#oneaday Day 7: Suggested Content

One of the "innovations" of modern tech and software that I am most consistently baffled by is the concept of "Suggestions".

Don't get me wrong, I am under no illusions as to what "Suggested Content" really means on websites and social media platforms (it's advertising, in case you somehow weren't savvy enough to know that by now) but I'm talking more in contexts where it's not obviously advertising, or where it doesn't make sense for advertising to try and worm its way into places.

Places like, you know, just Microsoft Windows in general. Or Google Drive. Both of those have features where they provide you with a list of "Suggested" files, and I absolutely, genuinely do not understand why that feature is there or what it is for. Right now, for example, my Google Drive "Suggested files" list is a non-chronological index of things that I have opened or edited recently. Fine, you might say, except there is a perfectly good "Recent" option in the sidebar which does give me a chronological list of things I have opened or edited recently.

Likewise, the Windows 11 start menu on my "work" computer (it came preinstalled, otherwise I would have been quite happy continuing with 10 as I do with my "play" computer) appears to "suggest" applications almost completely at random, with its first two suggestions usually being the things I have installed most recently, and the others being… pretty much anything that I have installed, for no discernible reason.

Under certain circumstances, I get the idea. When it comes to media, a "suggestion" feature might inspire you to look at photos or listen to music that you haven't enjoyed for a while — though this can also backfire somewhat. Earlier today, my phone's "Gallery" app decided to send me an unasked-for notification that I presume someone somewhere thought was "cute", with the text "Feline footprints in Southampton". The attached image? Our dearly departed cat Meg. I'm still quite upset about Meg's passing, so I emphatically do not want my phone randomly bringing her up out of the blue for no apparent reason. I will look at pictures of her when I'm good and ready, thanks very much.

The push for "AI" in everything is only making this shit worse, too; the Gallery app on my phone recognising that the image in question was a picture of a cat is a result of improving image recognition technology, and I suspect as generative AI becomes more and more pervasive and invasive in our daily online life, situations like this are only going to become more and more common — because you can bet your bippy that all these "Suggestion" features are going to be turned on by default.

What happens when your phone decides to "suggest" a photo of something you'd rather keep private at an exceedingly inappropriate moment? Well, some might say you should keep your private photos private, but realistically, practically speaking, most people these days are not that organised, because we've made the mistake of trusting our software and online services to do the organisation for us. I actually like the fact that Google Photos can pick out, say, pictures of cats, or pictures that mention something specific in a piece of text, because that is indisputably useful — but what I don't want is my phone going "HEY REMEMBER YOUR CAT THAT DIED? HUH? HERE SHE IS, I PICKED HER OUT FROM ALL YOUR PHOTOS, AREN'T I SMART?"

There's a place for some — some — of the innovations that are currently going on in tech. But, as always, it seems we're going to have to endure a period of people pushing things to absolute breaking point before we settle into something approaching a useful routine. And, unfortunately, that period appears to have been going on for quite a while now… and people don't seem to be willing to push back against the more unreasonable uses of these features.

"Suggested Content" can get in the fucking bin. I know what I need on my computer and when. And, more often than not, when I'm browsing the Web, I know what I'm looking for, too. Sadly, it feels increasingly unlikely that I'm going to be left in peace these days.

If anyone mentions Linux, they are getting a slap.

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 6: Best Thing Since

My wife Andie bought a breadmaker a little while back. We didn't need one — no-one needs a breadmaker — but I have to say, the bread that comes out of it is really nice. And it's got me thinking that as I've grown older, I've grown more and more fond of simple pleasures.

For instance, when I was a kid, I distinctly remember thinking of bread as being "boring". After all, a joking "threat" by a parent at the time could be "you won't get any dinner, you'll just have bread and water". (I hasten to add for anyone new to this blog that my parents were not in any way abusive, nor did they ever refuse me dinner and just give me bread and water.) But nowadays, I find it thoroughly pleasurable to sometimes just have a bit of bread with some spread or jam on it.

It doesn't even necessarily have to be good bread. Sometimes I'm quite happy with the mediocrity of a shop-bought sliced loaf — I'm particularly fond of toasted wholemeal bread with raspberry jam — but a nice crusty loaf, be it from a bakery or the breadmaker, is a genuine treat now.

It's kind of disappointing that bread isn't particularly brilliant for you, particularly white bread. I find this kind of strange, given how much of a staple food bread has always been considered — and I'm sure in years gone by, this was even more the case. Whenever I think of, say, medieval folks, I'm sure bread was a significant part of what they ate. It's a potentially winning strategy in Agricola to focus on bread-making, after all.

