#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…?

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 390: Over Nine Thousand

Microsoft apparently laid off somewhere in the region of nine thousand people today. This is simultaneously horrifying and difficult to conceptualise. I think I've only ever worked at one company where it would even be possible to lay off nine thousand people at once and still have a company left afterwards, so it's borderline unthinkable to imagine how many people's lives and careers have been destroyed today. To put it in context, laying off nine thousand people would be akin to completely obliterating the company I currently work for approximately 450 times.

And the gall. The gall of the memo that delivered this news, telling everyone that the company has "more players, games and gaming hours than ever before" before giving some mealy-mouthed nonsense about "prioritising opportunities" that doesn't really say anything, and doesn't even have the courage to say, outright, that people are going to lose their jobs.

But then, it's always like this, in my experience, whatever size company you work at. When the layoffs come, they're always sudden, without warning, and without any support for those affected. I have been through the process more times than I would have liked to, and it's been hellish every time.

The first time I experienced it was when I was still working as a teacher. It was my first "proper job" out of university, and while I didn't love it, it was a stable income and a job that I could take a certain amount of pride in. Unfortunately, as my year at that school progressed, it became clear that the school was struggling quite a bit, and that redundancies were looming. Naturally, as one of the last in, I was also one of the first out, and I was given an utterly humiliating and pointless opportunity to "plead my case" to the headteacher and the board of governors before they confirmed the decision that they had absolutely no intention of changing.

The second time I experienced it was when I was working on GamePro. One morning just before Christmas, I awoke to find a flurry of activity on social media and in my email inbox. Several of my colleagues had announced that they were leaving, seemingly out of the blue, and then the email came. This time there was no opportunity for discussion, no support. Just a firm boot out of the door because the company didn't want us or our work any more. Truly horrible.

The third time I experienced it was when I was on USgamer. On the morning of my birthday, I received an email out of the blue from the head of what was then Gamer Network, who informed me that my services would no longer be required. On this occasion, I was given about a month's notice, but I was given no support, no severance, no assistance in finding a new position, not even a little bit of empathy or sympathy.

In every instance, these ultimately boiled down to poor leadership. And yet it's never the leadership that takes the fall; it's always the workers at the bottom of the pile; the ones who need those jobs just to survive. And the leaders get their golden handshakes for successfully "prioritising opportunities" and "streamlining the business", adding to vast fortunes that are already far more than any one person could ever possibly need to have in their personal assets, while real people suffer.

My heart sincerely goes out to everyone who has been affected by a situation that is clearly out of their control. Not just at Microsoft, but everywhere that is slashing workforces right now. Whether it's out of an attempt to save money or ill-advised going "all-in" on generative-fucking-AI, it always sucks, and I wish we, as a society, could find a way to move past this. Where does it end?

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#oneaday Day 389: Belonging

One of the things I've struggled immensely with in more recent years — particularly during and after the COVID years — is a sense of belonging. I don't feel like I fit in anywhere. I don't feel like I have any friends. I feel like in the spaces where I have attempted to fit in, my presence is more just sort of tolerated at best, rather than particularly appreciated. And I'm really tired of having to pretend like everything's okay.

My particular snapping point this evening came in a small online community that I'm a member of. I'm not going to go into the details of the situation or the venue — and perhaps the fact that I don't feel able to, for fear of causing upset or drama, is part of the problem here — but suffice to say that a comment was made which made me feel rather unwelcome. It wasn't aimed directly at me, but it still had the net effect that I felt 1) unwelcome and 2) unable to talk about it, because honestly, it's not the first time it's happened, and on a previous occasion where I did speak up about it, there was a lot of unnecessary stress that I'm not especially keen to repeat.

The details don't matter. The important part is that I now feel less inclined to attempt to engage with that community on the things that are important to me because of this incident. Despite having been a member of that community for a while, and theoretically having a fair bit in common with a lot of them, I have, in various ways, been made to feel like I don't matter, like my opinion isn't important, like I'm somehow wrong to feel upset when something like this happens.

