The schedule appears to be working for now — I've successfully made it to the gym or the swimming pool on four out of five days this week, and I fully intend to make that a clean sweep on Friday. (I'm going to have the weekend off, 'cause I deserve it!)

I've actually been quite enjoying myself, which is an important part of getting this whole routine established. My only hesitation is that by the time I've been and gone and done a gym or a swim, there's not a ton of time left afterwards to do other things when I get back home.

I say that; I managed to play through an entire horror game this evening. A short one, yes, but a whole game nonetheless. So perhaps the problem is less pronounced than my brain wants to think it is. I suspect this is part of the "resistance" my subconscious has traditionally put up to getting going again with this sort of thing — and this is what I need to overcome.

Worst comes to the worst, if I feel like I'm really missing out on "gaming time", I can take the Switch to the gym and play something for 20 minutes while I'm on the exercise bike. And, once Steam Deck is a thing, I'll even be able to play stuff like Euro Truck Simulator and Final Fantasy XIV while working out. Truly, we are living in the future.

Anyway. Feeling reasonably positive right now. I have a lot of work to do to get my body back in vaguely working order, but this feels like a good first step. Let's see if I can maintain that — and perhaps supplement that with eating a bit better, which I know, I know, is even more important than the actual exercise side of things.

But at the moment, I'm looking at it like this: I'm doing the exercise to get my body working a bit better again. Once I feel a little bit more… "alive" (i.e. not hurting when attempting to perform basic bodily movements) I can expand my efforts further. And ultimately… well, we'll have to see, I guess.

As I say, it's a good start, which is all I was hoping for right now. One more swim tomorrow, then a well-earned break just in time to make some videos over the weekend!

I have probably given more thought than is healthy to what my elemental attributes would be if elemental attributes were actually a thing. And my opinion on my strengths and weaknesses tends to vary a little bit according to what I'm doing.

I can fairly confidently say that I'm not Earth element. I don't like getting dirty and I'm deeply uncomfortable any time I have to climb something rocky. That said, I do like mountains and caves, so perhaps there's something there.

My ever-present flatulence is probably cause for attributing the wind element to me, but I feel that's too easy a target. Wind element tends to be associated with… well, various things according to the particular interpretation. It can be anything from "gentle healing breeze" to "eviscerating blades of the cyclone", and I'm not sure any of those quite match me.

Fire element is, I suspect, the element everyone would like to be, because who doesn't enjoy flinging fireballs around? However, I don't like being too hot, so I feel that kind of precludes me from being fire element. Unless being fire element makes you immune to the heat. But then I'm not immune to the heat, so I still wouldn't be fire element. I can get quite angry about things, though, and that's a bit "fiery"?

Being water element is something that pops into my mind every time I go swimming (like I did this evening) and recall how much I enjoy simply existing in the water. I'm not a strong swimmer and I'm not good at complicated things like holding my breath, keeping my eyes open and not sucking water up my nose, but I do simply enjoy being in the water, whether it's swimming gently along at my doubtless excruciatingly slow pace, or just lying back, floating and relaxing.

I guess I could be ice? That's watery, and I enjoy winter sports video games. I am also more than capable of being (usually accidentally) cold and emotionally distant, which I feel is an essential part of an ice person's personality.

Or maybe I'm one of those weird elements you get in games where they want more than four elements? I don't think I'm light. I could be dark. Definitely not holy. Probably not evil. Don't think I'm poisonous. Lightning would be cool, but I feel that also implies speed, which I emphatically do not have.

I think I'll say I'm water and dark-type for now, with the possibility of evolving on class change. Gotta leave one's options open, after all.

Forgot to write again yesterday, didn't I. Doing well with this, huh?! In my defense… I forgot. Yeah, I don't really have an excuse, other than the fact that I was playing Tales of Arise all evening for a preview (which you can read here) and didn't get done until after 1am. I suppose that counts as an excuse.

I've joined a new gym that has a swimming pool. It's considerably more expensive for a "gym and swimming" membership than the other place I was at, and it's not 24 hours — but going by the last couple of days, I think I'm going to be better at sticking to some sort of "routine" with this place.