I always find it interesting in Japanese media when students talk about simply "buying some bread" for their lunch, though I suspect this more commonly refers to some sort of sandwich. I am especially fascinated by the concept of the yakisoba pan, which is a noodle sandwich in a hot dog bun, and melon pan, which is a sweet bread that always sounds delicious when people describe it. There's also anpan, which is a bread roll stuffed with sweet red bean paste that I'd personally say veers more towards the "cake" or "doughnut" end of the spectrum, but it still counts.

I don't know if any of those can be made in a breadmaker — thus far we've just tried simple bread recipes and shop-bought ready mixes (there's a cheese and sun-dried tomato one that is lovely) — but it might be interesting to experiment. We'll have to see, I guess. In the meantime, I've got a loaf to polish off.

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#oneaday Day 5: Trapped Inside

Do you ever feel trapped inside your own head? I mean obviously we're all trapped inside our own heads, our eyes our only windows out of our self-imposed prisons, but what I mean is, do you ever find yourself finding it, say, difficult to wake up because of what your imagination is conjuring up?

I've been feeling this for a while. I'm not entirely sure what causes it, whether it's a side-effect of the medication I'm taking, whether it's a symptom of my mental health conditions or if I'm just naturally predisposed towards this sort of thing. Regardless of the cause, though, there are mornings where I genuinely do feel absolutely "trapped" inside the scenarios my imagination has conjured up for me; part of my consciousness is saying "wake up, get up, you need to go to work", but my brain is saying "no, you need to stay here and resolve this completely fictional, made-up scenario before you do anything else".

Another way of putting it might be that I feel sort of "addicted" to dreaming. I have quite vivid dreams — always have done — and those dreams tend to be at their most vivid in the morning, particularly if I've already woken up once and fallen asleep again. In those circumstances, I suspect they're probably an interpretation of my brain being aware that I need to get up soon, if not now, and expressing that source of anxiety through somewhat surreal means. But it ends up being counterproductive, because I inevitably find the dreams so interesting that I don't want to leave them behind and wake up.

I've genuinely had mornings where I've felt like I didn't want to get up because I thought I needed to "finish" whatever was going on in the dream first. Except because the dreams themselves were so abstract, there was no real "win state", for want of a better word; no means of "completing" or "resolving" them. And so I just end up being drawn back in, often repeating the same situation over and over again rather than making any real "progress".

The human mind is fascinating. I wonder if one day we will be able to better understand and explore the things that go on in there. I'd certainly be fascinated to explore the worlds within in a more "lucid" manner. But for now, I guess I'll just have to be satisfied with sleeping in slightly longer than I should in the morning, in the vain hope that I might actually "finish" a dream.

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#oneaday Day 4: Upward Slope

Been feeling mildly better today. Had a small boost in mood from this week's Slimming World visit; although I haven't undone all the "damage" from last week I have lost some weight, and thus I count that as a success. It is important to celebrate the small victories, as they add up; I'm still down quite a bit on what I started, even though I still have a long way to go.

Today has been a pretty uneventful day all round. Work was quiet, as it's likely to be for a little while, and I spent a bit of time this evening playing some Steam Next Fest demos. That's a subject for MoeGamer though, so check over there in the next few days for some thoughts.

I've been spending my late evenings before bed watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which my brother kindly bought me a box set of for my birthday. I've never watched this right through to the end, so I'm looking forward to finally doing that. While it was tempting to try and watch all the Star Trek series chronologically, that's a mammoth undertaking that I'm not entirely sure is desirable anyway. I do want to at least see Deep Space Nine and Voyager all the way through, though, so I'm going to tackle those one at a time.

No header image today as I've left the Kindle Scribe downstairs and I'm typing this from bed. The post editor in the Jetpack app is actually surprisingly good, though I still prefer typing on a proper keyboard. Good to know I can do some decent posting from mobile, though; the WordPress app used to be kind of pump.

Anyway, that'll probably do for now. It's quarter past midnight and I am tired. Tomorrow is another day, and there is work to be done, so to sleep I go.

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#oneaday Day 3: Talking is Exhausting

I'm sure discussing things with people online wasn't always as exhausting as it feels these days.

