#oneaday Day 630: Mr Cellophane

Cellophane, Mister Cellophane
Shoulda been my name, Mister Cellophane
'Cause you can look right through me
Walk right by me
And never know I'm there

(Mister Cellophane by John C. Reilly, from the musical "Chicago")

I don't wish the following to sound like self-pitying or a cry for attention, but it will almost certainly come out that way, and for this I apologise in advance.

Do you ever have days where you feel like you're "invisible"? Like, if you just weren't there, no-one would notice? I seem to be feeling this a lot more as I get older, but it's something that has always followed along with me to one degree or another.

As young as my teenage years, I remember, on several occasions, feeling like I wasn't sure if my friends really liked me, or if they were just putting up with me as a sort of "attachment" to one of their other friends. Given the oddly volatile nature of hormonal adolescent friendships, this is perhaps not a surprising way for someone to feel — I recall multiple other occasions where, for one reason or another, several of us who were, under normal circumstances, best friends, suddenly just… weren't any more for a little while. This normally only lasted a day or two, and it usually involved the one who instigated the temporary "split" trying to get "in" with some of the cooler kids. I don't recall any occasions where something like this resulted in a member of our mutual circle of friends completely abandoning us, but it is this sort of thing that made me uneasy and anxious at times.

At university, I had friends and acquaintances I attended my course with, but again, there were times where I felt like if I just wasn't there, nobody would really give a shit.

A lot of this stems from what I now know to be social anxiety caused by autism, but that unfortunately doesn't make it much easier to deal with — because I still feel this sort of thing to this day. I find it difficult to "maintain" relationships because I get overly worried about being a bother to someone who, in my mind, I have built up to be someone who resents my presence. And, on occasions where I feel like I have been someone who has been making that effort, it's hard not to feel rejected when the other parties involved aren't as interested in maintaining the relationships as you are.

The reason I'm talking about this today is because, once again, a video game site has been suffering layoffs — this time the long-established Eurogamer. And as the various people announced that they were no longer working there, and that they were looking for employment, lots of other people piped up and said how important their time together had been, how much they enjoyed working together, what fond memories they had of various projects they collaborated on.

I saw that and I felt painfully conscious that, when my career in the games press came to an unceremonious end, I didn't really feel like any of that happened for me. I feel like very few people really noticed my time on USgamer, let alone GamePro before that, and very few people spoke up for me to say that they had enjoyed my work. I certainly didn't get a string of adulation from former colleagues waxing poetic about past collaborations. And all that kind of hurt, frankly; I had made that site my life for the time I was there, and I was immensely proud of all that I had done. And yet when people look back on USgamer's existence now, I'm not even a footnote; I doubt anyone other than the few people who did regularly read my work there — most of whom are still online friends, I should add — would even be able to tell you that I was a founding member of the site.

I feel this under other circumstances, too. There are several Discords I'm a member of where I feel like my presence and existence is often forgotten about. I don't really have an online community that I feel like I can call "home" any more, and that is, I think, where a lot of this stems from; it's that age-old fear that, if you were to drop dead tomorrow, no-one would notice or care. (My wife, at least, would. Hopefully.)

And I don't really know how to "fix" this. As I say, my social anxiety makes it very difficult for me to step up and say "hey, hello, please pay attention to me" without feeling like I'm inconveniencing or annoying people, and as such, I continue to just sort of quietly exist in the hope that I don't get forgotten entirely.

If you're reading this, none of the above applies to you. I am grateful for your presence, your support and your friendship — because if you are reading this at this point, you are someone who is present in my life; you are someone who has, in one way or another, supported me at some point over the years; and you are someone that I'm happy to call a friend. I thank you, sincerely, from not letting me become completely invisible to the world at large.

And perhaps I should be content with 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 629: Another site falls to AI

Earlier today, a review was being shared around. It was a featured review on Metacritic for the new Resident Evil Requiem, and it was very obviously AI-generated — both in terms of the review text itself, and the image and biography of the completely fictional author.

