Rundown (8/16/2026) A VD Captions Retrospective

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: A VD Captions Retrospective
• Natalie Muses About Cloud Gaming (It’s Viability Is Limited, and I Hate It)
• The Segregation of Sex (Team Puritan Vs. Team Goon)
• Epic Sells ArtStation and Sketchfab (Epic Crumbles! My Favorite!)
• Pokémon Bank is Ending Service February 27, 2027 (End of a Connected Era)

---

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
A VD Captions Retrospective

So, I’ve been thinking about my past creative ventures after releasing my big old Monkey Man Ramble two weeks ago, and think that I’ve covered just about everything that I’ve ever made, and finished, on Natalie.TF in some way. However, there is one exception. Something I’ve mentioned in the past, but never given much explicit attention to beyond off-handed mentions, and that is my old TG caption site, VD Captions.

TG captions have been a… well, maybe not love of mine, but a routine pleasure that I had enjoyed since 2009 or so. Generally speaking, they are a picture of a woman on the left or top with a story on the right or bottom. The picture is lifted from any source— fan art, movie, TV show, image search— reappropriated and recontextualized to tell a short-form TSF narrative. Most of these narratives follow a set cliché and format for their storytelling, often designed around a series of tags. Though, there are plenty of creators who aspire to greater, and weirder, heights with the narratives they deliver. There’s not really a word count limitation, but when it goes past, I don’t know, 1,000 words… it’s no longer a caption, it’s just a short story with a cover image. Or, on the other extreme, they could just be a single sentence, reframing existing art/photos with a new context, like what you used to find on TG Caps.

Again, this is a general definition. There are artists who make their own illustrations for their captions, there are those who commission art and apply captions they write, there are TG captions of women becoming men, and even TG captions that involve F2F transformations. They’re not TG captions by definition at that point, but I don’t make the rules! But cite my definition of TSF, and the above general rule should apply to 90% of TG captions out there.

TG captions are fast, cheap, easy, and can get out an interesting/novel story concept in a small number of words with an accompanying image. They are ways for creatives to set forth an idea and be done with it, but I would be disingenuous if I pretended they aren’t primarily masturbatory aids. They are as legitimate a form of storytelling as any newfangled hoopla, but most of these are made to give people a quick idea to spur on a quick wank. …Though I’m admittedly saying that as someone with plenty of experience.

To eschew any subtlety, I was working my dick like a damn lizard to TG captions back from 2009 to 2014— my teenage years— pilfering through World of TG and various BlogSpots for some hot pics and story concepts. Every night, I was bouncing between them, DeviantArt, and Writing.com for some HOT MILK before going beddy-bye.

Come 2015, I started entering a weird gender spot. After being into TSF stuff for going on seven years and exiting my teens, I was seriously reflecting who I wanted to be and reassessing my relationship to TSF. Which is a coy way of saying I was thinking I might be trans and… no shit, Sherlock. I was dense. Like, I had to write a college research paper on transgender workplace rights in 2014, before I would accept that I was trans.

Unfortunately, transitioning wasn’t in the cards at the time, as my family was going through some private matters, so I spent much of 2015 being dysphoric instead. I wrote a novel full of gender venting wish fulfillment. I started voice training because I was tired of having such a deep voice, going so far as to use my femme voice as my de facto voice. And I decided that my relationship with TSF needed to change, as I was under the mindset of, if you are trans, you shouldn’t be making TSF art. Which, in 2026, seems like a deranged position to have, but things were different back then and many TSF creators quit after they started their transition. The big one was Gemma Torrellas, aka TheTGArtist. She delivered absolute peak, transitioned, and burned it all down. …I guess Gooseworx also falls into that category, but she left her old DeviantArt up. Thanks, Goodwin!

During the summer of 2015, I was waiting for the right time to start my transition, just kind of milling through life at my downtown office job. Despite my years of devotion, I was planning on cutting off my relationship with TSF stuff after it played such a formative role in my adolescence. So, to mark my end with the subject matter, I decided that I would make a contribution, a thank you gift, to the vast field of TSF materials by doing something I’ve been musing over for years. I made my own dang TG caption site, dubbed VD Captions, as a reference to my established characters Vincent Dawn and Verde Dusk, from Verde’s Doohickey.

I also created a new alias with the moniker of The Enigmatic VD— which is probably the best screen name I ever made— rather than putting it under the Electric Nigma (get it, as in enigma, not the other thing) handle I was using at the time.

Why did I do this? Well, the reason is quite simple. I was ashamed of my TSF fixation at the time and did not want to platform it too much, as I thought it was dirty, icky, a fetish, and not something to be discussed about on this site. Sure, I mentioned Press-Switch, but I downplayed what it was and what it did. Sure, I wrote TSF novels and novellas, but I did not host them on the site back then. Sure, I reviewed Student Transfer, and X-Change Alternative, but I did so through the objective infallible eye of a critical blogger.

