#oneaday Day 216: I've probably written all of this before

There are, as I type this, 2,850 posts on this blog. 2,851 including this one. As such, I've almost certainly written things multiple times. Yesterday's story about The Rough Book is one I've told before, for example, and even found myself using some of the same turns of phrase to describe various incidents.

But I think it's interesting to reflect back on things multiple times, many years apart, because doing so can cause you to look at those situations from a new perspective, perhaps with different life experiences under your belt. In the case of The Rough Book, I last wrote about it in 2012, when I didn't know I was autistic. Or, perhaps, when I hadn't been diagnosed as autistic. Because even in those innocent, pre-COVID days, I think I always knew that something was "up", as it were.

Hell, I mean, even COVID. Life has not been the same on Planet Earth since the pandemic hit, and many folks (including, I suspect, me and my wife) are still feeling the aftereffects (or perhaps it's more accurate to say ongoing effects) of the situation, thanks to the lack of understanding around things like "Long COVID" and suchlike.

It's hard to say if my life has got better or worse as time has gone on, looking back at these old posts and realising all the topics I've previously written about. I think, on the whole, I'm in a much better situation than I ever have been in every regard except for my physical health; I've had lower lows of mental health in particular (catastrophically low lows on multiple occasions) and I certainly have very little to complain about with my present employment situation.

I have found a niche and I'm damn well staying there as long as possible; I have no desire to ever go back to the periods of joblessness I've endured over the years. Even with the experience I've built up over the course of the past few years, I still feel like if I was suddenly out of work that I would struggle to cope in today's volatile, competitive job market. I have been very fortunate with the situation I've ended up in from that perspective. I took some risks to get here, in some ways it took an uncharacteristic amount of persistence, and I actually think the pandemic helped me secure the position I'm in now thanks to how it made remote working feasible for everyone.

I like having this blog, and being able to look back over the posts, particularly with the "Random Post" button at the top, then following a rabbit hole of "related posts". Of course, I have a big gap between the end of my first #oneaday stint and this one, but other things online — like MoeGamer and YouTube, for example — fill that gap to some degree. This is why I was so upset when WordPress.com pulled their whole "your blog has been deleted, teehee" shit a while back. This site isn't useful from a perspective of… well, anything, really, other than giving me a semi-private outlet to muse on whatever subjects I feel like writing about. But, goddammit, it's mine, and it's not beholden to any platform holders who can arbitrarily take it away from me. Not any more, anyway.

I don't get anywhere near the readership I used to with this blog. I don't even think my family and friends read it any more. I don't think anyone reads blogs any more, because they're too busy doomscrolling on social media or shit like TikTok. And while I hate that personally, I can't really tell other people what they "should" be doing, when the stuff I'm posting here is probably just as vapid as all the people yelling at the camera on TikTok.

Or is it? There's probably a whole discussion for another post in this, but I can say with complete honesty that what I've written here over the years has been an accurate reflection of me. I've always made a point of being honest — to myself as much as anyone who might be reading — while TikTok, from my admittedly limited experience to it, feels obnoxiously performative. Oddly, despite TikTok in theory being more "personal" thanks to being video-based — you see and hear the person — I still feel much more like I'm getting to know someone when I read what they write, rather than seeing them yelling breathlessly into their phone camera like the world's least scary follow-up to The Blair Witch Project.

It saddens me a bit that blogs aren't what they used to be. Hell, most people don't even call them "blogs" any more; these days they tend to be described as "newsletters", and most of them seem to be read via email rather than actually on their websites. But I'm still resolutely old-school in how I do things; this is my blog, and has been since (checks) 2008. And there's no real point changing up how I do things now, is there?

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 210: Making some video plans

I was hoping to make more videos over the course of December for "DOScember", but a nasty cold with a cough that's been lingering for a while (and still is a bit) put paid to those plans. I was really hoping to play through both The Dagger of Amon Ra and the spiritual successor to the Laura Bow series, The Crimson Diamond, but that hasn't happened. I did start trying to record a The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough, but my throat gave out in less than ten minutes, so I abandoned that plan.

I mean, there's no reason they still can't happen, they just won't be "DOScember" features any more. And that's fine. So I think I may well still go ahead with those, 'cause doing adventure game playthroughs is always a lot of fun.

