#oneaday Day 615: No context cats

The above image has nothing to do with what I want to talk about today. Or maybe it does. I haven't decided yet, because I don't really know what I'm going to write about yet — despite having already started writing.

I have days like this, where I think "what should I blog about?" and nothing comes readily to mind. I've found the best approach when this happens, pretty consistently, is just to open a document, start typing and let random thoughts spill out onto the page. If they make sense, great. If they don't, you can look back on it as an entertaining stream of consciousness, perhaps providing a bit of insight into what might have been going through my mind at the time.

Today has been a funny old day. Not because of anything I've been directly involved with, really, but just people have been in a bit of a funny mood. Notably, a Discord server I'm part of, which primarily consists of middle-aged men who make YouTube videos about old tech and software (like me), had a big old tiff in its #general channel that was frankly kind of bewildering to see unfold. The main instigator has been "timed out" for a week, so I guess it remains to be seen whether or not he will be back — and if he is, if he will have changed his attitude at all.

Elsewhere, I was having a conversation with some friends in the Squadron of Shame Discord server, and it brought back to my mind the fact that I don't feel like I really remember my 30s all that much. There's a block of a good 10 years or so that is just sort of a dark spot in my memory. It hasn't gone completely, because if I think back over it I can remember bits and pieces — and if I look back at blog posts from that era, I get an even clearer reminder — so it's perhaps more accurate to say that period of time just sort of passed by in a blur without me really intending or wanting it to.

Some of that is down to a few mildly to moderately traumatic happenings I was dealing with in that period, all of which are now, thankfully, things of the past — though as anyone who has suffered trauma will know, just because the cause of said trauma is not present any more, it doesn't mean it stops affecting you. Part of my "lost decade" is almost certainly my brain telling me "don't go back there, there's nothing fun back there to remember" and I should probably listen to it.

But it wasn't all bad, and there are things I miss from back then. Seeing friends. Having friends. Going out and doing things. Not being the size and level of unfitness I am now. Not having a hernia. Having the passion and enthusiasm to write something on MoeGamer every day and make multiple videos a week.

A lot of things are better now, of course. I'm in a stable job that pays well, as is my wife Andie. We're getting our windows and doors done soon. I have a HeroQuest campaign on the go. I have a satisfyingly large game collection that will probably last me until the day I die. I am in control of, and proud of, the various websites that I have, at this point, held for many years. We have two wonderful cats (pictured).

And yet with the way the world is right now, it's hard to feel entirely happy, because there are so many things that are concerning about the short- to medium-term future. And it's difficult to escape from them. Impossible, in some cases. I fear for what the next few years hold, both in terms of things in my personal sphere, and more broadly about the world in general.

But right now, just this second, as I type this, things are All Right. So I should probably enjoy these moments of things being All Right while I can. So that's what I'm going to go and do now.

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 614: Can you hear us, sketching on your telephone

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my smartphone recently. The USB-C port in my trusty Samsung Galaxy S-something was being rather unreliable, and I was getting fed up with it. I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about upgrading, though, because every single phone on offer appeared to be festooned with unwanted "AI" features.

I plumped for the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, because my provider had a good offer on it, and I thought I might as well take advantage of it. It's an absolute beast of a phone size and weight-wise, which I rather like — but one thing I didn't know about it before I got hold of it was the fact it comes with an "S-pen" stylus.

This makes me quite happy, because I have fond memories of using Palm personal organisers with a stylus and resistive touchscreen, and I've always felt using your sweaty, greasy fingers is suboptimal compared to the precision one can get from a stylus.

One mild annoyance I have discovered with the stylus is that MagSafe accessories interfere with it, so if you have something like a magnetic PopSocket on the back, it fucks with the stylus. This is irritating, but not an insurmountable obstacle; the thing with a MagSafe PopSocket is that it's a lot easier to remove and put back on again compared to an adhesive one, so it's relatively little hassle to just remove the PopSocket when I want to use the pen, then stick it back on afterwards. But I digress.

