#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the Squadron of Shame once had on the 1up.com Radio forums, for example, and while some of 1up.com itself has been archived, the Club pages, which is where a lot of our conversations took place, are not among that which has been saved from oblivion.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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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#oneaday Day 304: Web maintenance at the worst times

I found it very hard to get out of bed this morning. The reason for this is simple: I stayed up until 2AM doing maintenance activities on this site and MoeGamer that could have almost certainly waited until a more sociable hour, but once I'd started, I wanted to see them through.

Y'see, both my sites have gone on a bit of a journey. They were both originally hosted on WordPress.com, with this blog being on a free account and MoeGamer being on a "Premium" paid tier. I was starting to reach the limits of what I could do with the Premium account in particular — most notably with regard to media storage space — and thus I moved MoeGamer to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation on a Bluehost hosting account.

Before anyone jumps in to decry Bluehost as being shit: believe me, I know. That is the reason neither of my sites are hosted with Bluehost at this point. But we'll come back to that.

As anyone who has ever tried to migrate a large site from WordPress.com to WordPress.org will tell you, the supposedly simple and straightforward migration process is anything but. What is supposed to happen is that you hit "Export" on your WordPress.com site, which spits out your site's contents as XML files, then you hit "Import" on your WordPress.org site, wherever you've hosted it, and it will recreate your site. Posts, pages and comments will go right back in, and the import process is supposed to look for any media you posted and automatically go and retrieve it from your old site, then transfer it to your new one.

Notice how I emphasise "supposed to". Because in the multiple times I have done this over the years, not once has it ever worked how it is, apparently, supposed to. Not only that, but the documentation on WordPress' own site refers to features and options that do not actually exist. Take these instructions for exporting your Media Library, for example. By following these instructions, even if the "automatic" process described above didn't work, you should be able to just tell WordPress.com to export all your media files into a big ol' .zip file, then import them all in one go to your WordPress.org installation.

Just one problem: the options they tell you to click on do not exist. Maybe they once existed and now do not, but right now — and for multiple years at this point, since I've done this several times with different sites — they do not exist, making them completely useless as instructions.

There are plugins that are supposed to help with this sort of thing. You can't install plugins on a WordPress.com site unless you're subscribed to the obscenely expensive "Business" plan, but you can install plugins on WordPress.org. Except you then run into the minefield of whether or not the plugins in question actually do what you think they're supposed to do, or if they're just some dodgy, shady thing trying to get you to sign up to their "Pro" account because the one vaguely useful option they have is paywalled.

And this is to say nothing of most web servers' tendency to crash if you throw too much data at them in one go. I have several thousand posts on both here and MoeGamer, and attempting to import them all at once would crash the import process every time. I ended up having to go a hundred at a time, which took a very long time, I can tell you, particularly as it would still crash on occasion. And amid all that, if it wasn't already clear, it didn't automatically import my old media and transfer it across to the new site; instead, it just left links to the old media and then… didn't do anything else.

So what I ended up with was two sites that were full of images that were hotlinked from an account I wasn't paying for any more, and which I wanted to close down. And it took me until last night to figure out some possible solutions.

For the record, I used two distinct plugins. Firstly, I used the Auto Upload Images plugin, which actually does do what the media import process is supposed to do: it looks for externally hosted images, then it imports them to your media library and updates the <img> tags to point to your new media library copies. The one downside I found with this plugin is that rather than importing the old images under the same date structure as the old site, it imports them all "today". This is down to a limitation with how WordPress handles files, I think, so no big deal — but it did cause an issue.

On both my sites, a lot of older images had automatically been set to allow people to click on them to see the full size versions. The links were now pointing at the old version of the image, while the <img> tags were showing the new versions. Not only that, but the mismatch in dates meant that some of these clickable links were just completely broken.

To resolve this, I took something of a nuclear option: I used the Broken Link Checker plugin to scan my site for all its links, searched those links for anything that was pointing at the old wordpress.com site and then just batch "unlinked" them. That means that the new images would be safely in place, the broken links would be removed and everything from thereon should, in theory, be hunky-dory.

