#oneaday Day 311: Literary Minded

Every so often, I get really in the mood to Read Stuff. I'm in one of those moods right now; having finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow recently, I found myself having a curious hankering to return to a book I haven't read since my university days: Jane Eyre.

I like Jane Eyre. At least, I remember liking it when I studied it at both secondary school and university. I found its first-person narration compelling, its protagonist likeable and interesting, and its multi-phase narrative most enjoyable. I also enjoyed reading it alongside Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, a more modern (well, 1966) novel that tells the story of the woman who would become the "madwoman in the attic" wife of Jane Eyre's Mr Rochester. That novel was also the one which introduced me to "stream of consciousness" first-person narrative, which is a format I found immediately pleasing, and promptly made use of in the vast majority of creative writing projects I have done ever since.

I haven't read any "literature" for a while, though. By "literature" I, of course, mean "older works". Most people, I'm sure, have a bit of a mental block about reading older literature due to how the language has changed and evolved considerably over time, and how this makes them "difficult" to read. For sure, reading the first few chapters of Jane Eyre on the toilet this evening required a little fine-tuning in the ol' brain to get back into the swing of things, but I remembered that despite being obviously archaic in some of its turns of phrase and lexicon, Charlotte Brontë's (or perhaps Jane's) prose is relatively breezy by the standards of certain other works from a similar period, and once you reconfigure your base frequency to match that of a novel written in 1847, it's a surprisingly easy read.

I'm also starting to feel like it's of increasing importance to keep one's brain "fresh". With how disappointingly widespread bullshit AI-generated "summaries" are becoming, I genuinely fear a bit for the future of literary analysis and study. Now, I'm not particularly intending on doing any more literary analysis on Jane Eyre than I already have done in my life, but one thing I did find during my studies in earlier years is that having an awareness of certain things actually enhances your appreciation of various works when you read them purely for pleasure.

And thus, for the first time in quite a few years, I'm going to be diving back into the literary archives and reading both some books I remember enjoying (Dracula is on my list, and perhaps the Sherlock Holmes stories) as well as some that I have never actually read — Frankenstein and Wuthering Heighs spring immediately to mind. I don't remember having read those, anyway.

It's easy to be all doom and gloom about the state of the world today, and with good reason. But good literature has always been about being able to transport you to another time, place, even world, and I feel like that is going to be of increasing importance as the years go on and our real world becomes increasingly terrible and awful. I mean, Jane Eyre has it pretty rough at various points in her story. But at least she has a degree of agency in her life, and we know her tale is going somewhere. No-one knows where the tale of life in 2025 is going, and with each passing day the possible conclusions feel a little more scary.

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 310: Low-effort post-midnight post

I have left it too late to write this. It's 25 past midnight and I really need to go to bed because I have to work tomorrow, and to make matters worse I have to do it with a somewhat improvised, cramped home office in our lounge because my wife decided a while back that she wanted to renovate my study.

I sound bitter, but I'm actually looking forward to seeing the end result of her work. She's stripping out the disgusting carpet that came with the house, fitting laminate flooring to match most of the rest of the house, repainting, putting up a nice blackout blind, putting some deliberately hideous wallpaper on at least one of the walls as what I believe is called a "feature wall", and generally just making the whole thing a bit nicer than it is. She's also removed the completely impractical chest of drawers from one of my desks, and I will be replacing that with something a bit more practical once the rest of the work is done.

Naturally, a project of this magnitude involves stripping everything out of the study as it currently exists, so of course I can't do my usual work in there this week while she does her thing. (She has this week off work specifically to do this project.) And so it is that I am relegated to the lounge on a tiny little folding desk that just about fits all the crap I need to do my job. I'm sure it will be fine. A change of scenery is nice every now and then, right?

It's been a busy few weeks at work. Naturally there's not a lot I can talk about that hasn't already been announced, but as well as working on the upcoming stuff we haven't told anyone about yet, I also need to come up with some stuff to promote the things we have announced. I have a lot to say about the impending Atari Arcade 2, for example; while there's a lot of largely unknown games on there, there are some absolute crackers if you like early '80s score-chasers.

My particular recommendation (besides the obvious Berzerk and Frenzy) is the excellent Tazz-Mania, which I had never encountered prior to working on this cartridge, but it's fab. Imagine TATE-mode Robotron but with the added time pressure of the walls of each stage closing in on you. I know nothing about this game or where it came from — and the Internet isn't much help either — but I do know that it's an absolute blast if you like that particular breed of colourful early '80s action, so be sure to spend some time with it when Atari Arcade 2 hits.

