#oneaday Day 490: Normalise roasting shitty customers

Earlier today, the publisher of the new automation-centric indie game Little Rocket Lab — by all accounts a thoroughly nice-looking, charming game that seems to have mostly gone down well — shared a few Steam posts, noting that they had completely lost patience with the idiots who cry "DEI" any time a woman or non-white character is included in a video game, and had just taken to responding to them in as blunt and unforgiving a manner as possible.

Here's the prime example:

And this one's pretty good, too:

Now, of course, this had A Certain Type of Gamer up in arms about the developer being "hostile" or "butthurt" to players, and to that I say… good. He has every right to be hostile when some little shit comes in and starts shooting their mouth off about something completely, utterly stupid. He has every right to want to curate his community and filter out toxic individuals — even in the case of a single-player game like this. He has every right to say that he's happy certain types of person are not going to play the game because they can't handle the presence of women and people who otherwise look a bit different from them.

I wish this attitude was a bit more normalised. Because it of course sucks to be on the receiving end of rudeness, but if you act like a twat then you should expect to be called on it, likely in anger, and that's a bit different from someone coming up to you and, completely unprovoked, telling you that they hope you die. Unfortunately, the culture of making everything as PR-friendly as possible these days means that even if you're receiving a torrent of abuse from some blowhard on the Internet, you're supposed to just quietly endure it, accept it, thank them for their feedback and move on with your day.

Well, honestly, it's not that easy. I, regrettably, have considerable experience from multiple positions I have worked over the years with people being complete shits to what they believe is a faceless social media account, and it sucks absolute donkey dick. Sometimes it's just weird, such as the one guy who harassed me when I was on GamePro because he thought debit cards were a conspiracy by George Bush to control society. But sometimes — often, even, I'd say — it's downright scary.

Under most circumstances, you're not allowed to respond in kind, you're not allowed to express any sort of frustration and you're absolutely not allowed to make the dickhead in question feel like they are the one who has done anything wrong.

I know why this is the case, of course. It's because the second a company steps out of perceived "line", particularly when it comes to something that has A Community around it, a million and one YouTube videos will appear with "[Brand Name] said WHAT??!!" and, in turn, further harassment will be sent the way of whatever poor sap is having to man the social media mines that day — and said poor employee of the company in question will probably find themselves facing if not disciplinary action, then certainly an awkward conversation with Management the next day.

It shouldn't have to be that way, though. In an age where you can't even walk into a coffee shop or doctor's office without prominent notices about how abuse and harassment of staff members will not be tolerated, why are we still sort of okay with it online? Why do we put up with this garbage treatment from "customers" who, in many cases, are not our target audience in the first place? Why can't we say that these people are not welcome in our community and shouldn't buy our products?

I, unfortunately, don't really have an answer to that. But I have plenty of respect for "Rave" (aka Mike Rose from publisher No More Robots) above, not only for responding the way he did, but also for sharing the crap that anyone involved in the production of games — or games journalism, for that matter — probably finds depressingly familiar at this point in time. We're long overdue a good, long talk about this, and how we can make things better. I'm just concerned it might be far too late to do anything about it.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 489: You've got Fun Factor

I've written about this before, but I write a lot of shit on this blog, so you may not have seen it, particularly since I last wrote about it in March of this year, when you may not have even been reading this blog. (The viewing figures would seem to suggest that quite a few more people are reading this blog now than there were in March. Although the other day I had approximately 900 bot visits from China, so I may take those figures with a pinch of salt or ten.)

Anyway, what I would like to talk about is the Fun Factor podcast, hosted by the experienced writers and video game enthusiasts, Ty Schalter and Aidan Moher. "Oh great," you might say. "Another video games podcast. Like we need any more of those!"

To that, dear reader, I say fie and pfaugh and other such expectorations! Fun Factor is different. Fun Factor isn't just a bunch of dudes sitting around talking about what they'd played that week, maybe coupled with the gaming news headlines they'd picked off their favourite website. Fun Factor is, as you might have determined from the name, about something which is very close to my heart and soul: magazines.

