#oneaday Day 751: Read/write access

There are a lot of things I don't like about myself, but one of the things that I have always been rather pleased with is my willingness to engage with the English language. A lot of this stems from being encouraged well at an early age, both by my parents and at school, but also a natural sense of inquisitiveness and curiosity about the use of words and language.

scattered word tiles on black background — Photo by Eleonora Vokueva on Pexels.com

I mention this because I am seeing more and more reports of a "literacy crisis" that appears to be arising, primarily as a result of "BookTok" (i.e. people on the odious short-form video platform TikTok who supposedly talk about books) and "book influencers" (i.e. people on a broader range of primarily video-based social platforms who supposedly talk about books). Most recently, the thing that has come up is some of these people complaining to authors when they come across a word they do not understand — and rather than looking that word up for themselves, using it as an opportunity to learn, they instead throw their toys out of the pram and get very mardy, even going so far as to throw around terms like "ableist". (Fuck off. Your assumption that disabled people can't read is the ableist perspective here.)

This sort of behaviour is absolutely unthinkable and unfathomable to me. I have always loved it when I learn new words, concepts or ways to express myself from things that I've read. There are turns of phrase I picked up as a child that I still use to this day, and I relish the opportunity to make use of a word that I've recently learned.

I am also more than happy to look something up if I'm not sure of it. I actually tend to find this happens more often while I am writing than reading; I'll be tapping out a sentence, and for some reason a particular word that I'm not entirely certain of the definition of will pop into my head as maybe-possibly being appropriate for the situation. Rather than shying away from using that word for fear of appearing stupid by using it incorrectly, I will look it up, determine whether or not it is, in fact, appropriate for the situation in question, and then, if possible, make good use of it. It's not out of a desire to appear "clever" or to baffle the reader with my vast vocabulary; I just find it fun and satisfying to discover new ways in which one can play with language.

I've always been like this. I started reading books that were well ahead of where I was "supposed" to be as a kid, so by the time I got to primary school I was reading things several "Levels" ahead of my peers and taking on considerably more challenging reading comprehension exercises. By the top end of primary school, I was busting out words like "antidisestablishmentarianism" and "floccinaucinihilipilification" in the morning Daily Spellings session in Class Four, and being able to correctly use them in a sentence.

I apparently once also terrified my parents by, one day, aged maybe three or four, coming down the stairs and immediately quoting the beginning of Genesis to them. In this particular instance, it was not a "reading" thing — I hadn't been secretly ploughing through the Bible in between episodes of the Mr. Men — but rather a quotation from a cartoon I had recently watched on video. I guess it's connected, though; I had found the whole "In the beginning…" speech striking, so I wanted to deliver it in my own childish way. That's still a way of playing with language, just using the spoken word and listening instead of reading and writing.

The concept of "BookTok" makes me angry. It is completely beyond me exactly how anyone thought a community of people who make short-form attention-deficit videos online were ever going to come out with anything particularly worthwhile to say about a medium that rewards taking your time and drinking things in. And the very term "book influencer" makes me bristle. We never should have accepted the marketers' insistence than "influencer" is a valid job description. It's disgustingly dystopian, particularly since "influencer marketing" is now an established part of promoting any sort of product online.

I love language. I love reading, and I love writing. It makes me by turns sad and furious that, in the space of a generation or two, we appear to be losing all respect for the written word. Just the other day, I saw someone online earnestly recommending that anyone who wanted to spend their time talking about a favourite topic should "just become a TikToker" rather than starting a blog. I bit my tongue at the time because I couldn't be arsed to start a fight, but it just made me feel weary more than anything.

What are we doing? It almost feels like a deliberate attempt to siphon all the "culture" out of society, perhaps in an attempt to ensure that none of us step out of line or express any sorts of "dangerous" opinions.

Funny, I think there are a few books about that…

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 750: Cooling and cat-proofing

The heat wave we've been suffering all week appears to have broken; outside is a relatively normal-feeling temperature right now, the humidity is down to levels where it's actually possible to breathe, and the sky has taken on a typically British summertime partially overcast look. It's really quite pleasant; if it could just stay like this, that would be absolutely lovely.

The view through the patio doors as I type this.

