Rundown (6/21/2026) Money on My Mind (Re;Finance Ver.)

This Week’s Topics:

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Money on My Mind (Re;Finance Ver.)

So, you know what I’m thinking about a lot nowadays? Money!

Now, I don’t like talking about money these days as so much of the world is being thrown into effective poverty, functioning as a wage slaves, and struggling to get by, much less accumulate capital. I’m not. I’m doing pretty alright financially, as I own a condo unit and live with my mother, we both make over $70,000 a year, and are able to live in comfort. We’re far from rich, comfortably in the upper half of the financial range, yet that doesn’t mean we don’t think about money all the time.

I buried the lead in my progress logs at the end of these Rundowns, but earlier this month I refinanced my home so that I could go down from an aggressive 7.5% interest rate on a 30 year mortgage to a far slimmer 5.5% mortgage rate on a 15 year mortgage. This might seem wild, but it actually is resulting in me paying roughly $400 less a month for mortgage payments— after hocking over $6,000 in prepaid property taxes and nearly $4,000 in refinancing costs. But the math ultimately works out in the long-run.

You might be wondering why I am doing this, in case the lower monthly burn wasn’t reason enough, and I have two key reasons. Reason one is that I hate having debt and want to make it go away as quickly as possible. In fact, I hate it so much that I am hoping to pay off my mortgage several years earlier, in 2030 or 2031 if possible. Reason two is that I do not trust the world to be stable enough for me to invest my money into anything other than my home.

This is something that has been plaguing my financial decision-making ever since DOGE, the tariffs, the establishment of what I’m just going to call fascism at this point, and the financial market’s irrationality. I bailed out of my stocks after getting burned by the dip in April 2025, tried to reinvest in gold and foreign currencies, because I can no longer fully trust the US dollar, and watched as the market defies reason. Seriously, the market remained giddy even as the US barreled into a war they had no chance of winning, and unanimously lost, gaining nothing but a bunch of dead Iranians and a depleted munitions reserve.

Because of the state of the US economy, of the world, and the sheer irrationality of financial markets, I am no longer concerned about accruing liquid capital. I tried, and I am too damn logical for this shit. As such, I’m just throwing money into my debts rather than my savings, because that’s personal finance 101 type stuff for a reason.

With my debts in order, now all I need to do is maintain things. Keep making monthly payments, with additional payments to hit my goal, and try to avoid spending too much on frivolous things.

Akumako: “How much have you spent on video games this year, Nat?”

$910.96, to the penny.

Akumako: “BOZO! The hell did you even get for that kinda skrill?”

BUCKETS. …80 to 90 or so games.

Akumako: “Have you played ANY of them yet?”

Uh, Vampire Crawlers. That one was pretty fun.

Akumako: “How much free cash do you even HAVE most months?”

After Patreon, retirement, taxes, mortgage, and association dues? Roughly $1,500.

Akumako: “…Don’t you have to pay for food and utilities and crap?”

My mother pays for that, I pay the property taxes and gas and water through the association dues. And, you know, for the place, as I own it.

Akumako: “Do I even want to ask what your net worth is?”

Like $50k.

Akumako: “Oh. That’s less than I thought—”

AFTER taking my mortgage into account, and NOT counting the value of the property.

Akumako: “…Bitch, for 31, you’re prolly in the top twenty percent.”

Oh, fo’ sho. I made over $7,000 from investments ALONE this year. But that don’t mean nuthin’. You are not rich unless you are in the top ten percentage, and I’m not gonna get there, not likely. Though, I am primo defo benefitting from that eKonomy.

Akumako: “Really, K-shaped economy means ekonomy? Cassie’s probably going to read this and get surprised you used kon like that.”

Anyhow, I think I’ve beaten this topic into the ground, and don’t care to divulge any further details about my personal finances. It’s time for a super small Rundown, because I am tired and busy working on a new project!

I Researched the Game Boy Advance Library
(It Really Is as Bad as They Say It Is…)

I was wrong~!

So, my current objective is making headway in my previously hyped up Natalie Rambles About Remasters, Remakes, and Re-Whatevers. It’s a very long and complicated process that I am making longer by going at it from a historical angle, as I want to push against the idea that this glutton of re-whatevers is a modern thing as, per my view of the data and release timelines, it really isn’t. It was billowing in the PS3 era, then went bananas in the PS4 era, because IT HAD TO.

However, rather than talk about that, I had a discovery that I just NEEDED to share with people, but would not fit in the more narrow focus of a Ramble. Gosh, that sounds so incredibly silly.