I thought today I'd experiment with using the pen to draw something using the mobile version of Clip Studio Paint. And the results are… well, a bit cack-handed, as you can see above, but I can definitely see potential there. I've learned something from this brief little doodle, which is that if you're sketching on a phone, for heaven's sake zoom in and do a little bit at a time rather than trying to do the whole thing at once.

Imprecisions aside, though, I was actually quite pleased with the S-pen's performance for doodling, and the mobile version of Clip Studio Paint seems quite good. It's an annoying subscription-based app, because of course it is, but you can use it for up to 30 hours a month for free without ads. I strongly suspect I won't hit that limit, but I guess we'll see! I will continue to experiment with both the S-pen and the tablet I got for Christmas, and see where things go from there.

The phone in general seems pretty good for the most part. The screen is lovely, the speakers are surprisingly good and the cameras are excellent. I just wish it didn't bug you to "do more with AI!" when attempting to do something simple like make a note. No, black rectangle of doom, I do not need you to "summarise" my notes. The very point of making notes is already a summary of what to think about later. Nor do I need you to turn a doodle into something that is not a doodle. Fuck off and leave me alone and we'll get along just fine.

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#oneaday Day 613: The impenetrability of certain sports games

One thing I found while doing my Atari A to Z Flashback series a few years back was that I actually rather enjoyed a lot of Atari 2600 sports games — because they put "being a fun video game" first, a realistic simulation of the sport a distant second. Likewise, I rather enjoy Irem's 10 Yard Fight, as it is by far the most accessible take on American football I think I've ever seen — with Doug Neubauer's Super Football for Atari 2600 close behind.

The reason these games are so accessible is because they implement the sort of basic understanding of the rules that can be picked up very quickly and don't get bogged down in the intricacies. They don't assume knowledge beyond "man kick ball, score point" and don't throw you in at the deep end with a series of impenetrable-seeming options that, as a beginner, you have no idea what to do with.

I've felt like this about American football titles in particular for a very long time, ever since I first played the original John Madden Football on Sega Mega Drive all those years ago. Yes, the parallaxing, quasi-3D field was super-impressive, and back then that was reason enough to boot the game up, but as soon as those "play selection" screens popped up, I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to do with them.

And what's worse, the documentation for those games doesn't explain anything about it, either — meaning that, for someone who has only ever been vaguely aware of American football as a sport that exists, and who occasionally was allowed to stay up late with his Dad to watch it on Channel 4, there is seemingly no real route "in" to picking up and enjoying these games. And, rather than modern games getting more accessible and inclusive, they've just become more and more complex over time.

I feel the same about wrestling games. The last time I played a wrestling game was Smackdown 2 on the original PlayStation, and I didn't entirely understand what was going on there. Oh, sure, I knew what the buttons did, but not how you were actually supposed to use those buttons effectively to demonstrate your skill at the game.

I've tried wrestling games that came out both before and after it, and I have not found a single one where I felt comfortable that I could explain to anyone else "how to play". At least Smackdown 2 had that incredible character creator, and to be honest, that was where the majority of the appeal was — we had many a drunken night at university making digital recreations of people we knew, cartoon characters and, on one memorable occasion where my friend managed to get the sliders to go outside of their usual ranges, an absolutely horrific looking monster known as "The Freak", who would burst on stage with his iconic war cry, "Baggogh!", and stare his opponents down with a growled "Durgogh."

Every so often, I get a strange urge to want to learn how to play either American football and/or wrestling games. And every time I am hit with the same issue: there does not appear to be any good way to "learn" them. There do not appear to be any helpful guides online that don't assume you already know how to play the games (and have an in-depth knowledge of the sports themselves); the documentation for them is threadbare at best and non-existent at worst; and any "tutorial" or "training" modes in the games focus on telling you which button does what, rather than actually how to play effectively.

I feel like there would be a good article or two in learning how to play these games! I could even tell other people how to learn how to play them, because I'm sure I'm not the only one who has looked at these two genres (and other, related types of game like, say, baseball, or football management) and thought "I'd bet I'd like that if I understood it"!

