Rundown (3/08/2026) Natalie’s Insufficient Queer Diversity

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This Week’s Topics:

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Natalie’s Insufficient Queer Diversity

This week’s topic will, once again, be a thinly veiled response to a video I watched the past two weeks that got my mind going places. With the video in question being the latest from Melody Nosurname. She’s kind of a scattershot video creator who talks about 2000s era gaming, her media fixations of the minute, trans stuff, and made that one Brazilian puppet show video essay. …What? It got over 1.7 million views. Of course I’m going to act like everybody has seen it!

Anyway, her latest video, There Is No Wrong Way To Be Trans, is largely a response to trends she has noticed throughout trans discourse, and mostly just her— via her puppet-sona— giving her thoughts on them. Topics include: femme experimenting folks who cop basic fits to play around with what sort of clothes they can wear. Egg discourse, a trend where some vocal trans women insist that this or that person is an “egg,” a term that is used for a trans person who has not “hatched” yet and realized they are trans. How there is no right or wrong way to be trans, as one’s transition should match what they want, and how one chooses to present themself should ultimately be their choice. How clothes are clothes, so people should wear whatever they want and what makes them comfortable. Surgery is optional, expensive, and people don’t need to go that direction unless they want to. HRT is a choice, not a requirement, and the DIY route is pretty easy. People generally should not constrain themselves to any labels and focus on trying to become them. All that good stuff.

It was pretty balanced, and a nice refresher on things that I’ve largely left by the wayside after I “finalized” my transition and bowed out of a lot of trans discourse. However, the reason I am bringing up this video here is that this made me think of how I choose to explore gender in my stories. …Or rather just how limited my exploration is.

If there is one universal constant in my stories, it is TF. Which most people use as an abbreviation for Transformation, but I’m trying to gaslight people into thinking always meant Transformation Fantasy. Basically, it’s a genre where some fantastical transformation occurs and drivers the story in some shape or form. It’s often a physical transformation, somebody turning into something that should not be possible in the realm of reality, hence the fantastical. But mental transformation, such as hypnosis, mind wiping, memory alteration, and so forth to all fall under the TF umbrella as well.

However, my preferred flavor of TF is TSF— Trans Sexual Fantasy— and involves changing their physical sex through fantastical means. Be it body swapping, standard transformation, possession, bodysuits, whatever. TSF should be an ideal avenue to explore gender identity, as it allows characters to embody a body vastly different than their own, allowing them to live and present as a different gender without even really trying, and in many ways, it is. TSF is lousy with stories about characters who embrace their new bodies, fall in love with them, and just stay that way for the rest of their days. Plenty of characters adopt a level of gender fluidity, playing with a new gender presentation by choice, or force, in order to expand who they are. And there are also many instances where characters’ gender identity falls into the murky middle of androgyny.

You’ve got he’s who become she’s, he’s who become they’s, she’s who become he’s, they’s who become she’s— whatever. Internal gender identity changes are at the core of many TSF works I have covered in the past. However, gender presentation tends to be notably less diverse. Yes, there is an almost customary level where characters slowly get more comfortable with their new sex and adjust their gender accordingly, changing how they present themselves to be more feminine or masculine as time goes on. Especially when the fantastical transformation is spread out over the span of days or months. Yet this transitional phase, this transformation sequence, is largely the only time a character is allowed to have an androgynous body.

Bodies in TSF tend to firmly settle on one of two ends of a binary, and you rarely see characters who have a body with a mixture of male and female physical features. You have futanari stuff, which I have previously deemed to be its own thing. Busty boys or scenarios where male presenting characters gain breasts are somewhat common. But mixing and matching features beyond basic-ass boobs and dicks is not something you often see in the genre. You need to go into other TF nooks and crannies like body part swaps and head swaps, but there the point and idea is typically built around the fact that things are out of place and don’t work.