Each episode of Fun Factor takes a close look at an individual video game magazine. The present "season" is focusing specifically on the "Generation Gap", which covers the years between 1995 and 1997. This was a time when gaming underwent a quantum shift as we moved from 16-bit pixel mastery into the brave new frontier of (texture-mapped, Gouraud-shaded) polygonal 3D thanks to platforms like the Nintendo 64, PlayStation and Sega Saturn.

It was an exciting time, and the press of the period reflected that — for many, this was a real golden age for games magazines, as the Internet was early enough in its mainstream adoption (i.e. a lot of us were still on dial-up, particularly outside the US) that it hadn't yet taken the place of traditional publishing.

Rather than attempting to summarise the entire magazine, an episode of Fun Factor instead primarily focuses on a single piece in that magazine: a "review of a review", as it were. Along the way, Aidan and Ty both take a bit of time to flip through the magazine as a whole and contextualise what they're about to do a deep-dive into, including commentary on what was going on in games at that time, what they were both up to in their own personal lives (and experience with gaming) — and even a look at some of the weird and wonderful adverts that cropped up in print.

What I particularly enjoy about Fun Factor is that it has a breezy, friendly tone that one iTunes reviewer quite correctly described as "being like reading old magazines with friends". It's unmistakably modern, as Ty and Aidan are not above pointing out how these magazines often demonstrate how social attitudes and conventions have changed over the years, but, crucially, this never becomes in any way overbearing or preachy. There is plenty to criticise and lessons to be learned in these old mags — but also plenty to celebrate, too, and the show always finds an excellent balance between reflecting on how we've grown (or not, in some cases!) and what a wonderful time it was to be interested in video games.

Both Aidan and Ty cite classic games magazines as being formative in their own decisions to get into professional writing, so it's all done out of love for the medium. I've seen all too many online discussions of '90s magazines and ads in particular descend into nothing but laughing at the terrible taste and attitudes we all had, but Fun Factor has never, to date, across 13 episodes at the time of writing, found anything completely irredeemable in the publications they've looked at.

Even in instances where both Ty and Aidan have disliked the review that was published — such as Edge's truly strange Final Fantasy VI review — there have been positives to pull out. And some of the best examples of reviews from that period have, so far, ended up coming from the most unexpected places — like, say, sports games.

I adore old magazines and have a small collection of them that I treasure — mostly from well before the era that Aidan and Ty are presently covering on Fun Factor — but I don't have many people that I feel I can talk and enthuse about them with, or who understand why they hold such meaning for me. One of the reasons I value Fun Factor so much is that it helps me feel like there are other people out there who get it, who understand why magazines, at one time, held such importance for us as video game enthusiasts — and why many of us miss those days greatly.

If you're after something new to listen to and the above sounds like fun, you can find more information about the Fun Factor podcast on their official website, funfactorpod.com. You can also subscribe to the podcast's channel on YouTube, and I'd encourage you to check out the video versions of the podcast, since each episode displays scans of the pages that Ty and Aidan are talking about, allowing you to "read along" with them to a certain extent.

Thanks for the entertainment, fellas, and I look forward to hearing more from you. Plus if you ever need to hear stories about old Atari magazines, Year 10 work experience on PC Zone or freelancing for the Official Nintendo Magazine here in the UK, you know where I am!

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#oneaday Day 488: Home ports deserve remembering too

I feel like I've talked about this before, but whatever. I feel like talking about it today, so talk about it I will.

In this age of being able to easily emulate the original arcade versions of games, I feel like one thing gets easily lost from the "preservation" aspect of retro rereleases on today's systems: home ports that are notably different from simple attempts to recreate the original arcade games.

I was reminded of this when watching the YouTuber Classic Gaming Quarterly playing Gauntlet for NES earlier. I legitimately had no idea that Gauntlet for NES is not, in fact, a straight port of the arcade game and is, instead, a completely different game. I did know that Gauntlet IV for the Mega Drive also pulls this stunt, but I did not know that this extended back to the NES version. And for my money, pretty much all the home ports of Gauntlet are much more fun than the quarter-munching arcade version — particularly if you're playing on emulation and thus have infinite credits and therefore infinite health.

