#oneaday Day 504: Enshittification comes for TV Tropes

Like it or loathe it — and there's an increasing number of people in the latter camp in more recent years, for reasons I'll get onto — but TV Tropes is an Internet institution.

At least it was, until today, when they decided that enough was enough with all those pesky users who didn't want their privacy invaded and their data sold and thus were running adblockers. Now, when attempting to view a page on TV Tropes, you get this screen:

This will probably be familiar to anyone who has viewed any number of websites in recent years. It's a step back from being a complete paywall, in that they'll allow you in if you just disable your adblocker a little bit, pweeeze, we'll only share some of your data with unknown third parties. But it's still a shitty move — particularly for a site like TV Tropes, which has always been a community-driven site. In fact, without the community, TV Tropes wouldn't exist.

As writer Aidan Moher put it earlier on Bluesky:

Aidan Moher
@aidanmoher.com
(Games Journalist)

TROPE: Popular website built entirely on unpaid community labour dies after blocking content from community unwilling to submit to exploitative data collection monetization methods.

That's right. Part of the reason why TV Tropes was so beloved, even with its problems — we're getting to those, I promise — was because it was built by the people. Much like Wikipedia, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale, TV Tropes was absolutely dependent on its enthusiast, volunteer authors and editors. Without those people tirelessly cataloguing examples of tropes used in all manner of media to a frighteningly comprehensive degree, there would be no TV Tropes.

But… now what? People are not going to pay for TV Tropes, and an adblocker is pretty much essential for browsing the modern Internet if you want an experience that is in any way tolerable. So now someone who might otherwise have wanted to contribute to the community effort that is TV Tropes is now locked out from doing so, with their only choices being to pay up or open the floodgates to God knows whatever advertisers are doing these days. (No, I'm not opening up a non-adblocked browser just to see what it's like now.)

Not only that, but this is essentially TV Tropes saying that it wants to profit from the unpaid labour all those volunteer contributors and editors have put in over the years. Because you can bet your sweet bippy none of that $5 a month/$25 a year subscription fee is going anywhere near the pockets of the people who have really made the site what it is today.

This, obviously, sucks, and is just another example of enshittification. Specifically, it's almost a textbook example of what Cory Doctorow was referring to in one of his first pieces he wrote on the subject, The Enshittification of TikTok:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sites between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

In the case of TV Tropes, you have your "users", who are the people who browse the site for fun, entertainment or in the hope of learning something; then you have your "business customers", who are the volunteer contributors, without whom the site wouldn't exist; the abuse of those "business customers" through locking them out unless they subscribe or open the adblock gates is the stage we're at now. I'd argue in this instance we skipped the usual "abusing users" part and jumped straight to "abusing business customers and users".

As I say, this clearly sucks, and it seems like a sure-fire way for TV Tropes to almost immediately make itself completely irrelevant to the rest of the Internet.

But! That might not be the worst thing in the world. Hear me out.

This is not to put down the incredible amount of time and effort TV Tropes contributors have spent cataloguing myriad tropes and even more countless uses across many, many different forms of media. I absolutely do not have an issue with the people who have taken the time to do that, because those people are creatives; they have made something.

No, the problem with TV Tropes is that, over time, it became a resource for the lazy. This is not TV Tropes' fault itself, but rather it's an extension of a general sense of dwindling media literacy across society. Why think for yourself about something you've just seen, played or heard, when there's a 3 hour YouTube video essay waiting to "explain" it to you in what appears to be authoritative detail? Why ponder the specific way a movie, TV show, video game or book chose to present its narrative, when you can just look it up on TV Tropes and get a ready-made list of "discussion points" that you can "borrow" and use for yourself? (Certain members of the "3 hour YouTube video essay maker" group are definitely prone to this, with some pretty much quoting TV Tropes pages verbatim in the name of "analysis".)

I have had conversations with people who will not even consider starting to watch a new TV show if there isn't a "companion" podcast (official or otherwise) ready and waiting to explain each and every episode to them. This is both frightening and baffling to me! Particularly when it comes to media that is designed to be fairly undemanding, mainstream entertainment!

TV Tropes isn't solely to blame for this, of course — blame can also be laid at the feet of reactionary, short-form video content on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts as well as the generally dwindling attention span of people online these days — but it is a symptom of a broader problem. And one of those sources of that problem going away might not be a terrible thing in the long term, as callous as that might sound to those who have poured hours of time and effort into researching things for that site.

Regardless of your feelings on TV Tropes — on the whole, I've always been fond of it, but then I've always used it more as entertainment than a source of "serious" research or analysis — this is an unfortunate day for an Internet institution, and I suspect it absolutely will not be the last longstanding website to take this direction.

Once Wikipedia and the Internet Archive go that way — and no, them occasionally badgering you for donations doesn't count — that's when you know we're really fucked. Let's hope that never happens.

