Rundown (3/24/2024) Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 Has Been Drafted!

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This Week’s Topics:

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
 Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 Has Been Drafted!

After 14 bloody months of working on this thing on and off, I FINALLY finished the first 370,000 word draft of acts 1 and 2 of Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp. Meaning that, no matter what, the story WILL be released starting May 29, 2024! (Actually on May 16, 2024 because there is a preview chapter.) In fact, I already took the unedited chapters and scheduled them for release. Just in case something happens to me!

This has been a damn ordeal for me to get done, and the worst part is… that I am not even done yet, as I still have two laborious tasks ahead of me. EDITING the 370,000 word novel and creating at least 34 header images and one cover for the story, preferably a header for every chapter. I have barely over two months to do this, and I know I won’t get it done. Things will get shoved onto the backburner, and I will be placed between a rock and a hard place.

You see, something that I failed to make contingency plans for are the facts that there are two projects that I will need to review, and both of them are coming up pretty soon. There is, of course, my annual re:Dreamer re-review on June 3rd with this year marking review number five. Which, for the record, will need to have a section dedicated to the hardships faced by CaptainCaption and the likelihood of this project never being completed.

The second, more insidious, one is Student Transfer. I have an RSS feed of the Git page for the game and keep tabs on how progress is going on the game. I don’t read the additions, because I got burned by routes that were shitcanned/abandoned before. But I do pay attention to when routes are being edited and animated and when branches are merged into the master. …Which they were recently. That does not mean an update is coming in a few weeks, it just means it’s possibly coming within the next… three months.

And to compound all these matters… I do have that other novel I want to release on Election Day, which I have not had the time to touch, let alone properly outline. I know what I want it to be. A 14 chapter 88,000 word story about a world being attacked by White people who turn into naked mole rat monsters thanks to the interference of a transsexual transracial transdimensional genocider. …Where the protagonist is a 1,500-year-old ex-pedophile and their merry band of immortal caretakers, the secondary antagonist is the president’s rat-cum, and the macguffin is a Dead Leaves reference. Also, the Dainagon is going to be in it, because spaceships that are also swords are badass!

If that last paragraph makes sense to you… piss off, you liar. Psycho Shatter 1988 is going to be the most alt-right sounding yet objectively radical leftist thing to ever ooze out of my brain.

Also, I originally wanted to create a header image of a living Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 doc, but that would take about an hour due to formatting mishaps, and I think that might be sorta impossible. At 370k words, the novel is far too big for my grammar edit tool, and also Google Docs in general. I’ll need to give every act its own master document, after editing every chapter in its own doc.

…Do most writers write every chapter in its own doc, or is that just me?

TSF Showcase 2024-12
Transformed Into A Busty Blonde [Kinpatsu x Kyonyuu ni Henshin de] by Ikuya Daikokudou

…Okay, I’ll be up front and say that this one just barely passes the bar for being TSF media, and I’m just featuring it here for three reasons. One, this comic is bonkers with extra mayo. Two, I don’t want to tackle any of the longer manga I have in my backlog until I’m done with the busy season at work. Three, while people are routinely producing quality TSF media, they tend to be in one of two groups: A longer running series that may take years to complete. And shorter-form media that I simply could not talk about for more than a few paragraphs. So instead you’re getting something from… 14 years ago? I guess that makes this another throwback…

Transformed into a Busty Blonde is a sex comedy about a boy genius with a crippling fetish for busty blondes and a loli genius who develops a drug that can turn her, or anyone, into a busty blonde. …I deliver weird synopsis pretty regularly, but that one sure packs a punch.

The series begins by establishing the bizarre schtick of the male protagonist, Daiki Higuchi. A teenage prodigy who has unparalleled concentration and academic ability so long as he regularly masturbates. And the only thing he can masturbate to is, of course, busty blondes. Immediately after establishing this, Daiki’s teacher confiscates his favorite copy of Playguy, and the kid undergoes masturbatory withdrawals so severe he gets sent to the infirmary.

There, he has a vision where he gets a blowjob from the Goddess of Blondes and awakens to see… that it wasn’t a dream, as there is a busty blonde sucking him off who begs to be his girlfriend. Daiki naturally agrees, as this is his lifelong sexual fantasy, and they make sweet consensual love. …Until right before the girl reveals her name, when she suddenly transforms into a loli, or chibi as the translation calls her. 

Her name is Mio Koide, an entry in the veritable genre of legal loli geniuses, who developed a love of Daiki, as he is the only person her age who is her intellectual equal. She loves him so much that she devoted months of her life to developing a drug that could transform her into his ideal girl. A busty blonde. Except the formula requires orgone energy. A pseudoscientific concept that this story uses as a proxy for ‘sexual energy,’ i.e. semen. But not just a regular old Dollar General jar of the stuff. It needs to be hot and viscous! So she raped Daiki to become a busty blonde… except the transformation didn’t last enough and Mio got exposed before she could get creamed.