Andie has been spending some time putting up window screens, which will have the dual purpose of "cat-proofing" the windows and allowing us to cool the house down somewhat by actually having the windows open. Obviously we are not keen for any sort of repeat of the last three weeks, so we are hoping that this particular solution — some seemingly well-crafted screens for the windows, attached to the frames via Velcro — will prove adequate. Oliver has not yet attempted to escape through one of the open windows and the house is significantly cooler than it has been for the past few days, so it's looking like we might be on to a winner.

Of course, we're still both extremely worried that he will somehow find his way out again, particularly if he succeeds in figuring out how to remove the window screens — if, indeed, he figures out that is a thing that is possible. Thus far he has shown no interest in wanting to move or scratch them — indeed, both cats have mostly just seemed appreciative that they can enjoy a bit of fresh air coming into the house, particularly now that there is a bit of a breeze coming in from outside, rather than the oppressively still and humid air of the last few days.

It is good to be able to leave the air-conditioned bedroom and enjoy a relatively normal existence in the rest of the house. Today I have mostly been playing the new Star Fox, which you can read more about over on MoeGamer. It's also actually our wedding anniversary today, but we never make a particularly big deal out of that. We are grateful to our respective parents for their generous financial gifts, however; those are going a significant way towards us being able to have another holiday in September as a "do-over" of the one we just had — and hopefully this time without the anxiety of a missing little ginger twat.

Oliver himself appears to have pretty much made a full recovery. He is behaving just like he used to — right down to showing an unhealthy interest in batting my Senran Kagura collection off the shelves in the living room — and is jumping up to his favourite high places, including the top shelf in the catio and the top of our media cabinet. He hasn't yet been back up to the very top of his cat tree, however; he's been most of the way up, but not all of the way up. We think he's dealing with a combination of still being a bit weak in his back legs (something the vet mentioned) and potentially still having a bit of trauma over being stuck up an actual tree, and thus perhaps not wanting to climb too high. His back legs are a lot stronger than they were already, however; he's been jumping up onto things without issue, and playing with things like the silly little deeply, deeply loved kitten he is.

Patti has also mostly adjusted to Oliver's return. She is still hissing at him a bit if he gets too close, but one gets the impression her heart really isn't in it. Earlier today, Oliver went right up to her and rubbed his face on her, and she hissed quietly, but didn't attack him and didn't actually appear to be all that bothered. I think she just feels obliged to appear mad at him, because she absolutely definitely won't admit that she was missing him and pining for him while he was absent.

Anyway, all in all, it has been a pleasant Saturday, and in the knowledge that some of the most difficult, time-consuming and challenging projects at work are now pretty much done, I actually feel like I can properly relax for the first time in quite a while! I recommend it.

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#oneaday Day 749: The lost decade

At therapy today, we got talking about how I think back extremely fondly on my time at sixth form — to such a degree that I would brand that period of time as probably the happiest of my life — and how I feel a curious… "closeness" to that time period, despite it being, at this point, quite a long time ago. It still feels weirdly recent to me!

pictures hanging on strings attached to trees in a garden — Photo by Pew Nguyen on Pexels.com. Not my photos, obviously.

Over the course of our discussion, I described a curious phenomenon that I've been sort of passively aware of for a while, and that is the fact that I don't really remember living through my thirties. Specifically, the period between about 2009 and (I estimate) about 2016, 2017 or so is a length of time that I feel just sort of… disappeared. And the disappearance of that period — and possibly a bit more either side of it — is what leads me to feel like things which were actually Quite A Long Time Ago are still relatively "recent" or at least fresh in my memory.

I hadn't really contemplated why this had happened, but it didn't take long to figure out: I had a rough time in that period. Let's ponder, shall we?

In 2009, when I was 28, I lost a job that I had previously thought would have me set for life; it was a job that I loved, that I was good at and which even paid reasonably well for the time. Unfortunately, it was snatched away from me by some true shithead managers who were on a real power trip at the time, and that kicked off a very long period of exceedingly uncertain employment.

In 2010, my first marriage fell apart for reasons that, in retrospect, I understand, but which, at the time, had me feeling the lowest I have ever felt. Having lost my job and, now, my partner, I was left alone in a flat I couldn't afford to keep living in, with no job, facing down the prospect of having to move back home with my parents. At the time, this felt mortifying; now, of course, I am exceedingly grateful to my parents for having supported me while I was at my lowest until I was able to pick myself back up and effectively start over.