I guess what I’m really asking is… why aren’t there more TF works where someone winds up with a body that ends as one neither rigidly male nor fully female. Hell, why don’t I pursue this? Why do I instead stick to strictly male or female characters for the most part? Well, because androgyny is not that uncommon, and not that hard to achieve. Plenty of cis women of all ages and backgrounds have what are generally considered masculine features. Plenty of cis men have more feminine features, which have only been further acknowledge by the mainstreaming of femboys.

Actually, no, I first need to ask this: If a non-binary person could fully customize their body, what type of body would they choose? Well, I already know that there is no singular answer. Every non-binary person wants something different. Some want to look genderless. Some want to be an androgynous beauty, capturing a careful balance between handsome and beautiful. Some have a carefully desired blend that suits their purpose and desires. For some it’s being butch, for others it’s being a twink, and for some they want to physically stay on one end of the spectrum, while expressing themselves in a different manner.

Akumako: “I think the answer you’re actually looking for is that non-binary is too broad, does not have a single thing it represents, and runs the gamut too much. But every three-year-old knows what a man is and what a woman is. They’ve been generalized across the world, across culture, and people just know what they are and look like. You can turn a woman into a twink, but that’s still turning her into a man. Just a more feminine, allowing her to still present as femme in some contexts. Which she wouldn’t be able to do if she was turned into a damn linebacker. Different body types, different sets of features, are perceived to be at different places in the spectrum of human sex. They aren’t actually. But the cultural ideal of sex ends with the gigachad on one end and a blow-up bimbo on the other.”

…What even is a blow-up bimbo?

Akumako: “Besides, the entire idea of a TSF story where someone lands in the middle of the spectrum… is kind of missing the whole point. The contrast is the point, the loss of something is the point, and if you do a half measure, you risk weakening the impact of the transformation. It stops being fantastical. You can write a story about a conventionally attractive woman getting cursed or whatever and winding up with more masculine facial features, broader shoulders, narrower hips, a flatter chest, taller stature, bulkier arms, and bigger hands, while still keeping her vagina and crap. That’s clearly TF, arguably TSF as it’s about someone’s secondary sexual features being transformed via magic, but it’s neither a strict upgrade nor strict downgrade.”

Most would probably say it is a downgrade, ‘cos society is a shitbird, but I see your point. Beauty is in the eye of the possessor and whatnot.

Akumako: “So why don’t you explore stuff like this? Hell, why don’t you have characters who futz around more with their physical sexual features and their gender expression overall?”

…Honestly, it’s mostly a lack of creative interest and inspiration. I don’t see creative examples of stories or artwork where someone is transformed and given a “non-binary body,” or bodies that don’t conform to some clear permutation of male or female. Well, so long as they are human. And I generally do not have much experience with non-binary people. They seem pretty busy doing their own thing and pursuing themselves beyond the societal binaries of sex and gender, choosing to view it as a spectrum for them to find their own place within. And if I am writing a story about transformation… I want it to involve a more extreme transformation. A change of sex is extreme. I like extreme. And I find it more interesting to explore than, say, giving a male character more or less masculine features.

For that type of story to work, you need to have the right idea, the right character for this role. Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to get into the mindset of someone who does not want to be male or female and wants to be their new kind of sexy. They’d need to be a cool weird freak for it to work!

I feel that, as a queer creative, I have a certain cultural responsibility to represent queerness in my work. That this is an avenue that I should be exploring, but I don’t know how, and don’t have a clear desire to.

Akumako: “Uh, yeah, but think about what kind of queer person you are. You’re not super femme, but you keep your hair medium, did your voice training, got on HRT, got a zero-depth vagina, are firmly a she/her. Much of the reason you transitioned stemmed from your hatred of being seen as a man, and after fantasizing about being a woman for basically a decade before you popped the trigger. You are a very binary trans person, not a nebby. If something’s not a part of your world, you don’t need to represent it. Shit, it’s stupid to represent something for the sake of representation.”

…So, I shouldn’t bother if I don’t want to?

