I originally had a theme set for this month. The plan was to exclusively cover games (and other things) by smaller developers (nothing higher than a AA title), and trying to find small creators to highlight. The latter would be extremely difficult, given how unhelpful search engines are these days, but I would at least make the effort. I had numerous reasons for wanting to do this, mostly due to what feels like a million years of frustration over today’s internet being driven by an advertisement-fueled algorithm, with gatekeeping being done by multiple cliques of serial abusers, alt-right douchebags, and alt-right douchebags who roleplay as communists for Twitter likes. I feel like this period of time might actually be the hardest time to be an independent creator since the advent of the internet. Not that it’s ever been easy to try and strike out on your own, but I feel like it used to be easier. I know that I’ve been beating this dead horse since 2019 (probably earlier, but I deleted all my posts from 2014-2018 because they were too cringe to keep up), but I am so thoroughly sick and tired of everything being controlled by social media. The endless Doomscroll of bull shit you don’t want to see or don’t care about in order to get to what you actually want. Hell, the catalyst for giving me the idea of Indie Game May was being shown some bull shit performative leftism from a certain TERF game journalist I have on a mutual block when I was actually trying to find some information on the upcoming AEW/New Japan crossover show in June. Twitters mute/block feature does not actually work when you need to block somebody, it turns out. I don’t like to be reminded that terrible people who have done material harm to people I would take a fucking bullet for still exist, especially when I’m trying to do research on a completely unrelated topic.

breaking up the text with some gay art i found online

Confession: the reason why I’ve been so adamant about getting at least one blog post out per week almost every week for the last two years, is because I was trying to show people that a better way is possible; that you don’t need to sift through tons of ads, discourse, and naked bigotry of people who very specifically want you dead just to tell the world “i ate a hot dog today.” That there’s a better world than 12-hour YouTube essays with titles like “Why You Are A Stupid Bitch Fuck Ass For Not Appreciating Call Of Duty Modern Warfare Reflex Edition For Nintendo Wii” or “IS THIS THE HARDEST NES GAME EVER????” with some dumb fuck doing the pog-face to a screenshot of World 1-1 in Super Mario Brothers. That there’s a better world than “You Have Used Up Your Free Article For The Day.” Everything is so fucking reactionary these days, and I don’t just mean politically reactionary. Feels like everything needs to feed off of negativity and clickbait bull shit. Like, more people will read this post where I complain about all this shit than they will my positive review of Paris-Dakar Rally right below this post, or the currently Patreon-only piece that will go public on Monday. More people know who I am because I pissed off a bunch of games journalists back in 2015 or because I stuck up for Natalie Lawhead last year, than people who know me for things I’ve written, games I’ve made, shows I’ve been on, or anything cool like that. Before anyone accuses me of making a self-own, this is a problem that a lot of other people in my position also have; any expression that isn’t anger is quickly overshadowed by the expressions that are. I’ve also had to reckon with the fact that the only reason I have some of the friends I do is not because we connected through common interests and shared views (though we do have those, luckily), but because we were all listed as members of the same neo-nazi sex cult by the lead writer of Starbound, which is kind of fucked up. Remember when you could make friends from things other than a shared traumatic incident that feels like a fucking fever dream in retrospect?

So, with this very long rationale in mind, I wanted to try and change things, and give attention to other people like me, trying to break free of Using The Same Three Web Sites. Now, I’m no fool; I know that I can’t use the internet to change the world (anymore), but I can at least try to convince some people to maybe look at the Doomsday Prophecy App a little less, right?

source: https://fantia.jp/fanclubs/114436/posts

Well, I changed my mind.

I announced my plans for this month publicly. A (now former) “mutual follower” proceeded to completely fucking explode on me in response. I was told that I was engaging in “escapism.” That I was living in the past. Things on the ‘net today are great, and I’m the one with the problem. Then I was called a list of slurs, only a couple of which I can actually reclaim. Now, whether or not I might be a retarded [CAN’T RECLAIM] [CAN’T RECLAIM] bitch [CAN’T RECLAIM] faggot is irrelevant here. This incident tripped a wire in my brain. I realized that what I’ve been doing is the digital equivalent of trying to put someone who doesn’t believe they have a problem into rehab. It’s not that people don’t know that things could be better, they don’t want them to be. So instead of committing myself to an entire month-long theme that will only be appreciated by a small number of people, I will instead go back to doing what I do best: post about whatever the fuck I want. I talk about games, an*me, pro wrestling, things like that, because I want to. I like these things, and I like to give a bit of analysis to them for other like-minded people to read. I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager, and I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Fuck it, nobody else deserves my attention. Not anymore.

Now, I don’t want to sound like I’m ungrateful to anyone who does support me. I appreciate each and every one of you who drops in every week to see what I have to say. I’m only frustrated with people who hate the way things are (or at least pretend to), but refuse to make even the most basic of changes to their lives. I’ll keep this up for you. Well, you and the game journos struggling on their latest piece and need to steal more of my ideas. But I am done with trying to convince others. Too much time and energy dedicated to a lost cause. If you’re too fucking stupid to see that, that’s your problem. By all means, keep calling each other unclean on Elon Musk’s vanity web site while enjoying a steady diet of Big Macs, Assassin’s Creed sequels, episodes of Monday Night Raw, incest-themed pornography, and other things that signify a mediocre existence and wallowing in a cultural wasteland. The rest of us will try to do what we can to lift ourselves out of this creative quagmire and maybe, just maybe, have a little fun doing it.

resident evil 4 is a very good game

So, what are my plans? Well, I already mentioned a post coming on Monday. After that, who knows? Maybe I’ll talk about Monster Hunter again. Maybe I’ll cover an old Sega Genesis game I liked when I was younger. Might even write about terrible porn again. Whatever. This is my space to post whatever I want. If you like it, cool. If not, feel free to fuck off. I refuse to perform anymore. I will simply do things. Everyone else can have fun continuing to spiral into complete insanity while I look at naked an*me boys and play immersive sims from the early-2000s.