In the following years, I will keep the details vague out of respect for the individual in question's privacy, but I found myself supporting someone with an addiction problem. I had no idea how to do this, and there is not really a "how-to" guide on doing this effectively. The person in question conquered their issues pretty much by themselves (and by that I mean "without professional psychiatric or medical assistance"), and I will be eternally impressed by and proud of them for this, but the experience of acting in a supporting role at the time left me with… some emotional scars, shall we say. I am not entirely sure I have fully processed everything that happened at this time, though I should also add that I lay no blame or ill-will at the feet of the affected person, and that's all I will say on the subject.

During these years, I was working regular freelance for various websites. I had a good gig working for GamePro, but we all got given the boot just before Christmas one year. Some time later, I worked for USgamer, but got laid off from that particular gig on my birthday. These were the most "regular" jobs I'd had since 2009, and it had not gotten any easier over the years to know what I was "supposed" to be doing. Every time I felt like I was getting somewhere, it felt like the rug would get pulled out from under me.

I took a job in a completely unrelated field — updating website content at energy company SSE — but found myself fundamentally incompatible with the incredibly patronising way that company does business, and got unfairly dismissed at the end of my probationary period. Some time later, I found myself doing a similar, equally tedious but mostly inoffensive job at sports tech maker Garmin, which was stable but absolutely mind-numbingly boring. I left that one voluntarily (and on good terms, which was a nice change) to take up what would eventually become the position I hold to this day.

All along the way, I was feeling a sense of near-constant instability, like I could never settle; like I had never reached an unknown destination I felt like I was constantly on the way towards. I faced setback after setback, challenge after challenge. At times it felt like I wanted to give up. But I eventually made it to where I am today, with a stable home life, a stable working life and stable financial security. It was realising that I had those three things that made me feel like I had, at last, been able to properly "start over", and that my life was no longer a thing of shame; a string of endless difficulties and non-achievements that just didn't appear to be going anywhere.

So in retrospect, I'm not really surprised that I don't really remember my thirties all that well, because a lot of things happened, and a significant, statistically significant proportion of them were Bad Things that I'd really rather not dwell on. I know those years happened — and there are probably blog posts covering a lot of them right here on this site — but, even knowing that they probably helped shape the person I am today and helped strengthen my own resolve as a "survivor", it's hard not to feel like it would be nice to have them all back.

Still, that's not a thing you can do, unfortunately, so here I am, at 2am in the morning, aged 45, pondering a lost decade of my life. Do I have a point to all this? You'd think I would, wouldn't you. But you know what? I don't think I do. And that's probably all right.

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#oneaday Day 748: It's really fuckin' hot

Not to state the obvious (twice), but it's really fuckin' hot. Today it hasn't been quite as fuckin' hot as it was yesterday — it was literally difficult to breathe in the outside air (or lack thereof) in the middle of the day yesterday — but it's still not at all nice.

desert under yellow sunset — Photo by Fabio Partenheimer on Pexels.com

For some reason, certain people are bitching and moaning about other people — those from countries where air conditioning isn't a cultural norm (because it wasn't needed in the past) — expressing discomfort in the extreme heat we're dealing with. Specifically, there seem to be a lot of Americans mocking Brits for finding temperatures of nearly 40 degrees Celsius quite uncomfortable. And this, in turn, leads to a lot of stupid arguments. Just, y'know, stop it. Accept that this is a particularly unusual situation, and that this leads to people struggling.

I mean, clearly this is not a normal situation, or a sustainable one. It's been so hot today that most of our freezer appears to have spontaneously defrosted, despite the fact it's still on and seemingly working. It's been so hot today that if you put a bottle of frozen water in front of a fan in an attempt to cool the air a bit, the ice becomes water in the space of about five minutes.

I am grateful for the fact that, a few years back, we got a portable air conditioner for the bedroom, because without it I feel like it would be literally impossible to sleep right now. I have spent a significant portion of today in the bedroom — thankfully, I am in the middle of doing some QA testing, which I can do from the bedroom — because the rest of the house feels barely habitable right now.

I feel for the poor cats. They're clearly finding the heat quite difficult to deal with, and are both spending quite a lot of the day napping in areas they find to be nice and cool. They're getting plenty of water, and they're coming to spend time with us in the bedroom when the air conditioning is on, though; they both know the sound of it, now, and very much seem to enjoy sitting right in front of a nice blast of cold air.