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 502: Another reminder that traditional games journalism is all but dead

It emerged today that the entire Features team of the gaming website TheGamer has been laid off, after owner Valnet decided that it likes money more than having actual employees who are capable of writing.

I'll admit that I was never a particular fan of TheGamer for a variety of reasons, but regardless of my own personal feelings about the site, this sucks. It's the latest instance of something that has continued to suck for a while now, with even big names of the games journalism industry — if such a thing even exists any more — suffering widespread layoffs, cutbacks and significant worsening of what they offer for their audiences. Enshittification, if you will. And yes, even longstanding behemoths like IGN and Eurogamer have been subject to this. According to VideoGamesChronicle and PressEngine, more than 1,200 journalists have left the business entirely in just the last two years — and that's not taking freelancers into account. (That puts the figure nearer 4,000.)

Honestly, seeing this happen to TheGamer isn't a surprise, though. This is just what the site's owner, Valnet, does. They buy up sites that were once successful, rip out everything that made them distinctive and unique — i.e. the people who worked hard on establishing the site's identity — then proceed to replace everything with slop. I would not be surprised at all if in short order we start seeing casino advertorials and AI-generated garbage on what remains of TheGamer.

Valnet and their big rival, Gamurs, are a scourge on what was once a thriving sector. They both take this model: they buy "verticals" (ugh) that they want to add to their portfolio, and then think that just because they now own, say, Polygon, that they have unlocked an infinite money glitch. But they have not — for a variety of reasons, not which is the model on which ad-supported commercial games journalism has been forced to operate for years now.

This article by Luke Plunkett of Aftermath sums it up nicely: these sites had been stuck in operating in the same way as 2000s-era Kotaku, which is to post as much as possible, as often as possible, and it didn't matter too much if nothing of any real substance was being said. It was all about the content.

I've been through this, too. During my time on both GamePro and USgamer, I was specifically hired to be someone who operated on a different time zone to the rest of the staff, with my responsibility being to ensure that there were things ready to read on the site by the time North America woke up. These typically end up being "news" posts, which, in the churn of having to produce so much content every day, often end up being little more than you could learn from just following a company's social media account or signing up to their mailing list.

"Guide content", that odious practice where every single site has to have 5,000 articles explaining every minutiae of every hot new game (and often badly, to boot), is also at play here, with the entire Internet gradually being flooded by "what is today's Wordle solution?" posts, individual articles explaining each and every shrine in The Legend of Zelda (often badly) and inconclusive, vapid answers to questions no-one was really asking with any great seriousness. It's all about the pursuit of endless, relentless content, and it doesn't matter if it's any good or not, it just has to be fresh, constantly updated and now.

And it sucks! It's not doing anyone any good! It's not making the writers on these sites look good, it doesn't make the games they're covering look good, it doesn't make the site look good, and it doesn't inform the readership of anything worthwhile. It just means those readers have something new to scroll through every time they refresh the page while they're staring, glassy-eyed, at their phone for the 14th consecutive hour that day.

It sucks that it has to be this way, too, because the presence of a specialist press is important. The idea that we might, one day, be completely without a games press altogether is absolutely baffling, but with every round of layoffs like the one we've seen today, we get closer to that dystopia.

Reader-supported sites such as Aftermath, 404 Media (not games, but relevant) and Giant Bomb are doing great work, but it remains to be seen how sustainable that model is — particularly as so many of the bloody things are starting to pop up that it is no longer possible or affordable for anyone to be "widely read" when it comes to good-quality games coverage. That's not necessarily a bad thing, given that back in the '80s and '90s we tended to be loyal to individual magazines rather than reading all of them, but it's a big shift in how the Internet has traditionally worked.

I don't even know what to think any more. It's bleak out there. And I wonder if it's ever going to get better again. I just want to have some fun websites to read again, by people who know their craft and are passionate about it. We used to have that — why can't we have that again? Why can't we have 1up.com again?

Those are rhetorical questions.

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#oneaday Day 499: A productive day of video-making

The MiSTer Multisystem 2 has been everything I hoped it would be: an all-in-one retro gaming device that I can very easily use to both enjoy classic games on a CRT television, with all the benefits that offers, and be able to capture footage from said games to make videos about them. The dual outputs on the Analogue model of the Multisystem 2 means I can do both at the same time, and it's a real delight. So I made a grand total of five (count 'em!) videos today, and I feel like this is going to help me broaden my whole remit on my YouTube channel considerably.

I've built a small following with Atari-focused stuff, and I by no means intend to leave that behind completely. But there's so much fascinating retro stuff out there that I'd love to explore on video that it just seems daft not to… do that.

