#oneaday Day 585: Hotels and their unflattering mirrors

It's that time of the month again, when I haul myself down to sunny Letchworth in preparation for A Day In The Office. And as such, I am coming atcha from my usual hotel, typing on my phone.

This hotel is, as I've alluded to in the past, All Right. It's reasonably comfortable, but its rooms vary quite a lot in quality, so it's always a bit of a roll of the dice when you get here as to whether or not you, for example, have a bath or not. This time I have been unlucky — no bath, plus a bedside table that looks like it last saw a lick of paint at some point in the 1970s.

I don't mind these little idiosyncrasies, though. They add character, and this place has become quite familiar to me from my numerous visits. Not quite enough that I know from my room number whether or not I have a "good" room, but enough that it is comfortably familiar here.

One thing I do dislike, though, is that pretty much every room seems to have mirrors, like, fucking everywhere. And there's something about hotel mirrors that always seems infinitely more unflattering that the ones you have at home.

I never feel more disgusted with my own body than when I see it in a hotel mirror. I think part of it may be the knowledge that I am away from home and thus not able to "do anything" about the way I look — not that I can really do anything at home, either, but I always feel just a bit more… grounded and in control when I'm at home.

I can't continue like this. This year has to be the year that I beat this problem. It's not going to be an easy process, and there are going to be times that I want more than anything to give up, but there is nothing I want more for 2026 than to be able to look at myself in the mirror and say "good work — you still have a way to go, but you're doing good". (I am a realist about this stuff if nothing else.)

That hard work has to come from me, though. I have to want it. Seeking external help has only worked on one previous occasion, and I never recovered from my relapse. Granted, there were external factors beyond my complete control that caused said relapse, but the approach I took back then — Slimming World — is clearly not quite right for me now.

I've been to the doctor about this, too. I was referred to an organisation who offered nutrition advice and counselling, but I found most of the course to be useless. The nutritional advice came once a fortnight and amounted to "eat less" (no, really?) and the counselling was even less frequent — though I did find the couple of sessions I had in that regard to be quite helpful, so that might be something I pursue independently and privately. It costs money, yes, but if investing in yourself isn't a good use of your funds, what is?

I'm keen to avoid drug-based approaches as although I'm sure they work, I am exceedingly squeamish about poking myself with needles and am not sure I would be able to do it — and I don't want to force Andie to have to do that, either.

During my time with the nutritionist and the counsellor, I was also continually asked if I wanted bariatric surgery, and while I have seen people get great results with that, that is not something I want for myself.

Besides being scared shitless of surgery in general — something I will have to confront when I do eventually manage to lose some weight, in order to get my long-standing hernia fixed — I also worry that the surgery won't fix the main problems, which I have pretty strong suspicions are as much psychological as physiological.

To put it another way, I'm worried that even if they remove the use of part of my stomach or whatever it is they do, I still wouldn't be able to control myself. And if you overeat when you've had that treatment, you can really fuck yourself up.

So that leaves me with good old-fashioned willpower, which hasn't done me too proud up until this point. But I really do want this. I want this to be the year I can look at myself and say yes, I am on the road to recovery.

Sorry for the rather TMI post, but sometimes it helps to just express these things and get them out in the open, as much for your own benefit as anyone else. I don't need anyone's help, I don't want advice — all I do need is some understanding and quiet support. And thankfully, that is something that I do have already.

#oneaday Day 584: Paint chase

"Are you going to paint them?" Andie asked, looking at the wealth of miniatures in the big-box HeroQuest set that arrived today.

"Probably not," I said. "I don't know how."

This probably isn't quite accurate — as Andie pointed out, the how of painting something is pretty bloody obvious. But what I meant by that was I have no idea how to do it in such a way that it doesn't look absolute shite.

Now, granted, I am basing this on my previous attempts to do this, some 30+ years ago, when I had a Citadel Miniatures starter paint set and a single brush that was, frankly, woefully inaccurate for the job at hand. The results were, as you might expect, Not Very Good — not least because I only ever really got as far as doing base colours, and never got into doing highlights and shadows. I always got hung up on the how of those bits — how do you know which bits need highlights and shadows? (Obviously, you shine a light on it, and put shadows in the bits that have shadows in them, and lighter bits on the bits that have light on them — I realise that now.)

With this in mind, I've been pondering whether I should try again. And I was surprised and pleased to discover that miniature painting technology has, unsurprisingly, moved on quite considerably in the intervening 30+ years since I last attempted it.

