I've done a lot of work on my Secret Creative Project over the course of the last few days. I am feeling a strong amount of Autistic Hyperfixation Energy on it right now — even if I do often have to juggle this with the equally autistic tendencies to fiddle around with the bits I've already created over and over rather than continuing to make new bits.
Thus far the project is standing at 16,826 words. I anticipate that by the time I finish this — which will be a pretty long time from now — that number will be in the high six digits at the very least. There's a lot of work still to do, but I feel good about this; I feel like this is a worthwhile undertaking, and one that I'm enjoying doing.
It's not something I plan to make any money from; it's not something I plan to plaster ads all over; it's not something I'm doing to "be famous" or anything like that. It's just a project based on something I enjoy that I think will help others to enjoy said thing as much as I do. Plus it's an excuse for me to dive down some thoroughly interesting research rabbit-holes.
Doing this is reminding me that I love writing, particularly about the things I'm passionate about. (Go on then; I'll give you a little hint as to what the project is about: it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, about games.) I love the little journeys that bits of research take you on; I love trying to craft a narrative from those nuggets of information you find; I love trying to get my enthusiasm across in a way that is hopefully enjoyable for the reader to engage with.
I don't know if I'll ever finish this. I would certainly like to, and while I'm feeling the strong Autistic Hyperfixation Energy, I intend to keep taking advantage of it as much as possible. I reached what I consider to be the first major milestone in the project this evening… out of many milestones along the way, yes, but a significant one, nonetheless. It feels like finally cresting a particularly steep hill, so I am going to "reward" myself with some nice relaxing time tomorrow. I haven't played Pragmata for a few days and need to get back on that, but this has been taking priority while I've been feeling very much in the mood for it.
On that note, though, it's after midnight, and I think I should probably get some sleep now.
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I think it's about time I used my platform here, such as it is, to make another hyper-specific product recommendation, based on something that I, Pete Davison, 45 years of age yesterday, have recently Bought And Thought Was Kind Of All Right.
The product today is Clearasil's Rapid Action Pads. They look like this:
If the name "Clearasil" is familiar, it's because you probably know them for their numerous varieties of zit-clearance products from over the years. The brand's been around for a long time at this point, and is, I would assume, something of a Trusted Name.
I came to these pads because a few weeks back, I found myself getting a few zits around my mouth, so I thought I should probably do something about them beyond simply attempting to pop them and then doing stifled screams when I was reminded, through bitter experience, that popping zits that are on or near your lips is excruciatingly painful.
My initial intent was to go out and find a product I used to use as a teenager known as "Oxy Duo Pads", but I wasn't convinced that Oxy anything was a thing any more, because the last time I had even thought about these things was more than 30 years ago. As it happens, when I searched for "Oxy Duo Pads" on Amazon, these Clearasil things are the first thing that came up — although a brief Google reveals that Oxy is apparently still a thing if you know where to get them.
Anyway, Oxy Duo Pads were little fabric pads that were a bit rough on one side and a bit smoother on the other side, and they were coated in the sort of stinky chemical that was unmistakably for blasting zits. The theory was that you'd rough up your skin and open the pores with the rough side, allowing all that delicious chemically goodness to seep in (and burn like fuck if you were a bit sore) then smooth things out a bit with the smooth side. In the process, you'd almost certainly realise that your face was a lot more dirty than you thought it was.
These Clearasil pads are essentially the same thing, without the "Duo" part — in other words, they pretty much just have what was the "rough" side from the Oxy product. They still smell unmistakably like some sort of flesh-burning chemical, and they're still pretty danged good at not only getting the filth off one's face, but also discouraging zits from coming back.
However, that's not the reason I want to recommend them. I want to recommend them for an added bonus feature I discovered after just a couple of days of using them.
For most of my life, I've suffered with dry skin, particularly on my face. It's possibly some sort of genetic thing, as my Dad has always had it, too, particularly around his nose. I had resigned myself to it just being sort of there all the time, and having to put up with, in the words of Alan Partridge, "my pillow [being] like a flapjack" when I woke up of a morning.
