#oneaday Day 135: Just one is fine

As I type this, I can overhear my wife listening to some YouTuber I hate the sound of promising to “review every celebrity brand make-up”. And this reminded me of a weird trend that is specifically a YouTube thing, whereby it seems like looking at just one thing is never enough, you’ve always got to do every instance of a thing.

I Ate At Every Margaritaville In the Country. I Watched Every Barbie Movie. I Played Every Poorly Reviewed Soulslike Game on Steam. This particular “style” of video always seems to be combined with some sort of deliberate suffering — both for the presenter and the viewer, I’d wager — and honestly, it just doesn’t appeal to me at all. I’m the sort of person who would much rather take their time over exploring something sprawling in depth and detail than attempting to cram it all into one video — because I can’t help but feel if you’re cramming a massive amount of things into one video, each individual thing isn’t going to get much of a look-in, is it?

I realise this is the point of some of these videos, either to highlight the fact that the many instances of Thing are almost identical to one another and thus can’t really be distinguished, but it still irks me somewhat — especially when it comes to a lineup of things that is quite varied such as, say, the output of a particular software company. A video along the lines of “I Played Every Blizzard Game” feels like it would do none of the games any real justice, because each one is very different from the last and deserves its time to shine. Hell, even “I Watched Every Barbie Movie” is probably doing at least some of the Barbie movies a disservice.

My thinking along these lines is why I handled the “Atari A to Z Flashback” series on my YouTube channel as I did. Atari Flashback Classics for Nintendo Switch had 150 games, so I made 150 videos. It took a long time, but I came out of it feeling like I’d completed a worthwhile project — and I absolutely gained some new appreciation for a bunch of games from among that 150 that I otherwise wouldn’t have if I’d just given them all a cursory glance and been done within 20 minutes.

Now I’m not saying that everything has to be an epic, long series or anything, and I suspect what I’m describing is more of a “me problem” than anything else. But I know that I, personally, would much rather take my time going through something with a lot of component parts, giving each piece time to digest and myself the opportunity to come to some conclusions that I might not otherwise have been able to if I was racing through to meet my “content deadline”.

I guess that isn’t what people want these days, though. They want short, quick-fire, snappy — because the modern Web has been set up to pander primarily to those with no attention span. But, as I’ve argued on several previous occasions, I fear that this just creates a vicious cycle, whereby people’s attention spans get shorter and shorter, and the quality and depth people go into when writing or producing videos suffers as a result.

If someone doesn’t have the attention span to stick around for more than 3 seconds, that’s not my problem; that is very much their problem. I am gratified to see the recent growth in “newsletters” (or blogs, as we used to call them) that present long-form articles intended to be sat down with and savoured; they’re not for everyone, sure, but it does please me to know that there are other people out there who enjoy life on the verbose side of things, and they don’t care if they “lose” some people due to the sheer length of what they post. As I say, that’s a reader problem, not a writer problem. No-one told Charles Dickens not to spend so many fucking pages describing fog — instead, he just gave anyone who couldn’t handle it the finger, and his work continues to be regarded as a classic regardless. No-one’s going to remember the names of any YouTube Shorts or TikTok creators in 50 years.

I think I got off the point somewhere. But yeah. Review one thing at a time, please. Then I might take your opinions seriously.

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 134: Layers of fear

I finished the Silent Hill 2 remake this evening. Aside from some truly infuriating boss battles towards the end — which is, at least, true to the source material — it was a fantastic, respectful experience that pays wonderful tribute to a horror classic while adding enough mechanical tweaks to make it a bit more palatable to a modern audience. But I don’t want to talk about that today. Instead, I want to talk a bit about fear, because while I was playing Silent Hill 2, I got thinking about things I’ve been irrationally afraid of over the years.

Fear is a strange thing — and, indeed, often irrational, hence the existence of the word “phobia”. I suspect there’s a lot for psychologists to unpack by looking at the things we are irrationally afraid of — or even the things that we feel a bit uneasy about.

