#oneaday Day 497: Not exactly Shakespeare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 490: Normalise roasting shitty customers

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

Here's the prime example:

And this one's pretty good, too:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 484: Comeuppance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 465: Home again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, onwards to life once again.

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#oneaday Day 457: A statement of intent

Hello! Tomorrow I am going on holiday, and I am using this as something of a "cutoff point" in an attempt to improve my own mental health and get me out of a rut I've been feeling for a long time at this point. I have written about this previously, but please consider this a "final warning" of sorts.

This isn't intended to be a dramatic flouncing off into the sunset in the hope that someone will take pity on me. It is simply a statement of what I intend to do, because my present online existence is absolutely crippling my mental health, and I need to do something proactive to resolve the situation.

Day in, day out, I feel beaten down and depressed by the constant negativity online, and a big part of it is my own fault for engaging with platforms where negativity gets rewarded. But it's not just that; everyone has been exceedingly down for a long time now, at least partly due to the disruption we all suffered during the COVID years, not to mention the horrible things going on in politics and society in general right now. And that, unfortunately, often means that communities I would otherwise enjoy being a part of often find themselves being relentlessly negative.

It's not a malicious attempt by anyone to drag everyone else down, but that often ends up being the net effect. And continually being surrounded by that has not been healthy for me.

And so, as loathe as I am to further isolate myself in a world where I already feel like I've lost most of my "real life" friends, I am going to be taking the following steps for my own digital wellbeing:

I will be deactivating my Bluesky account for at the very least the duration of my holiday.
I will be leaving a significant number of Discord communities that I am currently part of.
I will be focusing the majority of my online presence on this blog, MoeGamer (my video game blog) and Scratch Pad (my creative writing site).
I will only be contactable via email (you can use the Get In Touch page on this site if you don't know my email address), Discord messages in the communities I remain active in (plus Discord DMs if we are friends on that platform), Google Chat if you know my email address, or WhatsApp private message if you know my phone number. I also occasionally pop in to the Giant Bomb forums as "angryjedi".

I am sorry to disappoint the two people who were enjoying my #365games thread on Bluesky.

I would also like to add that none of this is personal and that none of this has been triggered by a particular individual. This is all a "me" thing that I've been thinking about for a while; an attempt to reclaim my own life and brain from the digital realm.

As noted above, it's not as if I am going to disappear completely. I can still be contacted via the above means, and I encourage you to do so! It'd be nice to have a private conversation with some of you, away from the noise of social media, so drop me an email or a direct message if that sounds like something you might like. I would certainly appreciate it.

Anyway, that's that. I will be taking the above steps this evening before I go to bed, so I can start my holiday "fresh" in the morning. Thanks for your time and attention, and I hope I'll hear from some of you via non-social media means soon!

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#oneaday Day 451: Random encounters

Popular Internet wisdom has it that you should never read the comments. And, for the most part, this is fairly sound advice. Because if you do read the comments, there is a significantly greater-than-zero percent chance that you will run into someone like "Steven Woolf" here, a thoroughly disagreeable individual who did me the questionable courtesy of leaving a particularly rancid comment on a five year old MoeGamer article earlier today:

I have never encountered this person before. Their email address was unfamiliar to me. The fact they showed up in the comments of an article from five years ago suggests to me that they stumbled across MoeGamer via random Googling. And the fact they took such umbrage at me using a naughty word to discourage "AI people" from feeling in any way welcome on my site suggests to me that they are, themselves, an "AI person" and thus, by extension, a cunt.

Comments like this are always sort of fascinating, because there was evidently some sort of thought process involved — and one that is alien to me. What was Steven Woolf doing reading a five year old article about a character from an obscure Japanese beat 'em up? The nature of his comment suggests that he wasn't there to celebrate his love of Japanese video games, otherwise he might have, you know, mentioned Japanese video games. Instead, he chose to absolutely, spectacularly lose his shit at a disclaimer halfway down my site's sidebar presented in a 12 pixel high font. Why is that? Could it be because he's a cunt? All signs point to "yes" thus far.