…Basically, I was just a coward who did not have the confidence to voice their own likes and opinions. And, well, I still am IRL, hence why I tend to try to lead such a bland life in meatspace. But I also did not really want to hide it, so I made it blooming obvious that VD Captions was just another version of Natalie.TF. It used the same themes, an inverted color scheme with the exact same colors, and both of the operators were bloody enigmas using anime girl avatars. …Assuming that Graphite Knight’s genderfluid character Skye and whatever cutie ONATaRT drew counted as anime girls.

Back to VD Captions, there was a slight problem with this plan, just a teensy little conceptual hurdle. I did not know how to make TG Captions, I don’t think there is a standard way, and that’s a beautiful part of the format/medium. Everybody does it a bit differently. They have different sources, different programs, but the end result is generally the same thing. Some might go into this field with some saucy lewds they want to affix a story into, but I went about this process like a freak.

First, I needed images, and found them using Google’s similar image feature circa 2015, putting in one image, and following the algorithm as it produced more and more images, allowing me to accumulate a collection of hundreds of, as Google deemed them, “busty candids.” Just photos of attractive young women going about the world, sourced from everywhere. Personal fashion blogs, bodybuilding and hip hop themed forums, or the site of a photographer selling his skills using, well, candid photos of busty women. This was a LONG process, one that took me untold hours, and resulted in a collection of hundreds of photos I could use.

…I could have also just gone to Danbooru or something, as those have always been a major pillar of the TG caption world. I liked Captions Café and Caption Corps, and I was a big fan of Divine Interventions by DivineBandit, who I’m 90% sure was trans. (I hope she’s living her best life.) However, uh, I did not feel comfortable taking illustrations drawn by various artists to recontextualize them into smut. Now, photos of real people? That was totes seiso. It’s their fault their photos were online!

So, I got the photos. What did I do with them then? Well, first, I decided to give them a numbering system, sort them based on race, and give them an iterative number. So White woman number 44 was W044.png. Anal, I know. Next, I needed to come up with ideas for stories, and to do so I created a tagging system that I would use to create these stories. Changes included body swap, bodysuit, fusion, possession, and transformation— the original elements and the literal hottest thing ever. There were 21 narrative categories, 21 causes, 21 relationships, and 4 differences that went along with these. Though, for site-wide tagging purposes, I just boiled it down to the change, context, and ethnicity. These were all the sorts of tagging systems you would see on a Swapping Grounds or CrestF, with the only difference being two wacko ideas I threw in for a lark. Drunk Wizard and Garbage Lady, who were basically homeless magic users who went out and triggered changes. A sort of “Spells R Us as a person” concept that felt in-line with the genre at the time.

All of this was written down in a spreadsheet I made— the most accountant-ass approach to anything— and that spreadsheet was made publicly available for those who wanted to veer behind the curtain. This spreadsheet included all text for the captions, statistics on how often tags were used, and has a crude idea generator to inspire me. Oh, and I also kept tabs on word counts, as I did not like longer captions back then, and did not want to write too much for a given caption. They started pretty short, with a floor of 71 words, but got longer as I went on, peaking at 154 words, which is still pretty darn short. Oh, and everything was double-spaced because I was told that’s how you should write by my Business & Technology teacher in summer school, and I just did not recognize that nobody else wrote that way.

I am oblivious to a FAULT.

Captions were conceptualized in batches, or waves as I called them, where I would grab some images I liked, figure out some concepts, and write them up, in groups of 30 to 60. After I had all the text prepped and edited, I would finally begin making the caption, which I did in Gimp, as it was the best option I knew of at the time. I would take the photo, crop it if need be, double its width, and fill in the other half with a color eyedropped from the main image, before applying Ubuntu black or white text to it. Very standard, very boring, with text scaled to fit the canvas. Or, in the case of my earlier ones, I could just pull an early TehSwitcher and left this big ass empty wad of color. Why not just add more story to this? I dunno! I added the caption I needed and did not want to futz with the format by making huge text or a narrow vertical space, as that sucks to read. I eventually fixed this problem by instituting a 100 word minimum and using better formatting tools, but that was too little too late.

To make the implicit part explicit, I was trying to run a damn TG caption factory here, and I succeeded in a sense. I produced nearly 400 captioned images, over 350 if you don’t count multi-parters, all within a period of less than a year. Not too shabby for someone writing a novel, running a video game blog, working, and going to school.

I should also talk about my release model, as it was deranged. The site went live on August 29, 2015, where it saw the release of 55 captions in a single day. September 3, 2015 saw 58 new captions. Then beginning on October 8, 2015, I started putting out two captions a day until November 20, 2015. The site then switched over to one caption a day until December 18, 2015 when the first delay happened. As I said at the time: “The past month has been hectic for me with school, work, and emotional circumstances, so I’m not quite done with my next set of captions.”

Gosh, what WAS I thinking with this formatting?

