#oneaday Day 419: I wanna write a story

It's been far too long since I actually did some proper, honest to goodness creative writing that isn't burbling stream of consciousness blog posts or video game analysis, and I have to admit, I've been feeling an increasing hunger to just write something recently.

But what? I don't really know. There are lots of possibilities in my head, ranging from simple slice-of-life affairs to ambitious sci-fi epics — plus, of course, the Dreamwalker story I've had in my head since a teen but never quite got around to figuring out how it would finish, particularly as it started life as a Klik 'n' Play game — and I think it would probably be fun to write a murder mystery, given how many of them I've been watching of late.

I am beset with the odd mind goblin*, though. I feel like I can't write a murder mystery because I can't think through a crime logically enough to make it convincing — although honestly, with some of the absolute nonsense they get up to on Death in Paradise, I feel like particularly elaborate, bafflingly complicated murders are perfectly fine in the genre.

I feel like I can't write slice-of-life because it would either be too boring, or too unconvincing, or come across too much like wish fulfilment — although, again, thinking about the slice-of-life anime and TV shows I've enjoyed over the years, none of those things are necessarily a problem.

I feel like I can't write sci-fi because I don't know enough science to make it convincing — although, again, if you lean hard on the science fantasy angle you don't necessarily have to worry about.

Mostly, my biggest mind goblin, though, is the big question: who would read it? And its closely related question, does that matter? No-one reads this fucking blog and I'm still tapping away every night, so surely if I'm taking some time on the semi-regular to write some fiction and I feel satisfied with what I've achieved, that should be enough, no?

I think that's probably the case. So I think I'm going to figure out what I might want to write, then set up a place where I can post it easily — likely another blog, separate from both this and MoeGamer. And then all I have to do is write, whenever I feel like it. And who knows? Maybe something will come of it in the long term.

^{*Mind goblin deez nuts? Yes, I got you good. Don't try and pretend like I didn't.}

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 418: A little flutter

I am not, generally speaking, a betting man, but I do have an occasional flutter on the National Lottery. This usually consists of me loading up my account with £10, playing two lines of whatever the next draw game is, then using the rest of the £10 to play a few of the "instant win" games. If, at any point, I go above the £10 I started at, I cash out. If I hit zero, I stop playing. This is how you stay in control of things.

The instant win games do frustrate me, though, because it's painfully transparent that they've worked everything out in advance of you even starting to play them, making the actual "playing" process feel more than a bit pointless at times. I don't know if this is just the side of me who understands how video games work talking, but there are a number of observations I have which make playing these games particularly annoying:

If a game has multiple ways to win a prize and you win a prize on one of them, none of the others will yield a prize, even though you have to keep playing "just to see" if you win anything else.
If a game is dependent on "random chance" such as virtual dice rolls or pulling letters out of a bag, at least one case of you taking that chance will be completely useless to you — for example, in the National Lottery's Cashword games, there will always be at least one letter you draw that doesn't appear anywhere on the board.
If a game should theoretically be based on recognisable odds — such as, say, the frequency with which different letters appear in English words — then the game will almost always be manipulated in such a way as to subvert those odds. Looking at Cashword again, don't count on pulling an "E" being particularly good for your chances, despite it being one of the most commonly used letters in English.
If a game offers you what appears to be a "1 in something" chance — e.g. a 1 in 3 chance of revealing your token beneath three thimbles, as seen in the National Lottery's Monopoly Gold Classic game, more often than not the chance is actually 0 in 3, because your token just isn't there at all.
A game will quite frequently present its outcome as being that you "nearly" won — for example, in the case of Monopoly Gold Classic, it's not at all unusual to end the game just needing one additional colour card to get the £100,000 prize. This does not mean you actually nearly won. It is, in most cases, the game artificially attempting to make itself more exciting.
Games which appear to be based on skill and timing are nothing of the sort. What a spinning wheel lands on has been determined even before you started spinning it.
Games which appear to let you use your intelligence are, likewise, nothing of the sort. They are pure chance.
Most instant win games barely qualify as "games" at all; you might as well just be paying £1 to click a button that says "DID YOU WIN?"

I think being aware of all these things and keeping them in mind any time I have a little flutter on the Lottery website is what keeps me from ever getting sucked in to anything gambling-related. Being aware that everything you do on the National Lottery website is nothing more than a prize draw, whether it is declared one or not, makes it a lot easier to set yourself some limits, have a brief little dopamine hit from thinking "it could be me!" and then not being all that disappointed when your £10 has vanished.

