So Google announced Stadia recently, and tech enthusiasts have been tripping over themselves to be the first to declare it "the future of gaming".

I really hope it isn't. Past experience with tech such as OnLive and PlayStation Now suggests that it probably won't be. But the risk factor is significantly higher now than it has been. And if it somehow does end up being the future of gaming… well, that's where I jump off from staying "current", and start to fill out my collections for past generations.

For the uninitiated, Stadia is a platform that allows you, through any web browser and theoretically any Web-connected device, to stream video games. That means no downloads, no installing, no patching, just click on a game and start playing. The game itself runs on Google's hardware — which they claim is more powerful than the current PS4 Pro and Xbox One X combined — and the video output is streamed back to you, in glorious 4K 60fps HDR and all those numbers and acronyms that only people more interested in tech than content care about.

It's a good idea on paper. A standardised platform will be good for triple-A developers in particular, who would be able to focus on making one version of their game work really well rather than three or four, and no-one will be left out in the cold because they don't have the latest iteration of a particular hardware platform. So long as your Internet connection is up to the job of streaming 4K 60fps HDR video, of course. And for many people at the moment, that's a big "if".

There are so many problems I have with this, though — chief among them being the idea of ownership. With a streaming service, you don't own anything, you're renting at best. And as such, you're even more at the mercy of publishers, licensing agreements and all manner of other bullshit than we already are with the digital marketplace. Want to play this game which the license for the cars used in has already expired? Tough luck, it's gone. Want to play that game in which a Japanese voice actor got into trouble for being caught with cocaine? Sorry, we had to remove it. Want to play Scott Pilgrim vs. The World? Never heard of it!

Meanwhile I can go to my PS2 shelf right now, pull down OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast and play it. Hm. Score one for the physical generation.

The physical matter is a big deal to me. I value games as possessions as much as the experiences I have with them. I've long been a proponent of the idea of "crystallised memories" — the idea that physical possessions can be embodiments of experiences that were important to you. And for me, this is true whether it's an indirect association — the object makes you think of something tangentially related to it — or a direct one where you remember specific things you did with that specific object.

One might argue that placing importance on this side of things leads to hoarding, and perhaps that's true for some people. But I only keep hold of those things that are genuinely important to me. Over the years, I've ditched lots of things that I just… "had". But the games in my collection? I have associations with important memories for pretty much each and every one on my shelf, and they are not things I want to abandon. With "the streaming future", that significant and important part of my hobby would be denied to me in future years.

There's also the question of disposability. Few can deny that music and movie streaming services have very much found a place in modern society… but even the most ardent enthusiasts of these services acknowledge that they devalue the individual works and make them far more disposable.

Music is particularly prone to this. When was the last time you sat down and actually listened to a full album from start to finish? (For me, it was February 11 of this year) Probably not for a while. Chances are you've picked and chosen your favourite tracks from several thousand albums and added them to your "chillout" or "motivational" playlists, then put them on while you're trying to get things done. They're just background noise rather than something to be appreciated on their own merits. And this isn't even getting into how much harder the streaming world has made it for musicians to make a living from what they do.

When I buy a game, it's because I look forward to the experience I will have with it. I've mentioned before that I specifically add games to my collection not to particularly try and be "complete" or anything, but because they are things I am interested in experiencing and writing about. I buy a game with the intention of experiencing it to its fullest; things I buy with Cover Game features in mind in particular are games that I know I'm going to be playing from start to finish, no questions asked.

I make an investment in these games. Even if I have no intention of playing a new acquisition immediately, it's an investment for the future. It has value. I've specifically chosen to bring it into my life, and as such I intend to make the most of it.

With a streaming service, I have none of that sense of "attachment". It becomes more of a case of "what do I feel like today?" and picking from a huge list. And I feel this, ultimately, will discourage people from seeing games through to their conclusion — something that the industry as a whole already struggles with, hence the rise of odious "games as a service" practices that aim to keep people invested (both in terms of time and money) in the long term. Because even if you're just paying a flat rate to access all of Stadia's content — and the details of this haven't been announced yet — you can bet your billy-o that EA and its ilk will still be ramming their games full of microtransactions. In fact, they'll have even more incentive to do this if they're competing for a slice of subscription fees rather than getting people to buy new copies of games at launch.

