Category Archives: Whatever

4/9/2021

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There’s something that’s been bugging me for the last few weeks. I’ve mostly been hiding it, choosing to take subtle potshots on here, or in private group chats or something. But it has gotten to me a bit more in the past few days. Figured that, since this is my web site where I can say whatever I want, I’ll do so here, even if that violates my 2020 stance of trying to keep the vibes good and not cutting a fucking promo all the time.

Let me start this by letting everyone know: being transgender is the least interesting part about me. My gender is the most mundane, boring, uninteresting shit possible. Me being good at Tekken is more important than that. Me being an artist is more important. Me being informative, or funny, or the rare times where I sound smart is more important. It’s only a big deal because you got these fucking weirdos out there who want it to be one. These dumb motherfuckers who cannot wrap their head around the concept of a person not wanting to adhere to a strict, made up binary, and use that fear and anger to cause harm to others. Your fucking Singals, your Savages (no relation to me), your Greenwalds, your Wendigs, your Wheatons, your Jeminsins, your Harpers, your Jacksons, whatever. Assholes whose idea of a good time is to permanently ruin the good time of somebody else.

I mention those names, and not anyone who is full-on Alt-Right, because these are the people who bug me the most, as they will stab us in the back, while the Right will simply shoot us in the face. They are Cowards, with a capital C. Cowards who will say and do a bunch of transphobic shit, play the victim when called out on it, and then will act sad when trans people get run out of public life, or die way too young, or when some bull shit legislature that targets children gets passed, as if this will convince us all that they are our allies. Cowards who will call us every horrible thing imaginable and accuse us of the most heinous crimes a person can commit, then hide behind their own marginalized identity. I can’t be transphobic, I’m Gay! I’m Jewish! I’m Black! I’m Disabled! I’m this, that, and the other thing! My response to this is: yeah, so? Being a member of another discriminated group doesn’t suddenly preclude you from being a jerk. I don’t give a pass to Blaire White whenever she says something stupid and racist. I’m not letting Buck Angel slide every time he sucks up to ugly people who would rather blow his face off with the largest gun they can find. Their trans status does not suddenly make their bull shit okay. And your status doesn’t make it okay, either.

If they don’t hide behind the shield of their identities, then they post the trans pride flag, or say “Trans Rights Are Human Rights,” shortly after calling Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin a couple of flaming faggots (because that’s allyship). Trans Rights Are Human Rights. What a bunch of shit that is. Another version of “It Gets Better,” the most toothless, meaningless thing you can say, normally said by the most mealy-mouthed Z-Level celebrities only in it for the likes. The only time I’ve ever believed someone who said that shit out loud was when Nick Fucking Gage said it, and that’s because he is a man notorious for not giving a fuck, and saying whatever he wants.

These worthless motherfuckers post this “no really, I like ‘you people'” bull shit, while they call us pedophiles, rapists, neo-nazis, liars lying about the sexual assaults we’ve been through, accuse us of cheating at sports, attempting invasive surgery on five year olds, whatever. If you have ever talked about sex at any point in your life, you molest children (sorry, I meant: “if you use the term ‘sexually averse person,’ I’m going to assume you’re a predator”). If you write a work of fiction that can move people to tears upon reading it, you’re a cis white man using a pen name. If you calmly explain to these chickenshit losers that these accusations are false, that’s Mansplaining. If you tell them to go fuck themselves, that’s Male Violence. It’s fine if their glorified blog posts are sourced in bigoted legislature, but it is not fine to be mad at them for it. It’s fine if their harassment has caused you to be up until five in the morning in a Discord call, convincing their “justified” target that suicide isn’t the answer, all while said targets are still fielding death threats from Breitbart readers, in addition to their shit, but it’s not fine to tell you to go to hell for putting someone through that. You’re “just asking questions” and I’m just asking you to fucking die. Now, wishing death upon those who would do the same, even if they don’t have the balls to outright say it, may sound extreme. If that does sound extreme, you can go fuck yourself too. I don’t need a bunch of wavering neolibs looking at me or my work. I hope these fucking losers stop living sooner rather than later.

I simply wish to go through life on my own terms. I want to play video games. I want to watch wrestling. I want to watch racing. I want to watch an*me. I want to make things that look cool. I want to do cool shit until my time is up. But no, no, I have to be forced into a position where I have to be an “activist.” I have to argue for my own right to exist, something nobody should have to fucking do. I don’t even like talking about gender anymore, but I fucking have to!

These sacks of human garbage have undeservedly put so many of us through hell, and they get rewarded for it. They get gainful employment by stoking the flames of hate, all while trying to play both sides like the world’s worst spy. They get those Star-Bellied Sneetches check marks. Hundreds of thousands of idiots look at them like a bunch of rocket scientists, when each and every one of them are dumber than me after taking half a Benadryl, or taking a couple long inhales of some Double Scorpio. The fact that these motherfuckers are alive and successful, while so many of us need to beg the internet for enough money to have dinner tonight, is all the proof I need to know that there is no such thing as God.

The fact is, these heartless monsters, these transphobic losers, with their sad little lives and no real friends other than the alt-right bigots they’re too afraid to acknowledge, are pathetic. They have no fucking talent. They can’t write. They can’t act. They’re dumber than a fucking rock. They’re ugly as fuck. They can’t create anything with any beauty to it. They are utterly worthless, and society is frankly much better off without them. If at least one of them dropped dead tomorrow (and I fucking hope so), good fucking riddance. I do not dislike you. I do not despise you. I hate you. I hate all of you for what you have put me through. I hate all of you for what you have put my friends through. I hate all of you for what you have put people I’ve never even met or heard of through. I hate all of you for what you are putting literal children through, all while trying to paint us as the child predators. I’m 34 years old, and I have gray hair that is only getting grayer by the day, and I will blame you gutless transphobic cowards for that.