I have some extremely fond memories of time spent on 1up.com's forums and "club" pages talking about games with a varied crew of folk, all of whom had come together through our shared interest in the video game medium. We didn't always agree on things, but that made for interesting discussions as we strove to understand one another's viewpoints. There was no shaming, there was no telling each other we were wrong (apart from on one podcast, where a couple of participants got a little more heated than a reasonable person perhaps should over whether Fallout 3 was playable from the third-person camera) and there was just a nice atmosphere of mutual respect.

These days, it's becoming more and more of an effort to open my virtual mouth online in places supposedly made for "discussion", because to a disproportionately large number of people, "discuss" appears to mean "disagree vehemently and aggressively". And it's inevitably over something that simply doesn't matter, but the nature of such exchanges make it easy for hot heads to prevail and things to get stupidly, absurdly aggressive over an absolute nothing of a subject. (No, I'm not citing specific examples, for reasons that I hope are already obvious.)

This is a disappointing development to me, because 20 years ago, I would have sat here and quite confidently said that on the Internet, I could be my "real" self much more than I could be in "the real world". I actually do still feel that way to a certain extent — outlets such as this blog, MoeGamer and my YouTube channel allow me to express myself in the way I want to, rather than how I'm "supposed to" — but even in those places, there's always the risk of some weirdo turning up and getting weirdly angry about something which absolutely does not matter.

Thing is, I sort of get it. I get why those people exist, because there are times when I'll read something online and I'll feel my own heckles rising (you feel it start around the balls) and contemplate posting some sort of snippy remark in response. Most of the time, I've conditioned myself to not do that. Occasionally one slips through, and I pretty much always regret it, because it inevitably leads to a disproportionately furious argument over something I actually don't feel that strongly about, because the whole "sense of honour" thing kicks in and you want to save face, no matter the cost.

It's exhausting. It's exhausting when you get pulled into situations like this, and it's exhausting making an effort to avoid situations like this, because it's very easy to take things much too far and end up simply not wanting to talk to anyone. I have definitely reached that latter end of things, as there are times when I feel extremely lonely but unable to reach out to someone because I simply don't have the mental fortitude to be able to fully process how today's online interactions tend to work.

I think about this sort of thing quite a lot, and when I do, I always end up asking myself if it's really worse than it used to be, or if my perspective has just changed. And honestly, I'm not completely sure of the answer to that. I suspect it's a bit of both, because I know I have deliberately changed my online habits for the sake of a quiet life — but then I'll look at something like this legendary thread from Usenet circa 1997 and see that people getting really very cross about things that don't matter was still a thing back when I thought the Internet was much nicer.

I guess the difference is that there was a certain "barrier to entry" for the "tougher" parts of the Internet back then; I never went on Usenet, so I never saw any of that sort of thing. These days, that aggressive means of interacting with one another is just the norm; social media has become what Usenet was, only rather than being neatly segregated into interest groups, everyone has all been plunged into the same vat of boiling piss to fight it out among themselves and see who has the loudest voice. I'm aware that was an utterly tortuous metaphor but I don't care. My blog, my rules.

The other difference, of course, is that today I am aware of my own mental health conditions, including depressive and anxious episodes that occur sporadically, along with my underlying condition of Asperger's. Being aware of why I find certain things about socialising difficult is useful, but it can also make me feel more hesitant than I perhaps "should" be to engage with certain scenarios.

I don't really have a conclusion for all this; I just felt like thinking "out loud", as it were. And so there you have it. Now I'm off to go and eat chilli.

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#oneaday Day 2: Taking Stock

So I said yesterday I'd come on to my present situation and what got me thinking that starting this nonsense up again might be helpful. It might as well be today, as that acts as a good introduction to what will come afterwards, as well and perhaps a means for those of you who are stopping by for the first time to get a better idea of who I am, what I do and why I'm typing this at all.

As I type this, I am 43 years old and, for the most part, broadly satisfied with my life situation. I am happily married to a wonderful wife, I have two delightful cats and I am gainfully employed in a field I actually have some enthusiasm for. I'm not what I'd call especially "wealthy", but I make enough each month to both get by and to be able to indulge my interests. Nothing to really complain about as such.

And yet I can't honestly say that I'm happy. Part of this is down to the depression and anxiety I have been suffering… well, probably since always, in retrospect, but which I've definitely been actually conscious of since my 20s. Part of this is down to the current state of the world in general, which just seems to be inexorably sliding towards self-inflicted oblivion in more ways than one. And part of this is down to specific things that occur on a day-to-day basis, which can have a fairly major impact on the way I'm feeling.