I've been pondering other things to do along the way, too. One thing I definitely want to do is spend some time exploring other microcomputer systems alongside the Atari stuff I've done a bunch of to date. There was some interesting discussion on Bluesky earlier today about how the overly "Americanised" canon of gaming history has a habit of erasing stuff like the European microcomputer scene, so I want to spend some time redressing the balance there a bit. I've obviously done a lot of Atari stuff already, and I intend to keep going that because it's a personal passion, but I also want to make some use of the C64 "Maxi", TheA500 Mini and The Spectrum that I have, because those are all thoroughly lovely machines.

As good a place as any to start with those would be to work through the built-in games on each, since that's actually not something I've done to date for anything other than The400 Mini. So a cautious plan I have is to spend a bit of time exploring each of those systems' built-in libraries, then onward into some other stuff on each of those platforms, just like I've done with the Atari 8-bit.

Assuming my voice holds out, then, I think that's what I'm going to try and make a start on this weekend, along with maybe a bit of The Dagger of Amon Ra.

I've also reached a conclusion I think I've known all along: I am absolutely not cut out for streaming. I just can't be arsed with it. It's a lot of setup and effort to get going, it's a pain to promote (particularly given my potential audience is all over the globe and thus there's no "good" timezone for it) and the number of viewers I get (both live and on the archived version on YouTube) is crap compared to my standard videos. I know that's something that improves with time, but this is supposed to be a hobby, not work, so I'm just going to stick with what I know and enjoy, and which works well — which is YouTube.

I'm not ruling out occasional "special" streams for events, charity drives and suchlike, or occasional chats with my buddy Chris in a quasi-podcast format. But I'm not going to make it a regular part of my routine. I know several people who want desperately to "make it" as a streamer, and they seem to spend a lot of their lives being miserable, and I have no desire to get into that situation. I do this for fun.

So, amid a bit of game room reorganisation that may be happening this weekend, I'm going to make a start on another year of retro computing fun. Broadening my remit will be an interesting journey for me to take, and it may well bring some new people to the channel, too. I know from previous times I've done this that there are a couple of people who get a bit sniffy when I cover non-Atari stuff, but y'know what? My channel, my rules. I am interested in gaming and microcomputer history, and while Atari stuff will always carry significant personal meaning for me, I want to know more about the other parts of this side of things, too.

So that means C64, Spectrum and Amiga stuff! There's a huge library of things for me to explore on all of those platforms, and still plenty of Atari material I haven't covered, either. So I certainly don't think I'm going to be short of things to play and talk about this year. Now I just need to make the dang videos!

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#oneaday Day 203: A distressing dichotomy

I am, as you'll know if you've been reading this here blog for a while, suffering from a fair old bit of loneliness. As the years have gone by, groups of friends have gradually drifted away, and it feels like one of the longest holdouts in that regard is heading in that direction of late. I haven't heard from anyone in this group for probably several months at this point, and to be honest, I'm burnt out.

Here's my problem, see: I'm lonely, but I'm also absolutely exhausted feeling like the only one trying to make an effort to keep friendships going or to try and "fit in" places. I'm a member of several online communities (well, let's be real, Discord servers at this point, since self-contained online communities barely seem to be a thing any more) but the prospect of trying to raise my head, say hello and generally get "noticed" in some way is just… deflating. It almost doesn't feel worth the effort. It feels like fighting my way out of quicksand.

Take this group I'm referring to, for example. I have been feeling for quite some time that if I don't say something and attempt to start a conversation, no-one says anything. And indeed, I must confess, over the past few months I simply haven't said anything, just to see if that was actually the case. I had gotten tired, you see, of every time I attempted to start a conversation resulting in the things I said getting either shut down or ignored. In particular, I have tried to express enthusiasm for the things I've worked on professionally — which I'm very proud of — and my own creative projects — which likewise I want to share with people who are important to me — and have found myself rebuffed. And it seems no-one wants to talk about anything that is important to them, either, so silence it is.

This is not a healthy way to be, I know, but I feel frustrated and resentful any time I feel like I'm the only one who has been making an effort with a friendship. And so, day by day, I feel myself retreating further into my own private world, and feeling less inclined to want to come out and show myself.

Well, no. It's not that. It's that I find doing so to be immensely draining, particularly when it's in an environment or situation I find uncomfortable. Take our work Christmas outing recently for example; while we were out there were several people who clearly wanted to make an effort to get to know me a bit better, and I had those conversations where I could — but because we were in an inordinately noisy environment where it was very difficult (and uncomfortable) to have a conversation, I didn't feel like I could really carry things on. It was too tiring. I felt bad, because it was people showing an honest interest in me, but I just couldn't keep trying to have a conversation while I couldn't hear anything.

