#oneaday Day 410: #StopKillingSoftware

There's been a lot of attention on the #StopKillingGames movement of late, and with good reason: they have a good point, and they've also had said point misrepresented quite severely on a number of occasions, but I think most people are starting to get it.

That's all very well and good for games, but what about software?

For various reasons, I decided to reinstall Windows today. I haven't lost anything important — the computer just needed a "refresh", plus it seemed like a good opportunity to finally take the plunge to update to Windows 11 (and then promptly "debloat" it).

Any reinstall is typically followed by trying to remember which applications you had on the computer that you actually need, and then going about reinstalling them one by one. This is one scenario in which I am grateful for the digital age, rather than requiring that I hunt down a million and one CD-ROMs, though it is still quite tedious having to download everything again — and, in some cases, find license information buried deep in your email archive.

One snag I ran into today is one that I thought I might come across at one point or another: the fact that the video editing software I use, Hitfilm Express, no longer exists. Moreover, it appears that the company which made Hitfilm decided to… stop doing Hitfilm in January of this year. In fact, I get the impression they stopped doing anything.

I had been using an old version of Hitfilm for some time, because upgrading to a newer version would mean abandoning the "pay what you want" copy I had, which was perfectly fine for my needs, and instead moving to the company's new subscription-based Software as a Service model. I was disappointed to see Hitfilm move to this model, but with the amount of other software packages out there doing the same — and the original developer of Hitfilm getting acquired by a larger company — I wasn't altogether surprised. But the old version still, at least, worked.

When I went to reinstall said old version today — which I used to be able to do from my account page on the company's website — that was no longer possible. All I could do was download the subscription-based version… or so it said. The downloads page had buttons to download it, but they weren't actually linked to anything. So the software was just… gone, basically.

If I had been paying a subscription, I would have been a bit annoyed, but recognised that this is always a risk when using Software as a Service. But I paid for a perpetual license to that software — granted, I didn't pay much for it, but I still paid for it, and expected it to remain available.

But no. Hitfilm Express has ceased to be. It is an ex-parrot. My only option was to either download the subscription-based one and then do some faffing around in the hope that a subscription would actually somehow "convert" to a perpetual license for that version, or to… well, to pirate it, frankly.

I know how to use Hitfilm. I like Hitfilm — at least I did before it went all Software as a Service. I don't really want to change to using something other than Hitfilm. I know DaVinci Resolve is well-regarded, but it's also several orders of magnitude more complicated than Hitfilm Express, and I'm not sure I want or need that.

So, well… I'll leave you to imagine which of the above options I went for.

Stop Killing Games has an excellent point. It also applies to software. If one buys a piece of software for a particular purpose, one should reasonably expect that software to be left in working order even after official support ends. That doesn't seem particularly unreasonable, and that's certainly how it used to work. Hell, I can still plug in an AtariWriter cartridge to my Atari 8-bit and use that, or load up Cubase on the Atari ST. If I still had a Mac, I bet I could still get my copies of Final Cut Pro and Logic Studio working, too.

So Stop Killing Software as well as Stop Killing Games, please. And if you could just generally Stop Making Everything Worse while you're on, that'd be great also.

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 407: More Death in Paradise

My slide into middle-age is ongoing as I find myself continuing to watch Death in Paradise, the murder mystery show about a fish-out-of-water detective from jolly old England finding themselves solving murders on a Caribbean island with probably the highest murders per capita figure in the entire world.

I'm up to the fifth season now, which is well into second lead Kris Marshall's tenure on the show. His arrival at the start of the third series, thanks to the impressively ballsy move of murdering the former lead, DI Poole (played with aplomb by Ben Miller), marked a notable shift for the show, but it handles it well. Most crucially, it continues to be enjoyable and appealing for much the same reasons as when Miller's Poole character had the leading role, and I suspect that later changes in the core cast will continue this trend.

