#oneaday Day 348: This is how you do physical editions

There are a lot of "boutique" limited-print companies around at the moment, and people inevitably have mixed feelings about them. A lot of people feel particularly negatively about some of them — often without being able to say why, probably because they only hate [company] because some YouTuber told them to — but I enjoy what they do. They provide physical copies of games that, in many (though not all) circumstances otherwise wouldn't have had one. And, even better, most of the time those physical copies are archive-ready, in that in the vast majority of cases, the physical print runs don't get done until all the DLC and updates for the game in question are done and dusted. I like that.

There are some companies who take things a bit further, though, and one that I've found particularly worthy of note just recently is called Lost in Cult. They're kicking off a new programme called EDITIONS, where they're publishing games that, previously, were digital-only.

We'll get onto EDITIONS in a moment, but what is also worthy of note about Lost in Cult is that they're also doing standard retail editions of their games, and these don't appear to be limited in quantity beyond the usual business considerations — i.e. how many they think they'll sell, and how long their licensing agreement is with the games' developers and original publishers. What they're effectively doing with these standard editions is doing a non-limited (in principle) physical print run of games that, on release, were assumed to be digital-only. That's great!

But EDITIONS is what I really want to talk about. EDITIONS are their special, collectors' editions of games. Costing £60 a pop, they come in a custom slipcase that contains the game, a decent-size poster, some miscellaneous goodies to do with the game, and an art/commentary book that explores the history, creative process and impact of the game.

Here's an example covering The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, a point and click adventure I played recently and really rather enjoyed, as my article about it on MoeGamer will attest:

Looks pretty lovely, doesn't it? Simple, but effective, and sure to look very nice as part of a collection.

The other games that are available to preorder from the company now include Immortality, a fascinating-sounding FMV game that I remember one of my writers on Rice Digital having a lot of time for a year or two back. The EDITIONS package for that one looks like this:

And then there's the wonderfully hilarious Thank Goodness You're Here!, which the EDITIONS package for doesn't appear to have been revealed just yet.

As someone who is always banging on about collecting physical games, I felt duty and honour-bound to support these releases. I've played The Excavation of Hob's Barrow before, and I've seen Andie play Thank Goodness You're Here!, but I've never played Immortality, and I'm definitely open to returning to the other two.

Lost in Cult's long-term plan is to have a "book club"-like approach, where they do one of these releases a month after this initial batch of three are out the door. I am well up for that, let me tell you. It, of course, remains to be seen what games will get this wonderful treatment, but judging by the initial picks, I feel like the Lost in Cult folks have good taste.

So I guess that's £60 a month accounted for, then…!

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.

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#oneaday Day 347: The pump

I've gone to the gym for the last two days in a row! Go me. I think I will probably take tomorrow off, but I went yesterday of my own volition and today to make up for the bratwurst we had for dinner, since I'm counting calories at the moment.

I go back and forth on my feelings towards the gym. There are times when I resent "having" to go (and, honestly, with the state my body's been in for a while, I do "have" to go) but there are times like the last couple of days when I actually feel like it's quite a pleasant experience. And it's for different reasons at different times.

Yesterday, I was feeling a bit down and miserable; I was having one of those evenings where I spent several hours not really doing anything worthwhile, and got to about 9pm feeling frustrated at how I had wasted the evening. So I decided that rather than sit around continuing to do nothing, I would do something productive and go to the gym. I dug out my cheap-ass wireless earbuds that don't really block out any external sound but which are adequate enough for listening to podcasts or YouTube videos, queued up a video I'd half-watched earlier, then went to the gym and did 20 minutes on the treadmill followed by about 30 minutes of resistance stuff on the machines.

And y'know what? I felt pretty damn good afterwards. My mood had lifted and I didn't feel anywhere near as frustrated as I'd felt prior to leaving the house. I'd still wasted a good few hours of the evening, of course, but it didn't feel like it mattered (because, let's face it, it doesn't, really) — and anyway, I'd made up for it by going and doing something that officially falls into the category of Bettering Oneself.