What's even better is that because MoeGamer (and likewise this site) has an "approval" process for new commenters, meaning that his furious, impotent raging at my discouraging of AI cunts from using my site as the basis for any of their lake-boiling bullshit will remain completely invisible to the rest of the world for all time, with the only record of it being a snarky post on Bluesky (which he doesn't appear to be on, and which will be deleted at the end of this week anyway) and this post here, which he will probably never see because it's on a different website and he's almost certainly too stupid to track it down for himself despite 90% of the URL being the same.

And even if he does find it, all he'll really encounter is the simple and indisputably correct assessment that he is, in fact, a cunt.

So well done, Steven Woolf. You gave me something to write about today. You have officially become content, and that's not a fate I would wish on anyone, except you, because you are a cunt.

I hope you're having a better day now you got your little tantrum out of the way. If not, I recommend you go and play some video games or something. I hear Denjin Makai is pretty good?

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#oneaday Day 438: Increasingly glad I kept this place

If you breathe as many Internet fumes as I do on a daily basis, you are probably aware of the ongoing campaigns against Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Stripe deciding that they are the arbiters of good taste, and causing big problems for anyone producing any sort of creative work that is even remotely sex-adjacent. I wrote a bit about the early days of what was going on here, but things have continued to escalate since I wrote that, and there are plenty of other people who can do a much better job than I can on reporting the ongoing saga.

An especially worrying development is that Patreon, long regarded as the "standard" for those who wish to financially support their favourite creatives on an ongoing basis, has started stepping up its intolerance of what it regards as "sexually gratifying media". This language is very deliberate, because it mirrors what payment processors have started to regard as "unacceptable" — despite the fact that, in their role as payment processors, it is absolutely not their place to judge what people are spending their money on.

Add this to the fact that Patreon recently sent around a rather worrying survey relating to generative AI, whose questions basically amounted to "can we pweeeeze steal all your precious content so we can train our AI?", and I am feeling increasingly glad that I have, over the last 17 years, stayed pretty much where I am in terms of my online presence. Sure, social media accounts have come and gone, but between this blog and MoeGamer, I'm feeling increasingly vindicated in keeping "my" parts of the Web mine.

There's a growing move towards (or should I say back towards) this in the form of the "indie Web movement". Honestly, the whole shtick there makes it sound a lot more complicated than it really is — much of the "official" IndieWeb site feels like it was written by Linux nerds… which I guess sort of tracks — because all you really need to carve out a piece of the Internet as your own is some means of hosting your own website, and some means of showcasing your… whatever it is you want to use as a means of expressing yourself.

There are some delightfully creative "indie Web" sites out there, with a lot of people seemingly getting right back into the depths of programming cool interactive things for people to explore, but honestly, the humble blog is all a lot of people need — and those are dead easy to set up, given the number of easily accessible, straightforward to use and often open-source options in that regard. I am, as I have been for the last 17 years, still using WordPress here, and while there are some things I very much do not like about the direction WordPress has taken in the last few years — particularly with regard to shoehorning in the obligatory "generate with AI" crap in several places — the software is still, on the whole, some of the best and most flexible in the business.

The difficulty, of course, is getting people to see your little corner of the Web without social media to promote it. Because it's harder than ever to get noticed on social media — and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) isn't much help, either. Not only because Google sucks now. Not only because a lot of search engines are pushing AI hard — and in the process discouraging people leaving the search site to go and visit individual websites. But also because heavily SEO'd text sucks to such a degree that it's almost as much of a waste of time as flat-out AI-generated text.

The answer, of course, is just to not really care. I don't. The value for me in writing on here and on MoeGamer is in having a place for me to just write. Sometimes people show up to read what I've written, and that's often (though not always) nice. But that's not why I do this. I'm not trying to be famous or some great authority on any subject. I am, as the header of this site says, just a nobody trying to make my way in an increasingly fucked-up world, and getting some thoughts out of my head onto the virtual page helps me to process things. A bit. I can say pretty much what I want here, within reason. And so I do.

I shan't pretend I don't still fall into pits of soul-sucking despair and depression, particularly when I'm feeling as burnt out as I do right now. But without this outlet, this safe place for myself, this little corner of the Internet that is my online home, more than any other social media profile page ever has been, I shudder to think what state I'd be in.

So yes. I am glad I have stuck with this place, and I will continue to stick with it for as long as it is practical to do so.

