#oneaday Day 225: The Secret Diary of Pete Davison, Age 43 3/4

Hello. Sorry about yesterday, I just had a bit of an internal explosion of existential dread and needed to express all that, although I was gratified to note that precisely no-one reached out to me to see if I was all right. Not that I'm particularly surprised or was expecting anyone to reach out and see if I was all right, because I'm under no illusions that anyone other than me is reading this blog, but still, y'know. Sometimes it's nice to know someone is looking out for you, and keeping an eye on the means you've been using to express the things you find difficult to say out loud for nearly 20 years.

But like I say, absolutely not blaming anyone. Really, I honestly mean that, no sarcasm. I posted yesterday's screed not because I particularly needed anyone to tell me things are going to be all right — and not just because I'd know they're lying — but because sometimes it just helps to get negative feelings out of your head and onto a page. It doesn't necessarily help you come to any conclusions about how to deal with them, but sometimes simply expressing them is all you need.

This, honestly, was the reason I kept a diary for much of my teenage years. I've talked a bit about this before, as with most subjects on this blog, but it sprung to mind today as I contemplate precisely why I'm still doing this: why I'm typing words into the virtual void for no-one to read, and why I'm still finding it a worthwhile exercise to do so.

I forget exactly what age I was when I started keeping a diary. I'd estimate maybe around 13 or 14 or so. I had recently read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, which I believe my mother had recommended to me as "worth reading" considering the age I was. I absolutely adored that book and its follow-up The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, and am long overdue a re-read of it all. I recognised that Adrian was a bit of a twat — and this only gets worse in the later installments as he moves into his adult life — but I also recognised parts of myself in him.

So I decided to do as he did, and start a diary. While I forget how old I was when I eventually started, I do remember the circumstances. We had been on a visit to, of all places, the National Stone Centre in Derbyshire, and had gone along with, if I remember rightly, my parents' friends Margaret and Mick. This detail isn't particularly important, but it adds a nugget of context, which was how I was young enough to still go along on visits like that to My Parents' Friends and not just be left at home.

Anyway, the reason I specifically remember that we went to visit the National Stone Centre is because while we were there, I ended up purchasing (or having purchased for me) a lovely hardback journal. It had nice quality paper, it had really nice material on the cover and binding, it was just a lovely book. My parents had encouraged me to use it as a scrapbook of sorts — a book for keepsakes from trips such as the one we'd just been on, as dull as it might have been. And so I did, for a while.

Then, one day, after I had not used it for the above purpose for quite some time (primarily due to having not really done anything worth scrapbooking) I thought that I might start using it to write down… things. I didn't have anything particularly specific in mind when I first started writing in it, I just felt like the experience of writing diary entries had seemed valuable to Adrian Mole in the books I loved so much, and thus I decided to give it a go for myself.

It didn't take long before I started using that diary to express things I found difficult to talk about "out loud", as it were, primarily relating to matters of emotions and feelings towards other people. As noted in my tales of The Rough Book, as a hormonal teenager I fell in love with a lot of girls over the course of my time at secondary school. And I found it difficult enough to admit my feelings about all this to my closest friends at the time, let alone my family. So I told the diary.

I told the diary a lot of things. One of my favourite things to do in the diary was to have "fantasy conversations", where I'd imagine how, in an ideal world, my confessing of my feelings to whatever the object of my affections was that week might go. I'd write these non-existent interactions (because they never actually happened) as a script, because I'd been enjoying looking at plays during English lessons at school, and, later in my school career, had parts in our productions of The Wizard of Oz and Twelfth Night.

I realise this might sound a bit creepy, and it probably is. But what you have to understand is, as an autistic teenager who didn't know he was autistic, social interactions, particularly with someone for whom you didn't really know where you stood and lacked the self-confidence to ever believe they might be interested in you, were very difficult. I wrote those "conversations" down because I knew I'd never be able to pull them off in reality. They were a comforting fiction, in a way; they allowed me to indulge my imagination and think about something which I believed to be impossible in reality.

There was one exception, as I recall. On one of the numerous occasions I had plucked up the courage to declare to my friends that I fancied a girl named Nikki, my friends practically forced me to tell her how I felt. They got me and her out onto the school field, essentially pushed us together and left me to get onto it. And, to my credit, I successfully managed to confess my feelings to Nikki, who, bless her heart, at least let me down exceedingly gently and pleasantly.

That evening, I decided to "analyse" the situation. I wrote a script based on what had actually happened. I drew diagrams, with a little picture of a lightbulb representing how much I was blushing through the whole experience. I attempted to determine if there was anything I might have been able to do differently and, of course, came up short; no means no, as it were, and that is something I have always respected.

As that lovely little journal started to fill up with my innermost feelings, I started to become uneasy. I'd taken to placing it in a position on the desk in my bedroom where it was inconspicuous and unlikely to be picked up and read by someone coming in, but something in the back of my mind was still gnawing away at me, worrying that my Mum or Dad would pick it up, read it all and… well, take the piss, frankly, because there was a lot in there that one could probably take the piss about.

