#oneaday Day 481: I have returned

I have returned! And I'm in a foul mood, apparently, but that's nothing unusual after having to do that drive. I set out at 5pm and got home at about 8.40pm. That's not fun. Granted, I did stop to have some dinner at the South Mimms services in an inevitably vain attempt to try and avoid the worst of rush hour on the M25, but still. It would be lovely to be able to leave my place of work and be home in a duration of time that is less than multiple episodes of a podcast. Although at least the journey does afford me the opportunity to actually listen to podcasts, which I otherwise don't really make much time for.

I am also in a less-than-charitable mood because the whole trip this time around felt a little bit pointless. It is always nice to see my colleagues in person because I like them, but the only real benefit of me actually being in the office today was that I could participate in a meeting by sitting in an uncomfortable chair near everyone else instead of sitting in my own comfortable chair via Teams. The rest of the day I was just sort of… there, and don't really feel like I achieved much that I couldn't have done from home. In fact, I generally feel like on my trips into the office I achieve significantly less than I do with a day working from home.

But oh well. This is the world we live in, and it's not that much of an inconvenience to have to do this once a month. Just enough to want to have a little moan about now and again. But now I am home, and I can see my cats (literally, they are both sitting staring at me as I type this) and be with my wife and play Final Fantasy Tactics, which arrived in my absence.

So I think that's probably what I'm going to spend the rest of the evening doing. I haven't played Final Fantasy Tactics through properly since the PS1 original, so it will be nice to do so with a translation that makes sense and the new voiceovers. I will do my best not to power through just to get to the bits with Ben Starr in, but I am making no promises.

On that note, it's time to get isometric and turn-based. Normal business will resume tomorrow. Probably.

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 480: Post-hotel

Realised I forgot to write something last night. It is time for my monthly trip to the office, y'see, and as such I was spending the evening in a hotel. I was so caught up in watching Police Interceptors and then ProJared playing Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon that I completely forgot to blog. Oh well. Life goes on. I'm sure all none of you who thought "hang on, Pete didn't blog today" will get over the immeasurable disappointment.

But I am here now! It is lunchtime in the office, so I am banging something out before everyone else gets back from lunch. Today I have had a Meal Deal from Boots. It was adequate, though I am pleased to see that you can get those Walkers Extra Flamin' Hot crisps in an individual bag now rather than having to use willpower not to eat an entire big bag in one go. Diet is mostly on pause for the time while I'm away — back to normality once I get home this evening.

We were discussing plans for next year in the office this morning. Lots of exciting things on the way — and for once we're well ahead of schedule on getting a bunch of them ready, too. It's going to be interesting to see how some folks react to the things we have on the way — I think a fair few people are going to be very pleasantly surprised at what we have coming!

Anyway, people are starting to filter back into the office now, so I guess lunch break is over. There's only so long I can type away at this before people wonder what I'm doing, plus I have some meetings scheduled for this afternoon. And so, on that half-hearted note, that is that for now. I will be back this evening to catch up properly!

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#oneaday Day 478: Counting Cals

As I've alluded to a couple of times recently, the latest attempt at weight loss has been centred on counting calories. And thus far it's actually been going reasonably well — as is often the case when embarking on a new campaign of doing this, I lost a decent chunk of weight in the first week, but this week it's slowed down again, though it is still going down, which is good.

As my past experiences doing this have shown, the crucial thing is to be constantly aware of what you're putting in your mouth, and thinking carefully before you stuff anything in there. Recording everything helps you to be aware of such things, and in the process make some better choices.

Now, "better choices" doesn't have to mean "I stopped having any bacon sandwiches ever, and for breakfast now I have half a banana with a handful of chia seeds and am miserable for the rest of the day". No; it means "I had a big lunch, so I should probably go easy at dinner". Or it means "I treated myself to a McDonald's breakfast, so I probably don't need a lot for lunch". Or it means "I've had three bags of crisps today already, I probably shouldn't have any more".

Working within those simple boundaries, you can set limits for yourself without feeling like you're missing out on things. When counting calories, you absolutely can still have a nice cake if you feel like one, but that probably means you should hold back on the snacks (or have lower-calorie snacks) for the rest of the day. And it can sometimes be surprising how easy it is to save calories by making a few little swaps here and there.