Thankfully, there is a certain amount of hope here. In both the music and movie sectors, the physical markets may be smaller, but they still exist — and even cater specifically to those who place importance on physical versions. Vinyl, a format once thought completely dead, is making a comeback. CDs are often cheaper than digital albums. Alternative methods of physical distribution such as USB devices and Blu-Ray discs are being explored.

Similarly, the gaming industry is responding. There will be a physical version of Cuphead — a previously digital-only game — on Switch, and if Nintendo has any sense, more like this will follow. "Boutique" limited-run publishers are thriving. Niche publishers put out affordable, high-quality limited editions that celebrate their new releases. And, talking to people online, I'm not the only person who still likes holding a new game in their hands rather than just clicking "download" — or, worse, "stream".

The future of gaming? Not if I have anything to say about it.

Morning folks! Couple of things to share with you today.

Firstly, you may have received an email about upcoming changes to Patreon. Apparently there has been the usual misinformation and rage flying around about this elsewhere on the Internet (having ignored Twitter completely for a week now, I have remained blissfully unaware) but I wanted to reassure you all that the proposed changes will have no impact on either me or you.

Patreon already takes a cut of what you kindly pledge to me — that's how they operate as a business, they're not a charity! — and thus if I see any changes at all to my income, they will be minor at best, particularly as a small creator without any large reward tiers. Likewise, you kind Patrons shouldn't see any changes either; your continued support is very much appreciated, and is always invested into something that will be useful for my projects, be it equipment, software, operating costs or simply new games to cover!

Short version: nothing to worry about here.

Right! Onto the second, far more exciting thing. And that is that The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available, including a compilation of the Cover Game features from 2016! My proof arrived much earlier than anticipated and I'm very happy with it, so it is my great pleasure to announce that it is now available to purchase at this link. I will be officially announcing and promoting this more actively starting next week, but feel free to share the link with anyone you know who may be interested.

The book is available in softcover and hardcover imagewrap variants, as well as a PDF electronic version. Here's a look at the hardcover version:

It's a weighty old tome — about a kilogram, to be exact. I won't lie, it's extremely satisfying to hold that in my hands and recall that it represents just a fraction of what I've created over the course of the last few years.

The hardcover version has a matt imagewrap on the outside. There was the option of creating one with a removable dustjacket, but that would have bumped the cost up a bit — and since it's a substantial book already I didn't want to get too extravagant.

Here's the back cover. It has an ISBN and everything. It's a real book!

Inside, you'll find each "chapter" begins with a colour page like this, featuring some artwork from the game or series in question. Since the book is primarily a collection of the feature articles, do note that these are the only pictures! While I'd have loved to make a fully illustrated book, that would have bumped up both the page count and the cost considerably.

Instead, the main content is presented in this nice readable font that I think looks rather pleasant. The articles themselves are mostly unchanged from their original form on MoeGamer, though in the case of those that made heavy use of references to images and video, I've made some minor edits to make them fit with the text-only format. I also haven't included the RPG Maker MV feature from 2016, since the majority of that consisted of image-heavy tutorials. Perhaps at some point in the future I'll expand my RPG Maker content and do a full, illustrated book on just that.

And here's evidence that it is indeed a chonker. 394 pages of chonk, to be exact, and something I'm very excited to have on my shelf. As with most things I do, I've primarily done this for my own gratification — and as a means of having a nice "hard copy" of my work should, God forbid, anything happen to WordPress or MoeGamer — but I'm very happy to make it available to you fine folks and the broader general public. I'm not expecting to sell many (any?!) copies but the option is there — plus the small profit I make on each book is another way you (and perhaps your friends and family!) can support my work on MoeGamer and Atari A to Z.

