Category: INTERNETZORZ

#oneaday Day 346: In need of inspiration

I haven't made any videos for a little while. I haven't been feeling super-inspired of late for some reason. So I'm going to use this evening's post to brainstorm a few things that I might want to shape into some sort of structure.

First up, I have been mulling over some sort of "Games of Summer" ongoing feature, where I talk about games that I find particularly appealing to play when the weather is nice outside. It being nice outside does not necessarily equate to wanting to go outside, however, with how hot the summers have become here, so the thinking behind this is games that provide a pleasant feeling of "going on holiday" or "doing things outside" without having to deal with things like sunburn and heatstroke. Games that I would probably cover include Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 for Xbox 360 (I still like that one better than the third one, because jetskis), TrackMania (there's something about the stadium courses with watery sections that feels very summery to me), maybe Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash and Kandagawa Jet Girls, and, of course, some classic Sega Blue Skies titles like OutRun and its follow-ups, and spiritual successors.

Secondly, I am once again mulling over my usual "format" of videos. I really like doing what I call the "Exploring Together" videos, where I provide a brief introduction to camera, then effectively do a Let's Play with a bit of foreknowledge (or prior experience) of what I'm playing. While this is a format that has somewhat declined in overall popularity on YouTube, there's still very much a place for it, and with the newly independent Giant Bomb getting its Quick Look series back underway after quite some time, I feel like it's sort of "timely" to get into doing this sort of thing.

The bit that's a little tricky is that I feel like I might want to cover some slightly more recent stuff. Stuff that's still a few years old at this point, but which is a bit more modern than early '80s home computer games. I'm talking Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3-era stuff. There are Considerations when doing this, however, not least of which is the number of games I might be interested in covering which have licensed soundtracks. I'd like to take a first look on camera at the MotorStorm series, for example — and the first two of these could probably also fit into the "summer games" theme, too — but the musical accompaniments to the action might be an issue. I guess I could upload some "test footage" and see if that gets dinged for copyright. In fact, I might do that.

Another thing that I kind of wish I could make happen but don't really see how I can do is getting someone else involved, so I have someone to talk to and riff off while I play. I've been watching the Giant Bomb guys since their big announcement, and it's a lot of fun to be included in their sessions of "hanging out" together, playing something and shooting the breeze while doing so. I've always made an effort with my videos to come across as if I'm a friend playing the game along with you, but, y'know, sometimes it'd be nice to have someone to talk to.

A third thing I've been pondering is doing a playthrough of the Ultima games. I'm fascinated by these, but have never really gotten deep into them. I've played a fair chunk of the first one and understand how that works, but I understand the second one in particular is a bit… obtuse. I think it would be an interesting and worthwhile pursuit to finally give those a go, though.

Then finally, of course, there are still myriad games left for me to cover on the classic microcomputer systems. There's all the built-in games on the C64, A500 Mini and Spectrum, for starters, plus the USB sticks full of other stuff I have for each of them. And, alongside that, there's still a ton of Atari 8-bit and Atari ST games I haven't covered yet, either.

That's plenty to be getting on with, surely. I just need to actually get my brain into a motivated space and actually crack on with one or more of these projects, I guess. The weather isn't helping, but I think I will do my best to make a start on at least one of the things I've outlined above this week, even if it's just falling back on my usual Let's Plays of microcomputer games.

On that note, I am at least feeling motivated to go to the gym this evening. So that's next on the agenda!

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 341: Rabbit (ass)holes

A random bit of Internet rabbithole-diving this evening brought me into the realm of "King Assripper". The name pretty much says it all, but in case you were in any doubt: this was a man who, as far as I can make out, became famous for eating a lot and farting. Particularly farting.

His most well-known work is "King Assripper Farts On His Roommate's Door", which, in this age of clickbait, is refreshingly honest about what it offers. Sadly, the originally posted video of this spectacular display of flatulence no longer exists — good old link rot strikes again — but, as with most things on the Internet, it has been archived for posterity by other people who, I'm sure, are more than happy to get some YouTube ad revenue from the hundreds of thousands of people keen to see a fat man guff really loud.

Except it goes deeper than that. I decided to look into whether there was any more information online about King Assripper, or if the above masterpiece was his one and only work. Besides a KnowYourMeme page on the "Farting On Roomate's [sic] Door", I also discovered what appears to be a complete archive of everything King Assripper has ever contributed to Internet culture, where else? The Internet Archive, of course.

The Internet Archive is a curious organisation, and I'm thoroughly grateful for its existence. It plays host to so much stuff, and it's fascinating to see what has been recorded in there. Looking for old magazines? Chances are you can find them in the Internet Archive. But, at the same time, you can also find the entire video output of a guy who liked to stuff his face and then fart thunderously.

In a sense, I guess it's important to archive stuff like King Assripper, because whatever you may think of his, uh, content, he has nonetheless had an impact on popular culture. This whole little adventure this evening was mostly set in motion by Arin from GameGrumps happening to mention "Farting On Roomate's Door" during an episode. My thought process ran something like "oh, I vaguely remember that", closely followed by a nigh-uncontrollable desire to see someone farting on their roommate's door.

