Shitty Casual

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.