It is very late, because I thought I'd finish Nighthawks this evening. I successfully did so, then decided that I wanted to write about it while it was fresh in my head, so I did that also. Now it is 1.15am and I haven't written this, so here I am.
I really should probably make an effort to go to bed earlier. I find it enormously challenging to get up every morning. It's a weird sort of… dread of what the day holds. Not because I'm actually literally anticipating anything terrible happening, but just because being in bed feels warm and safe and nice, and I often wake up in the morning having been in the middle of a pleasant dream that I'd like to go back to.
I know I can't just go back to a dream by snoozing my alarm and closing my eyes, of course, but my body still tries. Oh, heavens, it tries. It resists with every fibre of its being. It wants to disappear into whatever other dimension we go into when we dream, and leave this world behind, if only for an hour or two. Even though it's just had a good eight hours or so of being able to do exactly that.
It's strange, really, isn't it? We sleep every night, and most of us get roughly the amount of sleep we're supposed to get. So why is it so easy, of a morning, to fall into a pattern where you just want to keep sleeping? I love sleeping. I love what my brain does while I sleep. Dreams are fascinating, though I know not everyone enjoys hearing about them. I find them interesting, though, and often want to cling onto them after I know it's time to haul myself out of bed, make some breakfast and set about the day's business.
I dunno. It's probably just one of those things where you have to get yourself into a healthy and productive routine… and perhaps determine your own circadian rhythm, too. Oddly enough, I find myself more awake if I have to get up to have a wee at, like, 6am, than I do when my alarm goes off at 8. Maybe I should just start getting up at 6, have that wee and then stay up.
But then bed is warm and nice and comfy, and deliberately depriving myself of two hours in there feels like such a waste somehow.
I don't really know what I'm talking about any more. That's probably a good signal that I should save this post, scribble some stupid doodle to go at the top of it, and then actually go to bed. I am borderline delirious, but I have no regrets. I really enjoyed the end of Nighthawks, and I really enjoyed writing about it. Please go read my thing about Nighthawks, then buy and play Nighthawks. It really is very good.
And on that note, then, good night. I am about to go and sleep very well.
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One of the most complex parts of human interactions that we all have to independently learn to navigate is the politics and etiquette of farting. We all do it — yes, even you — but everyone, eventually, comes to their own conclusions as to how, when and why they let the bum gas fly.
I grew up in a household where farting was considered very amusing. Both my Dad and my Mum could let out an absolute ripper of a trump in their prime, and the culture of our family was that you did it without shame. The implication was that you were in a safe place and could be yourself, as disgusting as you wanted, and you would be accepted for it.
Curiously, though, I was not allowed to say the word "fart" as a child. It was considered a swear word. To this day, I'm not entirely sure why, though I guess it occupies the same tier as "crap" where, in the appropriate circumstances, you can probably consider it a mild profanity. Instead, we would typically just use the word "flatulence", which, despite being the scientific, medical term for it, is a very funny word indeed. Occasionally, if we came across a particularly amusing euphemism for it either on television or in other media (such as in The Beano, which I read habitually as a child) and would make use of that, but "flatulence" is the one that stuck, and "fart" was verboten. (I am allowed to say "fart" these days, though I'm pretty sure my parents still don't use it much.)
School is a complicated time to determine your outlook on farting, because you are faced with a variety of mixed messages. Were you to let out a honking grunt in the middle of a quiet lesson, would everyone laugh, or would everyone consider it disgusting and shameworthy? At least part of it is down to the overall way that you are seen generally; if you're one of the cool kids, farting is hilarious, while if you're an unpopular person for one reason or another, farting is the height of shame — so much so that even the accusation of having farted, even if you hadn't done so, could earn you the ridicule and censure of your peers.
Such was the case within lessons, of course. At break and lunchtime, that was a different matter. I have strangely vivid memories of an occasion during my time at primary school where my best friend Matthew and I were trying out shoulderstands (which we'd recently learned for the first time in PE) and discovered that the contortions involved in performing a shoulderstand not only churn up your guts a bit, they also slacken your ringpiece in a way that is eminently suitable for ripping a chuffnut. Thus we spent quite some time attempting to discover the optimal position in which to achieve salty guffs almost on demand.