This leaves Mio distraught, humiliated, and sexually frustrated, so she does what any sane mad scientist would do. Make a 3D printed mold of Daiki’s penis and attach it to a fucking machine. Like she’s ‘blight on the trans community’ Ray Blanchard, or the sick-as-hell perverts he met only to spread sick lies about them. This sequence is… kind of incredible for how brazen and shameless it is, while being filled with a bunch of visual gags to hammer home that this is meant to be silly. However, this does raise a topic I really ought to address, so let’s take a break to talk about the character.

Mio is a character with a small, flat, and generally… undeveloped form. I could highlight how tens of millions of adult working age (not senior) women are shorter than 5 feet tall. How people can age in dramatically different ways and rates depending on their biology, hormones, diet, lifestyle, and environment. There are 21-year-old girls who look 12, and 14-year-old men who look like they’re in their 30s. It’s absurd how much weight people simultaneously put into age and the idea that age can be cleanly visualized, when that is just not how reality works. People cannot always clearly be put into categories, and any attempt to force them into these roles will just make things worse for everybody.

…However, it’s also abundantly clear that Daikokudou was just being a stinky old pervert lady with Koide. She’s designed to look like a child. Partially in order to make the contrast between her normal form and blondie form more extreme. But also to capture the lucrative market of The Lolicon Legion. And just looking at how Daikokudou depicts children in her other other works… yeah, they knew what they were doing, and it’s part of their brand. So, uh, alternative argument time!

This comic is drawn like a damn cartoon half the time, which creates a dissonance between what would be reprehensible acts and the content of the story. I hate that I always conflate the two like this but… it is like how cartoon violence is far different than actual real life violence. Watching cartoon funny animals blow each other up with bombs and drop anvils on top of each other is meant to be funny and goofy, and so is most of this. Mind you, there are definitely points where comedy/absurdity/farce are not the goal, and there is always the matter of taste to consider. Personally, I tolerate it no problem, but that’s what because I’ve been tolerating stuff like this for 16 years.

Then there’s her personality, which… just makes her seem even more immature. She is incredibly talented and infinitely capable in the way cartoon scientists are. She has a strong sense of devotion and a simplistic view of relationships, due in part to the isolated childhood of a prodigy. However, I do like her for two core reasons. One, she is such a hyperactive little gremlin and it is a joy to watch her do stuff. …Not do stuff in the sexual way. In the more general way. And two, she actually undergoes a fair bit of development across the series, becoming more confident and comfortable around Daiki in a way that feels… surprisingly natural. But more on that in the later chapters.

Meanwhile, Daiki is a bit of an odd hentai protagonist, as he is academically intelligent, emotionally intelligent, a pretty good guy, and a strong believer in romance. He’s not a jerk. He wants sex to be rewarding for both partners. His hyper fixated fetish is just some quirk he deals with and manages effectively. And his fetish is what drives him to succeed academically which… is one hecking weird neurodivergence, I’ll say that much. …Though I do find the extent of his fixation and how it ties in with his Super High School Level Student abilities to be a bit… strange. My pet theory is that he’s like the Heisei-era Godzilla and has two brains. One in his skull, like your garden variety mammal, another in his lower abdomen, and when he masturbates, it makes the abdominal brain go wild with hormonal power. It’d make as much sense as anything else in this comic…

Going back to the plot, Daiki proves himself to be a classy fellow by visiting Mio the following day to walk her to school, as he did promise to be her girlfriend while Mio was transformed. Mio is reinvigorated by this and quickly devises a way to make the transformation drug even more powerful. And to do that, she needs to fill her asshole with Daiki’s cum so it stays in her system longer. Also known as suppository logic!

This leads to a sequence that really emphasizes the farcical nature that I referenced earlier. While the goal of this scene is for Daiki to cum in Mio’s little butthole, the comic has a lot of fun getting there. Mio keeps getting shifted into a super deformed gremlin-like critter when she emotes. Daiki starts holding onto Mio’s body and calling her his onahole as he swings her about up, down, and all around. They wind up reading Daiki’s Playguy magazine together, which is just plain old cute. Then when Daiki finally busts, Mio grows so much that the elementary school swimsuit she’s wearing needs to be cut with scissors to free her. 

When they do finally have sex, there is a real sense of affection and appreciation from both parties. With Daiki offering Mio a lot of praise and encouragement, Mio being so overblown with joy that she rolls around and shouts in delight, and the two of them indulge in their shared perversions. It’s reflected in the art as well, which manages to remain both energetic and jovial throughout, neatly skirting around any ickier element to the act. Sadly though, this doesn’t make Mio a busty blonde forever, as she turns back to her usual size even after a four-hour-long fuck sesh.