I appreciate that some people find it a tad harder to stop gambling once they start. I'm glad I've never fallen into that particular trap. And hey, you never know. One day it could be me. That'd be nice.

For now, though, it absolutely isn't.

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#oneaday Day 417: This content is not available

As I mentioned the other day, the UK's "Online Safety Act" came into force recently, forcing everyone to "verify" their age for everything from sending private messages on Bluesky to looking at the nastiest porn you can think of.

Just recently, I have run into age verification gates in multiple places. Discord made me do it to continue accessing channels marked "NSFW", even if there was no actual pornography in there — and then automatically enabled image blurring on "sensitive content" despite me never having given any indication that I might not want to see that. Bluesky made me do it to continue having access to the site's direct messaging feature. And, of course, it's on the porn sites.

It doesn't stop there, though. I went on Mobygames to look something up earlier, and was unable to view the cover for the game Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors on Nintendo DS without putting in my birthday; thankfully I didn't have to provide any "proof", unlike in the other cases mentioned above, but it still specifically mentioned that this was "to comply with EU law". The UK isn't the EU thanks to the shitshow that was Brexit, but I suspect it still gets lumped in with the EU in stuff like this.

Just to be clear, the cover for Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, which I was age gated from viewing immediately, looks like this:

Now, I'm open to anyone who can tell me what, there, exactly, needs age gating. The game itself is violent (and has one character with a massive honking pair of tits), but there's nothing in that cover image itself that is objectionable — and it was specifically this cover that Mobygames age-gated me from being able to see.

Elsewhere online, there are concerns that Wikipedia may find itself age-gated due to the Online Safety Act, due to the fact that the some of Wikipedia maybe possibly might not be suitable for children. It's a fucking encyclopaedia! We were looking up "sexual" in the Collins Dictionary at primary school and tittering at it talking about "penis" and "vagina"; exactly what purpose does plopping surveillance state age verification on a site like Wikipedia serve, exactly?

Well, I've said it already, haven't I. It is — it must be — at least, in part, about surveillance. You already can't speak out in support of certain groups in the Middle East without putting yourself at risk of being branded a "terrorist" and being prosecuted for hate speech. Just imagine the glee the government would probably have at knowing what porn you've been looking at, what knowledge you've been attempting to arm yourself with, who you've been talking to and how you've been communicating with them.

I hate that saying all this makes one sound like a conspiracy nut, but this stuff is actually happening. I don't trust any of these "age verification" services an inch, and everyone in the UK should be very concerned right now, regardless of what they look at online. As has often been said of late — particularly with regard to the currently unfolding Visa/Mastercard situation — it really is the pornographers and the sex workers who are the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to this. You don't have to enjoy looking at filth online to be affected by this in the long term; I'd say everyone is looking at a very dark time for the Internet, unless something is done.

You can, at least, make your discontent known, if you're a UK citizen, with this online petition, which has already attained over 400,000 signatures. It's probably worth writing to your MP, too. Beyond that, I don't know. Like I say, it's kind of scary — particularly not knowing where any of this is going to end, and what the longer-term consequences are going to be.

Anyway, this site will continue to exist, and I will continue to say what I want here, so a hearty fuck you to everyone involved with the Online Safety Act, and you can take your "robust but proportionate regulation" (which in reality is anything but) and jam it very firmly up your arse, until it comes out of your nostrils.

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#oneaday Day 416: Choose your own adventure

When I was a kid, I was really into the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I had a couple of the arguably more popular and/or well-known Fighting Fantasy ones also, but I always sort of preferred Choose Your Own Adventure. I was very much in a minority on this, but I didn't care then, and I don't care now. I am, however, now a bit more capable of reflecting on precisely why I preferred Choose Your Own Adventure to Fighting Fantasy. And, since I have a selection of the relatively recent reprints winging their way to me (one has arrived so far, but there are, I think, 11 more coming soon) I thought I might as well do just that.