I don't say anything because I know what the response will likely be. "Stop being defensive." "It's just a bit of fun." "It's a bit of banter, isn't it?" All with an implied "you're in the minority here, so everyone is going to laugh at you for getting upset".

I don't like this. I don't like that I feel this almost anywhere I go online these days. I don't like that I find it near-impossible to make new friends, I don't like that I can't be honest about things I'm thinking or feeling, and I don't like that the only places I have where I feel like I can really express myself are those that I have complete control over — like this blog and MoeGamer — and which getting people to pay attention to is difficult. I even feel anxiety posting things on YouTube and Bluesky for fear of someone (often wilfully) getting the wrong end of the stick and yelling at me.

But more often than not, I'm just ignored. Tuned out. I'm unimportant. Unremarkable. Worthless. No-one cares. If I cried out for help, like if I was going to do something really stupid, I feel like no-one would come. Thankfully I do at least have my wife, who loves and supports me, and my cats, who unconditionally adore me, as I do them. So that is something, at least.

It's just sometimes it would be nice to remember what it's like to have friends. People I can share just small but special moments with. People I can be unabashedly nerdy and dumb with. People I can get drunk and play retro games with. People I can get a pizza and watch anime with.

I used to have all of those things. There are, mercifully, still a few small elements in my life that mean I haven't given up hope on all of the above completely. But every day it feels like it gets a little bit harder, and the world feels a little bit less like I really belong in it.

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#oneaday Day 388: Death in Paradise

I've started watching Death in Paradise. This is a TV show that my wife watched in its entirety during quiet and boring moments at work a while back (she has a lot of quiet and boring moments at her job) and which I always enjoyed any time I happened to sit in the comfy chair in her study, usually to cuddle a demanding cat.

After watching Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators and A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, I thought I may as well just watch Death in Paradise from the start. And I'm really enjoying it.

For the uninitiated, Death in Paradise is a heavily formulaic murder mystery show in which a fish-out-of-water detective from Great Britain (or, for a period later in its run, Ireland) finds themselves acting as the Detective Inspector for a little police station in the town of Honoré on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie. Initially, this role is taken up by Ben Miller (of comedy duo Armstrong and Miller fame) who plays Detective Richard Poole, but over the course of the show's complete run to date, the lead role changes several times — including, via a rather ballsy move at the opening of the third series, the murder of said lead. Spoilers, I guess.

Death in Paradsise is not a particularly demanding watch. And when I say it's formulaic, I really mean it; each episode very much has a standard structure, and it sticks pretty rigidly to that format. Sometimes this sort of thing annoys me, as I find myself expecting each of the obvious story beats, but the cases themselves are interesting and varied enough that the repetitive structure of the show has not yet become an issue for me.

The show is helped along very much by its cast. Thus far, I'm coming towards the end of the second season, so I'm still in Ben Miller/Detective Richard Poole territory, but I've caught a little bit of several of the later series, which include excellent comic actors such as Kris Marshall, Ardal O'Hanlon and Ralf Little. The supporting characters are also very good, with Danny John-Jules (best known as Cat from Red Dwarf) putting in a particularly strong performance as one of the station's regular police officers, and Don Warrington as Commissioner Selwyn Patterson steals the show any time he's on screen with his understated, deadpan performances.

The show strikes a great balance between serious drama and entertainment. It's not as explicitly comedic as something like Shakespeare & Hathaway, but it is notably light-hearted — perhaps a strange thing to say about a show in which at least one person gets murdered every episode, but an accurate statement, nonetheless. It captures a good feeling of camaraderie between the core cast, and the growth in Miller's Poole character as the series goes on is endearing to watch, even as he remains steadfastly stiff-upper-lip British about everything.

Like I say, it's an undemanding watch, good to throw on when you don't really want to tax your brain too much, and thus I'm never going to hold it up as The Best Thing Ever or anything. But sometimes that doesn't matter; sometimes you just want something that has enough substance to be genuinely engaging and entertaining, but which doesn't make excessive demands of its audience. Death in Paradise very much falls into that category. No deep lore, no need to listen to podcasts to understand each episode after watching them, no worrying that you've missed out on major serialised storylines — aside from the occasional replacement of the lead role, of course.