Akumako: “I’ve seen what you did with non-binary characters in the past and, uh, you should stick to what you know.”

Black Vice is non-binary by… technicality. They are beyond gender because they are a being of immense power.

Akumako: “Sure they are.”

There’s also some gender ambiguity with the Zankers from Intertoids—

Akumako: “Don’t bring those horse fuckers into a discussion about non-binary folks, Nat. Just don’t.”

Fine…

For the record, I got bottom surgery because I fucking hated my dumb penis. I didn’t want to keep tucking for 12 hours a day for the rest of my life. It sucked, but it was necessary to fit in my skinny jeans without crushing my nards. However, getting genital electrolysis— which I apparently didn’t even need— was the singular worst experience in my life, and it made me truly DESPISE my junk.

Also, uh… most trans girls who are presenting as female tuck, right? Right? …Because I thought that was something you were supposed to do if you were trying to conform to the binary. It’s gotta be up there with voice training…

Natalie Muses About The Physical Media Resurgence
(Because She Read an Article and Had THOUGHTS)

I never took any photos of my old place back when I still had OBJECTS, so this is the best record I have of them.
All of these things were sold!

For the past year or two, probably even longer than that, there have been all of these stories about young people— particularly twentysomethings— getting really into physical media of all stripes. Vinyl is back and is pivoting to mainstream. People are buying CDs again. DVDs and Blu-rays are seeing an uptick in popularity after over a decade of decline. There is a movement about taking old tech and using it because social media made people’s phones into a digital biohazard. And after a lot of people went digital with their book collection in the 2010s with Amazon’s monopoly (big mistake), book stores and owning physical media is considered trendy among the youth.

Hell, just two weeks ago my village opened up a second Barnes and Noble, which says something.

Why do people do this? Lots of reasons. Because it lets them interact with something real and divert their eyes towards something that waits for them. Because it gives them something tangible and tactile to interact with. And because the act of going out, buying a thing, and putting it on a shelf feels satisfying on a base level. It makes it feel real in a way that buying a digital album or ebook just doesn’t.

This is something that I fully understand the appeal, and view it as a good trend in many ways. However, it also strikes me as a somewhat odd fixation. To explain… let me divulge in my own history on the matter.

As a kid of the 90s and early 2000s, I was very big on having physical stuff. I had a collection of over 100 physical games, a full bookshelf of strategy guides, magazines, regular books from school and book fairs and such, a small music collection. Hell, I talked about how I had like 100 Dragon Ball VHS tapes under my desk as a kid. But having all the stuff I had also came with some… sacrifices. I grew up in a 99 square foot room— 9.2 square meters— and was lucky enough to have ample storage space. A cubbyhole (that was mostly full of other people’s stuff), a closet, and a tall wooden bed frame with a bunch of drawers and four shelves at the headrest.

It was cramped at times, I did not have much room or means to move furniture, but I made do with that room, making it my own, and revising it from time to time. …Then in 2014, I got bed bugs. They were isolated only to my room, did not spread throughout the house, but a lot of my stuff was just ruined. My shelves were infected, my whole bedframe had to be destroyed. My entire bedroom was taken apart, and bed-less, for a full month. This forced me to reflect on and reconsider my belongings, the stuff I had, as it made me realized how easily it could just be destroyed. Furthermore, at this time, I had a lot of crap. Game consoles spanning several generations, oodles of games, that I was not going to do anything with and had no desire to go back to right then.

I questioned the purpose of accumulating all of this stuff when, after a point, after I use it, it just becomes stuff, clutter, and things I don’t particularly want. So, I began to give things away. Slowly, but I did it eventually. My toys went to an autistic Black kid whose mother I worked with. My strategy guides, manga, and various books were given to a used book store. And my game collection went to a local game store for a crisp $2,200. All because… I was not using it. I had no immediate desire to use it. And I did not feel it was right to accumulate it when I know that I would not use it.

