Rundown (5/24/2026) Costco Body Swap Brainstorming

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Costco Body Swap Brainstorming
• Sony Formally Cancels Single-Player Games Push on PC (Somehow, Console Exclusives Returned…)
• Embracer is FINALLY Splitting Up! (All The Good Eggs Go In One Basket!)
• Bungie Announces Final Destiny 2 Content Update (Natalie’s Wack-Ass Bungie Retrospective)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Costco Body Swap Brainstorming

This past Sunday I went to Costco with my mother and grandmother to use a $400 store credit certificate I got for buying gold last year, before prices went crazy. It was a Costco, on a Sunday, with an elderly person in one of those little electric shopping buggies, so naturally it was chaotic. And we didn’t even get anything cool, just not-so-perishable foodstuffs and stamps.

However, it was also a great place for people watching, observing Americans in their natural habitat of excess, and seeing people of all age groups going about their days in a large place full of sights of intrigue. Because I barely go outside nowadays and don’t see a lot of people, I naturally looked at this and thought about how a Costco would be a fantastic place for a mid-scale mass swap or possession event.

Normally I would just throw my musings about this concept into a note file that I’ll realistically never get around to pursuing. However, to kill two birds with one stone, I’m gonna masquerade what would otherwise be personal notes into something I can post here, maybe get a discussion going.

I should start by describing my terminology here, as what the heck is a mass event? Basically an event that involves a large group of people, with large having some wiggle room. It could be a couple dozens, hundreds, or thousands. This is a remarkable distinction when discussing body swap and possession stories, as those tend to only involve a small group of people. However, it also is not a global body swap à la The Great Shift, which I thought was a big deal when I was 13, so it’s forever a part of my brain space.

I’m also lumping together mass body swap events and mass possession events together as they’re basically the same thing. There are differences in how people get into certain bodies and how they choose their bodies. In a mass possession event, people have some ability to decide whose body they snag and the freedom of choice in bodies leads to more chaos, while a mass swap tends to be more random and more orchestrated. Though, I tend to view them as comparable, as the end result is the same. Loads of people swapped bodies.

As for why I think a Costco of all bloody places is a great location for a mass swap/possession event— swapposs if you prefer— my first reason is demographics. Costco is a place for people of all ages and a general working class disposition or background. You have families of middling income levels with parents ages 30 to 49 and children spanning the age of baby to 13. You have teens and college kids shopping for whatever stuff they want, snacks and such, expressing relative autonomy while likely chilling with their friends, as Costco is a third place. Then you have the frugal older folks, ages 50 to 90, who view Costco more as an economical location to obtain various goods, and food, to fill their homes as they continue to withdraw from a world that, in many ways, is designed to cater to them.

Here in Skokie, there were people of pretty much all racial/ethnic backgrounds. Mostly White, but that’s what happens when you have anything locked behind a membership. And by being a busy day, a Sunday afternoon, you are likely getting the most diverse group of people in terms of both shoppers and workers. Lots of people work second jobs on weekends, and lots of people don’t work on weekends. Mesh these demographics together and you get something hella diverse, and diversity, contrast, differences, is what you want in a body swap story, it’s what makes the genre interesting, and is particularly potent in a mass event like this. It’s primo defo more compelling than setting a story in another bloody school full of milves, dilves, and minors.

Reason two is the mundanity and practicality of the location and how that mundanity is transformed through the insertion of a supernatural element. Costco is a wholesale retailer with home supplies, furniture, and loads of food. The location is practical, draws people in, but is also a location prone to a good amount of American retail chaos. People get stressed, get lost, are shoving around carts full of crap, cluttering narrow and tall hallways, and figuring out where things are and how to get there is a skill in and of itself. It can be a terrifying location for people with sensory sensitivities, and when landing in a hot new bod, everybody has sensory sensitivities.

After the event, people would be looking at the world from a literally different perspective, in a different location, and need to deal with the ensuing chaos and unrest throughout the store. Carts clogging up the aisles, boxing people in, people smooshing against each other forming a crowd, forcing everybody to feel their new bodies. People would struggle to maneuver new bodies, falling, bumping into things, underestimating their strength, and suddenly being slapped with differing abilities or the addition/subtraction of disabilities.

Social unrest would follow the start of this event, as when people are denied the familiar, they tend to forget the social decorum and panic. Some would be selfish and defy good nature by focusing only on themself. People would flood and attack the one major exit. And some would, of course, aggressively grab and accost the person occupying their original body. Unrest, violence, confusion— mass hysteria— with the cap depending on the presence of an authority figure, or an otherwise calming figure.

However, something I have noticed in my attempts at writing TF fiction over the years is the sheer difficulty in writing anything involving a large group of characters. As a writer, you need to routinely remind the reader of who is around, who is doing things, and how they are participating in the storyline. You cannot just show someone like in a visual medium, you cannot say multiple things at the same time. You have one dimension, and it is far easier to write about one or two characters.

When writing TF stuff, I tend to focus a lot on characters’ personal experiences. How they feel being a person that looks different, sounds different, is perceived differently, and has different features. Mirror scenes, fondling scenes, scenes of them doing things while being consciously aware of the body they are moving, and the inherently intimate experience of adapting to their new form. This personal reaction, getting into their head of what something like this would feel like, is one of my favorite elements of writing transformation fantasy and something I love to see.