I returned on January 1, 2016 where daily captions resumed until January 23, 2016, when I killed the site. I released 69 captions that day, my entire remaining catalog through wave 6, and I announced that VD Captions is Dead. After writing nearly 300 captions in less than half a year, I was burnt out. Then in July and August 2016, shortly after I started HRT on June 23, 2016, I decided that I still had a few more ideas in the chamber, and began work on 37 final captions. These were released daily from July 1, 2015 to August 5, 2016, when I declared the site dead forever on August 7, 2016.

Over the following five years, I would periodically reply to assorted weirdos in the comments, but I have since left the site abandoned. As of writing, it has continued to collect tens of thousands of views every week, over a hundred views per day, with a lifetime viewership of 2.7 million. For the record, that is more than Natalie.TF’s lifetime views, where I have accumulated 2.45 million views since I launched this blog on May 25, 2012.

Yes, I know, I am near median age.

Now, I have talked about the background for over 2,000 words without touching upon the actual TG captions and the reason why is pretty simple: I have a very low emotional investment in them. These were captions I was producing at a rapid pace, using a factory system, and between tagging, writing, proofing, editing, assembling, and posting, I don’t think I ever spent more than 30 minutes on a single image. I wrote them, moved on, and wrote another one. Because of this, I don’t really have much to say about any individual caption. Some were bad ideas that were given a blasé execution, others were novel and serviceable captions, maybe even a little funny.

I’m proud of them as a collective work and effort, but isolating any single one is not really interesting to me. The narratives are often forced, the most remarkable ones are noteworthy for their absurdity over quality, and the biggest boon is how I featured a good amount of non-White women in my work.

Most of the women whose likeness I snatched were not White, and that’s remarkable because, even to this day, TG captions are crackerfests. I’d hope that more weirdos would wake up and recognize that some of the hottest women in the world are Black women and use them as the cornerstone of their erotic fantasies, but noooo.

Over the past decade, my interest in TG captions has declined considerably, and I only ever really engage with them if I need a little spark to help me masturbate. In recent memory, I’ve been visiting Swapping Grounds, CrestF, and Mostly Just Swap Caps as of late, if you’re curious.

However, I’ve largely moved away from the medium. I used to read them for the sake of reading them back in my teens, but at this point… I’m just impressed that some people can keep the creative juices going for this long. Some of y’all have been doing this shit consistently for 15 years, not changing it up, and I’m amazed at that kind of drive.

I mean, I get that drive, just look at what I’m doing here with Natalie.TF, and how I’ve never gone more than two weeks without a post. But as a creator, I have never been as consistent as I’d like to be, and I am guilty for getting worked up with fascinations that billow into something massive before I leave them by the wayside.

…On that note, I am BORED of this topic! Onto the next thing!

---

Natalie Muses About Cloud Gaming
(It’s Viability Is Limited, and I Hate It)

So, with gaming hardware getting more expensive, physical gaming being firmly on the way out, if you define gaming as PlayStation, and MANY PEOPLE do, and the industry pivoting toward live services, the topic of game streaming has resurfaced. I had hoped that this prospect was dead and done with after the failure of Google Stadia and the recent shuttering of Amazon Luna, yet executives, publishers, and the ilk all seem interested in making cloud gaming big again.

Now, I would like to point and laugh at these people for being nothing but a gaggle of fools. Unfortunately, the subject of video game streaming has never gone away, and does have some merit due to the modern way that people all over the world, but predominantly America, interact with media.

The culture of content consumption, aka entertainment, has become dominating by streaming services. Spotify is so popular it is the place to get music for generations of people, with YouTube Music and Apple Music filling in the gaps. Netflix, Disney Plus, and the menagerie of other video streaming services have successfully turned network television and cable into a wasteland of reruns and news broadcast for olds and political influencers. And it is easy to conceptualize so many things as a subscription service. Rent is a subscription service, phones are a subscription service, cars are a subscription service, student loans are a subscription service, AI is a subscription service, and as this erosion of ownership persists, the human imagination becomes limited.

Corporations want to turn everything into a subscription for predictable recurring revenue, which keeps their stock price up, which lets the executives running the companies justify massive payouts for themselves. This fulfills the corporation’s goals of providing something of “value” to the world, selling it, and giving the money to already wealthy people. It’s endgame capitalism, and it won’t work forever… which at a certain point starts sounding like saying “don’t worry, some day you’ll die and all that pain will go away!”

Game companies are no different, and have spent 15+ years trying to endear game-likes to the idea of subscriptions. Paying for online, annual releases with marginal changes and no progression carryover, and their own de facto subscription services. Sony acquired Gaikai in 2012 to make PlayStation Now, a streaming service originally for renting a specific game that morphed into the longest running game streaming service. Xbox has spent the past decade working on Game Pass, a subscription service to download a catalog of games, before spending 5-ish years trying to morph it into a broader game streaming service. Nvidia launched GeForce Now as a streaming service over a decade ago, and despite its more humble beginnings, they now service millions of people.

Hell, Sony has probably gone the hardest into the subscription angle with their PlayStation Portal handheld that is only capable of playing games via streaming. A cynic could easily look at the PlayStation Portal as the idealized end state for a games system in the eyes of a corporation, a screen with a controller that you use to play games via internet access.