From another perspective, I guess one could look at it as a little worrying. Consider the cultural output of previous centuries, and how much of it has been painstakingly archived, reproduced and, on occasion, updated to make it more palatable or understandable to a modern audience. Then consider someone in 200 years' time (assuming we haven't boiled the planet by then) looking back on the culture from today that we've preserved, and stumbling across the complete archive of King Assripper's videos.

Now there's one thing you never see in sci-fi, eh? You never see them looking back at galactic history in Star Trek and Worf going "I learned that in the 21st century, humans communicated by farting on one another's doors", and Picard having to explain that no, that was only something that happened under particular circumstances, and should by no means be taken as representative of the entire cultural output of the 21st century.

I bet Riker farted on a few doors in his younger days, though.

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 339: Eras

I remember when I was growing up, and I'd hear about life when my parents were young, and thinking "gosh, that was all jolly primitive, how on Earth did people get by without televisions and computers and the Internet?" Sitting here in 2025, thinking back to my own childhood, I feel like we've gone through shifts almost as big once again.

I grew up surrounded by computers. My Dad worked for IBM, and I'm pretty sure we had at least one Atari computer in the house from the moment I was born. I learned how to use computers from an early age — not just playing games, but also using them for productivity, programming and creativity. And my enjoyment of computing helped me make some friends, too.

But by modern standards, those computers were limited. They could run one program at a time, and you had to do everything using removable physical media. Want to play a game? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up. Want to do something creative? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up, then make sure you have another separate disk or tape handy to save your work onto. Hard disks existed, but they were something like £700 in '80s money for 20MB, and thus very few people had them — more to the point, not much software supported them, either, at least until the 16-bit era, when they became a little more commonplace.

"Going online" was something you could do from quite early on if you had the necessary hardware, and it was a very different experience to what using the Internet (really the Web) is today. To even get logged on you'd have to enter a cryptic string of commands to the modem, and sometimes it felt like a bit of a roll of the dice as to whether or not it would actually work at all. When you did get online, it was pages and pages of text, no pictures, and an understanding that you had a limited amount of time to do what you had to do before either 1) your family kicked you off for tying up the phone line for too long or 2) the SysOp kicked you off remotely for spending too long, preventing others from using the service.

When "online" spaces other than bulletin board systems came along — accompanied by computers that could do more than one thing at once — it was a revelation. I have immensely fond memories of exploring CompuServe on my Dad's account, spending time on the GAMERS forum, reading and replying to messages, and, on one memorable occasion, making $200 from some custom Wolfenstein 3-D levels. But it was still very different to today; CompuServe was a walled garden of curated stuff to explore, and access to the broader Web didn't come about until later. I remember us having great difficulty setting up the Mosaic browser to view simple websites, and how exciting it was when we finally got to look at, say, pictures from NASA for the first time.

I don't think anything tech-wise has changed things as much as the rise and growth of the mobile phone, though. Getting a mobile phone when I was in my late teens made me feel like I had a whole new degree of independence, free to communicate with my friends on my own terms when and how I felt like it (Pay as you Go credit permitting). I recall long, drunken text conversations with people important to me at university; there was even a time when I'd voluntarily phone people up for a chat. I used to have long phone conversations with my perpetually absent university housemate, for example; she was a good friend, but I didn't see her all that much for a variety of reasons.

Then, when smartphones arrived, everything changed. It didn't seem like it at first, because the earliest implementation of the iPhone was very limited. There were no installable apps; you had to do everything via the Web. But sites were starting to get savvy to the rise of this exciting new technology, and were starting to serve up "responsive" pages that looked nice on the small screen of an iPhone.

I was working at an Apple Store when the iPhone launched. It was an exciting time, for sure, and it only got more exciting when the App Store launched. Suddenly, there was this brave new frontier for software, and we'd all download and experiment with all manner of different apps; not just games, but productivity tools, creativity tools and silly joke apps — who can forget the "drinking a beer" one?

When in-app purchases were announced, my heart sank. We were already starting to see some nickel-and-diming in the console gaming space, and it was about to get much worse in mobile. Free-to-play became the default, and aggressive monetisation came along with it. And there were people who would make excuses for this. People who are still making excuses for it to this day, to such a degree that we're never going to get rid of free-to-play and microtransactions at this point.

But I think the biggest change was how addicted people became to those black plastic slabs. And I'm not excluding myself from that description, either; I could feel myself being compelled to fiddle with it constantly, and I didn't like it. I still don't like it. I'm better at controlling it today, but I still feel the "urges" near-constantly.

Things only got worse with the rise of content designed to be deliberately addictive, such as short-form videos. For quite some time now, I've found a lot of tech to be scary and unpleasant; definitely a far cry from the excitement I'd feel every day when I booted up the Atari 130XE to do some BASIC programming.

It's not all bad, of course. It's great having satellite navigation in your pocket when you're trying to find things. It's great being able to stay in touch with people via a whole host of different means. And it's great being able to quickly snap a photo or video of anything without kicking yourself for not bringing your camera with you.

But there have been some big changes. Whether or not they're as big as the differences between my parents' childhood and my childhood, I don't know. But I suspect the realisation that you've lived through some huge changes in the world and society is an important part of progressing through life; you often don't notice these changes while they're in the middle of happening, but when you look back on them you realise that they were pretty massive. And not always for the better.