The problem is that it is far harder to express this sense of intimacy in a group setting. If everybody is coming to terms with a new form, looking down at themselves, feeling themselves up, and shakily walking while aghast at the fact they can see their body walking away from them, it ceases to be a personal experience, and becomes a group experience. You could describe every person in that group, but finding something interesting to say about all of them can get difficult and be boring to read about.

Some of the hardest sections for me to write in Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 have been ones where I flip-flop perspectives between a group of 12 to 20 people when at a party or an event. However, I only managed to write those to a satisfactory level by positioning them as conversations, interrogations of how specific characters are reacting to this experience. Or, alternatively, sex scenes that try and capture the thrill, aversion, shame, awkwardness, and inherent silliness of mankind’s favorite past-time: fuckin’.

How do you mesh the inherently personal experience of someone entering a new body with the group experience of a mass swap? Well, my go-to references are pretty much Great Shift or class-wide swap stories I’ve read over the years, with specific attention to the forever incomplete Mass Poss path from Press-Switch. However, pretty much all of these examples follow a set protagonist’s perspective, which is not a great way to capture a group experience. You can switch between multiple POVs to see their reactions, such as in… Empyrée by C.R.E.A.M., yet that limits what you can show to a small group.

I guess what I’m asking at this point is just how do you tell a story with a large cast, plenty of details, without bogging down the experience? Or is this one of those damn triangles where you can cater to two sides while compromising the third? Like the BUS 101 staple of fast, cheap, and good or the character creator staple of skinny, muscle, and fat. Scale, detail, and expedience? Yeah, I think that works. You can write a large and detailed story, but it’s gonna be slow/long. Or you could write a fast and detailed story, but the scale is gonna be narrow. Or you could write a fast story with a large cast, but they are just going to be archetypes or wargaming playthings.

Taking all of those musings, throwing them into the purée, what is the conclusion I reach? What form should this scenario take? I personally have been multi-protagonist pilled for the past three years, so my answer is to focus on telling several stories that show different perspectives and reactions to this event. Again, there are people of all backgrounds, so you can facilitate any sort of swap you want with people, and explore the full spectrum of reactions.

Have a young person gain the autonomy and freedom of being an older person, getting a head start in life but also needing to resume someone’s life while they are in their intermediary stages, while being unable to track whoever took their body, leaving them on their own while refusing to admit what happened to them.

Have a young person become too old, because there are a lot of people at your typical Costco are, and there are not enough long-term stories about someone going from a regular-aged adult to a retiree. Probably because we don’t have enough old folks writing TSF… yet.

Have a pair transcend the trifecta of class, race, and gender as they need to rally together to maintain a sense of stability in each of their lives, putting in work and getting on each other’s fucking nerves as they are forced to do crap they hate or be with people who get right under their skin.

Oh, here’s a fun one. Have some dude land in the body of a mother with her two kids, have the motherland one of the kids, and have one of the kids swap with the sibling. Just mess the family up, have the other kid go missing, and force this random guy to be a mother by being bossed around by a mother turned child. Absolute cinema!

And of course you would need someone who switches with someone they know and trust, while they do the same. Through the power of cooperation, they could lead a movement to figure out the mystery behind what happened, who was responsible, while trying to contact those affected by the event. Less of a direct TF story, though the two can have some fun with their new forms, and more of a mystery where hints from prior stories could be used to foreshadow what these two sleuths discover.

You could go on and on with these ideas, picking up pairs, and use the mass event as a backdrop, the possibilities are bountiful. If writers still do collaborations, you could basically piece together a novel full of novellas as writers choose to follow one person, or group, of people affected by this while the lead write hashes out the fine details and pieces together the conclusion. That would be such a fun project. Oh, and if anybody is strapped for ideas, that’s what One Year After the Body Swap Terrorism Incident is for!

Though, uh, after writing all of this out, I realized that maybe the whole Mass swapposs angle is not the best and, perhaps, this should instead be the setting for a body jacking joyride story. You know the type. A group of two to four college aged friends get their grubby mitts on a body swapping slash possession doohickey. They could become spirits and occupy random people’s bodies, throw their friends in other people’s bodies, and swap bodies around just so they can watch the carnage ensue from the sidelines. Characters can try out bodies like they’re free samples, while literally trying free samples with these bodies, because Costco.

As a setting, it would ultimately work, with the only caveat being the fact that there’s arguably little unique about the setting, when such a story has functioned just dandily in malls for the past few decades. However, malls are no longer the cultural touchstone they were from 1980-ish to 2015-ish, so a supercenter such as a Costco, Sam’s Club, Walmart, or Target are all arguably more relevant to the youth of today.

Though, this sort of boundless joyride story is something I have a harder time writing, as I simply crave conflict, tension, and directly building towards something, and need characters to reach some breed of conclusion. Personal revelations, getting stuck, losing access to their power, or using their power for some harebrained purposes. Like throwing bad people off of tall buildings. Or one character going crazy while another tries to stop them, getting screwed over in the process while, technically, achieving their goal. Stories need to have an ending, and without this succulent draw, I could literally write a story for half a million words. I know that because I am editing the latest update to my 600,000 word body swap summer vacation novel… I know what the ending to that is, okay?

