Andie and I were out in the garden today, doing some gardeny things. Specifically, we were shovelling up all the cat shit the cats have left in their "catio" and laying down some… underlay-type stuff to prevent the whole thing getting overgrown with grass (and hopefully prevent further "shit in wrong place" incidents).

I do not like gardening. I never have. I like being out in nature, but I don't like getting up close with nature, be it flora or fauna. I think most of this is to do with the fact that I don't really like getting dirty, or stung, or bitten, or scratched or anything like that. And gardening tends to be something where most or all of these things happen on a regular basis. On top of that, you also get sweaty. I really don't like getting sweaty.

I can't deny the appeal of accomplishing something and making things look good, however. It now looks pretty good outside — certainly better than the overgrown mess it was before. But now I just want to sit down and play some video games… so I'm going to do just that, with some Disaster Report 4.

I checked to see how far off course I've gotten with the day numbering on this, and it's actually a little closer than I thought: I started doing daily posts on December 4, 2018, which was 488 days ago. This post is currently labelled Day 483. So I can probably get things back in order if I do a couple of posts a day until we "catch up".

I know you all probably don't really care all that much, but I have Asperger's, remember so these things take on greater importance than they probably should do! Plus if you're doing some sort of numbered "challenge" like this (not that I have an end goal or anything) it's nice to at least make sure you're being accurate about things.

My calculations would seem to indicate that if I do two posts a day until Thursday, I'll be all square and "correct" again, so I'm going to make an effort to do that — likely one in the morning, one in the evening. If nothing else it'll be a nice personal challenge to myself to figure out multiple things to write about in a day! Besides… all the… other… writing I do each day…

Uh, anyway. It's twenty past midnight and I should probably go to bed. I've hammered out a bunch of videos this evening and Andie and I have the joy of cleaning up a bunch of cat shit tomorrow. So that will be fun. I will follow it with more Disaster Report 4, though, which feels like both the best and worst possible game to be playing with the world in the state it is.

Hope you're having as good a weekend as it's possible to have without leaving your house! As someone who makes a point of not leaving his house all that much… I can confirm it's possible to have a very good weekend without going anywhere. Get on that backlog!

I seem to have inadvertently missed a couple of days; hearty apologies for that! I've been keeping myself busy what with doing the day job from home and getting stuck right in to Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm in the evenings, so evidently I got distracted somewhere along the line.

I've also got a new assignment for Nintendo Life: Disaster Report 4, which has no embargo so I can talk about it! Woo.

I'll do a proper writeup on Disaster Report 4 on MoeGamer alongside my Nintendo Life review as usual, but two things have become very apparent during my first play session this evening: 1) this game runs like crap on Switch — and like, actual crap, not "boo, it's 30fps on Switch when it's 60fps on PS4 — and 2) it doesn't matter, because I sat and played this for 4 hours solid without realising, I was having such an interesting time with it.

I've never played a Disaster Report game before so I didn't really know what to expect at all. I don't know how representative this one is of the series as a whole, but it's a fascinating blend of sort of survival horror without the "horror" bit — at least, without the "scary monsters and gore" bit, anyway; there are still genuinely horrifying moments — with adventure game. I've never seen a game with quite so many different dialogue options at critical story junctures. Or a game with quite as many toilets, for that matter, since there's a bit of lightweight "needs management" going on as you play, though not to an obtrusive degree.

It's one of those games that leaves you wondering "what if…?" when you reach the conclusion to a particular section, so I'll be interested to replay it. I'm probably going to pick up a boxed copy of this at some point; whether it's on Switch (so I can continue from the save I'm using at the moment) or on PS4 (where it'll run better… hopefully, anyway) remains to be seen. As I say, after a while the dodgy frame rate simply ceased to matter to me because the general experience was so enjoyable.

Anyway. I'll be getting stuck into that some more over the weekend. I hear about 15-20 hours for a playthrough, so hopefully I can bash that out reasonably quickly and be able to get back to Atelier Iris 3, which I am loving. But more on that another time!

I feel I haven't mentioned lately how grateful I am for all of you who have made the choice to support me and my work here on Patreon.