My aim for the channel has always been simply, to quote my own description, "make you feel like you're sitting down with an old friend to enjoy some great (and occasionally not-so-great!) games." The Atari focus just sort of happened with my own personal interest in the platforms, but it was never intended to be an Atari-exclusive thing, otherwise I would have branded the whole channel that way. Indeed, I'm having a lot of fun exploring weird and wonderful console titles right now — and some of my most successful, popular videos have been in that area.

I think the easiest way to put it is that my YouTube channel reflects how I like to enjoy games when I'm not on camera — I'm fascinated to explore the overlooked and underappreciated titles from both today and yesterday, and there's nothing I like more than being able to share my experiences with people, and those people find a new favourite as a result. As such, with a few exceptions — I'm almost certainly going to do some Ridge Racer at some point — you probably won't see "big name" or "triple-A" stuff on my channel, but you will see some lesser-known stuff that I either enjoyed a lot back in the day and think not enough people know about, or things that I've discovered more recently.

They draw minimal numbers, but I'm also pleased to be back into doing some long, episodic playthroughs. I'm really enjoying revisiting The Granstream Saga right now, and doing video series like this is a good reason to finally settle down and play some older RPGs that, for one reason or another, I have never gotten around to. I have a very long list of stuff that I'd like to play, and ideally I'd love to play them on the channel!

One thing at a time, though. The Granstream Saga is ongoing, but if I remember rightly that isn't super long overall. And then I guess I will have to spin a wheel or something to pick what comes next!

Anyway, if you're not subscribed and want to join me exploring some fun games, head on over to the channel and hit the subscribe button, maybe check out a few videos. It'll be like the good old days when we went over to each other's houses to play games together. Remember that? It's feeling like an increasingly dim and distant memory, but gosh, I miss it. That channel is the nearest thing I've got right now, so I hope at least a few of you derive the same value from it that I do.

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#oneaday Day 497: Not exactly Shakespeare

You know sometimes you find yourself on the Web, idly browsing through nonsense, pointedly avoiding social media, and you occasionally stumble across something that is not exactly important, but which you nonetheless feel like talking about? That's me with the website Wikitubia, a website which is, as the name suggests, a wiki about YouTubers and streamers.

In particular, I'm exceedingly fond of the "Quotes" section many pages sport, which quote the subjects of their page saying things that are regarded as somehow "noteworthy". Except I don't believe Wikitubia has any sort of "notability" criteria for these quotes, which means you end up with a list of complete non-sequiturs, devoid of context, that, more often than not, do not paint a particularly rosy picture of the YouTuber or streamer in question.

As an example, here's the list for the YouTuber "Jerma985", someone I have never watched and do not particularly care to watch, especially after reading this list of quotes — which, as the red scrollbar on the right suggests, is not the entire list:

Quotes
"You know... don't... say... sw... swears..."
"Okay, if I... if I chop you up in a meat grinder, and the only thing that comes out, that's left of you, is your eyeball, you'r- you're PROBABLY DEAD!"
"LIFE IS PAIN! I HATE-"
"OH LOOK IT'S A SHPEE!"
"And take care, everybody."
"Game sucks."
"IT'S OVER."
" What the F*CK is that thing?! "
"I'm not tiny, I'm compact."
"Check out this unprecedented grassroots movement from my boy Bern over here. Thanks guys. Can we get a BerniePog in the chat? BerniePog. BerniePog."
"Brush your teeth if you wanna not go to f*cking jail kids"
"HEY, how about you suck a fart out of my a**!?"
"Coffeeee, cheetooos, chickeeen..."
"Let's go, JERMA VS.STAR JERMA VS.STAR, EVERYBODY WANTS TO SEE THIS HAPPEN!"
"That joke's getting edited out of the video"
"Oh my god, I'm gonna squeeze an orange in my own mouth, and f*cking that's how I'm gonna drink orange juice tomorrow morning."
" I don't want you to ship me a Original Xbox. ".
"Merry Christmas, motherf*cker!"

Not exactly Shakespeare, is it? But then I'm not expecting a YouTuber to be Shakespeare. I just find it endlessly amusing that these specific quotes are picked out as being somehow "iconic" of the person in question. Of this list, I feel like Jerma comes off particularly well with "HEY, how about you suck a fart out of my ass?" and "Merry Christmas, motherfucker!" Truly one of the great philosophers of our time.

Let's do another one! Here's a selection from Videogamedunkey, a YouTuber I specifically dislike for a litany of reasons:

Quotes
I'm Hitman! (Hitman)
I'm Megaman!
I'm Sneakman!
I'm outta here!
I'm going back in!
GOTCHA!
What the b*tch?
Singed Flip!
Let's go to the ocean. (GTA 4)
Kindle? Nook? More like Josh Cook!
Good Job Dunkey.
Good Bye Dunkey.
YOU B*TCH.
Oh no... these people must have beat this whole boring a** game.
What the hell is going on, what is this, WHAT THE F*CK IS GOIN ON?!
It'll be YEEEEEEEEEEEEEARS before you can face me, Soraka!
No, not the Captcha!
Aww, sh*t...