However, as we have learned, the way that the mass market engages with music and video is vastly different from the way they engage with video games. Most people listen to some songs they like a lot, but generally listens to a lot of different music, picking up new tracks or albums as they see fit. People who are into movies watch a lot of movies, same with TVheads. Rewatching is common, but not a dominant, means of engagement. You enjoy it, and move on.

I am tempted to say that games were the same, but we’re not here to talk about corpses. Most people engage with live services these days and don’t play more than a handful of games a year. This likely includes some combination of Minecraft, Call of Duty, Fortnite, League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Roblox, GTA Online, the legion of annualized sports games, and the deluge of miscellaneous multiplatform live services. These mass market folks do not really want to engage with gaming as a broad thing, they just have “their game” and are content with playing it over and over again, for hundreds to thousands of hours, with their friends, their enemies, and assorted randos.

This was a fundamental misunderstanding of Microsoft’s Game Pass, which while not a failure, ultimately hit a cap far below what they anticipated, and is why these services generally don’t appeal to a casual game enjoyer. Because they can already access the games they play.

Now, many of these titles are free-to-play. Fortnite, League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Roblox, and everything on mobile that’s worth a darn. Their requirements are not harsh, except for maybe CS2, so they can be played on an office PC or phone with relative ease. You cannot SELL these games to people, because the SELLING happens in the game.

Call of Duty and sports games are both annualized $70 to $150 releases with progression systems that do not carry over. They are partial live services due to their online dependent features, but make most of their money on microtransactions. These games are effectively subscription services for the majority of players, ones that require both bringing your own hardware and erasing your progress every year. It’s a capitalist wet dream, and the people who thought of them are all grade-A demons.

Grand Theft Auto mostly refers to GTA Online, as I would refuse to believe that even 30% of all players played through the single player campaign, and it’s such an odd example to look at. It’s effectively a one-time purchase always online game with oodles of microtransactions to partake in, limited time events to participate in, and it makes hundreds of millions of dollars every year. It is a gift that keeps on giving to publisher Take-Two, and combined with CoD and sporting games, this represents the library of choice for so many console players.

This, finally, brings me to my next point.

The target for cloud gaming should have always been this hyper-casual user that wants to play the popular game(s) that all their friends are playing and that they have been playing for years. In the 2010s, the easiest answer was to just buy a $300 console, pay $60 for online a year, and $60 for each new release. This worked, as it was a more manageable price point and monetization of packaged games was nowhere near as aggressive as it is nowadays. However, as time goes forward, things get more expensive, and wages stagnate. Now you need to buy a $600 console, pay $80 for online, and a starter price of $70 for each game, not counting all the in-game purchases. The deal has gotten so much worse, so much faster, and like with so many things, it’s only going to get worse from here.

As the entry cost continues to rise past the $750 threshold, people are going to want alternative ways to get access to these games, and one avenue would be the ability to play the game via cloud streaming. Why pay $70 for a new EA FC game if you can just pay a subscription of $10 to $15 a month to stream it wherever you want, whenever you want? It’s trading in an upfront payment of $750 for a $120 to $180 paid over the span of a year. Sure, that may only get you access to one game, and the performance and latency might suffer, but if you are already burning $80 a year on online, then the prospect does not sound as egregious.

I want to emphasize that I DO NOT LIKE THIS IDEA, but I like to think I know how corporate executives think, and this back of the napkin math sounds pretty good. Why should Sony get this money when it could go to us— with us meaning EA (Saudi Arabia) or Take-Two?

Now, you might think that this still does not make economic sense, as wouldn’t the operators of games streaming need to get access to high-powered servers capable of running thousands of instances of their games? The answer is yes, and that we have them. The US in particular is becoming home to an infestation of datacenters with the intention of using them to run various AI models. This is despite there being a growing AI backlash and companies failing to see their promised productivity boons, partially due to AI-induced laziness and misplaced confidence. Oh, and the fact that the market is overly invested in this one technology, meaning it’s going to burst sooner or later. Or so they say.

In the event of a bubble pop, there are going to be a lot of datacenters buzzing along, looking for something to do. The supply is so high that there will assuredly be excess. This excess can be used to run games instead of AI models, and the infrastructure could be used to stream the ensuing gameplay.

Now, there are still problems with this. Internet infrastructure still sucks in a lot of places, and satellite internet is a crappy tech bro solution. The same is true for 5G, as we really need global fiber internet, but that requires too much effort, I suppose. However, for online games like the ones I’m talking about, this would have already been an issue. If someone has awful internet with no alternatives, then they are just not allowed to participate in this technology, and they’re probably used to that.

To summarize, I do not think that cloud gaming will ever appeal to the core diehard demographic who discusses video games for recreational purposes. I do however see a future where cloud gaming, through a lower entry price and greater convenience claims the wide mass market, who are only interested in a handful of games. Paradoxically, what they need to make this happen is to not make games broadly available via the cloud, but provide a handful of options. Cloud gaming is a mass market solution to accumulating review, and the mass market has a limited interest in games.

