#oneaday Day 75: Not Well

I’ve been unwell for the last couple of days. I don’t know whether it’s a delayed reaction to going to London last week or if it’s just a seasonal thing, but I’ve been feeling pretty rotten. Spent most of this evening asleep, and didn’t even end up feeling super rested because I was having sad and upsetting dreams.

But oh well. These things happen, they are a fact of life. At least with how most of us are still able to work from home, being ill doesn’t mean having to take a whole day off work. In fact, when I’m feeling fairly wretched, I’m more than happy to do some work anyway because it’s something to do and it helps keep my mind off things. Right now, we’re doing some preparatory work for the Evercade cartridges coming in the first half of 2025, and we’ve already got some excellent stuff lined up. Obviously I can’t talk about that in any more detail than that, though!

The situation I described yesterday appears to mostly be settling down, thankfully. A couple of people have left the Discord in question, which is a shame in at least one case, but everyone else (except arguably one person, whom I had to reprimand privately earlier, and who was less than gracious about it) seems to have stopped being quite so childish about the entire situation. I’m still baffled at supposedly grown adults behaving like primary school children, though… although given my local Slimming World group has groups of older ladies who have to be asked to stop talking while the consultant delivers the session, perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised.

I haven’t really played any games for the past few days because I just haven’t really felt like I’ve had the mental energy for it. I have watched a lot of episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, though, and I’m now into the fifth season, which I believe is virgin territory for me. I might have seen the first couple of episodes at some point, but beyond that, I think it’s all new to me. I’m particularly interested to see how the whole Dominion War arc proceeds, because I’ve been specifically avoiding a lot of Star Trek material that is positioned as being after the Dominion War — with one exception being the excellent Star Trek Resurgence, which I highly recommend to those who enjoy both Trek and Telltale Games’ past work.

I have been playing the piano, though. In fact, my long sleep tonight meant that today is the first day I haven’t played it since it arrived, but I’ll get back onto it tomorrow. At the moment I’m still just playing a few bits and pieces to get back into the swing of things, but I think from next week I’m going to try and start doing a bit more structured “practice” again. That feels like a good and healthy habit to get back into, and perhaps alongside that I can revitalise my enthusiasm for the gym while I’m establishing habits.

Good intentions and all that. Anyway, now it’s late, so I think it’s probably time to go back to bed, maybe watch another Deep Space Nine, and get some more sleep. Hopefully I’ll feel better tomorrow.

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 74: Flashbacks

Yesterday, we updated the rules on a Discord server I help run. The rules did not change from what they were before; they were simply expanded and clarified in a way that allows any of us on the moderation team to easily step in if things look like getting out of hand.

And you know, people absolutely lost their shit over it to a frankly baffling degree. We had people claiming that the server had been “destroyed”, that they were no longer able to express themselves fully, that mods were “power hungry”… if you’ve been on the Internet any length of time all this will be familiar, I’m sure, particularly if you were ever part of forum culture.

I have found the whole experience baffling and extremely frustrating. The new rules amount to “don’t be a hateful bigot”, “don’t be mean to other people” and “please use the channels as they are designed to be used”. Bizarrely, it’s that last one that got people most upset, because apparently asking people to keep off-topic discussions to the off-topic channel is something approaching a fascist dictatorship.

All this gave me exceedingly unpleasant flashbacks of “behaviour management” when I was working as a teacher. A classroom full of screaming children and a Discord server full of crying adults who are very much old enough to know better are remarkably similar. And it all comes down to people, regardless of age, having a great amount of difficulty with someone who isn’t them laying down boundaries.

In both cases, kids and adults, they feel they’re not able to behave as they please. In both cases, the rules are in place to help keep things somewhat more orderly: so that lessons can be taught in the classroom, and so that people who came to the Discord server to get specific information can find that information in the latter case.

No-one has quite gone as far as throwing out the “but my free speech!” card as yet but some people came remarkably close earlier. And I suspect we will continue to have some unrest for a few days.

I don’t get it. I’ve always been quite happy to follow the rules when I’ve been invited into someone’s house, be it real or virtual. I’m still mortified about one time, aged 12, when I used the word “bog” to refer to the toilet at a friend’s house, only to be admonished that “we don’t use that word in this house” (or at least not in front of his mother anyway). If someone asks me to behave myself online, I behave myself. It’s really not all that difficult.

