Category: INTERNETZORZ

#oneaday Day 376: The death of ambition

Earlier today, Dave Gilbert, renowned modern adventure game developer and publisher, happened to point out that Adventure Gamers, a website with a near 25-year history, had, at some point, sold out and become an online casino shilling site, leeching off the prior content — which, after 25 years, you can bet had some decent SEO juice, even with the myriad changes to such algorithms over the years — in order to hook people into shady gambling sites.

My immediate reaction to this was "ew, gross", shortly followed by "I bet I could make a really good adventure game site". Unfortunately, this thought was then almost immediately followed by "…but why should I bother?"

This isn't the first time I've thought something along these lines. The modern Web is killing, stifling any sense of ambition I might have once had. It's not one, single thing like generative AI causing me to feel this way — though you better believe the amount of AI slop out there is a big part of it — but rather a continual piling-up of little micro-enshittifications. Over the course of the last 10 years in particular, these micro-enshittifications have all accumulated into the garbage fire that is the Web of 2025: a place where it's hard to find reliable information, where it's even harder to verify whether what you're looking at is reliable information, and where the people with the power to make a difference don't seem to give a shit.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself, in case you've not been here on the previous occasions I've done so.

When I was a kid, I grew up surrounded by computers: specifically, the Atari 8-bit and ST, with MS-DOS and Windows PCs following along around the early '90s. For pretty much my entire childhood, my Dad and my brother were both regular contributors to an Atari magazine initially called Page 6 and later New Atari User, after it took over the name from a publication that was bowing out of the Atari 8-bit scene.

I loved getting a new issue of Page 6 every couple of months; I loved reading through all the features, even if I didn't understand all of them, and it gave me great pride to see my Dad and my brother's name in print pretty much every issue after a certain point. My Dad would cover flight simulators, productivity software and the use of music technology, while my brother would cover Atari ST games. We got a lot of free software out of this arrangement — much of which is now in my possession — and it's fair to say that this played an instrumental role in defining my interests and hobbies growing up.

When my brother left home, he had decided to forego university in favour of a staff writer position on a magazine called Games-X. This was a risky and ultimately unsuccessful venture on the part of publisher Hugh Gollner, but it was a nice idea: a weekly games magazine that covered new releases for the home computers and consoles that were around at the time — the tail end of the 8-bit era, the heyday of the ST and Amiga, and the days when the Mega Drive and SNES were just starting to get some attention.

I was immensely proud to have a family member in the games press, published every week in an actual magazine you could walk into a newsagent and buy. (Page 6 had a stint on newsstands, too, but it eventually went back to its roots as a subscription-only magazine, clinging on to dear life until 1998, impressively.) And my pride only continued after Games-X folded and my brother followed Gollner to the then-fledgling Maverick Magazines, where he initially worked as a staff writer on Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, while his girlfriend at the time held the same position on its Super NES counterpart Control.

It continued further still as he worked his way up the ranks, through several publications and publishing companies, until eventually he found himself in the United States working on the Official PlayStation Magazine and Electronic Gaming Monthly, and helping to launch the pioneering video game social networking site 1up.com — dearly missed.

Every step of the way, I followed his career with interest, conscious of the fact that I was 10 years younger than him, thinking "one day I'll get my chance; I really want to follow in his footsteps, and one day I'll have that opportunity if I just keep trying."

I did keep trying. I did some articles for Page 6, just as my brother had. I did some freelance contributions to PC Zone and the Official Nintendo Magazine, back in the days when one article would get you the money that two months' worth of news posts nets you today. I worked on some little sites, most of which have now disappeared, sadly, and I eventually had the opportunity to work on both GamePro and USgamer, two decent-sized but, admittedly, American sites.

For some reason I had found the UK games press perpetually impossible to crack after a certain point, and after attending a few PR events on behalf of both GamePro I understood why: there was very much a heavily cliquey, old boys' club thing going on, and as a socially awkward (and what I now know to be) autistic loser, that was not something I felt in any way able to crack my way into.

But still I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that GamePro was the start of something big, until we were told via email one morning just before Christmas that none of us had jobs any more. I wanted to believe that USgamer was another opportunity for something big, until I found myself screwed over and, once again, informed via email, this time on my actual birthday, that I no longer had a job.

After that, I didn't seek any further positions in the games press. I'd taken too many beatings. But I didn't want to give up. That's when I started MoeGamer, which initially began as a means of continuing some of the work I'd done at USgamer covering Japanese games that other publications didn't give the time of day. This was work that people in both the industry and from the "public" side of things told me that they found valuable and helpful, because I wasn't just going "ew, anime art" and writing things off as "pandering" or whatever.

Long-term, I wanted to build MoeGamer into something that really stood by itself: a site where you could look up information on a wide variety of games and find some thoughtful, well-considered writing about it. And I think I have achieved that, even if I don't have the time or energy to update it as often as I'd like; the one positive about my previous job, which was beyond tedious, was that it gave me ample time and energy to write new articles and make new videos.