The sun is going down, so hopefully things will cool off a bit from here. It's supposed to cool down a bit tomorrow, but what we really need is a great big thunderstorm. That would be lovely right now. But there doesn't appear to be one imminent just yet. Here's hoping one comes along soon, otherwise we'll be spending the whole weekend in the bedroom!

On that note, I'm going back to the air conditioning. Stay safe in the heat, all of you!

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#oneaday Day 746: Decompression

I know I said I'd write about something else on here, but after the late-night update on the situation, I feel inclined to bring this little saga to something of a "close" in a more conclusive manner. We are exhausted and emotional, but delighted beyond belief to have our precious Oliver back at home with us. There will be images of him peppered throughout this post.

It's hard to believe that this whole saga is over — and over in a way that is about the best possible way it could have resolved itself, outside of him coming home a little bit earlier. We took him to the vet today to get checked over, and outside of him having lost a bit of weight and muscle definition on his legs — unsurprising given his three weeks living rough — he has been given a completely clean bill of health. This is our last remaining worry put to rest: he is back, he is alive, he is safe, and he is healthy. Evidently he was a very lucky boy — and a clever boy for taking care of himself for so long; things could have been much worse, and I am grateful to anything that will listen that things did not end up that way.

Patti has not yet adjusted to his presence. She was very clearly missing him, because we caught her looking for him, she was acting incredibly clingy and occasionally letting out the most heartbreaking plaintive howls of an evening. But as soon as he came back, she was puffing up, growling and hissing, and she's spent all of today in the wardrobe. The wardrobe is a safe place. She is fine in there, she's just not quite ready to come out again yet. But she will get there.

As for Oliver himself, he is doing just fine. He's clearly very tired by his whole ordeal — and who can blame him? — but he's already settling back into his usual routines and behaviour. The one and only thing that has really changed about the way he behaves is that he is a lot more vocal now than he was before he escaped; he is spending a lot of time shouting at us, which is probably an aftereffect of him calling for us up the tree last night. He wants to know that we are nearby, and that he is safe.

The one thing we'll probably never know is where he went for most of those three weeks. Given that we found him a couple of hundred yards down the road, he probably didn't go all that far, but aside from him being stuck up a tree last night, we have no insight as to where he might have been. Was he locked in somewhere? Quite possibly. Was he taken in by somebody? Probably not, as otherwise he'd probably be a bit more well-fed than he is now. Did he just get lost? Entirely possible, as he's never been outside in this neighbourhood before, and thus even though we left him plenty of familiar scents outside, he was unable to find his way home by himself, even though he was so close. So very close.

The hardest thing about the whole situation was contemplating the possibility that we might never see him again. There are things everywhere in the house that remind us of him. There's some cat plushies on the shelves in the living room: a black one and a ginger one, for Patti and him. There's a little stained glass thing depicting a black cat and a ginger cat hanging out together on the shed. The wallpaper on my living room PC was Oliver. The avatar I used on Facebook and Nextdoor was Oliver. Days before he went away, I set my blog to automatically set a "Featured Image" on every single post that didn't already have one, and for the image in question to be one that showed Oliver and Patti napping together. I couldn't even contemplate booting up Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream for Switch, because I made anthropomorphised versions of Oliver and Patti in that game, and playing it while we didn't even know if Oliver was still alive or not would have absolutely broken my heart even more than it was already.

For me, one of the worst parts of dealing with some sort of loss is seeing all the remnants that are left behind, and deciding what you are going to do with them. Just little things that remind you of who or what you have lost; sometimes even the simplest, silliest little thing can bring you to tears. Back during a particularly bleak period in my life circa 2010 — the time I split from my first wife and was faced with essentially having to completely "reset" my post-graduate life and start over — I described these things as "crystallised memories", and it's a description I stand by. There they sit: a solid, tangible reminder of something that was once in your life and now is not. It can be difficult to let go of them, but sometimes that is the healthiest thing to do.

Thankfully, none of that was necessary this time around. And while there most certainly was a great deal of grief while Oliver was away from home, we can now thankfully set that grief aside and appreciate how lucky we are to have someone we love so much and that we feared we'd lost forever return to our lives, safe and well. Sometimes amazing things really do happen, seemingly against all odds.