Would I like to go back to earlier, less technologically advanced, less convenient days? Some days, I honestly do think that yes, I would. There are a lot of great things about our modern, connected society — and a lot of terrible things, too — but sometimes I just miss the simplicity of life as it was back then.

I find myself wondering exactly what I mean by "back then"; if it was possible to go back, exactly what point would be the optimal one? I think, for me, it would probably be the early 2000s. Mobile phones would exist but wouldn't be the life-consuming soul suckers they are today; computer and video game technology would be at a good point; and we might all see a bit more of one another in the real world.

I might not have this blog, though. Or maybe I would. Perhaps it wouldn't be in quite this form. Perhaps I'd be a trailblazer in the blogging space.

Who knows? You can't go back, more's the pity. So we're stuck with what we have, regrettably, constructed for ourselves. At least for the moment.

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 338: Bomb Reignited

Boy, it sure has been an… "interesting" time for the games media recently, as I've alluded to a few times recently. To catch you up: Valnet, the sweatshop of the media industry, has bought Polygon and laid off the vast majority of its staff, which, of course, suggests that Polygon is going to become yet another SEO slop factory where its writers are paid peanuts to produce nothing of any real cultural value.

For a time, it looked like the longstanding site Giant Bomb was going the same way, with upsets over "brand-friendly" (or, more accurately, "brand-unfriendly") shenanigans on streams causing a sudden halt to… seemingly everything the site was doing. Giant Bomb has changed hands numerous times over the years; until recently, it was in the hands of Fandom, the people who ruined Wikia with obnoxious autoplaying pop-over videos and links to "related content" that was not, in fact, related to the thing you were looking at in any way whatsoever.

You'll notice I say "until recently". That's because Giant Bomb is no longer under the Fandom umbrella; it was announced on a panel at PAX East yesterday that Fandom and the Giant Bomb staff reached an agreement for the latter to purchase the site and turn it into an employee-owned outlet, much like the growing number of other worker-owned arrangements that are really finding their feet these days.

This is excellent news. I must confess despite being in the official Final Fantasy XIV guild for Giant Bomb, I never really hung out there all that much, but I did know that Giant Bomb, for many folks, was all about the community — similar to the old 1up.com days. The site looking like it was going under thanks to corporate interference was really sad to see — and for once, the corporate interferers saw what was going on, had a seemingly genuine "oh, shit" moment and changed course. Strongly. You can criticise Fandom for many things, but the agreement they reached with the Giant Bomb staff is, to my knowledge, absolutely unprecedented in the online media biz.

I've decided to make an effort to join the Giant Bomb community a bit more. I've rescued my account that I apparently signed up for in 2010 (with a different email address that thankfully I still had access to) and pledged $10 a month to help the folks on the site out. I'm looking forward to seeing what it has to offer, getting to know the community and perhaps, hopefully, finally having a decent place to hang out and talk games.

What does this mean for all the other things I do online? Nothing. I'm still going to be blogging here, I'm still going to be writing about games on MoeGamer — it's just I might be posting a few more bits and pieces on Giant Bomb from hereon, in both the forums and using the site's blogging facility. If there's one thing I really miss from the Internet Gone By, it's 1up.com and its sense of community; I'm really interested to see if Giant Bomb can prove to be an adequate replacement, particularly for someone who is essentially "new" to proceedings over there. I'm intruding on 17 years of history (huh, the site is the same age as this blog) but the "Duders" are supposed to be thoroughly nice people, so we'll see.

Mostly I'm happy to see my pals Jeff Grubb and Mike "Tolkoto" Minotti back in action, because I know very well how hard those two chaps worked to claw their way up the mountain of shite that is the games media industry, and it was a massive bummer to see them seemingly kicked back to the ground. I've known both of 'em since the 1up.com, Bitmob and Squadron of Shame days, and it was wonderful to see that they'd made something of their passions — and that they will continue to be able to do that.

So yeah. Giant Bomb is back. Now, if we could just do something about the rancid degradation of everything else online…

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 337: Lyrical Genius

Have you ever been on the website "Genius"? It's a site that hosts song lyrics, but it also has an annotation feature that allows the nerds of the Internet to highlight sections of the lyrics and post overly elaborate explanations of what they "really" mean.

I love sites like this, because inevitably you will stumble across people who take it really seriously, and that often leads to amusingly impassioned arguments about things that really don't matter. So let's have an explore, shall we?

Genius Annotation 3 contributors Breakfast is one of the first things you do in the morning so if you burn you breakfast things are going “great”. (As to why he’s making breakfast, knowing he’s two hours late for work, is beyond me!)

That one's from the second verse of I'll Be There For You, the theme from Friends by The Rembrandts. Elsewhere in the comments, someone points out that the theme song is sung from the perspective of first-season Rachel specifically, which honestly is not something I'd really considered before, but it would seem to apply for the most part.