There are others, too. The Mega Drive port of Toaplan's Slap Fight features an entirely new game mode. The NES versions of the Double Dragon games are completely different to their arcade counterparts. And I'm sure there are countless others — to say nothing of the "home-exclusive sequels" we saw to numerous arcade games, often put together by western developers who didn't quite get what made the Japanese originals so good. (That said, I will happily go to bat for OutRun 2019.)

A few publishers are cottoning on to the fact that there is value in preserving multiple versions of classic games, including both the arcade originals and popular home ports, but it's by no means the norm. The reasons are likely due to licensing complications — in many cases, while the rights to the original arcade game remain with the original creators (or a company that has succeeded the original creators and/or bought the rights), home ports were developed by different teams, meaning that the rights would, I assume (IANAL), be split between the original creators of the arcade game and whoever made the port. This is not a problem when those are one and the same — like the Double Dragon games, for example — but there are plenty of situations where the home versions of a game were made by a completely different company, or even an individual at times.

The takeaway I have from all this is something that I've thought for a while: in many cases, I actually prefer playing the home conversions of games to the original arcade versions, even when the arcade version is obviously technologically superior. There are several reasons for this: firstly, those home conversions are often a good example of what their host platforms are (and are not) capable of. Secondly, since home ports are not obliged to keep people feeding coins into a machine, they are often balanced much better than their arcade counterparts. And this, in turn, makes them considerably more enjoyable to play.

Because there absolutely are arcade games out there that take "quarter-munching" way too far. I adore the beat 'em up genre, for example, but I'd much rather play Streets of Rage 2 than the arcade version of Final Fight, simply because Streets of Rage 2 is balanced much more fairly — and the beat 'em up genre appears particularly prone to this issue. The same is true for any sort of competitive game with a "1P vs COM" mode, be it a fighting game or a puzzle game. In their arcade incarnations, these tend to become absolutely impossible after just one or two levels, whereas in their home incarnations, they tend to save their biggest bullshit for their final challenges. Still annoying at times, yes — particularly in puzzle games, where final bosses tend to have superhuman capabilities as well as, more often than not, ways to "cheat" — but a little less galling than only being able to get through two or three stages before having to wipe your score and "Continue?"

Thankfully, while official licensors are seemingly hesitant to let those often flawed ports back out into the wild when one can just emulate the arcade version on a veritable toaster of a machine these days, one can make use of alternative means to enjoy them through software emulation or FPGA solutions. And I would encourage everyone to do so, because while everyone will inevitably have a preference as to which version of something is "best", it's worth exploring those versions rather than simply assuming the most technologically advanced version is automatically the most enjoyable.

Now, I think I might give Gauntlet on the NES a bit of a go for myself!

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#oneaday Day 487: Deeanddee

One of my biggest regrets — all right, probably not biggest, but one I find myself thinking about occasionally — is not getting more into Dungeons & Dragons when I was younger.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I was interested — at various points I have owned Player's Handbooks, Monster Manuals and Dungeon Master's Guides for at least three generations of the game — but outside of a few isolated opportunities, I never really had much of a chance to play it. And I understand that these days, at least partly due to Fifth Edition and/or Wizards of the Coast's possible mismanagement of the franchise, interest in the system is, on the whole, waning.

That's not to say there are no people playing tabletop role-playing games out there, of course. And I'm sure someone, even now, is preparing to type an epic comment telling me how much better their roleplaying system of choice is. I'm sure it is. But I will always have a particular soft spot for Dungeons & Dragons.

Why? The video games, of course. I must confess, I haven't played many of them, and even less of them to completion — I think Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights and its first expansion Shadows of Undrentide are the only ones I've actually beaten — but I like the ruleset(s), I understand the ruleset(s) and I often find myself wondering what it would have been like to get involved in a lengthy campaign.

I played a little bit at university as part of the Games Society. I had a thief character named Singol Nithryan, and he was constantly robbing my friend Tim, whose arrogant arse of a fighter was constantly asking for it with his behaviour. I don't remember a ton about the adventures we went on, but I do recall it being a lot of fun sitting there in the Student Union coffee bar while the Society took it over for a few hours, losing ourselves in our imaginations and the rolls of a bagful of dice.

