Been playing a bunch of Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers over the weekend… and without spoiling things for the sake of those who are yet to play it themselves, I am happy to report that I completely and utterly understand the hype and love that people have for this expansion. Technically I'm only still doing level 71 quests, but already some huge, major, emotional events have happened — so I shudder to think what will occur as the main story continues!

I've been very impressed with the side stories, too. I'm someone who, upon playing a new expansion in FFXIV, will tend to clear out every area of sidequests completely the moment said sidequests are available, and while in Shadowbringers few of these sidequests relate directly to the main scenario — understandable, since you can do them at any time — they do really flesh out the world wonderfully and have their own little arcs that are fascinating to follow through on. Again, I'll resist the spoilers for now.

I've just done the first dungeon of Shadowbringers, which is also the first where you can use the "Trust" system to fight alongside the story characters. I really like this, as it means you can jump straight into a story-critical dungeon immediately without having to queue — but the various comments the characters make as you proceed through the dungeon also provide their own nice bit of flavour. In particular, there was a boss fight in said dungeon that kind of follows on from an earlier bit of story you experienced alongside a particular character, and seeing that come to fruition alongside said character is a pretty awesome moment.

Mostly I'm really taken with the atmosphere, though. Wonderful use of sound, light and colour makes for a genuinely unsettling experience; there's this absolutely constant "rumbling" noise in the background that serves as a reminder of what's at stake, and the characters are all written in such a way to be varying degrees of "weird" — ranging from "slightly unsettling" to "absolutely batshit crazy". There's a particular section that carries a distinct "Wonderland" flavour, and I absolutely love it; that part of the narrative hasn't "resolved" just yet, but I'm looking forward to inevitably returning there at some point.

I'll write more about this on Rice this week, but thought I'd acknowledge here and now that yes, it is a very good thing, and I'm glad that I have managed to remain unspoiled up until this point! More to come.

I wrote an article over on Rice Digital today about DEMONDICE's new EP Shut Up, Get Happy. I've probably said most things that need to be said or that I want to say about that set of four tracks already — but I think some of those messages are worth reiterating.

For the unfamiliar, Shut Up, Get Happy is DEMONDICE's first work for quite some time; while she's been working her "other job" she put this personal project on hold. But now is absolutely the right time for her to bring back DEMONDICE as an outlet for the things she needs and wants to say.

Although her connections to said "other job" are pretty obvious if you know what to pay attention to (and, moreover, she has no problem with people knowing said connections, as she said in a livestream yesterday), there are no direct, obvious links between the two of them, and thus there will be things she feels able to say as "DEMONDICE Karen" that she can't say in her other capacity.

But her other capacity has had a pretty tough time recently — through no fault of her own. Okay, that's not entirely true; she did lash out at some of the people who had been starting shit with her, but this really is the point of the whole situation. She had been taking unwarranted abuse from people without provocation, and she should be able to speak her mind in such situations. She should be able to point to those people, tell them to well and truly fuck off out of her life, and for them to respect that.

Unfortunately, the world we live in today does not work that way, and thus for a short period it looked like there was going to be some troublesome drama. Thankfully, it didn't last for long and seemed to blow over pretty quickly — but our Karen was clearly still left with a fair amount of bitterness about the fact it had happened in the first place.

Hence, Shut Up, Get Happy: four tracks in which she explores the anger, frustration and depression she felt at her powerlessness in that situation — and in which she looks forward with renewed hope for the future. This is no angsty cry for help and call for attention: it's an honest, raw expression of emotion, followed by an acknowledgement that she can do something about this situation if no-one else is.

I have to hella respect her for that. As I've mentioned quite a few times before, there's an unpleasantly "adversarial" feel to the Internet a lot of the time these days, with people far too keen to start fights over things that don't matter. The only real solution is to rise above such petty squabbles and do the things that you find helpful, productive and healthy. It's a struggle, but sometimes it's a challenge worth following through on if it helps to establish you in a position of strength; to make it clear that you're not going to be beaten down by people with nothing better to do than to hurl abuse at strangers online.

It's all very well to give the traditional teacher-to-student advice of "just ignore it!" or "say no!" to bullying — but these days those things don't work. A lot of people seem to have lost the ability to empathise with others — particularly when they're not communicating face-to-face with them — and sometimes they need a sharp shock, for it to be made absolutely clear that their behaviour is not acceptable, and that people aren't going to stand for it.

I dealt with something similar last year with that pesky commenter on Rice Digital. He was an absolute shit to pretty much everyone else in the comments section, to such a degree that it actively discouraged others from commenting. When we banned him he, of course, kicked up a shitfit — but when we put our respective feet down and told him that he was being a cunt and wouldn't be welcome around here any more, he eventually departed, and to my knowledge he hasn't been back since.

It was the idea of "just ignore him" that had allowed him to run rampant for so long — and he had done a lot of damage in the process. But thankfully he's a thing of the past — and proof positive that an assertive, strong and consistent approach can work against the most annoying people online.

Anyway, that got a bit off the point, but go read my article, listen to Shut Up, Get Happy and pay particular attention to the lyrics. Girl's got a lot to say — and it's all very worthwhile.