Yesterday, during a conversation over dinner, one of our assembled group of friends posed the question "when was the last time you felt joy?" — and it proved to be a bit of a stumper for several of us. One of our number — the one who, and I mean this with no disrespect to him whatsoever, is probably the most "privileged" among us due to the combination of his upbringing, the hard work he put in to get to the position he is in now and said position that he is in now — is routinely fairly cheerful about most things, so he had no problem in pinning down some recent examples, but he also noted that there are plenty of stressors and difficulties in his own life, and there had even been occasions that had brought him to tears.

The rest of us didn't feel so positive, to varying degrees. A common thread of frustration and upset was how the world is today. Bombarded by advertisements, annoyed at the lies and misinformation routinely spread online, concerned about the yet-to-be-seen long-term consequences of innovations such as social media, we all found ourselves feeling somewhat despondent about certainly the near future, with the far future having some fairly severe question marks hovering above it.

And yes. There is a lot about today's world that I do not like. There is a lot about it that I do not like that I am not in a position to do anything about, either, which is doubly frustrating. But there are some things, closer to home, that I probably can do something about.

For starters, one of my biggest frustrations about "the world" in general is that it doesn't feel like it's built for me. This stems from a combination of factors, including the social anxiety I feel as a result of both my depression and anxiety and the underlying autism spectrum condition of Asperger's syndrome, and also physical factors such as my weight.

My weight is probably one of the things that upsets and annoys me the most, because I know it's entirely self-inflicted, but I also know that it's a symptom of other factors.

I've always had a bit of a problem with my weight, but since the COVID lockdowns of 2020 or so, it's been particularly bad. I got bigger than I ever have been before, and I was already at a size where certain activities were completely inaccessible to me. Couple this with the fact that I have a hernia which the doctors won't treat until I lose some weight — which itself causes physical pain and discomfort on a fairly regular basis — and you can hopefully understand where I'm coming from when I say that I physically feel uncomfortable in a lot of situations in today's world.

My weight problems can be tied to my mental health, because I know that I often use food as "self-medication", to use the clinical term. I get depressed, upset or angry about something, and I reach for something tasty to "make me feel better". I recognise that this is a problem; I even recognise the behavioural patterns as being alarmingly similar to someone with a substance addiction — without going into details, I have some experience of helping someone who went through such a scenario and thankfully made it out of the other side, though not without leaving me with some lasting trauma that I suspect will never go away. But that doesn't always help me in doing something about it.

The old cliché is that the first step in solving a problem is acknowledging it exists, though, and I'm already a few steps along that road. As you can see above, I recognise the problem, and I've sought support for it — specifically in the form of Slimming World, an organisation with which I lost a lot of weight nearly 10 years ago. So far it has been going reasonably well — though I had a bit of a setback last week and am expecting another this week — but it's hard work.

The trouble is with the concept of "normal". In confronting personal problems like this, one of the biggest difficulties is in acknowledging that you are not "normal" by societal definitions, and that means you are going to have to do some things a little differently, perhaps for a long time or even permanently. On some days it is easier to make my peace with this than others. When I am in a position where I can mostly be in control of things and have some support standing by when I need it, I can generally muddle through without making too many mistakes.

But I do make mistakes, and confronting those, acknowledging them and dealing with the consequences is something I struggle with. If I deviate from a "plan" or even a "hope" that I have for myself, I beat myself up about it a lot. It upsets me and frustrates me and I become afraid. I'm not even sure what I'm afraid of — or perhaps it's not just one thing. Sometimes it might be being afraid to face those who are trying to help me, like I've let them down somehow. Sometimes it might be being afraid of my mistake having irreversible consequences. Sometimes it's just plain, simple fear, with no real source; it's just there.

All of the above doesn't just apply to attempting to bring my weight under control; it's something I struggle with in daily life. If I make a mistake at work, it can utterly ruin my day, even if no-one else thinks anything more of it after the initial acknowledgement of the issue. If I make a mistake in a social interaction with someone, I'll play it over and over in my head, wishing that I'd done something differently. If I make a mistake in something I'm supposed to be doing "long term" — like losing weight — I can easily feel a huge hit to my motivation and wondering why and if I should bother.

All this might sound a bit bleak and, I'm not going to lie, it is. Despite being in a life situation that is more than satisfactory, as noted above, I am still struggling right now. Every day is a battle against myself; some mornings I even feel afraid to get up. That's not something one should be feeling.