It's not just the lead that changes, either. While Danny John-Jules' excellent Officer Dwayne Myers remains in place for a significant portion of the run — I believe he finally stops being a regular around the seventh season or so? — the other "main characters" shift around a bit. The lead detective's second, initially a young woman named Camille (Sara Martins), departs the show partway through the fourth season after having been a failed love interest for both Miller and Marshall's characters, and is replaced by Florence (Joséphine Jobert), who initially takes the place of Fidel, one of the uniformed officers in the show, and is subsequently promoted to take Camille's place after the latter takes a job in Paris. The open "second uniformed officer" slot is then taken up by JP (Tobi Bakare), who stays in place, as far as I can make out, until the end of the show's present run.

Anyway, point is, the cast undergoes some quite substantial changes over the course of the show's complete run to date, but it still feels coherent. There's a good sense of "handover" from prior cast members to new ones, and the overall "feel" of the show remains remarkably consistent.

Part of this is entirely deliberate, and somewhat lampshaded by the structure of the show — especially the denouement, during which the lead detective gathers all the main suspects and witnesses together, then dramatically explains whodunnit, how and why. Early in Marshall's run on the show, he is introduced to this format as being how DI Poole did things, and there are plenty of jokes in subsequent episodes when certain individuals talk about going to arrest a suspect, only to be told "that's not how we do things around here".

It's intensely, extremely formulaic, but in many ways that's what makes it so comforting. The details of each case are different enough to keep each episode feeling fresh, but the structure of the storytelling is always the same. It's a structure that works, and is effective at telling a fun murder-mystery story over the course of each hour-long episode.

I've always had a real spot for detective stories. I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories as a youth, in a book that basically reprinted all the old Strand magazine pages they originally appeared in, in extremely tiny print. I played a bunch of detective-style adventure games with my mother as a kid — and continued to do so into my adult life. And I don't think there's a detective-style TV show that I've watched to date that I haven't enjoyed.

There are some today who would probably argue that this sort of show is "copaganda", and I get that. There are many things one can criticise the real-world police for, and in more recent years I really feel like I understand why some people feel quite so aggrieved at the very existence of police forces.

But at the same time, a good old murder mystery is a classic story format with good reason, and a cast of police officers is an ideal vehicle for telling a story like that. So I don't feel the slightest bit guilty in unironically enjoying shows like Death in Paradise simply for what they are. The real police may, in many ways, suck, but that doesn't mean you can't root for fictional detectives to crack each case!

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#oneaday Day 404: Today's AI idiot story

The latest hilarious story from the world of artificial "intelligence" is the sorry saga of a Redditor who "worked on a book" (and I use the term "worked" loosely) with ChatGPT and found that they couldn't download it.

You want to know why? This is the best bit. It's because ChatGPT hadn't actually created anything, because it can't do that. It had outright lied to the person because, as a large language model — which, let's not forget, is essentially fancy predictive text, not actual intelligence — it believed, based on the data it had ingested, that telling the user it had successfully created 487MB of book was what the user wanted to hear.

To be fair, it was what the user wanted to hear, only they wanted that 487MB of book to, you know, actually exist.

The Redditor's eventual conclusion was thus:

After understanding a lot of things it's clear that it didn't [generate the book at all]. And it fooled me for two weeks.

I have learned my lesson and now I am using it to generate one page at a time.

Several other Redditors commented, quite correctly, that this is perhaps not the ideal takeaway from this lesson. This is my absolute favourite response, though. This response deserves to be framed and put in a museum as a monument to how utterly stupid the age we're living in is:

At least you're finally admitting that ChatGPT is working on creating this fictional thing instead of you having "worked on it together". lol. Meanwhile real writers don't need this nonsense to be creative.

As a wise person once said: why would I invest more time reading something than the author spent writing it? Best of luck on something literally no one, including you, will read.

Absolute perfection.

Even more hilarious is the fact that the original poster was supposedly trying to create "a collection of a lot of children [sic] stories with moral lessons that [they] wanted to present in a colourful manner with underprivileged kids of [their] area". They claimed that the text was "all theirs" and that they were using ChatGPT to "refine the flow"… and generate 700 images.

Because what the world needs is an AI-edited book of children's stories almost certainly ripped off from existing tales, illustrated with AI slop images.