"It's never too late," of course, and there are probably online groups and solutions also. But as an autistic adult with fairly severe social anxiety, self-esteem and body image issues, the prospect of finding a suitable group is a fairly daunting one. I don't even know where to begin, to be perfectly honest.

I'll tell you what I miss, and that is Neverwinter Connections, a website designed for aspiring roleplayers to get together with fellow enthusiasts of Neverwinter Nights and make use of that game's astoundingly good (and never since recreated) multiplayer mode, in which one player could take on the role of the Dungeon Master, controlling NPCs and monsters rather than leaving it all up to the game's AI. I have exceedingly fond memories of playing the sorcerer Jay Wrekin (and his pixie familiar Sianie, whom I was delighted to discover it was possible to "possess" and speak as during multiplayer) with several thoroughly lovely people that I miss quite a bit.

Ah well. One day I might get the chance to roll a THAC0 again. Yes, I know they don't do THAC0 any more (I don't think?), but Second Edition will always be special.

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#oneaday Day 486: Investing in retro the right way

I've talked about this once or twice before, but it doesn't hurt to say it again. I firmly believe that we've reached a point in time where collecting retro games is impractical, undesirable and inconvenient.

Don't get me wrong; there will always be an appeal to having original hardware and original media, and I don't begrudge anyone their choice to build up a substantial retro collection. I also think it's a bit sad that we've reached the stage we're at now. But with the absurd, exploitative prices that are being charged for both systems and media today — coupled with the fact that there's no real guarantee either of those things will actually work when you get them — I am very much a convert to the school of thought that says you're better off spending the money you would have spent on one copy of Rule of Rose for the PlayStation 2 on ways to get a "modern retro" setup up and running.

There are many ways you can do this. The absolute simplest way is to buy retro rereleases, either on modern platforms that you happen to own, or with specialist devices such as mini consoles or, of course, the Evercade. There are many benefits to these modern rereleases, such as bugfixes of games that shipped in a dodgy state back in the day, modern convenience features such as save states, rewind functions and in-game reference material, plus the fact they're generally a whole lot cheaper than buying the original releases and still fun to collect. If you were to buy all the games on the recently released NEOGEO Arcade 1 cartridge for Evercade in their original format, you'd be talking four figures. The cart is twenty quid. Do, as Atari once said, the math.

The only downside to officially licensed rereleases is that those licenses are sometimes hard to come by — or even completely impossible. Don't expect to see too many rereleases of racing games with licensed cars or licensed soundtracks, for example. Don't expect to see movie licenses making a return, either. But you might be surprised what licensors are still willing to play ball with, as the Evercade library to date shows.

Another relatively straightforward way is to devote a PC or similar device (like a Raspberry Pi, Steam Deck or Chinese gaming handheld) to it and install a suitable suite of emulators and organisation tools.

For Windows PCs that you also want to do other things, I would recommend Launchbox (even if they took to using odious AI images in their promotional emails of late), as this is not only a good means of organising all the games you might want to play, it also automatically retrieves additional information like box art, descriptions and even PDF copies of manuals where possible. The paid version also has a "Big Box" mode where the interface is designed to be used with a controller on a TV.

For other devices that are going to be dedicated to retro gaming, I highly recommend Batocera, which is a Linux distribution, but don't run away scared. It's all preconfigured to work in a similar fashion to something like Launchbox, and is pretty straightforward to get games up and running in. It's also highly customisable, so you can make the whole thing look and feel how you want it to.

The relative "luxury option", particularly if you still have a CRT knocking around that you want to use for the authentic look and feel, is MiSTer. As I've alluded to in a few posts recently, the absolute easiest way to get started with this is with a prebuilt device like the Multisystem 2 (my device of choice) or the upcoming SuperStation One. Alternatively, you can built your own — that's nowhere near as scary as it sounds, and it allows you a tad more customisability, though with the pricing of the Multisystem 2 and SuperStation One it's actually cheaper to buy one of those prebuilt options in a lot of cases — though note you will still need to provide accessories and storage.