I'm primarily talking about farting here, but burps bear mentioning, too. Burps, to my recollection, never carried the same possibility of shame as farting, and instead they had a variety of social functions. Those who learned how to burp on command became comedy gods, and those who could summon up a thunderous belch from the very depths of Hell itself could make use of them in a strangely aggressive, dominant manner. Again, I think back to my schooldays, and a particularly vivid memory is standing waiting for the bus with the other people from my village, and my sometimes-friend Dale repeatedly letting out some of the most earth-shaking burps the world has ever heard, on at least one occasion causing the headmaster of our old primary school (who lived near where we waited for the bus) to come outside and ask him to please stop doing that.
Farts are a sign of acceptance in a friendship group, though. People you can fart in front of without shame are people you can call true friends. And, unsurprisingly, I have a lot of weirdly "special" memories of times spent farting with people who are important to me. Some of the most vivid involve my friend Woody, who I would often end up sharing a room with if we were sleeping over at our mutual friend Edd's house, since we both lived a fair distance away.
On various occasions, Woody summoned up "canned veg farts" (absolutely rancid-smelling guffs that were akin to opening a bin that hadn't been emptied for a month in terms of the poisonous atmosphere they created), "water farts" (repeated, loud parps that he swore could be attributed to the amount of water he had drunk that evening) and "Emperor farts" (honking trumps that were preceded by a quote from The Emperor in one of the original three Star Wars movies). There was also the evening of "Did You Hear What I Just Felt", where a particularly vigorous anal fanfare was followed up by the briefest, quietest sound, a little like what raw chicken sounds like if you pick it up. He had to go and check himself after that one.
In somewhat later years, one of my most memorable days working at the Apple Store was the day we had a detailed discussion in Back of House about what the absolute optimal conditions for farting were, and we collectively determined that it was sitting on a hard, wooden dining chair while naked and slightly damp. If you have never farted on a non-padded dining chair, I highly encourage you to try it. You might be surprised.
Of course, it's also an important moment in a relationship when one or the other of you decides that now is the time to start farting in front of each other. It goes back to family; being able to rip out a salty grunt in front of someone without embarrassment, shame or fear is a sign of trust. And the expression of this trust is often unspoken; you never, ever have a discussion about "well, I guess it's time we started guffing around each other". It just sort of happens. And that's lovely.
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I think one of the most sobering parts of Becoming An Adult is coming to the unfortunate realisation that some people are just Bad People — and that, more often than not, they will get away with being Bad People, through some combination of money, power, influence and/or privilege.
I'm not speaking about anyone specific here (though heaven knows I have a depressingly large number of people in mind) but more just sort of making a general observation, particularly after seeing People Make Games' stellar piece of (video-based) journalism about Bobby Kotick floating across my feed today. It's a frustrating thing to realise, particularly when you were brought up to be a Good Person, and you've made significant efforts throughout your life to, as well as you are able, be that Good Person.
I've made mistakes along the way. We all have. My parents made mistakes at times when they were bringing me up, too, but I don't hold those against them. They were going through their own learning process at the same time I was learning how to function in society. I was learning how to be a Good Person; they were learning how to bring up a Good Person. (Although, granted, they had already done it once with my brother, ten years my senior.)
When you've spent your life making a specific effort to try and be a Good Person, though, including acknowledging the times when you could have done better, and reflecting on — sometimes agonising over — how you can avoid making the same mistakes in the future, it is frustrating, galling, infuriating to see the way some indisputably Bad People go through their lives. without a fucking care in the world about how they treat others or even how others see them, because the only thing that matters to them is themselves.
Being a Bad Person can take many forms, some of them more obvious than others. Some Bad People flout the laws of society, some ignore the demands of common decency, some simply cast the rules of politeness and etiquette aside. Some are more insidious; worming their way into a group and infecting it from the inside with their rancid attitudes and opinions. Some are up-front with their bigotry and lack of respect for people they see, for one reason or another, as "beneath" them. Others still are utterly deluded, believing that they have somehow done society a net good with what can laughably be called their "work", when in fact all they have done is filled their own pockets at the expense of others, often contributing a net negative to society and culture in the process.
The very worst Bad People, of course, do all of these things, and more besides. These people, unfortunately, exist; I have had the misfortune of encountering multiple of them in my lifetime. And perhaps most frustratingly of all, they keep getting away with it, because for one reason or another, no-one will confront them. No-one will stand up to them. No-one will give them a much-deserved punch in the face and tell them to stop being such an insufferable dickhead. Because it seems the one thing that Bad People are generally pretty good at is becoming powerful, influential, untouchable.
