This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: The Festivus Downtime!
- Everybody Has a Goal (Or At Least I Wish Everyone Did…)
- Anna’s Archive is Torrenting Pirated Music from Spotify (Circulate the Links and Maintain Music)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
The Festivus Downtime!
As 2025 comes to a close… I keep on feeling like this year has been ‘culturally done’ for a few weeks now. New Year’s is still a couple days away, but people have already been committed to wishing the year goodbye, and wrapping things up as best as they could. Awards shows, year-end retrospectives, platform activity logs that treat years as ending on November 30th, think pieces, ‘best of’ articles and awards, saying that ‘this is my final X for the year,’ or going on brief holiday hiatuses, this all causes the latter parts of December to fall into a nebulous un-time. New stuff generally is not coming out beyond perfunctory Christmas launching films, and everything is given less coverage. The media is taking a hiatus, and there is a sense of malaise everywhere that I guess is supposed to be calming, but I never particularly enjoyed.
It is an unnecessary slowing down that is, culturally, often professionally, is met with a rapid-pace January. It’s common for people to begin with new year with big ambitious, start projects, or using this as an excuse to improve their lives. For a new deluge of work to arrive on their desks as year-end stuff can finally be wrapped up, and it’s time to make stuff for the new year. As a creative, it is the beginning of a new slate, a new set of annual goals. And as a tax accountant, there is a certain level of dread that comes with a new year.
Effective January 1st of every year, I receive a deluge of new tasks cropping up on my radar, and everything that wasn’t done last year (blame my boss) is now late. With the dawn of the new year, I now need to go through personal financials, accrue information, and update like two hundred tax returns with preliminary information. All in addition to scouting through like 40 crypto clients in order to compile what is missing. It is going from having 25 things on my to-do list (blame my boss) to 200 things on my to-do list. And sure, that to-do list is meant to last me all year, but that doesn’t mean I like it.
I don’t like knowing I will be spending the next week working like nuts. Compiling information, updating things, and generating preliminary documents that need to be done while being just… unable to progress on them, as everything I do needs to be approved by a maladroit old man. And this sense of dread is ultimately made worse by the fact that people keep on acting like this year is always over, that this is a celebration when, for me, there is very little worth celebrating. Just the promise of more work. And I really, u don’t want to work another 250 hour month this March, because that was just miserable.
…In other words, I do not like the transition to a new year, as it means more work for me, and seeing people act like 2025 ended a month ago is messing with my head something fierce!
There, I took a common complaint I have had for years, and articulated it in a new, satisfying way! Is that enough for a Preamble Ramble? It is for this week! The least week of all weeks!
Everybody Has a Goal
(Or At Least I Wish Everyone Did…)
It’s the week of Christmas, nobody is announcing anything, and the only poignantly topical thing to really talk about is politics. But for as much as I would love to talk about how woefully inept, evil, and corrupt US politics are, I’d rather talk about something relevant for a year-end post. Goals.
Over my life, something that has been thoroughly hammed into my mind is the idea that everybody needs to have goals. Things that they are meaningfully aspiring towards, working towards, and have a reasonable chance of making happen. Wanting to get educated, develop a relationship, do something to improve themself physically/emotionally/professionally, achieve a feat of some sort, or generally improve their life. I take this desire to do things as a given, and assume that everybody was taught this via education or through vicarious pieces of media.
When I was in middle school and high school, the concept of setting goals was a persistent one. Walls were filled with posters encouraging this mindset, we had to set goals in various classes, and as a kid in with an Individual Education Plan, I had to set specific goals for my education. Hell, in order to graduate I had to set fitness goals, explaining how I was going to stay in shape after high school. And I know that many schools in many countries make students submit a series of goals they plan on achieving after high school.
