Man…
Today’s reading reassures me that it’s fine to express my feelings. There’s bigger matters to which that refers to, but needless to say it sure was prexcient for today.
I think I’ve mentioned this in the past, but one thing that makes me curl up like a baby is strong wind, specifically when strong wind makes whistling sounds. It’s one of the few pathological “this goes beyond simple self-preservation” fears I have.
The bit that DOES relate to self-preservation is that the wind kept buffeting the door and windows A LOT. The window one is daunting because it sounds like it might break, and the door one gets to me because it sounds exactly like someone trying to ram the door open.
All of which is to say that the typhoon has arrived.
I killed time in the kitchen of the villa. I actually left behind the girls I brought with me thinking “well, I’ll kill time by dressing them in lingerie and taking pics of them in the bedroom”, but with the window noises? Fuck That.
Another issue is that by now my meds had worn off, and the low activity left me kinda sleepy. So at like 4AM when the wind had calmed down somewhat I went to bed kinda half-heartedly, by which I mean I didn’t even undress.
SO! On a good day I’d already be having trouble sleeping because I set an alarm and I hate alarms enough that I’d rather not sleep than suffer one.
Add on top of that the fact that the wind calmed down a little but it kept buffeting the window.
AND THEN whenever I managed to start falling asleep? THE FUCKING STORM WARNINGS ON THE PHONE WOULD GO OFF.
I think I fell asleep more from giving up than from exhaustion proper, but I did wake up properly exhausted nonetheless.
No time for shower, no time for anything fancy. I checked out and then tried to call a cab but the apps were useless (in general, not because of the typhoon specifically) but thankfully the front desk helped calling one.
I go out and… sheesh… I guess the wind CAN blow a window off…
Today’s route is from Ujiyamada Station to take the express to Namba… the express ticket machine is not working. I go to the window and they tell me that shit’s collapsed because of the typhoon.
They give me another route and a ticket, so I board the train and almost miss the transfer. Thankfully I had like 20 minutes to spare once I got out.
I didn’t have the brain to think too hard so I went out the gate and asked for a ticket at the window, they got me the Urban Liner that goes to Namba.
I had to take a roundabout way, but one run towards the train later I was on my way.
As I sat down, finally having time to catch a breather, I decided to take stock of myself. First thing I thought was “holy shit, can you imagine if I had to run like this with TWO EXTRA SUITCASES?!”. God Bless Yamato Transport…
The other is that despite all the issues and not quite doing everything I wanted, I’d still call this trip a success. If nothing else I’m patting myself in the back for the choice I made of going to Ise Jingu when I did. If there’s any good call I made it was that one.
Even small bits of the experience like slapping the idea of a house with stairs out of me were interesting. The skies were pretty… I’m sure when I look back to the whole thing I’ll have good memories.
I might sneak a trip mid-June, but that’s still kinda up in the air.
The way back was shockingly smooth and I made it home relatively fast. After dropping my stuff, however, I went out to check some stuff and stock up on a couple of things before I ran out of energy completely.
When THAT happened I spent the rest of the day dissociating while playing a couple of new DLsite releases.
The first is Mamasis Healing. The premise is that your character is an overworked office worker that hasn’t seen his family in years but finally does after a bout of overwork sends him to the hospital.
They pamper him… a lot, eventually resulting in taking a bath with him and becoming aware of his Magnum Cock.
It’s a simple game of building up affection meters to unlock the next event and such, but it’s very charming because you really do feel the warmth and the desire to get pampered. One of my favorite details is that later on you can unlock a “work” activity to earn more money but you can only do it thrice per day and more than that makes your mom chide you because you already overworked yourself to almost-death once.
Also the designs are so good oh my God.
The other one is… the title is longer but the folder calls it Lvl99 Cheat Yuusha so I’ll call it that too.
And before I get to talking about it, I need to explain to you that certain fetish circles end up with certain… stereotypes. We don’t kinkshame in this house, but we DO regular shame, and the stereotypes are basically the people I would shame on principle instead of just because of their kink. Think for example about how foot fetishists try to pass what they’re into as a “haha wouldn’t it be funny” sort of thing.
Femdom game creators have a habit of being too verbose for their own good, the sort of thing where I’ll press the skip button for HALF A MINUTE and it just keeps skipping through a girl talking down on me and paragraphs of onomatopoeias.
Put a pin on that, we’ll get back to it.
The story of the game is as the name suggests: You’re a lvl99 hero with a cheat sword and a cheat armor. You go to a village plagued by Succubi and head down to the dungeon to eliminate them.
On the first floor there’s a succubus that offers you a titfuck if you give her the cheat armor and cheat sword.
Do you unlock a special event from this? Kinda… But is there a reward for a cheat-less run? Nope! You just make the game harder and get a CG you can just reload a save for after seeing.
My problem with this game is that it’s an honestly great game held back by the conventions of its kink. There’s a level drain mechanic, for example, but it’s not like levels are a currency you can use. That would be interesting. In fact not only does one of my favorite porn games (In The Village Of Big Tit Lolis by Aebafuti) use that as a mechanic where the girls drain your levels since they cannot gain levels naturally, but even one of my favorite non-porn games (Wild Arms 5) has an end game shop where the currency is character levels so you learn to grind from 1 to 100 to buy all the upgrades.
If you go past that, there’s a shocking amount of content in the game in a way that’s cool where you go “oh damn, I thought we were done”, and even the story has some neat recurrent characters and such. But then the first trio of bosses lets you choose whether to fight them or surrender to them and you can only advance certain plot points after being defeated at least once and EVEN IF I was into femdom instead of it instigating the part of my brain that makes me wanna discipline a brat until she has no fight in her, that’s still a design choice that would make me go “but why tho”.
This will sound weird coming from me, but there truly are a few cases where I feel like the author needs to use post-nut clarity and see what they’re doing. Because there’s so much good design involved otherwise that I wanna believe there was some inner push and pull leading to this sort of thing.
And I swear to God it’s always femdom writers. It’s not even like things like defeat and level draining are impossible to use as compelling mechanics! It’s not that I’m against the kink itself (I wrote about Muni Kobou ages ago and they’re very much in this camp), it’s more like the kink is designed to make bad gameplay if you don’t think clearly about it.
Fer just spent way too long bitching about porn, so that’s how you know I’m in a good mood after everything.