While writing my CodeMasters article over on Retrounite earlier, I happened to stumble across some information about what their regular composer Allister Brimble was up to. Turns out he's been very active ever since those early days when he was writing music for various Codies games, and he's put out a number of intriguing albums in more recent years.

One of the more interesting (to me, anyway) is one called David Whittaker Amiga Works, in which Brimble re-arranges and re-imagines a number of famous David Whittaker tracks that previously appeared in Amiga (and, by extension, Atari ST) games. There's some really great stuff in there, including the themes to Shadow of the Beast, Menace, Speedball, Xenon and Obliterator (a personal favourite) — and Brimble's rearrangements are really good.

The nice thing about them is that he doesn't try and overdo them; their sound quality is obviously vastly superior to the original host platforms on which we heard them, but they still feel and sound very authentic in terms of instrumentation, texture and timbre. Essentially what Brimble has done is bring us an album of what Whittaker's music would probably sound like if it was released a few decades after it originally showed up. I don't know if I necessarily want to say today because there's a certain retro vibe to it all — though that may be more about the original compositions than Brimble's arrangements. Either way, they're good.

I haven't explored Brimble's other releases as yet but I see he also has albums of his own Amiga and Spectrum compositions — again rearranged "to modern standards" — along with a pair of remix albums based on his work on Driver. I will have to spend some more time with these for sure, and perhaps pen a review or two!

I've provided Bandcamp links in this post, but they're also on Spotify and doubtless some other places too. Enjoy!

I'm not entirely sure where this week has gone. We seem to be sitting at the end of Thursday at after 10pm and I've no idea where all the time has disappeared to. I wouldn't position it as either a particularly "fun" or "stressful" week, so I'm sort of surprised that things seem to have flown by as they have.

Was feeling a bit down with everything earlier… still am right now, to be honest. I feel like I'm "waiting" for something to happen — practically speaking, part of me is probably waiting for the current pandemic situation to be over, which looks increasingly unlikely to ever happen at this point. At the same time, though, I feel like there's something just sort of… indescribably frustrating that feels out of reach, and just to add to the frustration, I'm not even sure what the thing that is out of reach actually is.

I'm also, to be honest, getting a bit run down by the sheer pace of modern Internet life, and a little upset at how much I can see it burning out people that I like and care about — and they don't seem to want to admit it. Those who have taken to streaming in particular seem to be having a really rough time of late, and quite a few people I know almost sound like they're doing it out of "obligation" rather than anything else. There's no joy in what they say about their streams; it's all chasing Affiliate or Partner and counting Channel Points rather than expressing any sort of enthusiasm in what they're playing or the friends they've made in the process.

There are exceptions, of course — I know some of you who are kind enough to support me here are running your own streaming regimes, and I hope those are going well for you. I'm talking more about a few people I've seen on Twitter recently who seemingly got into it because they felt like they had no other option; a few years back I feel everyone had a much more realistic perception about the possibility of making money "playing video games online", but that seems to have dissipated in the last couple of years — at least partly thanks to the pandemic, I'm sure, since streaming doubtless appeals to those who don't feel comfortable leaving the house amid all this.

With all that in mind, I think I'm resolved to not establish any sort of regular streaming regime for myself, at least not for my own personal hobby side of things. Work might be another matter at some point — though the writing and occasional YouTube vids are more than enough right now — but for now, I'm happy with what I do; I feel like I'm contributing something meaningful and useful to the community while at the same time doing something I enjoy. The moment it starts feeling too much like work is the time to hang it up and just "reclaim" my hobbies for myself — something which I think some of the people I just mentioned could probably do with doing, even if it's just temporarily.

I'm not ruling out streaming for special occasions, mind. I'd like to do something for one of the charity stream marathons at some point, because the couple of occasions I did Extra Life it was great fun. I'd likely do something a bit more "local" next time, though, since although Child's Play and Extra Life are wonderful things, they're still quite America-centric. I believe the charity Special Effect do more EU/UK-centric events, so I will probably look into those. I have plans forming for something along the lines of an Evercade marathon; I think that'd be really fun.

Anyway, that went off on a bit of a tangent. It's half past ten now, so probably time to go sit upstairs and play retro games for a bit, far away from the Internet. Join me!