It's simple, uncomplicated entertainment, and I'm all for that. So I'll be watching a lot more of it!

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#oneaday Day 387: A weekend off

I didn't get around to making any videos. Well, that's a partial lie: I got some scripts done for quite a few, I just didn't record any. It's still very warm, I was feeling pretty tired, and I just didn't want to. So rather than feeling guilty about it, I just enjoyed the weekend, relaxed, played with my cats, played some Xenoblade Chronicles X (I'm finally into the new Definitive Edition story material) and just had a generally nice time.

Andie and I have also booked a holiday for later in the year. We're off to Center Parcs again, because it's a holiday destination we both like very much, and we were given some very generous tenth wedding anniversary gifts from both our respective sets of parents, so we're spending a hefty chunk of them on a nice holiday. While on previous visits, we've only gone Monday to Friday, this time we're going Monday to Monday. It's a lot more expensive to do that, but it also means you have a lot more time to unwind, relax and generally have fun.

We're going to the Longleat Forest site this time. We've been to this one a couple of times, as well as the Elveden Forest one. The Elveden Forest site has some nice memories for me, as it's the one I went to with my parents a couple of times as a kid — though of course it's changed quite a bit since then — but Longleat is a bit closer and arguably a bit nicer. We've lucked out with our accommodation, too; despite not paying up for the option to choose where your lodge is, we're in the "central" area which is not very far away from the main plaza area where most of the shops and restaurants are, so that will be nice. We're still getting an old lady-style wheelie bag to carry the shopping in, though, because balls to carrying heavy groceries on foot. We learned that to our cost last time!

So that's something to look forward to in September, which isn't really that far away now. We're nearly at the end of June, after all, which means just over two months until we can escape from It All for a bit and enjoy some quiet time in the forest. I'm really looking forward to it.

The world is a terrible and awful place right now, and it's very, very easy to feel overwhelmed by it all. So I'm very much looking forward to a week of not having to think about all the horrible things that exist in this world, and just enjoying myself. It is an important thing to allow yourself that time every so often, even if you're a committed "activist" for a cause (which I most certainly am not), because if you don't allow yourself that time to unwind, you're just doing yourself a disservice, and quite possibly mental harm in the process, too.

So yeah. The countdown to holiday has begun, and I'm sure the knowledge that I get to escape for a bit is going to make the next couple of months of work fly by! At least I hope so. It's been a difficult few months, for reasons I won't get into now (nothing to worry about, it would just be unprofessional of me to comment on specifics in such a public place) but I think, I think we're getting over the worst of it now. In fact, we're already starting to get ahead of schedule with stuff planned for next year! How exciting.

Anyway. My Sunday is rapidly disappearing, and I want to go and play some video games before I get to bed at a vaguely reasonable hour. So, on that note, good night — and remember: book yourself some holiday, even if you don't go anywhere. Time off is important!

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#oneaday Day 386: Suboptimal creativity temperature

It is somewhere in the region of 27-28 degrees C here today. I know this is laughable to people who live in the actual desert or tropics or whatever, but it's bloody boiling here in the land of no (well, more like very little these days) air conditioning.

The heat is exhausting, but it's also quite nice. With the stuff Andie has done in the garden, it's really nice to just go and sit either out in the catio or on the nice garden furniture down at the bottom of the garden. We bought a nice parasol from Ikea the other day, so we can sit in the shade when down at the bottom of the garden, and the catio has a certain degree of shade by virtue of it being enclosed.

Trouble is, with it being quite nice to just go and sit in the garden and bask in the heat, it's not exactly conducive to getting anything done. I feel like I want to make some videos, but summoning up the motivation to do so is proving exceedingly troublesome, because doing so will mean locking myself in my study, and there's not much in the way of ventilation in there unless I blast the fans up full (which interferes with voice recording a bit) or have the window open (which brings in outside noise).