So one day I snapped. I took the journal and I threw it away. I took care not to throw it away in the kitchen bin, where it might have been noticed, but rather to throw it away in the outside bin, concealed in a bag beneath a large black bag of rubbish: somewhere no-one would even think to consider taking it out and rifling through it.

I regret that, now. I think it would be interesting to go back and look over those journal entries my teenage self made, as embarrassing and weird as some of them might have been. I don't know that it would have been helpful to do so, but thinking back, my school days (or, specifically, my time at secondary school and sixth form) are a time in my life I look back on with great fondness, where I was, retrospectively, very happy and satisfied with my lot in life, even if I had very little in the way of luck with women.

Thinking back on that diary is one of the reasons I've kept this blog around for so long. There's things I look back on that I'm not so proud of having written, and there's things I'm glad I wrote about. The one constant is that this blog is completely, honestly, unabashedly me, and it always will be.

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 224: Hopeless

It's honestly really hard to feel any hope for the future right now. The world is burning; far-right extremism is on the rise; the Internet has degraded to a point where it's unpleasant to use at best, actively dangerous at worst; Big Tech is continually abusing its users in the name of unsustainable perpetual growth; the odious AI fad won't go away; everything is too expensive; and the people about to take control of one of the most powerful nations on the planet are pure, unabashed evil.

I have no solutions. I have no words. I have no comfort for those who are suffering more than I am. I have little more than a sense of despair about how everything seems to have been getting worse in front of our very eyes for a decade or more, how we could have most certainly done something about it before it got this bad, and how if anything is ever going to improve, it's almost certainly going to get worse before it gets better.

I've never felt like anyone particularly important who makes a difference, and I've never striven to be such. At times like this I feel particularly helpless, powerless and alone, and I can't even begin to imagine how much worse it must be for people in the direct firing line of everything that is going on.

The only thing I can say is that I, personally, have always striven to not be a shitty person, and that's what I intend to keep doing for as long as I am able to. I'm afraid that's about all I really have the energy to write this evening. Tomorrow will be another day of this shit, but at least it's the weekend, so that's nice I guess.

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#oneaday Day 223: The Old Internet

As the rot economy continues apace, more and more people are starting to recognise the modern Web for what it is: an unpleasant place, in which commercial interests and venture capitalists come first, and making an actually pleasant, enjoyable and educational place for the actual users is far, far down the list. As a result, "the old Internet" is often romanticised, perhaps to an overly nostalgic, rose-tinted degree, but I have to kind of concur; things did used to be much more enjoyable online before our daily routine was nothing but scrolling through the only two or three websites that actually exist to most people.

I think about this a lot when I'm writing on here or MoeGamer. I used to get fairly decent numbers on both blogs, even though I was just posting daily nonsense on this one. Now, I get maybe double figures daily on here, if that. MoeGamer still pulls in about a thousand views a day, which is nice, but a lot of those views are for things I wrote about several years ago at this point, and rarely for things I've written about recently.

Now, I don't do either this blog or MoeGamer for the views, but I feel the trajectory this site has taken in terms of numbers is symptomatic of the way the Web has changed over the years. People just don't do blogs any more, either as writers or readers. Part of this is down to the fact that RSS readers just aren't a part of people's daily online routine any more (though I'm aware they still exist) — and even those "magazine-style" apps that were never really a good replacement for Google Reader seem to have died a bit of a death. Not only that, but the usefulness of search engines has declined considerably, too.

Instead, it is, of course, all about social media. It's all about having a presence on the "important" social networks — though even that has seen something of an upset over the last few years, and particularly in the last few months. Twitter was already circling the drain in terms of usefulness for sharing stuff even before Elon took over and did… whatever the fuck he's doing there; Facebook has been such a horrible experience to use for so long now that I question the sanity of anyone who is still using it — to say nothing of the frankly quite disturbing policy changes they've had recently; and the less said about TikTok, the better.

So what, exactly, is someone looking to express themselves online to do today? If you want to get seen, you seemingly have little choice but to sign your soul over to one of these companies and plunge your data into the mire that is "The Algorithm". Telling people that they should start their own website is a noble and proper goal, and one I stand behind, but the fact is… a lot of folks just don't and won't leave social media — and many of the social media companies are doing their best to keep those folks on their platform as much as possible.

Look at Twitter (no, I'm not calling it "X") and how Elon is desperate for people to "post content" on it, completely failing to see that it is a platform woefully ill-equipped for anything other than that which it was originally designed for: microblogging. No-one in their right mind is going to set up a video-centric Twitter account instead of a YouTube channel, even if the site wasn't infested with the worst bigots the Internet has to offer. And no writer is ever going to use Twitter as their primary means of posting their work.

Everyone knows this. And yet it's so difficult to get people to notice you if you're not spending all day "building your personal brand" or some such bullshit. Artists struggle to get commissions without social media. Writers struggle to get publishers without social media. Video makers struggle to get views on their videos without social media. It all sucks, and it feels far too late to be able to do anything about it.