I still never really "made it", though. Few people online know who I am; even fewer go "oh, wow, a Pete Davison article, gotta read that" — although I do have a pleasingly enthusiastic following in the Evercade community, at least, thanks to my work on the official site — and I just find myself wondering… was all this for nothing? Is there even any point trying any more?

The Adventure Gamers thing stings, because were it 10-15 years ago, I'm pretty sure I could have put together a banger of an adventure game-centric website, developed a decent following and kept it up and running for 25+ years without selling out to online casino shills. But now, from every corner of the Web I read horror stories about sites struggling for discoverability, struggling to earn the money to keep the lights on and struggling to get anyone to give a shit about the written word. There are rare outliers, and the rise of worker-owned, reader-supported initiatives such as Aftermath and Giant Bomb is encouraging — but both of those (and others like them) already had ready-made, built-in audiences thanks to the people involved and their prior positions; how long would a brand-new website with a specialist focus even last these days, if it wasn't "the next project from [insert big name site] alumnus, [name]"?

I feel utterly demoralised. I feel like what was once my dream career just doesn't really exist any more. I recognise that I'm extraordinarily fortunate to have fallen into the position I'm in now, where I get to work on games that I care about, crafting written material to help people understand and appreciate quite why I love them so much — and hopefully help said readers learn to love them, too — but there are days of increasing frequency when I wonder if anyone really gives a toss. The days when I have people screeching obscenities at me on social media because they can't buy a cartridge that is out of print. The days when I have to deal with endless, mind-numbing, Queen's Duck-level "feedback" from people who absolutely don't care about the games I'm working on as much as I do. The days when I'm genuinely fearful for the history and legacy of the hobby I love so much, and where I weep for the traditional, written-word games press, a side of the industry which almost doesn't exist at all any more.

I was born 10 years too late. And believe me, it really sucks to have spent a significant portion of your life thinking "I really want to do that", only to find out, much too late, that "that" just isn't really a thing any more.

The obvious answer to all this is something I've thought of and felt before — that even if there doesn't seem to be a "place" for something, you should do it anyway, because someone, somewhere, will appreciate it. But with every site sold to private equity companies and gutted to turn into an AI slop factory, the motivation and ambition to do something significant and meaningful diminishes, bit by bit. What was once a roaring flame of determination is now little more than a flicker. And I hate that.

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 375: So very very tired

Earlier today, someone shared a photo of a packet of Uncle Ben's instant noodles or something, which came with a disclaimer on the front that the image of the supposed product festering inside the pouch had been "generated with AI". And I think I felt something actually snap in my brain.

What are we doing. What are we actually doing. I am absolutely beyond sick of this garbage being force-fed to us from every possible angle, and for breathless ball-gargling apologists to come out with all the usual "oh, it's a tool, a tool can't be bad".

No. Fuck off. Generative AI is hot garbage, and I think we've proven that beyond every reasonable doubt at this point. "It hallucinates a bit" should be enough to put absolutely fucking everyone off ever even thinking about using it for research and analysis, and the fact that the companies who trained these models have had to go about it in the most underhanded means possible, potentially destroying creators' rights over their own work in the process, should be enough to ward everyone off. And to cap it all, these people spend billions every month to achieve nothing. Several years into this shit and we're still yet to see convincing use cases that don't have hefty caveats. And still the rich get richer, somehow, and the world, as a whole, gets worse and worse off.

Is the fact that people have been driven to suicide by "conversations" with AI bots not enough? Is the fact that multiple social media platforms are now pretty much unusable and a privacy nightmare due to the flood of AI not enough? Does the prospect of people not actually being able to perform necessary skills — like, say, coding to hold the world's infrastructure together — not absolutely terrify you? And do you not see anything even a little bit wrong with ChatGPT offering to modify an existing piece of writing "in the style of" another magazine so you can successfully pitch something you didn't write a single word of?

Every day, the world gets worse and worse, and frankly, I'm reaching a point where it is becoming less and less desirable to live in it. Couple all this inescapable AI shit with what's going on in America, the looming war in the Middle East (again) and the frankly frightening regressions the world has seemingly been going through with regard to acceptance, tolerance and inclusion, and it's not a pretty sight. It's no wonder that everyone in the world seems to be so argumentative, aggressive and confrontational all the time these days. This is a problem, but it's also a symptom.

When I was growing up, it felt like I was living through one of the most exciting periods in cultural, societal and technological history. Now I'm just embarrassed to be on the same planet as a frankly terrifying proportion of the population, who seem to think that everything we're doing right now is just fine, and we should definitely continue on this course, it absolutely won't cause terrible problems down the line.

I don't know what to do any more. I feel powerless, helpless, alone. And I'm sure I'm not the only one feeling that way.

