#oneaday Day 13: Sleep, Interrupted

At approximately 4.30am this morning, my cat Patti was sick all over the bed. I am annoyed by this, not because of the sick — Patti is very good at being sick, and we have come to accept this as just part of who she is — but because it interrupted what was, I’m pretty sure, one of the best nights of sleep I’ve had for a very long time.

Seriously. It was an unusually good night’s sleep. So much so that when I awoke to the inimitable sound of a cat being sick — if you know, you know — my first thought was not “oh God, she’s being sick” but “damn, that was an unusually good night’s sleep”. Closely followed by a frantic attempt to get Patti off the bed before she erupted, but sadly I was a little too late.

Rather than start a load of laundry in the middle of the night or sleep beneath a vomit-covered duvet, I instead went to hopefully continue that good night’s sleep in the spare bedroom. My wife didn’t wake up throughout any of this, I hasten to add, and the sick was enough on my side of the bed that I didn’t think she’d accidentally come into contact with it while she slept, so I left her to it. She told me this morning that she woke up for a wee, was briefly confused by my absence and then accidentally put her hand right in it, after which she immediately understood why I had gone elsewhere.

As it happened, I did manage to get back to sleep surprisingly quickly, and while I didn’t feel like getting up early today, I did feel quite refreshed when I did finally rouse myself. I had an interesting dream, too; I was visiting my old clarinet teacher from childhood, who had installed himself in a much bigger, nicer house than back when I really knew him. I recall complimenting him on his house and the huge plants he had in carefully labelled glass pots in his front garden, and him laughing that I thought he’d still be in the place I last saw him nearly 30 years ago. I woke up shortly afterwards.

Anyway, the reason I feel having a good night’s sleep is worth commenting on is not just because it’s already late in the afternoon and I haven’t thought of anything to write, but because I’ve struggled for a long time with getting to sleep. But last night it just seemed to come nice and easily. Perhaps it’s the exercise. Perhaps it was the warm milk. Perhaps it was the two episodes of Deep Space Nine. Perhaps it was a little of all of the above. But I hope I can make a habit of that.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 12: Establishing a Routine

I successfully got up early and went for a swim today. I’m actually surprised that I’m not struggling to get out of bed at 7am, given that one of the main reasons I was getting up five minutes before starting work was feeling super-tired in the morning.

I suspect it’s something to do with circadian rhythms or something along those lines. There are apparently “sweet spots” of time when I am able to get up and get things done without difficulty, and times when it is not easy to haul myself out of bed and start the day. 7am appears, at the moment at least, to be one of those sweet spots. Around about 9am is another. 8am, meanwhile, is apparently a no-no for my body, for whatever reason. After 9am, judging by how late we tend to get up at weekends, the next sweet spots are several hours later.

Regardless of the reason for it, I’m feeling quite satisfied with myself for successfully making a start on establishing a new routine with morning exercise. It’s still early days, of course, but I have at least reached my goal for this week, which was to make it out of the house before work to do some exercise at least twice. Given that the relatively “sudden” amount of exercise is making me a bit achey and stiff (not in a fun way), I’m of course going to be careful not to overexert myself, so tomorrow will either be a rest day, or a day in which I head out to the gym rather than the pool in the afternoon rather than first thing in the morning. Probably the former, if I’m being completely honest. One thing at a time.

I’m glad I’ve made that commitment to be a member at the leisure centre for a year. Their facilities are pretty good, and their timetable is friendly to someone who works for a living. One of the problems I had with the last place I was at a member at — the university — was that the timetable for the pool in particular was very tricky to get along with, as, being a university facility, it was often in use for things other than public swimming.

I also didn’t like the university gym much; it tended to be a bit crowded, and it had a real problem with people just sitting on machines staring glassy-eyed at TikTok rather than actually getting the fuck on with their workout. I made sure to mention this in the obligatory “Tell Us How We Did!” survey after I ended my membership, and they did at least acknowledge that it was an issue. Whether or not they’ll do anything about it is anyone’s guess, but it’s not my problem any more.

Anyway. My cat Patti is bugging me for attention and keeps clawing my leg as I type this, so I guess I better leave that there. Until next time!