If you're lucky enough to still have working classic hardware around, the first thing I recommend you do is investing in a modern power supply for them. My Mega Drive was prone to rolling noise on the screen with its original power supply, but replacing it gave a completely stable, flicker-free picture.

Once you've done that, invest in an EverDrive. Cheaper flashcart options exist, but EverDrives are premium products that support pretty much everything you might want to play on a piece of classic hardware. Not only that, in the case of systems that had add-ons, they can simulate the presence of the add-on, too — for example, the Mega EverDrive Pro can run Mega CD games.

For classic home computers, flashcarts are also available, or there are also plenty of media emulators you can use to "trick" the computer into believing it's using a real floppy drive or tape deck. For the Atari 8-bit, for example, I enjoyed using the SDrive-MAX device, which allows you to load executable files, disk images and tape images from an SD card. Similar devices are available for most classic computer platforms.

I won't lie; it's easy to spend a few hundred quid on this stuff — possibly even over a thousand. But once you're done, you have a great setup for what is, after all, the important bit of being interested in retro games: actually playing the games. And the kit you have will play pretty much anything without you having to pay some rando on eBay a three-figure sum just to play one game.

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#oneaday Day 485: Forgetful

Missed yesterday. I have no excuse, I just forgot. You can blame Final Fantasy Tactics or God. I did make some videos and write about Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, though. You can read that here.

Speaking of Final Fantasy Tactics, I'm really impressed with the new The Ivalice Chronicles version. I wasn't initially sold on the new look of the "remastered" mode, but seeing it in action makes it make a lot more sense than still screenshots might suggest. There's a nice almost "fabric"-like texture to everything, which makes the game sort of look like it's unfolding on a tapestry, which is entirely appropriate for the nature of the narrative it's telling.

The biggest upgrade by far is the full voice acting. I remember back in the PlayStation 1 era thinking that it was a bit sad, if understandable, that big games like RPGs didn't have full voice acting. The reality is that the voice data for a game as big as Final Fantasy Tactics probably wouldn't fit on a CD! We have no such constraints today, however, so a fully voiced Final Fantasy Tactics is a thing of wonder, and there's an incredible voice cast doing their thing with the excellent War of the Lions script from the PSP version — definitely an upgrade from the borderline nonsensical PS1 original.

The game is still just as hard as it ever was, though. It will absolutely kick your ass if you don't take a bit of time to buff up your characters — and you still need to use a solid strategy during the missions themselves, even if you've levelled up a bit and got good equipment. The computer-controlled "Guest" characters are still as dimwitted as ever, unfortunately, which can lead to some annoying situations, but you can just look at it as these characters being true to their personalities. I can't say I was sorry any time Argath got knocked out.

One of the little things I like the most is the fact that all your "cannon fodder" party members — i.e. the ones who aren't directly relevant to the story — have their own voices, too. And rather than having just one male voice and one female voice, there are actually several, so your individual, "unimportant" characters each have their own personality, which helps you become attached to them. And, given that Final Fantasy Tactics has permadeath (albeit a somewhat forgiving take on it, where you have a few turns to resurrect them before they're gone forever) that's an important part of the experience.

I'm not far into the game as yet, but I'm enjoying it a lot, and I suspect I will get a lot more out of it now than when I played it back in the day. It's a truly great game, and I'm thrilled that it's got a new release — and a release in Europe, which it never had back in the day!

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#oneaday Day 484: Comeuppance

I am going to leave names and specifics out of the following for reasons that will become obvious, but I wanted to talk about this today.

It is always satisfying to see someone you know is Not A Nice Person get their due comeuppance. And that has very much been happening over the course of the last few days.

The other day, I received a promotional email from a publisher extolling the virtues of their latest book. Again, I am redacting details for reasons that should hopefully become obvious, but those who follow these things will probably know exactly what I'm talking about.

Anyway, as part of that promotional email, the company boasted of its author, whom they described as "one of the most respected" in their field. I vaguely recognised the name, so I did a bit of Googling and confirmed that they were, in fact, the person who I thought they were: a thoroughly unpleasant individual with whom I had enjoyed a run-in or two in the past, and who I was exceedingly disappointed to see was now a published author with an actual book to their name.

