#oneaday Day 59: Popularity produces pricks

And not in the way you might be thinking. Okay, there are times when someone getting popular or enjoying some success with something leads to them becoming a prick, but that is not what I'd like to talk about today. I'd like to talk about life as a small-scale creative person on the Internet, and what happens when something you produce manages to extend far outside of its usual audience.

I'm prompted to talk about this as a result of the thoroughly lovely RoseTintedSpectrum's recent video on the first series of beloved video game TV show GamesMaster, which, to put it mildly, has been doing numbers since he released it. If you haven't watched it yet, I highly recommend giving it a look:

What we've all been noticing since the video started blowing up, however, is how much more frequent comments from complete arseholes become once you cross a particular popularity threshold. Not necessarily comments that are being directly insulting to the video maker, but comments from people who are just being dickish. People who use terms like "woketard". People who think the '90s was a utopia where white people flourished and you never, ever had to look at those filthy Muslims. You know the sort of people. The same sort of people who cry "DEI" anyone someone with a slight tan appears on screen.

When this first started happening, we were discussing the phenomenon in a Discord server that hosts a number of UK-based retro gaming and retro tech YouTubers, and we all had similar stories to share. There comes a point, it seems, usually after you cross the 1,000 views mark, where there's a marked uptick in comments from twats.

It makes sense when you think about it. A video blowing up and getting a lot of views means that it's being pushed by the ever-mysterious YouTube Algorithm to people beyond your usual audience and subscriber base, which means people from circles you might not normally mix (or want to associate) with may start stopping by. And boy, do they love to hear themselves talk.

I had something similar a while back when I had my own video "blow up". It was this one, a video I'm still pretty pleased with, but which left me feeling well and truly vindicated in just making videos about what pleases me, rather than what is guaranteed to be "popular".

Because what no-one tells you about getting popular and suddenly attracting all these complete penii is that it's genuinely stressful and often quite upsetting. I got to a point where I had to "pause" comments on the video above because the influx of them was stressing me out so much. And I wasn't even getting nearly as many dickheads as Rosie is getting on his video. It was just overwhelming, and not in a good way; I did not like it at all.

The same is true for anything tangentially related to social media or online presence. Post something — be it picture, video, blog post, article, whatever — that manages to get a significant reach, and it's seemingly inevitable that you'll have to deal with dickheads. This is, of course, frustrating, because one would hope that it's possible to get a significant reach on something without attracting the very dregs of Internet society, but with every "success story" like the ones I've described above, it seems increasingly inevitable that the dickheads? Oh they will come. They will come in droves.

I wonder how many people have been put off from a potential career of making creative things online by this sort of thing. I guess after a certain point you start to get used to it and be able to tune things out — and once you reach a certain size as an online personality, you can start hiring staff to take care of things like the comments section for you, so you can focus exclusively on actually making the videos.

But for everyone who gets to the point where they're able to hire a staff, I'm sure there are myriad more who gave up the first time they saw mild success, because the dickheads came. And I can't help thinking that's a real shame. Online culture shouldn't have come to this. But it has, and we just have to live with it, it seems, because no-one seems in a particular hurry to do anything about it.

Thank heavens for YouTube's "Hide user from channel" setting, at least, which means the dickhead of your choice is banished to the abyss; you'll never see them in your comments section again, and neither will the rest of your audience — but, here's the fun bit: they're still able to rage impotently at you, never knowing that you've effectively "blocked" them because YouTube doesn't tell them that.

This is the one bit of YouTube I can honestly say is absolutely masterful. There are few things better than knowing that there are dickheads who think they're posting amazing putdowns of your latest work, only for their comments to be silently banished to the abyss before they get anywhere near you.

Anyway, the Internet sucks, but go subscribe to Rosie 'cause he makes good vids. Ta-ra.

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 58: Was Ignorance Bliss?

There's some nasty shit going on in the world right now. Without getting bogged down in the details, there are some vicious riots going on "Up North" in this green and pleasant land, following the horrible killing of several young girls at their dance class.

It's hard to understand quite how outrage over the murders has escalated to what it is, but it's fair to say that things have gotten A Bit Racist, to say the least. Last I heard of the situation, a Holiday Inn Express that was supposedly housing immigrants — immigrants completely unrelated to the murders, I might add — was besieged by exactly the sort of people you're probably picturing when talking about people who are A Bit Racist Against Immigrants.