#oneaday Day 11: Direct to You

I did not manage to get up early and go for a swim today, but I wasn’t really expecting myself to. Suddenly doing some exercise after a long period of… not doing that left me feeling a bit stiff (eyy) so I thought I would take today off and make an effort to go tomorrow. Easing into it and all that.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Today was the latest Nintendo Direct, a presentation that many have been assuming will be one of the last big shows Nintendo do while the Switch is still their current platform. The Switch’s as-yet unnamed successor has not yet been announced — and a clearly increasingly irritable Nintendo has been repeatedly pointing out that it has nothing to announce aside from the existence of a successor as yet — but it’s clear that the console is currently doing its victory lap ahead of graceful retirement.

That does not mean there’s nothing interesting coming for Switch, however! On the contrary, there were some really cool things showed at the Nintendo Direct, including some long-awaited news on Metroid Prime 4.

As always, the reaction to the show on the Internet has either been breathless enthusiasm or varying degrees of “well I never liked Nintendo anyway“, but taking as balanced a viewpoint as is possible from someone who likes the Switch and probably uses it as his primary gaming platform, I thought it was a good presentation. Nothing earth-shatteringly amazing, but lots of things that were good. And, to be honest, that’s absolutely fine.

A notable highlight from the show was definitely the new Zelda game, in which you get to play Zelda herself rather than Link. It adopts the same tilt-shifted toy-like style seen in the Link’s Awakening remake from a while back; it’s nice to see that applied to an all-original game rather than a remake.

One thing I’ve been puzzled by is the number of people who seem to just want “Zelda where you play as Zelda but she’s just swinging a sword around like Link”. This is not what we’re getting with Echoes of Wisdom, as the new game is known, and as far as I’m concerned that’s a great thing. Instead, we have the ability to capture “echoes” of objects and monsters in Zelda’s wand, then summon these for various purposes. I can see this potentially being a very interesting mechanic, and a factor which sets Echoes of Wisdom apart from other Zelda games. I’m mostly just glad we’re not getting another Breath of the Wild-style Zelda, though; Breath of the Wild was great and I’m sure Tears of the Kingdom is also, but Zelda is at its best when it’s being experimental, interesting and notably different from one entry to the next.

Outside of Zelda, I was also thrilled to see the announcement of Ace Attorney Investigations for Switch, including the first ever official localisation of Ace Attorney Investigations 2. I was particularly pleased to see the game features the option to play with new high-res sprites or the original pixel art; that’s a nice touch indeed, particularly as Ace Attorney Investigations has actual character sprites walking around as well as the animated busts seen in the rest of the series.

What else? Dragon Quest III HD-2D or whatever it’s called looks great. I’m all for Dragon Quest being remade and made more generally accessible. It’s curious that III appears to be coming out before I and II but I guess they had their reasons. I’m looking forward to giving it a go, and hoping that IV, V and VI get a similar treatment; I’m lucky enough to have copies of the DS versions (they’re pricy these days!) but I would like to play them on the big screen.

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy looked very cool. I like the art style of the Danganronpa guy whose name I can never remember, and this looks like quite a different style of game. I dig it, but I’d like to see more of it.

The new project from Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu, aka the Final Fantasy grandaddies, looked a little underwhelming visually, but potentially mechanically interesting. I have faith that they can pull something cool out of the bag, based on their past post-Final Fantasy work together — The Last Story is a wonderful game, for instance.

Mario & Luigi getting a new entry in the form of Brothership is welcome news, even if I have never managed to get caught up on any of the Super Mario RPG-adjacent series. I do have a copy of the Super Mario RPG remake and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on Switch waiting for me to play, but it’ll be after Final Fantasy XIV’s new expansion Dawntrail before I get to those.

Metroid Prime 4 I’m excited to see on behalf of everyone else, even though my experience with Metroid pretty much starts and finishes with the excellent Super Metroid. I have the Wii version of Prime Trilogy to get to at some point, so I’ll have to make the time for that. I liked Super Metroid a lot, so it’s a series I’ve always been meaning to delve deeper into.

You know, the more I think about the Direct as a whole, the more I feel like it actually was a pretty strong one. I’m struggling to think of any games that were shown where I felt “ugh, this isn’t for me”. Sure, some certainly appeal more than others, but I’m pretty sure I could have some fun with absolutely everything that was shown off today. This is a good thing, and makes me feel like whenever the Switch’s successor is finally announced, the good ol’ Switch is still gonna be kicking for a while yet. And if Nintendo has any sense, said Switch successor will be backwards compatible. Here’s hoping; sometimes they have sense, sometimes they do not.

