These posts are normally for Patrons only, but I've left this one public because I want the people involved to be able to read it, on the off-chance they actually see this.

I just got back from Digitiser Live in London (and the Chunky Fringe event beforehand) — I'm not going to talk specifically about those events right now because it's 1am and I want to go to bed. I did, however, want to mention some things while they're still fresh in my mind and heart, so here we go.

I wanted to extend a huge thank-you to everyone involved in the events today for creating such a wonderfully welcoming, positive place for people to enjoy themselves. It felt like a complete escape from the negativity and nonsense of the rest of the world, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt remarkably refreshed to be in such an environment — off the Internet and among real people with whom they have something in common.

I've mentioned before that I have monstrous social anxiety that can probably mostly be attributed to my Asperger's. The prospect of attending events where there are lots of people is pretty terrifying to me, and even more so if it's not just random people, but also people that I greatly respect.

I am, in other words, not the sort of person who finds it easy to strike up conversations with random strangers — even if I know that stranger and I will probably get along — and nor am I particularly confident in responding to people initiating some sort of interaction with me. This, as you can probably imagine, is generally why I shy away from events like this.

Digitiser host and lead creative type Paul "Mr Biffo" Rose was aware that there were people feeling like this — I wasn't the only one — and encouraged them to come along anyway, promising an experience that they wouldn't regret. Bold words indeed, but having followed Rose on Twitter for a while — particularly since he got Digitiser: The Show and various related paraphernalia up and running — I knew that if there was one thing you could count on him for, it was sincerity and honesty.

Digitiser Live had previously sold out, but some more tickets became available. I was still not sure if I was going to be "up to" going, but my wife Andie encouraged me to buy two tickets — one for me, and one for a friend (if any of my local friends happened to be available, which they weren't) or for her if no-one else was able to come with me. I did so.

The day approached and, as I noted yesterday, I was a bit nervous about the prospect.

I knew that there would be things there that I was interested in, and people that I wanted to meet. I knew that there was a portion of the show in which I might be able to show off some of the old Atari hardware I love so much (sadly, random selection meant that I didn't get this opportunity in the end — but more on that in a moment!). And I knew that, based on the Digitiser YouTube videos — both the full-length Digitiser: The Show and the more regular short-form content they've been putting out recently — I would enjoy Digitiser Live.

But I also knew myself. I knew that when confronted with a room of unfamiliar people, I tend to clam up and not want to talk to anyone. I knew that if I didn't take an opportunity to speak to someone I admire, I'd regret it, but that would almost certainly happen anyway. And I knew that would sully the experience of the day a bit.

But while I was at Chunky Fringe ahead of Digitiser Live, something in my brain told me that it was probably safe to come a little bit further out of my comfort zone than I do normally. Paul Gannon, host of the Cheap Show podcast, Digitiser cast member and perpetual whipping boy for Biffo, was in attendance selling Cheap Show magazines and various bits and pieces. As Chunky Fringe was coming to an end and Gannon was preparing to leave to go and get ready for the evening's show, I decided to take a chance: I spoke to him.

And nothing bad happened. I had the opportunity to shake him by the hand, tell him I enjoyed his work and thank him for the entertainment. It was a brief interaction, but I can't underline enough what a massive deal my being able to do this was. My knees were trembling before and afterwards… but once it was done, I didn't regret it. And I knew that I was in a place where it would be safe to try that again.

If you're the sort of person who can just happily chat away to others regardless of whether or not you know them, you might not understand what a big deal this is. But for someone with social anxiety and/or Asperger's, even a simple interaction like this takes a huge mental "wind-up" — and often that very process can discourage you from taking that last step at all, as you start to visualise all the ways it could possibly go wrong, or in which you make a fool of yourself.

I still have in my mind the time I attended PAX and, by chance, met Don Woods, the father of the adventure game; I embarrassed myself by being a gibbering, nervous wreck and my friends I was there with gave me some light-hearted ribbing about it afterwards. This was several years before I'd been formally diagnosed with Asperger's, before you judge my friends too harshly; today I can look back on the situation and both understand it and see the funny side to a certain degree, but the memory still sticks with me a bit when situations like this present themselves.