It's not so much the practicality of the situation as it is just the sense of lethargy that this heat brings. My brain is saying "let's go", but my body is just going "I want to melt into the sofa". So I think what I might try and do is spend a bit of the daytime scripting some bits and pieces, then once the sun goes down, maybe record into the evening tonight. Then I can spend the remaining daylight hours sitting by the fan doing very little.

The other problem is that the mental lethargy brought about by this heat is it makes making any sort of decision difficult. Do I want to continue with my playthrough of The Sword of Hope? Do I want to do some Atari ST stuff? Do I want to do some Atari 8-bit stuff? Do I want to do some Evercade stuff? Part of the problem is that the answer to all of those is "yes", but from a practical perspective I should probably just pick one or two and be content with that, rather than feeling like I "have" to churn out two, three, four or more videos.

Anyway, when I'm done here I'm going to make that decision, make some notes on what I want to cover, then once the sun dips behind the horizon and things get a little cooler, I might just go and record something. Or I might just leave it until tomorrow. I guess it doesn't really matter all that much.

In the meantime, Xenoblade Chronicles X is a-callin'.

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#oneaday Day 385: Hater Checkpoint

I have spoken many times on this blog about how I find needless negativity to be exhausting, unproductive and not conducive to good conversation, but on a regular basis, I am made to feel like I have something of a minority opinion on this subject. People are much more willing to hate on things than they are to say nice things about something.

Case in point: this week one of those interminable "quote tweet (but on Bluesky)" memes did the rounds, this time encouraging people to go through Wikipedia's list of "Video games considered the best" and hate on games of their choice. Naturally, given an opportunity to spew vitriol at things a fair few people like, everyone jumped at the opportunity:

The whole post is, of course, fairly transparent engagement bait, and people fall for this sort of thing every time. But, like I say, they're significantly more likely to fall for it if the opportunity to be negative presents itself. This post got 1.8K quote posts, with people jumping at the chance to complain about titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Skyrim, Overwatch, Fortnite, Mass Effect and even fucking Pong.

I… don't understand it. I've always been of the opinion that if you're engaged with and love a hobby, then you seek out and enjoy the things about that hobby which appeal to you. Expending energy on things that you, personally, do not like — and make no mistake, pretty much every one of those quote posts is not "this is bad and here are some solid reasons why" but rather "I don't like this" — just seems like a massive waste of time and energy.

You not liking Thing does not mean that Thing is bad. It just means that, for whatever reason, it didn't click with you. And that's fine! I just don't need to hear about it, and I don't need to see you smugly thinking Your Opinion Is Correct because ooh, so brave, you think Fortnite is "bad". I don't like Fortnite, either. And that's why you've never seen me write about it. I know I won't enjoy it, I know there are many things I don't like about it — so I just don't engage with it! It's really not hard.

I'm not mad with people who do enjoy Fortnite and I don't feel the need to try and convince people that my dislike of Fortnite is "the correct opinion". I simply don't care. I have a bajillion other games to enjoy that I do like, and I'd much rather 1) play them and 2) talk about them with others. I could go off on a 20-post thread about why I don't like Fortnite, but what is that achieving? Not very much, really. To me, someone going "I hate Thing" is just a means of shutting down a conversation, whereas someone telling me how much they like Thing and why can be the start of something wonderful.

Word of mouth works! So I'd much rather it be used for something positive — I can take some sort of action with that, like buying the game you're recommending — rather than negativity.

I realise that this post is, in itself, being negative, though, so I'll just tell you that you should go and play Raiden Nova because it's a lot of fun, and leave it at that. Good night to you!

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#oneaday Day 384: Catio completio

Andie and I finished off our new "catio" today. I don't have any pictures to share because it's dark now and we didn't take any pictures when it was finished, but you'll have to take my word for it that it looks very good. I say "Andie and I" finished it off, but really 95% of the work was Andie, because she is handy and I am not, but I was slightly useful for holding things up and getting the roof on.

Okay, getting the roof on involved removing some of the guttering from the back of our house, but that's a problem we will confront tomorrow. And by we, I almost certainly mean Andie.

