#oneaday Day 877: A quiet life versus loneliness

Not for the first time, I find myself contemplating shutting down my social media accounts. I don't have many of them left any more; I have a Facebook account, which I was only really keeping around because I was an admin of the Evercade page, but no longer really have that responsibility, and a Bluesky account, which I'll talk more about in a moment.

Facebook, at this point, I probably can just get rid of. I'm not sure if my WhatsApp account is connected to it (I don't think it is?) but other than that, I have absolutely no reason to use it. No-one speaks to me on there, I don't like using it and it is, thus, largely useless to me. That should be fairly straightforward; my only real hesitation is the aforementioned professional responsibility, as there are times where I may have to hop in and cover moderation if no-one else is available to do so.

Bluesky is a more difficult one. For many folks, Bluesky has taken the place of Twitter, and that is the primary reason I have been using it. The combination of short-form posts and ease of starting conversations with people you follow has long been an appealing element, just like it once was with Twitter. But at the same time, Bluesky, being a heavily left-leaning platform, is very much home to some of the worst kinds of behaviour that turned me off Twitter in the first place. (The behaviours that are keeping me off Twitter now are, of course, from the opposite side of the political spectrum, and far more odious. But still.) While I, too, am a left-leaning individual, there's a particular breed of leftie that likes to make a lot of noise about whatever their hobby horse of the day is, and it can get very tiring when it feels like there is never a moment's peace.

Thing is, many of these issues are valid things to care about, but they often end up becoming "guilt by association" exercises, with other people and organisations getting drawn into the crossfire just because they might have once, in the past, crossed paths with whatever the target of the hour is. At that point, people start getting hurt; people who don't deserve to be hurt. And that's the biggest thing that makes me contemplate shutting things down. I am one of those people who have been hurt by situations like this, not because I (or any organisations I am attached to) have done anything wrong, but because at some point we have crossed paths with the target of someone's ire.

This might sound pretty cut and dry. I'm having negative feelings about Bluesky, so why don't I just jack it in?

Well, because for all its irritating features, it is the one and pretty much only place online where I feel like I have a connection to other people. There are a few people I know there; there are a few people I have got to know there; there are a few people I would like to know there. Cutting my connection to all those people because I am pissed off and exhausted at the behaviour of some other users feels… disproportionate and excessive.

The alternative, of course, is to take steps to remove the people whose behaviour I object to from my feed. Bluesky has numerous ways of doing that, including muting individual comment threads, muting users and blocking users. Honestly, that is probably the answer in this situation, but I'm always a bit hesitant about this, because in many cases, the people who have been exhibiting behaviour I object to aren't like that all the time; some of them are even folks that I like. But I don't feel comfortable confronting them on things like this, because, like I say, I don't necessarily think the core of what they're arguing is wrong; hurting other people unfairly, however, is. And that nuance often tends to get lost in online disagreements. I've had enough negative experiences in the past to know that for absolute sure.

So I sit here, with no particularly ideal solutions at hand. Close Bluesky, and end up feeling completely lonely and isolated, because no-one checks in on people if they're not on social media any more? (I've tried this before. It's like you cease to exist, even if you're doing something like I'm doing here, and updating a blog regularly.) Mute, unfollow or block the offenders and risk kicking off arguments that don't need to happen, and which will inevitably leave me feeling worse? Or just suck it up, recognise that I have a difference of opinion with some people, continue to catch occasional strays and feel miserable and uneasy?

I just want a Third Place where people are chill, man. There are fuck all left in the real world, and it's starting to feel like there are fuck all left online, either. I will never forgive them for taking 1up and its club pages from us.

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 875: Fuck you, Sam Altman

Speaking with YouTuber Cheeky Pint, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman said that "from a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and being used maybe 5% of the time. Like, you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that."

In response — and I appreciate I am a nobody, and that Clammy Sammy will never see this — I say the following.