I spent years doubting myself. Spent years wondering who I was; if I had any actual talent, or if people were blowing smoke up my ass because they were too nice to tell me I sucked. Whether or not you think I’m actually great is up to your opinion, but I can at least hang my hat on the fact that I’m better than all these clowns. Me at my worst is better than anyone I took shots at at the beginning of this post at their best. Me writing a post talking about how good Tower of Druaga is is far more valuable to the human race than any easily debunked, non-researched gender science. Me talking about a bad porn game on the Sega Saturn serves a bigger use than a shitty sex column. Poetry that I spent a week on has more views and more sales than their bad fucking Star Wars fanfic, I guess people are more interested in what I have to say than your concept of Luke Skywalker flippity-booping and skapappa-blabbing across the galaxy. Me playing fighting games on Twitch, even when I lose, is more entertaining than you trying to convince everyone that Overwatch is still worth playing in 2021. And so on.

You, The Girl Reading This, I don’t know who you are, but I will say this: if you are a trans girl doubting yourself, I can guarantee that you are better creator and a better person. I won’t say “it gets better” or any other useless platitudes, because I don’t think you’re an idiot, but I will say that you continuing to exist now, even when shit is fucking bleak, is pretty cool, dude. Despite what society or your brain may tell you, you are not better off dead. Society would be, but not you.

One final thing before I wrap up this disorganized rant. The last couple of weeks, I’ve heard about two trans women dying. Dying prematurely. I didn’t know them, didn’t even know who they were until the news broke. And while I didn’t know them, people who I talk to or follow did, and the news destroyed them. I don’t have to know a person to think it sucks when someone’s life ends way too soon when it absolutely shouldn’t have. But the one thing that I was able to take solace in was the knowledge that in death, their lives were celebrated. I can take solace in knowing that when we are dead, people will miss us. People will remember us. These fuckhead TERFs will not be missed or remembered beyond the monsters they were. In death, people will celebrate their deaths. And I will say this: if you are a worthless TERF, I guarantee that, no matter what it takes, or what I have do, I will outlive you. If I have to run on pure spite for thirty years, so be it. But I will outlive you. Once I do, I will find out where you are buried, and I will piss on your graves. Fuck you.

an update on some stuff i’m working on

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Hello everyone. I figured that for this post, instead of talking about other people’s media, I would talk about my own. Specifically, how things are going, what I’m doing, and what you should expect to eventually come out during the year. I would normally reserve this my extremely neglected Patreon, but I don’t think anyone actually reads that, so it’s going here.

I’ve been hard at work on a number of things. One of those things is an action-RPG. The name of it is “Knights of Wardinia.” In it, you play as, well uh, a knight, and you fight monsters and explore dungeons and stuff. Good news is that the hard part of the game is done; I spent a good couple of weeks creating and debugging an experience system, so you become stronger and have more health after killing enough things, like in any RPG. Now I’m currently in the process of putting the actual world together, so that exploration makes sense and the difficulty of the combat is reasonable. Look forward to this coming out eventually.



Some of you may know that I’ve also been learning how to make things in the Unreal Engine. Sorry, I meant Unreal Engine 4: the noble and pedigreed middleware from Epic Games. I had been working on a cutesy, brightly-colored platformer that I had titled “Astro Smash.” I’ll go ahead and post some in-progress shots here.

Now, the problem with this game is that 1) learning Unreal is actually really fucking hard, given that I have almost zero programming knowledge to speak of, 2) every Unreal tutorial worth its salt is demanding that I make a shooter instead, and 3) I’m starting to realize that this game’s main gimmick would probably work better on a 2D plane. I’m not dropping or cancelling this game, but for the time being, I may put it on the backburner, or turn it into another 2D game.

Much as I loathe to give in to peer pressure, if I want to learn how this engine works, I may need to say fuck it and make a damn shooter like everyone wants. But I wouldn’t do any regular ass shooter. No, I plan on bringing back a long-forgotten FPS sub-genre: the mecha corridor shooter! I’m a pretty big fan of stuff like Kileak, Space Griffon VF-9, and the most awesomely titled IRON ANGEL OF THE APOCALYPSE. Games where you are in a large robot, moving down cramped, atmospheric environments, and shooting stuff. I want to make a game that still maintains the aesthetic of a PSX game, but without making yet another jump scare horror game. I can’t make humans in 3D to save my fucking life, but I’m at least half-decent at making vehicles and locations. This theoretical project would at least play to my strengths.

Something you may have noticed in my post about Valis 2 is that I’m bringing Slimegirl back. Slimegirl was already in one game I’ve made, and I had been working on a second, when a couple of things went down and halted development until recently. One, I fell victim to the dreaded “scope creep,” where as I learned new things, I would find a way to include them in the game, meaning that it would take longer and never get done. Two, some musician took the name “Slimegirls” and decided to be a sex creep late last year, which really turned me off from my own character for a time. But fuck that, the people love Slimegirl; it’s probably the most enduring design I’ve ever made. The fact that at least two people have worn Slimegirl t-shirts in public is pretty damn cool. So I think I’ll get back into working on that, but remembering to maintain the KISS style. I don’t mean Knights In Satan’s Service, I mean: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Have a goal, and run straight for it. Scrapping a lot of the cruft, and sticking to a fun platformer where you shoot stuff and the characters say funny and vulgar things.

