I slept terribly last night and consequently woke up this morning feeling like absolute garbage. It didn’t improve much as the day went on, but I feel vaguely more human now, just as it’s about time to head to bed.
I can, at least, console myself with the fact that the wife and I have booked a much-needed holiday for in a couple of weeks. We’re going to Center Parcs in Elveden Forest again. This is, I believe, the third time we’ve been to Center Parcs together generally, and the second time we’ve been to Elveden Forest. It’s actually the fourth time I’ve been to Elveden Forest, as I went twice when I was a kid: once with my parents, my brother and one of his friends, then again some years later with my parents and one of my friends.
Center Parcs can be a pricy holiday, particularly if you start getting involved in the activities they offer, but honestly even if you do pretty much nothing for the time you’re there, it’s still a thoroughly pleasant getaway. This time around, we’re taking a two-bedroom villa (or “lodge”, I believe they call them now) as it was only fifty quid more than the apartments we usually go for. That should provide plenty of space to spread out, relax and enjoy ourselves.
I was kind of hoping that the next time we went away on holiday, I’d be in a better physical condition, but that’s very much a slow process that has kind of stalled a little bit of late. I’m still down in weight from where I was, but I’ve been really struggling with motivation, so I’ve decided to take a short break from attending Slimming World meetings, at least until after our holiday, and then decide what to do after that. I have been deriving some satisfaction from the Fitness Boxing sessions I’ve been doing, though, so once I feel a bit better after today’s crappy feeling, I’ll be back on that.
Anyway, regardless of the state I’m in, I’m looking forward to some time away. It’s good to get away from it all now and again, have a change of scenery and spend some time in an environment where there’s zero pressure. And I well and truly intend to “unplug” as much as possible from the Internet while I’m away. I’ll still post my daily blog there, and we’ll almost certainly take some gaming equipment with us, but other than that, I intend to pretty much completely ignore that the rest of the world exists for a while, and I’m very much looking forward to 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.
I’ve been playing .hack//Infection for the last couple of days on PlayStation 2. I’ve had the full set of four games on my shelf for a very long time and been meaning to properly run through them all, but have somehow never gotten around to it. I have previously completed Infection a very long time ago, but I’ve never gone through all four games and seen how it all ends — nor have I been spoiled on any of it. I also own a copy of the .hack//G.U. remasters on PlayStation 4, so I’ll have to get to those at some point, too, but I wanted to knock out the PS2 games first.
For the unfamiliar, .hack was one of the first (possibly the first) “MMO gone mad, if you die in the game you die for real” series. Unusually, it was designed from the outset as a fully transmedia production: not only were there four PS2 games in the series, each of these games also came with a DVD featuring an episode of a specially made anime known as .hack//Liminality which tells a “real world” story that unfolds concurrently with the events of the game, and there was a completely separate anime series known as .hack//Sign. Since that time, there have apparently been several other anime and manga series, along with the aforementioned .hack//G.U. trilogy of games, which originated on PS2 but which were ported to PS4 in 2017.
That may all sound terribly complicated, but be at ease: you can have a satisfying .hack experience if you just play the games. .hack//Infection, the first of the original set of four games, tells the story of “you”, an 8th grader who has just signed up for the hottest new MMO, The World, at the recommendation of your friend Yasuhiko, a veteran player. You join up and in that inimitable “early 2000s MMO” sort of way, you party up with Yasuhiko, or “Orca” as he’s known in the game, who destroys absolutely everything before you can even get a hit in by virtue of him being 50 levels higher than you.
But something goes horribly wrong. After an encounter with a mysterious young girl who is seemingly being chased by a bizarre creature carrying a red wand, Orca is entrusted with a strange book and shortly afterwards, his character is “Data Drained”, leaving the real Yasuhiko comatose. You end up taking possession of the book, which manifests itself as a strange bracelet that equips you with the power to Data Drain enemies in the game, and it’s then up to you to investigate the strange happenings in The World and determine if there’s any truth to the game seemingly having an impact on the real world.
The cool thing about .hack//Infection is that the entire PS2 game is diegetic, intended to represent you using your computer to check your mail, read the news and log in to The World. You never see the actual real world yourself in the game — hence the inclusion of the Liminality DVDs — but instead all your investigation is online. This unfolds through a combination of you checking and replying to mails (with predefined responses) and browsing through the official message boards for The World, looking for clues.
Canonically, .hack//Infection is supposed to be unfolding in 2010, but obviously in 2002 developers CyberConnect2 had to make something of a best guess as to what that near-future setting might look like. They actually got a fair few things right, such as high-speed, always-on Internet access being pretty much universal and fibre-optic cables being the main means of this infrastructure being implemented — though here in the real world, fibre broadband is a little more recent than 2010.
