#oneaday Day 513: Unnecessary replacements for things we already had a perfectly good name for

There's probably a more succinct way of putting that title, but in the interests of what I'm about to talk about, I thought I'd be perfectly clear. Today I would like to talk about the phenomenon, particularly in the "business" sphere, of completely unnecessary, arbitrary replacements for concepts and things we already had a perfectly fine, functional and clear name for.

My biggest bugbear in this regard is holiday. Time off work. Between these two terms, they cover pretty much everything anyone needs to know about you taking some time away from your job. "Holiday" tends to imply that you're going somewhere, while "time off" just suggests that you're not going to be working for a few days, for reasons that are, frankly, nobody's business but your own.

Both terms are, to me, interchangeable — I will use "holiday" for a single day off when all I want to do is bum around the house in my pants, and "time off" for a week away at Center Parcs. It doesn't matter. Both effectively mean the same thing, both are well-established words that we learn the meaning of at an early age, and there is no need for any other terminology to replace them.

So please explain to me why so many people insist on saying "Annual Leave" (or, worse, "AL"). Not only is this annoying business-speak, but it also feels inaccurate and dishonest. Because, to me, when you say something is "annual", you're suggesting it happens at the same time every year. So, instinctively, whenever someone says they're going on "annual leave", it suggests to me that they are going to do so at the exact same time every year. Which tends not to be the case. They are going on holiday, or having some time off work. There's nothing "annual" about it aside from the allowance they have for such periods of time off work.

Likewise, I also despite "Personal Time Off" or, more commonly, "PTO". "PTO" already has a meaning, and it is "Please Turn Over". In its fully spelled-out definition, it is unnecessarily specific. If you are having a holiday or some time off work, it is implied that is already "personal", because you have no obligation to share your reasons with your employer. As such, there is no need to state that you're taking "Personal Time Off". Just "Time Off" is fine.

It's all part of the obnoxiously insincere, obsequious way that people talk to one another in the workplace — the LinkedInification of language. It's the same concept that sees people starting the day or an email with "Good Morning Team" (or, worse, "Team,") rather than addressing you in a more sincere, personal sort of way. It's the same reason people say "Can you send me a full brief?" instead of saying "Please tell me exactly what it is you want."

If you know, trust and even like the people you work with, there is absolutely no need to communicate in this way. I would wager that office workers who address one another casually without resorting to business-speak at any point are, on average, significantly happier and less stressed at their job than those who speak like an AI-generated LinkedIn post. Because communicating clearly and in a way that expresses your personality is an inherently more honest way to be — and that, in turn, encourages you to be honest with your colleagues.

So fuck "Annual Leave". Go on holiday. Take some time off. Do whatever you want. Just be honest 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 512: Can't stop grinding

I have a problem, and its name is Final Fantasy Tactics. Specifically, it is Final Fantasy Tactics' progression system. It's not that it's bad. Oh, no. Not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

My problem is that I'm having too damn much fun beefing up my little guys. I have spent several entire play sessions doing nothing but fighting random battles and levelling up my guys, because the next thing that I think it would be cool to unlock is always just over the horizon, yet within reach. And so I keep going, and going, and going… and now my main team is pushing level 40 and is about 75% of the way through Chapter 3.

Part of the reason this has happened is due to the situation I described the other day, where the Golgollada Gallows fight proved to be something of a roadblock until I spent a bit of time grinding my way to be able to survive it convincingly. While I was engaging in that process, I found myself thinking "hey, this is actually kind of fun in and of itself", and so I have found myself drifting back towards just playing for level and job progression rather than advancing the story.

Oh, I'm not going so far as some particularly extreme examples of the genre, such as in Chris Person's excellent piece on Aftermath describing how he spends five hours at the start of every Final Fantasy Tactics playthrough absolutely breaking the game's progression system on the very first map, before the story even gets underway properly. No. That does sound like it might be fun to try sometime, but I'm not going that far for only my second full playthrough of this game in my life.

I'm just levelling everyone probably 10 levels higher than they need to be for the point in the story I'm at, and unlocking some of the seriously powerful jobs. Dragoon's fully upgraded Jump ability being able to hit almost any square on the map from any other point, after a small delay? Working on it. Ninja's frankly obscenely overpowered Dual Wield ability? Got it. Arithmetician's ability to nuke the entire map instantly and without using magic points? Definitely working on it.

