Tribune: Two things are for certain: love and taxes


A new anime dating simulation will also help you complete your taxes.1 That is, if you’re comfortable giving your Social Security number to the pink-haired, dew-eyed main character, Iris.

Tax Heaven 3000 was developed by MSCHF (pronounced “mischief”), an art collective based in Brooklyn that has produced artworks ranging from physical products like sneakers and popsicles to browser plug-ins, social media channels, and now tax software that you can also date.

Here is their description of the dating/filing software:

Most wealthy countries make tax filing free, if the burden of preparation is even passed along to individuals at all. But, corporate tax filing services are (by dint of extensive lobbying) predatory, parasitic bottlenecks that deliberately complicate the tax filing process in order to make it unnavigable by ordinary people.

And it works! The villainous corporation that controls the government from the shadows is a sadly mundane reality. It’s the most boring industry imaginable.

Videogames are, at the end of the day, pieces of software–ontologically akin to Microsoft Word. Tax Heaven 3000 simply makes the fiction the point. For some reason the game-to-real-life interface has tended to remain the purview of corporate metaverse fictions. Tax Heaven 3000 is a dongle that adapts from a visual novel to the IRS.

Boring?!? That’s it, we’re breaking up.