#oneaday Day 221: Little success

Reader, I did it. My alarm went off at 7.30 and I got up almost immediately. I add the qualifier because I lay there and listened to the radio for about 5 minutes, then got up and had a piss and seriously considered going back to bed for another half an hour on the justification that "the sun wasn't fully up yet" so going outside right then wouldn't be as beneficial as it would be when the day had properly started.

But I pushed through those thoughts, got dressed instead of getting back into bed, then went out to the little Tesco and got myself a coffee and a pastry. Then I came back and enjoyed them both. They both seemed to taste particularly great, perhaps because I wasn't in a rush to enjoy them before starting work, or perhaps because of the light exercise I'd just done, or perhaps simply because I hadn't treated myself to such things for a while. Anyway, they were good.

I have the yawns a little bit because this was, after all, quite a bit earlier than I usually roll out of bed, but like I said yesterday, it supposedly takes about three days to convince your body to fall into a new routine. I was actually surprised how easy it was to get out of bed at 7.30(ish); evidently that time is a good match for my existing circadian rhythms so hopefully that will just get easier.

I'll tell you one big reason I've always had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning: it's because of dreams. For some reason, I always seem to have the most vivid dreams first thing in the morning, almost immediately before I'm supposed to be getting up. And there are occasions where I'll wake up, still have memory of the dream and feel like I "have" to go back and "finish" the dream, even though that's an impossibility.

But there have been multiple occasions where my brain has felt that it is of critical importance that I finish the dream I was having, otherwise… you know what, I don't actually know what it thinks the consequences will be. Because there aren't any. A dream is just a dream; as enjoyable and interesting as they can be, they don't actually exist and they don't have any bearing on your real life, so prioritising them over actually living in the moment is, from a rational perspective, very silly.

As we all know, though, the human brain is prone to fits of irrationality at times, particularly if it's under any sort of stress or not feeling its best for one reason or another. And so, yes, there absolutely have been times where my brain has wanted to prioritise a fun or interesting dream over the drabness of everyday life.

No more, though! I will get up at a sensible hour, giving me enough time to have a nice chilled out morning before work starts, and this will be a Healthy Habit that will lead to other improvements! 2025 is the year.

Probably. Maybe.

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 220: Morning person

I'm not a morning person. I can get out of bed early when I absolutely have to (to catch a flight, say), but left to my own devices, I will happily just lie comatose in my bed until an embarrassing hour. I will note that it's not quite as bad as during 2010, The Worst Year Of My Life, when I was staying up until 5am on Second Life and then not even waking up until 5pm the next day, but it's still… challenging to get out of bed at a reasonable hour, particularly at weekends.

I've been reading around and watching some YouTube videos in an attempt to fix this, because as nice as staying in bed can be, I do actually want to try and make a bit better use of my day — because if nothing else, I think it will probably make me feel better, too. There are few things worse for feelings of perpetual non-specific anxiety than getting up moments before you're supposed to start working… although annoyingly enough, it's often those feelings of perpetual non-specific anxiety that make me want to stay in bed.

Thus far, the chief pieces of advice that seem to recur frequently are as follows:

Get up when your alarm goes off. (This is the difficult bit.)
Get out into natural light as soon as you can. (This assumes you have succeeded at step 1.)
Get some exercise shortly after getting up. (Likewise.)
Try and delay your caffeine intake a bit. (Challenging, but also agreed to not necessarily be essential.)
Get some food into you, preferably something which releases energy gradually.
Get to bed at a reasonable time at night. (Doesn't have to be early, just a sensible time.)

Supposedly it takes about three days to convince your body that you're starting a new routine, which is all to do with your circadian rhythms. The first two days are almost certainly going to be excruciatingly difficult, but it's important to stick with them. And, as time goes on, this (in theory) gets easier.

I've already made a sort of step towards improving my morning routine, in that I've given up using my phone as an alarm and instead got a clock radio. I find it somehow more conducive to waking up without feeling like complete shite, perhaps because it's not just the same sound every day that you eventually come to resent. The actual getting out of bed when it first sounds is still the challenging bit, but that's the "wall" you have to push through in order to achieve anything.

