#oneaday Day 251: I'm Also Here Because I Was a Forum Poster (or: Reflections on Losing a Community, Mistakes Made and a Desire to Reconnect)

Likely to be a long one today, and I'm not entirely sure exactly what I want to say, nor exactly how to say it, but I ask you to indulge me, whether you're a regular reader, someone who stumbled across this page, or someone I specifically pointed in the direction of this post.

I'm just going to start typing and see where things go from there.

This is something I've been meaning to write for some time, but have never really known exactly how to write it. It's probably going to be difficult to write, it's probably going to be difficult contemplating the possible reactions to it, and I honestly don't know if it's a good idea to even write it at all in the first place. But having had… Feelings festering inside me for probably the best part of a decade and some change at this point, I think it's time I got at least some of them down on paper.

I was inspired to write this by Chris "Papapishu" Person's excellent post over on Aftermath, I'm Only Here Because I Was A Forum Poster, in which he contemplates how, in the mid 2000s, he found a community of like-minded folks on the forums for 1up.com, and that, via a somewhat roundabout route, resulted in him being a professional games journalist, initially for Kotaku and subsequently for Aftermath.

Pishu isn't the only person for whom this is true. I can probably attribute my current position indirectly to those days back on the 1up.com forums, and Jeff Grubb and Mike "Tolkoto" Minotti of Giant Bomb, both specifically namechecked in Pishu's piece, almost certainly have their own similar stories. Those heady pre-social media days on 1up.com were, it's fair to say, a real high point for online socialisation for me and for many others, and I feel like things have only gotten worse since the collapse of that site and its consequences: the community scattering to the four winds, never really settling down and calling one place "home" ever again.

I first came to 1up.com because of the family connection. My brother, John Davison, helped to launch the site, and was also working on Electronic Gaming Monthly and the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine at the time. 1up.com was a bold new experiment in online video game-related media: its social features were, at the time, pretty revolutionary, allowing any of its users to start a blog, create a club with its own private message board, and post on the forums. The site still had professional staff, of course, and for many folks the various 1up.com podcasts by that staff were a real highlight of the site. But for me, the thing that made me happier more than anything was the sense of community it had at its peak.

As someone who is what I now understand to be autistic, finding a community of like-minded nerds online was an absolute lifeline. Finally, I had a place where I could well and truly be myself, among "my people". And it didn't take long for me to find a niche within a niche: nerds who enjoyed video games, and who enjoyed talking about them at great length, in great detail, and with a mind to proper in-depth critical analysis rather than just flame wars or quickly writing things off because they didn't score over 80% in a review.

If you look back over the past entries of this blog, you'll see frequent references to "The Squadron of Shame". This was a loose conglomerate of 1up.com members who came together after a discussion on the 1up Yours podcast about "The Pile of Shame": what today tends to be referred to as "the backlog". The pile of games that you've bought, but haven't gotten around to. The games you always meant to play, but haven't. The games that don't get the time of day in reviews, but which you always thought looked interesting.

Fun fact: the first video I ever posted on YouTube was a hacked-together "trailer" for the games we'd covered up until that point.

1up Yours was initially intending to pick a game from the hosts' respective Piles of Shame, play it as a group, then discuss it the following episode, book club style. They didn't really manage to do that — and this isn't a criticism or admonishment of them, as they were all busy people — but a group of us on the forums thought that it was a really good idea… so we did it instead, beginning with the game the 1up Yours crew intended to cover: Psychonauts.

Squad "Missions", as they were known, took the form of a forum thread, in which the person proposing the "mission" would outline the reasons they thought the game in question was noteworthy and why they thought it could do with some in-depth discussion. These initial posts were often long and in-depth in their own right, and they set a good tone for the subsequent discussion: Squad threads became notorious as being wordy, but no-one gave us grief for it, and we often got a shout-out on 1up Yours for successfully picking up and running with the otherwise aborted concept.

One day, something terrible happened on those forums, and I'm not entirely sure why. Where there once had been a selection of subforums specific to particular types of discussion — including individual platforms, plus a special forum for the "1up Radio" podcasts, which is where the Squad threads resided — there were now just two forums: "Games" and "Not Games". Presumably this was done in an attempt to make moderation easier, but it was the beginning of the end for 1up.com's community.

The first Squad thread we posted under this new layout (in "Games") was immediately trolled by someone, clearly unfamiliar with how we had done things on the 1up Radio boards, complaining about a "massive fucking wall of text", and things derailed quickly from there. It was abundantly clear, both from this forum upheaval and various other behind-the-scenes happenings at 1up.com, that the writing was on the wall for this community, and so we started looking into alternative approaches. (1up.com actually hobbled along until 2013, but most of the community and staff left long before that.)

Many of us settled on the fledgling Twitter as a means of interacting with one another, but one of the most important things we did was organise a podcast. This would take the place of our megathreads on the 1up.com boards, and allow a rotating group of us — with several regulars — to discuss the games in-depth, in person, for as long as we wanted. Although severely lacking in confidence to speak up when surrounded by people I always felt were probably a lot more clever and articulate than I was, I quickly developed a reputation among the group as The Guy Who Was Good At Editing The Podcast, so my seat in pretty much every episode was all but assured, and I made a (now-defunct, and apparently non-archived) website that left a written record of all the podcast episodes and the things we discussed. (The episodes themselves, thankfully, survived — you can find them all on my Soundcloud.)

For a while, things went well, and friendships solidified. I even made the trip across the pond to visit various other members of the Squad (who were mostly North America-based) on multiple occasions, and we played host to some Squaddies on at least one occasion that I recall.

We changed the format in which we discussed things several times over the podcast's complete run, shifting from the "book club" format to focusing on a particular topic and bringing our own examples to the table. Things were good, for a while. Then we stumbled across Katawa Shoujo, a visual novel about a boy with a heart condition and how he came to love a group of girls with disabilities that he came into contact with when they all attended the same special school.