Fuck you, Sam Altman. Fuck you five ways to Sunday. Fuck you for ruining the exciting world of tech with your garbage hallucinating "AI can make mistakes" chatbots, which is all that fucking tech seems to be now. Fuck you for ruining the world of creativity with your slop-peddling six-fingered piss-filter image models. Fuck you for ruining the world of music by stealing the world's compositions and allowing people with no taste to churn out song-shaped objects and claim they are being creative. Fuck you for ruining the world of writing with your cliché-spouting text generation models. Fuck you for taking the em-dash, the rule of threes and rhetorical questions from writers, who now cannot use any of those things without being accused of "being AI".

Fuck you for making my day job harder with your cuntish technology driving up not just RAM prices, but all tech prices. Yes, that's right, fuck you for being the one who fucking created this "supply constrained environment" that no-one asked for, and which didn't need to happen. Fuck you for your greed and avarice making it a thousand times harder for us to bring simple joy to people through the things we make. Fuck you for making it so there is so much distrust in the space we work in. Fuck you for the times we have had to fend off harassment and threats because some cunt we worked with used your garbage tech without telling us.

Fuck you for ruining my hobbies. Fuck you for even suggesting that people should not own and enjoy their own computer. Fuck you for corrupting a space that was once devoted to the joy of celebrating the past and learning from it with slopped-up, barely functional projects that no-one in their right mind will ever want to maintain. Fuck you for discouraging the people who still want to do things using their brain. Fuck you for the million and one arguments that have erupted in social media replies, comments sections, Discord servers, WhatsApp groups and forums over this useless garbage, thanks to the army of sycophants queueing up to fellate your robo-cock in exchange for seemingly no discernible benefit whatsoever. Fuck you for making it so I can't be excited about a new announcement of anything any more without checking to see whether or not it's been churned out by the slop machine.

Fuck you for what you've done to the world. Fuck you for the cognitive surrender you have triggered, the AI psychosis you've nurtured and the people you've killed with your irresponsible garbage technology. Fuck you for the mistrust you've sown, the ticking time bomb you have made the economy, the wedges you've driven between groups of friends, families and those with common interests. Fuck you for making everything more expensive. Fuck you for depriving people of joy. Fuck you for your self-important arrogance in thinking you — you! a massive cunt! — are the one to lead humanity to a better tomorrow.

Fuck you, Sam Altman. I hope an entire data centre falls on your stupid face, and that everyone who has been saving old RAM sticks "just in case" takes a moment to jam them right up your fucking arse if you're so desperate for them.

Also, Wario Amodei, Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and everyone else who has made 2020-2026 what it has been so far? Fuck you for all the above, too. History will hold you accountable for the damage you have done to our world, and to humanity as a whole.

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#oneaday Day 865: Earnestness is neither cringe nor cheesy

I've run into a few creative works recently that were evidently put together with a great deal of earnestness, genuine thought and emotion. And people like them! But, more often than not, not without including some sort of "disclaimer".

Said disclaimer is usually some form of admission that "I know this is cheesy, but…" or "yes, this might be cringe, but…" before going on to give a genuine emotional response. For some people, it is seemingly difficult to just give that emotional response without feeling the need to justify it or explain it away.

Well, I'd like to say: own it! If you got hit in the feelings by something, that's okay! If you had an emotional reaction to something that was so strong it reduced you to a sobbing wreck, that's fine! That's good! You have a healthy relationship with your own emotions, and you are not afraid to express them!

I say this as someone who listened to this track from Ace Combat 8 earlier (which I knew the full narrative context of, having beaten the game a couple of days ago) and burst into full-on sobbing at it by the midpoint. Like, I was legitimately crying so hard I had to stop everything else I was doing.

If your immediate response to that is "wow, that's cheesy" or "I can't believe you admitted that", stop. Take a minute. Ponder why you are thinking that. Are you concerned about what other people might think of you if you exhibit some sort of vulnerability? Because that's not something you need to concern yourself with — particularly if you are sitting by yourself.

It's okay to have an emotional response to something. It's okay to have a physiological reaction to that emotional response. You aren't faulty. You aren't broken. You are being human — something it can sometimes feel like we are, in may ways, being discouraged from by the daily algorithmic bombardment from social media.

Sometimes those emotional responses can come from the strangest places — like the funny plane game.