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#oneaday Day 745b: Oliver's return, the kindness of strangers, and the unkindness of the people you might need in a crisis

Hello. Second entry for today (although technically it's tomorrow now, as it's 1:21am as I type this) but this is big, important news: OLIVER HAS RETURNED!

Oh my God. I am an emotional wreck, and so is Andie, but our brave little boy managed to survive for three weeks out in the wilds of Lordswood, and we found him this evening thanks to a tip from a kind neighbour on Nextdoor. I had a feeling that either Facebook or Nextdoor, for all those platforms' many, many faults, would be the main way in which we tracked down our precious boy — but it certainly didn't hurt to advertise him on all manner of different services, even if it cost money to do so in some cases.

Our neighbour, Sam, reported that they had seen a ginger cat on his security cameras recently, and that they'd also been hearing a cat crying from the property over the road from them for a little while. We went out to go and check the area on the offchance that we would find at least a clue — and we heard a yowling from up in the tree. I knew immediately that it was Oliver. Oliver has never been a particularly vocal cat except under quite specific circumstances — usually rolling on the patio in the sunshine — but I recognised his voice straight away, and as soon as I saw him up there, I knew.

We couldn't work out how to get to him, though. The tree he was up was on private property — a children's home, I believe? — and initially we couldn't work out how to get in touch with them. When we did manage to run into a staff member leaving the property, they basically said they couldn't (or wouldn't) help us and said we'd have to wait until the morning, even though we made it clear Oliver has been missing for three weeks, and this was the first time we'd seen him.

So from there we tried to work out what to do next. Do you actually call the fire brigade when a cat is stuck up a tree? Apparently Hampshire Fire Service has a specialised animal rescue unit, but they are somewhere not in Southampton, and they weren't answering their phones. I called 101 and asked the police what we should do, and they said to phone the fire brigade. I phoned the fire brigade and they said that no, they don't do that, it's an urban legend.

So then what? I tried the 24-hour RSPCA hotline for animal welfare, but it turns out that it is not, in fact, a 24-hour service. I tried calling a local tree surgeon who had a 24-hour hotline for animal rescues, but again, it turns out that it is not, in fact, a 24-hour service either. Seemingly no-one was willing to help, at all. No-one that you would think to try calling in a situation like this was going to help us. Panic started to set in.

On the off-chance, I posted an update on both Facebook and Nextdoor that we had found Oliver, but we needed help. I honestly wasn't expecting anyone to come — but three very kind people showed up at various points, all very kind, considerate and understanding of our situation and our emotional state. Eventually a chap who was clearly some sort of tradesman in possession of an absolutely massive ladder — and who had clearly done this many times before — showed up, shot up his ladder and was back down with our precious boy in less than five minutes. Amazing.

Anyway. Fuck me, that was an awful three weeks. On the plus side, I can get back to writing about other things on here now, which I'm sure you'll all be delighted to hear. Thank you all for your patience — and for the kind words you have had to share during this absolutely, mindblowingly traumatic three weeks! I'm just glad it all ended well — though we're taking Oliver to the vet for a checkup tomorrow just in case.

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#oneaday Day 744: Trying to maintain hope

I am trying so hard to hang onto hope that we will find Oliver, or that he will just wander back in one day as if nothing happened, but with him being gone for three weeks from today, it is getting tougher and tougher to maintain that hope — and it's all the harder seeing other people on platforms like Facebook who have been going through the same thing ending up getting safely reunited with their beloved pets. I don't like feeling jealousy about such things, but I can't deny I have felt that way to a certain extent. I have done all the same things they have; why hasn't it brought our boy home yet?

That's not to say we're giving up on him — we had a single possible but completely unconfirmed sighting of a cat that may or may not have been him in the woods some distance from our house (but within a plausible radius of where he might have roamed over the course of three weeks) and thus have spent several sessions combing that section of woods at various times of day to no avail; I went yesterday afternoon after we got the comment; we got up early and went at dawn this morning; and I walked all the way from our house to this part of the woods this evening. There was no sign of him at any point.

I don't even know if we're looking in the right place. There are so many potential places he could have gone. The thing with the area we live in, known as Lordswood, is that there's a fucking great wood covering a lot of it, and thus if he found his way into there, which is entirely possible, heaven only knows how we're ever going to track him down and bring him home.