However, this idea of setting goals is something that expands well outside of my education and into, well, basically everything. If you read a book, play a game, watch a series, a cartoon, an anime, a comic, most of them are about somebody putting in effort, setting goals, and doing something. Not just surviving, not just milling about, but trying to improve conditions, change their lives, or escape a bad situation. And if there is anything one can take away from these works, at their most basic level, it’s the idea that changing things, improving things, takes work. It takes effort. To do things, you need to set a goal and enact upon that goal. Otherwise, things won’t get better, you won’t get happier, and all you will be doing is maintaining whatever your normal is.
For some people, I’m sure that’s enough, that just getting by day after day is enough work for them, especially if they are old, disabled, or suffering in some way, shape, or form. However, the idea of setting goals is something that I have internalized so heavily that I think almost everyone should have one. And when certain flavors of people: creatives, young people, those with big dreams, don’t have goals, I tend to get very confused. Because, pretty much all my cognizant life, I have looked up to creatives who set goals and enacted upon them. And I have wanted to become just like them!
As I have said many times before, I was an active internet user during the 2000s, where I encountered a deluge of people who were making works, comics, videos, writings, whatever, just for the sake of it. From webcomic authors who kitbashed character sprites together into a funny diorama. Dudes in their 20s who decided to record themselves playing games while offering light commentary and occasional edits. People who wrote inspired smut on Fictionmania. Even TG caption creators. Back before online monetization was widespread, before the era of clickbait, ragebait, and attention bait. Back when things were still, sorta, punk rock and cool.
Child me looked at these creators and realized that these people were spreading themselves across the world, making things because they want to make them, and seeing this stuff inspired me. I was a moderately creative as a child. I made fake trading cards. I created a 32 issue comic series called Monkey Man, which I unfortunately threw away as a teenager.
Akumako: “I found it!”
…Akumako, I am in the middle of a point, could you please—
Akumako: “I found copies of your Monkey Man comics at your grandma’s house!”
What? WHAT? Oh shit, we NEED to share those with the world!
Akumako: “Really? Your deadname’s all over them and—”
I care FAR more about people seeing the crummy comics I wrote when I was nine than knowing what my deadname is. You can literally look up my surname, the town I live, and find that our for yourself if you are that deranged.
Akumako: “So, will this be like a January Ramble project or—”
Oh, absolutely! Suicide to Salvation is getting bumped back to February. Maybe as a Valentine’s Day special. I’ve got MONKEY MAN to talk about!
Anyway, tangent aside, where was I? …Right!
I loved making maps, lists, and would create this ‘series’ of structured play events with my friend Matt, called Final Fantasy Chronicles. Basically, we would act out a loosely outlined serialized story, using repurposed toys to represent characters, moving them around and doing voices. A natural evolution of what 6-year-olds playing with toys would do, but we were 13.
This sporadic creativity lasted throughout my childhood, but lapsed in my teens. I had to miss a bunch of school due to a habit cough I developed during the end of eighth grade. High school scared me, and I thought I was going to die by age 19 as I used to think I was too incompetent and disabled to get a job. So I wanted to at least leave behind a good GPA. But during this era, I started developing a sense of ennui over not creating things, especially as I saw people my age making things offline. Art kids lining a gallery hall with their artwork. Theater kids putting on some genuinely good theatrical productions. Or AV kids creating student announcements we had to watch every morning. These were kids with goals and passions they were working towards, and if they were achieving this, then maybe I could achieve something greater. But what?
Around this time, the only thing I would have said I was good at was math. I nearly flunked out of Computer Science, as my teacher was not very hands-on. Mr. Ruth spent most of the class goofing around on his PC while we had to learn Java from an old, dry text book few no proper exercises. I was in remedial English for several years and did not consider myself to be a good writer, or even good at articulating my thoughts. And when it came to drawing, uh, what do you think? I thought about possibly getting into video editing, but my video editor father did such a poor job of introducing the concept to me that I thought I was incapable of that as well! Oh, and my voice was always gutter trash, so anything that involved speaking was out of the question!
I wanted to do something, didn’t know what I could do, and I was convinced that anything I did would be shit. However, as you can plainly see today, I did not give up. Instead, I found motivation.