To this day, this is my perspective on having stuff. Why accumulate things for the sake of it, unless you get something out of it? Sure, there is something enticing about seeing a vast collection of media, but is that worth the cost of investment, worth dedicating a space of your home, and worth managing if you ever want to move things around? For me, not really, no.

90% of all games I would want to play could be easily played on my PC. I have never been a big fan of reading physical books, as there are so many minor annoyances in the process. Tiny font size, questionable kerning, questionable formatting, holding down the pages of a 400 page chunker, the dread that comes with knowing that reading a book damages it, and finding a good reading light. Discs are prone to scratches, cases can break, and if you need to move, than a big physical media collection is a motherly burden.

Besides, if I ever wanted physical media, why would I BUY it when I can just visit my library, pick it up for a week or three, enjoy it, and then let someone else discover it? Sure, it might get scuffed up by some irresponsible person, but that’s what happens to physical media, period. And if you really want to stay screw the system, then why continue to pursue the capitalist idea of legal ownership? Wouldn’t it be better to share these things with a broader community via the institution of the library?

Akumako: “Natalie, you are making a point. But do remember that most public libraries aren’t half as ill as the Skokie Public Library. They got Switch 2 games, they got a theater, they got a 3D printer, they got programs to help disabled folks make crafts. Most libraries just got some musty-ass books.”

I know that, but, like, you could change that. A library is run by the local government and the only reason why a library is good or bad is because of the system that exists around it. You can just donate stuff to a library, and it could either stock it or give it away to the community. Any local library can fit a couple shelves of DVDs and Blu-rays, and you can make change happen if you get involved in your community.

Akumako: “Fucking communist cosplayer.”

This is the century where you need to decide team fascism and team communism. There ain’t no room for liberals no more~!

Akumako: “Okay, so, there are rental places that have been popping off and becoming popular. They rent physical media out for cheap, maybe through a subscription, and share them that way. It’s not all about ownership. …But a lot of it is.”

And that is the point I want to make. Young people, all around the world but especially in America, are being screwed over. Entry level jobs are being eliminated and constantly threatened by the rise of corporate adoption of AI. Wages have stagnated for the past decade while the cost of living went up dramatically, with what was a $10/hr job back in 2015 is still paying $10/hr because minimum wage laws have been put on the backfoot by lazy limp-dick liberals.

The financial market has gone full moron after crypto, NFTs, and meme stocks allowed people to make and lose stupid money, turning the stock market into a casino. Hell, prediction markets have turned THE NEWS and DEMOCRACY and America’s war with Iran into a casino. Across a few decades, we went from people being able to own a nice home to owning a nice car to owning nice things they can possess. Typically tech, consoles, computers, big TVs, nifty gizmos.

However, those gadgets are going up, not down, in price, and will continue to rise until the end of the decade at this rate, because Open AI is an evil organization and its operators should be [REDACTED]. So, what the hell else can people do? Well, they can own their media, own their entertainment, and have stuff that brings them joy. Plus, it’s generally not that expensive, and prices are set by the seller, so you can snag deals all the time. It’s honestly kind of amazing that you can still buy a DVD for $10 or $20 and a brand-new CD for under $15. Those are 2005 prices!

These are very special prices to note as, even though most Americans don’t have $1,000 for an emergency, most of them have $20 for a little splurge, and Americans are groomed to enjoy their retail therapy. Are you sick of your dumb shit job that you only work because you can’t find anything else? Well, it’s Friday night, Barnes and Noble is on your way home, and you can bring some joy in your sad life for just a li’l bit of cash. Cash you just made. It makes sense, and you can walk away with a physical memento, a thing to share with your friends that can’t be systematically taken from you.

And that’s what matters. It’s not about the ability to just access media outside of subscription services. Media piracy is on the rise, and I’m doing my part! Zoomies and twentysomethings could just learn how to torrent, as you can find seeds for just about everything if you look with your hands. They could figure out what the hell a Plex server is. However… that is not the point for many of them. Many of them want limited options. They want to look at things on a shelf. They crave cheap experiences that let them get away from phone, not embrace computer! Computer is where the news lives, where your boss emails you, and some people believe in the separation of work and pleasure.

