#oneaday day 335: Broken links

I like looking back over the mountains of nonsense I've posted on this site since 2010, but one thing that makes me a bit sad is quite how many of the links I posted years ago are now broken. You can tell at a glance, 'cause I have a plugin running that makes any broken links appear as crossed-out text, and the further back you go in my archives, the more likely you are to find these. (EDIT: I turned it off, because it was throwing up a lot of false positives.)

The same is true for YouTube videos I've posted. More often than not, any YouTube video I've posted that is more than maybe five years old has been taken down, made private or copyright claimed by someone. And, of course, with the mass exodus from Twitter since Elon went… the way he went, formerly embedded tweets that belonged to now-deleted accounts are just… gone.

One of the things I thought was supposed to happen with the Internet was that there would be a certain degree of permanence. You'd make something online, it would be your mark on the world. But, unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. There is no infallible means of making something on the Internet and having it stay as a permanent fixture. If it's your own website, it will cease to exist the moment you stop paying for hosting (or have something happen to you that precludes you from continuing to pay for hosting, like, say, dying) and if it's something you've hosted on someone else's service, such as a social media platform, your stuff is only as permanent as that social media platform.

There are exceptions to this, of course. The amazing work that the Internet Archive does with its Wayback Machine makes it possible to travel back in time and see websites as they appeared back in the day. Okay, it's not perfect — the archiving process often loses images and layout information, any interactive functions will inevitably be broken and anything built using defunct technology like Flash will remain inaccessible — but it's something, at least. I can still visit my website from 2004, for example. And, in slightly more broken form, my short-lived games blog from 2010.

But what about the stuff that, for one reason or another, has been impossible to archive? There is no longer any trace of the discussions the Squadron of Shame once had on the 1up.com Radio forums, for example, and while some of 1up.com itself has been archived, the Club pages, which is where a lot of our conversations took place, are not among that which has been saved from oblivion. Likewise, my old iWeb site, which I hosted on iCloud precursor .mac, no longer exists because at some point Apple discontinued the "iDisk" online storage that the site was hosted on. Those things are all long gone, and that's a bit sad.

This is one reason why I was so upset when WordPress.com made a hash of this site some time ago — against what some might call all odds, I have managed to keep this site in existence for 17 years, which is positively ancient in Internet terms, and the threat of having that all taken away based on a false positive from a stupid automated system was absolutely heartbreaking.

I guess the lesson is that if there's stuff you care about, back it up as well as having it online. Because one day, the online version might not be there any more, and it might not be through any fault of your own!

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 334: Shine on Me

Any time I have a long drive, I always agonise for at least a short period over What I Should Listen To. On the way down yesterday, this was pretty simple: I had two episodes of the excellent Fun Factor podcast to catch up on, so I did that. On the way back this evening, though, I had a momentary pause. Did I want to listen to more podcasts, did I want to listen to a playlist on shuffle that will inevitably surface the same tracks it always does, or did I want to do something a bit different?

Last September, I made the argument that you should listen to albums more. I stand by that, but I will extend my suggestion to say that by "albums" I also include specifically curated compilations. Because for my journey back this evening, I listened to nothing but the two-CD compilation Shine 7 (well, a digital version of it, anyway).

Shine 7 is, as the name suggests, the seventh in a series. Specifically, it was a series that ran throughout the 1990s by Polygram TV that focused on indie rock — primarily of the "Britpop" variety, but also incorporating some American artists such as Green Day and Soundgarden. There does not appear to be a record of why the series was called Shine, but I always chose to believe that it was because Liam Gallagher singing the word "Shine" as a three-syllable word ("Sheeee–eeeeyyyyeeeee–nnnnneh") in multiple Oasis songs was an iconic sound of the 1990s indie rock scene, and Oasis, of course, appeared on every Shine compilation except Shine 10. Sometimes, as in the case of Shine 7, multiple times.

Shine 7 in particular is a compilation that carries some personal nostalgia for me, because it was through Shine 7 specifically that I started to develop some of my tastes in popular music. I was a bit of a latecomer to buying and enjoying music of contemporary bands — indeed, I made a terrible faux pas when purchasing a CD album with my own money for the first time: I bought Oasis' Definitely Maybe literally the day before (What's the Story) Morning Glory? came out. Naturally, I copped a fair amount of ribbing from my school friends for that one, but I didn't regret it; I enjoyed Definitely Maybe and in some respects I think I still like it more than Morning Glory.

