2488: That Happened

Are you familiar with the subreddit /r/thatHappened? It is one of the more popular subreddits out there, devoted to posting the sort of "PLEASE LIKE AND SHARE!!" garbage that people so like to festoon their social media walls with these days.

Posts that crop up on /r/thatHappened typically have a number of things in common.

Firstly, they usually involve someone making a point of saying they were doing something entirely mundane, like going to school or filling their car with petrol.

Next, they introduce another character of some description, typically a stranger, but one whom the author of the post mysteriously seems to know absolutely everything about, right down to their ethnicity, age, employment status, affluence and anything else you'd care to mention.

Optionally, a child can be involved in the story. If a child is involved in the story, said child will be quoted saying something that no child in the world has ever said, something which can easily be discerned by the use of vocabulary or turn of phrase. Even at my most precocious growing up, when I knew what words like "floccinaucinihilipilification" and "antidisestablishmentarianism" meant (and how to spell them), I still spoke like, y'know, a kid. Kids in these stories never do, usually coming out with some sort of profound wisdom you'd normally expect to hear from a wizened old karate master or something.

The author of the story, the character they introduced (who is inevitably a minority of some description) and/or the child will then become involved in some sort of altercation with an antagonist, who is almost definitely a white male, because as we all know white men are all literally Satan.

The story will then go one of two ways. 1) The author, the character and/or the child will then devastate their opponent in some exaggerated manner, either physically or with razor-sharp wit. The white male(s) will then inevitably leave with their tails between their legs. Alternatively, 2) The author, the character and/or the child will suffer some sort of sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic or transphobic indignity that is so profoundly terrible that the author's immediate reaction was to post it on Facebook rather than take it to the authorities.

In the case of 1): If the altercation took place in a public place such as a school, petrol station or coffee shop, everyone surrounding the author, the character and/or the child will then spontaneously break into applause and at least one person will be crying.

In the case of 2): The author will blame the altercation on a major event that has happened in the news recently and will confess to be "crying right now", with bonus points if they are doing so "into [their] cereal" or some other foodstuff.

In both cases, the author will then attempt to sign off with some sort of quasi-poetic but ultimately asinine truism and encourage everyone to Like, Comment and Share their post to "raise awareness". Said post (which is inevitably set to Public visibility, even if the author typically keeps their social media pages private) will then receive multiple thousands of Likes, Comments and Shares through the phenomenon of virality, with a significant number of people sharing it doing so blindly without bothering to ponder how exactly something quite so improbable happened, or indeed questioning the author on further details of the incident. (This was a terrible racist/sexist/ableist incident, don't you know? You can't ask questions, you might traumatise the poor soul further!)

Once you're familiar with this template, you can spot bullshit a mile off. I encourage you to get intimately acquainted with it before clicking that "Share" button in the future. On a related note, I also encourage you to familiarise yourself with Snopes.com if you aren't already.

That is all.

2461: Gratuitous Self-Promotion

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Hey, you. If you're reading this, chances are you know me in some capacity or another, either online, offline or perhaps both. You may even follow this blog on a semi-regular basis, in which case thank you very much for enduring my directionless rambling.

Some of you may not be aware that I have another site, however; one with a bit more "structure" to its content, but also with a regular posting schedule. Some of you may already be aware of it, but perhaps haven't checked it out for a while. And some of you may already be loyal readers, in which case, again, thank you very much.

My other site is called MoeGamer and you can find it at http://moegamer.net.

MoeGamer has a pretty straightforward mission: to provide detailed and in-depth coverage of Japanese and Japanese-inspired games that often don't get the attention they deserve in the mainstream press — or, in the worst cases, get written off for one reason or another, usually on the grounds that they're "pervy".

I started it as a continuation of a regular, weekly column I had when I worked as USgamer; dubbed JPgamer, the column built up an audience of regular readers who appreciated what I did for these games, which was something that many other sites didn't bother with, particularly in this age of growing and obnoxious political correctness that seems inclined to brand anything with pretty girls in as "problematic". After I was laid off from USgamer, I decided to start MoeGamer simply to continue what I was doing with JPgamer, but over the course of the last few months I've been building it into something bigger.

Back in March of this year, I decided to reboot MoeGamer into something with a bit more structure; prior to this point, I had simply posted content on it whenever I felt like it and about whatever topics I saw fit. This meant that there were often long periods of time when I didn't post anything, and I wasn't happy with that.

