are the only reasonable opposition in the current administration. But I’ll digress and move on.

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The ARC Raiders Bit
(Natalie Will Probably Regret This Rant, But Fuck It!)

Okay, so… this is going to be a mostly uniformed rant based on a game that I actually did see pop up in my feed over the past few days, but not in an organic gameplay-driven way. Instead, most of my exposure to ARC Raiders has come from articles with punchy headlines from various publications that are trying to log the cultural moment this new IP extraction shooter is enjoying. With 700,000 concurrent players. Over 4 million sales within two weeks of launch. And a good push from Nexon, who is hoping that this title will last and become a pillar of theirs in the international marketplace.

To outright say something that is often subtext in a lot of my Rundowns, I don’t like multiplayer driven games. Social games, competitive games, or games with a strong community aspect. I like games to be geared towards a single player experience and prefer the social elements exist around that or in dedicated and clearly understood sub-modes. I have a strong dislike of competition over cooperation.

Despite the biggest games in the world almost all being competitive multiplayer titles, I do not view them as important to the medium. I want people to play oodles of games, to respect the medium in a general sense, but I can tell there are many people who don’t do that. Who box turtle themselves into a handful of games, play them for thousands of hours, don’t care about gaming in the broad strokes, or only view games as a way to muck around with their friends.

It limits their exposure to new things, limits the opportunities for game developers to get funding, and makes the industry smaller as people flock to these mega-games. I love it when contained games with a clear cap on what people can do in them amass sales. I loved seeing Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 become generational mega successes. But when I see a game like ARC Raiders do well, I cannot help but get angry. The bitter 12-year-old inside me just bursts out and starts screaming that this is not right, this is not deserved, and no brown and gray game as artistically vapid as this should be allowed to harbor success or attention from a wide audience of people with brains and/or personalities.

Now, I fully know this is a reductive, stupid, and downright rude way to view a game that hundreds of talented creators and artists have worked on and one that has been enjoyed by millions of people. That multiplayer has been the dominant way people play games since I started this bloody site 71 quarters years ago. But I occasionally have these ruptures of realization that a game has gotten big and lose my gourd, thinking that it cannot be this way. It’s the same part of my brain that looks at political ‘stats’ and ‘polls’ and becomes enraptured by woe. I feel like I know what is best for people, and for the world, and when I do not see these things harmoniously interact, I get ripe fookin pissed.

And this gets worse when it is the latest and brownest shooter on the market. A game that I just recoil when looking at it, as it appears to encapsulate everything I loathed back when I was a teenager, but rendered in the shiny glory of Unreal Engine 5, instead of 3. The religious reverence for gun and the ‘art’ of realistic firearm combat. A post-apocalyptic setting to perpetuate the narrative that apocalypse is inevitable, and we should not bother trying to better ourselves because the glory of the wasteland is too erotic to deny. A world where the goal is to salvage, steal, and hoard resources amongst one’s tribe when the true end goal for any society that cares about longevity is to provide essentials to everyone. A world where there is no true hope in saving it through any sort of action. Things are shit, and they are just going to stay shit.

Now, I could be WAY off base with my analysis here. I don’t actually understand what an extraction shooter is, beyond thinking it sounds like a looter shooter but with more steps. But whenever I see another fucking multiplayer shooter become an IT factor, I feel like the games industry is a lost cause. I feel like I am watching something I love shit a pus-riddled bloodied stool.

I am able to write off most of the big crazes by dismissing them. Counter-Strike is a gambling game before it is a shooter. Fortnite is a tool for IPs to be sold to a bunch of people with phones who view games as social vehicles and have no aspirations of viewing it as much more. Roblox is for lost sheep and poor children who were abused by an evil corporation. League of Legends is for people who hate themselves. Honor of Kings is not real. Call of Duty is for people who peak at age 18 and think ICE are real American heroes. Tarkov is for people who have a deep fascination with killing their fellow man as a form of sport. Et cetera. When a new game not from an established IP or genre shows up, I need to get angry at it, come up with a stereotype defense mechanism, and then move on, dismissing it as an irrelevant fake game that ought to be eliminated to preserve the sanctity of art, culture, and design. (Yes, I am aware of how evocative my language here is. That is part of the bit.)

Oh, and that is before getting into the fact that ARC Raiders uses AI voices. Honestly, the distinction between a custom text-to-speech engine and an AI voice is one that likely depends on the person. I think TTS is a great accessibility tool, and know that you can use TTS profiles to create something that sounds quite listenable. However, it just comes off as cheap, tacky, and crass when used in a major AAA production value product like this.