I've never been hugely fond of salad, for example, but drench it in enough salad cream and it can be quite a pleasant (and filling) accompaniment to a simple meal, like a piece of breaded meat. And a plate of salad, even if absolutely drowning in salad cream, is quite a lot fewer calories than a big pile of chips.

As it happens, the only chips I've had since starting this time around were on our Work Day Out, when I was necessarily somewhat limited in my options for dining, so I thought I would just enjoy that day as I saw fit, without guilt.

My challenge in this upcoming week is going to come in the form of my monthly trip to the office, which usually involves me grabbing something to eat on the drive down, or perhaps from the supermarket next to the hotel, or the hotel restaurant. On previous occasions, I'm mildly ashamed to admit that I have made less-than-stellar choices when choosing what to eat — after a long, tiring, boring journey, all I want is to have something tasty. This time, I'm going to try and pay at least a bit of attention to the choices that I make. I can still satisfy myself; I should probably try and do so without devouring a huge bag of Doritos and two frosted yum-yums, as delicious as they are.

I'm still feeling pretty good at the moment, then. Things are moving in the right direction and, crucially, I'm not feeling bored or frustrated with what I'm eating. That last part is particularly important; there's nothing worse than being bored of what you're eating, because that's the time you're most likely to think "that was disappointing, I'll make up for it with an entire chocolate gateau".

Not enough calories left for a sandwich before bed, sadly, but I think I'll probably survive.

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#oneaday Day 475: A traitorous experience

As noted yesterday, today was a Work Day Out. Not a Work Day Out where we had to do any work, but a Nice Thing To Do Together, presumably for the purposes of "team-building" and suchlike. I may sound cynical, but honestly my workplace is such a nice, small company that any occasion like this just feels like a nice gathering of friends — albeit one where the boss foots the bill. Winner.

Our main activity for the day was The Traitors Live Experience, an interactive group game based on the (apparently) popular TV show. (I've never seen it. But that doesn't mean much these days.) I was a little concerned ahead of time that we might end up playing with strangers, but thankfully we had enough people in our group to ensure that our game, which had 11 people total (and could have supported up to 14) was entirely people who knew each other. While The Traitors TV show is based on the assumption that most of the participants won't know one another prior to playing, they have a lot longer to get to know each other; as such, since The Traitors Live Experience is just shy of two hours in length, I suspect it is best played with people you have, at the very least, a passing acquaintance with.

I'm going to explain how the game works now on the assumption that you, like me, have never seen The Traitors, so if you're a big fan of the show and you feel like I'm stating the obvious, I can only apologise. I am not able to comment on the experience from a fan's perspective, so this will have to do you for now.

After an opportunity to hang out together in a comfortable bar area (with seating!) before your game starts, you are led into the depths of the venue, through a series of creepy Resident Evil mansion-style corridors, until you eventually reach your "Round Table" room. Once ensconced in your seat of choice, which you will stay in for the majority of the game, your host introduces the game and how it works.

Before play proper begins, at least one Traitor is selected. This unfolds through everyone seated at the table blindfolding themselves with blackout goggles, then loud music playing while the host stalks around the room and taps one or more people on the shoulder, indicating that they are the Traitors for the game. The remaining players are the Faithful.

The Traitors Live Experience unfolds in two parts: "day"-based missions and "night"-based potential betrayals. During the day, the group as a whole is given some sort of task to complete, and successfully achieving this rewards the group as a whole with "gold". You don't actually win any cash (unlike the TV show) — the "gold" is simply a score of sorts. At the end of the game, if all the Traitors have been eliminated, the Faithful score all the points, while if even one Traitor remains, the Traitors take all the points. The venue has daily leaderboards for how well Faithful and Traitors have performed.

At night, everyone dons their blackout goggles once more, but the Traitors are invited to take them off partway through proceedings. At this point, one of several things can happen: they can "murder" someone by pointing at them; they can "blackmail" a Faithful, causing them to become a Traitor (though I believe there are conditions on when this can occur, such as when a Traitor is eliminated from the game) or nothing at all can happen. Once again, if someone is "murdered", the host silently taps them on the shoulder, and they remove themselves from the room before everyone else takes their goggles off.