Outside of games, I would like to get back into making poetry. Girl Zone was surprisingly popular and well received, and I thought it was rewarding to make them. We’ll see; I don’t want to stretch myself too thin, here. I’m working on a bunch of games, trying to make at least one blog post per week, being involved with streams and podcasts, trying to get tournament ready in fighting games, and also having an actual day job and real life obligations. Not to mention continuing to work on my own mental health. February was honestly pretty rough, what with the whole, “transphobic game journos who harassed my friends for years are now publicly comparing a rape victim they all exploited to Peter fucking Thiel, a literal blood sucking white supremacist” thing going on, bringing up a lot of bad memories that I’ve actively tried to get over. And by “get over,” I mean “completely ignore until my brain finally breaks.”

In any case, this was a post to let people know that I’m not just fucking around with old video games and wrestling pay-per-views, and that your support, whether it be moral or monetary, is appreciated. I am actively working on things. And I guess this post is more of a reminder to myself that, oh yeah, making big projects like this takes a little while, especially when you’re flying solo, and I probably should stop stressing that it’s not all done right fucking now.

get a blog, part 2

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There was a post I made a couple years back. In it, I told you all to get a fucking blog. To summarize that post, the reason you should do this is because in doing so, you can establish your own online identity without the information overload that comes with places like Twitter and Facebook. The ability to express yourself or an opinion without the constant bull shit discourse that gives you a headache at best and will literally destroy a persons life at worst is something that’s been lost lo these many years.

Something that’s been said to me whenever I beg people to get the fuck off of shitty internet holes that hurt you is, “Ramona, that sounds good, but I have no idea where to begin!” So here we go, part 2 to a post I did not realize needed a part 2; I will help you find a new home on The Wired.

PART 1- GET A BLOG

If you are someone like me who is clearly in love with the sound of their own voice, maybe you want a platform that encourages a long-form communication of ideas, and not being restricted to only 240 characters, leading to the dreaded and much-hated-by-me “Tweet Chain.” You want a Web Blog. If you have a little bit of money on you, you can spend a bit of money on hosting for your own domain name and even your own web storage, as this web site does. But if you don’t feel like spending $120 (or whatever other hosts charge) a year (and I don’t blame you), there are at least two good free options that can get you what you need.

The first one is WordPress. This blog uses WordPress software, so I can at least vouch for it working well enough. It looks like the free version does not have the range of features that something like this would have, and it is ad-supported (but we all have ad blocker, right?), but it should be enough for what you need.

There’s also Blogger. Looking around online, this might be a better option if you are not feeling like dropping some money on something you only plan on using to talk about which Touhou girls you want to have as a mom someday. I have not touched Blogger in literally over a decade, but when I did, it seemed easy enough to use, and it’s probably gotten better over time.

I was going to talk about Ghost, the other blogging software. But in the few years since I heard of it, the front page turned into some weird venture capitalist shit and I have no fucking clue if there’s a free option because the site itself is a goddamn mess. Maybe look into it on your own if WP and Blogger aren’t suited for your needs.

PART 2- WHAT ABOUT A PERSONAL WEB SITE, INSTEAD?

Alright, maybe you don’t want to write a bunch of words down all the time, but you still want to have a place to post stuff you’ve made or stuff you like. Sounds like you want a web site rather than a web log. These days, there’s only one option for that: Neocities. It is the closest the internet can get to the old days of Web 1.0 until there’s a massive overthrow of every tech company in America.

You can get a site on Neocities and make it look like some twenty year old Geocities trash, or make it look sleek as fuck. I’ve never used it myself, as I’ve never needed to, but from what I am told, it is extremely easy to use.

PART 3- THE FEDIVERSE STILL EXISTS

Now, what if social media still has its poisonous claws latched onto you? What if you want to get the hell off the bad sites everyone expects you to use, but you still want the endorphins from likes and retweets? Well, there is still a decentralized thing called the “Mastodon Fediverse.” Okay, I know that even mentioning the term “Fediverse” causes everyone to look at you as if you just murdered a dog and fucked the corpse in full public view, but hear me out.

I admit that process of joining is a bit on the complicated side. You have to find a good instance to join, and hope that either they’re accepting new members, or you know a guy who knows a guy that can get you an invite. There is no single “Mastodon” to join. That’s the hard part. But otherwise, it’s mostly Twitter but without the Twitter.

However, because this is still a social media outlet, it is still beholden to some of the problems inherent to the format; I mean, hell, I made a big post about leaving the site for a time last year because too many Twitter refugees turned it into a performative hell hole. Since that time, though, it has become much easier to ignore the bull shit discourse. As such, my account has mostly been “played a game today” or “watched a show and it was pretty cool” without having to see literal teenagers or mentally aged teenagers annoy me again. So, you know, tread carefully on this one.

Now you got no goddamn excuse. I want more sites to put onto my RSS reader! Make your own web site!

making some observations

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This is one of those weeks where I played a bunch of games and watched a bunch of movies, but I couldn’t really find anything worth a whole write up. I wanted to do a post about the Valis games, as I just finished replaying Valis 2 a couple days ago, but I felt that it would be in poor taste to talk about a series featuring scantily-clad high school girls right after I made a post about porn.

Instead, I think I’ll talk about observations about different aspects of the games…um…for lack of a better term, “community,” that I’ve picked up on lo these many years. So these aren’t necessarily new thoughts that I have, but I don’t think I’ve ever brought up my grievances outside of late night Discord calls before.

this will be another one of those posts where i put unrelated images in to break up the walls of text. this is a screenshot from “clockwork knight” on the sega saturn.