So from tomorrow, I'm going to attempt to push through that wall and make some improvements. I've got my alarm set early (7.30am — I start work at 9) and I'm going to do my absolute damnedest to get up straight away, get dressed and then go straight outside. Not only that, I'm going to walk to the nearby Tesco, get myself some coffee and something nice (but not overly awful for me) for breakfast. That would seem to tick off several of the steps above in one fell swoop. Sure, walking to Tesco isn't exactly a "workout", but most of the stuff I've read and watched over the last couple of days suggests that you don't need your morning exercise to be a full-on workout, just moving a bit. And a walk of about a quarter of a mile each way would, I'd say, qualify as "just moving a bit".

When COVID hit, a lot of us introverts joked about how nice it was to have state approval for staying inside all day. But over the last couple of years in particular, I've started to really appreciate how important it is to just go outside and get some air sometimes. Doesn't have to involve interacting with other people or doing anything adventurous, just, as the kids say, touch some grass.

So that's the plan from tomorrow. Let's see if I'm able to actually stick to it.

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#oneaday Day 218: Memories of Me: Sixth Form

I occasionally find myself pondering when I think the happiest time in my life was, and I always conclude with one of two closely related period: sixth form (for non-British folks, this is the optional "Year 12" and "Year 13" you take if you want to stay on in non-compulsory education after finishing secondary school, typically taken before going to university) and my four years at university (three on my BA in English and Music, one on my PGCE in Music). Today I want to reminisce a bit about the former.

There was absolutely no question as to whether or not I was going to stay on at school after I finished compulsory education. My life has, to date, followed the typical autistic/ADHD trajectory of performing very well in school, then sliding into tepid mediocrity in adult life, so at the point I was finishing my GCSEs, I knew that I wanted to stay on and keep studying. I ended up choosing English Language, English Literature, Sociology and Music as my four subjects; at my school, it was considered unusual to take four A-Levels (five if you count General Studies, but no-one in their right mind does, for reasons that will become apparent), but all my teachers agreed that I could handle it. So I did. (And I did.)

I was excited about sixth form. I had seen my brother pass through sixth form at the same school some ten years earlier, and I knew what a good time he'd had while he was there. He'd made some good friends, he'd had a band, he had a long-term girlfriend, and he'd studied some interesting-sounding stuff that wasn't anything like the boring old National Curriculum gubbins I'd gone through lower down the school. I was looking forward to the whole experience, though I was also nervous about a few things.

One of them was the fact that I'd have more contact with a teacher known as Mr Watts, who was renowned at our school as one of the most terrifying teachers there was. He taught History, had a severe-looking moustache that always make it look like he was furious and, to be fair, he often seemed to be furious — particularly at anyone under the age of 15.

I'd actually had a year of Mr Watts as a History teacher in… Year 9, I think it was? Kids of that age are just on the cusp of what he considered to be actual human beings, so we got a bit of a taste of what he was really like. He could still be terrifying if someone stepped out of line, sure, but he also had a wicked sense of humour, and was a genuinely excellent teacher.

That didn't stop me being nervous about the fact he was head of Sixth Form, though. I don't really know why, because I wasn't the sort of kid who got into trouble particularly regularly (I think I had a grand total of two detentions during my entire time at school, at least one of which I managed to wangle my way out of thanks to music rehearsals) but Mr Watts just had that sort of impressive aura about him that made you want to stay well and truly in line.

Thankfully, we quickly discovered that Head of Sixth Form Mr Watts was a completely different person to History Teacher Mr Watts. He was much more down-to-earth, much more willing to let that sense of humour shine through, and extremely supportive of anyone who came to him with questions or concerns. He was a comforting presence, in other words; it was a surprise to many of us, to be sure, but a welcome one.