I don’t, but I’m a damn weirdo who lives in a sparse echoey room that’s too big for her, and spends 14 hours a day in front of the same pair of monitors.

Akumako: “You also have money and own a condo unit. Most people in your age and queerness don’t.”

Yes. And I have like $50k in liquid assets if you put them against my mortgage.

Akumako: “…Fuckin’ finance bitch.”

Let It Die is Getting an Offline Version
(I Love It When Online Games Get Offline Versions!)

This is a pretty minor story, but when an always online game is being converted into an offline experience, I feel the need to talk about it.

Let It Die (2016) was a free-to-play soulslike title produced by Grasshopper Manufacture as their last attempt at making a bigger title before they scaled down and then up again with the No More Heroes revival. Basically Grasshopper was a hot commodity after the success of No More Heroes, allowing them to broker deals with big names like EA and Warner Bros. while also producing a bunch of smaller scale titles. It made no sense how they went from makers of fancy artsy visual novels, Michigan: Report from Hell, and Killer 7 to that, but… they did.

Let It Die did pretty well all things considered, being an early and fairly polished take on a now oversaturated genre. In fact, it was so successful that many members of the team, migrated over to a new developer, Supertrick Games, Inc., which is owned by GungHo Online Entertainment. Supertrick continued the Let It Die IP for GungHo with Deathverse: Let It Die (2022), a failed battle royale game that lasted less than a year. Recognizing this failure, the developers attempted to strike iron again with Let It Die: Inferno (2025), a roguelike online survival game that came out last December to a middling reception. Clearly, Let It Die is not the franchise material GungHo wants it to be, but I will give the publisher this: for a company with online in its name, they at least understand the value in preserving their IP.

In fall 2026, Supertrick will be releasing an offline edition of Let It Die, cutting out the superfluous monetization elements, replacing premium currency with the in-game currency, and making the game available for purchase. The online version is shutting down on September 1st and people who bought DLC— it’s not clear what kind— will automatically get the game. There will be a window where the game is unplayable, probably a few weeks, but this sounds exactly like what people want to become a standard. Service is ending and now the game is available offline. It might not have every event, but it’s something.

For that, I just have to say thank you to GungHo for allowing this to happen, and thank you to the folks at Supertrick, as I’m sure you fought to make this happen. If more online games followed this approach, the medium of video games would be in a healthier place.

Sony Abandons PC Gaming Venture
(PlayStation Games Are Only On PlayStation… Again)

Well, this is a topic that attracted a lot of attention during the last week of February, but we finally have a proper article to go along with it. Per Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, Sony is planning on scaling back their release of single-player games on PC. They intend on releasing multiplayer games on the platform going forward, but their bread and butter single player games, such as Ghost of Yotei (2025) and the upcoming Saros will reportedly skip the platform, having had their ports canceled.

Before asking why things are changing, it’s important to acknowledge why Sony brought their games to PC in the first place. Because they saw the PC market as a growth market, a way to spread their IP to a new platform, and something not in strict competition with the console scene. They made a huge pivot when they released Horizon: Zero Dawn on Steam in 2020, and continued this trend with a dozen plus other games. Day’s Gone: The Gay’s Done, Marvel’s Spider-Man for PS4 for PC, God of War IV: Norse I, Uncharted 4: End of Thieves + The Lost Legacy, The Last of Us I & II: Re-Boot Camp, Ratchet & Clank 9: Ripped A Shart, Until Dawn: The First Remake, the quite popular Helldivers The Second, even Stellar Booty Blade by some technicality.

Sony clearly has been putting money into bringing their games to PC, and even acquired support studio Nixxes to help make better and more efficient PC ports. However, their approach to PC ports has always been… questionable.