I knew that after Digitiser Live was over in the evening, Biffo and the other cast members were planning to spend some time in the venue bar to meet fans, sign autographs and that sort of thing. Biffo had been kind enough to offer some positive, personal encouragement to me on Twitter, so I was hoping that I'd be able to meet him in person, shake him by the hand and thank him for this whole crazy phenomenon that culminated in today's event. After I didn't get picked for the "Antiques Roadshow" segment in the show itself, I was also keen to track down cast member Octav1us and show her the Atari 400 I'd brought with me, because I felt like she'd probably be the one who would appreciate it the most, given her interest in old microcomputers.

Despite my earlier positive interaction with Gannon, I was still nervous. I wasn't quite sure how I'd approach either of them; that initial "approach" is always the most difficult part for me, as I always worry that I'll be intruding on people, interrupting them doing things that they'd rather be doing and just generally being a nuisance. And I had plenty of time for my mind to stew this over, since Biffo and co were busy doing the "get out" for the performance before heading to the bar.

My wife Andie went out for a smoke while we were waiting, and when she came back she told me that Octav1us was outside. Something in my mind told me that this was a "now or never" moment — accurate, as it happened, since they were just about to leave for the night. (The "get out" had actually taken so long that the bar was already closed by the time they finished!) Again, I remembered the positive, supportive and safe atmosphere I felt like I'd been in all day, and managed to summon up the confidence to approach Octav1us, thank them for their contributions to the day and the entertainment their work on YouTube has brought me, and show them my Atari 400 so the poor beast hadn't had a wasted trip.

Once again, nothing bad happened. I had a nice chat with Octav1us for a few minutes, we discussed the Atari 400 and its keyboard and laughed about what a nightmare it must have been learning to program on stuff like the ZX81 and the original Spectrum with their horrid keyboards. (The Atari 400 also originally had a horrible membrane keyboard — ostensibly so it would be suitable for children and protected against spillages — but pretty much everyone who owned one paid their local computer shop to replace this with a "typewriter-style" set of physical keys.)

Buoyed by "success", I decided to seek out Biffo, since I'd seen on Twitter that he was somewhere in the corridors of the venue. Sure enough, I found him, had the opportunity to shake his hand and he even knew who I was when I introduced myself.

The only person from the main Digitiser Live cast I wasn't able to find before we left was Larry Bundy Jr, which was a pity as I wanted to show him some appreciation for his complete shamelessness on stage, but suffice to say by this point I feel like I would have probably also been able to speak to him without anything awful happening.

As I noted above, none of this may sound like a big deal to you if you're the sort of person who can just walk up to someone and talk to them, but I am not and have never been that person. That's why these small events, as insignificant as they probably were to the other parties involved, were very much appreciated, and I'm sure will become valuable memories for me.

As such, I specifically want to thank Biffo, Octav1us and Gannon for taking the time to speak with me and make me feel welcome — and more broadly and generally, I want to thank everyone involved with both Chunky Fringe and Digitiser Live for creating such a lovely, positive, welcoming, safe-feeling atmosphere for the whole day.

It really means a lot to me that not only did I have a great day of entertainment, I also felt able to do things I'm not normally able to. And so, while the day's events and excitement were fresh in my head, I wanted to say a public "thank you" to these people.

Thank you, everyone; you made my day.

Tomorrow, I'm doing something rather unusual: I'm going to a day of activities that celebrate the YouTube rebirth of a daily Teletext games magazine that ran from 1993 to 2003. The "publication" (if that's the right word) in question is Digitiser, which you may recall I wrote a bit about back when creator Paul "Mr Biffo" Rose first put out his new Digitiser "TV show" on YouTube.

Since the initial run of Digitiser: The Show, Rose and company have been experimenting with various other formats as well as preparing for a possible second season of the show. In the meantime, there's tomorrow's Digitiser Live event, which unfolds in the evening and is complemented in the daytime by a fan-organised event known as "Chunky Fringe", which features various panels and exhibitors with a connection to Digitiser, Biffo and/or Teletext.

I'm both excited and nervous about going to this. I have struck up something of a casual acquaintance with Biffo on Twitter as well as throwing him some Patreon support for the last few months, so I'm keen to meet him and shake his hand, along with those of the other cast members Paul Gannon, Octav1us and Larry Bundy Jr — all of whom are creators I respect greatly.