I won't lie, I was initially a little despondent at this — my thought process was something along the lines of "if a person as awful as that can get published, I should probably get my act together and do something worthwhile".

For context, this person is someone whom I used to respect, probably about ten years ago at this point. I respected them even more after they went on a bit of a self-reflection trip and posted a rather moving blog post about how they recognised they had not treated some of the people around them terribly well, and that they wanted to do better from thereon.

I drifted away from their work for various reasons, and some years later I rediscovered them, finding them to be considerably more abrasive and downright unpleasant than they had ever been before. Wondering if I had imagined the self-reflective blog post that I had found so moving and admirable a few years back, I tried to look it up. It had gone. To make doubly sure that I wasn't imagining things, I found it on the Internet Archive. So this individual had reflected on their self-reflection, gone "nah" and turned back into the person they had once been, only infinitely worse.

I happened to politely disagree with their opinion on something at one point, only to find myself on the receiving end of a torrent of abuse. When I blocked them as a result of this, they took to harassing me with multiple sockpuppet accounts, ostensibly for their various "projects" but also clearly not the first time they had been used for this purpose. It was at that point — well before it, to be perfectly honest — that this person whom I had once respected was all but dead to me. Any respect I had once had for them was well and truly in the past; they were, for whatever reason, a completely changed person, and not for the better. They had become arrogant, abusive, bigoted and generally… well, Not A Nice Person.

And so I was gratified to see that their new book had ended up in the hands of someone absolutely willing to tear this person's work a multitude of new assholes. There's a truly epic thread over on Bluesky dissecting this book and its many failings — to such a degree that I no longer feel bad about the person in question having got themselves published. I know I can do better than that. I have done better than that. I will do better than that.

This thread seemingly acted as the catalyst for a variety of people to come out of the woodwork and admit they had always thought the individual in question was a bit of a wrong'un, and I felt vindicated in what I have been quietly feeling about them for the last few years. I felt pleased that other people finally saw them for the person they really are. And, I won't lie, I laughed when I saw that the person in question had quietly nuked their entire Bluesky presence following this thread and all the people who had raised their head to speak out against them.

I'm generally not a fan of dogpiling and harassment. But that's not what has happened in this instance; the person hasn't had abuse hurled at them, nor have they been harassed. It's just been a bunch of people explaining to others, curious about the book in question, how they had always had misgivings about this individual — and how they, like me, feel particularly vindicated in feeling that way, given what others have said.

You shouldn't bully and harass people. But sometimes people really deserve to get their comeuppance for behaving like a complete shit. And that is what has happened here.

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#oneaday Day 483: I regret buying an expensive keyboard and mouse

A while back — probably a few years back at this point — I discovered the joy of a mechanical keyboard and a good quality mouse. Actually, it's probably more accurate to say I rediscovered it; growing up, after the Atari ST, we had a couple of "proper" IBM PCs, complete with Model M keyboard, and I have fond memories both of using that keyboard and of being able to hear it all the way downstairs when my Dad was typing on it upstairs.

But yeah; I started with a relatively cheap "Tecknet" wired mechanical keyboard and liked the feel and sound of that, so a little while later I decided to spend a bit of money and treat myself to some pricier models: specifically, a Razer Blackwidow V3 Pro keyboard and a Razer Basilisk X Hyperspeed mouse. I chose the Blackwidow V3 Pro specifically because it was a mechanical keyboard that was also wireless — for a while, that was a hard combination to find — and the Basilisk X Hyperspeed because it seemed to be decent without being overcomplicated.

I regret my purchases.

Not because either of them are unusably bad or anything, but because both of them have just enough little annoyances about them to make me wish I'd just stuck with the cheaper kit I was using before — or going with another manufacturer. Razer is very much the basic bitch of PC pimping — although I will say their Kiyo X webcam is genuinely excellent, and I have absolutely no regrets there.

