I've been listening to t.A.T.u this morning after an offhand comment on Twitter about the fact there was originally supposed to be an anime based on Lena Katina and Julia Volkova at some point in the past. How odd.

Anyway, this impromptu listening session reminded me that I actually unironically enjoyed t.A.T.u's music when it first came out, but it was one of those things that, at the time, I wasn't sure if I was "supposed" to like. And I think my changing attitude there is probably the biggest change I've gone through since my childhood and teenage years.

This was always a thing with music. At my school, you were judged by your musical tastes. One day, I went and bought Oasis' Definitely Maybe from the local record shop because lots of my friends were talking about it, and it seemed that liking Oasis made you marginally more socially acceptable. Trouble was, I bought Definitely Maybe literally a day before (What's the Story?) Morning Glory came out, exposing me as the ill-informed loser that I was.

Thinking back, though, I already had hints of my current "fuck what everyone else thinks" attitude back then. I bought a number of albums that most certainly weren't "cool" at the time, but which I thought I might like and, it turned out, in most cases I did. (In contrast, while I quite enjoyed Oasis, I certainly didn't find their music life-changing in the way I had been led to believe it would be.) I bought things based on things I'd heard on the radio and enjoyed; I bought things where I'd enjoyed a video I'd seen on TV; I bought things where I fancied the lead singer.

I bought t.A.T.u's first album because lesbian schoolgirls in the rain. And I was pleasantly surprised when the actual music on said album was exactly my sort of thing: tuneful, emotional, dramatic. I listened to that album a lot back in the day, but I don't think I ever told anyone I had it.

Today, I've been reading up on the rather turbulent story behind the band, including the question over whether or not the pair of them were actually gay or not (seemingly not, though they both claim to support people loving whoever they want to love) and an apparent ongoing off-on-off-on feud between the pair of them. It's been interesting to explore. And, today, of course, I feel like I'm much more able to talk about this sort of stuff, whatever other people might think of t.A.T.u and their music.

That's one thing that's definitely improved over time — both for me, and for the world at large. Shame about all the other things that are so massively and obviously worse! 🙂

I've been slacking a bit in my gym routine recently due to various instances of being ill, but I went last night and had what I felt like was a pretty good session. I deliberately decided to try and push myself a bit, particularly on the exercise bike, and it felt quite satisfying.

There's always a bit of a balance you have to find when it comes to this sort of thing. When pushing yourself further than usual, there's a distinct possibility you might not be able to do quite as much as when you're going more "casually", and indeed that was the case last night. While I can happily do half an hour of pretty casual cycling on the exercise bike, I managed ten minutes with a bit more intensity last night. I didn't feel too bad, though; I felt like I'd achieved something. And I think trying to push myself like that a little more often is the way to improve rather than just plateau.

I need to get my eating habits in order though. Andie and I took a break from Slimming World a while back because we were both feeling demotivated and kind of sick of the stuff you end up eating on that, but we're both still trying to be reasonably good. Operative word: trying. We're not as bad as we used to be, but we're also not particularly eating in a way that is conducive to losing weight, though.

If nothing else, I'm planning for a bit of a "reset" when the new year rolls around. Get into new, good habits — or re-establish old ones — and sort things out as much as possible. I'm also going back to the local counselling service to see if they can help at all; my mental health has been all over the shop of late, so having some means of hopefully stabilising it a bit will be worthwhile and helpful.

I've got this nagging sense in my head that I want… something to be "over", finished with, done. But there's nothing that really can be "over", finished with, done. It's just the ongoing challenge that is everyday existence in this modern world. I long for simpler, happier times.

I'm not a hugely super-organised person in my everyday life, as the "ring of chaos" (as my wife occasionally refers to it) around where I typically sit on the sofa will attest. But I do enjoy and appreciate some nicely organised shelves.

Those of you who have been following for a while will doubtless have seen my game shelves at least once by now. Well, by no means anywhere near as impressive, but already giving me a thoroughly pleasant sense of happiness when I look at it, is my fledgling manga shelf.