To put it simply, Choose Your Own Adventure is effective because its only "gimmick" is the choices part. That means you don't need anything but the book to get started with them. Contrast with Fighting Fantasy, where you need a pencil, six-sided dice and piece of paper to play — or the oft-forgotten (and really enjoyable) Asterix Adventure Games, which came with a plastic wallet full of "props" to use as part of the proceedings.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't dislike the extra gimmicks of Fighting Fantasy, the Asterix Adventure Games and any of the other similar things I might have engaged with in my youth. Fighting Fantasy, in particular, is a good introduction to the conventions of role-playing games — particularly their use of statistics and chance-based mechanics. The Asterix Adventure Games were just thematically quite nice — with the props you'd do things like track how much magic potion Asterix had left, use a scroll to decipher passwords, and use a translation tablet to translate Latin phrases. But you still needed a bit of space to play them.

Choose Your Own Adventure, meanwhile, you can play in bed, on the toilet, in the back of a car, halfway up a tree, in a tent in your back garden… anywhere you have hands free to read a book. And that, I think, is the chief attraction for me.

But there's more. I also liked that Choose Your Own Adventure, as a series, was thematically diverse. They weren't all swords-and-sorcery fantasy tales. They weren't all horror. They didn't all involve the same characters. There were a couple that acted as "sequels" to each other, but for the most part, they were all self-contained affairs that stood by themselves, required no prior knowledge — and often taught you a few things along the way, too.

I've been struggling to remember exactly which Choose Your Own Adventure books I had as a kid. I definitely remember having Space and Beyond, Supercomputer and, I think, Treasure Diver — the latter was enough to put me off ever wanting to try scuba diving myself thanks to its painfully vivid descriptions of getting "The Bends" — and probably a few more besides. Thus far, the only that has arrived from this new batch is Mystery of the Maya, a South American adventure which, depending on the paths you take, may or may not involve time travel. That in itself is quite impressive — the fact that it is not necessarily a time-travel adventure, depending on one of the first choices you make, should give you an idea of the flexibility of these books. This one alone claims to have 39 different endings; I've seen two so far.

I'm looking forward to exploring these books again, and I think I'm actually going to make some videos of me "playing" them, because I think that will be fun. I don't know how easy it will be to make them visually interesting, but it would seem to me that taking a "Let's Play" format for a Choose Your Own Adventure book could potentially make for an enjoyable video.

I'm going to wait until a few more have arrived before I jump into doing that — I didn't fancy doing it this weekend because I was knackered and just wanted to relax — but watch out for those soon. I can't wait to try some of the books from the series that I always wanted as a kid, but never managed to get hold of!

I've also just learned that the series came about when author Edward Packard used to tell stories to his daughters about a character named Pete, and ask them what they thought "Pete" should do next. It's like it was meant to be!

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#oneaday Day 415: Last time happy

Something got me thinking earlier: when was the last time I felt really, actually, genuinely happy? I feel like living through the 2020s (so far) in particular has given me such a sense of malaise and misanthropy that it's honestly quite difficult to remember what it felt like to just… exist in a sense of contentment and satisfaction.

A lot of blame can probably be laid at the feet of what I saw someone the other day describe as "breathing Internet fumes all day" — and I love that, apologies to whoever I stole it from — but it's also clear that even if I wasn't plugged in to online culture, it would still be readily apparent that these are not happy times we live in.

I often consider closing down every last bit of my social media and going completely off-grid. I don't have much of it left any more — the only standalone social media I still have is Bluesky, and some people also count Discord and YouTube as social media, though to me those are both a little bit different — so it's not like it would be a big effort to do so. But is that what I really want? Even with those few remaining connections to the "outside" world, I still feel isolated, disconnected and incredibly lonely on a daily basis. Surely it makes no sense to cut off what, from some respects, can be looked on as a lifeline?

I dunno. There are people I like talking to on Bluesky and Discord, and YouTube is a valuable creative outlet for me, just as this blog and MoeGamer are. The thing I find myself asking, though, is if anyone would actually notice if I were just to disappear from one or all of those services one day. I suspect that they would not, at least not immediately. Someone might, a few months down the line, think "oh, I haven't heard from that Pete guy for a while" and discover a closed profile page, but would they, then, feel inclined to reach out to me via other means? Again, I suspect that they would not, given that these days, if you are not on social media or in a WhatsApp group chat, you seemingly do not exist. The only person who emails me on a semi-regular basis is my mother; the rest of my daily emails are promotional offers, order confirmations or blogs/newsletters I've subscribed to.