All you can do, really, is just be stubborn. Keep plugging away at your own personal passion projects, and do those projects for the passion, not for the potential of monetising them. I keep doing this blog because I like writing and it's good therapy for me — nothing more. It's always a thoroughly welcome sight when I see someone I recognise in the comments, but that's becoming an increasingly rare occurrence these days. Family and friends who used to read on a regular basis just… don't any more, and the worst thing is, I completely understand why. The modern Web simply isn't built to support personal sites any more, and that's a real shame. It feels like we're very much at risk of losing an important part of our collective culture — because what happens to everyone's "content" (ugh) when one of these social media companies eventually implodes?

Anyway, close your Meta accounts, get off Twitter and read more blogs. That's my advice for surviving online today.

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#oneaday Day 222: Dawn of the Second Day

Second day in a row of successfully getting up at 7.30, getting out of the house and having a little walk down to the shop. It was a little bit harder to successfully achieve this today, but I was expecting this. As outlined yesterday, my dreams were doing their best to pull me back into sleep, but I recognised them as being pointless (I was dreaming about Fire Emblem, and if I want to play Fire Emblem I can just go downstairs) and managed to get myself out of bed.

The fact that I was woken up by my phone ringing at 7.28 also probably helped. I was concerned that the call would be Bad News, as phone calls at vaguely unsociable hours tend to be, but it was, in fact, just a wrong number offering one "Jenny" a supply teaching position.

I have done supply teaching before; having to get up early and wait for a phone call like that is the absolute worst, because if you do get one you inevitably then have to get ready as fast as possible and get to whatever hellhole of a school you've been assigned to before the beginning of the school day. (Of course, one might say if you were reliant on such phone calls for your income, you should probably get up and get ready a little earlier on the assumption that you will get one; the worst that can happen is you don't get one and will have put on your "nice clothes" for nothing.)

I'm hoping this whole little routine will lead to some other incremental improvements in other areas of life. I actually feel like I slept a little better than usual last night, and eventually what I would like to do is start integrating a little more exercise than just a quick walk to the shop into the morning routine. As I have learned in the past, though, making such lifestyle changes is best handled gradually rather than trying to do too much, too soon. So I'm just concentrating on what has historically been the "difficult bit" — getting up — and celebrating my successes in that area first. Everything else can come later.

Anyway, I'm up and about now and there's still a full ten minutes before I actually need to start work. So that's nice. Here's hoping today is at least vaguely stimulating and entertaining. Knowing what's coming later, it should be fun, all being well, though I'm sure the wonder that is social media will find something to piss and moan about, as happens every day. Letting humanity at large comment online was a mistake. But you know this. You've read my posts, and many of them were most certainly a mistake.

Oh, also it's my brother's birthday today, so if you see him about, be sure to wish him happy birthday.

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#oneaday Day 221: Little success

Reader, I did it. My alarm went off at 7.30 and I got up almost immediately. I add the qualifier because I lay there and listened to the radio for about 5 minutes, then got up and had a piss and seriously considered going back to bed for another half an hour on the justification that "the sun wasn't fully up yet" so going outside right then wouldn't be as beneficial as it would be when the day had properly started.

But I pushed through those thoughts, got dressed instead of getting back into bed, then went out to the little Tesco and got myself a coffee and a pastry. Then I came back and enjoyed them both. They both seemed to taste particularly great, perhaps because I wasn't in a rush to enjoy them before starting work, or perhaps because of the light exercise I'd just done, or perhaps simply because I hadn't treated myself to such things for a while. Anyway, they were good.

I have the yawns a little bit because this was, after all, quite a bit earlier than I usually roll out of bed, but like I said yesterday, it supposedly takes about three days to convince your body to fall into a new routine. I was actually surprised how easy it was to get out of bed at 7.30(ish); evidently that time is a good match for my existing circadian rhythms so hopefully that will just get easier.

I'll tell you one big reason I've always had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning: it's because of dreams. For some reason, I always seem to have the most vivid dreams first thing in the morning, almost immediately before I'm supposed to be getting up. And there are occasions where I'll wake up, still have memory of the dream and feel like I "have" to go back and "finish" the dream, even though that's an impossibility.

But there have been multiple occasions where my brain has felt that it is of critical importance that I finish the dream I was having, otherwise… you know what, I don't actually know what it thinks the consequences will be. Because there aren't any. A dream is just a dream; as enjoyable and interesting as they can be, they don't actually exist and they don't have any bearing on your real life, so prioritising them over actually living in the moment is, from a rational perspective, very silly.

As we all know, though, the human brain is prone to fits of irrationality at times, particularly if it's under any sort of stress or not feeling its best for one reason or another. And so, yes, there absolutely have been times where my brain has wanted to prioritise a fun or interesting dream over the drabness of everyday life.

No more, though! I will get up at a sensible hour, giving me enough time to have a nice chilled out morning before work starts, and this will be a Healthy Habit that will lead to other improvements! 2025 is the year.