As Chris says in his Aftermath piece, doing this is "funny and the game doesn't stop you". Nope; because the random encounters scale to your characters' levels, you'll always be presented with appropriately levelled opponents and be able to score some decent experience from them. As such, you can quite feasibly level all the way to 99 if you feel that way inclined — and in doing so, you'd likely unlock most, if not all, of the available jobs with some canny switching at appropriate moments.

I have set myself a milestone, though. When my "main five" hit level 40, I'm going to move on with the story.

Probably.

I mean, I want to make sure I can handle that Wiegraf fight, right? Maybe just a few more levels…

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#oneaday Day 511: Stop hitting me so hard

One of my biggest annoyances with a lot of modern games is enemies that hit like absolute dump trucks from the start of the game. Of recent games that I've played (and liked), Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 did this, Silent Hill f did this, and I've just started playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and that does it too. It's especially annoying in that, because you start with so little health, and having literally 95% of it gone if you get hit once in an early fight is very frustrating.

I'm pretty convinced that this aspect of game design is a side-effect of the popularity of FromSoftware's work, because in a Souls game, you expect all enemies to hit like dump trucks, even if they're absolute trash fodder, and the game is designed and built around that. To put it another way, Souls games are, in some respects, survival horror games, in which you play a vulnerable protagonist with limited resources facing overwhelming odds and unimaginable, often unexpected horrors.

I'm sure anyone who played Dungeons & Dragons games that started you off at level 1 are laughing at me right now, too. Believe me, I know all about old D&D.

Zelda, though? I don't want the game to patronise me or anything, but it would be nice if it took things a bit easier on you from the beginning. This is the exact same bugbear I had with Breath of the Wild, and it's probably a major contributing factor to how long it took me to actually beat that game.

See, I do like Breath of the Wild, and I like what I've played of Tears of the Kingdom so far. But when every single combat feels like you're a razor's edge away from frustrating death, it's kind of exhausting. Not only that, it's different to how past Zelda games did it, too. Earlier Zelda games still started you off with a pitiful amount of health, but to compensate for that somewhat, enemies you meet in the early hours do very little damage. And that works! Ease the player in gradually without smacking them in the face for making the slightest mistake, then as the game continues, escalate things gradually by increasing the power of the enemies at a roughly similar rate to the player gaining in power.

It's a very different sort of game, but this is something that Final Fantasy Tactics sort of nails. I say "sort of" because the game's story battles are pretty much at fixed levels, while the random encounters — which will likely form the majority of what you will be using to level up your characters most effectively — scale to your level. This means that you're always presented with a decent challenge when facing a random encounter; the flip side of that is that it's possible to charge into a story encounter either woefully underprepared and get your head shoved firmly up your anus, or extremely overprepared to such a degree that you trivialise supposedly dramatic encounters. Such has always been the way with role-playing games, of course, and there's a convincing argument to be made that part of the joy of Final Fantasy Tactics is seeing absolutely how much you can break it.

You can't do that with Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, though. You have to do the game's opening quests with the vitality of a wet paper bag, the lung capacity of a chaffinch and equipment so flimsy Chinese Amazon sellers would be embarrassed to put their nonsensical names on.

In some respects, you can look on this as the game saying "hey, you don't have to fight literally everything, and in fact it might be in your interests not to". But when you have situations like one I encountered this evening, where two particularly frustrating enemies were guarding a chest that wouldn't open until I beat them, you kind of feel like you do have to beat them. (Except the chest had nothing in it but a shiny rock. I was annoyed.)

I don't want to be too tough on Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, though, because I did ultimately very much enjoy the former and, outside of the above-mentioned encounter, I've had a lovely time with the latter this evening. I just think it would be nice if we had a few modern games where taking a single glancing blow from an enemy didn't feel like someone had just dropped a piano on your head.

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#oneaday Day 510: Another great Eddy Burback video

There's a lot of absolute garbage on YouTube, but there are a few folks out there who do some truly special work. One of those people is Eddy Burback, who makes maybe two or three videos a year, but they're always very high quality, both in technical terms and in terms of the amount of research that goes into them. You may recall a while back I was rather taken by his video about giving up the smartphone life.