Genius Annotation 1 contributor This is likely a reference to being high on Methamphetamine, which is sometimes refered to as “Scooby snacks”

This one's from, unsurprisingly, Scooby Snacks by The Fun Lovin' Criminals. The downvotes are due to the fact that "Scooby Snacks" refer to ecstasy, not methamphetamine, and while the two share some chemical bits and pieces in common, they are not the same thing. Underneath, someone posted this alternative explanation, which I think I like a bit more anyway:

Comment by TiwakingTiwakingTiwaking, 6 months ago: "Huey Morgan came up with lyrics about drug-addled bank robbers, an idea inspired by a security guard who handed out Valium to rowdy patrons at a New York City club called The Tunnel. “On Sunday nights they had this crazy hip-hop party called Mecca,” Leiser explained. “There were fights and people trying to sneak weapons in, guns and knives, so the security guards were always on edge. One of the guards was a crazy dude and he’d be giving everyone Valiums so at least they were all chilled out. He’d hand them around and say, ‘Does anyone want a scooby snack?’ That’s where got the idea for the chorus from: what if this dude and some of his meathead friends were robbing banks, all high on these scooby snacks?”"

Here's some actual insight on MMMBop by Hanson:

Genius Annotation 1 contributor Via Vulture: Zac: “MMMBop” was started as a background part during the making of our previous independent album, called Boomerang. We were looking for background parts for a song, and somebody started singing what became the “MMMBop” chorus. Ike: We were trying to come up with a catchy background part, and it was too catchy — like, “Oh, that’s really a foreground part.”

And some on Barbie Girl by Aqua, too:

Genius Annotation 2 contributors The singer lives a life similar to the famous Barbie, where people live carefree, easy lives. This line spawned one of the more hilarious court cases in music history, where Mattel, parent company to Barbie, sued Aqua for damaging the doll’s reputation. The judge ultimately sided with Aqua, leading to the now infamous ruling: “The parties are advised to chill.”

"Oh baby, baby, the reason I breathe is you (Oh yeah)" from …Baby One More Time by Britney Spears prompted this discussion:

Genius Annotation 2 contributors She’s addicted to her lover, and he’s the only reason she’s alive. In 2003, 5 years after “…Baby One More Time,” Britney released a song called “Breathe on Me,” where breathing has less to do with survival and more to do with sex.

You know, I launched into this post thinking I would mock Genius and its community for taking things far too seriously, but a lot of these are actually surprisingly insightful. Maybe I should just pick something really stupid, dumb and obvious. Hmm.

Genius Annotation 1 contributor “I need some love like I never needed love before.” The chorus erupts—a primal plea for connection. She yearns to make love, to explore every crevice of desire. Her past love was a mere appetizer; now, she’s back for the main course. The chorus repeats, a mantra of longing, urging her lover to set their spirits free—the only way to truly be.

This, from 2 Become 1 by the Spice Girls, is getting there, but I don't know. It's not wrong as such. It's just written in spectacularly flowery language, but then this is nothing unusual for music criticism, and I'm getting the increasing sense that Genius commentators would like nothing more than to be published music critics.

I was hoping that a song like Don't Stop (Wiggle Wiggle) by The Outhere Brothers would offer some gold, but disappointingly, there are no annotations on this song at all. I guess the lines "Put yo' ass on my face / I love the way your pussy tastes / Girl, you know you are the one / Take that ass and make me cum" are fairly self-explanatory, after all. Let's keep looking.

Genius Annotation 1 contributor “I need some love like I never needed love before.” The chorus erupts—a primal plea for connection. She yearns to make love, to explore every crevice of desire. Her past love was a mere appetizer; now, she’s back for the main course. The chorus repeats, a mantra of longing, urging her lover to set their spirits free—the only way to truly be. (then an image of the "finger into a hole made by the other hand" gesture to indicate sexysex)

Okay, this one has a diagram. (Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!! by Vengaboys, if you were wondering.) Good work. But, again, neither wrong nor particularly worthy of mocking. What are you doing to me, Genius? Stop providing genuine value and a good sense of humour! You have no place on the Internet of 2025!

Genius Annotation 3 contributors In this part of the song, Rick is saying that he will be loyal to his girl and, as the lyrics says, he’ll never give up on her, neither let her down, etc. The chorus is remembered by a lot of people because of the “Rick Rolled” meme. (Pie chart showing Rick Astley, indicating the things he would never do, including Give You Up, Let You Down, Run Around and Desert You, Make You Cry, Say Goodbye, Tell a Lie and Hurt You. Proportionally, Give You Up has the largest portion of the pie.)

Okay, I think we're done here. You win this round, Genius. But I will find you. I will find the most stupid annotation on your stupid website, and I will share it and I will mock it.

But in the meantime, I will probably just continue looking up lyrics on you, because you seem like a pretty reliable source for that and, with adblockers and all that shenanigans set up, you also don't appear to want to fill my computer with malware, so good job on that, I guess.

If you happen to find anything particularly ridiculous in your own explorations of Genius, please do share!

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday day 335: Broken links

I like looking back over the mountains of nonsense I've posted on this site since 2010, but one thing that makes me a bit sad is quite how many of the links I posted years ago are now broken. You can tell at a glance, 'cause I have a plugin running that makes any broken links appear as crossed-out text, and the further back you go in my archives, the more likely you are to find these. (EDIT: I turned it off, because it was throwing up a lot of false positives.)

The same is true for YouTube videos I've posted. More often than not, any YouTube video I've posted that is more than maybe five years old has been taken down, made private or copyright claimed by someone. And, of course, with the mass exodus from Twitter since Elon went… the way he went, formerly embedded tweets that belonged to now-deleted accounts are just… gone.