I suspect much of it stems from the people in question never having had those boundaries set in the past, and not knowing what to do when they are set — even if they were already following the rules anyway. I suppose it’s easy to feel a weird sort of guilt when you’re involved in a community and that community feels the need to lay down the law, even if you know you had nothing to do with it.

But honestly, come on now. If you have difficulty with rules that amount to “don’t be a dick” and “use this server for its stated purpose”, that’s an issue with you, not the rules.

#oneaday Day 73: Stylised TV

One of the things that I’m finding most striking about watching through Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is how the show is, on the whole, willing to experiment with structure, presentation and the entire way an episode’s story is told. I don’t know if it’s just that I haven’t watched a really good TV show for a long while or if things really were a lot more ambitious in this regard in the ’90s; either way, I’ve found it very striking.

There are several episodes that defy the conventions of what I think of as “regular TV” — or perhaps it’s more accurate to say what I perceive as the “norms” of the show. The first of these that springs to mind is the early fourth season episode The Visitor, which is frequently held up as an example of the show at its absolute best. And interestingly, it’s an episode of the show where it’s at its least “sci-fi”, outside of one significant aspect.

Spoilers ahead, though this episode is nearly thirty years old at this point, so I’m going to assume most of you reading this who might be interested in watching it will have probably seen it by this point.

In The Visitor, we are introduced to an old man who lives by himself. It’s a dark and stormy night, and a young woman comes knocking at his door, seeking shelter from the rain. The old man introduces himself as Jake Sisko — but at this point, we, the audience, know Jake Sisko as the 18 year old son of the show’s lead, Captain Benjamin Sisko.

The old Jake explains to the young woman that at some point after he turned 18, his father died.

Boom. Right in there with the intrigue. Had Star Trek: Deep Space Nine really killed off its lead in the second episode of its fourth season? No, of course it hadn’t, and everyone watching knew that was the case. But it was still one hell of a way to get the audience’s attention prior to the opening credits rolling.

The Visitor continues with old Jake telling the story of what happened to his father — apparently an accident aboard the USS Defiant pushed Ben out of sync with reality, causing him to “time jump” at various intervals. He’d return to Jake for a while — sometimes a few days, sometimes just a moment — and Jake would be older, but he’d not have aged a day.

Long story short, Jake spends his life trying to figure out what exactly is going on with his father, and how he might be able to save him. Eventually he comes to the conclusion that the only way for him to prevent his father from springing through time, attached to him by an invisible thread, is for him to die. And so, it gradually becomes clear over the course of the episode, that old man Jake Sisko is going to die, and that this is the only way for Ben to return to his own time.

The way this episode is presented is beautiful. It cuts back and forth between Old Jake simply telling the story to his companion, and us actually seeing what was going on at various points in Old Jake’s “past” — including some delightful “aged up” takes on Dr Bashir and Jadzia Dax. It’s just so unusual and beautifully directed that it remains one of the most memorable episodes of the series to this day; I remembered it fondly from when I first saw it on VHS tape roughly when it was “current”, and it hasn’t lost any of its impact in the intervening years.

I’m now getting into episodes that are less familiar to me, because I drifted off watching Deep Space Nine partway through the fourth season. Not because I wasn’t enjoying it, but because I didn’t really have the money or space to keep investing in VHS tapes with just two episodes on each!

Recently, I watched an episode called Rules of Engagement, and this also does some interesting things with its direction. The concept of this episode is that Worf is facing a hearing for supposedly destroying a civilian vessel during a confrontation with the Klingon Empire, who are, throughout the fourth season, being A Bit Of A Dick, to put it mildly.

Similar to The Visitor, a lot of the narration takes place in the “present” through the words of the participants in the hearing, but it also cuts to scenes that are being remembered by the people involved and the witnesses. In these instances, there are situations where the characters are going about their business as they did back in the way, but narrating them as they go — and even speaking directly to the “viewer” at various points. Seeing a character in a TV show directly address you, as if you are a participant in proceedings — in this case, casting you in the role of one of the participants in Worf’s hearing — is quite unusual, and it’s used to striking effect in this episode.