Or perhaps a song developed by a father, based on the near-gibberish his young daughter writes as "stories":

My immediate response to this was just "aw, that's cute and adorable… and surprisingly well-produced for what is essentially a silly joke video". I won't lie, I listened to it multiple times in succession for its pure catchiness.

Then I read the comments to the "Living Room version" of the song (actually just the song with an animation rather than the vertical video of the chap singing). And the emotions hit me, hard.

Y'see, if you haven't listened to the song, the end part features the repeated motif that "everything all fell down, but he picked it up". In the context of the original story and lyrics, it's a silly moment; the main character, the "Little Tall Prince", dropped a cup in the grocery store which caused everything to fall over, so, being a good little prince, he picked it up. Simple, silly, right?

Except human beings have the tendency to ascribe meaning to things where it might not have been the original intent, but it most certainly fits. That video has comment after comment of people expressing the sincere hope that "we can pick it up" — that we can fix the world after "everything all fell down" over the course of the last few years or so.

The world is broken. Peoples' souls are broken. And they want nothing more than to begin the healing process. Little moments like this song give just a glimpse of a world we once knew; one where we could have hope for the future and not find ourselves continually enraged and saddened by the latest stupid, wasteful, obnoxious, tragic, violent, unjust things happening on a daily basis. Hope for the future, through the eyes of a child.

I saw the number of people expressing this sincere hope, completely earnestly, and it hit me right in the heart. I'm not too proud to admit that I shed a few more tears there. And listened to the song a good few more times.

I want to believe that we can pick it up. I want to believe that we can come together in a Song of Wings as one. It is not cringe, embarrassing or cheesy to think such things. Take a moment and have a good cry over something today. I can't guarantee you will necessarily feel better, but you will almost certainly feel some relief at having let out emotions that have probably been pent up within you for a long time.

That's what I felt after putting my own emotions through the wringer over the last couple of days. Sometimes self-care is just about allowing yourself to feel.

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#oneaday Day 856: Flurry of activity

As so often happens after I have a day of feeling a bit maudlin, today I had a day where I got a lot done. Six videos, to be exact, including both Atari 8-bit and Atari ST videos. It's good to be getting back into the rhythm of these, and I really enjoyed the games I played for these vids — hopefully that comes across in the final products, which will be released over the course of the next few weeks!

I've definitely made the right decision to refocus my YouTube effort back on what I was having the most fun with in the first place. I am never going to "make it big" on YouTube and I have no intention of making it into a second job in an attempt to do so; I already keep more than busy enough for the day job, and I want YouTube to be fun. But I also want it to reflect the things that are important to me — hence the refocus on Atari stuff.

I think part of the reason I pressed pause on the A to Z series a while back was because I was worried I was going to start running out of things to cover. But going through the spreadsheet of reviews I put together a while back, it's clear that isn't going to happen for a long time, on either Atari 8-bit or Atari ST. There may be some individual letters that are a little short on things to cover — as I recall, I was running out of games that began with "Y" on ST, unless I wanted to cover various iterations on Yahtzee over and over again! — but I can just skip those if necessary. Or, indeed, I can play a multitude of Yahtzees, since I'm sure at least some of them do something vaguely interesting with the concept!

Anyway, as a preview of what's to come, I will be covering Desmond's Dungeon, Eastern Front (1941) and Firefleet on Atari 8-bit, and Archipelagos, Blasteroids and Cards on Atari ST. Most of these are new to me, which is exciting; I'd played Eastern Front and Blasteroids before, but I was a bit young to understand Eastern Front when I was a kid, so it's been interesting to return to that now I know what a wargame is. I'm not convinced I know how to play effectively, but it was fun giving it a go, regardless.

I think the biggest pleasant surprise of the day for me was Archipelagos. I remember seeing this back when it originally released and thinking it looked thoroughly interesting, and it really, really is. The version I was playing had a strange bug where every fifth level kills you instantly, but since you can just skip levels at will — and there are 9,999 of them — you shouldn't feel too bad about just skipping those ones that don't work. The version I was playing was the hard disk converted version by Pera Putnik, so it's entirely possible that the conversion process just made something go a bit skew-whiff somewhere; I haven't yet tried a disk-only version of it. Either way, it's a thoroughly interesting game, and you'll get to see exactly why quite soon!