Katawa Shoujo was — is — a thoroughly interesting cultural artifact, if you're unfamiliar. It stems from the work of an independent Japanese artist named RAITA (if I remember correctly), who sketched some girls who had various forms of physical disabilities. Various members of the notorious imageboard 4chan found these images somewhat striking, and so, seven years after the original images' publication, they took the unusual step of forming a development collective of individuals from all across the world in order to bring these characters to life. The result was an absolutely fascinating visual novel that handled the subject matter infinitely more sensitively than anyone would have ever expected, given the origins of the development team being a website commonly referred to by many (not without cause) as a "cesspit".

In keeping with the visual novels that tended to come west at the time of its release, Katawa Shoujo was a sexually explicit game, featuring erotic scenes between the protagonist and each of the various heroines. Unsurprisingly, this made some people uncomfortable, particularly given the high school setting of the game and the way it (like many other localised Japanese works) left the cast members' ages somewhat ambiguous. And, although we had a great podcast discussion about the game itself — during which several of us opened up emotionally more than we'd ever done in public before — some damage had been done to our group. I don't blame the folks who splintered off or their reasons for it, but I am still sad that it happened, because it marked the beginning of the end.

We managed a few more episodes post-Katawa Shoujo, but eventually things petered out. We'd had plans for a Squadron of Shame website with its own forum to host discussions just like in the Good Old Days, but it took a long time for those to come to fruition, and it never quite built up the same momentum as in the 1up.com era. Eventually, it fizzled out completely, and after many years of reflection I probably can't say with any confidence that I was completely blameless in this.

Around the time of our Katawa Shoujo discussions, I'd started getting to know one of our members known as "Shingro" a bit better, and he was particularly interested in anime, manga and Japanese games. He, along with a couple of other people I knew in other places online (including Google+, remember that?) had given me some recommendations for some localised Japanese games to try — games that never got much attention from the press, weren't received particularly positively when they did, but which were likely to appeal to anyone who "got" what Katawa Shoujo was going for. Among those games were the early entries in the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, the Atelier Arland series and the Ar Tonelico series.

I played and absolutely adored all of those games, and, along with Katawa Shoujo, found that I was experiencing something unusual and interesting: I was enjoying games that felt like they had been tailor-made to suit me and the way what I would later come to recognise as my neurodivergent brain worked. I recognised that they likely wouldn't appeal to everyone for a wide variety of reasons — and not just the sexually provocative element. They were unabashedly cheerful, they were colourful, they were often gleefully experimental (and not always successfully so) with their game mechanics, and their voice acting had a lot of screeching and shouting, particularly if you played in Japanese.

But I liked them for that; they knew their audience, and they unashamedly catered to that audience and no-one else with a laser-like focus. I started to discover hidden depths in these games; even the most silly-seeming ecchi titles, like Senran Kagura Burst, had something interesting to say, and they often had a lot less shame about it than many mainstream titles, many of which were still in their "dark and edgy equals mature" phase. In stark contrast to my growing disillusionment with triple-A games — Gears of War was my absolute last straw in this regard, as I hated that game and pretty much swore off "big games" after that — I felt like I was discovering gaming afresh for the first time.

And, naturally, I wanted to share the way these games made me feel. So I did. And for a while, things were okay, until I saw a few messages that made me feel a bit uncomfortable. Messages that, while it almost certainly wasn't the intent, given the sources, made me feel like I was being judged for the type of entertainment I was enjoying — entertainment that, let's not forget, I had recently come to feel was "speaking" to me like pretty much never before in my gaming career. Words like "creepy" and "perverted" were bandied about a bit too readily, and I… did not like that.

For a bit of context, I was struggling in my personal life around this time. (So what else is new?) Shortly after I took one of the aforementioned trips across the pond to meet some Squad members at PAX East in Boston, I split up with my first wife. And I… did not handle it very well. I felt betrayed, broken, utterly destroyed, and the things that I could cling onto for some degree of comfort in those trying times were of increasing importance to me. By the time Katawa Shoujo and the aforementioned other games came along, I was several years deep into A Difficult Time and, although I had met Andie, the wonderful person who is now my wife, I was still struggling and in great need of comfort.

I started to get frustrated when I saw the things I enjoyed come under what I perceived to be "attack". In the early to mid 2010s, this really started to come to a head, as the modern progressive movement started to really raise its head online — and was being more than a little abrasive about it, with public shaming often being the weapon of choice. In retrospect, I recognise how effective this can be — and how flaccid groups like the USA's Democratic party appear when they're not willing to step up and confidently declare their opponents to be Bad People — but at the time, I did not like it, particularly as I saw people I knew and cared about caught in the crossfire on multiple occasions.

At this point I should clarify that I have always had beliefs that are broadly in line with what one would call "progressiveness". I believe that straight white men have indeed been in a position of power and privilege for many years, and that marginalised groups, including women, have had an uphill struggle to stand on the same level — and that it is the responsibility of those who are in positions of power and privilege to help others up, so we can all benefit. I believe trans rights are human rights, I believe everyone has the right to love whoever they want to love, regardless of gender, and I believe racism is something we should have left behind long ago, and that it doesn't go challenged nearly often enough these days.

At the same time, part of my frustration stemmed from those mid-2010s feeling like I was being demonised for my gender and my sexuality in particular. I am sure at least part of this was down to my vulnerability at the time, but when I saw articles literally branding people who liked certain games as "creepy", "paedophiles" and "sex pests", I didn't like it. At all. Striving for equality, I felt, shouldn't mean dragging people down — particularly when there's a lot more nuance to the situation than just "white straight man = privileged". As someone having difficulty with my own personal situation — and what I later learned was neurodivergence — I certainly didn't feel like I was in the same position as the hypothetical straight white bogeyman, sitting in his suit with his perfect white teeth, counting his money and posting slurs on the Internet.