At the same time, the prospect of doing exactly this fills me with terror and dread. I worry about making a complete idiot of myself or somehow offending someone, even though the latter part in particular is especially unlikely. But these are people who, if I have the opportunity to make an impression, I want to make a good impression. And so, riddled with social anxiety as I am, I am very nervous about saying and doing the right thing.

Of course, there's no guarantee I'll have the opportunity to even get close to any of them, so this may all be a moot point. Regardless, I'm looking forward to the day despite my anxiety, and I'm sure I'll provide you all with a full report in the very near future!

If you happen to be anywhere near the UK and able to get to the outskirts of London tomorrow, a few tickets are still available. Grab one here.

I was shocked and saddened to hear this morning that Kyoto Animation, better known colloquially as KyoAni, had been the victim of an arson attack. As I type this, 33 people have been confirmed dead, with many more injured, missing or in critical condition. The motive for the attack remains unknown right now.

I'm not going to talk too much about the specifics of this incident, as the story is still developing. I did want to acknowledge it, however, as it's a devastating blow to Japanese popular media — and, hell, popular media in general.

On the offchance you're unfamiliar with KyoAni, they're an anime studio who, since 2003, have been putting out a pretty consistent string of widely beloved anime, ranging from adaptations of Key's classic visual novels Air, Kanon and Clannad to series like Lucky Star and K-On!!, which played a significant part in defining modern anime in general, and the "slice of life" genre specifically.

The studio is particularly noteworthy for the fact that its employees are all salaried rather than paid per frame on a freelance basis. This allowed the company to both develop a distinctive "house style" that is immediately recognisable, and for its animators to be able to focus on the quality of each frame rather than rushing to produce as much work as possible in a short period of time.

In other words, they were a studio doing a great amount of good — and, unlike the disagreements that tend to spring up over most popular media, I don't know a single person who ever had a bad thing to say about a KyoAni production.

The company was not especially large, so it's entirely possible that it will be unable to recover from an attack of this magnitude. That hasn't stopped people from rallying around to gather support, however; American licensing company Sentai Filmworks set up a GoFundMe page that has raised nearly three quarters of a million dollars in less than a day at the time of writing, and various people have pointed out that KyoAni has an online shop where you can buy high-definition digital pictures. If you'd like to support those affected by this tragedy, these appear to be the two best (or at least easiest) ways to do so right now. That and, as always, buying official KyoAni products such as anime and merchandise.

I'm saddened and disappointed by this news, and anything further I might be able to say feels a bit futile; nothing will bring those 33 people back or heal the countless injured, and KyoAni will never be the same after this — if it even survives at all. But it has, at least, been encouraging to see how many people wanted to offer their support and condolences after this horrific tragedy; small comfort for those affected, perhaps, but a reminder that not everyone in the world is as reprehensible a creature as the one responsible for this attack.

I don't really know what to write today. My brain is pretty much melted from a combination of the heat throughout the day, the current tedium at the day job and working hard on various creative projects — as well as continuing to flex my language-learning muscles with The Expression: Amrilato, which has really ramped up the difficulty with its "study" sessions!

I went swimming this morning. It was good. I think I can make this a habit… or at least I would have done had the pool not suddenly decided that three days a week they were going to open a little bit later than they were going to when I first started attending. It's not the end of the world, since as I noted yesterday I signed up to the gym — and even if I hadn't, I can still get a decent half hour's swimming in if I get changed quickly — but it is a little annoying.

Still, that's established what will hopefully become a routine now: I'm intending to go to the gym on Monday, Tuesday and Thursdays, and to the pool on Wednesdays and Fridays. I'll then take the weekends off. That should get me into a decent rhythm of doing a variety of different things, hopefully giving most of my battered, broken old body a much-needed workout in the process.

It's a new episode of How Heavy are the Dumbbells You Lift? today. I'm going to watch that — and probably an episode of Dagashi Kashi before bed tonight, since anime before sleep seems to have been working well to relax me for the past few days. Plus the former has been, as you can see, pretty motivational!

Apologies I don't have anything more meaningful to write about, but it's been just a sort of "eh" day, really. Hopefully tomorrow will be…  tolerable at the very least!

Last time I visited my parents, I nabbed a few old Atari-related books. I'll probably do something a bit more detailed with them on Atari A to Z at some point — either an article about them or perhaps a video "reading" of bits of them.