Being murdered (or, in later rounds of the game, "banished" by the Faithful if they believe you are a Traitor) doesn't mean your game is completely over; instead, you are removed to a separate room where you can watch live camera feeds of the surviving players, and at various junctures you are given the opportunity to interact with the games they are playing by solving puzzles in the other room, or perhaps by finding creative ways to communicate "from beyond the grave", as it were. There was a nice vaguely "escape room" feel to this side of proceedings, helping even those who are eliminated early to feel involved in the complete game.

As it happens, I, a Faithful, was murdered quite early on due to my strong performance in one of the missions and making some solid observations during the pre-Banishment deliberations. I was worried that getting knocked out early would be boring and annoying, but actually it was rather fun, particularly once some other people joined me in the room and we had to discuss whether to help the survivors or actively sabotage their attempts.

The missions themselves are all pretty simple parlour game-style puzzles — I assume they have a bank of them available to randomise so that two games aren't exactly alike. In our game, we initially had a straightforward puzzle where we had to rotate dials on the table to accurately depict the cycles of the moon. This was followed by a "spot the difference" game where we were showed a model of a crime scene and some photographs of a few details from it, then shortly after, we were shown a different model of the same crime scene (and "the same but potentially different" photographs) and tasked with spotting five changes, with bonus points on offer if we could determine how the corpse was actually murdered.

After that, we had a game where we were challenged to press a hidden button under the table after an exact amount of time had elapsed — this was the one I excelled at, since I've always been rather good at that sort of thing — and, after I'd been eliminated, the group were tasked with arranging a set of Tarot-like cards in order (with us "assisting" from beyond the grave by flashing the lights in the Round Table room from afar) and, as the grand finale, the group were challenged to recreate several scenes shown in silhouette by equipping themselves with props and standing in place.

I don't know how close in execution the whole thing is to the TV show, but plenty of effort has been made with the presentation of everything. There's plenty of cool lighting effects, dramatic music and suchlike, and the "Round Table room" is nicely detailed, even concealing a secret exit to "Traitors Tower", where the finale sequence took place. The whole thing was very enjoyable, and I'm glad I overcame my initial misgivings about playing a game so based on social cues to enjoy the experience.

As I say, I feel like for certain types of people, the experience will lose some of its appeal if you attend in a small group and end up being paired up with strangers, but likewise some people will thrive in that environment. It's good that the game is seemingly flexible and doesn't force anyone to do anything they're uncomfortable with — prior to starting the game, you're given the opportunity to privately indicate if you'd rather not be a Traitor from the outset, though this doesn't preclude you from potentially being "recruited" later in the game if the Traitors' ranks find themselves thinning.

We followed our time at The Traitors Live Experience with a late lunch at The Ivy Market Grill, a posh and expensive restaurant on Covent Garden that lets you go "I had lunch at The Ivy" without having to actually go to the real Ivy in the West End or pay the astronomical prices required to become a member of The Ivy Club. I had a cheese souffle, a sirloin steak and a chocolate bombe for dessert. All of them were delicious and I am still stuffed even now, a good four hours after we finished eating. The diet has gone out the window for today, of course, but y'know what, it doesn't matter. I had a good time, and I can be back on track tomorrow. It's not as if I'm going to be eating like that every day, after all.

Anyway, all in all it was a very good day, and I'm glad I went along. I'm knackered now, though; on paper it might not sound like we did all that much, but when you take into account the train travel in both directions, add the walking required when progressing across London in various ways, add the energy required to keep your social batteries topped up for most of a day with the same group of people, it all adds up. So I'm back home now, writing this in my pants, feeling thoroughly satisfied. Probably an early night tonight, though.

Although Silent Hill f did arrive today, so…

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#oneaday Day 474: Archiving with mixed results

My 5.25" floppy drive and power source came today, so I've been tinkering this evening attempting to image some Atari 8-bit disks from the big boxes I have buried in a cupboard upstairs.

After a few frightening mechanical noises and some initial frustrations — the most annoying of which by far was discovering I had the floppy drive cable inserted into the Greaseweazle the wrong way around, causing the drive to perpetually spin and never actually read anything — I got the setup up and running, and successfully ripped a couple of disks, initially to the "raw flux" .scp format, and then converted them to the more commonly used (for emulators, MiSTer and suchlike) .atr.