Hello everyone. I’ve taken the week off, as I had a death in my family on Sunday. This was kind of a big one, as this was one of the only people in my family that I didn’t have issues with. Because of that, I felt like it probably wasn’t super appropriate to write another “games are cool” post or go on Twitch and tell jokes. But it’s Saturday now, and I felt the need to write something this week. Admittedly, I sometimes get so wrapped up in the idea of “oh fuck, what am I writing about this week?” that I don’t get around to making posts that are like “hey how’s it going.” So I think I will simply talk about a bunch of thoughts and stuff I’ve been having.

The first thing, assuming you didn’t see me announce it elsewhere, is that I am now doing the “non-binary” thing. Now, unlike pretty much everything else I’ve ever done in my life, this was not an impulsive decision; it’s something that’s been in the back of my mind for about a year, and getting closer to the forefront for the last six months. Just a whole number of factors causing me to rethink things: I don’t mind being called “dude” or “bro.” I still enjoy traditional “guy” shit. I watch sports. I haven’t had a dysphoric episode in about three years. Now, you might be thinking, “well, that’s a lot of gender essentialist bull shit you’ve said.” You would be right! The thing is, it doesn’t matter if you are into all that stuff while having a different pronoun. Then I started thinking, well then, does it matter then if I start using “they” instead of “she?” Plus, my whole thing, especially over the last 2-3 years, is doing what I can to try and live life on my own terms. Doing what I want, existing outside of society’s expectations. A wise man, Daisuke Ishiwatari, once said of a non-binary character he created, “they’ve transcended humanity, just like me.” What a killer fucking line that is. That’s me, doing my own thing, but with a more ambiguous identity.

Another thing about all this, was the thought in my head: am I giving up? I mean, I’ve spent so many years, made so many enemies, got onto so many games industry blacklists, due to my unwillingness to sit back and deal with cis people and their inability to comprehend a world beyond their own limited worldview. Hell, only two posts ago I was ragging on these motherfuckers over them all wanting to buy J.K Rowling’s Jew Basher 2K22, once and for all proving that “support the developers” is a dog whistle. Am I throwing away years of my life, making me a coward? I was “angry tranny bitch” for so long, and now that’s not my gimmick anymore. But then it dawned on me that it doesn’t matter. Gender has never been my problem. Gender has always been everyone else’s problem. I didn’t like being a man, so I changed that. Seven years have gone by, and I’m realizing now that it’s better to be both genders and also neither. I simply changed my mind, and that doesn’t invalidate all things I’ve said and done to support binary trans people. Besides, it’s not I’m joining Buck Angel in a Zoom call with Graham Linehan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Leigh Alexander or anything. I’ve spent all this time curating a space for me to do what I want, and my body is a space, so I should be able to do what I want with that too.

pac-man and ms pac-man, breaking up the text

That’s enough of the important shit. I’ve spent the last week processing a lot of things, and also losing myself in games and wrestling. The big thing in wrestling lately is that bitch coward sell-out Cody Rhodes going back to WWE. The biggest carny of them all, fuck him. You might think that I’m too old to be doing the whole “fandom” thing and getting back into that late-90s Monday Night Wars mentality, but also: FUCK THE WWE OH HELL YEAH

This isn’t a WWE vs AEW thing. Yes, I’m a big AEW fan; I’ve been buying and watching all their shows since last year. But I have also been getting into independent wrestling pretty hard. Stuff like Enjoy, GCW, TJPW, and Deadlock. In my mind, my love of wrestling is Literally Everything vs WWE. That company is the evil empire runs by soulless bigots that have legitimately worked their wrestlers to death, have covered up murders and sexual assaults, straight up killed Owen Hart via criminal negligence and then told his grieving friends to go wrestle in the hole his dead body created, provides propaganda for two shitty governments (America and Saudi Arabia) among a lot of other fucked up shit. AEW has faults, sure, but it’s not “covering up murders and child molestation rings” bad.

Even putting aside the moral issues, WWE is a company that has treated its audience with open contempt for decades. We’re talking about a shitty company run by a complete monster who is so fucking stupid that he didn’t see anything in Bret Hart, Steve Austin, Mick Foley, CM Punk, Bryan Danielson, Adam Cole, Keith Lee, Matt Cordona, Kofi Kingston, Big E Langston, Bray Wyatt, Scott Hall, Ricky Steamboat, Sting, among many other names I’m forgetting until circumstances forced their hand to either put them in the main event, or fire them. Hell, they didn’t even see anything in Cody Rhodes! At this point, if you’re working for WWE, you are either only a few years in the business and getting paid to sit in catering for a year will make you more money than getting booked on the indie scene, you are being paid so much money that nobody in your family will have to work another day in their lives until maybe your great-grandchildren are born, or you’re a fucking idiot/bigot who stands firmly in line with Vince McMahon’s bull shit. Cody might have been the worst part of AEW for a good couple years, true, but that doesn’t excuse spending six years creating an “Us vs Them” narrative and telling anyone who would listen that “wrestling is for everyone” before crawling back to a bunch of Trumpers who would rather “everyone” be put before a firing squad. It may seem childish for me to call a man I’ve never met a sell-out for going from one major company owned by a billionaire to another, but let me reiterate: FUCK THE WWE OH HELL YEAH and fuck Cody too.