The real turning point for me was in October 2011, when I first heard about The Comedy Button. A 2011 to 2023 podcast that basically depicted a group of men growing up over the span of 12 years, trying to make a living in the online entertainment industry. Talking about real shit, nonsense, personal trauma, loss, cartoons, isolation, career woes, video games on occasion, how to get pussy, all the hits. And one of the things that stuck with me the most, that persisted throughout their entire show, was the idea that “if you do nothing, nothing will happen” and that “if you want something, you gotta work for it.”
These probably aren’t exact quotes, It’s been years since I listened to the early episodes, which are kinda shit, but this is something that I fully believed, and I believed because I saw where these people were in life. They were comfortable, working in the games media business, writing, making things, and despite having lives with various forms of trouble, were ultimately happy people. As such, their words really struck with me— in general, as I would not be who I am today without The Comedy Button— so I created the briefly lived predecessor to Natalie.TF, The Breaded Rump. This site began as something of an exercise. A game review blog where I would map out how I thought and viewed video games, a way to practice writing, practice articulating my thoughts. After a few months at this, I began writing my own short stories, then novellas, then novels. All because I wanted to do something creative, something that enriched my mind, forced me to develop skills, and use muscles that are, ultimately, fun to use.
Akumako: “Oi! Stop getting off track! This is about setting goals, not about Natalie.TF lore! This ain’t your biography!”
God, my biography would be so easy and incredibly difficult to write. Because I have written so much about my life, but it’s buried all over the place!
The reason I went face-first into this project— that has been going on for 14 years— is that I took this idea of setting goals, of always working towards something, to heart. I wanted to do something ‘active,’ vaguely productive, that I wanted to be proud of. I only had one life, everything I did then would affect my life going forward, and I was sick of spending it just playing games, doing nothing with that experience. So, I set myself a goal. And… I firmly believe that it is the natural state for humans with free time to set goals, and for them to keep working towards those goals.
As such, I tend to be confused whenever someone says they don’t have goals, aspirations, or things they are directly working towards, preferring to spend their free time in leisure. Even if they are a creative. I recently ran into this conflict with Missy Scrumptious, who wrote a guest article last week. I was befuddled why she wanted this to be a one-off thing as, well, she is a creative. She is an English major, is a good writer per what I have seen— better than me when I was her age— and an artisté whose work you will be seeing very soon.
I have offered her additional work, paid work, and even editing jobs, yet she has refrained from taking me up on these offers, despite working for a pittance at a service job. I thought these would be opportunities for her to develop her skills, achieve personal creative or monetary goals, and possibly embolden her to pursue the many ideas and fixations she has. Yet she has routinely passed up such requests, despite having enough time to yap with me for a solid hour a day.
Akumako: “What? Is that why your output has been so shit? Because you keep talking to college kids?”
However, after much deliberation, and some more fraught conversations, she explained that she is too overwhelmed and uncertain about the future to really set goals. And that she feels she needs this leisure, this ability to relax, to not worry about deadlines or duties, in order to keep existing. This confused me for the longest time, but I think I now understand where she is coming from. Trump 1.0, Trump 2.0, and COVID-19 have made the past 9 years terribly fraught, frustrating, and horrible. Things have been so bad for so long that some people give up on no only the abstract concept of hope, the prospect of working, but the concept of setting goals or working toward anything.
Why bother with goals if you don’t have any stability or assurance that you are going to be allowed to return home tomorrow. That some ICE officer or other Nazi fuckhead won’t apprehend you, deport you, or shoot you in the back of the head? That if you get hit by a car, you may be in debt for life, because America does not believe in healthcare. Why bother working towards something if you fear that the methods and means of storing and sharing this work is going to be taken from you by poverty, seizure, or censorship? Why bother developing a skill when an AI can make something that, on the surface, looks better and more realized than anything you can hope for? (BTW, Missy loathes AI.)