When I was a child, I was afraid of quite a few things. The main one was spiders. I still don’t like spiders and will likely do anything in my power to get myself out of a situation involving a particularly large hairy spider, but I have mellowed a little in that regard over the years. That’s a pretty common, boring one though; most people spend at least some time in their life being afraid of spiders, and it’s not a particularly unreasonable fear, I don’t think; while obviously little house spiders aren’t going to do anything to harm you, the aforementioned large hairy spiders can absolutely do some serious damage to you, and thus I think it’s just fine to want to say “fuck that” to all spiders.

A more unusual fear I had was a fear of passing by my bedroom window in the middle of the night. In my childhood bedroom, my bed was in a sort of little “alcove” at the side of the room, and in order to leave the bedroom (to visit the toilet, say) I had to climb out of the alcove and pass by the window. For some reason, I was absolutely convinced that there was something lurking somewhere in the vicinity of that window, so if I needed to get up and go for a wee in the middle of the night, I’d often leap past the window so I spent as little time as possible exposing myself to the unknown evil that was lying in wait.

An equally bizarre fear that I think was related to the window thing was a fear of a plush toy pajama case I owned, known as American Brown Bear, because he was from America and he was a brown bear. I was absolutely fine with American Brown Bear in the daytime, but at night-time I was convinced he was possessed by some unknown evil presence, and I suspect at least one of the things I feared with regard to my bedroom window was American Brown Bear jumping out and “getting” me.

I sort of know where that one came from. And I mean “sort of”, because the thing that I think caused that fear couldn’t have possibly happened, making me think that it was some sort of dream, hallucination or other false memory. Or perhaps it’s an actual memory of something someone did that I’d come to have peculiar associations with. Either way, it’s a strange one. Are you ready?

I was convinced that when American Brown Bear would jump out and “get” me, he would shout “MRS. LINCOLN PUPPIES”. And for some reason, I found this absolutely terrifying, despite it obviously making no sense whatsoever. I have no idea who Mrs. Lincoln is, or indeed why I should care about her puppies — or what American Brown Bear had to do with the puppies, for that matter. But what I do know for sure is that that phrase struck the absolute fear of God into me as a young’un.

For the record, American Brown Bear never “got” me, to my knowledge, and likewise the ancient evil lurking in the vicinity of my bedroom window never showed itself, either. And, as a result, I eventually left those fears behind — particularly once my brother left home and I was able to move into the larger bedroom at the back of the house. The windows in that room weren’t scary.

Another completely irrational feeling — I’m not sure I’d call it a “fear” as such — that I’ve had for as long as I can remember is another oddly specific thing, and that is that I feel distinctly uneasy around toilets with a very high cistern. You know, the kinds you get in sort of Victorian-era houses that have never really been updated; the kind of toilet that looks ridiculous if you draw it, because the cistern is comically high up compared to modern toilets.

I don’t know why I have this sense of unease around them. I don’t know what I think is going to happen. Perhaps it’s more a fear-by-association sort of thing; toilets like this tend to be in old houses, which tend to be in varying states of disrepair and often have lots of spiders lurking in dark corners. Whatever the reason, I don’t like them and will generally avoid having to spend any time in a toilet with a high cistern. I’ll have a wee in one no problem, but I’d rather not go for a poo on a toilet like that. I have no idea why, but that is the reality of the situation.

A related fear that I had as a child which I subsequently got rid of was an irrational fear of extractor fans in bathrooms. Oddly enough, I remember the exact circumstances under which I developed this fear. At the time, my language skills were still developing — I was about 4 or 5 years old at the time — and we were visiting America. My Dad had, I think, been doing some work out there, but because he was out there for some time he was able to bring the rest of the family along. It was a great (and long, from what I recall) trip, during which we took in, among other things, Disney World in Florida.

The reason I mention my language skills developing at the time is because I didn’t know what an extractor fan was called, so I called it a “dotch”. More accurately, an extractor fan which came on when you pulled a cord to turn the light on in a bathroom was a “wim-dotch wib hamdongs”; “dotch”, meanwhile, was a more generic term that could just mean “ominous-looking air vent”, as seen in the bathrooms of my grandparents’ houses.