(For future reference, Atari disks are 40 tracks, meaning you need to set Greaseweazle to read cylinders 0-34 and 35-39. I don't know the technicalities behind this, but it worked.)

My initial success was reassuring, but I had a number of failures after that. I think some of these disks may be beyond help — and frustratingly, so far it appears to be the disks with more "personal" contents.

I attempted to rip a disk that had some of my brother's early BASIC programming experiments on it (including a simple multi-choice adventure game called Treasures of Crylos that I remember being rather fond of), but the disk barely registered as having any contents at all when I attempted to rip it.

I had a little more success with "Pete's Disk 1", which was a SpartaDOS X-formatted double-density disk, so a bit of an unusual edge case. The disk seemingly ripped successfully, and loading it into an emulator with SpartaDOS X installed allowed me to view the disk directory, but I was unable to actually load and run anything from the disk. So close! So very close. Also man, SpartaDOS X could fit a hell of a lot of stuff on one floppy disk. No wonder my Dad set me up with it for my personal disks rather than trusty old DOS 2.5. You can squeeze a lot more on when your file sizes are measured in bytes rather than sectors.

Other successes I had included what we colloquially referred to as "The Dutch Demo", a multi-part graphics and sound demo that is, unsurprisingly, Dutch (and I don't think I've ever seen archived anywhere online, so I will be sharing that at some point); Red Rat's Technicolour Dream Demo, which is a slideshow of pictures produced with the software in question, which supported considerably higher colour depth than the Atari was "supposed" to support; and a couple of disks of collected games.

I haven't started ripping and organising in any great depth yet, but I would like to rip as many of these as I can, then archive them somewhere online. While most of the software on these disks is archived via other means elsewhere around the Internet, it's the little things, like the menu systems used to collect these games together, and the specific combination of things on each disk, which is unique to my own computing history — and something that I'm keen to preserve if at all possible.

I don't know how many of these disks are going to be salvageable. I'm already seeing that some brands of disk have much better longevity than others — thus far, Radio Shack and Verbatim's disks have had the highest success rate, with Wabash being the worst — so it will be interesting to find out exactly how much I might be able to recover and (re)discover throughout this process.

I'm done for the evening, though. Back to it on Friday, since tomorrow is a Work Trip. A fun Work Trip, but still one I have to get up early and catch a train for, so I better get some sleep.

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#oneaday Day 473: The worst MIDI file in existence

It may sound peculiar in these days of being able to stream or download pretty much any piece of music you'd care to mention in its original format — be it legally or less-than-legally — but back in the '90s we had a lot of fun downloading MIDI files.

Some of these MIDI files we downloaded with the intention of using them somehow — primarily in Klik and Play and The Games Factory projects — but sometimes it was just for fun. And it was fun! Even with the limited synthesis capabilities of the sound cards most of us had at the time — it was very much the days of OPL FM synthesis being the norm, as wavetable cards were an extremely expensive luxury, if you could even get them at all — we used to enjoy tracking down MIDI files of songs we recognised and playing them back.

One day, my friend Edd found the worst MIDI file in existence. It is called EWOK.MID and I've been attempting to track it down for a good twenty years. Recently, I succeeded in my search and rediscovered EWOK.MID in all its glory — though I did forget to make a note of the website where I found it, so you'll have to settle for a version hosted here. (EDIT: It was here. Which appears to be buried deep in the depths of an SEO-optimised, likely AI-generated site about tech, which I suspect is built atop the remnants of a long-abandoned website that has somehow kept all its old uploads intact since 1999.)

I would like to share EWOK.MID with you now, but given that MIDI file support is no longer a given on modern machines, you'll have to settle for a recording of my computer playing it back in the name of universal compatibility.

Isn't it magnificent? Someone spent time on that. Moreover, someone thought that the time they spent on that was worth sharing with the world. And I am unironically glad that they did, because EWOK.MID has given me many, many laughs over the years.