This evening, meanwhile, I had made myself a little anxious by knowingly going over the calorie limit I'm supposed to be following with dinner, but then I recalled the calorie consumption I had recorded from yesterday's session, realised that this would more than make up for the "overspill", and resolved to go and have a decent session. Once again, I got the shitty wireless earbuds and set the latest Giant Bombcast to playing while on the treadmill, and managed 30 minutes without too much difficulty. It normally takes me quite a while to muster the motivation to do more than 10 minutes on the treadmill, but today it was easy.

It's all about how you occupy your mind while you're doing those exercises, I think. At least, it is for me. If I'm just walking on the treadmill and I don't have anything to distract me from the tedium of the endeavour, even just 10 minutes feels like an absolute eternity. But if I have something compelling, interesting or just plain amusing to listen to while I'm doing the tedious thing, the time passes way faster, because I'm simply not paying attention to the time.

It's the same phenomenon we found in secondary school German classes. We spent so much time clockwatching in those lessons that they felt five times longer than any other lesson we had at school — one time I really freaked my friend out by using the countdown timer on my Casio watch to make it look like time really was running backwards — but if they had been a tad more engaging and interesting, I'm sure they wouldn't have felt as long. No disrespect to my German teachers, who were doing their best, but National Curriculum and GCSE-level German are set up to not be very interesting and engaging to study. At least, they weren't when I was at school.

So yes. I think the secret of gym success is to have something to occupy your ears and, in the case of the treadmill, your eyes, too. If you're looking at a screen to watch a video, you're not watching the clock. Bonus points if your gym's treadmill has an arrangement where you can physically block the clock screen with your phone or tablet. Or just lay your towel over the top, I guess.

Anyway, like I say, probably going to have a day off tomorrow 'cause my muscles are a bit sore after two days of pumping it (at weakling levels) in a row. But, so long as I continue to have good stuff to put in my eyes and ears while doing the boring bits, I think I might be able to keep this up for a bit. Let's see how it goes.

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#oneaday Day 346: In need of inspiration

I haven't made any videos for a little while. I haven't been feeling super-inspired of late for some reason. So I'm going to use this evening's post to brainstorm a few things that I might want to shape into some sort of structure.

First up, I have been mulling over some sort of "Games of Summer" ongoing feature, where I talk about games that I find particularly appealing to play when the weather is nice outside. It being nice outside does not necessarily equate to wanting to go outside, however, with how hot the summers have become here, so the thinking behind this is games that provide a pleasant feeling of "going on holiday" or "doing things outside" without having to deal with things like sunburn and heatstroke. Games that I would probably cover include Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 for Xbox 360 (I still like that one better than the third one, because jetskis), TrackMania (there's something about the stadium courses with watery sections that feels very summery to me), maybe Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash and Kandagawa Jet Girls, and, of course, some classic Sega Blue Skies titles like OutRun and its follow-ups, and spiritual successors.

Secondly, I am once again mulling over my usual "format" of videos. I really like doing what I call the "Exploring Together" videos, where I provide a brief introduction to camera, then effectively do a Let's Play with a bit of foreknowledge (or prior experience) of what I'm playing. While this is a format that has somewhat declined in overall popularity on YouTube, there's still very much a place for it, and with the newly independent Giant Bomb getting its Quick Look series back underway after quite some time, I feel like it's sort of "timely" to get into doing this sort of thing.

The bit that's a little tricky is that I feel like I might want to cover some slightly more recent stuff. Stuff that's still a few years old at this point, but which is a bit more modern than early '80s home computer games. I'm talking Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3-era stuff. There are Considerations when doing this, however, not least of which is the number of games I might be interested in covering which have licensed soundtracks. I'd like to take a first look on camera at the MotorStorm series, for example — and the first two of these could probably also fit into the "summer games" theme, too — but the musical accompaniments to the action might be an issue. I guess I could upload some "test footage" and see if that gets dinged for copyright. In fact, I might do that.