For the past 25 years, the GBA has been routinely dogged on by gaming enthusiasts who viewed the system as nothing but a bunch of Super Nintendo re-whatevers. I’ve pushed back toward this before, but in doing research for this article, I was faced with the fact that… no, I was wrong. The GBA was not a true bastion of quality games, and its library is not only home to a considerable amount of older titles, but it’s home to some of the lowest original game rate of any successful console.

I tried finding a list of this, but I eventually decided to do this myself, going through the Game Boy Advance’s North American lineup of 949 games, per Wikipedia to tag re-whatevers, original games, and other nebulous categories. I wanted to do the entire library, but I did not want to research what over 250 Japanese exclusive games were. Admittedly, I did not fully research every title, I just whipped these numbers up on four hours of research and tagging. However, I am reasonably confident that these figures are materially correct, so here are some GBA library facts:

  • 87 games were re-whatevers of titles previously released on another platform, including glorified ports of Super Nintendo games, full remakes, and other odd situations
  • 12 games were direct reissues of NES games, just with screen crunch as an added feature
  • 20 games were compilations of older titles with no significant changes
  • 93 games were sports games, including both licensed and general titles— yes, the GBA really did have that many sports games.
  • 431 games were licensed titles related to some broader properly, ranging from a TV show, movie, toy line, board game, or even a car brand
  • 121 games were handheld spin-off tie-ins related to a larger PC or console title, often releases simultaneously with a console game
  • 10 games were just different versions of original games, because it feels like double-dipping to count them normally
  • And only 175 games, less than 20% of the library, were original standalone games, not related to any other category

This… only supports claims that the GBA wasn’t a major console because… Jesus Christ those numbers are dire.

The 175 count would not be terrible… though the library of original titles also has a lot of middling titles thrown into it, particularly racing games of all things, and obviously puzzle games. Looking around, I’d say that only about 100 of these original games are maybe worthwhile, speaking broadly and knowingly including all 10 Yu-Gi-Oh games for the platform, the 11 Mega Man games, along with all 4 Froggers.

Even considering the system only had four years of consistent support, as many developers were quick to jump ship to the Nintendo DS, this is NOT a lot of support for original games for a system that sold 80 million units. This is the sort of discovery that makes me want to go through a console’s library to gauge how many better-than-mediocre games are on a system to determine what the averages are, how many good games a system actually had, and maybe wind up forming some greater list. However, this process alone took up too much of my time, and I know even doing something similar for the GameCube or what have you would take roughly the same time, and the PS2… I don’t even want to think about that!

Anyway, that’s my discovery. I had to put it SOMEWHERE, and here seemed more appropriate than an article about re-whatevers.

Next up: Hell. We are in Hell!

Xbox Hits Reset and Plans A New Wave of Layoffs
(Compulsion Games, Ninja Theory, and Double Fine are in Danger)

After all the layoffs plaguing the industry, affecting over a third of the US games industry, I have become desensitized to the sight, reality, and weight of these constant layoffs. It’s always the same shit. Greedy capitalist owners and managers use cheap money to build up a studio, profit off of the labor of others, and wind up giving themselves a lion’s share of the revenue through bonus packages. This siphons wealth from the studio, forces developers to live paycheck to paycheck, often choosing a smaller salary so they can make video games, the objectively coolest thing ever.

Even mind-blowing success will not save you, as extracting wealth is the name of the game, and employees are not assets, but expenses. This capitalist exploitation is so pervasive in the US and its wannabe imitators that it’s easy to view the US not as a goods economy, not as a service economy, but a capitalist economic opportunity zone. It is rapidly becoming, or already is, a place where the true citizens are the wealthy and the corporations. Regular people are not even humans, just the gristle that keeps the gears churning. If they starve, become homeless, or just flat out die, that’s just the system working as intended.

Humans are not humans under this system. The inhuman are humans. This IS the law, this IS the government, this IS what the powerful want. And given how much they’ve ransacked the world, I think the only course of action is to take it back, tell them no, and start treating them the way they treat us. …Just without all the subtleties and slowness of large systems, for all it takes is the power of one to make seismic shifts. The elite know this, but what they don’t want you to know is that their power can be taken from them in a literal second.

…Okay, that’s enough thinly veiled murmurings of a misanthrope, let’s get onto the main story. The buzz of the industry the past week has been how Xbox plans on hitting reset per a leaked memo and through the act of dedicated journalists, we know that this means either layoffs or closures.

The layoffs are expected company-wide. Meanwhile, the key shutdown targets are Compulsion Games (We Happy Few, South of Midnight), Ninja Theory (Hellblade, Enslaved), and Double Fine (Psychonauts, Keeper). All of these are developers Microsoft acquired during their 2018 acquisition blitz, all are strappy reasonable scale developers who have a decent history behind them, and all produce quality games that bolster up any library.