Anyway, I knew that it was "cool" to be into "indie" at the time, even though I didn't really know what "indie" meant, and I'm not sure anyone else did either. I did know that Stacey, a girl I had struck up a friendship with while participating in a school play, and, as it happened, a girl I rather fancied, seemed to know her stuff about music, though, so I asked her for some recommendations. And she recommended Shine 7 to me, as she'd recently got a copy and was impressed with the two CDs, which contained a nice mix of both very well-known and lesser-known groups from the time.

Aside: this is a story I'll probably tell in more detail another time, but for quite some time I was known as "non-pulling Stacey freak" by my friend Woody for an utterly failed attempt to seduce her at a party I was hosting. Largely because, as a socially awkward (and, retrospectively, autistic) teenager, I had absolutely no idea how one would go about such things. And ultimately decided that I valued my friendship with her more than my apparently indescribable, incommunicable desire to kiss her on the mouth. But I digress.

So anyway, I bought myself a copy of Shine 7, thinking that this might bring me a little closer to Stacey, and also thinking that this might be a good means of getting to know a few names in the "indie" space. It didn't bring me any closer to knowing what "indie" meant — it was an embarrassing number of years later that I discovered it meant "independent", which was probably a misnomer for a significant number of names on Shine 7 — but it did introduce me to a variety of interesting music that I enjoyed listening to.

And I enjoyed the curation of the compilation; there wasn't a particularly running "theme" through it or anything, but the progression of the songs was pleasing to me. You'd get some well-known stuff you'd heard on the radio, then some stuff you probably weren't familiar with, then maybe some stuff that had only released as singles, not on albums (Oasis' Whatever was my first contact with this type of release) and then back to the really well-known stuff. It didn't sit still or become complacent, and everything felt like it had equal "importance". There were, of course, some tracks I came to like a lot more than others — and some that I tended to skip on subsequent re-listens — but for the most part, I appreciated Shine 7 as a complete work in and of itself.

And y'know what? Listening to it in full for the first time in probably more than 30 years on the drive home this evening, it really took me back. I haven't heard some of these songs for a very long time, but pretty much all of them were comfortably familiar despite that long period away from my lugholes. I listened to Shine 7 a lot when I first got it — you have to remember that we didn't have music streaming services or even digital music stores like iTunes then, so you were stuck with whatever CDs you had — and I think it imprinted itself on my soul.

I'm not going to tell you that Shine 7 is a work of great genius or anything. If anything, it was a cynical attempt to cash in on the Britpop and indie rock craze that was sweeping the nation in the 1990s — the fact that there are 10 numbered Shine albums plus two Best of Shine compilations-of-compilations should tell you that — but back then, it was simply an enjoyable part of my CD collection that I liked a lot. I don't know if it really brought me any closer to Stacey or not, but I'd like to think it did.

And in listening to it on the way home this evening, I thought fondly of Stacey for the first time in many years. I hope she's doing well.

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#oneaday Day 333: Scribus Interruptus

Yes, I know that's almost certainly not correct Latin. No, I don't care. I just wanted a post title that wasn't just "catching up" again, because I missed yesterday and, as such, you are getting two loads of nonsense today instead of just one. Aren't you lucky?

The reason I forgot to write anything was because yesterday and today were my monthly trip down to the office, meaning last night I was staying in a hotel and, after having spent a long drive getting there, I doubt I would have felt like typing much of anything meaningful on my phone even if I had remembered to write something. But anyway, enough of that. You know by this point that my stays in hotels tend to result in short posts that either involve me talking about cop shows on TV or ranting about AI adverts I saw in between cop shows on TV.

Instead, today I want to call back to something I wrote about in the previous post: my previous creative writing projects. I actually went back and read the one I said I didn't remember writing or remember anything about. Turns out I did actually remember writing it and what at least some of it was about, though the exact details were actually something of a surprise to me come the conclusion. So I guess that did its job, or something.

I have decided to dub that particular work my name. for reasons that will be apparent to anyone who has read it. I actually rather enjoyed revisiting it, and while I think there's probably a bunch of work I could do to it before "publishing" it, I'm overall satisfied with it. Judging by the time I wrote it (November 2012), it was almost certainly as much a therapeutic exercise as anything else, and there are a lot of things about the main character's journey in particular that I can directly relate to my own experiences. I, unsurprisingly, do that in my own creative writing rather a lot; it's a means of processing the things I've felt and the things I've experienced, and by exploring them through another character, even if I'm writing from a first-person perspective, I can sort of take a step back and contemplate them from a slightly different angle.