So yeah. They did a good. I’m looking forward to finding out more about all the games they showed — not just the ones I remembered to talk about here — and feel pretty confident Switch will continue to bring the hits for quite some time to come yet.

#oneaday Day 10: A Success

I did it! I got up at a sensible hour rather than 5 minutes before work started, I had a cup of coffee, then I damn well went for a swim. Did 20 lengths at my excruciatingly slow pace (I’ve never claimed to be good at swimming) and came home feeling surprisingly chipper. I hate it when those people who say exercise is good for you are right. But hey. You have to celebrate the small victories on the road to lasting change, or something.

One thing I found less than good about my trip to the pool today was the fact they’ve installed lockers that eat your 10p coins rather than letting you have your coin back when you’re done. This would have been mildly annoying 10-15 years ago, but in an age where hardly anyone carries cash around any more it’s absolutely infuriating. At least it’s only 10p a time rather than a pound.

But I removed that from the equation, as the leisure complex in the town centre that I rather like and have been a member of numerous times in the past was running a very good deal on annual memberships, so I decided to make a proper commitment and signed up for a year of both swimming and gym membership. That gives me maximum flexibility without being beholden to things that have frustrated me in the past, such as the university pool’s schedule and suchlike.

Said centre’s pool is open from first thing in the morning (well, 7am) until mid-afternoon every weekday except Friday, and the gym is just… there. Having free access to both for the next year will be a positive thing, so long as I can motivate myself to actually get down there. And I think, as with anything, it’s just a matter of establishing good habits — a process that starts right now, this morning, with my trip to the pool.

I don’t like being unfit, unhealthy and lazy. In fact, it really sucks. It actively upsets me. But the trouble with being unfit, unhealthy and lazy is that it’s something of a vicious cycle: being unfit, unhealthy and lazy makes you more unfit, unhealthy and lazy, and then because you’re unfit, unhealthy and lazy the prospect of doing something to make you not at least one of those three things often feels like an insurmountable obstacle.

I’m feeling weirdly motivated right now, though. Perhaps I really am on the way back up after a bit of a mental health crash in the last few weeks or so. Here’s hoping I can keep up the momentum and go the distance. I’ll likely use this blog as one means of keeping myself vaguely accountable, so we’ll see how things go.

#oneaday Day 9: The Culture War is a Problem

Earlier today, someone I haven’t spoken to for a while popped up on Steam and asked if I was OK, because I’d been “posting way more politically than usual” of late.

Confused, I asked for more details, since I wasn’t aware I’d been doing anything of the sort, and it transpired that he somehow thought I ran the Twitter account for a certain website that I’m not going to name for reasons that will probably become obvious. (It’s not Rice Digital, the site I used to be in charge of, before you wonder!) I explained that no, that was nothing to do with me, I had never written for that site and I wasn’t even on Twitter any more, which I’m not.

Hopefully reassured, my acquaintance wished me well and that was the end of that.

He got me curious, though, so I went and looked at what the account in question had been posting, and it didn’t take me long to stumble across what the issue was. It seems that the main problem stems from a story the site in question had recently posted that was, in essence, nothing but a rumour with sources that could be called questionable if one was being charitable, non-existent if one was being realistic. The thrust of the story was that it was one of many instances of a supposed conspiracy that “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) consultants are destroying modern gaming.

I’ll address some things up front, because I have spoken about these things in the past, often critically, and I want to make it clear what my own stance on the situation is.

Diversity, equity and inclusion are not bad things. Do some companies and individuals take things a little too far in terms of pussy-footing around protected groups in an attempt to not offend anyone? Absolutely, particularly in the corporate space. Have there been instances of games journalists slagging off games that they knew nothing about because there was sexually suggestive content in them? Most definitely. Both of those things are, I believe, still worthy of criticism. Any creative work deserves to have a fair shake at expressing what its creators want to express without interference, and without those engaging with it treating it in bad faith.

However, this current conspiracy theory — and make no mistake, it really is a conspiracy theory — goes a lot further than those things. The current belief is that a cadre of games journalists and diversity consultants are running an extortion racket on game developers and publishers in the name of making all the women ugly and not white. To these people, if this situation continues unchecked, all of gaming will be completely destroyed, because having the opportunity to select your pronouns in a first-person role-playing game where you play a self-insert avatar is somehow responsible for the complete downfall of western society. It’ll turn all your kids into immigrant transgender gays, I tells ya.