What’s quite interesting is the design of The World itself, because it could quite plausibly work as an online RPG — though perhaps not in the way that western players understood “MMOs” at the time. For context, World of Warcraft came out in 2004, two years after .hack//Infection, so “MMO” up until that point in the west meant either EverQuest or Ultima Online.
The World is closer in execution to something like Sega’s Phantasy Star Online from 2000 in that there are small, shared communal areas (known as “Root Towns”) where you can hang out with other players, but your actual fighting and questing takes place in discrete areas that you teleport to rather than exploring a coherent world. It’s not quite the same as the “instanced” areas seen in World of Warcraft and, later, Final Fantasy XIV, as you can meet up with other players who happen to be visiting the same area, but the nature of how The World is structured means that you’re relatively unlikely to stumble across someone at random.
Anyway, let’s not get bogged down too much in details as I’ll probably want to write about this on MoeGamer once I’m finished. Suffice to say for now that .hack//Infection and its subsequent parts unfold as a combination of you just flat-out playing The World to get treasure, gear and helpful items, and gradually working your way through the core mystery at the heart of everything. At most points in the game, you can put the main plot on hold and just go dungeon-crawling to your heart’s content — and it’s probably advisable to, since you’ll need to level both your own character and the various companions you can recruit to your cause.
.hack//Infection is somewhat clunky by more recent action RPG standards, but once you get a feel for it and an understanding of its mechanics, it’s enjoyable. There’s a variety of enemies to deal with, and their different strengths and weaknesses will often require you to think about various strategies to deal with them. And, since the game is supposed to be simulating an MMO, you can pretty much concentrate on your own play; any companions you bring with you will usually do a pretty good job of fighting alongside you, though you can issue various orders to them if you need them to, say, heal or unleash their most powerful abilities. You can also micromanage their equipment to a certain degree, and since equipment has skills attached, by doing this you can try and optimise them for the challenges you’re about to face.
I can completely understand the criticisms of .hack from back in the day. It is repetitive. The dungeons are very obviously constructed from pre-built blocks with different textures put atop them, and there’s not a lot of variation to them. And yet there’s something about .hack that I’ve always found fascinating and compelling. I think it’s the oddly menacing atmosphere the whole thing has; The World, as a game, is designed to be cheerful and colourful, but it’s very obvious that there are dark things going on beneath the surface, and that the players of the game are clearly being used for some nefarious purpose.
I’m in no rush to plough through all four games, but I’ve enjoyed making a start on .hack//Infection this weekend, and as a long term project I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes together in the end. And there will, of course, be in-depth articles on MoeGamer (and possibly videos) to go along with it.
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.
Since UFO 50’s release, I’ve had a few Thoughts. Firstly, UFO 50 is one of the most noteworthy interactive creative projects ever put together. Secondly, there are a lot of (obviously) young people who really Do Not Get It and, in that inimitably entitled way 21st century gamers do, they think it should change entirely to accommodate how they think it “should” be.
Aside: I’m covering UFO 50 both on MoeGamer and on YouTube. Check out here for the written articles, and here for the video versions of the articles. You can also enjoy the whole playlist embedded below.
A significant portion of the “unrest”, if you want to call it that, comes from Barbuta being the first game in the collection. Barbuta is, as you’ll know if you’ve read or watched my piece on it, a game that is ostensibly from 1982, and which follows the mould of the “arcade adventure”, a genre of game that doesn’t really exist any more, but which was a major part of the ’80s home computer scene.
In the “lore” of UFO 50, which, if you’re unfamiliar, concerns a completely fictional games console known as the LX System, Barbuta was the first game to be developed — and by an individual who had never made a game before, no less. Consequently, it’s janky, slow and unrefined — deliberately so. The nature of how it is janky, slow and unrefined makes it very clear that Derek Yu and the various other developers who put UFO 50 together are intimately familiar with ’80s home computer games — but it also sets expectations for the rest of UFO 50 accordingly.
One of the most significant things about UFO 50 is that it is, in part, a demonstration of how game design can be inherently intuitive. None of the games feature full instructions beyond their basic controls and sometimes a little bit of in-game information text, and yet they’re all designed in such a way that you can figure things out without too much difficulty. In Barbuta’s case, the main challenge comes from determining what all the items you can collect actually do — because the game certainly doesn’t tell you.
But here’s the key thing: it all makes sense. It’s easy to determine what all the items do, either by logical deduction or simply observing what happens on-screen. And this is true not just for Barbuta, but also for pretty much all of the other games in the collection, too. You just have to use your brain a bit.