Not only is it much nicer in terms of facilities — some of the exercise machines are genuinely comfortable to sit on, which is a bizarre feeling — but, at present, the fact they're still using a booking system to manage COVID means that I have to make a commitment in advance and stick to it. So far — after two days — I've done that with no problem, so hopefully I can make that continue.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I need to develop that distinct change in my thinking where going to the gym or having a swim is something I actively want to do rather than an inconvenience to be squeezed in at some point that doesn't get in the way of other things. Booking in advance will help make that happen, for sure — though I know they're going to "re-evaluate" the systems in mid-August. I might continue "booking" things for myself and committing to them even if they ditch the requirement to pre-book things, as scheduling stuff for myself has always been a good means of keeping myself organised.

I really enjoyed my swim yesterday. I am as woefully slow as I ever was — I've never been a particularly strong swimmer — but I simply enjoy being in the water; it's a relaxing feeling, and it was especially pleasant on my aching muscles. Plus, again, while pre-bookings are necessary, it's never too crowded in there either, so I don't have to feel too stressed out about being the incredibly slow fat guy getting in everyone's way in the slow lane.

Going for another swim tomorrow, then a gym session the day after, all being well. Going to try and alternate like this in the week and hopefully get myself into a good routine. A good ten years or so ago I got into a similar routine — the gym and pool happened to be on my way home from work at the time — and it was beneficial to my general wellbeing. While I am, of course, not the same person I was ten years ago — I am much more decrepit — I have faith that I can at least attempt to better myself a bit, somewhat. Maybe.

Anyway. Now I've taken care of all of today's "commitments", it's time for some video games.

Had a nice restful weekend in the end, which I'm pleased with — that was the whole intention. I feel reasonably motivated to try and Be A Bit Better To Myself from tomorrow onwards — I'm going to try and eat reasonably, and I'm intending on going for a swim around 7pm. That gives me a bit of time after work to chill out, then I can go swim and have some dinner when I get back.

Despite saying I was going to take a break this weekend, I've actually prepped a bunch of articles to post on Retrounite this week, which didn't feel like work so I'm choosing not to count it as work. Expect some looks at the games on the Indie Heroes cartridge for Evercade alongside some other features this week — I've been really enjoying exploring those games, and there's some real gems among them.

My video announcing my short break on YouTube has done oddly well. I guess eight minutes of someone programming clumsily in rudimentary Atari BASIC has a certain appeal! Time to start doing "typing in listings from magazines in real-time ASMR" videos, perhaps?

Anyway. I'm feeling that good kind of tired right now where it feels like I might actually get some decent sleep tonight. Going to glug down a glass of milk (and maybe have a chocolate biscuit) and get some rest, ready to be refreshed for tomorrow. Hopefully.

Hope you all had a good weekend!

Still super tired but I've had a nice quiet day without commitments, and I intend to do the same tomorrow! (To remind you, I'm taking a week off from personal projects to recharge my  batteries a bit; no videos this week and Atelier MegaFeature will be back next Saturday!)

I've spent the day exploring the Evercade Indie Heroes cart, and I'll be covering each of the games over on Retrounite in the coming week. Most of them are available as ROMs for emulators as well as via the Evercade cart, so they're of interest to the broader retro gaming community as well as just Evercade enthusiasts.

Most of today was spent with two of the more substantial games on the cart: Quest Arrest and Deadeus. I say substantial, but both of them are only a couple of hours tops each — but they're definitely worthwhile experiences.

It's especially interesting to see that they were both developed with the same piece of software — GB Studio — but came out rather differently. Quest Arrest is endearingly scrappy, while Deadeus has a noticeable amount of polish to it. This isn't a knock against Quest Arrest, either; its rough edges are very much part of its charm!

I'll likely spend some more time with this cart tomorrow — I know saying that I'm going to write about these technically means that I'm "doing work" on my "weekend off", but I was going to play these games anyway — no time like the present!

Anyway, with it now being 2am I think it's probably time to get some sleep if I hope to be feeling a bit better in time for my new fitness regime on Monday. Hope you're all having a pleasant weekend!