If your country is going to shit, you live in a shithole, you are poor, and you believe that society is going to collapse, why do anything more than browse your phone, pursue quick pleasures, and fuck around with friends? Because if death is tomorrow, and you own nothing, there’s no reason to plan anything. Now, I do not agree with this perspective. I think it is dumb and short-sighted. But I also get why some people lost hope.
…And I just find it immensely sad that society has been allowed to move into this direction. That hopelessness and giving up are so common. And for as much as I can say it’s important to always fight back, always resist, and to never just lie down and let the world burn, you can’t just force people to be hopeful. …You can’t force people to have goals or be productive. I want everybody, everything to think in long-terms, to plan goals years and years in advance. But first, they need to be able to exist in a world where things can be safely planned.
Anna’s Archive is Torrenting Pirated Music from Spotify
(Circulate the Links and Maintain Music)
So, here’s an interesting story that I can gab on about. This past week, Anna’s Archive, a site that primarily hosts ePubs and PDFs of a truly insane number of books and comics, has, scraped 300 TB of data from Spotify, totaling to over 86 MILLION audio files. The site intends on distributing these files via bulk torrents with the goal of creating a perpetual library of music. One that does not aim to preserve everything on the platform, but is certainly the largest attempt at a proper music archive. Something that does not rely on decentralized album-specific torrents or shady BlogSpot sites that might have active download links if you pray hard enough.
This is something that I cannot help but be or two minds about. Firstly, while it is great to have personal archives of anything, or to create an independent library with lending limits, spreading information like this is just piracy. They are taking and distributing potentially infinite copies of artists work without their consent or control. There’s no real defending it from any sort of legal standpoint, merely an ethical/moral one.
From that perspective, I think this is a bold, cool, and beneficial move for so, so many people. Piracy has been part of the internet since its inception, and it has persisted as a way for people to freely access just about any piece of digital media without paying for it. For as much as it can harm the potential revenue of certain creators— or, more likely, corporations— piracy is a means of keeping abandoned works widely available. It keeps them alive after the rights holders abandon them, and exposes them to a vastly larger audience of people around the world. And as we have seen with the rise of streaming, corporations are cool with just deleting shows when they want to take a write-off.
In a world where corporations are so vehemently against the concept of selling goods rather than perpetual subscriptions, any effort to distribute files is one that I cannot help but be in favor of. Corporations got greedy, lazy, and after competing against piracy with convenience, piracy needs to spur them into action again. If corporations want money, they should compete with piracy, as it results in better products for user and creators alike. And if people like the product, if they like a creator, plenty are going to be happy to support them. If that was not true, concerts would not be alive and kicking. If that was not true, Patreon would not have taken off and reshaped the entire “creator economy.” If that was not true, then merch stores and pop up plushie shops would not be big business for a lot of creators.
Spotify dominates the entire medium of music, pays artists fractions of a penny for reach play their songs get, and has constantly been making its service worse, while keeping people locked into it. As a service, Spotify needs competition, needs pushback, and needs to see numbers go down as people ditch their crap and start finding alternative routes. Not from other streaming services, but from the infinite potential of piracy. So I think this is ultimately a good move… even though I doubt it will leave much of a dent in the dominance of Spotify, as this torrent approach only appeals to a fairly niche subset. In fact, here is a list of problems with this plan:
- iPhones cannot torrent things easily, so there are tens of millions who just cannot easily use torrents on their primary computer.
- Zoomies don’t know how to torrent. When I tried teaching one, she vehemently refused, seeing no point in learning something new or downloading something when she could just stream it via Discord.
- Phones are bad at playing music files as a general rule, and are designed to push the user toward streaming platforms or storefronts, just like with everything else.
- Spotify has eliminated most competition and become the de facto music streaming service. YouTube Music exists, but it’s marred by being a sorta sloppy extension of YouTube.
- Spotify’s multi-platform approach works well in the mobile lives of a lot of younger people who travel between home, school, and work, often commuting on public transit. Back in the day, they would have just used an iPod and iPod speakers for home use. But we are past that era.