Or, in other words, they made the exact type of games that Xbox has lacked since the early Xbox 360 era. However, companies seem to think that you need to be focused, and cannot do multiple things at multiple scales. When… no, you can, it just requires running a company responsibly and knowing what you are doing. It requires management doing its job, it requires leaders who know how to lead and understand how things work. Alas, if you are accountable to money-focused shareholders and executives who want things explained to them like they’re 12, then I guess this is just too hard and that’s so sad for you.

This is all a partial justification for how I want Microsoft, as a company, to suffer, to decline, and for the Xbox division to become such a mess, such an utter failure of management, that Microsoft throws it away in abject shame. I do not want the company to have a great turnaround. I have no faith that such a thing can happen when the foundation is so deeply rotten. Leadership has been pivoting every two or so years, leaving it utterly directionless and incapable of long-term thinking. It is so bad that… everybody under their umbrella would be better off left out in the rain. I’d rather have a person/company to fall through their own failures than for them/it to be stabbed in the back by their/its master.

As of writing, we currently do not know what the future holds for these Xbox studios, but I am expecting the loss of thousands of jobs, something far worse than the loss of 1,900 jobs back in early 2024. Ideally, the studios Microsoft plans on closing could be spun off and left to live, but if history is any indication, the unaccountable destruction of community and culture will continue.

The fact they are doing this a week or so after announcing Ninja Theory’s next game, Senua, is an excellent example of a truism that I have come to learn about any Microsoft published title. You cannot trust that the game exists until it’s out. They manufacture hype based on the ideas of games, based on curated trailers, then cancel them, often discarding centuries of labor in the process.

People make games, companies destroy them to secure pretty financials, and anybody who espouses about how they need to do this for business reasons can promptly fuck off. Just because capitalism demands that things work a certain way is not a defense. Capitalism is a deeply flawed system that demands a systemic underclass, poverty, slavery, and the abuse of children, and accordingly, it should be criticized at every point, for a better world can be created. Choosing to not accept that is choosing to allow the whims of capital to do as they please, and is expressing complicity with a system designed to hurt the many, enrich the few, and systematically murder the weakest people around.

The future will either be fascist or communist, so pick a side now and stick to it.

Unreal Engine 6 Will Be A Slop Machine
(Divest From Big Tech. NOW!)

I previously expressed sheer befuddlement at what Epic Tencent Games could be cooking with Unreal Engine 6, announced less than five years after the release of Unreal 5, and who could blame me? They did not divulge any details, but they did this past week, hosting a big floppy event, that I did not watch, and releasing a post about their plans for Unreal 6. Per this write-up, it sounds pretty dreadful.

In short, their goal is to make Unreal into a more homogenized and limited experience and for people to rely more on templates and shared code they buy from the marketplace. They want Unreal and Fortnite content creation to be interlinked. They want it so that if you are using Unreal, you are making things that can be shipped to Fortnite as user-generated content, and what you are doing is, in some way, modeled after the precise tools that Epic wants to use for Fortnite going forward.

This move is further complicated through a pivot to a new programming framework they call Verse. I’m a Computer Science dropout (meaning I nearly failed the class), so some of the jargon is lost on me, but I think I get the gist. Epic wants to change the way people code, features are added, and the way people make games. To which I have to ask: why? If people think something is bad, then altering it in small and smart ways is usually the best option to make a tool more usable. Tech has not changed enough over the past few years to warrant a radical reinvention.

Well, because they want it to work better for their AI crap, integrating it into the engine at a core level and… how about no? Read the room, dude, gamers in the west do not want to play things that were generated by AI. AI is polluting their town with run-off, chemicals, and sickening noise. AI is making their friends and family go insane as it feeds them delusions and affirms their most insane ideas for the sake of user retention. AI is threatening to destroy careers and industry, leaving people destitute and unable to sustain themselves on a widespread level the likes of which we have not seen since the 1930s.

If you are going to throw AI into people’s face, they’ll tell you to go fuck yourself.Plus, if I am understanding how this engine works… then isn’t this just a way for people to steal the code of other people’s games? If the AI is integrated into the engine, looking over code, then wouldn’t it share the relevant chunks of code with other developers? I am all for distributing the means of production and asset/code reuse, but I also believe in this foreign concept— I think it may be French— called consent. Oh, but billionaire Tim Sweeney doesn’t know anything about that now, does he? He’s more than happy to rob people of their jobs, without even asking, hoping that a severance plan is good enough. Which… is something, but still, fuck you, dude.