Our year was the first to make use of the new sixth form centre that had been built on our school's campus. The Upper School Dining Hall (aka just "Upper Dining") had given its life so that the Sidney Banks Sixth Form Centre may live, and it was great. The building, being new, was in great condition, and it was outfitted with reasonably decent PCs for the period; prior to joining the sixth form, most of our computer-related lessons in school had been on Acorn Archimedes computers, but by the time we reached sixth form, proprietary platforms like the ol' Archie were falling out of favour as Windows 95-equipped PCs became the norm in homes, offices and society in general.

The sixth form centre mostly consisted of computer rooms, in fact. Each of its "classrooms" were in fact just rooms with tables and a bunch of PCs, and the main large room in the middle was split in half between the common room and a study area (with more computers), with a sliding divider door allowing for the rooms to be separated completely when necessary.

In the common room, we didn't have a lot of exciting facilities, but I recall we did have a stereo, and folks tended to bring magazines in and leave them for others once they were done with them. For the most part, though, the common room was a space for chilling out, hanging with friends and making use of any of your own entertainment that you had happened to bring.

As it happened, I ended up spending a lot of my time in sixth form in the Art room. My friends Ed and Woody were both studying Art, so in the times where I wasn't attending my own lessons, I tended to hang with them in there. Since the number of folks studying Art at A-level was relatively small, they had their own little common area in the corner of the art room; again, it wasn't really equipped with anything other than a few chairs, but it was a nice place to just hang out.

One thing we were supposed to do as part of our time at sixth form was attend General Studies lessons. We would, we were told, get another A-level out of these lessons, but after attending just one or two at the start of our time in sixth form, we realised that they were largely worthless, so we just… stopped going. And, as part of the whole "treating us as adults" thing that came along with joining the sixth form, no-one ever pursued us about it or queried us on it.

Well, that's not quite true. One General Studies period we did see Mr Watts out and about, seemingly looking for people, so we hid under the chairs in the Art room common area. But that was just once. We all did the exam at the end of our two years in sixth form; I don't know how anyone else did, but I got an "A" having attended one lesson in two years. That should give you a general idea of what General Studies is all about. (One of the questions on the final exam paper was "In Alice in Wonderland, the text describes the Cheshire Cat as 'disappearing tail first'. Assuming the cat did not simply vanish, which direction must he have moved to disappear in this way?")

I mostly enjoyed my A-level studies. I particularly enjoyed English Language, because we got to write essays about swearing, and English Literature exposed me to a variety of interesting novels and plays that I probably wouldn't otherwise have read. Sociology was a thoroughly interesting subject to study, too, and the overall "vibe" of those classes was quite interesting given I was the only boy present; the rest of the class was all girls, and our teacher, Mrs Lloyd, was, of course, a lady also. I wasn't made to feel out of place or anything, I hasten to add; in fact, throughout my time at secondary school, I'd become good friends with a lot of the girls in that class already, so it was nice to have some time where it was just me and them.

Music was a good time, also. At the time I was doing A-level Music, I was also preparing to take my Advanced Certificate practical exam, and doing so basically exempted me from having to do some of the Music A-level, which was pretty neat. The only bit of the Music course I didn't like was learning about how to do Baroque four-part harmony; it felt like it was frustratingly bound by rules rather than truly creative, and I didn't like the teacher much, either. He wasn't one of the regular Music teachers; he was actually the peripatetic strings teacher.

One of the best things about sixth form was how we weren't obliged to stay on the school campus all day if we didn't have lessons. That meant we often walked into town; it was probably about a mile's walk from the school to the town centre, and being young and (relatively) spry at the time, we could do this in a not-unreasonable amount of time.

Our typical town routine involved wandering down there, getting a steak slice and a Belgian Bun from The Baker's Oven, then visiting the CD shop Barneys and computer shop First Compute. Inevitably, upon a visit to the latter, I would be encouraged by my friends to pick up a new game, which I often did, and then we'd head back to school. The reason I was able to grab so many new games at the time was because I'd done some occasional freelancing for PC Zone and the Official Nintendo Magazine, and back in those days you'd get £500 for one article — an absolute fortune to a teenage kid, and, hell, an absolute fortune to anyone involved in freelancing for the games press today.