Probably. Maybe.

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#oneaday Day 220: Morning person

I'm not a morning person. I can get out of bed early when I absolutely have to (to catch a flight, say), but left to my own devices, I will happily just lie comatose in my bed until an embarrassing hour. I will note that it's not quite as bad as during 2010, The Worst Year Of My Life, when I was staying up until 5am on Second Life and then not even waking up until 5pm the next day, but it's still… challenging to get out of bed at a reasonable hour, particularly at weekends.

I've been reading around and watching some YouTube videos in an attempt to fix this, because as nice as staying in bed can be, I do actually want to try and make a bit better use of my day — because if nothing else, I think it will probably make me feel better, too. There are few things worse for feelings of perpetual non-specific anxiety than getting up moments before you're supposed to start working… although annoyingly enough, it's often those feelings of perpetual non-specific anxiety that make me want to stay in bed.

Thus far, the chief pieces of advice that seem to recur frequently are as follows:

Get up when your alarm goes off. (This is the difficult bit.)
Get out into natural light as soon as you can. (This assumes you have succeeded at step 1.)
Get some exercise shortly after getting up. (Likewise.)
Try and delay your caffeine intake a bit. (Challenging, but also agreed to not necessarily be essential.)
Get some food into you, preferably something which releases energy gradually.
Get to bed at a reasonable time at night. (Doesn't have to be early, just a sensible time.)

Supposedly it takes about three days to convince your body that you're starting a new routine, which is all to do with your circadian rhythms. The first two days are almost certainly going to be excruciatingly difficult, but it's important to stick with them. And, as time goes on, this (in theory) gets easier.

I've already made a sort of step towards improving my morning routine, in that I've given up using my phone as an alarm and instead got a clock radio. I find it somehow more conducive to waking up without feeling like complete shite, perhaps because it's not just the same sound every day that you eventually come to resent. The actual getting out of bed when it first sounds is still the challenging bit, but that's the "wall" you have to push through in order to achieve anything.

So from tomorrow, I'm going to attempt to push through that wall and make some improvements. I've got my alarm set early (7.30am — I start work at 9) and I'm going to do my absolute damnedest to get up straight away, get dressed and then go straight outside. Not only that, I'm going to walk to the nearby Tesco, get myself some coffee and something nice (but not overly awful for me) for breakfast. That would seem to tick off several of the steps above in one fell swoop. Sure, walking to Tesco isn't exactly a "workout", but most of the stuff I've read and watched over the last couple of days suggests that you don't need your morning exercise to be a full-on workout, just moving a bit. And a walk of about a quarter of a mile each way would, I'd say, qualify as "just moving a bit".

When COVID hit, a lot of us introverts joked about how nice it was to have state approval for staying inside all day. But over the last couple of years in particular, I've started to really appreciate how important it is to just go outside and get some air sometimes. Doesn't have to involve interacting with other people or doing anything adventurous, just, as the kids say, touch some grass.

So that's the plan from tomorrow. Let's see if I'm able to actually stick to it.

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#oneaday Day 219: Getting it done

I finally managed to muster up the motivation to make some YouTube videos today. Three of them, in fact; they'll be up on the channel over the course of the next week or so.

To be clear, I wasn't putting off making these videos because I didn't want to make them; I was primarily putting them off because I had a cold in mid-December, and it's left me with a really annoying cough but no other symptoms. (I went to the doctor to see if it was an infection or anything, and it seems there's nothing to be concerned about; I just Have A Cough for a bit, frustratingly.)

I didn't want to start recording videos and collapse into a coughing fit partway through, so I'd been putting it off, particularly as a couple of weekends ago I started trying to record a The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough and had to stop because my throat wasn't up to it.

My cough is still here — mostly in the evenings, and especially annoyingly when I lie down to go to sleep — but I managed to hold it at bay for the duration of three videos earlier, which is nice. Those three videos are kicking off something I want to be doing throughout this year: exploring a variety of home computer stuff, including Spectrum, Amiga and C64 stuff as well as the Atari 8-bit and ST stuff I've primarily built my channel on.

It felt good to finally get them done. While I have no real "obligations" towards my YouTube channel and could just… stop making videos at any point with no real consequence, it would feel like a great shame to do so. I have somehow made 1,303 videos so far since I created my channel in 2007 (but didn't start Being A Creator until to any vaguely serious degree until 2017) and my channel has shown very slow but steady growth, particularly over the course of the last five years or so. I don't have any grand designs on Being A YouTuber as a career, particularly since the sort of stuff I do isn't exactly algorithm-baiting, but it is nice to be able to sit down, play some games, talk about them to an empty room and feel like at least a few people will, eventually, listen.

In some respects, being able to do that with YouTube has almost been a substitute for being able to spend time with friends talking about this stuff. Pretty much all of my friends who used to be into gaming to any degree have drifted away for one reason or another, and it really sucks to be enthusiastic about things and have no-one to share that with. So by handling my YouTube videos the way I do — as if I'm sitting playing it with the viewer there as a friend beside me — it at least helps a bit with that side of things, if not all of the loneliness I feel at times.