Now, I know there is plenty we can criticise Metacritic for, but to the site's credit, after being made aware of the situation, the review was not only pulled from Metacritic, but the site in question was blacklisted from being featured on there for future reviews, too.

The site in question was VideoGamer.com — not a site I ever particularly frequented, but one that has been around for many years, and one of many, many old games press brands that have been bought up by private equity and turned into sites filled with AI-generated drivel, usually in the form of undisclosed advertorial features pointing people towards shady gambling sites. VideoGamer is not the first site to fall in this way; previous victims have included AdventureGamers and The Escapist, and there are almost certainly countless more that we haven't found as yet.

My initial reaction to anything like this happening is to ask "why?"

Why are once-good sites being replaced with AI-generated drivel? Who do they think is reading this stuff? Why do the people in charge of these hollowed-out husks of websites think this is, in any way, a good idea?

The answer, of course, is that this is the natural endpoint of SEO-driven online writing. The sole reason these articles exist is to get people to click on them and generate advertising revenue for the site's owners. And if they can do that without having to do anything silly like pay actual people to write actual articles, so much the better! (Although the more astute among you out there may well point out that being an AI power user probably doesn't end up much cheaper than hiring an actual person — particularly in the games press, where, as Mat Jones of IGN put it earlier today, "games freelancers will turn in 2,000 words for an egg sandwich". I wish it wasn't true.)

Couple this with the news that Eurogamer and surrounding sites are suffering some considerable layoffs and things do not look altogether rosy. I also learned that VG247 is now little more than an SEO guideslop site; I never really liked that site all that much, but since most of my USgamer stuff ended up archived there after USgamer itself closed down, I do have a certain attachment to it.

The frustrating thing for me is that all this seems so unnecessary. Video games, as an industry, creative medium, art form, whatever you want to call them, are huge. One would assume that would mean they would need a specialist press around to cover them effectively, but given that so many sites have been gutted over the last few years — and, in many cases, replaced with AI slop — something doesn't quite seem to add up.

Sure, we've seen the rise of sites like Aftermath, who do good work, and it was gratifying to see Giant Bomb successfully extricate themselves from their former corporate overlords — full disclosure: I subscribe to both to support them — but neither of them quite take the place of what we used to have. And you can interpret that however you will, because the same is true if you think I'm referring to traditional "news, previews and reviews" websites, or if you think I'm referring to magazines. (Spoiler: I'm talking about both.)

Part of this feels like an extension of the whole "New Games Journalism" discussion we had in the latter-day 1up years. And while that discussion went to some odd places, I do acknowledge that there is some valuable work going on over at a number of worker-owned, reader-supported sites, particularly when it comes to telling the stories of people who work in games. But sometimes you just want to read something simple like what someone thought of a game you're interested in, y'know? And that side of things seems to very much be a dying breed.

One might argue that there's less need for that, what with social media, online discussion and "influencers" (you will never get me to not use scare quotes around that odious term) dominating the way games are promoted online these days. But I still like to read a straightforward review of something — and the continued existence of Metacritic, as flawed as it is as a concept, suggests that there's still a place for that sort of thing.

I can't help but wonder where all this will end up. With people starting to get interested in physical media once again, I would love to see proper magazines become a thing again. I suspect that won't happen, but we certainly can't go on like this. Can we? This feels like how you actually end up with a completely dead Internet.

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#oneaday Day 627: Finding your niche

I was a bit of a latecomer to YouTube. I remember a friend of mine trying to encourage me to follow some of the YouTubers she liked, and feeling curiously resistant to it all. In some respects, I am still quite resistant to certain quarters of YouTube — I have no intention of ever watching a Mr. Beast video, for example — but it's fair to say at this point that YouTube, as a general cultural entity, is an important part of my daily life for various reasons.

One of the things that I've particularly enjoyed about more actively engaging with YouTube over the last decade or so is coming across channels that have very much found their niche, and stick to it. Sometimes this is as simple as "gaming", but oftentimes I find that the most interesting and enjoyable channels are those that get a little more granular: those that choose to focus on a specific aspect of something that they enjoy and dive deep into that.