Two days of using these damn things, and the skin on my face was clear, soft and not peeling or sore even a little bit. Sure, that first day made me feel like I was voluntarily inflicting serious chemical burns on myself, but after the second day, I noticed a difference. And, using them every day since then, I haven't had even a hint of dry or sore skin on my face.
I believe the reason for this is that the Clearasil pads include something called salicylic acid. This is something that I've seen among my wife's numerous skincare products on the bathroom windowsill, but never thought to even ask what it was for. It turns out that it basically strips the top layer off your skin, which is not as horrifying as it sounds. The net effect, it seems, is that the outer layer, which was all dry and crispy and horrible, is removed, leaving soft, fresh, new skin underneath. And I believe you are unlikely to whittle your own face down to the skull while using this stuff, because we all grow new skin on a pretty regular basis. Also it's apparently vaguely related to aspirin, and taking it orally is inadvisable. Thanks, Wikipedia.
Anyway, if you, like me, have ever suffered with a face that seems to want to come off at the most inconvenient times, it seems the answer is to regularly douse it in a form of acid that, in itself, will also cause your face to come off, but in a more useful and less messy way than when your face wants to do it itself.
I guess I have a "skincare routine" now, such as it is.
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It is my birthday. I am 45 years of age today. I have had a reasonably nice day — I took the whole beginning of this week off — but to be honest I didn't achieve what I initially thought I was going to achieve in this time off. I thought I was going to make some videos, but it turns out I have not done that. Instead, I have made some headway on a Mystery Creative Project I teased a while back.
I'm still not going to tell you what it is, because my aim for it is to finish it before unleashing it on the world, rather than doing it piecemeal. My reasoning for this is that… well, I have prior experience. At one point a while back, I started doing a website whose long-term intention was to go through every cartridge available for the Philips G7000 "Videopac" computer and write something about all of them. I stalled on that project for various reasons, and at some point a WordPress update broke my layout on the page and I haven't been able to summon up the mental fortitude to go and fix it. As such, it's just sort of sitting there in a broken, unfinished state, and will likely continue to do so.
My thinking is that if I work on this thing a bit at a time, trying to knock off a little bit of it every day, I'll have something impressive to show off when it's complete. (Once it's "complete", it will continue to evolve by virtue of what it is, but there will definitely be a moment when it reaches "version 1.0" status and I am happy to reveal it.) Conversely, if I were to launch what I've done now, people might just go "huh, cool", realise there's not all that much to it yet and then never think about it ever again.
So that's my plan. And I've made a good dent in starting this whole project over the course of the last few days. Starting these things is always one of the toughest bits, because you keep thinking of little bits and pieces you might want to do to refine the experience — and if these revelations come too late, it can be a bit of a faff to implement them. Thankfully, I'm happy with the situation I've got things into now, and I can now focus on the real meat of the overall project.
Make no mistake, though, this project is going to be a lot of work. There is somewhere in the region of 800 "little jobs" to do in the name of putting the whole thing together, and so far I have completed (counts) nine. Still, every journey begins with a single step and all that, and now I've got started, I feel like I can bang out a bit of this whole thing each day until it is all done. And it is something that I think will feel good when it is finished.
I apologise for being vague about all this, but hopefully you understand my reasoning for it. I want the grand unveiling of this thing, whenever that might end up being at some indefinite point in the future, to be a worthwhile and meaningful event for those it is relevant to. And I feel like teasing it too early will be counterproductive to that. So this is the approach I'm taking. And this probably won't be the last time I mention it in such vague terms. But you'll see… eventually. Hopefully, anyway.
On that note, I'm off to take a break from this self-inflicted "work" and enjoy the rest of my birthday before I have to go back to work tomorrow.
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I was in Marks and Spencers earlier — yes, yes, something something middle class — and I happened to see that they had copies of The Beano on sale in the small newsstand near the tills. I've noticed this before, but never picked one up. Today, I decided to finally satisfy a longstanding curiosity and answer the question: "what is The Beano like, more than thirty years after I last read it?"