Dear Lord. I absolutely despair that we're living in an age where people are this fucking stupid.

Let me be 100% clear on this: if you're using ChatGPT to generate or "refine" anything you want to publish, you are not an author. You are certainly not the illustrator.

Learn to write. Practice it. It is a craft like any other. Develop your own unique, distinctive voice, because AI very much has a "voice" of its own — a particularly obnoxious, hand-wringing, obsequious, simpering one — and it is immediately recognisable. And, if you want to improve, hire a fucking editor. Or, at the very least, just give it to another sodding human being to look at.

ChatGPT is not an editor. ChatGPT gets things wrong a significant proportion of the time. And, as this story shows, ChatGPT just fucking makes things up quite a bit, too. You cannot trust it. You should not trust it. It is not a person. It is not intelligent. It doesn't "know" anything.

And if you need art? Two options: one, learn to do it yourself, which can be rewarding and fulfilling in its own right. Or two, and you'll like this, can you guess what it is yet? That's right, it's hire a fucking artist.

I truly despair for the fucking dumb age we live in right now. I can't wait for the AI bubble to pop and all this stupid shit to go the way of the Metaverse and NFTs. Because it's actually driving me insane what it's clearly doing to people. We're going to end up completely incapable of producing cultural artefacts if we're not careful. And that's not a world I want to live in.

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#oneaday Day 403: Falling asleep to Let's Plays

Not for the first time, I find myself reassured by an article from Aftermath, this time on the subject of falling asleep to Let's Plays, which is something my wife and I do on the daily. Nightly. Whatever.

Anyway, I knew that falling asleep to some sort of "noise" was becoming increasingly widespread for various reasons — not least of which being the huge ball of anxiety pretty much all of us appear to be carrying around inside our respective heads at all times these days — but I wasn't sure how common specifically using Let's Plays was. I especially wasn't sure about the use of Game Grumps, one of our shows of choice.

But, according to the article, it seems that it's not only common (right down to using Game Grumps!) but that there might actually be a certain amount of value to it. And that's an actual neurologist saying that.

I never used to "need" noise to get to sleep, and I'm not sure I really do now. But my wife Andie finds it difficult to deal with complete silence, particularly in the dead of night, and so we've both fallen into the habit of having something playing when we are ready to go to sleep. Most of the time, it is either the aforementioned Game Grumps — or my own videos, which, as it turns out, are pleasantly relaxing to listen to.

In fact, I'll be honest here — and I'm aware that this may well make me sound much more narcissistic than I actually am — I find my own videos to be the absolute best thing to help me get to sleep. I think it's because I'm already so familiar with all of them — both from having made them, and from having listened to each of them many times each at this point — that they strike a good balance between making enough noise to distract me from Thinking Bad Thoughts, and from not engaging me enough to want to pay attention to them. The trouble I occasionally have with Game Grumps is that I enjoy listening to them so much — particularly if it's a series I haven't watched or listened to before — that I end up paying attention to them rather than concentrating on getting to sleep.

I don't know if I'm a textbook "insomniac" as such, but I've always found it difficult to get to sleep. I get stuck in a sort of loop where I lie down and close my eyes, then my brain suddenly pipes up and goes "you don't actually know how to make yourself go to sleep, do you?" I then spend ages thinking "I really want to go to sleep, I wish I could go to sleep right now", but the act of thinking those things means that my brain is not shutting down and actually going to sleep. This can go on for hours at a time, particularly if the room is silent.

And that's where the Let's Plays help. If there's some noise on, my brain can latch onto that, and it doesn't get caught in that self-destructive cycle. It has to be the right kind of noise, though; I've found that music doesn't tend to work, and neither does simple, straightforward white noise (and/or its variously "coloured" relatives). But talking does, particularly if it's about something I find relaxing, familiar and comforting.

And so that's how we typically fall asleep: either to Danny from Game Grumps playing King's Quest IV or Space Quest for the umpteenth time… or to me playing old Atari games (including, on occasion, King's Quest and Space Quest games).