Plus, the troll in me likes fucking with all the unhinged weirdos who call people like me an assortment of slurs because of the wrestling I watch. The sensible side of me knows that Tony Khan is not my friend; he is simply someone who puts on a show I enjoy, and have given him some walking around money as a result of that. But it is more fun to say that AEW is the greatest thing to ever happen to television since televisions inception, and Tony Khan is the only good billionaire. And FUCK THE WWE OH HELL YEAH!

As far as games go, I’ve been getting back into Monster Hunter real fucking hard. Both Rise and Generations Ultimate. And I must be still processing some grief, because I started a new game in Dark Souls 2 and I am somehow starting to “get” it. Getting it to the point where I’m actually starting to, dare I say it, enjoy the game. Maybe it’s all these recent months of getting into Western RPGs and rediscovering the mindset that one needs to play those. I’ve just finished getting the ring from Drangleic Castle, so I’ve got another 800 areas to get through before I reach the end.

Naturally, I’ve been plugging away at Guilty Gear Strive. Of course, given recent gender things, I’ve been playing as Testament. Testament is a fucking awesome character. Here is a screenshot of me getting a perfect on my friend Hazel. I had to screenshot this, because I don’t get many moments like this, because Hazel is really good and is still much better than me.

Testament’s new theme song is…fine, I guess. Fine in that it’s not as egregious as some of the other music in Strive (shout out to Potemkin). Still not a patch on their theme from GGX2, a game that I would say has the best soundtrack in the entire medium. Listening to that song again and it’s like, fuck dude, it seems so obvious in hindsight that being a moody, genderless thing who loves goth shit is what I was always meant to be.

I was planning on writing some more, but I’m already 1500 words in, so I should probably stop. I’ll be back to doing my usual thing of essays and streams in the coming week, just needed to take a quick break.

Last night, I sat down with a couple friends as we watched the 2010 KOF movie together. I figured that since my last post was on KOF ’95, I would continue with that particular theme.

I’ll spare you any shock or surprise by telling you that this movie sucks. The problem with this movie sucking is that it doesn’t suck in a spectacular way, like a lot of other TV Game movies. Infamous examples like Street Fighter or The House of the Dead had at least some kind of redeeming qualities to them; Street Fighter was funny and Raul Julia was around to chew on the scenery like the world’s largest Termite, while House of the Dead had like 100 Matrix camera sweeps and thought it would be a good idea to cut game footage in-between fight scenes (also, the retroactive knowledge of Uwe Boll knocking Lowtax flat on his ass). The King of Fighters is simply boring. The best, and only, good thing about it is picking apart just how badly the film doesn’t seem to even know what the source material is, let alone not being true to it. So, let’s take a look at how badly the producers fucked this up.

Let’s start with the cast. For anyone who hasn’t played any KOF game, I’ve gone ahead and posted shots of the characters in the movie next to their in-game designs. So who do we got in this movie?

Mai Shiranui

Terry Bogard

Iori Yagami

Rugal Bernstein

And finally, get fucking ready for this: Kyo Kusanagi

That’s right, folks: the studio execs gave the fucking King of Fighters movie the Jake Gyllenhaal treatment.

Now, these are only the credited roles. Eagle-eyed viewers can find many “Easter Eggs” and figure out which other characters this movie fucked up.

Goro Daimon

Chin Gentsai

Joe Higashi

And if you look real carefully in this shot, you can see Leona Heidern

Yeah, right…..there!

Right away, you can tell that there was no care put into this movie at all. They couldn’t even be bothered to put a red wig on Iori’s actor. Or, for that matter, pronounce “Iori” correctly a single time throughout. “Eye-ori” Yagami.

There’s a plot to this movie. I think. Rugal Bernstein wishes to become “The King of Fighters,” and to do this, he needs to steal three ancient artifacts, and somehow transfer them over to virtual reality, where all of the KOF fights take place. Oh yeah, nobody in this movie can fight for real, and instead need to use Magical Bluetooth Headsets to enter the Metaverse and duke it out there. Anyways, by having these ancient artifacts, Rugal will finally be able to make the cliche “if you die in the game, you die for real” a reality. No, I do not know why he needs to do this, other than to be a dick. But it’s fine, because the script doesn’t know why he needs to do this, either. Nothing in this movie is explained; shit simply happens and then the credits roll. In order to stop Rugal and his video game addiction, CIA agents Mai Shiranui and Terry Bogard need to team up. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Mai and Terry are in the CIA. Because, you know, when I think “sexy big titty ninja” and “homeless guy with a tenuous grasp of the English language” I think of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Also, Iori is there because reasons, and Kyo shows up and does White People things.