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#oneaday Day 435: Performative tediousness

As time advances ever-onwards towards my holiday and my (possibly permanent) break from social media, I find myself considering starting the whole thing early. Bluesky in particular has started showing worrying signs of the sort of passive-aggressive, performative annoyingness that plagued Twitter in the mid-2010s — this was, for me, what really set me on a path to disliking social media in general — and it's just not really fun any more.

There are aspects of Bluesky I do like. The "nuclear block", which prevents anyone seeing the specific posts you're replying to or quoting when you blocked the original poster, remains the platform's best feature, and is a good — albeit imperfect — solution to dogpiling. But dogpiling still goes on, because there are other ways of doing that.

But the passive aggressive thing, known in a past life as "subtweeting", where you post something obviously intended for the attention of a specific person, but one that you're not replying to explicitly, has seen a marked uptick recently. You know the sort of thing, posts that start "If you think [not-particularly contentious opinion, like thinking trans people should have rights], then just unfollow me now" or "When someone says [exceedingly obvious and hyper-specific red flag that clearly someone has mentioned in the last ten minutes], that tells you everything you need to know about that person" — posts that are intended to wind up a very specific person, but in a "not touching, can't get mad" sort of way; posts that encourage a "well, if you think this might be about you, you might be the problem" sort of attitude.

Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't confront hateful bigotry when it comes up. Particularly these days, when the significant progress we've made over the course of the last decade in terms of tolerance and acceptance with regard to race, gender and sexuality appears to be coming undone at a frighteningly rapid rate. But there are better ways to do it than posting passive-aggressive statements into the void. If you want to have an argument with someone, just go ahead and fucking have the argument. It might make you feel better for five minutes, until you realise how much time and energy you have wasted trying to change the mind of someone else on the Internet.

Or you could do something yourself that is more positive. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that. Calling someone bouncing off the walls going "I HATE THE JEWS" a "Nazi" is not suddenly going to make them go "shit, I am? I am, aren't I? Thank you for setting me straight". Setting a good example yourself, meanwhile, up to and including getting involved in activism if you feel strongly enough about the issue in question, is a much more productive use of everyone's time. It won't stop the Nazis being Nazis, but if there's one thing several decades of Internet discourse should tell you at this point, it's that very little will.

One technique I've found extremely useful in training myself out of getting into annoying situations online is that if I see something which, for one reason or another, angers me, I will fully type out an indignant reply, look at it for a moment, take ten seconds to think "do I actually want to post this? Is the potential fallout from posting this worth it?" and then, more often than not, delete it, because the answer to both questions is inevitably "no". Just recently, this has been happening with such frequency that I find myself asking a follow-up question: "do I really still want to be part of this community, if situations like this keep arising?" And the answer there, too, is often turning out to be "no".

This is the thinking behind my great "unplug" in early September. I'm going to disconnect completely from all forms of "discourse" online for the duration of my holiday. I'm still going to keep my phone with me, of course, and I will do things like keep up to date on the news and suchlike with RSS, but social media and any sort of "open" chat (read: Discord) is off the table for me.

I'm just glad I've never got involved with TikTok. My overwhelming feeling from my thankfully limited exposure to TikTok is that TikTok is hell for this sort of performative crap, except now you have to see someone yelling things into their phone camera instead of posting indignant text messages. And TikTok never ends. God, what a fucking nightmare proposition.

I realise this entire post could itself be seen as performative and passive-aggressive. But, frankly, this is my own website, and I'm not pushing this out into the wider world in the hope some very specific person is going to see it. I'm just writing it for myself. And possibly my cat, who has been cuddling my leg for the entire time I've been writing this. I hope you enjoyed it, Patti.

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#oneaday Day 428: My home online

As I count down to deactivating all social media aside from the little bit I need for work, I find myself tinkering with this site to make it a more comfortable "home" online. After all, once I ditch Bluesky, I will have no feed- or algorithm-based social media at all, with only YouTube (which is algorithm-based, yes, but I don't really count it as "social media"), Discord and various other private chat solutions (depending on friends' preferred methods) remaining.

Honestly, at this point, I'm relishing the prospect of some peace and quiet. Bluesky was fun for a while, but it just doesn't really feel worth the effort. Absolutely no other social media whatsoever holds any appeal for me, and I long for (LONG for) the day when I can ditch the work social media accounts also, because I absolutely detest working on them.

