#oneaday Day 621: Tired

I am, as these things tend to go, back from my day at the office, following a horrible long drive home in the cold and wet, featuring a stop for a Burger King at Fleet Services that I honestly kind of regret now. I got back too late to pick up my prescription from Tesco, too, so that was annoying. If I hadn't stopped for the Burger King I might have made it. But oh well.

As a result of all this, I am extremely tired and my brain feels like it is firing on roughly 30% capacity. As such, I have started writing this without any particular topic in mind, so I'm just going to babble my way through it until I've done enough words to satisfy myself, and then, honestly, probably just go to bed.

Ooh, here's something I can talk about. Last night I got around to finally watching Pixels to Pages: The Story of Electronic Gaming Monthly, a well-regarded documentary put together as a collaborative affair between the My Life in Gaming and Game Sack channels. I have slightly mixed views on it, because while I cannot deny that it was a well-crafted, well-produced and beautifully edited documentary, it purports to be "the story of Electronic Gaming Monthly" while it is, in fact, "the story of Electronic Gaming Monthly's early years".

Since, as a Brit, I came to EGM rather late, primarily due to my brother taking up the Editor-in-Chief's reins in 1998, I only really knew it from when it was well into the Ziff-Davis era, and the documentary was disappointingly scant on anything from that age of the magazine. My brother got a passing mention as "they got some new guy in, I think he was from England?" and that was it; the vast majority of the documentary focused on the people who helped start it at Sendai Publications, with a few contributions from Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation and Dan "Shoe" Hsu, who joined EGM in 1996 and remained with it until 2008.

For context, EGM ran between 1988 and 2009, and the Ziff era started in 1996. To be fair, the story of EGM's early days is fascinating, and its history is populated by real characters, but it just seemed a bit odd for the documentary to position itself as telling the story of a publication and then just… not really acknowledge anything that happened after 1996 beyond a brief, cursory mention. I'm not just saying this because I'm biased and want to see a family member's contributions to the publication's legacy acknowledged — though that is, of course, part of it — it just felt a little odd to rush through a good 12 years of the magazine's existence as if they didn't matter.

Still, like I say, the documentary is a worthwhile watch, and even with its specific focus it's quite a lengthy affair. It's entirely possible that they just decided to focus on the early days because they thought that was the most interesting story to tell — and I reiterate, it is an interesting story! — or perhaps there was some reason people from the Ziff era were unable or unwilling to contribute their voices to the whole thing. The net result was that it left me with somewhat mixed feelings about the project as a whole, but happy to recommend it to anyone interested in the subject matter.

Among other things, this documentary, along with the continuing excellent work of the Fun Factor podcast, has rekindled a desire to do more Magazine Stuff on my YouTube channel. So I'm going to do exactly that this weekend. There's a lot of different things I would like to cover, so you'll have to wait and see what I decide to do!

Anyway, that's enough of that. Time for bed.

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 619: My kingdom for some new ideas

I watch a few YouTube channels that I would describe as "generic semi-mainstream entertainment". These include Good Mythical Morning, its spinoff Mythical Kitchen, and the Game Grumps spinoff, The Grumps (which primarily consists of their show, 10 Minute Power Hour). I enjoy all of these channels and generally watch most of the stuff they put out, but I can't help but notice a lot of channels like this seem to be stuck in a bit of a holding pattern of the same few ideas, over and over.

"We ate EVERYTHING by [brand]!" "We try VIRAL TikTok [trend]!" "We cook STRUGGLE MEALS!" The strength of the channels I've mentioned by name above is that they generally manage to put their own distinctive twist on things — Good Mythical Morning is heavily formulaic, but has a warmth to it that is very appealing to feel like you're included in; Mythical Kitchen's chaotic energy combined with genuine cooking skills and a willingness to experiment with unconventional concoctions is always enjoyable to watch; and The Grumps is always anarchic chaos — but I won't deny that I feel my heart sink just a little when I see those same old "content" trends being recycled over and over and over.

I think my least favourite of them is anything to do with TikTok, because that inevitably devolves into a significant part of the episode being watching people watching vertical videos of other people yelling at their camera, and I already find that format of video to be uncomfortable and annoying to watch. I also tend to dislike it when one creator's work is dependent on providing commentary on another creator's work; while none of the above-mentioned channels go about this in the "wrong" way, it absolutely can be a vector for abuse and exploitation, as veteran YouTuber Jacksfilms' spinoff channel JJJacksfilms highlights regularly.