Hearing a human character, all modeled with a million polygons or whatever, speak in a robot voice just comes off as uncanny and cheap. It’s fine if it’s from a player character of this type, as they are effectively a vessel for the player, not a defined person. But seeing a vendor speak in what is clearly TTS of some manner, makes me wonder why the vendor can’t just be a vending machine.

Also, I would argue that TTS voices SHOULD sound robotic, so there is little ambiguity that they are TTS voices. But that’s shifting the topic.

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Valve Announced A Bunch of Steam Hardware
(And Most of It Looks Cool!)

While Valve has a disproportional, if not frightening, amount of control over the PC gaming market, I cannot really ever get mad at them. They provide good products, convenience, and are nowhere near as short-term profit-driven as most big gaming companies.

They have been paving the way for Linux to become a viable gaming platform, having embarked on a decade-long project to support the OS with both native ports and compatibility via Proton. They ushered in an era of handheld gaming PCs that we are still feeling the ripple effects of after releasing the Steam Deck in 2022. And the feature set of Steam is so robust that no other storefront has come close. Now if only they could address their Nazi forums problem…

Point is, I am interested in any hardware they have in store, as I think it will sell millions, shape at least some of those people, and get people playing more dang video games. And this past week, they announced… three pieces of new hardware.

New hardware announcement number one is a new Steam Controller. The original Steam Controller was an artifact of Valve’s first big attempt to get into gaming hardware, and it was not particularly great, trying to do everything while being ideal for a very few number of games. They really did not happen upon an ideal control scheme until they made the Steam Deck, and even that is debatable, given the sheer number of inputs and general girth of the thing. Still, it is no surprise to see them make a controller that is basically Steam Deck parts but on a more familiar form factor.

Now, will it be comfortable? Eh, I kind of doubt it. The controller looks too thick and complicated to be ideal for any game, and will most be a master of nothing. Still, it makes sense for them to have an official controller, and for it to be more than just an Xbox 360 derivative. If you wanted that, you could just get whatever 8BitDo is selling these days.

Next up is the Steam Machine. A label used for various licensed gaming PC in 2015, but the venture largely did not pan out. Linux was not widely supported enough and, at their best, these were just a bunch of pre-built gaming PCs with caveats attached to them. It was too much, too soon, so Valve took the idea back to the drawing board, and is back with their own new Steam Machine, built in-house, and… it’s a game cube!

Yes, the Steam Machine V2 is a tiny little cube-shaped computer that runs SteamOS, has semi-custom hardware, and is capable of 4K 60 fps gameplay… in certain loosely specified games. It honestly sounds very promising as a piece of hardware, a cute and customizable little box that doubles as a discrete, quiet, and powerful bit of gaming hardware sealed in an aesthetic shape. However, I really need to see the specs and the price before I gauge how good it truly is.

…And looking at the specs, I am disappointed. Because these things are not really next gen pieces of hardware, being dated by a few years. The device only has 16 GB of RAM, when my darn laptop is running on 32. It only has 8 GB of VRAM, when that is not quite enough for many modern, unoptimized, games that are released now, let alone in three years. And it is launching with two models— 512 GB and 2 TB of NVMe storage, when I would argue that any premium computer should have at least 4 TB, maybe even 8 TB, to store everything. Yes, it does support microSD cards for quick storage, but… those are more expensive than NVMe drives and objectively worse.

Yes, SteamOS and Arch Linux are far more effective than Windows and a lot of Windows software, but I want PC specs to have BIG numbers, and these numbers do not look BIG enough! This is a mid-range entry level gaming PC, capable of playing most things, but the problem with mid-range PCs is that they don’t hold their muster for long, and I don’t know how or if people could upgrade this blasted thing. I guess there is a limit to what they could do considering this is a tiny 6 inch tall cube, but… I don’t like it! If I am going to get a gaming device, I want more power! MORE! No compromises!

Last and possibly least is the Steam Frame, Valve’s newest, fully in-house, VR headset. And… I really don’t care about it, because it’s a VR headset. Time has relegated VR to being an enthusiast market, as general customers are not really interested in sensory deprivation beyond a quick lark. Plus, Facebook has been buying up every VR studio they can, trying to create a monopoly, but everybody hates Facebook, so why bother getting invested into their ecosystem? It is interesting that this device is its own computer and does not need to be tethered to a powerful gaming PC for certain applications, but… I just don’t see VR going mainstream, ever. Using a VR headset means you look like a dipshit and you can’t use your phone.