There are plenty of people out there who, I'm sure, have made social media work for them and even have an enjoyable time scrolling their feeds. I haven't felt the same sort of joy in silliness that I did in the early days of Twitter for many years at this point; after online interactions in general sort of imploded on themselves around the Gamergate years, things were never quite the same again afterwards. They'd been building that way for a while — for me, I think the Mass Effect 3 ending "controversy" was the beginning of the end, and that was, what, 2012? — and ever since then, what little social media I've kept up and running has been for one of two reasons: fear of losing touch with people that I have only ever interacted with on social media, and the feeling of "obligation" that I had to share my work, be it personal or professional in nature.

I still fear losing touch with some people, although honestly so many people have just fallen out of my life completely over the course of the last decade or so, what's a few more at this point for an incredibly lonely middle-aged man? The people who really matter to me, I already have alternative means of getting in touch with. I have a pinned post on my Bluesky page making my intentions clear, and so far no-one has made any particular attempt to get in touch via alternative means, and thus I have to conclude that either no-one cares, or it's going to be a situation where two months down the line, someone goes looking for me, finds my account deactivated and goes "I wonder what happened to that guy?"

I'm here. I'm still here. I've always been here. And as I let go of more and more of the toxic "services" that have been poisoning my mental health for the last decade and a half, I look forward to this place (and my other sites) being my true "home" online.

You are, of course, welcome to visit, dear reader. I'll be very happy to welcome you in.

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#oneaday Day 421: Ch-ch-ch-changes

I'll write about this again nearer the time that I'm actually going to put this into practice, but I wanted to give some advance notice of what I'm planning.

On September 8, 2025, I'll be taking a big step back from social media for personal use. I'll be deactivating my Bluesky account, removing it and Discord from my phone, and leaving a bunch of Discord servers.

The reason for this is that social media in general — even the little bit I still hold onto for some inexplicable reason — continues to play havoc with my overall mental health, and honestly, there is really absolutely nothing left that makes me feel like I "need" it for anything other than occasional contact with other people. And there are other means of achieving that contact with other people.

This isn't intended to be a big dramatic "well I'm taking my ball and going home without you!" post, and it's nothing personal, particularly with regard to the Discord servers I will be disconnecting from. This is a me thing; it's about removing myself from situations that are continually self-destructive and unproductive — i.e. spending far too much time doomscrolling on Bluesky or just rotating around several Discord servers in case someone said anything vaguely interesting — and freeing up time and headspace for doing things that I want to do, that make me happy, and that are less inclined to have me staring into space of an evening.

Thus, as loathe as part of me is to isolate myself further from a world where I already feel somewhat abandoned by and/or alienated from most of my "real life" friends, I intend to take the following steps for the sake of my mental health and overall digital wellbeing:

I will be deactivating my Bluesky account, at the very least temporarily while I am on holiday, and likely permanently.
I will be leaving a significant number of Discord communities that I am currently part of. I emphasise, again, that there is nothing personal in this; I am just attempting to cut down on the "noise" and the self-destructive habits of continually scrolling around the same servers time after time, hour after hour. I will be keeping some small, "friendship group" servers, but that's it.
I will be deleting Bluesky and Discord from my phone for the duration of my holiday, possibly permanently.
I will be focusing the majority of my online presence on this blog, MoeGamer (my video game blog) and Scratch Pad (my creative writing site).
I will only be contactable via email (you can use the Get In Touch page on this site if you don’t know my email address), Discord messages in the communities I remain active in (plus Discord DMs if we are friends on that platform), Google Chat if you know my email address, or WhatsApp private message if you know my phone number.

If you would like to stay in touch — and there are a bunch of you I would very much like it if you did! — then you can feel free to use any of the means outlined above to have a chat. It'd actually be quite nice to have some private conversations with many of you, away from the chaos of social media, so if we've had some good times in the past and I seem to have otherwise disappeared from the social channels you tend to use on the daily, please feel free to drop me a line.

Anyway, like I say, I wanted to give some advance notice of this, and I'll be posting something very similar on September 7, the day before I have a week's holiday as a last reminder. Thanks for your time, and if you have any questions or whatever about the above, well, you know where to find me!

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