This is, of course, complete bollocks. It is true that the triple-A space has been making some marked steps towards improving diversity in many of its games, but as I’ve argued numerous times both here and over on MoeGamer, the triple-A space is just a tiny piece of the complete behemoth that is the games industry. Just because some triple-A blockbuster game has a woman with “woke chin” (an actual quote from one of these nutcases, criticising the new Joanna Dark for having a wider chin than she used to) does not mean that games with anime titties are going anywhere. Right now, you can play Final Fantasy XIV as a bunnygirl with big tits running around in bra and pants if you want, and Steam is filled with games where you can fuck your aunt. Hell, there are physical releases of Switch games that feature uncensored jizz-filled vaginas. Jizz! In a Nintendo game! (Actually, don’t, you’ll need to do more than blow in the cartridge afterwards if you do.)

Here’s the thing: diversity means that you end up with diverse things. Some of those things will appeal to you, personally, while others will not. Those things that do not appeal to you, personally, are not a personal affront to you. Consider something that you really really love, but which other people don’t seem to get. Now contemplate someone with a completely different worldview to you — be it a differing political ideology, racial background, sexuality, gender identity or any of the myriad other distinguishing characteristics we all have — finding something that they really really love, but which you don’t seem to get. It’s the exact same situation, only you’re seeing it from the other side. Neither of those things cancel out the other.

The longstanding concern that this conspiracy theory stems from is that the growth in progressivism in the games industry — and particularly in games journalism — is somehow going to be responsible for the death of games that push boundaries or cater specifically to those with particular tastes, especially if those tastes are “playing games with conventionally attractive female characters in them”. Well, ten years on from the shitshow that was GamerGate, I think we can say pretty conclusively that this has not happened. If anything, we’re far more likely to encounter boundary-pushing games today than we were ten years ago… arguably to a fault, in some situations, such as with the amount of AI-generated “Hentai”-labeled crap that infests both the Nintendo eShop and Steam.

What we have now is a landscape that has changed. Triple-A may well be taking aim at a more diverse market, and that’s entirely understandable, because with budgets spiralling out of control and layoffs happening left, right and centre, those games have to appeal to the broadest demographic possible. And just because some set-in-his-ways white dude doesn’t like that a new big-budget game has black/gay/transgender/[insert minority group of choice here] people in it doesn’t mean that others won’t like it. It makes the most sense for triple-A to try and include as many people as possible, because, cynically speaking, that’s how you make the money.

But the thing to remember is that none of this is “taking your games away” or “killing gaming”.

I will freely admit that, ten years ago, I had some serious concerns that the strong push for progressivism in games journalism in particular would push certain forms of interactive media underground or possibly even cause them to dry up altogether. I almost certainly made some ill-advised comments during that time which are likely still on this blog and MoeGamer somewhere — but I’ll say now, in 2024, those fears some of us had ten years ago completely failed to materialise, and I’m not afraid to admit that I was wrong about those things.

Triple-A has changed, yes. But ten years ago I wasn’t concerned about triple-A because I’d bounced hard off that part of the industry several years prior — and I still don’t care about triple-A today. I was worried about the games I did enjoy, which were B-tier titles, primarily from Japanese developers and publishers, that had a laser focus on their target audience.

Despite never engaging with triple-A beyond games with “Final Fantasy” in the title, I have never been short of things to play. If anything, I have too many things to play, as my rapidly filling shelves will attest. If I threw triple-A in the mix, I’d really be overwhelmed.

There’s no “great replacement” of video games. There’s no “DEI” or “Modern Audiences” conspiracy to make every woman in gaming ugly. There’s no “extortion racket” causing games journalists to circle the wagons and protect a firm of diversity consultants from the “true gamers”.

There is, however, a problem with intolerance. And it seems to be getting worse, fuelled by conspiracy theories such as this. I’ve seen way more in the way of racism, homophobia and transphobia in Internet comments — particularly in busy, public places such as YouTube and what is left of the burning garbage fire that is Twitter — than ever before.