I won't dwell on the situation because I haven't read up much on it, so I'll refrain from commenting further about specifics. But it's brought something into focus for me which is a tad worrying: the fact that despite how we're supposedly a lot more tolerant, progressive and understanding these days, as a society, a lot more of this horrible shit appears to be happening.

Whether it's racist riots against people who had nothing to do with a horrible crime, transphobia at the Olympics (against someone who isn't actually trans) or just general foul behaviour and intolerance, we seem to have hit something of a bump in the road in attempting to create a 21st century utopia.

Who am I kidding; we absolutely were not on the road to a utopia. Everything has been going to shit for a while, so it's perhaps not altogether surprising that people are starting to act up, even if their behaviour and attitudes are completely misdirected. So I have to ask myself: was ignorance actually bliss?

I think back to my time living through the '80s, '90s and '00s and I don't remember ever feeling the sense of existential anxiety and dread over the world that I do these days. It's entirely possible that this was entirely due to our collective ignorance of various groups of people who were downtrodden and oppressed, which of course carries its own problems, but I don't remember encountering anywhere near the sort of outright hatred that is expressed today towards certain groups.

And it wasn't as if we weren't aware of the people who come in for the brunt of the abuse today. I just legitimately don't remember the hatred being anywhere near as vicious as it is today.

At least some of that is down to social media, of course. It's entirely possible that hatred like this was going on, but no-one saw it because not everyone had the means to plaster all their odious beliefs over every available space online. There was no "collective public space" like Twitter once was (and I don't think it is that any more, since a significant portion of people have abandoned it completely, and the most active of those remaining tend to veer fairly hard right) and so people tended to stick to their own communities.

On the one hand, that probably allowed hate groups to thrive in private; on the other, well, you can see the result of everyone being thrown together just from a casual glance at Twitter on any given day. It's not pretty.

Part of the existential anxiety and dread I feel over this whole situation is whether or not I "should" be doing something more, or even if that's possible. I've always settled for some variation of "treat others as you would like to be treated", and even take that as far as not commenting mean things on YouTube videos I really dislike (because I hate it when I get horrible comments). But is that really enough today? And if not, what can one do, other than simply actively not be a racist transphobic shit, and not go deliberately seeking fights?

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#oneaday Day 56: Disconnect

I'm officially on holiday for a week! I don't have anything much planned for the time off, aside from our trip on Thursday to go and look at pianos, but I'm going to try and be vaguely "productive" with my time. That means I'm going to try and force myself out in this heat and into the gym — once I'm in the air conditioning, I'm sure it'll be fine — and I'm going to record some videos, and perhaps write some stuff.

One thing I'm going to try and make an effort to do is not look at "online" stuff as much as humanly possible. I'm not going to look at Twitter (easy, since I don't have an account any more except the official one I use for work), I'm not going to look at Facebook (ditto), I'm not going to look at BlueSky (easy enough) and I'm probably going to try and ration my Discord usage as much as possible also.

I just don't want to know, you see. I don't want or need to know what people are arguing about today, or what the worst people on the Internet are being sexist, racist or transphobic about today. I don't want to know about the seemingly endless parade of layoffs in the games industry. And I don't want to know how shit online media in general is. I know all these things. They are not going to change.

Instead, I would like a nice, quiet week off, away from it all as much as possible. This will demand a certain amount of willpower, of course, but I'm confident I can find enough things to occupy myself with that I won't need to idly flip through social-related apps on my phone. I have games to play, books to read, episodes of Deep Space Nine to watch, music to play, videos to make and all manner of other things. So why should I waste my time with stuff that, on balance, makes me miserable?

I shouldn't, obviously. So that's the plan. Minimise looking at anything potentially upsetting, frustrating or annoying online and just enjoy the things I have around me. I will, of course, still be checking in here and those videos I'm making will be up on YouTube, but aside from that… a bit of "digital detox" is just what the doctor ordered for a week. I hope it leaves me feeling refreshed, because heaven knows I feel run-down right now.

Time for the first sleep of the holiday, then. Bring on the aircon!