Anyway, that’s enough for a preamble. If you have any ideas you want to throw into this bucket that will likely be left to rot in my closet, let me know in the comments below.

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Sony Formally Cancels Single-Player Games Push on PC
(Somehow, Console Exclusives Returned…)

Two months ago, I reported on Jason Schrier’s reporting that Sony was scrapping their plans of bringing their single-player first-party offerings to PC. I was very bitter about this, and I’m even more bitter after PlayStation studio business CEO Hermen Hulst formally stated that the publisher’s future narrative single player games will be PlayStation exclusives.

As I explained when this subject last broke containment, the reason for this is because Sony has not seen the returns they wanted from the PC userbase, and I consider that to be their own damn fault. They released games a year or longer after their initial release, out of their core hype cycle, and did not offer competitive pricing or the like. At the same time, Sony has been making more and more money from their digital storefront, where they are able to net 30% of every transaction without doing much work. This lead the new reshuffled management to look at their disappointing Steam revenue as expendable, except for the success of titles like Helldivers II.

From a customer perspective, I think the idea of single players games being console exclusives while multiplayer games are on consoles and PC is a bizarre thing to comprehend. Yes, these games target different markets, but games are games are games, and as we saw with Xbox’s multiplatform woes this generation, people are EASILY confused when things change and prefer simple exclusives messaging.

From the perspective of someone who cares about gaming, I think this is some primo dumb shit. Both Microsoft and PlayStation have been infected with the same sovereign console brainworm, leaving them utterly divorced from reality. Neither company is properly reacting to the fact that consumer electronics are in the midst of a dark period that will last at least two more years as The Protagonists of Humanity keep purchasing components for their AI datacenters. RAM is ridiculously expensive, storage is stupid expensive, PC component manufacturers and assemblers, by in large, are in a rough patch. There is reason to doubt that prices will not return to the stable downward slope that we have enjoyed for the past few… decades, and we are seeing the end of an era of cheap consumer electronics.

Consoles have gotten drastically more expensive over the past 7 years, bucking any and all consumer trends that we have seen since the bloody 1970s. The idea of buying a console for a kid as a birthday/Christmas present is becoming “rich people shit” and there is reason to doubt the future of game consoles. Because if someone never gets a console as a kid, why the hell would they get a console as an adult? I am incredibly dubious of the prospects of the upcoming Xbox Helix and the PlayStation 6 selling well, as they are likely going to be a minimum of $900 or maximum of $1099.99 at launch.

This price point filters out a sizable chunk of their historic audience and I doubt the incredibly cash squeezed masses struggling to pay rent or afford groceries will be enticed by what these new systems could do. PS5 games already look incredibly good and run at both high frame rates and resolutions. Most developers have only gotten to make a maximum of two games targeting the platforms, and any contemporary performance issues are due solely on optimization. We don’t need more power, and most people could not tell the difference between a PS5 or a PS5 Pro, so what is a PlayStation 6 going to do to impress people in lieu of a new hardware gimmick like those dumb triggers?

Why should people want a PlayStation 6? Well, Sony’s answer seems to be to bring back single player exclusive games. That way people would need to buy their consoles, buy games in their ecosystems, and engage with their platform if they want to play their games. It makes sense, it’s how things used to be before Microsoft shifted the whole scene by putting every one of their games on Steam in 2016, but that does not mean I have to like it.

I do not like platform exclusivity, as everything it does is pretty bad in my book:

• Limits the potential audience a game can reach
• Enriches a specific platform owner by giving them access to a chunk of every single sale of this game
• Endear an audience with a sense of tribalism by creating an economy of haves and have-nots
• Leaves games stranded on specific platforms, rather than put them on an evergreen platform (PC/Linux)
• Encourages people to spend money on redundant hardware

You might argue that I am ignoring how platform exclusivity moves money around, makes a game seem special, and can allow developers to optimize games around a specific piece of hardware. All of these were true, but I don’t believe that they are in 2026. Microsoft’s brazen cancelations have made me view any sort of platform exclusivity as more of a bane than it is a boon. The “exclusives are more important” mindset is largely the result of years of effective marketing and an era where game exclusivity was far in a way more common. It’s the result of a fanboy mentality where consoles’ unique features must be emphasized to prove their merit. And while launching on one SKU makes optimization way easier, game consoles are more similar nowadays than they ever have been, optimization issues are not unique to multi-platform titles, and many games launch on multiple platforms with no issues. You just don’t hear about them.

I have many reasons to just not like the push towards exclusivity. I believe it to be a destructive act that only subtracts, adding nothing but a reason for consumers to consume like the Munchables they were engineered to be. But I am also particularly critical of this as it is a return to console exclusivity, and in discussing this topic, I have come to terms with something: I don’t like console gaming.