Anyway, the reason I became frightened of the dotch was because of a Muppets movie we had watched on television. The Muppet Movie, as it happens, and specifically this scene:

Yes, that is Kermit the Frog being put into what is essentially an electric chair — sorry, an “electronic celebrectomy” machine. I found this scene intensely traumatic when I saw it as a kid, and I was horrified to discover that the bathroom light in the motel we were staying at at the time — the Edison Motor Inn, Poughkeepsie, NY, if you were curious — resembled the glowing circular light at the top of the “electronic celebrectomy” machine. For some reason, that then led me to associate the wim-dotch wib hamdongs that came on at the same time as the light with this “electric chair”, which then caused me to be afraid of dotches for a good few years afterwards.

I don’t think I ever told anyone the specifics of that because even then I knew it was a ridiculous association to make in my head — in fact, for many years, I was convinced that I had completely made up the above scene, and wasn’t able to confirm it was real once and for all until YouTube came along. But that’s the thing with irrational fears: they are completely irrational, and make no sense. However stupid you know they are, if they’ve taken a hold, they will still frighten you, even as part of your brain is frantically telling the scared part “you are being ridiculous“. And it seems I was particularly prone to this sort of irrational fear as a kid.

You will be pleased to know that I am no longer afraid of dotches. Spiders, no thanks. Toilets with high cisterns, only if I have to. But dotches? I think I’m fine now. Probably.

#oneaday Day 133: Back to life, back to reality

We’re back home! Boo! Although honestly, we’re both kind of knackered, so it’s nice to get back home, see the cats and have the prospect of our own bed waiting for us. It’s been a lovely break, and we enjoyed a final dip in the pool before we departed early this afternoon, but now we both need a day or two to get ourselves back in working order for a vaguely normal existence from Monday onwards!

I was pleased to see that my cat Patti has been getting along with my mother-in-law while we were away. Patti is a very shy, scared cat when confronted with anyone other than us, but it seems that she’s learned to trust my mother-in-law over the course of the last few days. The pair have spent some time together before and they had a similar outcome; Patti hid for the first little while, but eventually came out and became quite friendly and sociable once she determined once and for all that there was no threat, and, in fact, there was the distinct possibility of being spoiled with treats.

Oliver, meanwhile, has seemingly had a lovely time. He’s already a very sociable cat, and it sounds as if my mother-in-law has had a nice time playing with him. We reckon he’s probably about a year and a half old at this point, and he still loves to play for hours; we’ll often hear him kicking his toys around well into the early hours of the morning once we’ve gone to bed, and he is showing no signs whatsoever of slowing down just yet.

A few packages arrived while we were away. One was a pair of swimming shorts that I paid for next-day delivery on in the hope that they would arrive before we left; needless to say, they did not, in fact, arrive on the next day thanks to Yodel being fucking idiots. “We need some more information about your address,” they said. “Please contact us.” They did not provide any means of contacting them, so I had to go ferreting through their support pages until I found the dreaded “Live Chat” option, then had to endure the obligatory Indian person with broken English copy-pasting set phrases and platitudes from their handbook, only for the outcome to be “we don’t actually need any information about your address, we just fucked up and didn’t even attempt to deliver it”, which was nice. But at least I have a spare pair of swimming shorts for future excursions, I guess.

The one package I was hoping to arrive hasn’t come yet, though: a box of all the Atari-branded sauces. As someone who enjoys sauce, I’m looking forward to trying these, and I also think it will make a fun video to try them all for the first time on camera, so I’m hoping these will arrive sometime soon. Sadly, they’re not here yet and don’t look like they’ve even been dispatched as yet, so I will have to wait a little longer to learn exactly what Yars’ Revenge tastes like.

Anyway, I’m pooped and my back hurts, so I’m going to bed, in my own bed. I suspect I will not wake up until quite late tomorrow. And that’s fine. I’m technically still on holiday, even though I’m back home. And I intend to continue enjoying that holiday until work starts again on Monday!