I used to read The Beano pretty much every week. I had Beano annuals most years for Christmas, and when I was lucky, I'd get a Bash Street Kids or Dennis the Menace annual to go along with it. My parents used to read The Beano when they were kids, too; they have some pretty old Beano annuals knocking around somewhere, and probably (hopefully?) still all my old ones, too.
I liked The Beano because it was straightforwardly funny, and it was something that I could share my amusement about with my family. We all particularly enjoyed Calamity James, a comic strip about an unlucky boy that always featured an absurd amount of background detail that was often more hilarious than the actual happenings in the strip — plus at least one smelly sock in every single full-page strip.
I wasn't sure what to expect from a copy of The Beano in 2026. Would it be filled with impenetrable Young Person Slang? I wasn't sure it would be, as although it was kid-friendly when I was young, I don't remember it being too tryhard about trying to "sound like" us. The thing I was most expecting was that it would be childish humour that I simply wouldn't find funny — but then I remembered that I still find burps and farts hilarious, and felt that even if it was childish, it would probably be about my level.
So I dove in while enjoying a sandwich. And I enjoyed it! It even elicited some genuine out-loud laughs on multiple occasions. There are, as you might expect, quite a lot of changes that have happened in the intervening 30+ years, but a lot of things have stayed the same, too. So let's look at a few highlights.
Dennis the Menace is still the cover star, though his strip no longer adorns the front and back covers — there's a more conventional "magazine-style" cover on the front now, though there's still a strip on the back for the "Make Me A Menace" feature, where readers can send a photo of themselves in and be featured in a comic strip.
I highlighted these first frames because I thought they were a good visual gag. The strip, which ran for four pages in total — so much longer than in his cover-mounted days — told the story of how Dennis refused to cut his hair until Beanotown United won three games in a row, and this caused his hair to grow so long that it became sentient and started eating people. Thoroughly silly, and exactly the sort of thing I would have expected to see in The Beano back in the day.
Calamity James is, unfortunately, a shadow of its former self. It's clearly done by a different artist now, and it's only a three-panel strip alongside fellow Beano veteran Billy Whizz and newcomer Addams Family wannabes Number 13. All the wonderful background detail and silly visual gags are gone — no more smelly sock! — but I'm pleased they kept James looking like a slightly deranged pencil. The gag is, I have to admit, mildly funny, too, though it does rely on an awareness of stupid modern trends like "6-7" and thus would probably be impenetrable to my parents at this point.
One of the biggest changes since I read The Beano as a kid is the addition of quite a few non-white characters, including some who have their own strip, such as in Har Har's Joke Shop here. Doubtless this made the "anti-woke" people furious at some point in the past, but it's a sensible change for the comic to make, as it reflects the multicultural nature of our society while at the same time highlighting how people having differently coloured skin doesn't mean they suddenly become completely alien types of person; the non-white characters in The Beano fit right in with all the usual mayhem without being picked out as being something "unusual" — which is a good message to send to kids.
This idea continues with the changes to The Bash Street Kids. While all the old cast are there, a couple have had name changes in the name of sensitivity — Spotty is now Scotty, and Fatty is now Freddy, though Plug (as in "plug-ugly") is still as he was. New additions to the crew include Cuthbert (the chief "softy" from older Dennis the Menace cartoons, though I wonder if he's been retired from that role in the name of not promoting bullying) along with Harsha from Har Har's Joke Shop and apparent newcomers Mahira, Stevie and Khadija, all non-white characters of various descriptions.
This was a good gag. I'm pleased to see The Beano come down on the anti-AI side of things. I find that oddly reassuring.
Elsewhere, the comic is apparently in the process of serialising Bananaman's origin story. I was just explaining to some baffled Americans about Bananaman the other day, and it turns out he's still relevant, apparently. I would never have expected that.