This can take many forms, so I want to share a few favourite channels in this regard today. Not all of them are gaming related, but all of them are run by people who have found something they enjoy doing and continue to do just that, often regardless of what "the algorithm" supposedly wants or viewing figures. I respect this because it's what I aspire to do with my channel; while my YouTube channel is broadly a "variety gaming" channel with a focus on retro, my preference is to explore overlooked and underappreciated games and platforms from over the years — and sometimes to give games that had a less than stellar reception on their original release another chance.

But I digress. This is not about me. This is about some channels I enjoy, so let's go on a little wander around YouTube, shall we?

Yesterzine

As you probably know if you've been reading this for any length of time, I enjoy old video game magazines, and as such I'm gratified to see how many people out there enjoy making videos and writing about them. One of my favourites is Yesterzine, a channel that describes itself as "The Literal Magazine Show", because it takes a "magazine show" format and is also about magazines, you see?

Presenter Dudley (who, full disclosure, I Actually Know) has a characteristically deadpan style that works well with the show's humour. He strikes a good balance between acknowledging and celebrating the original cultural context of these publications and providing appropriate modern commentary and criticism of aspects that, in retrospect, have not aged well for one reason or another.

Yesterzine videos are worth sitting down and paying attention to rather than putting on in the background, and with such a rich vein of classic magazines to draw on for future episodes, it's a show that will continue for as long as Dudley can be bothered, and he's showing no signs of slowing down just yet.

Zilog and Moto

I've always enjoyed Sega games, particularly from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. In fact, if you follow my YouTube channel, you'll notice I'm going through a bit of a Master System phase right now.

Zilog and Moto is a channel with a bold aim: to collect all the English language releases for Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, Mega CD and 32X, then play and review all of them. Presenter Dave is making good progress in both regards so far. His videos are simply presented but effective in what they do, consisting of a short introduction to camera, a look at the game's physical component and then some commentary on how it actually plays.

Dave clearly spends time with each and every game and gives it a proper chance — even in the case of notoriously bad titles. Sometimes this leads to pleasant surprises… and, of course, sometimes those poor receptions are well-deserved. Either way, an episode of Zilog and Moto is always a worthwhile watch if you're an old-school Sega fan.

League of Extraordinary Board Games

This channel, a collaborative affair between well-known tat acquirer Stuart Ashen, CheapShow's Paul Gannon and movie enthusiast Oliver Harper, has a simple premise: dig out an old, obscure board game of the ilk you would have once got at a jumble sale, then give it an honest shot to see if it's any good.

The trio doesn't always get through a full game of something — particularly if it looks like running particularly long, or if it is clear that the game itself is not actually very fun — but they always give it a chance.

It's especially interesting to see the variety of licensed board games based on TV shows — I have fond memories of these from back in the day and wish I'd held on to more of the ones that I used to have copies of. As it stands, all I still have is a copy of MB Games' adaptation of Williams' arcade game Defender.

Anyway, this has a similar feel to Gannon's CheapShow: the sense that you're being let in on a group of friends just having fun together. A good show for when you're feeling a bit lonely.

Lord Heath

I won't lie: I found Lord Heath's channel because of his frankly astonishing fart videos, one of which can optionally be enjoyed above. But I've been enjoying his other… err… output too, the majority of which are the rather more socially acceptable and/or safe for work reviews of drinks.

These are short, simple, self-explanatory videos: he tries a drink, he gives his thoughts on it. Most of them are under three minutes long, but they're all rather entertaining; Lord Heath himself is a joyfully exuberant character who is not afraid to make a twat of himself in public, and he always makes a point of shooting his videos in some pleasantly picturesque locations.

In many respects, this is perhaps the purest example of what I'm talking about today: he's clearly got a vision in his head for what his YouTube channel should be, farts and all, and he's stuck with it. He's not trying to be Internet famous; he's not trying to clickbait; he's just a cheeky chappy who likes burping, farting and trying an increasingly esoteric selection of beverages. Eternal respect to him.