Whether or not this will work remains to be proven, but executives like Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick seem to think that this will be the industry’s way to expand games to more people. And for as much as I want to disagree… I am used to the common man disappointing me.

---

The Segregation of Sex
(Team Puritan Vs. Team Goon)

…So, one of the subjects that I keep see crop up every few months or so is the matter of Zoomies, née The Children, having tastes towards sexual content that is deviant in comparison with their elders. This has been going on since at least 2023, and is a topic that I feel people keep trying to pigeon hole into a single group, try to cast a whole generation with a broad brush, when there has never been a monolithic generation. The specific subject matter is also complicated as sex is complicated, society makes it complicated, and sex in such a heavily censored platform-driven state as the modern internet is… frustrating.

Step one, let’s illustrate the way that most of the olds, such as my *37-year-old* self, view the role of sex in media. For those who did not grow up with ready access to a smartphone, you had to dig if you wanted something sexy or lascivious, and it was pretty common for people to settle on something mundane or only slightly sexual. Yes, yes, porno mags were available for those with money, or in the local pedophile’s woods duffle bag, but as a physical object that had to be hidden, lest you face social ostracization. This often led to a culture of young people finding stuff to jerk off to in more crafty ways, namely something that aired on television, with a common target being late night broadcasts and music videos. You know, the ones that were full of sexy gyrating ladies. Find a local 43-year-old dude, and they will tell you about some weird shit they desperately used to jerk off.

However, this stopped being a common thing with the advent of home computers, sort of died down when personal computers/laptops were common fixtures, and functionally died as the smartphone became an expectation for all peoples, young and old. You no longer had to seek out erotic sections, and the idea of jerking off to a sex scene in a major motion picture became laughable in its perverse chastity.

People now had unlimited access to sexy thangs on a personal pocket computer they could view in near complete anonymity. This will naturally change the way people engage in sexual materials, but it also radically changes the landscape the youths enter as their sexual desires develop. Meaning if they want to find something erotic, they can just go onto their phones and do it where they see fit. Their bed, their car, the toilet… their backyard in the middle of the night. …Denny’s?

This event happened in parallel with a transformation in the way many social media platforms, which have simultaneously become hornier and more puritanical.

On one hand, platforms have been increasingly restrictive of what language, materials, and sexual references creators are allowed to make in order to remain monetized. This is rarely an exact moral justification and more of a public relationship decision, as brands, who offer these platforms most of their revenue, don’t want to be associated with someone saying something obscene. …Like referencing the fact that suicide exists. This neutering of contents limits how much sexual content one is exposed to on these platforms, and can lead them to think that overt sex, violence, or unsettling themes are simply bad. When no, they are not, you are just being fed a curated diet of self-censored works by creators trying to make hot dochy cheddar off of AdSense.

On the other hand, platforms value user retention and will routinely use sex appeal in order to keep users engaged. Sex is appealing, can divert eyes, and leaves people more receptive to ads and other forms of monetization. UGC phone apps are awash in thirst traps, softcore, provocative sexual imagery, and oodles of scantily clad young woman. While lacking any “real sex” or nudity— outside of Twixtter and BlueSkeets— the content’s sexual nature is largely without question as is the intention to spur an audience’s sex drive. Sex sells, platforms boost it, but only the stuff that won’t make their advertisers too riled up, assuming they care.

Effectively, you have powerful entities in this society that simultaneously sell sex while punishing discussions of it by branding it lascivious and nonmonetizable. Everybody has porn in their pocket, but is being pressured by these platforms— and society in general— to keep it hush-hush, as porn has long been considered something you don’t talk about in polite company.

I believe this ultimately results in a sort of time and place divide, where certain people want erotic materials when they are in the mood for them, and away when they are not. To cite the recurring example, Zoomies don’t like watching TV and movies with sex scenes, because they are quite possibly viewing them on a larger display, with friends or family, and find the crossing of “polite society” and “sexual materials” to be uncomfortable. Which… is somewhat sensible. I’d imagine that nobody but Gem Stone likes watching sex scenes with their mom and dad.

Akumako: “Read Verde’s Doohickey 2.0, ya fricks!”

I understand the desire to not want to engage in sexual materials and make them a sometimes thing. Sex is weird, complicated, and people will probably always have a skewed relationship with it. There’s nothing wrong with not wanting something horny in something, or finding something overly sexualized as being gauche, crude, or generally unsightly. As an asexual aromantic smut peddler with a checkered erotic past, I’d be a HUGE hypocrite if that were the case!

However, I have been noticing— meaning this is just an anecdote, proceed with caution— an increase in extreme reactions to sex in the circles I fly through. Which has simultaneously led to a rise in what I’m going to call neo-seiso puritanism, because that’s a funny uWu spin on something horrifying, and what I will call the art of goonmaxxing.