This isn’t enough for some “gamers” though. There’s a guy on UFO 50’s Steam forums spamming pretty much every thread he can find about how he believes the games are a “joke”, that it’s “not funny” and that the package as a whole is a “scam”. There are others complaining about Barbuta as if it’s the only game in the collection, refusing to even contemplate trying any of the other 49 that are available. And there are those who simply do not get it.
UFO 50 is a work of art with something to say. It’s an acknowledgement both of how rapidly game design evolved over the course of the 1980s, and how modern ideas can be applied to these classic formulae to give them a fresh new twist. Demanding that it change to better fit the needs of attention-deficit zoomers is entirely missing the point. These are games that are supposed to be tricky and perhaps not immediately clear, because that’s what games from the ’80s were actually like — but dig into things just a little deeper and you’ll discover that every single game is inherently fair in a way that only 40 years of evolving game design can manage.
What you have to remember is that when real ’80s games came out, they had nothing to refer to on how to do it “right” — and some of them got things what we could consider “wrong” by modern standards. What UFO 50 does is take the conventions of these ’80s games, eliminate the things that just flat-out don’t work, and gives you a collection of titles that feel authentically retro, but also completely fair and modern in their execution. There’s no moon logic, no inconsistent behaviour, no technical shortcomings making things harder through no fault of the player.
In short, it’s a work of genius. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised that some people don’t get it. Perhaps I shouldn’t be frustrated that there are people who want to deface it with mods. Perhaps I should just enjoy it myself, and screw the people who don’t understand.
Yes. That sounds like a good approach. I’ll keep doing that. Please enjoy my series of articles and videos on each and every game!
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.
One of the things I like about having had this blog for so long — and one of the reasons I was so upset at WordPress fucking around with it the other day — is that little “Random Post” option in the menu. Click it, and it takes you to a completely random post. And there are a lot of posts here. So I thought we could go on a little journey together today.
I’ll do all the randomising, don’t worry. If you want to read the full post, just click the title.
This is a post from 2011, when I was playing The Witcher. The first one, albeit in its “Enhanced Edition” form. This was back when you could still get physical copies of PC games; I remember buying a copy of this from Game and being excited to give it a try, then somewhat disappointed that my PC at the time wasn’t really up to the job of running it very well. I kept hold of it, though, and gave it a proper go when I upgraded my PC, and enjoyed the experience very much.
It’s kind of funny to think that back then, CD Projekt Red was a little scrappy Polish developer, and this, their magnum opus at the time, was equally scrappy to a charming degree. Sure, it was technically quite impressive — I recall comparing its visuals favourably to Xbox 360 games that were around at the time — but it also had its fair share of jank, such as heavily repeated NPC models, questionable animations and a dodgy interface.
What really shone through even back then, though, was the quality of the writing, and the fact it felt properly like a game for adults — and not just because of the collectible boobylicious “sex cards” you were awarded for bedding the various ladies of the game world. It was a game with proper consequences, not just “press A for the good answer, B for the evil answer”, and that carried through into its two successors.
Overall, my enjoyment for the series tapered off a bit after the first Witcher game; the second one felt like it was tuned too hard, and the third one’s open world aspect was, to my mind, completely needless. But I have fond memories of the series, and they started right here.
Here’s a post from 2015, in which I was having a play with the PlayStation 4’s ShareFactory app, which I suspect is mostly forgotten today. This is back when I was first experimenting with YouTube, and before I really got into making videos. I found, having experimented with both formats a bit, I enjoyed making pre-scripted videos a little more than freeform “Let’s Play”-style ones, because at the time, in the latter case, I worried about running out of things to say.
I’m still not 100% sure which style of video I actually prefer to this day, as both have their benefits. But if you’re curious, here’s a very early attempt at a pre-scripted video, created using ShareFactory on the PS4 and recorded using a distinctly shittier microphone than I have now. (If I recall, it was actually the Guitar Hero microphone!) I have better equipment and a better workflow now, but I was still quite pleased with this when I first published it.
This was a 2012 progress report on my journey through Sierra’s Quest for Glory series, which I’d never played prior to this runthrough, but had always been curious about. Quest for Glory IV in particular was one I was really looking forward to, as it’s a full “talkie”, featuring the legendary John Rhys-Davies on narration duties.
I compared Quest for Glory IV to the Elder Scrolls series, using its similar “use it to improve it” skill systems as a point of comparison. I had already started falling off the Elder Scrolls bandwagon by this point, and games like Quest for Glory reminded me why; I simply preferred a much smaller, well-crafted environment with things to do rather than a vast open world with not much of actual interest in it.