Console gaming is limiting, I think it confers too much power to publicly traded tech giants, and I view it as being simply lesser than home computer gaming. It was cheaper and easier to use before, but I believe that truism faded away over the past 15 years. There are illusions that console gaming is a purer, intimate, focused, and optimized experience, but that illusion died to me on June 10, 2013, when Sony “won” E3 by saying their game console could play used games. Since then, I have not looked back. Rising hardware prices, stagnant game prices, stupidly expensive peripherals, online dependencies, overpriced subscriptions, allusions to ownership that break down as digital only releases, codes on a disc, and Game Key Cards have become almost expected. Consoles have steadily yet precipitously lost what made them special over the past decade. Combined with the rising accessibility of pre-build gaming hardware, the fact that PC is the platform for many viral games that never touch consoles, I don’t think consoles should be necessary.

I think consoles are just crummy locked down computers that benefit from the economies of scale, both in terms of costs and optimization. They are obviously useful for some people, but the very idea of buying a console when I have a perfectly good computer that I use for 12+ hours a day makes me feel insane. I already feel like a prick for owning a 2021-built PC, a 2025-bought laptop, a refurbished iPhone XS, a Nintendo Switch 2, an original Nintendo Switch, a broken iPhone 6S, and a 2015-built decommissioned PC. I have accumulated enough ewaste, thank you, I don’t need to buy a new computer just to play like ten games.

It’s just a bad use of resources, and I had hopes that we could get past this. That everybody could play games on whatever device they wanted. We were inching closer to a platform-agnostic future, which is what I want. Which is what everybody who cares about gaming as a medium, not your precious fucking cocaine flavored brands, should care about. But no. We’re not getting that. We’re not getting collaboration. We’re not getting compromise. Sony is working against this dream, and I think this move will only hurt their games going forward… while having an immaterial effect on system sales.

So many issues regarding game availability and preservation could have been solved if companies just worked together and released their games on everything, like so many other mediums. Instead, they are rallying together to create waste, friction to access, and barriers that prevent people from engaging with art.

No wonder so many alleged people are allegedly buying retro recreation consoles with ROMs they allegedly dumped themselves.

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Embracer is FINALLY Splitting Up!
(All The Good Eggs Go In One Basket!)

Oh, Embracer. What a ripe little dastard you turned out to be. About two years ago, following the fallout of their Saudi Arabia deal, Embracer announced that they were going to break apart into several entities as part of a larger reconstruction effort. Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends, Coffee Stain & Friends, and Asmodee. Since then, Asmodee has been spun-off as its own company, same with Coffee Stain Studios, plans have evidently changed, and now the remaining assets of Embracer will be partitioned into two entities: Fellowship Entertainment and the Embracer Group.

Fortunately, Embracer makes it very clear how these studios and IPs will be partitioned, even if it is still quite a bit to wrap one’s head around.

Fellowship will be the parent company of 4A Games, Crystal Dynamics, Dambuster Studios, Dark Horse Media, Eidos-Montréal, Fishlabs, Flying Wild Hog Studios, Gunfire Games, Middle-earth Enterprises, Redoctane Games, and Warhorse Studios. These are their biggest and most acclaimed studios, along with their biggest IP baskets with Dark Hours and Middle-earth. While the IPs will consist of Darksiders, Dead Island, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Metro, Remnant, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tomb Raider among others. A later letter to investors mentioned that Saints Row, Legacy of Kain, Deus Ex, Red Faction, The Mask, Thief, and TimeSplitters will also be retained by Fellowship.

As for Embracer, well, they will be left with a big rabble of other stuff. Alkimia, Aspyr, Ashborne, Beamdog, Bugbear, CrazyLabs, Deca, Demiurge, DigixArt, DPI Merchandising, Experiment 101, Grimlore, Limited Run Games, Milestone, Nine Rocks, Purple Lamp, PLAION Partners, PLAION Pictures, THQ Nordic, Tripwire, and Vertigo Games. Basically their smaller studios, focusing more on AA, indie, porting, and support work. The less valuable stuff that investors would likely shrug off as stuffing. While the IP line up would consist of Arizona Sunshine, Biomutant, Destroy All Humans!, Desperados, Gothic, Killing Floor, Kingdom of Amalur, MX vs. ATV, Reanimal, Ride, Screamer, Titan Quest, and Wreckfest. Not a bad line-up, but many of them are IPs that are not particularly resonant with larger audiences. Reanimal is likely the biggest, but it’s still a $40 AA venture.

Why is Embracer partition their studios this way? Well, the stated answer is some corporate fluff about management and business strategy. The layperson answer is that it makes sense for their AAA studios, Dark Horse, and Middle-earth to be lumped together as their biggest and most desirable IP house. While the riffraff mobile, indie-scale, AA titles, and orphaned IPs can stay with Embracer, as that was originally what Embracer’s schtick was before they got big enough balls to buy Gearbox and such.

The allocation does make sense— barring the bizarre choice to bundle the Lord of the Rings IP and Dark Horse with a bunch of unrelated games studios. I’d say just make all of your comic, TV, and movie stuff under one banner and give them LOTR. However, I think there is a more cynical, understated, reason why they are allocating assets this way: to facilitate a large-scale corporate acquisition.

Buying Embracer would be too expensive. It’s too big, has too many tendrils, and is full of undesirable assets. However, Fellowship, a multinational company with only 2,100 employees and some lucratively beloved IP? That is going to be a lot easier to fund, face a lot less regulatory scrutiny, and just involve a lot less paperwork. I could certainly see a certain six-letter company whose name begins with A and whose packaging liter the lobby of any condo wanting to buy up these IPs and studios after failing to launch their own game studios. …Even if they end up destroying them in 5 to 10 years.