The thing about playing and writing about retro games is that the internet will give you lots of information that you don’t want. If I want to look up release dates and system ports? Google is occasionally good at that, when it isn’t trying to shove obvious spam links at the top of the query. Like yeah man, I bet I’ll find out all sorts of info on Hydlide from a URL like flyfishingwinelaw.shoes or whatever the fuck.

This bull shit carries over into the dread YouTube Algorithm. That evil thing that assumes you logged on specifically to watch 100% unfiltered white supremacist garbage after you watched three videos where cats did humorous things. Luckily, I’m getting a lot less “SJW’S RUINING STAR WARS!?” videos featuring some guy standing in front of a wall of Funko Pops. What I get now is video after video of people buying stuff. Retro collectors basically showing off how much money they have in the stupidest way possible.

I just want to say: first of all, collectors can go to hell. Because “collectors” also includes these motherfuckers hoarding all this rare, expensive shit, refusing to dump or scan these things for the rest of the world to appreciate, holding hostage the work of defunct companies and deceased artists. These anti-preservation sacks of garbage directly contributing to capitalism’s slow murder of art. I’m a person who doesn’t care if you play a game on original hardware or through a Retroarch core, or if you watch a movie on Laser Disc or in MP4 format, so long as you’re able to still enjoy it. These people are my enemy.

Second of all, you assholes are fucking BORING. I don’t know how to tell this machine that puts these garbage videos in front of me that I don’t give a fuck about some 40 year old idiot with no personality other than “I remember things I saw on TV as a kid” recording himself looking for 80’s shit at Goodwill, rubbing his hands all over the merchandise, which is definitely a good thing to do during a pandemic at a place frequented by lower income families, you selfish fuck, and going home with a bunch of Ninja Turtles merchandise to fix the hole in his heart left by his wife divorcing him. Or else you get these five minute videos about an old NES game that all follow the same script: “The game was good. The graphics are nice. The sound is an eight out of ten. All in all, I had a fun time. Like, comment, and subscribe.” You’re not going to tell me any of this shit in more detail? Not going to tell me what attracted you to the game or the Leonardo But With A New Hat action figure? Do any of you know how to think critically? Do any of you know how to think at all? Fuck! Get another Mario tattoo and drive to the store in your Dodge Dart that you customized to look like the car from Ghostbusters.

It can be very obnoxious, because I like to look for new voices. I like to find people who are creative with their thoughts. People with a fucking personality. People who can tell a joke that isn’t “the cake is a lie” or “arrow to the knee.” I mentioned before that I worry about being too normal. In my eyes, being a status quo Normie is the worst thing I could be. Being weird, traveling off the beaten path, having a little goddamned culture is where it’s at. I’m friends with multiple artists and free thinkers, I sometimes get a little self-conscious, because I talk about “normal” things like games. I’m developing games right now, games that are more in line with the mechanics-driven works I played when I was younger, rather than games steeped in a large narrative. I sometimes feel like I’m losing my touch; that spark of madness that makes me Me. Then I watch videos like this and it hits that no, me at my worst is still about a million times better then these clowns at their best.

But it could always be worse. They could be people who work on video game fan-translations.

Oh fuck yeah, bro, fan translations! A way for people to enjoy work in their native language for when companies don’t have the time, resources, or just straight up don’t exist anymore to do localizations themselves. And also at least 95% of the people who work on these (or at least work on the programing aspect of them) also happen to be, ironically enough, racist as fuck. Hey, thanks for translating this hours-long Japanese RPG, let me go to your web site or to your social media to see what else you’ve worked on. Oh okay, you seem to have some fucked up views on Black people! Hmm, yes, another joke about pronouns that got old ten years ago! Lots of Ben Shapiro and Mike Cernovich retweets you got here! You sure do have a wonderful theory that Trump can take back the White House from Joe Biden who stole the election thanks to the forced-feminization satellite laser owned and operated by Anita Sarkeesian! Nice sidebar on your website dedicated to showing a random Chuck Norris joke! A checklist of things anyone with any remote sense of empathy for another human being is beyond tired of seeing and hearing.

Shit like this is no secret; I’ve known about it for years. But I found out last night that one of these assholes did a bunch of Wizardry translations. It was bad enough that these motherfuckers tried to ruin the Ys series for me, now they have to go after goddamn Wizardry. What did those games ever do to you, huh?

I just want to grab one of these guys by the shoulders and shake them until they understood that YOU WORK WITHIN A REALM OF MEDIA THAT USES A LANGUAGE AND CULTURE THAT IS NOT RELATED TO WHITE PEOPLE IN ANY WAY, YOU STUPID ASS! Despite what your boy Hitler may have said about the Japanese back in the 30’s and 40’s, they are actually Asian. You know, the same people you blame for spreading the Coronavirus, assuming that you haven’t gone literally mask off and think that the virus is fake?

Now you, the astute reader, may think to point out Japan’s history of xenophobia and its own issues with right-wing bull shit, both in the past and at this very moment. I counter that with the following: do you actually think these fuckheads are actually smart enough to ingratiate themselves in the conservatism of another country? Let’s be real, these are guys who watched some an*me and assumed, wrongly, that Japan is this apolitical paradise where queers and women with their own autonomy don’t exist. Guys who think that their weird asses can simply stroll into the country and get the waifu of their dreams within moments of the airplane touching the ground. Guys who are dumb enough to believe that Metal Gear is not a political work. Hate the idea of the rest of us having to rely on the dice roll of whether or not a new translation of a piece of media that looks interesting was done by some shitheads that may or may not have tried to slide in their own bigoted beliefs into the text (see example: the Netflix version of Neon Genesis Evangelion). It’s fucking stupid, and if you’re going to be an alt-right fuckhead, at least be consistent and hate all of the races, not just some of them, and maybe the cognitive dissonance will get you the fuck out of game localization. And also leave things I like, such as Wizardry, the fuck alone. Jerks.