Today, he put out a new video called "ChatGPT made me delusional", and I sincerely recommend you set aside an hour or so of your life to watch it through in its entirety. Not skip through it at 1.5x speed, not "have it on in the background". Watch it. Because I think it is important.

Here it is:

Burback's aim for the video was to understand the phenomenon of "chatbot-induced psychosis" or "AI psychosis". This is where vulnerable people, already struggling with matters of mental health, would turn to large language model chatbots such as ChatGPT and use them as a form of "therapy" or as a substitute for actual human contact. There have already been some incredibly tragic results, as anyone who has ever read any science fiction would have been able to predict a mile off.

To explore how this might happen, Burback presented ChatGPT with an obviously ridiculous hypothesis based on complete fabrications: that he was the smartest under-1 baby of 1997, capable of producing great works of art, having in-depth philosophical discussions and demonstrating a deep understanding of complex mathematics. It took him two statements to convince the chatbot that this was the undeniable truth, and things just escalated from there.

Burback presented the chatbot with suggestions that his friends and family might not understand his brilliance, and it recommended he flee into the middle of nowhere and break all contact with them, including stopping sharing his location data with the person he trusts most in the world: his twin brother. He continued feeding the chatbot with increasingly ridiculous, obviously delusional statements and deliberate, complete and utter nonsense, and at no point did it attempt to deter him from the path it had set him on.

It was only at one point — the day when OpenAI controversially swapped its "4o" model for GPT-5 — that the chatbot had a momentary blip in feeding into his "delusions" (and, to its credit, suggested some psychological help facilities in the neighbourhood), but Burback pointed out that it was very easy for someone who was paying for the service to just switch it back to the old model, which seemingly finds it impossible to say "no" to the user.

What was particularly eerie about the whole situation is that Burback was using the premium voice feature on ChatGPT, which has clearly been designed to sound as "human" as possible, even going so far as to add realistic inflections and non-fluency features to the things it is saying. (It also pronounces emojis as completely unrelated sound effects, which somewhat detracts from the "humanity" of it all, but still.) In other words, it wasn't hard to see how someone suffering from real, genuine mental health problems might feel like they really did have a person in their phone who was willing to listen to them, tell them they were always right, and repeatedly give them some really, really bad advice.

It was actually kind of horrifying. The way the bot continually escalated into increasingly outlandish behaviour — culminating in him chanting mantras under an electricity pylon, wrapping his entire apartment in tin foil and tattooing a symbol into his thigh — was genuinely frightening.

I know we can all have a good laugh about how the chatbots get things wrong sometimes, but Burback's research here demonstrates that it doesn't just get things wrong (and I apologise for using this sentence construction, given its indelible association with AI writing, but it's an established turn of phrase for a reason) — it offers genuinely dangerous advice with minimal guardrails in place. And it does so without thinking about it or understanding why it might be dangerous — because it's not actually thinking or understanding anything at all. It's constructing sentences that, based on the data it has Hoovered up from across the Internet, it thinks are the correct responses to the things the user has been typing. It is, in essence, an extremely advanced version of the old ELIZA program on classic computers.

And it can go fuck itself.

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#oneaday Day 509: A new age of "talkies"

Back when the CD-ROM era first started, and game developers suddenly had a lot more storage capacity to play with, a revolution unfolded. Games became "talkie", with formerly text-based dialogue now being supported (or sometimes, in those less enlightened times, replaced) with voice acting of variable quality. This was, for the most part, seen as a significant step forwards in terms of games being able to tell interesting and convincing stories, though some genres benefited from it more than others, with probably the biggest beneficiary being point-and-click adventures.

These games already had pretensions of movie-style storytelling. Indeed, back when Ron Gilbert of LucasArts coined the term "cutscene" with Maniac Mansion, he defined them as "short, animated sequences — like scenes from a movie — which can provide clues and information about the characters" (emphasis mine). As such, it was only natural that as interactive entertainment and movies moved ever-closer together, we would start to hear game dialogue as much as read it.