It’s a song and dance we have seen a lot over the past decade: rapid corporate consolidation, spin-off-ing, and reallocating, and I just hate to see this happen. Games, tech, entertainment, all of these industries and more have been in a state of constant instability. If your job is always on the line, it is hard to do productive work. If people are being shuffled around and thrown away per budget cuts, the corporation loses value as a result of brain drain, project cancelation, and the utter loss of the institutional knowledge that makes a studio… a studio. I am deeply sick of how corporate meddling has been jostling game companies, destroyed art, destroyed lives, and prevented games from being what they could have if corporations had the wherewithal to behave decently. If only the world was not dominated by greedy bastards who viewed the masses as gristle to be abused.

…SPEAKING OF WHICH!

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Bungie Announces Final Destiny 2 Content Update
(Natalie’s Wack-Ass Bungie Retrospective)

…Well, this was a surprise. After nearly nine years of being one of the more popular live services around, developer Bungie has announced that Destiny 2 (2017) will receive its final content update on June 9, 2026. This comes after previously announced plans to launch new expansions for the title, after they began a new story arc, and just a few months after the release of their latest live service, a PS3-ass reboot of the Marathon series.

The reason for this is unstated, but pretty simple. Destiny 2 has been struggling to retain players following the release of what felt like the final expansion, 2024’s The Final Shape. With their game losing players, i.e., money, Bungie was forced to reassess their plans if they wanted to remain relevant in the go-go world of video gaming. This likely accelerated the release of their latest live service, Marathon, a reboot of a beloved and textually rich Macintosh shooter trilogy that… really should have just been a new IP.

This is all fine and good on its own— despite being neither fine nor good— but like with many things, I feel the need to stop and explain how we got here. Because Destiny is Destiny, and I believe Bungie’s games must be interrogated for what they did to the core gaming landscape.

For most intents and purposes, Bungie first made a splash with Halo: Combat Evolved (2001), which can be commonly credited for changing how first-person shooters played on consoles and for launching one of the most aimless, if not abused, IPs in gaming. While it cannot be credited with much that wasn’t already done on computers between games like Half-Life (1998), Unreal (1999), Counter-Strike (1999), or Quake III: Arena (1999), it did these things on a console. Its campaign was beloved, but where the game really garnered mileage from was its multiplayer modes. While only available via split-screen and LAN, the game was played by millions of young men and quickly became an institution for boys born from 1980 to 1990 in particular.

While prior titles like GoldenEye and Perfect Dark were similarly popular local multiplayer shooters, Halo achieved a level of acclaim and hype that was beyond those titles, that itself warranted buying a system and an extra three controllers, and anybody making a console shooter in this era had to compare it to Halo. It set the standard, became an industry leader overnight, and was the flagship title for the Xbox “exp-ire-ment.” That’s already plenty important, but this sense of importance only grew with the next time.

Halo 2 (2004) served as a flagship title for Microsoft’s nascent Xbox Live service, allowing gamers to play online. While far from the first online service— big ups to XBAND— no prior online service had a killer app like Halo 2. This was when what Halo was would change forever, where console FPSes would change forever, and I’d say for the worse.

Not content with merely letting people play together anonymously, Xbox Live’s true signature feature was the inclusion of a headset, allowing players to communicate verbally, chat with each other, and strategize while keeping their hands on the controller. Unfortunately, doing this created a new platform for a toxicity that lurked in the bedrooms and LAN parties of stank boys.

In a just society, people learn to be careful with inflammatory, insulting, or derogatory speech as it could harm their reputation, socially isolated them, and potentially get their face kicked in for being a diet, or proper, Nazi. However, when one is in special company, is a man in a man-only space or a White in a Whites-only space, these rules do not apply, and they are allowed to let their true bigoted colors show. It’s a form of racial/sexual bonding.

With the rise in digital communications, anonymity grew stronger and more prominent, allowing people to just spout hate speech without any consequences, allowing them to not only spew their toxic rhetoric, but give it a place to fester and grow. Back in the day, you had to join your local chapter of da Klan for that shit, but with the power of the internet, da Klan was everywhere!

Almost immediately, Halo 2 lobbies and online matches became a platform for (mostly White) boys ages 8 to 34 to bond over misogyny, sexism, racism, Whiteness, hatred of The Other, Islamophobia, toxic masculine ideas that harm men and women alike, fascist dog whistles, glorification of rape, and the primordial Cuacasoidal joy of calling someone a n***er, faggot, retard, or any other manner of slur that I am not permitted to write out.

Akumako: “Wait, I get why you can write faggot, but why is retard okay?”

I’m autistic and got lumped in with the special needs crowd at my school. I spent 3.5 years riding paratransit with my fellow disabled people, many of whom were people who required full-time care and would have, in an earlier era, been classified as “mentally retarded.” I have lived my entire life in a considerate community where people with these mental disabilities are cared for and given the opportunity to contribute to society. This proximity, in my mind, gives me the “okay” to use the term retard in certain contexts, unlike n***er, as if White folks say that, they are putting a damn wall between themselves and Black people. At least that’s what the Black people I listen to say, and I defer to the opinions of Black people on many things.