These people will never see consequences for their actions, behaviour and attitudes because everyone is too afraid of them. It sucks that this is the way the world works, and that these dickheads can just continue getting away with all the shitty things they do. But, unfortunately, that is the reality of life in 2026, and one of my least favourite parts of "growing up" over the years has been having to come to terms with that.
It sometimes makes me wonder why I've bothered. But at least I can look back on my own existence and reflect that, on the whole, I've done my very best to not ruin other people's experiences of living in this world we share, and that I am, overall, satisfied that I fall on the "good" side of the alignment chart. I doubt any of the people I have in my head right now do much in the way of introspection. If they did, I wonder if they could truly look upon what they find and say that they're completely and honestly happy with it?
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One of the most irritating new developments in the world of generative AI is the use of "agents" to spam you. This can take numerous forms; earlier today, Luke Plunkett of Aftermath shared an AI "pitch" he had received via email, Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation shared something similar, and of late I've seen a marked uptick in blog comments that are obviously (but, of course, undisclosed) AI-generated spam.
The reason I can tell they are AI-generated spam is because they don't come from a person. Inevitably, they come from a "company", with the email address and website you can optionally include when leaving a comment linking to some sketchy website or other that wants you to download their new AI-powered tool to, I don't know, delete all the shit on your hard drive or some such shit.
The reason why these are infinitely more frustrating than good old-fashioned spam (and man, at this point I really miss the surreal narrative spam from 2009) is because, using the magic of AI, they might initially appear to be a genuine comment. In other words, the "agent" (spit) has taken a blog post as input, been tasked with composing a comment that might initially appear to be engaging directly with the subject matter, but which is actually just stating what you wrote back to you with slightly different wording, then attached a sketchy link and email address to it. The hope, presumably, is twofold: firstly, that the blog's owner will fall for the spam by clicking on the link or sending a message to the email address; and secondly, that the blog's owner will publish the comment, making the link public and thereby, potentially, tricking others into inadvertently clicking on it.
This is fucking scummy behaviour! Moreover, this is not convincing me that "agents" are in any way a net good for humanity! Not to the absurd degree that I think they're going to "destroy humanity" or any of that utter nonsense, but slowly but surely, generative AI in general is making the Internet harder and harder to use effectively — and, moreover, it's destroying our trust in one another.
Earlier today on Bluesky, I saw someone share a post from an "Atari news" account that looked interesting. Supposedly there's a project out there that is attempting (and starting to succeed) to get Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI, but not that one) games working on Atari 8-bit. They've supposedly already got King's Quest up and running, and the parallel C64 project is, it seems, a little further along.
However, I was immediately inclined to distrust everything about this news, firstly because of the amount of vibecoded bullshit that is out there at the moment — and apologies to the creators of the project in question if it has all been done by hand; you might want to put that very fucking prominently on your website — and secondly, because the Atari news Bluesky account that shared it in the first place is absolutely fucking infested with garbage AI-generated artwork, leading me to believe that the account is automated. An automated news-aggregating account isn't necessarily a bad thing in its own right, but when combined with the amount of AI imagery that account shares, every single one of my bullshit sensors starts going off.
Want another example? Time Extension, the retro gaming website, has recently been dealing with AI-powered plagiarism and harassment from an account calling itself "Generation Amiga", ostensibly a news site about… well, the Amiga. And yet if you ever accidentally have the misfortune to end up on Generation Amiga's website, you will discover that not one of the articles there (very few of which are actually Amiga-related) is written by a person. Their "exclusive reviews" consist of LLM-generated slop derived from marketing material. And they even had the gall to accuse Time Extension of being "Big Media" harassing a poor, innocent little independent creator who was just using an ickle-wickle bit of planet-destroying AI to construct a vibecoded website that has a net negative value to humanity — all because Time Extension's editor, Damien McFerran, quite rightly called this absolute bullshit out, for the benefit of anyone in retro gaming who had never had the misfortune of stumbling across these fucknuts.
You know, contrary to how it might appear, I don't like ranting and raving and complaining about this all the time! (All right, maybe a little bit.) I would much rather live in a world where it wasn't happening at all! But when I'm in a situation where I can no longer trust that comments on my fucking personal blog are written by actual people, I think I am more than justified in losing my patience. When I am in a situation where my first response to a potentially cool piece of retro gaming-related news is not "wow, that's cool!" but instead "is this AI bullshit…?" I think I am very fucking justified in losing my patience.