Quest for Glory and The Elder Scrolls are very different series, of course — if you’ve never come across the former, I recommend exploring it; the blend of role-playing game and point-and-click adventure is still unique and fresh-feeling — but I find it a bit of a shame that one approach very much became “the norm”, particularly in the PC space, while the other languishes in gaming history. In fact, I bemoaned this very fact in this post; why haven’t there been more attempts to recreate the Quest for Glory formula?
Off to 2016 for this next post, and a reminder of something that I like to try and remember every so often: sometimes it’s nice to cleanse one’s gaming palate with a game you can finish in an evening or a weekend. At the time, I had just come off the horror game Outlast (which I didn’t like all that much) and the visual novel Negligee (which I liked very much) and come to the conclusion that Not All Games Need To Be A Thousand Hours Long.
This is something that today’s games industry is still struggling with. The triple-A space is still obsessed with making us all grind through epic amounts of Content rather than just providing a neat 10-hour experience that doesn’t outstay its welcome. This has only become worse with the rise of live service games — and, worse, single-player games that appear to want to be live service games.
Thankfully, short-form games do still also exist. And I recommend you spend some time with some. Because you might find that they offer a lot of value.
Back to 2014 now, and a look at EA’s desecration of Dungeon Keeper by turning it into a tap-and-wait free-to-play piece of shit for mobile phones. Back then I said “it pretty much is reasonable to brand free-to-play mobile games a universally bad thing… I can’t think of any good free-to-play mobile games offhand”. This situation has changed a bit since then, most notably in the “gacha games” space, because they actually have a bit of a game attached to them now, but I still swore off free-to-play mobile games a while back and haven’t missed them.
Dungeon Keeper was an absolute monstrosity though. It was one of those games that was posing as a strategy game, but which actually required no strategy whatsoever; only deep pockets. Crazy to think this was ten years ago now, and EA hasn’t learned a fucking thing since.
This post from 2008 makes me a bit sad, because it represents an age of my life that seems to have come to an end, and not through my choice. It’s a rundown of some board games I particularly enjoyed playing, posted during the time when we were having regular (weekly-ish) board game sessions and trying out a wide variety of weird and wonderful games.
Sadly, the folks I played those games with have mostly become boring grown-ups with families since then and never want to do anything any more, so I have a cupboard full of board games that don’t get played. Which is a shame, but oh well. That is what happens as we all grow old.
Anyway, on that melancholy note, probably time to call it a night. If you’re new ’round here, feel free to hit that Random button and check out some posts from years gone by; just remember to check the date on any posts you read, though, before you get mad at me about something I said 15 years ago!
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.
Hello! And welcome to the all-new incarnation of I’m Not Doctor Who, which can now be found at https://imnotdoctorwho.moegamer.net instead of its previous WordPress.com incarnation. (The old site is still there for archival/linking purposes, but all new updates will now be over here.)
Why did I do this? I think you know why, if you’re a regular follower, anyway. After Automattic’s dumbass automated “anti-spam” systems mistakenly flagged my blog and simply nuked it (albeit temporarily) rather than attempting to contact me in any way, I became somewhat concerned as to the “security” of the memories I have stored on this here blog. 17+ years of them, to be exact, and it would be a real pisser to lose them. Because while this blog is and always has been an unfocused mess with no real purpose other than to be a scratch pad for me to write whatever I feel like, it’s mine, and having some idiotic undoubtedly “AI” (ugh) powered bot potentially take it away from me at a moment’s notice without even telling me made me feel like it was probably time I took better ownership of it.
So here we are, on a shiny new subdomain of moegamer.net, my gaming website. I think most of the important stuff has transferred over now, though not without fighting WordPress’ terrible import function and the fact that no website on the Internet, including WordPress themselves, actually hosts up-to-date information on how to perform the export and import function correctly. Consequently, there may be a few broken images here and there, so please feel free to let me know if you spot any and I’ll attempt to fix them.
The incident earlier in the week highlighted how important this site is to me, though. Not only has it played host to two sets of daily ramblings in the form of the #oneaday blogs, it also includes several creative writing projects of varying degrees of finishedness, photographs, memories of dearly departed pets, and all manner of other things. It has also helped me survive several incredibly tough periods of my life.
The more I thought about it while the site was down the other day, the angrier I felt that it had just been snatched from me without warning — and, I reiterate, without me having done anything wrong. This was entirely on WordPress’ parent company Automattic, who are going in hard on “AI” bullshit at the moment. And so while this site is still running on the WordPress software, it is no longer running on Automattic’s platform, meaning I am not beholden to the whims of their automated shit machines going voonkarankachank and nuking any blogs they feel like without having the courtesy to contact the authors first.