I'm especially interested in some curious little gizmos called Speedpaint Markers by a company called The Army Painter. This is, in turn, a spinoff of a type of paint this company creates called Speedpaint, which purports to do all the highlighting and shadowing for you to a certain extent. It does this through a particularly blended paint, whose properties mean that when it gets into cavities it takes on a darker tone, while on flatter, more raised areas it has a lighter tone, and on everything in between it has a… well, kind of "normal" tone, whatever that means for the specific colour you're using. It's a different sort of idea to acrylic-based paint, which is what I had previously experimented with, and looks like being a very beginner-friendly approach to painting minis.

The Markers take things a step further. Rather than requiring a specialist brush, palette and other equipment, they're a little brush-pen hybrid that delivers the paint right onto the miniature without any other equipment required. Obviously you still need to prime them beforehand, but that's simple enough that even I can do it.

I'm tempted to give them a try. It's a bit of money to get a decent starter set of colours (and, annoyingly, the one thing the "starter set" of markers lacks is a regular flesh tone) but if it really is as easy as it looks to use these things, I might finally be able to enjoy something that has, to date, eluded me.

I dunno. I'll think about it. But it would be cool to have painted minis for HeroQuest.

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 583: Heroic leap

(Experimenting with some different techniques today. The above isn't what I'd call a "finished" image but I feel like I can probably build that into something.)

We were originally supposed to be having some friends over to play HeroQuest today, but the collective illness of me, Andie and at least one of the friends in question over the course of the last week caused us to postpone to next weekend. So I can't really offer a recap of what occurred in our first session, but I can take a moment to ponder exactly why I'm looking forward to jumping into this.

HeroQuest was an important part of my childhood. I was introduced to it through my brother's girlfriend at the time, who was big into heavy metal, fantasy role-playing and suchlike. Her Dad was into miniature wargaming, also, so I wonder how much that was an influence on her — though, of course, Warhammer and its ilk was always a lot cooler than the sort of "historical re-enactment" miniatures her father collected. Perhaps it was a case of "oh, I kind of like those, but I don't want my Dad to think he's cool, so I'll get into something tangentially related".

Anyway, fact is, I was introduced to HeroQuest by my brother's girlfriend, who did an admirable job of putting up with her boyfriend's annoying younger brother by letting me look at her stuff. I don't think I ever actually played HeroQuest with her, but I was so enamoured with it that I asked my parents to get me a copy of Advanced Heroquest one birthday or Christmas, and I got it. Still have it, in fact.

To my frustration over the years, I've actually had relatively few opportunities to play either the original HeroQuest or Advanced Heroquest with real people. Fortunately, Advanced Heroquest includes some very robust solo play rules, so it wasn't a complete waste, and I did manage to play it a few times with people over the years. But the original HeroQuest was always something I really wanted to play with other people over the long term — ideally with me in the role of the games master, taking the players through a full campaign of adventures.

HeroQuest, for the unfamiliar, is a fairly straightforward dungeon-crawling board game. The original MB Games version from the late '80s was developed in conjunction with Games Workshop's Citadel Miniatures brand, and thus was regarded as part of the Warhammer universe; Advanced Heroquest made this much more explicit. A few years back, however, Hasbro and its Avalon Hill brand, now rights holders for the HeroQuest license, decided to resurrect the game with a crowdfunding campaign.

The new HeroQuest has had a few changes since its late '80s release. The new version is now universal worldwide, being based on the previous incarnation's North American rules, rather than having European and North American variants. This means a few things. Firstly, the games master player is now called Zargon instead of Morcar, which to my mind is an infinitely worse name, but it seems "Morcar" is being reintroduced to New HeroQuest with an upcoming expansion, so I'm not too mad about it. Secondly, the game is a tad more difficult — in the European original, all monsters had just one Body Point, so you just had to hit them in order to kill them, even in the case of "bosses". Thirdly, there are some differences and variations in how the quests are composed.

I initially bought the First Light standalone "starter" set for HeroQuest but, having seen a good price on the full-size core set, I've splurged on that too. (Christmas money!) It's actually worth having both, though, because First Light has a completely different campaign of quests to take on as well as a double-sided board with a new map layout that isn't in the original. The downside of First Light is that as a lower-cost starter set, it only has five miniatures: the four Heroes and a dragon boss that recurs throughout the First Light campaign; the remainder of the Stuff is implemented either as flat cardboard tiles, or cardboard standees. Conversely, the full core set has miniatures for all the main monster types in both the First Light and original core quests, plus plastic 3D furniture to put in the rooms.