Thank you, as always, for your kind support! There will be more of these books coming in the very near future to cover 2017, 2018, 2019 (when it's over!), regardless of how this one sells, and perhaps some other collections of articles too. If there's anything on the site you might be interested in seeing collected together into a book, please let me know — now I've got the basic template set up it's pretty straightforward to put more together.

You know what I miss from "the good old days" of The Internet? (And by that, I mean "the pre-social media age") Clearly demarcated communities. I'm going to talk a bit about my past experiences with these over the course of the next few posts.

Nowadays this sort of thing isn't a fashionable thing to say and brings forth accusations of "echo chambers" and suchlike, and to be sure there's a certain amount of truth to those words. But I have far more fond memories of being a member of various "gated" communities rather than the messy, free-for-all that is modern social media. Sadly, this seems to be an age long gone.

My first experience with online interactions was via online service CompuServe, which I discovered the other day is still sort of around in the form of a pleasingly simple, straightforward and rather retro home page. These interactions on CompuServe took a few forms: there was the real-time "CB Simulator", which was an early incarnation of real-time chat. There were the forums, which is where I spent the majority of my time. And there was email, which I mostly used to try (and fail) to hook up with girls I'd met in the CB Simulator, all the time conscious that I was sharing a single email address with my parents.

The gaming forum on CompuServe, GO GAMERS, was a fun hangout — although in retrospect I don't remember doing a ton of interacting with others there. Instead, I'd spend a lot of my time downloading shareware and freeware that previously I'd have had to rely on magazine cover disks and the local shareware library to get copies of.

I did have one significant interaction, though: I met a guy whose name is now lost to the mists of time (I want to say Clayton something?) who claimed to be from renowned shareware publisher Apogee, and he was on the hunt for fan-created levels for Wolfenstein 3-D that could be included in an upcoming expansion pack. I'd recently got into Wolfenstein editing, and had been discussing level design and editor software in the forum. Long story short, this guy offered me $200 for my levels. I talked it over with my parents, and they didn't see any particular danger — the guy wasn't asking for any unreasonable personal details or anything, and besides, we had clear records of all of my communications with him should anything untoward happen.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting anything to come of this particular interaction, but I was happy to take a chance on it. I sent him my pack of ten levels and waited. He thanked me, then there was nothing for a little while.

Then a few months later, I got a package in the post. Contained within were three floppy disks: one containing a copy of the full registered version of Wolfenstein 3-D (which I actually didn't own at the time — all my levels had been created for the shareware version!) and two that held the "Super Upgrades" expansion he'd been telling me about. As well as that, there was a cheque for $200. I attempted to cash it and it was indeed real.

$200 is a lot of money to a secondary school kid. It did not, however, take long for my friends to convince me to spend it on video games. A fool and his money and all that.

All of the above is irrefutable proof that I'm technically a professional game developer. All thanks to GO GAMERS, may it rest in digital peace.

Something occurred to me the other day that… I think I'd always known, but for one reason or another, it came into sharp focus while I was writing an article.

Have you noticed that, when looking back to gaming eras such as the PS1 and PS2 in particular, the games that tend to attract the most excitement and interest among wannabe gaming historians and retro collectors tend to be the ones that were a little more obscure, perhaps a little more clunky, perhaps a big bit "weird"?

Part of the reason for this is that a lot of the "big name" well-known games from those ages have been rereleased several times over the years — franchises like Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid are prime examples — but it's also down to the fact that a lot of the lesser-known games simply didn't have a lot of time and attention devoted to them in the press of the period… and the Internet wasn't around for the community to pick up the slack.

Somehow, though, many of these games have endured and become cult classics or highly prized on the collector's market, and I think that's cool. Well, maybe not the "collector's market" bit; it's nice to be able to afford things sometimes! But more importantly, it's also a good reminder of why I started doing what I'm doing with MoeGamer, and indeed before that with my JPgamer column on USgamer… and before that with my work on Games Are Evil.

The vast majority of the games I cover on MoeGamer — particularly the Cover Game features — are deliberately chosen because they don't get a lot of column inches devoted to them in the current commercial press. The reasons for this are many and varied, the most likely being that there simply isn't time to cover every game out there, and the EA, Ubisoft and Activision games of the world are always going to pull in more ad impressions than some peculiar RPG. Their audiences are inherently larger, which means more readers for coverage, which means more ad revenue for commercial sites. It makes business sense, but it doesn't do a lot to paint a broad picture of this era of gaming from a historical perspective.