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#oneaday Day 55: Do Not Turn AI On Without Asking Me

Partway through writing the previous post, I was surprised to see a weird yellow underline appear under one of the words I'd used. I hovered over it and was horrified to see the symbol no-one wants to see pop up, completely unasked for and unbidden. It seems that Automattic, makers of WordPress and specifically the JetPack plugin that handles things like social sharing and search engine optimisation, have been sneaking in an "AI Assistant" without anyone asking for it.

And I really haven't asked for it, because I saw it pop up in the sidebar a few months back and immediately turned it off in the options. See:

And yet turning it off in there has not made it go away. Because this shit is still here:

I do not want this. I did not ask for this. I specifically turned this off and it's still fucking there. And you can guarantee with that "Available Requests" counter at the bottom, they're going to try and sell me a subscription plan to get more "credits" for their stupid pointless pile of crap feature.

I am not the only one who feels this way. And the fact that comments are closed on WordPress' blog announcing this garbage feature speaks volumes.

A recent study published by the Journal of Hospitality Marketing and Management suggests that the terms "AI" or "artificial intelligence" are proving a turnoff to users.

"When AI is mentioned, it tends to lower emotional trust," said the lead author Mesut Cicek. "We found emotional trust plays a critical role in how consumers perceive AI-powered products."

The study is mostly around purchasing decisions rather than just generally using services, but the point stands: people see "AI" in something these days, and unless they're an insufferable Silicon Valley-poisoned techbro, they are immediately switched off by it. Social network Bluesky recently announced that they were partnering with social analytics and scheduling platform Buffer, and the response was universally negative not because Buffer is a particularly bad service on the whole — I've used it in the past — but because they, like so many other tech companies right now, have shoehorned in an "AI Assistant" when no-one wanted one.

No-one wants this. Stop trying to make AI happen. It's not going to happen.

I've long recommended WordPress as a great platform for folks who want to build a regularly updated website without getting too deep into the nitty gritty of web dev. But forcing AI on people may cause me to rethink that somewhat.

I wouldn't mind it being there if it was opt-in, and one could ignore it. But it is not. It is turned on by default. And you can't make it completely go away, only stop it being quite as annoying.

I cannot wait for this AI "gold rush" to be over. It is infesting everything even vaguely tech-related right now, including services that, as noted, I would previously have recommended without any reservations whatsoever.

Fuck off, AI. As a large language model, you are ill-equipped to receive my fist up your arsehole, but you're going to anyway.

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#oneaday Day 53: Our AI-powered dystopian garbage future

I was unfortunately exposed to this video today:

For those who quite understandably can't bring themselves to watch it based on the thumbnail and source alone, it's a video about how a dad is super-proud of his daughter and her athletics ability, but how he also knows that his daughter idolises an Olympic athlete. All seemingly wholesome and nice on the surface, until the main point of the ad: the Dad gets Google Gemini (which is Google's ChatGPT-esque chatbot interface) to write the athlete in question a "fan letter" that is supposedly from his daughter.

It's difficult to know exactly where to start with how fucked up this is. But I think as good a place as any is to point out that written communication between people has always been a means of direct, personal contact — particularly if it's via what is seen as a medium that takes a bit more effort, such as a handwritten letter. Of course, chances are that if the "fan letter" ever made it to the athlete in question, any response would probably be a carefully vetted template from a PR representative rather than the athlete herself, which sticks something of a pin in the "direct, personal contact" thing, but that's no reason that regular people who aren't PR consultants should auto-generate things that are supposed to be personal.

If someone inspires you, you presumably respect them. And if you respect them, you should demonstrate that respect by making an appropriate effort when attempting to contact them. And getting an AI to write a fan letter for you is the height of disrespect. It tells the recipient that you don't even respect them enough to communicate with them in your own words. It tells them that you would rather get a machine to handle your communication than "waste time" writing things yourself.

"But what about people who aren't able to write?" you may ask. To that I would point out that in order to get Google Gemini to write something, you still have to write a fucking prompt for it, and if you're capable of doing that you're capable of writing a letter. They teach how to do that in primary school. At least they used to.

There are myriad other ways to get your point across without getting garbage generative AI involved, even if you're incapable of holding a pen or typing on a keyboard. There's voice recognition, allowing you to still communicate in your own words without typing. Or you can get someone to help you — remember other people? Remember how to speak to them? Or do you need ChatGPT for that too? I'm a socially anxious autistic recluse and I can still talk to a person if I absolutely have to, and on more than one occasion I have sent some form of personal message to someone who genuinely inspires me, all in my own words.