Another thing that I kind of wish I could make happen but don't really see how I can do is getting someone else involved, so I have someone to talk to and riff off while I play. I've been watching the Giant Bomb guys since their big announcement, and it's a lot of fun to be included in their sessions of "hanging out" together, playing something and shooting the breeze while doing so. I've always made an effort with my videos to come across as if I'm a friend playing the game along with you, but, y'know, sometimes it'd be nice to have someone to talk to.

A third thing I've been pondering is doing a playthrough of the Ultima games. I'm fascinated by these, but have never really gotten deep into them. I've played a fair chunk of the first one and understand how that works, but I understand the second one in particular is a bit… obtuse. I think it would be an interesting and worthwhile pursuit to finally give those a go, though.

Then finally, of course, there are still myriad games left for me to cover on the classic microcomputer systems. There's all the built-in games on the C64, A500 Mini and Spectrum, for starters, plus the USB sticks full of other stuff I have for each of them. And, alongside that, there's still a ton of Atari 8-bit and Atari ST games I haven't covered yet, either.

That's plenty to be getting on with, surely. I just need to actually get my brain into a motivated space and actually crack on with one or more of these projects, I guess. The weather isn't helping, but I think I will do my best to make a start on at least one of the things I've outlined above this week, even if it's just falling back on my usual Let's Plays of microcomputer games.

On that note, I am at least feeling motivated to go to the gym this evening. So that's next on the agenda!

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#oneaday Day 345: For the sake of fun

I recently picked up the Capcom Fighting Collection 2, primarily on the strength of it having Project Justice in there — one of a few games from the PS1-Dreamcast era that I seriously regret letting go of at some point in the past, considering the prices they command now. (The other is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PS1.) And, spending a bit of time mashing buttons through a brief attempt at Project Justice last night, it got me thinking: I should spend more time with games that are not just about getting from beginning to end, and then being done with them.

I've had this thought before, of course. But I'm feeling particularly conscious of it once again, particularly after rolling credits on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 at the end of last week. Games that have a clear beginning, middle and end are great, and nothing will ever make me want to step away from experiencing games with particularly strong stories. But I'm also very aware of the fact that there are gaming experiences I specifically shy away from because they're not something you can start, work your way through, and finish.

I'm not really talking about what some people call "lifestyle games" like Fortnite and Minecraft. I'm talking about things like arcade games, fighting games, that sort of thing. But also the kinds of games that are friendly to just dipping into for a bit, having a good time and then setting them aside again for a while.

I think part of the problem I have is that so many games these days want to attach a story to the experience. It can feel like a somewhat overwhelming commitment to have multiple titles on the go at once, if you hope to keep all these narratives straight in your head. Of course, some might argue that the stories in some games aren't really worth thinking about too hard — but at the same time, I've played enough games over the years that have been less than favourably received critically, but which actually turned out to have meaningful and worthwhile things to say. I want to pay attention, but sometimes it feels difficult and overwhelming to.

Having finished Clair Obscur, I'm heading back into the Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition trenches as my "main" game. But perhaps I shouldn't think of it like that. If I think of something as a "main" game, that invites a sense of guilt when I play something that is not that. And, realistically speaking, I have zero obligations to anyone in terms of what I play. I never have done, except perhaps when I was working on gaming publications and was obliged to have played the things that I reviewed. (And quite right, too.)

This is definitely, as I think I've said before, a mindset that I have accidentally conditioned myself into. Back in earlier times — I think probably Xbox 360/PS3 and backwards — I had absolutely no problem jumping back and forth between all manner of different games according to mood. When I found something that gripped me, I'd stick with it; when I wasn't in the mood for something, I wouldn't play it, and I certainly wouldn't spend any time feeling a weirdly anxious sense of quasi-panic about whether I really should be playing it just because I'd started it.

Part of what got me into this mental mess is the desire to create things online: videos and articles. I've always loved creating things, and having the opportunity to just share all these things that I love with the world is great. But it also, at times, affects my brain in somewhat unwelcome ways. Should I play this game For Fun, or should I play it with a mind to Making Something About It? The correct answer is "it doesn't matter, it can be both, or it can be just one, just do what you feel like you want to do at any given time rather than agonising over it".