Email used to be exciting. While my short-lived penpal relationship with a girl named Julia in my teens pretty much fizzled out when we finally met — at least partly my fault for being completely socially inept in person, for reasons I did not understand then but very much do now — I still have fond memories of the excitement I felt every time I received an email from her.

Going even further back, I actually still have a couple of hand-written penpal letters from a primary school friend that I was very close with, who subsequently moved away. I don't really know why I've kept those — I am unlikely to ever see or hear from her ever again, given the many years since we last had any contact whatsoever — but, I don't know. Something about the enthusiasm with which she asked me if I was still playing football (multiple times in one letter) and how I was getting on at Cub Scouts (which should give you an idea of how old I was when writing and receiving these letters) was… thoroughly pleasant. I felt like I mattered, like I had a place in someone's life, even if it was just as the recipient of an occasional letter.

The advice people normally give to this sort of situation is "get out there and meet people". And it's probably sound advice. Trouble is, with my general physical and mental state, I'm kind of… I guess "afraid" is the right way to put it. Honestly, at this point I don't really have anything to lose by trying it, but I'm still… afraid to lose whatever it is. Maybe if I'm able to work on some of my own problems first — and I am doing so — I might be able to tackle some of these broader issues. And, with any luck, I might actually feel happiness again by the time I'm 60.

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#oneaday Day 414: Two types of game

Finishing up Old Skies today (read my article on it over on MoeGamer!) and then jumping right back into Donkey Kong Bananza, I was suddenly struck with the clearest way yet to express something I've been pondering for quite some time. And it stems from the core differences between those two games.

I put it to you, dear reader, that there are just two types of video games: ones where someone watching asks "what's it about?", and ones where someone asks "what do you have to do?"

Old Skies? "What's it about?" (Time travel, regrets, grief, making your mark on the world.) Donkey Kong Bananza? "What do you have to do?" (Find all the bananas.)

Essentially what this boils down to is the game's main priority: does the game primarily exist to tell a story, or does it exist as a form of "play"? To put it even more simply, is it a "narrative" game, or a "mechanics" game?

There's crossover, of course — narrative games can have strong mechanics, and mechanics games can have strong narratives. But pretty much every game you'll ever play will strongly skew one way or the other, to such a degree that in some cases, fans of one won't enjoy something from the other category.

Donkey Kong Bananza is a good example of this. It's a mechanics game; the narrative setup is flimsy at best, and there's not really a "story" to follow as you go through. Instead, you visit a bunch of places, meet some characters, unlock new abilities, then use all of those abilities to explore the broader world and, as noted above, find all of the bananas.

The fact that Donkey Kong Bananza doesn't really have an unfolding story is enough to put some people I know off from playing it completely. And while I maintain that those people are missing out on one of Nintendo's finest games to date, I completely understand. For the longest time, I felt like I favoured narrative games to the exclusion of all else, but as I've grown older — and, perhaps more crucially, I've developed my knowledge of how games are designed, how they work and the many different approaches developers can take when constructing an interactive experience — I have a much more balanced approach: I can (and do) enjoy both. This, of course, stands me in good stead for my day job, which involves enthusing about everything from Atari 2600 and Intellivision games up to PlayStation and NEOGEO titles.

I suspect at least part of this also stems from the fact that I grew up playing exclusively mechanics games, because the technology didn't really exist to deliver narrative games effectively. Except that's not quite true; text adventures and early graphic adventures existed pretty much from when I was old enough to use the computer, but as a child, they often felt a bit too complicated for me, even as an avid reader. So the vast majority of games I played on my first gaming systems — Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Super NES — were "what do you have to do?" games, where narrative was typically reserved for introduction and/or ending sequences, if indeed the game had any in-game storytelling at all.

Things started to change when we switched over to MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for our daily driver computer. Point-and-click adventures really came to the forefront, with titles like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and The Secret of Monkey Island proving that story-centric games could absolutely be a thing. And by the time I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time, I was absolutely all-in on video games as a storytelling medium, leading me to primarily focus on "what's it about?" games for the longest time.

In fact, you can see the evidence here on this blog how long this attitude lasted: a post which actually got showcased by WordPress.com, back when they actually cared about the community rather than garbage AI, highlighted my desire to play a racing game with a story. I felt that the racing game genre had been done something of a disservice by never having a game that took the Wing Commander approach of alternating narrative scenes with mechanics scenes, and on some level I think this might actually still be a fun idea… except I've played a few games where they've tried that, and the story scenes are just… not very good.