My one exception to generally disliking "reaction" videos is when it's the Grumps reacting to their own stuff. A particular highlight in this regard is always any time the musicians "Sbassbear" get involved, remixing some of the more stupid moments from the Grumps' video game show into some real toe-tappers. Not only are the remixes brilliant in their own right, but the Grumps' reactions to them are always entertaining; it's a real "laugh along with them" moment in the same way as watching out-takes in which actors completely lose the plot and get the uncontrollable giggles is appealing.

Conversely, the one instance of the things above that I do tend to feel has legs is the "We tried everything by [brand]", because there's so many different types of things out there that you can explore, and each will result in quite a different video. Consider one video trying out every type of Oreo, and another trying every variety of Buldak noodles. Very different. The trouble is, even within this particular niche, you tend to see the same brands coming up all the time — with Oreos and Buldak being two of the prime offenders in this regard. It's one reason I'm quite fond of the CheapShow podcast's "Off-Brand Brand-Off" segment, in which they try own-brand and branded varieties of a single thing in order to determine which one, if any, is the "best".

I guess there are only a finite number of ideas in the world, and if you're making YouTube your career, you have to go where both the trends and "the algorithm" take you. And I guess that means making endless "We try VIRAL TikTok recipes!" videos. Which is a bit of a shame, because we, as humans, are capable of a lot more.

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#oneaday Day 617: Single screen

There are a few people I follow (and a few I've followed recently) that I primarily followed because I like what they do in terms of streaming — but I'm almost certainly never going to watch them. This is not because I dislike or do not enjoy what they do on their streams, but because I honestly don't understand how anyone has the time to sit and watch streamers.

This is probably at least partly a "me" problem. I am the sort of person who prefers to engage in a single activity at a time. If I'm playing a game, that's all I'm doing; splitting my attention between that and a podcast, video or stream feels like I'm being disrespectful to the developers of the game; they crafted it to be paid attention to, after all, and thus I feel like the least I can do is appreciate it as intended, with my full attention.

I sometimes feel like I'm in a bit of a minority in doing this, though. People talk a lot about "second screen content" — some streamers, like the excellent Josh Strife Hayes, make a recurring joke about it — but I've tried, and I just can't do it. The way my attentiveness works is that I can pay attention to one thing or the other, not both. If I'm paying attention to the game, I'm not listening to the podcast, video or stream; if I'm paying attention to the podcast, video or stream, I'm not giving the game my full attention.

I guess part of this is down to the games I play. I don't play any multiplayer-centric games or MMOs that demand you repeat things over and over again, and thus I don't really play anything that really lends itself to dividing your attention away from it. I am, as I always have been, generally inclined towards games with interesting stories or compelling mechanics, and in both of those instances you are robbing yourself of the full experience if you're not giving those your full attention. Perhaps I might feel a bit differently if I was grinding my way through a Battle Pass (ugh) or still on the Tomestone grind in Final Fantasy XIV, but I am not doing either of those things right now. I'm not ruling out a return to Final Fantasy XIV at some point, but I'm pretty certain my days of playing that game hardcore are well and truly behind me.

I mean, I guess I could have put a podcast or video or stream on while I was playing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment recently? There are some repetitive missions in that, but then there are also story missions where I want to pay attention to what's going on, and I like enjoying the whole audio-visual experience of that game: the graphics; the sound; the music; the voice acting. Now I've reached the postgame, I could feasibly grind my way through some of those challenges with divided attention, but I'm not sure I'm going to do that; I'm likely going to move on to something else instead, and maybe dip into the postgame any time I just feel like punching Moblins.

My wife, meanwhile, has YouTube videos on constantly, whether she's playing Final Fantasy XIV or whichever farming and crafting game has caught her attention recently. She even does some work sometimes, inevitably with a YouTube video on.

See, I even find it quite difficult to do work with a distraction like a video, podcast or stream; I do work quite well with a musical accompaniment, mind. I think it's the talking. If someone is talking, my mind tells me, repeatedly, pay attention to this. And if, for whatever reason, I'm not able to, I start to feel genuinely stressed out. I know this because I'm very conscious of it any time someone tries to talk to me while I'm in the middle of, say, watching a video, or TV show, or something like that. Two people talking at the same time makes my brain melt and I don't like it.