There are a few things that have broken along the way, like any Gallery posts I hosted have lost all their images and I don't see any means of fixing that aside from doing them all manually, plus there's been the usual "link rot" of old copyright-infringing YouTube videos no longer being available online. Plus any audio media seems to have gone walkies, too, but again, no big deal, really; I don't think anyone expects a website that has been around for nearly 20 years to suffer from no link rot whatsoever.

But anyway. I got rather involved in this process last night, starting around 11pm. I knew, looking at the clock, that I shouldn't start doing something like this so late in the evening. But then I did, and hyperfixation kicked in, and I kept going until everything was, so far as I can tell, sorted. I mean, my galleries and audio bits are still broken, but I can live with that. What I didn't really want to live with was several thousand broken image links that led nowhere. And I think I've fixed that issue.

If you happen to notice anything wrong with any old posts you find yourself reading, do let me know and I'll see if it's possible to fix them. In some cases, that may be possible; in others, less so. As I say, it's part and parcel of a site being live for this long, even if it has moved hosting and domain names multiple times in its lifespan. But hopefully it's going to stick around right here for quite some time, so I wanted to fix as many of the annoying little issues as possible. So here we are!

I hope the three or four of you who actually read this appreciate the work I put in!

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#oneaday Day 298: Can you give up your phone?

I watched a good video earlier, and I recommend you do too if you have a spare 46 minutes and 4 seconds. It's by a chap called Eddy Burback, who makes videos that are just… about stuff. He always puts in a decent amount of research to the topics he talks about, he makes his discussions both interesting and personally relevant, and he's genuinely entertaining. If you've never watched his stuff before, this video is a great place to get to know him.

For those too lazy or disinclined to click that video and actually watch it, his aim was to go 30 days with his smartphone locked up in a safe so he couldn't use it at all. He wasn't denying himself access to the Internet, social media or anything like that, and he set up an old Mac laptop in the corner of his living room to access iMessage if he needed it, but only allowed himself a cumulative total of 5 minutes across the entire month to check it. He found, among other things, that after checking it once, he decided he didn't really need to check it at all.

The other things he did were deliberate, conscious steps "backwards". He set up a landline with an on-device answering machine. He made plans with friends over the phone, and then just showed up at the place he said he'd be at the time he said he'd be there, rather than constantly checking in via text or chat. He navigated by looking things up on the computer at home, then either writing things down in a notepad or just remembering them. He bought a physical pre-payment card to ride the bus rather than using an app. He handled electronic "tickets" for events and facilities such as the cinema by printing out a hardcopy.

And he seemed happy. I'm sure part of this was to aid with the storytelling — you tend to go into a project like this with a hypothesis that you kind of want to prove — but I don't doubt that spending a month without habitually, obsessively checking one's phone is a healthy thing to do. And as time goes on, I increasingly find myself wanting to do just that.

There are, as Burback talks about in the video, drawbacks. If you're not someone who likes talking on the phone, a landline isn't going to do you much good — and likewise if your friends tend to interact with you primarily via text message or chat applications. On top of that, landlines attract spam calls even more than mobiles do. This means you can very easily find yourself feeling even more isolated than you were already, which is probably counter-productive to the intent of the experiment: the aim is to get off your phone so that you can enjoy living your life a little more, and part of that is spending time with friends. If you can't get in touch with those friends via any means other than a text or chat message, that's a problem.

Most other things, there are ways round, though. For navigation, you can still print out maps and directions from sites like Google Maps and Mapquest (which, yes, still exists!). For convenient payments, most places accept contactless cards now, particularly since the pandemic almost outlawed cash altogether. For public transport, pre-paid cards exist, even if you have to go digging to a retailer who actually remembers where they keep them after not selling one for a decade or more. And for making arrangements with friends? Well, if they're good friends, they'll respect your lifestyle decision and be willing to interact with you and make plans via whatever means you are allowing, such as the phone; the fact that people were perfectly fine with adapting to his situation is one of the things Burback seemed most surprised about.