The realisation I came to is that what I'm doing now is basically what some people are still doing today with relatively unheard-of PS1 and PS2 games: finding experiences that are somehow interesting, unusual, creative or otherwise fascinating, and celebrating them regardless of their perceived "status" in the industry. We live in an era now where there are distinct "tiers" of game releases, different people have different tastes, and a game selling ten million copies doesn't necessarily mean that it's either "good" or universally appealing; it just means it's a blockbuster.

That's why I get fired up and excited about what I do. There aren't many places out there writing about the things I do in the amount of depth I do. And while my audience may be small in comparison to some other destinations on the Web — I'm a one-man show, remember, with the exception of Chris' excellent contributions to the podcast — I like to think I'm doing my little bit to highlight some unusual, off-the-beaten-track experiences now rather than twenty years down the line… which hopefully means people won't be stuck having to pay £80 for a copy of [insert obscure RPG here]!

If nothing else, people stop by literally every day to read about Honey Select Unlimited on MoeGamer, so there's always that…

My parents stopped by to visit today. We haven't seen them for a while, so it was nice to catch up, particularly now they're doing a lot better than when we saw them around Christmas. (They are also reading this, so be nice!)

My Dad was good enough to brave the loft at my childhood home and attempt to retrieve a few additional bits of software that I thought was still lurking somewhere or other. Specifically, I knew that there were a few MicroProse titles for Atari ST that it would be nice to have hold of, plus a few games that I knew we once had that seemed to be missing from the collection they brought down last time they came to visit.

Well, he found three full boxes of stuff:

The contents included both PC (DOS and Windows 3.1/95-era) games and software, plus most of the ST stuff I'd correctly assumed was still lurking somewhere or other. Here are a few highlights:

Here's a DOS-era PC game from Accolade that I remember being very interested in because it was sort of "illicit" thanks to its stomach-churning horror imagery. I liked the game itself, too; I just never really got anywhere with it, though judging by the graph paper in the box, I'd at least attempted to at some point.

This was one of my favourite games back in the day: Space Rogue by Origin. This was an interesting combination of space sim and role-playing game, the likes of which I haven't really seen since. The space sim was full-on 3D polygons, including navigation, combat and flying through warp gates to get from sector to sector, while the role-playing game section was presented like its contemporaries from the Ultima series, using a combination of top-down tile-based graphics and text.

One thing I absolutely adored about Origin's games was that they always came with a bunch of "in-character" stuff that could help you immerse yourself in the game world. Here, for example, is a promotional flyer for the galaxy's hottest new arcade game, Hive! And yes, you can actually play Hive! as part of Space Rogue.

The manual for Space Rogue was presented as an actual manual for the spaceship you spent the duration of the game in, annotated with comments from the ship's previous owner, plus added coffee stains here and there.

Here's another beast of a package: Spectrum Holobyte's Flight of the Intruder, the sequel to their popular F-16 simulation Falcon. Flight of the Intruder was based on a novel which, conveniently, was included as part of the game package.

Also, when I say "remember manuals?" I'm not referring to the little pamphlets you used to get with PS2 games. I'm talking about beasts like this one. Spiral bound! Over a hundred pages!

The heaviest package among today's acquisitions is undoubtedly A320 Airbus, a game about flying an A320 Airbus. Well, "game" kind of undersells it a bit; this is a realistic flight simulator in the Flight Simulator mould, only with a particular emphasis on commercial flight, and including some game-like structure where it evaluates your performance in handling various situations.

Much of the bulk comes from the collection of high altitude enroute charts and a book of ILS approach charts, both of which are genuinely useful during gameplay for navigation and setting up landing approaches.

The bulk of that manual shouldn't be underestimated though. Look at the state of that. Beautiful, high-quality coated paper and a glossy front cover. Delicious. This wasn't a MicroProse game, but you could generally expect this sort of quality from their titles too — very much a feeling of these games being "premium" titles for grown-ups.