That wasn't universally the case, mind; not every game that featured dialogue was fully voiced. In many cases this was because the storage capacity of a CD wouldn't have been sufficient to include the entire script for longer games such as RPGs, particularly on console, where they had been becoming more and more dialogue-heavy. In those cases, the extra storage space instead went to other purposes such as pre-rendered video sequences or even live action video.

The advent of DVD didn't lead to longer games suddenly becoming "talkie", either; while there was often a lot more speech in these games, they still often weren't fully voiced. Final Fantasy X is a good example — major story scenes in that game are fully voiced, but incidental interactions and random NPC conversations remain text-based. And this situation has continued right up until this day — even with the huge storage capacity of modern flash memory-based cartridges and Blu-Ray discs, there are still a fair number of RPGs that have unvoiced dialogue — although that number is dwindling a bit. Many Japanese games, even from relatively low-budget studios like Compile Heart, even have dual audio today.

We're in a position now where it's possible for another minor revolution in "talkie" terms, and one of the best examples I've seen is the recent Final Fantasy Tactics remake. This is one of those games where, as outlined above, there was far too much in the way of script for them ever to be able to make it fully voiced back in the PlayStation days. Not only that, but video game voice acting in the late '90s was generally… Not Good. There was the odd exception, yes, but going back and listening to some of those early "talkie" games sometimes makes you just want to turn the speech off and go back to fully text-based dialogue. King's Quest V says hello. (King's Quest VI, meanwhile, is excellent.)

Today, though, we have a wide and diverse variety of voice actors with plenty of video game experience, and pretty much all of them can be heard in Final Fantasy Tactics. And the result is simply smashing. By combining the revised (and considerably better) retranslation for the PlayStation Portable "War of the Lions" version of Final Fantasy Tactics with a cast of voice actors who can actually act, we have one of the most gloriously theatrical games I think I've ever played. It really is a thing of wonder, and it adds so much to the game.

It makes me want to see more games from the PS1 era tackled like this. I would love to see some remasters of games from that period where the basic gameplay isn't touched all that much aside from a few interface and balance tweaks, but a fully voiced script delivered by people who know what they're doing is added. There's a bunch of games that would really benefit from this treatment — though it remains to be seen if companies like Square Enix will feel inclined to do this any more.

By all accounts, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles appears to have been doing well both critically and commercially, though, so hopefully this is taken as a sign of something people would like to see (and hear) more often.

In the meantime, I'm off to go enjoy it a bit more.

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#oneaday Day 508: Pondering a new video idea

I play a lot of classic games on my YouTube channel, and that's not going to be changing any time soon. But I'm always pondering interesting new things I might be able to do with the channel, and something popped into my head earlier.

What if I do some videos specifically about programming in Atari BASIC, with an aim to showcasing what an interesting, flexible language it is — particularly compared to some other micros' BASICs — and basing the videos on the numerous tutorials published in magazines like Page 6 and Atari User? (Crediting the original writers, obviously.)

My thinking behind it comes from several perspectives: one, there is a niche interest "market" in videos about programming for classic computers, as evidenced by the thoroughly lovely Yawning Angel Retro channel, who specialises in programming the Amiga with the AMOS language.

Two, I just think it would be an interesting twist on what I do on the channel.

Three, I will probably learn something from it — albeit something that may not necessarily be especially "useful" in the modern world.

Four, it's something to do with the magazines I've been acquiring besides just doing flipthroughs of them (which I also intend to keep doing on an occasional basis).

And five, it's something a bit different to do with the computer stuff. I'm not exactly bored of doing the games — there are still myriad titles I haven't covered on both Atari 8-bit and ST! — but I have reached a point where I want to do something a little different. This is part of the reason I've done so much console stuff on the channel recently — that and the MiSTer Multisystem 2 making it so easy to capture from all manner of different platforms — but I'm always conscious that the backbone of my channel was built on Atari home computer stuff.

I think I will try an experiment in the coming weeks and months. I will start with the absolute basics (no pun intended) for the sake of those who have never programmed in '70s/'80s computer BASIC, and gradually move on to the Atari specialisms: graphics, sound, manipulating the Display List, Player/Missile Graphics and all manner of other things. Some of these things I've never understood, so I feel like taking the time to make a video version of some of these tutorials may well allow me to improve and advance my own knowledge — something I've always kind of wanted to do, but never really made the time for.