On one trip to First Compute, I happened to see that a budget rerelease of a piece of software called Klik and Play for PC was on one of the racks. I recalled reading a fun review of this in PC Zone by the one and only Charlie Brooker; a review that had attracted numerous complaints (as did many other pieces Brooker contributed) for using a game in which you knocked a decapitated Frenchman's head around the screen as its demonstration project.

I was attracted to Klik and Play because it promised programming-free game making. I'd previously learned to program in BASIC on Atari 8-bit and STOS on Atari ST, but had never really got into the upper echelons of "knowing how to code", and by this point in the late '90s, "coding" had moved into realms like C and Java, and I didn't really understand those at all. Klik and Play promised to allow creativity without needing to get super-technical, so I was excited to give it a go.

And boy did we love it. Not just me, but my friends Ed and Woody, too, since of course I let them borrow the disc and install it on their own PCs. We made so many stupid games with Klik and Play, many of which remained unfinished, but our crowning achievement was, without a doubt, Pie Eater's Destiny.

This was a game where we'd started with the title, which was intended to take the piss out of our mutual friend Andrew, who was a big lad and enjoyed the game Fighter's Destiny on Nintendo 64. It grew a life of its own after I was demonstrating how to use Klik and Play to Ed and Woody one day, and I imported a scanned image of Andrew's face as an enemy sprite, then added a ripped Contra sprite for the player to move around and shoot at the giant head.

Something about this stupid, humble beginning captured our imagination, and we ended up making a full game with full voice acting, with each level unfolding as a single boss fight against a digitised head of someone we knew, culminating with a battle against the most powerful force in the galaxy: Mr Watts.

Naturally, once Pie Eater's Destiny was completed, we brought it in to school to install on the sixth form computers, and we ended up showing it to Mr Watts. We were initially nervous about this, but the moment he saw that he was the villain, with his introductory line being simply "YOU PATHETIC BASTARDS, YOU WILL NEVER DEFEAT ME! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA", he was absolutely delighted with it.

My time at sixth form is full of wonderful memories like these. I don't recall a single moment of being unhappy while I was at sixth form, and dear Lord, I miss living that life and being that person.

But you can't go back, can you? So these memories have to remain just that: memories. Still, I will always have them, and when times get tough I can think back to a time where life just seemed simpler, easier, more full of possibilities. Not everyone has the luxury of good memories like this, so I should treasure them. And you'd better believe that I do, as the preceding 2,000 words has hopefully made clear.

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#oneaday Day 217: Fuck Facebook, and fuck Meta

I don't know if you've been following the recent news about Meta, Facebook's parent company, but if you still have an account over there for any reason, I thought you might be interested to learn the following.

A few days ago, Meta (which covers Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp Messenger) published some substantial changes to its Hateful Conduct policy, ostensibly a policy that was devised in order to, among other things, help marginalised groups feel safe using their services as a means of online socialisation. You can see the changelog at this link (click the "7 Jan 2025" link on the left of that page to see the changes highlighted), but here are some notable parts for your convenience:

The green highlighted stuff is newly added, the red strikethrough stuff has been removed. Note that the banning of "dehumanising speech in the form of comparisons to or generalisations about animals, pathogens or other sub-human life forms, including women as household objects or property or objects in general; black people as farm equipment; transgender or non-binary people as 'it'" has been removed. This was previously a "Tier 1" violation, among the most serious on the platform, and yet now it is A-OK.

Elsewhere:

In this section, you will see that Meta now "allows allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like 'weird'."

Elsewhere still:

So you're cool to, like, blame the Chinese or whatever group of Johnny Foreigners you think created COVID, if you even believe COVID existed at all in the first place because you're a nutcase who believes vaccination programmes are about Bill Gates trying to fit you with a microtransmitter.

I shouldn't have to point out that these changes are Bad, regardless of whether or not you fall into one of the "protected" categories. It's particularly telling that amid the parts people are mostly focusing on — the stuff about homosexual and transgender people — they snuck in a bit about regarding women as objects and black people as farm equipment. You know, just to make sure everyone except white straight cis men gets their own share of a kicking. On top of that, they have deleted the trans and non-binary themes for Facebook Messenger, as well as the blog post announcing them.