Perhaps talking about this stuff, even if it's just to myself, will help matters somewhat. That is at least part of the intention of resurrecting #oneaday. It's helped me before, so I suspect it may be able to help me again. And in the meantime, I'm thankful that I do have the support I do when I need it.

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#oneaday Day 1: Blogging Therapy

Good evening. If the header looks familiar, you've doubtless been following this blog for quite some time and will remember that time, starting in January of 2010, where I decided to participate in a loosely organised blogging project. Dubbed "One A Day" or, more commonly, "#oneaday" due to its origins on Twitter, it was a collective effort by all the participants to write something — anything — every single day for a year.

I joined the project a little late, but ended up going the distance considerably more than some of the other people who started alongside me — including the original organisers, several of whom gave up after less than a month. I eventually managed 2,541 posts, eventually calling it a day on December 31, 2016.

Sometimes I think about that project and the value it had for me. Ultimately, I don't think I really got a great deal out of the "community" side of things — on the contrary, when I decided to step forward and encourage a group of bloggers to do a year of #oneaday in aid of charity, I got a fair chunk of abuse from the original organisers, who still felt some weird sense of "ownership" over the concept of daily blogging, despite having dropped out of the whole process very early. But what I did get out of it was a sense of… I guess "therapy" is probably the best word for it.

My starting #oneaday first time around coincided with one of the absolute worst times of my life, during which I suffered bullying at work, culminating in me being dismissed from a job I loved because I stood up for a colleague who was also being bullied; a period during which my first marriage broke down irreparably and left me alone, without an income and staring down what I saw back then as the humiliating possibility of having to return home to stay with my parents; a time when my anxiety and depression were enjoying a particular "peak" (or is that a trough?), to say the least.

One of the things that got me through that period mostly intact was making the time each evening to sit down and write something. It didn't necessarily have to be about what had happened that day or even how I was feeling at that point; just the act of being creative was somehow comforting. It seems that the human mind is often at its most creative when it is suffering, and I was most definitely suffering around that time. And indeed on several other occasions during those 2,541 posts.

It's not an exaggeration to say that daily blogging helped get me through that time. It's not an exaggeration to say that daily blogging is a significant part of why I am still here to write this right now. Because believe me, things inside my head were bleak for quite some time on several separate occasions.

Today, on the 8th of June, 2024, I'm not in anywhere near as bad a situation as any of those previous instances, but my mental health most certainly has been dipping down into a bit of a trough for quite some time. So I thought it was time to kick the tyres on this here ol' blog, which is still humming away, and make a commitment to writing something every day in the hopes that it might help, even a little.

I will hasten to add that my sudden inclination to write something on here is nothing to do with the events of today specifically, which were actually rather pleasant; some friends who I haven't seen for some time were all finally available to come and have a day of playing video games and chatting. We haven't done this for a long time — I've tried to make it an annual tradition of sorts, since our respective lives make it difficult to do anything more regularly — and it was nice. But some of the conversations we had got me thinking, and that indirectly led me back here to the "Compose" page.

So anyway. That's what this is. I've rambled on for long enough for today, so perhaps we'll talk a little bit more about my present situation and what I really hope to get out of all this another time. For now, let's just say it's good to be back, and I'll see you again tomorrow.

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Goodbye, Meg

This is a repost from MoeGamer for the sake of those who aren't subscribed over there.

Today we lost our beloved Meg, our cat who joined our family back in 2016. She was just 12 years old, but sadly she was suffering with what looked like fairly severe liver cancer and had to leave us before what we all thought "her time" should be.

Much like when we lost her playmate Ruby — who we suspect may have been her daughter, though we have no real confirmation of this — I wanted to leave a permanent record of the mark Meg made on our family and lives, and celebrate how much she was loved.

Both Ruby and Meg came from a local rescue centre. They were very much a pair; while they contrasted quite significantly in personality, it was clear that they had spent their entire lives together. As such, when we lost Ruby unexpectedly to an accident, Meg was hit hard by it. But she soldiered on, and took well to Patti, a nervous little black cat who we took in to give Meg some company, since she was clearly pining for Ruby.

I say she "took well" to Patti; the first few weeks of them being together were interesting, to say the least. Patti expressed her nervousness by launching herself at Meg at high speed, causing Meg to initially be somewhat wary of her; as time went on, though, Meg grew to at the very least tolerate her and, though she would never admit this, love her.

For Meg was a Grumpuss, you see — or at least she liked to put that impression across. I don't think she really was grumpy most of the time, but she had a face that looked like she disapproved of everything going on around her — particularly anything Patti had something to do with. But it was clear that it was just a front; any time Patti decided to hide or we had to take her to the vet or something, Meg made it very obvious that she was worrying about her.