The other completely unrelated issue is that many of the streamers I might otherwise be inclined to watch are often playing games that I want to play at some point. And if I haven't played that game myself yet, I will tend to avoid anything else about it online (including reviews) until I have at least tried it for myself. That's just a habit I've fallen into — although I must admit, there have been occasions where I have watched a YouTuber like GameGrumps or ProJared play something and thought "yeah, that looks fun, I'll give it a go myself".

Because yes, it's not that I don't watch any video game stuff online at all. We quite often watch Game Grumps with lunch or dinner. But those are 20-30 minutes at most, focused on the game (well, focused on Arin and Dan's experience of playing the game, at least) and coming to a clear conclusion after a set amount of time. Your average stream, meanwhile, is several hours long and includes boring bits of downtime, shout-outs to donations and subscribers and all that stuff, and I just find all that very distracting.

I dunno. I guess I just have to come to the conclusion that there are parts of the Internet experience today that I just don't really get and probably won't ever get. And I think I'm fine with that.

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#oneaday Day 612: Cleaning up the filth

I spent a goodly portion of this evening cleaning up my Google Photos library, because, frankly, it's been a right mess for years. It still is a right mess, but at least I have got ~~all~~ most of the hentai out of it now.

How did it get into this state, I hear you ask? Well, it's partly my fault, partly the fault of software. It's my fault because I didn't think to change the settings on various pieces of software, including the Google Drive and Photos apps for PC and my various phones' operating systems, and it's the software's fault for, by default, backing up images from every folder on my devices instead of just ones that make sense — like, you know, the camera roll. Lesson learned. Always check if your phone is "syncing" things you don't want it to!

In other words, what had happened is that, on numerous occasions, I had downloaded a dirty picture or ten that I found invigorating, and Google Photos had dutifully backed this up, despite me not actually wanting it to do that. So every so often, when scrolling back through the archives, I would inadvertently stumble across some absolute filth that probably shouldn't be in there. Nothing illegal, I should probably point out, but still not the sort of thing you want to accidentally appear on your screen when you're looking for a picture of your dearly departed cat or what your living room used to look like and attempting to show someone.

The most egregious offender actually wasn't explicitly offensive at all, but it was still taking up a lot of my library. Evidently at some point I had downloaded an archive of all the card art from the Senran Kagura mobile game — I wasn't going to play it, but I liked the art — and, again, Google Photos had dutifully backed this up despite me not actually wanting it to.

Unfortunately, the images from the Senran Kagura mobile game had all sorts of timestamps on them, so I would find them scattered randomly throughout actual photos I wanted to keep over the course of several years in my library's timeline. Towards the earlier years, there was a big lump of them all together though — it felt good to sweep all those into the trash.

I'm not doing this out of any sort of prudishness or anything — I still love some fine anime tiddies, after all — but more out of a desire to make Google Photos a bit more useful as an image archive, since there are myriad other options for getting one's hands on grotty pictures. It's already got a lot of screenshots in there as well as actual photographs, though I'm fine with that — it means that if I want to grab a screenshot of a game I played 10 years ago, I probably can — I just didn't want it full of images that I'd just downloaded for the sake of it. That includes silly memes and screengrabs of Twitter posts, also; any arguments those screenshots were intended to "win" are inevitably long gone, and life is too short to give a shit about what people I used to think were assholes are up to today. There's enough assholes in the present, thank you very much.

Anyway, I think I got most of the filth. I'm sure I will continue to find random little bits and pieces here and there, but at least now it will be more like a little treat and a surprise rather than "good Lord, most of 2016 appears to consist of anime women in provocative poses and Kirino from Oreimo with a massive cock".

That's it. That's the post for today. I'm off to play some Wolfenstein.

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#oneaday Day 610: Sorry again, and an explanation

Hello there! I am once again very sorry to those of you who are subscribed via email who got a flurry of messages yesterday. As I mentioned, I was in the process of importing all the old blog posts I previously posted on my now-defunct Patreon page, and I didn't realise that it was going to publish each and every one of them as if they were a brand new blog post — which meant that it sent each and every one of them as a "newsletter", at least until I found a way to turn the damn thing off and make it go about its business quietly.