Anyway, like I say, those videos will be coming out over the next week or so. There's one Spectrum one, one C64 one and one Atari 8-bit one; I'm not necessarily going to do all that every week (at least partly because I want to do some ST and Amiga stuff in there too) but it's a nice spread to start the year with. And it's onwards to a whole new year of exploring classic home computers and the myriad weird and wonderful games they played host to!

If you're not yet subscribed, stop by my channel, watch a few vids and hit the dang subscribe button already. Here's a link. Go on, click it.

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#oneaday Day 218: Memories of Me: Sixth Form

I occasionally find myself pondering when I think the happiest time in my life was, and I always conclude with one of two closely related period: sixth form (for non-British folks, this is the optional "Year 12" and "Year 13" you take if you want to stay on in non-compulsory education after finishing secondary school, typically taken before going to university) and my four years at university (three on my BA in English and Music, one on my PGCE in Music). Today I want to reminisce a bit about the former.

There was absolutely no question as to whether or not I was going to stay on at school after I finished compulsory education. My life has, to date, followed the typical autistic/ADHD trajectory of performing very well in school, then sliding into tepid mediocrity in adult life, so at the point I was finishing my GCSEs, I knew that I wanted to stay on and keep studying. I ended up choosing English Language, English Literature, Sociology and Music as my four subjects; at my school, it was considered unusual to take four A-Levels (five if you count General Studies, but no-one in their right mind does, for reasons that will become apparent), but all my teachers agreed that I could handle it. So I did. (And I did.)

I was excited about sixth form. I had seen my brother pass through sixth form at the same school some ten years earlier, and I knew what a good time he'd had while he was there. He'd made some good friends, he'd had a band, he had a long-term girlfriend, and he'd studied some interesting-sounding stuff that wasn't anything like the boring old National Curriculum gubbins I'd gone through lower down the school. I was looking forward to the whole experience, though I was also nervous about a few things.

One of them was the fact that I'd have more contact with a teacher known as Mr Watts, who was renowned at our school as one of the most terrifying teachers there was. He taught History, had a severe-looking moustache that always make it look like he was furious and, to be fair, he often seemed to be furious — particularly at anyone under the age of 15.

I'd actually had a year of Mr Watts as a History teacher in… Year 9, I think it was? Kids of that age are just on the cusp of what he considered to be actual human beings, so we got a bit of a taste of what he was really like. He could still be terrifying if someone stepped out of line, sure, but he also had a wicked sense of humour, and was a genuinely excellent teacher.

That didn't stop me being nervous about the fact he was head of Sixth Form, though. I don't really know why, because I wasn't the sort of kid who got into trouble particularly regularly (I think I had a grand total of two detentions during my entire time at school, at least one of which I managed to wangle my way out of thanks to music rehearsals) but Mr Watts just had that sort of impressive aura about him that made you want to stay well and truly in line.

Thankfully, we quickly discovered that Head of Sixth Form Mr Watts was a completely different person to History Teacher Mr Watts. He was much more down-to-earth, much more willing to let that sense of humour shine through, and extremely supportive of anyone who came to him with questions or concerns. He was a comforting presence, in other words; it was a surprise to many of us, to be sure, but a welcome one.

Our year was the first to make use of the new sixth form centre that had been built on our school's campus. The Upper School Dining Hall (aka just "Upper Dining") had given its life so that the Sidney Banks Sixth Form Centre may live, and it was great. The building, being new, was in great condition, and it was outfitted with reasonably decent PCs for the period; prior to joining the sixth form, most of our computer-related lessons in school had been on Acorn Archimedes computers, but by the time we reached sixth form, proprietary platforms like the ol' Archie were falling out of favour as Windows 95-equipped PCs became the norm in homes, offices and society in general.

The sixth form centre mostly consisted of computer rooms, in fact. Each of its "classrooms" were in fact just rooms with tables and a bunch of PCs, and the main large room in the middle was split in half between the common room and a study area (with more computers), with a sliding divider door allowing for the rooms to be separated completely when necessary.

In the common room, we didn't have a lot of exciting facilities, but I recall we did have a stereo, and folks tended to bring magazines in and leave them for others once they were done with them. For the most part, though, the common room was a space for chilling out, hanging with friends and making use of any of your own entertainment that you had happened to bring.

As it happened, I ended up spending a lot of my time in sixth form in the Art room. My friends Ed and Woody were both studying Art, so in the times where I wasn't attending my own lessons, I tended to hang with them in there. Since the number of folks studying Art at A-level was relatively small, they had their own little common area in the corner of the art room; again, it wasn't really equipped with anything other than a few chairs, but it was a nice place to just hang out.

One thing we were supposed to do as part of our time at sixth form was attend General Studies lessons. We would, we were told, get another A-level out of these lessons, but after attending just one or two at the start of our time in sixth form, we realised that they were largely worthless, so we just… stopped going. And, as part of the whole "treating us as adults" thing that came along with joining the sixth form, no-one ever pursued us about it or queried us on it.