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 365: A year of this

Yes, it appears I have been doing this nonsense (again) for a whole year. And with it, I feel a curious sense of… well, not a lot at all, really. The world, both online and offline, has changed a great deal since the first time I did a daily blogging project, and the purpose of this blog has, by extension — and not necessarily deliberately — changed somewhat, too.

When I started doing #oneaday first time around, it was an attempt to be part of a community. The people who kicked off the "challenge", as it were, were people who I wanted to get to know a bit better, mostly from in and around the games press. Unfortunately, that never really happened, as most of them dropped out pretty early, and some of them actually got rather abusive towards the entire #oneaday project at various points. So that was unfortunate.

I persisted, though. There were other people who decided to get involved that I did enjoy reading the posts of. Several people who I got to know through their posts, and enjoyed interacting with through their comments sections. Out of all of them, I'm not sure any of them even still have their blogs that they started back in the 2010s — I know I've been looking for several of them, and they're just not there any more. I hope they're doing well; it saddens me a little to think that they'd take something they'd created and just cast it aside for one reason or another, but I also understand that today, you often can't be too careful about your "Internet footprint" lest something that seemed innocuous at the time ends up getting dug up to be used against you maliciously.

That's not all, though. There are also a number of people from the anime, manga and video game enthusiast communities who I got to know a few years after I stopped doing #oneaday on a regular basis, and most of them have abandoned their blogs, too. There are a few still knocking around, to be sure, but a lot of the ones I most enjoyed reading and chatting in the comments sections of are simply no longer online at all. Again, that's a real shame; I miss those people, and since our only real point of contact was our blogs, chances are I won't hear from them ever again.

I've spoken before elsewhere about how viewing figures for personal websites are in the absolute toilet these days. I'm lucky to break double figures in views on this site these days, whereas ten years ago I'd maybe get a couple of hundred. Not particularly impressive compared to a commercial site, no, but considering all I do here is waffle on about whatever pops into my head on a given day, I thought it was quite a noteworthy achievement. MoeGamer, as a site with a tighter focus, still gets a decent number of views per day, but most of them are confined to just a few pages and articles, many of which I wrote several years ago and thus successfully acquired the SEO juice for.

As I've also said before, this blog has never been "for" anyone other than myself. I write here because I enjoy writing, because I've always enjoyed keeping a journal, and because I find it a valuable means of expressing myself. The fact that hardly anyone is reading it any more is a shame, sure, but getting people to read this site has never been a priority. If it was, I'd be sharing posts every day on social media, and I just can't be arsed with that.

You see, a post "gaining traction", as Internet vernacular has it, is a bit of a double-edged sword. Yes, it's nice to see people reading your stuff, but it also means that you're likely to run into that particular type of person online who does nothing other than arbitrarily disagree with everything you write. In many instances, one gets the impression that they don't even particularly care what they're arguing about — just that they're arguing. And when something you post online gets viewing figures outside of the circles it normally moves in, you get an exponentially greater number of people like this. And it can be exhausting.

So that's why I'm not too bothered about no-one reading this except me. I derive value from this site from being able to look back at my entries from various different times, and see how I was dealing with particular situations. I enjoy looking back over this semi-permanent record of my own memories, both good and bad. And I feel like I occasionally learn something from reflecting on things that I wrote in the past — both things that I'm proud of, and things that I regret. All of those things helped make me the person I am today, and they're all here on this one site, as a complete reference guide to Pete.

So yeah. I've been doing this daily for the second time, for a year. And I have no intention of stopping just yet. If you happen to be following along, thanks for being a member of an increasingly exclusive club. If you're new here, hi, if you have any questions chances are many of them have been answered at some point in the last three thousand posts. And if you're one of those lapsed bloggers I mentioned earlier, do say hi — it would be great to hear from some of you.

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 359: Commenter policy

I've had a few right weirdoes in the comments section of MoeGamer of late, and they are a prime example of why I adopt a fairly strict moderation policy: anyone who hasn't commented before has to have their first comment approved before any of their comments will appear on the site. If I don't approve that initial comment, the words they hammered into their crusty keyboard will not appear on the site.

I think by far the strangest so far was the one who started off talking about nostalgia, but then started banging on about the "globalist agenda" and how modern video games were all basically in service to this. By "globalist agenda", by the way, this person absolutely meant "the Jews", and as such their comment didn't get anywhere even a little bit close to being published on my site. I did mock it a bit on social media, though.

Today I had a guy who got really uppity about me writing about the Game Boy game The Sword of Hope and thinking that it was actually quite worthwhile and interesting. He absolutely could not fathom the idea of someone from well after a creative work had been published not judging it by the standards of its time. He also almost immediately started banging on about "censorship" due to the combination of my anti-spam filter and my aforementioned comments policy, so he did not get let through either.