Only trouble is, I don't understand them. And I don't even know where to begin doing something about that!

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#oneaday Day 612: Cleaning up the filth

I spent a goodly portion of this evening cleaning up my Google Photos library, because, frankly, it's been a right mess for years. It still is a right mess, but at least I have got ~~all~~ most of the hentai out of it now.

How did it get into this state, I hear you ask? Well, it's partly my fault, partly the fault of software. It's my fault because I didn't think to change the settings on various pieces of software, including the Google Drive and Photos apps for PC and my various phones' operating systems, and it's the software's fault for, by default, backing up images from every folder on my devices instead of just ones that make sense — like, you know, the camera roll. Lesson learned. Always check if your phone is "syncing" things you don't want it to!

In other words, what had happened is that, on numerous occasions, I had downloaded a dirty picture or ten that I found invigorating, and Google Photos had dutifully backed this up, despite me not actually wanting it to do that. So every so often, when scrolling back through the archives, I would inadvertently stumble across some absolute filth that probably shouldn't be in there. Nothing illegal, I should probably point out, but still not the sort of thing you want to accidentally appear on your screen when you're looking for a picture of your dearly departed cat or what your living room used to look like and attempting to show someone.

The most egregious offender actually wasn't explicitly offensive at all, but it was still taking up a lot of my library. Evidently at some point I had downloaded an archive of all the card art from the Senran Kagura mobile game — I wasn't going to play it, but I liked the art — and, again, Google Photos had dutifully backed this up despite me not actually wanting it to.

Unfortunately, the images from the Senran Kagura mobile game had all sorts of timestamps on them, so I would find them scattered randomly throughout actual photos I wanted to keep over the course of several years in my library's timeline. Towards the earlier years, there was a big lump of them all together though — it felt good to sweep all those into the trash.

I'm not doing this out of any sort of prudishness or anything — I still love some fine anime tiddies, after all — but more out of a desire to make Google Photos a bit more useful as an image archive, since there are myriad other options for getting one's hands on grotty pictures. It's already got a lot of screenshots in there as well as actual photographs, though I'm fine with that — it means that if I want to grab a screenshot of a game I played 10 years ago, I probably can — I just didn't want it full of images that I'd just downloaded for the sake of it. That includes silly memes and screengrabs of Twitter posts, also; any arguments those screenshots were intended to "win" are inevitably long gone, and life is too short to give a shit about what people I used to think were assholes are up to today. There's enough assholes in the present, thank you very much.

Anyway, I think I got most of the filth. I'm sure I will continue to find random little bits and pieces here and there, but at least now it will be more like a little treat and a surprise rather than "good Lord, most of 2016 appears to consist of anime women in provocative poses and Kirino from Oreimo with a massive cock".

That's it. That's the post for today. I'm off to play some Wolfenstein.

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#oneaday Day 611: The sad loss of the Olympic video game

I've always been extremely fond of Olympics-themed video games, ever since I played titles like Epyx's Summer Games and Activision's Decathlon on the Atari 8-bit. I haven't always kept up with all of the Olympic releases over the years, but I have added a few to my collection in more recent years. And I'm a bit sad, as the Winter Olympics are unfolding at the time of writing, that the official Olympic video game is no more. At least, on consoles and PC; I believe for the last Olympics, there was some horrible mobile game that looked like absolute microtransaction-riddled garbage. So that's the end of that, I guess.

I'm not sure exactly what it is I like so much about these multi-disciplinary sports games. They are, in essence, just a collection of minigames, and some don't get more adventurous than asking you to tap a button or waggle a joystick very fast. But I have always enjoyed them a lot — at least in part because they tend to simulate sports that you don't otherwise get much of an opportunity to engage with in the video game space.

One of my favourite Olympics video games was Sega's official Tokyo 2020 game — released just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the "real" Tokyo Olympics were postponed. This was a huge amount of arcade-style fun, made all the better by the fact that you could create custom characters. Yes, multiple; while you spent most of the game playing as your one "main" athlete, you could also create a team of other athletes who would show up in events that required multiple participants, such a rugby sevens, soccer, judo and suchlike.