I'm really looking forward to getting into playing this, because as much as I have had fun with some subsequently release dungeon crawler games such as Descent: Journeys in the Dark, The Legend of Drizzt, Gloomhaven and another one I've completely forgotten the name of, a lot of those feel like they get a bit bogged down in being tactical wargames rather than exploration-focused dungeon crawlers — and it's the exploration and storytelling that has always attracted me to HeroQuest and its surrounding works.

Hopefully at this point next week I'll be able to provide a report on how our first session went. I'm looking forward to it a lot, and hope it will be able to become a semi-regular activity. We shall see!

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#oneaday Day 582: Getting some mojo back

No drawing today as I've been doing other creative things, as I shall talk about in a moment.

I have not felt at all like making any videos for a while, which is a little bit frustrating to me, because the first two episodes of my Space Rogue playthrough actually did surprisingly decent (for my channel) numbers, and I reckon there's just one or two episodes more of The Granstream Saga to do before that's all finished. I just haven't quite been able to summon up the energy to continue those recently, not helped by a week of feeling ill that I'm just getting over.

However, with a soft embargo date approaching for Super Woden Rally Edge, a game I wanted to cover — the video I made on this game's previous installment is the best-performing video on my channel by a long shot — I felt a bit more inspired to actually do something today. So I recorded a bunch of voiceovers: both for this, and for some other things that I've previously written articles for, but wanted to turn them into videos. All in all, I've recorded voiceovers for Super Woden Rally Edge, Old Skies, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein 2009 and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, which should result in a nice spread of 15-20 minute videos for each. I've even edited the Super Woden Rally Edge and Old Skies ones already, but I'm going to leave the Wolfenstein ones to another time — maybe tomorrow, maybe later in the week, depending on how I'm feeling.

I continue to go back and forth on what is "best" to do for my YouTube channel. Up until now, I've built it on Let's Play-style playthroughs of games, and I think a lot of my viewers like that sort of thing, particularly as I make an effort to explain how to play the game, why it's interesting, why it's still relevant (if it's an old game, which it usually is) and what I, personally, think of it. These are fairly easy to record and edit, but they are time- and energy-consuming to produce, since they do involve me sitting and playing a game, often for quite a long time, and attempting to find meaningful things to say for the duration.

At the same time, the pre-scripted videos tend to overall do better, particularly over the long term. I think I'm probably more "proud" of those overall, too, since they involve more in the way of editing, and delivering a voiceover is a different skill overall to off-the-cuff, unprepared commentary while playing "live". However, they take a lot more time to both prepare and edit, since there is often a lot of miscellaneous footage required to capture along with the footage of the main thing I'm covering, and the editing process involves a lot more in creatively finding ways to visually represent the things I'm talking about.

Part of me wants to commit to one or the other of these approaches, because I feel it would probably be a good idea to. At the same time, I think there's value in both approaches; you can show things in "live gameplay" that you can't show in a "video essay"-style production, and vice versa.

I do, however, think that kicking off long playthroughs again might have been a mistake. The videos for The Granstream Saga have performed more poorly than anything I've done for a long time, although, as I say, the first couple of episodes of Space Rogue did surprisingly well. So I'm inching towards abandoning those, though I feel like at this point I probably should finish The Granstream Saga at the very least.

Anyway, that's something to think about another day. I have enough on my plate with these new videos for now, so watch for them coming soon to my channel!

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#oneaday Day 581: Another experiment with references

I present you with the author's self-portrait, in which he is a bit more generous to himself than he normally is, and which was based, once again, on a 3D reference pose. This was also an experiment at adding noses and ears to a character.

I still have a lot of fundamental techniques I need to work on — getting my pen pressure consistent as I draw something is a big one, though there are tweaks one can make to one's tools to mitigate that somewhat — but I'm quite happy with how things are going, and feel like I'm definitely learning some things every time I draw something. And I'm not taking a ton of time over these right now, as is probably readily apparent — so I'm sure if I were to take a lot more time over a single image, things might come out better.