And her caring nature applied to us, too. I loved Meg so much at least partly because she reminded me in attitude of my childhood cat Penny, who would always come and "look after" any member of the family who was suffering for one reason or another.

Meg had incredible empathy skills, and knew exactly when what you needed more than anything else was a cat to just come and sit with you. I've lost count of the number of times I was lying feeling hopeless and depressed in bed, and Meg came to come and look after me. She didn't actually do anything beyond sit with me — usually either on me, or in such a way that she was pressed up against me — but that was enough. Her presence was comforting. And now it's gone.

Meg reminded me of Penny in other ways, too, perhaps most notably in her love of "human food". She would do anything for a little piece of ham or cheese, and on more than one occasion she sat down for Christmas dinner with us as a special treat. She was always well-behaved, though; while she would certainly "beg" for things when the fridge opened, she rarely went so far as to steal things.

Except for one memorable occasion, when Andie had made some sort of sausage-based casserole stew-type thing. We forgot that we'd left the pot out overnight, and when we came down in the morning, we found half a sausage sitting on the kitchen floor, along with a noticeable hole in the (rather thick) stew mixture, suggesting that Meg had precisely picked out a single sausage from the pot without disturbing anything else, consumed enough to satisfy herself, then left the evidence behind as if to say "and what are you going to do about it?"

I have any number of stories like that I could tell about Meg. She was such a strong personality, and beloved by everyone who came to our house. She was the kind of cat who could pick out the "person who didn't like cats" from a lineup, and convert them to a cat-lover within five to ten minutes. She was more than just a pet; she was a beloved family member, and that's why losing her hurts so much.

But we had to say goodbye; it was the right thing to do. She was so sick, to the point that she wasn't eating, that it was heartbreaking to see her in such a sorry state. But at the same time, we knew that she was hanging on for our sake. We knew that she didn't want us to be sad, so even though over time it clearly got to a point where it hurt for her to do anything, she would still come and spend time with us, and she stubbornly refused to let go and leave us behind. She would sit on a cushion next to me while I played games, or she would sit on Andie in bed, or she would just hang out in the same room as us, content to be in our company.

But sometimes, no matter how much you love someone and you wish your time with them could last forever, you just have to say goodbye. And while we wish Meg could have just passed peacefully at home surrounded by the warmth of family, we couldn't bear for her to keep suffering for our sakes. I don't know how long she would have clung on out of sheer stubbornness, but we had to let her go. It was the right thing to do. And as we laid her to rest, she looked happy.

Meg, we love you and we will never forget you. We're sorry we occasionally called you Princess Professor Megatron Meowington the Third, but you brought out our childish, happy sides even during dark times. Our life was richer, more joyful and more colourful for your presence, and we hope — no, we know — you understand what an important part of our family you were. We hope you are at peace now and that, reunited with Ruby, you will continue to watch over us forevermore; in exchange, we'll keep a watchful eye on Patti for you. She misses you already.

Goodbye, Meg. You deserve eternal happiness. I hope you have found it.

Attempting to process some bad news

You'll hopefully indulge me for a while, as we had some devastating news today: our beloved cat Meg appears to have liver cancer, and there's nothing we or the vet are able to do about it aside from attempt to make her feel comfortable and loved for the immediate future.

Meg is just shy of 12 years of age, and neither Andie nor I are ready to say goodbye to her. She's been such an important part of our lives for so long at this point that I've been hit very hard by the sorrow of knowing that our time together is coming to an end. I won't speak for Andie, because she doubtless has her own feelings on the matter, but I can at least talk through how I'm feeling in an attempt to process the situation.

A bit of background for those curious: we've had Meg since she was about 2 or 3 years old. She was a rescue cat, but she and her companion Ruby hadn't been mistreated or anything like that; they'd simply been put up for adoption because someone in their former home turned out to be allergic to cats. We fell in love with both of them almost immediately, and they joined our family in 2016.

Ruby, sadly, had an accident in 2018 and left us well before her time, and Meg was clearly hit hard by the situation; she was clearly pining for the company of another cat. We suspect (though we've never known for sure) that Ruby may have been her kitten, which made the situation doubly sad. But we decided quickly to adopt another cat, both because we enjoyed having two cats around and we didn't want Meg to be sad. And so Patti, a nervous little black cat who had something of a troubled start to her life from the sound of things, joined us.