Despite the thickness, the A320 Airbus manual is actually kept rather readable with large print and broad line spacing. This helps make what could be an extremely daunting game seem a little more approachable.

And the final highlight for today has to be ERE International's Teenage Queen, a strip poker game for Atari ST that was my second ever encounter with lewd games, following Artworx's imaginatively titled Strip Poker for Atari 8-bit.

Teenage Queen, like most strip poker games at the time, followed a slight twist on five-card draw poker and saw you facing off against an anonymous opponent designed by artist Jocelyn Valais. Valais worked on a few titles in the 16-bit computer era, but seemed to disappear off the face of the planet following Infogrames' simple digital adaptation of Beauty and the Beast.

Teenage Queen became somewhat legendary for a couple of reasons: firstly, all the "spectaculor" images for the heroine's various states of undress were stored in unprotected .pi1 image files on the disk, allowing you to make use of the popular graphics program Degas Elite (for which .pi1 was its native format for 320x200x16 colour low-resolution images) to simply ogle to your heart's content without having to play all that pesky poker.

The second was that once you got the young lady in the nip, she carried on playing, until this happened:

Oh no! She was a robot all along! Oh well. Given the advances in technology in that regard in recent years, I don't think that would stop a lot of people I know.

Aaaanyway… having now found a home for these new acquisitions plus the other goodies in those boxes, my upstairs "study" now looks like this from various angles:

On the left we've got big-box PC stuff, both 3.5" floppy disk and CD-ROM. Across the top shelf from the middle onwards we have some Atari 8-bit stuff and then some Microsoft Windows stuff I couldn't find any other home for over on the far right. The other stuff you may well have seen before if you've been following me for a while; on that middle shelf we have a NES and a few games, a Saturn (sans cables or controllers), a Game Gear with a knackered speaker and partially buggered screen and an old digital camera. Then over on the far right we have my collection of Philips Videopac games for the G7000.

Here's a better view of the Videopac stuff, plus my cool Pong poster signed by Nolan Bushnell. That turned up in the post one day while I was working on GamePro; I can't remember why, because this was long after Atari had tried to "reboot" Pong on PS1. Perhaps it was just some sort of goodwill gesture from a PR company. Either way, I like it.

Here's what's on the desk: an Atari 520ST with two floppy drives (one single-, one double-sided), a Philips G7000, a Sony Trinitron TV-monitor, and an Atari 130XE with two disk drives and a tape deck. The tape deck currently lacks a power cable, but the two disk drives work. Also apparently some cat ears from somewhere.

And here's the shelf at the side of the room. This is all Atari ST stuff, mostly games, but there are a few cool bits of software in there, like the various releases of the Replay sound sampling software and some music sequencing packages such as Steinberg Pro-24. I also chose to keep all the beautiful Psygnosis boxes together up the top there.

And panning left a bit, here's the majority of the big-box ST games collection. Plenty of old favourites I still enjoy booting up there — and some new acquisitions today that I'm really looking forward to revisiting for the first time in a good few years.

At the time of writing, Humble Bundle is hosting a cracking deal for a bunch of really cool audio and music production software — it's on for three and a bit more days as I type this.

The highlight of this package is, for me, ACID Pro 7, the not-quite latest version of a piece of software I used to absolutely love using. Originally published by Sonic Foundry, who was later absorbed into the Sony empire, the software is now published under the Magix brand alongside a number of other former Sony creative packages including the well-regarded Vegas video editor.

ACID, in its various incarnations, is what is known as a DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation. That's a fancy term for a software package that facilitates the production of music using MIDI, recorded audio or a combination of both. A typical DAW incorporates the ability to both record and arrange MIDI and audio sequences, then output the resulting mix to a final file that can then be burnt to CD if you're stuck in the '90s like I am, or turned into a standalone audio file if you're a normal person.