I’m sure from some perspectives both of these framing devices can be looked upon as a little cheesy. But I was struck by both of them as being thoroughly unusual and interesting. Like I say, it’s entirely possible that I just haven’t watched any “good TV” for quite some time (I can’t remember the last series I watched from start to finish. Possibly Fringe? And that was years ago) and thus haven’t seen anyone being particularly ambitious with direction and storytelling. But it doesn’t really matter; what matters is that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine still stands out as spectacularly good television, even nearly 30 years later.

#oneaday Day 72: A life less ordinary

I can’t shake the feeling that life just used to be… more interesting. When I look back on the last time I did this #oneaday thing and consider all the things that happened back then, and I look at today, I can’t help but feel that while there were things that happened back then I’d rather not go through again, things were certainly more interesting and exciting.

Part of this is self-inflicted, of course. I’m not the same person I was ten years ago for a variety of reasons: physically, mentally and emotionally. I’m older, so of course the day-to-day nature of one’s life changes as you age. But in the middle of all that there was COVID, and that, for me, is where a lot of the dissatisfaction I’m feeling right now started from.

Sure, it was easy to joke about the COVID lockdowns as being government-sanctioned “not having to go out and interact with three-dimensional people”. And that was fun for a bit. Plus I certainly don’t want to go back to a full-time office job, because working from home is just way more convenient. Any bosses who are attempting to get their workforce back into the office full time are just trying to exert control over them: simple as that. And, frankly, fuck that.

But the COVID lockdowns also brought with them the inability to see friends and family, and that lack of socialisation has persisted long after the lockdowns ended. My “IRL” friends were already reaching a point where they rarely wanted to do anything together due to them starting families and whatnot, but things haven’t picked up at all ever since their children grew up a bit and the restrictions on us doing things together lifted. Even trying to get any of them to play something online occasionally is like pulling teeth from a particularly bloodless stone.

And daily life feels increasingly dominated by “online” and social media. I’ve doubtless spoken before about how odious I find TikTok and short-video culture, but every time I inadvertently come into contact with a vertical video of someone yelling at their phone camera, I’m reminded that the world moved on and kind of left me behind a bit.

To be perfectly honest, I’m pretty sure the world left me behind 20+ years ago. I’m pretty sure I was at my happiest and most content between 1997 and 2002 — the years from sixth form to the end of university. I had friends, I had hobbies, I had things I could go out and do, and I never felt the same sense of indefinable “pressure” on my mental health that I do today. Sure, there were things I wish I had done differently and regrets I have, but I was happy and satisfied with my lot in life.

Today? I feel like I’m being ungrateful when I say that I’m dissatisfied with existence, because I have a lot that I should be thankful for — a wonderful wife, two gorgeous cats, a nice house, a video game collection that would blow the mind of my teenage self — but life in general just feels so empty. And I don’t really know what to do about it other than wallow in nostalgia and think about how nice things used to be.

Oh well. I don’t have any solutions for that right now, so I think I’m just going to go upstairs and watch another episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

#oneaday Day 71: New Piano Ownership

The new piano arrived yesterday, but as it was a working day and it arrived quite late in the day, I didn’t have a lot of time to play around with it. Today, though? Today is the weekend. So I spent some time playing it earlier.

It is very shiny. And yes, you can see Oliver in the upper-left corner. He is sitting on his tree. He is less shiny, but he wanted to see what was going on.

In fact, I did something I haven’t done for at least 20 years, which is practice all the scales. All the normal ones, anyway; I didn’t go on and do the scales in thirds and sixths like you have to do at Grade 8, I didn’t do any chromatics and I didn’t do any arpeggios. Those can wait until I’m a bit more back into the swing of things.

The new piano was definitely a good choice. I feel like I have a whole lot more control over tone and dynamics than I had with the clapped-out old thing we had before. It’s clear that the old one we had was a nice piano back in its day — Bechstein is a good make, I believe — but the fact it was nearly a hundred years old (possibly more) meant that it was definitely showing its age more than a little bit.