- Spotify Wrapped is a big deal for a lot of Zoomies, as they like to share what music they like listening to. I sorta get the appeal, but I’d be scared to see what would dominate my stats. …Wait, no, it would mostly be citypop at this point.
I am all for taking the fight to corporations via piracy, but I think that this is more likely going to succeed as a preservation effort, making things easier for some people. And that’s kind of what Anna’s Archive is all about. Using the tools and network and storage of the broader internet to save copious amounts of data, under the guise of an independent library. And I would be a damn hypocrite if I did not stand by people like them. I mean, how do you think I get access to all the movies and anime I watch with Cassie on Sundays? I already pay over $3,000 on entertainment a year, and you’re telling me I need to pay $4 to watch a 90 minute movie? One that I could probably pick up at the library 7 minutes from my house? HA!
Natalie’s Movie Musings 2025-01
(A Possible New Segment!)
As per usual, I spent last Sunday watching movies with friends. But rather than just bolt these thoughts onto the progress report, mucking things up, I’m going to start throwing them into their own section at the end of the Rundown. Because it’s just cleaner. But it will be a secret section because… honestly, who cares? Cassie and the rest of the Shrinies wanted to watch Christmas movies to get in tune with the season, and through much bickering we settled on The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Jingle All The Way (1996), and The Mask (1994).
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) is a movie I remember loving when I was a little kid. It was cool, edgy, and stop motion, which I had a strong love of as a child, being a big Wallace and Gromit fan. Even on DVD, there was a sense of tactility with every character and set. The environments felt real, because they were real, yet the characters moved and acted like they were cartoons. And as a kid who was a fan of clay, Play-Doh, and playsets there was something immensely appealing about a movie that looked like a refined version of things I played with. I similarly was fascinated with anything that depicted moving or living toys, like Action League Now or Small Soldiers (1998), and this fascination carried over with a love of things that look toyetic, but specifically the type of toys I enjoyed as a child. So not the Link’s Awakening remake, where everything looks like it would be cold to the touch.
Anyway, TNBC was a holiday movie I rented repeatedly, enjoying the music, loving the imagery, and how it blended the two major Holidays for any kid. I thought its creepy art direction, which ultimately extended to both the Halloween world and the Christmas world, was incredibly compelling, distinct, and generally inspiring. I was fascinated by the way the protagonist, Jack Skellington, moved with his horribly exaggerated limbs. Slenderman is just a knock off of Jack Skellington. And how it made something distinctly dark and gross, but approachable enough for a 6-year-old to enjoy. Going back to it in 2025, I think the movie, as a movie, is actually pretty weak.
Jack is a man who is a fixture of his local town, the icon of the autumn festival, yet he feels a sense of ennui, wants something new, something fresh. While wandering through the woods, he gets isekai’d to another community, learning of its culture, and wanting to spread it across his local community. However, Jack’s community do not understand these imported customs, and while Jack has a better understanding, he does not fully get it either. Because he just looked at the superficial elements, did not speak to anyone, and thought that he could replicate their winter festival. This would be fine. Sloppy imports of other cultures happen all the time, but Jack is not content with just bringing Christmas to Halloween Town. Instead, he enlists three children to kidnap Sandy Claws, whom he believes is named Santa Claus despite having (stolen?) BOOKS ABOUT SANTA!
The climax of the film plays out, with Jack venturing into a third community, which is meant to be the real world, where he acts as Santa Claus on Christmas, leaving behind awful presents that attack children. This goes so badly so quickly that the military shoots Jack down from his flying sleigh, presumably killing him. Then Jack wakes up in a cemetery, still undead because you cannot really kill a Skellington, and reflects on his actions. He realizes that he should not have tried to steal Christmas, and this excursion has, somehow, rekindled his passion for what he does best. The Halloween festival. So he rescues Santa Claus, has him work his magic, and ends the movie by recognizing the love of a zombie girl who has been sneaking out to see him for the past few months. What did he learn? …I dunno! Stay in your lane, I guess?