ACID's strength has always been in its audio handling; the earlier versions of the software, if I remember correctly, didn't do anything with MIDI at all, meaning they were primarily useful if you were interested in sequencing samples. If you ever had a play with the eJay software that first appeared in the late '90s, the earliest versions of ACID provided a step up from that, with a much fuller suite of features for manipulating samples in various ways, including pitch-shifting, time-stretching, adding real-time effects and all manner of other exciting things.

Despite its added complexity over more "casual" solutions such as eJay, another real strength of ACID has always been its accessibility and flexibility. There is a lot that the software can do if you know your way around a DAW, but at the same time it's not so daunting that a beginner can't put something together remarkably quickly. At its heart, ACID is a drag-and-drop program — drag a sample from the bin at the bottom into the timeline, and voila, you're on your way to producing the next floor-filler at Kaos. Maybe not. (I'm not sure Kaos is even still there.)

Today, I acquired a new SSD for my computer intended primarily for media projects, so my video editing stuff will be on there rather than cluttering my main system SSD from now on. I picked up the ACID bundle from Humble, and have also found a good 30+ CD-ROMs filled with samples that I had from the early '00s, mostly published under the eJay branding, as it happens.

I haven't sat down for a fiddle with ACID Pro 7 as yet, but having copied most of those CDs (the ones that have survived, anyway — a few of them have become unreadable) to my current system, I'm looking forward to bashing out some new silliness. Making ridiculous tracks with ACID helped keep me sane in 2003 while I was training to be a teacher, and even earlier than that was a highlight of some time I spent with my school friends.

I'm looking forward to rekindling those feelings of creativity and joy that this software used to bring me — and to the fact that these sample CDs I have are now so old that they probably now qualify as being "cool" again. Sweet.

Will I share any of my creations? Hmm. We'll see! 🙂

"Do you remember when the Internet wasn't made up of six websites, each of which were made up of screenshots from the other five?"

That's a comment I saw someone leave a little while back — ironically on Twitter, which is the main prompt for this discussion today — and it kind of struck a chord with me. What happened?

Internet use has definitely changed over the years, and not just because of technology. When I was a teen, "using the Internet" was a special treat that you got to do when no-one needed to make a phone call, and when no-one else in the family needed to use the computer. I'd have half an hour or an hour to spend on CompuServe (and later, the Web) before being unceremoniously booted off to go and do something else. I made the most of that 30-60 minutes; I had some enjoyable interactions with people, downloaded some interesting files and even, on one memorable occasion, made $200 for some Wolfenstein 3-D levels.

When I was at university, it was still the tail-end of the dial-up days, and so my use of the Internet was pretty similar; it was something you had to make an effort to go and use when you wanted or needed to, not this constant, looming presence that pervaded everything else you did. Yes, some of that use was pretty asinine — fond memories of dumb old Flash animations and sites like Hamsterdance — but it was a form of entertainment like any other. Spend some time with it as your main activity, then turn it off, put it away and do something else. (Perhaps involving the things you had downloaded during your Internet session!)

Even the early "always on" broadband days still kind of worked like this; it was just a bit more convenient. Despite now having access to the Internet at the click of a button, it was still just a tool to be used as and when necessary or desired, not the be-all and end-all of existence. There were sites I would read when I felt like it, things I'd stumble across that people had told me about, interesting hyperlinks I'd follow. But it still wasn't the compulsion it is now; during idle moments, I wouldn't just "have a look" to see if anyone had sent me an email in the last five minutes.

I was resistant to social media for quite some time. I recall all my friends getting very excited about Facebook, but I didn't join until a good year or two after it had started to get fashionable. I was away in the States visiting my brother, and setting up a Facebook account seemed like a good way to share the photographs I'd been taking while I was over there. I was just getting to grips with a new camera, so it was nice to be able to show everyone the cool things I'd been taking pictures of and the photography techniques I'd been experimenting with.

I was likewise resistant to Twitter; I couldn't see the point. I didn't jump on Twitter until 1up.com, a place where I'd previously found a number of like-minded gamers, pretty much collapsed in on itself and our "squad" was left without a home. At the time, Twitter seemed like as good a place as any.