I'm reassured to learn that this isn't "a weird thing that we do"; it's a thing that seemingly is quite widespread.

Now, I just need to decide what's on the playlist for tonight…

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#oneaday Day 402: I heard you

Do you ever catch yourself behaving in a particular way and think "why on Earth do I do that?" I do quite frequently, with one of the most common offenders being the fact that I will often ask people to repeat something that I heard perfectly well the first time, particularly if they're asking me to do something.

An example: earlier, my wife asked me to bring a cloth upstairs, because we were both in the process of attempting to figure out what in our bedroom smelled of stale cat piss (we think we found it, but we were scrubbing everything down to be sure) and, despite having heard her perfectly well the first time, I still responded as if I hadn't heard her correctly.

Why? I don't know. Perhaps it's a subconscious thing, where I want to "confirm" requests people have made of me before attempting to carry them out, but if so, I would have thought I'd find myself doing it more frequently — at work, for example. Perhaps it's a related thing to hearing a shouted request from another room and pretending not to hear on the grounds that if I wait until the second time someone asks, I have a few more minutes to myself. Plus it determines whether or not the thing being requested of me is actually important. (I don't do this often. But I must confess to doing it sometimes, particularly if I'm in the middle of something.)

Human behaviour is, at times, strange and chaotic. I suppose that is what makes us interesting, and why people have, over the years, attempted to understand The Way We Are in numerous ways over the years: philosophically, psychologically, physiologically, and perhaps some other words that begin with "p" too. The assumption, presumably, is that someday at least one person will somehow Get It, and then human nature will be a solved problem. Until that day comes, though, we have everything from inexplicable but ultimately harmless behaviour such as that which I describe above, to the sort of horrible hatred we are, rather disturbingly, starting to see on a rather more regular basis than, say, 10 years ago.

I wonder if we ever will solve a problem like humanity? Is there even a solution to be found? What would that look like? And what would we do with that information? Taken to its logical extreme, if there is a "solved" human with an "ideal" set of behaviours, that implies that everyone who doesn't behave like that is somehow imperfect and flawed — but at the same time, if everyone did behave in the exact same way, we'd have no individuality whatsoever. And that individuality is, in itself, an important, even core, part of what makes us human in the first place.

I don't know where these rambling thoughts have come from, dear reader. I was just a bit confused about why I asked my wife to repeat herself when I heard her perfectly well the first time that she wanted me to bring a cloth upstairs. And the bedroom still smells a bit of cat piss.

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#oneaday Day 399: Tiresome

It is the weekend, and I am tired. It has been a very busy period at work for various reasons. It would probably be unprofessional of me to explain further, but suffice it to say for now that the struggles we've been dealing with have been external in nature, and the people who've been pestering us about certain things for years had better bloody well appreciate what we've been getting up to!

It's tiring, but it's also worthwhile. I spent a goodly portion of this afternoon just Getting Things Organised, and it was a lot more satisfying than I thought it would be. I had been putting off this particular specific task of Getting Things Organised for a while, but I had said I would get it done by the end of the week, and that's exactly what I've successfully done. My Things That Are Now Organised will hopefully help me out in the day-to-day running of my job, and, with any luck, make my life a bit easier. We shall see.

There's lots of exciting things coming up for Evercade. The new Super Pocket devices are out now, bringing with them a built-in selection of NEOGEO and Data East games. I've also got an early copy of our first NEOGEO cartridge, so I will be looking forward to sitting down and actually taking some time to enjoy these games, rather than writing documentation for them or testing them. I'll also be spending a bunch of time playing Roguecraft DX when that comes in, but we haven't had the advance copies for that just yet.

Then there's all the stuff we haven't announced yet! There are some great things coming later in the year and early next year. I've been working on some of the first cartridges that we have planned for 2026 recently, and it's going to be another fantastic year. Evercade really has gone from strength to strength since it launched against all odds in 2020, and I'm proud to be part of the whole thing. If you'd told child me that one day I'd be working on producing official rereleases of some of my all-time favourite games, I'm sure he'd be delighted. He might wish that this role had come about a little sooner in my life, but, well, we can't have everything, and at least I can enjoy it now. I am right in the target audience for the products I'm working on.