I’m definitely happy with it. It inspired me to pick up some classical pieces that I haven’t touched for a long time and give them a shot earlier, plus the stuff I really like playing these days, which is piano arrangements from the Final Fantasy and Nier series of video games, all sound great on it.

I don’t think anything is quite up to snuff for me to want to share at this point, but once I’ve done a bit of that mysterious thing known as “practicing” and knocked something into shape a bit more, perhaps I’ll share a piece or two via my YouTube channel or something.

It’s nice to share music, so long as it’s on your own terms and you’re not being strongarmed into it or forced to do it against your will or anything. Thankfully, I never felt like I was being “forced” into learning the piano when I was a kid; I discovered early on that it was something I was quite good at, and that I could impress people who otherwise wouldn’t give me the time of day with my piano skills.

I’ll be perfectly honest: being at university and studying music alongside people who were at my standard or even better knocked my confidence a bit. I’d probably got a bit complacent and comfortable in my abilities and my relatively “superior” position to my peers at school — I never lorded it over anyone, I hasten to add, but I did always enjoy the looks of admiration and appreciation I got from people who didn’t expect a teenager to be able to play the things I was playing at the time.

I think it’s been enough years away from all that, though, that I can start rebuilding my enjoyment of the instrument, and getting a nice-quality instrument to play is an important step in that process. Now I just have to develop the self-discipline to practice on a regular basis, and during those practice sessions to push myself a little bit rather than just falling back on the pieces I know I can play well without too much difficulty.

One step at a time. And today was definitely a good first step.

#oneaday Day 70: Attention Deficit Gaming

There’s a guy (I assume it’s a guy) in a Discord I’m in who is the most attention-deficit gamer I think I’ve ever seen, and I cannot imagine living life like he does. His entire contribution to the Discord in question is announcing what he has bought from a digital storefront today (and he buys a lot seemingly every week) and what he is reinstalling for presumably not the first time.

I get actual anxiety if I have more than one or two games on the go at once. I start feeling like I “should” finish one of the things I’m playing before I start something else. This is an entirely self-inflicted scenario that has come about at least in part from the habits I picked up while working in games journalism and running my own website, but I’m not particularly mad about it; the way I feel about things means that I’m much more likely to play things through to completion and get what I believe to be a full appreciation of them.

If there’s one thing that doing my “Cover Game” thing on MoeGamer for several years taught me, it’s that a significant proportion of games out there have considerable hidden depths that only truly reveal themselves to analysis when you’ve spent a protracted amount of time with the game. I like being able to talk about things in that much depth — even if, as I’ve bemoaned frequently over the last few years, it’s fucking impossible to get anyone to give a shit these days — and thus I don’t have any particular desire to change.

Being in those habits, though, just makes me confused as to what this person is getting out of their gaming time. By jumping back and forth between big games like Fate/stay night, Utawarerumono and numerous others, he’s surely dooming himself to never making any substantial progress in any of them. And when you’re talking story-centric games or visual novels like that, that seems like a… sub-optimal means of enjoying them.

Perhaps I’m the weird one. I know plenty of people who flit from Game Pass game to Game Pass game and think nothing of it. I just think it’s a bit sad that the norm these days seems to be to get a surface-level look at something and then move on to the next new shiny thing. One could say that some games could stand to be a bit shorter — and that’s certainly true — but that doesn’t mean the long ones have no value or aren’t worth sticking with over the long term. It just seems less and less likely that people will actually stick with those longer titles.

I hope that doesn’t mean that we end up with a gaming sector that eschews long-form experiences altogether. I don’t think that will happen — not least because the triple-A studios seem obsessed with “player retention” over the long term, even in single-player titles — but I would say, if you recognise yourself in what I’m describing here: take the time to focus on and complete one game. You might just be surprised what a rewarding experience it is.

#oneaday Day 69: A Grand Day Out

We had a work day out today. Despite us not being based in London and none of us living in London, we went to London.

I haven’t been to London for a very long time. For context, the last time I went to London they had not introduced the ability to “touch in” and “touch out” on the Underground with a credit or debit card.

My work colleagues went to The Crystal Maze Live Experience first of all, but I passed on that as I suspected I probably wasn’t physically fit enough to take part. A shame, because it sounds like it was fun, but I don’t mind too much. I’m knackered enough as it is!