For the unfamiliar, a catio is an enclosed space designed for mostly indoor cats to be able to go outside without roaming. In less than charitable terms, it's a cage attached to the back of your house, but big enough for people to go in as well as cats. That sounds a bit wrong. We're not keeping prisoners, honest.

Anyway, yes, the aim was simply to provide a means for our cats Patti and Oliver to be able to go outside, but stay safe. After we lost one of our first cats, Ruby, on the road, we decided to keep our cats indoors. We don't live in a particularly busy area, but there are some absolute cunts who ride motorbikes up and down the street at all hours, plus we're not very far away from quite a busy main road. Plus none of the cats we've had have ever seemed too interested about roaming.

Both of them have been enjoying the ability to go outside, though. Oliver has been particularly interested in learning what Outside is like in recent weeks, and Patti took some tentative but interested steps out there this evening, too. Patti used to go out in the old catio before we tore it down, but Oliver has only ever been outside under heavy supervision from us. The completion of the catio means he'll be able to go out and enjoy himself unsupervised, which I think is going to be really good for the energetic little bugger.

Yes, we had a catio before, but it was something of an experimental project by Andie, more to prove she could do it than anything else. We tore it down after Meg passed, because Patti wasn't showing much interest in going outside, and it looked a bit shabby. Since then, we've revamped the garden quite a bit — the mostly dirt area that was enclosed by the old catio now actually has a patio under it, so it looks much nicer — and the new catio is of much more sturdy construction than the old one. I'd go so far as to say it looks very professional indeed; Andie has become an incredibly skilled handyperson over the course of the last 10 years, and I consider myself very lucky to be able to enjoy all her good work.

I'd make an effort to be handier myself if I lost some weight — which, as longstanding readers will know, has been pretty much a lifelong struggle — and if I didn't have a hernia — which, as longstanding readers will know, has been a problem for a while. The two are connected. If I fix one, I can get the other sorted, too. I am attempting to work on that. If I am ever successful, who knows? Maybe I will become someone who "potters around in the garden", as the cliché has it.

In the meantime, we now have a nice catio, a nice garden and two cats who appear to appreciate the hard work that has been done for them. I look forward to letting them out for some proper time in the sunshine tomorrow.

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#oneaday Day 383: Missed connections

I don't know if this is a side-effect of getting older, or if my thoughts and emotional state have changed, or whatever, but I've found myself missing my grandparents a lot recently, particularly those on my mother's side. This may sound a little harsh, but my family in general were always quite a bit closer with my maternal grandparents for various reasons — and this isn't to say I don't miss my grandparents on the Davison side, along with Bill, the lovely chap my Nan Davison married rather late in life — and thus I find it's them that my thoughts turn to with increasing frequency of late.

I feel a particular sense that I wish I'd gotten to know my Grandad a bit better. He was the first of my grandparents that we lost, but he was a beloved part of our family. He was always quite a character, and somewhat notorious to my parents for his famous "bodge jobs" on things that needed fixing or building. Since my wife, Andie, is rather handy (no jokes please) and good at improvising when things go sub-optimally, I find myself thinking that my Grandad would have got along well with her.

My Grandad was also always very supportive of things like my creativity and musical ability. Quite often when we made the trek from Cambridgeshire over to the West Midlands to visit the grandparents, both sets of whom were there, we'd take along a keyboard from home and I'd put on impromptu little "concerts" in their living room. Rather cheekily, I'd put up hand-made signs to make it look like we were in a real concert hall or theatre — I always used to find it particularly amusing to put signs up for the toilet — and I'm pretty sure on more than one occasion I put a modified tissue box on the door as a means of charging "admission". But my Nan and Grandad always humoured me, and they were always pretty generous with the pocket money, too.