You know you're down the VTuber rabbit hole when you have dreams about them. To be fair, I've only had two VTuber dreams to date, but they were both oddly vivid and memorable as opposed to those dreams that sort of dissipate the moment you wake up, however much you enjoyed them at the time.

The first one I had was a good few months back, and it involved IRyS from Hololive. For one reason or another, I was hanging out in her bedroom while she was getting ready — she was sort of half-dressed (she didn't have any shoes on, but she did have most of her outfit on, and she hadn't "done her hair") and talking to me while she was wandering around getting ready. I sadly don't remember the specifics of the conversation she was having with me, but I do recall that it was some sort of helpful life advice.

In other words, there was nothing romantic or sexual about the encounter at all; I was just hanging out in her room as if she was a friend of mine, and she was advising me on something that had been bothering me. I wish I could remember what as it could have actually been important.

Regardless of any deeper meaning, it was interesting to see her in "3D" as a "real" person. And I don't mean I saw the performer behind the IRyS avatar, I mean IRyS was real, but still looked like IRyS. And it didn't feel weird. This is perhaps helped by the fact that IRyS is one of the Hololive VTubers who is designed with a little more realism to her facial proportions than some of the others, but still. It was interesting and nice.

The other VTuber dream I had was the other night, and it was absolutely baffling because it felt like several different unrelated scenes were overlapping and somehow interacting with one another.

The main thrust of what was going on was that I was exploring some sort of dungeon or castle in the Neverwinter Nights engine, and just engaging in combat with a group of foes. The battle began, and things weren't going all that well — our healer went down fast. At the same time, sort of overlaid on top of proceedings (so I could see through and still see "Neverwinter Nights") was a sort of… I'm not sure how to describe it. Like a party, I guess? Specifically, like the kind of party you see at big awards ceremonies: lots of people sitting around round tables, mingling with one another. Except all the people at the party were VTubers. I think. Most of them sort of blended into the background as ill-defined grey figures.

I called out to the party for a healer, and, without acknowledging me directly, Finana Ryugu from Nijisanji stood up from her table and wandered over to the next table over, where Uruha Rushia from Hololive was sitting. Without saying a word, Rushia stood up and — there's no easy way to say this, so I'm just going to say it — took out her erect penis. Finana promptly grasped hold of Rushia's implement and began manipulating it, at which point it took on an oddly unnatural sort of… gleam, I guess you'd call it, almost like a polished orb. And as this happened, light began to emanate from their… uh… union, and those of us involved in the battle felt healing energy flowing into us, and we were able to fight on.

I awoke just as Finana and Rushia completed their ritual, relieved to discover that I had not inadvertently had my own ritual in my sleep in the process. But that certainly was a weird one — possibly second only to the dream where I was unable to have sex with someone on the London Underground because I didn't have the sheet music.

The subconscious is a funny place.

Been back to the gym for the last couple of days, just gently to try and get things moving again. It has, for the most part, felt reasonably good to do so — though I made the mistake of going this evening when I was already reasonably hungry and thus by the time I returned I was actually feeling a bit queasy with hunger. That'll learn me.

Having spent so long away from the gym after injuring myself late last year, I've obviously got a lot to do to build myself back up again — not that I was particularly "built up" previously, but I was at least able to manage a 30-minute moderate pace session on the bikes without too much trouble. For these initial sessions, I've tried not to put too much pressure on myself — I just wanted to get moving in any way to begin with, as that's the initial barrier that needs breaking. Now that's successfully broken, I can start looking at making gradual improvements.

To begin with, I'm thinking I might separate cardio and strength training days completely rather than trying to cram them both into a single session. This means that a single session can be a bit shorter and more manageable, and also isn't quite as daunting a prospect going into it while I'm still readjusting. I can always switch back to a sort of "circuit" routine once I get back into the swing of things, but I think this is how I'm going to handle things for now — perhaps punctuated with a day or two of swimming here and there.

I think I'm going to take tomorrow off, though; this evening's strength training left me a bit achey, and I want to try and establish a routine of going first thing in the morning. I successfully managed this on Monday, but failed today, hence the evening session.