I'm so, so tired of this all. None of this is making the Internet better. None of this is making the world better. All it's doing is, at best, sowing division and mistrust, and at worst, completely obliterating what was once the world's most valuable repository of information, knowledge and human creativity. That's the "AIpocalypse" we should be concerned about.
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It feels like pretty much every day for the last few months we've seen a story that claims some game or other has been translated for the first time ever, or ported to PC for the first time ever… and I feel like a good nine times out of every ten of these projects that show up, the project ends up being vibecoded slop.
I'm afraid I don't give any credence to the theory that AI development tools "democratise" development of stuff like this. The biggest problem — besides the fact that AI models are all built on stolen data, of course… and the environmental impacts — is, without a doubt, the fact that people using them end up shitting out something that they have absolutely no understanding of. Thus, when a problem arises — and you can bet a problem will arise with something shat out by AI — they have no idea how to fix it.
"Well, just hand it over to someone who knows what they're doing!" you might say. And to that I say, any developer worth their salt will not accept such a project. No-one wants to debug the spaghetti code shat out by a plagiarism robot. Not only will that be a lot of work, much of which wouldn't have needed to happen if the project had been done properly in the first place, but the person fixing the job will end up with their reputation tarnished purely by virtue of having worked on an AI project.
Unfair? Perhaps. But at this point, people have to know that using generative AI is going to attract backlash. People fucking hate it! People would rather not have a thing than have a thing that was pumped out using generative AI tools! And any short-lived kudos you might attain for being the "first" person to do something (except you didn't actually do the thing yourself) will, in short order, absolutely torpedo your reputation. At this point, with all the high-profile cases there have been of backlash against projects that involve generative AI, you would have to be either wilfully ignorant or just outright sticking your fingers in your ears to be unaware of the resistance to all this.
And the thing that sucks is that, for me and numerous others like me, the torrent of vibecoded slop projects has completely destroyed any interest or excitement we might have had for things that should be interesting and exciting. The decomp/recomp scene should be fascinating, and the non-vibecoded examples of these games put out amazing results that can potentially breathe new life into all manner of different games. But I've seen so many announcements that conclude with "…and this was made with Claude" that I'm afraid I just don't give a shit any more. I just do not care. I do not have the time, energy or inclination to sort through everything just to find the few things that have been made with genuine human knowledge and craft. And so I just can't be arsed to keep up with any of this sort of project any more, be they fan translations or decomp/recomp efforts. It's enough of a pain having to resist generative AI bullshit in full-price commercial titles already.
I know pushback against generative AI is repetitive and tedious and annoying, but, frankly, the signs are very much apparent that we haven't been pushing back hard enough. We need to get to a point where even thinking about using generative AI for something like this makes these dorks flush their own heads down the toilet. I'm sick of it. And, if you're reading this, you probably are too.
Still, with any luck the bubble will burst soon, and all of this garbage will go the way of NFTs. I cannot wait. Cannot wait.
Advance notice to any AI boosters already composing an indignant comment: I think I have made my stance on this abundantly clear at this point. If you come in here with any of the usual garbage about "just a tool" and "what about the motor car" or "Amazon Web Services" or "Luddites", you will be banished to the pit of I Never Have To Hear From You Ever Again. You have been warned. Go cry to your precious Claude about it. And it will not care, because it can't. You are going to die alone. And you deserve it.
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It is, I suspect, a natural part of growing older that you start to miss things that are no longer a regular part of your life. So I thought I might reflect on that a bit today. In what turned out to be rough chronological order:
I miss my school days. While there are aspects of those days I'd rather not repeat, there were, on the whole, far more fond memories than sad or otherwise upsetting ones. I enjoyed having a sense of structure to my day; I enjoyed learning new things; I enjoyed having a group of friends around me.
I miss being part of musical groups. I miss the satisfaction of being part of something bigger than myself. I miss the inimitable atmosphere and sense of romance that formal performances brought. I miss surprising people with my capabilities, and earning the respect of people who might never have known who I was otherwise.
I miss my sixth form days. They were like school days, but better. I'd just learn the things I was truly interested in, and the rest of the time, I felt like I was spending good times in good company.
I miss sleepovers at friends' houses, keeping one another awake with relentless farting and impressions of The Emperor from Star Wars. I miss parties where the host thought making a Devil's Food Cake would be a good idea with a house full of drunken teenagers.