Anyway, that process is all done now, so things should hopefully return to normal — and there is now a bunch more Stuff for you to read on this site, should you feel so inclined. It's all conveniently categorised under the Patreon category — or, if you want to jump straight to the beginning of that particular "season" of #oneaday blogging, you can click here or use the link in the site menu.

The reason I wanted to bring that stuff across is because there was a lot more of it than I realised! I'd forgotten that I'd done another 1,000+ days of daily blogging as a Patrons-exclusive "perk" (if you can call it that), and having it all locked away in an unlaunched Patreon page seemed a bit wasteful. Not that I think I wrote anything of particular importance in those pages, mind.

No; the main reason I wanted to get those posts across is to fill a bit of a "gap" on this blog. There were a couple of years where I didn't really post anything on here because I was using Patreon instead, and that always bugged me a bit. Now, if you will be so good as to check the Archives section in the sidebar (it's right at the bottom of the page if you're on mobile), you'll see I now have a nice run of posts running from 2008 all the way up to today. Not all of that has been daily blogging and not every year has posts every month, even, but it is satisfying to look back over all that stuff and think "I did that".

Why did I do that? I don't really know, other than the fact I've always enjoyed it. There's just something about blogging about any old bullshit that I've always found immensely enjoyable; for me, it's always been much more fun to bash out a blog post than use social media, because you can go into as much detail as you want to hyperfixate on, and anyone who has a problem with that can just bally well bugger off because it's your site, dammit, and that means you make the gosh-darn-diddly rules.

The other reason I was interested to bring these posts over is because they cover the COVID years, and I think that was an important moment in history that we all lived through, for better or worse (mostly worse), and I'm interested to look back over what my brain was doing at that time.

Obligatory disclaimer: as I say, I have little to no memory of what I might have written during the Patreon years. I don't think I posted anything egregiously offensive — I still had to work within the rules of Patreon, after all — but I will say I can't guarantee I didn't say anything that 2026 Pete might regret in retrospect. But hey. If you're reading this, you've probably been with me through the exceedingly rough and the occasionally smooth, so little that dribbles out of my brain and onto the page will probably surprise you at this point. I just thought I'd mention that just in case, y'know.

Anyway, that is that. I hope you enjoy looking back through the archives — I'm certainly planning to — and normal business will now resume. Apologies again for flooding your inboxes!

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#oneaday Day 609: Sorry about that

Hello. Sorry about the multiple emails. I am attempting to import my old blog posts from my now-defunct Patreon and I got a setting wrong somewhere, so it started publishing old things as new things, and if you were subscribed you would have got an email for each one of those. I think I've sorted it so it won't do that now, but if it does, I apologise!

I'm doing this because there's a whole bunch of blogging that has been trapped on my Patreon for a long time. There's nothing of any particular Earth-shattering importance there, but I felt like it would be nice to have access to that all in one place, rather than relying on a third-party service.

Annoyingly, Patreon doesn't have a simple "export everything" option — you have to go via their WordPress plugin, which is a little bewildering in terms of how it sets things up, and its default settings are, as we've already seen, kind of dumb. Am I likely to want to republish something from 2016 as if it was now, Patreon? Am I? No? Then maybe don't do that.

Anyway. Hopefully what this will mean once it's all been taken care of is a bunch more pointless meanderings for you to explore at your leisure in the archives, and I'll have more things to reminisce over while sitting on the toilet.

I've considered reopening my Patreon on a few occasions, but I just don't think it's worth it. The inordinate amount of pressure I felt like it put on me to "fulfil obligations" made doing pretty much anything Not Fun, so I ditched it in order to be able to focus on just creating stuff as a hobby. That's what all this has always been; at various points I've thought it would be nice to be able to make a full-time career out of it all, but honestly I'd rather have the security of a job like my current one.

I have kept my Ko-Fi and PayPal donation pages open, though. Not that anyone uses them — and this isn't a passive-aggressive way to suggest that you might want to slip me some cash — but I think it's nice to keep a little "tip jar" open for when people feel generous or particularly appreciative for something you've done. Plus there are some regular readers/viewers who drop me a bit of pocket change when it's my birthday, which is always nice and heartwarming. But other than that, I'm not in any of this to "monetise" it — I write because I enjoy it, I write about games because I'm passionate about them, I make videos because I think it's a good medium to show and talk about the things I'm interested in, and perhaps share those things with others. That's all.