I don't think the answer is specifically scheduling my time. I tried that a while back for a feature on MoeGamer, and while the experiment was an interesting one, I think it's too inflexible, and it takes things too far in the other direction. What if I'm not in the mood to play a sim on Tuesdays? What then?

This hobby is supposed to be fun, and with the sheer amount of stimulation it offers these days, it's easy to get very overwhelmed. At times like that, you need to take a step back, think "yes, I actually do feel like playing Project Justice this evening, even though I still have Xenoblade on the go" and then go bloody well play Project Justice.

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#oneaday Day 344: Very late night

It is 1am and, surprisingly, I am wide awake. And this is after an evening of drinking… well, I'm not sure I'd say heavily, but we all had a fair few cocktails over the course of 6 hours or so. None of those cocktails were astronomically, brain-fryingly strong, though, so right now I just feel quite… pleasant. Which is nice. The last few times I've had a drink I've found myself just skipping the "happy drunk" phase and going straight to "maudlin".

It was the Eurovision Song Contest this evening. I never feel like I particularly give a shit about this, but if it's on I always find myself getting curiously invested in proceedings. We missed most of the actual performances because we were out in the garden having a barbecue, though we did have them on the radio in the background, so at least we heard most of them.

Without getting too much into global geopolitics, it was looking a bit… risky for a while, shall we say, but I don't think many people will have had too many complaints about Austria winning. The song itself was a bit boring, but no-one can deny the impressive range and power of the Austrian chap's voice. Very operatic. Very impressive.

I find it curious that Eurovision is often described as being very "camp" and even "gay" or "queer" — and I'm not denying any of those things, I hasten to add — while simultaneously having plenty of performances and costumes that heterosexual people would also get a kick out of. I guess a sexy bod and a sexy outfit is always a sexy bod and a sexy outfit, regardless of what gender identity or sexual orientation you're looking at it from.

I suspect the "camp" and "gay" descriptors tend to apply primarily to the performances in their entirety: the flamboyant, overdramatic productions that most of them involve are, for whatever reason, associated with queerness, and that, in turn, gives the whole thing a distinctly queer identity of its own. At least, I suppose that's the case, anyway. I am not, I hasten to add and emphasise strongly, an expert.

Perhaps the argument runs something like "Musical theatre is flamboyant and overdramatic, gay people like musical theatre, therefore anything musical theatre-adjacent that is flamboyant and overdramatic must be gay." I think I've cracked it! Or maybe not. I don't know. I've drunk four cocktails this evening and consequently I'm not entirely sure my powers of reasoning are the best right now, and I probably shouldn't even be typing this. But oh well. It's done now. And, I think, without any spelling mistakes. Certainly a far cry from certain earlier entries on this blog. Or, rather, the tweets I sent the night before the blog after. In fact, you know what, let's revisit those for posterity. (Read from bottom to top for chronological posts.)

For context, these were sent on the 7th of May, 2010, when I was absolutely twatted off my face, basking in the misery of my first marriage having broken down and the prospect of having to move back home to live with my parents for a while. I, obviously, apologise for the errant homophobia, but, y'know, different times and all that. Not that it was particularly acceptable then, either. But I'm sure most of you reading this have some off-colour things you say when you're among friends. And, at the time, my Twitter account was pretty much entirely "among friends".

I haven't seen most of those lovely people for quite a while, though I did randomly run into "dollydaydream" at Specsavers a couple of weekends ago while I was getting a new pair of glasses. That was nice. Hopefully we can have a proper catch-up soon.

I kind of miss that (relatively) youthful exuberance. At the same time, I'm also glad I'm not going out in town on a regular basis, because going out drinking these days is expensive. Much better to just have a few nice drinks in your nice comfy home with people you enjoy the company of, and actually be able to hear one another.