If Sony values PC as a platform, then why have their release schedules been so scattershot? Why are games frequently released over a year after they come out on consoles, but without any hint of true regularity? Why have they not brought over many games from their back catalog to the platform, often necessitating a remaster or remake before a title could be brought over to PC? Why didn’t they release Bluepoint’s Demon’s Souls Remake on the platform, when the Souls series only really took off because of the PC audience? And where did they get the audacity to charge $50 or $60 for late ports of games that they frequently marked down to $20, or had an MSRP of $20, on their storefront?

Sony’s approach to PC games have been bad, often treating PC gamers as second class citizens barring certain multiplatform releases. While a small delay could be understood, they have failed to communicate anything consistently, and if the games sold poorly as a result, frankly, it’s their own damn fault. If they gave up on the idea of true console exclusives and released all their releases on PS5 and PC at the same time, they would have the benefit of a larger audience of players.

Everybody’s who’s decently into gaming news or console gaming discourse has a PS5 or PC, and should have the ability to play them on their platform of choice. And if they put out games six or twelve months after release as a rule, then people would know when the game was hitting PC. Hell, I figured that Ghost of Yotei was hitting PC sometime this summer given how probably two million people bought the PC port of Ghost of Tsushima. You know what I look at when I see that? Tens of millions of dollars in potential revenue for a port that probably won’t require much more than a tenth of what it will make back.

Now, the argument, as it often is, that this profitable avenue is not making enough money for it to make sense as part of PlayStation’s core business. While I understand this conceptually… I think it is being penny wise and pound foolish. As a company, Sony’s main function is to make money for their shareholders, and these PC ports generally make money. Maybe not Sackboy’s littleBIG Sack (2020), which I’m guessing sold 100,000 units over almost four years. (I always go with the lowest estimate on these things.) Ratchet & Clank 9: Rift Apart probably did a bit better than breaking even at probably 400,000+ units. A figure that I think is good for a year late port of a game in a series that has never seen a PC release and received little in way of a marketing push.

What I’m getting at is that even if these ports don’t sell millions, they are still a boon for Sony. They mean more people are playing their games, accessing their games, and bringing in precious revenue. It made sense for Sony to pivot to PC in 2020, and with the PC market on the rise while the console market shrinks, I think it only makes sense to keep releasing games on the platform. Especially after customers have gotten used to Sony games being on PC. It’s been six years, plenty of people have bought and played a PlayStation Studios game on PC at this point, and they have assuredly made new fans in the process.

If Sony were to pivot away, they would lose this audience, piss them off. I doubt any meaningful quantity of people who has been playing PlayStation games on PC are going to decide to buy a PS5 now of all times. If PC players want third-person cinematic story-driven action games, they have other options.

Sony’s rationale in this decision is pretty simple: the PC market is not making them enough money to their liking, and is a tiny fragment next to the revenue they get from PSN transactions. Remember, they get 30 cents on every dollar spent on digital PlayStation 5 games. Because digital game sales and microtransactions have exploded in popularity over the past 5/6 years, they want to hunker down on their console, on their storefront. If your main source of revenue is not your products, but your storefront markup, it feels stupid to sell your digital wares on a “competing” storefront. If someone buys a Sony published game on PS5, they get all the money. If someone buys a Sony published game on PC, they get 70% of the money.

This is what current management at Sony is thinking, per my own analysis. They are doubling down on their console, but I think it is too late for them to do so. Furthermore, if they continue to release MULTIPLAYER games on PC day and date… they are deliberately making things even more confusing. At some point several years ago, we reached a state where being platform-agnostic was seen as the best way forward for any big player in gaming. Sony understood this, made the shift, and are now changing their mind. This is a back-down. They had a good idea, invested into it, could not commit hard enough to make it work, and because of their lack of effort, it was not profitable enough to warrant a place at the table.

What a bunch of dunderheads.