I ended up bowing out of the evening relatively early because my senses had just been completely overwhelmed by the noise. I had a good time overall; I just knew I couldn't take any more.

It sort of feels like a variation on that at other times. I don't want to be a lonely recluse who never talks to anyone, but when I never get anything back when I do attempt to initiate something — and when no-one else seemingly wants to initiate things with me without me prompting them — I get to a point where it just doesn't feel worth trying any more, which I fear will eventually build into actively pushing people away if and when they do ever reach out.

Perhaps the thing to do is just to accept that this is the way things are, and to try and structure my life accordingly. If people aren't going to make the effort themselves but they are still, for one reason or another, actually important to me, then I make some time to ensure that I get heard. It doesn't have to be much; perhaps just set aside a time each week to drop a quick message to the group in an attempt to start a conversation. That feels very formal, I know, and that's one of the reasons I haven't done something like this sooner — but right now it feels like doing something overtly "artificial-feeling" might be the only way I get my almost completely drained "Social" meter back up into the green.

I should probably mention at this point that I am inordinately grateful to my good pal Chris, who has stuck by me through exceedingly thick and enormously thin, and always has a kind word and receptive ear any time I drop him a message. The only trouble is he's on the other side of the world to me, so not someone I can just drop in on for some beers and video games.

My wife Andie is and always has been a rock, too, and any time I start feeling lonely I am grateful that I am not completely alone, thanks to her, our two cats (who both know to come and look after me when I'm feeling low — they're both sat with me on the sofa as I type this) and, of course, my family, who just accept me as I am, with all my myriad flaws.

Is that enough, though? It doesn't feel like enough. Something in my mind remains intensely dissatisfied in my socialisation, and I need to do something about it. So, as tempting as it is to just wallow in despair at things gradually getting worse on their own without my input… I guess it's time to acknowledge that I need to provide that input if I ever want things to get better again.

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#oneaday Day 196: Migration complete!

We sorted out the problems MoeGamer was having. If you happen to care, the problem I was having was this: the site itself appeared to be working just fine, but a number of image links were broken, the Media Library appeared to be full of empty images and attempting to hotlink to files that I knew were there was throwing a 404 "Not Found" error.

The solution was surprisingly simple. On my former Bluehost account, MoeGamer was hosted in a subdirectory of the public_html folder, and the domain name had been pointed to that subdirectory as its document root. That means if you went to moegamer.net, it would assume you meant "[the address of my hosting]/public_html/[the subfolder name]" rather than just the more conventional "[the address of my hosting/public_html/".

The problem stemmed from the fact that once my domain had been mapped to my Zume hosting instead, the document root was set to public_html rather than the subfolder, and that meant it wasn't quite looking in the right place for lots of things — most notably images hosted on the site that weren't being delivered via content delivery network, and plugins for WordPress.

The solution was simple: move all the MoeGamer files out of that subfolder into public_html and now everything is sorted and working as it should do. I'm glad; I was worried this was going to be a whole palaver to fix, but it turned out to be something pretty simple. It's just fortunate that I spotted the discrepancy when I did; I had a feeling Bluehost had done something "non-standard" when I hosted my sites with them, so I followed a hunch and it turned out to be correct.

I have little doubt that the guy helping me from Zume's support desk would have figured it out before long, though. Zume's customer service during this whole migration has been absolutely exemplary. And because they promise "same-day migration" but were unable to achieve this with Bluehost's dumbass setup, they've given me a free month of hosting as compensation. I didn't ask for this nor did I indicate I was in any way dissatisfied with their service; they just gave it to me. Top-notch stuff.

I know this was a whole faff, but hopefully I won't have to do it again for a while. Fingers crossed that Zume 1) sticks around and 2) doesn't get bought up by the company that made Bluehost (who used to be good!) shit. And in the meantime, I feel like both this site and MoeGamer have seen a significant performance increase, which is great.

Anyway, with that nonsense over, I can perhaps get back to more regular updates over on MoeGamer. I have a few games that I want to write about, but I've been holding off while all this was sorted. Perhaps I shall be spending some time writing tomorrow!

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#oneaday Day 195: Migration... almost complete?