Despite all of this, I still love games. I love to talk about them. I love to make them. I love to find other decent human beings that can also do these things in a creative way. But fuck me if there isn’t also a lot of annoying and outright evil shit you have to deal with to get there. The reward is usually enough to make up for it, though.

new years 2021

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posting random images to break up the amount of text

Hello. I took a week off for the holidays, but now I’m back. Just wanted to do a big year in review post this time. I’ll get back to games soon enough; look forward to me talking about the PS2 game “Michigan.”

2020 was a strange, complicated year. It was terrible for numerous reasons both big and small. Yet, on a personal level, was also really good? Feel like breaking all of it down to try and make some sense of things.

Let’s start with all the bad shit. A killer virus that ravaged the world’s population and, as far as the US is concerned, will still be a major problem for some time to come. The continued escalation of police and politicians abusing their authority, mostly at the expense of the marginalized. Watching, over and over, as so many amazingly talented trans artists were harassed to hell and back, ultimately driven out of public life; the fact that we see the name “Isabel Fall” as a cautionary tale of what happens when Keeping It Real Goes Wrong instead of an awesome new author to keep an eye out for continues to disgust me. Having to hear about something called “Blaseball” for months on end. Just terrible, horrible shit all around.

On a games-related level, because this is a gaming blog kind of, there was a lot of shit to deal with there, too. I admit that I let the Cyberpunk bullshit get under my skin and ruin my mood, but I think it’s at least a little bit understandable? It was an overhyped piece of shit that barely worked, exploited its employees to an unacceptable degree, appealed directly to the worst kind of people imaginable through its advertising, punched down on people of color and trans women, cast cops and billionaires in a heroic light, to the point of literally featuring Elon Musk as a character. Oh yeah, and it had a scene that was designed to literally give you a seizure. And, as I had predicted, games writers were willing to cast aside any semblance of dignity to try and wring out any degree of enjoyment they could get out of it, at the expense of literally every leftist belief they purport to have. Then you had another game: some shitty looking horror game walking sim made by an idiot who thinks you’re a privileged white dude for wanting games to be less buggy, transphobic, not made in toxic working conditions, or not literally try to kill you via a series of flashing lights, and his co-dev, who came into my blog’s comments section back in 2017 and made thinly-veiled threats about my “friends and family” while one of my closest friends just so happened to be her roommate at the time. Having to see that bullshit on everyone’s Game of the Year list was an exercise in biting my tongue and not wanting to put a hole in the fucking wall. You’ll find me playing Cyberpunk before I put down the three bucks or whatever for “what if Silent Hill sucked and had graphics that looked like the Harry Potter Playstation games?”

On a personal level, I was having mobility issues for a while. I’ve had issues with my knees for several years now, and I probably have a 50/50 shot of catching Neuropathy when I’m older, a condition where the nerves in my legs will slowly die, taking away my ability to walk without assistance, if even at all. Having my dog and my grandfather die pretty close to one another sucked too. I’ve never had much of a family, biologically speaking, and as time goes on, it gets smaller and smaller. Spent a lot of time these last several months thinking about mortality.

Oh yeah, and some dickhead took the name “Slimegirl” and decided to be a sex pest with it. Given that that’s the name of the title character in the game I’ve been working on, and that the plot was an allegory for the way trans people are treated like absolute dog shit by society, labeled predators for the slightest thing, it’s probably a bad idea to continue that path when there’s an actual “Slimegirl” (in quotes because fuck that guy, Slimegirl is my creation) who is allegedly being a predator for real.

But what about the good stuff? 2020 wasn’t all hiding from a respiratory illness, death, video game grudges, and continuing to be blamed for everything that’s ever gone wrong in cis people’s lives.

First, holy fuck, my art got a lot better. I’ve been looking at stuff I’ve been making over years, even 2019, and comparing it to 2020, and it’s like night and day.

Like, look at that. That sucks. This was from 2018.

So was this.

And this.

I think you get the point. I was not making good stuff.

Let’s look at 2020.

Much better. I guess if the creator of Space Funeral is hitting “like” on some of these, I must be on the right track.

2020 was the first time since 2008 where I started making poetry. I was honestly surprised that it took off the way it did. Didn’t imagine anyone would actually like it; maybe some pity clicks. But no, it turned out to be well received!

If it sound like I’m bragging here, well…I am! I am absolutely going to brag about myself in this post. This was a year where I improved drastically as a person. I, with a few missteps here and there, got a better hold of my Bipolar mood swings and PTSD-fueled meltdowns. I’m continuing to win my battle against addiction. I got better at art. I got better at fighting games, holding my own with and even beating tournament winners. I got better at streaming, back when I was still doing that (working/grieving/being sick/Twitch technical issues took the wind of those sails). I got into the sport of auto racing, and went for a ride on the emotional rollercoaster of F1’s 2020 season, in addition to looking into IMSA, IndyCar, Super Formula and Super GT. I had a really fucking good birthday. Managed to mostly keep a weekly update on this blog. Lots of great music and games came out. I met a whole bunch of new friends that I’m really grateful for. Got back in touch with older friends that I was a bit worried about, but I’m glad that things aren’t as catastrophic as they were in 2015 and The Band is back together. Even with all the fucked up shit that went down in 2020, I can’t bring myself to say that it was a bad year, when a lot of good things happened.