I have a fairly flawless sense these days of when someone is going to be a pain in the arse in the comments. There's just a certain way that some people come across in text that lets you know they're a dickhead and probably a racist, and thus I have absolutely no hesitation in banishing them to the shadow realm when they happen to stagger into my comments section.

I do the same on YouTube; for all its faults, YouTube has one of the absolute best moderation tools in existence, which is the "Hide User From Channel" option. For the unfamiliar, what this does is effectively "shadowbanning" the commenter from your channel, so their comments don't appear under your videos and you don't get notifications about them… but to their eyes, they're still able to comment as normal. There's a perverse satisfaction in doing this, because you know some of these absolute cretins will be typing out long, obnoxious diatribes about whatever has offended their delicate sensibilities this week, and no-one will ever see them. Again, I have zero hesitation in doing this; if someone bursts into the comments section and the first thing they do is act like a twat, they're going straight in the sin bin.

Life is too short to deal with dickheads on the Internet. Of course, we'd all rather they didn't exist at all, but at least there are plenty of tools with which we can frustrate and repel them. Make good use of them; it's worth the effort.

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 353: Too much media?

The world can be an overwhelming place for all manner of reasons, and one of the things most likely to overstimulate all of us at one point or another is the sheer amount of media that there is. There is more stuff in the world than one person can reasonably experience in a single lifetime, and most of us likely feel at various times like we're being pulled in multiple directions, the constant threat of Maybe Not Enjoying The Thing You Picked As Much As The Thing You Didn't Pick a common source of analysis paralysis.

Case in point: this evening, I happened to see over Andie's shoulder that she's watching a TV show called Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators. I can tell from the bits I've watched over her shoulder that I would almost certainly enjoy this show, but is it something that I "should" add to my plate, given I have games on my shelves I haven't played, DVDs and Blu-Rays on other shelves that I haven't watched, and an entire Internet full of possibilities just a click away?

The answer, of course, is "stop overthinking it, and if you think you might enjoy it, watch it". And I think I just might. It's not as if I have to commit to watching it to the exclusion of all else, and it's not as if I have to watch it every day without fail otherwise I'll forget what's going on. As a TV show, it's designed to be inherently "disposable", as horrible as that sounds to say about a creative work; perhaps "transient" is a better descriptor. It's something designed for you to enjoy in the moment, then not think particularly hard about. There are plenty of other TV shows that I've watched in the past that fall into this category — I quite often look back over past entries of this blog and see entries about shows I apparently watched but have absolutely no recollection of whatsoever — and I don't feel too bad about that. I enjoyed them in the moment, which was their purpose.

Not everything needs to have meaning, to be life-changing, or to have a particularly strong and powerful message to deliver. Sometimes entertainment is simply for entertainment's sake, and there's nothing wrong with that.

So y'know what? I think I might just start watching Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators. It looks like a fun show that I think I will enjoy, and my instincts are usually pretty good on these things. I may not remember it a year or two down the line, but does that really matter? Not at all; if it's enjoyable now, and it helps distract from the shitshow that is life in 2025, bring it on, I say. The planet might have burned down in a couple of years, and when that time comes it's not going to matter one jot what my media consumption habits were.

This isn't even a new problem. For as long as television has existed, people have doubtless agonised over which channel they should watch, or if they should do something other than watching television. That particular problem is compounded for those who had satellite or cable TV, of course, as they had even more choice. And in times before electronic media, were people agonising over which book they should read, which painting they should admire or which sonata they should play on the piano? Entirely possible.

Life is short; much too short to agonise over decisions as ultimately trivial as what you're going to do to entertain yourself of an evening. So if you feel like you might fancy something, just take the plunge and enjoy it. There are no wrong choices. (Well, there are, but that's not the sort of decision we're talking about here.) Taking care of yourself is of paramount importance, and allowing yourself to get trapped into a mental spiral of trying to prioritise things of equal unimportance is a sure-fire way to make yourself miserable.

So, y'know, don't do that. I am going to try and take my own advice here.

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 346: In need of inspiration

I haven't made any videos for a little while. I haven't been feeling super-inspired of late for some reason. So I'm going to use this evening's post to brainstorm a few things that I might want to shape into some sort of structure.

First up, I have been mulling over some sort of "Games of Summer" ongoing feature, where I talk about games that I find particularly appealing to play when the weather is nice outside. It being nice outside does not necessarily equate to wanting to go outside, however, with how hot the summers have become here, so the thinking behind this is games that provide a pleasant feeling of "going on holiday" or "doing things outside" without having to deal with things like sunburn and heatstroke. Games that I would probably cover include Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 for Xbox 360 (I still like that one better than the third one, because jetskis), TrackMania (there's something about the stadium courses with watery sections that feels very summery to me), maybe Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash and Kandagawa Jet Girls, and, of course, some classic Sega Blue Skies titles like OutRun and its follow-ups, and spiritual successors.