Does that make me an old fart? Almost certainly. But y'know what, I don't give a shit. And now, as a great man once said: Going to bd. Fuck off. Nght night.

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#oneaday Day 343: MiSTerious

I have been, as you do, contemplating my impending ownership of a MiSTer Multisystem 2. And, as so often happens with such things, I have been pondering how I might make good use of it as something that spurs me on to be creative.

The obvious, simple answer is to use it to write about things and make videos in the places I already have: this site, my YouTube channel, MoeGamer. But part of me also wants to start something new, something a bit different.

Let me tell you the idea I've been kicking around in my head. I'm not particularly looking for "feedback" on this, but I think it will help me out to get this out of my head and onto the page.

You know how everyone likes to say they have a "newsletter" now, rather than a "blog"? Well, I was thinking about that, and thinking about how it might be fun to take that "newsletter" idea a little more literally. Specifically, I was thinking about how practical it might be to do some sort of newsletter/blog thing where, rather than individual articles being about one thing, each post was actually an "issue", like a magazine.

I was thinking it might be interesting to do such a thing with the MiSTer Multisystem 2. Each "issue" could have a brief summary of any news about the system itself — and perhaps about the broader MiSTer ecosystem, though as I type this I know absolutely bugger all about that — and then move on to some magazine-style features, perhaps with a theme for each issue. There could be a "preview" of an upcoming "modern retro" game by one of today's indie developers. There could be a "big review" of a noteworthy game that particularly fit the theme. There could be tips and tricks for classic games. There could be short, capsule reviews for smaller games. And, of course, there could be straightforward features on a particular subject, using the MiSTer Multisystem 2 as a means of exploring and researching that subject.

Realistically speaking, I'm not sure such a thing would really work, because you know what people's attention spans are like these days. Were I to put all that in a single blog post or email newsletter, how many people would read beyond the first paragraph? Perhaps it might be better to do individual posts on an existing site, and then provide some sort of separate newsletter that people could subscribe to via email. I used to do this with Rice Digital and it was fun. The newsletter had a good number of subscribers, too, but honestly I inherited most of those from the previous owners.

The reality of the situation is that it would almost certainly be piss in the wind, because you almost certainly know how hard it is to get noticed online these days. The recent rise of independent publications is great, but in a lot of cases these are already well-established names, and I think (no, I know) there's a lot of great individual independent creators out there who just don't get the credit they really deserve when putting their work out into the world.

So I dunno. I have a lot to think about, but I also have a lot of time to think about it, given that the MiSTer Multisystem 2 isn't arriving until August.

I could also just enjoy the damn thing without worrying about any of this nonsense, but where's the fun in not agonising over things that don't matter, hmm?

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#oneaday Day 342: Palette Cleanser

Yes, I know it's "palate cleanser", but I'm making a Clair Obscur pun, see. 'Cause I finished it last night, and boy, was that ever a good game. So much so that I'm sort of sitting in this weird afterglow right now where I don't quite feel ready to go back to Xenoblade Chronicles X, but also feel mildly dazed and confused about what, if anything, I might want to play next.

I won't go into specific details about how Clair Obscur ends right now — that's probably a job for either a podcast or an in-depth article on MoeGamer — but suffice to say that I think, or I hope, anyway, that people will be talking about this game for a very long time. For me, it's the first game that has felt like a notable step forward in the medium for quite some time. Yes, technology has advanced, graphics have got better and load times have got shorter, but I'm not sure the games have got any better.

Clair Obscur, though, is one of the best RPGs I've ever played. Sure, if we're getting technical about things, almost the exact same game could have probably been made (with somewhat worse visuals) one, two, maybe even three generations of console hardware ago. We had the fundamentals of its game design, the way it tells its story, its mechanics and aspects of its presentation back in the PlayStation 2 era, but somehow, all of those elements have never quite come together in this exact form until just now.