Well, that's not quite true. One General Studies period we did see Mr Watts out and about, seemingly looking for people, so we hid under the chairs in the Art room common area. But that was just once. We all did the exam at the end of our two years in sixth form; I don't know how anyone else did, but I got an "A" having attended one lesson in two years. That should give you a general idea of what General Studies is all about. (One of the questions on the final exam paper was "In Alice in Wonderland, the text describes the Cheshire Cat as 'disappearing tail first'. Assuming the cat did not simply vanish, which direction must he have moved to disappear in this way?")

I mostly enjoyed my A-level studies. I particularly enjoyed English Language, because we got to write essays about swearing, and English Literature exposed me to a variety of interesting novels and plays that I probably wouldn't otherwise have read. Sociology was a thoroughly interesting subject to study, too, and the overall "vibe" of those classes was quite interesting given I was the only boy present; the rest of the class was all girls, and our teacher, Mrs Lloyd, was, of course, a lady also. I wasn't made to feel out of place or anything, I hasten to add; in fact, throughout my time at secondary school, I'd become good friends with a lot of the girls in that class already, so it was nice to have some time where it was just me and them.

Music was a good time, also. At the time I was doing A-level Music, I was also preparing to take my Advanced Certificate practical exam, and doing so basically exempted me from having to do some of the Music A-level, which was pretty neat. The only bit of the Music course I didn't like was learning about how to do Baroque four-part harmony; it felt like it was frustratingly bound by rules rather than truly creative, and I didn't like the teacher much, either. He wasn't one of the regular Music teachers; he was actually the peripatetic strings teacher.

One of the best things about sixth form was how we weren't obliged to stay on the school campus all day if we didn't have lessons. That meant we often walked into town; it was probably about a mile's walk from the school to the town centre, and being young and (relatively) spry at the time, we could do this in a not-unreasonable amount of time.

Our typical town routine involved wandering down there, getting a steak slice and a Belgian Bun from The Baker's Oven, then visiting the CD shop Barneys and computer shop First Compute. Inevitably, upon a visit to the latter, I would be encouraged by my friends to pick up a new game, which I often did, and then we'd head back to school. The reason I was able to grab so many new games at the time was because I'd done some occasional freelancing for PC Zone and the Official Nintendo Magazine, and back in those days you'd get £500 for one article — an absolute fortune to a teenage kid, and, hell, an absolute fortune to anyone involved in freelancing for the games press today.

On one trip to First Compute, I happened to see that a budget rerelease of a piece of software called Klik and Play for PC was on one of the racks. I recalled reading a fun review of this in PC Zone by the one and only Charlie Brooker; a review that had attracted numerous complaints (as did many other pieces Brooker contributed) for using a game in which you knocked a decapitated Frenchman's head around the screen as its demonstration project.

I was attracted to Klik and Play because it promised programming-free game making. I'd previously learned to program in BASIC on Atari 8-bit and STOS on Atari ST, but had never really got into the upper echelons of "knowing how to code", and by this point in the late '90s, "coding" had moved into realms like C and Java, and I didn't really understand those at all. Klik and Play promised to allow creativity without needing to get super-technical, so I was excited to give it a go.

And boy did we love it. Not just me, but my friends Ed and Woody, too, since of course I let them borrow the disc and install it on their own PCs. We made so many stupid games with Klik and Play, many of which remained unfinished, but our crowning achievement was, without a doubt, Pie Eater's Destiny.

This was a game where we'd started with the title, which was intended to take the piss out of our mutual friend Andrew, who was a big lad and enjoyed the game Fighter's Destiny on Nintendo 64. It grew a life of its own after I was demonstrating how to use Klik and Play to Ed and Woody one day, and I imported a scanned image of Andrew's face as an enemy sprite, then added a ripped Contra sprite for the player to move around and shoot at the giant head.

Something about this stupid, humble beginning captured our imagination, and we ended up making a full game with full voice acting, with each level unfolding as a single boss fight against a digitised head of someone we knew, culminating with a battle against the most powerful force in the galaxy: Mr Watts.

Naturally, once Pie Eater's Destiny was completed, we brought it in to school to install on the sixth form computers, and we ended up showing it to Mr Watts. We were initially nervous about this, but the moment he saw that he was the villain, with his introductory line being simply "YOU PATHETIC BASTARDS, YOU WILL NEVER DEFEAT ME! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA", he was absolutely delighted with it.

My time at sixth form is full of wonderful memories like these. I don't recall a single moment of being unhappy while I was at sixth form, and dear Lord, I miss living that life and being that person.

But you can't go back, can you? So these memories have to remain just that: memories. Still, I will always have them, and when times get tough I can think back to a time where life just seemed simpler, easier, more full of possibilities. Not everyone has the luxury of good memories like this, so I should treasure them. And you'd better believe that I do, as the preceding 2,000 words has hopefully made clear.