We absolutely should not normalise the use of AI to craft even form responses to emails. I used to get mildly offended when a pal of mine used the "auto-respond" text message facility on his phone, which would send a rather blunt "Answer is YES" or "Answer is NO" SMS on his behalf if he couldn't be bothered to type a full message, but at least in that instance I know he had at least read my message and considered whether to respond in the affirmative or negative.

AI zealots seem to think that garbage like this is going to revolutionise communication between human beings, making it "more efficient" or some such bullshit. But all it's going to do is remove any semblance of personality from an individual's method of communication with you — something which is already somewhat at risk as a result of the homogenisation of culture brought about by the Internet. Look at how many people fall back on the same memes and turn of phrase these days rather than communicating in their own individual fashion, using their background and location as a means of making their communication unique. Now imagine even that layer of personalisation being taken away, with everyone "communicating" with one another using that smug, pretentious tone all AI chatbots appear to have developed.

"You're just resistant to change!" Yes, I am, if that "change" is demonstrably harmful to the way we interact with one another and our culture in general. Anyone who uses AI to communicate with someone rather than drafting an email, chat message or social media post themselves is an inconsiderate, disrespectful asshole, and I will absolutely not shift my opinion on this. I will, however, point and laugh.

So fuck off with your "Gemini" garbage, Google. And Mr Man's little girl? Tell your father to go fuck himself, punch him in the balls hard enough that he doesn't have any more children, and go write something yourself, with a pen. I can guarantee that your idol Sydney will find that far more meaningful and emotionally worthwhile than what is effectively a form letter that you didn't even write the prompt for.

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#oneaday Day 51: The Art of the Thumbnail

I'm in a Discord with some other (relatively) low-subscriber retro gaming and tech YouTubers, and we've had some interesting discussions over there. One subject that comes up frequently that I think I've derived the most value from is that of video thumbnails.

To put this in context, prior to joining this Discord, and for quite some time, my YouTube channel looked something like this:

I don't dislike this look. I was rather fond of how each "series" I was doing had its own distinct appearance, and I feel each thumbnail got nicely to the point: telling viewers that it was a video about a particular game on a particular platform.

But that's not really how YouTube works. However nice it looks to have a lineup of games with lovely consistent thumbnails Criterion Collection-style, it doesn't necessarily bring the views in. And so, with the advice and encouragement of the folks in the aforementioned Discord, I do things a little bit differently now.

This is how my channel looks today:

I'm pleased with this. Because I feel like these thumbnails do a much better job of intriguing and attracting the viewer's attention without assuming knowledge — i.e. "what is 'Atari A to Z'?" — while still allowing me a certain degree of consistency and coherence that makes my work immediately identifiable if you know what to look for.

Best of all, I haven't resorted to any of the more flagrantly transparent "clickbait" techniques, and "YouTube Face" is nowhere to be seen. The videos I make on YouTube are not for the same audience as Mr. Beast, so I make zero effort to court the sort of people who respond to those sorts of thumbnails.

And it works. At least I think so. Some of my videos perform about as well as what I considered a "solid performance" two or three years ago — that is to say, breaking three figures in the view count — but quite a lot more of them exceed that by two, three or even four times. And I've had a few breakout successes: my Super Woden GP 2 video sits at 86K views to date, my look at Ultima love letter Moonring has 21K views to date (and a very long tail), my video covering the announcement of The400 Mini attracted 14K views, and most recently a video on Project Gotham Racing 3 brought in a relatively modest but still impressive-for-my-channel 2.5K pairs of eyes.

I don't do this for the views, as I quite frequently state; I do it because I enjoy it. But I won't pretend it's not nice when a video does well — at least partly because it results in a bit of pocket money for me. That Super Woden GP 2 video made me over a hundred quid within a few days of it being posted. And now I get a small payout from YouTube earnings (i.e. the minimum payment threshold) every couple of months, whereas once it was a far-off goal I thought I'd never achieve. That's nice.