I'm looking forward to a nice break, though. I think I mentioned the other day that Andie and I are going to Center Parcs again later this year, in September. It's going to be lovely to have some time away, particularly as we're staying for a little longer than we have done on previous visits. It will hopefully be time to thoroughly unwind and relax before having to jump back into our respective job roles, both of which have been a tad stressful for a while!

Still, rather what I've been doing than… well, pretty much anything else I've done in what can laughably be called my "career" to date. I'm doing something I (mostly) enjoy in a field I care deeply about, my contributions are appreciated, and I'm paid well for the privilege. Not a lot to complain about, aside from people being rude on social media. Things could be (and have been, at various points in my past) a lot worse!

Anyway. I'm off to go start enjoying my weekend, perhaps with a few of those NEOGEO games. I never have finished Metal Slug before… perhaps it's time I gave it a proper shot?

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#oneaday Day 397: Cool Sites: where are they now?

Earlier today, prompted by some discussion online, I found myself pondering the concept of the Cool Website. You know the kind of thing: the places you used to point your browser at on a semi-regular basis before everyone collectively agreed (apparently) that the only websites worth a damn now are social media, "newsletters" and whatever "legacy media" rag people are angry at this hour.

I've been trying to think of some Cool Websites that I used to visit at various points in my long-term Internet history, and I thought it might be interesting to see what happened — if anything — to each of them that I can remember. Sound like fun? No? Well, I'm doing it anyway.

1up.com

I must confess familial bias here: since my brother helped launch it and was a key part of its team that helped to establish what we know today as The Gaming Podcast, 1up.com will always be special to me. But it will always be special for another reason, too: it's where I met a number of like-minded folks that I enjoy discussing video games in great depth and at great length with. Honestly, I always spent at least as much time on 1up.com with the community features as I did with the staff's writing, but it was just a damned good website all round, really.

Where it is now: 1up.com officially closed in July of 2013, but everything that had once made it special had disappeared long before that. I put it probably around 2008-2009 or so when most of us made a grand exodus off the site to try and find a new collective home; we never quite settled in one place since, more's the pity, though most of us had at least brief dalliances with Facebook, Twitter and even Google+. 1up.com itself though is long-gone, now, though; not even a holding page remains, and the nature of how the site was programmed means that archive.org can't even get particularly reliable snapshots to pull out of the ether. So this one is, sadly, long dead.

Persian Kitty's Adult Links

Picture, if you will, a land and a time before PornHub. Indeed, a time before YouTube. A time where watching a pornographic video meant a significant commitment in order to download a 10-second video that filled a quarter of your screen, because no-one was streaming filth over dial-up connections. In that environment, Persian Kitty's Adult Links became legendary for me and my friends after one of us saw it mentioned in a magazine. This was a site that updated daily with new links to free galleries of ladies with their kit off. Sometimes there were even videos. Most of these galleries were trying to get you to sign up for a pay site, but there was plenty of material available that was perfectly suitable for a wafty crank of an evening.

Where it is now: Astonishingly (or perhaps not, given the enduring nature of online pornography), Persian Kitty's Adult Links still exists as a website… though it is a shadow of its former self, consisting of little more than some banner ads for various adult livestreaming sites. Four, to be exact, two generic "sex/adult cam" sites, one BDSM-themed site and one MILF-themed site. I'm happy that the Persian Kitty flag still flies, but less thrilled at what the site has become. It always kind of was a big ad, but now it's not trying to hide that.

Kongregate

For quite a while, Kongregate was the place to go for online Web-based games. All the big Flash game makers posted their stuff there, and the site had a bunch of interesting features like achievements, real-time chat, online multiplayer and even a site-wide metagame where you could collect trading cards by playing individual games, then battle other players with those cards in its own self-contained area. While I never got as big into Flash games as some others did, there were some legit all-time classics on Kongregate, with Desktop Tower Defense being the one that springs most readily to mind.