Steam Controller V2, Steam Machine V2, and Steam Frame are all shipping in early 2026, but I think they will live or die by their pricing. There is no way the Steam Controller V2 will sell for over $100. I think the Steam Machine is looking to be $700/$800 at most for its models. Good enough for a low-end gaming PC that people like to call a mid-range gaming PC for some reason. And Steam Frame will be… whatever VR gaming headsets go for these days.

I’m almost certainly going to pass on all of this, but I’m a basic Xbox controller desktop computer girl, and know this is not for me. If I wanted a new PC… I would not do that right now, because prices are crazy for RAM and storage. But I would just buy the parts, put it together, and try my hand at running Arch Linux or something.

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Cassie’s Corner 2025-11
(Verbalising the V!)

So while I was recovering from surgery, watching Natalie type away I had a spark of inspiration and decided to ruminate on what I had done in a Natalie.TF style.

When I decided to have a Shallow Vaginoplasty, I was mostly focused on certain aspects, such as my inability to wear certain types of outfit due to the inconvenient bulge between my legs.

I wanted to wear swimming clothes and get back into something I had not been able to do for what must have been almost a decade now. I wanted to wear certain clothes, such as leggings without fear that I had something that wouldn’t fit and I wanted cosplays to look normal. Whenever I make the annual-every two year decision to buy one.

I also frequently had discomforts with my member of the middle, such as having to constantly adjust the “lay” of it whilst out and about or at home. As the dangling doofus would always decide to find the most inconvenient position in the underwear. Not to mention, the movement. I guess partially “my fault” here as I am not a frequent wearer of clothing but an uncontained unit will flail about everywhere, especially when it comes to stairs. This again has an awful habit of drawing attention to it, and I personally prefer things that don’t draw attention to themselves, like breathing. Oh whoops~!

There are lots of little things that frustrated me with what I now lack, such as the overly complicated structure that needs cleaning or it leaks. The pair of vegetables that one has to sling underneath, prone to getting hit or slightly twisting for some form of agony. The holding sack is unquestionably ugly, and just like the primary unit gets everywhere where it isn’t wanted.

Now reading all of that, it seems somewhat unsurprising that I went forward with the surgery. However that’s not the full story.

Because before the surgery, I found myself feeling quite the opposite.

The phallus is a fairly simple object in some respects, a mere tubular object that functions very well at directing urea away from the body. During the period before my surgery, I found myself simply “fine” with the current equipment.

Now, this may vary for transgirls but personally I find dysphoria to come and go like a roller coaster, with highs and downs. Before the surgery I was simply okay with the situation and that made it hard to justify the surgery at the time.

I had for over 26 years at this point and over that time I had come to simply accept it. It was just “The norm” and the greatest fear of that is “The Unknown”.

And it truly was unknown, because I have never seen a V-unit before my surgery consultation reference images. Since I have, or had, a problem where I would immediately look away wherever a pubic area came into view and would feel sick if I forced myself to look for longer.

So to a certain extent I had some concerns about whether this decision was the correct one. I felt relatively fine with what I had coming up to it and was kinda worried about the whole thing.

Not to mention how stressful the lead up was. Booking tests between hospital and my local GP, making sure I was stopping medications when I needed to. Knowing where I had to be and when with somewhat poor information from them.

Multiple times I had considered dropping the surgery entirely because of my doubts I had felt. The fact that I was fine with how things were and the concerns I had with undertaking such a significant surgery with major recovery times made it hard to justify in my head at times.

However I pushed through with the surgery, supported by Natalie and my friends and I am glad I did. Right before the surgery my dysphoria came and I found myself frustrated with my phallus again. A conversation with my mother gave me conviction which carried me through the rest of the process.

The process being kind of scary in retrospect. They take you to a room and have you sit down, insert a needle that makes you feel super drowsy and then a second that painkills the lower half of the body. After that you just drift off and wake up, surgery done.

The idea of simply falling asleep and waking up to something so significant happening is something that I find to be kind of spooky. Whilst this surgery was obviously with full consent and intentional, there’s plenty of areas in life where one could be left vulnerable like that to much more malicious intentions. Very spooky.

Anyway, the rest of the stay in the hospital was its own form of enlightening. I got to experience various things like waking up after surgery, being unable to mobilise and slowly recovering. It was an interesting time probably helped by the amount of painkillers and drugs I was on post-surgery, which made it surprisingly pleasant and not that hurtful.