The relationship between the pair was initially somewhat cautious. Despite being a complete scaredy-cat (no pun intended), Patti had a habit of launching herself towards Meg at high velocity when she first arrived, making Meg a little uneasy about her. Over time, they came to tolerate one another, though, and while I know Meg would never admit it, I'm pretty sure they even came to like one another.

We knew something was wrong with Meg a few months back when we noticed she was looking obviously skinnier than she had ever done, and, taking her to the vet, it seemed that she had indeed lost rather a lot of weight. She had a blood test that came back without any real indication that anything was wrong, ruling out common causes of sudden weight loss such as hyperthyroidism and diabetes, but we were still a little concerned.

It took a couple more appointments, including today's, where she was put under general anaesthetic and examined thoroughly, to discover what was actually wrong with her. And now we're kind of at a loss. We don't want to lose Meg, but we also don't want her to suffer.

At present, she's actually doing reasonably well considering the circumstances, but she hasn't been eating as much as she has done in the past, which accounts for the weight loss. And, realistically, things are not going to get any better from here. But we're not ready to say goodbye just yet, so we've got some medicine to hopefully make her feel a bit better for now, and we'll have to see what happens from there.

I don't know if I want to say that death scares me, because I'm not sure that it's death itself that scares me. It's more the knowledge that I do not handle grief well at all, and the difficulty I have in picturing a life without someone or something that has been such a major fixture in it for so long.

Meg is such a precious, loved part of our family that even contemplating moving forward without her is enough to bring tears to my eyes. And the prospect of telling someone else "yes, it's time for her to die," as you regrettably often have to do with pets, is near-inconceivable. I don't know if I can do it. But it's also not fair to lumber Andie with everything.

Part of my brain knows, rationally, that all lives come to an end, and often a lot sooner than we would like, particularly when animals are concerned. That same part of my brain knows that it is the right thing to do to just let her go when simply existing is too difficult or painful for her. But another part of my brain says "what right do I have to decide that for her?"

I think part of why I have so much difficulty dealing with and processing this sort of thing is that there are no answers. There is no "right way" to handle it. There is no person you can go to for help and get everything resolved neatly and without pain. There is just that period of grief, pain and sadness awaiting, and I unfortunately know from past experience that when you're in the middle of it, it sometimes doesn't feel like you'll ever be able to break out again.

This is what scares me. I know that I will be completely devastated with grief for quite some time when it is finally Meg's time to pass on. And I can't help but worry about how I will cope when something even worse happens in the future. Because I know it will, one day. Hopefully not for a good long while yet, but it will.

The things I'm feeling are not, I suspect, unique to me by any means. But it's difficult to talk about them, which means it's difficult to find a suitable outlet to express and process the storm of emotions that situations like this bring to one's mind. I have been in floods of tears off and on all day, and I don't know what else I can do. Because there probably isn't anything else I can do.

Writing those feelings down is as good a solution as any for now, then, I guess. At least then I can look back on them after the fact and perhaps learn something from them — and hopefully those close to me will also have a better understanding about how I'm feeling and why I'm struggling.

In the meantime, Meg is now home and doing as well as can be expected. She's just had something to eat, as she hasn't had anything since last night, and I'm sure she just wants to get some rest now. She will be loved for however much time we have left together, and anything beyond that we'll just have to deal with as it happens.

The TikTokification of comedy

I fucking hate TikTok. I hate "short-form content" in general, which means I loathe YouTube Shorts, Instagram/Facebook Reels and anything anyone feels the need to send me that is in a 9:16 aspect ratio. So if you're considering it… don't. I won't watch it.

My reasons for despising short-form content are numerous and varied, so I won't go into all of them here, but one thing in particular vexed me so when I stumbled across it yesterday that I felt the need to get this particular rant out of my system. And that is what I call the TikTokification of comedy — or, to put it another way, the divorcing of comedic moments from context purely so that idiots can quickly and easily steal them and share them on their mindless social media.

I've actually been thinking about this for a while. The first time I was particularly conscious of it was when I started seeing that a number of comedians had started upping their YouTube presence. And all their videos had a few things in common. Take a look at these thumbnails:

All of these are completely transparent clickbait. And while a certain amount of clickbait is a necessity on a platform as saturated with material as YouTube is, I really detest the whole "half a sentence" thumbnail format. I didn't click on this one, which has almost certainly floated across your YouTube recommendations at some point, either:

This, to me, is the YouTube equivalent of the Twitter engagement bait (that thankfully seems to have died a bit of a death… along with the rest of Twitter) where a brand would go "[our brand] is _________" and expect people to "fill in the blank". And people, dumb consumers that they are, absolutely would. And it didn't matter whether they were filling it in with obscenities or bootlicking nice things, it was engagement. It made the numbers go up. That's all that mattered.