This leads into chapter four, which is mostly noteworthy for being the threesome and netorare chapter. Specifically NTR and not cuckolding, because that term was stolen annexed by the alt-right and now cuck primarily means ‘White guy who failed to keep his White woman from the Black man.’ With ‘keep’ having multiple meanings.

After some collaboration from Daiki, Mio has further improved the busty blonde TF tonic, letting her transform into a blonde without any injection of ‘orgone energy.’ Because rules are for schmucks and that concept was already taken to its limit. Wanting to further test the drug, Mio presents it as tea and gives it to her sensei. I don’t think she actually has a name, but she’s a glasses MILF who views Mio as a way to make money and… also lives with her, I guess? Their relationship is not made very clear, and I like that. It keeps me wondering.

Anyway, Sensei drinks the transformation tea, turns into a bustier blonde than even Mio, and fueled by the secondary aphrodisiac effect of the transformation, proceeds to fuck Daiki. Mio gets bound up, Daiki is unable to resist a busty blonde MILF, and they have sex on top of Mio for good measure, with Sensei teasing her as she gets turned on from this display. After the initial orgone energy boost fades, Mio is able to escape by returning to her chibi size, where she channels her inner hedgehog and does a homing attack on Sensei. This incapacitates her, letting Mio suck the cum out of her vagina because that kinda girl.

This turns Mio back into her busty blonde form and the three proceed to apologize for that scenario before engaging in the aforementioned threesome, and making a Mio sandwich. All of which is sufficiently wild enough to be a spectacle, though it doesn’t really do much for the overall story. Which is fine. Sometimes you just need to go off on an indulgence. Not every work needs to be perfectly balanced.

Moving onto chapter five, we finally reach the TSF (Transformation of Sex Fantasy) part of this TF (Transformation Fantasy) story. It’s a hot school day, Daiki heads to Mio’s personal high school lab, finds a suspicious bottle of ‘barley tea’, and drinks it, turning him into a busty blonde! Though he is not as busty as the others, being typical by hentai standards and… actually he has auburn hair based on the cover. That’s not a blondie!

Possibly due to his lack of blonde-ness, Daiki does not immediately start masturbating after assuming this form and even after waiting an hour, the transformation does end like it should. It’s later explained that not only does the TF tea work on men, it lasts far longer on them due to the orgone energy in their system on account of their testicles. Which makes sense if you want it to, and is a good enough excuse for some TSF tomfoolery.

On that note, Daiki heads into the bathroom for his hourly masturbation session, goes into the boy’s room, and fumbles around before getting the hang of a female body. I actually find his exploration to be a bit novel, as he just winds up rubbing his clitoris, does not finger himself, and plays with his nipples over his breasts. I’ve seen countless TSF masturbation sequences, and while far from being truly unique, I appreciate it when stories at least take things in lateral directions like this. Daiki’s basically a pro masturbator, so it makes sense he would just jump head first for the erogenous zones and start giving them some sensual rubs.

Sadly, Daiki’s hands are not enough to satisfy him and he goes into heat, begging for cock in front of minor friend character Motohashi. This naturally leads to a sex scene and… it’s the worst one in the entire comic. All pain, no love. Daiki gets his hymen stretched and torn up. He cries a bunch, narrates on how much this hurts, and just is unable to properly communicate with Motohashi. While Motohashi is… just self-absorbed. He keeps talking to Daiki as he is unable to respond, goes on about how important this experience is for him, and does not even really care about getting the name of the first ‘girl’ he had sex with. Yeah, Motohashi sucks. I wish this was just Mio and Sensei’s female masturbation tutorial instead. That’d be TSF as heck and it would keep the key element of most good non-horror sex scenes. Affection.

Chapter six, my favorite of the bunch, picks up the next day, with Daiki still in his female form and spending the night at Sensei’s place. …Where they have been up all night, playing around with Mio’s 3D printed fucking machine. I just need to stop and gawk at the absurdity of this. Daiki does not know how long he’ll be like this for, so he’s making use of his holes, and fucking himself with a perfect replica of his own penis. It reminds me of a story I heard years ago about a trans woman getting a mold of her penis before bottom surgery, and then using her own penis to fuck herself… but taken to the extreme. It’s a helluva way to start a chapter, but most of it is spent on Daiki and Mio going out on a girls’ day out— their first date!

Now, I’ve got to give Daiki chops for being such a good TSF protagonist. Not only is he willing to go out like this, he doesn’t even pull some bullcrap about not wanting to be girly, or wear dresses. He spent all night with a fucking machine. He knows what’s up. And the outfit he puts together is, well… just look at him! 