Let's start with the names. If I hadn't told you the Blackwidow was a keyboard and the Basilisk was a mouse, would you have been able to determine which was which? I still have to look it up every time, which is very unhelpful when Razer's software (we'll get onto that in a moment, believe me) informs me that the battery is low on one of them. It doesn't have a helpful little icon showing whether it's the keyboard or mouse; it just says the battery is low in the Blackwidow or the Basilisk. And I'm fucked if I can remember which is which. (Although writing this blog is, annoyingly enough, probably going to help me remember.)

Okay. So the Blackwidow. It's a nice keyboard — feels nice to type on, makes a nice clicky sound when you do so. But it has an eminently stupid design that causes it to get filthier than any keyboard I've ever used. Rather than having the keys in a slightly recessed cutout from the main body of the keyboard, which is easy enough to clean if you take all the keys off and then Hoover it or something, the keys "float" slightly above the keyboard case, which is otherwise solid. This means all manner of disgusting crap gets caught in between and beneath the keys within about five seconds of you starting to use it, and cleaning it seems woefully ineffective because immediately after doing so, it attracts filth again.

Possibly related to the perpetually filthy status is the fact that the volume knob on the top right of the keyboard is a real roll of the dice on whether or not it'll actually do what you want it to do. A significant portion of the time, it will do the exact opposite of what you are indicating you would like it to do, and sometimes it will just judder back and forth between two values. The particularly annoying thing about it is that I generally don't use it to adjust the volume, so any time I have to use it, it is because I have knocked it accidentally. And on multiple occasions it has taken several minutes to revert it to 100% after it had dropped to just 80% or so.

The Blackwidow has the obligatory RGB lighting that everything vaguely "premium" has to have on PCs these days, and this is all very nice, apart from the inexplicable fact that the hash key refuses to light up when the keyboard is in wireless mode. It's not broken, because it lights up when the keyboard is connected via USB, and it's not a faulty profile, because I've tried changing the profile and even setting the options for that key individually. It's just… fucked somehow in a non-mechanical way. And it's little annoyances like that which make you realise how surprisingly often you want to use the hash key in the dark.

Speaking of wired versus wireless, I discovered a while back that the keyboard will not charge its battery unless the Razer software is installed. This was something of a problem when I determined that the Razer software was causing my PC to freeze up. (It transpires that something else was wrong on a deeper level, because a complete reformat and Windows reinstall fixed the freezes, but still.) It's also just fucking stupid. What other USB device does not charge unless you are running a specific piece of software? One of the main benefits of USB is that you can just plug a thing into a socket and it charges, even if the computer doesn't know how to talk to the device otherwise. But no! Not the case with the Razer Blackwidow V3 Pro. So pro that it can't handle charging without its special software to hold its hand. Real fearsome.

Now, onto the Basilisk, which I think I hate significantly more than the Blackwidow, which at least is 98% reliably functional, wireless hash key aside. I have never had as many connectivity problems with a wireless mouse as I have done with the Basilisk. I don't sit an unreasonable distance away from my computer — basically the computer is under my TV, and the keyboard and mouse are on a coffee table in front of the sofa — but this goddamn thing will not stay connected if there is any form of obstacle in its path. And I mean anything. Put a box of biscuits in front of it so you can stuff your face while idly browsing YouTube? Flashy light, lost connection. Put a glass of drink vaguely in front of it for mid-game refreshment? Flashy light, lost connection. Put a discarded lunch plate on the table near it because you'll take it to the kitchen the next time you stand up? Flashy light, lost connection.

It's annoying, because other than this fairly glaring issue, the Basilisk is a nice mouse. It has a good, comfortable shape, nicely clicky buttons and a scroll wheel that, so far, does not appear to have suffered the same fate as the volume control on the Blackwidow — or, indeed, the fate every single Apple mouse I have used has succumbed to. You can actually scroll with it, in other words. It has a couple of side buttons that default to forward/back buttons when web browsing, but I don't really use them. As a basic mouse, it's comfortable, and were it not for the connectivity issues, I would like it a lot. Unfortunately, the connectivity issues happen frequently enough for it to be massively irritating.