I find looking back over these old books and magazines fascinating, because they really highlight how computer use has changed over the years. Back in the early days of Page 6 magazine, a publication which my father, my brother and I all contributed to at one time or another, it was seemingly expected that most people who purchased a home computer would at least dabble in programming, for example; this was understandable, given that BASIC was readily accessible either via a cartridge or built into the system's ROM in later model Atari 8-bits.

It went further than that, though. Magazines included type-in listings that you could copy into your computer and save to disk or cassette, then have some "free" software in exchange for your hard work (and purchasing the magazine in the first place). For me, this was always a highly enjoyable activity, and is probably the reason I can type so well today. I absolutely loved typing these things in and ending up with something I could make use of on my computer; it was second only to actually having built the program yourself.

In the case of games and applications built in BASIC, these listings had an important secondary function: they were things you could study in order to learn various techniques. Much like one of the most effective ways of learning a new language is to immerse yourself in it as much as possible (hello, The Expression: Amrilato), programming rewards those with the confidence to poke around a bit, fiddle around and attempt to adapt things they think they understand to their own requirements.

I was never particularly good at programming, but I was at least competent enough to put together some basic (no pun intended) things using the old Atari computers. I vividly recall being very proud I made a (rather crap) treasure hunting game, for example — and much of what I needed to create that I learned from studying various type-in listings.

Machine code was another matter entirely. People who could program in assembly language or raw machine code back then are still like gods to me. I don't understand how anyone can possibly work like that. But, again, it was something that was kind of taken for granted back then; if you wanted your computer to do something that BASIC was a bit too slow to handle, you'd use machine code. Sometimes the aforementioned magazines even published entire machine code games and applications, the listing for which would produce a bootable floppy disk or cassette just like the ones you'd go out and buy in a shop. This is still kind of incredible to me.

I really want to talk about this some more, but I'm wondering what the best way to do it might be. Perhaps some videos showing off the books and their contents, interspersed with some footage of me attempting some of the exercises and listings therein? I dunno.

Whatever I end up doing with these, looking back over these old books and magazines reminds me of why computers and gaming excited me in the first place. It's because I'm a massive nerd.

Well, I watched How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? again. (Or, more accurately, its first two episodes again.) And today I found myself signing up for the gym. It helps that the day job provides a half-price corporate membership for the year (although that's still a fair bit) but if I make sure I go reasonably often for at least a few months, it'll be worthwhile.

And y'know what, I'm feeling pretty motivated right now, for once. Motivation to exercise is something that seems to come and go with me; when it comes, it really comes (and when it goes, it buggers off for years at a time), but I've never really managed to effectively combine it with weight loss. The last time I got "into" exercise I ended up running a 10k. I was still fat, and it took me a long time to finish, but I finished it; I have the medal to prove it.

This time around, I'm following a weight loss program with regard to food and feeling motivated to exercise. This, to me, sounds like a winning combination — though of course thanks to past experience I know all too well that things don't happen overnight.

I'm feeling pretty good about the prospect right now, anyway. We'll see how I feel if/when I manage to get myself out of bed in time for a morning workout tomorrow… and when I remember how achey your first gym session after umpteen months inevitably makes you!

But I'll do it for Hibiki. And Ayaka. And Akemi. And the other ones who haven't been in the anime yet.

SIDE CHEST

I've not watched any anime for ages — not because I haven't wanted to, but simply because I haven't been making time for it.

I decided to be decisive and change that last night, and the anime I picked for my triumphant return to the medium was this season's currently airing How Heavy are the Dumbbells You Lift? — a show about a cute girl who, upset to be putting on weight (but oblivious to her lifestyle factors that were making this happen) decides to join a local gym with a certain sense of trepidation.

I'm in love. There are only two episodes released so far at the time of writing, but I'm already feeling a bit like I want to do something kind of unprecedented for me: I want to re-watch those two episodes I've already seen, I enjoyed them so much. It's a wonderful blend of comedy and fanservice, and it's utterly charmed me so far.

Not only that, but I found the educational content of the show to actually be rather inspirational — so much so that I've found myself looking up opening times and costs for my local gym, and am strongly considering joining up to complement my early-morning swimming sessions that I'm hoping to make more of a habit this coming week. It may help, of course, that the more educational sections of the show — most notably those that demonstrate the exercises and how they might be beneficial — are needlessly erotic in the best possible way.

