Briathrail // Albert 2MNG

October 19-25 2025

 

Just went to a Western online bookstore… and just wondering out loud, why is it that the “explicit” books aimed for men is labeled with a 18+ warning and has to be buried deep in search to even find, but “explicit” books aimed for women involving romancing centaurs, minotaurs and man-lizards are among the “bestsellers” on the front page with almost-zero warnings? Is it some weird thing in the West that I’m too Asian to understand?

Just saying it loud. It is pretty weird, given the salaciously explicit language in all of these kinky furry books that I’ve heard from some content creators. Like, holy shit. It’s like having a general-products store where dildos and Tenga products are in a R-18 section, but the front page has sex rings and vibrators. Consistency, please. If the impossibly big-breasted scantily-dressed anime lady or the two dudes intimately fondling each other on the books’ front cover gets them in the Mature Audience section, then the minotaur in second base with a negligee-wearing woman on the book front cover should also be on the same “Mature Audience” section. Because right now, these erotic furry books are in either the “Science Fiction and Fantasy” or the “Young Adult” sections.

At least, in Western bookstores and online shops. Asian bookstores got their shit together – either the book is in a naughty section, or they have labels on the wrapped book that this is for “Unsuitable for the young” or along those lines.

 

Hot take: Nintendo’s online subscription model is currently more sustainable than XBox and PlayStation. Not “better”, not “feature-rich”, just in plain pure terms of being a sustainable model of online subscriptions.

I feel XBox’s online subscription models will crash and burn, and PlayStation’s might become way more expensive, both within 5 years. Meanwhile Big N is just chilling in the corner just keeping an eye on the Japanese gamer market.

To be fair, this quite easily passes the eye test.

Nintendo’s base online subscription model costs USD $20 a year (or 19.99, if to be precise). What does the base give players? Online multiplayer, cloud saves, access to Nintendo Music, and select NES, SNES, and Game Boy game libraries in dedicated console apps. Basically, USD $1.67 a month. Dirt cheap. They have an upper tier that costs an additional USD $30 a year (around USD $4.17 a month), which includes all standard benefits plus GBA, N64, and SEGA Genesis retro libraries, alongside free access to some major first-party game DLCs and NSW2 editions. These tiers can get even cheaper if you have a maxed family plan.

Of course, they aren’t having a whole smorgasbord of a rotating catalog of free games you can play or EA Play or cloud gaming or tiers with Fortnite membership. But for USD $1.67 a month on the base model, that’s reasonable.They offer the essentials, plus some retro games and some music app for a monthly fee less than a McDonald’s single-patty cheeseburger. Anyone can easily pay for that.

Then XBOX, where its base Essential tier is at USD $9.99 a month – it has online multiplayer, offers a rotating curated catalog of 50+ games and has exclusive member deals. The tiers go up too, but they have four tiers in total, and the top tier – Ultimate – is for USD $22.99 a month.

As expected, XBOX stuffed those tiers to the gills of what they could offer for their respective price points – some even called it “the best deal in gaming” years ago. But even for the lowest price tier, USD $119.88 a year is a hard pill to swallow even in the face of the tier’s services. Also keep in mind, XBOX increased their Ultimate and PC Game Pass prices a few weeks ago.

For PlayStation, depending on length of plan and tier, the base cheapest “essential” per-month is at USD $79.99 for a 12-month subscription, which includes online multiplayer, cloud saves, and a few free monthly downloadable games, basically USD $6.67 a month. Their highest “deluxe” tier of service goes up to $159.99 a year for a 12-month subscription – around USD $13.33 a month. Compared to XBOX, PlayStation’s slightly cheaper because it’s not as stuffed as XBOX’s offer is, but it’s still on the high end.

I’ve heard from friends that used to subscribe to XBOX Game Pass that they transitioned to PS Plus because the price (even before the price increases) was unwieldy for them – that they have so little time for gaming as adults that they could not use some of the benefits of XBOX Game Pass (free game rotation, cloud gaming, major title bonuses), they just play 1-3 games a month on average, so the cheaper PS Plus made a lot more sense for them in this day and age. Can’t blame them – on average, I play games like NBA2K and JRPGs on weekends, and I don’t even play heavy hours because I like going out to eat and walk.