#oneaday Day 132: Broadcast Television

It must seem incredibly quaint to people who grew up after a certain point to know that when we wanted to watch something on television, we used to be beholden to an arbitrary schedule that wasn’t decided by us, the viewers.

Sure, pay-per-view and on-demand services existed, but they were often extremely expensive and in some cases still beholden to someone else’s schedule.

Today, of course, if you want to watch something you just call it up from any of the bazillion streaming services available, or raid your network-attached storage that is loaded up with pirated movies you’ve torrented over the course of the last decade.

Streaming services have their own drawbacks, of course, with the two main ones being that there are about as many streaming services as there used to be cable packages, and the dreaded “analysis paralysis”, where being given complete freedom to choose anything often causes you to end up choosing nothing.

The reason I bring this up is because while we’ve been away on holiday, we haven’t had any TV-connected streaming devices with us. And you know what? It’s been kind of nice. We’ve watched a bit of telly while we’ve been here, and it’s just been whatever happened to be on while we wanted to just zone out for a bit. And broadcast television as it exists today is more than happy to cater to this type of viewer.

You know the sort of thing: shows that require zero commitment or even attention, like game shows and reality TV programmes about traffic police. Mindless garbage, to be sure, but somehow to me will always feel less offensive than attention-deficit slop on services like TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Perhaps that’s just my age talking — and to be clear, there’s plenty of broadcast TV I find too offensively awful to even watch as background noise — but everything we’ve watched “by chance” this week feels like something I’ve actually got something from, even if it’s just some general knowledge trivia. I absolutely do not get that from “pov: u ordered a large fish and chips at wetherspoons”.

Anyway, it’s time to go home tomorrow, so it will likely be back to not watching any broadcast TV at home. It’s been a nice change, though, and a reminder that some forms of media still aren’t quite as dead as some people would like you to believe.

#oneaday Day 131: Mandela Affected

Well, I’ve been well and truly hit with the Mandela Effect today.

Earlier, I was playing Maniac Square, a puzzle game by Spanish arcade developer Gaelco. Andie overheard the music and asked, “why does that game have the Blue Peter music?”

“It doesn’t,” I said, absolutely convinced of this fact. Blue Peter, as everyone knows, has Sailor’s Hornpipe (or, to give it its more correct name, College Hornpipe) as its theme. The same one they play at the Proms every year.

Except it doesn’t.

Blue Peter, I have learned, actually uses a tune called Barnacle Bill. It’s similar, but different. Have a listen.

Here’s Sailor’s Hornpipe, with a YouTube thumbnail that resembles the Blue Peter logo, just to add insult to injury:

And here is the Blue Peter theme in one of its more famous incarnations by Mike Oldfield of Tubular Bells fame:

You will hopefully forgive me for getting the two confused. But wait! What’s this?

It’s only bloody Mike Oldfield doing the Sailor’s Hornpipe. And just to confuse matters, his rendition of Barnacle Bill for Blue Peter in the ’80s is often misattributed to being a B-side to Tubular Bells called, you guessed it, Sailor’s Hornpipe. Except that one actually is Sailor’s Hornpipe.

For anyone reading this who isn’t British, I’m sorry. I’m not sure I can adequately explain Blue Peter to you other than to say it was a children’s TV show that, during my childhood at least, made a lot of things involving “sticky-backed plastic”, and occasionally also had wild animals shitting in their studio. It’s also the origin point, for a certain generation anyway, of the phrase “here’s one I made earlier”.

You’re going to go and tell me that isn’t true either now, aren’t you?

#oneaday Day 130: Rest and Relaxation

Well, that’s our first “full” day of holiday over and done with, and we’ve had a pleasantly relaxing, chilled out day. The temptation when coming somewhere like Center Parcs is to want to be doing stuff all the time, but honestly we’ve had a very nice day today just visiting the swimming pool in the morning, getting some bits and pieces from the shop for lunch and dinner, and then just enjoying hanging out in our lodge.