In fact, I think one of the best things about Clair Obscur is that it takes influences from a number of different "eras" of gaming. It has the "world map" structure of PS1 and even 16-bit RPGs. It has turn-based combat that, in some regards, feels like it owes something to Final Fantasy X. It has timing-based parry and dodge mechanics that owe a debt to FromSoftware's work. And, of course, it all looks bloody lovely thanks to Unreal Engine 5. I think that's the reason we haven't seen something quite as sumptuous as Clair Obscur for quite some time, because we've needed all those previous generations of influences for them to be able to merge together into this piece.

Anyway, I said I wasn't going to talk a lot about Clair Obscur and then I went and did. What I'm mulling over as I type this is exactly what I might want to play next. And the reason I made the increasingly regrettable pun in the title of this post is that I'm feeling like I might want to play something fairly short as a palate-cleanser before I return to Xenoblade Chronicles X. Or perhaps to play alongside Xenoblade Chronicles X, because I feel like I should probably try and get out of the habit of only feeling "able" to play one game at once, particularly given how many of the bloody things line my walls.

I'm leaning towards something platformer-y. Maybe a Castlevania, or something like it. I have the Castlevania Advance and Dominus collections that I haven't explored yet, so that might be something. Or there's always a racing game. I like racing games. Fuel is currently in my PlayStation 3 because I've been playing that a bit recently, but I also think I maybe might want to play something different. Or maybe I do want to play Fuel. Fuel is good, after all.

In fact, yes. Decision made. I will play some Fuel. I like Fuel. It is a comfort game, and that is what I feel like I need right now. So let's go be comfortable!

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#oneaday Day 341: Rabbit (ass)holes

A random bit of Internet rabbithole-diving this evening brought me into the realm of "King Assripper". The name pretty much says it all, but in case you were in any doubt: this was a man who, as far as I can make out, became famous for eating a lot and farting. Particularly farting.

His most well-known work is "King Assripper Farts On His Roommate's Door", which, in this age of clickbait, is refreshingly honest about what it offers. Sadly, the originally posted video of this spectacular display of flatulence no longer exists — good old link rot strikes again — but, as with most things on the Internet, it has been archived for posterity by other people who, I'm sure, are more than happy to get some YouTube ad revenue from the hundreds of thousands of people keen to see a fat man guff really loud.

Except it goes deeper than that. I decided to look into whether there was any more information online about King Assripper, or if the above masterpiece was his one and only work. Besides a KnowYourMeme page on the "Farting On Roomate's [sic] Door", I also discovered what appears to be a complete archive of everything King Assripper has ever contributed to Internet culture, where else? The Internet Archive, of course.

The Internet Archive is a curious organisation, and I'm thoroughly grateful for its existence. It plays host to so much stuff, and it's fascinating to see what has been recorded in there. Looking for old magazines? Chances are you can find them in the Internet Archive. But, at the same time, you can also find the entire video output of a guy who liked to stuff his face and then fart thunderously.

In a sense, I guess it's important to archive stuff like King Assripper, because whatever you may think of his, uh, content, he has nonetheless had an impact on popular culture. This whole little adventure this evening was mostly set in motion by Arin from GameGrumps happening to mention "Farting On Roomate's Door" during an episode. My thought process ran something like "oh, I vaguely remember that", closely followed by a nigh-uncontrollable desire to see someone farting on their roommate's door.

From another perspective, I guess one could look at it as a little worrying. Consider the cultural output of previous centuries, and how much of it has been painstakingly archived, reproduced and, on occasion, updated to make it more palatable or understandable to a modern audience. Then consider someone in 200 years' time (assuming we haven't boiled the planet by then) looking back on the culture from today that we've preserved, and stumbling across the complete archive of King Assripper's videos.

Now there's one thing you never see in sci-fi, eh? You never see them looking back at galactic history in Star Trek and Worf going "I learned that in the 21st century, humans communicated by farting on one another's doors", and Picard having to explain that no, that was only something that happened under particular circumstances, and should by no means be taken as representative of the entire cultural output of the 21st century.

I bet Riker farted on a few doors in his younger days, though.