One thing I do enjoy playing with when creative writing is perspective. I went through a phase of writing a lot of things in first-person present tense, and it's a style I still like very much. I forget exactly what inspired me to first do this, but I'm pretty sure it was something we were looking at in English Literature classes in school — likely something along the lines of Jane Eyre (which isn't first-person present, but is first-person) or its companion piece Wide Sargasso Sea (which introduced me to "stream-of-consciousness" narrative, a form I was also rather taken with, if that were not already very apparent.)

Out of curiosity, the other evening I happened to look up if there have been any novels written using second-person perspective — i.e. placing the reader in the role of the protagonist by narrating using the "you" pronoun. Of course, things like Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy automatically fall into this category, but no; I was thinking something more "conventional" and non-interactive.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover there are, in fact, several novels that have been written at least partially in this style. One that I found particularly intriguing was an Italian piece by Italo Calvino known as If on a winter's night a traveler. This novel is about you, the reader, attempting to read a novel named If on a winter's night a traveler and continually getting distracted. The story apparently jumps back and forth between what "you" are doing — which is the main plot — and the first chapter of a variety of other novels that, for one reason or another, keep distracting you. Supposedly the themes of the various novel extracts are weaved into the main narrative, and it all sounds very clever and, yes, post-modern. It may well be completely insufferable to read — and I'm not going to try until I've finished my Jane Eyre re-read that I started recently — but it definitely intrigued me, and made me think I might try something with second-person perspective at some point.

Anyway, I think that's probably enough for the first post of today. Please feel free to go and read my name. now I've given it a name, or indeed any of my other past creative writing pieces, which you can find in the menu bar at the top. I've even set it so they display in chronological order rather than the usual reverse chronological order — though WordPress' limitations mean that when you want to read the next page you have to press the "Older Posts" button rather than "Newer Posts". But I'm sure you can figure that out.

Enough! I have another post to write. So it's time to do that!

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#oneaday Day 332: From the brain to the page

I've been feeling kind of in the mood to do a bit of creative writing recently. I have not yet actually acted on this impulse, because I haven't yet decided what the optimal means of doing it is. Longtime readers may recall that I did not-NaNoWriMo (before NaNoWriMo became a dirty word) a few times on this very site, using my daily #oneaday posts to compose a story 1,000+ words or so at a time. If, for whatever reason, you're interested in reading those, you can find them with their first chapters starting at the following links:

Wasteland Diaries, a post-apocalyptic tale I inexplicably decided to write as someone who isn't the biggest fan of post-apocalyptic settings.
Untitled, a story I don't remember writing and can't remember anything about. I'm going to have to re-read this one, I think.
Special Measures, a novel about a teacher in a struggling school. (There's even an Actual Book version of this, though I did it through Blurb before I found out about their absurd shipping costs. You're welcome to buy a copy though.)
Unfinished, an unfinished project.

There are also a few other bits and pieces here and there, such as an extremely short-lived "collection" of two short stories about a school (number 1 here, number 2 here), and another extremely short-lived collection of short stories based around the themes of "beginnings and endings" starting here. And probably some other stuff I've forgotten. Like this!

I think I just want to "write a story" again. It's something that used to bring me great joy when I was younger, particularly when I was at school — I was notorious among my English teachers for creative writing projects that were several orders of magnitude longer than anyone else in my cohort — and I feel like it's one of those things that is probably good "therapy" of sorts, too.

The thing I'm umming and ahhing over is whether I should start a new site specifically for the creative writing stuff, or if I should just do what I've done previously and host it here. My concern if I host it here is that I'll lose it, or forget about it, such as what has apparently happened with Untitled, above. But then at the same time it's nice to dive back into the archives sometimes and stumble across something like that. So perhaps I will just host it here, and maybe make a bit more of an effort with the menus to make accessing things like those past stories a bit more straightforward.

Okay, then it's settled. Maybe. I will start Writing Stories again. Whether these stories will form part of my #oneaday efforts or be something completely separate I haven't yet decided. But creativity will happen. Oh yes, it will happen. You just wait. And without even a whiff of generative AI bullshit, because generative AI, particularly anyone attempting to make out that using it is somehow "creative", can eat my entire ass.