It occurred to me while stowing away this small collection that one of the things I particularly enjoy about being a collector of physical media is simply how pleasing a well-organised set of anything vaguely uniform looks when on a shelf. And I'm pretty sure manga publishers know this; look at all those spines.

Each series has its own distinct look that makes it immediately identifiable without even reading the title. Each series has a distinct colour scheme, logo design, use of fonts and pattern that makes it nice to look at by itself, but lovely to look at when there's more than one there. Look at those Monster Musume volumes. Look at Komi Can't Communicate.

In some respects this is probably both dangerous and manipulative, because it encourages people (like me, I guess) to want to expand their collections in order to improve the way they look on the shelf, and to derive satisfaction from "complete" (or at the very least expansive) sets of various series.

But in others, it's also showing understanding of the sort of person who might be interested in following a manga series over the long term. It'd be irksome if every volume of Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro had a different form factor, for example — although just blame that on Nagatoro herself and it would actually be rather thematically appropriate — so publishers appear to take care to keep the various volumes of their series consistent over the years — far more so than various editions of Western books.

I've had those two volumes of Fruits Basket for probably more than ten years at this point, for example, and yet if I were to walk into a manga shop today to try and expand or complete that set, they'd still look like that. Compare and contrast with a popular Western series like Harry Potter or His Dark Materials and, if you left a few years between volumes, you might well find yourself with a radically different looking book on yourself that doesn't "fit" with the earlier volumes. Whether or not this bothers you, of course, is down to your own personal tastes and character!

Anyway. Manga. I'm pleased with what I've got so far, and after payday rolls around I'm going to pick up a few more bits and bobs — the second volume of Interspecies Reviewers and more Plus-Sized Elf are definitely first on the list, but I also have a few other series and one-offs that I'm interested in reading, too. This is an exciting (kind of) new world for me to explore, and I'm feeling great enthusiasm for it right now… so doubtless more photos of this shelf will follow in the future 🙂 Thank you for indulging me and my Aspergers!

I read a news article on the BBC this morning where World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee attacked the UK's Conservative party over a recent bit of controversy. During a recent leaders' debate ahead of the upcoming General Election, one of the party's Twitter accounts had apparently rebranded itself "Factcheck UK", suggesting that it was some sort of official fact-checking service for the claims made at said debate — when, of course, it was nothing of the sort.

"What the Conservative Party has done is obviously a no no. That's amazingly blatant," said Sir Tim.

And it is. And this got me thinking… as the man credited with creating what we know the World Wide Web as today… what does he think of what the modern Internet had become?

As it happens, the BBC had already got there before me. Speaking in March of this year, Sir Tim said that he felt the Web was in a "downward plunge to [a] dysfunctional future", and that this needed to be stopped, perhaps through programmes such as Contract for the Web, which he played a part in creating.

Trouble is, the Web seems to be a bit of a Pandora's Box at this point; its lid has been left open for so long now that it's impossible to put everything back inside the box, and any attempts to regulate it in any way will inevitably be met with resistance. Said regulation would probably be unenforceable anyway.

It's hard to argue with Sir Tim's concerns, though, of which he has three main ones:

• malicious activity such as hacking and harassment

• problematic system design such as business models that reward clickbait

• unintended consequences, such as aggressive or polarised discussions

All of these are things that are very much in evidence today, and just sort of accepted as part of everyday life. While actual hacking remains a relatively unusual occurrence for most people to come into contact with — by "actual hacking" I mean something beyond someone getting hold of your password and posting offensive things on your Facebook page — few can argue that harassment is very much part of the modern Internet.

And not just in the way that it is most commonly argued, either. While I'm not denying that harassment against specific groups does exist — it absolutely does — there's also lots of it going on under the guise of "activism" and "progressiveness". Just yesterday I saw someone participating in a "controversial food opinions" thread on Twitter — lightweight, throwaway fluff, by anyone's measure — and then get extremely publicly dragged over hot coals by a variety of people for saying that he didn't like Indian food and didn't understand why it was so popular. His words, which were pretty straightforward — and which I don't personally agree with, but I understand where he's coming from — made it pretty clear what he was talking about, yet numerous people took the opportunity to use this as evidence of racism.

