Shitty Casual

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Struggling a bit here. My current book is at about 60k and I'm projecting 100k, and "Why Am I Doing This?" keeps rattling through my brain.

One of my colleagues recently made $10,000 on their first novel the first month. Friendly reminder I recently had my best launch month, which was $250. This writer is three decades my junior, and very new to writing comparatively. They made more in one day than I made in a month. They made more in one month than I did in 3 years.

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Anyway, all this to say, this is awesome, and this author is a very kind, hard-working person, but fml. Royalties are reflective of readership, so even if you ostensibly don't care about the money, you actually do care because that's the primary metric by which we gauge interest and engagement with the work.

As a matter of self-preservation, I've recently adopted the attitude "my books don't sell and that's okay," as way to sorta push through my doubts and keep publishing. But the truth is... that's not a very good strategy. Because you need a carrot and a goal. "I write because that's what I do" is neither. So I'm gonna sit down and revisit my goals and think about being a bit more brave in terms of my ambitions and defining my own success.

A possibly premature post, but I think some of you are familiar with this series.

I've been wanting to play a Shin Megami Tensei game but was never sure where to start. Players look favorably on Nocturne, and I understand the somewhat recent remaster wasn't very good, so I got PS2 running on my SteamDeck and gave it a whirl. Until now, I've limited emulation to pre-PSX for the most part, so being able to dig more into PSX and PS2 really opens up my options.

I went into this not knowing what to expect beyond "demons" and it's pretty damn compelling. The graphics have aged well and the atmosphere and mood is awesome. I wanted to set expectations, so I read a little more and according to HLTB this is about a 50-hour game. It has multiple endings, and the dungeon crawling is very crawly, and I think people got annoyed about getting a mediocre ending which, for a game of this length, is very understandable. Definitely not a "put down and come back 2 weeks later and still know where the hell you are" type of game. My gaming threshold tends to be 30 to 40 hours at the very best of times, so we'll see how it goes.

I'm now knee-deep in the first book of an SFF trilogy (I'm tentatively describing it as Science Fantasy, I don't know if anyone actually uses that term), and I have a lot of uncertainty. Not about the books per se, I'm committed and confident I'll finally be able to write this story. I'm a little nervous about writing my first series, because I've only written standalones.

This is probably technically a good time to be switching to a new genre with lots of ????, since a lot of things are changing across the board anyway and the old conventional advice may no longer apply (ranks slowing/freezing on amazon means some of the old promo strategies might not be as effective, etc etc). But I feel like I've gotten off the bus on the opposite side of town and have no idea where everything is.

I've taken steps to reassure myself.

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Time for numberwang! It's always fun when my "big counter" ticks up to a milestone:

This is just for active titles on D2D. I've actually sold over 5,700 books across platforms. My bestselling book has sold 320 copies in like 2 years (and in case you're wondering, YES, it is emphatically one of my stupidest books!). I think I've published 50 books so far, but I delisted the stinkiest ones sales-wise so IDK.

As you can see, even if your books don't sell "a lot," especially up-front, over time it adds up if you keep on truckin'.

I know someone whose recent pen-debut novel sold more copies in one week than I sold from my entire catalog in one year. It would be foolish of me to compare myself to them, even if we were in the same genre doing similar things, because you never really know what's going on under the hood. Even if they TELL you what's going on, you're taking their word for it, not only that they told the truth but that they actually understand what made the difference (oftentimes, we don't unless you've got years of experience in a genre and you keep meticulous records).

You decide what you're asking your pen name to do for you. You decide what's cool. My first year I sold maybe 250 books. I decided 5.7k books in 3 years is cool. YMMV.

In the spirit of trying new things, I once again tackled the problem of writing on the go. Last year I resisted expanding my writing time, but now that writing is a "hobby" (lol) and I have a better handle on my time management, I decided it would be a more fun way to spend downtime than doomscrolling my feeds.