What I didn't notice until it was too late was how much Twitter in particular comes to monopolise your Internet time, with many people now seemingly seeing it as the whole Internet. (I don't use Facebook any more, but from what I understand, this is a widespread feeling there, too, particularly among the older generation.) People would spend all day on Twitter waiting to jump on things they disagreed with, and the art of "public shaming" began. I was immediately uncomfortable with this and had a number of disagreements with friends over it, but I was seemingly in the minority.

Now I feel like we're at a point where Twitter isn't even especially useful for one of the main things that people claim you "need" to use it for. In terms of my own work, a relative minority of views come from Twitter, because my attempts to promote it get so lost in the other noise that, more often than not, other people simply don't notice it — or don't want to click away from the latest Internet slapfight they're involved with. Instead, I've seen a number of people I know, like and respect resorting to posting images and memes simply because those inevitably generate more "engagement" such as likes and retweets — but what's the point? It's the digital equivalent of holding up a picture of a girl in a swimsuit and everyone applauding.

I want to break this habit; it's unhealthy. I hate myself a little bit every time my hands are idle and they immediately grab my phone as an unconscious, automatic response. I know there's a lot of interesting stuff out there on the Internet still, and getting bogged down in the depressing, infuriating mire that is social media prevents you from enjoying all that fascinating stuff. So aside from my usual scheduled shares of MoeGamer and Atari A to Z content, I'm taking another step back from Twitter for a bit. I feel good every time I do this, and I feel like I should try and stick with it. Perhaps then I can rediscover the things that are cool about the Internet rather than despairing for the state of humanity every time I log on.

Or maybe things really are that bad and Twitter is just the perfect microcosm of Internet culture at large. In which case the temptation to just pull the plug is enormous!

I've been trying to figure out a good way to get a "hardcopy" of some of the writing I've worked on for some time, and the most convenient, usable service I've found to date is Blurb.

Blurb isn't necessarily the cheapest or the best solution for self-publishing, but they have a good set of tools and previous proofs I've ordered from them have looked nice. What I haven't really been able to figure out was a particularly cost-effective way of archiving stuff in bulk. I'm quite wordy, you see, and that tends to fill quite a few pages.

Probably the main issue is that in previous attempts I've been trying to create a "coffee table" type of book with lots of images and colour, when in fact the long-form nature of my writing is better suited to a more… "normal" book. So I've done an experiment and formatted all the 2016 Cover Game feature articles into one of these more "normal" books, with a splash of colour here and there for interest. It came out at 394 pages, and that was skipping the RPG Maker MV feature, which was very image-heavy and not really appropriate for a text-centric book.

I'm interested to see how this will come out. Blurb take quite a while to print and send out proofs, so I should hopefully have something to share by about the 26th or so. After that, if there's interest, I can put hardcopies and ebook versions up for sale, just in case you want me on your shelf! (If you don't, that's fine, too; I'm mostly doing this so I have a more "permanent" copy of some of the things I've written.)

Anyway, just wanted to share that, and I'll let you know how it comes out when I receive my proof.

Well, here we are, a hundred consecutive days of my personal ramblings for your entertainment. Kind of, anyway. I know I had a few "accidents" along the way, but I do believe we're fully up to date right now.

It's been a… contemplative few days, to say the least, partly prompted by Biffo's post from yesterday and a subsequent video that he and his Digitiser compatriots put out today (Patron-exclusive for now, but it'll be public on Friday) on the subject of why they all do what they do.

I shan't spoil the entire contents of Biffo's video as I'd very much like it if you watched it on Friday, but a key point in the discussion was the use of creativity as a "coping mechanism". Specifically, creativity as a means of staving off mental health issues. Everyone involved in Digitiser had been touched by mental illness of one form or another to varying degrees, and every one of them had found solace in doing something that they love.

Needless to say, I can relate. And I've always been that way; I recognise that now, even though I only really became aware of what depression and anxiety even were when I went to university, and only got a formal diagnosis of Asperger's a couple of years back. I've always used creativity of one form or another as a means of staving off the darkness, be it writing game reviews and stories as a kid (some things never change), writing a diary, making music (both with real instruments and electronically), podcasting, blogging and, most recently, working on MoeGamer and YouTube.