So, there has always been a more puritanical, effectively anti-sex or “anti-icky-sex” bent across online communities since online communities were a thing. Contrarian anti-whatevers who don’t want to see anything seen as unpleasant or unsightly in something they enjoy. But over the past decade, there has been a groundswell of people who view their media diet as reflective of their worth as a person and want to shun things they deem unclean. Not seiso. This is often because it has a “bad thing” in it in some way, or just does not sit well with them due to what are generously moral reasons. Pessimistically, they just take their media consumption too seriously and want to voice their displeasure whenever thy see it.

This is a broad disconnected category of people with many names— they’re often called “antis” in fandom, no specific fandom, just fandom, not to be confused with Fandom. But this group can easily include people who simply want things they dislike, for often shitty reasons, to be erased, censored by government, or removed from their life, despite having the ability to just ignore or not engage with it. These are both people who have fallen for the same “porn corrupts the soul” arguments of decades past, and people who are so conditioned to view anything remotely sexual as unsightly, as an impolite element, that they want it removed. Such as, uh, breasts.

No, seriously, one of the things that inspired this was a maligned comment about someone who was complaining about a character revealing a low cut shirt with a boob window in anime faming sim Fields of Mistria, saying it wasn’t wholesome. While this was just one dude, it serves as representative of a genre of person who many of the erotic artists I follow deal with all the time. And it is a mentality that platforms are trying to push, like monetarily incentivizing creators to censor the sight of a woman in a bra or bikini for being too lascivious. The more these arguments are made, the more their voices are heard, the more normal these ideas have, as discourse can simply shift the realm of acceptable thought. A fact that’s good when it’s good… but woeful when it’s not.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the gooner. The idea of a “dude” who is just obsessed with sex, jerking off, and making everything sexual is not a new invention. Ever since porn became a widely available mass-produced commodity with visual elements to it, this was a thing. However, the availability, access, and potency of erotic materials have all increased with the advent of the internet. The original limitation was finding and downloading things, then finding a safe time to access them. But now in the era of infinite porn— plus AI generated porn— all limits are unlocked.

There is no longer any real friction with pursuing pornography and this fact, combined with ready access to it from a young age, is absolutely affecting a growing population of people. This leads people to pursue rampant prolonged masturbation at the cost of their physical health, mental health, and ability to exist as a person. With the worst examples seeking to achieve a goonstate and endless masturbation in order to kill themselves on a metaphysical level.

Now, there is a lot that you can say about the deranged stuff that gooner communities have gotten up to. But I’d say they’re a result of disenfranchisement from society, the commodification of immediate pleasure, and isolation in an increasingly anti-human world without sympathy for iconoclasts or underachievers. A modern extreme refutation to the chaste culture of decades prior, born from nihilism and technological innovations. But this is not a symptom of the new kids being born weird, wrong, or hypersexualized through an innate purpose.

Both of these are the results of bad, inefficient, and broken systems that do not care about the actual people living under them. One wishes to conform with purity demanded at the top in order to save oneself and be one of the good ones, clear in morals and virtue. The other sees the world as broken, and is just alone for the ride, soaking up and eking out pleasure wherever they can, and fuck the consequences. Both of them are problems that have existed before, but they are more concentrated in their latest iteration in people with fewer lived experiences, who don’t remember The Before Times.

A safer, less extreme— less radical— middle ground is there, and that’s where most people are, but it is concerning that the extremes are seemingly growing. Sadly, the only way to change this is to change the tits and boobs bits and bobs of society, which are both resistant to change, chiefly due to the vested interests of those who control and profit from it.

In other words, to summarize my takeaway whenever I dredge into generational discourse: The kids are alright, the world is fucked, and everybody is just trying to make sense of a complex and hypocritical world that is made for the precious few.

Akumako: “Like poetry, it rhymes, and now Natalie got her goon talk out of her system.”

Freaking… just masturbate to some women wearing clothes and go to bed, like a sane person!

---

Epic Sells ArtStation and Sketchfab
(Epic Crumbles! My Favorite!)

As much as I don’t like Epic as a game studio and publisher of one of the biggest game engines in the world… I also don’t think I want them to die.

Akumako: “If they die, then Tencent would probably gain the rights to Unreal Engine.”

…Still an improvement over Tim Sweeney.

Anyway! As part of Epic’s response to Fortnite no longer being the top banana, as the game came out NINE YEARS AGO, they have decided to lighten their operations by discarding some of their studios.

Akumako: “Fuckin’ hell, more layoffs?”

No, actually, they just sold two of their pandemic purchases, ArtStation and Sketchfab. ArtStation is a portfolio site for artists across various industries, particularly games, and is well worth checking out if you’re a lover of the craft. I miss being able to see a front page of something and to NOT see AI trash mucking it up. What purpose did Epic have for this site? Because they have a marketplace and wanted to incorporate them within Unreal Engine. Did they ever do that? I don’t think so!

Meanwhile, Sketchfab is a hosting platform for creators of 3D models and a form of middleware for businesses that want to host 3D models on their website, in addition to… seeming being the foundation for Fab.com, Unreal’s model storefront. …I guess this was the end goal. You stole their store and replaced it with your own!