One of the things I thought was supposed to happen with the Internet was that there would be a certain degree of permanence. You'd make something online, it would be your mark on the world. But, unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. There is no infallible means of making something on the Internet and having it stay as a permanent fixture. If it's your own website, it will cease to exist the moment you stop paying for hosting (or have something happen to you that precludes you from continuing to pay for hosting, like, say, dying) and if it's something you've hosted on someone else's service, such as a social media platform, your stuff is only as permanent as that social media platform.

There are exceptions to this, of course. The amazing work that the Internet Archive does with its Wayback Machine makes it possible to travel back in time and see websites as they appeared back in the day. Okay, it's not perfect — the archiving process often loses images and layout information, any interactive functions will inevitably be broken and anything built using defunct technology like Flash will remain inaccessible — but it's something, at least. I can still visit my website from 2004, for example. And, in slightly more broken form, my short-lived games blog from 2010.

But what about the stuff that, for one reason or another, has been impossible to archive? There is no longer any trace of the discussions the Squadron of Shame once had on the 1up.com Radio forums, for example, and while some of 1up.com itself has been archived, the Club pages, which is where a lot of our conversations took place, are not among that which has been saved from oblivion. Likewise, my old iWeb site, which I hosted on iCloud precursor .mac, no longer exists because at some point Apple discontinued the "iDisk" online storage that the site was hosted on. Those things are all long gone, and that's a bit sad.

This is one reason why I was so upset when WordPress.com made a hash of this site some time ago — against what some might call all odds, I have managed to keep this site in existence for 17 years, which is positively ancient in Internet terms, and the threat of having that all taken away based on a false positive from a stupid automated system was absolutely heartbreaking.

I guess the lesson is that if there's stuff you care about, back it up as well as having it online. Because one day, the online version might not be there any more, and it might not be through any fault of your own!

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 329: Open your wallet

One thing that has been a constant in all the discussions over the death of Giant Bomb and Polygon yesterday is that we need to support independent creators. We need to support worker-owned organisations, we need to support publications that aren't corporate-owned, and perhaps most importantly, we need to support individual creators who, in many cases, do not have the backing of a corporation or even an organisation to help them out.

What this means in practical terms is that if you like something a particular creator or group of creators does, you should open your wallet and toss them a bit of change now and then. It doesn't have to be a regular pledge, it doesn't have to be a lot of money, but it's something we all need to get better at doing.

Of course, for those of limited means, ways of supporting creators that don't involve spending money are helpful, too. Telling others about the creators and their work; sharing links to ways people can support them; telling their own stories about why that creator and their work are important to them.

But there has to be a slightly mercenary element to this: there are people out there working hard who deserve to get paid for the work they put in — particularly if it is their actual job — and that payment shouldn't be contingent on SEO optimisation and ad revenue. The obsession with those to the exclusion of all else — including the quality of the work — is what has led us to a situation where almost the entirety of the traditional games press has collapsed, with the scraps being hoovered up by corporations that pay peanuts for absurdly unreasonable quantities of work. And when that happens, you get an Internet flooded with shite. And when there aren't workers to do that but the content still needs to flow, that's when you get an Internet flooded with AI-generated shite that is riddled with errors as well as being crap.

In many ways, the democratisation of information that the Internet has brought everyone is an amazing thing. There is no need to spend thousands of pounds on an Encyclopaedia Britannica because you have access to all that information and more via the Web. But the trouble is, this same democratisation of information has led everyone to expect everything for free. And that is simply not sustainable. People who make things as their job need to get paid. That money needs to come from somewhere. And we've proven pretty clearly beyond any shadow of a doubt that the ad-driven model is not a good way of doing things, for a variety of reasons: the workload it places on underpaid workers; the unreliability of it as an income stream; and the fact it encourages a race to the bottom in terms of content churn rather than the production of actually meaningful, worthwhile work.

So I say again: open your wallet. Think back to the days when if you wanted to read something about your hobby, you'd walk into Smiths and pick up a magazine, maybe flip through it a bit, then walk over to the counter and pay a few quid for it. You might do this multiple times a month for different aspects of your hobby, or, hell, for different hobbies altogether. You might even set up a subscription so you got the magazines sent straight to you. In doing that, you were supporting the people who made the magazines, the people who wrote the articles, and you were helping to ensure the continued existence of that magazine.

Sure, you could read the whole thing for free in Smiths if you wanted to, but I think most people were honest enough to actually pony up for a copy of a magazine if they had a quick flip through and saw one or two things they thought were worthwhile. More often than not, you'd find things you didn't expect to find interesting when you later perused the magazine in its entirety later in the day. And sometimes, you'd even return to that magazine years later and rediscover things you had forgotten about, or notice things you never saw first time around.

You can't easily do that with the churn of SEO optimised website content because of the sheer volume of it — and the inability to guarantee that the information will still be there [x] years down the line. Someone on Bluesky earlier noted that they were doing research for a video they were making and found a good article from 2014, but was unable to follow up on any of the sources that article cited because every link in it was broken.