I know for most people on the Internet, committing to even a dollar a month for the sake of someone else is a lot to ask, particularly in a world where the widespread belief is that most things — if not everything — should be free. And so I'm continually touched by the fact that there are a bunch of you kind enough to slip me varying amounts of your hard-earned each and every month.

MoeGamer and Atari A to Z aren't my job. I'd love it if they were, but they're not. However, that doesn't mean I don't take them seriously. When I "rebooted" MoeGamer back in March of 2016, I made a commitment to myself: to produce something that I would be proud to call my own, and which would be something a bit different from the million and one other "me too" (not that kind of Me Too) gaming sites out there.

And I'm not talking about the big commercial sites, either — though a lot of them have become practically indistinguishable from one another over the years. No; I'm talking about the small-scale operations run by people who wish they were working for IGN or Gamespot or whoever — the sites churning out news article after news article day after day in an attempt to attract those who, for one reason or another, fell out with the big names of the biz.

I've done the daily news cycle. It's fun and it's always changing, but it has little in the way of lasting value. Something I wrote one day and was particularly pleased with would be pushed off the front page by the next, likely never to be seen again. Reviews and features tend to have something of a longer tail — they're the things that tend to come up in Google search results when you're looking for something — but can still easily be lost.

That's why I decided to do what I do now with both MoeGamer and Atari A to Z: to write and produce videos that can be enjoyed any time. I make a deliberate attempt to "date" my articles as little as possible — where it's unavoidable for context's sake, the little phrase "at the time of writing/recording" is a godsend — in the hope that people will stop by maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe in five years from now, and find something that they find interesting.

I don't focus a lot of viewing figures, but I do keep an eye on them every so often. And it always pleases me to see the disparity between the number of specific visitors and the number of page views: it suggests to me that people stopping by for a visit are sticking around and looking at other things. That's super-cool, particularly as I do a lot of things in multiple parts.

At the time of writing (see) there are 1,463 posts on MoeGamer, 412 of which are videos, 226 of which are Atari A to Z videos.

Each and every one of them is something that I'm glad I've shared with the world, because they've allowed me to express my feelings about the things that are important to me — not something that always comes easily to one On The (non-ZX) Spectrum — as well as provide what is hopefully some helpful, interesting or at least entertaining information about a wide variety of games and visual novels, many of which don't get anywhere near the attention or love they deserve.

I'm super-grateful to all of you for supporting me in that. It's become something that's really important to me, and having people who believe in what I do or at the very least want to show some appreciation for my efforts is very welcome.

A sincere thank you, to all of you. And I hope you continue to enjoy what I do.

(Making this post public, as looking over it, these are thoughts I want to share more broadly. Thank you!)

Looking back at "yesterday's" post from ten years ago made me think it might be interesting to look back at a few more things and see how much stuff has changed in the last decade.

Today, ten years ago, I was contemplating the matter of "celebrity", and how the world of nerdy pursuits had its own celebrities who would doubtless be completely unknown to people outside of our circle of interests.

Interestingly, the specific example I had at that time was Wil Wheaton, who I described as an "admirable human being" on the grounds that he was "not a dick". It's a little disheartening to think that the last time I saw Wheaton do anything, he was blocking anyone and everyone on Twitter because they didn't like how much of an unpleasant person he'd become; he'd become the very definition of what used to be his own credo: "Don't Be a Dick".

I was also determined to write a novel. Technically I've achieved this a few times now — though only one has been self-published, and I'd like to revamp that in some way to make it a bit more accessible and/or affordable. I have done it though; this isn't to say I don't want to do it again, or make something more of it… but as with everything, it's all a matter of time.

Well, you may say, you have ample time on your hands right now. And that might be true — although I'm still working the day job from home, I might add — but I'm managing to keep myself surprisingly busy, and I think that's a big part of why stir craziness hasn't set in just yet.

My wife Andie heard that it may be getting on for September before she and her colleagues go back to work "properly", depending on the situation, and she wasn't at all happy about that. Me, I'm delighted, to be perfectly honest; I don't have to sit in a soul-destroying office environment, and any time I'm at a loose end with nothing to do — or just bored — I can go and do something else. Which is, y'know, nice.

I'll look back on a few more of these decade-old posts in the next few entries; in the meantime, if you want to read my old ramblings, don't forget you can do so at https://imnotdoctorwho.moegamer.net.

Have a lovely day!