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Obsidian is not Scrivener

I'm convinced that adopting Scrivener made it possible for me to finish novels. I simply could not wrap my brain around the story when I used a word processor, and the visual organization of the Scrivener binder, plus the ability to have side notes, was a game-changer. Now I think Obsidian is going to make more complex books and series possible. I'm simultaneously outlining book one and the full series right now, and I'm powering past the points where I got stuck before because I was just so goddamned overwhelmed by the volume of stuff I was juggling.

It's the links, folks. It is EFFORTLESS to link and track data in this tool. Need to rework a bit of lore? Toss in a [[TODO]] link with a brief sentence explaining what needs to be done. Need to fill a placeholder? Drop a link to the placeholder link in the outline. Having a dynamic TODO list that I don't even think about, that is always updated and links right to the spot I need to make the change, is chef's kiss

Obsidian's other big strength is layout flexibility and unlimited split panes. Scrivener only allows a single split pane. Most of the time, this is fine. But in the planning stages, being able to have chapters, series notes, outline notes, and wiki notes all open as needed in various panes has really helped.

Scrivener is gonna come into play after the rough draft, when I'm splitting and moving big chunks of text around, running my various editing tools, and getting ready for epub output.

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Anyway, writing Baby's First SeriousBook Series is kinda scary! D: I'll talk about that next time. But I feel a lot better now that I have ways to organize that seem to be working.

I'm fascinated by a story I only recently heard about... An extremely popular romantasy book (Crave by Tracy Wolff) is facing accusations of plagiarism, and the connections between the unpublished manuscript and the published book raise a lot of questions. Not just about sharing tropes and genre language, but about osmosis, and how much we absorb from other people's work and unconsciously project into our art.

Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer's Story? (at archive.is)

Romantasy’s reliance on tropes poses a challenge for questions of copyright. Traditionally, the law protects the original expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. A doctrine named for the French phrase scènes à faire, or “scenes that must be done,” holds that the standard elements of a genre (such as a showdown between the hero and the villain) are not legally protectable, although their selection and arrangement might be. The wild proliferation of intensely derivative romantasies has complicated this picture. The worlds of romance and fantasy have been so thoroughly balkanized, the production of content so accelerated, that what one might assume to be tropes—falling in love with a werewolf or vampire, say—are actually subgenres. Tropes operate at an even more granular level (bounty-hunter werewolves, space vampires). And the more specific the trope, the harder it is to argue that such a thing as an original detail exists.

The article also delves into the role of book packagers in several high-profile Romantasy bestsellers. All traditionally published books are collaborative on some level, but when book packaging companies get involved the lines between author, editor, publisher, and marketing can get extremely blurred. Crave's final draft was created by multiple collaborators during several whirlwind weeks right before the book went to press, and the rough was written in 2 months. In deposition, the author wasn't entirely sure if she wrote all the passages in question.

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I don't read or write romantasy, but from what I gather, the readership craves "more of that" to such an exacting standard an outsider might not understand why This Romantasy book went gangbusters, and That One did not. Writers who can read and understand the market (which is a specific skillset not every writer has, in Clifton it's referred to as the Drafter archetype) have been able to leverage that understanding to make lot of money in this genre, but eventually Romantasy will hit a saturation point and it will be harder to sell books.

I casually know a couple of full-time indie romantasy authors (middle and top earners) who LOVE the genre. They genuinely love reading and writing it, they are incredibly intelligent and hard-working writers who have absolutely earned every bit of their success, and there is clearly a lot of heart in their books and process. But this genre seems ideal for "chefs in the kitchen" tinkering to find that winning recipe, and the book packaging company's ability to leverage this genre multiple times shows it can be done. Reading about the marketing savvy of the book packager Entangled Publishing (which also published Fourth Wing) gave me flashbacks to another story of a made-for-market book going gangbusters: 50 Shades of Gray. E. L. James is a little different, in that part of her strategy was filing off the serial numbers (a strategy many other fanfiction writers would later employ to launch their own romances as part of the more recent fanfic-to-tradpub pipeline), but at it's core 50 Shades incredible success is a marketing success story.