Now, I’m not expecting a particularly deep plot here. After all, this is a movie based on a series of fighting games where super-powered martial artists call each other “dweebenheimer.” But I am expecting like, basic coherence. The Mortal Kombat movie was all over the place, but at least was all over the place in a way that made sense; everyone’s on an island where fights can break out at any time, and fights do in fact break out at any time and any place. Johnny Cage and Scorpion fighting it out in a random forest with no explanation still worked in that context. The fact that it was a mostly dialogue-free extended fight scene didn’t hurt.

KOF does not have this. It splits its time between nonsensical exposition, virtual fight scene, more exposition, another fight scene, and repeat. The characters all have to enter a VR chat room to fight in a tournament that has been going on for thousands of years. Thousands of years, a time frame that would have predated things like “virtual reality,” “electricity,” and “international relations.” A virtual reality that everyone totally knows about, yet CIA Agent Terry Bogard thinks it’s a non-existent bunch of bull shit. He does not believe that there is a VR world where people fight it out in a never-ending tournament, despite his CIA partner entering it multiple times, with several of his contacts also knowing about it. The long-standing rivalry between Kyo and Iori is not due to a predestined fate that they share, but because Kyo is biracial in this movie, and Iori is discriminatory against those who are only half-Japanese. You would think that maybe the casting decision to turn Kyo Kusanagi into Kyle Kusanagi would be a commentary on a very real issue in Japanese culture, but no, it’s just a quick way to cover their ass. These flashback scenes with Kyo where the whitest thing about him is his Gi proves that:

he literally outgrew being asian

The writing is a fucking mess, full stop. Maybe the only good thing it did was turn Vice and Mature into full-blown lesbians, which would be cool if they had any character beyond getting their asses kicked repeatedly like cartoon henchmen, and the scene where it’s strongly implied that Rugal rapes the both of them. Because, you know, that was the missing ingredient that kept SNK from overtaking the big boys of the arcade scene: sexual assault.

Something you may have noticed in these screenshots I’ve taken is that the movie is shot badly, too. Lots and lots and lots and lots of Dutch Angles. There are so many Dutch Angles that my hands involuntarily typed “How Do I Join Scientology” into Google.

Did I mention that Rugal is now Freddy Krueger in this movie? He has a different outfit in every fight scene, and he makes sure to ham it up with terrible lines. Ray Park sure has come a long way from playing Darth Fucking Maul in Star Wars.

I will give credit to this movie for one thing: the fight scenes themselves are actually pretty good. Turns out having a bulk of your cast played by stunt coordinators can lead to the action being well done. But, because this is the KOF movie, even that gets fucked up. Lots of quick cuts that kill the action, use of shaky-cam that makes things hard to follow, and those Goddamn Dutch Angles. When the actors are given time to breathe and punch each other, it’s pretty darn entertaining, but you have to sit through a lot of bull shit to get to those few moments of quality.

This movie sucks. Don’t watch it. If you laughed at any of my jokes, then you have been entertained better than this movie could do. And if you didn’t laugh at any of my jokes, then you have been entertained better than this movie could do. Go laugh at the Double Dragon movie or something instead.

The yearly bill for this site was due on Monday. Obviously, I paid it, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read this. Running this has been a lot more worthwhile of an investment in that last couple of years, and I’d like to keep this going for as long as possible.

There is a problem, however. My hosting provider has decided that the costs are going up next year, and I guess I don’t get any sort of grandfathered clause or anything to not have to spend more money, despite being a paying customer since 2006. So, I have decided that I am really going to get my money’s worth even more than I have lately. This is, essentially, my house, and I feel like living in it. This has mostly been a space for essays and reviews and such, but what if I did more shitposting? What if I just, you know, fucking posted stuff for the sake of posting? Having fun? Didn’t follow any sort of rules other than my own? Post some songs or some lewd shit I found online. I have done this every now and again, as recently as December, but I feel like I should be fucking around more often. Here’s a couple pictures of catboys I found online. Why am I posting these? Because why not? You’re welcome.

Speaking of December, things have definitely been a lot better in the old brain region since then. Turns out, it’s actually a really good idea to simply cut out a lot of unnecessary bull shit in my life before I get completely Jokerfied, rather than simply mostly Jokerfied. Avoiding discourse, or playing Guess Who? Sexual Predator Edition, and shit like that has been great. I have spent my time since then simply enjoying myself: playing TV Games, watching an*me and indie wrestling, and generally being a perverted little goblin in my private time. Trying to enjoy my mid-30s as best I can during year three of “oh fuck, my chronically ill ass better not go outside unless I absolutely need to!” I’m under a blanket in my Gamer Chair, playing a pirated copy of Bayonetta on PC (in case I need to justify piracy to any new and probably now former readers, I’ve already paid for it twice on two different consoles, so fuck off), and listening to a fucking ton of death metal and Post-Rock. Oh yeah, I’ve been listening to death metal more regularly since December. Strangely, it’s very good at helping me focus and pay attention when I’m working on stuff. I could really stand to include more goth metal in the playlist.

That’s how I’ve been. As for how I’m doing, I’m just vibing, bro. Waiting for King of Fighters XV to come out next week and kick my friend Hazel’s ass in it (the opposite will happen). I plan on getting back into streaming on a regular basis, looking at cool and obscure old stuff. AEW Revolution is the beginning of March, the same day as the first race of the new F1 season. Hoping for a ring that actually explodes and a season that doesn’t end in bull shit, respectively. Other than that, I plan on remaining chill as fuck. Write some cool shit. Finish making some cool games. I want 2022 to be the year I finally wash and dry clean my brain of many years of garbage.