This one is a particularly good example of what I'm talking about here, containing such pearls of wisdom as "GOTCHA!", "YOU BITCH" and "Aww, shit". As I'm sure you are aware, Videogamedunkey not only popularised these iconic phrases through saying them often enough to be quoted on Wikitubia, he actually invented all of them. Yes he did. He really did. (No he didn't.)

Another! In the interests of fairness, let's do someone I like. But that means I have to find someone I like who is listed on Wikitubia and who has a Quotes section. Bear with me a moment (grawr)… nothing for LGR, nowt for Classic Game Room, nada for Good Mythical Morning, I bet Game Grumps has something, though… nope, nothing for them either… Ah, here we go. ProJared!

Quotes
"Hey! It's me, ProJared!" - Jared at the beginning of almost every video he makes
"I'm playing X." - Jared's cold open intro
"Jim the knight. Killed by bees." - Jared in his first Hydelide video
"Yes, I cheated, and I'm okay with that." - Jared on cheating in Two Worlds
"OH MY GOD, IT'S MONSTER HUNTER! I LOVE IT, IT'S SO MUCH FUN!" - Jared in his Monster Hunter One Minute Review
"I rate this an X out of 10." - Jared at the end of almost every video he makes
"Hello ladies. And dudes."
"'Ey girl, what's up? You wanna f*ck?"
"Ready, go!" - Jared in his One Minute Reviews
"X gets a X out of 10 from me." - Jared in his One Minute Reviews
"Don't be that guy! Nobody likes that guy!" - Jared in a DnDecember video
"I have the receipts." - Jared in his "YOU'VE BEEN LIED TO" video
"The next time you see someone being cancelled with a mob attacking them and going after them, ask 'What's the other side's story?' 'Is there more to this?' How do you know that they deserve to be bullied and shamed? Through evidence? Or through public opinion? Nobody likes cancel culture, until they get an opportunity to cancel someone." - Jared at the end of his "YOU'VE BEEN LIED TO" video
"Ever wonder WHY a game is good? Or why it's bad? I'm ProJared, and I'll tell you why. Emphasis on RPGs and retro games most people have never heard of!"

If you're wondering where that random epic rant about "cancel culture" in the middle came from, it was from his extremely well-measured response to some exceedingly nasty allegations that were made against him in 2019 — allegations which he later comprehensively disproved, leading to one of the most impressive redemption arcs I've seen in the online space.

While I know some folks have an issue with the term "cancel culture" due to it often being abused by the worst people on the Internet today, 2019 was a time when the term "cancelling someone" was at its height, particularly among those who were doing their best to destroy someone's reputation. It was often paired with the "crab rave" GIF and coupled with hashtags along the lines of #[name]isoverparty, celebrating the "death" of someone's career online.

Aside from that… again, not a particularly solid list of quotes, is it? I mean, "I'm playing X" and "'Ey girl, what's up? You wanna fuck?" are hardly the sort of thing great literature is made from, are they?

Anyway, Wikitubia is kind of stupid and its Quotes section is even more stupid. But it is, at least, a little bit amusing. And no, I'm not on there. I'm not nearly noteworthy enough, even for Wikitubia — although I must say, I am kind of surprised that some of the particularly annoying people my wife occasionally watches (several of whom have millions of subscribers) are nowhere to be seen, either. I guess it's because the vast majority of Wikitubia seems to be gaming-related YouTubers and streamers, perhaps unsurprisingly. Gaming enthusiasts are exactly the sort of nerds who would compile a list of stupid quotes from people they watch online, after all.

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#oneaday Day 490: Normalise roasting shitty customers

Earlier today, the publisher of the new automation-centric indie game Little Rocket Lab — by all accounts a thoroughly nice-looking, charming game that seems to have mostly gone down well — shared a few Steam posts, noting that they had completely lost patience with the idiots who cry "DEI" any time a woman or non-white character is included in a video game, and had just taken to responding to them in as blunt and unforgiving a manner as possible.

Here's the prime example:

And this one's pretty good, too:

Now, of course, this had A Certain Type of Gamer up in arms about the developer being "hostile" or "butthurt" to players, and to that I say… good. He has every right to be hostile when some little shit comes in and starts shooting their mouth off about something completely, utterly stupid. He has every right to want to curate his community and filter out toxic individuals — even in the case of a single-player game like this. He has every right to say that he's happy certain types of person are not going to play the game because they can't handle the presence of women and people who otherwise look a bit different from them.