In time, maybe I'll even be able to Snorkify some Atari BASIC games. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we…?

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#oneaday Day 507: Things that haven't got better

I wasn't sure what to write about today. I'm still not entirely sure what to write about, and as I do at such times, I found myself hitting the "Random Post" button a few times on this site to look at things I've written about before. And I was mildly dismayed to discover that a number of things that I find frustrating about life in 2025 — both in a personal sense and in a broader, societal or cultural sense — have been An Issue for a lot longer than I'd realised.

For example, I've written a few times recently about how "analysis paralysis" can easily descend when you're preparing to enjoy some entertainment for the evening. I also wrote about this back in 2013 — though I do feel like it has only continued to get worse in the age of streaming, Game Pass and all that stuff, not that I subscribe to any of those things.

I also wrote about how frustrating I found websites' "guide content" used as clickbait back in 2016, though this was less of a surprise, since I was forced into the production of SEO-juicing crap like that when I was laid off from USgamer. That has definitely gotten worse — and the specific issue I complained about in that post, which was websites posting a "landing page" for a guide that didn't actually exist, is still a thing that happens.

I just don't feel like the world is significantly better in 2025 than it was in 2013 or 2016! In many ways, it's significantly worse! We reached something of a tipping point with tech in particular where new innovations stopped being about making life better for everyone, and instead became about cynically making money for people who really don't need any more money. Such is the way of capitalism, of course, but it feels like that side of things has been especially obnoxious over the course of the last 5 years or so.

Then, of course, there's the fact that intolerance of marginalised groups is way back up compared to what it was ten years ago. There was absolutely still work to be done back then, of course, but the mid-20-teens had shown a marked amount of progress in generally accepted progressive attitudes. Much of that progress feels like it has been spitefully torn up in the last year or so in particular — unsurprisingly, coinciding with the inauguration of the world's most embarrassing authoritarian.

But hey. At least you can use AI to generate revenge porn of people you don't like, completely without their consent, and then share it with the world, again, completely without the subject's consent. So that's nice!

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#oneaday Day 506: Tactical Sunday

Final Fantasy Tactics is a game I absolutely love and respect greatly, but I have to be in the right mood to play it. Today I was very much in the mood to play it, so play it I did. I got to a point that proved to be a sticking point for me when I first played it on PlayStation — Golgollada Gallows, also known as Golgorand Execution Site in the original — and, indeed, it proved to be a bit of a sticking point for me this time around, also.

However! This time around, I was armed with the knowledge of how I beat it last time around, which was to spend several hours doing random battles to level up my core units to such a point that they could survive the challenge of Golgollada Gallows — notorious as one of the toughest fights in the relatively early game — and progress without too much trouble.

Y'see, the difficulty I had with this first time around is that Final Fantasy Tactics sort of positions itself as a game where you move from story beat to story beat without any interruptions. Because it's not a conventional RPG in which you directly control the protagonist as he wanders around towns and dungeons, it's easy to see the random engagements you can run into on the node-based world map as annoying inconveniences preventing you from seeing the next bit of story.

But they are there for a reason — and, indeed, The Ivalice Chronicles version of the game makes it even easier for you to take advantage of them by making them not random at all. Sure, sometimes as you move from node to node you'll get the distinctive "swoosh" that indicates a battle is incoming, but unlike the PlayStation original, you can choose not to engage if you don't want to. This prevents you from encountering a minor softlock if, for example, you're trying to get to a town to stock up on healing items or refresh your units' equipment.

However, it also goes the other way. If you pass through a non-story node and you don't have an encounter there, you can choose to "search for enemies" and manually trigger a battle. This means if you actually want to spend some time levelling your units or earning them some new abilities — which the game doesn't tell you to do, but which is very much a good idea — you can do that much more easily than in the PlayStation version. If you want to, you can just stand on one battlefield, do a fight, then immediately trigger another one — no running back and forth between nodes in the hope of getting the "swoosh", because you can trigger it at will, and you can ignore it if it's inconvenient.

While I'm not normally a fan of being able to turn off encounters in a regular RPG — it feels very much like cheating, plus it does you out of some progression that you probably need — in a game like Final Fantasy Tactics, where battles take 5-10 minutes or more rather than a few seconds, this was an important and very welcome tweak to the formula.