Popular media is a wonderful means of inspiring people to do things — whether it's learning an instrument, making new friends, getting fit or simply being a better person. I'm already feeling that How Heavy are the Dumbbells You Lift? is going to be a favourite anime from this season — and people who watch a lot more than I do are always saying that this season is the strongest they've seen for a long time!

Will it top that glorious season we had Gabriel Dropout, Interviews with Monster Girls and Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid all in one go, though? That remains to be seen, but I think I've flipped the switch in my head that has made me excited to find out now…

One of my local friends had a rare occasion of actually being free at a weekend, so we managed a short-notice evening of board gaming. The game of choice tonight was Above and Below, a new acquisition by one of our number that I'd not heard of before.

Above and Below is a kind of hybrid game: it incorporates both Euro-style worker placement gameplay with the "storytelling" component of titles like SMERSH and Arabian Nights. Interestingly, it doesn't go super-hard on either of these things, making for an interesting game that isn't too heavy, but has a nice variety of things going on.

The concept of Above and Below is that you are attempting to rebuild your village after it was destroyed by barbarians. In order to do this, you have to gather resources, earn money, expand your population and build structures. On top of all that, though, there's also a network of caves beneath the village which you can go and explore; successful explorations open up underground areas to colonise, in which you can then build "outposts" to extend your village beneath the ground as well as on the surface.

Each round, you ultimately have the option to take up to as many actions as you have available villagers. Each player takes one action with one or more villagers, then play passes around the table until everyone has had a turn. The actions include harvesting materials from structures that produce them, constructing new buildings by paying the appropriate cost, recruiting new villagers, labouring for a small amount of additional income, and exploring the caves.

Most of that is fairly self-explanatory and typically Eurogamey; there's no real direct player interaction and you building your village is pretty much group solitaire, though there is the option to mess with other players a little bit by purchasing buildings from the communal pool that someone else might have wanted, or acquiring villagers with particularly potent skillsets.

Where things get interesting is in the exploration aspect. Upon taking two or more villagers into the caves, you draw a "cave card" and roll a die. The cave card tells you which passage you need to read from an encounter book according to your die roll. Each encounter consists of some flavour text — which presents a variety of weird and wonderful situations, and really rewards those willing to put a bit of "oomph" into their delivery — and generally provides two options on how to proceed.

These options will either take you to another passage in the encounter book or ask you to make an "explore check". This involves rolling one die per villager who is participating in the exploration, then consulting their token to see how many "lanterns" you score with them according to the die roll. For example, a low-skilled villager might only score one lantern if you roll a three or higher, while a more valuable villager might provide you with three lanterns if you roll four or more, and guarantee a single lantern by providing you one if you roll one or higher.

Passing an explore check is a simple matter of acquiring enough lanterns to meet the difficulty level requested — an "explore 3" check requires three lanterns, for example. Many of the options provide two possible outcomes: one for a small number of lanterns, one for a larger number. Generally speaking — though not always — the larger number of lanterns results in a bigger reward, and if it's impossible to acquire that many through just rolling, you can "exert" your villagers to earn additional lanterns, but they'll be injured in the process, putting them out of action for the following round unless you have a potion to give them.

At the end of the game, you earn points for a variety of things: a flat rate per building constructed, a gradually increasing range of points for the different types of resource you can harvest, and various bonus points from the specific buildings you constructed. Some buildings simply give you a flat amount of bonus points, others give you bonus points per something — per building, per villager, per specific resources.

It was an enjoyable game that plays quickly and has the potential to be quite different each time you give it a shot. I like it a lot more than other, similar games because there's not so much reliance on, say, knowing the deck of cards like in Agricola, and the variety of ways to score points at the end of the game means that there are multiple possible strategies you can employ along the way. You need to pick one pretty quick, though; there are only seven rounds in the game, and those pass by alarmingly quickly!

Unlike in other games where time is tight — such as the aforementioned Agricola — I didn't find this frustrating, however, because there wasn't an obvious "perfect play". Agricola pisses me off because there is a perfect play — fill up your farm board and have some good point-scoring cards to go with it — and there never seems to be enough time to achieve both of those things. Here, however, it's a simple case of "do as well as you can within the time available", and that makes things much more interesting. It also makes the final scoring a lot of fun, since you can never quite predict who is going to win — the people I thought were going to take the bottom spots (me and my friend Tim) actually ended up taking the top two!