So yeah. It's been a good day. Okay, I didn't get up until noon because I was having strange dreams and they put me in a bit of a funk at the start of the day, but I began my day with the intention of making some videos, and by jingo I've gone and done it: recorded, edited and exported, all in a day. Not bad, eh?

Now I think I've earned an hour or two of Ace Combat to celebrate. And maybe some ice cream.

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#oneaday Day 852: Rotting retro

You know, I have historically thought that out of all the subcommunities of computer and tech enthusiasts, the one which would have more respect for doing things "the hard way" than anyone else would be the retro fans. These are people who, in many cases, grew up seeing genius programmers making limited hardware do things far beyond its supposed capabilities, and, even if they never saw fit to take up programming themselves, could at least understand why it was impressive when, for example, someone made an Atari 8-bit display 256 colours on screen at the same time.

Sadly, it is increasingly looking as if the retro sphere, much like everyfuckingthing else, has been infiltrated, corrupted, poisoned and rotted by the scourge that is generative AI.

In just the last week, I have seen myriad vibe-coded "recompilation" projects, slop peddlers attempting to submit 50k lines of changes to an FPGA core that was already working just fine, the Oliver Twins making it abundantly clear what their odious stance is, web-based editors for the ZX Spectrum games Chaos and Target: Renegade slapped together using AI coding tools and someone making the bold claim that they have been "working on" (i.e. they prompted Claude to do it for them) multiplayer conversions of a variety of classic games for home computers and consoles, including Wizard of Wor, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros. and Metroid. Oh, and someone who claimed to have decompiled Adobe's entire Creative Cloud suite of software and made a "clean room" version of it that doesn't work, like, at all, but that's not exactly retro. Still relevant, though.

The irritating thing is that a lot of these projects sound like they could be potentially interesting! 4-player Pac-Man on Atari 8-bit is a cool idea! Simultaneous co-op in Super Mario Bros. and Metroid are potentially intriguing twists on classic games! Tweaking retro games to play in different ways has been a proud tradition ever since everyone learned what the POKE command does!

And yet, I cannot, will not support any of these projects in good conscience. I just cannot. I cannot bring myself to give any sort of "reward" — and attention is a form of reward — to someone who thinks that throwing something into Claude Code and getting it to spit out something that looks convincing at first glance (but is probably deeply, deeply broken under the hood) is "working on something". I do not care that it looks impressive, at first glance, that you can click a button and some sort of functional-seeming, executable code pops out of the other end.

Because, really, what is the point? These projects are not put out into the wild with any attempt of aiding our collective understanding of things; they are put out in an attempt to accumulate clout, pure and simple. People want to be the first to do something, or the only person to do something, and the assumption, today, appears to be that the best way to do this is "just get AI to do it". Except then you haven't done anything yourself, have you? You have used a technology based on the stolen creativity and expertise of humanity, which consumes vast amounts of energy and water, which is unsustainably expensive to maintain beyond the next couple of years at most, which often gets things flat-out wrong, and which is responsible for making the Internet seven hundred thousand orders of magnitude worse than it has ever been, and you have got it to churn out something that, if you had to debug it yourself, you almost certainly wouldn't know where to start.

The standard counterargument to all this is "well, if this person hadn't done their little Claude Code project, it wouldn't have happened at all". And that, to me, is not a convincing case. It's a waste of time and money (but not effort) to produce something that, at first glance, appears to be "good enough" rather than something which has actually been crafted to work properly and perfectly — and in the meantime, it discourages people who are still doing this sort of thing properly to continue with their own projects, because that whole part of the scene has now been tainted with Claudeslop, and we've already seen with a variety of projects how disheartening that can be for some.

I think my biggest concern with all this is the long-term brain drain effect it will have. We're already seeing frightening numbers of people completely surrendering to the AI's "judgement" (which isn't a thing, but they believe it is) rather than thinking for themselves. And the end result, the longer all this goes on, is that actual skills and knowledge will atrophy. As the people who did this "the hard way" back in the day start to pass on — and many of them are passing on at this point, sadly — there will not be a generation of people who can take over. And when all this AI nonsense eventually collapses — which it will, as there is no way the world's economy can keep up this absolute insanity forever — it's going to leave a lot of people, projects and AI-corrupted enthusiast scenes in a real mess.