He’s got his hair done up with a nice little curl, a fancy lady hat, a classy black and white dress and cropped cardigan that draws the eye to his great curves, high-heeled sandals, a spiffy purse, and a set of three fly necklaces. Dude looks like he invented clothes with drip like this! Hell, he makes Mio seem even more goblin-coded, as she goes out in nothing but flip-flops, jorts, and a shirt with ‘Natural’ and three hearts on it. I’d make a joke about how that means flat is love, actually, but that would mean ass is life and boobs are hometown. …Hold on, that might be truer than true…

Trading one tangent for another, the next page is my favorite in the entire comic, as it is just a collage of Daiki and Mio as they go out and have fun. Hitting up the carnival, batting cages, bowling alley, and crane games. One of the best things about comics is that moments like these can be captured with just a single frame. With writing, it’s far harder to paint a picture like this in a paragraph or less. With nearly every other medium, the costs of production mean even minor scenes have an obligation to do more. But here, you just need one image of these two eating takoyaki to sell a scene. I love it!

Once the two get to the karaoke parlor, Daiki kills it on the mic but Mio is more shy about performing. She confesses that she has lived a sheltered life, does not know how things like this work, and does not want to disappoint or bore Daiki. Daiki affirms her though that he is having fun with her, that he likes her, and promptly gives her a bit wet sloppy kiss on the cheek. It goes back to what I said about Daiki being such a positive, loving, and good dude. His reaction to Mio getting upset or doubting herself is to throw her into something he knows she’d enjoy. And, man or woman, Mio loves Daiki, and no matter what their bodies are like, they’ll find some way to make it work. 

What follows is the obligatory sex scene. The first part is Mio using Daiki’s 3D printed penis mold to fuck him, using it as a strap-on, just without the strap. And the second part is Mio and Daiki embracing each other, Daiki telling Mio that he doesn’t need a “big breasted blonde lover” because he has her. It’s a sweet moment that makes this sex scene feel ‘deserved,’ and could have ended the story on a strong note.

Instead, the chapter ends with Daiki turning back to normal and the introduction of a new challenger when you least expect it. The All-American busty blonde bombshell, Millet! An exchange student who, right after being introduced, plants her whore lips on Daiki, claiming him as her man!

Chapter seven sees Yankee Thot Millet take things a step further. Hitting on Daiki during lunch and revealing her true power as the… Erotic Oriental Medicinist, Mistress of Hamon, and Super High School Level Acupuncturist. She is a master of pressure points, uses them to enhance sex, and demonstrates her appropriated wisdom by altering Daiki’s “cerebral neocortex.” With just one poke, Millet robs him of his intelligence and turns him into a slave of his body’s urges. Daiki, thinking only with his lower reptilian brain, tries to resist this most un-cuddly vixen, but her ways, charm, hair, and Caucasian Oppais are too much for him to handle, and he succumbs to her. Becoming a man who no longer knows what love is, and only knows lust!

Upon learning of this, Mio is crushed. Daiki brightened up her world and to see him frolic with this… harlot is too much for her to bear. The heroine is at her lowest and she is only saved by… Mr. Poopypants Stinkboy himself, Motohashi, who comes to her with the straight dope. He explains that Millet the Anti-Concubine has created a brainwashed reverse harem and that, despite whatever Mio thinks, Daiki only loves Mio. He was once obsessed with looks, yet after getting to know her, he realized that what was really important was sincerity. Someone he could view as an equal. And someone who… loved him for who he is. 

With newfound resolve, Mio ventures to the field of battle, armed with her booba tea, and challenges Millet to a duel of sex and resolve. First woman who cums loses, and the winner takes Daiki. Millet the Haughty Hoe agrees to this challenge and, armed with aphrodisiac tea and pressure points respectively, they battle it out in bed. It’s experience versus passion. Love versus lust! Brains versus… well, they’re both hot so beauty doesn’t really work, but you get my point! Also, Mio grows a dick using her latest invention to try to make Millet cum, because there needed to be some futa content in this comic. 

Mio puts in an admirable effort, channels all her love and passion… only to burst into a cascade of cum, leaving her dazed and canceling out her transformation. Millet the Maneater stands before her sexually fatigued foe and goes to Daiki, ready to claim him now and forever. …Only for Daiki to fight through his mental block and go to Mio, embracing her in his arms! Because when push comes to shove, love always triumphs over lust! And if it doesn’t, I guess your love wasn’t shit!

Chapter ten skips ahead six months later. Millet the Erotic Menace accepted the love of Diaki and Mio, and even used her powers to unlock the sealed chakra within Mio. Thereby turning her from a chibi into… a real-sized person! With boobs and everything! Daiki and Mio, having grown from their escapades, say goodbye to their high school. The place where Mio made her greatest invention, where their love was born, and where their wild adventures began. Yet rather than just clean up and leave for university, they have one last time together. 