As such, my reboot of the site sees me posting on a weekly basis, with a specific focus on a "cover game" for a month-long period. Over the course of four articles, I explore these cover games from a variety of perspectives: a look at their historical context; an exploration of their mechanics; a deep-dive into their narrative, themes and characterisation; and a look at their audio-visual aesthetics. This has proven to be a good way for me to talk about each of these games in as much detail as I'd like without overwhelming readers with a single, insanely long article. (Make no mistake, this is still long-form writing, however, because I believe there's plenty of people out there still hungry for detailed writing even as the collective attention span of Internet denizens has gone right down the toilet in the last few years.)

MoeGamer is primarily intended for existing enthusiasts of Japanese (and Japan-inspired) gaming and entertainment, but I make a conscious effort with each piece to keep things accessible to everyone without any assumed knowledge. The order in which I chose to post the articles about each "cover game" was deliberate, too: talking about a game's history gives you the opportunity to introduce it in general terms to those who aren't familiar with it, then a discussion of its mechanics gives most people an idea of whether they'd enjoy playing it. After that, an analysis of its narrative is "taking things to the next level", as it were, and finally exploring its audio-visual aesthetic provides a good opportunity to provide "further reading" with regard to its art, music and inspirations.

In other words, don't feel like there's nothing for you on MoeGamer if you're not an existing fan of Japanese popular entertainment. I strive to make the site an informative, knowledgeable resource about some of the most interesting and underappreciated games on the market, from both yesterday and today, and hope that over the course of my articles, I can do my part to help dispel some of the unhelpful preconceptions that mainstream media perpetuates with regard to Japanese popular entertainment.

I'm doing this as a passion project at present, but a number of readers have been generous enough to pledge their support to my work via Patreon. At present, it's a much-appreciated trickle of money each month that perhaps pays for a new game or piece of equipment, but it would be a dream come true to make enough money from MoeGamer to call it an actual job. I'm skeptical as to whether that will ever happen, but in the meantime I'm eternally grateful for each and every person who has shown their support to the site. If you like the sound of what I'm doing, please do consider pledging a small amount per month and help me keep doing what I love doing — you can do so here.

If you can't spare any cash, that's fine, too; you can also show your support by paying the site a visit and sharing the articles you particularly enjoy with friends and family on social media. MoeGamer is not ad-supported (any ads which do appear are WordPress' work, not mine) and so remains clickbait-free, 100% guaranteed — share with confidence!

Thanks for your time and support. I hope you enjoy the content currently on MoeGamer, and which I've got planned for the coming months.

Here are some quick links you might be interested in:

October 2016's Cover Game: Gal*Gun Double Peace

Previous Cover Games

One Way Heroics (September 2016)
RPG Maker MV (August 2016)
Ys (July 2016)
Dungeon Travelers 2 (June 2016)
Megadimension Neptunia V-II (May 2016)
Senran Kagura Estival Versus (April 2016)

All games covered by MoeGamer to date (including one-off articles and content from before the revamp)

More about MoeGamer

Moe 101: the beginner's guide

2446: We've Reached Peak Idiot

At least, I hope this is peak idiot: I present to you an actual article that appeared in the actual business section of the Washington Post, which sported the headline "Is your dog's Halloween costume sexist?"

No. No, your dog's Halloween costume is not sexist. It is a costume for a dog.

Between this and Vice's recent monstrosity of an article about Forza Horizon 3, in which the writer proceeds to spend 1,500 words using the Australian setting of Forza Horizon 3 (a game about nothing more than driving pretty cars very fast around pretty scenery) as an excuse to go off on a tirade against Australian politics in general (actual specific references to the game come in just two out of the article's 13 paragraphs), it's hard to imagine if online journalism can get any worse. It's even harder to imagine exactly why there are people out there who still defend this kind of garbage.

I've been continuing to read old back issues of Page 6, Atari User, ANALOG, Antic and ACE recently, and one thing that repeatedly strikes me whenever I read any of these magazines is that the writers know their audience because they are part of that audience. And in the case of all those magazines, that audience is computer enthusiasts; who better to write for them than fellow enthusiasts? Should be a no-brainer, surely.

Nope; instead we get dross that reads like it was written by a recent Social Sciences graduate and which inevitably takes a negative tone of some description — usually of the "Here Are All The Reasons You Should Feel Bad for Liking the Things You Do" variety — rather than performing what, I believe, is a much more valuable function: bringing people together under the banner of the things they love, celebrating those things and perhaps teaching them some intricate, specialist details.