Just last week I watched an episode of the Game Grumps’ spinoff show Ten Minute Power Hour, in which Arin and Dan got gussied up as drag queens with the assistance of a professional. While there were plenty of comments in support of the episode — particularly as it aired during Pride Month, which is ongoing as I type this — there was some serious ugliness further down in the comments below where the moderators had been doing the majority of their work.

I’d say I was kind of shocked, but I’ve seen this intolerance and outright hatred rising over the last few years, and it’s not pretty at all. It was particularly shocking to see it in the comments of a Game Grumps video, though; while the Grumps have toned down some of the more colourful elements of their humour over the last 10+ years — no more “Sad Hoshi” in an exaggerated faux Japanese accent, for example — they certainly have not, in any way, abandoned who they are or the overall vibe their humour creates. What has changed, however, is how vocal the intolerant and hateful have become.

Browsing Twitter as I was earlier, I stumbled across an absolutely enormous thread by one fan of the website that started this whole discussion, collecting “evidence” of the supposed conspiracy — actually just screenshots of games journalists saying that maybe this website shouldn’t report on stupid rumours without even attempting to verify them, or commenting in support of progressive talking points. As I scrolled through page after page of this guy collecting these tweets, all I could think of was the old wisdom that if more and more people seem to be against you, perhaps you are the one who actually has the problem.

Look, I have absolutely no time for the militant end of the left wing. I find them insufferable, tedious and just plain annoying. But I feel like I’m seeing a lot less of them these days; the problem we have right now is coming from the opposite end of the spectrum. And it is a problem. When people like me, who have long made a specific effort to try and steer as clear as possible of anything even vaguely politically charged or controversial, are noticing an uptick in intolerance and hatred, there’s definitely an intolerance and hatred problem.

It may be a cliché to say, but it sure would be nice if we could just all get along. We’re talking about video games, after all.

#oneaday Day 8: Escaping a Rut

Hello. As has probably been quite apparent from my last few posts, I’ve been in something of a rut mental health-wise for a little while now, and I’ve reached a point where I actively want to do something about it. Starting up the whole #oneaday thing again is part of that, but I also need to make some more active changes to my lifestyle in order to make progress.

Specifically, I need to get properly back into the swing of following Slimming World, as I’ve been a tad lax on that for the past few weeks, and I also want to try and get a bit more exercise. Along with that, I want to try and start my day a bit earlier rather than rolling out of bed and immediately into work.

Thus, what I would like to start achieving from the beginning of next week is getting up a couple of hours earlier, going to our local pool and having a swim before work. One of my big mental blocks with exercise is when I feel like it’s encroaching on “my” time after work, and so going first thing in the morning is a good way of getting around that, since I don’t count the period before work starts as really “my” time as such. This may sound daft to you, but it’s the way my brain has always thought of things.

The difficulty is going to be actually getting up a couple of hours earlier. The reason I’ve fallen into the habit of getting up pretty much immediately before work starts is because I haven’t felt like I’ve had anything to get up “for”, but conversely this means that I don’t want to get up any earlier than I do because my brain has come to think of those last few moments of sleep as somehow more precious than the rest of the night.

Part of this is to do with the “trapped inside your own head” phenomenon that I talked about the other day. I’m most likely to feel like I “can’t” get up because I “need to finish” the dream I was having first thing in the morning, and that, for quite some time now, has prevented me from getting up at a sensible time. That, I feel, is going to be the most significant battle I face on the road to making a bit of morning exercise a regular routine.

Thing is, swimming is an activity I actually like doing, in contrast to a lot of other forms of exercise that I tend to feel negatively about. I find swimming both relaxing and invigorating; I know I’m not very good at it, but it’s something that I simply like. And since it’s something that, done enough, can actually be good for me, I feel like I should take advantage of that fact.

So, then, the challenge is going to be ensuring that I actually haul myself out of bed in time to go for a swim of a morning. My local pool does morning sessions every weekday morning between 7 and 9, and ideally speaking, I’d like to try and go every day. I feel like that might be an unrealistic target to begin with, though, so for the upcoming week I’m setting myself the goal of getting up and going swimming before work at least twice during the week.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see how that goes. I’m trying not to contemplate “likely failure” before it happens, and go into this with a positive mindset. But we’ll see, I guess!

#oneaday Day 7: Suggested Content

One of the “innovations” of modern tech and software that I am most consistently baffled by is the concept of “Suggestions”.