I miss that one endless-feeling summer when my parents went away and I had the house to myself. I miss having friends over every day to drink heavily and play Final Fantasy VII on the living room TV. I miss arguing with my friend Woody over whether or not my Japanese PlayStation fucked up the timing on Bust-a-Move (turns out it did, sorry Woody). I miss leaving a metronome outside my friend Edd's door because he'd flaked out early and gone to bed while we were playing Frogger on MAME until 3am.
I miss that first year of university, where it felt like there were endless possibilities ahead of us. I miss being part of a group of people who had been thrown together by chance, but who became fast friends. I miss showing up to morning lectures and only once having to leave because I needed to be sick after a heavy night. I miss having things to learn and do, but the freedom to approach them how I saw fit.
I miss the subsequent years of university, which was the first taste most of us had of living somewhere that was imperfect but charming in its own way. I miss piling around a friend's house to play Mario Kart and Perfect Dark multiplayer on his N64. I miss couch-surfing on a nightly basis.
I miss the university Theatre Group, where I initially felt out of place, but after inadvertently displaying my vulnerability one night in Edinburgh, feeling embraced and comforted by people who did, in fact, like and respect me. I miss growing to feel like I was an important part of that group as a whole. I miss exploring a fascinating form of self-expression. I miss truly finding my voice and my sense of humour. I miss learning to be assertive and confident.
I miss the early days of the Internet, which felt like a brave new frontier and an opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals in a way I had never really experienced. I miss those first real attempts to express myself freely, and learning to understand how to express why the things that were important to me resonated so deeply. I miss an age when going online was a time when you could truly be yourself, and didn't have to have your guard up at all times.
I miss playing board games with friends, on evenings where none of us had any real commitments save those we had made to our collective friendship. I miss communal takeaways. I miss that one drunk guy outside the Indian restaurant that one time who warned us that we'd "get our legs lifted" if we went in there. Still no idea what that means.
I miss having friends, whether we were going out and having a raucous, drunken night out or a quiet night in with board or video games. I miss the feeling of sharing my life with others, like we mattered to one another.
I miss a time where not feeling lonely was a normal state of being.
I miss lots of things. But I think I miss that last one the most.
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I'm having one of those evenings where I don't really know what to write. So I tend to find in these situations the best thing to do is just open up an empty page and let the stream-of-consciousness flow. So that's exactly what I'm going to do.
As a reminder that I am not getting any younger, I have been dealing with some nasty back and knee pain ever since we got back from Center Parcs; as of this evening, I think it is subsiding a little, thankfully, but it's been painful to just stand up for the last couple of days, which has not been at all fun, and which has contributed somewhat to my general grumpiness, along with various other factors.
Still, the weekend is nearly here, and I intend to enjoy it. As I have alluded to previously, I intend to get some recording done for the first time in a while, rebooting my Atari A to Z series and bringing my YouTube channel somewhat "back to basics". The Atari stuff is something I care deeply about, and much of my channel is built on it; it makes sense to return to focusing on it somewhat.
I've already lined up the first few games that I want to cover. All of these are, as it happens, games that I've been meaning to give some attention to for a while, but which I've never got around to for one reason or another. If you're curious, since we're starting from "A" again, the first few will be Astro Chase, Batty Builders and Clowns and Balloons, all of which are games I am very fond of and have good memories of from back in the day. I think they'll make good, fun videos.
I haven't looked at ST stuff yet, but I want to get back to that alongside the 8-bit stuff, as the ST also has a great library of thoroughly interesting games — and its longstanding rival, the Amiga, tends to get all the attention from most retro critics and commentators these days. Just like with the Atari 8-bit stuff, it provides an opportunity for me to do something distinctive with my channel — and something which, in the past, has specifically drawn people to my channel.
So I'm looking forward to that. I'm not sure exactly how much I'll get recorded and edited over the weekend, but certainly the 8-bit games listed above are all fairly straightforward, arcade-style affairs, so should be easy enough to make a video of a reasonable length about. It will be good to get back into a rhythm with these; I've been feeling a bit like I've been somewhat creatively "adrift" so far as YouTube is concerned for a while, so renewing my original focus will hopefully be a solid move — for me, at least, regardless of what my audience ends up thinking.
I have wasted a lot of this evening staring at this blog, though, so I'm going to go and play something fun before I go to bed, now. And would you look at that? I managed to get some words out of my head and onto the page. Amazing what your brain can do when you just wind it up and let it go, isn't it?