Seemingly recognizing this, and hungry for cash, Epic has made the decision to sell both ArtStation and Sketchfab to KitBash. Who is KitBash? Well, they are a 3D art company that already owns two major art platforms that are sorta interrelated. KitBash3D is where you can license thematic 3D models and texture packs for the use in games and other applications. Meanwhile, GreyscaleGorilla is a subscription service to access scanned materials, texture packs, and individual models, stuff that can be used in more general 3D applications and not just games. I do not understand why they are to separate services, when they both use the same Cargo software and are sold together as a bundle, but I guess the applications are slightly different.

Regardless, any home away from Epic’s is a plus to me, and I’m just glad that they weren’t shut down, as platforms like this as a boon to creators and professionals. So, thanks for being a sensible business, Epic. And KitBash, you better not go the evil route. Artists depend on services like yours, and you could have a nice simple business catering to their needs! PLEASE! I am sick of every company turning evil! Don’t be evil! AAAAAAAA!!!

---

Pokémon Bank is Ending Service February 27, 2027
(End of a Connected Era)

It still befuddles me that Pokémon is as big as it is when so much of the prior library is inaccessible on modern hardware— more so than most other Nintendo IPs— and how difficult it can be to acquire certain Pokémon in certain games.

This is a process that has always sucked. It sucked trying to get elusive RGBY Pokémon in GSC. Gen III was a well documented nightmare due to version exclusives and arbitrary limitations that locked various Pokémon behind a playthrough. And the act of transferring up Pokémon from the GBA games to DPPt and HGSS to Black and White to X and Y was a… freaking terrible experience. I know, because I did that in late 2013, acquiring every Pokémon I could from my back catalog of games, bringing them up into Pokémon X.

This was all before Pokémon Bank was released in February 2014, which provided a cross-game platform to store your games and import them from BW and B2W2. It was never a great service, with long load times and slow rollouts for certain games… while supporting ORAS and USUM week one, letting players bring their own team into these games. (Playing Alpha Sapphire with a Swampert, Sceptile, Blaziken, Gengar, Metagross, Gengar team was a blast and a half.) In 2020, this 3DS exclusive service was superseded with the new Pokémon Home, which you could use to deposit and shuffle around Pokémon from Go, Let’s Go, and SWSH along with your library of Pokémon Bank Pokémon. It was a one way transfer, but everyone could tell that Home would be what Bank should have always been, and not limited by the 3DS’s technical capabilities.

Still, Pokémon Bank remained the only way to bridge the 2002 to 2017 era of main Pokémon RPGs to the 2018 to 2025 era of games. Without it, then Pokémon can’t go past SM and USUM. This was a problem for people with a close connection to their digital critters, and for collectors who wanted to OWN their Pokémon in a piece of plastic and silicon. Which IS better than paying for a service where they could be erased if you forget to update your credit card info or don’t have enough funds in your account.

Sadly, there has not been a single Pokémon game with all Pokémon in it since Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon for the 3DS in 2017, so players are dependent on this service to manage and cull their roster of Pokémon. This is a bit of an issue, as the service costs money to actively use and just isn’t very good. Managing Pokémon is a ripe PITA due to a lack of tools and the fact that mobile version just throws every Pokémon into a bucket. The Switch version, by comparison, uses the visual boxes system the series has known since the first Bush administration, but without the ability to, do intuitive things, like group a bunch of Pokémon and sort them by number. Or have ANY tools to help someone make a “living dex.” You might say that “doing it yourself is half the fun,” but, buddy, I make spreadsheets for FUN, and this ain’t fun!

I really should do a game system versus spreadsheet comparison at some point. Would be a lark. But seriously speaking, if you care about play expression in RPGs, you should really learn Excel. You should also write bad novels too in that case. Just sayin’.

I wish The Pokémon Company would just make a game where the entire point is to just get Pokémon that you can fill your collection with, rather than force people through this multi-game rat race to get many things. But they are not going to, and are, in fact, going to make it harder for people to catch ’em all by cutting an essential part of the process for many, maybe millions, of people. Because the Pokémon Bank service is ending on February 27, 2027!

This is… not surprising, at all. Nintendo shut down the 3DS eShop on March 27, 2023, with other services ending on April 8, 2024. Pokémon Bank was an exception, and it was going to be shut down eventually. Oh, sure, they could afford it, but it’s assuredly a pain in the ass, and would require expertise and maintenance for a service that… most people have probably used to their heart’s content at this point. People have had over a decade to bring Pokémon from generation 3 to 7 to Pokémon Bank, and people have had seven years to port those forward to Pokémon Home. Pokémon Bank as a bit of software cannot even be downloaded from official sources and… the shut down feels like an inevitability. They’re a major company, and while they will profit off of nostalgia, they aren’t getting a cent from that era of games or making the hardware needed to run them.