I wish this attitude was a bit more normalised. Because it of course sucks to be on the receiving end of rudeness, but if you act like a twat then you should expect to be called on it, likely in anger, and that's a bit different from someone coming up to you and, completely unprovoked, telling you that they hope you die. Unfortunately, the culture of making everything as PR-friendly as possible these days means that even if you're receiving a torrent of abuse from some blowhard on the Internet, you're supposed to just quietly endure it, accept it, thank them for their feedback and move on with your day.

Well, honestly, it's not that easy. I, regrettably, have considerable experience from multiple positions I have worked over the years with people being complete shits to what they believe is a faceless social media account, and it sucks absolute donkey dick. Sometimes it's just weird, such as the one guy who harassed me when I was on GamePro because he thought debit cards were a conspiracy by George Bush to control society. But sometimes — often, even, I'd say — it's downright scary.

Under most circumstances, you're not allowed to respond in kind, you're not allowed to express any sort of frustration and you're absolutely not allowed to make the dickhead in question feel like they are the one who has done anything wrong.

I know why this is the case, of course. It's because the second a company steps out of perceived "line", particularly when it comes to something that has A Community around it, a million and one YouTube videos will appear with "[Brand Name] said WHAT??!!" and, in turn, further harassment will be sent the way of whatever poor sap is having to man the social media mines that day — and said poor employee of the company in question will probably find themselves facing if not disciplinary action, then certainly an awkward conversation with Management the next day.

It shouldn't have to be that way, though. In an age where you can't even walk into a coffee shop or doctor's office without prominent notices about how abuse and harassment of staff members will not be tolerated, why are we still sort of okay with it online? Why do we put up with this garbage treatment from "customers" who, in many cases, are not our target audience in the first place? Why can't we say that these people are not welcome in our community and shouldn't buy our products?

I, unfortunately, don't really have an answer to that. But I have plenty of respect for "Rave" (aka Mike Rose from publisher No More Robots) above, not only for responding the way he did, but also for sharing the crap that anyone involved in the production of games — or games journalism, for that matter — probably finds depressingly familiar at this point in time. We're long overdue a good, long talk about this, and how we can make things better. I'm just concerned it might be far too late to do anything about it.

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#oneaday Day 489: You've got Fun Factor

I've written about this before, but I write a lot of shit on this blog, so you may not have seen it, particularly since I last wrote about it in March of this year, when you may not have even been reading this blog. (The viewing figures would seem to suggest that quite a few more people are reading this blog now than there were in March. Although the other day I had approximately 900 bot visits from China, so I may take those figures with a pinch of salt or ten.)

Anyway, what I would like to talk about is the Fun Factor podcast, hosted by the experienced writers and video game enthusiasts, Ty Schalter and Aidan Moher. "Oh great," you might say. "Another video games podcast. Like we need any more of those!"

To that, dear reader, I say fie and pfaugh and other such expectorations! Fun Factor is different. Fun Factor isn't just a bunch of dudes sitting around talking about what they'd played that week, maybe coupled with the gaming news headlines they'd picked off their favourite website. Fun Factor is, as you might have determined from the name, about something which is very close to my heart and soul: magazines.

Each episode of Fun Factor takes a close look at an individual video game magazine. The present "season" is focusing specifically on the "Generation Gap", which covers the years between 1995 and 1997. This was a time when gaming underwent a quantum shift as we moved from 16-bit pixel mastery into the brave new frontier of (texture-mapped, Gouraud-shaded) polygonal 3D thanks to platforms like the Nintendo 64, PlayStation and Sega Saturn.

It was an exciting time, and the press of the period reflected that — for many, this was a real golden age for games magazines, as the Internet was early enough in its mainstream adoption (i.e. a lot of us were still on dial-up, particularly outside the US) that it hadn't yet taken the place of traditional publishing.

Rather than attempting to summarise the entire magazine, an episode of Fun Factor instead primarily focuses on a single piece in that magazine: a "review of a review", as it were. Along the way, Aidan and Ty both take a bit of time to flip through the magazine as a whole and contextualise what they're about to do a deep-dive into, including commentary on what was going on in games at that time, what they were both up to in their own personal lives (and experience with gaming) — and even a look at some of the weird and wonderful adverts that cropped up in print.

What I particularly enjoy about Fun Factor is that it has a breezy, friendly tone that one iTunes reviewer quite correctly described as "being like reading old magazines with friends". It's unmistakably modern, as Ty and Aidan are not above pointing out how these magazines often demonstrate how social attitudes and conventions have changed over the years, but, crucially, this never becomes in any way overbearing or preachy. There is plenty to criticise and lessons to be learned in these old mags — but also plenty to celebrate, too, and the show always finds an excellent balance between reflecting on how we've grown (or not, in some cases!) and what a wonderful time it was to be interested in video games.