Gonna have another good go at this "fitness" thing again starting from next week, because I'm increasingly aware with each passing week that the entire pandemic situation has knocked my body and general sense of physical wellbeing for six. And I don't mean because I've had COVID — I mean the general inactivity of the last year and a half has really taken its toll on me, and I haven't been looking after myself properly

I've known for some time that I'd need to do something about this, but I think the big problem up until now has been thinking of doing so as something of an "inconvenience" — something that I begrudgingly do at a time when I don't feel like I'm "missing out" on something else. It occurred to me today that I really need to change that thinking: I need to think of taking care of myself as something that I want to do, and something that I'm going to make time to do.

So starting from Monday, I'm going to get myself into a regular regime of swimming and gym visits. I've changed my gym membership from my local 24 hour place to a complex in town that has a swimming pool. Its opening hours are a bit more restrictive, but that will hopefully prevent me from going "ah, I'll go at 11pm when it's quiet", and then not going.

What I'm planning to do, then, is make some time around 7pm-ish every day to either go for a swim or visit the gym. I'm not going to do anything particularly "heavy" to begin with — I just need to get into the routine first, then take things from there. And the reason I wanted to incorporate swimming is that it's something I genuinely enjoy and find quite relaxing, even though I'm not terribly good at it. It also has the potential to be quite good exercise or at the very least a means of getting the whole body doing something, and that's what I need right now.

Before I jump into all that, I'm going to have a nice quiet weekend — no recording, no writing, no pressure on myself, just time to relax. I'm super-tired right now — partly as a side-effect of the second shot of the COVID vaccine but also just being a bit run-down generally — so I'm going to take the weekend to hopefully get a sense of relaxation to a suitable level before jumping into something a bit more "rigorous" starting on Monday.

What this means is that there will be no new videos on YouTube next week (except one announcing this short break) and no new part of the Atelier MegaFeature this weekend. Daily posts will continue here, though — and S-Rank Patrons will get a wallpaper this weekend, too. I think I might owe you two, actually, because I don't think I got around to one in the month just gone.

Things will be back to normal the following week — I just want to take this weekend to sort of collect myself and "reboot" somewhat without applying any sort of pressure.

I'm sure you all understand and have no objections to me doing this, but I wanted to let you all know regardless! Thank you for your understanding and continued support, and I'll (hopefully) be back to full strength in short order! Well, full mental strength, at least — I think the ol' body might need more than a quick tune-up at this point.

Anyway, that's that. Just wanted to let you know!

After I wrote the post the other day about "rebuilding" my Spotify library, something suddenly occurred to me: if I were to search by the years in which I was actively buying music on CDs, I would likely be able to track down most of the things I once owned. Although I tended to prefer stuff on the indie side of the spectrum (with occasional dalliances into the most delightfully awful of cheesy pop), so far as my musical tastes went they were nowhere near as… "obscure" or "niche" as my video game tastes, so surely it would be reasonably straightforward.

And it actually was; turns out that Spotify has a series of curated playlists that collect together a bunch of the biggest hits of each year, stretching right back for… well, I didn't test how early it was, but they definitely went back to 1992, which is when I remember buying my first CD (Oasis' Definitely Maybe, which cemented my reputation as being uncool and unaware of anything fashionable by being the CD I purchased literally a single day before its follow-up (What's the Story?) Morning Glory came out) and, as you might expect, continue right up to today.

I mostly focused on adding albums that I definitely owned, but in a few instances I've added some extra ones of artists I remember particularly liking. And I'm pleased with the results; I'm sure there's some albums that I've missed — and there's definitely some compilation CDs that aren't there, since Spotify doesn't do those (though some people have made playlists to "simulate" said compilations, interestingly) but for the most part, looking at my Spotify library now reminds me very much of my classic CD collection: varied and broad, but not so excessively large that I'd only ever end up listening to one or two albums.

That's the trouble with digital music and indeed digital media in general; give yourself too much choice and you end up not picking anything. That's kind of why I wanted to do this little exercise; by limiting myself to things that I know I like (or once liked, at least) I'm more likely to enjoy and appreciate all of it, rather than just treating it as disposable. Because it saddens me how disposable music is considered today — and while I know collecting a bunch of streaming playlists together isn't really doing anything about that, it at least gives me something of a feeling of the "good old days".