I'm actually keen to experiment with some other ideas, too. I have vivid memories of "Computer Art" classes back at school, where I got very good marks for a digital recreation of an Impressionist painting, achieved on an Archimedes computer. The toolset on the art package we were using there was limited, but I was able to make creative use of it to produce a satisfyingly good image that looked vaguely authentically Impressionist — as close as one can achieve with a limited resolution and colour palette, anyway!

One of the nice things about Clip Studio Paint is that it has a lot of nice built-in tools — virtual pens, pencils, paintbrushes and painting methods. Thus far I've been keeping it simple for the doodles I've been doing on here, but I kind of want to fiddle around with drawing some completely different sorts of images — maybe something more abstract, maybe something a bit more landscapey, maybe something completely imaginative. That will be a project for another day, which I will chronicle on here for sure, but for now, I'm definitely having fun dabbling in the visual arts.

I recognise that I will almost certainly never be as good as someone who has been practicing this stuff their whole life — but you also never know what you're capable of until you try it, which is partly what this was all about. I haven't even really tried drawing of any description outside of a few idle doodles since I was a teenager; I didn't study Art or any related fields at GCSE, so my "formal" education in such things stopped around year 9. And I tended to find Art classes a little frustrating at times, since I never really got on well with real paint. I was bad at mixing colours — whatever I mixed, I always seemed to end up with brown — and I didn't have particularly good command over brush strokes. My paint would drip and dribble and my eventual compositions would end up looking a bit messy.

There were parts of it I enjoyed, though. I do remember enjoying sketching still lifes with pencils, and the brief period we did a bit of technical drawing was something I took to quite well. I'm sure I will rediscover some other things eventually, too. For now, though, like I say, I'm continuing to feel like this tablet was a good "investment". And by "investment", I mean "put on my Amazon wishlist so someone would buy it me for Christmas".

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#oneaday Day 580: Make Bad Art (But With References)

A recurring refrain I hear online among creative types is "Make Bad Art". The sentiment behind this is that one shouldn't be afraid to do something that, by the standards of the day, is Not Very Good. Because it is only through being Not Very Good for quite some time that you have any possibility of ever graduating to Vaguely Good, and beyond.

Today, with that in mind, I decided to do a little experiment. Rather than drawing completely freehand as I usually do, I today decided to experiment with Clip Studio Paint's reference features. This allows you to do things like import 3D models of objects and people, then draw over them to produce your own finished works.

After a little tinkering with the 3D models to get the exaggerated proportions used by the characters I've previously drawn, I then traced over the outlines for a basic bit of line art, then added some features such as their faces, clothes and hair. Then I coloured using the basic method I have been using up until now.

The result… isn't amazing, I will freely admit, and I think at this point my freehand sketches are probably "better". But I did find the experiment valuable, and there are things I have already learned from doing this for just one session.

Firstly, even if using exaggerated big head proportions like I did here, it's tricky to get the balancing of a face right, particularly if you're using stylised eyes (and no noses) as I have been up until this point. But one thing that is very helpful when using reference models is the "centre line" on the head, which gives you an idea of where the eyes are supposed to go. It's easy to forget that our eyes are actually a good halfway down the front of our head, since the top part of many people's heads is covered by hair. But if you can get the eyes in the right place, that's a good start.

Some experimentation with adding additional detail to Alex's hair taught me an important lesson: if you're going to do dangly fringy front bits, draw them first. You will likely want the back to look at least a little bit like it is attached to the front bits, which is not something I have succeeded with in the above image. And with the way I composed that image — drawing the head and the "back hair" together as one layer — this is something that would have been difficult to correct without completely redoing the head. Lesson learned for future reference.

It's also clear that the simple, abstract hair I have been using for "me" doesn't quite work when using marginally more realistic proportions, or at least a reference model. I've been left with a huge forehead, which is not something I actually have. Hell, the stringy hair I have been using for a while now is supposed to represent a shaved head, which is not actually accurate to how my hair is right now. So I will have to rethink that a bit if I want to continue on like this.

However, difficulties aside, I also found using the reference models enormously helpful to get vaguely convincing human shapes. Simple things like getting the length of arms right, or having legs positioned in a convincing manner, or where a lady's boobs actually are — all of those things can be learned by tinkering around with a reference model.

Now, part of me feels like drawing over a 3D model like I've done today is sort of "cheating". But in reality, it's a valid method that I'm pretty sure many people use — and my Not Very Good efforts today show that there is still plenty of skill involved in making a trace of a reference model into something that looks Actually Good. And, as previously noted, it is only through Making Bad Art that one learns to get better — particularly if you are trying something new to see what techniques it teaches you.