Now, you might think that doesn't matter for 40+ year old 8-bit home computers, but it absolutely does. Understanding how things work and how to recreate the conditions from back in the day is a crucial part of preserving the history of the medium, and the second you prompt Claude to just do it for you, you are wilfully saying that doesn't matter; you are wilfully disrespecting people who still know how to do all this stuff the old-fashioned way.

It matters. Your personal clout, on the other hand, does not, particularly if said clout has been accumulated by not really doing anything.

Maybe I should learn 6502 assembler just to spite these people.

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#oneaday Day 851: Abandon ship?

Earlier today, the thoroughly lovely Quest 64 Official account on Bluesky (actually, in their own words, an account that has "spent nearly a decade attempting to rehab the way people view Quest 64/games in general", which is a sentiment I am 100% on board with) expressed frustration over a YouTube video they had seen cross their feed, which promised "12 longest N64 games that will take forever to beat!"

Now, that might not sound like a particularly offensive topic for a video, and it arguably isn't — even if it is both clichéd and clickbaity. What was offensive was… well, it was a lot of things. The video's thumbnail, which showed an obvious AI-generated approximation of Quest 64 rather than an actual screenshot. The fact Quest 64 was the poster boy for this topic in the first place (Quest 64 is approximately 12 hours long, which is very short by RPG standards). The fact that the channel, "Retro Pocket", very obviously uses an AI-generated logo — and thus it is not unreasonable to assume that the entire video may well be AI-generated.

"Now I have to not only fight the past," Quest said, "but future AI misinformation. It's becoming increasingly clear my Internet days are numbered, sadly." He went on to criticise the growing "Claudepuke" scene in the recompilation and modding scenes — something which has driven me to despair of late also.

The thing that made me most sad about this — and I feel sad and angry about all of it, make no mistake — is the fact that a person as thoroughly admirable and pleasant as Quest is should have to feel this way; like his contributions to online culture are no longer welcome, appreciated or worthwhile continuing with. I say this as someone who both follows the Quest 64 Official account, and has casually chatted with the person behind the account outside the context of public-facing social media: we need more people like this, not fewer.

It makes me sad, because I get it. As someone who still runs both a personal blog and an enthusiast, non-commercial video game website, I am a relic of a past age. I refuse to engage with short-form vertical video because I fucking hate it as a medium. I am tired of clickbait, AI slop, YouTubers covering the same few topics over and over again (I tried everything by BRAND! Testing VIRAL TIKTOK recipes! I bought AI SLOP PRODUCTS!) and headlines that refuse to name the proper noun that is the subject of the story. And yet with each passing day, I feel more and more like I cannot escape any of those things. I feel more and more like I am not welcome on an Internet I was once excited to be a part of. That offline existence feels increasingly appealing.

And yet I don't want to give up. I still remember that wide-eyed wonderment that my whole family had when we were first looking at Web pages in a crash-prone copy of Mosaic when CompuServe first added access to the broader Internet. I still remember the first time we ordered something online. I still remember the first time I chatted to someone online and formed a genuine friendship as a result. I refuse to accept that Internet is completely gone.

I feel like those of us who have been online since the beginning (or the beginning of it being relatively "mainstream", anyway) have just as much right to exist on the Internet as those who are systematically destroying everything that used to be great about it. In fact, if I'm honest, I feel like we have more right to exist than those who are systematically destroying everything that used to be great about it. I would be sad to see Quest 64 Official stop posting. I would be elated to never see anything from Sam Altman, Wario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg and their ilk ever again.

But I don't know what to do, other than to stubbornly Keep Posting. To keep writing this silly little personal blog here, to keep penning my in-depth thoughts about video games I've played, and to steadfastly refuse to get on board with technological trends that are actively, demonstrably harmful to the concept of "culture" in general. To prove that there is still a place for The Old Internet.