So I lashed out. There are numerous posts on both this blog and on MoeGamer where I did just that: I attempted to express how I was feeling about this. I attempted to express how these things that were important to me made me feel — and how it made me feel when I was called all manner of horrible names simply for what I liked, including by former colleagues. When I left USgamer, I was subject to some absolutely horrible abuse from an individual who joined the organisation as I was on the way out, and I received absolutely no support from anyone when that happened.

All this, as you might expect, eventually attracted the attention of the Gamergate crowd, who also counted among their number people who liked sexually provocative (or explicit) games, just like I did, and seemed to be forming a community of like-minded folks. I recognised even in the early days that Gamergate — and particularly its subreddit, KotakuInAction — was a scarlet letter, so I always took care not to publicly associate myself with the movement or even express support for it, particularly as things escalated and it became clear that no, for some of those people, it really wasn't about ethics in games journalism.

I maintain to this day, however, that among the early Gamergate crowd were some genuinely good people who wanted change for the better — and in a few cases actually achieved meaningful change that didn't involve any sort of bigotry — but with the inherently disorganised nature of the whole thing, it was, in retrospect, very easy for it to become an alt-right pipeline, and for bad actors to take control of things. And, as silly as it may sound for a dispute supposedly over video games to have such power, I firmly believe that at least part of the reason the world (particularly the online world) is in such a mess today is down to Gamergate.

Although I continued not to associate myself with Gamergate or its supposed beliefs, I found supporters from among its members for what little overlap we had. And I won't lie, it was nice to feel like there was someone who supported the way I felt, regardless of where they'd chosen to plant their flag. I found people who seemed to understand me, many of whom were on the periphery of the whole "culture war" by choice, much like I was, but who often got dragged into things whether they wanted to or not.

I continued to feel frustrated and vulnerable, though, like I was being pushed aside by people I had once called friends and a community I had once felt part of, all for the things I enjoyed. I continued to lash out, including towards people who had once been good to me, close friends, all because I felt like they had "sided" with people who didn't value my opinion, who wanted to brand me some of the worst names you can call people. And all because I liked anime-style games that occasionally crossed a line into sexual provocativeness or explicit scenes.

I said some things that I regret on multiple occasions, and I am deeply sorry about that. I recognise today that, in retrospect, I was standing at the very mouth of the alt-right pipeline and, if I had made some very different choices, I would be in a far worse situation than I am in today. Thankfully, I eventually recognised the danger I was in, and successfully changed my ways in such a way that I could continue to enjoy the things I loved without putting myself at risk of becoming one of those "everything I don't like is WOKE" idiots who infest online discourse today. And one of many positive results from that was a very enjoyable period in charge of Rice Digital, which subsequently led to my current position with Evercade — a job that, were it not for the necessity to check in on social media every day when I have otherwise mostly abandoned it for my personal life, would be 100% a dream assignment.

That doesn't change the regrets I have, though, and I wish I had come to the above realisation sooner than I did. There was still a period where I was in a bad place, and doing bad things, whether or not I really intended to. I deeply regret lashing out and pushing people away, and I wish I could make up for what I did, regardless of my reasons for it.

The reasons don't even matter any more; all that remains is the result, that being that I am growing older, I am mostly alone (except, thankfully, for the blessings that are my wife, cats and family) and in complete and utter despair at the mess I've made of my interpersonal relationships over the course of the last decade and a half.

I have many regrets. I am sorry to those I hurt. And I want to make things right. I just don't know how.

So this post is, hopefully, a start.

If you're reading this and you used to know me before… all this, I would like to know you again. I'm sure both our lives are very different to how they once were, hopefully for the better. On the whole, my life is much better than it was 10-15 years ago.

But I wish I hadn't lost those 10-15 years, and all the people I lost with them.

I am sorry to those of you I pushed away, either consciously or unconsciously. I am sorry to those of you I hurt. It doesn't matter if it was deliberate or not; if I hurt you, I hurt you, and I am sorry.

I just want things to go back to how they were during that one brief time in my life when I can say I was happy, when I felt I was accepted, when I felt I was among "my people". I know it can never be exactly the same as it once was. But I'm willing to put in the work needed to rebuild, reconnect and rekindle lost friendships.

Whatever it takes.

Thanks for reading.

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 245: Unplug

It is the end of what has been a long and stressful week, but I think today was actually reasonably productive, so hopefully next week I will feel a bit better about things. I still want to take a bit of time off sometime soon, but I'm feeling somewhat less in the "I need to get out right now" panic that I feel like I was in the other evening.

I mean, don't get me wrong, the world is still burning around me, but at least in my own little haven of calm here, things are pretty peaceful. Andie is painting the stairs, the cats are sitting either side of me napping, I have no other commitments besides this blog this evening, and I don't have to get up tomorrow if I don't want to. Not a lot to complain about there, really.

It's important to take a step back from the chaos of life in the 21st century every now and again and consider How Things Really Are. A good means of visualising this is imagining what life would be like if you unplugged the Internet and had no means of being contacted besides someone calling you on your phone or stopping by your house. If you can look at your life from that perspective and see that things are, for the most part, Okay, then you should probably do your best to keep seeing things from that angle when you plug the Ethernet cable back in.

Because ultimately, as shit as some of the stuff going on in the world can be, there's little you can probably do about it, particularly if you're far away from the Bad Things. Take the situation in America, for example; I am concerned for the safety and wellbeing of the people I know over there, of course, but practically speaking, there's absolutely nothing I can do to affect that whole situation. Things are different for those in the middle of that whole shitshow, of course — and I'm gratified to see that at least some folks are waking up to the fact that posting disapproving messages on a social network is not the same as getting out there and Doing Activism — but from where I'm sitting, all I can really do is be a supportive ear if people need it and not be a jerk to those who are Dealing With Shit.