Perhaps most reassuring of all, though, is The Beano's willingness to include a full-on fart gag. Oddly enough, despite being plenty mischievous back in the day, I don't recall ever seeing Beano characters burping and farting, except perhaps sometimes in the background of Calamity James strips. This little beauty from newcomer Rubi's Screwtop Science, featuring a lead character in a wheelchair, gave me a good giggle, though…
…as did the fact the comic apparently April Fooled people by suggesting you could scratch and sniff Minnie the Minx farting in a prior issue. I love this because I feel like there's a whole bunch of layers to this gag, some of which only the grown-ups will get. I'll leave them to your imagination.
All in all, I enjoyed my first look at The Beano in more than thirty years. It's nice to see how inclusive it's become, though like I say, I suspect there are certain Daily Mail-reading portions of the population who believe it's an outrage that there's a character wearing a hijab in The Bash Street Kids. Thankfully I have never run into them, and I hope I never do.
It's most reassuring to see how funny it still is, though, even as an almost-45 year old man. (45 tomorrow!) Will I keep buying The Beano? I don't know. I actually wouldn't be averse to the idea. So let's maybe have a think about that…
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I am in a hotel for the second time in one week! This time it's for non-work reasons. We're going to The Cave tomorrow to see a talk by Ian "h0ffman" Ford, a veteran of the Amiga demoscene, and an experienced porter of games to platforms they absolutely were not designed for. It should be a good time.
Anyway, it's also my birthday in a few days time, and Andie couldn't think of what to buy me as a present, so she paid for us to have a night in a nice hotel ahead of our Cave visit, rather than having to drive there early in the morning. It's about two hours' drive from us, so getting there for an 11am start would have meant getting up much earlier than we normally do on a weekend. Yes, we are still teenagers in that regard.
The hotel is nice. It's a four-star hotel, so it evidently was pretty swanky in its prime; today, it could do with a lick of paint and some repairs here and there, but it's not in bad condition. The facilities are nice — there's a great pool and spa area that we spent a bit of time in this afternoon — and the food at the restaurant we had for dinner was really tasty. Moderately pricy, but not unreasonably so, particularly considering we had three courses.
I'm looking forward to visiting The Cave again. My visit a couple of years back is a fond memory, and the place has had more work done since then, plus some new additions to the collection. h0ffman's talk should be interesting, and it will be nice to show my wife and a friend of ours what it's all about.
Anyway, I'm typing this on my phone because I didn't have the foresight to bring a keyboard with me, so I'm going to leave that there. It's after midnight anyway, so we had better sleep. I will try and remember to take some photos tomorrow!
I've been absolutely exhausted all day. I feel like I got a decent night's sleep, particularly after the tiring day I had at work followed by the long drive home, but also feel like I could have done with approximately 12 hours more sleep. I actually managed to get a fair amount done today, but right now I just feel like I could shut my eyes and fall asleep right here on the sofa.
With that in mind, I'm probably going to have an early night tonight. I'd like to get back into Pragmata, which I'm enjoying a lot, but I'm also not sure my brain is up to playing anything too complex this evening. Perhaps this would be a good evening to do a bit of retro gaming, with an emphasis on something that isn't too challenging or complex to deal with.
I actually have the next two Evercade cartridges that haven't been released yet, which I'm kind of dying to talk about but can't because although I have them in my hands, we haven't even announced them yet. That will be happening soon, however, and when it does I will have plenty to enthuse about, believe me. They're not the biggest releases of the year, by any means, but they are some of my favourites.
No; I'm thinking this evening might be a good opportunity to settle down with something comfortably familiar, but which I perhaps haven't played for a while. I'm hoping in the process of typing this, something will come to mind that feels like it might be fun to spend my evening playing. Maybe Starwing? I haven't played that for a while. Last time I tried it, the MiSTer SNES core was having issues with the SuperFX chip, but I believe that's been resolved at this point, so that might be a good shout. I do love a bit of Starwing, and it is actually quite a long time since I've played it.