I'm not sure if it's just that the scenes weren't particularly interesting, inspiring or well-written, or if racing games really don't actually need a story to be fun — I suspect a little of both — but these days, I'm much more happy to let the racing game genre, a type of game in which "what do you have to do?" is so obvious that most people don't need to bother to ask, pootle along in the way it always has done. In fact, I've often found it quite refreshing to go back to games like the Project Gotham Racing series, where there's no open world or overcomplicated metagame to engage with, just a series of "levels" that you complete, one at a time, and gradually unlock harder challenges.

I suspect some games may even be different things to different people. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar is a good example; to one person, it's a "what do you have to do?" game, where the answer is "wander around, explore, beat up monsters, find treasure", while to another, it's a "what's it about?" game, where the answer is "proving your worth in the Eight Virtues and becoming the Avatar". In other cases — The Last of Us, say — the distinction is probably pretty clear-cut.

Anyway, that was my meandering thought for the day. You're welcome to borrow my theory for your own pointless discussions with your friends if you want to. I'll let you. Or you can just leave it to rot here on this forgotten corner of the Internet as we all, gradually, bit by bit, turn to dust. Your call, really.

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#oneaday Day 413: Our tedious cyberpunk future

So, it seems like today is the day that the UK's "Online Safety Act" rolls out, which means all manner of sites and services, from Bluesky to PornHub via Discord, have started demanding that you "verify" your age, either by gurning into your device's camera (or, indeed, providing a photo of Norman Reedus from Death Stranding 2) or by — fuck this all the way to hell and back — sending over a photo of your ID, or registering your payment card details.

The reason for this is ostensibly to "protect children" from all the nasty, terrible awful things on the Internet, but as we've seen it can be circumvented by a few nerds on X, The Everything App or enlisting the services of a VPN — exactly the sort of thing these services are for — then it all seems a bit pointless really. Plus then you have to consider what might be the real reason this is all happening. It may sound a bit tinfoil hatty, but most people aren't entirely comfortable associating a photograph of themselves, their ID or their payment information with, among other things, something they fancy cracking one off to.

The ID verification services, of course, assure us that your photographs and data are deleted immediately after you've been verified, but we have no real way of knowing if that is actually the case, or if the deletion process simply copies them to a server somewhere offshore that isn't subject to GDPR. And if the latter is true, given that the services associate your ID information with your email address in most cases, it's probably straightforward enough to tie any sort of "unsavoury" (regardless of legality) activity back to an individual — be it hammering one out to stepsisters stuck in washing machines, looking up instructions on how to make a bomb or attempting to organise political protests.

Over the course of the last few years, with the rise of AI and all manner of other tech enshittification, I can't help but feel — and I'm not alone in this — that we're getting all the downsides of a cyberpunk future that authors warned about, and none of the upsides. Our city centres are not the sprawling, darkly beautiful neon landscapes they're supposed to be — though you might have a backlit, animated ad for Persil on your local bus stop — and no-one is going through life kitting themselves out with cybernetics to do interesting, unusual, creative, daring and illegal things.

Worse, and this is probably the biggest kicker, is that all the "villains" of the piece are so very boring. Cyberpunk villains are vibrant, exciting, dramatic — but not in reality. We have Trump, whose name literally means "guff", and Elon Musk, who is just a fucking idiot, and Sam Altman, who is a delusional cunt. None of them have the charisma to make them worth hating; they're just… there, making the world worse, bit by bit, one little nibble at a time. The world is suffering death by a thousand cuts, and it feels like there's not much we can do about it other than to subscribe to NordVPN (and feel weird about it after all the jokes about YouTubers shilling it) and just try to muddle on the best we can.

Perhaps this will mark a grand return to finding discarded porn mags in bushes. That'll be a blast from the past, won't it? Though hopefully not a blast you come into direct contact with.

If you're in the UK, you might want to sign this.

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#oneaday Day 412: Garlic breath

I have garlic breath, the natural result of consuming garlic bread. Or, perhaps to be more accurate, garlic ciabatta, which we had to accompany our simple but enjoyable dinner of stuffed pasta thingies (tortelloni?) with a nice mushroom sauce. Sometimes simple is thoroughly pleasant; not every dinner needs to be an out-and-out feast, after all.