Don’t get me wrong, I am under no illusions as to what “Suggested Content” really means on websites and social media platforms (it’s advertising, in case you somehow weren’t savvy enough to know that by now) but I’m talking more in contexts where it’s not obviously advertising, or where it doesn’t make sense for advertising to try and worm its way into places.

Places like, you know, just Microsoft Windows in general. Or Google Drive. Both of those have features where they provide you with a list of “Suggested” files, and I absolutely, genuinely do not understand why that feature is there or what it is for. Right now, for example, my Google Drive “Suggested files” list is a non-chronological index of things that I have opened or edited recently. Fine, you might say, except there is a perfectly good “Recent” option in the sidebar which does give me a chronological list of things I have opened or edited recently.

Likewise, the Windows 11 start menu on my “work” computer (it came preinstalled, otherwise I would have been quite happy continuing with 10 as I do with my “play” computer) appears to “suggest” applications almost completely at random, with its first two suggestions usually being the things I have installed most recently, and the others being… pretty much anything that I have installed, for no discernible reason.

Under certain circumstances, I get the idea. When it comes to media, a “suggestion” feature might inspire you to look at photos or listen to music that you haven’t enjoyed for a while — though this can also backfire somewhat. Earlier today, my phone’s “Gallery” app decided to send me an unasked-for notification that I presume someone somewhere thought was “cute”, with the text “Feline footprints in Southampton”. The attached image? Our dearly departed cat Meg. I’m still quite upset about Meg’s passing, so I emphatically do not want my phone randomly bringing her up out of the blue for no apparent reason. I will look at pictures of her when I’m good and ready, thanks very much.

The push for “AI” in everything is only making this shit worse, too; the Gallery app on my phone recognising that the image in question was a picture of a cat is a result of improving image recognition technology, and I suspect as generative AI becomes more and more pervasive and invasive in our daily online life, situations like this are only going to become more and more common — because you can bet your bippy that all these “Suggestion” features are going to be turned on by default.

What happens when your phone decides to “suggest” a photo of something you’d rather keep private at an exceedingly inappropriate moment? Well, some might say you should keep your private photos private, but realistically, practically speaking, most people these days are not that organised, because we’ve made the mistake of trusting our software and online services to do the organisation for us. I actually like the fact that Google Photos can pick out, say, pictures of cats, or pictures that mention something specific in a piece of text, because that is indisputably useful — but what I don’t want is my phone going “HEY REMEMBER YOUR CAT THAT DIED? HUH? HERE SHE IS, I PICKED HER OUT FROM ALL YOUR PHOTOS, AREN’T I SMART?”

There’s a place for some — some — of the innovations that are currently going on in tech. But, as always, it seems we’re going to have to endure a period of people pushing things to absolute breaking point before we settle into something approaching a useful routine. And, unfortunately, that period appears to have been going on for quite a while now… and people don’t seem to be willing to push back against the more unreasonable uses of these features.

“Suggested Content” can get in the fucking bin. I know what I need on my computer and when. And, more often than not, when I’m browsing the Web, I know what I’m looking for, too. Sadly, it feels increasingly unlikely that I’m going to be left in peace these days.

If anyone mentions Linux, they are getting a slap.

#oneaday Day 6: Best Thing Since

My wife Andie bought a breadmaker a little while back. We didn’t need one — no-one needs a breadmaker — but I have to say, the bread that comes out of it is really nice. And it’s got me thinking that as I’ve grown older, I’ve grown more and more fond of simple pleasures.

For instance, when I was a kid, I distinctly remember thinking of bread as being “boring”. After all, a joking “threat” by a parent at the time could be “you won’t get any dinner, you’ll just have bread and water”. (I hasten to add for anyone new to this blog that my parents were not in any way abusive, nor did they ever refuse me dinner and just give me bread and water.) But nowadays, I find it thoroughly pleasurable to sometimes just have a bit of bread with some spread or jam on it.

It doesn’t even necessarily have to be good bread. Sometimes I’m quite happy with the mediocrity of a shop-bought sliced loaf — I’m particularly fond of toasted wholemeal bread with raspberry jam — but a nice crusty loaf, be it from a bakery or the breadmaker, is a genuine treat now.