Well, it seems my migration to a new web host has been mostly successfully completed. Both this site and MoeGamer are now safely ensconced on Zume's servers, and the nameservers have been switched over. There's a few little issues here and there which I'm hoping will resolve themselves as the DNS propagates or whatever it has to do, but other than that, things are looking pretty good!

I have to give a huge shout-out to Ross from Zume's support here, as he was inordinately patient with Bluehost's many, many attempts to make it as difficult as possible to just transfer your website from one place to another. Bluehost, like many other sites these days, seemingly insist on making you use a chat facility to get any sort of support, and, like most chat support services, seems to be staffed almost exclusively by people who don't really know what they're talking about. This meant it took several separate chat sessions by me to get them to do something approaching what we needed to perform the migration, and even then they still did it wrong multiple times.

I have confidence, though, that even if there are any lingering issues from the migration, Zume's support staff will be able to sort them out. Like I say, I'm hoping that most of these will be resolved by the DNS propagation completing, so I'm not going to worry too much about things for a few days. And in the meantime, it's nice to know that I can just get on with blogging here; I didn't even lose any posts from the last few days, which is great.

Anyway, that's that. If you happen to see any weirdness here or on MoeGamer for the next couple of days, that's why. Hopefully it will all be sorted soon, and we can return to business as usual!

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#oneaday Day 193: Migration woes

I was suspicious when the new hosting provider I've signed up with, Zume, offered "same-day migration" — not because I doubted their abilities, but because I doubted my current/prior host, Bluehost, would make it in any way easy to get everything off their servers and onto someone else's.

Turns out I was correct. Migrating a complete website setup like mine should be a case of going into cPanel and exporting something called a "cpmove" archive, which contains everything about the website: all its content, all its configuration, everything. Naturally, this is only something you can export yourself on a more expensive plan than I'm on, leading to multiple conversations with support people via a bloody chat interface, during which they consistently failed to understand what I was asking of them, despite me spelling it out to them very clearly and repeatedly.

The first time they ran the export, it seemingly worked correctly and created an archive, but said archive was, for some reason, faulty — and in the meantime, it had filled up my hosting account's storage space. So I then had to delete that and spend another couple of hours waiting for the person on the other end of the chat to run another export, only for them to first of all misunderstand the fact that I wanted to export two websites (this one and MoeGamer) not just this one, and then to completely miss the whole "cpmove" part.

Thankfully, the representative from Zume that I've been dealing with has been inordinately patient throughout this entire process, and has been keeping me informed on progress. It seems that he will be able to complete the migration without the "cpmove" part, it'll just take a bit longer to get things set up. I'm fine with this; I'm not in a rush to get it done, so I'd rather it be done right than done fast.

Self-hosting your own website certainly gives you more flexibility than being locked in to something like WordPress.com — to say nothing of the inherent risks of hosting your entire website on someone else's service — but man, it is a pain in the arse when something like this happens. And make no mistake: this is happening because Bluehost are deceptive fuckers who gave absolutely no indication when I signed up that their prices were going to increase this much after a year. We're talking an increase from about £60 to nearly £300. Absurd. And I bet they count on people just thinking "eh, I can't be bothered to fix it, so I'll just pay up".

Well, no. I'm not paying up. I'm looking forward to hitting the big red "CANCEL" button when all my sites are successfully transferred over, and here's hoping that Zume lasts at least a few years before enshittifying itself, too.

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#oneaday Day 191: Moving online home again?

Annoyingly, it's looking like I'm going to have to uproot this here site and MoeGamer yet again, because my current host has increased the annual price of hosting by literally about four times over the supposedly "introductory" offer I wasn't aware that I was on. Reading around, it seems this company — Bluehost, 'cause I'm going to name and shame — is notorious for doing this, and I am just the latest of many people to fall foul of it. So don't use Bluehost.

Thankfully, I have seen a few recommendations floating around, and I think the one I'm probably going to go with is Zume. This is a UK-based hosting service that comes particularly recommended by the nerds on r/webhosting, plus they supposedly do a free complete migration and you can pay monthly — though of course, as always, it works out more expensive to do that than paying for a year or two up front. Honestly, I think I'd rather have a predictable £10 a month than £X every year or two, though, as that's much easier to budget for.