Where it is now: The site still exists and still offers many of the features I mentioned above, but the distinctive Web-based nature of the old Flash games has disappeared with the retirement of Flash as a commonly used Web technology. What we have now are pretty much the same free-to-play games you'd see on your average storefront, including licensed junk and a bajillion Raid: Shadow Legends knockoffs. Of greater concern is the site's new tagline at the bottom, which states "Kongregate is an open platform for all web games and a pioneering game developer in the blockchain space." Yeah. Fuck that.

hairytongue.com

I don't even remember what the main point of this site was — I think it was just a general "Internet humour" site similar to b3ta.com (which still exists and I don't think has updated its design since about 2005, but which still appears to be quite active) — but I do recall there being an extensive gallery of photoshops based on the easily provable hypothesis that Jamie Oliver is a flabby tongued Mockney wanker.

Where it is now: It is nowhere, save for a GoDaddy holding page. Thankfully, archive.org just managed to grab its last wheezes of life on this Earth. I was surprised and saddened to discover that it was as long ago as 2003-2004 that this site apparently ceased to exist. Oh, and if you were wondering, it was a site about hangovers. But mostly about mocking Jamie Oliver.

Weebl's Stuff

This was, among other things, the home of badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger mushroom mushroom, and was a mainstay of popular Internet culture for many years. As with several of these other sites, the decline of Flash meant there's now a whole generation who (probably) haven't grown up with the adventures of Weebl and Bob, Magical Trevor and numerous other pieces of absolute nonsense.

Where it is now: It's still there! Not only that, but Weebl himself is still making videos, and from the sounds of some recent posts on Bluesky, has found himself a creatively fulfilling Actual Job involving writing.

I think that's probably a nice place to leave this, isn't it? Definitely a subject I might return to at some point, though… once I can remember what websites used to exist, that is…

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#oneaday Day 395: A place for authors

One thing I've found myself wondering about a fair bit of late is whether the world still has a place for authors. By that, I mean people who primarily write books as their main contribution to existence; people whose job it is to write things that are, by their very nature, more long-form than your average 500-word Internet article.

Because, you know, I'm a little concerned. I'm a little concerned that a lot of people simply don't seem to have the mental capacity to digest anything written that is more than 250-500 words these days. Worse, there are people out there who genuinely believe that getting ChatGPT to "summarise" books for you is the same as "reading" them.

Part of me wants to write a book, or perhaps more accurately, multiple books, both fiction and non-fiction. I've always wanted to do this, and to my shame I've never pursued it to any particular degree, when I probably should. But these days I find myself wondering if I haven't left it too late. Is anyone even reading books any more? If I were to write a complete book that was all me, conjured up from the depths of my imagination, would anyone even believe that it wasn't AI-generated these days?

There's also the question of what to write about. There are numerous things I've started writing over the years, but only a few I've actually finished. Some of them you can read on this blog; one I even turned into an actual, physical self-published book. But that big question always hangs over my head: would anyone give a shit? Would anyone care enough to read it? Does that even matter?

Well, of course it matters to a certain degree. Writing a book is a significant amount of work, and putting all that effort in only for no-one to actually read it is… a suboptimal outcome, to say the least. And the trouble is, I feel, that the longer I leave it, the more likely that suboptimal outcome is to come true. The fewer people will be reading books. The fewer people will ever care about me, a nobody in the grand scheme of things, having found some means of expressing my creativity.

I've just been back and had a rummage through my "Creative Writing" folder that I have on my Google Drive. There's a few things in there that are the start of a good idea. Perhaps I should develop some of those. Perhaps I should try and start something completely new. Perhaps I should try and actually finish the story I've had half-complete in my mind since the age of about 15.

Or perhaps I should just accept the world as it apparently is today, recognise that I have maybe left it too late, and attempt to content myself with the other creative things I do.

I dunno. That last one doesn't feel altogether satisfactory. I still clearly have some thinking to do in this regard, it seems.

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#oneaday Day 393: Howling in a box

It was Patti the cat's annual checkup and vaccinations today, which meant we had the always-heartbreaking task of putting her in The Box and then listening to her howl all the way to the vet's.