Both Aidan and Ty cite classic games magazines as being formative in their own decisions to get into professional writing, so it's all done out of love for the medium. I've seen all too many online discussions of '90s magazines and ads in particular descend into nothing but laughing at the terrible taste and attitudes we all had, but Fun Factor has never, to date, across 13 episodes at the time of writing, found anything completely irredeemable in the publications they've looked at.

Even in instances where both Ty and Aidan have disliked the review that was published — such as Edge's truly strange Final Fantasy VI review — there have been positives to pull out. And some of the best examples of reviews from that period have, so far, ended up coming from the most unexpected places — like, say, sports games.

I adore old magazines and have a small collection of them that I treasure — mostly from well before the era that Aidan and Ty are presently covering on Fun Factor — but I don't have many people that I feel I can talk and enthuse about them with, or who understand why they hold such meaning for me. One of the reasons I value Fun Factor so much is that it helps me feel like there are other people out there who get it, who understand why magazines, at one time, held such importance for us as video game enthusiasts — and why many of us miss those days greatly.

If you're after something new to listen to and the above sounds like fun, you can find more information about the Fun Factor podcast on their official website, funfactorpod.com. You can also subscribe to the podcast's channel on YouTube, and I'd encourage you to check out the video versions of the podcast, since each episode displays scans of the pages that Ty and Aidan are talking about, allowing you to "read along" with them to a certain extent.

Thanks for the entertainment, fellas, and I look forward to hearing more from you. Plus if you ever need to hear stories about old Atari magazines, Year 10 work experience on PC Zone or freelancing for the Official Nintendo Magazine here in the UK, you know where I am!

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#oneaday Day 484: Comeuppance

I am going to leave names and specifics out of the following for reasons that will become obvious, but I wanted to talk about this today.

It is always satisfying to see someone you know is Not A Nice Person get their due comeuppance. And that has very much been happening over the course of the last few days.

The other day, I received a promotional email from a publisher extolling the virtues of their latest book. Again, I am redacting details for reasons that should hopefully become obvious, but those who follow these things will probably know exactly what I'm talking about.

Anyway, as part of that promotional email, the company boasted of its author, whom they described as "one of the most respected" in their field. I vaguely recognised the name, so I did a bit of Googling and confirmed that they were, in fact, the person who I thought they were: a thoroughly unpleasant individual with whom I had enjoyed a run-in or two in the past, and who I was exceedingly disappointed to see was now a published author with an actual book to their name.

I won't lie, I was initially a little despondent at this — my thought process was something along the lines of "if a person as awful as that can get published, I should probably get my act together and do something worthwhile".

For context, this person is someone whom I used to respect, probably about ten years ago at this point. I respected them even more after they went on a bit of a self-reflection trip and posted a rather moving blog post about how they recognised they had not treated some of the people around them terribly well, and that they wanted to do better from thereon.

I drifted away from their work for various reasons, and some years later I rediscovered them, finding them to be considerably more abrasive and downright unpleasant than they had ever been before. Wondering if I had imagined the self-reflective blog post that I had found so moving and admirable a few years back, I tried to look it up. It had gone. To make doubly sure that I wasn't imagining things, I found it on the Internet Archive. So this individual had reflected on their self-reflection, gone "nah" and turned back into the person they had once been, only infinitely worse.

I happened to politely disagree with their opinion on something at one point, only to find myself on the receiving end of a torrent of abuse. When I blocked them as a result of this, they took to harassing me with multiple sockpuppet accounts, ostensibly for their various "projects" but also clearly not the first time they had been used for this purpose. It was at that point — well before it, to be perfectly honest — that this person whom I had once respected was all but dead to me. Any respect I had once had for them was well and truly in the past; they were, for whatever reason, a completely changed person, and not for the better. They had become arrogant, abusive, bigoted and generally… well, Not A Nice Person.

And so I was gratified to see that their new book had ended up in the hands of someone absolutely willing to tear this person's work a multitude of new assholes. There's a truly epic thread over on Bluesky dissecting this book and its many failings — to such a degree that I no longer feel bad about the person in question having got themselves published. I know I can do better than that. I have done better than that. I will do better than that.

This thread seemingly acted as the catalyst for a variety of people to come out of the woodwork and admit they had always thought the individual in question was a bit of a wrong'un, and I felt vindicated in what I have been quietly feeling about them for the last few years. I felt pleased that other people finally saw them for the person they really are. And, I won't lie, I laughed when I saw that the person in question had quietly nuked their entire Bluesky presence following this thread and all the people who had raised their head to speak out against them.

I'm generally not a fan of dogpiling and harassment. But that's not what has happened in this instance; the person hasn't had abuse hurled at them, nor have they been harassed. It's just been a bunch of people explaining to others, curious about the book in question, how they had always had misgivings about this individual — and how they, like me, feel particularly vindicated in feeling that way, given what others have said.