Still, as small a step as this might be, it is, at least, progress, I guess.

I feel like I've been playing Evercade more than any other platform of late. I've just been super in the mood for a lot of the sort of things that system offers — and that system offers a lot of different possibilities across all the cartridges that are available now. (Plus there are several in the works that are very exciting… two of which have already been announced and a couple more I already know about!)

Just lately, I've actually been enjoying the CodeMasters lineup quite a bit. CodeMasters' NES games are rather interesting to me, because I always knew them as home computer games — so playing them on a console is an interesting novelty. I also find them quite intriguing because they don't "feel" like NES games — at least partly due to their music. I don't know offhand if they were using custom sound chips or just making use of the NES' sound chip in a different way to many other developers at the time, but folks like Allister Brimble made the NES' sound chip sing like a Commodore 64, with some astonishingly well put together tunes across various Codies titles.

At the same time, I recognise that a fair bit of CodeMasters stuff might not be for everyone because there's a distinct feeling of "Euro jank" about a lot of it — or at least there is at first glance. Take the time to get to know some of the games, though, and there really is a lot to like about even the most obscure ones.

I'm a particular fan of F-16 Renegade and MiG-29 Soviet Fighter, for example, which are basically two variations on a theme: games that combine vertically scrolling shoot 'em up segments with After Burner-style quasi-3D sections. One interesting thing is that between the two of them, they each have the opposite balance — F-16 Renegade favours the vertically scrolling stages with occasional 3D sequences, while MiG-29 favours the 3D gameplay, occasionally switching to top-down. MiG-29 was also obviously developed a little later, as it's overall rather more polished, featuring in-game music and surprisingly impressive "transitions" between scenes and perspectives.

The other reason I find MiG-29 specifically rather interesting is that I have the Atari ST version on my shelf, and that game is absolute hot garbage. With that in mind, I wasn't expecting much from the NES version, but it turns out it's much, much better. I'd be embarrassed for the poor old ST if this wasn't a fairly common pattern when it came to games that were originally developed for 8-bit platforms and ported to 16-bit ones!

Anyway. Enough talking, time to get in a few rounds for Uncle Ivan before sleep time. Hope you've all had a pleasant day!

Right, I said yesterday there were other things I was going to be making an effort with from the beginning of the new week, so I guess I have to talk about those now. Or at least one of them.

One of the things I've already mentioned to a certain degree when talking about "scheduling" is trying to get myself feeling a bit healthier again. This will come about as a combination of following the Weight Watchers diet Andie and I started a while back, and getting back into doing some exercise. I've struggled with both for the last little while, so I need a hard reset on both.

The exercise thing has been troublesome and perhaps slightly worrying. Since I sprained my ankle a few months back, I feel like I haven't quite "recovered". I don't mean that my ankle still hurts — though it did the other day — but rather I feel like my entire body is aching a lot more than it used to. I suspect this is probably the result of inactivity on top of an already sedentary lifestyle, but it's been causing me a not insignificant amount of physical pain of late.

I'm hoping that actually getting those muscles moving again will help to alleviate this by simply "loosening" everything up, but I don't know if it quite works like that. At the very least, I'm going to give it a go, though. And I think what I might probably do is rather than trying to cram everything into a single session, I'm going to take one session to do some more "cardio" stuff (though probably taking it relatively easy to begin with) and the next to do strength training. It's easy to feel like you have to do as much as possible while you're at the gym, but really there's no need; I can go as many times as I want or need in the week.

The food thing is… a challenge. I like food, and food brings me comfort. I often need comfort, because I have numerous mental health struggles. Unfortunately, overconsumption of food makes me unhealthily overweight, and that causes me anxiety and depression, so I… you get the picture.

The thing I liked about Weight Watchers when we started doing it before Christmas was that it didn't feel overly restrictive. Since I'm in a position where I need a reasonable amount of energy just to exist per day, I have a lot of flexibility in what I can eat per day and still be able to lose weight. That will drop off over time — and I suspect that's where things will become challenging — but to begin with at least, I have the option to eat actually quite a bit each day, so long as it's the "right" stuff.

It's the getting it right bit that is challenging — but now that the Christmas and new year period is over and I'm pretty sure we've eliminated all the "treats" from the house, it will be easier to get back on track. And once I start seeing some results, that will motivate me again.