Take the old Atari magazines. Every single one of these, without fail, opened its first issue with a comment from the editor about how Atari computers are far more than just the games machines that people at the time apparently assumed they were. The stated aim of Page 6, ANALOG, Antic and Atari User alike was to explore the length and breadth of titles available for the Atari computer, teaching enthusiasts new things along the way. These old magazines had type-in BASIC listings with full breakdowns of what was happening where in the program, memory maps of the computers so you could learn to program in machine code, special techniques that could elevate your programming from "eh" to "wow!" and all manner of other stuff.

The most negative things ever got was in the editorial section, where editors would occasionally vent their spleen about Atari's repeated failures to market their own products, or about how they had been let down by industry contacts. This was always framed as an explanation of why, say, the issue didn't have a feature that readers might expect, rather than being the sole point of the article. The articles themselves were all positive in tone, often educational and far less frustrating to read than the daily garbage modern online journalists seem to be expected to churn out to order.

Times have changed, of course. Magazines used to be published monthly or, in some cases, bi-monthly. Internet publications are expected to be updated on a daily basis, otherwise they are seen as "irrelevant" and "not up to date". With the amount of pressure on Internet writers, it's little surprise that they pluck something out of their arse that they know will "get people talking" (i.e. is contentious for one reason or another) rather than spending the time to do proper research or to enthuse about the things they are passionate about.

There's too much negativity in the world as it is, and it's coming from all angles: both traditional media and social media. Negativity begets negativity, and the longer it goes on, the more cynical we get. We're at a stage now where many people simply don't trust the online press to cover things as an enthusiast would, and that's going to be hard to recover from. Meanwhile, the Men In Suits see outrage-bait like the articles linked above as "successes" because they bring in the clicks and consequent advertising revenue.

Advertising impressions lie, however. An impression on an article in the commercial press doesn't mean someone liked what the author had to say. More often than not, it's the result of someone having a look at an article out of sheer disbelief that someone really wrote an article about dogs' Halloween costumes being sexist, or about how Forza Horizon 3 depicts a "better Australia than [Australians] deserve".

I wish it were possible to just make this mess stop, and for us all to go back to a world where enthusiasts write about the things they are knowledgeable about rather than everyone, everywhere trying to make everything somehow "political". There's a time and a place for politics, and, unless you are reviewing a game that deals with political issues — either through its narrative or its mechanics — then that place is emphatically not in the games press. Certainly not in an article about a driving game; and certainly not in an article about a driving game that exists solely to revel in the sheer joy of driving.

Also, you can dress your dog up however the fuck you like so long as you're not hurting it. Make it extra slutty, take loads of photos for Facebook and immediately unfriend anyone who whines about sexism. You don't need dickholes like that in your life.

2436: Default Tone

Earlier today, I was browsing through the digital editions of the old magazines I downloaded from AtariMania and came across a short series of articles written by my Dad about "going online".

This was pre-Internet "going online", however, involving a 64K Atari 800XL, a 300 baud modem and an external interface for plugging in such devices, and as such involved dialling up bulletin board services (BBSes) directly to access their information and files.

What struck me when reading my Dad's wide-eyed wonderment at being able to phone up a computer in Birmingham, read messages and download programs (a much more cumbersome process than we take for granted today, involving downloading the program into a "buffer" and then saving it to floppy disk or cassette afterwards) was the fact that any time he mentioned interacting with other people — usually through the BBSes' approximation of a "forum", which allowed people to post and reply to short, simple text-based messages — he was struck with how pleasant, polite and enthusiastic people were. These BBSes were generally run by enthusiasts rather than professional, commercial organisations and consequently tended to attract people in a similar vein.

Fast forward to today and I witness this somewhat sad, plaintive monologue from PR superhero Tom Ohle of Evolve PR:

Read Twitter feed for 5 minutes. Remember why I avoid the internet more often than not. Oh, people.

— Tom Ohle (@EvolveTom) September 20, 2016

Trump this, celebrity that, politics wah wah, disaster, horrible news, oh nobody understands me, blah blah.

— Tom Ohle (@EvolveTom) September 20, 2016

I guess it's just that negativity and cynicism are so commonplace these days, and many people don't even realize they're contributing. Meh!