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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Today I got sucked off. And by that I mean I had all the wax noisily hoovered out of my ears by a nice lady at Boots.
I'd been dealing with a sporadic issue with my right ear for a while. It started during a holiday a few years back, where Andie and I spent a few days away in Bournemouth. Bournemouth is not far away from where we live, but it is far enough away that it felt like a nice holiday, so we thought we'd just do it. It was nice.
Apart from one day, where I'd spent some time in the pool, got an ear full of water — nothing unusual there, it's happened before — but then, after attempting to empty out the water, my ear was just sort of… stuck. I don't really know exactly what was going in there, but it felt like someone had glued it shut. No amount of wriggling it around, poking it, wanging my hand over it and making farty noises with it and stuffing things into it unblocked it, causing me a not-inconsiderable amount of concern that I might have just suddenly gone deaf.
I had not, in fact, suddenly gone deaf, and the blockage, stickiness, whatever it was, disappeared naturally after a while. But ever since, I have had infrequent episodes of it coming back, usually brought on by sleeping or lying on it. Finally, I decided that I should probably do something about it, and looked into "getting my ears syringed", which is something I knew people had done sometimes, but which didn't sound very pleasant and consequently was something I had been putting off investigating further. (Fun fact: according to Andie, who has had it done in the past, it's actually quite a pleasant experience.)
I discovered during my investigations that one does not simply get one's ears syringed any more. Aside from the fact that apparently you can't just go to your doctor and get it done any more — I increasingly find myself wondering exactly what the police, fire service and medical professionals are actually doing all fucking day these days, with all the things they "don't do any more" — the practice has apparently fallen out of favour, to be replaced with a procedure known as "microsuction". Which is exactly what it sounds like; someone sticks a tube in your ear which sucks really hard, and all the goopy horrible wax comes plopping out a bit at a time.
I went for my initial appointment just before we went away on holiday, and my left ear got cleared out nicely, but my right ear apparently had some hardened, awkwardly positioned wax that was a bit close to my ear drum for the nice lady to go poking and sucking around. As such, she suggested I spend the next week and a bit dribbling olive oil into my ear (it really works, as ridiculous as it sounds) and then come back for the job to get finished. She even only charged me for half the appointment on that first occasion.
Today, I went back for the follow-up appointment, half-expecting the various concoctions I have dribbled into my right ear over the course of the last week and a half to not have had all that much of an effect. But thankfully, they had. And the (different) nice lady who took me through the whole process this time was highly entertaining.
I suspect that she may have been an exorcist in a previous life, because when surveying my lugholes prior to getting the sucking started, she caught herself referring to the "streaks of darkness". Then, while the process was ongoing, she gleefully announced that "the darkness is being released! The darkness is coming!" which I found exceedingly amusing but had to try not to laugh because it's best not to jiggle around too much when someone has a powerful suction device inserted into your head.
Anyway, long story short, all the disgusting goop that was in my ears is now in the revolting receptacle at the base of the machine (bet it's fun emptying that out) and, after the initial temporary mild deafness brought on by the screeching, bubbling sounds of disgusting goop being sucked out of my ears into a machine, hopefully that will prevent any further auditory mischief, at least for the immediate future.
It was £65 for the whole process, which sounds pricy, but the service was helpful, respectful (exorcist-style comments aside) and informative. If you've never had your ears cleaned out by someone who knows what they're doing, I can recommend the experience, particularly if you've ever had a gummed-up weird sticky ear issue like I've had. I am looking forward to (hopefully) not experiencing that again for a while!
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Well, as predicted that was a massive waste of time. Six hour round trip for a one-hour meeting that was of very little value whatsoever. Never mind, it's done with now, and I can start getting back to normality.
After my mini PC unceremoniously died on me on the first day of our holiday, I was waiting to get home in the hope that hooking it back up to its usual setup would sort things out. It did not, sadly, so I ended up ordering another one. Andie and I suspect that some loose screws inside had just shorted something out — likely on the video circuit — and thus it was just bad luck, really. I had heard something rattling around inside the case for ages and had never gotten around to checking it because it hadn't been a problem; I guess it finally was a problem. Whoops. Oh well.