One thing Burback found was that without the constant connectivity a phone in your pocket brings, he was much less likely to cancel plans on a moment's notice or suddenly decide he wasn't in the mood for something. Instead, if he'd made plans, he'd made a commitment to another person, and not showing up for that commitment would be letting them down. Of course, sometimes these things are unavoidable — but that's why you still have means of communicating like the landline or email. It's not like locking your smartphone away completely cuts you off from society altogether. It just means that you are reachable on your own terms.

And I think that's the important thing. It allows you to really take control of your own life. It means you are not beholden to social media algorithms and the arbitrary schedules of whether or not "interesting" people are online posting mindless content that doesn't really enrich your life in any way. It means you're more likely to pick up a book and read it all the way through, instead of scrolling through 50 TikTok videos, not taking anything in from any of them.

Completely getting rid of your phone is obviously a drastic option. But the conclusion Burback came to was that while there are undoubted conveniences — and pleasures — to having a smartphone accessible at all times, having a month completely disconnected from it allowed him to develop a more healthy relationship with it. He was less inclined to doomscroll through social media, less inclined to experience the world through a camera app rather than his own eyes, and more inclined to having fewer but more meaningful interactions with the people who are important to him. And that, in turn, left a lot more time for doing things that he found enjoyable and pleasurable: watching movies, reading books, all that sort of thing.

I won't lie: that sounds nice. I have already cut back on using my phone a lot compared to what I used to do with it, but there are still times when I really resent its presence. Perhaps I should try a similar experiment sometime.

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#oneaday Day 294: Microsoft Teams is where joy goes to die

Working from home is, on the whole, infinitely preferable to having to do a daily commute into an office to spend time with people I don't know very well or like all that much and attempt to find ways to look busy and/or enthusiastic about working on things I don't give a shit about. (To that I will also add: it is infinitely preferable to have a job you give a shit about, populated by people you like, which thankfully I have. I've paid my dues at shitty jobs full of shitty people.)

But there's one thing I have come to hate about working from home, and that is waking up of a morning and seeing Microsoft Teams notifications already waiting for me. It's my own fault, really, for allowing Teams onto my phone, but there are occasions when it's useful to be reachable when not sitting in front of the work computer, so there it is for now.

I hate Microsoft Teams. I don't really know why. It's not as if it's a completely broken, non-functional piece of software; by Microsoft's standards, it's reasonably not-bad, though like all their other modern pieces of software, it defies pretty much all interface standards which Microsoft set themselves with their own operating system, which continues to baffle me. Plus, as with everyfuckingthing else these days, "AI" is starting to creep into it with the ability to "add chatbots" to conversations.

I think it's just the utter joylessness of it as an application. It's a piece of software primarily designed for facilitating boring online meetings that only the person hosting them actually gives a shit about, and even with the inclusion of the ability to post GIFs in text chat (because, of course, what says "professional" more than copyright-infringing memes?) it just feels so incredibly po-faced at all times.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't want Teams to turn into Discord with its cutesy wutesy oopsy woopsy we made a fucky wucky update notices and gradual introduction of myriad stupid features no-one actually wants or needs. But it's also a program I just find depressing to open up.

And, as I say, I don't really 100% know why I feel that way. Functionally, it's inoffensive, if riddled with strange design decisions. Practically, it's useful for being able to converse with colleagues easily. And yet I still hate it. I hate its ability to intrude on things you're doing. I hate the fact people can just "call" you without you giving your consent. And, as I say, there are few things worse than waking up of a morning and seeing there are already a bajillion Teams notifications waiting for you.

Maybe I should just delete it from my phone and if people can't reach me until I'm at my computer, that's tough shit. I mean, that's no different from working in an office and no-one being able to reach me until I'm at my desk and within reach of my work phone, right?

Not that I ever answered my work phone when I actually had one in the few office jobs I've ever had, mind. Email or bust.

Anyway, I'm going to bed now. Notifications off!

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#oneaday Day 291: If you like old games mags, here's a podcast you might like

The other day, I was contacted relatively out of the blue (no pun intended) on Bluesky by a chap called Ty Schalter, who wanted to let me know he and a fellow writer, journalist and author, Aidan Moher, were launching a new podcast, and would I mind giving it a bit of a nudge on socials.