…That being said, I do not blame Bungie, Halo, or even really Microsoft for creating this culture. This culture began in the toxic lobbies of oodles of PC games, particular shooters, and can be seen throughout years of vile chatlogs of titles like Let’s League of Leggings, Defense of the Ancients T.W.O., and any game where players can talk smack to one another. However, it is also wrong to blame any preceding game for this culture, as it existed long before video games were a thing.

Bigotry of all shades has always been a core and popular part of the American zeitgeist, and bigotry is a fundamental principle of America. Past, present, and, unfortunately, future tense. However, the forces that created Xbox Live gave a place for this cultural sickness to grow and percolate uncritically with no moderation and no social stigma.

Dudes were just calling 10-year-old Black kids the k-slur and talk about throwing them into a gas chamber and there were literally zero consequences. Actually, there were. They got laughs. They got affirmation. But even if they did get shit, nobody knew their real name, their face, or where they lived. It was bigotry with absolutely zero negative consequences. And when a young boy is exposed to this, after having gotten an Xbox to be the cool kid in middle school, this has a good chance of fucking them for life.

The forced behind Halo did not start the fire that would lead to the normalization of extremist rhetoric, the ongoing rollback of civil rights, mundanity of genocide, and everything. But without Halo, we would not have had GamerGate. And without GamerGate, Donald Trump would not have become president once, let alone twice. How do I know this? I was there, dude, seeing the culture change in real time. I was listening to out and proud Nazis, slurping up the misinformation propaganda about “ethics in games journalism” like the dumbass White boy I was.

What was I going on about? Right, why Halo is important!

Bungie had made their mark with Halo, made Xbox a core pillar of gaming through the appeal of these games alone, further popularized console FPSes, popularized online multiplayer FPSes for consoles, and popularized calling children slurs online as a form of social/cultural indoctrination. Many modern Halo fans like to ignore this, focusing on the campaigns, but when gauging the true cultural impact of Halo, you need to look at the multiplayer first and foremost. You need to acknowledge that, just like every American, bigotry is your legacy. It is your CULTURE. You were born in this shit, and carry it in the most reptilian layer of your dick.

Having made this mark on society, Bungie then left the Halo series behind, at the wayside to be [REDACTED] by Halo Studios née 343 Industries. Their next venture had them partner with Activision Blizzard on Destiny (2014), which was initially marketed as a generation defining title. It was a title used to introduce people into a new console generation. A title that would not be a single entry, but a platform, a stage for a living growing online world that would last for a decade. It was to be forged through a partnership between a publisher with nigh unlimited resources and a developer who only had hits, no misses. …Oni (2001) was good, shaddup.

The hype around Destiny (2014) was something else, and lasted a full year and a half. People expected something that would set a standard that other games would follow, and deliver the coveted and desired(?) next gen experience. It was a game that blended FPP with RPG. A game that blended sci-fi with fantasy. An MMO for consoles that could be played solo. A game that was everything and anything, born from pure imagination, with a half a billion dollar budget behind it. It would be what Halo was in 2001, if not bigger, launching on every major platform. …It was just kind of okay.

While not bad, Destiny was considered one of the great disappointments of its year of release, and continued to have this unfortunate reputation as a game that did not reach its true potential. They tried to improve it, delivering updates like The Taken King that delivered compelling narratives and assorted mechanical improvements, but it was not the critical darling that it was poised to be. It was not even nominated for the Geoff Keighley awards show for GOTY. It had a damn 76 on Metacritic.

However, Destiny did succeed in one sense. It got a LOT of players. Millions upon millions of people flocked to the game, drawn in by the prospect of playing this MMO-lite shooter with their friends, getting loot, and exploring its great big world with dope gunplay. This was back when I listened to gaming podcasts— before podcast was spoken like a slur— and I was surprised by how many people referenced going back to Destiny as a filler game. It was a game to play when they did not have much else to play at the moment. It was the game they played with while catching up with their friends each week. And looking back… Destiny was the first big console live service.

Now, online only multiplayer games had been a thing for a while at this point— big ups to MAG (2010). However, the structure of Destiny, its progression system, its routine expansions, it was a live service before games as a service became a widely known term. Most multiplayer games at the time, at least for consoles, might have gotten updates, new maps, or cosmetics, or a prestige system. But what Destiny was doing, its ability to blend single player and multiplayer gameplay, it was new to a lot of people, and as a Bungie title, oodles of devs were looking intently, taking notes, and bringing them back to get funding from publishers. People might not have loved Destiny, but they still played it, still went back to it, and it was still huge during the messy first two years of wiggle room between the PS3 and PS4 generation.

This hugeness only expanded as Bungie decided to bunk their plans for Destiny to last for the next decade as they released Destiny 2, or D2, much to the chagrin of all Diablo II fans. Now, this seemed like a calculated business move, to make people who invested in this game to buy a new title, but it was necessary. Bungie’s technical foundation for Destiny (2014) was bad. Like, hot dog boiled in dog urine levels of bad. They had to redo things, had to reimagine a lot of systems, and Activision also wanted another windfall of cash, so with Activision dictating their actions, Bungie pressed on, making Destiny 2, treating it as Destiny: The Better Version, and garnered even greater success. It was still not a critical darling, but it was no longer the “that wizard came from the moon” game.