Think I’ll end this with more pictures of erotic maid outfits. That seems like a good idea. Like I said, fuck it, this shit is about to cost a hair under $200 next year, so I may as well go all in and post whatever the fuck I want, up to and including examples of an extremely mild fetish I have.

How about another song too?

Been pretty hard to try and write things as of late. I mean, hey, a whole week’s worth of some of the most transphobic bull shit I’ve seen since 2015, in a year that has already been some of the transphobic bull shit I’ve seen since 2015, has left me in a bad mood. This is a year where I saw some poor trans girl get doxxed for the heinous crime of going on social media and saying, “whoa, this new Evangelion movie looks pretty cool!” You think nothing would be worse or at least stupider than that, and then life finds a way to let you down more. I won’t say anything more on the subject (at least not until the internet annoys me into saying something again), but what happened to Isabel Fall was a bunch of bull shit, and I think it’s fucked up that the people who fucked her life up are portraying themselves as the real victims, and one of them is straight up capitalizing on her work. I will never change my mind on this. It sucks to see people I had a degree of respect for, either out of fear of losing an audience, or because they turned out to be stupid in the end, jumping onto the side of this #NotYourShield-esque ID-Pol defense going on, but whatever. Fuck them, too.

So, because of all this, it’s been hard to write. Like I said last time, I have some drafts in my folder, but every time I go to work on them, I think “eh, I’m not feeling this right now” and then I don’t finish them. Instead, I’ve thrown myself back to my other work. I’ve been drawing and programming a bit more than I have been. There’s some cool stuff I put together, but I’m not quite ready to show it off publicly just yet. You’ll have to wait until the end of December. I will however, post one image as a preview:

it’s a sumo wrestler. no i do not know why the gif does not animate well. aseprite’s export thing is being weird lately.

That’s all I’ve been doing this week: drawing 8-bit sprites and listening to Japanese Hardcore music. Haven’t really played too many games or watched anything outside of the usual AEW shows. I’ve been moody and boring, really. It’s Saturday night, maybe I should give myself a break? I’ll illegally download a PS2 game and write about it in a couple days, how does that sound?

Whatever, have this picture of a lewd maid I stole from Tumblr. I enjoy maid outfits from an aesthetic point of view. However, I also like them in the sexual sense.

Again, that’s the cool thing about having my own personally curated and maintained space: I can post whatever the fuck I want. No takes, no discourse, no bull shit. I can post my thoughts on games, an*me, sports entertainment, post some spicy pics, some good songs, whatever. Then I can go to my RSS reader and see more game opinions from people who aren’t jerks, and also more spicy pics. More people should do this.

Eugenics Scarlet Divinity- Noctis:ovium

I’m kind of in a mood, so I wasn’t feeling up to doing another essay this week. I have a few things in the drafts folder that will be done fairly quick. Instead, I think I’ll use this space to I don’t know, talk about life, I guess?

After hemming and hawwing over it for a while, I’ve decided that I’m quitting sex work. Not because I’m ashamed of it, or because I got fucked over by the industry or anyone within it. Sure, the pay kind of sucked, but I suppose you can apply that to any other job in the world. No, I quit because I was sick and tired of the clientele. Working a phone sex line, you would imagine that you would be taking calls from horny dudes who wanted someone to moan and talk dirty in their ears; perfectly normal, understandable stuff. For a time, that was true. For the last couple months, shit has gotten dark. Disturbed men calling me at weird hours, telling me about their sexual fantasies involving children and animals. Telling me about wanting to watch their own daughters be gangbanged by a large group of Black men. Of course, they didn’t say “Black men,” they used a much different word that I’m not going to repeat. I don’t like being up until four in the morning, lying awake and feeling like shit over hearing some fucked up, depraved stuff for nearly an hour at a time. Hearing the absolute hate and venom in their voices, I can’t imagine that at least one of these assholes isn’t on Facebook, posting boomer memes about people like me in public bathrooms. Every week, some poor TGirl gets labeled a monster by the world at large, all over the stupidest shit: posting too many selfies, making a sex joke, being too popular, having self-confidence, you fucking name it. All the while, men like this can operate no fucking problem. It’s disgusting, and it has actively been affecting my mental well-being in extremely negative ways. Doesn’t help that Niteflirt does an extremely good job of making sure that nobody’s contact info is ever made public, so it’s not like I can report to them to some authority, who will then proceed to do absolutely nothing about it.

So I’m quitting. Financially speaking, this is certainly a terrible decision. In the long run, I think it will be better for me.

I suppose I quit just in time because, oh hell yeah, extremely fucked up transmisogyny is back in the news! Nothing I look forward to more than an ever-present reminder that me wanting to go the rest of my life playing games or watching an*me or pro wrestling in peace, except as a girl now, is way too much to ask of people who have absolutely nothing better going on in their lives other than to constantly load themselves up with hate like they’re a prejudiced Hummer.

Before I really get into this, I need to say one thing: Neon Yang is a talentless, opportunistic, transphobic piece of fucking trash. If that’s a sticking point for you, feel free to stick it up your ass. Also, please imagine that I am giving you The Finger as you read this.