I can barely believe how detached this corporate article is, just read some of this crap: “Our goal for UE6 is to greatly reduce the tedious work in authoring content to leave more time for creative exploration, and increase the amount of iterations a team can make to polish their content.” Anybody who says something like this has not actually worked a real job in years or does not understand what real work is. Yes, there are always things to be automated, there are things that are more procedural. However, if you don’t know how a game works, if your programmers don’t know what they are doing, it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to explore things creatively. Bad code makes iterations harder, it may make polish impossible! If your game is coded with garbage, then you’ll need to rip it apart and build it properly to get it to work.

Do I think AI can help with coding? Sure, AI can help with anything in select instances. But AI is also uniquely stupid, and nothing it says should be taken without verifying it, as we have seen time, and time, again. Software, in general, has been taking a hit due to the belief that skills, planning, and making things to last are outdated concepts. The more you pivot to this automation, to this engine trying to shove everything into the same template, you not only get a worse game on a technical level, you get a worse game on every level.

A good game engine should actually let someone make whatever they want, however they want, with tools that are understood across an industry. And if you are not going to do that with Unreal then, well, I guess that’s just another reason for people to look for something else.

…If only this industry wasn’t a damn duopoly. God do I hope Godot keeps building up its capabilities. The future needs to be open source…

Progress Report 2026-06-21

I am in the writing mines, so have the Wisconsin Tax Cow!

2026-06-14: Watched the Super Mario Galaxy Movie with friends, and I thought it was great. It was jam-packed with ideas, with setpieces, and was a sugary Mario filled kitbash of the first six Star Wars movies! Was it original? No. Was it a bunch of scene ideas and setpieces stitched together into like three minute chunks? Yeah. Was it a damn good time? YEAH! Then watched The Fifth Element (1997), which is a movie that should be weirder and more spectacular than it is, but feels like there were suits with bland guns ready to fire every other minute. You can tell that the creative staff wanted to make something highly ambitious and special, but they were told no. I think I wrote 3,500 words or something for my next Ramble. It’s going to need to be two parts at this point.

2026-06-15: Okay, good, about 4,500 words, getting up to the PSP era.

2026-06-16: Only about 2,800 words written for the Re-Whatever Ramble today, because of all this darn spreadsheeting research. I hate how slow this is going! Also, played some Halo for research, just to confirm that the art direction changes with the remaster were THAT BAD.

2026-06-17: Wrote like 3,800 words for the Re-Whatever Ramble. Wrote basically 2,300 words between the preamble, the Unreal 6 bit, and the Xbox bit, waiting until news drops to finish things off.

2026-06-18: Edited this Rundown. Got distracted by other crap, studying, Steam Next Fest demos, only wrote something like 2,000 words for the Re-Whatever Rambles

2026-06-19: Wrote 5,500 words for the Re-Whatever Ramble, wrapping up the history section FINALLY, so now I get to write a bunch of focused rambly mini essays and then stitch them together! Yay! Yay! Yay! Yay!

2026-06-20: I think I wrote like 7,000 words for the Re-Whatever Ramble. Which is good considering it was chore day and I kept chatting with Missy and Cassie for a decent while. Keeping track of my word counts for this is a MESS, as I am moving segments around like nuts, half writing them, rewriting them, and just copying others that I wrote months ago and need to subtract. Point is, I can see the ending! If I finish my draft tomorrow, I will be SO HAPPY!

Natalie.TF 2026 Progress Report

  • 2026-07-01: Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp Act 3: Worldly Wonders – DONE
  • 2026-07-01: Natalie Rambles About the History of Remasters, Remakes, and Re-Whatevers
  • 2026-07-08: Natalie Rambles About the Modern Reality of Remasters, Remakes, and Re-Whatevers
  • 2026-07-15: Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension Review
  • 2026-07-22: Help! I’m Turning into a Mermaid! Review
  • 2026-07-29: Class of ’09 – Puzzle Challenge Review
  • 2026-08-04: Natsumi Legacy Route – Student Transfer Scenario Review
  • 2026-08-06: Maria Mania Legacy Route – Student Transfer Scenario Review
  • 2026-08-12: Natalie Rambles About Monkey Man
  • 2026-08-??: Beast of Reincarnation Review
  • 2026-09-??: TSF Series #019: A Change of Flesh
  • 2026-??-??: re:Dreamer Review #6
  • 2026-??-??: Coffee Buns Review (TSF Game)
  • 2026-??-??: Fate Stay Night Remastered Review (Shiba & Rain Request)
  • 2026-??-??: A Mirror’s Curse Review (TSF Game)
  • 2026-??-??: Thread – A Tale of Identity, Monsters, and College Review (TSF Game)
  • 2026-??-??: TSF Showcase 2026-01: Chronicstuss (Ouran Request)
  • 2026-??-??: Natalie Rambles About Re-Whatevers
  • 2026-11-18: TSF Series #020: Chateau del Bitz
  • 2026-12-29: Natalie Rambles About 2026
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