The one thing I am trying to tell myself is that when I make an excursion like this evening, I am hopefully leaving some sort of scent trail that might help him to find his way home. Lord knows I was sweating enough to leave a stink trail by the time I finished my wanderings this evening, but who knows if that's enough? I certainly don't, because as I've said, we've seen absolutely no sign of him anywhere for the last three weeks, meaning we have no idea if we're looking in even the right direction. That said, given how we believe he escaped and the fact he did not appear on the cameras mounted on the front of our house when he did so, we have an instinctive feeling as to which way he went, but no actual proof.

I haven't ruled out the possibility that he has been taken in by someone, either. And if that has happened, I have no idea how we'll find him, because if the people who take him in never take him to the vet or a shelter or get his microchip scanned by a volunteer, he won't get flagged up as his home being here, and the fact he is away from a family who love and miss him very much. If this is what has happened, I just hope that they will do the decent thing.

If that is not what has happened, I am at something of a loss as to what else I can do at this point.

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#oneaday Day 743: Talk therapy

I've alluded to it a bit recently, but I thought I'd talk specifically about it today. For the last little while, I have been attending talk therapy. I have been meaning to do this for a long time, because there are lots of people I know and trust who have made use of it, but I always found the prospect of choosing a therapist and actually getting started on the whole process to be extremely daunting. How do you pick the "right" one for you? What do all the different "approaches" mean? Can I really afford to do this?

woman lying on the couch at a therapy session — Not an image of either my therapist or me. Photo by Timur Weber on Pexels.com

Well, the answer to the last one was easy; at some point in the last couple of years, I feel like I've got to a point where I'm in a relatively comfortable position in terms of finances — after many years of finding money an absolutely panic-inducing but unavoidable aspect of life, this is good — and thus I didn't feel that making what is a fairly substantial financial commitment to my own wellbeing was something that would be inadvisable.

Technically, you can get talk therapy on the NHS, of course, but my past experiences with that haven't been great — because yes, I've tried. In practice, what happened was that I got referred to a scheme by my GP, but left to my own devices to follow it up — something which I found very difficult to do — and when I finally mustered the courage to join said scheme, I found it absolutely, definitely did not fit my needs at all, as it was a group therapy session, and that was not a situation where I felt, in any way, comfortable.

I'd stumbled across a local organisation known as The Empathy Project a few times during past sessions of research, so this time around I decided to actually be proactive and contact them directly. Their therapists aren't the cheapest around — though they do have a scheme where those on more limited incomes can take advantage of semi-subsidised sessions — but they seemed like a legitimate organisation, and as good a place as any to actually see if Getting Some Professional Help was actually, well, helpful.

I will add that I started attending therapy sessions well before my current situation with Oliver, so thankfully I was in a somewhat more coherent, clear-headed place than I am right now — and I am glad that I already had everything sorted out well before I, as you might look at it, really needed this kind of support.

Anyway, to those of you considering starting some sort of talk therapy: I recommend it. It is Very Good to have a place where you feel like you can say the things that perhaps on a day-to-day basis you don't feel you get the opportunity to say under normal circumstances — or which, for one reason or another, you don't feel comfortable expressing. It is Very Good to have a place you can go where someone will listen to whatever you have to say, however much difficulty you might have explaining it, or however worried you might be about people not taking it seriously. It is Very Good to have a place where, if necessary, you can burst into tears and the only other person present there knows how to handle that.

Therapy is not a magic bullet solution to all the things that ail your mind. Mental health is complicated, and many of the things you struggle with are likely to be ingrained over the course of years, even decades. You will have times where you feel like you make progress, and times where you feel like things have gone a bit backwards. But it is a place where there are no wrong answers to difficult, abstract questions, and where, if you allow yourself to let go of many of the usual social restraints you might place upon yourself when around family and friends, you can freely express things that have been bothering you — and perhaps come to realise quite how much some of them have actually been affecting you. At the other end of the spectrum, it is also sometimes the case that things which have felt like they have taken over your entire life for a certain period sometimes just need you to be able to talk about them in a safe, non-confrontational and non-judgemental environment.

All this is to say that in the time I've spent in therapy so far, I've found it very helpful. I still have a lot of work to do on a lot of things about my life and my mental health, but already I have found myself able to acknowledge a bunch of things that are perhaps difficult to contemplate independently, to say the least — and I'm sure I will continue to discover things in subsequent sessions. I just need to get through this current particularly bleak episode in the saga of my life to be able to move forwards.