This ties in with clickbait, too. I've seen numerous examples of deliberately provocative content presented by commercial websites deliberately followed up by the writers complaining about "how much harassment they received" — when they knew full well that people were going to respond negatively to their Hot Take of the Day when they posted it. It's manipulative and deceptive… and people fall for it every time. It drives me nuts to see.

And then, of course, we have the most difficult to define one; his third point about "unintended consequences". It's difficult to establish exactly how this happened, given that the Web was always intended as an open marketplace of ideas, ideologies and opinions. But as time has passed — and over the last decade in particular, I'd say — people have set up camp in very specific areas, erected fortifications and made it a lot more difficult to exchange ideas and interact with one another. Aggression is the default response to disagreement; many people feel that they have free reign to insult and belittle people with whom they disagree, and this further poisons overall discourse online, because it makes people less willing to share their ideas — and less willing to discuss and help one another understand them.

It's not all bad, of course, The modern Web allows people to express themselves as never before, and have an important outlet for the things that mean something to them. At this point I can't imagine what sort of life I'd be leading if I didn't have my various creative projects to use as an outlet… though I also can't help but think that if the Internet wasn't a thing in the first place, there's a lot of stress and anxiety I wouldn't have come into contact with at all.

In summary, I can entirely understand why Sir Tim might feel a bit… disappointed in what his creation would go on to become. It's like seeing your kid grow up to be a delinquent… only instead of one kid, there's several billion of them.

Bleak? Maybe. But I'm feeling hugely anxious today so just wanted to offload some random thoughts. Thank you for listening!

I have recorded… counts ten videos this weekend. Two Atari A to Z, two Atari ST A to Z, two Atari A to Z Flashback (one of which went out yesterday), two Warriors Wednesday and two Final Fantasy Marathon. I have had a blast doing so, even if it is both time-consuming and tiring.

It's amazing how productive you can be when you actually enjoy what you're doing… and how demoralising it can be when you're stuck somewhere having to do things that you don't really want to do, that you can't really feel the benefit of doing and that sometimes you don't entirely feel like you get the recognition you're sometimes due.

Don't get me wrong, I've said on numerous occasions that I don't hate the day job; I'm actually rather grateful that it's not worse than it is, and that I can get things done to a good standard in a reasonably short timeframe, allowing me enough time during many working days to be able to actually get some posts done on the sly.

But I don't love it. It's a chore. It's not something I look forward to getting up for every morning. I'll reiterate: I'm not at a point where I dread getting up for it every morning, like back when I was teaching, or when I worked for SSE, but I am at a point where getting out of bed feels like just another installment in a long and interminable series of… something that simply isn't going anywhere. A series with no entertainment or cultural value along the way; it's just sort of there. Like Eastenders, only with less murder and adultery, and the world's most boring Christmas special.

Still, as I say, I shouldn't be too mad about it, because it keeps me paid each month, with enough money left over to be able to do some of the things that I want to do — and then, of course, you wonderful people help me out by providing me some very welcome pocket money with which I can further explore those things through investing in new hardware, software and whatnot.

I can't pretend after weekends like this that it's not nice to dream, though. I remember how much I enjoyed getting out of bed in the morning to work on USgamer and GamePro; it was something that I genuinely loved doing, much as I genuinely love doing what I do now with MoeGamer and Atari A to Z. Wouldn't it be amazing to be able to do that every day? If I can be this productive over two days of a weekend, imagine how much I could get done if I had the whole week available to me!

Still, it remains just a dream for now. One that I don't know whether or not it will ever be achieved; this sort of thing often feels like it's up to the whims of fate and destiny more than it is up to the time and effort you put in yourself. So sometimes you just have to keep plugging away and hope for the best!

So that's what I'll keep doing.

Hello everyone! On time this week, here's your weekly vlog thingummy wotsit. Hope you enjoy. And if you know anyone who works for a private parking company (I'm not convinced anyone actually does; it didn't actually appear to be possible to speak to a real person when I tried earlier) please give them a swift kick in the nadgers for me. Thank you muchly!