You shouldn't bully and harass people. But sometimes people really deserve to get their comeuppance for behaving like a complete shit. And that is what has happened here.

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#oneaday Day 472: Goodbye and thank you to Billy Chaser

I've made a YouTube video about this (above), but I thought I may as well type something up also. I will likely repeat myself.

Today I learned that a few days ago, Billy Hudson, better known as Billy Chaser and one half of The Game Chasers on YouTube, lost his battle with a brain tumour and passed away. I was deeply saddened by this news, because Billy was a wonderful part of the retro gaming community, and someone who had entertained and inspired me ever since I first stumbled across his channel about ten years ago.

At that time, I was working a boring, dead-end office job. I wasn't having a terrible time or anything, but I was bored and creatively unfulfilled. I was fortunate enough to have a desk with its back to the wall and in a corner, so I could watch YouTube videos without anyone noticing.

As it happened, prior to that job I had never really taken the time to explore YouTube at all, so I didn't really know where to start. I forget exactly how I found my way to The Game Chasers, but it was via a deep and branching rabbit hole that included channels such as Classic Gaming Quarterly, Classic Game Room, LGR, ProJared, Game Grumps, Game Sack and all manner of other folks, many of whom are still making great videos to this day.

The Game Chasers was really striking, though. This was a YouTube channel that had the production values of a TV show. Each The Game Chasers video could have easily been a broadcast TV show. Billy, one half of the core pair of Billy and "Shady" Jay, was a trained filmmaker, and it showed in his fantastic editing for each and every episode of the show.

The Game Chasers' concept was simple. It was like those reality shows where people rummage through storage lockers in search of treasure, but with a focus on video games. Billy and Jay would visit flea markets, antique stores, storage lockers and all manner of other places in search of retro classics — and often find some real wonders. This was in the years before "graded" collecting pushed the price of retro games up into ridiculously unattainable territory for most of us, so their stories were inspiring; indeed, watching The Game Chasers was pretty much the direct cause for me expanding my own collection so massively.

Billy was a wonderful character. He was funny and silly, but smart and knowledgeable. Part of the beauty of The Game Chasers is it made the viewer feel included. It made the viewer feel like they were part of the excitement of taking these trips, and part of the joy of discovering hidden treasures in dusty old lofts. It made the viewer feel like a valued friend.

And that was important to me! I have tried, and I have tried, and I have tried to get across to the people I know "in real life" how important retro gaming and computing is to me, but with each passing year, I grew more and more lonely as it became very clear that people not only don't care, they are, at times, actively hostile.

This was heartbreaking, because a hobby is so much more fun if you can share it with people. And as time went on, it was starting to feel I just… didn't really have anyone like that. As unhealthy as parasocial relationships are, watching shows like The Game Chasers made me feel less alone. It made me feel like there were other people out there as passionate about this as me. It made me feel like I wasn't the only one who still enjoyed all this stuff that I grew up with — and for more than just nostalgia. I enjoy collecting, playing and exploring retro games in the here and now — including both revisiting titles from my past, and discovering brand new favourites. That's entirely what my YouTube channel is about.

And that's why it's so sad that the retro gaming community has lost as wonderful a friend as Billy was. Most of us didn't know him personally, but I suspect if we found ourselves at a convention, he would have made the time to shake each of us by the hand and make us feel as welcome as we do watching his videos. And those out there who were fortunate enough to know Billy in real life had nothing but wonderful things to say about him. He would play up the joker aspect for the camera, but in private he would be an incredibly supportive friend.

The world is a worse place without Billy in it. And I hope wherever he is now, he finds eternal happiness amid endless aisles of every video game one might ever want — and endless friends to enjoy them with.

Rest in peace, you magnificent chode. You will be missed, not just by your close friends, but by the entire retro gaming community.

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#oneaday Day 465: Home again

We have safely returned home. It is good to see the cats again, both of whom are very pleased to see us, but it is a shame that our holiday is over. (Well, technically Andie has one more day, but she has to spend it taking her mother home, so it's not a day she's going to be able to enjoy to the fullest.) I am back to work tomorrow, and already not really looking forward to logging back in to Microsoft fucking Teams, the most depressing application you can install on any computer. But oh well. It's a living and all that.

I have, as should hopefully be abundantly clear at this point, very much enjoyed my time away. It was some very much needed rest, relaxation and complete disconnection from anything to do with the Internet aside from this here blog and MoeGamer, which I wrote a couple of things on over the course of my time off.

And it was nice! I didn't once find myself habitually reaching for my phone in the hope of checking Bluesky, which I had already removed from the device some days prior to us departing. I didn't even really check the news, RSS feeds, websites or YouTube all that much while I was away, either. It was a blissful reminder that many of us voluntarily (or by necessity) corral ourselves off into insular little pockets of existence on a daily basis, and sometimes it is helpful and healthy to break completely free of all that, remind yourself that the world is a much bigger and nicer place than anything accessible via a URL or an app might lead you to believe, and just take the time to take a bit of pleasure in your own existence, and that of the people you care about.