This no-good motherfucker, this garbage excuse for a human being teams up with both the head of a Sci-Fi authors guild and a literal millionaire, and they all use their platforms to hound and harass a brand new trans author into a psych ward, causing her to detransition and disappear from public life. I’ve read a lot of great fiction from a lot of great misfits, and I’m saying that Isabel Fall’s short story was legitimately the best work I read in 2020. Now she’s gone, somewhere where the world can’t get her. Her defining work now only exists as a PDF file passed from person to person like it’s fucking contraband. To know what happened to Isabel, and what has happened before and after her, is infuriating. It always happens, some fucking sociopath gets into a jealousy-fueled rage and uses the underlying hate in society to unperson a person. Yeah, I’ve been around that block two or three times.

Seeing Yang gleefully take part in what was essentially a witch hunt over some manufactured “harm” that was done by a well-written science fiction story about the co-opting of gender and sexuality by the military; a story so “harmful” that it was universally praised and beloved by every trans woman who isn’t a moron, then pop up in some sci-fi anthology about…the co-opting of gender and sexuality by the military. Irony is fucking dead. Really, what can you do about it? It’s not like you can do sweet wrestling moves through your computer, or click a button to stop this thing from happening. All you can do is sit there and be mad about it. All you can do is talk shit for a couple hours, while these ghouls laugh at you, and their alt-right cheerleaders on the sidelines slap their thighs and yell out “TRIGGERED! TRIGGERED!” to nobody in particular. It sucks. And it sucks that being upset is wrong, because something something privilege something something marginalized people cannot be shitty towards other marginalized people something something I got all my politics from Tumblr.

Just…sick and tired of seeing so many girls being told to roll over and take it because some bootlicking fuck on a bad web site might subtweet you. Fighting back is Problematic now because it’s an act of male violence and Yang isn’t the spitting image of Mitt Romney. You know, I get cut off in traffic, I honk my horn, yell “HEY FUCK YOU ASSHOLE!” and maybe give the finger. I don’t pull over and mentally rank privilege, before ultimately deciding that I must have deserved it somehow. Some hack writer helping to whip up a braying mob of other shitheads to ruin a woman’s life, solely to take their place and do a much shittier job of it is, in my eyes, starting shit. Someone starts some shit, I will say some back. That’s that. Anyone who tries to tell me that this is an evil thing and “YOU’RE JUST AS BAD AS THEY ARE!!!!!!!” can fuck off.

It’s funny how a few posts ago, I was focusing on trying to be positive and happier in the coming year than I have been in this one. Well, that didn’t really work out, did it?

I’m 35 years old, yet I feel like this old grump. This curmudgeonly fuck that has a growing hatred of the way things are going. I’ve been writing about the hypocrisy of cis people and their bitch ass collaborators. Still writing about it! I’ve been writing about social media perpetuating the further erosion of communication and freedom that the internet once had, now being reduced to a husk of commercialism. So sick of the “hot take clout chasing nft armchair psychiatrist callout why media is bad and you’re stupid for liking it (run time 7:46:29) fleet spaces thread ya’ll quote dunk change my mind wholesome smol bun anime is a slur literally 30 year old media caused trump” culture. I hate what the internet has become. I feel so bad for all the kids that won’t be able to grow up and be able to discover themselves the way that I did, instead stuck with the bland, corporate mandated system of “engagements.” Not super related to my last two points, but fuck it, I’m still in a mood.

Not everything has been frustrating and soul-rending, at least. I did use the last of my Niteflirt earnings to buy myself a PC-Engine Mini. So now after twenty years, I can finally say that I own one. Kind of. Some people say that nostalgia is for those escaping their pain, so I guess it was a hell of a coincidence that this all came to a head while I spend money to relive my teen years in a more official capacity. You bet your ass I’ll be talking about this bad boy when it gets here. Whatever helps keep me indoors while another COVID strain spreads, and keeps me from having to talk to people I wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire. This Summer, I was planning on going Full Weaboo. I think in 2022, I will go full-on Hikkikomori. Have fun with your discourse and your barely-disguised transmisogyny, I have games to play.

hey, how about i post more unrelated images in long posts?

Once again, I begin a post with a confession: this is a second attempt at making a year-end retrospective. I’m doing this in November, rather than the end of December or beginning of January because I don’t think shit is going to change much in the next month and a half. I was also just generally moody and pissed off, so I decided to write a lot of shit down ahead of time. My original draft was pretty much a big list of every shitty thing that happened this year. 2021 sucked, to put it lightly, for numerous reasons. The problem is that I cleared 2,000 words before I managed to get past June, and that is way too fucking long. The thing is, I’ve been spending the last few months wallowing in negativity, which I hate. I hate being upset! I hate being angry! I hate feeling despair over shitty things! I hate being pessimistic and hopeless! Given the chance, I would much rather see the good in the world. I want to be honest about the fact that shit sucks, but try to find the good that happened this year.

Make no bones about it, I did not have a good year. Bad things happened in the world, bad things happened to my friends, and bad things happened to people I am at least empathetic towards. A community that I’m part of fractured in a pretty bad way. I’ve had a hard time making art this year, unlike last year, where I felt like a machine. Game development has been hard, barely being able to get a three-level demo out. A lack of output due a recurring instance of Bad Brain. I’ve been sick multiple times with different things. There was even a particularly nasty health scare that I’ve kept from everyone until writing it out right now. Luckily, it only turned out to be a bad reaction to a side effect from some medication I was on. Having anxiety while also having a sudden pain in your side and needing to urinate every two hours fills your head up with every worst case scenario possible.