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#oneaday Day 742: Crash and burn

There is increasing talk of the video games industry staring down an honest-to-goodness crash — and this time around, unlike the notorious Great Global Video Game Crash of North America from 1983, it looks very much like it could be one that will happen across the world. All this said, I feel like, at this point, there is enough disparity between the bit that will be affected by it and the bit that will be able to continue on regardless for the latter to be able to survive comfortably.

dramatic fireball explosion with dark smoke — Photo by Edu Raw on Pexels.com

This will, in its own curious way, reflect what happened in 1983, where a significant portion of the game-playing world — the UK and Europe, notably — were blissfully unaware of the problems the broader games business were suffering, because they were enjoying the fruits of a thriving cottage games industry. Here in the UK, we had no idea a "crash" was happening across the pond because we were all cheerfully buying £1.99 Mastertronic tapes from our local corner shop.

Something's gotta give, though, because the relentless torrent of shit that is coming out from shareholder-beholden companies — particularly with regard to the odiousness that is generative AI — is completely unsustainable. And we've reached a point where all but the most ardent bootlickers are feeling more and more emboldened to criticise what's going on — though sadly this also coincides with a period where thousands of people are being laid off and games aren't actually getting any better.

Take this statement attributed to Sony, posted on Bluesky earlier today:

How AI evolves the PlayStation experience

• As AI lowers barriers to creation and increases the volume and diversity of content, the PlayStation platform and studios are expected to remain critical in delivering high quality experiences and helping players discover the right content in an increasingly crowded landscape.
• Within the studio business, AI powered tools are automating repetitive workflows and improving productivity across areas such as software development, quality assurance, 3D modeling, and animation, allowing production teams to focus on building richer worlds and gameplay experiences.
• Across the platform business, AI is driving efficiency, personalization, and customer value at scale, while continued investments in AI and machine learning are expected to push visual fidelity forward and deliver higher quality player experiences.
• Overall, AI is expected to unleash the creativity of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s studios, power a more curated and consumer-centric platform, and enhance the PlayStation experience, supported by its global player base, deep IP library, and integrated ecosystem.

This is a complete nothing of a statement! It says nothing! It gives precisely no examples of how AI "improves productivity", "drives efficiency, personalisation and customer value at scale" and "unleashes the creativity of Sony Interactive Entertainment's studios"! It is five paragraphs that explain nothing and say nothing, but which exist purely to, supposedly, placate shareholders who, apparently, have absolutely no functioning brain cells between them and desire nothing more than every stupid fucking company to follow every stupid fucking trend in existence, even when they are demonstrably, actively harmful and just plain shit!

I am mildly heartened that a number of developers are starting to speak up a bit more about this. There's a good piece on Aftermath on the subject, and another on gamesindustry.biz. There are still the annoying sycophants in every single comments section who all parrot the exact same lines about "the genie being out of the bottle" and "get used to AI or get left behind", but there is, I feel, increasing resistance to that side of things. A lot of smaller-scale developers are also making a good name for themselves by saying, out loud, and prominently, that they do not use generative AI at any point in their development process. Good!

The utterly dumbshit thing about corpos like Sony sucking Sam Altman and Wario Amodei's robophalluses is that there is not a single documented instance of a project involving generative AI being well-received by either press or public. I'm not even convinced that it's actually what shareholders want to see. The otherwise excellent Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was soured for a lot of folks (including me) when it was found that they had used generative AI for "placeholder" (sure) assets, and likewise for the apparently also very good The Alters. New projects coming out that are revealed to be using generative AI are subject to mass shunnings and censure from press and public alike — and rightly so. It is starting to feel less and less desirable to have any involvement whatsoever in the top end of today's games industry — a once-exciting, vibrant place — and more and more understandable when people choose to focus their time and attention on both small, independent projects and retro titles.

On top of that, the very generative AI that all these shareholder-appeasing corpos are rushing to use for no real specified purpose is becoming increasingly responsible for pricing people out of games and tech! No good having "volume and diversity of content" (ugh) if no-one can fucking afford the devices to play it on, is there?

All this can easily be avoided! We have been making games for a very long time without the use of a glorified Autocorrect trained on stolen data! I find it near-impossible to believe that every game developer has suddenly completely forgotten how to do things the way we've been doing them for many years at this point, just because you can tell "Claude" to churn you out some spaghetti code using conversational English. And yet. And yet.