One of the main experiences from the hospital that I remember was going to the toilet for the second time and trying to walk back to bed, only to find myself with rising dizziness so I quickly hit the button to call the nurse. I must’ve been very lucky because the next thing I remember is waking up on the hospital floor surrounded by half a dozen or more nurses with alarms blaring.

I had seemingly collapsed shortly after calling for the nurse, where one entered and immediately had to catch me as I fell to the ground. The nurse call button can take up to several minutes depending on availability but I had gotten lucky enough that one arrived at the perfect time to catch me and gently put me on the ground rather than me falling, barely days out of surgery.

Waking up in that situation plays into what I had said earlier, it was genuinely very unnerving. Whist the cause of my fall seems to just be general dehydration, it could’ve been something far worse and the experience was nerve-racking to go through. At the time I was very worried that something significant had gone wrong. So that was another lesson learned in mortality.

The rest of the hospital trip was honestly somewhat pleasant with only a few bad parts. Mostly being my concerns about the immediate future and recovery with what seemed like complex treatment plans I had to follow.

And that’s where Natalie has been the most amazing help. At the start I was capable of very little, though still surprising Natalie with my mobility as I was able to walk and even go up stairs slowly. However I could not (and still can’t, roughly two weeks later) sit down normally. I have to take extra care when I get up or down and during the first days had to walk in a funny way to prevent movement irritating the surgical site.

So Natalie being there was a godsend. She’s been fetching me things, making me almost every meal according to my specifications, doing shopping and cleaning. Honestly I feel kind of bad with how much she’s done for me. But I definitely know one thing for sure, I would have had a horrible time if I was left to deal with this alone.

Simply having a friend by me gives me so much confidence regarding things. It helps me push forward past my doubts and simply get on with things. She’s been there when I’ve had panics, frustrations and overall made my recovery a hugely positive time. It almost feels like going on a holiday to me.

So to conclude, I did have doubts about the surgery before it. Doubts that I could handle the recovery or if I truly needed the surgery. However I refound my conviction to have it and pushed through.

The recovery is a long process and I’m sure the inconveniences will continue into the coming weeks and only be that much harder to deal with without my best friend, Natalie. Who has been an invaluable assistant and nurse during this time.

I do not regret getting the surgery and am happy with the results. Whilst it is still painful, swelled and leaks various fluids whilst recovering. I can see the future and I believe it to be that much brighter thanks to it.

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Progress Report 2025-11-16

BOTE! BOTE!! BOTE!!!

2025-11-09: Finished reading the TSF Showcase for November and then got roped into some stuff with Cassie before dozing off. Natalie also tried battered fish, her first fish ever, for the first time. It was good.

2025-11-10: Wrote 1,800 words for TSF Showcase 2025-13. Getting this girl started and revved up as best as I can. Cassie had a bad night and I had to bop around town trying to find cleaning supplies, calling moms to get information on how to clean out blood, and generally playing homemaker.

2025-11-11: Wrote 2,500 words for TSF Showcase. Watched a bunch of Yu-Gi-Oh GX with Cassie, made food, bought food, and slept for like 10 hours today. Not very productive, but I still got some stuff done, I suppose.

2025-11-12: Wrote 3,600 words for the Rundown, including the preamble, State of Play, and ARC Raiders sections. Wrote 1,000 words for the TSF Showcase, finishing the first third of the comic. Yeah, this is gonna be a slow burn. Then wrote another 1,000 word bit on the Steam hardware.

2025-11-13: Made the header image, edited the Rundown, except for Cassie’s bit. Wrote 2,800 words for TSF Showcase before getting fed up with it for the day. Nat gets sleepy early because this new climate is weird and foreign for her!

2025-11-14: Wrote 3,600 words for TSF Showcase, finishing the initial draft beyond the conclusion, which needs some reforming to work, but I don’t like writing the conclusion until the day after writing everything else. Added Cassie’s Corner for this week. Tried editing TSF Showcase, but I ran out of steam and lacked the passion to do anything writing based. I would have messed around with a spreadsheet project while watching the new Mia Mulder video, but I did not save the spreadsheet in my sync folder. Orz.

2025-11-15: Finished editing the She is Me showcase, grabbed like 70 images, and got the post ret-2-go. Also, watched like 10 episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX with Cassie and we ate ourselves into a food coma by eating over $50 of Chinese. Good times!

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