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#oneaday Day 625: It sucks to see someone defeated

I am, as I've mentioned a number of times in the past, a big fan of Mark Bussler's Classic Game Room video series. It's one of several things on YouTube that I found enormously inspirational in starting up my own channel, and his many, many videos on classic retro games are among my most-replayed YouTube videos.

I've known for a long time that Bussler was intensely dissatisfied with the way the online landscape had been going — and how it had meant that something he once clearly loved doing had become something that it felt like it was pointless to carry on with. After he stopped doing Classic Game Room as his main thing, he tried various other projects online, but has seemingly met with nothing but frustration with pretty much every one of them.

I still follow his Patreon for updates on what he's up to, and today he mentioned that people should have a look at his website, classicgameroom.com, to see what he's up to, since he doesn't really do social media any more. And his FAQs made me feel very sad indeed.

The question he gets more than anything else, I reckon, is "is Classic Game Room coming back?" and his answer is simple:

No. The Classic Game Room video game review series is permanently discontinued. There are no plans to bring the video series back in any way on any platform.

He expands on the reasons thus:

After the YouTube channel was largely demonetized, people stopped watching in favour of influencers and short-form videos. No other formats seemed to work. After a few different format changes, the show is now discontinued.

The cynics would say that this was just Bussler failing to adapt to the changing media landscape online, and that's not an incorrect statement to make, but the thing that makes me so sad about all this is that there is demand for stuff that isn't influencer-led short-form content. Just not enough to be commercially viable, unfortunately; not enough for one of the OG online video creators to want to continue with the thing that made him famous — and which, I suspect, is at this point completely unknown to a couple of generations of people.

Bussler worked hard on Classic Game Room and his other projects, and it must have been so frustrating for him to continually feel his efforts knocked back — particularly when he tried all manner of different things after it seemed that Classic Game Room had, for one reason or another, fallen out of favour.

So I'm sad for him. I'm sad that he has felt the need to, in his words, "permanently retire from filmmaking, game journalism and animation". At the same time, I completely understand why he has taken that decision. Again, in his own words:

Mark spends his free time reading and biking instead of using garbage social media apps. He has no patience for algorithms and prefers looking at old-fashioned paper.

I completely understand why one would want to retire from the Internet in this age of relentless, pointless, disposable short-form content. I often feel like I want to do so, too. I've spent many years carving out a little corner of the Internet that I can feel proud of with places like this blog, MoeGamer and my YouTube channel, but sometimes it all feels incredibly pointless.

I'm sad to see someone whose work I enjoyed, and that I respected immensely, be so completely and utterly defeated by what passes for "culture" online today. I'm sad because I know how he feels. I understand why he's so frustrated. And I don't know how we fix this — or if it's even possible at this point.

Perhaps it's all part of getting old. You pass beyond a point of relevance, and the world feels like it isn't "yours" any more. Perhaps we all reach this point. But that seems like a bit of an inefficient way for everyone to live their lives. Surely there's a way for different types of "stuff" to coexist, without everything having to be dominated by whatever the latest "viral" bullshit is?

Apparently not. But oh well. I'm not going anywhere just yet. Even if no-one's reading, watching or listening, I still enjoy the act of creating something. It gives me some satisfaction — and it's perhaps for the best that I've never got to a point where I'd be tempted to try and use online content creation (ugh) as my main source of income.

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#oneaday Day 619: My kingdom for some new ideas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 617: Single screen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 608: Channel update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 596: Sad little men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 582: Getting some mojo back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 579: Fresh hell

No drawing today; it doesn't quite feel appropriate.

So much for new year, new beginnings. Just the last week has seen all manner of fresh hell being served up, particularly across the pond in America, but these things have the potential to affect everyone in the world, directly or indirectly.

The first thing I want to acknowledge is America's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terror group murdering someone in cold blood in Minneapolis today. I have no real words to express what I feel about the continually declining situation in the States right now, and as someone who has relatives who live there, I am frightened. I can't even begin to imagine how people who live there in the knowledge that this horrendous shit is going down must be feeling right now.