Right, I think that's probably enough for now. I need to go to bed. Apologies that this is such a half-arsed post, but I've spent most of my evening going through Digital Eclipse's fantastic Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story and really enjoying it, and the time just sort of ran away with me a bit.

So that's that. More coherent thoughts tomorrow, probably. Maybe.

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#oneaday Day 306: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

I finally got around to reading a novel my mother has been bugging me to read for ages now. It's by Gabrielle Zevin and is called Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which is one of those titles that looks more and more wrong the more times you type it out in succession. I didn't know much about the book going in other than that it was somehow related to video games, and I deliberately didn't read anything about it prior to starting it, so I had gone in with the (mistaken, as it turns out) assumption that it was going to be another Ready Player One sort of situation.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is rather different, though. While it does indeed draw inspiration from the world of video games, it is not a sci-fi novel, and the games are used more as a backdrop to what is going on rather than in-your-face references. The main story concerns two individuals who meet as children in a hospital: Sam Masur is a traumatised young man with a mangled foot after a car crash that killed his mother, while Sadie Green is an intelligent young woman who had initially been attending the hospital to visit her sister, who had leukaemia, but who subsequently managed to strike up a friendship with Sam.

The pair bond over video games, something which was clearly already important in both of their lives; Sam displays himself to be a skilled player of Super Mario Bros. when Sadie first encounters him, while Sadie has long exchanged in-jokes relating to The Oregon Trail with her sister. Sadie discovers that her interactions with Sam have caused him to speak for the first time in a very long while, and she is encouraged to see him regularly as part of the "community service" requirements for her bat mitzvah. Sam eventually discovers this — helped along by Sadie's rather jealous sister — and, understandably, begins to doubt Sadie's friendship, causing a rift between them that lasts for several years.

The pair meet again by chance several years later, when they are both nineteen years old and studying at institutions in Cambridge, Massachusetts — Sam at Harvard, Sadie at MIT. They once again bond over video games; Sadie introduces Sam to a video game she composed called Solution. Solution is an early example of an "art game"; it positions players in the role of someone working at a factory, but "completing" the game reveals that one was actually producing weapons for the Nazis in World War II. Players can alternatively complete the game by uncovering "the truth" about what they are actually up to earlier on.

Aside: real-life developer Brenda Romero believes that Solution is based a little too closely on her board game Train, which had a similar concept of going "surprise! You're a Nazi!" at its conclusion, but, as the name suggests, a different focus. I can see how she arrived at that conclusion — particularly as Zevin acknowledged the game's influence — but Sadie's Solution approaches the matter from a somewhat different angle, and Sadie, rather than Romero, being the creator is important to the story. So I think we can maybe let that slide for now.

Anyway, Solution made people in Sadie's game design class absolutely furious, as you might expect, but Sam sees something in it. And thus begins a rather tempestuous working relationship, as the pair decide to make games together — some of which are huge successes, and others of which are big fat flops.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about video games, but it's also about the creative spirit and the balance young professionals often have to find between truly expressing themselves and doing something that will actually make them some money. It's about the wild mood swings the creative temperament can bring, and about how different ideals can sometimes lead to seemingly irreconcilable differences — and how the truly strong friendships can weather those storms, even if it takes years to do so sometimes.

The games are used as a backdrop to the main story of the relationship between Sam, Sadie and the other people who are part of their lives, both personally and professionally. Author Gabrielle Zevin admits that there are a few anachronisms in terms of the games she mentions and the times at which people are playing or discussing them, but notes that this is all in service of the story. We are, after all, talking about a fictional world that refers to a variety of things that exist in the real world — ranging from the classic arcade game Donkey Kong to the gaming lifestyle website Kotaku — and couples them with events that never actually happened. In this sense, it's an "alternate history" novel of sorts, only this history is about video games rather than, say, Hitler never having been born.

It's an interesting approach. The novel's perspective jumps around in time and in terms of which character it is focusing on at any given time. Sometimes you're "in the moment" as the events of the past are occurring; at others, the narration presents Sam and/or Sadie being "interviewed" by a real-life site (such as Kotaku) about something that never actually happened in the real world, but which was an important occurrence in this alternate history. Aside from a few early hiccups where Zevin refers to "3.25 inch floppy disks" on more than one occasion (which made me wince slightly every time), the effect is mostly very convincing; it doesn't take long before you're swept along with this account of something that could have happened in this world, but which didn't.