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Packaging companies are not new to plagiarism claims. This story reminded me of an older one... In 2006, Kaavya Viswanathan was accused of plagiarizing several authors when she wrote How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. The book packager Alloy Entertainment was involved in that process. Viswanathan was introduced to an agent who felt her current manuscript was too dark, and suggested she write something lighter that would sell better, and the agency referred her to the book packaging service.

I won't get into how some agents take kickbacks to steer writers towards dubious companies and programs, and I'm not making the assertion that Alloy Entertainment is or was dubious, but if an agent referred me to a book packager I would consider that a creative disconnect and politely cut my losses. In Viswanathan's case, Alloy Entertainment inked a 2-book deal with Little, Brown stipulating Viswanathan would produce the books, with the author and Alloy Entertainment splitting the advance and copyright. The scandal blew up, and the book crashed and burned big time and was pulled. As with Crave, the work of the author and the packaging company blended in such a way there was some question as to who actually plagiarized what.

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There's been a lot of talk about why, if you'll forgive me for phrasing it this way, Romantasy readers are the way they are (It's the pandemic! It's being obsessed with Twilight/Harry Potter/Etc during one's formative years! It's the economy! It's the crushing state of the world!). Reading the GR reviews for the more popular romantasy books is always mind-boggling to me, because there's always a standard ratio of incoherent squeeing to "this was a boring retread" or "this is exactly like x, y, and z," or "omg this book literally copied such-and-such" and as an outsider I'm never really sure what tipped the scale one way or another.

Wanting More of That is not new. Mystery series have always leaned heavily on providing same protagonist, slightly different flavor of murder, for example. Romance and Fantasy are two readerships that I think historically have been very forgiving of retreading and rehashing favorite scenarios, particularly in stories with wish-fulfillment protagonists. At least right now, it seems a lot of what's selling in fiction across the board is escapism that's fast to process. People just want to kick back and read a fun story about a snarky woman who butts-heads-with-but-ultimately-marries a slightly-bad-but-mostly-just-hot vampire/werewolf/dragon while making an impact on the world around her. It's not for me, but I get it.

When will romantasy fans collectively decide they've had their fill? And when that happens... where will they go next? It will be interesting to see.

I've been having fun with the short visual novel Billionaire Lovers, which doubles as a paranoia simulator. It's about an MC who unexpectedly inherits $100 million and suddenly has a lot of hot guys in their life being especially nice and/or clingy. It's light on the romance side, but I found the reveals fun and I especially like how quickly the game can end if you're not paying attention.

My only gripe is the MC gets addicted to an annoying Gacha game on multiple routes and I appreciate they were making a point but it was tedious to RP a loot box addict.

If you like VNs that go off the beaten path, this one's a no-brainer at $3 and 2-4 hours playtime. This was an impulse buy based on title and the promise of being scammed. Would definitely get scammed again.

I Must Return To Weekly Screeching/Crying About Writing

I must.

But first~! Someone said ChatGPT is free and you don't even have to sign up, so I fired it up and asked it to write a story based on the hook/concept of my upcoming novella (the hook is unique enough I can't tell you; you might find my books and either be scarred for life or slavishly devoted and I value your mental health just as much as mine). And I told myself, do not get upset. Whatever comes out... do not get upset.

I did not get upset but my blood pressure did briefly go up a tick, lol.

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I have a lot of thoughts percolating right now (I generated the story AS I typed this post) and will have to revisit this later. But I have to say, having seen the output--and I might get some heat for this--I don't begrudge anyone wanting to use these tools, for whatever reason. It's not a learning tool, though. It's a shortcut tool. I think you could use this tool to make 50 stories and not necessarily learn what you'd learn writing a handful of stories on your own. But maybe you don't want to learn. Maybe you just want to make things and put them out there.