So, I say again: open your wallet, if it is within your means to do so. Help writers produce fewer articles with more words that are better and which stick around for longer. Help video makers produce fewer videos that are better quality, more in-depth and completely devoid of SEO or ragebaiting.

And if anyone makes a new paper magazine about your passions, you throw those goddamn heroes a subscription.

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 315: Short-form shite

I am once again inspired to write something by a piece over on Aftermath, this time on the subject of short-form videos such as Instagram/Facebook Reels and TikTok. The thrust of the piece is that the author decided to completely give up looking at this type of video online for the 40 days of Lent, and has felt considerably better as a result.

I am not surprised. I have noted on numerous other occasions how much I detest the push for short-form vertical-format "content" happening all over the Internet, and how frustrating I find it when I see people mindlessly scrolling through video after video without really taking anything in, just scrolling, over and over, for hour after hour.

I have never been sucked into this corner of the Internet. I've done the social media quasi-addiction thing, and it's not nice. I recognised short-form video as being kind of bullshit when it first started to be a thing — I still remember the now-deleted Glove and Boots video about how shooting vertical video makes you a terrible person — and I feel vindicated any time I see a piece like Riley's article on Aftermath concluding that yes, short-form video is a big pile of shit. I'm firmly of the belief that the format has done potentially irreversible harm to people's mental wellbeing in general, and specifically their attention span.

Do you know what the most depressing statistic on YouTube is? I've probably asked this before, but it's my blog, so I will ask the same rhetorical questions again if I feel like it. Anyway, the most depressing statistic on YouTube is the watch time or "retention" factor for your videos. This tracks how long people actually watch your videos for — in other words, if they sit down, click "Play" and watch the whole thing, or if they just tap onto it on their phone, watch ten seconds and then click on the next thing that catches their attention, without taking anything in whatsoever.

The stat makes for grim reading on longer videos, as you might expect, but I find it especially frustrating and upsetting when I see it being in the toilet on videos that are a couple of minutes long at most, like a trailer or something. And I suspect the "pivot" to short-form video on multiple social media platforms has played a significant role in this situation, because none of the platforms that host short-form video encourage their users to show any sort of respect for the creators of those videos. All they want you to do is keep scrolling through the never-ending feed, helping them build their algorithmic picture of Who You Really Are, all so they can better advertise to you.

This isn't to say the short-form video creators are entirely blameless in this, either. I never "got" Vine when it was a thing, either, and every time I'm inadvertently subjected to a short-form vertical video with sped-up footage of someone ranting and raving about something to the camera, I find myself never wanting to see anything from that creator ever again.

This might be a "me" thing, it might be an "autistic" thing, but I find so much short-form video to be incredibly aggressive and confrontational. Whether it's someone bellowing at the top of their lungs about the terrible customer service experience they had in B&Q last Wednesday or someone giving an impassioned plea to support a cause that actually matters, all I feel when I see a thumbnail or a video of someone's face right up against their phone camera is the same sort of discomfort I would feel if that person was invading my personal space, getting right in my face and shouting so close I could smell their breath.

I genuinely do not understand. I do not see the appeal. I do not find the supposed "jokes" funny. I do not find the "skits" funny. And anyone who thinks TikTok is a good place to go to get recipes or DIY guides is fucking delusional. How, in any way, is a looping video in any way an optimal means of learning how to cook something or build something? We've had these things sorted for years at this point.

And don't get me started on all the YouTube videos who make their entire content strategy "I saw this thing on TikTok and now I'm going to do something with it". Testing "viral" TikTok recipes. Trying "viral" TikTok AliExpress plastic landfill. Attempting to perform a "viral" TikTok dance. At least by not being on TikTok I can avoid all this shit at the source, but when it starts spilling over into other forms of media that I do still engage with, like YouTube, it's very annoying.

I am glad I never stuck my head into TikTok and found anything even the slightest bit worthwhile. On my one foray into the service just to see what the retro gaming scene looked like on there, I found an American guy gurning at the camera and explaining that "back in the day we had to plug our consoles into the TV and the wall!", immediately closed the app and deleted it. There was nothing there for me. I am better than that. You are better than that. And, as with everyfuckingthing else in the world at this point, the AI garbage that is starting to fill these platforms is just making them even worse than they already are.

"Oh, it's harmless," people say. "It's just a bit of fun. I like to watch the girls dancing. Sometimes there are really good recipes on there."

No. Stop it. You do not need that shit in your life. All of those things you just described can be accessed via other means that aren't destroying your attention span and your ability to focus on anything for more than 20 seconds at a time. And there are even ways to do all of them that don't involve feeding advertising algorithms.

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 314: The news churn

There was a good piece over on Aftermath today titled "Video game blogs from the 2000s were fast, reckless and very bad at news". The gist of the piece was that video game websites that adopted a continuously updating "blog" format, in contrast to the "magazine" approach many earlier gaming sites had used, inadvertently set in place a format for games journalism that isn't particularly helpful for readers, and is definitely not good for the writers.

The piece goes on to note that the pressure to have [x] number of articles per day, or the fact that many writers were paid (a pittance) by the article placed a great deal of pressure on the site's writers to make even the most mundane, pointless bullshit somehow "newsworthy". It is this, among other things, that led numerous websites to continuously and uncritically quote Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter whenever he spouted off something that was either immensely obvious (the new Grand Theft Auto will probably sell well!) or so utterly vague as to be completely useless.