This is not a "freedom of speech" thing; this is deliberately courting the worst people in the world and giving them carte blanche to be as sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic as they desire with zero consequences. And you all know exactly why this has happened: because of the election result in the US.

The world's billionaires have been flocking to kiss Trump's ringpiece ever since the election, and of course Mark Zuckerberg is at the head of the queue. Social media is a veritable breeding ground for the worst kind of right-wing attitudes and has been for a while; all Zuck is doing is making it explicitly okay for this sort of thing to go on, much like Elon Musk has done with Twitter, destroying its value as social media in the process.

This isn't the only thing wrong with Facebook, of course. If you're still using it (again, I ask, why?) you have almost certainly seen how the News Feed or whatever it is called has declined over the years. Chances are yours has multiple "Suggested" posts (i.e. ads) in a row before you see anything from someone you actually care about, and many of those posts will be filled with AI-generated garbage slop like the infamous "Shrimp Jesus" and the many, many images of crying multiple amputee soldiers who don't exist saying it's their birthday. And rather than Facebook seeing this as a problem, it is being encouraged.

In fact, Meta announced plans to introduce AI-driven profiles to both Facebook and Instagram, presumably in an attempt to hide the fact that users are (correctly) leaving their services in droves. People stumbled across one of these AI-powered profiles on Instagram recently, discovering it to be, of course, full of images that never happened and hosting a chatbot that was little more than racial stereotyping. Meta were quick to say that this was an experiment from a few years back, but this is exactly the sort of shit they want to introduce.

Along the same lines, some Instagram users have found themselves presented with AI-generated images of themselves in their own feed, without having asked for them. In most cases, this is because Instagram's AI features count "using them once" as "perpetual consent to use your likeness", even if you don't want or need AI-generated images of yourself. Which no-one does.

Facebook is a shithole, and it's only going to get worse. If I haven't convinced you enough, I urge you to read at least some of the following links (plus the ones I've peppered throughout the above) for more on the story, because these folks report on this stuff for a living and can provide a lot more detail on what is going on.

Never Forgive Them by Ed Zitron – a comprehensive breakdown of how, over the last 10-15 years in particular, big tech has been systematically making life worse for everyone online under the guise of "growth". And it seeps into all areas of life, be it Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media, or a cheap laptop you buy from Amazon.

AI Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide by Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media. Not directly related to Meta, though it is a tale of why AI-powered anything relating to advertising (a category which Meta stuff firmly falls into) is a pile of shit. I will say 404 Media has been doing some of the absolute best reporting on all this for quite some time now.

Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. About how Zuckerberg doesn't believe the AI sludge that is taking over Facebook is a problem, and how he actually wants to encourage it.

Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. Self-explanatory, though you may be surprised at the answer to the headline and the reasons why.

Mark Zuckerberg, Recipient of World's First Rat Penis Transplant, Announces Meta Will Stop Fact-Checking by Matt Husser, The Hard Times. Also self-explanatory. The fact-checking thing is actually where all this started; Zuck is putting this side of things in the hands of the users via a Twitter-style "Community Notes" system, rather than having fact-checkers to combat disinformation on staff. Things just got worse from there.

Meta has 'heard the message' from Trump, says whistleblower Frances Haugen by Dan Milmo and Robert Booth, The Guardian. Some insider knowledge on the situation and how it's happening exactly because of the reasons you thought.

Look, I get it. I appreciate that some of you might not be able to delete your Facebook accounts because it's the only means you have of getting in touch with some people. I can't really delete mine either, because I have to use it for work, though I haven't used Facebook "personally" for years now because I saw it enshittifying a long time ago and jumped ship. The only Meta service I use these days — and that's irregularly — is WhatsApp.

But I would urge you to look over all of the above, and consider whether that is a company you still want to have any involvement with. Not only are the policy changes above actively harmful, the service as a whole has, as Zitron explains in his piece linked above, gradually been getting worse and worse, abusing its users in the name of profit and growth, for years at this point.