For Nintendo… its base online gaming price per year is so negligible, I just don’t even mind it anymore. I’m always sure I have upwards of USD $100 in my Wise multi-currency account. That low entry point is why I’m sure Nintendo has the more sustainable model – it’s just barebones service with only a few frills, but it’s still service at the end of the day. They don’t have to stuff their service with too many benefits, and the only major third-party company they have a big transaction with is Sega for the classic Genesis games. I myself don’t mind the $20 a year, I just play Nintendo and a few third-party games. As long as it backs up my game saves in their cloud, I can play Switch Sports online, and I can still access the Nintendo Music app, fine by me.

XBOX Game Pass may have the most bang-for-your-buck-and-more service offer at the base pricepoint, but given it’s almost $10, they have to maintain a rotating catalog of free games and their price points have too many transactional agreements (EA Play, Ubisoft+ Classics, Fortnite Crew, the owners of the third-party games they offer on rotation) that one suspects this Game Pass model will implode sooner or later. I myself don’t believe in a free lunch in a tech economy – someone else pays for the free stuff others get. I predict someday, this model will downsize.

PS Plus might be in a better position than XBOX Game Pass in terms of sustainability – one can say they are in between Nintendo Online and XBOX Game Pass in that aspect, offering much more benefits than Nintendo’s, but less benefits than XBOX’s. Still, almost USD $7 a month can make most gamers flinch a bit. But if I have to predict what PS Plus’ immediate future will be, they’ll cut off Ubisoft+ Classics from Deluxe, trim their free game offers to mostly easy-completion games, and extend their classics catalog to the Extra tier.

Mothership.SG
M’sia influencer requests free meal in exchange for exposure, eatery has more followers than him

Another moron who thought 40k TikTok followers was “big” enough to warrant paying for meals with clout. Let’s put it this way – TikTok follower count is the Vietnamese Dong (currency) of social media.

I always find the concept of influencer-powered promotion business rather strange and somewhat tricky to judge. There are very few of them influencers that genuinely have strong multi-platform online presence, has production-quality promotion and (maybe) aligns with the sponsor’s taste themselves. Like any other business in history, once a few strikes gold, others soon follow in hopes of replicating success. Some do by hook and some do by crook, as it goes. Same with the influencer business.

Even just the concept of an “influencer” is strange. What qualifies as an “influencer”, legally? The name itself explains what it is – someone who influences. But is there a cutoff of how many they influence? There is a company called Karat Financial that offers banking services for influencers, and they maintained their own qualification – their minimum benchmarks reportedly include 100k+ for YouTuber, 125k+ for Instagram, and around 2.5 mil for TikTok. But that benchmark is just for Karat’s – what about the media? Oh wait, never mind – their bar’s too low, that maybe if you have 10 followers on Facebook and a beating pulse on your wrist, they’d call you an influencer too. Who really qualifies as an “influencer”, socially speaking? Is a million big enough, or is ten thousand good enough?

Some aspiring moron in Southeast Asia found out for himself. Over previous years, some smaller content creators (food vloggers or food review site makers) either cold-message or walk into restaurants offering social media posts or curated vlogs in exchange for a free meal. I emphasize small because most of the major food vloggers and content creators never do that – they all know the blowback makes any attempt worse than worthless, they are affluent enough to afford any food they want to review, and they can write it off as a business expense. The smaller influencers do not, and they try to do workarounds – like asking the restaurants for a free meal in exchange for a social media post.

This particular moron in the article deluded himself that 40k followers on TikTok is “enough” for him to try and sell himself as a walk-on “influencer”. Well, he tried on the wrong place in Malaysia. He went in an eatery with his family (presumably with wife and a kid), and afterwards went to the owner showing off his measly follower count on TikTok. The eatery he tried to scam has 190,000 followers on Facebook alone. So the owner, knowing the shit this moron tried to pull, stood his ground and asked him to pay for his family’s $16.20 meal despite his multiple instances of insisting he was an “influencer” and he could pay with “exposure”. Sure exposed his ass to the air.

I have to say, this is on Mr. Remulla. Clearly he’s new on the job and the office and all the fantastic things buried in the Ombudsman’s office, so I assume he hasn’t gone through all the things his predecessor left behind. So I suggest if I may, he should halt any plans for restarting any longstanding items until he gets fully settled in and reassesses all those things. Unless he savors being repeatedly “caught unaware”. Once is an accident, twice is on you.

I wish this would be a lesson to be learned for all future Ombudsman appointees. They are inheriting a post. Of course their predecessors ran the Office of the Ombudsman their way. Their personnel, their dossier, their deals. Like any kind of inheritance, their inheritors should go through the affairs with a fine-toothed comb lest they miss something important. Lest they get caught unaware.