The novel is not just about how video games have changed over time. It's also about how attempts to introduce progressive themes into games have, at times, met with uncomfortable challenges. The novel takes this to something of an extreme — more so than anything that has, to my knowledge, happened in the real world — but the point it makes is convincing. As far as I'm aware, no-one has gone and shot up a game company in the real world over the inclusion of gay and transgender characters in a video game, but the idea is depressingly plausible. From a broader perspective, the inclusion of a sequence in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow where one of the major characters is shot dead following such an encounter can be looked on as criticism of gun culture and violence in America, and how more often than not mass shootings are the result of a disaffected white dude who has snapped about something in his life or society.

Some of the most effective sequences in the book are where Zevin isn't afraid to get a bit weird. After the aforementioned shooting sequence, there's a peculiar second-person sequence presented as the reader occupying the role of the fatally shot character in the present tense as their life slips away. There's another sequence later where a depressed Sadie is playing a massively multiplayer online game, but it never actually mentions the character we're following is Sadie; everything is presented "in character" and "in world". Like the world of video game development, the literary techniques that Zevin uses throughout Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow never remain constant; they're always changing, developing, moving on, advancing.

It's also a novel about how women struggle to be taken seriously in what is still perceived to be a "boys' club", even with more and more evidence to the contrary that women have always been a part of gaming. Sadie continually struggles to be seen as the artist she is because Sam is better at the business aspect. Despite being depicted as somewhat awkward in the early hours of the book, he ends up becoming a confident "face of the company" when promoting their work, suggesting that there may be some sort of mental health issues in an autistic/ADHD-adjacent area at work with Sam's character; his behaviour is very consistent with hyperfixations and intense, deep passions for very specific things.

But Sadie struggles too, despite being less obviously "broken" than Sam is. She may not have suffered the traumatic, violent loss of a parent, she may not have physical mobility issues and she may come from a background of relative privilege, but there are times when she struggles. There are times when she finds herself swept up in an abusive relationship because she thinks its benefits outweigh its drawbacks. There are times she falls into an inconsolable depression, when even those closest to her cannot reach her. There are times when she simply doesn't know what to do, despite her intelligence. She suffers, too — perhaps even more than Sam does — and the story of her own trials are an important part of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

I'll refrain from spoiling too much more of the details of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, because I do recommend it, even if you're not "a gamer". Having the context of and an understanding of the video games referenced throughout is helpful, certainly, but this is not a story that is specifically about those video games. Instead, they're used to support the narrative and its approach to a fairly mundane but nonetheless impactful alternate history; the thrust of the story is, instead, about love, friendship, creativity, artistry and the range of challenges creative types (with varying degrees of mental health struggles) have faced over the course of the last 30-40 years or so.

So there we go. Now my mother can stop asking me if I've read it yet, because now I have!

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#oneaday Day 305: In the Attic

I am doing my monthly(ish) visit to the office, so you join me once again from a hotel room. This time around I have had mostly good luck: while I am technically stuffed into the "attic" on the third floor, my room is next to the lift and stairs and it has a bath.

So I had a bath. It's always nice to have a bath in a hotel, because their baths tend to be much bigger than ours. And as a large gentleman, it is nice to have a large bath to match. Even if I miscalculated, as I always do, the amount of water displacement my fat arse causes, leading to me semi-flooding the bathroom. I managed to mop most of it up with one of the towels, but the annoyance of that threatened to put something of a dampener (pun intended and not apologised for) on my evening.

I wasn't feeling great anyway. The drive down here was stressful. Occasionally I find myself… I don't know if "dissociating" is the right word, but I'm going to use it anyway. I feel sort of "detached" from myself, like I'm watching things going on but as if I'm sort of a step "back" from them. Then, inevitably, I become conscious of my dissociation, which inevitably occurs at an inconvenient time, such as when driving, and that freaks me out and makes me stressed. So I end up in a bit of a cycle.

Still, I made it here safely, accompanied by the second episode of the Fun Factor Podcast, which I can highly recommend if you're as interested in classic video game magazines as I am. This time around they take a look at a magazine I'm not familiar with, not being from North America, but a lot of the stuff discussed was familiar — including the full postal addresses of actual children being published in a continent-wide magazine and no-one seeming to think that might be a bit of a dodgy idea.

Anyway, I'm here now, I've eaten Hotel Snacks and now I'm ready to just sit and vegetate a bit before going to sleep. The usual Police Interceptors garbage is on TV and I have some video games and ebooks with me, so I think I can safely stave off any further stress or dissociation with either or both of those.

Oh, I did finish a book last night, but I want to talk about it a fair bit and there ain't no way I'm going to battle my phone's keyboard to do that right now. So perhaps tomorrow (and tomorrow, and tomorrow)…

#oneaday Day 304: Web maintenance at the worst times

I found it very hard to get out of bed this morning. The reason for this is simple: I stayed up until 2AM doing maintenance activities on this site and MoeGamer that could have almost certainly waited until a more sociable hour, but once I'd started, I wanted to see them through.