The mythology is weird, the message is all mucked up, and I think the movie only really works on a visual level, because my god is this a thing of beauty. Its aesthetics— and music— have arguably transcended the film as a film in a cultural sense. They were a core fixation of a former Disney kid’s edgy phase, and a general fashion staple for burgeoning teens who wanted to play around with the goth/emo/scene styles that were becoming cool in post-9/11 America. And as someone who loved this movie as a kid… it does not hold up as well as I hoped.
Jingle All The Way (1996) was suggested by Shiba, who viewed it as a quintessential Christmas movie, and I see where she is coming from. The film centers around a workaholic executive who is neglecting his family. He makes promises he does not keep, misses important events in his child’s life, and is simply not an observant person, taking his family for granted. It’s December 24th, and he has forgotten to get his child a Christmas present he promised he would buy for him. A Turbo Man toy, meant to as a pastiche of Power Rangers, with some more American influences thrown in. So he needs to drive across his midwestern city in order to find the hottest toy of the year. Bopping between toy stores, malls, and even scalpers.
I was largely impressed by a lot of the little digs of social commentary, or observation, throughout the film. It nicely captures a lot of the post-Reagan American consumerist zeitgeist, where people are expected to work and overwork. Where children are aggressively marketed to with tie-in merchandise. And where the hottest toy of the season is so coveted yet undersupplied that people are willing to do insane things to get them. This trend of consumer panic over the hottest toy has been a thing since Cabbage Patch Kids, but this was a unique era. There was no ready way to order toys like this via the internet. Well, some tries, but most people were not comfortable doing that, and shipping back then was both more expensive and a lot slower, making it considerably worse than just visiting a store.
Cell phones had yet to be widely adopted and calling a store to check its inventory was not as common a practice as it would become during, say, the heyday of the Wii. And the modern climate of online scalping was not as feasible, requiring a more elaborate operations of counterfeits or imports. You had to find a guy who wanted something and sell it to him in-person. And people did this, put in so much work, all in order to make their stupid kid happy. Because in a consumerist society, getting a child what they want, is seen as more important than spending time with them or getting to learn about them as a person. A dad could neglect his kid, but under these cultural values, so long as he paid the bills and got them a Nintendo on Christmas, they’re a good dad.
It’s dystopian from a certain perspective, but it’s also laughable in its absurdity, and I think Jingle does a good job of showcasing that. How hateful, competitive, and aggressive parents are towards others, viewing other people are enemies in these contexts. How little respect they have for social codes and standards. And how they are willing to just steal from others, they are so desperate about maintaining their household. And this desire to maintain the household, to keep their family safe, is seen throughout a recurring neighbor character.
A guy who volunteers to put up Christmas lights on the protagonist’s house, buys his son lavish gifts while feeding him into the husky section, and goes over to his neighbor’s house to “help” his wife. Making cookies with her. Putting the star on the family tree. Driving her to the local parade, in his car, with her close enough for him to wrap an arm around her. It’s the same defensiveness and hatred of the neighbor, not even the other, that led to an atomized and spiteful culture. Which only grew throughout the War on Terror, rise of social media, and COVID-19 pandemic, leading us to… modern America!
Political yapping aside, the ending of this film is just at odds with the preceding 80% of it. Instead of being a grounded story, it’s an excuse for the dad to go flying around in a jetpack as he tries saving his blonde child from a Black man who wants to steal his Turbo Man toy. Its fun in its absurdity, but it also feels like we fell into another movie after executives demanded an action set piece. Still, I do appreciate the majority of the movie, and find it to be, at the very least, spiritually evocative of an era of American retail that is no more. …What? How people shop for goods and what they buy is a cornerstone of any culture.