Now to ponder what I might want to write about, I guess!

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#oneaday Day 331: Visit The Cave

It occurs to me that a while back, I went to visit the Retro Collective museums over in Gloucestershire, and I don't think I actually wrote about the experience. Looking back at my Google Photos, it seems that it was 2023 (wow) when I went, and I hadn't yet kicked off this particular round of #oneaday shenanigans back then. In fact, the only thing I wrote about on this blog in the month that I went was a vitriolic diatribe on how much I detested the TikTokification of comedy, something which, rewatching Friends, the subject of much of that post, I still maintain my position on. But I digress.

So! Anyway, what am I talking about? Well, the Retro Collective is a group of people and organisations that make their home in an old mill in Chalford, Gloucestershire, just outside of Stroud. The main attractions for most visitors are the two hands-on interactive museums: "The Cave" upstairs for retro computers, consoles and general gaming tech, and the "Arcade Archive" downstairs for… well, I think you can probably guess.

The Cave is run by Neil Thomas, a thoroughly lovely gentleman who started a retro tech YouTube channel back in 2012, and gradually became considerably more ambitious with what he was getting up to. Notably, he actually followed through on those ambitions, and the result, in collaboration with the other members of the Retro Collective, is a fantastic day out for anyone with the slightest interest in the history of computing and video games.

Neil still makes YouTube videos along with running The Cave — an operation which has a number of regular staffers and volunteers helping out — and he often does restorations on classic computer hardware. If you're into that sort of thing, his YouTube channel, which is now the home of the whole Retro Collective on YouTube, is well worth a follow. You might even see a familiar face in the video below:

The Cave is designed to be nostalgic and comfortable to explore and experience. The main room is absolutely packed with classic computer and console hardware, and the vast majority of it is hands-on and interactive. If you had a favourite computer or console growing up, chances are it's there, and there are plenty of games available to play on it. But there are also lesser-known devices to fiddle around with too, some of which are on a bit of a rotation thanks to being on loan from other collectors, and others of which are part of the permanent collection.

A particular highlight when I went back in 2023 was the Sharp X68000, which, as any fans of Japanese gaming will know, is a bit of a "holy grail" of home computers. Immensely capable and home to some near-as-dammit arcade-perfect ports, as well as games that were as good as — if not better than — the 16-bit consoles of the era, it was a pleasure to finally have a play with this, even if I inadvertently found the inevitable hentai puzzle game that had snuck into the collection of games installed on the machine's hard drive! (I wasn't looking for it, honest. I was more enamoured with the system's excellent version of Namco's Star Luster, anyway.)

As well as all the classic machines that are set up and ready to play, there's a bunch of less common, more valuable stuff on display, with resources to learn about them. There's a huge library of magazines you can browse through at your leisure. And one of the most impressive parts is a little side room built to resemble the software section of a WHSmiths circa 1990. Not only is this an immensely nostalgic recreation of a long-gone shopping experience, but it's interactive, too; the room is equipped with a MiSTer Multisystem hooked up to a barcode scanner, which allows you to scan the barcode of any game in the "shop" and play it. Very nifty.

The Arcade Archive, meanwhile, for which tickets are sold separately — though you can buy tickets for both The Cave and the Arcade Archive at the same time, visiting one in the morning and the other in the afternoon — is situated downstairs in the mill, and is… well, it's just a recreation of a classic arcade. It's dark, lit with neon signs, filled with the noise of a variety of machines competing for your attention, and they've all been lovingly restored to full working order (and free play!) for you to explore and play as much as you like.

Like The Cave, the Arcade Archive has both a permanent collection and a rotating selection of guest cabinets on loan from other collectors. At the time I visited, a particularly noteworthy inclusion was a little-known Nintendo arcade machine known as Sky Skipper, which had quite an interesting story behind it.

Elsewhere in the mill is the engineering company Heber, who work on a wide variety of interesting things, many of which have a retro gaming focus. Notably, they're responsible for the design and manufacturing of the aforementioned MiSTer Multisystem and its upcoming follow-up model, but they also make accessories and all manner of other bits and bobs.

I can't recommend The Cave and the Arcade Archive enough if you want a great, highly interactive day out, whether you're a grown-up or a kid… or just a kid at heart. The museums are immaculately kept by people who absolutely love what they do, and you feel the passion for everything the moment you walk in the door. It's a truly special experience that everyone involved with the Retro Collective has created, and I'm looking forward to paying the place another visit sometime soon.