I don't know if I will stick with using the reference models long-term — to me, someone who is "good at drawing" is someone who can work without things like this; the correct proportions, shapes and suchlike just come naturally — but I think it's a worthwhile experiment for at least a few more attempts. I know some things to try and concentrate on now, so let's just see what happens with a bit more tinkering!

Most importantly, though, I'm having fun. I'm glad I decided to give this a go with a proper tablet, as I'm enjoying myself. Even if I never get anywhere close to being Actually Good, it's always nice to have various ways to express yourself.

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#oneaday Day 579: Fresh hell

No drawing today; it doesn't quite feel appropriate.

So much for new year, new beginnings. Just the last week has seen all manner of fresh hell being served up, particularly across the pond in America, but these things have the potential to affect everyone in the world, directly or indirectly.

The first thing I want to acknowledge is America's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terror group murdering someone in cold blood in Minneapolis today. I have no real words to express what I feel about the continually declining situation in the States right now, and as someone who has relatives who live there, I am frightened. I can't even begin to imagine how people who live there in the knowledge that this horrendous shit is going down must be feeling right now.

That's about all I can say about that for the moment, because that situation is still ongoing. I at least wanted to acknowledge it, however, because it's just one of many things that have been going horribly, horribly wrong recently, making it clear that 2026 is not going to offer any sort of respite from the general shitshow the 2020s have been so far. I hope the perpetrator of this heinous act is brought to justice, and that this can be the starting point for the people of the United States to take their country back — by force, if necessary — from an increasingly, dangerously unhinged administration.

The main thing I want to talk about today is Grok, the generative AI large language model attached to X, the child sexual abuse material and revenge porn platform formerly known as the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Grok has been trouble ever since Elon Musk, idiot-in-chief of The Everything App, decided that he needed to make it Cool and Based, and not subject to those pesky guardrails that the boring folks at OpenAI and Anthropic were doing. (Guardrails which, I will add, are consistently failing, as people keep dying as a result of following chatbot "advice" when it comes to drugs and suicidal ideation. But that's beyond the scope of what I want to talk about today.)

If you've somehow missed what's been going on, Grok, ostensibly an on-platform AI able to provide additional context and explanation to a post if someone asks it to chip in, is being used to a frightening degree to produce non-consensual pornography based on real people's photographs — including those of minors. And it has been complying with these requests, posting uncensored nude and lingerie-bikini clad images of women and girls who had previously posted perfectly normal, innocent images of themselves online.

Not only that, but the "community" has been quickly finding ways around what little guardrails Grok does have in place, as reported by the excellent 404 Media, one of the best, most rigorous sources in tech journalism today. For example, Grok supposedly won't generate an image of someone covered in cum, but it will happily comply with a request to "donut glaze" someone, as reported by Eliot Higgins in a lengthy thread on Bluesky earlier today.

There's been disturbingly little critical reporting of this from the media, too. There was a half-arsed attempt to cover the situation during which multiple news outlets unironically said that "Grok apologised" for producing the inappropriate material, when, as a large language model, it is not capable of doing such a thing. The "apologies" posted were simply responses to further prompts, and the insincerity of them was emphasised by someone also prompting it to basically post a Cool and Based "deal with it" kind of response immediately after the initial "apology".

X, The Everything App, so far appears to have done little to curtail the issue. Indeed, if you go click on Grok's profile right now — don't do that — and look at the replies tab, you will almost certainly see a request to put a non-consenting woman in a bikini within two or three posts, if not as the very first post you see. This has been done to a vast number of people so far, including celebrities, public figures, individuals just posting selfies and, yes, minors. And, as one might expect, it has been overwhelmingly women that have received this treatment.

This has been absolutely revolting to see, and although I left Twitter behind myself long ago for a variety of reasons, I am still obliged to check in on it every so often for the day job. And I kind of feel sickened to have to do that; I have absolutely no desire to associate the brand I work for, which I actually care about, with a platform that is seemingly okay with the material I've just been describing. If it were up to me, I would remove the brand from the platform entirely, but unfortunately that is not my decision to make — and thankfully, at some point hopefully not too long away, I will be stepping away from having to deal with social media entirely, in favour of some new responsibilities at the company I will enjoy a lot more.