The volume of AI clogging up discovery right now is frustrating and sucks, but I'm not gonna moralize it. Things are changing as new tools are made available, and we must adapt. That's all.

Or, This Shit Again

A song as old as time, I keep meaning to post here and keep not and here we are. Let's just start at the top, baby steps.

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And as an aside, I'd like to start being frank about numbers in these posts. Writers tend to guard The Numbers like precious jewels, because We're All Competitors except we're not (I'll save that rant for later). If you're new here, I'm a wide niche queer (mostly MM) writer, my backlists are erotica and romance but my goal is to move into SFF.

I never posted my year-end roundup for 2024 and I just finished my taxes, so in the spirit of that, here we go.

2024 Roundup

Last year I made about $7,000 in royalties. If you're trying to make a living in the US, this is nowhere near what you need. If you're a hobbyist who just needs to buy book covers, video games, and maybe replace your old fridge, this is a fantastic number. While some of these earnings came from branching out and trying new platforms, the vast majority of that is backlist sales on established platforms as MM readers slowly discover me and resonate with my off-market weirdness.

US TAXes

While it's fresh in my mind.

Self-published writers need to file a Schedule C 1040 with the IRS (NOT a Schedule E, which are different types of royalties). Most of the big platforms will send you a 1099 with two notable exceptions. Kobo, which is Canadian, does not. And if you have royalties dispensed through PayPal, PP will only send a 1099-K if you received over $5,000 in payments in 2024. (For 2025, it will be anything over $600, and that is the new standard I believe).

The tax rate for most of us is 15.3%, and the IRS will penalize you if you wait until the end of the year to file, no matter what you make. This is because the people who deliberately made our tax code complicated so millionaires can tax evade are in fact sadists, and they're taking it out on us normies. For self-employed income you're supposed to estimate what you'll make and pay quarterly. You can do this through IRS pay direct. I made $2,400 Q1, and after deductions I'm paying about $340 this quarter.

2025 Look Ahead

• I'm on track to release my 50th book this year. (ffffffffffffff)
• I'll be releasing at least 6 books across 3 pens, and 3 of them are ghosts (books I started writing and had to abandon for whatever reason) so I'm happy about that.
• I'm on track for over 9k this year (my 4th). I made around 10k my first 3 years combined, to provide some perspective.

I recently released a book that won't earn out. It's written entirely for my pleasure, and it's a weird, imperfect, beautiful little book. I underpriced it, commissioned a cover, and pumped some money into ARCs because I like it when people say nice things about my books.

Do to royalty rate stupidity, at the 99c price point has to sell somewhere between 150-200 copies to break even, it varies with each platform. (At the "correct" higher price point of $2.99, it only has to sell around 35 copies... what a difference the 30% vs 70% royalty rate makes!) This is why I normally strongly, strongly, STRONGLY discourage shortrom pricing at 99c. Fuck that shit.

Anyway, I expect to sell 20 copies the first month on the high end, but we'll see? I've never released a book at 99c, and I'm treating it like an entry point to my backlist. But I also want to release a book I know can't earn out, as a mental exercise.

My goal is to not look at it for a month, and to focus on my current ghost. (I did already re-read it once; yes, I read my own books for fun.) I'm trying to internalize what Gilbert says: it doesn't matter if no one likes it, buys it, or reads it. I like it. And that's all that matters, and I'm onto the next one. (Gushing 4 and 5-star reviews certainly won't hurt though.)

I love digging mechanics, so A Game About Digging a Hole seemed like a no-brainer.

The funniest thing about this one is it actually has a setup. You buy a house that is advertised as having treasure in the back yard. You buy an automatic shovel to aid in this. If your battery runs out, the shovel blows up (meaning you lose your ore).

As ores are gathered and sold on the internet, you gain money to upgrade your shovel size, inventory size, battery life, and jet pack ability. You have treasure detecting equipment that goes off if you get near an object of interest, guiding you to it.