Cats have got it sorted. They know exactly the right noises to make to have an emotional impact, and while of course they don't have "words" in the same way we do, they are absolutely capable of communicating, both through sound and through action.

Thankfully, Patti's checkup was all fine, and the one arguably fortunate side effect of her not liking trips to the vets (or people other than us, generally) is that she behaves herself while she's there. Okay, yes, the fact it's because she's paralysed with fear makes me feel awful every time, but at least she doesn't react like our dearly departed Meg, who was such a troublesome patient she had a note on her file. I always found this kind of hilarious, because at home she was always the sweetest thing, and she enjoyed company, including strangers.

Oliver, meanwhile, has had nothing but good visits to the vet to date. He of course does not like being in The Box, as no cat does, and he of course let's out the plaintive howls of heartbreak on the way, but once at the vets, he's always sociable, friendly and extremely susceptible to treats.

Patti has, I think, forgiven us for today's trauma, because as I type this she's sitting on me, occasionally making a point of reminding me she's there. I know you're there, Patti; you are precious family and I will always be here for you.

Anyway, I've had a few drinks, I'm tired, I'm hot, and Patti has got one of her claws stuck in my pants. So I think I probably better leave that there!

#oneaday Day 392: Never forgive them for what they have done to the computer

[Recommended reading: Ed Zitron's "Never Forgive Them", from which the title of this post is taken.]

This evening, my computer inexplicably ground to a halt while I was doing… nothing in particular. Browsing a few webpages, doing a bit of research in preparation for some videos I'd like to make, if I'm being specific, but it really wasn't anything the slightest bit demanding. For whatever reason, though, everything just stopped, nothing was responsive, and the only thing I could do was force the power off and restart.

When the computer restarted, it took 10 solid minutes to become responsive because a piece of software for a controller that isn't connected decided to spontaneously uninstall and reinstall itself, while at the same time popular chat app Discord decided to install 18 updates that were apparently essential, despite the fact I'd updated it yesterday, Steam updated itself (which, all credit to it, it did without complaining or holding anything else up) and, of course, Windows is bugging me to "upgrade" to Windows 11.

At the same time, my phone has been repeatedly sending me notifications telling me it "needs optimising" and "must restart", despite everything working absolutely fine, and despite it never having insisted on this process before. (It does, however, insist on "Optimising Apps" every time you turn it on or restart it, though, which makes what should be a very simple, quick process — turning it off and on again — take a good few minutes.)

This is what people mean when they say "enshittification". All of the above is unnecessary. All of the above are examples of tech deliberately making itself worse, for reasons that are not apparent to the end user, but which I'm sure are "providing shareholder value" via some means or another. This is what Ed Zitron means when he says "never forgive them for what they have done to the computer".

I love that description. I feel like people don't say "going on the computer" any more, because most of us spend pretty much our entire waking life joined at the hip to one form of computer or another, be it a PC, phone or tablet. When I was a kid, "going on the computer" was a discrete activity. You'd come home from school, do your homework, have some dinner, then go on the computer. And the computer would oblige. You'd turn it on, and there it was. If something went wrong, you turned it off, waited a moment, then turned it back on again, and nine times out of ten, the problem would be gone.

Now, granted, "the computer" that I'm talking about here is several orders of magnitude less sophisticated, powerful and, arguably, useful than the PC I'm typing this post on. But it still feels like we've lost something. Things have been taken out of our control. I could literally do nothing while those stupid update processes were running on my PC, because they were so badly programmed that they monopolised the system to such a degree that I couldn't even bring up Task Manager to stop them. And, as I discovered, turning the PC off and on again wouldn't have helped, because they'd have just started again — or, perhaps worse, fallen over because of the half-finished job I switched them off in the middle of.

I appreciate that updates are sometimes necessary to add new features, fix bugs and, in the case of operating systems, plug security holes that could be exploited by malicious actors. But man, do I ever miss turning on the Atari 8-bit, booting right into BASIC and being able to just get on with things. Those "things" may have been considerably less elaborate than what I can do on "the computer" today, but was that really so bad…?

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