So that's all I can do, really. Just Keep Posting. I refuse to let the fuckheads win. I will, hopefully, still be here when all the AI companies collapse and the world endures a hitherto unprecedented financial crisis that brings the very concept of capitalism to complete ruin. And I will be laughing. And probably crying a bit. But mostly laughing.

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#oneaday Day 847: Skeletons

I've been following this Jacob Geller business with mild interest. I have no particular "horse in the race", as it were, as I don't really know who he is, haven't watched any of his videos and don't own his book(s), but it's clear that his work meant a lot to people and thus, the recent revelations about him have genuinely hurt those people.

If you haven't been following this, Jacob Geller is a video essayist who apparently does some good things about video games. As I say, I've never watched his stuff (and am probably not going to now) but, prior to all this, he seemed to have a pretty solid reputation as being a decent human being. Progressive, even. Now, of course, that trust has been broken; in a statement he put out yesterday, Geller noted that the whole situation is "the biggest regret of his life", but regardless of those regrets and what he has done since that time, to a lot of people — particularly his biggest fans — that past indiscretion is a permanent blot on the copybook.

And I'm not even saying that's wrong. Sexual assault is, of course, no laughing matter, and for it to get as far as the victim invoking "Title IX" (whatever that is, I don't know American law for obvious reasons) means that it must have been pretty serious. It's entirely understandable that, even though that offence took place many years ago at this point, some people simply cannot trust this person ever again.

What I find myself wondering is how this keeps happening. I feel like for the last few years, we've seen a steady stream of people who build up a following and a fanbase in the public eye online, only for it to come out that, at some point in their past, they were a despicable human being and may or may not, in fact, actually still be one, despite the front that they've been putting up to the world. And every time it happens I just wonder: what happened to these people? How did their life end up that way?

Perhaps it's a personality type thing: the person who is likely to find success at YouTube and streaming in 2026 is also the type of person who is likely to have sexually assaulted someone ten years ago. I don't really think that's true. I know people personally who have been doing YouTube for that long and, to my knowledge, none of them has ever done anything like that. I guess that's always the point in these kinds of situations, though; you never really know until something comes out about them.

Does that mean everyone should be looked on with mistrust? Of course not; that's no way to live. But I don't blame people for being wary at this point. It's happened too many times.

I think in my case I'm just confused because everything about all this is just a completely alien concept to me. I'm not saying this in a self-aggrandising "look at me, I'm a wonderful person" sort of way; I just mean that the very idea of treating another human being with such a lack of respect is so utterly unthinkable to me that I simply cannot imagine how people like this ended up doing what they did. But it only takes one lapse of judgement to bring a career to an end — those consequences might not be for ten years or more, as we've seen here, but it seems they are pretty likely to catch up with them eventually.

Perhaps it's for the best that I've always been riddled with social anxiety and have thus led quite a straightforward, normal and boring life. If nothing else, it means that Past Me has never been in a position to acquire any skeletons in his closet. And I'm glad about that. Not because I have any particular designs on Internet Fame or anything, despite the amount of stuff I post publicly. But because it means I can continue existing with a clear conscience.

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#oneaday Day 838: A shitty new trend

One of the most irritating new developments in the world of generative AI is the use of "agents" to spam you. This can take numerous forms; earlier today, Luke Plunkett of Aftermath shared an AI "pitch" he had received via email, Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation shared something similar, and of late I've seen a marked uptick in blog comments that are obviously (but, of course, undisclosed) AI-generated spam.

The reason I can tell they are AI-generated spam is because they don't come from a person. Inevitably, they come from a "company", with the email address and website you can optionally include when leaving a comment linking to some sketchy website or other that wants you to download their new AI-powered tool to, I don't know, delete all the shit on your hard drive or some such shit.

The reason why these are infinitely more frustrating than good old-fashioned spam (and man, at this point I really miss the surreal narrative spam from 2009) is because, using the magic of AI, they might initially appear to be a genuine comment. In other words, the "agent" (spit) has taken a blog post as input, been tasked with composing a comment that might initially appear to be engaging directly with the subject matter, but which is actually just stating what you wrote back to you with slightly different wording, then attached a sketchy link and email address to it. The hope, presumably, is twofold: firstly, that the blog's owner will fall for the spam by clicking on the link or sending a message to the email address; and secondly, that the blog's owner will publish the comment, making the link public and thereby, potentially, tricking others into inadvertently clicking on it.