A Game About Digging a Hole doesn't really get satisfying until you unlock the larger shovels. My first hole was such a sprawling mess I decided to start over and focus on building a very tidy, organized hole, and I've only just gotten to the point where my shovel is big enough to be fun. I needed a game I could mindlessly play to blow off steam, and if you're into games like Powerwasher Simulator you'd probably enjoy it, since it is essentially that with some exploration mechanics. As time wasters go, I like it okay. I'm generally going to prefer a survivors like or puzzle game to eat up my time, but once you get some upgrades under your belt and the digging opens up it can be satisfying.

Factorio is the defacto factory-building game by Wube Software. After your ship crashes on a planet, you must harvest resources and research technology until you can build a rocket to escape. In the meantime, the Biters living there are most displeased with your encroachment, and reasonably seek to destroy everything you've built.

Factorio has been on my short list for a while now because I went through factory phase and every time I researched this type of game the answer was always, "Play Factorio." A lot of people say Factorio is the last factory game you'll ever need, so I took their word for it and played a few others first, understanding all roads would eventually lead here.

I took the plunge this weekend because I needed something to distract and occupy my mind, and it has been wonderful. The overhead view makes it much easier to build than the first-person perspective in Satisfactory, and the early game balance of building and fending off the Biters (as the local wildlife is known) provides a nice push and pull.

My first factory I expanded a bit too aggressively and my factory was too sprawling with minimal defenses, so when my pollution (I think?) got high enough to trigger recurring waves of Biters I was constantly on defense and felt like I was treading water repairing defenses and manufacturing ammo and couldn't really catch up.

I love restarting factory games! Starting over with a nice open playfield is really satisfying after I've set up a Frankenstein mess out of my control. So I already started a new game. This time, I'm keeping things scaled down and slowly building up defensive pockets. My first map had pockets of the 4 main resources all together. This map has stone, which is vital for defenses, a ways away, so I'm taking a more modular approach.

I'm to the point where I need to double up my power grid, but last time doing that may have been what triggered the increased Biter activity, so I'm gonna focus on solar panels which have zero pollution for now and keeping the current factory chains I have as efficient as possible. I'm overloaded with copper plate, but iron is always needed. I checked the wiki and confirmed copper wire is used in electronics and a few others things, but I'm probably gonna condense and retire about half of my copper setup soon to focus more on iron.

Anyway, this is a very fun game if you like to optimize All The Things, free form spacial puzzle solving, and build manufacturing chains with the occasional hazard break. Researching and unlocking technologies means there's always something new to push for and try out. The goal of the game is to build a rocket and escape the planet.

On a technical note, you can purchase this game direct from the website and get a DRM free offline version plus a Steam key. They have mod and multiplayer integration through their site, and the whole thing is polished and gives a nice sense of community. The game has tons of starting options and a few different scenario types. You can really get lost in this one, and I plan on it.

I keep meaning to get back to posting about writing and games and keep NOT, and I was gonna pop off on Tumblr again and I thought hey, let's funnel that energy onto DW so here we are.

Earlier this year, I estimated I'd double what I made last year (est $6k) but I'm sitting at $4.5k I believe so ¯_(ツ)_/¯ There's a major sale at the end of the year, and I have one more big release going out, so $6k may be on the table still.

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The time tracking reeeeeally forced me to think about how I'm spending my writing life. I enjoy everything I write, and I sincerely believe my books are good, but I need to think about the long term and put together a 5-year plan. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll have some clarity on direction.

I've been remiss in posting gamelogs (I write them and never get around to posting them, and then the moment passes and I'm onto something different). I'll try to remedy it.

Grindstone is a puzzle "battle" game by Capybara Games. This color-match puzzle thingy has been on my list for a while, mostly because of its enticingly weird aesthetic. I finally pulled the trigger and now battle Donut for Switch time (they are playing a lot of Minecraft and Ultimate Chicken Horse this summer).