It's difficult to keep your mind trained to think in this way, particularly when the buzz of Online is always there, encouraging you to check in on things and "just see how bad things have gotten". You can tell yourself all you want that you're doing it because you find it darkly humorous rather than utterly terrifying, but deep down, you, of course, know that all you're doing is deliberately and wilfully making your own mood darker for no real discernible benefit to your life as a whole.

That may sound callous. That may sound uncaring. But at some point you have to disconnect. At some point you have to focus on yourself and the people directly around you. At some point you have to remember that as enriching and fulfilling and exciting as an online life can be, it will always have to play second fiddle to your Real Life. Your Real Life is in the here and now, surrounding you, defining you. Your online life can be made to go away by just pulling out that Ethernet cable. And, as long as you haven't stumbled into any situations where your online life has seeped into your Real Life — which is an increasing risk these days, I will concede — you can just go about your day.

That's what I'm going to attempt to keep telling myself, anyway. The alternative just feels like perpetual misery.

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#oneaday Day 244: Is "best practice" the enemy of expression?

I, as you probably know, have a YouTube channel. I have had it for a grand total of about seventeen years at the time of writing, though I would say I've only really been actively, semi-regularly using it since about 2018, initially to host video versions of a podcast I was doing, and subsequently to kick off the series that I'm still running in one form or another to this day.

Over the course of those 17 years, I have picked up just over 3,600 subscribers at the time of writing, with the vast majority of those showing up since 2018. While that is obviously a drop in the ocean compared to big, successful channels out there, I am pleased with it, and honestly I don't particularly want my channel to grow any faster.

In order to acquire those 3,600 subscribers, I have done… nothing particularly special, to be perfectly honest. I have steadfastly ignored the advice of YouTube "gurus" to pursue trends, to be clickbaity with titles and thumbnails, and to "edit for engagement". In short, I consistently reject what is supposed "best practice" in favour of just doing whatever the hell I want — and I have seen some success doing just that. Could I see more success if I was following the supposed "rules" to the letter? Quite possibly. But then I don't think my channel would be mine any more.

One of the things I object to most about online culture in general these days — not just YouTube, but this applies all over — is how no-one really seems to have a personality any more. Everyone says the same things, everyone responds to things in the same way, everyone uses the same bank of reaction GIFs when they can't be bothered to use their words. In YouTube, this is best exemplified by the way you could watch five randomly chosen videos from five moderately sized channels, and I bet you'd hear the exact same sound effects and music clips, and see the exact same visual memes, in at least half of them — if not all of them.

This is because these things, supposedly, work. But in using that "best practice", you are eliminating a lot of the soul from your own work. You're making something that caters to the mysterious "algorithm" — or rather, an imaginary audience — rather than expressing yourself, as yourself. It's the same with the way people talk to one another online; because those reaction GIFs and snippy retorts like "skill issue" are universally understood by everyone, everyone uses them because they're seen as an efficient means of communication.

But, again, there's no personality there. Any time someone comes out with "skill issue" or "tourist" or whatever the derogatory term-du-jour is, I lose all interest in getting to know that person, just as I lose interest in a YouTube video the moment they start busting out the Metal Gear Solid alert noise, The X-Files theme and Spongebob "a few moments later" interstitial cards… and just as, at some point in the last 20 years, you've probably lost interest in someone who won't shut up about bacon, won't stop saying "the cake is a lie" or thinks declaring that pineapple on pizza is "weird" is a daring and brave opinion to express.

People like that don't have a personality of their own; their personality is The Internet, Circa 2025. And, as we've pretty comprehensively established at this point, The Internet, Circa 2025 is not someone you'd want to bring home to meet your parents. It's someone who deserves to be kicked into a ditch 50 miles from the nearest town and left to rot.

So, as much as there are probably things I could do "better" with my YouTube channel, I choose not to do them. I don't feel the need to. I didn't create that channel to be famous, I didn't create that channel to be a huge "thing", I created it as a means of expressing myself and sharing my own, personal enthusiasm for things that are important to me. That's it. That 3,600 people like what I do enough to want to follow it without me resorting to "best practice" says something to me: it says "if you're happy, just keep doing what you're doing".

So that's what I intend to do.

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#oneaday Day 243: I think I'm stressed

I think I am, as the title says, stressed. I yelled at the robot vacuum cleaner earlier because it was being a dimwit and chewing up loose threads rather than going back to its charging base. I get infuriated by stupid little acts of clumsiness that really shouldn't be as annoying as I am feeling they are right now. And at work today I felt more overwhelmed than I've felt for a long time, for a variety of reasons.

I probably just need a good break to get away from… everything, so I'm going to see about getting a bit of time off in the not-too-distant future. Everything just feels like… a lot to deal with right now, and I'm not coping with it very well. It's the combination of a particularly busy patch at work, coupled with a few annoying specific stressors related to that (which I won't go into now), with The Situation in the world (particularly America) piled on top of that, and a general sense of helpless frustration at how, with every passing day, I feel less and less like I really "belong" in the world we're apparently building.

Take the AI thing. As time goes on, more and more people seem to have resigned themselves to the fact that the lake-boiling plagiarism machines don't appear to be going away, so we "might as well" embrace them because you shouldn't get "left behind". As far as I'm concerned, the ones being "left behind" are the ones wilfully giving up their own skills — and the opportunity to learn new ones — in favour of typing a fucking prompt into a dumbshit autocorrect that hallucinates complete bullshit a statistically significant proportion of the time.

Earlier on, someone posted (mockingly, thankfully) a "tool" that allowed people to generate Bluesky posts using AI. If you're too much of a lazy cunt to think of 280 characters you want to share on a social network, you shouldn't be using that social network. Now, granted, I absolutely fucking hate the vast majority of the time I have to spend doing social media posts for work, but I'm still not going to use AI to generate them, because I know it'll be just as much work checking through all the dross it produces to ensure it's not saying anything fucking stupid or completely fabricated.