What made this even more fun is that Sega decided to err on the side of "silly" to a certain extent, so these characters were somewhat cartoonish in their proportions, and you could unlock and dress them up in all sorts of thoroughly silly outfits as well as vaguely plausible athletic gear. If you wanted someone to enter the swimming competitions dressed like a spaceman, you absolutely could do that.

These games were always great fun with friends, too. While it's been a very long time since I had the opportunity to play one of these games with other people, I have very fond memories of enjoying them together when I was younger.

One of my favourite memories in this regard was the first time I went up to the Edinburgh Festival with the university theatre group. On my first night there, I felt like I might have made a bit of a mistake coming along, because my social anxiety was making it enormously difficult to involve myself with the other members socialising. I actually ended up sitting up late, in tears, over the whole situation.

Yes, I know I said this was a "favourite" memory; I'm getting to that.

Two of the theatre group members found me in the corridor being thoroughly sorry for myself and took pity on me. They sat with me, helped reassure me that people did like me and appreciated my presence, and then they played some International Track and Field on PlayStation with me. I chose to play as Germany, and attempted to enter my name as "HELMUT" because I thought that was funny, but there were only enough letters to put "HELMU". My nickname within Theatre Group remained "Helmu" for several years, until it was replaced with "Beast Man". That's probably a story for another day.

Anyway, I will always be extremely grateful to those two lovely people from Theatre Group — known colloquially to everyone as Stiffy and Des — for taking the time to bring me under their wings. That night, I actually stayed in their room instead of the one I'd been assigned, and it was enormously comforting. It was definitely a turning point, and means that International Track and Field, as relatively a minor part as it had played in proceedings, will always be rather special to me.

That got well off the point, didn't it? But still. I like Olympics games, be they summer or winter-themed, and I think what we have there is definitive proof that they can bring people together — just like, in theory, the real Olympics.

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#oneaday Day 610: Sorry again, and an explanation

Hello there! I am once again very sorry to those of you who are subscribed via email who got a flurry of messages yesterday. As I mentioned, I was in the process of importing all the old blog posts I previously posted on my now-defunct Patreon page, and I didn't realise that it was going to publish each and every one of them as if they were a brand new blog post — which meant that it sent each and every one of them as a "newsletter", at least until I found a way to turn the damn thing off and make it go about its business quietly.

Anyway, that process is all done now, so things should hopefully return to normal — and there is now a bunch more Stuff for you to read on this site, should you feel so inclined. It's all conveniently categorised under the Patreon category — or, if you want to jump straight to the beginning of that particular "season" of #oneaday blogging, you can click here or use the link in the site menu.

The reason I wanted to bring that stuff across is because there was a lot more of it than I realised! I'd forgotten that I'd done another 1,000+ days of daily blogging as a Patrons-exclusive "perk" (if you can call it that), and having it all locked away in an unlaunched Patreon page seemed a bit wasteful. Not that I think I wrote anything of particular importance in those pages, mind.

No; the main reason I wanted to get those posts across is to fill a bit of a "gap" on this blog. There were a couple of years where I didn't really post anything on here because I was using Patreon instead, and that always bugged me a bit. Now, if you will be so good as to check the Archives section in the sidebar (it's right at the bottom of the page if you're on mobile), you'll see I now have a nice run of posts running from 2008 all the way up to today. Not all of that has been daily blogging and not every year has posts every month, even, but it is satisfying to look back over all that stuff and think "I did that".

Why did I do that? I don't really know, other than the fact I've always enjoyed it. There's just something about blogging about any old bullshit that I've always found immensely enjoyable; for me, it's always been much more fun to bash out a blog post than use social media, because you can go into as much detail as you want to hyperfixate on, and anyone who has a problem with that can just bally well bugger off because it's your site, dammit, and that means you make the gosh-darn-diddly rules.

The other reason I was interested to bring these posts over is because they cover the COVID years, and I think that was an important moment in history that we all lived through, for better or worse (mostly worse), and I'm interested to look back over what my brain was doing at that time.