So that’s that. Welcome, I guess. And let’s see where things go from here!
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.
I’ve been trying to make an effort, when I listen to music, to put a full album on and let it run all the way through. It’s how I enjoyed listening to music as a teen and twentysomething — I had a big CD collection that I kind of wish I hadn’t gotten rid of now — and I’m beginning to drift back into preferring that kind of listening now, too.
Y’see, I’ve become increasingly conscious of the “media as content” problem that we, as a society, have been enthusiastically plunging ourselves headfirst into. Music has become disposable, and streaming services have made it very difficult for career musicians to… well, have a career out of music. Not only that, there is a not-insignificant number of people out there now who simply don’t respect music for its artistry; they just want “background noise”. Doesn’t matter what it is, so long as it’s noise.
I had a 3+ hour drive to and from the office yesterday and today respectively, so I decided to listen to some music rather than putting a podcast on. And I deliberately set up my music queue to play several full albums in succession rather than just a selection of favourite tracks — or, worse, just sticking it on “Shuffle” or “Radio” and letting it do its thing.
I really enjoyed it. And there’s still something very pleasant about listening to an entire album in the context it’s supposed to be heard. Really good albums feel like they’re taking you on a journey; it’s not necessarily that they have a narrative (though, of course, some do) but they do have a definite sense of progression from track to track. This is particularly evident in the case of stuff like Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land, which smoothly transitions one track into the next, making for one continuous soundscape that evolves in character and energy as it progresses through its complete runtime.
I will attempt to outline my enjoyment of several albums that I found to be particular highlights throughout both journeys.
WWDD – Dempagumi.inc
I can’t remember how I first came across Dempagumi.inc, a Japanese idol group that has been around since 2008, but I remember being very struck with this particular album from 2015 the first time I heard it. The songs were catchy and it felt like there was a sense of narrative to it. I didn’t understand a word of it, of course, with it being all in Japanese, but I felt like that didn’t matter all that much; what does matter to the Dempagumi.inc experience is being swept along by the energy of the group.
One track that I particularly like is Dear Stage e Youkoso (above). It’s not necessarily the song on the album that I would describe as the “best”, but the narrative setup of a seemingly downtrodden-sounding man discovering the real-life idol bar Dear Stage really works well. The listener finds themselves inhabiting the role of this man who gradually discovers joy through surrounding himself with the energy of the idols, and it feels like the performance is just for you. Or him. Or both. Whatever. Anyway, it’s good.
The whole album is energetic and enjoyable, and it’s one I come back to a lot. Definitely a good.
These Nuts – Ninja Sex Party
I absolutely adore Ninja Sex Party, the musical outfit run by Dan Avidan (best known as half of Game Grumps) and theoretical physicist Brian Wecht. Their work captures an absolutely perfect balance between being perfect pastiches of classic ’80s rock and ballads, and being utterly, hilariously absurd. I could pick any Ninja Sex Party album to go in this slot, but These Nuts, their album from this year, is the one that particularly stuck in my mind today.
The opening track (after Danny Sexbang’s obligatory introduction) is one of my favourites. Get Ready (To Get Ready) is a brilliantly energetic piece about people who will never be quite ready to do something when you want them to be — there’s always one little thing to do, an email to send or something like that. The whole thing is delivered with such overblown earnestness that it’s hard not to enjoy it.
Sports Anthem is also brilliant just because of the mental image it conjures up. It doesn’t matter what sport it’s referring to — because it doesn’t refer to any specific one, and one suspects that neither Danny Sexbang nor Ninja Brian being really into sports is definitely part of the joke — the sentiment of “don’t fuck it up” is universal.
The Fat of the Land – Prodigy
I vividly remember when I “discovered” Prodigy. I was on a bus for a school trip of some description, and my partial namesake Peter Miles was listening to a CD single of Breathe by Prodigy. I asked him if I could have a listen, and was immediately taken by, more than anything, the immensely satisfying drumbeat.
I hadn’t really thought much of Prodigy prior to this. I’d probably heard Out of Space in passing, and I absolutely detested Firestarter the first time I heard it — though this was, in part, reflected disgust from my parents who, quite understandably, didn’t understand the appeal.
But Breathe resonated with me for some reason, even though I still don’t know what the actual words are. And when The Fat of the Land came out, I listened to it a lot. I liked Firestarter in context, though it was probably my least favourite track on the album.