Y'see, both my sites have gone on a bit of a journey. They were both originally hosted on WordPress.com, with this blog being on a free account and MoeGamer being on a "Premium" paid tier. I was starting to reach the limits of what I could do with the Premium account in particular — most notably with regard to media storage space — and thus I moved MoeGamer to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation on a Bluehost hosting account.

Before anyone jumps in to decry Bluehost as being shit: believe me, I know. That is the reason neither of my sites are hosted with Bluehost at this point. But we'll come back to that.

As anyone who has ever tried to migrate a large site from WordPress.com to WordPress.org will tell you, the supposedly simple and straightforward migration process is anything but. What is supposed to happen is that you hit "Export" on your WordPress.com site, which spits out your site's contents as XML files, then you hit "Import" on your WordPress.org site, wherever you've hosted it, and it will recreate your site. Posts, pages and comments will go right back in, and the import process is supposed to look for any media you posted and automatically go and retrieve it from your old site, then transfer it to your new one.

Notice how I emphasise "supposed to". Because in the multiple times I have done this over the years, not once has it ever worked how it is, apparently, supposed to. Not only that, but the documentation on WordPress' own site refers to features and options that do not actually exist. Take these instructions for exporting your Media Library, for example. By following these instructions, even if the "automatic" process described above didn't work, you should be able to just tell WordPress.com to export all your media files into a big ol' .zip file, then import them all in one go to your WordPress.org installation.

Just one problem: the options they tell you to click on do not exist. Maybe they once existed and now do not, but right now — and for multiple years at this point, since I've done this several times with different sites — they do not exist, making them completely useless as instructions.

There are plugins that are supposed to help with this sort of thing. You can't install plugins on a WordPress.com site unless you're subscribed to the obscenely expensive "Business" plan, but you can install plugins on WordPress.org. Except you then run into the minefield of whether or not the plugins in question actually do what you think they're supposed to do, or if they're just some dodgy, shady thing trying to get you to sign up to their "Pro" account because the one vaguely useful option they have is paywalled.

And this is to say nothing of most web servers' tendency to crash if you throw too much data at them in one go. I have several thousand posts on both here and MoeGamer, and attempting to import them all at once would crash the import process every time. I ended up having to go a hundred at a time, which took a very long time, I can tell you, particularly as it would still crash on occasion. And amid all that, if it wasn't already clear, it didn't automatically import my old media and transfer it across to the new site; instead, it just left links to the old media and then… didn't do anything else.

So what I ended up with was two sites that were full of images that were hotlinked from an account I wasn't paying for any more, and which I wanted to close down. And it took me until last night to figure out some possible solutions.

For the record, I used two distinct plugins. Firstly, I used the Auto Upload Images plugin, which actually does do what the media import process is supposed to do: it looks for externally hosted images, then it imports them to your media library and updates the <img> tags to point to your new media library copies. The one downside I found with this plugin is that rather than importing the old images under the same date structure as the old site, it imports them all "today". This is down to a limitation with how WordPress handles files, I think, so no big deal — but it did cause an issue.

On both my sites, a lot of older images had automatically been set to allow people to click on them to see the full size versions. The links were now pointing at the old version of the image, while the <img> tags were showing the new versions. Not only that, but the mismatch in dates meant that some of these clickable links were just completely broken.

To resolve this, I took something of a nuclear option: I used the Broken Link Checker plugin to scan my site for all its links, searched those links for anything that was pointing at the old wordpress.com site and then just batch "unlinked" them. That means that the new images would be safely in place, the broken links would be removed and everything from thereon should, in theory, be hunky-dory.

There are a few things that have broken along the way, like any Gallery posts I hosted have lost all their images and I don't see any means of fixing that aside from doing them all manually, plus there's been the usual "link rot" of old copyright-infringing YouTube videos no longer being available online. Plus any audio media seems to have gone walkies, too, but again, no big deal, really; I don't think anyone expects a website that has been around for nearly 20 years to suffer from no link rot whatsoever.

But anyway. I got rather involved in this process last night, starting around 11pm. I knew, looking at the clock, that I shouldn't start doing something like this so late in the evening. But then I did, and hyperfixation kicked in, and I kept going until everything was, so far as I can tell, sorted. I mean, my galleries and audio bits are still broken, but I can live with that. What I didn't really want to live with was several thousand broken image links that led nowhere. And I think I've fixed that issue.