There are always alternatives. You can email people, just like in the good old days, or alternative messaging solutions like Discord, Zoom and Skype exist. They all have their issues, yes, but they're not actively being harmful like Meta is now. You can build a website to share your photos. Hell, if you're hooked on social media, there are plenty of better alternatives to Facebook now. (Just don't join TikTok.)

Online is a garbage fire right now, and it's only getting worse. One day, we might be able to look back on this whole sorry situation and laugh, but right now it's getting to a point where it's outright dangerous for some folks online. And I would hope that you, dear reader, don't want to be part of making that problem any worse.

If you didn't know anything about any of this prior to today, I hope you feel a little better informed now. And if you did, I'd urge you to take that step and move well away from Meta as soon as you are able.

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#oneaday Day 216: I've probably written all of this before

There are, as I type this, 2,850 posts on this blog. 2,851 including this one. As such, I've almost certainly written things multiple times. Yesterday's story about The Rough Book is one I've told before, for example, and even found myself using some of the same turns of phrase to describe various incidents.

But I think it's interesting to reflect back on things multiple times, many years apart, because doing so can cause you to look at those situations from a new perspective, perhaps with different life experiences under your belt. In the case of The Rough Book, I last wrote about it in 2012, when I didn't know I was autistic. Or, perhaps, when I hadn't been diagnosed as autistic. Because even in those innocent, pre-COVID days, I think I always knew that something was "up", as it were.

Hell, I mean, even COVID. Life has not been the same on Planet Earth since the pandemic hit, and many folks (including, I suspect, me and my wife) are still feeling the aftereffects (or perhaps it's more accurate to say ongoing effects) of the situation, thanks to the lack of understanding around things like "Long COVID" and suchlike.

It's hard to say if my life has got better or worse as time has gone on, looking back at these old posts and realising all the topics I've previously written about. I think, on the whole, I'm in a much better situation than I ever have been in every regard except for my physical health; I've had lower lows of mental health in particular (catastrophically low lows on multiple occasions) and I certainly have very little to complain about with my present employment situation.

I have found a niche and I'm damn well staying there as long as possible; I have no desire to ever go back to the periods of joblessness I've endured over the years. Even with the experience I've built up over the course of the past few years, I still feel like if I was suddenly out of work that I would struggle to cope in today's volatile, competitive job market. I have been very fortunate with the situation I've ended up in from that perspective. I took some risks to get here, in some ways it took an uncharacteristic amount of persistence, and I actually think the pandemic helped me secure the position I'm in now thanks to how it made remote working feasible for everyone.

I like having this blog, and being able to look back over the posts, particularly with the "Random Post" button at the top, then following a rabbit hole of "related posts". Of course, I have a big gap between the end of my first #oneaday stint and this one, but other things online — like MoeGamer and YouTube, for example — fill that gap to some degree. This is why I was so upset when WordPress.com pulled their whole "your blog has been deleted, teehee" shit a while back. This site isn't useful from a perspective of… well, anything, really, other than giving me a semi-private outlet to muse on whatever subjects I feel like writing about. But, goddammit, it's mine, and it's not beholden to any platform holders who can arbitrarily take it away from me. Not any more, anyway.

I don't get anywhere near the readership I used to with this blog. I don't even think my family and friends read it any more. I don't think anyone reads blogs any more, because they're too busy doomscrolling on social media or shit like TikTok. And while I hate that personally, I can't really tell other people what they "should" be doing, when the stuff I'm posting here is probably just as vapid as all the people yelling at the camera on TikTok.

Or is it? There's probably a whole discussion for another post in this, but I can say with complete honesty that what I've written here over the years has been an accurate reflection of me. I've always made a point of being honest — to myself as much as anyone who might be reading — while TikTok, from my admittedly limited experience to it, feels obnoxiously performative. Oddly, despite TikTok in theory being more "personal" thanks to being video-based — you see and hear the person — I still feel much more like I'm getting to know someone when I read what they write, rather than seeing them yelling breathlessly into their phone camera like the world's least scary follow-up to The Blair Witch Project.