Returning to it today, it’s a great album. An absolute punch in the face of noise for most of its runtime, of course, but it has that really great sense of progression I was talking about before. Wisely, the whole album doesn’t rely on heavy basslines and driving rhythms as in Breathe; around the midpoint there are several more downtempo numbers including the famous Mindfields (probably known by most people due to it being in The Matrix), the Crispian Mills-fronted Narayan and the instrumental Climbatize, all of which I rather like (though I must admit I’d forgotten about Climbatize until today’s listen). Definitely one I will likely pop on when I’m in the mood for something loud.
Album-making is definitely an art form, and I worry that it’s something we’re at risk of losing — as with so many forms of culture. I feel like in the last 25 years or so we’ve lost more forms of culture than we’ve gained; the vapid brain-rotting dogshit that is TikTok doesn’t feel like a very fair exchange for listening to full albums being the norm.
Still, it’s not as if those old albums have gone away. So I’m going to continue making a point of listening to full albums as much as I can. And if you haven’t done it for a while, I recommend giving it a go — you might be pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable it is.
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.
Hello. Perhaps you noticed that for some of yesterday and most of today, this site was down for “violations of the Terms of Service”.
I had not violated the Terms of Service. What had happened was that WordPress.com’s automated anti-spam service had somehow flagged my site mistakenly, and because we’re all so fucking keen to trust stupid, proven-to-be-immensely fallible automation, it just nuked my site rather than, you know, actually attempting to contact me.
I’m glad I got the site back (not before sending about six emails to WordPress, because they didn’t even have the courtesy to send me an email notification that the site had been suspended) but I won’t lie: this whole incident has severely damaged my trust in WordPress.com. And that is a big deal; this site has been hosted on WordPress.com since 2008, and for the longest time, my site MoeGamer.net was also hosted on WordPress.com.
For many years, I have recommended WordPress in preference to all other similar platforms for its ease of use and flexibility. Sure, WordPress.com’s paid plans are vastly overpriced for what they provide, but the simplicity of what the platform offers and how you don’t have to do any complicated configuration or optimisation to get a site running efficiently has always been a big selling point in my book.
Unfortunately, of late, WordPress’ parent company Automattic has been drinking deep of the AI Kool-Aid, and stupid, pointless, obnoxious AI features are infesting every part of their operation, leading to rampant enshittification. When I first attempted to enquire about what had happened to my site, I was greeted with this response:
What “Wapuu” did not tell me was that when you have a suspended blog, you are not allowed to post in WordPress.com’s forums, so I was seemingly completely out of luck at any attempt to communicate with an actual human being about the situation. Thankfully, I found a loophole and managed to post anyway. But I was dismayed to see this post as the top pinned post in said forums:
I particularly like how they acknowledge that AI frequently talks complete shit, so you should “verify the accuracy” of anything something tells you. Support forums are supposed to be a place to go to get helpful advice, not a bot telling you to eat poisonous mushrooms or some other such shit. I am not interested in “embracing the amazing potential of AI”, I want someone from the fucking company to help me with a problem I am having which the company has caused.
It took multiple emails to WordPress.com to even get them to acknowledge there was a problem because, as I say, I was not even sent an email notification (or indeed a notification via WordPress’ own system) to tell me that the site was suspended — and, of course, that left me completely in the dark as to why it was suspended, too.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that this blog, as low-effort as it can probably seem at times, is immensely precious to me. It hosts nearly 17 years of memories and helped me survive some seriously dark times in my life, and it’s always been a valuable means of self-expression and self-therapy. To have it suddenly taken away through something that was 100% not my fault in the slightest was devastating, and it’s all but destroyed my trust in WordPress.com and Automattic as a company.
I’m presently looking into moving this blog into the self-hosted space, likely as a subdomain of moegamer.net, so watch this space for news on that if I get things sorted. In the meantime, hopefully this post won’t trigger any “AI” to take everything down again, because I’m really angry about what happened here. While you’re always at risk of something like this happening when hosting your work on servers that belong to someone else — particularly if you’re using a free service — it doesn’t feel acceptable that a 17 year old, well-established site can be completely nuked at the whim of a clearly fallible automated solution.
So yeah. That’s the situation. At least things were resolved… for now, at least. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how things go from here.
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Because I’m sick of feeling like a decrepit old man and I can’t quite muster up the mental wellbeing to head to the gym right now, I dusted off my copy of Fitness Boxing 2 for Nintendo Switch and have been giving it a go for the last couple of days. I considered grabbing the new Hatsune Miku version of the game, but it’s £50 and I haven’t yet established a good routine with the two previous entries in the series I have on my shelf. So I thought I’d do something about it.