I'm probably going to start the process for this going tomorrow. Supposedly they'll get the whole shebang done same-day, but it remains to be seen if that actually is the case. This is, I guess, then, your official warning that there may be some unexpected downtime both here and on MoeGamer at some point in the next couple of days.

I wish I didn't have to do this, as moving "online home" is almost as frustrating as having to move your real home. Granted, there's a lot less putting things in boxes and cleaning, but there's still a laundry list of things you need to remember to do — and inevitably an equally as long list of things that you have already forgotten that you need to do. But, well, I'm not paying nearly £300 for a year's web hosting, because that is daylight fucking robbery. £10 a month? Fine. I am 100% okay with that.

Here's hoping that 1) Zume sticks around for the long term, 2) Zume doesn't get eaten by a big corpo that jacks up prices to an absurd degree and 3) the whole migration process goes smoothly. Fingers crossed, and further updates as events warrant.

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#oneaday Day 184: Deprecated feature

I went into my Amazon wishlist earlier today, as I know it's the first port of call for several family members when trying to determine what to get me for Christmas, and I was a little perturbed to discover that it is seemingly not possible to change the order of the things on your wishlist any more. Or, to be more accurate, you can rearrange the order of the items in the first three rows in Grid view, but everything else doesn't respond to clicking and dragging like it used to.

I did a little research online and, indeed, it seems that Amazon deliberately removed this a while back. It's a "deprecated feature", apparently.

I always find the idea of "deprecated features" bizarre, because inevitably the features that get "deprecated" are ones that are actually useful, and in many cases they don't actually get replaced by something with similar functionality. In the case of Amazon wishlists, aside from the Grid view exception I note above (which I suspect is a bug) you can now only sort them in various automated ways, or you can push something to the top of the wishlist by going to its product page and "re-adding" it. You can also move it to another list and then move it back to the original list. Both of these are, I'm sure you'll agree, inferior to being able to just drag the damn thing to the position you want it — or, indeed, click a "send to top" button, which I'm sure also used to exist.

Modern software — be it stuff you run on your computer or that which powers billion-dollar ecommerce platforms — seems to be full of stuff getting "deprecated" without any real net benefit to the user. The usual interpretation of this is that the creators of said software want to discourage users from doing something in favour of doing something else with a similar function. But in Amazon's case I'm really struggling to see why I might be discouraged from reordering my wishlist into whatever order I want… particularly as there is no real alternative, aside from the rather clunky options I've just outlined.

There's a lot of discussion going on right now about how tech is genuinely getting worse year on year, and it's not just people "getting old". The writer, blogger and tech commentator Ed Zitron does some great work in this field, and I encourage you to check out his blog Where's Your Ed At and his podcast Better Offline, because while both paint a bleak picture of the tech landscape as it exists in 2024, some of you might find it reassuring that no, it's not just you, things really are getting worse in terms of usability and overall functionality.

As for me, well, I guess it's time to go re-add some stuff to my wishlist so it gets pushed to the top!

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#oneaday Day 179: Your occasional reminder that AI can fuck off

I saw a TV ad for "Apple Intelligence" yesterday. The concept of the ad is that someone is angry someone at their workplace keeps stealing their pudding — hahaha, so hilarious and cosy and relatable — and writes them a furious email. They then click the "Friendly" button on Apple Intelligence and the email is rewritten to be the most milquetoast, handwringy, insincere thing you've ever seen. And this is supposed to be a selling point.

Elsewhere, a YouTuber I know had someone in their comments getting pissy about how they pronounced "ZX81", and, presumably in an attempt to further their argument, the commenter in question then copy-pasted a ChatGPT conversation — without editing out the "ChatGPT says:" bits — that didn't even particularly help their cause.

I keep seeing YouTube thumbnails made with AI art-stealing machines. Coca-Cola made a Christmas ad with AI. The memorial lunch for beloved broadcaster Steve Wright had an invitation that was made with AI. Entire websites are made of AI slop. And even here in fucking WordPress, I can't escape the sodding "Generate with AI" button.

I fucking hate it. I want it to go away. I want people who say "but it's good for summarising things" to drown in the sea. I want people who say "but it's better than doctors at diagnosing problems!" to be the victims of the worst malpractice the medical industry has ever seen. I wish eternal loneliness and desolation on those who use it to write emails. And I want it out of the pieces of software I use on a daily basis.