Anyway, upshot of all this is that I beat Golgollada Gallows on my second attempt rather than taking the many, many, many attempts I did back in the day. I was still relatively new to console RPGs when I first picked up Final Fantasy Tactics, after all, and it hadn't occurred to me to grind because I wasn't super-familiar with the concept. Once I spent that time levelling my units properly, though, everything fell into place, and the rest of the game was much more straightforward. As, indeed, I suspect it will be this time around, too.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is a wonderful remake of an already wonderful game. I have greatly enjoyed my time playing today, and, having got over that notorious difficulty spike, I suspect the remainder of the game (except maybe "that" Wiegraf fight) will be even more enjoyable.

So your lesson for the day, then, if you're new to Final Fantasy Tactics, is don't be afraid to grind. Embrace it. Love it. You will come to appreciate it when all your units are suddenly orders of magnitude more effective with just four or five additional levels under their belts!

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#oneaday Day 505: Getting to know Yiruma

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I have been making a concerted effort to get back into playing the piano more regularly, and as part of that process, I bought some new music books. One of them was another album of pieces by Ludovico Einaudi, a composer whose work I had enjoyed playing both for the way it sounded and for its relative "pick-up-and-play"-ability. While I was picking up this second book of Einaudi, I was also recommended a book by a Korean pianist named Yiruma, so I thought I'd take a chance, go in blind (deaf?) and see what he was all about.

I've played a few pieces from Yiruma's book today, and they are lovely. Moreover, they are pitched at a slightly higher ability level than most of the Einaudi stuff I have played to date, which is exactly what I wanted; I wanted something that pushed me just a little bit without being overwhelming, as that will help me in rebuilding my confidence, which is the main point of this overall exercise.

Yiruma, for the unfamiliar, is a South Korean pianist whose real name is Lee Ru-Ma. He studied in the UK at the Purcell and subsequently King's College London before later moving back to South Korea after his military service. Over the years, he has composed both standalone music and soundtracks to films and animation. Apparently his music saw particular popularity during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, although good ol' Wikipedia doesn't specifically cite a source (or reason) for this.

I can kind of get why, though. The 2020 lockdowns were an unsettling period where none of us really knew what was going to happen, and Yiruma's music is pleasant, relaxing, uplifting and emotional. Indeed, in the front of the book I bought there's a message from him saying:

I hope my music finds its way into your hands whenever you feel happiness, heaviness, or need light in your darkest times.

This was what I wished for, and this wish could come true through you. I sincerely hope that someday the music remains a part of your memory.

Aside from what I assume is a slightly clunky translation, the sentiment is nice. The guy wants to feel like there is a personal connection between him, his music, and the people who are enjoying it — presumably whether they are just listening to it or actually playing it for themselves. And the 2020 lockdowns were a time when we could have all done with a bit more in the way of personal connections — as much as I joked at the time about not having to go out being a real pleasure for an introvert, the last five years have been… difficult, so far as interpersonal relationships are concerned. While I don't think Yiruma is saying his music is going to "solve" anything, he does seem to sincerely hope that it will bring some form of comfort or distraction from potentially difficult times — and provide some nice memories too.

Ultimately that's what good music is about: feeling some form of emotional connection. The exact form that takes depends on the specifics of the music itself, but it's pretty much a constant across much of both the artistic and mainstream, popular side of things.

I'm looking forward to playing some more from the book, as I like what I've played so far. If I figure out a decent means of recording, I might even share some with you sometime. After a bit more practice, though…

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#oneaday Day 504: Enshittification comes for TV Tropes

Like it or loathe it — and there's an increasing number of people in the latter camp in more recent years, for reasons I'll get onto — but TV Tropes is an Internet institution.

At least it was, until today, when they decided that enough was enough with all those pesky users who didn't want their privacy invaded and their data sold and thus were running adblockers. Now, when attempting to view a page on TV Tropes, you get this screen:

This will probably be familiar to anyone who has viewed any number of websites in recent years. It's a step back from being a complete paywall, in that they'll allow you in if you just disable your adblocker a little bit, pweeeze, we'll only share some of your data with unknown third parties. But it's still a shitty move — particularly for a site like TV Tropes, which has always been a community-driven site. In fact, without the community, TV Tropes wouldn't exist.