The secret behind those thumbnails? It's not really anything complicated. The most effective advice from the Discord I've followed is to keep text to just a few bold words, and present those words using at least two of the following: a bold outline around the letters; a bold drop shadow; and slightly rotating various parts of the complete text so that the eye is drawn to lines that aren't quite "straight". That's about it. I don't overuse colour; I don't overdo the "big red arrow" or "circling the obvious thing" tricks (although I put in a big red arrow occasionally as an in-joke to the group, which refers to itself as the "Big Red Arrow Club"); and, as noted, I don't do the "YouTube Face".

It works for me. The result is a channel full of videos I'm proud to call my own, and which a gradually (very gradually) growing number of people are coming to appreciate. That's pleasing to me.

YouTube and YouTube culture has myriad problems, but it's still the best place to create and share stuff like this. It's a valuable means of self-expression and sharing one's interests, and it's something I'm glad I decided to get stuck into exploring properly.

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#oneaday Day 49: No Hate

I have little to no time for cynical negativity, and I've felt this way for quite some time. I've been trying to pin down exactly why I feel like I can't participate in a conversation where one or more of the participants has switched to "cynical negativity" mode, and I think I've just answered my own question: it's because it feels like those who are being negative are trying to close the conversation.

I don't always mean literally, as in "let's not talk about this any more", but I tend to find that a negative opinion about something almost certainly stops people from wanting to pipe up and say "actually, I liked it", because these days that often seems to lead to an unnecessarily heated argument. Both sides become entrenched in their respective positions, and both inevitably come out of the encounter feeling worse about the other person.

I know. I have been there on a frustrating number of occasions. There are Discord servers that I have come to feel less than welcome in because I liked something that someone with a louder voice than me didn't. And I feel it's genuinely quite hard to find a place where you can just go and be enthusiastic about something any more, without some killjoy jumping in and rattling off a laundry list of its "flaws". And the negative one always seems to come off better than someone who feels positively about something — even when the positive one clearly knows a lot more about the thing in question.

Once someone has opened that initial negativity valve, one of two things tends to happen: 1) the conversation ends, with the positive person left feeling like they can no longer talk about something they like, or 2) other people, some of whom have no experience with the thing under discussion, feel emboldened to jump on board with the person being negative, leaving the positive person feeling like they're being ganged up on.

There are responses to this, and I've heard them all.

"If you really love something, you criticise it." That may be true, but "criticising it" is not the same as shitting all over it and, in some cases, casting aspersions on those who do like it.

"Stop being so defensive." I am defensive because you are attacking something that is important to me.

"People are allowed to have different opinions." If that is the case, why do I now feel like I cannot open my mouth and express my support for the thing that "the room" has now decided is "bad"?

"Stop playing the victim." I'm sorry, but after probably over a decade of this at this point — of feeling like I have no place to really "belong" — I feel somewhat hard done by.

More than anything, though, it's just boring. I know we can all have a good laugh at the creative ways in which people talk about things they dislike — it's a lot harder to be "amusing" when you're being positive, it seems — but when no-one seems to like anything any more, it becomes extremely tiresome.

I'm not saying no-one is allowed to dislike things. I'm not saying no-one is allowed to hate things with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns. I'm saying I wish people would just be a little more considerate of those who like things, and want nothing more than to be able to talk about the things they like with other people.

Someone liking or loving something is an opportunity to learn and grow. Even if you end up not feeling the same way about the thing in question, you can learn something about the person you were talking to, and why the thing might be important to them. Meanwhile, if you close them down by saying you hate the thing before they've even had a chance to express themselves fully, that's a potential relationship that is never going to go anywhere.

I feel bad that I even have to justify this. But with every passing day, I feel more and more alienated from people who should, in theory, be my friends, based on our shared interests. But when I'm confronted with negativity, I don't feel welcome. I don't feel like anyone wants to understand me. And I don't feel like anyone wants to be my friend.

That's a really shitty way to be feeling, let me tell you. And I hope it never happens to you.

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#oneaday Day 46: I Fucking Hate Emoji

I fucking hate emoji. And I judge you negatively if you use them. I can't control it. I hate the fucking things. And I firmly believe that using them, particularly to excess, makes you look like an absolute idiot.