— Tom Ohle (@EvolveTom) September 20, 2016

I'm with Tom here, but I'm at a loss as to how we got from the enjoyably enthusiastic experience my Dad described in these articles to a situation where the default tone on the Internet is aggressive, confrontational, cynical and negative.

This isn't universal, of course — there are still plenty of community groups that are made up of genuine enthusiasts, and interestingly enough many of them are still centred around the Atari community — but even among such community groups you find trolls, naysayers and people who are always keen to see the negative in everything.

This is particularly apparent in the gamer community, who are seemingly never satisfied by anything — blockbuster triple-A games are too formulaic, indie games are too weird, imported games are too "censored" — but it happens right across the Internet, make no mistake.

It's usually explained away by the John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory:

And for a while that was plausible. But it's not as simple as that any more: the rise in services such as Facebook means that people are quite comfortable being total fuckwads even with their real name attached to the nonsense they're spouting. And it seems to be the default tone these days, which is disheartening; it's actually unusual when you find a community that isn't full of complainers.

Perhaps it's a consequence of throwing everyone from all different backgrounds all together into a melting pot, resulting in inevitable culture clash. Or perhaps the world of today really does engender negativity rather than positivity — I know that I certainly don't feel particularly happy about the way the world is these days, though my way of attempting to counter it is instead to focus on the things that I do love.

Whatever the explanation, I feel it's sad how things have developed since those innocent days of dialling up that BBS in Birmingham and having to explain to my mother why we were on the phone for so long. I feel we've gone backwards rather than forwards, and that it's probably too late to do anything about it now.

All an individual can do, I guess, is try their best not to be part of it.

2429: Ads Ruin Everything

(This was supposed to post last night but didn't for some reason.)

If anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can.

Kill yourself.

Seriously though, if you are, do.

Aaah, no, really. There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself.

Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good.

Seriously.

No this is not a joke. You’re going, “There’s going to be a joke coming.” There’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself

Planting seeds.

I know all the marketing people are going, “He’s doing a joke…” There’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. Whatever, you know what I mean.

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.”

Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking, evil scumbags!

“Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now? He’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research – huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”

Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scumbags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet.

– Bill Hicks

It makes me feel a little bit sick inside to recall that when I was a child, I used to actually enjoy the advert breaks on commercial TV. There were ads I used to look forward to seeing, and ads that I still remember today that, to my knowledge, I only ever saw broadcast once.

The reason this memory makes me feel a bit sick is because I look around today and look at all the damage advertising has done to so many aspects of modern life, and I'm disgusted and ashamed.

Mobile phone games, once thought to be a true competitor to home computers and consoles, have been ruined by advertising. Creative work has been devalued to such a degree that it's now a significant risk for a developer to release anything at a price point above "free" (with in-app purchases of up to £80 a time, mind you), with ads punctuating every aspect of the game experience — or, in the worst-designed cases, actively getting in the way of what you want to do.

Games journalism has been ruined by advertising. Earlier today I saw a link to a "review in progress" of a soccer game. The "review in progress" format is usually reserved for games that it is impossible to review based on a launch-day experience — things like MMOs or multiplayer-centric titles. But it's increasingly being used by publishers to stake a claim on all-important search engine optimisation terms and ad revenue by posting an article that includes both the game name and the word "review" in its URL — thereby attracting anyone casually Googling "[game name] review" — without having to actually do a full job of reviewing a game in the traditional sense, and lapping up the ad revenue in the process. Not only that, we have sites spamming articles about the latest, most popular games — even if the sites' verdict on said game was that it wasn't very good, as has happened with Rock, Paper, Shotgun and divisive space sim No Man's Sky — and pulling in those precious ad revenue clicks by anyone Googling the game in question.

Online video streaming has been ruined by advertising. Earlier I was attempting to watch an episode of 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown — hardly the most thrilling or cerebral viewing, but I was enjoying it at the time as an accompaniment to dinner — and the ad break halfway through the programme crashed. When this happens, there is no way to skip the "broken" ad because oh no, you have to watch five minutes of adverts before you can see the rest of the programme, and if you can't watch those five minutes of ads, well then, you're not seeing the rest of the programme.

The Internet in general has been ruined by advertising. I can't think of many sites I've been to recently that haven't had some sort of obtrusive background, auto-playing video trailer or worse, complete page takeover making the browsing experience actively unpleasant. One of the worst offenders is one of the most useful sites on the Web: Wikia, which allows users to create wikis for any topic under the sun, but which makes the site practically unusable on mobile by first loading the page in, then loading a full-page pop-over ad a couple of seconds later which you inevitably click on when you're trying to simply follow a link in the text.