Firstly, I was flattered that Ty thought I had anywhere near enough reach online to make a difference these days, but I indeed shared it anyway, and am, in fact, doing so again right now. Secondly, I was 100% on board with the concept for the podcast, which was to take a fond look back at classic games magazines. Here's the first episode for you to enjoy:

Now, as I stated in no uncertain terms just the other day, I am a big fan of old computer and video games magazines, and am always up for some discussion of them. These days, it's a bit tempting for everyone to look at the worst of their output, go "ugh, cringe" and leave it at that, but Schalter and Moher are doing the subject justice, judging by their first episode; they're acknowledging that while there are often faults we can pick from a 2025 perspective, these magazines were a vitally important part of gaming culture, particularly in the days before we had always-online Internet and, later, mobile phones.

What you've gotta remember is that in the '90s, if you had an Internet connection at all, it was a dial-up one that you had to ration your time with so as not to leave yourself with an astronomical phone and/or usage bill; earlier than that, the only online services out there were self-contained bulletin board systems. There was also a curious "in-betweeny" phase in the early '90s where services like AOL and CompuServe came to prominence; these offered global online services somewhat akin to the modern Internet, but in their own curated walled gardens. Later, both services provided access to the broader Web, but initially, they were their own little communities.

Why is this important? Because it meant that it was nowhere near as easy to talk about games with people as it is today. There was no magic black slab in your pocket that connected you to the rest of the world, and there was no guarantee that when you "logged on" with your computer that you'd find someone you wanted to talk to. There certainly wasn't the opportunity for carving out your own little space online as there is today, and absolutely no social media. (Maybe it wasn't all bad.)

This meant that magazines played a crucial role for video game enthusiasts: they were the main way that people who enjoyed games found out about new releases, the latest news and in-depth information about stuff that was already out. They were a point of common contact that, when we met up with our "real-life" friends (remember them?), we could use as the basis for a discussion. They were a connection to the outside world — and for many of us, a lifeline that made us feel much less alone in our passion for what is, most of the time, a fairly solitary pastime.

Schalter and Moher get this. They understand that for many of us, magazines were "the gaming community". We came to the mags not just for the games, but in many cases, for the personalities involved and the opinions we trusted. We'd obsess over a 250-word review of a 40-hour RPG, reading it repeatedly and drinking in the screenshots, wondering what it would be like to actually play the thing. We'd base our purchasing decisions on the arbitrary numbers the reviewers thought up, for better or worse. And we'd get to know the studios behind our favourite games through special features, interviews and preview reports.

Many of these things can be argued to still be present in today's games press, to be sure. But the daily churn of gaming news online makes it somehow less special than it was to get a monthly magazine. What game would be on the cover? What games would get in-depth features? What games were getting walkthroughs, tips and cheats? Would there be any cool cover-mounted gifts or bonus booklets included?

While it can be funny to look back and laugh (or cringe) at The People We Were 20-30+ Years Ago, it's important to take a look at the full picture for an understanding of why things were the way they were — and why so many people are still nostalgic for an era long past.

That's what the Fun Factor podcast seemingly aims to explore, and judging by the first episode — which features lengthy reminiscences about Final Fantasy VII that I'm sure will be familiar to anyone Of A Certain Age — it's going to be a good listen over the long term.

So go give that first episode a listen now, and if you're so inclined, support the podcast on its official website. You can also follow the pod, Ty and Aidan over on Bluesky.

I'm excited to see where the show goes from here, as it's a subject near and dear to my own heart. And if you have any fond nostalgia for that supposed "golden age" of magazines, I recommend checking it out, too. 'Cause heaven knows we could all do with some fun, happy stuff to enjoy right now, I'm sure.

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#oneaday Day 290: Foxit? More like Fuckit

Good one, I know.

As I alluded to yesterday, I've been spending a bit of time collecting together scans of old computer and video games (and Computer & Video Games) magazines with a mind to sticking them on an old Kindle Fire tablet to use as a portable "magazine reader". As part of that process, today I found myself looking for PDF readers, both for Windows and for Android.