It’s strange, isn’t it? Even when you’re doing the sort of things you’d usually do at home, they somehow feel more “special” when you’re doing them somewhere out of the ordinary. I had a cheese baguette at lunchtime and it was approximately 48% more delicious by virtue of the fact it was prepared and eaten by me in a forest cabin rather than our house.

The wildlife around here is insanely tame. Earlier in the day, a group of ducks came up to our window and actually started tapping on it. They somehow knew we’d just made sandwiches, and wanted to participate. At other times, we’ve had deer and squirrels come right up to the patio doors, clearly begging. It seems the advice to not feed the wildlife mostly falls on deaf ears. And the wildlife, it appears, is not above being cute in an attempt to get food.

For activities that don’t involve going outside, I decided to play through Ufouria: The Saga on Evercade while I was here, and I beat it earlier today. That was thoroughly satisfying; it’s a great game, and I’m glad I took the time to play it. Perhaps some words on MoeGamer about that one when I get back.

Anyway, it’s now well after midnight and I should probably sleep. No real plans for tomorrow except to have dinner out, and perhaps do some “Adventure Golf”. Toodle pip.

#oneaday Day 129: Current holiday

We’re on holiday! After a three hour drive earlier today — which honestly already feels like a lifetime ago — we are safely ensconced in our accommodation at Center Parcs.

The last few times we’ve been, we’ve stayed in the apartments that are near the main plaza of shops and restaurants, but this year it was only a little extra to get a two-bedroom lodge in the woods, so we’ve gone for that as a little extra added luxury. It’s lovely having lots of space. Indeed, there’s an entire (bed)room we probably won’t use at all; presently, it’s where I dumped my suitcase so it wouldn’t clutter our bedroom.

We haven’t done very much today. It’s been nice to just relax with no worries or commitment to anything, so we’ve been enjoying that today. We had some nice dinner bought from the shop and an amazing cake, then the rest of the evening has been spent lounging, looking at the wildlife while the light was still present, then watching some TV (old school broadcast style!) and playing some video games.

Tomorrow we’re likely going to hit the pool… sorry, the “Subtropical Swimming Paradise”, and from there, who knows? We have some idle intentions of maybe going to the gym, playing some pool and going bowling, but we’re just going to take each day as it comes and decide according to what we feel like.

The Lodge brings back some nice memories. When I came to Center Parcs as a teen with my family and some friends, we always stayed in a lodge (or a “villa” as they were known then) and while some things have changed — the appliances are more up to date and the TV is, of course, a wall-mounted flatscreen instead of a hulking great CRT — but aside from that, the layout feels comfortably familiar.

It’s bringing back fond memories of my friend Ed attempting to explain the appeal of Wolfenstein 3-D to my parents over breakfast — as I recall, his 12 year old self arguing that you “just don’t notice” the bloody violence after playing a whole didn’t go down too well.

It’s bringing back fond memories of my friend Craig and I watching MTV and realising that we both liked quite a bit broader a spectrum of music than the indie rock that was fashionable at the time — after that holiday, I remember going out and buying Madonna and Savage Garden albums on the strength of the tunes we liked on the TV.

And it’s bringing back fond memories of a trip when I was young enough for my brother to still be living at home with us, and him bringing his friend Alex along. My enduring memory of that pairing was Alex, who thought he was God’s gift to women, causing two girls to fall off their bikes by saying a distinctly Leslie Phillips-style “hell-O!” as they passed by.

A lot of good memories here, then, from both the recent and distant past. It’ll be good to add a few more to the mix this year.

#oneaday Day 128: Imminent Holiday

As I may have mentioned once or twice recently, we’re going on holiday tomorrow. We’ll be away from Monday to Friday visiting Center Parcs in Elveden Forest, which has been a thoroughly nice place to have some time away on all the previous occasions we’ve visited.