It's a good time then. Hopefully it'll hit the table a few more times, because it's that delightfully rare thing: something we all seemed to enjoy.

I was thinking recently about what, exactly, made Twitter annoying to participate in, and I came to the conclusion that one of the biggest problems was the Retweet function.

The reason for this is that the Retweet function causes stuff to be thrown into your feed that you didn't ask for. More often than not, people will retweet deliberately contentious stuff so that they can get into an argument with someone and win Internet Points for saying "the right things" for whatever group they're trying to impress.

You can turn off retweets on Twitter, but you have to do so for each individual person you follow; there didn't seem to be a blanket means of simply turning off retweets altogether.

However, I refused to believe that no-one out there had ever thought it might be nice to cut down on this particular source of noise, so I did a bit of investigating. And I found the first helpful Lifehacker article I've ever seen — not only that, but the actual advice in this one is probably the first time a Lifehacker article can be vaguely accurately described as a "hack" in the programming sense.

Lifehacker is a Gawker publication, so I don't really want to give them any traffic. As such, I'll share the tip with you right here and you can enjoy it without supporting the Gawker machine.

You need to be using Chrome to do this… I think, anyway. In theory any browser with a developer console that can execute instructions in immediate mode should work, but Chrome definitely works.

Step 1: Go to your Twitter following page at https://twitter.com/following

Step 2: Wait for all the profiles to load. This can take a little while if you follow a lot of people. Scroll down the page to verify everything has loaded.

Step 3: Hit F12 to open the Developer Console. Down towards the bottom of this panel, click the "Console" option.

Step 4: Copy and paste this code into the console window and hit Return.

a=Array.prototype.slice.call(document.querySelectorAll("div.ProfileCard-content div.dropdown"));a.forEach(function(e) {e.querySelector("button").click(); e.querySelector("li.retweet-off-text button").click(); }) 

Like the loading of profiles, this will also take a moment. When it finishes, retweets will be turned off for everyone you follow, so you can then selectively re-enable if there are those you do want to see retweets from. Or just leave them turned off altogether and enjoy the novelty of a timeline that sometimes stays completely silent for five minutes or more at a time! Bliss.

While you're on, if you haven't already, also mute the words  suggest_recycled_tweet_inline and suggest_activity_tweet in your account settings to stop seeing other people's Likes on your timeline.

And with that, Twitter is (mostly) usable again! Enjoy!

While I was in the pool this morning (yes, I made it again), I found myself thinking about quantification and gamification. My trigger for this thought was contemplating whether or not I should count how many lengths I swam in the half an hour I had available before I had to leave for work, and ultimately I decided that no, I didn't need to; that wasn't why I was here.

Today, we're encouraged to quantify and gamify almost everything in our lives. Step counters on our phones check to see if we've been active enough. Websites provide experience points and achievements for engaging with their content. And, of course, social media, for many, is spent in the never-ending pursuit of higher numbers of likes and shares.

Quantifying things can, at times, be valuable. It's helpful to know, for example, how many people a particular surgeon has killed (preferably zero), or how many civilian facilities a bomber pilot has destroyed (likewise). It's also helpful if you're trying to train for something specific; if you're hoping to run a marathon, for example, you'd want to see how long it takes you to run various distances so you can track your improvement in speed and endurance as time goes on.

But that doesn't mean we need to attach numbers to absolutely everything. I deliberately chose not to count my lengths in the swimming pool this morning because all I'm trying to do is simply something vaguely active. How "well" I do at that is irrelevant; I'm not trying to get better (at least not right now) — I'm just trying to do something.

It's easy to lose sight of that today in a world filled with jobs that constantly demand you meet "KPIs", likes and shares on social media corresponding to the amount of value people feel they should place on your opinion and a society that, in general, seems to think that you should never be satisfied and happy with who you are right now.

In some respects, it's good to constantly strive to improve. But sometimes you just need a break from the pressure, and to be able to do something just for the sake of it. At those times, you need to ignore all the numbers and just lose yourself in whatever you're doing. And enjoy it!