Daiki reveals he has conquered his fetish for busty blondes by getting an erection in front of Mio. Mio literally throws herself at him, grabbing and savoring his penis before the two have about as tender a time as two adults can on a tile floor. They shout for joy, roll around, and eagerly voice their love for each other, right through the sticky climax. It is a great ending that really makes all the insane escalation up until this point seem warranted. 

…Also, there’s some weird elseworld story that is shoved in afterwards. It features Daiki and Mio as they are university students living together and having sex. But it cannot be canon because Mio is back to her former size in regards to her height, breast size, and… everything. That is not how humans work, so I think this was just included to appease the lolicons who felt gibbed by losing a cutie. At least it gave me a good panel for the header image…

Transformed Into A Busty Blonde is a rousing old time, and I’m surprised how well it’s held up in the six years since I first read it. The dynamic between Daiki and Mio is surprisingly sweet and effective. The comic relishes in its erotic absurdity from start to end, without ever being full-ass bonkers. The artwork is adorable, regularly deforming its characters into little moeblobs and featuring excellent expressions, without overusing them. And it always feels like it’s eager to move onto the next thing, without compromising the current scenario. Really, I don’t know what more I could ask for… other than more TSF. 

Well, good thing Ikuya Daikokudou has a bit of a history as a TSF author. She’s actually written a few TSF Showcase candidates in her tenure as a mangaka. Such as Kyoukai no Nai Sekai, which sounds super interesting but apparently has some iffy execution. The meme-worthy Dokka Ichatta, about a schoolboy who lost his penis and became a girl. And Mirai wa Bokura no Ude no Naka, a story about a guy who can see and interact with his female self from another world. 

Sadly, most of their more recent works snub the TSF trappings, and Daikokudou had gotten on the loli isekai train. Which… I get. Artists gotta eat, and the isekai market is still fertile.

Not Safe For The Powerful Puritans
(Natalie Gets Political – March 2024 Ver.2)

Goldarn do I hate how this comes up more than zero times a decade. This past week, I have been made aware of certain changes made on Patreon and Gumroad. Two platforms that are the lifeblood of many creators whose work I adore, and have garnered a not-insignificant number of NSFW creators.

Let’s start with Patreon, the premiere creator funding platform that has enabled thousands upon thousands of people to pursue dream projects that could not exist otherwise. I love them in theory… but they’ve been getting exponentially worse over the past few years, after their investors demanded some profits. And now… they reached a new low after redeveloping their guidelines. The key changes are the introductions of a “zero tolerance” policy for works featuring non-consentual intercourse and sexual violence. A decision that might make sense if you don’t think about it, but give it… fifteen seconds, and you can probably see the problem. While non-consensual sex and sexual violence are very bad things that should be punished and should not be promoted as anything more than the crimes they are… this is a platform for creators of FICTION. 

Fictional characters are not real, they do not have rights, they are merely ideas. This is Patreon saying that they refuse to support those who deal in these subject matters, no matter who they are, no matter the artistry or intent behind their work. It is a cowardly move that prevents creators from telling what could be moving and meaningful stories. Knowing this makes me not want to use the platform, which I say as someone whose annual Patreon payments exceed $1,000 a year. 

If a viable competitor comes around, I will happily switch, as I do not want to support a platform with policies as restrictive as this. They are not allowing creators to depict a character being raped… when you can depict them being killed, tortured, or maimed in horrific ways. I call this the ‘violence good, sexuality bad’ trap, and every time I see it, a part of me dies. Because it indicates that people with power have no firm grip on reality, what people actually go through, and what is more painful. Most parents would be horrified if their child was raped, but they would be broken if they were murdered. 

Then we have Gumroad, a site I admittedly have used very little, but regularly saw used by creators to sell their works. They are just not allowing most NSFW content anymore, plain and simple, as is their reason. They have agreements with payment processing platforms, namely PayPal and Stripe, and those policies changed, becoming more rigid and restrictive.

Also, last minute addition to this segment, but Pixiv Fanbox just removed PayPal as an option for people who want to support “R-18” creators. Yeesh. At this rate, I might need to open up a Japanese convenience store account just for buying things internationally. If that’s even possible.

This sorry state of affairs reminds me of when Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg wrote a transparent blog post about this matter back in 2022. The bulk of what he had to say is that the people with actual power, the credit card companies, Apple, governments, and investors, hate NSFW creations and want to get rid of them.

Credit card companies do not like porn sites because they are either run by puritans who think their values should be law, or view them as a source of rampant fraud. People frequently get into a porn site, bust, then leave, burning the trail, and denying all transactions. It wastes their time and costs the credit card companies money to refund these transactions. I get that… but does that truly warrant blanket discrimination?