So that's that. From tomorrow, I'm going to attempt to get up early and get some gym time in in the morning. I'm not going to overdo it, but I am going to attempt to establish some habits. And on top of that, I'll be tracking my food and drink intake very carefully, unlike what I've been doing lately.

It's going to be hard to get back on track, but I've done it before, I can do it again. Good luck to anyone else who is trying to do something similar.

Next week is going to be a proper "reboot" for me. The first week of the new year hasn't quite gone to plan, so I need to make an effort this coming week.

There are a number of things I'm going to do. And I think it might help me out to itemise them. Perhaps you will get something out of this, too, but I'm typing this mostly for my own benefit, I must confess!

My first goal is to establish a better sort of "daily schedule" for myself that allows me to fit in all the things that I want to be able to do. I have a list of things that I want to be able to do regularly — not all of them need to be every day, but ideally each of them need to have several opportunities a week. Those things are:

• Work the day job (obviously, this isn't going anywhere)

• Get video projects done (at present, doing these at weekends works quite nicely, but I may spread them out throughout the week instead)

• Pick up Atelier MegaFeature again

• Practice the piano (I've got a bunch of new music and it'd be nice to be able to actually play some of it)

• Spend some time catching up on FFXIV

• Read Full Metal Daemon Muramasa (this is technically "work" but it's a significant enough time commitment to be worth scheduling in its own right)

• Get to the gym at least a couple of times a week

• Get to the swimming pool once or twice a week

• Make time to read manga/novels/watch anime

• Get back on diet (it was working, then we completely fell off and basically need to start over)

• Enjoy some retro games on Evercade

• Enjoy some current games

There's probably some more things too, but those are the things that immediately spring to mind without having to think too hard. I'd add "see friends" to that list but I'm kind of sick of being the only one who makes an effort in that regard, so I'm also kind of over making an effort. If they invite me, I'll come, but no more suggestions from me that get summarily ignored.

It may sound like a drastic solution, but I'm thinking that actually dividing my week up into specifically scheduled blocks of time — almost like a school timetable — might actually be a helpful process for me. Of course, it doesn't pay to be too rigid with these things, but I feel like the number of dreams I've had recently about not having my school timetable on hand (both as a student and as a teacher) is trying to tell me something.

At the very least I feel like things that can be neatly divided up into chunks of time — like going to the gym, or spending a set amount of time catching up on FFXIV, or practicing the piano… or, indeed, thinking about it, most of the things on that list — would benefit from actually being scheduled in some way. So from Monday I'm going to give it a shot.

What I would like to be able to do is get up earlier than I do currently, go do the gym and/or swimming before work starts, then have the rest of the day available to do work and the other things on the list. Unfortunately "getting up early" has been proving very difficult for both Andie and I of late, but I guess it's one of those many things where you just have to build good habits — and resist bad ones. Bed is so nice and warm and comfy, though.

As for other things I want to do… well, I've rambled on a bit today, so I'll save them for another post. Writing the above has helped me sort a few things out in my mind, though, so thank you for indulging me on that front. Now, time to go enjoy some Evercade, I think…

Have you played Wordle? It's the currently fashionable "thing" to be playing, and pleasingly it's not in any way annoying, predatory, monetised or full of advertising. It's just a simple, fun little thing. You can try it out here.

Wordle is a simple word-guessing game in which you have up to 6 guesses to figure out a 5-letter word. After making a guess, you're told, Mastermind-style, whether you have any letters in the right place, or any letters that are correct but in the wrong place. Notably, you're also told which letters are not in the word at all, so this can help inform your subsequent guesses.

It's straightforward, it's enjoyable and it takes a couple of minutes to play — because you can only play one puzzle a day. That's not an arbitrary "Get More Energy!" restriction either — there's simply one puzzle a day that is the same for absolutely everyone who plays. And part of the fun comes from sharing the "grid" pattern of whether or not you solved the puzzle — this shows your sequence of guesses in terms of your "letter in the right place" and "letter in the wrong place" positions, but not what the actual letters were.