My intentions for this holiday are to unplug almost completely. I will post on this blog daily because of the whole #oneaday thing, but outside of that, I intend to avoid any sort of attachment to the Internet whatsoever, except where absolutely necessary to research things. That means I am making the following promises to myself:

I will not worry about writing anything for MoeGamer or making any sort of video for YouTube.
I will not poke my head in on Discord channels that are likely to annoy me.
I will not look at Twitter at all.
I will minimise my use of Bluesky.

I haven’t really talked about the last one at all, but as you may have surmised from the sidebar, I have been dipping my toe back into social media with Bluesky recently. And for the most part, I’ve found it a thoroughly pleasant environment that feels very much like Twitter did in the early days. It’s very left-leaning, which can at times be a little insufferable, and wherever you look you’re very likely to run into either a particularly horny furry or someone proud of the fact they’re wearing a cage on their cock, but for the most part it has been a remarkably stress-free social media experience so far.

Part of the reason for this is that the platform is built to discourage “dunking”, whereas Twitter outright incentivises it these days. The main way Bluesky differs from Twitter is through its absolutely nuclear block function, which means that if someone quote-posts or replies to someone they have subsequently blocked, if you are following the person who made the quote-post or reply, the original post will appear as blocked to you also. This discourages people from going “looking for trouble” because you can’t even see the username of the blocked post. This can be frustrating at times if you missed the original context, but for the most part I think it’s a positive thing.

So anyway, as a result of all that, and the fact I have a few friendly faces there, I have been using Bluesky a bit recently, and thus, if I’m going to share anything about the holiday that isn’t on this blog, I’ll likely do so there. If you’re a Bluesky user and want to follow me, here.

But yes. Anyway, the main point of this post is to note that I will be disconnecting from the greater part of the Internet as much as humanly possible while I am away, because I need it. I need some time away where I just don’t put any unnecessary pressure on myself, or potentially put myself in situations where I might end up getting annoyed. I’m tempted to outright leave a few Discord servers to remove the temptation altogether, but probably won’t go that far.

This holiday is to rest, relax and genuinely get away from it all. My mental health has been in the toilet of late, and the Internet has played a big part in creating that situation. So instead I’m going to be among the trees, play some video games, go swimming and look at friendly deer. We might go and fire a crossbow (not at the deer) and play some pool, too. We haven’t decided yet. But it’s going to be nice.

Today, meanwhile, it’s last-minute packing and tidying up ahead of my mother-in-law coming to look after the cats — sorry burglars, the house will still be occupied while we’re away — and perhaps finishing off Silent Hill 2 later.

#oneaday Day 127: What You Leave Behind

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve made it through all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine at last, and I’m pleased to report that it was fantastic. A consistently excellent show from start to finish, and a real demonstration of why ’90s Trek is so fondly regarded to this day.

I should probably add at this point that there may be spoilers ahead. I have somehow managed to go this long without having any of the latter part of Deep Space Nine (which I hadn’t seen prior to this watchthrough) being spoiled to me, so on the offchance there’s anyone in the world still left in that position, I thought I’d give you due warning. After this image of Doctor Bashir and Garak smouldering with unresolved sexual tension, anything goes discussion-wise.

One of the things I’ve always liked about Star Trek is that it strikes a good balance between being convincingly “sciencey” and having quasi-mystical elements. That’s the kind of sci-fi I like: where there’s a high level of technology and cool spaceships, but also where there’s still stuff that science can’t quite explain, or which feels like it drifts somewhat into the realm of fantasy. As someone who enjoys nothing more than an RPG where you kill God (or equivalent) at the end, I always have time for pseudo-mystical fantasy, even in a sci-fi setting; in fact, I tend to find that particularly “hard” sci-fi — that is to say, sci-fi that paints an overly practical, “realistic” image of the future without any overtly fantastical stuff, is a bit of a turn-off.

Deep Space Nine had this right from its very first episode, where leading character Ben Sisko encounters “The Prophets”, aka the noncorporeal entities that live outside of linear time inside the Bajoran wormhole. And this element runs as a constant thread through the entire series, right up until its climactic confrontation, placing Ben Sisko, Emissary of the Prophets, up against his most fearsome foe: the Emissary of the Pah-wraiths, who, of course, turns out to be Gul Dukat.