Anyway, sorry again if you got a flurry of emails! It shouldn't happen again, but feel free to yell at me if it does.

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#oneaday Day 608: Channel update

I posted an update on my YouTube channel yesterday. You can watch it right here! I also play some Galaxian on Atari 8-bit in an attempt to participate in the current "High Score Club" challenge over on AtariAge.

I thought I'd talk about the things I mention in the video for today's post, because… well, because I want to.

The main takeaway from the update is that I'm giving up on doing longer playthroughs of stuff on video. For the most part, anyway. I'm not ruling out the possibility of doing another full playthrough of something reasonably short like an adventure game, as those are fun videos to make. But long RPGs as a playthrough series are out of the window.

There are a few reasons for this, chief among which is it makes playing one single game take for-fucking-ever. If you're only playing a game when you're recording videos for it, that inevitably means you're not playing it all that regularly (I have a life outside YouTube videos!) and thus it takes ages to get anywhere. If you combine that with a game that involves a fair amount of going back and forth grinding for experience, money or whatever, that doesn't make for particularly fun video-making, and it almost certainly doesn't make for particularly fun watching, either.

The other reason is that although I don't really care about viewing figures in general, the number of people who were showing up for episodes of The Granstream Saga in particular was utterly woeful. And, I mean, I get it; if you get an hour and a half long video in your feed that's part 7 of a series, are you going to click on it if you're not already invested? Probably not, even if the video has a link to the full series playlist in its description — because you still have to actually click on the video in the first place to know that.

So what I'm going to do is that, in future, for long games that I want to cover on the channel somehow, I'm going to make sure that I record some footage of the game while I'm playing it, then write a proper script for a "review-style" video of the game to be posted at some point afterwards. This will probably also be combined with a written version of the piece for MoeGamer, because I know that some people prefer to read and some people prefer to watch, so it just makes sense to do the same thing in both places — and that's what I've been doing with a number of recent pieces.

This means that for the "Let's Play"-style videos, which I want to keep on doing, because I think they're a good means of exploring retro games in particular, I will focus on doing one-offs. I'm not going to fret over doing "series" or sticking to one platform specifically, because there are many, many, many retro titles that I would love to talk about (in many cases while I'm trying them for the first time) and I just think it will be best for my own sanity to keep things breezy. This isn't a job, after all, it's a hobby. Were I relying more seriously on income from YouTube, I'd be 1) fucked and 2) making a lot more effort to bait the algorithm, post consistently and all that other gubbins. But I'm not, so I don't.

Regular readers will know that I've been wrestling internally over what exactly to do with the YouTube channel for a long time. I enjoyed the period back in about 2018-2020 or so when I was doing up to five videos a week and specific series such as Atari A To Z, Atari A to Z Flashback and suchlike, but it's also pleasing when the scripted videos perform well — and they tend to do a lot better than the Let's Play-style stuff in general.

But, as I say, I think the Let's Play-style format is a good means of showcasing and explaining retro games. My "vision", if you want to be pretentious about it, is that of me sitting down with you, the viewer, to "go on the computer" and explore a game together. I have very, very fond memories of having friends over after school to "go on the computer" and play games together; in many cases, these were single-player games, and we'd take turns, or my friend would watch and ask questions, and what I at least attempt to recapture the feeling of with my Let's Play-style videos is that sort of thing.

So that's the plan. Go back to/keep doing one-shot Let's Play-style videos of Stuff I Just Find Interesting, then scripted review-style videos of stuff that benefits from being explored in a bit more depth, or which is too long to practically sit down and commentate over the entire duration of.

It was important for me to make this video, if only to "give myself permission" to admit that some things weren't working, and I didn't need to ride them out to the bitter end just for the sake of pride or whatever. I already feel like I've lifted an entirely self-inflicted weight off my shoulders by doing so, and hopefully this will mean some renewed enthusiasm for Doing YouTube in the coming weeks.

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#oneaday Day 602: A farewell to Cpt.Carnage

I received the sad news earlier today that a far-off friend of mine, Jeff, aka "Cpt.Carnage", passed away last night.

I don't really know how to process this, so I'm just going to start typing and see what happens.