Secondly, I am once again mulling over my usual "format" of videos. I really like doing what I call the "Exploring Together" videos, where I provide a brief introduction to camera, then effectively do a Let's Play with a bit of foreknowledge (or prior experience) of what I'm playing. While this is a format that has somewhat declined in overall popularity on YouTube, there's still very much a place for it, and with the newly independent Giant Bomb getting its Quick Look series back underway after quite some time, I feel like it's sort of "timely" to get into doing this sort of thing.

The bit that's a little tricky is that I feel like I might want to cover some slightly more recent stuff. Stuff that's still a few years old at this point, but which is a bit more modern than early '80s home computer games. I'm talking Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3-era stuff. There are Considerations when doing this, however, not least of which is the number of games I might be interested in covering which have licensed soundtracks. I'd like to take a first look on camera at the MotorStorm series, for example — and the first two of these could probably also fit into the "summer games" theme, too — but the musical accompaniments to the action might be an issue. I guess I could upload some "test footage" and see if that gets dinged for copyright. In fact, I might do that.

Another thing that I kind of wish I could make happen but don't really see how I can do is getting someone else involved, so I have someone to talk to and riff off while I play. I've been watching the Giant Bomb guys since their big announcement, and it's a lot of fun to be included in their sessions of "hanging out" together, playing something and shooting the breeze while doing so. I've always made an effort with my videos to come across as if I'm a friend playing the game along with you, but, y'know, sometimes it'd be nice to have someone to talk to.

A third thing I've been pondering is doing a playthrough of the Ultima games. I'm fascinated by these, but have never really gotten deep into them. I've played a fair chunk of the first one and understand how that works, but I understand the second one in particular is a bit… obtuse. I think it would be an interesting and worthwhile pursuit to finally give those a go, though.

Then finally, of course, there are still myriad games left for me to cover on the classic microcomputer systems. There's all the built-in games on the C64, A500 Mini and Spectrum, for starters, plus the USB sticks full of other stuff I have for each of them. And, alongside that, there's still a ton of Atari 8-bit and Atari ST games I haven't covered yet, either.

That's plenty to be getting on with, surely. I just need to actually get my brain into a motivated space and actually crack on with one or more of these projects, I guess. The weather isn't helping, but I think I will do my best to make a start on at least one of the things I've outlined above this week, even if it's just falling back on my usual Let's Plays of microcomputer games.

On that note, I am at least feeling motivated to go to the gym this evening. So that's next on the agenda!

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 341: Rabbit (ass)holes

A random bit of Internet rabbithole-diving this evening brought me into the realm of "King Assripper". The name pretty much says it all, but in case you were in any doubt: this was a man who, as far as I can make out, became famous for eating a lot and farting. Particularly farting.

His most well-known work is "King Assripper Farts On His Roommate's Door", which, in this age of clickbait, is refreshingly honest about what it offers. Sadly, the originally posted video of this spectacular display of flatulence no longer exists — good old link rot strikes again — but, as with most things on the Internet, it has been archived for posterity by other people who, I'm sure, are more than happy to get some YouTube ad revenue from the hundreds of thousands of people keen to see a fat man guff really loud.

Except it goes deeper than that. I decided to look into whether there was any more information online about King Assripper, or if the above masterpiece was his one and only work. Besides a KnowYourMeme page on the "Farting On Roomate's [sic] Door", I also discovered what appears to be a complete archive of everything King Assripper has ever contributed to Internet culture, where else? The Internet Archive, of course.

The Internet Archive is a curious organisation, and I'm thoroughly grateful for its existence. It plays host to so much stuff, and it's fascinating to see what has been recorded in there. Looking for old magazines? Chances are you can find them in the Internet Archive. But, at the same time, you can also find the entire video output of a guy who liked to stuff his face and then fart thunderously.

In a sense, I guess it's important to archive stuff like King Assripper, because whatever you may think of his, uh, content, he has nonetheless had an impact on popular culture. This whole little adventure this evening was mostly set in motion by Arin from GameGrumps happening to mention "Farting On Roomate's Door" during an episode. My thought process ran something like "oh, I vaguely remember that", closely followed by a nigh-uncontrollable desire to see someone farting on their roommate's door.

From another perspective, I guess one could look at it as a little worrying. Consider the cultural output of previous centuries, and how much of it has been painstakingly archived, reproduced and, on occasion, updated to make it more palatable or understandable to a modern audience. Then consider someone in 200 years' time (assuming we haven't boiled the planet by then) looking back on the culture from today that we've preserved, and stumbling across the complete archive of King Assripper's videos.

Now there's one thing you never see in sci-fi, eh? You never see them looking back at galactic history in Star Trek and Worf going "I learned that in the 21st century, humans communicated by farting on one another's doors", and Picard having to explain that no, that was only something that happened under particular circumstances, and should by no means be taken as representative of the entire cultural output of the 21st century.