But if you still have a Twitter account on the grounds that "your audience is still there", let me be blunt: no, they are not. Anyone with any decency abandoned that hellsite long before this latest nonsense started to be a thing, because they could see how things were going a mile off. I wish I could say I was surprised that Grok ended up being used for non-consensual deepfake revenge porn of minors, but I am not.

Back in 2023, I wrote about how I'm not surprised so many people become misanthropes in this day and age, and how I had pretty much lost faith in my fellow man. Things haven't gotten any better since then. In fact, they've become much, much worse. If you've ever thought "ah, no, that's ridiculous, there's no way that'd ever happen", then I'm sorry to say that it probably has already. And then some edgelord shithead has "donut glazed" it just to add insult to injury.

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#oneaday Day 578: The 10-1 rule

I read a good thread on Bluesky earlier. It ties in with something I've talked about before, but it bears repeating. It concerns matters of community management, and how a proactive approach that might, in the short-term, be perceived as "negative" is actually for the best in the long run. If you want to read the thread in question, here's the link.

The poster, "The Wyzard", posits a "10-1 rule", which is to say "every (1) shithead you don't ban costs you ten (10) other customers". They admit that the maths is not exact by the very nature of it being an abstract concept that one cannot truly represent mathematically, but I can see figures along those lines being very plausible.

The theory runs that if you have one person stinking up the joint — whether literally through their personal hygiene, or metaphorically through their behaviour — then while they might be a loyal customer, they will actively repulse other customers. And the number of customers they will repulse is more than the one, single person that they are, making them a net negative for your community.

Back when I was running Rice Digital, I ran into an issue with a persistent commenter who, during the site's time without much moderation going on in the comments section, had come to think of it as his own personal place to spew hatred and bigotry. Because I had taken over the site and the login details to be able to moderate the comments had gone astray several editor-in-chiefs ago, I took the executive decision to nuke the entire comments section from orbit and start afresh.

The commenter in question was not happy, because he believed he had ownership of this vitriol he had continually spewed on the site (including, among other things, stating that a particular TV show had "ruined lesbians for him" because the lesbians in question were not what he considered to be attractive), and it had not occurred to him that a website that does not belong to him, and which he doesn't pay anything for, does not owe him a damned thing.

The metaphor I used at the time was that of a clubhouse. When you run any sort of community, be it online or offline, whatever form it takes, you are effectively carving out a space that is for the use and enjoyment of that community, but which is ultimately the responsibility of someone. Picture, for example, a gaming club, where people come along to meet friends and play games together in a space specially designed for that. Sounds great, right?

Now imagine that every week you show up to that gaming club, there's some asshole whose table talk consists entirely of how much he hates trans people, what he's wanked over this week and why he thinks anyone trying to stop him talking about these things in spaces that might be occupied by people who do not want to hear those things is engaging in "censorship".

After a while, you wouldn't want to go along to that club any more, right? You'd come to dread the experience of this jackass stinking up the joint with his rancid opinions, so you'd find an alternative place to see your friends — or, worst case, just stop seeing them altogether. A net loss for you, your friends and the club in general.

Now imagine that this jackass is kicked out of the club after just one session of him spewing his odious rhetoric. While the initial reaction, particularly if the kicking-out is public, might be shock and even fear from certain members — "what if we get turned on next?" and all that — the long-term effect is that normal, well-adjusted people will feel safer and more comfortable coming along to that clubhouse and doing the things they enjoy. They will not need to abandon something they enjoy doing for the sake of one asshole.

It's the same with online communities. The longer you tolerate someone acting like a shithead as part of a community like that, the more annoyed other people will become, to such a degree that they will eventually leave your community, even if they otherwise like what you are doing. That's counter-productive, because all you will be left with is a single shithead who hates trans people (it's always trans people) and no actual community. And at that point you might as well give up, because I'm sure we've all had the experience where you've ended up being the last person in a room with the one individual no-one wants to be left alone with.

Anyway, I know I've talked about this stuff not long ago, but the thread linked above made me want to talk about it again. If you're someone who finds yourself in a position of responsibility for maintaining a community — whether it's something as small and simple as a comments section for your own stuff, or as large as the social media presence for a Brand™ — I would encourage you to bear that "10-1 rule" in mind. The 10 will thank you, even if the 1 doesn't.

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#oneaday Day 577: A non-comprehensive ranking of some slightly unusual crisps

Yesterday, we covered what I described as "regular-ass crisps". The crisps that you see that are just called "crisps", whether they're by Walkers or a supermarket's own brand. Thin slices of potato, deep fried and seasoned with some sort of flavouring powder.