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#oneaday Day 217: Fuck Facebook, and fuck Meta

I don't know if you've been following the recent news about Meta, Facebook's parent company, but if you still have an account over there for any reason, I thought you might be interested to learn the following.

A few days ago, Meta (which covers Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp Messenger) published some substantial changes to its Hateful Conduct policy, ostensibly a policy that was devised in order to, among other things, help marginalised groups feel safe using their services as a means of online socialisation. You can see the changelog at this link (click the "7 Jan 2025" link on the left of that page to see the changes highlighted), but here are some notable parts for your convenience:

The green highlighted stuff is newly added, the red strikethrough stuff has been removed. Note that the banning of "dehumanising speech in the form of comparisons to or generalisations about animals, pathogens or other sub-human life forms, including women as household objects or property or objects in general; black people as farm equipment; transgender or non-binary people as 'it'" has been removed. This was previously a "Tier 1" violation, among the most serious on the platform, and yet now it is A-OK.

Elsewhere:

In this section, you will see that Meta now "allows allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like 'weird'."

Elsewhere still:

So you're cool to, like, blame the Chinese or whatever group of Johnny Foreigners you think created COVID, if you even believe COVID existed at all in the first place because you're a nutcase who believes vaccination programmes are about Bill Gates trying to fit you with a microtransmitter.

I shouldn't have to point out that these changes are Bad, regardless of whether or not you fall into one of the "protected" categories. It's particularly telling that amid the parts people are mostly focusing on — the stuff about homosexual and transgender people — they snuck in a bit about regarding women as objects and black people as farm equipment. You know, just to make sure everyone except white straight cis men gets their own share of a kicking. On top of that, they have deleted the trans and non-binary themes for Facebook Messenger, as well as the blog post announcing them.

This is not a "freedom of speech" thing; this is deliberately courting the worst people in the world and giving them carte blanche to be as sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic as they desire with zero consequences. And you all know exactly why this has happened: because of the election result in the US.

The world's billionaires have been flocking to kiss Trump's ringpiece ever since the election, and of course Mark Zuckerberg is at the head of the queue. Social media is a veritable breeding ground for the worst kind of right-wing attitudes and has been for a while; all Zuck is doing is making it explicitly okay for this sort of thing to go on, much like Elon Musk has done with Twitter, destroying its value as social media in the process.

This isn't the only thing wrong with Facebook, of course. If you're still using it (again, I ask, why?) you have almost certainly seen how the News Feed or whatever it is called has declined over the years. Chances are yours has multiple "Suggested" posts (i.e. ads) in a row before you see anything from someone you actually care about, and many of those posts will be filled with AI-generated garbage slop like the infamous "Shrimp Jesus" and the many, many images of crying multiple amputee soldiers who don't exist saying it's their birthday. And rather than Facebook seeing this as a problem, it is being encouraged.

In fact, Meta announced plans to introduce AI-driven profiles to both Facebook and Instagram, presumably in an attempt to hide the fact that users are (correctly) leaving their services in droves. People stumbled across one of these AI-powered profiles on Instagram recently, discovering it to be, of course, full of images that never happened and hosting a chatbot that was little more than racial stereotyping. Meta were quick to say that this was an experiment from a few years back, but this is exactly the sort of shit they want to introduce.

Along the same lines, some Instagram users have found themselves presented with AI-generated images of themselves in their own feed, without having asked for them. In most cases, this is because Instagram's AI features count "using them once" as "perpetual consent to use your likeness", even if you don't want or need AI-generated images of yourself. Which no-one does.

Facebook is a shithole, and it's only going to get worse. If I haven't convinced you enough, I urge you to read at least some of the following links (plus the ones I've peppered throughout the above) for more on the story, because these folks report on this stuff for a living and can provide a lot more detail on what is going on.

Never Forgive Them by Ed Zitron – a comprehensive breakdown of how, over the last 10-15 years in particular, big tech has been systematically making life worse for everyone online under the guise of "growth". And it seeps into all areas of life, be it Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media, or a cheap laptop you buy from Amazon.

AI Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide by Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media. Not directly related to Meta, though it is a tale of why AI-powered anything relating to advertising (a category which Meta stuff firmly falls into) is a pile of shit. I will say 404 Media has been doing some of the absolute best reporting on all this for quite some time now.

Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. About how Zuckerberg doesn't believe the AI sludge that is taking over Facebook is a problem, and how he actually wants to encourage it.

Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. Self-explanatory, though you may be surprised at the answer to the headline and the reasons why.

Mark Zuckerberg, Recipient of World's First Rat Penis Transplant, Announces Meta Will Stop Fact-Checking by Matt Husser, The Hard Times. Also self-explanatory. The fact-checking thing is actually where all this started; Zuck is putting this side of things in the hands of the users via a Twitter-style "Community Notes" system, rather than having fact-checkers to combat disinformation on staff. Things just got worse from there.

Meta has 'heard the message' from Trump, says whistleblower Frances Haugen by Dan Milmo and Robert Booth, The Guardian. Some insider knowledge on the situation and how it's happening exactly because of the reasons you thought.