Instead, I joined everyone for lunch at Covent Garden. We went to an “Asian fusion” place with touchscreen tables that didn’t work very well, and had a selection of Japanese-style tapas. Pretty tasty, though I have been left with foul smelling burps.

I suspect that may have been more to do with the cocktails we had at our next destination, an arcade bar just off Oxford street. This was a dingy basement with lots of blacklight and some great arcade machines, though a few clearly needed a bit of TLC on the displays.

There was a great mix of classic stuff, including oldies like Galaga, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, along with later large scale stuff like OutRun 2 and all three Time Crises. It wasn’t free play, sadly, you had to buy tokens (£9.50 for 15, and a lot of games took 2 tokens) but the CEO was kind enough to provide us a generous allowance. There were also plenty of consoles equipped with Everdrives and equivalents, and those were free for anyone to play.

It was an enjoyable hangout. A little loud for decent conversation — from the music rather than the machines — but there was a nice vibe, and it seemed to pick up and become quite lively as afternoon turned to evening. The gaming-themed cocktails were great, too, even if they were all at least £11 a pop.

I am, however, as previously noted, absolutely pooped, so now it is time to sleep. I suspect I will sleep well tonight!

#oneaday Day 68: YouTube thoughts

I’ve been pondering my YouTube channel ever since I wrote this post. Indeed, I’m still firmly of the opinion that Not Everything Has To Be Content, but I also think I work best when I have some sort of “structure” to proceedings, to know what I’m doing when. So I’ve come up with something for myself.

This is not intended to be a completely rigid structure of [x] videos per week or anything like that, but more some guidelines for me to work within that allow me to cover my diverse interests, celebrate a variety of games and still focus on the things that I’m most passionate about.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to work on a four-week cycle, which will go as follows:

Week 1: Atari 8-bit. One or two videos on Atari 8-bit games. Now I’ve covered all the built-in games of The400 Mini, this will be pretty much anything.

Week 2: Atari ST. I love the ST, and there are sections of my audience who love it too, so I want to make sure I make some time for it. Like the Atari 8-bit week, this will be one or two videos on Atari ST games.

Week 3: Public Domain and Magazines. This is relatively “open” to interpretation each time it rolls around, but in this week I’d like to either take some time to read through a magazine on camera, or to cover some of the Page 6 Public Domain Library disks for Atari 8-bit and ST, as I enjoyed the few videos I made on those a while back.

Week 4: Wild Card. This can be absolutely anything I feel like doing. If I feel like playing some DOS games, I’ll do that. If I feel like playing some SNES games, I’ll do that. If I feel like playing some Amiga games, I’ll do that.

I feel good about this; it lets me cover the things that I definitely want to keep covering on the channel, as well as the flexibility to do other stuff. And at any point, I won’t feel guilt if I want to take a week off due to fatigue or the weather or anything like that… I’ll just pick up where I left off!

So that’s that. I’m going to start implementing this from this coming weekend and we’ll keep moving from there. I hope you enjoy!

#oneaday Day 67: The pleasure of organisation

Ahead of the new piano arriving on Friday, we bought a new filing cabinet. The idea was to replace the clapped-out old bookshelf we have in the back room that currently holds my music books, and to just generally tidy up that back room a bit now that there’s going to be a nice shiny piano in there.

I derive quite a bit of pleasure from organisation. I often have a bit (all right, a lot) of trouble actually getting started, but once I do, I find it immensely satisfying to put everything into place, sort things into alphabetical order and know that everything has a “right place” to put things into. By the same token, our larder cupboard in our kitchen drives me nuts because it’s a chaotic bomb site of a cupboard, where you take your life into your own hands any time you attempt to extract something from it without causing an avalanche of baking materials, cereal and cat food.

I know exactly why I derive such pleasure from organisation, of course; it is doubtless to do with the autism, what with one of the key characteristics of those of us On The Spectrum being an appreciation for orderliness, routines, patterns and suchlike. Even better if said orderliness is all your own work rather than a structure built by someone else that you’re having to adapt to.