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#oneaday Day 330: Portsmouth Comic Con

[EDIT: The first paragraph of this post inexplicably disappeared since publishing it. It said something about how my wife and two of our mutual friends went to Portsmouth Comic Con today. In fact, it probably said exactly that. I now return you to the original post, armed with Context.]

You may recall a while back that this same group went to another, smaller convention that I described as "kind of shit, but in a charming way". I think we actually, on the whole, enjoyed ourselves more at that smaller event.

Not all of this was the fault of Portsmouth Comic Con. It was a much bigger event in a considerably larger venue, and if you were into certain specific fandoms — most notably Star Wars, Doctor Who and, to a slightly lesser extent, Star Trek — there was plenty to see and do. But there were a lot of people there — way more than at the Anime and Gaming Con — and it was a very hot, humid day.

The combination of those factors, plus the fact that all of us are getting on a bit and in varying degrees of disrepair, unfitness, anxiety and obesity, meant that the overall experience was, at times, quite uncomfortable. Not enough to want to run away screaming or anything, but enough to make us, on several occasions, quit what we were doing and go back to it a bit later when there were fewer people. Also my back hurts because apparently I'm an old man now.

But as I say, none of us came away from the event feeling like we'd had a bad time. We all found some nice things to buy — I bought a few stickers to put in my sticker book, Andie bought a great picture of a Kraken that we're going to hang in our toilet — and we all got a kick out of seeing some really great cosplay from the other attendees. It's just… we were done by about 3pm, and didn't feel like we were likely to go again next year.

It was nice to go and check it out and see what it was all about. But I think for future possible events, we're going to try and focus a bit more on attending events that are a little more directly relevant to our shared interests — video games — rather than events like this, which are more adjacent to those interests rather than directly catering to them. (I did find one stall selling Mega Drive games, at least.)

Anyway, now we are home and I am sitting down. It is nice. I am going to enjoy doing that for a few hours and then really enjoy going to bed. And then with it being a long weekend for the May Day (sorry, "Early May") bank holiday we still have two days off from work to enjoy! Hurrah.

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#oneaday Day 329: Open your wallet

One thing that has been a constant in all the discussions over the death of Giant Bomb and Polygon yesterday is that we need to support independent creators. We need to support worker-owned organisations, we need to support publications that aren't corporate-owned, and perhaps most importantly, we need to support individual creators who, in many cases, do not have the backing of a corporation or even an organisation to help them out.

What this means in practical terms is that if you like something a particular creator or group of creators does, you should open your wallet and toss them a bit of change now and then. It doesn't have to be a regular pledge, it doesn't have to be a lot of money, but it's something we all need to get better at doing.

Of course, for those of limited means, ways of supporting creators that don't involve spending money are helpful, too. Telling others about the creators and their work; sharing links to ways people can support them; telling their own stories about why that creator and their work are important to them.

But there has to be a slightly mercenary element to this: there are people out there working hard who deserve to get paid for the work they put in — particularly if it is their actual job — and that payment shouldn't be contingent on SEO optimisation and ad revenue. The obsession with those to the exclusion of all else — including the quality of the work — is what has led us to a situation where almost the entirety of the traditional games press has collapsed, with the scraps being hoovered up by corporations that pay peanuts for absurdly unreasonable quantities of work. And when that happens, you get an Internet flooded with shite. And when there aren't workers to do that but the content still needs to flow, that's when you get an Internet flooded with AI-generated shite that is riddled with errors as well as being crap.

In many ways, the democratisation of information that the Internet has brought everyone is an amazing thing. There is no need to spend thousands of pounds on an Encyclopaedia Britannica because you have access to all that information and more via the Web. But the trouble is, this same democratisation of information has led everyone to expect everything for free. And that is simply not sustainable. People who make things as their job need to get paid. That money needs to come from somewhere. And we've proven pretty clearly beyond any shadow of a doubt that the ad-driven model is not a good way of doing things, for a variety of reasons: the workload it places on underpaid workers; the unreliability of it as an income stream; and the fact it encourages a race to the bottom in terms of content churn rather than the production of actually meaningful, worthwhile work.