I wanted one for Windows so that I could potentially use it to make some videos about the magazines I don't have hard copies of, and neither Chrome nor Firefox's built-in PDF handling quite does what I wanted. (Chrome, notably, still lacks the ability to display two-page spreads but assume there is a "cover page", meaning it fucks up magazine and book layouts and there's nothing you can do about it.) So I did what any normal person does, and I Googled it, even knowing that Google itself has been gradually going down the toilet.

After skipping past the fucking useless AI summary and sponsored links, I clicked on an article that was absolutely bullshit SEO bait ("The best free PDF readers for Windows!") but was at least from a vaguely reputable outlet, TechRadar. This article informed me that Foxit was the best PDF reader for Windows.

Great, I thought. I've used Foxit before in the past. I doubt it's changed that much.

EH. WRONG.

Foxit has enshittified itself beyond all recognition. Not only has it made the inexplicable decision to model its UI on Microsoft's odious "Ribbon" interface, it also boots up with a floating "AI" button that you can't get rid of without some tinkering deep in the options and then quitting and restarting the program.

Let's take each of these in turn. First, the Ribbon.

I hate the Ribbon. I've despised the Ribbon ever since Microsoft introduced it in Microsoft Office 2007, and every time I use a program that uses this obnoxious piece of crap instead of normal toolbars and drop-down menus, I make a specific effort to find something else to use instead.

The Ribbon is an eyesore. The Ribbon takes up far too much space on the screen. The Ribbon's myriad tabs and huge buttons make it a massive chore to find simple functionality, since each tab is organised with no real care or attention. It doesn't conform to any standard functionality, so you'll find the same functions in different places in different applications, and it feels the need to take over the entire fucking window when you want to do something as simple as open, save or close a file, or look at the program's settings page.

In Foxit's specific case, I am honestly struggling to think of why a supposedly "lightweight" PDF reader has enough functions in it to warrant having a multi-tab Ribbon. I need a PDF reader to do one thing: read PDFs. Occasionally I might need to copy and paste images and text from a PDF, and the ability to take a snapshot of a section of a PDF and save it as an image is always nice. But I do not need multiple tabs worth of disorganised functionality, making it a chore to do something as simple as display two pages side by side and let me flip through the entire document like… well, like a magazine or book.

This is what people are talking about when they say "the computer" is constantly being enshittified. Things that worked perfectly well are being "updated" for no other reason than to say that they have been updated. Simple, straightforward, intuitive interfaces that remained standard conventions for decades are being uprooted in favour of borderline abusive design that forces you to click through page after page of crap in order to find the one thing you're looking for. And for what? To say that the company is "growing"? To say that the company is "innovating"? Fuck that. Just make me a fucking PDF reader that lets me read PDFs.

Which brings me to the "AI" button. I do not need a fucking AI button in my PDF reader. If I have opened something in a PDF reader, I intend to read it or print it. I am not going to ask a fucking chatbot that gets things wrong an average of a third of the time you ask it things to "summarise" the thing that I'm trying to read either for information or pleasure. I am not going to ask a fucking chatbot that gets things wrong an average of a third of the time you ask it things to "analyse" the document or figure out "trends". I am a human being. I have a brain. I can do these things myself. I do not need "AI" to "do it more quickly". Believe it or not, I enjoy reading. I enjoy researching. I'm not so fucking lazy that I need a fucking chatbot (&c. &c.) to take the human part out of the equation. Because that's just depressing.

Things weren't much better on the Android front. I tried Foxit on Android as well, just out of curiosity, and sure enough, while it lacked the Ribbon (the one benefit of a phone screen is that it's too small for such a shitty interface) it still had the odious little AI bubble. So I uninstalled it immediately.

If you've been in a similar situation at any point, may I recommend Sumatra PDF for your desktop PDF reading needs, and PDF viewer lite for Android. Both of those seem to fit my needs perfectly well right now: no ads, no subscriptions, no Ribbon, no AI, no bullshit. Just a thing to read PDFs with. Which should not be a hard thing to find in 2025. But apparently this is the world we've built for ourselves.

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