I picked up Forza Horizon 4 in the Steam sale. I actually signed up for a trial of Game Pass to give it a go initially, but Game Pass makes me feel so vile and dirty I ended up cancelling it in favour of just buying the damn thing. The Steam version was available for a good price with all the expansions and DLC, anyway, while the version on Game Pass was just the base game.

Forza Horizon 4 is great! I'm not sure why I've never tried this series before. I think, honestly, it's the Forza name that had put me off; prior to getting my Logitech G29, racing sims had always annoyed me with their difficulty, so I'd kind of sworn off anything Forza — well, that, and I never jumped on board with anything Xbox post-360, so.

For the unfamiliar, though, Forza Horizon 4 — and the series as a whole, I guess — is emphatically not a petrolhead sim. Rather, it's more along the lines of something like Test Drive Unlimited: big open-world map with lots of things to do that aren't just races, lots of cars to piss around in, a real sense of "just enjoy yourself". It is probably what the Project Gotham Racing series would have evolved into if Bizarre Creations were still with us — the "skill points" system that rewards you for everything from smashing fences to big airtime is very much like the old school Kudos system.

And, for those who have heard me talk about racing games and sims before, Forza Horizon 4 scratches my "I want to drive a crap car" itch perfectly. My current ride is a dark green Morris Minor (albeit one with some upgrades that make it outperform any Morris Minor you've ever seen) and I also have a stock Citroen 2CV in my garage for when I feel like it. There's even a Ford Transit available, though I haven't acquired that for myself yet.

One of the best things about the game is that it appears the various events tailor themselves to your vehicle of choice. So if you want to run rally races in a Morris Minor, you can do; your opponents will have cars from the same "class". In this way, if you find the more terrifying sports cars hard to handle — and some of them really are tricky! — you can stick to something you're more comfortable with for most of the game. I like this a lot; it means you can use the cars much more as a means of "expression" than in some other games.

And, of course, there's Forza's famous livery editor. I haven't delved into this at all as yet, but I used to enjoy tinkering with it on the old Forza games. Perhaps I'll do some Final Fantasy pixel art like I normally do — that's relatively straightforward to accomplish and looks cool.

Anyway, it was a good investment, and it plays great with the wheel. So I'm pretty sure that's going to be my "comfy game" of choice — a game I play "just for me", because with its soundtrack there's no way in hell I'd be able to make videos about it — for the indefinite future. Because pratting around in cars is always fun!

Back to work for realsies tomorrow. The new year is officially here!

After writing yesterday's post, I put a few things into practice. I didn't go so far as unfollowing everyone on Twitter, but I may have completely revolutionised the way I use the platform in a positive way.

Basically I sorted everyone I followed into a few lists: gaming, retro gaming, VTubers, friends, artists and anime bloggers. Those are the things I particularly care about, so anyone who didn't fit neatly into one of those areas from my following list is just in no-list limbo now. Then I started training myself to go straight to the "Lists" function on Twitter instead of "Home".

That looked like it might be all right — but I noticed a few flaws. Most notably, the fact that all the retweets from people I'd turned off retweets for were back with a vengeance, since Twitter's Lists function doesn't respect your settings in this regard. (It doesn't respect your muted user settings, either.) Retweets are a big part of the anxiety-inducing "noise" on Twitter, so I really wanted them gone.

I looked into it a bit further and discovered that you can use Lists in TweetDeck and turn off Retweets in them. Ideal. Not only that, but given the way TweetDeck works with customisable columns, you can completely eliminate your "home" timeline altogether and look exclusively at lists if you so desire. Even more ideal.

So I'm going to be making use of that for a while and see if that improves my general outlook on things. Signs are good so far; it was a good 20 minutes before several of those columns moved at all earlier, which is much easier to deal with than the constant "rolling" they have when retweets are active and there are lots of people all yelling at each other!

Like I say, the easy option would just be to delete Twitter, but as I mentioned yesterday, I've had enough opportunities for stories, leads and other such things come up via Twitter to make it worthwhile maintaining at least a token presence on there. So I'll stick with that for the moment — unless things happen to take a serious turn for the worse.

Thank you for bearing with me while I think through all this out loud — and perhaps it might help some of you to make better, healthier use of the platform, too!

Happy new year! I have a bunch of stuff I want to talk about today, but no real… structure in mind for talking about them, so forgive me if today's post is a little disjointed. I feel like there's a bunch of things I want to get off my chest, and the start of a new year feels like as good a time as any to ponder them, so let's do that.

The main thread running through all this is that in 2022, I think I want — probably even need — to rethink my relationship with the Internet in general. Longtime followers will know that I've often commented on how my feelings towards social media in particular have soured in recent years, and in the last few weeks I think I've really pinned down exactly why I feel so negatively towards the idea of social media in general.

When I first joined Twitter, which must have been probably 2009 or so, I reckon, I did so because the place where my online friends and I used to hang out — the 1up.com Radio forums, which were ostensibly the place to discuss the site's podcasts, but also became "the mature end" of the community — were obliterated from the Internet in favour of a stupid, simple "Games" and "Not Games" divide.