The trouble with exercise is that it always feels like it’s going to be a bloody nightmare to get started, particularly after a long period of inactivity, but then once you actually do it it’s rather satisfying. My two sessions of Fitness Boxing 2 over the past couple of days have been hard work for someone as out of shape as I am — though my rhythm game skills have netted me a “Fitness Age” of 24 on both occasions, thereby proving once and for all that such a metric is, as everyone suspected, complete bollocks — but I’ve come out of both of them feeling like I’ve done something worthwhile, and something that, in the long run, will be good for me.
For those unfamiliar with Fitness Boxing, it’s a game that somewhat follows the mould of Nintendo’s classic Wii-era fitness games, only with a bit more of a specific focus rather than providing lots of minigames. At its core, it’s a rhythm game, tasking you with using the Joy-Cons to punch in various ways and, in the more advanced workouts, ducking, weaving and suchlike, too — though pleasingly, given how dodgy the motion detection can be on movements other than punching, you can turn any troublesome exercises off, or set the game to automatically score you “Perfect” on them, regardless of what the Joy-Cons tell the Switch you were doing.
A full daily workout consists of several stages, beginning and ending with some simple stretches. In between, you’ll have a series of specific workouts of varying degrees of intensity and difficulty, typically following your opening stretches and preceding your closing stretches with something relatively gentle and putting one or more fairly high-intensity (and longer) ones in the middle.
Each individual stage tends to unfold in the same way. You’ll start in “orthodox” stance (left foot forward, right foot back) and gradually be introduced to a complete combo, usually one move at a time but sometimes a bit quicker in the shorter, lower-intensity stages. You’ll gradually build up to performing the full combo, and in a special “Zone” sequence where you get more points, you perform the full combo multiple times in rapid succession — typically four, six or eight times in a row without a gap in between, depending on the length of the combo.
After that, you switch to “southpaw” stance (right foot forward, left foot back) and then do the exact same thing, but the other way around. In the higher intensity, longer workouts, you’ll then do another combo, again both in orthodox and southpaw stances, and then you’re done.
Typically a short stage lasts about 5-6 minutes, and longer stages are about 11-12 minutes apiece. The “Normal” intensity workout for a day consists of stretches, two short stages and two long stages, totalling about 35-40 minutes of activity altogether; you also have the choice of doing a slightly shorter or longer workout, which equates to about 25-30 or 45-50 minutes of activity respectively by varying the number of stages in the complete workout.
As someone who is desperately unfit, the pacing of the exercises seem OK to me at the moment. The longer stages definitely feel like an effort to endure, but that’s good — they’re not so difficult that I can’t make it through them, but I do feel like I’m doing some actual work that will be beneficial.
I could be doing them better, of course; the game suggests that when you’re not punching, you bob back and forth in time with the music and I can’t quite manage to keep that up constantly along with all the other stuff, but I’m sure I can get there over the long term. The important thing is, after all, getting started.
The trainer voices throughout are rather repetitive, but helpful in giving you cues and encouragement, and the visual demonstration of what you’re supposed to be doing (“mirrored” so you can follow along more easily) is very helpful. The game-like feel to the whole thing makes it feel more “fun” than some other forms of exercise, and there’s a wide range of musical accompaniments to go along with your workouts — including both instrumental versions of “real” songs and some original stuff composed specifically for the game. The original stuff is actually quite a bit better than some of the Kidz Bop-tier arrangements, but honestly part of the fun of the game is the absurdity inherent in aggressively throwing punches to something like Hot and Cold by Katy Perry or the frigging YMCA.
I have a long drive tomorrow afternoon after work, and then a long drive back home after work the day after, so I’ll likely take a rest for at least tomorrow and possibly the day after also, depending on how I feel when I get back, but I intend to get back to this as soon as I can. It feels pitched at about the level I can deal with right now, and I think it’ll just be helpful to get moving a bit in any way. Because I’m sick of waking up aching all over like someone twice my age, and I suspect a significant part of the reason that is happening is because I haven’t been exercising.
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.
I’ve seen quite a few news reports and political manifestos over the course of the last few years that claim “we” as a society are supposedly doing something to “tackle loneliness”.
Okay. What?What are “we” doing to tackle loneliness? Because from where I’m sitting in this extremely lonely state of mind, I can see precisely fuck all going on. I am in a position where I feel like I need some sort of help in this regard, and I do not have a fucking clue where I might go to find it.
Oh, I can see lots of statistics and reports that confirm indeed, yes, people are feeling lonely. But no actual action taking place. Lots of big words like “we need to take a holistic life course approach” and other such shit, but no actual evidence of anything really being done.