Gul Dukat is a thoroughly interesting character throughout the entirety of Deep Space Nine, and played brilliantly by Marc Alaimo. Beginning as a somewhat smarmy individual that is clearly bitter about the Federation occupying the space station he used to be in charge of, the episodes that involve him reveal a character with a considerable amount of depth and complexity — and one who goes through almost as much shit as Miles O’Brien. Sadly for Dukat, he doesn’t pull through in the way O’Brien tends to; his eventual fate is unglamorous, but for him to be the “final boss” of the series, defeated by Sisko flinging himself into the fire with a Pah-wraith-possessed Dukat in tow, is entirely appropriate.

The whole Dominion War arc, which takes up a significant portion of Deep Space Nine’s complete runtime, is kept consistently interesting by allowing us to see it from a variety of different perspectives. Even the Dominion’s grunt soldiers, the Jem’Hadar, are given some complexity through episodes such as “Hippocratic Oath” and “Rocks and Shoals”. And the sinister twist of Section 31, while relegated somewhat to background lore, provides a good means of giving the Federation a bit of interest, too.

One of the things Deep Space Nine shows repeatedly is that even the forces we have previously been led to believe are the “goodies” have their dark sides — and likewise, traditional “baddies” can have solid redemption arcs, too. The narrative arc of Dumar, set up to be a character the audience is supposed to loathe when he kills Dukat’s daughter Ziyal — one of the few indisputably “good” characters in the series — is thoroughly fascinating, with his descent into alcoholism and bitterness and his emergence on the other side with a new-found determination to cast off the shackles of the Dominion’s oppression. It’s fitting that he die a martyr.

Kai Winn is another character who I was pleased to see eventually get their comeuppance. I wasn’t sure if they were going to go full-on “Evil Space Pope” with her during the finale, but it is, again, entirely fitting that she have all the power and glory denied to her at the last minute as Dukat steals the show. She was a consistently loathsome character throughout her entire run in the series, so seeing her fall to evil out of her lust for power and end up incinerated for it was thoroughly satisfying.

It’s kind of sad that the end of the series marked so many “farewells” from the regular cast, but it makes sense; Deep Space Nine was not the kind of Star Trek that would necessarily lend itself well to a movie in the same way as The Next Generation was, and so it felt appropriate for most people to go their separate ways at the conclusion. I was surprised at the inconclusive fate of Sisko himself — I was expecting him to pop back into existence, Q-style, towards the end of the episode — but again, with the buildup of him being part Prophet throughout the latter seasons, it made sense for him to at least temporarily be “at one with them”, if not actually dead.

Anyway, I’m relieved, as finishing Deep Space Nine now means I feel like I can engage with Trek media produced since that series finished. The Dominion War was such an important event in Star Trek canon that I had always been hesitant to engage with anything post-Deep Space Nine for fear of inadvertently spoiling myself, but now I feel like I’m free to explore the wider Trek universe, be that through other series or video games. And there are a fair few Trek video games I’m interested in trying.

That said, I do kind of want to see how Voyager goes for its whole run. That’s another one I haven’t seen all the way through, so as far as my Star Trek journeys go, that one might well be next on the list.

Later, though. We’re off on holiday on Monday, and I wanted to finish Deep Space Nine before then, as it would have been frustrating to have just a couple of episodes left and no means of watching them while we were away! Now I just need to finish Silent Hill 2 before the end of tomorrow and I can go away with no regrets…

#oneaday Day 126: What is WordPress doing?

You may recall a little while back I had an issue with my WordPress.com blog, the original incarnation of this site. The site’s “automated anti-spam” system had flagged my blog and taken it offline. I hasten to add that there is, of course, no spam or any other sort of inappropriate, objectionable or illegal content either on the original form of this site or this present incarnation. It was a mistake on their part, brought about by WordPress.com’s parent company Automattic increasingly relying on “AI” (spit) for more and more of their functionality.