Apple does not like porn because they want to seem like a clean and pure tech company, and they have a massive grapple over… the internet. Because they, more than anyone, turned it into this highly segregated domain of platforms, because that’s how they designed their shitty smartphones. …I write while staring at an iPhone XS.

Governments are controlled by puritans who are ideologically opposed to sexual liberation and want to use sex as a means of control… while in turn paying for sex and having their own crazy kinks. …It’s a tale as old as time, dating back well before the 19th century. 

Investors want stability, good returns, and porn companies… seldom ever get big and just keep succeeding. PornHub, RedTube, xHamster, Brazzers, and whatever might be household names, but they are not making oodles of money.

Every powerful figure who has a say over NSFW creators does not like them, either morally or financially. This makes it hard for NSFW creators to get paid and with the rise in states banning porn sites via ID verification, it’s pretty clear that they just want to ban porn. They want to make everything safe for advertisers. They want to vilify everything that does not adhere to their ideology as being ‘unsafe for children.’ And they want to make the world simpler, easier to control, and easier to arrange in a way that benefits them. Because all they care about is creating the world they want to see. A world where their enemies are not allowed to exist, and they are amongst the highest caste. 

…How do you even begin to fight against that?

The liberal approach (depending on what that word currently means) is to launch a petition, lawyer up, and try to fight for people’s rights. To empower groups like the ACLU to defend people’s freedom. However, I am growing increasingly bitter about that very prospect. Politics keep getting more capital-C Conservative. Those with power keep amassing more power. And while things like protest and voting can work… I keep losing faith in the ability for current systems to be reformed, and think the only way to fix the problem is by destroying it. By taking those in power… and taking that power away from them. By any means necessary.

…That’s commonly recognized as a Malcom X phrase, but it could be adopted by any group who wants to change things, no matter the affiliation

Ship Broken, Fix Maybe
(There’s Nothing Remarkable About The Battlefront Classic Launch Disaster)

A story that I could have talked about last week but didn’t want to is vehemently negative reaction to the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection. In part because I thought it was a minor footnote… but then I saw videos about the game, racking up over a million views, and realized that this is probably discussion worthy enough to get a topic here.

For those not in the loop, the story is that this 2024 port of Star Wars: Battlefront (2004) and Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005) was very bad. I’m sure there is a laundry list of things wrong with the game, but here are the big ones:

  • On Steam it launched with over 9,000 players, but barely any of them could play multiplayer, as the game only had three servers available, which could only host 64 players each. 
  • The game was filled with bugs not in the original title, an artifact of converting them to a new framework and modifying them to run on new hardware. 
  • The netcode, in general, is just pretty bad, and I don’t know how you even do that in 2024…
  • The game has optimization issues and is about… four times the size as it should be. 
  • And the game featured content from the games’ robust modding community. Which could be a nice boon… except the developer, Aspyr, neither asked for permission nor credited the creators.

It was a truly terrible launch by all accounts, the sort that featured such a brazen lack of quality control and foresight that it begs the question of how the game wound up in this state. Not necessarily why. That is the same reason as always. The developers did not have the time/money to properly test the game, implement fixes, or improve the general experience. Those are the reasons why games launch in this state and… this shit has been happening constantly for about a decade.

With the launch of the PS4 and Xbox One, a lot of game developers started skipping over ‘C-class’ bugs. Not because they were being ‘lazy,’ but because they were told to by the publishers they were working with. Previously, patches for console games were possible, but they often required developers to pay a not insignificant fee for anything after the first patch. We’re talking about five figures. A terrible system… that was abolished after the PS3/360 era. This led to 2014 being the first year console players were subject to a widespread assortment of glitches. This is something PC players were more accustomed to, and while this was partially attributed to ‘new console transition,’ it sadly set the stage for a lot of major releases in the ensuing generation.

In the past decade, there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of stories of buggy launches. It’s been so bad that I have long since considered the launch of a game to be the worst time to sit down and play it. At launch, games are at their most likely to be broken, glitchy, unbalanced, and devoid of content. And this is also when games are given the most attention, leading people to get sour first impressions of games, which… probably has something to do with the gaming ennui that has been echoed for a good two years now. The more bad launches one endures, the more bitter their souls become…

Buggy launches are something that can be fixed— plenty of games have fully recovered from a bad launch— but some never really recovered. Sometimes there just isn’t enough funding to fix the game. Sometimes the studio shuts down. Sometimes the game bombs hard enough that developers have no choice but to abandon it. And sometimes… the issues are so severe that they simply cannot be fixed without making a new game. Games are hard to make and game developers might be a smart bunch, but they cannot work miracles… most of the time.