I say this as someone who frequently still uses the ":)" emoticon from the early days of the Internet, though only in instant messages. I don't use any others except very occasionally a ":(" if something bad has happened, but I tend to feel like using something as flippant as an emoticon somewhat detracts from the perceived gravity of the situation under discussion, so there are times when I refuse to use them altogether.

Emoji, though, are the scourge of modern communication. Particularly any variation of the "laughing" emoji.

I'm talking about these cunts -> 😂🤣

Because inevitably they are used excessively, and usually in a context where they are mocking or patronising someone rather than expressing genuine amusement. I'm particularly not-fond of them on Facebook posts that use that annoying "auto e-card" setting or whatever it is where an unfunny joke by an annoying person is absolutely fucking surrounded by them. You know, like this.

I judge people who use that particular setting on Facebook even more negatively than people who just use emojis.

I think my absolute least favourite use of emoji, though, is when someone insists on punctuating every few words of a sentence with them, as if we're all too stupid to read the big scary words and need little pictures to go along with them in order to understand what's going on.

I had a book called Bunny Rabbit Rebus when I was a kid, and I found it kind of interesting, but also kind of annoying. For the unfamiliar, a rebus is when you represent a word (or part of a word) using pictures or symbols, and Bunny Rabbit Rebus used them for significant portions of its text. It was mildly amusing to the childish me at first, but by the time I'd figured out that a capital letter "E" coloured red meant "Ready" (Red E, geddit) I was already starting to think that this book thought it was much more clever than it actually was. And I was, like, five years old at the time.

Whenever I read a post from someone who insists on writing things like "Feeling 🙏 blessed because of my 👪 family 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣" I just think of Bunny Rabbit Rebus, and immediately assume that whoever typed that shit has reverted to being a not-particularly-intelligent five year old.

I think part of this stems from how I've always been a very competent reader, and these stupid little icons break up text and actively make it harder to read, particularly when they're jammed in the middle of a sentence. I also kind of resent the use of them to tell me how I'm supposed to be feeling when I read the thing — or, indeed, in the most common use of the "laughing" emojis, that I'm being patronised by someone who, for whatever reason, disagrees with me and thinks that is worthy of "rolling on the floor laughing". Because polite disagreement is not a thing we do online any more.

Anyway, the long and short of this is that if you use emoji excessively, I will judge you. And I will laugh at you. And I don't need 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣 to do it.

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#oneaday Day 45: Happy Wordiversary

Apparently, according to my notifications anyway, today is the 16th anniversary of me signing up on WordPress.com. Indeed, looking back at my very first post it does seem that I started blogging on here on July 22, 2008.

Back in those days, I posted sporadically. I wasn't really sure what to do with a blog at the time, I just felt like I wanted one. It actually wasn't the first blog I'd had, either, although it's the only one that's survived this long.

I did, at one point, post an anonymous "Tales from the Staffroom" blog on BlogSpot that recounted my experiences as a classroom teacher, but there appears to be no trace of that left on the current Internet. There is an archive of it from as recently as 2023, but Google appears to have gone on a "Blogger purge" at some point in the last year, so the address no longer works on the current Web. This is a shame, but at least archive.org caught it before it disappeared.

At the time I started this blog, I was still working at the Apple Store as a "Creative" — that is to say, I was one of the people whose job it was to provide training sessions for Mac users on the use of creative software. Technically our job was supposed to be confined to lessons on Apple software only, but we inevitably found ourselves having to deal with customers using all manner of weird and wonderful pieces of software for their very specific needs.

This was partly our own fault — one guy on the Creative team was a Photoshop expert, so him happily covering that set the expectation with customers that we should all be able to cover Photoshop, even though several of us had specialisms in other areas — but also it just felt a bit mean to have someone just turn up, ask for help (which, nine times out of ten, was pretty simple, given that most folks who signed up for the "One to One" programme were new Mac users and often elderly) and tell them "no".

I enjoyed that job for quite a while. I had a nice group of friends and I was good at it. The pay was… all right, considering it was a retail position, and the freebies and staff discounts were excellent. Unfortunately it ended badly when the management of the store inexplicably went into something of a decline and started being unnecessarily harsh on the folks working for them. I ended up losing my job after standing up for a colleague of mine who absolutely was unfairly dismissed, but given that both management and the folks above them closed ranks, he was never going to get fair treatment. And, as it turned out, I didn't, either. Thankfully, I resigned before they could fire me, but it left an extremely bitter taste in my mouth with regards to all things Apple.