If you happen to notice anything wrong with any old posts you find yourself reading, do let me know and I'll see if it's possible to fix them. In some cases, that may be possible; in others, less so. As I say, it's part and parcel of a site being live for this long, even if it has moved hosting and domain names multiple times in its lifespan. But hopefully it's going to stick around right here for quite some time, so I wanted to fix as many of the annoying little issues as possible. So here we are!

I hope the three or four of you who actually read this appreciate the work I put in!

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#oneaday Day 303: Uhoh, new hyperfixation

The thing with being autistic, I have both been led to believe and experienced first-hand, is that every so often you get a Great Idea in your head about something you are going to be Into. Sometimes these Things That You Are Now Into stick around and become long-term hobbies and interests, at other times they fall by the wayside. But in my experience, they're usually worth following along with for at least a little while, unless they involve a major uprooting of your entire life. Which they usually don't.

While at the Portsmouth Anime and Gaming Con yesterday, our friend Dan spoke a little about collecting stickers. For some reason, Dan's enthusing about this tripped something in my brain, which suddenly and uncontrollably exploded with a chorus of "I want to be into collecting stickers!".

I actually used to be into collecting stickers when I was a kid. For two separate years, I collected stickers for the Panini sticker album themed around The Beano, and I used to swap stickers with my friend Joanna. Joanna herself is probably a story for another day — and one that, for once, I don't think I've actually told here previously — but all you need to know for now is that we were both pretty avid Beano sticker collectors, but I don't think either of us ever actually completed one of those albums 100%.

Panini stickers were, of course, one of the original "booster packs", and doubtless our parents grit their respective teeth any time we asked for a pack of stickers to go in our albums, particularly if a significant number of them ended up being duplicates of ones we already had. But it was a fun thing to do as a child, and an opportunity to socialise, too; I don't remember anyone else collecting Beano stickers, but I always enjoyed the chance to spend some time with Joanna. As I say, though, story for another day.

So anyway, with that in mind, my brain decided that Now I'm Into Stickers, so I immediately took the opportunity to wander off and buy a few packs of stickers that had caught my eye earlier. And, today, I dug out one of the lovely "journal"-style notebooks I've had in my drawer for ages but never really done anything with, and I started sticking stickers in it. Not only did I stick the stickers I bought yesterday in it, but I stuck some stickers I've had hanging around for ages in there, too; I had, up until this point, resisted sticking them anywhere because I was worried about the "permanence" of whatever I might have stuck them on.

This is actually something that Dan expressed yesterday, too, and thus my immediate solution was to stick them in a book. What's more permanent than a book! Unless you throw it away, obviously. But I'm not planning on throwing this away any time soon.

Anyway, do you want to see? Of course you do. Here:

I like doing title pages in the style of Victorian novels. I have done this for many years now, and I have no intention of stopping.

On the first page, a Neptunia sticker that's been floating around various rooms in my house since Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution showed up. I finally stuck it in something. So to speak. On the second, one of the first batches of stickers we did as a bonus extra in Evercade cartridges: a selection of sprites and artwork from Indie Heroes Collection 1, a compilation of "modern retro" games made by today's indie developers for vintage systems.

On the next page, some stickers from Piko Interactive Collection 2 for Evercade, which technically came out before Indie Heroes Collection 1 and thus was the trigger for me to add the "in no particular order" caveat to the title page of this volume. On the following page, a selection of stickers from the Goodboy Galaxy/Witch n' Wiz dual cartridge for Evercade, focusing on the former game. If you've never played Goodboy Galaxy I highly recommend it; it's an excellent exploratory platformer.

Then we have the stickers that came with Toaplan Arcade 3 and Data East Arcade 2 for Evercade, mostly based on the original cabinet or marquee art for these games.

And the same deal for these stickers, from Toaplan Arcade 4 and Atari Arcade 2.

Then a bumper crop of stickers from the Strictly Limited Games release of Sisters Royale, a shoot 'em up by the folks who made the Castle of Shikigami series. A lot of folks have beef with Strictly Limited for the amount of time they take to make their physical editions of games — I have some orders that have been outstanding for multiple years — but they always come through eventually. Their special editions are some of the highest quality but most affordable special editions I have on my shelves.

A bit of overflow of Sisters Royale stickers here, plus the first of the sticker packs I bought yesterday from the Portsmouth Anime and Gaming Con. This "Pretty Girls Sticker Pack" is by an art studio called Kumigaki.

And finally, for now, anyway, a few Final Fantasy VII-themed stickers I nabbed from a local outfit known as Taroball Studios.