Which, of course, begs the question: exactly what can be done? “Tackling loneliness” isn’t just a case of dumping a bunch of people in a room and telling them to talk to one another — though one of our local bus companies seems to think that branding their buses the “ChattyBus” and encouraging people to make “bus friends” is an approach that will have any effect whatsoever, clearly not understanding that the sort of people who will talk to you on a bus are generally not people you want in your immediate circle of friends.
There are volunteer services that exist in an attempt to “tackle loneliness”, but I feel like these would always feel very artificial. Someone is acting like your friend because it’s their job to act like your friend. I’m sure real social connections can and do come about as a result of initiatives like this, but judging by a quick scoot around the websites for ones in the general area, they are all very oversubscribed. Which, in itself, probably says something that isn’t all that good.
Mostly I just want my old friendships back. Friendships from before an age of social media, friendships from before the worldwide political stage became the perpetual firework show it seems to be these days, friendships from when we were all just happy to hang out and do something fun in one another’s company.
And it’s not as if I haven’t tried to maintain those friendships that used to be like that. But I always seem to be faced with resistance: resistance that seems to grow by the year. I have reached a point where I feel very much unwanted by a lot of people with whom I used to be very close, and it upsets me. Like, really upsets me. Keeps-me-awake-at-night upsets me.
And this feeling of being unwanted of course feeds into other mental health issues — including self-esteem and social anxiety. If the people who are supposedly some of my oldest friends don’t want me, how on Earth can I be expected to find the confidence to make new friends? How, even, do you make new friends in 2024? I just don’t know any more.
In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever known. I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again, because it’s relevant.
On my first day at secondary school, I was pleased to discover I was in a class with several of the people I had known at primary school — including the person who was ostensibly my “best friend”. We had been put in a seating arrangement for morning registration, presumably in an attempt to get us to mingle a bit and get to know one another. I was sat next to a lad called Murray. I had absolutely no idea how to talk to him. I vividly remember turning around to my former “best friend”, who was sitting behind me, and urgently whispering to him “I don’t remember how to make friends”.
Because I didn’t. And I still don’t. Any friendships I found myself in tended to be ones of circumstance such as living together in the same flat at university, and I always felt like I existed on the periphery of larger friendship groups that these acquaintances had. I felt like I was “intruding”, like I wouldn’t be welcome if I tried to ingratiate myself with these people who “weren’t my friends”. Those people were their friends, not my friends, and what right did I have to attempt to call them my friends too?
It looks silly on paper, I’m sure, but that’s the reality of social anxiety. Legitimately one of my proudest moments of personal growth in my whole life is a time I was caught in a lift with a stranger I was on a music course with and I plucked up the courage to actually introduce myself. I felt enormously awkward and like a complete idiot at the time, but that one occasion actually became a genuine friendship — and several other friendships came about as a result of that initial contact.
But good Lord, did it ever feel like scaling Everest to get those words out of my mouth in the first place. And these days, I don’t exactly find myself stuck in a lift with people I might have something in common with all that often. So here I am, stuck typing this to myself at 11:15 on a Sunday night, wondering where it all went wrong and even if it’s possible to fix things at this point. Because the longer this goes on, the more I worry about what the end result of it all might be for me.
I’m lonely. That’s about it, really.
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.
Well, I streamed for a bit! But I didn’t do UFO 50 in the end. I wasn’t satisfied with how it was performing while running at the same time as OBS, so rather than faff around attempting to optimise stuff, I decided to stream some Evercade stuff instead — specifically Thalamus Collection 1.
I enjoyed the stream. I kept things simple and just played some games. A few people showed up, including some real people as well as some bots (who were swiftly blocked) and we all had a good time. I’m keen to do some more.
I haven’t yet decided how this is going to fit in with everything else I do, but I think I might want to try and do something at least semi-regular. If I can set aside an evening in the week as “stream night” I think that might be good — streaming in the evening means that I should be able to get people from multiple time zones. I have viewers on YouTube from both sides of the pond, so that’s always been a consideration.
Right now, Tuesday nights are out because that’s Slimming World night, and Wednesday should probably be kept free because I often go into the office on Wednesdays and get back late.
Thursday might be good. It’s midweek, and it’s not an obvious night when people want to go out and do stuff like on a Friday. So I think I might try and make a go of it on Thursdays, focusing on retro stuff.
We’ll see. Next week is a busy one as I’m heading to the office for one of those aforementioned trips, but I think it might be fun to get this sort of thing started.
And getting started is one of the hardest bits, I guess!
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.