I wouldn't say I'm 100% better — I still feel a bit queasy every so often — but I'm not constantly on the edge of throwing up like I was yesterday. So that's a bonus. Work wasn't particularly challenging or stressful; I mean, it could have been due to a few shirty emails but Ill Pete correctly recognised that the things the people in them were complaining about were nothing to do with him, and thus they weren't worth stressing out over in any way whatsoever. So a pretty quiet Friday on that front then.

Nothing in particular planned this weekend, and Andie isn't well so I doubt she'll want to do anything either. Consequently I plan to make videos, write stuff, pet cats, read manga, play Pokémon and just generally have a nice relaxing time doing the things I want to do. You know, what a weekend should be. I had the option of going over to a friend's house to play more Gloomhaven tomorrow evening but I don't think I can face any more of that game just yet. I may reconsider depending on how much I get done throughout the day and if I feel in any way sociable.

For now, I think yet more much-needed sleep, and hopefully feeling refreshed in the morning. I hope you all have a good weekend!

Well, disappointingly I'm not really feeling any better after a day of mostly rest (and Pokémon) so I find myself once again in bed rather early. I hope I feel better tomorrow; no form of being ill is fun, but an upset stomach is one of the least fun there is.

Still, it's nearly the weekend, which means I can look forward to recording some videos, which I always have a lot of fun doing. And with the Bullet Girls Phantasia main feature now done and dusted, I can concentrate on thinking about what I'm going to write about Pokémon. 

I think I mentioned this a little while ago, but just in case I didn't, my plan for the immediate future is to do Pokémon and the MoeGamer Awards throughout December, then move on to a visual novel called Lamunation, and after that spend some time with Atelier — both the Dusk trilogy and Ryza.

I'm squeezing Lamunation in because Meru from Love Lab was kind enough to provide a review copy, and she's an extremely positive presence in the localisation space who I'm keen to support. If you're not familiar, her outfit Love Lab localised both Bullet Girls Phantasia and Love³ — and did so absolutely fantastically in both instances — so of course I'm more than happy to show some support for one of their most major projects ever.

I don't know a lot about Lamunation aside from the fact it involves cute girls, traditional Japanese soda and doubtless some sort of amusing weirdness. I'm looking forward to it.

Anyway, I'm going to try and get some sleep now and hope my stomach behaves itself enough for me to feel like a human being rather than a vomit demon tomorrow.

Take care of yourselves and have a lovely evening!

Good morning, apologies for the lack of update yesterday, but I went to bed at approximately 8pm and slept for a very long time, pausing only to be violently sick at approximately 6am this morning. So that was nice. Evidently I am Not Well.

I think the worst has passed now, at least; I don't feel like any of my insides are going to explode or produce any further vile eructations (at least, beyond the usual ones) so I'm just left feeling like I haven't really had all that much rest, despite the main reason that I went to bed early last night being that I felt like I hadn't been getting enough sleep lately.

Another early night tonight, I guess. And at least in the meantime I have the time to do some writing and get some videos sorted. And then tomorrow is Friday, so there's only one day to survive even if I still feel a bit crappy in the morning. Let's be thankful for small mercies, I guess.

Today I'm probably going to try and do the Bullet Girls Phantasia narrative writeup since I have time on my hands, and I'm also probably going to start doing some writeups of some manga that I've been reading lately, as manga and/or anime are, as I've said a few times previously, areas that I've been interested to branch out into for a while. I just finished reading the first volume of Interspecies Reviewers (which I think might be getting an anime in the near future) so that seems like something fun to tackle.

Anyway, I'm going to dose myself up with drugs and try to figure out if I'm too cold or too hot now, which is proving to be something of a challenge. Here's hoping I'm better later/tomorrow! Have a lovely day.

It's officially #ThankYouPatrons day here on Patreon (well, okay, we're half an hour over here in the UK, but my video had to render and upload), so I thought I'd post a special video to mark the occasion. This post and video are public, so please feel free to share them if you so desire.

I say everything I want to in the video, but it bears repeating: thank you so much for your continued support, whether it's through your generous donations here on Patreon or via other sources, or simply through likes, comments, RTs and shares on social media. I love you all and I intend to keep doing this for a very long time!