Obligatory disclaimer: as I say, I have little to no memory of what I might have written during the Patreon years. I don't think I posted anything egregiously offensive — I still had to work within the rules of Patreon, after all — but I will say I can't guarantee I didn't say anything that 2026 Pete might regret in retrospect. But hey. If you're reading this, you've probably been with me through the exceedingly rough and the occasionally smooth, so little that dribbles out of my brain and onto the page will probably surprise you at this point. I just thought I'd mention that just in case, y'know.

Anyway, that is that. I hope you enjoy looking back through the archives — I'm certainly planning to — and normal business will now resume. Apologies again for flooding your inboxes!

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#oneaday Day 609: Sorry about that

Hello. Sorry about the multiple emails. I am attempting to import my old blog posts from my now-defunct Patreon and I got a setting wrong somewhere, so it started publishing old things as new things, and if you were subscribed you would have got an email for each one of those. I think I've sorted it so it won't do that now, but if it does, I apologise!

I'm doing this because there's a whole bunch of blogging that has been trapped on my Patreon for a long time. There's nothing of any particular Earth-shattering importance there, but I felt like it would be nice to have access to that all in one place, rather than relying on a third-party service.

Annoyingly, Patreon doesn't have a simple "export everything" option — you have to go via their WordPress plugin, which is a little bewildering in terms of how it sets things up, and its default settings are, as we've already seen, kind of dumb. Am I likely to want to republish something from 2016 as if it was now, Patreon? Am I? No? Then maybe don't do that.

Anyway. Hopefully what this will mean once it's all been taken care of is a bunch more pointless meanderings for you to explore at your leisure in the archives, and I'll have more things to reminisce over while sitting on the toilet.

I've considered reopening my Patreon on a few occasions, but I just don't think it's worth it. The inordinate amount of pressure I felt like it put on me to "fulfil obligations" made doing pretty much anything Not Fun, so I ditched it in order to be able to focus on just creating stuff as a hobby. That's what all this has always been; at various points I've thought it would be nice to be able to make a full-time career out of it all, but honestly I'd rather have the security of a job like my current one.

I have kept my Ko-Fi and PayPal donation pages open, though. Not that anyone uses them — and this isn't a passive-aggressive way to suggest that you might want to slip me some cash — but I think it's nice to keep a little "tip jar" open for when people feel generous or particularly appreciative for something you've done. Plus there are some regular readers/viewers who drop me a bit of pocket change when it's my birthday, which is always nice and heartwarming. But other than that, I'm not in any of this to "monetise" it — I write because I enjoy it, I write about games because I'm passionate about them, I make videos because I think it's a good medium to show and talk about the things I'm interested in, and perhaps share those things with others. That's all.

Anyway, sorry again if you got a flurry of emails! It shouldn't happen again, but feel free to yell at me if it does.

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#oneaday Day 608: Channel update

I posted an update on my YouTube channel yesterday. You can watch it right here! I also play some Galaxian on Atari 8-bit in an attempt to participate in the current "High Score Club" challenge over on AtariAge.

I thought I'd talk about the things I mention in the video for today's post, because… well, because I want to.

The main takeaway from the update is that I'm giving up on doing longer playthroughs of stuff on video. For the most part, anyway. I'm not ruling out the possibility of doing another full playthrough of something reasonably short like an adventure game, as those are fun videos to make. But long RPGs as a playthrough series are out of the window.

There are a few reasons for this, chief among which is it makes playing one single game take for-fucking-ever. If you're only playing a game when you're recording videos for it, that inevitably means you're not playing it all that regularly (I have a life outside YouTube videos!) and thus it takes ages to get anywhere. If you combine that with a game that involves a fair amount of going back and forth grinding for experience, money or whatever, that doesn't make for particularly fun video-making, and it almost certainly doesn't make for particularly fun watching, either.