Computer software has been ruined by advertising. Whether it's Windows bugging you to upgrade or anti-virus software promising you a "free gift" that is actually just the ability to subscribe to its premium service for the same price it always is, not even in the world of productivity can you escape someone, somewhere trying to extract money from you.

I hate, loathe and despise it, particularly when I see how demoralised it makes people who want so desperately to do things ethically, but who inevitably find themselves trampled underfoot by people with fewer scruples.

I think I hate it most of all for what it's done to something I love, though: writing about games. There's little to no room for passion in the commercial games press today; instead, it's all "you must have [x] articles about [insert popular game name here] up by the end of the week". It does the wonderful diversity of the medium an incredible disservice, and I feel sorry for those people who, like me, are genuinely passionate about the things they enjoy, but who struggle to get heard and can't even think about making a living from what they love.

Unfortunately, it's the world we live in now. I'm kinda with Mr. Hicks on this one.

2415: The World Doesn't Need Any More Stock Images of Businessmen Pressing Things from Behind

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I mean, come on. Seriously. Look at this.

And this.

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You want more? I got more. This one's fancy.

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Make your own button with this one! I suggest a big red one that says "CUNT".

Maybe start with "TRANSLATE"-ing the weird backwards text you're apparently reading through your Minority Report-style touchscreen.

Had enough yet? No no no.

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Icons!

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And just to be multicultural, here's one in Arabian flavour.

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I'm unsure if these are more or less irritating than the ones that feature a businessman writing on something from behind.

What's that? You want to see some? Well…

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I'm not sure that I'm taking this one's advice.

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This one's just weird.

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NO-ONE WRITES LIKE THIS.

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Fill it up with meaningless, unrelated words, that'll make it better!

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Or perhaps emphasise the point by circling it!

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And let's not forget we live in the Age of Social Media when everything must be shared. SHARE NOW, PUNY HUMANS, OR WE WILL ASSIMILATE YOU. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. OBEY THE HAND.

2360: A Life Without Social Media is a Life Without Pointless Outrage and Guilt

I poked my head on to Twitter earlier — not to participate or engage, because I think I've well and truly broken my former addiction to it, but instead simply to share the article on Ys that I spent all day writing.

Literally immediately — and yes, I do mean literally — I saw someone indulging in one of the reasons I stopped wanting to use Twitter in the first place: pointless, unnecessary handwringing and guilt over things that were nothing to do with them.

The person in question, whom I had previously thought to be a fairly level-headed, rational sort of individual, went on an 8-tweet tirade about how awful the 4th of July was and how Americans enjoying and celebrating what has become nothing more than a holiday — regardless of its history — was somehow racist.

I closed the tab straight after I shared the link to my work, because frankly I don't have time for that shit.

One might argue that it's a good thing the Internet has supposedly made us all more socially responsible and aware of all the terrible things in the world — and perhaps it is. However, one thing the Internet very rarely does is actually do anything about these terrible things in the world. Whether it's people changing their Facebook avatars to "raise awareness" for a charity (I think they'd rather have your bank details, thanks), someone painting their nails in protest against the amorphous concept of "toxic masculinity" or flaccid "protests" against whatever the issue du jour is, Internet activism achieves absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Actually, no, that's not true — it does achieve something. But it's not anything good.

The only thing Internet activism achieves is to drive wedges between people — alienating people from one another, and drawing very, very clear battle lines that you can only ever be on one side or the other of. Us and them. The "right side of history" and its respective "wrong side". If you're not with us, you're against us. That sort of thing.

The inherently divisive nature of self-proclaimed activists' behaviour online has had an overall enormously negative impact on online discourse as a whole. As I noted in my post where I decided to set Twitter aside, people who believe strongly in things (or at least consider themselves to believe strongly in things) have a tendency to take an "I'm right, you're wrong" approach with no middle ground. And this is true for everyone who holds strong opinions on one thing or another, whether it's "censorship" in games, the supposed epidemic of "misogyny" that the Internet is suffering, or who they think should win the Presidential election.