It’s kind of disappointing that bread isn’t particularly brilliant for you, particularly white bread. I find this kind of strange, given how much of a staple food bread has always been considered — and I’m sure in years gone by, this was even more the case. Whenever I think of, say, medieval folks, I’m sure bread was a significant part of what they ate. It’s a potentially winning strategy in Agricola to focus on bread-making, after all.

I always find it interesting in Japanese media when students talk about simply “buying some bread” for their lunch, though I suspect this more commonly refers to some sort of sandwich. I am especially fascinated by the concept of the yakisoba pan, which is a noodle sandwich in a hot dog bun, and melon pan, which is a sweet bread that always sounds delicious when people describe it. There’s also anpan, which is a bread roll stuffed with sweet red bean paste that I’d personally say veers more towards the “cake” or “doughnut” end of the spectrum, but it still counts.

I don’t know if any of those can be made in a breadmaker — thus far we’ve just tried simple bread recipes and shop-bought ready mixes (there’s a cheese and sun-dried tomato one that is lovely) — but it might be interesting to experiment. We’ll have to see, I guess. In the meantime, I’ve got a loaf to polish off.

#oneaday Day 5: Trapped Inside

Do you ever feel trapped inside your own head? I mean obviously we’re all trapped inside our own heads, our eyes our only windows out of our self-imposed prisons, but what I mean is, do you ever find yourself finding it, say, difficult to wake up because of what your imagination is conjuring up?

I’ve been feeling this for a while. I’m not entirely sure what causes it, whether it’s a side-effect of the medication I’m taking, whether it’s a symptom of my mental health conditions or if I’m just naturally predisposed towards this sort of thing. Regardless of the cause, though, there are mornings where I genuinely do feel absolutely “trapped” inside the scenarios my imagination has conjured up for me; part of my consciousness is saying “wake up, get up, you need to go to work”, but my brain is saying “no, you need to stay here and resolve this completely fictional, made-up scenario before you do anything else”.

Another way of putting it might be that I feel sort of “addicted” to dreaming. I have quite vivid dreams — always have done — and those dreams tend to be at their most vivid in the morning, particularly if I’ve already woken up once and fallen asleep again. In those circumstances, I suspect they’re probably an interpretation of my brain being aware that I need to get up soon, if not now, and expressing that source of anxiety through somewhat surreal means. But it ends up being counterproductive, because I inevitably find the dreams so interesting that I don’t want to leave them behind and wake up.

I’ve genuinely had mornings where I’ve felt like I didn’t want to get up because I thought I needed to “finish” whatever was going on in the dream first. Except because the dreams themselves were so abstract, there was no real “win state”, for want of a better word; no means of “completing” or “resolving” them. And so I just end up being drawn back in, often repeating the same situation over and over again rather than making any real “progress”.

The human mind is fascinating. I wonder if one day we will be able to better understand and explore the things that go on in there. I’d certainly be fascinated to explore the worlds within in a more “lucid” manner. But for now, I guess I’ll just have to be satisfied with sleeping in slightly longer than I should in the morning, in the vain hope that I might actually “finish” a dream.

#oneaday Day 4: Upward Slope

Been feeling mildly better today. Had a small boost in mood from this week’s Slimming World visit; although I haven’t undone all the “damage” from last week I have lost some weight, and thus I count that as a success. It is important to celebrate the small victories, as they add up; I’m still down quite a bit on what I started, even though I still have a long way to go.

Today has been a pretty uneventful day all round. Work was quiet, as it’s likely to be for a little while, and I spent a bit of time this evening playing some Steam Next Fest demos. That’s a subject for MoeGamer though, so check over there in the next few days for some thoughts.

I’ve been spending my late evenings before bed watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which my brother kindly bought me a box set of for my birthday. I’ve never watched this right through to the end, so I’m looking forward to finally doing that. While it was tempting to try and watch all the Star Trek series chronologically, that’s a mammoth undertaking that I’m not entirely sure is desirable anyway. I do want to at least see Deep Space Nine and Voyager all the way through, though, so I’m going to tackle those one at a time.

No header image today as I’ve left the Kindle Scribe downstairs and I’m typing this from bed. The post editor in the Jetpack app is actually surprisingly good, though I still prefer typing on a proper keyboard. Good to know I can do some decent posting from mobile, though; the WordPress app used to be kind of pump.

Anyway, that’ll probably do for now. It’s quarter past midnight and I am tired. Tomorrow is another day, and there is work to be done, so to sleep I go.