It saddens me a bit that blogs aren't what they used to be. Hell, most people don't even call them "blogs" any more; these days they tend to be described as "newsletters", and most of them seem to be read via email rather than actually on their websites. But I'm still resolutely old-school in how I do things; this is my blog, and has been since (checks) 2008. And there's no real point changing up how I do things now, is there?

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#oneaday Day 215: Memories of Me: The Rough Book

Life changed for me and my friend Ed in secondary school when we discovered that the school library would sell you a new, blank exercise book in the colour of your choice for something like 30p. Ostensibly the option was there for those who had lost their exercise books and were replacing them at their own expense (the school would provide new ones for free when old ones were full, they weren't that stingy) but the librarian, Mrs Miller, didn't ask too many questions.

Mrs Miller was an interesting character, actually. As is often the case for school librarians, she developed something of a reputation for being a stickler for the rules and wanting to ensure everyone was silent at all times in the library. Of course, much of this was exaggerated by playground gossip, and Mrs Miller was, in fact, a thoroughly lovely person with a fun, dry sense of humour, and she was much more willing to demonstrate this side of herself to those who were further up the school.

But I digress. The important thing is that Mrs Miller would sell you a new exercise book for pocket change, and this meant you could use that book for whatever you pleased. Ed and I took to branding these quasi-illicit exercise books our "Rough Books", and they were used for all manner of things — primarily doodling, playing silly games and comic strips. It was in Rough Books that we established several fixtures of our teenage sense of humour, including:

The German Stickmen. A four-frame comic in which two German stickmen would get into an argument over something stupid, culminating in them going "Nein!" "Ja!" repeatedly at one another until one of them bellowed "ACHTUNG!" (like in Wolfenstein 3-D, you know) and inflicted some form of horrible (usually explosive) violence on the other. My favourite ran "Ich bin Fred." "Nein, du bist James." "Nein!" "Ja!" "Nein!" "Ja!" "ACHTUNG!" (nuclear explosion).
The X-35 Plasma Gun. Actually a creation of our mutual friend Daniel, the X-35 Plasma Gun didn't have a fixed form, but there was one constant in all its depictions: it was a gun one would hold with a pistol grip, but which carried a comedically large variety of attachments atop it, including not just additional weaponry such as bazookas and '50s-style laser guns, but also practical functions such as a washing machine and full-size bath. I will have to draw one of these again someday to truly get across what I mean, because I feel that description doesn't really do the X-35 Plasma Gun justice.
Adverts for games that we were making with Klik and Play. One day I acquired the budget release of Clickteam's Klik and Play, and thus began a new obsession of us trying to make our own games. We only ever finished one — Pie Eater's Destiny, a game that featured idealised versions of me and my friends (actually ripped and recoloured Contra III sprites) battling giant digitised heads of our classmates in space. But that didn't stop us from drawing fake adverts for the many, many half-finished games we made that are now, sadly, almost definitely lost to time.
Edlock Holmes and Watson. I talked about this in my video on The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, but the gist is this: Ed and I were obsessed with The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, so we made a comic that cast us in the role of "Holmes and Watson", and sent our virtual selves on various comedic adventures. There's probably an entire post of Edlock Holmes lore in me at some point, but that will have to do for now.

One of the most significant features of multiple Rough Books, though, was My Friends Hijack the Middle Pages and Write The Name of the Girl I Fancied That Week in Giant Letters. I feel the title for this is probably self-explanatory, but let me elaborate.

At school, I fell in love with a lot of girls, often for the most mundane reasons, like them acknowledging my existence, holding a conversation with me or allowing me to work in a group with them in class without being physically repulsed by my presence. I was too much of a socially awkward (retrospectively: autistic) teen to ever be able to express my feelings adequately to any of these girls, mind you, and thus most of my teenage years were spent feeling like a doomed poet, forever to suffer unrequited love from afar.