The general unwillingness to take other people's perspectives into account has ruined all sense of rational discourse on social media. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but it's certainly soured the experience for me; social media of all types (with the exception of this blog, if that counts, which I don't really feel it does) had just stopped being fun, and seeing that string of tweets today the moment I opened the Twitter page drove it home for me. There was a stark contrast between this and the private conversation I was having with my friend Chris at the time, whereby we disagreed on our opinions regarding the video game Limbo — he liked it, I hated it — and somehow, magically, managed to do so without feeling the need to convince the other person that they were wrong. We simply enjoy different things, and talking about those things you don't have in common as much as the things you do makes for some of the most interesting conversations.

You can enjoy your life, or you can spend your time getting pointlessly angry about things and people on the Internet. I've got games to play and things to write, so I know which one I choose.

2344: Life without Social

Well, it's been a few days since I stepped away from Twitter, Facebook and social media in general (that includes my very, very occasional visits to Reddit) and I'm actually feeling pretty good about it. I'm not feeling especially isolated, since I 1) have other outlets through which I can talk about the things I want to talk about, and 2) have other means of talking to the people I actually want to talk to.

One experiment that I'm pleased with the progress of so far is my new Pile of Shame website. Here I'm using WordPress' P2 theme to basically fulfil one of the things I did still enjoy using Twitter for: sharing my thoughts and reactions on games that I'm playing, perhaps in the hope of convincing other people to check out said games after having seen a screenshot that piqued their interest or a description they found intriguing.

I guess what I'm essentially doing is microblogging a "Let's Play" of the games I'm playing, though I still far, far prefer the written/blog format for such things, even though video or streaming is probably a much more practical solution for doing it. When I think about what I'd be interested in seeing, though, should I ever find myself wanting to see what someone else's thoughts on a game are, video is very low down the list, particularly when it comes to looking at things on mobile. I'd much rather read something — even if it's bite-sized nuggets at irregular intervals — than watch a video and suffer through some idiot YouTuber's attempts to be a comedy god. (This is unfair, of course; I know plenty of people who make YouTube videos and stream who aren't immensely irritating, but sadly the ones who tend to get really popular are the ones who are immensely irritating. It's just like TV or other forms of popular media in that regard, I guess.)

But anyway. Check out the Pile of Shame site if you're interested in following what I've been playing — currently Ys Seven and VA-11 HALL-A — and feel free to leave comments.

Speaking more broadly, I'm not missing social media because it means no opportunity for me to get annoyed at all the things that are annoying on social media. These things differ from platform to platform: on Facebook it's the sheer amount of links I don't want to read that are shared by people I don't want to talk to — along with people thinking that they're suddenly God's gift to politics/economics/racism — while on Twitter it's the seemingly daily occurrence of one group or another getting upset, offended and/or angry about something or other. I don't care about any of it any more. I just want to exist in my own world, surrounded by people I actually care about and enjoy the things I enjoy without people crying about, by turns, censorship, misogyny, sexism, racism, People of Colour, Nintendo, Activision, EA, Japanese games, Western games, Gamergate, Call of Duty and whatever else has got people's respective goats this week.

The other positive feeling I have when not checking Twitter and/or Facebook every five minutes is the time and inclination to check out other sites on the Web. As any social addict will tell you, it's very easy to fall into the trap of feeling like Twitter and Facebook (and perhaps Reddit and its ilk) are the only sites on the Internet. Cut them out of your life, and there's a rich vein of interesting stuff you suddenly have time to explore; most notably, recently, I've finally been exploring the wonderful Hardcore Gaming 101, an admirably comprehensive site that covers hundreds of games in a delightful level of detail, including games from my youth that I don't think I've seen written about anywhere else on the Internet. Just last night I was reading a detailed rundown of the Dunjonquest series, for example, which I knew during the Atari 8-bit era through the games Gateway to Apshai and Temple of Apshai Trilogy. Tonight I'm reading about all the Asterix games that have been released over the years, and the site has also made for some interesting reading as I have been going through the Ys series for the first time.

There's a pleasantly wide world out there, and ditching the various virtual rooms full of people screaming at you for one reason or another makes it all the easier to see it. I'm very much enjoying the quiet.

(Note: My Twitter account is still live, sharing articles from both here and the Pile of Shame site, but it is not monitored. Please don't try and send me messages on Twitter because I won't see them! Instead, see this post for other ways to get hold of me. Or just leave a comment here.)

2341: Taking a Break from Social Media; Here's Where to Find Me

I've reached this situation before, as longtime readers will doubtless remember, but I think I've lost patience with public social media (specifically Twitter and Facebook), and as such I think for the benefit of my mental health and overall enjoyment of life, I'm going to step away. I'll talk more about the reasons in a moment for those of you who are interested, but before I do that I'd like to share the important stuff: how you can get in touch with me if you so desire.