I bet Riker farted on a few doors in his younger days, though.

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 339: Eras

I remember when I was growing up, and I'd hear about life when my parents were young, and thinking "gosh, that was all jolly primitive, how on Earth did people get by without televisions and computers and the Internet?" Sitting here in 2025, thinking back to my own childhood, I feel like we've gone through shifts almost as big once again.

I grew up surrounded by computers. My Dad worked for IBM, and I'm pretty sure we had at least one Atari computer in the house from the moment I was born. I learned how to use computers from an early age — not just playing games, but also using them for productivity, programming and creativity. And my enjoyment of computing helped me make some friends, too.

But by modern standards, those computers were limited. They could run one program at a time, and you had to do everything using removable physical media. Want to play a game? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up. Want to do something creative? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up, then make sure you have another separate disk or tape handy to save your work onto. Hard disks existed, but they were something like £700 in '80s money for 20MB, and thus very few people had them — more to the point, not much software supported them, either, at least until the 16-bit era, when they became a little more commonplace.

"Going online" was something you could do from quite early on if you had the necessary hardware, and it was a very different experience to what using the Internet (really the Web) is today. To even get logged on you'd have to enter a cryptic string of commands to the modem, and sometimes it felt like a bit of a roll of the dice as to whether or not it would actually work at all. When you did get online, it was pages and pages of text, no pictures, and an understanding that you had a limited amount of time to do what you had to do before either 1) your family kicked you off for tying up the phone line for too long or 2) the SysOp kicked you off remotely for spending too long, preventing others from using the service.

When "online" spaces other than bulletin board systems came along — accompanied by computers that could do more than one thing at once — it was a revelation. I have immensely fond memories of exploring CompuServe on my Dad's account, spending time on the GAMERS forum, reading and replying to messages, and, on one memorable occasion, making $200 from some custom Wolfenstein 3-D levels. But it was still very different to today; CompuServe was a walled garden of curated stuff to explore, and access to the broader Web didn't come about until later. I remember us having great difficulty setting up the Mosaic browser to view simple websites, and how exciting it was when we finally got to look at, say, pictures from NASA for the first time.

I don't think anything tech-wise has changed things as much as the rise and growth of the mobile phone, though. Getting a mobile phone when I was in my late teens made me feel like I had a whole new degree of independence, free to communicate with my friends on my own terms when and how I felt like it (Pay as you Go credit permitting). I recall long, drunken text conversations with people important to me at university; there was even a time when I'd voluntarily phone people up for a chat. I used to have long phone conversations with my perpetually absent university housemate, for example; she was a good friend, but I didn't see her all that much for a variety of reasons.

Then, when smartphones arrived, everything changed. It didn't seem like it at first, because the earliest implementation of the iPhone was very limited. There were no installable apps; you had to do everything via the Web. But sites were starting to get savvy to the rise of this exciting new technology, and were starting to serve up "responsive" pages that looked nice on the small screen of an iPhone.

I was working at an Apple Store when the iPhone launched. It was an exciting time, for sure, and it only got more exciting when the App Store launched. Suddenly, there was this brave new frontier for software, and we'd all download and experiment with all manner of different apps; not just games, but productivity tools, creativity tools and silly joke apps — who can forget the "drinking a beer" one?

When in-app purchases were announced, my heart sank. We were already starting to see some nickel-and-diming in the console gaming space, and it was about to get much worse in mobile. Free-to-play became the default, and aggressive monetisation came along with it. And there were people who would make excuses for this. People who are still making excuses for it to this day, to such a degree that we're never going to get rid of free-to-play and microtransactions at this point.

But I think the biggest change was how addicted people became to those black plastic slabs. And I'm not excluding myself from that description, either; I could feel myself being compelled to fiddle with it constantly, and I didn't like it. I still don't like it. I'm better at controlling it today, but I still feel the "urges" near-constantly.

Things only got worse with the rise of content designed to be deliberately addictive, such as short-form videos. For quite some time now, I've found a lot of tech to be scary and unpleasant; definitely a far cry from the excitement I'd feel every day when I booted up the Atari 130XE to do some BASIC programming.

It's not all bad, of course. It's great having satellite navigation in your pocket when you're trying to find things. It's great being able to stay in touch with people via a whole host of different means. And it's great being able to quickly snap a photo or video of anything without kicking yourself for not bringing your camera with you.

But there have been some big changes. Whether or not they're as big as the differences between my parents' childhood and my childhood, I don't know. But I suspect the realisation that you've lived through some huge changes in the world and society is an important part of progressing through life; you often don't notice these changes while they're in the middle of happening, but when you look back on them you realise that they were pretty massive. And not always for the better.

Would I like to go back to earlier, less technologically advanced, less convenient days? Some days, I honestly do think that yes, I would. There are a lot of great things about our modern, connected society — and a lot of terrible things, too — but sometimes I just miss the simplicity of life as it was back then.