The other reason is that although I don't really care about viewing figures in general, the number of people who were showing up for episodes of The Granstream Saga in particular was utterly woeful. And, I mean, I get it; if you get an hour and a half long video in your feed that's part 7 of a series, are you going to click on it if you're not already invested? Probably not, even if the video has a link to the full series playlist in its description — because you still have to actually click on the video in the first place to know that.

So what I'm going to do is that, in future, for long games that I want to cover on the channel somehow, I'm going to make sure that I record some footage of the game while I'm playing it, then write a proper script for a "review-style" video of the game to be posted at some point afterwards. This will probably also be combined with a written version of the piece for MoeGamer, because I know that some people prefer to read and some people prefer to watch, so it just makes sense to do the same thing in both places — and that's what I've been doing with a number of recent pieces.

This means that for the "Let's Play"-style videos, which I want to keep on doing, because I think they're a good means of exploring retro games in particular, I will focus on doing one-offs. I'm not going to fret over doing "series" or sticking to one platform specifically, because there are many, many, many retro titles that I would love to talk about (in many cases while I'm trying them for the first time) and I just think it will be best for my own sanity to keep things breezy. This isn't a job, after all, it's a hobby. Were I relying more seriously on income from YouTube, I'd be 1) fucked and 2) making a lot more effort to bait the algorithm, post consistently and all that other gubbins. But I'm not, so I don't.

Regular readers will know that I've been wrestling internally over what exactly to do with the YouTube channel for a long time. I enjoyed the period back in about 2018-2020 or so when I was doing up to five videos a week and specific series such as Atari A To Z, Atari A to Z Flashback and suchlike, but it's also pleasing when the scripted videos perform well — and they tend to do a lot better than the Let's Play-style stuff in general.

But, as I say, I think the Let's Play-style format is a good means of showcasing and explaining retro games. My "vision", if you want to be pretentious about it, is that of me sitting down with you, the viewer, to "go on the computer" and explore a game together. I have very, very fond memories of having friends over after school to "go on the computer" and play games together; in many cases, these were single-player games, and we'd take turns, or my friend would watch and ask questions, and what I at least attempt to recapture the feeling of with my Let's Play-style videos is that sort of thing.

So that's the plan. Go back to/keep doing one-shot Let's Play-style videos of Stuff I Just Find Interesting, then scripted review-style videos of stuff that benefits from being explored in a bit more depth, or which is too long to practically sit down and commentate over the entire duration of.

It was important for me to make this video, if only to "give myself permission" to admit that some things weren't working, and I didn't need to ride them out to the bitter end just for the sake of pride or whatever. I already feel like I've lifted an entirely self-inflicted weight off my shoulders by doing so, and hopefully this will mean some renewed enthusiasm for Doing YouTube in the coming weeks.

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#oneaday Day 607: Ruined by the grindset

I read an interesting post that someone shared from Reddit earlier. You can read the full thing here.

The gist of the post is that the person in question has spent so much time and effort "optimising" their life, tracking everything from their water intake to the amount of time they spend on their morning routine, and have come to the conclusion that none of that has made them in any way happy. In fact, it has made them miserable and incapable of feeling joy in anything; worse, it has made them resent things that should be good, like having a pleasant date with a nice person or consoling a friend after a bad breakup.

I read this with interest because some of it sounded familiar. I've never gotten that deep into "optimising" my life, but over the last few years in particular, I have started to feel like it is undesirable to track everything about your life, record it in an app and obsess over numbers. This is a far cry from how I felt during the birth of the "gamification" craze, nearly 20 years ago.

In fact, I specifically recall being excited about the release of an iOS app called Epic Win, which basically positioned itself as a to-do list with experience points, allowing you to assign every job an XP value and a relevant stat, allowing you to "build a character" according to the things you'd been doing. When I eventually downloaded it, I found that it wasn't quite as fun as I thought it would be, but that didn't stop me from thinking that the "real world XP" thing was a good idea, hence my experimenting with the now-defunct Fitocracy, an app that gave you XP, levels and quests for going to the gym.