Honestly, the best thing that could come from this would probably be a greater push within The Pokémon Company to push for more classic game re-releases so that every game could connect with Pokémon Home in some way. Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are such direct remakes I’d consider them sufficient ways to play Diamond and Pearl on Switch— not Platinum though. We also just got ports of FireRed and LeafGreen earlier this year, where they had no features beyond local wireless trades and the ability to connect to Home.

…What do you mean they didn’t have that feature at launch? FireRed and LeafGreen are just getting Pokémon Home support NOW? It’s been SIX MONTHS! How does it take six months to add support for some goldarn GBA games? This HAD to be an intentional delay. I swear most of these are. Because it makes NO SENSE that TPC was able to get Pokémon Bank support working day one for certain titles, but now takes half a year before you can bring your own Pokémon.

Ugh. This kind of malarkey is why the quiet part in all of these discussions is that emulating older Pokémon games is just easier for most people. Plus, there you don’t need to pay $20 for a GBA ROM with no good features, like speed up or save states.

Akumako: “You bitch, but FRLG has sold over 4 million units and Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald are gonna do similar numbers when they allegedly get reissued later this year.”

In conclusion, this whole situation sucks, but it’s something related to the services used to tape Pokémon games together. It’d be more surprising if they actually made things better.

---

Progress Report 2026-08-16

Cassie kept me in the movie theater this past Sunday, which was okay as she was in a bad mood after suffering the prior day. Watched Puss in Boots (2011), which was just okay. Very fine, disposable kids movie from the 2000s to mid-2010s. Then we watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is just brilliant all around, a triumph of a film, and bona fide classic. It’s the type of movie that could not be made in the modern iron-tight IP dominated climate of today, and keeps its inclusions and callbacks to places where they fit in its wacky universe. Also, the movie is about a judge wanting to genocide a Black entertainer neighborhood to build a freeway and get rid of the railcars. It is a fundamentally woke movie, which just goes to show how stupid this backlash is, fucking 80s family features were saying this crap as not just subtext, but literal text.

We also watched an episode of Danger Mouse, an early 80s and fairly low budget British cartoon series that… is not great on any technical level, but you can tell it has a lot of heart behind it. Oh, and then we watched Looney Tunes: Back in Action. Utterly spectacular display that one was, HOW is this not more well regarded? It was way ahead of its time, and is such a marvelous spin on film conventions of the 90s and early 2000s, with Bugs and Daffy firing on all cylinders. How the HELL is this not talked about with the same fondness as Space Jam, when this is just better in every possible way? Well, because it was a box office bomb. Commercial and culture are the same thing much of the time, and I hate it!

---

2026-08-09: Wrote 2,700 word retrospective on VD Captions. Good times! Wrote 2,200 words for TSF Series #019, while deciding that one chapter had problems and was too plain, so I added a silly dream character to make it work.

2026-08-10: Hella fine wine with extra lime! Finished the main section of TSF Series #019 with the big climax, 6,200 words, some primo HOT MILK. Now I need to do the foreword, the afterword, and the extra special epilogue. …This is going to be a novel isn’t it? Goldarn it! I REALLY want to finish this by the end of the week. Can I do it? I dunno! But that would be a KILLER timeline. Production technically started on July 20th, so that will be a novel written in less than a month, with plenty of breaks and other diversions? That is what I WANT to do! Well, one of those things.

2026-08-11: Wrote 600 words for the sex bit this week. 5,600 words on TSF Series #019, which is… not good. This WILL just be a novel at this point.

2026-08-12: Wrote 450 Epic Games bit, wrote 1,300 words for the goon bit, edited this Rundown, made some images, and shipped this… I forgot to work on TSF Series #019.

2026-08-13: Bossman was gone, so I forced myself to focus on studying, finishing the last lecture phase. Now I have HELLA mock exams to take. But that can wait for later. For now, I got back to TSF Series #019, writing 1,100 words. Would have done more, but Missy distracted me! That scrumptious creampuff!

2026-08-14: FINALLY! I finished writing TSF Series #019 including the foreword, so that’s 5,200 words down. I also wrote a 900 word section that I cut because it just distracted from the main story. Counting, the draft is… 50,194 words, just over novel length. …I need to get it under 50k, but that’s what editing is for, which I will start TOMORROW! Also need make SOME header images, as I am NOT making ones for all 27 sections. FUCK THAT! Decided to focus on the sprite arts while talking to Missy about Verde’s Doohickey. That girl reads SLOW! Made the first header image, as a sort of sequel to another one I made like six years ago. I’m so old, dude.

2026-08-15: Made another 6 header images for TSF Series #019, did work, did chores, edited 12,000 words, getting it below 50k words. Meaning 49,998 words. Orz.

---

Natalie.TF 2026 Progress Report

• 2026-08-26 TSF Series #019: An Exchange 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-??-??: Beast of Reincarnation Review
• 2026-??-??: TSF Showcase: Chronicstuss (Ouran Request)
• 2026-11-18: TSF Series #020: Chateau del Bitz
• 2026-12-29: Natalie Rambles About 2026