The main reason I'm not relishing the prospect of going back to work is that it effectively forces me back into that little bubble, though I'm not going to be reactivating my Bluesky account any time soon. It is tempting to do so just to share the things I write and the videos I make, but I know all too well that "just sharing things" all too quickly turns into that detestable dependence on social media in the search for apparent meaning to one's existence, and never finding it there.

There are people I've enjoyed chatting with on Bluesky, for sure. But I'm also thoroughly over the "public town square" model of social media, with everyone vying for attention in the same frustratingly predictable ways. As good as it is that Bluesky has mostly remained resistant to the more obnoxious end of the horrible people that now dominate Twitter, there are still plenty of odious behaviours on display over there, and I'm just so tired of it all. I feel no need to engage with it; no enjoyment from engaging with it. And so I'm just… not going to.

In an ideal world, I'd be able to disconnect completely from social media from a professional perspective, too. I would love to be able to abandon social media responsibilities for the day job because I absolutely fucking hate doing those rounds each week and feel my time could be pretty much infinitely better spent doing literally anything else. That's probably a difficult conversation I'm going to have to raise carefully, though. Something to aim for, at least.

In the meantime, it will be nice to sleep a night in my own bed again, and enjoy the dearly beloved company of my wonderful cats. They were the only thing missing from a truly heavenly week away, so it is good to be back with them.

Now, onwards to life once again.

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#oneaday Day 458: A salute to Maru

It's a shame to start my holiday by responding to some bad news, but I couldn't let the passing of such a beloved figure pass without acknowledgement.

I am, of course, referring to the very sad departure of Maru, the Scottish Fold cat who has been a YouTube star since 2008, making him one of the original sources of "cat videos", that ever-reliable activity of those who can't think of anything better to do on the Internet. His owner announced the sad news yesterday, and I have to confess, it made me very sad indeed.

I know first-hand how hard it is to lose a pet. It is like losing a family member. Hell, it is losing a family member. It may be a family member who cannot speak in the same way as we can, it may be a family member who doesn't go out and get a job in the same way we can (although I bet in his own way Maru "earned his keep" in monetary terms!) but it doesn't make them any less important or meaningful to our existences.

Maru's passing is so sad because he was not only clearly a truly beloved pet for his owner, he was effectively a pet of the entire Internet. While I feel the number of people who know who you are referring to when you say "Maru" these days has declined somewhat compared to, say, ten years ago, he has still, without a doubt, touched hundreds of thousands of lives, possibly even millions. In some cases, he may have touched people's lives without them knowing who he was, but the joy he would have brought them in that brief encounter is something truly remarkable.

Maru was a cat with personality. He had a distinct attitude about him, and he clearly behaved in ways that he enjoyed. Granted, I suspect his owner would have "encouraged" him to engage in behaviours that made good videos, but I suspect those behaviours initially emerged completely organically. Our own cats both do silly and hilarious things, completely unprompted by us, so I have little to no doubt that one day, Maru would have just spontaneously leapt into a cardboard box, or belly-slid his way into a beer bottle multipack casing.

He also loved to fit himself into things that were not cat-shaped, such as boxes that were too small for him, and even glass bowls. Again, I suspect this is something that almost certainly happened naturally one day, and then he may well have been "encouraged" to do this a little more often for the sake of some videos. But I certainly don't begrudge Maru's owner — still mysterious and perpetually off-screen to this day, without even their gender being widespread knowledge — any of the fame their beloved cat attained during his long and very clearly happy lifetime.

Maru enjoyed 18 joyful years on this planet, and during this time he must have been one of the most loved pets in the entire world. Because, like I say, not only did he have the love of his owner — who clearly adored him — but he also had the love of pretty much the entire world, too. There aren't many individuals in this world who can truly say that; there aren't many people who can truly claim to be universally beloved, regardless of nationality, language, background, socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, sexuality or any of the other things you might care to mention that act as ways of dividing ourselves from one another.

Maru was a universal. Maru felt like he would be a constant. Sadly, he has gone to a better place now, but I suspect he will continue to be remembered and loved for many years to come. We love you, Maru, and I hope that one day we will have the chance to see you again.

I'll leave you with the tearjerking words of his owner, posted today, and I'm sure we all join them in saluting our dear, departed, beloved cat and the wonderful life he head.

"I'm lonely, so be sure to be born again soon!" I said to him insistently, but he is by nature a laid-back cat, and I wonder if he is relaxing in the sky now. But he loves to surprise us, so I'll wait patiently, hoping for a surprise from him.

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