So, why am I bringing this up? To dismiss the Battlefront Classic Collection as being anything remarkable. This is a systemic issue that has to do with how media is released, how games are distributed, and how hard deadlines can lead to shitty rushed launches. How do you fix it? By not giving games release dates until they are done. By implementing harsher certification standards that require games to be relatively bug-free before they can be released. And do things that discourage publishers from pursuing this ‘ship broken patch later’ mentality. None of these are good solutions though. They ignore situations where developers release games early when they run out of money and cannot lead to an exploit-free system. 

This trend has only eroded customer trust in games and I worry that it will get worse as time goes on. People are upset, worn down, and it might be pushing them away from gaming as a whole. I won’t say that things need to change, as I view ‘need’ as a more absolute matter, i.e. humans do not need water, but humans need water to survive. Accordingly, I’ll just say that if the industry wants to stop filling their base, their core audience, with anger and negativity, this is something that needs to change.

A Relic Castle Reduced to Ruin
(The Pokémon Company Killed A Fan Game Site)

…Oh fuck right the fuck off, The Pokémon Company International! 

Over the past… 6 months, I have taken up collecting Pokémon fan games and ROM hacks. Not necessarily trying to get every single one of them, but download and save every one that seems remotely interesting and is substantially complete. I did this because I fear that the legal situation around emulation and fan projects may change. A stance largely inspired by the takedown notices issued by Nintendo and affiliated entities. While that idea might sound absurd… life is more absurd than you can imagine. 

The Relic Castle is a Pokémon fan game repository that has served as the home for hundreds of Pokémon fan projects. A centralized resource for creators to display, distribute, and discuss their games to a dedicated community. I visited it a few times to download titles, find documentation, and overall learn about what these games had to offer. …And this past Thursday the site went down, taken down by a company on behalf of TPCI.

This is far from the first time TPCI has shut down a fan project— the big one was Pokémon Uranium in 2016, giving the game far more of a legacy than it would have otherwise. This probably won’t kill any game or project, as I doubt they are going to scrub all download links and make the creators remove MediaFire and Mega links. That would just require too many DMCA notices. But this is a significant blow to a community of people who… ultimately support the series, buy the games, and love them enough to develop fan games.

I understand that actions like these are ultimately designed to help TPCI protect their insanely valuable IP and… that’s about it. As such, my response is: fuck off, you despicable ass-rats. Within just a few hours, they destroyed something people have spent over nine years building and curating. All that work, all that time, now only exists as web archives (and personal archives I’m sure the site owners downloaded). It’s not like this was the Pokémon Pirate Bay. If that site goes down, I would not be surprised. Instead, this site only hosted fan created patches for games and fan games built in RPG Maker. 

However, that never stopped TPCI before— just look at Pokémon Prism, a GameBoy Color ROM Hack that came out in 2016, but was hit with a DMCA, immortalizing it with a Wikipedia article. Why did it get taken down? Because some motherfucker snitched about it on a major gaming site, it was the 20th anniversary year, and they wanted to sell the GameBoy games on the dead 3DS eShop.

I’m writing this right after learning the news and… I have nothing but spite and vinegar to offer. After what happened here and after the Yuzu incident, I feel as if my paranoid fears of companies fighting against emulation and fan works were actually justified and… that sucks. I want things to change, want new standards to be imposed, and for progress to be made on stagnant matters… this is the opposite of the desired outcome. 

Things like this makes me want to just cancel my Pokémon Home subscription and erase the Pokémon I’ve collected over hundreds of hours. Just because I don’t want to give these bastards another cent.

Steamy Family Funsies
(Valve Announces Steam Families Overhaul)

Okay, okay, I need something positive to clear the fart gas wafting about my face. While I am becoming increasingly suspicious of Steam as the people running it grow increasingly libertarian and lax, they are still one of the best major digital goods distributors around. The storefront is cluttered, crowded, and visibility is a bitch to build on the platform. It enabled a generation of gamblers with Counter-Strike. It has terrible hiring policies, making it disproportionately White and male, especially at the top. It also has its own nonsense anti-porn policy that… I think they just gave up on? At least one in ten games I see in my queue is a porn game… Sure, there was the Chaos;Head kerfuffle from 2022, but I don’t remember anything since then. 

Sorry, sorry. Let’s try positive think!

Steam Family Sharing, introduced over a decade ago in September 2013 is lowkey one of the best features for any digital library. For those not aware, as people barely ever talk about this, Steam Family Sharing allows people to let family members on different computers, access the entirety of one’s game library. The only major caveat with it was that if person A wants to play a game from their library, person B would not be able to access person A’s library until they are done playing. A somewhat sensible solution, but it worked great for people in different time zones or schedules and made sharing account-based digital games… easier than it had been up to that point.

I remember wishing that this would become the standard among Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo. Sure, they let other people using the same console share digital games… but you could already do that in the halcyon years. It was called putting a game in a console. I’m talking about playing games on other systems without transferring discs or cartridges, just downloading multiple copies under different accounts, with no fuss or bother. 