With Destiny 2, they further normalized the idea of live services, interconnected game worlds that depend on central servers, and delivered a whole sloshing wet bucket of news-worthy events in the following years. In 2019, Bungie broke up with Activision, becoming the sole owners of the Destiny IP. In 2020, Bungie began the process of vaulting away entire environments and storyline of their game due to behind-the-scene changes to how environments were made, effectively gating off parts of the game from ever being played again. In 2021, Bungie was the subject of an exposé illustrating their toxic workplace culture, which was hardly a surprise. Bungie has always been a studio where crunch was normalized, misogyny was expected, and senior developers were allowed to behave like jackasses just because they did something impressive a few years ago.

Then in 2022, Bungie was bought by PlayStation for a brisk $3.6 billion US dollars. Around this time, Bungie management, jet-jacked by the booming rise of gaming during The Pandemic Years, decided to used Bungie’s expertise to launch a line of live services. It went badly, and part of that is because this entire acquisition was built upon lies by Bungie’s leadership. They lied, misled, and tricked Sony out of money, fabricating projects, metrics, and results in order to get a higher payday.

Once the ink was dry and the deal was done, they canceled a swarm of projects and laid off half their workforce. This is a cruel, callous, and downright immoral action that ate up whatever lingering goodwill the series had and, following the well received 2024 Destiny 2 expansion, The Final Shape, Destiny 2‘s player base began bleeding out. They saw that Bungie had changed, that the people leading the ship were trying to scrap it for parts, and that the people who made the game they spent years playing were being thrown away.

There’s the decision to reboot a single-player story-driven shooter, Marathon, as an online only extraction shooter. The fact that the Marathon reboot had plagiarized artwork. The other plagiarism that people spotted across Destiny 2. Various changes that caused people to drop, fall back in love with, and drop Destiny 2 again ad Bungie kept changing crap. Hell, Bungie’s goodwill, which was the main thing Sony was buying when they bought the studio, has gotten so bad that Sony took a nearly billion dollar impairment loss on their investment. Not because Sony did something wrong, though, rest assured, they did, but because Bungie kept fucking up.

Bungie’s management lied, they destroyed hundreds of people’s lives, and caused irreparable damage to something that was built up over the span of decades by thousands of people. We know who is responsible for this, their names are public, but they will face zero consequences. In fact, they have already walked away with tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars. They now have generational wealth and can spend all their time building a collection of dozens and dozens of vintage cars. God, fuck Pete Parsons. I hope he drives one of his fucking cars off a cliff and spends the rest of his days brain-dead and unable to move.

Akumako: “Natalie!“

What? I fantasize about the deaths of evil people every day of my fucking life. It brings me JOY! It is HEALTHY.

While not the true originator of any of these ideas or concepts, I hold Bungie, the corporate entity, responsible for perpetuating so many of the things wrong with video games. They facilitated a cesspool that has allowed everything wrong with gamer culture to flourish without criticism or culpability. They were, before Fortnite became Fortnite, the game that sold players, studios, and publishers on the destructive self-consuming abscess that is live services. As a studio, they were built on crunch, thrived on abuse, and the very same people who fostered this culture, set it from the top, walked away like a bunch of capitalists while the people who made the damn games, were disposed of.

I HATE Bungie for what they did. I can respect their games as works of art, as they are. Halo is Halo, period. I have heard too many good specific things about Destiny to ever write it off completely. I have eyes so I can see the beauty of its art design. I have heard so many sob stories about Destiny 2 and its community to be there for people during dark times that I consider it a cliché narrative. And I am sure that NuMarathon has instances of game designerly mastery strewn throughout. As an outsider to Bungie, as someone who knows that people get things done and leaders fuck things up, I just view this as a corporate mandated defeat. The freedom of the remaining creatives has been stifled and, due to corporate failures, development on this project is not allowed to continue.

Destiny 2 will no longer see any content updates. While this will be paired with a massive update, going live on June 9, 2026, that will mark the end of things for the title beyond various technical fixes. It is not being preserved, nor is it going offline, it will remain online and playable for the foreseeable future, with its original campaign still locked away in the content vault. It, like many live services before it, is going into maintenance mode while the remaining devs will be partitioned to new live service projects. Presumably Destiny 3, which may or may not be announced at the upcoming State of Play or the Geoff Keighley’s.

God, I can never remember how to spell that man’s surname. Let me just add a substitution rule to fix that…

Now, you might expect me to berate this or that thing, and talk about how you should not engage with Destiny 3, but… no, it doesn’t quite work that way. The profits of Destiny are just going to Sony, and while I do not like Sony— they murdered Japan Studio, the second-greatest game developer of all time— they are not a malicious corporation. They’re just a sorta dumb one. As Bungie was sold, its leadership lost more and more power, and after that BILLION DOLLAR IMPAIRMENT, you bet your stank-ass that they are going to be forced to do whatever Sony wants.