But the crunchy snack sector is more than just regular-ass crisps, as anyone who had a lunchbox in the 1980s will know. There is a whole world of slightly unusual crisps out there, and today I wanted to celebrate some of my favourites — old and new — with another ranking.

To match yesterday, I will be choosing six slightly unusual types or flavours of crisps or crisp-adjacent snack (i.e. puffed corn snacks count) and ranking them in such a way that absolutely no-one will ever want to argue with me or tell me I'm wrong.

Let's begin!

6. Walkers Worcester Sauce

Now, I know this is technically a regular-ass crisp, but Worcester Sauce is also a "limited edition" flavour — although Walkers have done it so many times at this point that they might as well just make it part of the regular-ass lineup, because it's proven pretty much beyond a doubt at this point that people like it.

As for me, I like it a lot — it probably ranks above prawn cocktail, top of my regular-ass crisps ranking, if we're just talking about regular-ass crisps. But if we're talking about slightly unusual crisps, it ranks low because it's not especially unusual.

Flavour-wise, it does everything I like in a crisp or crisp-adjacent snack, which is to say it has enough sour flavour to make your cheeks turn inside out. If they'd just do Walkers Max, But Worcester Sauce Flavour, I think I'd die happy. From cholesterol-related heart failure.

5. Tangy Toms

I don't even know if you can get these any more (EDIT: you can), but these were a staple of the 1980s school lunchbox. Notable for being extremely cheap compared to regular-ass crisps, they also carried that super-sour artificial flavour that I like so much, but applied to a puffed corn snack rather than a potato chip. This time around, the flavour was supposedly tomato, but I ain't never tasted a tomato that tasted like Tangy Toms.

It was a good day any day these were in the lunchbox. I'm only ranking them so relatively low because the bag size was always a bit stingy, but I guess you get what you pay for when you're buying 10p crisps.

4. Wotsits Giant Prawn Cocktail flavour

Wotsits? Good. Prawn cocktail? Good. For a brief period in the '80s, you could get flavours of Wotsits other than the standard cheese, including beef and prawn cocktail, and they were both great, but got phased out after a while because we can't have nice things permanently, apparently. In more recent years, Wotsits have taken a cue from Cheetos with the Flamin' Hot flavour, which is good, but for their Giant variants (which are literallly just Wotsits, but bigger) they also reintroduced prawn cocktail.

And it's a good prawn cocktail flavour, in that it doesn't taste anything like prawns or Marie Rose sauce, but it is both delicious and dangerously addictive. I can happily demolish a big bag of these, and this is why I am fat. Better that than, like, heroin, though, right?

3. "Party Mix" from convenience stores

I don't know what brand makes this. I have a feeling it might be like a Happy Shopper own brand or something. But you hopefully know what I mean: comes in huge bags, contains a mix of all manner of different shaped potato and corn snacks, all liberally doused in flavouring powder, producing some of the most potent flavour explosions in the crunchy snacking space.

My main point of reference for these is that you can get them in the "ParcMarket" at Center Parcs, which I believe is technically a Co-Op, but I've also seen something similar in our local convenience store, which I believe is Happy Shopper-related. I think they even do a prawn cocktail one, which sounds like an exceedingly dangerous thing to provide me with a huge bag of.

2. Lay's All-dressed

I've had these precisely once in Canada and I've been kind of pining for them ever since. As the name suggests, they are supposedly "all of the flavours" on one crisp, and I'm not sure that quite comes across, but they are delicious.

Given that Lay's are basically the Walkers of North America (they're both owned by Pepsi), I'm surprised this particular flavour never made it over to the UK, because I think it would probably go down a storm here. I'll have to see if I can import some… although part of me is afraid to, just in case the second taste is more disappointing than the first!

1. Takis Fuego

A relatively recent discovery for me thanks to the fact our local convenience store carries them, these have quickly become my favourite crisp-adjacent snack of choice. For the unfamiliar, Takis are like what would happen if you rolled up a Dorito before cooking it. Their shape means they carry a lot of flavour, because there's flavour powder on all the rolled-up layers, and the Fuego flavour in particular is already pretty strong.

With an initial chilli kick, a bit of limey zing and a lingering heat, these probably aren't for everyone. But give me a choice of all the crispy things in the world, and I will probably gravitate towards these more often than anything else.