So there we go. Stickers! And none of the dissatisfaction with empty spaces you got with Panini albums. I wonder if I'll ever fill this book? Only one way to find out!

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#oneaday Day 302: Portsmouth Anime and Gaming Con

I went out today! SHOCK. Specifically, I went out with my wife and two of her friends that I happen to also get along well with, and we all went along to the Portsmouth Anime and Gaming Con, an event organised by a group called "Animeleague", who claim (as you do online) to host "The UK's most popular anime cons".

The event took place at a Marriott hotel in Cosham, a part of Portsmouth that is so shitty the first things that come up when you Google it are the crime statistics. But the Marriott itself was nice enough, even if its main reception and bar area, where most of the con took place, looked like an aircraft hangar had been clumsily bolted on to the side of the actual hotel. (Aside: I have previously encountered this kind of arrangement once, when I was teacher training, where the school I was placed at had very obviously taken a concourse that was once outside and decided to make it inside using some of the most industrial-looking architecture imaginable.)

The con was… kind of shit, to be honest, but in a charming way. We all had a good time and certainly didn't resent the train fare and ticket prices, but there's no way we would have been able to fill a full weekend with the activities that were taking place there.

The entire con consisted of a fairly small artist's alley (populated with some admittedly talented artists and craftspeople… as well as some other folks who were very obviously reselling AliExpress anime merch) and a "dealer's room", which primarily consisted of a huge booth from a company called Estatic Anime, which sold everything from katanas (a lot of people had been "studying the blade", it seems) to grab bags of Japanese snacks, but which also had some more artists and craftspeople around the periphery. And a wall of Funko Pop landfill relegated to a back corner, as it should be.

The "Gaming" part of the con consisted of a few side function rooms with a bunch of consoles set up, ranging from a number of Switches playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, some laptops with Minecraft and a few retro consoles, including all the major "minis" from the last few years, plus a couple of real retro systems such as a SNES, Mega Drive and a PlayStation. These rooms were pretty busy so we didn't spend a lot of time in them; as Andie said, "we can just do that at home". Quite. I believe there were supposed to be some actual tournaments going on throughout the day, but we didn't see any of that as it was mostly in games we weren't super-interested in watching.

There was a fairly small main stage in one of the hotel's function rooms, and there were Things Happening there all day. We went along to a couple of them: we caught the end of a writers' workshop hosted by a woman who appeared to be exceedingly nervous, but I'm sure addressing a room full of nerds, at least 40% of whom are in elaborate cosplay, is fairly daunting, then stayed on for a "lip-sync battle" where they struggled to find willing participants, then crashed their web browser for a good 10 minutes before they could actually start the competition. Then later in the day we returned for a "cosplay masquerade", which was probably the main attraction we were looking forward to seeing.

The lip-sync battle was quite entertaining, and I have to say, fair play to everyone who got up there, including the two incredibly nervous young girls in full cosplay who got up there, stood stock still and just about mouthed Japanese lyrics if you squinted and looked closely. They were, of course, shown up by those who had a natural talent and flair for performing on stage, including a Junko from Danganronpa performing an exceedingly (and appropriately) slutty take on Kesha's Joyride and an Ichigo from Bleach who was having the time of his life performing Thunderstruck by AC/DC. Both of these had clearly choreographed their routines in advance. One of the con staff also got up and did an excellent performance of You'll Be Back from Hamilton, a song (and show) I'm not familiar with, but which Andie assures me I absolutely should see. But still. It took guts for the two nervous girls to even try, so I cannot and will not take the piss.

The cosplay masquerade was… kind of similar, to be honest. It opened with a bunch of cosplayers who had signed up in advance and had clearly devised themselves some suitable dance (and, in the case of a Deadpool cosplayer, comedy) routines to establish a rapport with the audience rather than just standing there and looking nice. Then there were a few folks who had signed up on the day and either just stood there looking nice, or made some shit up on the spot to show off their costume.

The eventual winner of this was a Sakura Miku who did a fairly elaborate dance routine, but who Andie believes should have been disqualified for not ironing her shirt, making it pretty clear that she had just bought the costume rather than made it; by contrast, there was a spectacular Lulu from Final Fantasy X, who clearly had made her own costume, and she came in second place. Robbed, I tell you. Robbed.

Anyway, we bought some tat (and some sour cherry mead, which is delicious) and then came home to have a pizza. All in all, I'd judge that a pretty good day; as I say, the con itself was not necessarily something I'd particularly recommend to anyone unless they were particularly into bootleg Dragon Ball merchandise, but we didn't have a bad time there, and it was nice to get out of the house and spend some time with the three-dimensional people.