Email: pjedavison at gmail dot com, or you can use the Contact page on this site, which comes through to the same address.

Google Chat: My only real form of private IM; same email address as above. I have a few other IM services but don't use them much, so please don't try and chat to me on Skype because I probably won't know you're trying to reach me!

Discord: You can drop in on my server at https://discord.gg/0PVr1hioSgchWQAs and/or add me as a friend under ID Amarysse#2465.

Pete's Pile of Shame: I'm going to post some "live" thoughts and media relating to the games I'm playing over at this new site. Feel free to leave comments.

Note that I will be leaving my various Twitter accounts open, but not monitoring them. They will simply reshare my articles and posts from my sites. Likewise for Facebook. Please do not try to contact me using either Twitter or Facebook, because I won't reply or even see your message!

If you want to play games with me, here are my various game IDs you might want:

PSN: Angry_Jedi
Xbox Live: sonicfunkstars
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/angryjedi
Battle.net: AngryJedi#2260
Final Fantasy XIV: Amarysse Jerhynsson, Ultros server (VinCo Free Company)

Okay. Onto the reasoning for me stepping away, if you care.

To put it bluntly, I'm tired of negativity, because that's what social media seems to have become a magnet for. If people aren't sharing the latest in Awful News from Around the World, they're trying their damnedest to be contrary at every opportunity. No-one agrees with anything any more; everyone seems to perpetually feel the need to "correct" everyone else or have a differing viewpoint.

It's the problem with everyone being able to express their opinions, in other words: everyone feels the need to have their own opinion, and heaven forbid it be the same as someone else's. Arguments erupt over the most stupid things, and people snark about things that don't matter with sufficient aggressiveness and determination to make considering talking about almost anything an unpleasant prospect. As someone who already feels a great amount of social anxiety during in-person interactions, to start feeling this way about online interactions, too — a manner of interacting which I had previously found much more comfortable and pleasant, but which I am starting to recoil away from — this is not the way I want to be feeling.

I'll give you a simple example from today: earlier, I learned that Microsoft sells hilariously awful-looking soft porn movies on its marketplace — a storefront which is accessible on its Xbox One console — and yet we still can't have Adults Only-rated games on consoles due to outdated concerns about Wal*Mart and Gamestop not stocking their shelves with anything controversial. I made a glib observation to this effect, and rather than a simple response of "Oh, interesting" or "huh, that is weird", the first response I got felt the need to correct me on my use of the word "porn". Apparently "topless" is not the same as "porn".

This interaction in itself wasn't anything unusual or particularly hurtful, but it was the proverbial straw that… you know. It exemplified everything that's come to frustrate me about social media in the last few years; coupled with the fact that no-one ever seems to be happy about anything any more — between people whining about misogyny, sexism, racism, homophobia, censorship, Donald Trump, black people, white people, Asian people, Nazis, neo-Nazis, Germans, Belgians, gamers, games journalists, Anita Sarkeesian, feminists, men's rights activists, Facebook, Twitter, Simon Cowell, Nigel Farage, gun enthusiasts, people who drink Mountain Dew, people who do fanart "wrong" and any number of other things, it's no wonder I'm feeling particularly miserable and negative about life in general, really, is it?

So the most sensible thing to do from a mental health perspective when something starts making you miserable is to cut that thing out of your life altogether. Preferably cold turkey. But the thing that always makes me hesitate is the fact that amid all the negativity and bullshit, I have struck up some genuine friendships, and I'd hate to lose those. I'd hate to lose contact with people like Mike Cunningham from RPGamer; Steve Baltimore, Joe "Eritach" Sigadel and several others from Operation Rainfall; the glorious perverts of Anitwitter such as Vyers, Ashley, Luka, Firion, Bubbel, Xiaomu, Rin, Radkatsu, TheHatPerson and doubtless hundreds of others I've forgotten to mention. (If I didn't call you out by name here, it's to save time and space, not because I don't want to stay in touch! Unless you're a shithead. In which case I probably wasn't following you anyway.)

As such, then, the details above are there in an attempt to stay in contact with people I want to stay in contact with, despite intending to leave what has previously been our primary means of communication behind. Please do feel free to use them and to say hi to me using any of the means listed; they're there to be used, so don't feel like you're "intruding" in any way by sending me a friend request or a private message via some other non social media means.