What I find most amusing about it is that they clearly got the gist of the track from Star Wars that they're trying to ape, but then weren't quite sure how to do all the other bits. I suspect they started with the melody line first, and then attempted to play the drum parts "live" over the top of it. At that point, the sensible thing to do would be to use MIDI sequencer features such as quantizing to get the notes a bit more "in time" with one another, and get the whole thing sounding a bit more "professional". (Of course, quantizing demands that your notes are vaguely in time in the first place, so I do find myself wondering if EWOK.MID is possible to save.)

But no! Our heroic arranger decided that the work they'd done was enough. This was their magnum opus; their note-for-note recreation of a classic theme from a classic movie. So they uploaded it to the Internet one February morning in 1999, and sat back to enjoy the reactions of everyone who stumbled across it, whether deliberately or by accident.

I salute you, heroic arranger, whoever you are. You have brought me many hours of joy over the years, and I'm glad I finally rediscovered your finest work. I hope you're doing well, wherever and whoever you are.

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#oneaday Day 470: Time travel

I like reading old magazines. I always have done, ever since I was a child — and in fact, the "old magazines" I read today are pretty much the same old magazines I read when I was a child: that is to say, old issues of Page 6 and Atari User, with an occasional PC Zone or Official Nintendo Magazine from the mid to late '90s.

Part of this is down to the family connection: my Dad, my brother and I all contributed to Page 6, so it will always be important to me. None of us wrote for Atari User, but as the only other magazine devoted to Atari 8-bits around at the time, we bought pretty much every issue. Likewise, my brother worked on PC Zone for quite some time in the mid to late '90s — I even went and did my Year 10 work experience with him — and I did a few freelance gigs for the Official Nintendo Magazine during my latter days of Sixth Form and early days of university.

I don't just re-read these magazines because I'm proud of the people involved, mind. I read them because while I'm reading them, for a brief moment, I have escaped 2025, and I have travelled back in time to when they were current. I've caught myself numerous times genuinely thinking that I wanted to order something from one of the companies advertising in the magazines, before remembering that they almost certainly do not exist any more, particularly in the case of those supporting the Atari 8-bit computers.

But it's nice. While I was a bit young to be involved in things like user groups, computer clubs and (let's be honest here) piracy exchanges back when these magazines were current, reading them, even now, makes me almost feel like I'm there. It almost makes me feel like I can reach out and touch the past — and find great happiness there.

This is the root of nostalgia, of course, and some would argue it's not necessarily a healthy thing to fall into the habit of. But to that I say pish, pfaugh and all manner of other Victorian expectorations, because 2025 sucks balls, and any escape from it is welcome — particularly if it can be achieved through a means as simple as opening an old magazine and reading Garry Francis ranting about Scott Adams adventures, or Patrick McCarthy writing an entire preview in "Franglais", or even the odious "street talk" house style that was used at the Official Nintendo Magazine at the time I was doing occasional freelance work for them.

Many of the people involved in these things have moved on to better things in later years. In the case of the early Atari magazines, some of them may not even be with us any more. I wonder how many of them, penning their lines for the latest print deadline, would know that their words would carry great comfort and meaning for someone — even if it's just me, and no-one else gives a shit any more — so many years later?

A few articles in some magazines might seem like a small legacy to leave, but it is a legacy nonetheless. I wonder if, many years from now, someone might find something I've written and draw some comfort from it? If that's you, I pre-emptively appreciate your time and attention, and I hope the future doesn't suck quite as bad as our current present.

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#oneaday Day 469: Where have all the 5.25" drives gone?

Earlier today, I had an idle thought that has occurred to me numerous times over the last little while, but today I thought I'd look into actually doing something about it.

A while back, I bought a Greaseweazle, which is a USB device you can connect to a modern PC at one end and a floppy disk drive at the other, then "rip" floppies using a particularly accurate method of imaging known as flux imaging. These images can then be converted into various formats, such as those commonly used with emulators (or MiSTer), and can then be safely archived.

I've got two boxes of 5.25" Atari 8-bit disks in my cupboard upstairs that I'd quite like to get all the stuff off — assuming the discs themselves have survived. I know some of them have (and, equally, some appear to have not) and so I thought it would be a nice, interesting and fun thing to do to archive my unique collection of disks, which in some respects are a snapshot of family life in the mid 1980s.