2020 was the transition point. A year where I took steps in becoming something great. When you grow up constantly being told that you are worthless and will never amount to anything, you tend to spend your adulthood proving everyone wrong and become something. I’m going to go ahead and predict that 2021 will be the year where I actually become something. Hopefully, you all will, too.

Happy New Year!

birthday post

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My birthday was on Saturday. I’m 34, which means that I am now officially Too Old For This Shit. Be nice to me, or go to hell. Anyways, here’s how my day went.

I began my morning by watching some TV, while drinking my morning coffee and checking out the results of the Italian Grand Prix qualifying round. First of all, holy shit @ Lewis Hamilton setting the fastest lap time in F1 history, even after the FIA put his car at a handicap because he was winning too much. And shout out to Pierre Gasly breaking the status quo and winning the race itself today after all the shit he’s been through.

But back to my TV. I don’t watch a lot of it. Dynamite every week, and maybe some reruns of Bar Rescue. But I was flipping through the channels anyways, and what did I find?

MOTHERFUCKING TRAIN CRUISE

Granted, it was a rerun from last Summer, but still. Train Cruise on my big ass TV. And to top it all off, it’s not an episode that I was able to find online (I double-checked before I started writing this). Between the races and this, I was feeling pretty good about the way the day was going to go.

I also wanted to check out my Animal Crossing town before I left the house. I wanted to see what was in store for the Birthday Bitch.

It was a sweet little party with a cake and a pinata. But I wanted to walk around, and see what the rest of the town was doing that day.

K.K Slider holds a special concert for you! That’s cool! And as this happens, various villagers leave these sweet messages for you.

Very nice.

Now it was time to leave. The plan for the day was that I was going to go to this sort of new mall (rebuilt after getting fucked the fuck up in a hail storm) with my mother. I was going to get her to buy me the new Tony Hawk, and then we would have pizza, and then I would go home. I didn’t plan on being out all day, 1) mostly due to COVID; hell, I felt bad just being out there for non-essential reasons in the first place and 2) it reached 100 degrees outside, and it was way too fucking hot.

So of course I ended up getting Tony Hawk as a gift. I also bought myself a couple pairs of pants.

If I ever decide that I want to cosplay Leo Kliesen, I’ve got half the outfit ready to go. We can pretend that the stripes are the right color.

My thoughts on the Tony Hawk remasters are that they fucking own. Something I don’t talk about much, because the topic doesn’t come up, is that Tony Hawk 2 is one of my absolute favorite PSX games, and probably one of my favorite games ever. I was also a bit wary, not going to lie, because this would have been the third PSX game getting remade for the PS4 that I was getting, after Resident Evil 2 and Final Fantasy VII. Great news, unlike those two games, Tony Hawk 2 was not fucked with. It is exactly what it claims to be: Tony Hawk 1 and 2 with some extra stuff. Extra music, extra skaters, all sorts of cool new shit added to the custom skater and custom park modes.

I’ve finished all the Tony Hawk 2 levels (because of course). I’ll eventually make my way over to the first game, even with the downhill levels that nobody except for Hawk himself actually likes.

A neat thing about this game is that the custom skater option lets you make an exceptionally non-passing trans skater. This is not a complaint; I think it’s great that you can have women with masculine features, or men with feminine ones. I felt it was going against the spirit of skateboarding if I made myself look like some smoking hot model, instead of a grungy transsexual who doesn’t give a fuck.

I also bought myself a copy of F1 2020 on PC, because of course. It’s another awesome racing game with a fun new team management mode. The character creation isn’t as robust as Tony Hawk’s, but hey, being able to customize my livery and team uniforms is cool too.

Sad news: the pizza place we were planning on going to was closed. Instead, I ordered some noodles from a local Chinese place, and that was my dinner. Ate that, and some cake, while watching AEW All Out. All Out was a really fun show, aside from Matt Sydal fucking up his Shooting Star Press literally the minute he debuted, and Matt Hardy’s really scary concussion.

A really fun day, overall. Got some cool stuff. People were really nice to me, both on and offline. The racing was good. The wrestling was good. On top of all this, guess what? I’m now two whole years sober, motherfucker! Not a single drop of alcohol has touched me. Admittedly, it’s been hard as fuck, especially when you got assholes out there really testing my patience and willpower as of late. But I held strong, and pulled through. I have to remind myself of the good things I have in life, and fight the urge to go off on people who caused/continue to press old traumas. The best revenge is living well. Their bullshit shouldn’t be my business anymore. I don’t work in their industry. I’m not in their social circles. I should stop giving a fuck. As I said, I’m now too old for it. Be nice to me, or go to hell.

3DOFace #1: neurodancer

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The 3DO. It existed. It didn’t do well (I mean, obviously). Bad marketing in an oversaturated market, a confusing distribution system, and a price tag of Way Too Much Fucking Money, it was doomed as soon as it left the starting gate.

But to its credit, the 3DO had some good games. It had some games that at least tried to be good (Immercenary, what could have been). Kenji Eno loved the system, and when Kenji Eno speaks, wise men listen.

Another line of praise for the 3DO is that, among its many genres it covered in its software library, it had one that no other system of the time had: Pornography! Hell yeah, motherfucker! Imagine, you’re playing Star Control 2, or Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, when The Mood strikes. The internet isn’t quite what it is today back in 1994. Maybe you don’t feel like fumbling around trying to get your VCR set up, or looking around for your back issues of Penthouse. You need to crank one out right fucking now, but there is too much work involved. Then you remember that, in addition to an arcade-perfect Super Turbo and Samurai Shodown, you bought some Adult Entertainment for your Real Panasonic 3DO Interactive Multiplayer! For $700 (plus an additional $60 per game), you could own a video game system where you can look at a pair of massive himmer-hommers.