I'm going to get back into doing some videos soon, for those who have been wondering why it's been all quiet on that front for a while. I just haven't really felt an urge to do that for a little while, and forcing yourself to do something you're not really feeling is a sure-fire way to get yourself feeling burnt out. I won't have time to do any this coming weekend, as we're taking a trip to The Cave, but I have a few days off for my birthday at the start of next week, so I might take a day or two to record a few things over that period. Exactly what, I have no idea just yet; I have a few things in mind that I might like to explore, but haven't decided firmly on when or how to tackle them. This upcoming bit of free time might be the ideal opportunity to jump into them.
Anyway, I think I might have made a decision on what to do with my evening — although at the rate I'm going, I may well be asleep before I've got anywhere. If that's the way it goes, though, that's the way it goes!
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I know the common joke that Taco Bell gives you the shits, though I must confess I've never had an issue with its UK-based incarnation. In fact, I rather like a lot of their stuff — a Volcano Burrito is my usual poison of choice.
Today, though, I had I think the worst meal I've ever had from them, and possibly from any service station fast food place. I did not end up with the shits — at least I don't think so; I did have a large dump when I got in, but that is usually the case after the long drive home from work.
Anyway, I saw that they were doing "Sweet habanero tenders", and thought they sounded nice. The picture looked nice, too — some rather Wingstop-esque tenders drizzled with what would presumably be a sweet, hot sauce. Andie and I are big fans of Wingstop, and their mango habanero sauce is one of my favourite things to have on their chicken, even if it gives me hiccups every time, without fail.
I got my food and was surprised to discover that the tenders were just stuffed into a bag and not drizzled with any sort of sauce, but I thought "oh well, the coating is probably nice by itself".
What then followed is, I think, the driest meal I have ever eaten. I made the mistake of also accompanying the tenders with some nachos rather than fries, and as such the experience as a whole was remarkably akin to eating a bag of lightly seasoned sand. The only mildly redeeming part of the meal was the glazed churros for dessert; they both tasted good and brought some much-needed "wet" to proceedings with their sauce.
On the whole, though, I cannot, in any way, recommend the sweet habanero tenders at Taco Bell, particularly at South Mimms Services at the A1/M25 junction. I normally look forward to grabbing a bit of a treat on the drive home from my monthly office visit, but this time it seems I made a terrible mistake. I won't let that happen again!
At least the food I had last night was good. When I met up with my friend, we got food from the hotel I was staying at — and said hotel does pretty good food. I fancied something a bit different from the norm, so had a Hungarian Goulash, and it was delicious. A rich, flavourful, creamy sauce, well-cooked meat, fluffy potatoes and some nice squishy dumpling-like things that were apparently made from egg noodles, of all things. It was accompanied by some nice bread and served up in a little cauldron over a candle for you to ladle into the main bowl. Absolutely lovely stuff — and it basically cost the same as the shitty Taco Bell meal I had this evening on the way home.
This was followed by a lovely chocolate brownie accompanied with some decent ice cream, and all delivered with some excellent service from a waitress that my friend was rather taken with. A thoroughly agreeable evening, gastronomically speaking. And socially speaking, for that matter, as yesterday's post hopefully made clear.
Well, lesson learned. Perhaps I should just have dinner at the hotel before starting the long drive home!
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"It's so cool that literally every job now is understaffed by 30-50%. It's great because I didn't want whatever it was done well or with any care at all. But please keep raising prices anyway."
I saw this post earlier and it resonated. I'm sure that right now, wherever you are in the world, you are feeling some variation of this thought. You are probably also feeling as bewildered as I am at why this is all the case. Yes, the economy is fucked due to the AI bubble, private equity dominating everything and the stock market continually doing weird things (a shoe company "pivoted to AI" recently and their stock value exploded!), but surely some things are constant. Like, say, the need for groceries.
Our local big Sainsbury's is a prime example. It's a decently sized supermarket that serves a wide area in the town; it's conveniently located, as it's somewhat on the outskirts of the general urban area, and it's also near a number of local amenities, such as a doctor's surgery and bingo hall. It does plenty of business, as the car park is always pretty full and there are always people in it.