I have what I would describe as a complicated relationship with garlic. I like a lot of things that contain garlic, and one of my most enduring memories of childhood is, oddly, being outside probably the first Italian restaurant I ever went to, and being able to smell a distinctive combination of tomato and garlic that I don't think I've ever really smelled again since. I would immediately recognise it if I smelled it again, though.

On a trip to New York one time, some friends that we met up who lived there took us to this incredible little local place that doesn't appear in any of the tourist books and invited us to try the deep-fried garlic they did there. It was delicious, even if the very prospect of deep-fried garlic sounds utterly horrifying to you. (It did to me, but I tried it anyway, and did not regret it.)

The smell, though, particularly if you're not using fresh stuff. For a while, my wife was making use of these weird frozen garlic cube things in recipes, and they smelled fucking rank when you cooked them. Same for the jar of "minced garlic" paste we have had in the fridge for quite a while now. But, strangely, the jarred, chopped garlic that I tend to use by preference when a recipe calls for garlic, doesn't bother me at all. I know some people are super sniffy about "jarlic", as it's referred to, but I guess that's my line. Jarlic is fine for me, but anything lower down the "naturality" chain than that is not. Especially not those fucking frozen cubes. I am glad we have no more of them. They made your hands stink just to touch them, even for a moment.

But yeah. There are some recipes we make semi-regularly that make use of garlic. Probably our favourite is a sort of stir-fried beef one that features a sauce made from soy sauce, mirin, beef stock and honey, plus a bit of garlic browned in the pan before the sauce is added to thicken it all up. The jarlic works great in that one.

So yeah. My relationship with garlic is… complex. Fitting, I guess, since one could argue it adds a certain "complexity" to a dish. It certainly doesn't need to be in everything. But it can be nice, once in a while, particularly when delivered in the form of garlic bread, especially if said garlic bread is topped with cheese.

Yes, that's right, today's post really was just about garlic. Hey, they can't all be winners. Sometimes I just have to go with what's on my mind (or on my breath) at any given moment, y'know…? Besides, I wrote something much more thoughtful over on MoeGamer earlier today, so go read that instead. I want to go to bed.

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#oneaday Day 411: Blogiversary

It is, according to WordPress, the 17th anniversary of me signing up for WordPress and starting this blog. This was not my first blog, but it is, by far, the one that has stuck around the longest, in that it still exists. I don't think any of my other blogs are still online, though several of them are archived in the Wayback Machine.

In my first post on here, I explained that I signed up with WordPress so I wouldn't have to rely on, I quote, "crappy, shit-arsed web hosts who don't reply to my emails when I politely (and subsequently, less politely) enquire exactly why they have absconded with £30 of my hard-earned for another year's hosting and domain name ownership". I can't remember the exact circumstances that surrounded this, but it would have been one of my previous self-hosted websites, which I had a domain name for.

Now, 17 years later, this blog is once again self-hosted, after an incident that is well-documented on this site. If you weren't around for that, the short version is that this site got mistakenly flagged as spam by WordPress.com's automated AI-powered bots, and rather than contacting me to enquire if, you know, everything was all right, they just shut the whole thing down — and, to add insult to injury, when your site has been shut down for supposed "terms of service violations", as in this case, you're not actually able to post in the Support forums to get an explanation.

It took multiple angry emails (very angry emails) to WordPress to get them to reinstate my site… which I then promptly uprooted and moved here. My traffic has been a fraction of what it once was ever since, but eh. On this site in particular, I don't really care; this place has always been my own personal little haven where I write what I want, and it's never been about getting people to read it. As perhaps exemplified by the fact I don't really share what I write about here; some people who have been hanging around for a while still read because they're still subscribed via email or RSS or whatever, and the rest of the Internet doesn't really know I exist. Honestly, I'm kind of fine with this.

I have changed a lot since that first post in 2008. I've been through a divorce and remarriage, I survived the COVID years, I've been through several different jobs and… well, frankly, it hasn't been an easy ride at all, for a whole mess of reasons you'll have to delve back into the archives to find out more about. But one near-constant in all that nonsense was this blog; even when I wasn't posting here daily, it was comforting to know that it was somewhere that I could come when I needed an outlet. And in some respects, it's nice to be able to look back on times gone by — good and bad — and reflect on how things have changed over the years.