Lastly, The Mask is a very odd film for me to talk about. It’s effectively a dual identity film where the protagonist, a banker who loves classic cartoons, finds a magical mask that turns him into a cartoon character when he puts it on at night. The titular Mask, a green-faced superhero who can do basically anything that cartoon logic permits, while dressed up in a wide variety of fashionable fits. He spins around like the Tasmanian Devil, can peel himself off the road, can make a tommy gun out of balloon animal balloons she shoved outta his magic pocket, and likes the bonk things on the head with a giant mallet. As somebody who LOVES cartoon logic like this, who basically views her non-serious works as glorified cartoons, and interacts with her friends in a cartoonish manner, I fuck with this. I fuck with it hard.
However, the film is not strictly about this stick-in-the-mud letting loose as he embraces this exaggerated cartoon-powered alter ego. Instead, it gets bogged down into a story about a criminal group, an exclusive nightclub, attempted bank robbery, and one henchman deciding to turn against his boss to get the money and run. It’s not strictly bad, but it is at odds with the rest of the movie. The Mask is so outlandish, so bizarre, that any group of boring criminals who dress in black are going to look like a waste of my damn time.
This might be a remnant of the comic series the film was based on, but when you have someone as charismatic as Jim Carrey in his peak, I don’t think it works. I don’t care about these criminals, don’t want to look at them, I just want to see the funny man with the green face get up to some mischief in a pulpy American shithole. I want to see him commit petty crimes, make fools out of cops, cause trouble for his human alter ego, Stanley, and fight criminal goods with the power of cartoon logic. When the movie is this, it’s amazing, it’s inspiring, and I love it. When it’s not, it makes me want to do something like this, but more cartoonish, TSF, and with fucking. Gosh, Trans Venus X The Mask would actually work super bloody well.
Progress Report 2025-12-28
Natalie had a Christmas, and ate a lot of food. The Fatalie is back, and she is FULL!
2025-12-21: Wrote 2,400 words for the first two segments of this Rundown. Watched three movies with Cassie as a Christmas celebration. None of them were very Christmassy by her standards. I am not gonna count the words spent writing the Movie Musings, because I don’t think anybody cares about those. Made three two header images for the 2025 Ramble. Pretty basic, but it should be good enough. Not putting a lot of passion into the sprite-based headers, as my spark to create them was not really there, as this is not a major project.
2025-12-22: Stimmed on a Pokémon spreadsheet project for a good chunk of the day, reviewed my status on the Student Transfer flowcharts, as the release is imminent, and decided to go through and recalculate the weights of all 70 relevant characters between VD2.0, PS1988, and PS2000. I used these two tools.
2025-12-23: I have been holding off on starting any new project because I know Student Transfer could drop any moment now. Which, by the way, sucks. I HATE when the exact time of a release of something that takes 10+ hours is unknown, and anything that has been nervous whenever I see a Discord notification is a BAD THING. Wrote like 900 words for the Spotify bit, made some header images, and started reviewing the notes for Suicide to Salvation.
2025-12-24: So, I had about 3,700 words of notes that I expanded upon and rewrote to make a 10,000 word outline. It’s not done yet, but I have the skeleton of a story in place, and know where it is going to go. MOSTLY!
2025-12-25: I was busy with family stuff from about 11:00 to 17:00, because today was Christmas. Afterwards, I did some spreadsheet stimming before seeing a story that I got so excited about that I wrote 2,500 words. I will save that for next week’s Rundown. …Oh snap, I can only fit 3 2,500 word bits in a Rundown now! Noooooo! Then I edited this Rundown! Also, wrote like 1,000 words for the outline of Suicide to Salvation
2025-12-26: Today’s schedule was weird. 3 hours of work, then I had an outing with my mother, then I decided to work on the outline again, adding a total of 3,500 words of stuff that happens. Progress was a bit fraught though, as I became too invested in my spreadsheet stimming and chatting with Missy and Rain.
2025-12-27: Kinda scattered day. I did chores in the morning, had to go to the office for three hours because of technical difficulties with one PC. Got sidetracked with stuff with Missy. Wrote 2,000 words for the Suicide to Salvation outline. Got the 2025 Ramble as ret-2-go without Missy’s additional assets.