"So just replace them!" you might say. "Reader, I spent £250 on the pair of them," I will reply. "I am going to at least attempt to get my money's worth."

And then, sotto voce, "And then never spend that much on a keyboard and mouse ever again."

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#oneaday Day 482: Among the dead

I got off my arse and went for a walk this evening. I'm going to try and make a bit more of a habit of this. I know I have said this before, but since I am starting to see some success in establishing the good habits necessary for weight loss, I should get some exercise in there too, as that will help with the whole calorie deficit thing, as well as getting my body generally moving and hopefully a bit less stiff (not in a good way) than it has been for the last [x] years.

I mostly like going for a walk, even if in my current state I am painfully slow at getting anywhere, particularly if there is any sort of incline whatsoever. The annoying thing about where we live is that we're sort of at the top of a hill, so whichever direction I set off in to go for a walk, inevitably at least some of the way back involves going uphill to varying degrees.

I've tried a few different routes on various occasions, and the most… acceptable I have found strikes a good balance between being reasonably picturesque (a significant portion of it involves walking through the local cemetery, which, although maudlin, is also quite pleasant and peaceful), being a decent distance to get some reasonably good exercise out of, and not having overly difficult changes in elevation for my battered and broken body to have to contend with.

I find cemeteries quite interesting. I often find myself looking at the graves; part of me wonders if I'll see a name I recognise, but the rest of my brain explains that is fairly unlikely. As such, I find my own life briefly touching the fleeting existences of complete strangers and pondering their circumstances, and what kind of people they were. Sometimes there are clearly tragic stories, such as the extremely ornate memorial which had been raised to a baby who lived less than an hour. At others, there is clearly family history, with little quotes and well-wishes from people — usually couples. Sometimes it's just a simple expression of remembrance, such as with the rather out-of-place looking grave with the simple wooden cross marking its location, surrounded by more elaborate marble headstones.

Supposedly Benny Hill is buried in that cemetery. I didn't go looking for him; I just remember happening to notice his name marked on Google Maps when I was pondering a route to take before I left.

I thought about getting some sort of fitness tracker up and running before going, but then the part of my brain that is specifically trying to disconnect from stuff like that took over and reminded me that I don't need or even want "numbers" — the important thing is just getting out and doing it. Yes, yes, I know we're all supposed to do 10,000 steps a day, but all I find when introducing metrics into the mix is added anxiety. Just get out there, do the thing and be happy that you did it.

So I did!

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#oneaday Day 481: I have returned

I have returned! And I'm in a foul mood, apparently, but that's nothing unusual after having to do that drive. I set out at 5pm and got home at about 8.40pm. That's not fun. Granted, I did stop to have some dinner at the South Mimms services in an inevitably vain attempt to try and avoid the worst of rush hour on the M25, but still. It would be lovely to be able to leave my place of work and be home in a duration of time that is less than multiple episodes of a podcast. Although at least the journey does afford me the opportunity to actually listen to podcasts, which I otherwise don't really make much time for.

I am also in a less-than-charitable mood because the whole trip this time around felt a little bit pointless. It is always nice to see my colleagues in person because I like them, but the only real benefit of me actually being in the office today was that I could participate in a meeting by sitting in an uncomfortable chair near everyone else instead of sitting in my own comfortable chair via Teams. The rest of the day I was just sort of… there, and don't really feel like I achieved much that I couldn't have done from home. In fact, I generally feel like on my trips into the office I achieve significantly less than I do with a day working from home.

But oh well. This is the world we live in, and it's not that much of an inconvenience to have to do this once a month. Just enough to want to have a little moan about now and again. But now I am home, and I can see my cats (literally, they are both sitting staring at me as I type this) and be with my wife and play Final Fantasy Tactics, which arrived in my absence.

So I think that's probably what I'm going to spend the rest of the evening doing. I haven't played Final Fantasy Tactics through properly since the PS1 original, so it will be nice to do so with a translation that makes sense and the new voiceovers. I will do my best not to power through just to get to the bits with Ben Starr in, but I am making no promises.

On that note, it's time to get isometric and turn-based. Normal business will resume tomorrow. Probably.

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