I find myself wondering exactly what I mean by "back then"; if it was possible to go back, exactly what point would be the optimal one? I think, for me, it would probably be the early 2000s. Mobile phones would exist but wouldn't be the life-consuming soul suckers they are today; computer and video game technology would be at a good point; and we might all see a bit more of one another in the real world.

I might not have this blog, though. Or maybe I would. Perhaps it wouldn't be in quite this form. Perhaps I'd be a trailblazer in the blogging space.

Who knows? You can't go back, more's the pity. So we're stuck with what we have, regrettably, constructed for ourselves. At least for the moment.

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 338: Bomb Reignited

Boy, it sure has been an… "interesting" time for the games media recently, as I've alluded to a few times recently. To catch you up: Valnet, the sweatshop of the media industry, has bought Polygon and laid off the vast majority of its staff, which, of course, suggests that Polygon is going to become yet another SEO slop factory where its writers are paid peanuts to produce nothing of any real cultural value.

For a time, it looked like the longstanding site Giant Bomb was going the same way, with upsets over "brand-friendly" (or, more accurately, "brand-unfriendly") shenanigans on streams causing a sudden halt to… seemingly everything the site was doing. Giant Bomb has changed hands numerous times over the years; until recently, it was in the hands of Fandom, the people who ruined Wikia with obnoxious autoplaying pop-over videos and links to "related content" that was not, in fact, related to the thing you were looking at in any way whatsoever.

You'll notice I say "until recently". That's because Giant Bomb is no longer under the Fandom umbrella; it was announced on a panel at PAX East yesterday that Fandom and the Giant Bomb staff reached an agreement for the latter to purchase the site and turn it into an employee-owned outlet, much like the growing number of other worker-owned arrangements that are really finding their feet these days.

This is excellent news. I must confess despite being in the official Final Fantasy XIV guild for Giant Bomb, I never really hung out there all that much, but I did know that Giant Bomb, for many folks, was all about the community — similar to the old 1up.com days. The site looking like it was going under thanks to corporate interference was really sad to see — and for once, the corporate interferers saw what was going on, had a seemingly genuine "oh, shit" moment and changed course. Strongly. You can criticise Fandom for many things, but the agreement they reached with the Giant Bomb staff is, to my knowledge, absolutely unprecedented in the online media biz.

I've decided to make an effort to join the Giant Bomb community a bit more. I've rescued my account that I apparently signed up for in 2010 (with a different email address that thankfully I still had access to) and pledged $10 a month to help the folks on the site out. I'm looking forward to seeing what it has to offer, getting to know the community and perhaps, hopefully, finally having a decent place to hang out and talk games.

What does this mean for all the other things I do online? Nothing. I'm still going to be blogging here, I'm still going to be writing about games on MoeGamer — it's just I might be posting a few more bits and pieces on Giant Bomb from hereon, in both the forums and using the site's blogging facility. If there's one thing I really miss from the Internet Gone By, it's 1up.com and its sense of community; I'm really interested to see if Giant Bomb can prove to be an adequate replacement, particularly for someone who is essentially "new" to proceedings over there. I'm intruding on 17 years of history (huh, the site is the same age as this blog) but the "Duders" are supposed to be thoroughly nice people, so we'll see.

Mostly I'm happy to see my pals Jeff Grubb and Mike "Tolkoto" Minotti back in action, because I know very well how hard those two chaps worked to claw their way up the mountain of shite that is the games media industry, and it was a massive bummer to see them seemingly kicked back to the ground. I've known both of 'em since the 1up.com, Bitmob and Squadron of Shame days, and it was wonderful to see that they'd made something of their passions — and that they will continue to be able to do that.

So yeah. Giant Bomb is back. Now, if we could just do something about the rancid degradation of everything else online…

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 337: Lyrical Genius

Have you ever been on the website "Genius"? It's a site that hosts song lyrics, but it also has an annotation feature that allows the nerds of the Internet to highlight sections of the lyrics and post overly elaborate explanations of what they "really" mean.

I love sites like this, because inevitably you will stumble across people who take it really seriously, and that often leads to amusingly impassioned arguments about things that really don't matter. So let's have an explore, shall we?

Genius Annotation 3 contributors Breakfast is one of the first things you do in the morning so if you burn you breakfast things are going “great”. (As to why he’s making breakfast, knowing he’s two hours late for work, is beyond me!)

That one's from the second verse of I'll Be There For You, the theme from Friends by The Rembrandts. Elsewhere in the comments, someone points out that the theme song is sung from the perspective of first-season Rachel specifically, which honestly is not something I'd really considered before, but it would seem to apply for the most part.