As writer Aidan Moher put it earlier on Bluesky:

Aidan Moher
@aidanmoher.com
(Games Journalist)

TROPE: Popular website built entirely on unpaid community labour dies after blocking content from community unwilling to submit to exploitative data collection monetization methods.

That's right. Part of the reason why TV Tropes was so beloved, even with its problems — we're getting to those, I promise — was because it was built by the people. Much like Wikipedia, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale, TV Tropes was absolutely dependent on its enthusiast, volunteer authors and editors. Without those people tirelessly cataloguing examples of tropes used in all manner of media to a frighteningly comprehensive degree, there would be no TV Tropes.

But… now what? People are not going to pay for TV Tropes, and an adblocker is pretty much essential for browsing the modern Internet if you want an experience that is in any way tolerable. So now someone who might otherwise have wanted to contribute to the community effort that is TV Tropes is now locked out from doing so, with their only choices being to pay up or open the floodgates to God knows whatever advertisers are doing these days. (No, I'm not opening up a non-adblocked browser just to see what it's like now.)

Not only that, but this is essentially TV Tropes saying that it wants to profit from the unpaid labour all those volunteer contributors and editors have put in over the years. Because you can bet your sweet bippy none of that $5 a month/$25 a year subscription fee is going anywhere near the pockets of the people who have really made the site what it is today.

This, obviously, sucks, and is just another example of enshittification. Specifically, it's almost a textbook example of what Cory Doctorow was referring to in one of his first pieces he wrote on the subject, The Enshittification of TikTok:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sites between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

In the case of TV Tropes, you have your "users", who are the people who browse the site for fun, entertainment or in the hope of learning something; then you have your "business customers", who are the volunteer contributors, without whom the site wouldn't exist; the abuse of those "business customers" through locking them out unless they subscribe or open the adblock gates is the stage we're at now. I'd argue in this instance we skipped the usual "abusing users" part and jumped straight to "abusing business customers and users".

As I say, this clearly sucks, and it seems like a sure-fire way for TV Tropes to almost immediately make itself completely irrelevant to the rest of the Internet.

But! That might not be the worst thing in the world. Hear me out.

This is not to put down the incredible amount of time and effort TV Tropes contributors have spent cataloguing myriad tropes and even more countless uses across many, many different forms of media. I absolutely do not have an issue with the people who have taken the time to do that, because those people are creatives; they have made something.

No, the problem with TV Tropes is that, over time, it became a resource for the lazy. This is not TV Tropes' fault itself, but rather it's an extension of a general sense of dwindling media literacy across society. Why think for yourself about something you've just seen, played or heard, when there's a 3 hour YouTube video essay waiting to "explain" it to you in what appears to be authoritative detail? Why ponder the specific way a movie, TV show, video game or book chose to present its narrative, when you can just look it up on TV Tropes and get a ready-made list of "discussion points" that you can "borrow" and use for yourself? (Certain members of the "3 hour YouTube video essay maker" group are definitely prone to this, with some pretty much quoting TV Tropes pages verbatim in the name of "analysis".)

I have had conversations with people who will not even consider starting to watch a new TV show if there isn't a "companion" podcast (official or otherwise) ready and waiting to explain each and every episode to them. This is both frightening and baffling to me! Particularly when it comes to media that is designed to be fairly undemanding, mainstream entertainment!

TV Tropes isn't solely to blame for this, of course — blame can also be laid at the feet of reactionary, short-form video content on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts as well as the generally dwindling attention span of people online these days — but it is a symptom of a broader problem. And one of those sources of that problem going away might not be a terrible thing in the long term, as callous as that might sound to those who have poured hours of time and effort into researching things for that site.

Regardless of your feelings on TV Tropes — on the whole, I've always been fond of it, but then I've always used it more as entertainment than a source of "serious" research or analysis — this is an unfortunate day for an Internet institution, and I suspect it absolutely will not be the last longstanding website to take this direction.

Once Wikipedia and the Internet Archive go that way — and no, them occasionally badgering you for donations doesn't count — that's when you know we're really fucked. Let's hope that never happens.

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