Anyway, with the feature old enough to meet the 10 year retro test, Steam announced an overhaul to Steam Family Sharing with Steam Families. The gist of this new feature is that it basically puts an entire family’s games into one bucket and lets people play them whenever they want. If there are two copies in the bucket, two people can play the game at once. If one copy is in the bucket, only one person can play the game at a time. Unlike the old system though, persons A, B, C, and D can all play different games from person A’s account, at the same time. Also, it lets parents monitor what kids are playing, approve purchases, and other good features like that.

It is like having a physical library owned by a family, with all the games mixed in from everybody… but digital and everybody needs their own copy of a multiplayer game. …Unless they want to play on the same device. Which some PC games do support.

Okay, what’s the catch with this? Well, Valve makes it clear that this feature is intended for households, caps out at six people, and they do not want people leaving families. People can only be in one family, and if they leave there is a one year cooldown. This kinda sucks… but I get it. Valve does not want people sharing their libraries or paying to let people be part of their ‘families.’

I can see this being incredibly useful for some people, and it might be good enough to warrant being an industry standard feature. I know it would be great for couples who each own a Switch, close friends who have the same console, or… I guess families. But that’s actually a foreign concept to me, as nobody else in my immediate family ever really liked games. They made my mother dizzy, my dad fell off after Atari, and my sister only ever played Mario Kart, but still bitched that we got a Nintendo when she wanted a PlayStation… back in like 2002.

My uncles liked games. The first game I ever played was on their Mega Drive Genesis, they gave me their N64 for Christmas in 2000, and I know they were into Call of Duty a decade ago. But I don’t know jack about those dudes…

Progress Report 2024-03-24

When I saw this a month ago, I knew I had to check it out because that thumbnail and that title are the best ways to get my attention. It came up into my feed again this past week… and it had over a million views. …I will never understand how music works on YouTube. Then again, I just plain old don’t get how people listen to music these days, so maybe that’s my first problem. 

…And don’t say Spotify, because why would you stream music, when music is something you’re supposed to build a connection with?

2024-03-17: Only 3,600 words… on my day off… but I can explain. I severely under-outlined this chapter and had to redo the outlines and add a new plot element to tie things together, while also planning on lowering the scope. I should not have spent all morning with my friends, but I did anyway, and realized I had to write another damn song parody. I could not think of a period appropriate couples song, so I did that awful thing of perusing best of lists for inspiration. Which sucks, because my other song picks have been oddball what-the-fucks. …Fuck it, I’m going to just make original lyrics for the second Nichijou theme. The energy is correct, and I do not care what the original lyrics are. This is some OG shit, son.

2024-03-18: Wrote 1,600 words of Rundown, re-read this week’s TSF Showcase subject, writing about 1,000 words for the TSF Showcase. I wound up working until like 19:30, so that limited my available writing time.

2024-03-19: Wrote 2,600 words for this week’s TSF Showcase. Wrote the 750 word Battlefront segment. Wrote 2,500 words for VD 2.0 before getting tired. I’d call that a banner day, in part due to how my boss was loopy and I only worked 6.5 hours and spent part of it writing because we were on hold with the IRS.

2024-03-20: I had a poorly directed day at work and decided to go through the trouble of prepping all 33 chapters of VD2.0 for publication. Which seems like it should be simple, but WordPress does not preserve text alignment or understand new lines in the same paragraph, and even though all uploaded text is placeholder, I still did it. Because I said I would in the preamble. I wrote a small explanation I’ve been procrastinating on, prepared a synopsis, and created a tentative content warning, prepared a skeleton, changed some chapter names. Also, I did some minor reformatting by breaking up chapters into parts whenever there’s a time jump. Lots of piddly things that needed to get done, and it took like… four hours. Now I just need to finish the final fucking chapter.

2024-03-21: I was busy with work and dishes until 21:00 and spent most of the night working on the Rundown… shit. Still managed to write 1,000 words for VD2.0… FUCK!

2024-03-22: Somehow… I wrote 5,500 words for a story, and wrote a song parody that, on its own, is only 540 words, but with speaker tags and narration, wound up being 1,000. I was genuinely surprised I managed to do that, and that is after erasing about 700 words of a draft that wasn’t working out. Damn, sometimes I can be good! Also, I only worked a half day today, so that explains this productivity. Now I can actually finish this draft tomorrow!

2024-03-23: Wrote the final 1,500 words of the draft and decided to take a break for the rest of the day, because I DID IT! VD2.0 has been DRAFTED!

Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp
Acts 1 and 2 Progress Report:

Current Word Count: 372,625

Estimated Word Count: 372,000

Total Chapters: 33

Chapters Outlined: 33 

Chapters Drafted: 33

Chapters Edited: 0

Header Images Made: 0

Days Until Deadline: 66

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