A lot of shitheads felt emboldened for reasons that I do not care to figure out. It has felt like there’s been an even bigger trend of upholding bigotry, abuse, and assault. It has felt like talent or even being a decent human being is a hindrance. It sucks, and has caused a lot of bad mental health flare ups. Before I go into this post proper, I will simply say this: the Western Indie Game scene, whether it be as a critic at some fucking rag like Kotaku or Waypoint, or a developer enjoying that Itch.io front page, is straight up the most evil shit you can ever be a part of. My short run of covering local music events riddled with talentless jobbers with bassists in their 30’s who would openly brag about sleeping with underage fans was less soul-rending than this. More or less being blacklisted from the “Indie” scene is one of the best things that has ever happened to me, and it’s a shame that it took me this long to realize it. And it is also a shame that there are still some good people out there who are having to learn this the hard way; my heart goes out to Wren and Nathalie. Also fuck Dave Chapelle and fuck NFTs.

So yeah, I was not at my best in 2021. The most I was able to get done in any work sense was maintaining the streak of at least one blog post per week. I think to most of you, that’s good enough. In my eyes it’s not. I do apologize for not being able to get cool stuff out this year, especially to those of out there still supporting my criminally-neglected Patreon. To try and not be so hard on myself, at least I was writing consistently, even if the subject was “wow cool video game” over and over. My writing did get people thinking about stuff critically, and even convinced people to check out the stuff I was recommending. That’s awesome. Plus, at least being able to sit here and write about things I like was fun enough. I’ll try and keep the streak going throughout 2022, barring any sudden catastrophe.

Another area in my life where I felt like I was making an improvement was my fighting game prowess. Making it to level 10 in Guilty Gear Strive, with several trips to the Celestial Realm. Having who is essentially the Daigo Umehara of Vampire Savior tell me that I was one of the best players he had ever come across (despite me getting my ass kicked), was not something I simply brushed off. I haven’t been feeling super great these last few months, and being in a highly-competitive environment where everyone, even the very best, have their bad days, sometimes feels more like self-harm. Like I need to justify my brain saying all the bad, fucked up things about me. “Hey dumbass, you sure are getting your ass kicked a lot! Look at you, still falling for Millia’s mix-ups like a loser! Just like how you can’t do anything else right, and why everyone who has ever fucked with you and your friends are living their best lives, bitch!” I tried getting into Melty Blood Type Lumina while the onset of a Bad Brain Time™ was going on, and I didn’t handle myself well as a result; maybe I can try getting back into it later. But to know, and to sit back and try to be logical, that I am actually pretty fucking good, but also remember that I’m new. I’ve only been playing fighting games with any serious competitive ideas since 2020, maybe parts of 2019. Of course I’m going to have my weak spots, and I’m not suddenly going to be beating SonicFox with my eyes closed and pressing buttons with my feet.

okay, this image is actually related to the text

Maybe that’s the biggest takeaway of this year: that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. Remembering that no matter how fucked the world at large might be, and how shitty things are for a lot of people I love, and that I still have a ways to go in improving myself, I still have good people in my life. There was a lot of cool shit that came out this year. I took a four hour break in the middle of writing this to watch Full Gear with a bunch of friends and had a great time. I’m not trying to be one of those toxic positivity assholes that pretend everything is cool all the time, I’m just trying to see the best in things because I don’t want to be swallowed up in that black hole of despair that I’ve seen so many others fall into. Some this year, even.

Shit sucks, and there’s not a whole lot I do about it; one person can’t change the world. I’m a chronically ill idiot with a shitty immune system who stays indoors because of a virus outside that will never be cured. I can’t fix things, but I can at least try to a better friend? Make things better for my own small group. Keep making things, whether it be a simple blog post, or actually getting some new art out finally, that people enjoy or are moved by the same way I am for others’ work. Admittedly, I’m writing all this from a place of guilt. I feel like shit about the fact that I’ve been dealing with all this negative emotion and indulging the more self-destructive side of me: talking shit, relitigating grudges, getting mad at myself way too easily and letting all those dark thoughts take over. Not that I can’t or shouldn’t be upset about things sucking ass, or that I can’t talk some shit when the time is right, but it can’t be all I feel.

I’ve managed to do a mostly good job of not spraying all my personal shit on here, instead constantly venting privately on Discord, or making the mistake of logging back onto social media, and that ain’t no fucking way to live. Hopefully, this year was a stumbling block. It’s weird, because this is a public post that (being generous here) a couple hundred people might read, but I am writing this for myself. Felt like I’ve spent this whole year suspended in thick gel, and it’s prevented me from being at my best. This is me making this shit public as a way of holding myself accountable that this shit needs to change. Striving to make 2022 a year where I get myself to the consistent level I was at in 2020, only better. Of course, having a chemical imbalance in my brain and having a lot of enemies won’t make that easy, but I have to give it a better effort than I did this year. That’s my goal. More good articles. More finished games. More sprite work. More sprite animation. More 3D modelling. More streams. More doing things that I like, with a lot less of the “oh fuck, is this good enough??????” anxiety that’s arrested me all this time.

If you’ve read this far, you didn’t have to. Also thanks, I guess.