I checked in on LinkedIn for the first time in like 15 years the other day, and was horrified to see how much generative AI is all over the place on that platform. LinkedIn is already a place that joy goes to die, so it doesn't surprise me to see tools for generating vapid slop placed front and centre there. I can't think of anywhere I want to hang out less. It was already insufferable before people could just get a machine to generate their "inspirational" posts about what the coffee they had that morning taught them about B2B sales, and now… God.

I'm wound up, I'm irritable, and I just want to… escape for a bit. So once I've dealt with my most pressing commitments, I'll be doing everything I can to ensure that I can take a bit of time to get my shit together and calm down a bit. Because feeling like this probably isn't good for me. I've seen the endpoint of feeling like this, and it's not pretty. I don't want to end up there again.

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#oneaday Day 226: I wish the TikTok ban was worldwide

I fucking hate TikTok, and while I know there are all sort of "considerations" about the American ban of it that is happening right now — and which people seem to think Trump will overturn when he takes office — you are never going to convince me that it was a good thing for humanity as a whole. I feel like it is an app which has actively made the world more stupid, less inclined to pay attention to things and generally quite a bit shitter.

As an autistic person, I actively despise the idea of an app where a significant number of videos are either someone shouting directly "at" me, or outright sensory overload. Hell, a whole term was coined to describe the proliferation of these sensory overload videos, and that term is "sludge content". That is not something we should be celebrating.

A common pro-TikTok argument that people make is that "some people were reliant on it for income". If your sole employable skill is yelling incoherently into a camera, you should probably spend some time working on employable skills other than yelling incoherently into a camera. If you were using TikTok as a means of selling things, you should perhaps consider selling your things via a platform you actually have control over, like people had been doing for years before TikTok, and like people will continue to do for years from hereon. And if you really want to make money from videos, there are plenty of other means of doing so.

But then there's also the fact that people place a vast overemphasis on "monetising their content" online these days anyway. It's one of the major factors in the gradual degradation of social media as an actual means of socialising over the last decade and a half. A significant proportion of users are no longer interested in having conversations — you know, being social — on social media these days. Instead, they want to "create content" for others to "consume". How about you stop seeing dollar signs in everything you do and just do something because it's enjoyable, and because you might make some friends in the process? No?

"But you can watch sexy girls dancing on TikTok!" Brother, I'm not sure how to tell you this, but there are myriad ways to watch sexy girls dancing — and doing a lot more than that — on the Internet, and there has been pretty much since its inception. If your argument for Why TikTok is Good, Actually is that you can mindlessly dribble over something that makes your peepee hard, you are not providing a convincing argument.

"But what about BookTok?" What about all the myriad book-centric blogs that have been destroyed by the collective destruction of the world's attention span via shit like TikTok and YouTube Shorts? What about the fact that your average TikTok user almost certainly doesn't have the patience or brain power to sit down and read a book if they won't read a blog post? What about the fact that authors don't want to have to waste their fucking time yelling at their phone camera when they would much rather be writing something worthwhile?

TikTok is shit, and while I see and appreciate the arguments against the US banning it, I will be shedding precisely zero tears for it. It is one of the absolute worst examples of the enshittification of the modern Internet and people in general, and nothing you can say will ever make me change my mind on that fact. I just wish the fucking thing would go away here, too.

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#oneaday Day 223: The Old Internet

As the rot economy continues apace, more and more people are starting to recognise the modern Web for what it is: an unpleasant place, in which commercial interests and venture capitalists come first, and making an actually pleasant, enjoyable and educational place for the actual users is far, far down the list. As a result, "the old Internet" is often romanticised, perhaps to an overly nostalgic, rose-tinted degree, but I have to kind of concur; things did used to be much more enjoyable online before our daily routine was nothing but scrolling through the only two or three websites that actually exist to most people.

I think about this a lot when I'm writing on here or MoeGamer. I used to get fairly decent numbers on both blogs, even though I was just posting daily nonsense on this one. Now, I get maybe double figures daily on here, if that. MoeGamer still pulls in about a thousand views a day, which is nice, but a lot of those views are for things I wrote about several years ago at this point, and rarely for things I've written about recently.

Now, I don't do either this blog or MoeGamer for the views, but I feel the trajectory this site has taken in terms of numbers is symptomatic of the way the Web has changed over the years. People just don't do blogs any more, either as writers or readers. Part of this is down to the fact that RSS readers just aren't a part of people's daily online routine any more (though I'm aware they still exist) — and even those "magazine-style" apps that were never really a good replacement for Google Reader seem to have died a bit of a death. Not only that, but the usefulness of search engines has declined considerably, too.

Instead, it is, of course, all about social media. It's all about having a presence on the "important" social networks — though even that has seen something of an upset over the last few years, and particularly in the last few months. Twitter was already circling the drain in terms of usefulness for sharing stuff even before Elon took over and did… whatever the fuck he's doing there; Facebook has been such a horrible experience to use for so long now that I question the sanity of anyone who is still using it — to say nothing of the frankly quite disturbing policy changes they've had recently; and the less said about TikTok, the better.

So what, exactly, is someone looking to express themselves online to do today? If you want to get seen, you seemingly have little choice but to sign your soul over to one of these companies and plunge your data into the mire that is "The Algorithm". Telling people that they should start their own website is a noble and proper goal, and one I stand behind, but the fact is… a lot of folks just don't and won't leave social media — and many of the social media companies are doing their best to keep those folks on their platform as much as possible.

Look at Twitter (no, I'm not calling it "X") and how Elon is desperate for people to "post content" on it, completely failing to see that it is a platform woefully ill-equipped for anything other than that which it was originally designed for: microblogging. No-one in their right mind is going to set up a video-centric Twitter account instead of a YouTube channel, even if the site wasn't infested with the worst bigots the Internet has to offer. And no writer is ever going to use Twitter as their primary means of posting their work.