However tiresome a day might be, however difficult it might be to deal with stresses and anxieties that the brain of someone like me amplifies about a thousand times from what they actually are… I always have that to look forward to. I always have things that I can do that I can look forward to. I always have something to write about, a video to publish. And that is something I think I will always have, regardless of whether or not anyone is reading it; regardless of whether or not anyone is supporting it via various means. (I am, of course, extremely grateful to those of you reading this, since it means that you do support it — so thank you, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart!)

I don't really have a point to make. I think I just wanted to reiterate to myself why I do what I do, and how it's quite nice to feel like I'm not the only person who works that way. Numbers can give a nice stroke to the old ego, but ultimately personal fulfilment is much more important.

Mr Biffo of Digitiser (who I am a Patron of here on Patreon) posted an interesting (and slightly sad) article earlier, on the subject of creating things for people to enjoy.

Biffo was concerned, among other things, that he was spreading himself too thin between his Digitiser 2000 website, which was originally intended as an attempt to recapture the magic of Digitiser on Teletext, and his new YouTube channel, where he has been greatly enjoying putting together both his full-length "Digitiser: The Show" episodes and his more recent short-form content.

Biffo's concerns stem from something all content creators tend to bang their heads on at some point, which is whether or not you're doing something "for the numbers", or if you're doing it "for the love". At some point you need to contemplate whether what you're doing is a business or a hobby, because increasingly in this oversaturated modern world of free expression, it seems impossible to do both.

Treat something as a hobby and you run the risk of stagnating in terms of "growth"; yes, you may well get a loyal core audience and be incredibly grateful for them, but there often seems to be something of a "glass ceiling", as Biffo describes it. I sometimes feel a bit like this with what I do — my projects are much smaller scale than the various forms of modern Digitiser are, but I still find myself struggling to reach simple milestones like, say, breaking $100 a month here on Patreon.

Treat something as a business, however, and you risk sucking all the joy out of it, making it become "just a job", and in the worst case scenario something you absolutely hate. This is something we regrettably see every day with professional games journalists, who increasingly seem to churn stuff out with absolute resentment for their audience (who, in turn, become defensive, and thus the whole cycle continues to worsen) and professional YouTubers, who it seems we're increasingly seeing suffering from complete burnout and exhaustion.

"It gives me respite from what I do for a living, it's a place where I have creative freedom, and I probably wouldn't want to rely on it for the entirety of my income," writes Biffo of his various Digitiser projects. "I think that would place too much pressure on it, and mean I'd end up tailoring my content for views. And I've never really been one for watering down my own voice."

I feel exactly the same way. The reason I enjoy doing what I do so much at the moment is the creative freedom I have, and the fact that I'm not beholden to things like embargoes, publication schedules and the whims of a prissy, stick-up-the-arse editor-in-chief who won't allow me to cover certain games that there's a proven hunger for fair coverage of because they offend his delicate little sensibilities and might make him look bad to his super-rad hyper-woke little friends.

Ahem, sorry, got a bit off the point there. Anyway, yes. I do what I do because I enjoy it. My day job isn't unpleasant, but it is boring, totally bereft of creativity and fairly soulless, and as such the time I get to work on MoeGamer, YouTube and Atari A to Z is precious to me. I know that if I was in a position where I needed to tailor all those projects' content to clickbait views, I wouldn't be nearly as happy, and thus I'm thankful for the freedom I have.

Of course, that doesn't mean I wouldn't immediately jack in my day job if I won the lottery. Were I to suddenly find myself with "fuck you" money, I would most certainly quit the day job, and devote more time to these creative projects. With the money to be self-sufficient, however, I'd be free to continue doing what I do now, the way I do now; I'd just have the time to do it more, and better.

Ah well. It's nice to dream sometimes, isn't it. Go tell a favourite creator (it doesn't have to be me!) that you appreciate what they do today, because sometimes it's just nice to hear a simple "I enjoyed that, thank you".