I don't know exactly what a "crash" is going to look like in this instance, but I feel like it's not going to be pretty — and the potential knock-on effects concern me somewhat. Like, if games consoles go away — and with the current tech pricing situation, that's a real risk — what does that then mean for people who like to collect games, and for the long-term archival of games using physical media? There are so many potentially terrible things that could happen that I don't feel like the world of video games has adequately prepared for, and it's really quite worrying.

Still, if the worst comes to the worst, I have shelves full of games, many of which are complete-on-disc or complete-on-cart, and a fully-loaded MiSTer. I could, at this point, duck out of "modern gaming" at any time — and with each passing month, it feels more and more like I might end up doing that.

To pre-empt the inevitable comments from weirdly aggressive generative AI-boosting corpo bootlickers: fuck off; you are not welcome here, if the above doesn't make that abundantly clear already, and your comments will just be deleted, so you may as well just not bother. Hope that helps!

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#oneaday Day 741: The bubble

The thing people who have been fortunate enough to have never been afflicted with debilitating depression don't always understand is that the whole experience is more than just being "a bit sad", and thus it's not something you can just "snap out of" or "cheer up" from. (To be clear, those scare quotes are purely hypothetical; no-one has actually been disrespectful enough to declare my current feelings non-valid.) I suspect it's something that is different for everyone who experiences it, so today I thought I'd talk a bit about how I feel when I get like this.

a man in pink shirt with his head on a glass ball — Photo by Caique Araujo on Pexels.com

For me, it's like being inside a bubble of sorts. I can see the world going on around me; I can hear it; I can even interact with it. But I feel an almost total disconnect from it. It's like I'm on a slightly different plane of existence; reality kept at arm's length. Close enough to be familiar and still just about within reach, under most circumstances, but far enough away to making going about normal, everyday things varying degrees of "challenging", ranging from "begrudging reluctance" all the way up to "this feels like a completely insurmountable task that I will never be capable of". And the challenge factor doesn't necessarily relate directly to how difficult the actual task is; as an example, the simple act of talking to people I know and like right now feels very much like it's up around the "insurmountable" end of the scale. Not quite there, because I can just about carry on a conversation right now, but not something I am deliberately seeking out if I absolutely do not have to.

It can be disconcerting, and the description of it as a "bubble" is perhaps not the best one; bubbles, after all, are fragile, delicate things that can be popped at a moment's notice, while whatever encloses my mind at times like this is much more… solid-seeming. And it weighs you down; it drains the energy and vitality from your mind and body, and makes, as I say, just going about your regular, everyday business feel like an enormous effort; a toil that never ends.

And the worst thing is that being in this state is weirdly addictive. I recognise this about myself. I recognise that when I get into a state like this, something in my brain almost wants to remain this way, even though another little voice in my brain knows that it's unproductive and unhelpful, both to myself and to the people around me. It becomes a battle between different aspects of my consciousness, I guess; the more primal, emotional part of myself wants to continue to wallow in the darkness because there's a strange sort of comfort there, while what I would probably describe as the more high-functioning, pragmatic part of myself wants to tell me to… just do something, whether that's a simple thing like doing something enjoyable that might take my mind off things, or something more complex and long-term that might lead to some sort of solution (or at least resolution) to the problem I'm experiencing.

At the moment, the primal part is winning. I am right in the depths of that bubble, and normality feels a very long way away. I don't know if it's slipping further away or getting closer, either; the feeling changes from moment to moment. Sometimes I feel like I am just going to have to accept that Something Bad has happened and try to move on from it; at others, I feel like I described the other day, like everything has come to a screeching halt until this particular "episode" of my life has concluded in some fashion.

This is all very abstract I know, and I'm almost certainly mixing metaphors and whatnot. But this also just happens to be the sort of musings that dribble forth from my brain at times like this, as particularly longstanding readers of this blog will be well aware, I'm sure.

I have little doubt that I will eventually manage to make it through this particularly bleak period of my life one way or another; I have survived plenty of other episodes like this in the past, and I'm sure there are plenty more to come in the future. But right now, if I seem a bit off, or if I don't really want to talk, or you get the distinct impression I just want to be left alone… well, as I said the other day, it's probably not you, and it is most definitely me.

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