So I say again: open your wallet. Think back to the days when if you wanted to read something about your hobby, you'd walk into Smiths and pick up a magazine, maybe flip through it a bit, then walk over to the counter and pay a few quid for it. You might do this multiple times a month for different aspects of your hobby, or, hell, for different hobbies altogether. You might even set up a subscription so you got the magazines sent straight to you. In doing that, you were supporting the people who made the magazines, the people who wrote the articles, and you were helping to ensure the continued existence of that magazine.

Sure, you could read the whole thing for free in Smiths if you wanted to, but I think most people were honest enough to actually pony up for a copy of a magazine if they had a quick flip through and saw one or two things they thought were worthwhile. More often than not, you'd find things you didn't expect to find interesting when you later perused the magazine in its entirety later in the day. And sometimes, you'd even return to that magazine years later and rediscover things you had forgotten about, or notice things you never saw first time around.

You can't easily do that with the churn of SEO optimised website content because of the sheer volume of it — and the inability to guarantee that the information will still be there [x] years down the line. Someone on Bluesky earlier noted that they were doing research for a video they were making and found a good article from 2014, but was unable to follow up on any of the sources that article cited because every link in it was broken.

So, I say again: open your wallet, if it is within your means to do so. Help writers produce fewer articles with more words that are better and which stick around for longer. Help video makers produce fewer videos that are better quality, more in-depth and completely devoid of SEO or ragebaiting.

And if anyone makes a new paper magazine about your passions, you throw those goddamn heroes a subscription.

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#oneaday Day 328: Polygone

Well, another one bites the dust. Today, we learned that gaming site Polygon has been sold to Valnet, the sweatshop of online media, and that, as is standard practice in this situation, pretty much all the regular writing staff have been let go, to be replaced by contractors who will be paid absolute fucking peanuts to churn out SEO-baiting drivel and contribute nothing of any real value to the broader conversation about video games.

I was never a huge fan of Polygon, I'll confess. But this isn't about me. It's about yet another significant pillar of Video Games Journalism collapsing — because make no mistake, being sold to Valnet means that your brand is going to have very little value left afterwards — and the entire landscape of this section of the media getting just a little bit worse.

To make matters worse, it appears that Giant Bomb is circling the drain, too. I don't think anything "official" has been announced on that front yet, but from what some of the people involved have been saying publicly… yeah, that site isn't long for this world, either.

Why does this keep happening? Why are we allowing sites that are demonstrably good at what they do to get destroyed in this way? At this rate, we're going to have absolutely no "big names" in the games press left.

And perhaps that might, over the long-term, be a good thing. Because every time something like this happens, it feels like more and more worker/creator-owned outfits pop up and show that yes, it is possible to do things a bit differently; it is possible to put together an interesting and enjoyable site without resorting to SEO-baiting bilge and Guide Content; it is possible to build a sustainable publication that doesn't rely on ad-revenue and instead asks its most interested readers to pony up a couple of quid a month in exchange for stuff that is actually worth reading.

But will this successfully become the norm? We have to make that happen. We have to look beyond the search engine algorithms, start following the sites we actually care about… and support them. One of the worst things to ever happen to the press in general — not just in gaming — was to set the expectation that everything, everywhere, should be free, always. It's devalued the hard work of people working in the media, it's normalised paying people an absolute pittance for hard work, and it's actively making useful information and meaningful commentary harder to find. None of that seems the slightest bit desirable, but we keep heading down that path.

I already support a few folks I like via Patreon. I think it's probably about time I start ponying up for a subscription or two for sites I think are doing worthwhile work. Off the top of my head, I recommend Aftermath for gaming-related stuff, and 404 Media for tech journalism. Both are doing great work, and both are doing well through support from their audiences.

The issue, of course, is that if you end up supporting a lot of sites in this way, it can get pricy. But then think of it this way: did you buy every magazine that existed every month, or did you have a favourite? There you go. I guess the answer is to read fewer, better sites. And don't support the shittier behaviour of the sites that have already been fed to the Valnet monster, or which are in the process of sliding down that drain. You can solve today's Wordle by yourself, believe me. I believe in you!

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#oneaday Day 327: Catch-up club

I missed yesterday in all the excitement. We went to Ikea and had meatballs. Yes! What a tremendously exciting day that was. I joke, of course, but it was a perfectly nice day, and the last of my time off for my birthday, so I enjoyed just having time to relax.

Today, it's back to work, although it's only a couple of days and then a long weekend for the May Day bank holiday, so it's not so bad, even if I have to endure a bunch of meetings in the meantime between now and then. I'd much rather just get on with my work, y'know?