Simply put, I think this is a mistake. Console sales are declining and I doubt that will change anytime soon. We are in a post price drop era, where consumer goods are only going to get more expensive in time, not less expensive. And while Sony could have just kept their PlayStation games on PlayStation, they ultimately didn’t. When someone takes something away from their customers, cut features, or stop doing things, they look like a bunch of assholes, and people hate them for being assholes. And Sony are being huge fucking assholes with this movie.

For me, I don’t strictly care about Sony’s post Japan Studios output, but I do view this as a bad move for gaming in general. Most games from before 2014 are only widely accessible via PC and emulation. Around 2016, PC ports became such big business that it was seen as a problem when game publishers chose to NOT port their games to new platforms. Outside of Nintendo and Sony games, the overwhelming majority of console games were also released on PC. It was good business, made games bigger, and I accepted this as the future. A BETTER future.

Sony looked at all this progress, looked at their financials, and decided to go backwards. And if there is any singular thing in this world that pisses me off, it’s when people go backwards.

Humble Games is Reborn as Balor Games
(A Subsidiary of MEP Capital!)

In 2024, Ziff Davis bought up a massive chunk of the games media landscape, because big publishers want to own every publication that’s available for sale. They bought Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, Rock Paper Shotgun, etc. and then proceeded to cut down their game publishing subsidiary, Humble Games. Most of the staff was laid off, the publisher was reduced to a shoestring operation, and the folks who ran Humble Games went on to form a new company. This company, Good Games Group, was quietly established shortly after these layoffs, and… was subsequently hired by Ziff Davis to run Humble Games.

This would be hilarious… if not for the fact that restructuring like this is a huge pain in the ass and most executives would go catatonic if they had to do this flavor of shit work. It was a needless arrangement, where GGG was running a company without owning it, while Ziff Davis probably didn’t want to run a small games publisher. So through contract negotiations— and a bag of money from MEP Capital— GGG purchased Humble Games, their back catalog, and all of their assets. But rather than operate as GGG or Humble Games though, the new owners have decided to adopt the name Balor Games. Which is… a name.

I would like to prop this up as a big win for independent gaming… but really all this is a group of people moving under a publicly traded mega corporation to a smaller private equity company.

…Yay?

…No. No yay.

The Next Xbox is Going to be a PC
(Project Helix Will Hopefully Bring An End to Xbox)

I am already sick of talking about Microsoft this year. At this point they are just begging for attention with these announcements. If you’ve been following these Rundowns, you have seen how I have gone back and forth over the downfall of Xbox. But after Microsoft’s commitment to Middle Eastern genocide, planet and society destroying “artificial intelligence,” and making their software fucking shit, I simply want to see Xbox go away. However, Microsoft is determined to keep a foot in the gaming scene— they have invested WAY too much to ditch it outright— but we may be seeing an end to Xbox games. At least in a traditional sense.

This past week Microsoft Gaming CEO, and AI natalist, Asha Sharma tweeted out a vague announcement of the next generation of Xbox, dubbed Project Helix, with the following text:

“Great start to the morning with Team Xbox, where we talked about our commitment to the return of Xbox including Project Helix, the code name for our next generation console. Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games. Looking forward to chatting about this more with partners and studios at my first GDC next week!”

Now, the announcement of a next generation of consoles is something that I don’t find particularly interesting. It’s inevitable at this point. Instead, the main thing to talk about here is the fact that next Xbox will be able to play PC games. Which indicates that the system will, effectively, be a Windows gaming PC that runs some scaled down version of Windows, as demonstrated in the Asus ROG Xbox Ally earlier this year, but with the ability to emulate Xbox software.

In isolation, this is a good thing. A pre-build PC that will act as a standard for developers to aim for, optimize around, with access to a back catalog of thousands of console games that it can run sufficiently. If people can do basic web activities on this device— plug a mouse and keyboard into it to have it work as a computer, then this could just be a computer for a lot of people.

Most of the boons of the Steam Machine apply to a device like this. And I am a believer that game consoles, which have always been computers, should be able to do what a computer does. Why have multiple devices when you could just have one thing that does all you need? I mean, sure, I do have a work laptop that I have as a backup, but that’s because I am useless at life without a computer.