In order to continue one thing I did enjoy about Twitter — posting "live" thoughts and reactions to games I'm playing — I've set up this site to continue doing so. It'll probably be primarily PC games on there, as sharing console or handheld screenshots and other media is a bit more of a faff, but if you want to see what I'm up to and share your own thoughts on games I'm playing, feel free to drop by and leave a comment.

I'll be leaving my various Twitter accounts and my Facebook page active in order to share things like these blog posts and my other content from around the Web, but I won't be actively checking them, so please don't use them to try and get in touch with me. No, really; I've turned off notifications on my phone and everything, so if you try and say something via one of those means, I won't see it.

I'll be continuing to post here each and every day, sporadically on my new site and (hopefully) weekly on MoeGamer. Those are the best ways of keeping up to date with what I'm doing and having a chat with me, so feel free to follow and comment on any of them.

Hopefully stepping away will allow me to regain a little perspective and a lot of wasted time on a daily basis. If nothing else, it's probably healthy to get away from relentless negativity, particularly when I'm already depressed and anxious.

Thanks for reading if you came this far; hopefully I'll hear from some of you elsewhere on the Internet sometime soon.

2318: Rebooting in Progress

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You may recall a while back I decided to reboot my "sister site" to this blog, MoeGamer. Having now spent two months with my new format, I thought I'd revisit the idea here for the benefit of those who haven't checked in on it recently.

Essentially, my thinking behind MoeGamer's new format was to forgo the scattershot approach that games journalism and criticism today typically follows, and instead have a laser-sharp focus each month: a single game, or perhaps a series of games. Over the course of that month, I'd post a series of in-depth articles, each of which focused on a specific aspect of the game or series. By the time the month was up, there'd be a complete, substantial amount of writing about the game in question for readers to enjoy at their leisure, with the content remaining relevant long after it was written.

This is part of the problem with modern games journalism and criticism, and part of the reason it's so trapped in the clickbait quagmire that ruins it so much. The ever-present need to produce timely content to meet embargoes and line up with release dates means that games that often deserve better don't get the attention they deserve, and some games, as we've seen in the past, get a writeup of no value whatsoever, consisting entirely of the writer in question doing nothing but mocking the game and the people who like it without demonstrating any real evidence that they've bothered to try and engage with it on anything more than the most superficial level.

As I noted in my previous piece, though, because MoeGamer is a personal site that I write as a passion project, I'm not beholden to the fickle whims of advertising revenue and I have no obligation to bait people in with provocative headlines and articles about the creator of Minecraft calling someone a cunt (which, for what it's worth, he was perfectly within his rights to do, as the person whingeing at him was being a cunt). Instead, I can explore games that have proven meaningful or interesting to me; games that are worthy of discussion. I can be positive about them, too, highlighting the things they do differently or particularly well and giving people reasons to check them out rather than, as so often happens with reviews today, reasons to avoid them.

The positivity thing in particular is something I feel strongly about. There seems to be a perception in a lot of modern criticism that you're not doing your job properly if you're not tearing something apart or telling it things it should do better. While there is value in this sort of criticism at times, it's very easy to start reaching for things that are of little relevance to the work as a whole. Polygon's infamous review of The Witcher 3 that complained about the lack of black people in a world inspired by Eastern European folklore is a good example, as is any writeup that bleats about sexism in an anime-style game without demonstrating any evidence of having explored the characters' backgrounds.

Personally speaking, the kind of writing about games that I like to read is positive in nature. Games that changed your life, games that had personal meaning, games that elicited emotional responses, games that people haven't heard of but should absolutely definitely positively check out. It is eminently possible to remain positive about things and still write interesting, compelling content, and it has the pleasant side-effect of creating a positive atmosphere around the articles, too, which encourages discussion and anecdotes of what the work in question means to other people. (There are exceptions, of course, as with most things on the Internet, but most people I know seem to respond far better to positive, enthusiastic writeups than ill-informed, poorly researched pieces that tear things apart unfairly.)

So that's what I'm doing with MoeGamer. So far I've covered Senran Kagura Estival Versus and Megadimension Neptunia V-II. Next month I'll be tackling Dungeon Travelers 2. Beyond that, I have a whole shelf full of games that I'm very interested in exploring in this level of depth, and I hope at least some of you enjoy reading my thoughts on them.