We're even starting to get accounts on BlueSky that pretend to be real people, but simply respond with ChatGPT answers that are tuned to be deliberately argumentative. What is the fucking point of all this shit? How is it benefiting humanity and productivity in any way whatsoever?

It isn't. All it's doing is continuing to make tech worse, year on year, while keeping oblivious shareholders — who aren't interested in anything but seeing "growth" — happy that companies are providing supposed "new innovations" that actually don't provide any sort of useful functionality whatsoever.

I'm aware I'm ranting incoherently, but honestly right now it feels like it's pointless to even try and come up with a cogent argument. This shit is infesting everything, and it's becoming impossible to escape from. And I legitimately do not understand how anyone can possibly think this shit is in any way better than what we had before.

I guess the one upside is that with how much AI is being used pointlessly to provide "summaries" of Google Searches, YouTube videos and other such shite, the planet will burn down all the sooner, so eventually we won't have to worry about it at all. Then the Great Thinkers of the day — assuming anyone survives — can stroke their chins for two hundred years about "where it all went wrong".

Here. Here is where it all went wrong.

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#oneaday Day 178: Acceptable mediocrity

My Bold Proclamation of the Day is that I feel like it would probably behoove us, as a society, to be more comfortable with mediocrity than we are.

This evening, Andie and I went out for dinner, because we both just wanted to get out of the house for a bit. We went to a local chain pub that we've been to a few times before and always liked, and the food was fine. It was perfectly acceptable. If we were living in a world where star ratings were used properly, I would rate it three out of five stars. It was not the sort of meal that I will remember for the rest of my life (or indeed the rest of the week, probably) but it also wasn't so terrible that I wanted to throw it in the face of the chef who microwaved it.

Thing is, I don't feel hard done-by to have a three-out-of-five meal at a place like this. In fact, that's pretty much what I expect. But I feel like the way we live life today, a three-out-of-five meal would be seen as somehow "unacceptable", and my commentary on how it was perfectly fine and exactly what you want sometimes, would be ignored completely, with nothing but the star rating being seen as a sort of "inverse recommendation".

Back when I worked at the Apple Store in the late '00s, the company introduced a scheme called NetPromoter. Initially I thought this was an Apple initiative, but I have learned in the years that followed that it is quite a common thing in the service and retail sectors generally.

If you're not familiar with NetPromoter, it goes like this. You engage with a customer and provide them your service or sell them something. Then, after they have departed your premises/website/whatever, they get emailed a short survey in which they are asked to rate their experience out of 10. Higher scores are, of course, good, and are regarded as "Promoters" — people who are actively likely to recommend (or "promote") your store or service to family, friends and colleagues. Conversely, low scores are, naturally, bad, and are regarded as "Detractors" — people who will recommend against your services.

All sounds reasonable enough, right? What if I told you that only scores of 8 and above were regarded as "Promoters", and anything below that was considered a "Detractor"? Because that's how it fucking works. There's no option for "this was fine, I had no complaints, but it also wasn't anything particularly special that I feel like shouting about" either. If we assume someone who felt that way believed that was worth a 5 or 6 out of 10, the poor old employee responsible for that perfectly acceptable service would probably find themselves on the receiving end of some sort of disciplinary action. Because yes, of course, systems like NetPromoter are inevitably used to browbeat employees into submission, rather than to actually improve things for the customer.

The same is true of online reviews for pretty much anything. Have you ever noticed how when an app on your phone bugs you to rate it, it's never "Leave us a review!", it's always "Leave us a 5-star review!"? That's because to most folks online these days, there are only really two ratings: 5-star (good) and everything else (bad). The video game sector has, of course, also been guilty of this for as long as the games press has been a thing; "70%" is seen as a barely average passing grade, and anything below that will almost certainly be ignored or considered "bad" by a significant portion of the games-purchasing public.

I've spoken numerous times about how I've had the absolute best times with games that, on average, net scores of 65% and below, and it's often for very similar reasons that I find mediocrity in other areas of life perfectly acceptable: sometimes that's precisely what you're in the mood for. This evening, we were in the mood for some average pub food, and by golly, that's most certainly what we got. When I'm in the mood to play a Neptunia game, I also know exactly what I'm getting and am in the correct mindset to appreciate it, too.

It's time we embraced perfectly acceptable mediocrity. Perfection is the enemy of good, as the aphorism says, and I absolutely agree with that. If you spend all your time looking for something that is really worth that 5-star rating, you're never going to be satisfied with anything.

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