Besides the obvious disks full of pirated games, my brother and I both had our own disks that we'd save BASIC programs to — both those that we'd typed in from magazines, and those which we'd written ourselves. Then there's a bunch of disks that my Mum and Dad did stuff with — my Dad did all manner of things, including writing, music and various productivity things (that and Flight Simulator II, which "isn't a game") while my Mum, on several occasions, spent some time writing. My brother made pictures with AtariArtist. And I'm sure there are plenty of other hidden treasures among them, too.

Now, here's the problem. I bought the Greaseweazle with a mind to making some floppy disks that could be used with the Atari ST, which uses 3.5" 360K or 720K disks. (Actually, Atari format can push the 800K+ mark, but they're broadly MS-DOS compatible, so 720K is a sensible limit for everyday use.) The device worked great for that, though I ultimately got an UltraSatan for the ST (which is an SD card-based storage solution that effectively emulates a hard drive) and have now moved on to the MiSTer for most of my retro computing needs and wants.

I'd been putting off getting a 5.25" drive to archive these big boxes of Atari stuff, though. I knew the process of getting a 5.25" drive hooked up was a little more involved, for one thing, since a 3.5" floppy drive can power itself from the Greaseweazle, while a 5.25" drive generally needs an external power source. But something in me today said "right, go on, get this sorted". So I headed for eBay in search of what I thought would be an easy thing to find: an old, discarded but working 5.25" floppy disk drive that someone had grabbed out of an obsolete PC and decided to sell online.

Reader, it turns out that 5.25" drives are not, in fact, easy to find. In fact, there seem to be very few floating around out there, and the ones that are are surprisingly expensive. While you can score yourself a 3.5" drive very easily — and it probably be in decent working order, too — 5.25" drives are, apparently, like gold dust.

I did find one promising looking unit earlier, which was actually a self-contained enclosure with a power supply and two 5.25" floppy drives, but after bidding on it a few times, the price went a little higher than I was comfortable paying, so I dropped out. (Also, I was having dinner at the time the auction ended, so I kind of sort of forgot to check in.) The final price was over £80, though, which would have probably given me a certain degree of buyer's remorse. Or maybe not. I guess now we'll never know.

I'll keep keeping an eye out for reasonably priced drives, though. I really would like to get those disks archived and share them with my family — it's something I probably should have done a long time ago (before 5.25" drives went completely extinct, apparently) but I guess it's going to be a bit of effort to get up and running!

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#oneaday Day 468: Determination

Predictably, I put on a fair amount of weight during my time away, but rather than feeling despondent about this, I am using it to provide myself with a sense of determination to crack this thing once and for all. After we got rid of all the leftover holiday goodies, I started strictly calorie counting, and thus far (admittedly it's only been a couple of days) I have managed to stay within my budget.

The challenging thing with any diet, I find, is keeping it sustainable. Gimmicky and fad diets may sound like an amazing way to quickly get some weight off, but in practice it doesn't take very long for their limitations to become suffocating and oppressive — which makes you not want to pay attention to them, which in turn makes you feel guilty, and for many of us, that makes us eat… you see where the problem lies.

I'm looking long-term. I'm using an app called Lose It! which came recommended from a few people I know, and that seems pretty good about having a solid built-in food database to make tracking calories straightforward, and also at setting appropriate goals and giving you an estimate of when you should reach them if you keep going at your current pace.

The thing I need to get into the habit of is recording things constantly, rather than just when I feel like a day is going well. One difficulty I've consistently had in the past whenever doing any kind of food tracking — be it Slimming World counting Healthy Extras and Syns, Weight Watchers points or anything else — is feeling too guilty to write down when things have gone wrong. And once you break that streak of being disciplined, it becomes significantly harder to recover. The ideal situation, of course, is to acknowledge that, for one day, things didn't go quite according to plan for one reason or another, but not to let that ruin everything.

One day is not a lot in the grand scheme of things, particularly when you're doing something as long-term as weight-loss, so acknowledging that one day out of a much longer journey proved to be a bit of a "blip" is healthy. After all, what journey of self-improvement does happen without facing challenges along the way? The thing you need to do is face those challenges head-on, and see if you can figure out some ways to prevent them occurring again — or, at the very least, developing a strategy for what you will do next time they arise.