Everyone knows this. And yet it's so difficult to get people to notice you if you're not spending all day "building your personal brand" or some such bullshit. Artists struggle to get commissions without social media. Writers struggle to get publishers without social media. Video makers struggle to get views on their videos without social media. It all sucks, and it feels far too late to be able to do anything about it.

All you can do, really, is just be stubborn. Keep plugging away at your own personal passion projects, and do those projects for the passion, not for the potential of monetising them. I keep doing this blog because I like writing and it's good therapy for me — nothing more. It's always a thoroughly welcome sight when I see someone I recognise in the comments, but that's becoming an increasingly rare occurrence these days. Family and friends who used to read on a regular basis just… don't any more, and the worst thing is, I completely understand why. The modern Web simply isn't built to support personal sites any more, and that's a real shame. It feels like we're very much at risk of losing an important part of our collective culture — because what happens to everyone's "content" (ugh) when one of these social media companies eventually implodes?

Anyway, close your Meta accounts, get off Twitter and read more blogs. That's my advice for surviving online today.

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#oneaday Day 217: Fuck Facebook, and fuck Meta

I don't know if you've been following the recent news about Meta, Facebook's parent company, but if you still have an account over there for any reason, I thought you might be interested to learn the following.

A few days ago, Meta (which covers Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp Messenger) published some substantial changes to its Hateful Conduct policy, ostensibly a policy that was devised in order to, among other things, help marginalised groups feel safe using their services as a means of online socialisation. You can see the changelog at this link (click the "7 Jan 2025" link on the left of that page to see the changes highlighted), but here are some notable parts for your convenience:

The green highlighted stuff is newly added, the red strikethrough stuff has been removed. Note that the banning of "dehumanising speech in the form of comparisons to or generalisations about animals, pathogens or other sub-human life forms, including women as household objects or property or objects in general; black people as farm equipment; transgender or non-binary people as 'it'" has been removed. This was previously a "Tier 1" violation, among the most serious on the platform, and yet now it is A-OK.

Elsewhere:

In this section, you will see that Meta now "allows allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like 'weird'."

Elsewhere still:

So you're cool to, like, blame the Chinese or whatever group of Johnny Foreigners you think created COVID, if you even believe COVID existed at all in the first place because you're a nutcase who believes vaccination programmes are about Bill Gates trying to fit you with a microtransmitter.

I shouldn't have to point out that these changes are Bad, regardless of whether or not you fall into one of the "protected" categories. It's particularly telling that amid the parts people are mostly focusing on — the stuff about homosexual and transgender people — they snuck in a bit about regarding women as objects and black people as farm equipment. You know, just to make sure everyone except white straight cis men gets their own share of a kicking. On top of that, they have deleted the trans and non-binary themes for Facebook Messenger, as well as the blog post announcing them.

This is not a "freedom of speech" thing; this is deliberately courting the worst people in the world and giving them carte blanche to be as sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic as they desire with zero consequences. And you all know exactly why this has happened: because of the election result in the US.

The world's billionaires have been flocking to kiss Trump's ringpiece ever since the election, and of course Mark Zuckerberg is at the head of the queue. Social media is a veritable breeding ground for the worst kind of right-wing attitudes and has been for a while; all Zuck is doing is making it explicitly okay for this sort of thing to go on, much like Elon Musk has done with Twitter, destroying its value as social media in the process.

This isn't the only thing wrong with Facebook, of course. If you're still using it (again, I ask, why?) you have almost certainly seen how the News Feed or whatever it is called has declined over the years. Chances are yours has multiple "Suggested" posts (i.e. ads) in a row before you see anything from someone you actually care about, and many of those posts will be filled with AI-generated garbage slop like the infamous "Shrimp Jesus" and the many, many images of crying multiple amputee soldiers who don't exist saying it's their birthday. And rather than Facebook seeing this as a problem, it is being encouraged.

In fact, Meta announced plans to introduce AI-driven profiles to both Facebook and Instagram, presumably in an attempt to hide the fact that users are (correctly) leaving their services in droves. People stumbled across one of these AI-powered profiles on Instagram recently, discovering it to be, of course, full of images that never happened and hosting a chatbot that was little more than racial stereotyping. Meta were quick to say that this was an experiment from a few years back, but this is exactly the sort of shit they want to introduce.

Along the same lines, some Instagram users have found themselves presented with AI-generated images of themselves in their own feed, without having asked for them. In most cases, this is because Instagram's AI features count "using them once" as "perpetual consent to use your likeness", even if you don't want or need AI-generated images of yourself. Which no-one does.

Facebook is a shithole, and it's only going to get worse. If I haven't convinced you enough, I urge you to read at least some of the following links (plus the ones I've peppered throughout the above) for more on the story, because these folks report on this stuff for a living and can provide a lot more detail on what is going on.

Never Forgive Them by Ed Zitron – a comprehensive breakdown of how, over the last 10-15 years in particular, big tech has been systematically making life worse for everyone online under the guise of "growth". And it seeps into all areas of life, be it Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media, or a cheap laptop you buy from Amazon.

AI Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide by Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media. Not directly related to Meta, though it is a tale of why AI-powered anything relating to advertising (a category which Meta stuff firmly falls into) is a pile of shit. I will say 404 Media has been doing some of the absolute best reporting on all this for quite some time now.

Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. About how Zuckerberg doesn't believe the AI sludge that is taking over Facebook is a problem, and how he actually wants to encourage it.

Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. Self-explanatory, though you may be surprised at the answer to the headline and the reasons why.