I wasn't involved in the biz at the start of this, but I definitely felt its effects. When I joined GamePro in 2011, the site was just starting to experiment with a new format for its news coverage. At the start of my shift each day, I was to dig up a bunch of stories and post them as just headlines and a brief summary on a front-page forum as a sort of "news briefing". Then, later in my shift, after the stories had all had a bit of time to percolate, I would write one or two up in further detail based on which of the posts had seemingly been the most popular, judged primarily by comments.

GamePro's readers initially fucking hated it, because the way it was implemented cluttered up the front page of the site's main forums, and I wasn't a huge fan of it, either, because it felt like the time I spent digging up those initial stories — which, more often than not, took the form of either another site having reported on something first, or a press release we'd received that morning — could have almost certainly been better used finding bigger stories to explore, or writing features, or reviews, or anything other than desperately, vainly scrabbling for just a scrap of news, please, guvnor.

That said, over time it did seem to settle down a bit, I broke a few genuine exclusives and provided some good editorial commentary on other stories that were happening, and I was told on multiple occasions that the work I was doing was playing a big role in giving the site a nice uptick in traffic.

Of course, even that uptick was all for naught when IDG Media unceremoniously closed the site and the magazine just before Christmas that year, meaning I woke up one morning all set to do work, only to find that not only was there no job to work any more, all the stuff I had written was about to become absolutely impossible to find due to the inexplicable decision to fold some (not all) of GamePro's material into the unrelated publication PC World. Good stuff. (If you dig deep enough into PC World's atrocious search function, you can still find the odd bit of my stuff, but it's not easy to find, which was great for building a portfolio, I can tell you.)

Something similar happened at USgamer, also. When we started the site, the intention was for the whole thing to be a return to something like the 1up.com days: a primarily personality-driven site, where each of the writers would have their own specialisms, and they would be free to write about whatever they wanted, developing their own little sub-communities in the process.

That went great for a while! I wrote about anime RPGs and visual novels, another chap wrote about racing sims, and all the other people on staff each had their own Things, too. Comments from the community were positive; I can't speak specifics to the other folks' work as I didn't tend to delve into their comment sections, but on my pieces, there was always a great deal of appreciation for my work making USgamer a site that was welcoming and inclusive to a portion of gaming that didn't always get a lot of love and respect from the mainstream sites. This was all pre-Gamergate, I'll add, so there was no culture war bullshit going on; it was just folks who liked anime-style games, including those with mildly provocative content (as there was a fair amount of in the mid-2010s) having an appreciation for a site that didn't just write their favourite games off as being for perverts or whatever.

That lasted for a few months, but then an edict came down from On High (in this case, USgamer's parent company Gamer Network) that we needed to juice the numbers. In other words, abandon everything we'd done to make the site unique and start the daily churn of news and guides that is so painfully familiar to this day. I went from being able to post whatever I wanted to having to get manual approval for each and every news story I wanted to post, and I was outright forbidden from covering certain games.

Eventually, when I was laid off from the site — again, through waking up one morning only to discover I didn't have a job any more — I was forced into spending the majority of my days rejigging and reposting "guide content" from Prima Games, which was also under the Gamer Network umbrella at the time. Out of spite, I stuck with several of my regular weekly columns even with this SEO-juicing bullshit I had been lumbered with, and it was that degree of spite for what the site had become that eventually led me to create MoeGamer: a site where I could play by my rule and cover whatever the fuck I wanted, and fuck traffic numbers.

MoeGamer itself has had a few evolutions over the years. Initially, it was an occasional blog where I basically continued writing my JPgamer column from USgamer — I'd just write about things that interested me, or which I'd happened to play recently, or which had been on my mind. Eventually, when I was working a series of very boring office jobs that had nothing to do with the games press, I launched my "Cover Game" feature, with a mind to giving underappreciated, oft-overlooked titles the level of detailed coverage that your average traffic-baiting triple-A title did. At the height of my boredom in the office, I was posting stuff on MoeGamer daily, including episodes in each multi-part Cover Game feature, plus shorter one-off articles about things that I found interesting, or had happened to collect back when CEX did free shipping (ahh, those heady days), or that I had always loved but never written about.

Today, I actually like my day job, so MoeGamer has had to take a bit of a back seat, but I'm still writing over there sporadically. It's nice to have a space that is for a specific subject, and a contrast from this general-purpose thought-dumping ground that is this blog. I don't have any intention of making MoeGamer "big" or "famous" or trying to make money from it; it's just my site about games I like, and over the last 10+ years I've filled it with a lot of work I'm very proud of. Today, I think I'm more proud of what I've built with MoeGamer than my all-too-brief time as part of the professional games press.

I've pretty much taken the MoeGamer approach with YouTube, too, albeit with more of a focus on retro games than RPGs and visual novels. And y'know what? While my channel hasn't exploded in terms of growth since I launched it (or since I started using it a bit more actively around 2018 or so), it has seen steady growth without me putting any effort whatsoever into either algorithm-baiting or SEO juicing. I have over three and a half thousand subscribers over there right now, and while that's a drop in the ocean compared to the Mr Beasts of this world, I feel creatively fulfilled and proud of what I've done, and am not an awful human being.