What was once a nice community where different types of people could interact with one another in their own distinct areas became a complete clusterfuck, and an unpleasant place to hang out. So we jumped ship to Twitter, which was just starting to get big at the time. And it worked well; this was long before Twitter had added even Retweets to its core offering, so the site's original mission of allowing for "microblogging" was very much intact.

On top of that, it was a great place to hang out and actually talk to people in an asychronous manner; if you were online at the same time as a friend, you could chat in quasi real-time, whereas if you were in different time zones — as I always have been with the majority of my online friends — you could leave a message for them to read later.

When I look at Twitter today, it's unrecognisable from that. Scrolling down my timeline, the vast majority of posts are very obviously people trying hard to do one of several things: have a "viral" post; provide "shareable content"; post the "funniest" reaction to something that has happened; or establish themselves as an "influencer" or "content creator".

None of those things are conducive to conversation. Someone posting "retro gaming memories" with nothing more than images pulled from Google Image Search every day isn't really engaging with the hobby; they're trying to get followers, shares and likes. Someone living their entire life by their stream schedule doesn't strike me as someone who is enjoying life. And someone who is always first in line to respond to [insert vaguely Internet-famous person here] doesn't feel like someone who wants to chat; they feel like someone who wants to promote themselves, and feels like piggybacking off someone more popular than them is a good way to do that.

Now, I know I've been guilty of most of these things at one point or another for a variety of reasons, but every time I've done them it's felt… frustrating. Unfulfilling. Particularly since over the last… probably two or three years now, getting anyone to actually respond to anything on Twitter feels like getting blood out of a stone. And Lord knows I've tried different ways of doing things. Starting conversations. Sharing articles. Responding to other people. Being deliberately provocative. It's just all so much effort, and the potential rewards on offer have been feeling of less and less value as time has gone on.

Now, realistically speaking I probably need to maintain a Twitter presence, because I've had enough contact from game developers and publishers via the platform to convince me that it's a helpful means of communication for some people and companies. But all semblance of "pleasure" from the platform has gone. When I scroll through Twitter it's not fun. It's not interesting. And it sure as heck isn't social.

So I basically want to find a way to remove it from my life without giving up the occasionally useful things that it offers — and ideally without offending anyone. And I think I'm probably overthinking it. When I've taken a break from Twitter in the past, I've been very clear about providing alternative contact details for people to say hi to me elsewhere… and it's been exceedingly rare that anyone has actually made use of those. So I'm inclined to think that if people aren't going to make that effort for me, I probably shouldn't be fretting so much about what they might think if I were to disappear or at least change the way I use the platform.

By extension, this also means that I'm not in any great hurry to join any other social media platforms. I detest the vapid nature of Instagram and TikTok, Facebook is a cluttered mess and full of idiots, Pinterest is pointless and any other social media platforms that have attempted to establish themselves have quickly become havens for some of the absolute worst people on the Internet.

This also kind of extends to the idea of streaming, too. On the one hand, I quite like the idea of doing streaming as a way of meeting some new friends, chatting with them while I play some games and whatever. It seems, at first consideration, to be a nice possible solution to the frustration I feel over not having anyone living nearby that I can really share my love of gaming with.

On the other, I've seen what "pursuing streaming" has done to some people that I know and like very much (no-one reading this, I hasten to add) and… I don't like it at all. I don't like how "false" those people have become; I don't like how the things they post on social media have become transparent attempts to court engagement rather than genuine attempts to talk to others; I don't like how their life has come to revolve around their numbers, their revenue or whether or not they're close to reaching Affiliate, Partner or whatever it is you do on Twitch; and frankly I can't be arsed with all the stupid needless Bits, Points, emotes, subscriptions and whatever other crap you have to fuck around with in order to "do Twitch" properly.

A lot of this is, I'm sure, "old man is out of touch", and I'm perfectly happy with that. To be honest, the possibility of keeping up with all this stuff and still being able to enjoy my own hobbies is exhausting. I like doing what I do now with videos and writing, and I feel like I should focus on those things that I do specifically enjoy doing, and simply cast all the other stuff aside. But then, of course, those doubts enter my mind: should I care more about these things? Should I get over my dissatisfaction with social media? Am I missing something?

I honestly don't know. But I do feel like I need to make some significant changes, because worrying about all this bollocks has been causing me significant anxiety for quite some time. I haven't decided exactly what form those changes will take as yet, but they need to be made.

Here's what I'm thinking:

• Rebrand my Twitter account to be something along the lines of "RiceEditorPete" so people know at a glance that they can get in touch with me about Rice Digital stuff.

• Completely restructure how I use Twitter. Unfollow everyone for a clean "home" screen. Use lists for various things — one for friends, one for professional contacts, one for retro gaming, one for artists, one for gaming news, one for VTubers, etc. That way I can concentrate on a topic at a time as required, and ignore the other junk.

• Schedule my Twitter use rather than use it as an idle distraction. Perhaps check it once at the start of the working day, once at lunchtime and once at the end of the day. Break the habit of it being a "default" thing to fiddle with if my mind is wandering.

Just those things will probably help — though they'll be an effort, too. But I think they're probably worth trying.

If you've had any success in managing the frustration of being online in 2021 and beyond, I'd love to hear it.