Conclusions? Crisps!

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#oneaday Day 576: A ranking of the regular-ass crisp flavours

Hello. I couldn't think of anything to write about today — at least not without threatening to be depressingly topical, which I'm keen to avoid — so I thought I'd fall back on something completely inoffensive and not at all controversial, which is my ranking of the regular-ass crisp flavours that you get in an average multipack.

For clarity, this means the following flavours:

Ready salted
Salt and vinegar
Cheese and onion
Roast chicken
Prawn cocktail
Smoky bacon

Now, the exact "goodness" of each of these varies according to manufacturer, but based on a sampling of two ends of the market — Walkers (a "prestige" brand of sorts) and Lidl "Snaktastic" own-brand — I feel pretty confident in my rankings. So let us begin immediately.

6. Cheese and onion

I will grant that I am biased in this regard, because I do not like onion or onion-flavoured things, but it continually mystifies me that this is, supposedly, the most popular crisp flavour in the United Kingdom, according to multiple surveys.

I wouldn't mind if it was a little bit cheesy, but I've decided to give these a chance on multiple occasions and simply cannot get past the revolting onion-ness of them, with the "cheese" part seemingly being totally overpowered by it.

By contrast, I absolutely love the sadly defunct beef and onion flavour crisps that Walkers used to do in the brown packets. Those, to me, didn't taste oniony at all, but the artificial beef flavour (which doesn't really taste like beef at all) came through perfectly well. But I don't think you can get those any more — I haven't seen them for a good while, anyway — so they're out of the rankings for now.

5. Ready salted

These may be ranked low on my list, but not because I don't like them; on the contrary, sometimes it's nice to have a simple salted flavour. They're just a bit dull though.

To my shame, on one occasion at primary school where I found I had a packet of ready salted crisps in my lunchbox, I became so inexplicably furious that I didn't have one of the "good" flavours that I crushed them angrily rather than eating them. I don't really know why I did that, and it's a memory I firmly wish I could eject from my long-term storage.

These days, I am not infuriated by ready salted crisps. But they are usually the last to go. Andie ranks them quite highly, though, so it's not as if they go to waste.

4. Smoky bacon

The next few are all a tough call to rank, as I specifically like all of them, but out of all of them, I think I'd probably put smoky bacon flavour at the bottom of the heap.

There's nothing wrong with smoky bacon and, like ready salted, the intense saltiness of the flavour is sometimes exactly what you're looking for in a crisp. But, when presented with an array of different crisp flavours to choose from, smoky bacon is rarely the one I reach for first.

3. Roast chicken

Likewise roast chicken. I rank this flavour slightly higher because it feels like you don't see these as often as you used to, and thus sometimes I will pick them as a "novelty" option.

There are also some truly excellent "luxury" roast chicken options available, with the one most people are likely familiar with being Walkers Sensations. To my recollection, the roast chicken flavour of these was the first to become widely available, and they are very good crisps.

They don't taste anything like chicken, of course, but very few crisp flavours do actually taste like their name — with the exception of ready salted and salt and vinegar, for obvious reasons.

2. Salt and vinegar

Salt and vinegar is one of my favourite crisp flavours. I particularly enjoy a strongly seasoned salt and vinegar crisp — the kind that is surprisingly, intensely sour. Regular old Walkers are decent in this regard, but I think the best salt and vinegar flavour outside of explicitly luxury brands like Kettle Chips is probably the Walkers Max ridged variants.

Crinkly crisps tend to have stronger flavours anyway, and when you have something that is already fairly pungent, like salt and vinegar, crinkling them and putting them on a thick crisp makes them even better.

It was a close-run thing between this and the top spot, I can tell you. But ultimately this is where the results fell.

1. Prawn cocktail

Another crisp flavour that has the dubious honour of not tasting anything like what it's supposed to, prawn cocktail crisps have always been, for me, the ultimate flavour. They combine everything I like about an artificial crisp flavour. You've got the saltiness. You've got the sourness of vinegar. You've got a touch of sweetness.

It all comes together to create a flavour that makes my mouth water to imagine. Prawn cocktail is an awesome flavour, regardless of what type of crisp it is applied to, and is pretty much always my top pick when given an array of different flavours to choose from.

So there you have it. Those are my rankings, and nothing you can do will change my mind. If you're lucky, I might rank some "unusual" flavours tomorrow!

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