Spotify has a neat "library" function, where even though you don't "own" anything on the platform, you can still build up a "collection" of albums and music that you like listening to on a regular basis.

Since I tend to prefer listening to albums rather than playlists full of random bits and pieces, this is great for me — so I've been making an effort to rebuild my late '90s/early '00s CD collection that I no longer own. Several house moves ago, we did a fair bit of "downsizing" of possessions, and as part of that we had a big Music Magpie session with old CDs in order to get a bit of money in exchange for our old garbage.

Oddly, despite being quite attached to that CD collection, I've been struggling to recall its exact contents. Certain inclusions are easy, because everyone had them at the time — stuff like Alanis Morisette's Jagged Little Pill, all the Oasis albums up to Be Here Now and the like — and there are likewise a fair few "mainstream indie" albums that I remember owning. But I'm reaching a point where I'm at something of a loss as to what to add next; I'm sure I used to have more than I've added to the library so far, but I really can't think what it might be.

I know I bought a fair amount of cheesy pop like Spice Girls and S Club 7 semi-ironically (I did not-so-secretly genuinely like quite a lot of it) but that doesn't account for what feels like a big gap in my virtual collection. And, weirdly, I can't find the receipt for the Music Magpie order that we did, so I can't check against the listing of the CDs that we actually got paid for.

Oh well, I'm sure it will all come back to me at some point. And perhaps I'm forgetting some of those albums for a good reason!

Still not feeling quite up to full capacity — had a nice nap earlier — but managed to get all the recording I wanted to do done, so that's something. Even managed to get a Simmin' and Chillin' done, too — actually ended up recording it twice because OBS went loopy on me without me noticing first time around, meaning we lost the wonder of my journey from Paris to the south of France. Instead, we're going from the south of France to Portugal.

As I'll talk about a bit more in the Simmin' and Chillin' video, which I'll post tomorrow if it doesn't take too long to process, I've got some fun plans in mind for Retrounite this coming week now that the site's security issues are resolved and everything is all happy and good. I'll explain the specifics in the video, but here's an exclusive teaser of what I have planned:

Graphic design is, as the saying goes, my passion.

Anyway. Time for sleepytime now, I think, though I might have a bit of toast first. We seem to have a surfeit of bread, and the best means of dealing with that situation is to make toast, particularly if there's good jam available. And there is good jam available, so that's what's about to happen.

Hope you've all had a good weekend; here's to yet another week on all our inexorable, mutual slides towards the inevitable heat death of the universe. Tatty-bye!

Feel like crap today — think I'm being hit by the worst of the vaccine side-effects, so I'm going to get an early(ish) night in just a moment. Then hopefully I'll feel reasonably fresh to do some video recording tomorrow!

After getting a bunch of Atelier Firis done as I hoped, I closed off my evening with a nice drive in Euro Truck Simulator 2. That game really is delightfully comfy, and the experience can vary nicely according to how you set it up, too — you can create a very different atmosphere for yourself simply by whether or not you have the in-game radio (which actually streams from Internet radio stations, some of which cater specifically to Euro Truck Simulator 2) turned on or not.

Tonight, I had it turned off, so the only sound was the muffled noise of my engine from within the apparently nicely soundproofed cabin on the Mercedes whatever my truck is, the rumble of the road beneath my wheels, and the occasional swoosh of a car passing — punctuated, of course, by occasional law-abiding use of indicators. My truck has nice-sounding indicators, so I make a point of using them appropriately.

Tonight's drive took me from Groningen in the northern Netherlands to Paris, France. It was a reasonable length trip that didn't provide a ton of particularly spectacular scenery, but there was an enjoyable bridge crossing which the Internet reliably informs me is known as the Afsluitdijk. I like bridges, and this was a good one — although I guess more accurately it is a dam and/or a causeway. Either way, it was probably the main highlight of the trip.

My head is aching and my eyes are having trouble staying open, so I'm off to bed. Lots to do tomorrow, so I hope I'm feeling better by then!