Sony, presumably, wants a new Destiny. People, searching for joy, for connection, and a way to bond with friends during hard times, probably want another Destiny. And with the studio entering this new era, with many of the bad men (90% of the time, it is men) having left, I just hope that they can deliver a good game that doesn’t hurt my beloved medium. Because the more time goes on, the more convinced I become that video games played a significant role in the current hellscape us Americans are currently living through. Not because of the games themselves, but the culture they allowed to fester.

Also, to everybody who is saying that Destiny 2 is “dead,” congratulations, you don’t know what words mean. You have completely fallen for the wrongful idea that games are only “alive” when they are “live” or culturally relevant. Games are only DEAD when they are literally unplayable without the use of a server emulator.

This seems so damn obvious to me. When a TV show you’re watching ends, does that mean it’s dead? No, you numb-nuts! You absolute bozos. Dead means dead.

I swear, people just keep getting dumber with language every year nowadays…

Akumako: “Oi! Shut your whore mouth, you ace fuck! I got some fresh news, hot off the presses! Destiny 3 is NOT in active development, per Jason Schreier‬.”

…Oh. Fuck.

Akumako: “And Sony is planning another wave of layoffs.”

…It’s dead, Jim.

Akumako: “Just because I ate Jim does not mean I am Jim.”

No, that… if layoffs are on the menu, Destiny 3 is not on the cards, Destiny 2 is in maintenance mode, then all they have is Marathon, which is just doing alright, then I think there’s a good chance that Sony, four years after buying Bungie, is planning on shutting them down. And if Bungie is shut down then, well, Destiny is over. Stick a fork in ’em, they’re done, cooked.

…And wouldn’t that just be the saddest, most pathetic, most appropriate ending for a studio that pioneered the live service genre? For their company to be squashed, their name to be erased, and for the last 20 years of their work to be wiped away, never to be played outside of “illegal” replications?

I could see it happening…

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Progress Report 2026-05-24

Here’s a glimpse at how I’m currently editing novels, by listening to a text-to-speech program read them to me while I carefully read them with the assistance of a grammar checker, because I make oodles of mistakes! Big ups to Obsidian, LanguageTool, and Balabolka. This is my first time actually using them to edit a novel, and it’s been a good time so far. A bit jank, but it’s better than just giving my writing over to Google by using Google Docs.

2026-05-17: Wrapped up the Air Twister review with an extra 2,700 words. Then I edited the Harmony of Dissonance review and got this fat fish ret-2-go. Then I edited the Air Twister review but did not grab the images as I did not feel like doing it tonight.

2026-05-18: Wrote 1,400 word Sony bit. Wrote 2,300 words for the preamble before realizing I REALLY ought to start work on VD2.0. So I did that and edited the first of 15 chapters, which was 13,000 words.

2026-05-19: Today I was not working until the evening, so I hunkered down on VD2.0 Act 3. I did two chapters, getting right before the behemoth that is the July 4th chapter. I got 20,900 words into the July 4th chapter. Hopefully that will be the biggest chapter I’ll ever— no, the detective chapter will be bigger. Why did I edit over 54,000 words today? Because I barely had any work and I already took care of my other reviews. Also, I just want to get this crap out the door and want to save the headers for last. I do not like flip-flopping between editing and art production. It’s not fun for me! Also also, I just edited a novel’s worth of shit in a single day. Dafuq is going on with me? My personal best was like 30,000 words! Have I just gotten better at editing, or did I do a crummy job? I dunno! Not doing a second pass. Bonk that ish!

2026-05-20: Wrote 850 words for the Embracer bit. Resumed the great editing, but things went slower. I guess I just made more mistakes this time! Edited about 5,400 words for VD2.0 Act 3 CH 7-04, edited all of CH 7-05 (11,800 words). Realized I made a mistake and needed to rewrite something for 7-06. A continuity flub. Damn me and my non-linear writing style!

2026-05-21: Somehow, the Destiny 2 bit was 3,200 words. Edited this fat hawg. Decided I was sick of looking at my own words and took the night off. I’ll do like two chapters tomorrow, buttercup with cheese.

2026-05-22: My left hand got hurt from pressing down on the left trigger too much while playing video games last night. Drats! No work, but the sprinkler replacement guys showed up to check that our sprinklers functioned, so that was good. Edited two more chapters, 7-06 and 7-07, that’s 34,600 words, while making the executive decision to replace a fictional location Räretzung, with its real life reference point, Hallstatt, as making up ONE fake location for a travel chapter seems dumb.

2026-05-23: I blazed past the halfway point in my great big editing, knocking out 30,000 words with the completion of chapters 7-08 and 7-09. Woo-hoo! At this rate, I’ll be able to be DONE with the editing by May 31st. Yay! Just in time for S3 2026! ♫Forever we can make it~♫ Also, I tried out a game I was recommended, a big TSF game, and wrote 2,000 words on why it pissed me off to high heaven. Look forward to that in next week’s Rundown!

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

Current Word Count: 248,721

Estimated Word Count: 248,500

Words Edited: 142,301

Total Segments: 29

Segments Outlined: 29

Segments Drafted: 29

Segments Edited: 18

Header Images Made: 0

Days Until Deadline: 38

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Header image is a modified screen cap of this video of the Costco I visited this past Sunday. I was too busy shopping in a busy store to try snapping pics.