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#oneaday Day 340: Forbidden

It's kind of weird how, as you go through your life, you inevitably develop the feeling that you're "not allowed" to do certain things, because people will judge you and mock you for doing them — and that your own individual window of tolerance for that sort of thing will inevitably change as your life goes on, you grow older and stop giving a shit what anyone else thinks.

One of the things that most readily springs to mind is the matter of taking a bath. When you're a kid, taking a bath is, for most people, probably the default for a full-body wash, simply because you may not be tall enough to be able to use the shower effectively, or because it's easier to supervise a child in a bath than it is a child in the shower. At some point, probably around your early teens, taking a bath — if you're a boy, anyway — becomes taboo. You have showers now; you're a big manly man. You don't even cry when you get shampoo in your eyes while washing your hair. No baths for you!

A few years back — I forget exactly when, but it was at some point in the last 15 years or so — I started taking baths as a default again. The first couple of times reminded me that sometimes, there's nothing nicer than just being able to luxuriate in some warm water that has something that smells nice in it. And now, it is by far my preferred means of getting myself clean — even if, as a larger gentleman, it would perhaps be nice to be able to fill the tub a little higher without risk of spilling water all over the floor.

I wonder where these attitudes come from? I don't remember anyone specifically telling me that I should no longer have baths — though I do remember Chandler on Friends being mocked by his male peers Joey and Ross for taking a bath at the suggestion of the girls — but I definitely had the feeling that I described above: I was a grown man now, so I "should" have showers. Why? Why "should" I have showers? Who is going to tell me that I'm not "supposed" to have baths? No-one. Because the idea that you're not supposed to do something like that is bollocks, of course.

I'm sure it happens with lots of other things, too. The alcoholic drinks that it's socially acceptable for one to order, particularly as a man. (To be fair, when I still drank semi-regularly, this is a "rule" I flouted pretty much all the time, because I don't like beer and much preferred alcopops as a general rule.) The food one eats. The media one engages with. The colours of clothing one can wear. The designs one can have on one's T-shirt.

I guess the one advantage of being mostly disgusted with my own appearance and general status is that I really don't give a shit about any of these things any more. I wear what I want, I engage with the media that I want to engage with and I certainly still order a Smirnoff Ice with no shame if I'm in a situation where drinking socially would probably make the evening more bearable.

And, yes, I take baths. In fact, I'm off to go and take one right now, because I smell, bits of me are sticking to other bits of me, and I think pretty much every muscle in my entire body aches. So I am going to go and have a bath, and I am going to go and enjoy it. And there's nothing any of you can do about it!

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#oneaday Day 339: Eras

I remember when I was growing up, and I'd hear about life when my parents were young, and thinking "gosh, that was all jolly primitive, how on Earth did people get by without televisions and computers and the Internet?" Sitting here in 2025, thinking back to my own childhood, I feel like we've gone through shifts almost as big once again.

I grew up surrounded by computers. My Dad worked for IBM, and I'm pretty sure we had at least one Atari computer in the house from the moment I was born. I learned how to use computers from an early age — not just playing games, but also using them for productivity, programming and creativity. And my enjoyment of computing helped me make some friends, too.

But by modern standards, those computers were limited. They could run one program at a time, and you had to do everything using removable physical media. Want to play a game? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up. Want to do something creative? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up, then make sure you have another separate disk or tape handy to save your work onto. Hard disks existed, but they were something like £700 in '80s money for 20MB, and thus very few people had them — more to the point, not much software supported them, either, at least until the 16-bit era, when they became a little more commonplace.

"Going online" was something you could do from quite early on if you had the necessary hardware, and it was a very different experience to what using the Internet (really the Web) is today. To even get logged on you'd have to enter a cryptic string of commands to the modem, and sometimes it felt like a bit of a roll of the dice as to whether or not it would actually work at all. When you did get online, it was pages and pages of text, no pictures, and an understanding that you had a limited amount of time to do what you had to do before either 1) your family kicked you off for tying up the phone line for too long or 2) the SysOp kicked you off remotely for spending too long, preventing others from using the service.