This is fucking scummy behaviour! Moreover, this is not convincing me that "agents" are in any way a net good for humanity! Not to the absurd degree that I think they're going to "destroy humanity" or any of that utter nonsense, but slowly but surely, generative AI in general is making the Internet harder and harder to use effectively — and, moreover, it's destroying our trust in one another.

Earlier today on Bluesky, I saw someone share a post from an "Atari news" account that looked interesting. Supposedly there's a project out there that is attempting (and starting to succeed) to get Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI, but not that one) games working on Atari 8-bit. They've supposedly already got King's Quest up and running, and the parallel C64 project is, it seems, a little further along.

However, I was immediately inclined to distrust everything about this news, firstly because of the amount of vibecoded bullshit that is out there at the moment — and apologies to the creators of the project in question if it has all been done by hand; you might want to put that very fucking prominently on your website — and secondly, because the Atari news Bluesky account that shared it in the first place is absolutely fucking infested with garbage AI-generated artwork, leading me to believe that the account is automated. An automated news-aggregating account isn't necessarily a bad thing in its own right, but when combined with the amount of AI imagery that account shares, every single one of my bullshit sensors starts going off.

Want another example? Time Extension, the retro gaming website, has recently been dealing with AI-powered plagiarism and harassment from an account calling itself "Generation Amiga", ostensibly a news site about… well, the Amiga. And yet if you ever accidentally have the misfortune to end up on Generation Amiga's website, you will discover that not one of the articles there (very few of which are actually Amiga-related) is written by a person. Their "exclusive reviews" consist of LLM-generated slop derived from marketing material. And they even had the gall to accuse Time Extension of being "Big Media" harassing a poor, innocent little independent creator who was just using an ickle-wickle bit of planet-destroying AI to construct a vibecoded website that has a net negative value to humanity — all because Time Extension's editor, Damien McFerran, quite rightly called this absolute bullshit out, for the benefit of anyone in retro gaming who had never had the misfortune of stumbling across these fucknuts.

You know, contrary to how it might appear, I don't like ranting and raving and complaining about this all the time! (All right, maybe a little bit.) I would much rather live in a world where it wasn't happening at all! But when I'm in a situation where I can no longer trust that comments on my fucking personal blog are written by actual people, I think I am more than justified in losing my patience. When I am in a situation where my first response to a potentially cool piece of retro gaming-related news is not "wow, that's cool!" but instead "is this AI bullshit…?" I think I am very fucking justified in losing my patience.

I'm so, so tired of this all. None of this is making the Internet better. None of this is making the world better. All it's doing is, at best, sowing division and mistrust, and at worst, completely obliterating what was once the world's most valuable repository of information, knowledge and human creativity. That's the "AIpocalypse" we should be concerned about.

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#oneaday Day 819: Comments sections are self-harm

"Don't read the comments. Never read the comments." It's one of the most enduring pieces of advice on the Internet, and it's always been sound advice. And I've always thought that to be a bit of a shame.

Well, let me qualify that somewhat: you shouldn't read the comments on public-facing, commercial sites. If you have successfully cultivated your own pleasant little community in your own comments section, you absolutely should not feel bad about reading your comments and continuing to encourage that sort of behaviour. You might even find yourself forming some genuine friendships.

Comments that are open to the broader Internet, though. No. Just… don't. Do yourself a favour, because wading in there is going to make you feel worse. You know that, I know that. And yet still we both do it, even though we both know, at this point, that it is a form of mental self-harm.

There's a website that I enjoy reading, which I won't name because I think it's a bit mean to draw attention to them for having a shitty comments section. But… well, they have a really shitty comments section, and it's immensely frustrating, because the subject matter of the site is something that I would like to engage with other people over! I would like to get to know more people who are into the same things I am into!