Anyway, I don't want to dwell on that too much because that's probably a whole other story I can tell another day. That was the context in which I was writing those first posts, though: I was, for a time, genuinely quite happy and satisfied with the way things were going. My life perhaps wasn't proceeding in the direction I had initially intended — after a nervous breakdown, I decided that classroom teaching really wasn't for me — but it was proceeding, at least. And having a blog was a nice breezy way to ponder on all sorts of things without any sort of real "pressure". I can't even remember if I'd joined Facebook or Twitter in 2008; I think I probably had, but social media certainly wasn't the all-encompassing force of shittiness that it is today back then.

It's interesting to look back and see things that no longer exist, such as PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game, where you earned experience points and other RPG-style benefits for simply browsing the Web. And it's also gratifying to see that so far as my tastes are concerned, some things never change.

You are, of course, always welcome to browse back into the archives via the dropdown in the sidebar. (I'm not sure where it is on mobile, probably at the bottom?) I'm not the same person I was back then — but every experience I've had, everything I've written about, has helped make me who I am today, for better or worse.

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#oneaday Day 38: The Mystery of Mario500

Earlier today, I was reading an article on retro gaming site Time Extension. The article was quite interesting — it was about the struggles academics were encountering in getting today's students (18 year olds) to engage with anything other than Minecraft or Fortnite. It's a good read, and I encourage you to take a few minutes and give it a look.

That's not what I want to talk about today, though. I want to talk about this comment I found underneath it.

A screenshot of a comment from the website "Time Extension". The comment is by a user named "Mario500", and is dated "Yesterday, 2:01pm". The comment reads "(note: the creator of this message was unable to finish reading this article immediately upon finding vulgar (or profane) language among its text)".

The "vulgar (or profane) language", by the way, was the word "damn", used in the context of the phrase "didn't give a damn".

Intrigued, I decided to delve into "Mario500"'s comment history. And what I found didn't make things any clearer. Because this is what I found:

A screenshot of Mario500's comment history. There are too many comments in the image to include in this alt text, but you can read them all at https://www.timeextension.com/users/Mario500/comments

I was immediately fascinated. Who is this person, and why do they seem to think they're the editor of Time Extension? Why do they ask questions about things a regular reader of Time Extension — and particularly a Nintendo fan — would almost inevitably be very familiar with? Why do they constantly refer to themselves in the third person (except in their earliest comments)? Why do they put everything in brackets?

I'm particularly fascinated by their apparent inability to understand sarcasm or exaggeration for comic effect, but for the life of me I cannot work out if they're taking the piss, if it's someone who really does think and talk like this — entirely possible that they're someone on the autistic spectrum, for example — or if they're a bot.

The bizarrely Puritan attitude throughout is odd, too. Besides the initial "vulgar (or profane) language", there's another comment that uses the exact same phrasing, along with one that offers "(suggestion: no hoping for swearing)" when an interview with a fan translator expresses that they hope the official release of a game keeps the naughty language intact, and possibly my favourite, "(suggestion: never insult thy self (or any other (separate) self))" in response to an article writer self-deprecatingly calling themselves a "moron" for selling their Gamecube setup.

I'm intrigued by Mario500's first comment, too. It lacks the later "gimmicky" elements of their subsequent replies, instead simply stating "This article could have been much more objective if I were involved in its creation."

They offer no further explanation of exactly how they would make the article — a lengthy feature about the history of media mogul Robert Maxwell's involvement in the games industry — any more "objective" than it already is, but chances are they, for some reason, took umbrage at the description of Maxwell's "shady business practices" in the article. But, I mean, those are pretty established facts at this point; no amount of "objectivity" (which, under these sorts of circumstances, generally means "stop saying mean things about bad people I like") can really spin it another way. Maxwell was a shit; he didn't deserve to die (probably), but he was still a shit.

(note: the creator of this message was unable to finish reading this article immediately upon finding vulgar (or profane) language among its text)

Anyway, I'm baffled. The rest of their profile on Time Extension is completely barren, they rarely get responses to their bizarre comments and I'm still not entirely unconvinced that they're a bot.

Still, it was a mild diversion earlier today. I thought you might be interested to see the stranger side of the Internet.

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