This wasn’t a good look for the newly-installed Ombudsman, Mr. Jesus Crispin “Boying” Remulla. He was newly installed in the post, so in my opinion, first thing he should’ve done was to go through what his office has and assess everything – from personnel, to handled cases/efforts, to outstanding affairs – before ANY pronouncement. Apparently, he was “caught unaware” of his predecessor junking the dismissal order against Senator Joel Villanueva in 2019. For me, him admitting he was “caught” unaware meant he had little time to go through his new post’s digs. Maybe he rushed to pronounce something publicly but his staff later showed him his predecessor’s actions stuck a wrench in his plans. Either way, again, not a good look.

 

Had an overseas friend that came to Quezon City recently and remarked how SM North Edsa and Trinoma were “drastically different”. I had to explain that there are generally two kinds of malls in Metro Manila – SM malls and Ayala malls.

SM malls are designed around a “corporate efficiency” ethos – near-straight alleys, predictable layouts, bunched business types and repetitive floor plans. Any able man will never be lost in any SM mall. Their ultimate opus is Mall of Asia, where every ills of all SM mall designs were made manifest in one place.

Ayala malls, on the other hand, are beautiful and whimsical walking grounds that just happened to be a mall. Weird floor plans, deliberately designed atriums, at least has something in there that makes people go “wtf is this here”, and often has amazingly beautiful features strewn both inside and outside. I’ve often heard of people getting lost in Ayala malls like Glorietta. Not surprising.

I only go to SM malls if I have business to urgently do on a certain time of a day. For example, if I want to buy some barong for a next-day affair, I go to the nearest big SM mall’s department store at its earliest opening hour. I know where it is, I can map my path where to specify my drop-off and pick-up for the Grab app, I can come, buy and go as fast as I can. SM malls may not be pretty or wonderful, but they are efficient and predictable if you can plan around it.

Ayala malls, on the other hand, I only go to for leisure and free time. I will never shop at an Ayala mall if I am pressed for time. They are, simply put, beautiful and whimsical walking grounds that just happened to be a mall. In terms of both beauty and benefit to a general community, Ayala malls win hands down. Compared to the box-and-glass building design that most SM malls have, Ayala malls try their hardest to make pretty stuff. That includes greenery. But that artistic flair never translated to making their malls efficient for all kinds of shoppers.

For example, I can somewhat guess what section of an SM mall to go to if someone names me a store, provided I’ve been to that SM mall before even just once, because SM malls use a general strategy called “tenant clustering”. They group similar businesses within the same zones or wings, but they focus more on high-efficiency, mass-market utility, mostly for foot traffic and shopping efficiency. The concepts of behavior-based grouping, destination anchors and tiered retail was hyper-engineered for their malls to design tenancy around, like some sort of optimized program. I shop at SM malls for grocery runs, for necessity buying, that’s it really. I don’t go to SM malls for leisure and window-shopping, it can get boring as fuck pretty quickly.

Ayala malls actually uses the same clustering idea, but their focus is on deliberate, lifestyle-focused clustering. For example, their Greenbelt mall in Makati is clustered for lifestyle. Take Greenbelt 4. It has the dedicated high-end luxury boutiques and international design labels. But Greenbelt 5 has the contemporary international apparel and lifestyle brands. So if you are shopping there, you have to ask a different question for your shopping itinerary than you would in an SM mall. Like, is the store I’m looking for a “luxury” brand, or a “contemprary” brand? Rich, or filthy rich? Not enough to say “I’m looking for clothes”, you have to append your wallet to the question. Finding a store’s location in Greenbelt is a research and a half, in my opinion. Better Google it, or end up walking so much by the time you get to the right store, you’re already tired.

Not helping in that clustering strategy is the layout of the walking paths. If you want to exercise by walking, Ayala malls are both king and god for that. There is no easy way for a casual shopper to know “where” they are in an Ayala mall. Old people get easily lost there. For example, one of their malls near my home, U.P. Town Center in Katipunan Avenue, is very chic, extremely nice for fun window-shopping and great for getting some steps for your daily 10k count. But it’s not easy to “find” people, and even if you know where they are, parking is some dookie. And if you’re shopping, you better have a roadmap and a route plan, or else you’d definitely meet your daily 10k step count.

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