When "online" spaces other than bulletin board systems came along — accompanied by computers that could do more than one thing at once — it was a revelation. I have immensely fond memories of exploring CompuServe on my Dad's account, spending time on the GAMERS forum, reading and replying to messages, and, on one memorable occasion, making $200 from some custom Wolfenstein 3-D levels. But it was still very different to today; CompuServe was a walled garden of curated stuff to explore, and access to the broader Web didn't come about until later. I remember us having great difficulty setting up the Mosaic browser to view simple websites, and how exciting it was when we finally got to look at, say, pictures from NASA for the first time.

I don't think anything tech-wise has changed things as much as the rise and growth of the mobile phone, though. Getting a mobile phone when I was in my late teens made me feel like I had a whole new degree of independence, free to communicate with my friends on my own terms when and how I felt like it (Pay as you Go credit permitting). I recall long, drunken text conversations with people important to me at university; there was even a time when I'd voluntarily phone people up for a chat. I used to have long phone conversations with my perpetually absent university housemate, for example; she was a good friend, but I didn't see her all that much for a variety of reasons.

Then, when smartphones arrived, everything changed. It didn't seem like it at first, because the earliest implementation of the iPhone was very limited. There were no installable apps; you had to do everything via the Web. But sites were starting to get savvy to the rise of this exciting new technology, and were starting to serve up "responsive" pages that looked nice on the small screen of an iPhone.

I was working at an Apple Store when the iPhone launched. It was an exciting time, for sure, and it only got more exciting when the App Store launched. Suddenly, there was this brave new frontier for software, and we'd all download and experiment with all manner of different apps; not just games, but productivity tools, creativity tools and silly joke apps — who can forget the "drinking a beer" one?

When in-app purchases were announced, my heart sank. We were already starting to see some nickel-and-diming in the console gaming space, and it was about to get much worse in mobile. Free-to-play became the default, and aggressive monetisation came along with it. And there were people who would make excuses for this. People who are still making excuses for it to this day, to such a degree that we're never going to get rid of free-to-play and microtransactions at this point.

But I think the biggest change was how addicted people became to those black plastic slabs. And I'm not excluding myself from that description, either; I could feel myself being compelled to fiddle with it constantly, and I didn't like it. I still don't like it. I'm better at controlling it today, but I still feel the "urges" near-constantly.

Things only got worse with the rise of content designed to be deliberately addictive, such as short-form videos. For quite some time now, I've found a lot of tech to be scary and unpleasant; definitely a far cry from the excitement I'd feel every day when I booted up the Atari 130XE to do some BASIC programming.

It's not all bad, of course. It's great having satellite navigation in your pocket when you're trying to find things. It's great being able to stay in touch with people via a whole host of different means. And it's great being able to quickly snap a photo or video of anything without kicking yourself for not bringing your camera with you.

But there have been some big changes. Whether or not they're as big as the differences between my parents' childhood and my childhood, I don't know. But I suspect the realisation that you've lived through some huge changes in the world and society is an important part of progressing through life; you often don't notice these changes while they're in the middle of happening, but when you look back on them you realise that they were pretty massive. And not always for the better.

Would I like to go back to earlier, less technologically advanced, less convenient days? Some days, I honestly do think that yes, I would. There are a lot of great things about our modern, connected society — and a lot of terrible things, too — but sometimes I just miss the simplicity of life as it was back then.

I find myself wondering exactly what I mean by "back then"; if it was possible to go back, exactly what point would be the optimal one? I think, for me, it would probably be the early 2000s. Mobile phones would exist but wouldn't be the life-consuming soul suckers they are today; computer and video game technology would be at a good point; and we might all see a bit more of one another in the real world.

I might not have this blog, though. Or maybe I would. Perhaps it wouldn't be in quite this form. Perhaps I'd be a trailblazer in the blogging space.

Who knows? You can't go back, more's the pity. So we're stuck with what we have, regrettably, constructed for ourselves. At least for the moment.

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