Neurodancer is one of these pieces of software. And oh man, is it a piece of something, too.

I’m not a person to discount something simply because it’s pornographic in nature. As an actual sex worker, that would be immensely stupid and hypocritical of me. Even if I wasn’t, I’ve played way too many hours of House Party (how’s it goin’ dude?), and have no place to judge. Being a pervert, I’m totally okay with video games merging with porn. It’s not sad or pathetic to own or play porno games.

Unless it’s Neurodancer.

Neurodancer gives you a first impression of actually having a unique concept and atmosphere. As the title no doubt gave away, this is set in the far, dystopic, cyberpunk future. And as the title also no doubt gave away, it’s supposed to be a take on Neuromancer, but with titties, instead of #StillWithHer Neoliberalism and tranny jokes so tired that even 4chan would roll their collective eyes (suck my ass, William Gibson). You would expect way too many neon lights and mega corporations and xenophobic paranoia about the Japanese becoming the leaders of world industry, but now there is sex too. You would expect these things, yes. You would also be wrong!

The synopsis of Neurodancer is that you, the main character, are some sort of horny hacker. You’re two months behind on rent, facing eviction and/or your knees getting broken. What do you do in this situation? You sit in your dingy, nearly pitch black apartment and send your slow moving unmanned drone out into a series of identical hallways, breaking into terminals for credits (money), so you can watch cam shows on your holographic TV.

Let me take a moment to put that into perspective, before I get into the parts where women take their clothes off. You are in debt. Zero dollars (sorry, credits) to your name. And to reiterate here, your solution is to hunt for loose change so you can look at porn. That’s like an addict combing through the carpet for a loose pill. You clearly have a problem, and the game is not finished with highlighting your sad existence just yet.

Here’s the interactivity: slowly (and I do mean slowly) trudging through a hallway, occasionally turning so you find a terminal. Hacking? Pressing a button, then pressing a button again before the Cyber-Police bust you for being jacked in (lol) for too long. Time your button presses right, and you get more credits.

(Now this is the part where I tell you that I’m posting nudity from here on out. Maybe don’t read this post with your mom in the room.)

Your reward for doing this, and your entire reason for continuing to exist, is to watch a girl dance and eventually get naked.

When I said that they “eventually” get naked, I wasn’t kidding. Those clothes are nearly bonded to their bodies.

hey, at least you can zoom in and out with the shoulder buttons!

Something you may have noticed in these screenshots is that number going down in the lower right. That’s your money, and it goes down by 100 every time you interact with the women. See, they dance, then suddenly stop, you have to pay them to continue. All with no guarantee that an article of clothing will be removed. I have no idea what the Credits-Dollars exchange rate is, but I have to imagine that this is (pardon me for referencing current events) a Bella Thorne level rip-off. Keep in mind, there is no “full” nudity to Neurodancer. Yeah, you’ll see some titties, and about half of a bare ass, but that’s it. Maybe Trip Hawkins drew the line at seeing someone’s spread asshole on his gaming console.

600 credits gets you some titties

700? part of a butt! oohh baby!

I’m not bringing all this up as a complaint. I knew going in that the 3DO’s adult library would be the most mediocre of mid-90s softcore bullshit. But this all does bring up the overall pathetic nature of Neurodancer’s protagonist. Not paying rent in some shitty apartment, probably not taking care of themselves either, all to spend hundreds of dollars for something that looks like the old Desktop Stripper that was advertised on seemingly every sketchy website twenty years ago. In our current dystopic cyberpunk future, pretty much any fetish you have can be catered to for about $20 on ManyVids. I guess sex workers of the future realize their worth a lot better than we do.

One more thing, mid-90s FMV was definitely not up to the task. The thickest thing on these girls’ bodies are their pixels.

Through all of this, I haven’t gotten to the worst part. The interactive segment! When the girl of your choice finally gets nude, or nude enough I guess, another screen opens up, and you can actually touch them. Probably. I think.

What’s so weird and fucked up about this is that you think you might be able to do something like cop a feel or give a light smack on the ass or something. Fuck that. You’re here to really please a woman. It’s possible that I’ve been doing it wrong over the course of my adulthood, but I’m not entirely sure that success in the bedroom involves stroking a woman’s hair or rubbing her behind the ear like a fucking cat.

think i’m joking here?

That’s Neurodancer. Blow hundreds, if not thousands, of points of cyber-currency to watch a naked woman dance. Then, when you finally get a chance to actually touch her, you instead limply drag the back of your knuckles all over her. It’s like a sadder version of Hoverhands. Here’s your reminder, over a thousand words later, that this was designed for you to masturbate to.

If you think I’m going back and getting screenshots for the other two dancers, you’re out of your fucking mind. This sucked. I’d be so pissed off if I spent actual money on this, rather than grabbing the ROM off Internet Archive. I plan on continuing the 3DO-Face series; hopefully the other sex-based games on here are at least funny or interesting.

Let me finish this off (lol again) by laughing at the terrible intro. This bullshit here is some prime “Cinemax on Saturday night” material.

“yep, that sure is a woman getting naked on my computer screen! time to put my hands behind my head in a ludicrous, exasperated fashion!”

lattice 200ec7

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Some time ago, while chilling out in the Snesploration Podcast Discord server, as one does, I was streaming some Playstation games because we were all bored. Then the sometimes-host and also co-host of Hinge Problems, and overall Good Guy Rudie said, “hey Ramona, play Lattice!” My reaction was probably a lot like yours. “What the fuck is Lattice?” He said nothing. He only sent me a link to a lonely Google Drive folder that said RATTICE.ZIP.