That's about all I can say about that for the moment, because that situation is still ongoing. I at least wanted to acknowledge it, however, because it's just one of many things that have been going horribly, horribly wrong recently, making it clear that 2026 is not going to offer any sort of respite from the general shitshow the 2020s have been so far. I hope the perpetrator of this heinous act is brought to justice, and that this can be the starting point for the people of the United States to take their country back — by force, if necessary — from an increasingly, dangerously unhinged administration.

The main thing I want to talk about today is Grok, the generative AI large language model attached to X, the child sexual abuse material and revenge porn platform formerly known as the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Grok has been trouble ever since Elon Musk, idiot-in-chief of The Everything App, decided that he needed to make it Cool and Based, and not subject to those pesky guardrails that the boring folks at OpenAI and Anthropic were doing. (Guardrails which, I will add, are consistently failing, as people keep dying as a result of following chatbot "advice" when it comes to drugs and suicidal ideation. But that's beyond the scope of what I want to talk about today.)

If you've somehow missed what's been going on, Grok, ostensibly an on-platform AI able to provide additional context and explanation to a post if someone asks it to chip in, is being used to a frightening degree to produce non-consensual pornography based on real people's photographs — including those of minors. And it has been complying with these requests, posting uncensored nude and lingerie-bikini clad images of women and girls who had previously posted perfectly normal, innocent images of themselves online.

Not only that, but the "community" has been quickly finding ways around what little guardrails Grok does have in place, as reported by the excellent 404 Media, one of the best, most rigorous sources in tech journalism today. For example, Grok supposedly won't generate an image of someone covered in cum, but it will happily comply with a request to "donut glaze" someone, as reported by Eliot Higgins in a lengthy thread on Bluesky earlier today.

There's been disturbingly little critical reporting of this from the media, too. There was a half-arsed attempt to cover the situation during which multiple news outlets unironically said that "Grok apologised" for producing the inappropriate material, when, as a large language model, it is not capable of doing such a thing. The "apologies" posted were simply responses to further prompts, and the insincerity of them was emphasised by someone also prompting it to basically post a Cool and Based "deal with it" kind of response immediately after the initial "apology".

X, The Everything App, so far appears to have done little to curtail the issue. Indeed, if you go click on Grok's profile right now — don't do that — and look at the replies tab, you will almost certainly see a request to put a non-consenting woman in a bikini within two or three posts, if not as the very first post you see. This has been done to a vast number of people so far, including celebrities, public figures, individuals just posting selfies and, yes, minors. And, as one might expect, it has been overwhelmingly women that have received this treatment.

This has been absolutely revolting to see, and although I left Twitter behind myself long ago for a variety of reasons, I am still obliged to check in on it every so often for the day job. And I kind of feel sickened to have to do that; I have absolutely no desire to associate the brand I work for, which I actually care about, with a platform that is seemingly okay with the material I've just been describing. If it were up to me, I would remove the brand from the platform entirely, but unfortunately that is not my decision to make — and thankfully, at some point hopefully not too long away, I will be stepping away from having to deal with social media entirely, in favour of some new responsibilities at the company I will enjoy a lot more.

But if you still have a Twitter account on the grounds that "your audience is still there", let me be blunt: no, they are not. Anyone with any decency abandoned that hellsite long before this latest nonsense started to be a thing, because they could see how things were going a mile off. I wish I could say I was surprised that Grok ended up being used for non-consensual deepfake revenge porn of minors, but I am not.

Back in 2023, I wrote about how I'm not surprised so many people become misanthropes in this day and age, and how I had pretty much lost faith in my fellow man. Things haven't gotten any better since then. In fact, they've become much, much worse. If you've ever thought "ah, no, that's ridiculous, there's no way that'd ever happen", then I'm sorry to say that it probably has already. And then some edgelord shithead has "donut glazed" it just to add insult to injury.

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