There are things I regret, absolutely. There are also things I had little to no control over. On the whole, I'm in a mostly better place now than I was then — and especially during a particularly dark time in 2010 — though there are other ways in which life was better, simpler, back then. I certainly wasn't getting annoyed about AI back in 2008, and social media certainly didn't feel quite as toxic as it does today.

One thing hasn't changed since that first post, though, and that is the fact that I am "constantly shaking my head at the rancid, disgusting, despicable state that this country is in". How little I knew. If only I knew that things were going to get much, much worse nearly 20 years later.

Because they are fucking worse, aren't they? Not only is late-stage capitalism destroying lives on a regular basis, we have an insane paedophile rapist in the most powerful office in the world, we've taken about a million steps back in terms of not being racist, homophobic and transphobic, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and no-one knows how to behave like a decent human being any more because they spent all their fucking time staring at TikTok instead of interacting with other people.

Still, this blog will remain a constant. And, in these challenging times, that thing about it being a helpful outlet for me rings especially true!

Happy birthday, blog. Thanks for listening.

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#oneaday Day 410: #StopKillingSoftware

There's been a lot of attention on the #StopKillingGames movement of late, and with good reason: they have a good point, and they've also had said point misrepresented quite severely on a number of occasions, but I think most people are starting to get it.

That's all very well and good for games, but what about software?

For various reasons, I decided to reinstall Windows today. I haven't lost anything important — the computer just needed a "refresh", plus it seemed like a good opportunity to finally take the plunge to update to Windows 11 (and then promptly "debloat" it).

Any reinstall is typically followed by trying to remember which applications you had on the computer that you actually need, and then going about reinstalling them one by one. This is one scenario in which I am grateful for the digital age, rather than requiring that I hunt down a million and one CD-ROMs, though it is still quite tedious having to download everything again — and, in some cases, find license information buried deep in your email archive.

One snag I ran into today is one that I thought I might come across at one point or another: the fact that the video editing software I use, Hitfilm Express, no longer exists. Moreover, it appears that the company which made Hitfilm decided to… stop doing Hitfilm in January of this year. In fact, I get the impression they stopped doing anything.

I had been using an old version of Hitfilm for some time, because upgrading to a newer version would mean abandoning the "pay what you want" copy I had, which was perfectly fine for my needs, and instead moving to the company's new subscription-based Software as a Service model. I was disappointed to see Hitfilm move to this model, but with the amount of other software packages out there doing the same — and the original developer of Hitfilm getting acquired by a larger company — I wasn't altogether surprised. But the old version still, at least, worked.

When I went to reinstall said old version today — which I used to be able to do from my account page on the company's website — that was no longer possible. All I could do was download the subscription-based version… or so it said. The downloads page had buttons to download it, but they weren't actually linked to anything. So the software was just… gone, basically.

If I had been paying a subscription, I would have been a bit annoyed, but recognised that this is always a risk when using Software as a Service. But I paid for a perpetual license to that software — granted, I didn't pay much for it, but I still paid for it, and expected it to remain available.

But no. Hitfilm Express has ceased to be. It is an ex-parrot. My only option was to either download the subscription-based one and then do some faffing around in the hope that a subscription would actually somehow "convert" to a perpetual license for that version, or to… well, to pirate it, frankly.

I know how to use Hitfilm. I like Hitfilm — at least I did before it went all Software as a Service. I don't really want to change to using something other than Hitfilm. I know DaVinci Resolve is well-regarded, but it's also several orders of magnitude more complicated than Hitfilm Express, and I'm not sure I want or need that.

So, well… I'll leave you to imagine which of the above options I went for.

Stop Killing Games has an excellent point. It also applies to software. If one buys a piece of software for a particular purpose, one should reasonably expect that software to be left in working order even after official support ends. That doesn't seem particularly unreasonable, and that's certainly how it used to work. Hell, I can still plug in an AtariWriter cartridge to my Atari 8-bit and use that, or load up Cubase on the Atari ST. If I still had a Mac, I bet I could still get my copies of Final Cut Pro and Logic Studio working, too.

So Stop Killing Software as well as Stop Killing Games, please. And if you could just generally Stop Making Everything Worse while you're on, that'd be great also.

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