Now, about the only thing I track is my daily calorie intake, and that's because I'm specifically trying to lose weight. I'm not obsessing over the number of steps I take in a day, I'm not obsessing over "streaks" on anything except my underpants, I'm not obsessing over hydration. Because, as that Reddit post demonstrates, you can do too much of all that. If you project manage your entire life, then your entire life is going to feel like work. And that is not something that anyone should find desirable.

I mention this because I know on several occasions I have considered whether or not scheduling my days down to an extremely granular level would be beneficial. In some respects I feel like it probably still would be a good idea, as there are lots of things I would like to do but never make the time to do so. But then I feel like if you schedule things too much, you start to get resentful when things don't fit into neat two-hour blocks — because inevitably they won't, much as the Reddit poster discovered. And that's a sure-fire method to end up demotivated and bored with existence.

Much better to try and get yourself into solid habits in a natural-feeling, sustainable way. People have been doing that for thousands of years, so I refuse to believe that 20 years chained to our smartphones has completely removed humanity's capability to function independently without obsessing over statistics that relate to every little thing we do.

This is, in many ways, why I don't obsess over view counts on this blog, MoeGamer or my YouTube channel — it's not fun, and I'm not doing any of those things for a job, so I shouldn't treat them like one.

Your life doesn't need KPIs. I would argue that a lot of jobs don't need KPIs, either, but that's a whole other discussion, I feel…!

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#oneaday Day 606: How evil is too evil?

Every new reveal from the Epstein files seems to bring with it brand new and exciting horrors to be disgusted by. It is unsurprising to see a veritable Who's Who of The Worst People In the World cropping up as having had contact with the rancid old paedo — and yet with every new name that bubbles up from the sewer, I find myself wondering, more and more, if anything is actually going to happen because of all this.

You'll forgive me for not having a lot of faith that these people will suffer any consequences whatsoever.

We live in a world where companies can just set fire to billions of dollars a year for a technology no-one wants, and where no amount of people going "please fuck off, please fuck off" will make them fuck off.

We live in a world where the President of the United States is demonstrably both an actual criminal and an incompetent fuckhead who shits himself in public, but nothing is done about either of these things — both of which, one would argue, should probably put him out of the running for being in charge of one of the most powerful nations on Earth.

We live in a world where the world's richest man proudly takes over what was once a good method of online communication and turns it into his own personal playground, where his antisemitic, CSAM-generating chatbot floods the world with disinformation and allows some truly vile examples of humanity to thrive. (At least, in this case, something is being attempted in response, though due to all of the other things I'm talking about today, I don't have much faith this will end in any other way than someone paying a lot of money to make it all just "go away".)

The world is dominated by rich people who are making existence for everyone except themselves objectively much, much worse. And I feel like they're going to get away with it. I know legal action takes time and money to come to fruition, and it's entirely possible that things are going on behind the scenes to bring some of these scumbags to some sort of justice, but I somehow doubt it at this point. I suspect what will happen is that some of them will get a slap on the wrist at most, and then maybe asked to pay some money that is a meaninglessly miniscule fraction of their total fortunes, and then we will all be expected to forget about everything.

As the quote frequently misattributed to Final Fantasy Tactics goes, "if the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that crime only exists for the lower class". It's true. If Elon Musk is made to pay even several million dollars by the French authorities for his CSAM-generating chatbot, it means nothing to him. Same for Donald Trump. Same for the myriad rich folks who engaged in barely literate email exchanges with Epstein about "partying" (and we know what that means, unfortunately) on his special paedo island, or how they were going to manipulate and fuck up the economy, politics, tolerance and inclusivity… the list goes on.

I'm open to being proved wrong on all this. But at the moment it feels like there simply isn't anyone to hold these rich fuckheads to account… aside from The People themselves. And, despite growing evidence that people in the States are willing to hit the streets when it really counts, I'm not sure The People have the motivation or the strength to be able to undo all this damage that's been done.

I hope one day we can look back on this period from a better place, and feel like we all learned something from it. After all, the world has recovered from terrible things before. But has anything ever really been quite like what we're dealing with right now…?

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