You are a mountain climber type dude named Jorj who quests on Grindstone mountain to kill jerks, the color-coded inhabitants of this place, and find grindstones and random loot. Most jerks start out passive, happily bouncing on their assigned grid square, but some fly into a rage. Enraged jerks will attack you if you're in their attack radius, so part of the strategy is chaining enemies while avoiding landing in a square that will deplete your HP.

Increasingly, Donut has observed the protagonists of our favorite video games are wrong and should be stopped. Case in point, the jerks are happily being their jerk selves, and are not bothering anyone. Jorj came into their territory on Grindstone mountain, where they were innocently bouncing on squares, and began attacking them. Of course, some jerks would be angered by this provocation--rightly so! What business do I have coming into their place, breaking all the crates, and taking all the grindstones? They are defending themselves, and their home, from a hostile invader who offers nothing nothing but resource theft and murder. It is Jorj who is wrong. I find it interesting, and unfortunately unsurprising, my nine-year-old has a more empathetic and sophisticated moral compass than almost all the adult Republicans I know.

Anyway, this is a fairly mindless puzzle type game with a fun artstyle and lots of bells and whistles in the form of challenges, bonuses, unlockable equipment, collectibles, and so on. Chaining is satisfying, and I've enjoyed picking my way through the levels trying to max all the collection goals (generally: unlock the next level, gain a crown, and open a chest). I don't know if there's much to say beyond you get into these types of games or you don't, and my kid likes watching me play this one and will chime in to offer chaining suggestions, which is always a bonus.

The Switch port takes advantage of the touch screen, which is nice since my joycons are still borked (I bought a kit and took the joycons apart, but didn't replace them, I think because I couldn't get the screws out without risking stripping them, even after buying several different screwdrivers. Incidentally, I will NOT be buying Nintendo's next console until I'm confident they didn't intentionally ship faulty controllers. Fool me once.).

I went into this one assuming I would get bored of it sooner rather than later, because I figured difficulty would be primarily increased by having less blocks of color, or less chainable configurations, which means "less of the fun part." In fact, difficulty is increased by having breakable barriers that require a certain level of chaining to break an dropping in mini-bosses that have more (sometimes way more) HP than the jerks. So I can see myself blowing through a few levels every night for a while.

I can't imagine completing all 250+ levels like, ever, but I appreciate how thorough the game interrogates its premise.

I was enjoying watching Donut build a sweetberry farm in Minecraft, and I had an epiphany... I really love automation farming! It scratches a really specific itch in my brain, yet I've never sought out a game exclusively for that purpose. I still play Farm Together, in fact I created a whole-ass website just so you guys wouldn't have to scroll past my weird, crunchy posts on that game, but 150 hours in much of my fun centers around figuring out mechanisms that let me automate... basically anything, so I can passively rack up resources while I'm running around decorating houses.

Factorio is the go-to automation game, but I wanted something more farmy and after poking around a bit, I landed on Assembly Planter. I played for about 30 minutes, and was like eh I'm over it. But I came back later that afternoon and at some point the hook got sunk deep. Deep my friends.

Assembly Planter is a 20-level optimization sandbox puzzle. The early levels, which walk you through the game mechanics, require you to plant seeds to farm resources, but once you hit later levels the farming gets abstracted to the point it's more of a factory automation game. I really enjoyed the middle section of the progression, where I had a convoluted farm chain that really slapped and I could sit there and watch it do it's thing. As you progress, much of the challenge hinges on fitting increasingly elaborate machines into the limited building area. You unlock a Shrinker feature that allows you to shrunk larger machines into 1 block machines to save space. The boxy machines are less fun to watch, but it is still satisfying to see all the resources popping out.