We've got some loose plans to go along to Portsmouth Comic Con, which is… next month, I think? That's in a larger venue so will probably be a bit more of an elaborate affair, so it should be pretty fun. For now, though, I think maybe a snifter of mead before bed, then sleepytime. And I forgot to buy milk. Bugger.

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#oneaday Day 301: Weird things from Lidl

My wife Andie and I have started doing a lot of our food shopping at our local Lidl. It's not really any further away from the Tesco and/or Sainsbury's we had typically been going to up until now, it's generally a bit cheaper, and there's something just a bit more fun about it, inasmuch as grocery shopping can ever be fun. Also, I am nearly forty-four years old, and thus several decades too old for people to take the piss out of me for going to Lidl.

For the unfamiliar, Lidl is a budget supermarket that, as well as having the usual supermarket groceries, tends to have a bunch of random crap down its middle aisles ranging from portable greenhouses to cookware via dog toys, and also has an aisle or two that have a rotating "themed" selection of foods, with the theme usually being a particular geographical area.

The one… challenge we have, if you want to call it that, is because Lidl has these interesting "novelty" sections each time you go, the temptation is to do that thing where you go to another country and visit their supermarkets, and then you want to do stupid shit like buy their version of Corn Flakes to see if they taste any different, stuff like that. I know I'm not the only one who does this because Andie does it too.

Okay, the Corn Flakes thing is an exaggeration, but the natural response to seeing unfamiliar but tasty-looking things in a supermarket is to go "ooh, that looks unfamiliar but tasty, I'll give it a try". You will then repeat this process approximately 10-15 times over the course of your complete visit to Lidl — along with deciding that you actually do need a new frying pan, and the one they had in the middle aisle really wasn't that unreasonably priced — and end up with a shopping bill a good £20-£50 more than if you'd just gone to Tesco.

This, I guess, is the genius of Lidl. They can position themselves as a budget supermarket, because they are, but the way they merchandise their products means that people are, on the whole, probably more likely to spend more than they normally would. This is a work of dastardly genius, but I'm not mad about it.

I like being able to do the weekly food shop and discover weird American snacks that are a cross between Wotsits and a bag of salted peanuts. I like knowing that when I'm buying bread and milk, I have the option to also purchase a chainsaw at the same time. I like the fact that I could show up to Lidl at any hour of the day, purchase a large pack of toilet paper, some lubricant and a large item of garden furniture and no-one would look twice at the contents of my trolley. Well, all right, they might in that last instance.

Also, you remember a while back I talked about my lifelong desire to rediscover the brownies the friends of my parents once served me in America one Halloween? Lidl's in-store bakery brownies are the absolute closest thing I've had to those brownies. I still don't think they're quite there, but they are, by far, the closest I've had to those brownies from all those years ago. And thus their merchandising genius can't be all that evil, can it? Unless they're lacing those brownies with something that makes you inherently more suggestible…

Oh well. Anyway, we need to do a food shop soon, so I will be intrigued to see what nonsense we come back with next time. Perhaps I'll even report on it. Bet you can't wait, no?

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#oneaday Day 298: Can you give up your phone?

I watched a good video earlier, and I recommend you do too if you have a spare 46 minutes and 4 seconds. It's by a chap called Eddy Burback, who makes videos that are just… about stuff. He always puts in a decent amount of research to the topics he talks about, he makes his discussions both interesting and personally relevant, and he's genuinely entertaining. If you've never watched his stuff before, this video is a great place to get to know him.

For those too lazy or disinclined to click that video and actually watch it, his aim was to go 30 days with his smartphone locked up in a safe so he couldn't use it at all. He wasn't denying himself access to the Internet, social media or anything like that, and he set up an old Mac laptop in the corner of his living room to access iMessage if he needed it, but only allowed himself a cumulative total of 5 minutes across the entire month to check it. He found, among other things, that after checking it once, he decided he didn't really need to check it at all.

The other things he did were deliberate, conscious steps "backwards". He set up a landline with an on-device answering machine. He made plans with friends over the phone, and then just showed up at the place he said he'd be at the time he said he'd be there, rather than constantly checking in via text or chat. He navigated by looking things up on the computer at home, then either writing things down in a notepad or just remembering them. He bought a physical pre-payment card to ride the bus rather than using an app. He handled electronic "tickets" for events and facilities such as the cinema by printing out a hardcopy.

And he seemed happy. I'm sure part of this was to aid with the storytelling — you tend to go into a project like this with a hypothesis that you kind of want to prove — but I don't doubt that spending a month without habitually, obsessively checking one's phone is a healthy thing to do. And as time goes on, I increasingly find myself wanting to do just that.