Going through the music books was nice for another reason: it made me realise that I have a lot of them, and there’s a fair old chunk of music in them that I’ve just never played. For the most part, the music books I own fall into two categories: those which I acquired while I was actively having piano tuition, which are mostly “classical” books from historical art music composers; and those which I have acquired in more recent years, which tend to be piano arrangements of soundtracks from video games and anime that I particularly appreciate. I’ve been playing a lot more of the latter in more recent years, but with the new piano it might be time to revisit (or explore further) into the other stuff.

The reason why I own so much stuff and haven’t played a lot of it is simple: when learning stuff while having piano tuition, my teachers would often suggest a piece of music to learn, which was only available as part of a larger book, usually of a single composer’s work. So for example when I learned how to play Liszt’s Consolation No. 3, I also acquired a book of other short piano pieces by Liszt (including, among other things, the other Consolations). When I learned a Mozart sonata, I then had access to all the Mozart sonatas because while you can buy some of these pieces as individual sheet music, it’s generally more worthwhile in the long term to buy “The Complete Mozart Sonatas” or equivalent.

So I’ve got a lot of stuff to explore once the new piano gets here. I’m going to have to get back into the habit of playing more frequently, but I suspect with a decent-quality instrument readily available, that won’t be too much of an ordeal. Getting myself back up to the standard I was once at might take a bit more work, but I’m sure it’ll be worth it as another means of expressing and enjoying myself if nothing else.

#oneaday Day 66: That One

I have an irrational hatred of any product that describes variants of itself as “The [x] One”. Shreddies: The Frosted One. McDonalds Wraps: The Chilli Chicken One. Petrol: The Unleaded One.

I’ve been trying to pin down precisely why this annoys me, because it only reflects the way people talk about products with variants. When discussing what to buy from the supermarket, you don’t say “Let’s buy some McVities Digestive Biscuits, Caramel Flavour”, you say “I really like the caramel ones, let’s get some more of those”. When ordering at McDonalds, you don’t say “I would like a McWrap with Crispy Chicken and Sweet Chilli Sauce”, you say “I want the sweet chilli one”.

But I think that’s sort of part of the problem; I’ve always felt like there should be a disparity in the way people talk about a product and the way the product presents itself. It’s not customers’ jobs to do the marketing for the products, yet as soon as you make the name of the product the same as how people refer to it in casual conversation, you are intruding on that division. You are refusing to allow the customer to refer to the product the way they prefer to, instead taking the opportunity to throw in some “chummy copy”, as the folks on the excellent CheapShow podcast call it.

Chummy copy is the scourge of modern products. It’s why we get boxes of Coca-Cola telling you to “remember to flatten me before recycling me!” and boxes of cereal that say inane platitudes like “BREAKFAST is the MOST IMPORTANT MEAL of the DAY”, with every word in a different font. I don’t want a product to be my friend, I want it to perform the function I purchased it for. Which, in the case of most things that feature chummy copy, is to shut up and let me eat or drink it.

I’m not sure exactly where both of these things started. “The [x] One” can probably be at least indirectly attributed to the popularity of the sitcom Friends, whose episode titles were all The One With [An Individual Element of the Episode as a Whole] — and before you point out that Friends was a late ’90s/early ’00s phenomenon that couldn’t possibly be relevant 25+ years later, I would just point out that Krispy Kreme have just brought out a range of Friends-themed doughnuts, and “How You Doin’?” is still very much part of the popular vernacular — even if, I suspect, many people using it don’t know its origin.

For some reason it didn’t bother me in Friends, at least partly because Friends was the kind of show where the episode title didn’t matter. It was never displayed on screen at any point during the episode, for one thing, and it was an interesting novelty at the time, particularly compared to the dramatic episode titles shows like Star Trek were using in the same period.

Now, though? Chummy copy feels kind of weirdly insidious. Contrary to what I presume is its intention, which is to make products feel more approachable and trustworthy, I am disinclined to trust a product that makes such a big deal out of how amazing it is, or which tries to ingratiate itself with me by going “haha, look, we gave our product a SUPER CASUAL name like what you call it!”

Anyway, yeah. Time to open Microsoft Teams: The Work One and crack on with actually getting something useful done.