So much about the modern Internet sucks, and as Ed Zitron frequently notes, so much of it is about the growth-at-all-costs mindset. It's not just business that this "rot economy" infests; it's creative pursuits, hobbies, specialist fields. So many people are desperate to monetise everything they put online that the actual value for the people looking at the articles, videos and suchlike is diminishing — and the conditions for those producing the work are becoming increasingly intolerable. Throw AI garbage into the mix — and the fuckers who are now flooding YouTube and social media apps with AI-generated bilge that they pump out all day every day — and you have a real melting pot of absolutely rancid filth.

It's definitely a good idea for people who are Into Things to retreat into their own little specialised corners of the Internet, rather than the whole Internet being treated as some great Marketplace of Shit. This is happening to a certain degree, with many communities forming on Discord these days — though Discord itself isn't immune to enshittification, and I suspect we'll all have to find a new home before long — but I do miss the glory days of forums. I really do. I know a few forums still exist, but the 1up.com Radio Boards days are long gone, and every day I miss them a little more.

This has been quite the ramble, and I'm not sure I made a specific point along the way, but hopefully you understand what I was waffling on about. I am grateful to Past Me for setting up spaces like this blog and MoeGamer for me to continue to express myself, and as time goes on I feel personal spaces like these are going to once again become an important part of life online. Because the alternative is wading out into the mires of advertising-laden shit that is the rest of the Internet, and that gets less appealing day after day.

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 308: The apparent need to hate

It's been interesting to see the public response to Blue Prince since it came out yesterday. A bunch of folks on Steam, the absolute worst place to talk about video games, seem oddly resistant to the idea that it might actually be quite good.

(For the record, I'll note that for now, after about 6 hours of play, I'm definitely enjoying Blue Prince, but I'm not yet convinced of all the "Game of the Year!" accolades it's already getting. I am open to it convincing me, however.)

Earlier, I saw someone praising a negative review by saying "finally, an honest review", and others noting that the "positive reviews are suspicious", despite the vast majority of them being articulate and knowledgeable about the game and its appeal elements. In the Discussions tab, which is where hope really goes to die, there are some folks getting legitimately angry that some people are enjoying the game more than they do.

I'm not entirely sure why this is occurring, either. Blue Prince is not, to my knowledge, a particularly — and you'll pardon me for using this obnoxious word — "woke" game in that it doesn't force Gamers™ to acknowledge the existence of black, female, homosexual or transgender people. (If it does later, it certainly doesn't within its first 6 hours of play. This is not a criticism — more a side-effect of the way the game is designed and structured, since you are alone while you play, and the other characters appear in photographs, notes, journal entries and suchlike.)

I mention this because the attitude I'm seeing from some people is normally reserved for the "anti-woke" crowd when they want to tear a game down for challenging their narrow-minded perceptions of the world. But… there's seemingly nothing like that in here, which makes the sheer passion with which some people seem to hate this game on principle all the more confusing.

Now I will admit that Blue Prince is probably not a game for everyone. It is slow-paced, thoughtful and contemplative. There's nothing that one would call "action". It requires that you learn its rules through play rather than having your hand held through tutorials. And it is a game where, despite there being no real "skill" involved from a hand-eye co-ordination perspective, you will still fail a lot before you roll credits on it — and where you will doubtless fail even more after those credits have rolled and there is more to discover.

I get that. When I encounter a game like that, my response is to go "Eh, okay, I see why some people like that but it's not for me." Then I turn it off, uninstall it, whatever, and I don't play it again. I might return to it when some time has passed — there are several games I've come to appreciate many years after I bounced off them when I first encountered them — but, in most cases, I won't be mad at the game. I think the maddest I've got at a game was with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, because I found the single-player campaign in that singularly insulting to my intelligence, but even then I just… did what I outlined above. I uninstalled it, then I didn't play it again. Job done.

The funny thing about the people getting absolutely frothing mad about Blue Prince right now is that in most cases, they are revealing themselves to have not understood what the game is doing. Blue Prince is deliberately obtuse in some ways, yes, but I am particularly stupid when it comes to things like this and I got the general vibe of what's expected of me pretty quickly. The people getting most upset by it are the ones who seemingly want a simple, straight line to the finish, to max out all the achievements and say they're "done" with it. Rather delightfully, Blue Prince is not at all forthcoming with achievements and trophies; it eschews the usual "started the game!" and "got a Game Over!" achievements in favour of a small collection of awards that demonstrate you've made meaningful progress. The fact that this is probably making some people mad is quite enjoyable.

Also whiny little babies pissing and moaning about "no ultrawide support" can get in the bin. Buy a normal person monitor, or play the game in 16:9. No-one gives a shit about your "no ultrawide, no buy" policy.

Anyway, Blue Prince has been a good time thus far. Like I say, so far I remain unconvinced of its "Game of the Year" status, but I'm willing to keep plugging away at it to see what I can discover, because there's enough here that I do like. And if I end up tiring of it? I won't be mad, and I won't feel like I've wasted my time. It's nice to be part of the current conversation for once and to experience something that has clearly resonated with a lot of people for one reason or another.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.