Many moons ago, you may recall me talking about a little group called the Squadron of Shame that originated on the 1up.com forums. We were a group of people who eschewed the big hits of the day in favour of the overlooked and underappreciated; our collective name was inspired by the term "Pile of Shame", which we first heard discussed on the 1up Yours podcast.

For the unfamiliar, the Pile of Shame is the pile of "stuff" you have that you keep meaning to get around to, but never do. You can have a Pile of Shame of pretty much any form of media, and pretty much everyone has one these days; some refer to it as their "backlog". The concept behind the discussion on the podcast was that the participants would take a game that they felt had passed them by — in this case, Psychonauts by Double Fine — then play it through independently and come back later to discuss it.

That never actually happened on the 1up Yours podcast because everyone involved was much too busy to be able to devote any time to such a project. But a group of us on the "Radio" forums on 1up.com thought it was a great idea, so we ran with it instead, playing through Psychonauts together and discussing it on the forums. We quickly gained a reputation for lengthy, in-depth discussion, but the Radio boards were a good place for that sort of thing, since they were generally relatively quiet, and free of the general console fanboy wars that were going on in the more generic forums.

I'm honestly not entirely sure if Jeff was with us right from the beginning, because to be perfectly honest he's felt like a fixture for as long as I can remember. In that respect, I think it simply doesn't matter whether he was there from the start or not; fact is, he was a part of our little group. A precious friend. A valued contributor to our discussions. Part of something bigger than each of our own, individual selves.

After 1up.com went through its slow, agonising death, much of the Squad drifted apart for one reason or another. Many of us moved to Twitter (from the period before it was The Worst Place On The Internet — yes, believe it or not, there once was a time like that) and there were several attempts to build our own little communal spaces online through shared blogs and forums. We got together and did our own podcast. Some of us even managed to meet face-to-face — and yes, that includes me, despite the vast majority of the Squad being in the U.S. and Canada. On one occasion I was happy to meet Jeff, who was pretty much how I had imagined him. That's a good thing.

The 2010s were, generally speaking, a fairly dark period for me for all manner of reasons that are beyond the scope of what I want to talk about today, but the net result was that I lost touch with a lot of people for a good few years, including former Squadmates. But when I emerged from the other side of things and found that there was a small but dedicated little unit of the Squad still hanging out online, chatting and sharing war stories, it was enormously comforting — and a big part of that comfort came from the fact that I saw Jeff was still there. He had always been there, even if I hadn't.

Jeff was the sort of person I always enjoyed seeing in the chat — and, of course, on that one occasion we were actually in the same place. He always had a kind word, something to contribute or something to share that he thought we'd be interested in. He was someone that it was simply nice to have around; as I say, he had always felt like a fixture, in a good way.

It's shocking, upsetting and scary to think that he could be gone so suddenly. The world has lost a wonderful person while so many other complete shitbags continue to exist.

It's not fair. It's not fair on Jeff, it's not fair on the people he leaves behind. But I hope, wherever he is now, that he knows how much people cared for him, and how much people are going to miss him now that he's gone. And that whatever is next is a better, more peaceful existence than the world we live in right now.

Farewell, Jeff. Forever a Squaddie.

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#oneaday Day 596: Sad little men

I've had two angry emails this week, one from someone who was upset I was covering Wolfenstein over on MoeGamer and drawing some parallels between the alt-history 1960s Nazi world order depicted in the game and the heinous shit going down in the United States right now, and another, likely a sock puppet, from someone who was angry that I said mean things about a particularly notorious revolting little troll that occasionally tries to start shit with the UK retro gaming YouTube community.

To both of these individuals, I extend my middle finger in an unmistakeable gesture and invite them, politely, to eat an entire bag of dicks. Because neither of these people were up for any sort of discussion — not that I wanted to discuss their odious viewpoints with them — and just wanted to spew a wall of vitriol at me before flouncing off into the sunset, likely to never think of me ever again. And I'm 100% fine with that last bit.

The first bit is a shitty thing to have to deal with, though. I, unfortunately, know quite a few people who have been on the receiving end of abusive messages from people like these two fucknuggets, and none of them have deserved what they have gotten. The people who spew this kind of hatefulness are, without exception, bigoted, intolerant fuckheads who are angry that the world doesn't cater specifically to them. They don't like that certain types of people who are different from them exist, whether those differences come in the form of their skin colour, gender identity, sexuality or how many YouTube subscribers they have. They are angry at the simple existence of people they see as different from them; they think these differences make those people somehow dangerous.