This was the first time I’d had an issue with WordPress.com since joining in 2006. But it was serious enough that it made me move my site over to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation, which is what you’re reading right now.

For those unfamiliar with the distinction, WordPress.com is a free-with-paid-options blogging service where you can set up a blog or other website quickly and easily. Its free offering has gradually gotten worse over the years, now placing a rather obtrusive “Made with WordPress” banner on new sites created, but for the most part, I’ve always been satisfied with it for my purposes, particularly because, having been a user for so long, I had been “grandfathered” in to not having things like that banner ad.

WordPress.org, meanwhile, is an open-source project that maintains WordPress itself, which is a content management system and blogging platform you can install on any website. The main distinction is that WordPress.com is a service provided to you, while WordPress.org is both a piece of Web-based software and the community surrounding it. And one of the key differences is that while with WordPress.com, you’re stuck with preset configurations unless you pay through the nose for their extortionate “Business” plan, with WordPress.org you can tinker with and customise the core software as you see fit, either by fiddling with the code yourself, or by installing plugins.

I was dismayed to see how much “AI” rot had infested WordPress.com, and it made me no longer want to associate with the platform. Now, it seems, there is trouble with WordPress.org too, as reported by the excellent tech blog 404 Media.

I have not followed this whole saga, but it seems Automattic is having a bit of a spat with a company called “WP Engine”, which is a service that hosts websites built using WordPress. Apparently Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg branded WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress” and complained about them and their investors not contributing “sufficiently” to the open source project, and that WP Engine’s use of the “WP” brand might confuse users into thinking it is an official WordPress thing.

I can sort of see his point on that last thing — though WP Engine maintains their usage is covered by fair use — but this whole thing appears to escalated beyond reasonable proportion at this point. WP Engine sent Automattic a cease and desist letter telling Mullenweg to stop having a tantrum, and Mullenweg responded with what he calls a “scorched Earth nuclear approach”, sending his own cease and desist letter to WP Engine.

It didn’t stop there. Mullenweg banned WP Engine from accessing resources on WordPress.org, including, among other things, the plugin directory and the ability to automatically update plugins and themes. Not only that, he has raised a significant number of eyebrows by adding a peculiar checkbox to the WordPress.org login page, asking users to confirm that they are “not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise”.

This, of course, has had people asking what the consequences are for not ticking that box. And it seems a few individuals who have been longtime contributors to the WordPress.org project have been banned from the community simply for asking “what the hell, bro?”, to paraphrase.

This is concerning. Not being able to access the WordPress.org community doesn’t preclude anyone from building their site using the WordPress.org software, but it is a problem for those who have been helping to maintain and update it. On top of that, some contributors are quite reasonably concerned about potential legal repercussions if they do not tick the box, believing Mullenweg to be just that petty.

My simple question is… well, it’s “what the hell, bro?”

WordPress, in both its .com and .org incarnations, powers a significant chunk of the modern Web. And while blogs have somewhat fallen out of favour since the rise of social media, there are still thriving communities of both WordPress.com and WordPress.org bloggers regularly posting — and who, more to the point, likely have a significant body of work hosted on some form of WordPress derivative at this point, which it will be a pain to move somewhere else.

It’s depressing to see both incarnations of WordPress fall foul of enshittification and CEO arrogance. Because that’s what this is. Whether it’s the AI garbage being rammed into WordPress.com or whatever the fuck Mullenweg thinks he’s doing with WordPress.org right now, the WordPress name is being dragged through the mud right now. And that’s unfortunate because, AI garbage aside, WordPress is still a great product.

I hope this situation is resolved sooner rather than later. And in the meantime, if you’re still blogging on WordPress.com, you might want to pop into your Site Settings menu and tick this checkbox just so your blog isn’t scraped for AI shite.

This site is staying where it is and in the incarnation it presently has for the moment. I really hope I don’t have to migrate again, and that I can go back to recommending WordPress like I always used to. Right now, though, Automattic is a company I would advise most folks to avoid like the plague.