There are, as Burback talks about in the video, drawbacks. If you're not someone who likes talking on the phone, a landline isn't going to do you much good — and likewise if your friends tend to interact with you primarily via text message or chat applications. On top of that, landlines attract spam calls even more than mobiles do. This means you can very easily find yourself feeling even more isolated than you were already, which is probably counter-productive to the intent of the experiment: the aim is to get off your phone so that you can enjoy living your life a little more, and part of that is spending time with friends. If you can't get in touch with those friends via any means other than a text or chat message, that's a problem.

Most other things, there are ways round, though. For navigation, you can still print out maps and directions from sites like Google Maps and Mapquest (which, yes, still exists!). For convenient payments, most places accept contactless cards now, particularly since the pandemic almost outlawed cash altogether. For public transport, pre-paid cards exist, even if you have to go digging to a retailer who actually remembers where they keep them after not selling one for a decade or more. And for making arrangements with friends? Well, if they're good friends, they'll respect your lifestyle decision and be willing to interact with you and make plans via whatever means you are allowing, such as the phone; the fact that people were perfectly fine with adapting to his situation is one of the things Burback seemed most surprised about.

One thing Burback found was that without the constant connectivity a phone in your pocket brings, he was much less likely to cancel plans on a moment's notice or suddenly decide he wasn't in the mood for something. Instead, if he'd made plans, he'd made a commitment to another person, and not showing up for that commitment would be letting them down. Of course, sometimes these things are unavoidable — but that's why you still have means of communicating like the landline or email. It's not like locking your smartphone away completely cuts you off from society altogether. It just means that you are reachable on your own terms.

And I think that's the important thing. It allows you to really take control of your own life. It means you are not beholden to social media algorithms and the arbitrary schedules of whether or not "interesting" people are online posting mindless content that doesn't really enrich your life in any way. It means you're more likely to pick up a book and read it all the way through, instead of scrolling through 50 TikTok videos, not taking anything in from any of them.

Completely getting rid of your phone is obviously a drastic option. But the conclusion Burback came to was that while there are undoubted conveniences — and pleasures — to having a smartphone accessible at all times, having a month completely disconnected from it allowed him to develop a more healthy relationship with it. He was less inclined to doomscroll through social media, less inclined to experience the world through a camera app rather than his own eyes, and more inclined to having fewer but more meaningful interactions with the people who are important to him. And that, in turn, left a lot more time for doing things that he found enjoyable and pleasurable: watching movies, reading books, all that sort of thing.

I won't lie: that sounds nice. I have already cut back on using my phone a lot compared to what I used to do with it, but there are still times when I really resent its presence. Perhaps I should try a similar experiment sometime.

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#oneaday Day 296: Hefty project

I put together a new video this weekend. Just the one, because it turned out being quite a beefy one to put together, but hopefully you will appreciate the effort once it's live, which will probably be tomorrow.

Inspired by the recent launch of the Fun Factor Podcast, I thought it was high time I got back to my retrospective look back over the issues of Page 6/New Atari User magazine that I started a while back, but only got around to doing two issues of. The reason I've been putting off doing any more may well already be self-evident: each "episode" of this takes quite a bit of time and effort to put together!

I mean, to my satisfaction, anyway. I could just turn the camera on, rabbit on about what's in the magazine and leave it at that. But one thing I like about doing these videos — and the bit that's particularly time-consuming — is that I can supplement the magazine's contents with actual footage of the things that are being discussed, whether those are programming techniques or the latest games. Getting together all that footage as well as recording the actual run-through of the magazine takes quite a bit of time all together — but the end result is worth it. I like these videos.

If you haven't seen the previous ones, by the way, may I present them below. Here's a look at the very first issue of Page 6, including the back story of where it came from and what it means to me:

And here's a look at the second issue, in which we observe the rise of a mostly forgotten piece of '80s slang: the adjective "keen" to mean "cheap" or "eminently reasonable", which I had never come across before. Well, I mean, I had, because I'd read this issue before, but somehow it had never struck me as odd:

As I note in the videos, these old magazines are of tremendous importance to me, and I'm happy to have the opportunity to be able to share them with everyone through the medium of video. The ability to splice in footage of the stuff being talked about allows you to get some context that you might not have had just reading the magazine back in the day, and this is a part of retro gaming culture that I'm always happy to celebrate in one form or another.

The new episode is uploading and processing right now, so it should be live on YouTube tomorrow as soon as I've done a thumbnail and all the other gubbins for it. Watch out for it then — stop by my channel and subscribe if you haven't already. Go on. You know you want to.

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