And yet, unfortunately, it seems that the subject matter in question — it's retro gaming, I might as well say it — attracts some of the most unpleasant people out there. I already knew this to a certain extent, with the amount of drama that often surrounds the retro YouTuber sector in particular, but it's frustrating that there can't just be a nice place for people who are interested in retro gaming to hang out without a variety of dipshits coming in and stinking the place up with some truly foul opinions.

I mean, come on. We're talking about a site focusing on retro gaming where one guy in the comments decided that A Really Cool Thing To Do would be to go off on one about how much he thought CRTs were shit, and how everyone who enjoyed using CRTs for their retro consoles were idiots, and how anyone disagreeing with him was a shithead and wrong. Come on, man. Know your audience. What sort of response were you expecting when you pulled something like that out of your arse?

Unfortunately, I know the answer to that: they did know their audience; they wanted to start conflict. They wanted to start arguments and make other people's lives miserable, even in one of the places where they should be able to feel like they can just enjoy their hobbies and interests. People like this have always been around, for as long as "Going Online" has been a thing. They get some sort of perverse gratification from it. And somehow, we can't look away, even though we know it hurts us to do so — and hurts even more if we rise to the bait and respond to these dickheads.

So yeah. Do yourself a favour and don't read the comments. There are better places to build a community over common interests than the comments section of a public-facing website. Although if you happen to find any relating to retro gaming, do let me know…?

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#oneaday Day 807: Atarimania got a new look

After many years of rocking the same distinctive and still-functional look, Atarimania, the massive Atari software database, has finally updated its visual style. And from a brief glance over, it looks great!

For the unfamiliar, Atarimania is a place where you can go to look up pretty much any piece of software that has ever been released on an Atari platform. It probably gets the most use for those who are interested in the 8-bit and ST ranges of home computers, but it also has substantial console sections for the 2600, 5200, 7800, Lynx and Jaguar, though some of these are still under construction at the time of writing..

Most entries provide some helpful historical information about the piece of software in question, including the date of release (often just a year, as back in the day we apparently weren't quite as fastidious about recording the exact dates things released), the people who worked on it (with hyperlinks allowing you to quickly see what else they worked on) and various other bits and bobs of information. Many entries also allow you to download cartridge ROM files or disk images for the software in question, too, allowing you to quickly load it up in an emulator or even get it up and running on real hardware or an FPGA solution.

One of my favourite parts of Atarimania is the magazine section, which is full of PDF archives for a variety of publications. Some of these are specialist Atari 8-bit and ST magazines (including Page 6/New Atari User, which my Dad, my brother and I all wrote for at various points), but there are also things like Activision's Activisions newsletter, enthusiast user group zines and even some multi-format mags that happened to cover Atari, like Advanced Computer Entertainment (aka ACE), which was a favourite magazine of mine back in the day. It's a wonderful source of authentic information from back when this stuff was current, and it's been a godsend for me when putting together videos.

Atarimania's redesign doesn't reinvent the site's functionality. So far as I am aware, the exact same information is being presented, just with a new look. Notably, it's mobile-friendly now, which it didn't used to be, which makes quickly accessing information on the fly much more convenient than it once was. I'll have to spend some time digging into it all, but from my brief look this evening, it all looks great.

Every time I look at Atarimania, I find myself wishing that a similar resource existed for other platforms. The C64 and Amiga have something similar in the form of Lemon64 and LemonAmiga respectively, the Spectrum has World of Spectrum and the other one I always forget the name of, and I'm sure others exist for other platforms. But for me, none of them quite match Atarimania for sheer comprehensiveness — and I also think that there's a real gap in the market for something similar, but for consoles. Like, I would absolutely love to see a SNESMania, a MasterSystemMania, a MegaDriveMania and suchlike. To my knowledge, nothing quite like that exists right now for console platforms — and I don't really know anything about creating a database-driven website like that, otherwise I would consider looking into it myself. If these sites do exist, they're not anywhere near as well-known as Atarimania is for Atari enthusiasts.

There's MobyGames, of course, and that is definitely a valuable, helpful resource, but it's not quite the same thing.

Anyway, eternal respect to anyone who builds and maintains this sort of thing. You help make the retro gaming hobby that much more enjoyable to participate in — and turbonerds like me happy when we need to research things. Please keep doing what you do forever!

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