I feel like the pacing is good. Every level a new production goal is set, and I usually end up completely tearing down whatever I had built because the new goal requires serious optimization and my current Frankenstein setup isn't gonna cut it. I love optimization (as a coder, I spent so much time refactoring code, purely for fun) and within the confines of Assembly Planter it's mostly fun, but around level 15, I started to get just kind of... overwhelmed with it. I kept trying to create self-feeding machines in the shrinker, which it turns out is impossible until you actually unlock self-feeding collectors. I got past this by setting really specific intermediary goals, like creating a crate assembly line so I can expand my stack size, or farming earth orbs to expand my farm area.

Level 16 unlocks transmutation, which are resource shortcuts. So you can go from 30x lead > Gold, rather than Dirt>Sandlion>Sand>Cactus>Compacted Sand>Gold. This changes things up and gives you a lot more options for the long-tail crafting resources.

I'm currently on level 18, and my goal is to figure out a way to craft 1 gold per second passively. But before I do that, I think I'm gonna have to solve my dirt generation problem and build another crate factory. If this sounds terrible to you, you might hate this game! But it's $5, so if you wanna try the genre this might be a good entry point.

I grilled ADA on the system and got some dialogue I'd forgotten about. ADA despises Edgewater and actively roots for you to kill everyone there. She says she sent a distress signal when the Unreliable landed because Hawthorne was injured, but instead of sending medical help they sent people to collect illegal landing fees. Hawthorne apparently had a concussion (?) when he set up the landing beacon, and that's why he remained in the landing zone after he activated it. For the longest time, I could not figure out why Hawthorne died that way.

I also learned you cannot go back to check on Guard Pelham. There's a collision block preventing your return to the starter area. He'll end up in the constabulary at some point, if you helped him.

The Groundbreaker has all kinds of interesting nooks and crannies, as well as lots of side story tidbits, environmental storytelling, and a few deadends. It is neat from a level design perspective. They did a good job of giving the impression of different factions coexisting in an enclosed space. Last playthrough I discovered the secret skeleton (climb up above the entrance and make a few running jumps to get onto some platforms with loot and find a skeleton stahed behind some pillars). If you enter the Groundbreaker this way, you can avoid triggering the ship impound conversation at the front gate, but I assume doing so breaks the game or at least creates some continuity weirdness.

• This level has some pretty funny conversations if you pretend to be Hawthorne (or deny you're him, in some cases).
• You can't recruit Felix until you talk to Udon about the ship impound. I usually take Felix and Max at the beginning of this area, because of Max's personal quest, but this time I took Pavarti and opened some interesting asides, including a bit where Pavarti expresses interest in Junlei and gets teased by the security officer. Felix defends her.
• If you pay a bribe, you can enter the security office and mardet quarters without the holographic shroud countdown timer. Not sure if it's really worth the bits, but I appreciated taking my time snooping around.
• I'm not sure why there's a Doc Maybell wanted poster on the Groundbreaker, but if you investigate Welles' poster your companions will weigh in.
• MacRedd is like, the peak TOW NPC. Everything about him--allegedly 26 years old, offers to let you "parlay with the king," wants to go corporate, had a carnal relationship with Sanita--is exquisite. It really doesn't get better than this. He's basically the Toledo Killswitch of Halcyon.
• The Groundbreaker has an "unmarked" quest, Greasy the robot, that you can investigate for the heck of it. There's evidently no kitchen key (I certainly looked) so you have to pick the lock.

There are also a few weird dead ends, including a mysterious series of emails that are deleted and a few named NPCs that seem like they ought to be attached to a quest somewhere but they just.... aren't. One of the devs remarked they cut more content than the probably should have (paraphrasing), but as far as I can tell they haven't really confirmed what they cut beyond the fact they cut an entire planet and later regretted it. I assume these strange little loose ends are related to cut content or a lack of time. But it also makes the game world seem bigger and messier, and not as tidy as it might if everything was neatly contained.