I was hoping that setting up the new one would be a simple case of whipping out the SSD from the old one and putting it in the new one, but nothing involving computers is ever that simple. Doing this booted to Windows seemingly correctly, but with the computer completely refusing to acknowledge the existence of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth hardware. After several attempts to fix the problem, I just resigned myself to putting the "new" SSD back in and doing a completely fresh start, then transferring my stuff over from the old SSD as required. It's a minor inconvenience, but easy enough to sort out. After the lengthy process that is setting up a fresh install of Windows 11 (and then "debloating" it) I copied my stuff over, installed the important applications and now the thing is — hopefully, anyway — ready to go for work tomorrow.
Computers are really fucking annoying these days. During the setup process for the new machine, I had to go through multiple two-factor authentication steps, several of which completely refused to work using the most convenient methods. The system continually bugs me for a "passkey", which I cannot be arsed with because I fail to see how it is more secure than the existing security measures. (This is not an invitation to "educate" me.) Then I had to download Office, tell it not to register itself automatically using my Hotmail account and instead use my work account… then sign in to my multiple work accounts, each of which asked me for two-factor authentication multiple times for no apparent reason, and finally we were up and running again.
While I acknowledge that some of the above is due to the cloud-based world we live in these days, and all this nonsense allows us to be able to recover our Stuff much more easily when something happens like the situation I've been dealing with… man, it really makes me miss the days of the Atari 8-bit and ST, when you just turn the thing on and load the software you need from a disk. I'm sure attempting to function normally with a setup like that would present its own pain points today, but with the increasingly inhospitable environment of the modern Internet and the far-ranging splattering of sewage that generative AI has covered everything with, I find myself longing for a somewhat simpler implementation of technology.
Unfortunately, with the work I do — and to a lesser extent, with the life I lead — going back to a life where I could run everything from a computer with one megabyte of RAM and no hard drive is an impossibility.
Technology today is more advanced. But is it really better?
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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As promised, I am coming to you live from The Broadway Hotel, Letchworth, where I am staying overnight ahead of a Work Thing that I don't think anyone in their right mind is looking forward to.
I am tired, I am grumpy, my back hurts and I just want to be at home in my own bed with my cats, but instead here I am in another hotel room, the same day I returned from holiday, trying to get comfortable on a bed that is weirdly high off the ground.
Still, at least I was fortunate enough to get a room with a bath this time, so I enjoyed a mildly indulgent soak earlier, which was nice. The hotel baths are nicer than our bath at home, so I usually take the opportunity to use them if I have one. Unfortunately not all the rooms have them, so I can never guarantee this will be the case — and the shower-only rooms here appear to have been designed by someone whose understanding of spatial awareness is somewhat different from what one might call "the norm", shall we say.
Also I smelled pretty bad, so I was glad to be able to properly wash off the stench of packing up, going swimming, having lunch, driving home, placating the cats, packing up again then driving for three hours.
Were it not for the last bit, our last official day of holiday would have been very pleasant. We got up in plenty of time to pack up and vacate the lodge ahead of our 10am departure time, but we thought we'd hang around for a little bit before leaving. You're technically allowed to stay until midnight on the day of your departure, you just can't have your accommodation after 10am.
We kicked off our morning of being in limbo between vacating the lodge and leaving the site with a swim. I have been doing a lot of swimming on this holiday, and my aching body today reminded me of this fact, so we took it prettt easy, just having a casual splash around in the main pool, a few times around the slow river and a session in the wave machine.
After that we did something we haven't done before: we thought we'd have a nice meal out at one of the restaurants as a final farewell. We picked Bella Italia, which I know isn't super exciting, but Andie had been working on the assumption that "it's just pasta, which you might as well do at home" until I convinced her to look at the menu and she discovered they do a bunch of other stuff.
Andie had dough balls then a sea bass fillet with veg and buttery potatoes, and I had calamari then a spicy pizza with nduja, roquito sweet chili peppers, red pepper and tomato. It was really good, but I have had humongous farts for the rest of the day. I say "but", when of course I consider this to be a tremendous benefit.
Anyway, the first part of today was a good way to see off our holiday. The latter part has made me grumpy, but I'm trying not to think too hard about that. Tomorrow will be over and done with before I know it, and then hopefully normality can resume.
Oh, and my mini PC was indeed dead dead, so I've had to hastily buy a new one. Fun. That should arrive tomorrow, so aside from not actually having my own computer in the office tomorrow, life should continue with minimal interruptions — and from next weekend, I plan to make a start on my renewed plans for YouTube, so there's that to look forward to.
Anyway, I should probably attempt to sleep amid this cloud of fart gas I currently exist within, so on that note I will bid you a good night.
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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