This is neat because it's eminently shareable, but it's not thrusting "advertising" in everyone's face. The default "share" button doesn't even give a link to Wordle — it just posts the puzzle number, how many attempts you got it in and your "grid", so if anyone is interested in finding out what Wordle is, they have to do so themselves. That somehow feels less obtrusive than constantly sharing links to the same thing over and over again.

I think the best thing of all, though, as previously mentioned, is that Wordle is clearly just a project the author Josh Wardle (see what he did there) made for a bit of fun, rather than in an attempt to make money or be an advertising platform. There's no monetisation on Wordle at all; it just is. And let me tell you, finding something actually entertaining on the Internet that is completely free of cynical monetisation, predatory practices and otherwise manipulative behaviour is a genuine pleasure these days.

So yeah, Wordle. It's a good.

It's been kind of tough to get back into the swing of things for the new year so far. I don't mean work-wise — that's all going fine, since I didn't really take a ton of time off from doing that. Rather, I mean things like getting back on track with the diet, going to the gym and that sort of thing.

We're about a week into the new year, and despite Andie and I saying that we were going to get straight back on the Weight Watchers regime, we've spectacularly failed to do so thus far. Likewise, my aching body is practically hungering for some exercise, so I know that going back to the gym would probably make me feel a whole lot better after not really moving a whole lot for months, but I'm finding it hard to take that "step".

I think part of it is the fact that the changeover of years kind of didn't really feel like much of an "event" this year, whereas in years prior to COVID there was an obvious "transition" from the holiday season to the "back to work/school" moment. We haven't really had that for the last couple of years, and thus I suspect it's hard to put your foot down and say to yourself "right, I am going to start doing this right now, and that's that".

We're nearly at the weekend and I want an ice-cream, though, so perhaps an indulgence for now to soothe my troubled mind, and a proper proper reboot on Monday. Hopefully. Wish me luck.

Started reading Full Metal Daemon Muramasa this evening after a request from a Rice reader, and I'm enjoying it so far. It's quite… dense and heavy going at times, but it's also thoroughly intriguing in that inimitable Nitroplus sort of way, so I'm anticipating great things. It's also one of the highest-rated visual novels I've ever seen on VNDB — and those folks are usually pretty stingy with their ratings — so it was something I wanted to check out at some point anyway.

For the unfamiliar — from what I can make out, anyway — Muramasa is set in an alternate history Japan (or Yamato as it's known here) circa 1940. Since time immemorial, battlefields have been dominated by supernatural suits of armour known as tsurugi, piloted by musha. A tsurugi gets its power from a smith literally infusing his soul and humanity into it — though by the time our story begins, scientific advancements in cloning have allowed tsurugi to be mass-produced without loss of life.

I'll write more about all this on Rice in the near future — likely across several articles — but Muramasa has done a nice job of depicting the situation from a variety of alternative perspectives so far. The initial intro depicts the true horror of these tsurugi on the battlefield — and the massacres that result when they are irresponsibly wielded by the power-hungry — while the first main chapter focuses on a more "human" story: a group of kids who want to track down their missing friend, whose disappearance appears to have something to do with a musha.

I'm not far enough into the game to know much about any other details as yet, but supposedly the narrative explores the ideas of good and evil and sometimes circumstances meaning that you're not able to pick either of them; a lot of it ties in with the real-life legend of the Muramasa sword, samurai culture and the like. It's thoroughly compelling so far, but also clear that it's going to be a challenging, uncompromising read going forward.

The translation is top-notch so far. I follow a bunch of the people who were responsible for it on Twitter, and they're quite rightly proud of their work; it really is excellent. It reads well, it features evocative prose and while there are, of course, moments where the English text elaborates somewhat on what was originally said in Japanese, the tone is consistent. In many respects, it reminds me somewhat of Deus Machina Demonbane, another Nitroplus title that featured florid prose, vivid descriptions, absolutely horrifying scenes and giant robots.

It's a long one — VNDB places it at around 68 hours or so — but I'm definitely interested to see where it goes from here, and particularly to see what other narrative perspectives we're going to witness this all unfold from. The character who is ostensibly positioned as the "protagonist" in the promotional material has only appeared as a side character so far, so I'm wondering what's up with that.

Only one way to find out!