One of the most annoying features of this game is slippery rocks, because it never fails to start raining when I want to climb some big thing. I was recently awarded the first part of the frog armor, and that is how I learned there are 3 levels of slip protection. So I can still slip, but chugging a few sticky frog potions helps.

The thought of doing enough side quests to get the rest of the frog armor made me go :P though. My interest is starting to wind down, which is fairly typical in open world games once I've put in around 60 hours. I didn't start playing regularly until December and it absorbed most of my gaming attention for the past two months. I periodically returned to Breath of the Wild over the years, and I suspect I will do the same thing with this game. Hopefully next time I'll be motivated to complete shrines and work on the main quests.

• Completing the map early had the unexpected effect of making exploration a bit overwhelming. If I had to do it again, I'd try to focus on exploring one area at a time, if only to make it easier to keep track of where I've been.
• I've discovered maybe half the shrines, but I still find them tedious and lack the patience to finish them. As a result, my heath/energy is still pretty low.
• Bizarrely, I kinda got into finding koroks! This game has a lot more variety of korok challenge, which is part of it. I've unlocked plenty of weapon/bow/shield slots (honestly, maybe too many, it takes a second to scroll through my weaposn now) so now I'm just collecting korok seeds for fun.
• There are 147 caves, and therefore 147 bubbul gems, and I've only found a fraction of them. I've unlocked maybe half the rewards. I didn't realize there was a bubbul gem in each cave when I started playing, and I have no idea how many caves I explored without finding one.
• There are 12 geoglyphs and I've unlocked about half the memories.
• I've discovered maaaaybe 1/4 of the armors, if even.
• There are 58 wells and I've found about half.
• I've barely touched the sky portion of the game. Every time I launched from a tower, I would explore whatever sections were within gliding distance, but I honestly found this aspect of the game underwhelming and generally uninteresting compared to the underground/caves/wells areas.
• IIRC I've only undarked about half the underground area. I haven't been down there in like a month.

Overall, I like this game better than the first one and I've enjoyed playing it, but I feel like the lackluster storytelling is a huge missed opportunity, and Nintendo keeps doing really annoying things from a design perspective that feel assholish and contrarian for no good reason.

I've continued roaming around completing side quests. Most recently, I filled out the full map and confirmed I've barely scratched the surface exploring though I've put over 50 hours into this game. I usually settle in for a 30 to 45 minute play session after work, which is generally enough time to find something new or die trying.

One of the main plots is to Find Zelda. Ask around and Zelda is seemingly everywhere asking people to do counter-intuitive things, like go into monster-infested caves naked or ignore strange ruins. Obviously this is an imposter and not really Zelda. I think the idea was to encourage players to get into the rich sidequest economy.

Mount Doom sucked the first time, but it sucks slightly less this time. One issue I have here (and elsewhere) is there are caves that are filled with excessive amounts of rock walls that must be broken, and this is primarily done with a sword fused to a rock. There's one on Mount Doom so large I broke 5 rock weapons tunneling through it. Weapons decay makes a "puzzle" like this even more tedious. The devs understand this, but rather than Not Doing That, they make sure there are lots of rocks and swords lying around so you don't have to constantly scrounge around for more rocks and swords which would be even more tedious. So thanks, I guess? But maybe we could have just skipped the excessive rock breaking part in the first place. (I say, even though swinging around a huge sword fused to a boulder is actually kind of therapeutic.)

In the plus column, there are a bunch of minecarts lying around and it has been good fun to hijack these and send a few koroks hurtling around the mountain. The first time was an accident, the rest were for personal enjoyment. I've since begun fusing rockets to koroks and launching them into space, which is fun and has been well-received by Donut.

On the sidequest side, I'm helping rebuild a coastal village (Hylian rice is proving to be a terrible bottleneck, but I've honestly enjoyed this one a lot) and I stumbled across a mayoral race and IDK what the hell is going on in Hateno but I need rice which they only stock in increments of 4 or 5 so I guess I'm here for it.