They fear them, and that's why they lash out in the way they do — they hope to break the spirit of people they have decided that they dislike. They have no endgame; no real purpose in mind. They just want to hurt people. And it's fucking pathetic. Particularly because the targets they pick, like me, are, frankly, completely harmless individuals who they likely never would have come into contact with were it not for the increasingly potholed Information Superhighway.

It sucks that we have to tolerate the existence of pathetic little trolls like this, because practically speaking, there's not a lot that can really be done about them. Law enforcement aren't interested in some mean messages on the Internet, social media platforms are increasingly lawless zones, and hosting your own sites means you have the joy of having to deal with moderation tasks yourself. At least WordPress and YouTube make it easy enough to block commenters via various means.

It's a shitty world out there, both online and offline, and there are days when it doesn't feel like there's anything worth "saving" any more. If you encounter any little shits like the ones I've described today, my best advice is to remember that their pathetic little lives are almost certainly full of more self-inflicted misery than you can possibly imagine, and that they're lashing out precisely because of that fact because they're unwilling to admit that they're at fault. Once you start down the path of being an Internet Dickhead, it's very difficult to pull yourself back and save face. Because, frankly, even if these two clagnuts came to me with a genuine apology tomorrow, I would not have the time of day for them.

You get one chance in life to make a first impression, and if that first impression is violently shitting yourself while screaming and waving a knife around, I'm not going to let you into my house, ever.

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#oneaday Day 582: Getting some mojo back

No drawing today as I've been doing other creative things, as I shall talk about in a moment.

I have not felt at all like making any videos for a while, which is a little bit frustrating to me, because the first two episodes of my Space Rogue playthrough actually did surprisingly decent (for my channel) numbers, and I reckon there's just one or two episodes more of The Granstream Saga to do before that's all finished. I just haven't quite been able to summon up the energy to continue those recently, not helped by a week of feeling ill that I'm just getting over.

However, with a soft embargo date approaching for Super Woden Rally Edge, a game I wanted to cover — the video I made on this game's previous installment is the best-performing video on my channel by a long shot — I felt a bit more inspired to actually do something today. So I recorded a bunch of voiceovers: both for this, and for some other things that I've previously written articles for, but wanted to turn them into videos. All in all, I've recorded voiceovers for Super Woden Rally Edge, Old Skies, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein 2009 and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, which should result in a nice spread of 15-20 minute videos for each. I've even edited the Super Woden Rally Edge and Old Skies ones already, but I'm going to leave the Wolfenstein ones to another time — maybe tomorrow, maybe later in the week, depending on how I'm feeling.

I continue to go back and forth on what is "best" to do for my YouTube channel. Up until now, I've built it on Let's Play-style playthroughs of games, and I think a lot of my viewers like that sort of thing, particularly as I make an effort to explain how to play the game, why it's interesting, why it's still relevant (if it's an old game, which it usually is) and what I, personally, think of it. These are fairly easy to record and edit, but they are time- and energy-consuming to produce, since they do involve me sitting and playing a game, often for quite a long time, and attempting to find meaningful things to say for the duration.

At the same time, the pre-scripted videos tend to overall do better, particularly over the long term. I think I'm probably more "proud" of those overall, too, since they involve more in the way of editing, and delivering a voiceover is a different skill overall to off-the-cuff, unprepared commentary while playing "live". However, they take a lot more time to both prepare and edit, since there is often a lot of miscellaneous footage required to capture along with the footage of the main thing I'm covering, and the editing process involves a lot more in creatively finding ways to visually represent the things I'm talking about.

Part of me wants to commit to one or the other of these approaches, because I feel it would probably be a good idea to. At the same time, I think there's value in both approaches; you can show things in "live gameplay" that you can't show in a "video essay"-style production, and vice versa.

I do, however, think that kicking off long playthroughs again might have been a mistake. The videos for The Granstream Saga have performed more poorly than anything I've done for a long time, although, as I say, the first couple of episodes of Space Rogue did surprisingly well. So I'm inching towards abandoning those, though I feel like at this point I probably should finish The Granstream Saga at the very least.

Anyway, that's something to think about another day. I have enough on my plate with these new videos for now, so watch for them coming soon to my channel!

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