Look, I get it. I appreciate that some of you might not be able to delete your Facebook accounts because it's the only means you have of getting in touch with some people. I can't really delete mine either, because I have to use it for work, though I haven't used Facebook "personally" for years now because I saw it enshittifying a long time ago and jumped ship. The only Meta service I use these days — and that's irregularly — is WhatsApp.

But I would urge you to look over all of the above, and consider whether that is a company you still want to have any involvement with. Not only are the policy changes above actively harmful, the service as a whole has, as Zitron explains in his piece linked above, gradually been getting worse and worse, abusing its users in the name of profit and growth, for years at this point.

There are always alternatives. You can email people, just like in the good old days, or alternative messaging solutions like Discord, Zoom and Skype exist. They all have their issues, yes, but they're not actively being harmful like Meta is now. You can build a website to share your photos. Hell, if you're hooked on social media, there are plenty of better alternatives to Facebook now. (Just don't join TikTok.)

Online is a garbage fire right now, and it's only getting worse. One day, we might be able to look back on this whole sorry situation and laugh, but right now it's getting to a point where it's outright dangerous for some folks online. And I would hope that you, dear reader, don't want to be part of making that problem any worse.

If you didn't know anything about any of this prior to today, I hope you feel a little better informed now. And if you did, I'd urge you to take that step and move well away from Meta as soon as you are able.

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#oneaday Day 216: I've probably written all of this before

There are, as I type this, 2,850 posts on this blog. 2,851 including this one. As such, I've almost certainly written things multiple times. Yesterday's story about The Rough Book is one I've told before, for example, and even found myself using some of the same turns of phrase to describe various incidents.

But I think it's interesting to reflect back on things multiple times, many years apart, because doing so can cause you to look at those situations from a new perspective, perhaps with different life experiences under your belt. In the case of The Rough Book, I last wrote about it in 2012, when I didn't know I was autistic. Or, perhaps, when I hadn't been diagnosed as autistic. Because even in those innocent, pre-COVID days, I think I always knew that something was "up", as it were.

Hell, I mean, even COVID. Life has not been the same on Planet Earth since the pandemic hit, and many folks (including, I suspect, me and my wife) are still feeling the aftereffects (or perhaps it's more accurate to say ongoing effects) of the situation, thanks to the lack of understanding around things like "Long COVID" and suchlike.

It's hard to say if my life has got better or worse as time has gone on, looking back at these old posts and realising all the topics I've previously written about. I think, on the whole, I'm in a much better situation than I ever have been in every regard except for my physical health; I've had lower lows of mental health in particular (catastrophically low lows on multiple occasions) and I certainly have very little to complain about with my present employment situation.

I have found a niche and I'm damn well staying there as long as possible; I have no desire to ever go back to the periods of joblessness I've endured over the years. Even with the experience I've built up over the course of the past few years, I still feel like if I was suddenly out of work that I would struggle to cope in today's volatile, competitive job market. I have been very fortunate with the situation I've ended up in from that perspective. I took some risks to get here, in some ways it took an uncharacteristic amount of persistence, and I actually think the pandemic helped me secure the position I'm in now thanks to how it made remote working feasible for everyone.

I like having this blog, and being able to look back over the posts, particularly with the "Random Post" button at the top, then following a rabbit hole of "related posts". Of course, I have a big gap between the end of my first #oneaday stint and this one, but other things online — like MoeGamer and YouTube, for example — fill that gap to some degree. This is why I was so upset when WordPress.com pulled their whole "your blog has been deleted, teehee" shit a while back. This site isn't useful from a perspective of… well, anything, really, other than giving me a semi-private outlet to muse on whatever subjects I feel like writing about. But, goddammit, it's mine, and it's not beholden to any platform holders who can arbitrarily take it away from me. Not any more, anyway.

I don't get anywhere near the readership I used to with this blog. I don't even think my family and friends read it any more. I don't think anyone reads blogs any more, because they're too busy doomscrolling on social media or shit like TikTok. And while I hate that personally, I can't really tell other people what they "should" be doing, when the stuff I'm posting here is probably just as vapid as all the people yelling at the camera on TikTok.

Or is it? There's probably a whole discussion for another post in this, but I can say with complete honesty that what I've written here over the years has been an accurate reflection of me. I've always made a point of being honest — to myself as much as anyone who might be reading — while TikTok, from my admittedly limited experience to it, feels obnoxiously performative. Oddly, despite TikTok in theory being more "personal" thanks to being video-based — you see and hear the person — I still feel much more like I'm getting to know someone when I read what they write, rather than seeing them yelling breathlessly into their phone camera like the world's least scary follow-up to The Blair Witch Project.

It saddens me a bit that blogs aren't what they used to be. Hell, most people don't even call them "blogs" any more; these days they tend to be described as "newsletters", and most of them seem to be read via email rather than actually on their websites. But I'm still resolutely old-school in how I do things; this is my blog, and has been since (checks) 2008. And there's no real point changing up how I do things now, is there?

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