I’ve been away from home for the last two weeks for work reasons. I have another half a week to go. At this point, I’m clawing at the walls and losing my mind. While I have consumed a lot of media to try and pass the time, and getting pissed that time isn’t going fast enough, my brain is so fucking drained that honestly, I have no fucking clue what to write this week. But I’m still dedicated to making my one post per week.

posting random images because i can

I am dying to get back home. You see, because at least when I’m cooped up in my house due to a number of different reasons, mostly a shitty immune system and a never ending plague outside, I have all my stuff. My high-end PC, my art making tools, my game collection, my movie collection, an external hard drive with 15 years worth of old memories and programs, comfortable furniture that doesn’t make my back hurt, and so on. I won’t be bored and sore. I can sleep, cook, and straight up live. Here, all I have is a decent at best laptop and an inability to sit still without needing to get up and take a pain reliever. It sucks.

Watching some an*mes and playing the same games I’ve written about before is only fun for so long. This is one of those times where I’m really missing the days of the old internet. The days when you could lose hours reading other people’s web sites, or even find a forum full of discussion. But because everything is fucking Twitter and Wikia, that shit stops being fun real quick. Like, I don’t want to read Twitter! Fuck Twitter! Fuck the endless discourse and “hot takes” designed for clicks and the intentionally designed doomscrolling. Why yes, I would like to read about some washed-up celebrity talking shit about minorities! I would like to also read the thoughts of that celebrities idiot fans. Let me hear about some con artist fuckhead who nearly hurt a bunch of my friends doing really well in life! Awesome! Cool! How about a fucking personal web page by someone who really wanted to talk about a TV show they liked?

Anyways. I’m bored. I’m grumpy. My back hurts. I don’t really feel like doing any reviews or essays right now. Not sure when I went into that sort of mode, when this was meant to be me just posting shit for the sake of it to begin with. But nothing interesting is happening other than me being miserable, so you know, hey. Well, see you. Here’s a screenshot of a gay porno from like 2013 that I thought was really funny, because it involved a femboy named Kevin Nash.

don’t turn your back on the wolfpack

I need to sit down and go on a rant about something that has been bothering me for quite some time now. It’s something that you, the reader, have probably also noticed.

As you all probably know, I like to play fighting games. I especially like to play them on a competitive level. Now, the thing about fighting games is that they are actually pretty fucking complicated; “getting good” is really hard. Sometimes I am stumped on how to respond to certain attacks, blockstrings, knowledge of frame data, and various other miscellaneous things. As a result, I need to hop on over to Google and type a query into its search bar. At risk of dating myself here, but back in my day, when you typed something into Google, you got the information that you needed. It was pretty fucking painless. You didn’t know something, so you asked a question, then you learned something.

These days, Google is completely fucking useless. I mentioned fighting games earlier, because that’s what kicked off me wanting to write this. I’m trying to get better at The King of Fighters 2002 and Virtua Fighter 5. No matter how specific my search query is, the result is the same: “The King of Fighters 2002 is a 2002 release for the SNK Neo-Geo arcade system.” “Press down, down-forward and punch to throw a projectile.” “Virtua Fighter Street Fighter Chun-Li Hentai Fuck Prada Bag.” Maybe I’ll get a copy/paste of the game’s Wikipedia entry from some place called cheesewheel.chgrz.notavirus.com. It is such bull shit. Like, huh, I am losing a lot of matches, and I need to figure out how not to lose so many matches, let me go to the internet for advice. Then the internet responds by being actively antagonistic about it. Sorry, I guess I should have been born with the wisdom of the cosmos.

Now, getting better at fighting games is not really all that important in the grand scheme of things, but it does help illustrate a bigger problem. Trying to look up anything these days sucks. If you are looking for help, you ain’t getting it! Google would probably save a lot more money if they changed their results page to a picture of a middle finger in front of a flashing, seizure-inducing background that called you a dumb ass idiot bitch moron retard clown shithead stupid motherfucker that doesn’t know things. Why not have your results posted to a Twitter account in real-time where Google doxxes users, like, “Dick Gosinya at 2487 Riverfuck Lane in Salt Lake City, Utah doesn’t know things!” Just go full-on insulting to my intelligence, why not?

I’m not sure what exactly caused this very quick decline. Is it capitalism? Tech bros desperate for Elon Musk’s validation? Because this is not just a problem with Google so much as it is a problem with the greater internet. A reason why I’m so adamant in my stance of making your own web site is because doing so is frowned upon by the people in charge of this new, shittier, internet. The Internet is supposed to be a tool for communication and information. It’s not anymore. It is a place where some blue check mark who makes way too much money says something asinine and inflammatory, gets dunked on hundreds or even thousands of times, and this is considered normal; profit is generated on outrage. It’s a place where you watch a couple of video on YouTube to have a laugh, then spend the next five years rolling your eyes and blocking a deluge of recommended videos where some white supremacist fuck sits in his bathtub for two hours and rants about pronouns or some shit. It’s a place where whether you are doing research on a serious scientific topic, or figuring out how to escape Orochi Chris’ corner pressure, you are instead served with ads. It’s a place where the individual no longer matters. Get on Medium. Get on Substack. Pivot to video. Become a “Content Creator.” Like, Comment, and Subscribe.

Fuck that.

I don’t have any sort of answer on how to fix any of this; I am simply here on my own web site to complain about it. I’m almost 35 and I feel like a fucking boomer. I do not get, nor do I like, this new generation of the World Wide Web. My heart goes out to the younger generation, who don’t know how things used to be. Fuck, I was frustrated when I started writing this, now I’m sad.