Meetings are a scourge of modern existence. I hate Microsoft Teams and find waking up to Teams notifications one of the most depressing things imaginable, but at least if your meetings are on Teams you can get on with other things while other people are rabbiting on about bollocks you don't care about or which aren't relevant to you.

I have to give a little credit to my job here: the meetings are, for the most part, reasonably helpful and productive, and there aren't too many of them. It's not like my last job, where we would have a meeting called the "Good Morning Call" every Tuesday morning, which involved sometimes up to two hours of listening to our French colleagues very slowly reading out everything from our project management tool. When COVID hit and we all started working from home, I actually took to going back to bed while this meeting was on speakerphone (and turning my microphone and camera off, obviously) — I literally slept through pretty much every one for about six months, and no-one ever noticed.

I feel like if meetings were completely eliminated from the weekly work calendar, everyone could get so much more done. Since more often than not, meetings are used as a means of going "what stage are we at and what needs doing?", it would be far more productive for everyone to just agree that, say, on a Monday morning they just send out an email saying what they're going to be working on and if they need anything from other people. "This meeting could have been an email" is a meme for a reason, after all.

Also, people who want a "quick call" to confirm something with you rather than just putting what they want in the chat or an email can get to fuck, too. I've got shit to do, and the last thing I want to spend time doing is sitting in an environment I feel uncomfortable (video chatting) when I could be just getting on with the big pile of shit that is continuing to build up while these distractions are happening.

Ahem. Anyway. Those are my thoughts on meetings. If you can successfully run a company without endless, pointless meetings, you have my respect. Keep it up. Your employees with thank you.

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#oneaday Day 326: It's officially my birthday

It is, as promised, Actually My Birthday now, since I have been to bed since last night's post and woken up since then. I have had today (and the days surrounding it) off work for reasons I've already outlined, so today has been mostly about playing more Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and then going out for a nice pub dinner with Andie this evening. I have simple tastes.

One thing many of you will have doubtless discovered as you get older is that people inevitably find it harder and harder to buy presents for you. Gone are the days when you could circle things in the Argos catalogue and hope that one of them would be your "main" or "big" present on the big day. Nope, much more common as a grown-up to get a few little bits and pieces from your Amazon wishlist — which I'm very grateful for, by the way, those who sent such things! — and "I'll just give you some money" from the parents.

I would like to reiterate: this is fine, and not in the "room is burning around me" sense. This is good, even! Much better that one is able to get something they actually want to celebrate their birthday rather than running the risk of getting gifts they already have, gifts they don't really want but are obliged to look like they like or any of the other situations in which people in 2025 are, in my experience, brazenly ungrateful.

I got some very generous monetary gifts from both my parents and my mother-in-law, both of whom are very clearly trying to spend some of their accumulated cash to minimise the impact of inheritance tax in the future. My parents' gift paid for my Nintendo Switch 2, which is nice, and my mother-in-law has bought (well, pre-ordered) me a MiSTer Multisystem 2 from Heber Electronics.

If you are unfamiliar with the latter, it's an all-in-one FPGA console designed for playing retro games from a wide variety of home computer, arcade and console systems. FPGA means something inordinately technical that I don't understand at all, but it basically means that it's the hardware pretending to be a classic system rather than a piece of software doing its best to imitate it. That means that the recreation of the experience is pretty much 1:1 of What It Was Actually Like without any sort of emulation quirks, but with modern benefits such as HDMI out, USB storage and suchlike. There are even addon thingies you can get to use original controllers and other peripherals.

To put it simply, the Multisystem 2 is a console that plays almost any retro game you can throw at it, making it a nice all-in-one, self-contained system for authentic-feeling retro game fun, on either a classic CRT or a modern HDMI display. (Or both at the same time, even!) With old gaming hardware and media becoming increasingly expensive and impractical to collect for a variety of reasons, this is a great option for just… enjoying retro games. Which, ultimately, is what I really want to do with all this stuff. And having the opportunity to easily hook it up to capture hardware via HDMI is even better, 'cause then I can share what I'm doing and what I'm interested in and the things I've discovered.

So yeah. My "big presents" this year are a Nintendo Switch 2 and a MiSTer Multisystem. Pretty great, I'd say. I know my child self would be thrilled, even if I have to wait until June for one and August for the other.

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