So why have I only ever seen one person actually on the checkouts at a time? There are like five or six conventional checkout lanes (plus a large self-checkout area for trolleys, and another separate large self-checkout area for baskets, inevitably with at least one person using a trolley in it) and there only ever seem to be about three people on hand at any time: one person begrudgingly staffing the conventional checkout, and two people milling around the self-checkout areas, occasionally noticing that yes, you are, in fact, old enough to purchase a can of Monster and gracing you with their woefully insecure three-digit user ID and password combo to confirm this fact in the eyes of the law.
"Just use the self-checkouts," you'll probably say. And that's sometimes fine. Except when you run into the inevitable Unexpected Item in Bagging Area incidents, or the aforementioned need to prove your legal worthiness to consume drinks that don't taste like anything Nature has ever produced, or you're buying a shirt with a security tag on it, or you're buying alcohol, or you have two packets of paracetamol in your basket, or… you get the idea.
A good example from my own experience is a rather middle-class problem, but it shows how these checkouts being inexplicably left fallow can be a genuine issue if you need to speak to an actual person in order to achieve something during your shopping trip. We have a SodaStream, and SodaStream does a thing where if you return your old gas cylinder at the same time as getting a new one, you get ten quid off the new one. It's worth doing, as it means you don't have to worry about disposing of bulky gas cylinders, and it's cheaper. Yet, as far as I'm aware, there is no means of carrying out this process yourself at the self-checkouts, meaning you need to go to a staffed checkout. If there's only one person working the staffed checkouts at any given time, this can mean you'll be in for a long wait. If you go in at the wrong time of day, when there are no people on the staffed checkouts, then you're fucked.
Like I say, it's a very middle-class example. But I'm sure there are other instances where you need (or just prefer) to interact with an actual human being, and there are times of day where that's literally impossible at this Sainsbury's. Why do they even have that many checkout aisles if they're never, ever going to use all of them?
Is it because they don't have the money to pay enough staff to man those checkouts? I doubt it, particularly since prices are through the roof. I can pop to the shop to get a few snacky bits and household bits and pieces — i.e. not a "big shop" — and easily spend £50 these days. That's more expensive than a video game! (For now, anyway.) I feel like if you spend more than it costs to get a new PlayStation game, you should come away with more than a few bags of crisps, bottles of drink and packets of cat food.
To be clear, I don't blame any of the workers staffing either the conventional checkouts or the self-checkout aisles for this. It is not their fault, and they probably wish they had more people helping out, too. It is, almost certainly, a failing of management, presumably initiated on the grounds that they want to "do more with less" or some other such LinkedIn platitude at their corporate overlords' behest. In that sense, it's probably not even the managers' fault, but instead, as with everything else, the blame can, without a doubt, be laid at the feet of the out-of-touch executive class and/or private equity.
One day we'll be free of all this. I don't know that. But I have to believe it. Because things don't seem to be getting a whole lot better right now, and the prospect of continuing to endure the world being such a shitty place is becoming increasingly intolerable.
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For some reason, I decided to start re-watching the Channel 4 comedy show Peep Show recently. I say re-watch; I'm not sure I've ever watched it all the way through, but it is a show that I always used to like, and as the show that shot David Mitchell and Robert Webb to stardom (or at the very least "household name" status), it's something I've always considered to be fairly evergreen, even if its somewhat "cringe comedy" nature makes it unpalatable to some folks — my wife being one of them.
I was dismayed to discover upon starting my rewatch that Peep Show is over twenty fucking years old. I don't know why, given that I remember having DVDs of it just after my time at university, but I've always thought of it as a relatively "recent" show. But no! It's a show that pre-dates smartphones and flatscreen TVs and monitors; it's a show that is old enough to come with one of those "this show was made in 2003 and is not representative of today's values" disclaimers that you normally see on shit from the 1920s.
The source of this particular warning is a scene early in the second series that is essentially blackface. I say "essentially" because the scene in question is actually criticising blackface, particularly in the context of using it as something to be deliberately provocative — or even a fetish — but it still involves Robert Webb with his skin painted a darker colour and thus I appreciate that to some, it may be hard to defend.