In reality, I don’t trust Microsoft as far as I can throw them and… how TF do you even throw a multi-trillion dollar company? I want to divest from them, would discourage anyone from investing into the ecosystem, and would far sooner recommend a Mac Mini or MacBook Neo for casual computer users. So when I see them announce a new bit of hardware, my thoughts are “cool idea, but I hope it fails, leading Microsoft to lose money and power.”

Progress Report 2026-03-08

Ah shit. Here we go again…

…Should I break my streak of just not acknowledging about the latest live service to come onto the chopping block? Nah. I really don’t see why there was any groundswell around such a generic looking game, why people were trying to build it up to be the next big thing with all of these articles about it. Sure, it got an ad as the last game features in the Keighley’s back in December, but I didn’t watch most of that crap. I had better things to do. Like masturbate to the idea of my OCs fucking each other.

2026-03-01: Watched ten episodes of RE:Zero with the Cassie and Shiba. RE:Zero is REALLY GOOD! Like, no wonder this anime was so popular, this is great! Such drama, such tension, such intensity, and such polish! I should have watched it in 2016, but I had anime burnout. Then I worked for like nine hours starting in the afternoon NO PROGRESS!

2026-03-02: Worked until around 19:00, got foggy in the brain, tried playing that Parasite Eve spiritual successor’s demo. It was alright, WAY too dark for its own good. PS1 games were bright as HELL in comparison! Then I wrote 3,600 words for this Rundown, because I did not have the mindspace to resume work on VD2.0.

2026-03-03: Another long day. Wrote 400 word Let It Die bit. And that was it.

2026-03-04: Wrote 1,700 words for the PlayStation and Bangor, Maine bits. Made the header, made some other headers. Wrote like 700 words for VD2.0 CH 7-13, before realizing I was too tired and exhausted to keep on writing. I had to do some light research on freaking Rathausplatz music festivals, because that seems like a good place for a mom turned teen to get their funk on! Also, so tired! Like, bro, it’s Wednesday and I’ve already put in 37 hours this week. I feel like I haven’t gotten SHIT done though!

2026-03-05: Edited this fat bitch— THEY ARE ALL FAT BITCHES! Did the basic research I needed to on Rathausplatz and wrote 3,200 words for VD2.0 CH 7-13. Pretty decent progress, but work is leaving me more fatigued than I would like. This is easily going to be another 50 hour week, and I haven’t had a proper day off since the 22nd. Hell, I haven’t even had a true slow week since the year began. AND FOR WHAT? Ugh, I just want to pay off my mortgage, MAN!

2026-03-06: Wrote 2,700 words for VD2.0 CH 7-13. Just… two more 2,000+ word scenes to write before this segment is done. ARGH! Why am I like this? Also, wrote 500 words for the Project Helix bit, as I felt the need to say SOMETHING about it. I just know my boss is going to make me work 6 hours tomorrow too, after blueballing me throughout the day. First he cannot get out of bed, then he needs to take a nap, but that nap was a lie, and he really was just chatting to an AI in his big boy chair, and then bam, I don’t finish work until after 20:00. GREAT!

2026-03-07: Chores, 6 hours of weekend work dictated by my boss who starts and ends things whenever he feels like it, and then I got to FINALLY work more on VD2.0 CH 7-13, finishing this damn segment I have waited YEARS to conclude at this point. 4,500 words to the dot, and while I mayneed to revise certain things, and possibly flesh out the ending a bit more, this mini-novella in this novel is DRAFTED. 36,000 words on a damn SUBPLOT! How many pages is that? I dunno, fuck your pages, 180 pages or something!

Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly Wonders
Progress Report

Current Word Count: 117,403

Estimated Word Count: 250,000

Words Edited: 0

Total Segments: 30

Segments Outlined: 30

Segments Drafted: 14

Segments Edited: 0

Header Images Made: 0

Days Until Deadline: 115

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