Mark Zuckerberg, Recipient of World's First Rat Penis Transplant, Announces Meta Will Stop Fact-Checking by Matt Husser, The Hard Times. Also self-explanatory. The fact-checking thing is actually where all this started; Zuck is putting this side of things in the hands of the users via a Twitter-style "Community Notes" system, rather than having fact-checkers to combat disinformation on staff. Things just got worse from there.

Meta has 'heard the message' from Trump, says whistleblower Frances Haugen by Dan Milmo and Robert Booth, The Guardian. Some insider knowledge on the situation and how it's happening exactly because of the reasons you thought.

Look, I get it. I appreciate that some of you might not be able to delete your Facebook accounts because it's the only means you have of getting in touch with some people. I can't really delete mine either, because I have to use it for work, though I haven't used Facebook "personally" for years now because I saw it enshittifying a long time ago and jumped ship. The only Meta service I use these days — and that's irregularly — is WhatsApp.

But I would urge you to look over all of the above, and consider whether that is a company you still want to have any involvement with. Not only are the policy changes above actively harmful, the service as a whole has, as Zitron explains in his piece linked above, gradually been getting worse and worse, abusing its users in the name of profit and growth, for years at this point.

There are always alternatives. You can email people, just like in the good old days, or alternative messaging solutions like Discord, Zoom and Skype exist. They all have their issues, yes, but they're not actively being harmful like Meta is now. You can build a website to share your photos. Hell, if you're hooked on social media, there are plenty of better alternatives to Facebook now. (Just don't join TikTok.)

Online is a garbage fire right now, and it's only getting worse. One day, we might be able to look back on this whole sorry situation and laugh, but right now it's getting to a point where it's outright dangerous for some folks online. And I would hope that you, dear reader, don't want to be part of making that problem any worse.

If you didn't know anything about any of this prior to today, I hope you feel a little better informed now. And if you did, I'd urge you to take that step and move well away from Meta as soon as you are able.

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#oneaday Day 203: A distressing dichotomy

I am, as you'll know if you've been reading this here blog for a while, suffering from a fair old bit of loneliness. As the years have gone by, groups of friends have gradually drifted away, and it feels like one of the longest holdouts in that regard is heading in that direction of late. I haven't heard from anyone in this group for probably several months at this point, and to be honest, I'm burnt out.

Here's my problem, see: I'm lonely, but I'm also absolutely exhausted feeling like the only one trying to make an effort to keep friendships going or to try and "fit in" places. I'm a member of several online communities (well, let's be real, Discord servers at this point, since self-contained online communities barely seem to be a thing any more) but the prospect of trying to raise my head, say hello and generally get "noticed" in some way is just… deflating. It almost doesn't feel worth the effort. It feels like fighting my way out of quicksand.

Take this group I'm referring to, for example. I have been feeling for quite some time that if I don't say something and attempt to start a conversation, no-one says anything. And indeed, I must confess, over the past few months I simply haven't said anything, just to see if that was actually the case. I had gotten tired, you see, of every time I attempted to start a conversation resulting in the things I said getting either shut down or ignored. In particular, I have tried to express enthusiasm for the things I've worked on professionally — which I'm very proud of — and my own creative projects — which likewise I want to share with people who are important to me — and have found myself rebuffed. And it seems no-one wants to talk about anything that is important to them, either, so silence it is.

This is not a healthy way to be, I know, but I feel frustrated and resentful any time I feel like I'm the only one who has been making an effort with a friendship. And so, day by day, I feel myself retreating further into my own private world, and feeling less inclined to want to come out and show myself.

Well, no. It's not that. It's that I find doing so to be immensely draining, particularly when it's in an environment or situation I find uncomfortable. Take our work Christmas outing recently for example; while we were out there were several people who clearly wanted to make an effort to get to know me a bit better, and I had those conversations where I could — but because we were in an inordinately noisy environment where it was very difficult (and uncomfortable) to have a conversation, I didn't feel like I could really carry things on. It was too tiring. I felt bad, because it was people showing an honest interest in me, but I just couldn't keep trying to have a conversation while I couldn't hear anything.

I ended up bowing out of the evening relatively early because my senses had just been completely overwhelmed by the noise. I had a good time overall; I just knew I couldn't take any more.

It sort of feels like a variation on that at other times. I don't want to be a lonely recluse who never talks to anyone, but when I never get anything back when I do attempt to initiate something — and when no-one else seemingly wants to initiate things with me without me prompting them — I get to a point where it just doesn't feel worth trying any more, which I fear will eventually build into actively pushing people away if and when they do ever reach out.

Perhaps the thing to do is just to accept that this is the way things are, and to try and structure my life accordingly. If people aren't going to make the effort themselves but they are still, for one reason or another, actually important to me, then I make some time to ensure that I get heard. It doesn't have to be much; perhaps just set aside a time each week to drop a quick message to the group in an attempt to start a conversation. That feels very formal, I know, and that's one of the reasons I haven't done something like this sooner — but right now it feels like doing something overtly "artificial-feeling" might be the only way I get my almost completely drained "Social" meter back up into the green.

I should probably mention at this point that I am inordinately grateful to my good pal Chris, who has stuck by me through exceedingly thick and enormously thin, and always has a kind word and receptive ear any time I drop him a message. The only trouble is he's on the other side of the world to me, so not someone I can just drop in on for some beers and video games.

My wife Andie is and always has been a rock, too, and any time I start feeling lonely I am grateful that I am not completely alone, thanks to her, our two cats (who both know to come and look after me when I'm feeling low — they're both sat with me on the sofa as I type this) and, of course, my family, who just accept me as I am, with all my myriad flaws.

Is that enough, though? It doesn't feel like enough. Something in my mind remains intensely dissatisfied in my socialisation, and I need to do something about it. So, as tempting as it is to just wallow in despair at things gradually getting worse on their own without my input… I guess it's time to acknowledge that I need to provide that input if I ever want things to get better again.

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#oneaday Day 174: Why am I still doing this?