For me, I think a big challenge is lunchtime. It's always tempting to just go to the shop and get a Meal Deal, because what harm can a sandwich do, really? Except that Meal Deal isn't just a sandwich. It's a snack, too, which is often a bag of crisps, and shops seem to only sell giant "Grab Bags" of crisps these days. And then it's nice to have a chocolate bar afterwards too, right? And, of course, shops seem to only sell king-size or "Duo" bars these days. It's like they want you to overeat.

I've thought about this, and I don't really know why they do this. Some shops have, of course, made an effort to make the "impulse purchases" shelves near the tills have more "healthy choices" (usually bags of fruit and nuts) but most people going into a shop for a Meal Deal are going straight for the Meal Deal aisle, not the "healthy choices" shelves. And when given the option between a bag of wood chippings and a Star Bar Duo, what do you think most people are going to pick?

Or maybe it's just me. I actually find it genuinely quite difficult to fathom how people successfully live on the 2,000 calories a day we're "supposed" to have, when everything that surrounds us on a daily basis that isn't a handful of house plants and chia seeds seems to be absolutely packed with calories. How is it that people are going out for coffee every day and not ending up as big as I am?

Activity is probably the answer there, I know, but I refuse to believe everyone I see enjoying a cake in Starbucks is going to spend two hours in the gym working it off later. Maybe it's just about walking more, or cycling to work, or whatever. I don't really know. There are lots of things I probably need to get a better handle on to make this work over the long term, but for now, getting into the discipline of counting the calories is working quite well. We'll see how things go from here.

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#oneaday Day 466: In one's own home

As much as we enjoyed our holiday, it is also good to be back among our own things, with our cats, and sleeping in our own bed. Patti seems to have mostly forgiven us now, and I'm not entirely sure Oliver even noticed we were away. He's currently sitting outside in his catio chasing a moth. I don't think the little fella knows what it means to not be happy. It must be nice.

Getting up for work in the morning was, predictably, a bit of an ordeal, and I feel it's going to take a few days of adjustment before I feel well and truly "back" properly. I feel like whatever you do for a job, you'll inevitably come back to stories of things that have gone wrong while you were away, and a checklist of things that are Probably Going To Stress You Out By The End of the Week. Thankfully in this instance I don't think anything Earth-shatteringly awful has happened in my absence, but there were still a few entries on that list, because of course there are.

I have to feel for the folks who work somewhere like Center Parcs. After completing the survey they sent (I might win a free break! I probably won't.) I made the mistake of looking at their TripAdvisor page, and despite the site having an overall 4/5 rating, dear Lord were there a ton of people moaning and complaining. It's easy to see something like that and feel like something is very wrong, but I saw no real evidence of anything that the recent reviews have complained about, aside from part of the pool complex being closed for a couple of days at the start of our break. Mildly disappointing, yes, but the correct response to that — shit has to be maintained at some point! — is just to shrug and go do something else instead. It's not as if the whole pool was closed, and there is a lot to do in that pool complex.

But yeah. I can imagine being a Center Parcs employee, making the mistake of looking at that page and becoming thoroughly demoralised. I feel particularly bad for whatever chump is lumbered with the job of posting the "Thank you for sharing your helpful feedback, we're sorry your stay didn't live up to your expectations" responses, because I know just from doing a bit of social media gubbins for a product that ultimately doesn't really "matter" that people can be mean, and it is considered inappropriate to tell someone who is being mean to a customer service agent to fuck off.

Anyway. I am at least thankful that I have a job where when the end of the day rolls around, I can just switch off and ignore everything. For the most part, anyway; I still have to moderate chats around announcements and whatnot, and occasionally I will get asked to respond to someone kicking off about something or other. But for the most part, I can have a quiet life during non-business hours, and that's exactly how it should be. My "work" area is different from my "play" and "relaxation" area in my house, so once I get out of that chair and leave the work PC behind for the day, that's that — and that's especially important to do if you work from home, because the absolute worst thing that can happen is that your home stops feeling like it's a haven away from your job.

Everyone needs a haven away from their job. And that's what your home is supposed to be for!

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