I do find the whole "today's values" thing mildly interesting, and occasionally annoying. I find it especially grating when people start talking about how a piece of dialogue is "problematic", when the dialogue in question is supposed to be depicting a character that is a piece of shit. There's a certain subset of people, many of whom have grown up with what passes for cultural critique on asinine platforms like TikTok, who have a very black-and-white (no pun intended, given the above) view of morality in fiction. These people tend to find it especially "problematic" — a word I've always hated, if that wasn't already clear — when "villains" of the piece act in a villainous manner. Who would have thought it?
I mean, sure. You probably can get across the fact that a person is a piece of shit without resorting to actions and utterances that are offensive by modern standards. But at the same time, I do feel writers should be able to depict characters who are offensive in some way or another — otherwise your critique of them and their actions lacks a bit of bite. It's like all the people on YouTube who bleep out any time they say words like "sex" or "death". It's a bit too much, y'know?
Obviously I'm not advocating for black-and-white minstrel shows and racial slurs 24/7, but I feel like there comes a point where you can wrap modern audiences in cotton wool just a little too much, and the result is an entire cohort of people who cannot cope with being challenged by fiction even a little bit. We already see this on "BookTok" (ugh). Don't even get me started on those idiots.
I guess, thinking rationally, the solution Channel 4 took with this Peep Show episode is probably as good as one can expect right now; the episode itself is untouched, it just has a warning before you watch it. And, as far as I'm aware, that hasn't caused any particular scandals around the place online. So perhaps we should just keep quiet, acknowledge these when they exist and just get on with things. Because the alternative is a dark place for the creative arts, as we're already starting to get a hint of in some places.
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The advice "it's about the journey, not the destination" is valid in a lot of contexts, but I find that there's a very literal reading of it that I find particularly worthwhile. And that is when it comes to taking some exercise, particularly if you are not someone who is generally inclined towards such things.
Since the weather has turned nice, I've gone out for a couple of walks. I had a short walk on the common the other day, and this morning after breakfast, I decided to just leave my house, set off in whatever direction I felt like, and just keep walking. I ended up having a very lovely walk of approximately 5 kilometres, burning a nice number of calories due having to haul my disgusting fat carcass around with me wherever I go, and coming home feeling rather satisfied with myself.
What I discovered along the way is that on the outward journey, when I didn't have a particular destination in mind, I felt like I could pretty much go forever. I kept walking and walking and walking until I had got quite a distance away from my house. And I was enjoying it; I found some nice little scenic areas, even, which you will see photographs of punctuating this blog post. It's always nice when you find pleasant green areas within a reasonably sized and generally quite busy city.
The moment I felt like I was "on the way back", though, things became several orders of magnitude more difficult. It's weird! It was like a switch flipped in my mind, a big countdown appeared (figuratively speaking), and I was aware of quite how far I still had left to go before I could call proceedings to a halt. I had to take several breaks on this "return leg" of the journey, because I kept getting to points where I felt like I wanted to get home, but also where I wasn't sure I had the energy to make it all the way back without stopping.
Okay, it doesn't help that we live on top of a hill, and thus whichever direction I set out from when I go for a walk, I always have to end my journey by climbing a hill that might not look that steep, but which is always absolutely exhausting to walk up. Well, it is if you're a fat shit like me, anyway.
Still, I feel like if I had just kept walking "outwards", I could have probably made it even further afield. Could I have made it into the town centre? I don't know — maybe. I wasn't far off making it to one of the local shopping areas. And if I had made it there, I could have always stopped for a coffee and then even got the bus back home if I had really wanted to.
Perhaps that's the answer. Just walk and walk and walk outwards, then for the return journey catch the bus. Is that cheating? I don't think it is, is it? Not if you are able to make the outward journey significantly longer as a result of knowing that you're not going to have to walk back again.
Maybe I'll try that next time out. I just need to familiarise myself with the bus routes around the area, I guess!
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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