Why am I still doing this? Or, perhaps to the point, why did I start doing this again? This article from Aftermath does a good job of explaining why.

Since the rise of social media, I feel like it's significantly less likely for someone to have a "personal website", because everyone is concerned about their "reach" and "engagement", and if you want both of those things, you want to be on a well-established social media site.

But if you're more concerned with self-expression and having a space to truly call your own, having your own website is hard to beat. And I think as people become more and more disillusioned with social media — Twitter and Facebook in particular — I think personal websites are going to become more and more important to a wider range of people.

Times have changed a bit, though. The word "blog" seems to have fallen out of wide usage, to be replaced with "newsletter", this being a result of the assumption that people will sign up to get your posts delivered to them via email, rather than going out of their way to visit your site. However, most of the "newsletters" out there are actually just blogs: people having a space to call their own, writing whatever they feel like at any given moment.

The best blogs… sorry, newsletters… of course have a distinct focus. One of my favourites is Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At?, which is one of the few sites out there continually taking the garbage of the AI industry and other enshittified parts of the Internet to account for their making life worse for everyone.

And, of course, if you've been following me for a while, you'll know about my own MoeGamer, which is my main video game blog. MoeGamer has now outlived all of the professional, commercial sites I have ever written for, which is a nice feeling. Sure, I don't update it every day or indeed regularly, but there's a ton of stuff to read on there, and I've made sure all of it is hopefully relevant and interesting, regardless of when you come to it. No racing to get "news" out the door; no rushing games to meet embargoes; just in-depth articles about games that, for one reason or another, I have found it worthwhile to spend some time, effort and words talking about.

This site, though, this is mostly for me. This site is my virtual replacement for the personal diaries I used to write as a teenager, only at no point have I become embarrassed enough about something I've written to want to throw the whole thing in the outside bin so it would never be found by anyone, except maybe the dustmen, who I hope had a good laugh about how much I fancied Nikki Rose before flinging the book into landfill. This site is my reminder of at least part of my time on this planet which, for sure, has had some hefty ups and downs over the course of the last 15-20 years or so.

Does it have many people reading it? No. But I'm not doing it for them. I'm doing it for myself — and if anyone happens to stumble across this little corner of the Internet and gets something out of something I've written, that's just a happy bonus.

If you've never given this sort of thing a try and you find yourself frustrated at social media, I can highly recommend giving it a go. It's dead easy to get started with a platform like WordPress or its numerous imitators; in many cases, you can get up and running for free, too.

However you choose to do it, I can assure you of one thing: having a space to truly call your own, in which you can express yourself completely freely, is something that I've started to find increasingly important with each passing year. It's a good thing to have an outlet, for both the good feelings and the bad, and banging out 500-1000 words every so often just about whatever's on your mind is a healthy habit to get into.

That's why I'm still doing this. Not to be famous, not to make money, not to get engagement and followers. But because it's just something I want to do, and which I find is of great benefit to my overall wellbeing. Give it a try!

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#oneaday Day 170: I really don't care about drama

I've been umming and ahhing about whether or not to post this, but if I can't speak freely on my own fricking website, I think I'll explode, so I'm going to say it anyway.

I really, really don't give a damn about any drama surrounding an individual behind a particular project. I'm not saying you have to feel the same way, but I do want to express that I find it continually tiresome and genuinely upsetting when I want to talk about something that I think is cool, but the first response is always "but [individual] worked on it, so it's bad (and by extension you are bad for having anything positive to say about it)".

I'm not going to talk about specific cases here, because even doing that has the potential to attract ire towards me, and that's not what this post is about. What it is about is the sense of frustration I feel that the real people who worked on a project end up getting punished for the actions or behaviour of one individual — and, by extension, the attacks people who express enthusiasm for that project end up suffering also.

It is an unfortunate fact of capitalist life that in order to claw your way up to the top of the heap, you probably have to be a bit of a shithead. The way capitalism works, the way business works; you need to be a bit of a shithead in order to see success. You need to doggedly pursue the things you want to achieve, and you need to defend your commercial interests. This is true for pretty much all industries, whether it's groceries, tech, publishing or whatever. I defy you to find any company out there with an executive suite that has never done anything you're not a particular fan of, all in the name of either pursuing their goals or defending their commercial interests.

Trouble is, when the higher-ups at a company do something that is regarded as "bad" or "indefensible", the real people who suffer are those who are just doing their job underneath. When one CEO behaves poorly, the people who are actually making the products that CEO's company is known for end up getting punished for it. They could do an absolutely amazing job on whatever they worked on, but still get punished because their boss once did "A Bad Thing", often several years ago.

This, unfortunately, spreads outwards. Because "(CEO = Bad) = (Company = Bad)", anyone who then expresses an interest in or an enthusiasm for the products of Company gets yelled at by people who care more about the CEO than the company or the product. And that leaves people feeling like they simply can't express their enjoyment of something they like just as a product, because of one thing the CEO did half a decade ago.

CEOs should, ideally, not do shit things. It would be lovely if we lived in a world where CEOs did not feel the need to do shit things, be it in the name of pursuing their goals or defending their interests. But we do not. And frankly, I am, I'm afraid, long past giving a shit.

I've seen too many pointless, unnecessary arguments and too many strained, even broken friendships over this sort of thing, and it just doesn't matter. We live in a joyless enough world as it is; we should not be attacking one another over the things we choose to have fun with, so long as those things are not actively hurting someone. And in the specific instances I'm thinking about here, no-one is getting hurt except the folks who worked on them, and the people being attacked for daring to say something positive about them.

That's all I'm going to say on the subject. I do not want an argument on this, I do not want anyone in the comments trying to tell me I'm wrong for feeling this way. I'm fed up and I'm annoyed, and I am absolutely not in the mood for someone to tell me I'm wrong for feeling that way. So if you're gearing up to type a comment like that, zip it. I do not want to hear it.

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