The reasons why Rudie wanted me to play Lattice so bad was because he wanted to see if I could decipher what the game was. He couldn’t figure it out. Nobody else he showed the game to could figure it out. Now it was my turn to be confused.

It’s no wonder he wanted to show me this game. It’s fucking weird. Lattice manages to be both a game in an easily described sub-genre, and also a game that defies explanation. You fly down a series of tubes and rails, you shoot things, you pick up power-ups, you avoid obstacles, seems reasonable at first. It doesn’t sound any different from something like Tempest 2000, or even other PSX games like N20 or Internal Section.

Then you start to notice the changes pretty quickly. It’s not a straightforward shooter, you have to find keys by riding different sides of the rails you’re on. Every so often, an enemy will randomly appear and freeze you in place until you remember to use the “free-look” button to aim and shoot at it. The levels look linear, but are actually mazes. Confession: I have not been able to finish level 3 because the maze got way too confusing for me to figure out.

While this is all happening, keep in mind that you’re flying along at over 100 mph. Enemies and obstacles are oblong geometric shapes. There’s a constant flashing of lights and explosions. Things pop out at you immediately, giving you about half a second to react. Trying to navigate a wireframe map that you can only see a small part of. This fast, surreal game with a pounding EDM soundtrack. This is not your usual “trippy” game. After a point, it stops feeling like a game. After a point, it feels like the game equivalent of dissociating at 3 A.M. The feeling of your brain proceeding to shit itself and lose control of its cognitive reasoning. Everything is faster. Everything is brighter. The Fight Or Flight reflex is kicking in, but your body won’t respond. Nothing makes any fucking sense anymore.

And after all this, it hits me: this not your normal “weird” Japanese game. You know, the kind where if you could actually understand the language, you could decipher things pretty quickly, and the “mystery” becomes a “curiosity.” The slow, dawning horror of remembering that Rudie can speak, hear, read, and write Japanese fluently. He lives and works in Japan. Any mysterious video game that you or I can’t understand is most likely mundane for him. Rudie sent me a copy of this game because he couldn’t figure it out. It had to be sent to me, the resident Weirdo. The person who has lived and died by these one-shot Playstation games made and forgotten about before some of the people reading this post were even born. My brain is burning and patches of white are forming around my peripheral vision and the guy who speaks the language and understands the culture is confused and nothing means anything anymore.

Lattice is the one and only game made by nousite, inc. (capitalization as found). They still exist; you can “like” them on Facebook, even. nousite, inc. made this game, then dropped game development, moving into web design and then into app development for mobile devices. This only creates more questions than it answers.

It’s Lattice.

more f1! holy shit!!!!!

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My last post ended with me being real bummed out over F1 games not being super great, and me contemplating picking up the new Codemasters F1 game at a certain point.

Well, days later, Humble Bundle is like, “hey, we’re giving F1 2018 away for free.” And then I’m like, “I’m there, dude!” Maybe several generations of hardware later, F1 will get a really good game.

I’ve been playing this for a few days now, and I knew that I needed to make a blog post about this. Because, holy shit, what a nice coincidence that this would fall right in my lap so close to my last post.

Now, did F1 finally get a good game? It did! 2018 feels so fucking good once you’re out on that track. Cars feel nice and rumbly (this is a word now). It’s extremely satisfying when you nail a corner perfectly, gaining that burst of speed so you can overtake the driver in front of you or set the fastest lap time. Even more satisfying when you’re overtaking Lewis Hamilton, who’s like my favorite driver right now. He goes out, gets in his car, gets a podium finish all the time, winning without a tyre, and then he makes assholes angry by doing stuff like this:

He rules.

Anyways, the game. For the career mode, I joined McLaren, because of course. I mean, there’s a lot of history with that team and Ayrton Senna, and as someone way too nostalgic for that transition period of the late 80s-early 90s, McLaren is extremely appealing to me. McLaren is not “high-tier” team; Mercedes and Ferrari are, but they’re fine. Let me pick McLaren, then sit back while listening to some Casiopea, think about Sega, and indulge myself completely in being a piece of shit nostalgia mutant.

Cool thing is, you can make your own driver. This includes women, something that is, uh, a bit lacking in the real deal. Anyways. This woman (me) took 4th place in the Australian Grand Prix. Would have been 2nd, but I had to go and get a penalty for an accidental illegal overtake. I then moved up to 2nd place in the Bahrain Grand Prix. Would have been 1st, but then Lewis Hamilton suddenly got fast as fuck out of nowhere and overtook me on the final lap. Probably because I still don’t take corners as well as I should. But hey, getting a podium win while wedged between two Mercedes drivers is nothing to sneeze at, let alone be ashamed of.

I’m still pretty early on in the career, so I haven’t run into any kind of off-track drama, assuming that it’s there in the first place. No team owners throwing me under the bus. No cringe-inducing press conferences with that (I’m assuming) Danish guy that takes around an hour to ask a question. No ending a friendship with another driver because our (justifiably) large egos can no longer coexist. None of that. You just get that awesome on-track drama: screaming down a straightaway at 300 km/h. Narrowly avoiding collisions with drivers just as eager as you to win. Dealing with sudden technical issues, and having to make that heartbreaking decision to pit when you’re so close to the end. Just a driver and their skills, combined with their car, and the skills of their engineering team. The things that make F1 so appealing to me.

I’m going to keep playing this. I want to get further in and see where the season takes me. This games rules, and F1 is an good-ass sport, and I’m loving everything right now.