Genius Annotation 1 contributor This is likely a reference to being high on Methamphetamine, which is sometimes refered to as “Scooby snacks”

This one's from, unsurprisingly, Scooby Snacks by The Fun Lovin' Criminals. The downvotes are due to the fact that "Scooby Snacks" refer to ecstasy, not methamphetamine, and while the two share some chemical bits and pieces in common, they are not the same thing. Underneath, someone posted this alternative explanation, which I think I like a bit more anyway:

Comment by TiwakingTiwakingTiwaking, 6 months ago: "Huey Morgan came up with lyrics about drug-addled bank robbers, an idea inspired by a security guard who handed out Valium to rowdy patrons at a New York City club called The Tunnel. “On Sunday nights they had this crazy hip-hop party called Mecca,” Leiser explained. “There were fights and people trying to sneak weapons in, guns and knives, so the security guards were always on edge. One of the guards was a crazy dude and he’d be giving everyone Valiums so at least they were all chilled out. He’d hand them around and say, ‘Does anyone want a scooby snack?’ That’s where got the idea for the chorus from: what if this dude and some of his meathead friends were robbing banks, all high on these scooby snacks?”"

Here's some actual insight on MMMBop by Hanson:

Genius Annotation 1 contributor Via Vulture: Zac: “MMMBop” was started as a background part during the making of our previous independent album, called Boomerang. We were looking for background parts for a song, and somebody started singing what became the “MMMBop” chorus. Ike: We were trying to come up with a catchy background part, and it was too catchy — like, “Oh, that’s really a foreground part.”

And some on Barbie Girl by Aqua, too:

Genius Annotation 2 contributors The singer lives a life similar to the famous Barbie, where people live carefree, easy lives. This line spawned one of the more hilarious court cases in music history, where Mattel, parent company to Barbie, sued Aqua for damaging the doll’s reputation. The judge ultimately sided with Aqua, leading to the now infamous ruling: “The parties are advised to chill.”

"Oh baby, baby, the reason I breathe is you (Oh yeah)" from …Baby One More Time by Britney Spears prompted this discussion:

Genius Annotation 2 contributors She’s addicted to her lover, and he’s the only reason she’s alive. In 2003, 5 years after “…Baby One More Time,” Britney released a song called “Breathe on Me,” where breathing has less to do with survival and more to do with sex.

You know, I launched into this post thinking I would mock Genius and its community for taking things far too seriously, but a lot of these are actually surprisingly insightful. Maybe I should just pick something really stupid, dumb and obvious. Hmm.

Genius Annotation 1 contributor “I need some love like I never needed love before.” The chorus erupts—a primal plea for connection. She yearns to make love, to explore every crevice of desire. Her past love was a mere appetizer; now, she’s back for the main course. The chorus repeats, a mantra of longing, urging her lover to set their spirits free—the only way to truly be.

This, from 2 Become 1 by the Spice Girls, is getting there, but I don't know. It's not wrong as such. It's just written in spectacularly flowery language, but then this is nothing unusual for music criticism, and I'm getting the increasing sense that Genius commentators would like nothing more than to be published music critics.

I was hoping that a song like Don't Stop (Wiggle Wiggle) by The Outhere Brothers would offer some gold, but disappointingly, there are no annotations on this song at all. I guess the lines "Put yo' ass on my face / I love the way your pussy tastes / Girl, you know you are the one / Take that ass and make me cum" are fairly self-explanatory, after all. Let's keep looking.

Genius Annotation 1 contributor “I need some love like I never needed love before.” The chorus erupts—a primal plea for connection. She yearns to make love, to explore every crevice of desire. Her past love was a mere appetizer; now, she’s back for the main course. The chorus repeats, a mantra of longing, urging her lover to set their spirits free—the only way to truly be. (then an image of the "finger into a hole made by the other hand" gesture to indicate sexysex)

Okay, this one has a diagram. (Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!! by Vengaboys, if you were wondering.) Good work. But, again, neither wrong nor particularly worthy of mocking. What are you doing to me, Genius? Stop providing genuine value and a good sense of humour! You have no place on the Internet of 2025!

Genius Annotation 3 contributors In this part of the song, Rick is saying that he will be loyal to his girl and, as the lyrics says, he’ll never give up on her, neither let her down, etc. The chorus is remembered by a lot of people because of the “Rick Rolled” meme. (Pie chart showing Rick Astley, indicating the things he would never do, including Give You Up, Let You Down, Run Around and Desert You, Make You Cry, Say Goodbye, Tell a Lie and Hurt You. Proportionally, Give You Up has the largest portion of the pie.)

Okay, I think we're done here. You win this round, Genius. But I will find you. I will find the most stupid annotation on your stupid website, and I will share it and I will mock it.

But in the meantime, I will probably just continue looking up lyrics on you, because you seem like a pretty reliable source for that and, with adblockers and all that shenanigans set up, you also don't appear to want to fill my computer with malware, so good job on that, I guess.

If you happen to find anything particularly ridiculous in your own explorations of Genius, please do share!

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.