I own a book called Is It Just Me, Or Is Everything Shit? It was published in 2005, and actually got a follow-up a little later. It's basically a humorous A to Z guide of things that are shit about life in the modern day… well, 2005, anyway. I read a bit on the toilet earlier, and I was not at all surprised to determine that things are indeed still shit — and quite possibly worse than they were in 2005.

The only real difference is that at the time Is It Just Me, Or Is Everything Shit? was published, the Labour party were in power and Gordon Brown was just starting to slobber over the possibility of becoming Prime Minister, whereas now… I just don't want to talk about it, really.

Actually, no, that's not quite true. Looking back on these books after a few years is quite an interesting and sobering experience when you consider the context of things. Back in 2005, many of the things we take for granted today were just getting started and in some cases didn't even exist yet. Twitter wasn't a thing, for example, so it does not put in an appearance — and besides, it was a good few years between Twitter launching and it becoming the absolute cesspit it is today. Ah, for the good old days — manual retweets and all. Better than cancellation by quote-tweet, anyway.

I suspect a new version of this book written today would look quite similar in some ways, but there are plenty of new and annoying things to add to it — many of them simply from the world of technology. Cryptocurrency, NFTs, DLC, "live service" games, in-app purchases… very few of those things (if any) existed back at the time Is It Just Me, Or Is Everything Shit? was first published, and yet they would be an important part of it today. And that's to say nothing of COVID.

I guess this is part of getting older: assuming that things are getting worse rather than better. But, y'know, things really are pretty shit.

Finally finished Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood! As in, finished the main story through all the patches, plus Omega, Ivalice, the optional dungeons and the Hildibrand questline. I haven't delved into Eureka because there's no real "need" to right now, but I am curious to give it a look at some point. Another time, though.

That means Shadowbringers is up next! I've been very excited to get into this, but have also dragged my heels far too much in getting here. Still, I'm here now, and I can't wait to see what it's all about. The finale for Stormblood's postgame storyline was absolutely excellent, and that was quite a cliffhanger at the end, too. I imagine that must have been quite frustrating if you then had to wait for Shadowbringers to actually release!

Playing Final Fantasy XIV with all the story available from the outset has been a really fun experience. I like the gradual reveal of the main story when you're playing it "up to date", but it's hard to deny that everything is just… better when it all flows right into each other. I mean, you can still see when the patches were — one quest ends with a character basically saying "come back later" and the next starts with them saying "welcome back, it's been a while" even if you haven't moved from in front of them — but for the most part, it's a nicely coherent, flowing story.

Anyway. I'll write more about this on Rice at some point in the next couple of days, I'm sure, because as always, the game's done a great job of "uprooting" you before the next expansion — something which I've previously written about. And this time around, the "uprooting" is probably more drastic than ever before — but it remains to be seen exactly what that all means.

Somehow I've managed to remain completely unspoiled on some very exciting and genuinely shocking revelations, and I suspect there will be more to come. For the benefit of those even further behind than me, I won't share them for now — but suffice to say there are some great scenes the further you go.

Anyway, as tempting as it is to start Shadowbringers right now, I'll save it for another day; I was ready for bed at about 8pm this evening and now it's quarter past 11!

Well, the last few days just sort of flew by, apologies for the lack of posts once again! I can show you the reason why I kept forgetting though — we spent most of the weekend doing this!

This is my upstairs study, which most of you probably know as the place I sit to record intros for my videos. It's been a bit of a state for a while — most notably covered in dust since my wife's most recent DIY spree — so this weekend we took some time to give it a proper deep clean, put things away that didn't need to be out, and rearrange the storage space to make the whole thing be a lot more practical. The results are very pleasing indeed!

If you're wondering what the marks on the side of the chair are, they are the result of a certain cat discovering that a Gamer Chair is the ideal thing to use as a scratching post. The perils of living with such beasts.

Here's a closer look at the desk. I've got the 1MB Atari STE out on the left, and the 130XE Atari 8-bit on the right. Both can easily be connected to the 14 inch Trinitron monitor via RGB SCART, as can all the consoles on the shelves behind except for the N64, which doesn't have RGB output. It does have standard SCART output, at least.

Above the desk there's an NES, a SNES, an N64 and a Mega Drive. There's an Atari 2600 atop the TV, too. I still only have two games for that; I should look into grabbing some more.

A look at the shelves. On the left is all Atari ST stuff — mostly games, but there's also some educational, productivity and music software there, too. On the right is mostly PC games, with some boxed Atari 8-bit stuff towards the bottom and on the very top shelf above the consoles.

And finally another angle on the desk. You can just about see the display of Philips Videopac cartridges at the back. The Philips isn't out at the moment as it takes up a lot of space, but it's just inside a cupboard (out of shot to the right) so can be set up at a moment's notice if I fancy a game of Satellite Attack or Munchkin.

The flatscreen TV that's there has a Chromecast attached to it, and I'll likely use it as a sort of second monitor if I'm doing work up here — which I now have space to do, so that will be nice.

Anyway, that's the result of a very tiring weekend! Now I sleep, and hopefully with considerably fewer weird dreams than I had last night!