It's the same with these comedy clips. I like all of those comedians above, but I don't want to click on their videos because it's rewarding manipulative behaviour, and also encouraging the main problem that I want to talk about today: encouraging people away from enjoying a creative work in its entirety and towards a grab-bag full of "best moments" that completely lack their original context.

Good stand-up comedy makes the entire show into an event, and runs a narrative thread through the whole thing. Not all comedians do this, but the best comedians, in my experience, make you feel like you've enjoyed a complete story by the time you've left the room. Sure, there may have been some deviations along the way, and the story may not have made all that much sense… but there was still a sense of narrative progression. A beginning, middle and end, if you will. For some great examples, check out Rhod Gilbert's show Rhod Gilbert and the Award-Winning Mince Pie and pretty much anything by Eddie Izzard.

When you slice a show up into little bite-sized bits, you lose that context. Sure, the individual moments might be funny on a superficial level, but you lose the added depth of them being part of something bigger. And that's a real shame. And this leads me on to the real reason I'm writing this today: my discovery yesterday that Friends, a TV show I absolutely adored during my formative years, has its own YouTube channel.

And yes, you guessed it, the Friends YouTube channel looks like this:

The stand-up comedy thing I can sort of forgive. While I much prefer seeing an entire stand-up set and enjoying that feeling of context and narrative, there are sometimes just single jokes or routines that you want to share with someone. And you can probably make the same argument about Friends.

But for me, and regardless of what you and/or the general public might think of it now in 2023, Friends was always about more than just the jokes. Friends was a phenomenon. Friends was about us spending 10 years alongside these characters in an important, turbulent part of their lives, and watching them grow and change. Friends was about us simultaneously being envious of these twentysomethings somehow being able to afford massive apartments in Manhattan, but also feeling like the moments they shared were relatable in their own ways.

And an important part of the entire experience was context. While Friends actually starts kind of in medias res, halfway through a member of this pre-existing friendship group telling a story in their favourite coffee shop, it still makes an effort to introduce us to everyone through the way Rachel enters the picture as a formerly estranged friend of Monica.

We feel included. We feel like we're learning who these people are — and over the course of the subsequent ten seasons, we really get to know everyone. And while the age of the show means that life in general is quite different for most folks right now — look how infrequently anyone on the show uses a mobile phone or a computer, for example — it's still relatable to anyone either going through that "20s to 30s" part of their life, or who has already been through it.

These characters grow and change as a result of the things that happen to them and the simple act of getting older. They enjoy amazing high points and some heartbreaking low points — although nothing too heartbreaking; this was a primetime comedy show, after all. But everything that happens helps to define these characters and make them more than simple, mawkish, two-dimensional representations of a single personality trait.

Slice all 236 24-minute episodes up into one-minute chunks, though, and you have content. You have individual moments that, in many cases, simply don't really work as standalone "jokes" because they rely on you knowing and understanding the characters and their relationships. And you have no sense of that ongoing growth and character development, because all these clips are posted in a seemingly completely random order determined by whatever the person running the Friends YouTube account felt like putting up today.

I realise this is a bit silly to get annoyed and upset over, but it's frustrating to me to see something that I loved so much in its original form and its original context be treated as fodder for the mindless content consumption machine of 2023. It irritates me to think that there are doubtless some people out there whose only contact with Friends will have been minute-long clips on YouTube, and through those they will likely have formed a totally different opinion of the show than someone who watched it from start to finish.

Is this elitist and gatekeepery? Not really, since Friends itself is easy enough to watch in its entirety via either streaming services or undoubtedly cheap DVD box sets that no-one wants any more. It's just the latest symptom in a disease that blights society, where no-one believes they have "time" for anything any more, so watch badly cropped minute-long 9:16 clips on double speed while they're doing their daily quests in Mindless Gacha Bullshit X, rather than settling down, taking some time to relax and just enjoying something in its entirety.

I hate it. Hate it. And while I'm aware there's nothing stopping me from doing what I describe above — I think I even still have my Friends DVD box set somewhere — it's exhausting just to be around all this short-form garbage, and frustrating to live in a world where seemingly no-one has an attention span longer than a TikTok video.