My Nan was a nice person, too. Every time we went to visit, she'd make me jelly and ice cream and make sure she had Jammy Dodger biscuits in because she knew I liked them. I have odd little flashes of memory of my time spent with her, like attempting to draw Asterix in my sketch books while listening to the tape of '80s chart hits that felt strangely out of place in my grandparents' house. I remember playing Super NES on the ratty old portable television in the dining room. And I have regrets over occasionally being a moody adolescent on certain visits. I don't even remember why I was upset or angry; I just feel a bit ashamed when I look back on those moments, which occasionally, likewise, pop into my mind unbidden.

It's an odd thing, really, isn't it. As you grow older, you have a better sense of who you are, and who you feel you might get along with. As I've grown older, I feel like I would have enjoyed spending more time with my grandparents, and I'm pretty sure they would have liked Andie a lot, too. There are times when I almost feel like my Grandad is watching over me from wherever he is, even. And as he watches, he never judges; he's just there, a comforting presence.

Perhaps that's enough. Well, it kind of has to be, doesn't it? Because you can't turn back the clock. Sometimes it's just a bit of a shame that you feel like you understand the importance of certain people in your life long after they've departed it.

Perhaps I'll see my grandparents again someday. No-one really knows. But it's kind of a comforting thought to feel like they might be there waiting to see me again.

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#oneaday Day 380: My Flawless Every Time (Unless You Burn It) Chilli con Carne Recipe

We all have a Thing That We Can Cook, even if you're not someone who is particularly culinarily minded. If you're really good at doing omelettes or fried eggs or bacon sandwiches, that 100% counts; even a cheese toastie can be your one Thing That You Can Cook really well.

For me, it's a chilli con carne. This was one of the first things my mother taught me to make, and wrote, by hand, in a little red notebook that she gave me to take to university with a bunch of her recipes. My mum is a good cook, though to my shame I only cooked a few of the things in that little red book, and I'm not entirely sure where it eventually ended up.

Anyway, my Flawless Every Time (Unless You Burn It) Chilli con Carne recipe is probably loosely based on what my mother taught me, but it's been adapted and refined over the course of probably the last ten years or so in particular. So I thought I would share it with you today. You may note the absence of some ingredients such as onions and garlic; I don't put onions in 'cause I don't like them, and I don't put garlic in because I don't think it's necessary. Aside from that, this should be fairly as-you-expect, but read on anyway:

Ingredients

500g minced beef. If you're trying to be vaguely healthy, go for the 5% fat option. It works just fine.
1 x 400g can of kidney beans in chilli sauce
1 x 400g can of chopped tomatoes
1-2 teaspoons of red chillies in a jar (or you can use fresh if you can be arsed)
1-2 teaspoons of chipotle paste
1 teaspoon of cumin
1 teaspoon of paprika
2 teaspoons of smoked paprika
1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon of chilli powder
Pinch of salt and black pepper
Rice to serve

Method

Mix all the spices together in a little bowl and set them to one side.
Begin frying the minced beef in a little oil. When it starts to brown, dump in the spice mix and stir well so the beef is nicely coated in it. It should go from grey-brown to having a nice red-orange tint.
When most of the red of the beef has turned brown add the chillies and stir well.
After 1-2 minutes, add the chipotle paste and stir well again.
After 1-2 minutes, add the kidney beans and sauce and stir well yet again.
After another 1-2 minutes, add the chopped tomatoes and stir well.
Once everything is mixed together nicely, lower the heat a bit and simmer for about 20 minutes.
While the chilli is cooking, cook the rice. If you're using a rice cooker, allow about 1.5 cups of rice for 2 people and add about 3 cups of water. Use the rice paddle to agitate the rice off the bottom of the rice cooker to minimise it burning/toasting on the bottom.
Serve.

Easy, right? The only way you can feasibly fuck this up is if you forget to turn the heat down a bit and you burn the damn thing. You can optionally tweak it a bit, also; add 2 tins of tomatoes and simmer for twice as long for a richer sauce, but if you can't be arsed to wait that long, this method makes a nicely flavourful, spicy and probably not-at-all authentic chilli con carne with ingredients you can easily find on supermarket shelves.

Gourmet? God no. But it is tasty and comforting. And that's what you want from a quick and easy meal, right?

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