I secretly quite enjoyed the feeling of "being in love", though, regardless of whether or not anything actually happened. There was something about that teenage "butterflies in the stomach" feeling which was oddly… addictive, almost, and so, over time, I would flit from girl to girl, deciding that this time, she was absolutely the one for me, despite in most cases me not actually knowing that much about her at all, because that would involve talking to her and not making a complete idiot of myself, which my brain successfully convinced me on a daily basis was a complete impossibility.

Any time I fancied someone new, I would keep it quiet for a while, but after some time the feelings inside me would "boil over" to such a point that I had to admit it to one of my friends, even though I knew they would almost certainly take the piss out of me for it. And one of the ways they took the piss was getting hold of my Rough Book, then performing the sacred art of My Friends Hijack the Middle Pages and Write The Name of the Girl I Fancied That Week in Giant Letters.

The ornateness of how the name would be written varied from one occasion to another. Sometimes it would be in beautifully crafted, pencilled block letters. Sometimes it would be scrawled in multiple colours of felt-tipped pens. On one particularly memorable occasion, my Rough Book was returned to me with the name "NIKKI" (my affections returned to Nikki on multiple occasions; she was, to my teenage eyes and hormones, feminine perfection and, retrospectively, possibly the source of a mild tights fetish) beautifully painted in watercolours, which I feel was rather more grandiosity than the situation warranted, but such was the nature of my curious little friendship group.

I say they did this to take the piss. In their own way, I think they were showing a funny kind of "support" for my feelings. They knew that I was extremely unlikely to ever actually go up to any of these girls and ask them out, so they did what they could to make my feelings feel… "special". Sometimes they even went out of their way to try and put me in a situation with the girl in question — situations I would tend to squander due to my social ineptitude — and I don't think every one of those was an attempt to embarrass me in a malicious way.

Some of them absolutely were, mind. I have vivid memories of our class having been studying Romeo and Juliet in class, learning the expression "taking one's maidenhead" and numerous puns surrounding that phrase as euphemisms for taking a young lady's virginity. One lunchtime, one member of our class — Luke, a peripheral member of our friendship group at best — bellowed at the top of his voice "PETE WANTS TO CHOP DANIELLE'S HEAD OFF" while the Danielle in question (who I was, of course, exceedingly attracted to at the time and would have concurred privately with Luke's assessment had I not considered it a little disrespectful to contemplate the status of others' maidenheads) was most certainly well within earshot.

Thankfully, Danielle was cool, and someone I counted as an actual friend as well as someone I fancied, so on that occasion I actually successfully plucked up the courage to talk to her about it, apologise for Luke's outburst and successfully block myself off from ever being able to really admit I liked her by, in effect, friendzoning myself. (I also knew that she was, at the time, already going out with someone a bit older than her, and that fact intimidated me somewhat, as I did not want to end up on the receiving end of a beating from "Carmine", I believe his name was. Why do I remember this shit?)

Anyway. I got off the point there a bit, but I hope you enjoyed my memories of the Rough Book. I wish I still had some of them. I have a few bits of miscellanea from my teenage years, but sadly the Rough Books are not among them. By their nature, they were a transient form of media, doomed to end up in the bin so my parents and teachers didn't find them. But while they lasted they were a wonderful part of my secondary school days, and, as odd as it may sound, a big reason why I mostly look back on those days with fondness.

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#oneaday Day 211: Things that don't exist any more

I was watching a Game Grumps episode where they were playing Supermarket Simulator earlier, and, as is often the case with that series, discussion got well and truly off the topic of the game and onto other matters.

One of the subjects they talked about was "secret tracks" on CDs. The existence of these used to be common knowledge, but with digital music having been A Thing for so long now, it was pretty much necessary for Dan to explain what one of these actually was.

I doubt anyone reading this is young enough to not know what a secret track on a CD is, but on the off-chance you are (or if you've just forgotten), it's where the last track on the CD would end, but the CD would keep playing, often for 10-15 minutes of complete silence, before cutting in with an unexpected new song that wasn't on its own individual track.

You could generally identify a CD with a secret track by if its last song was more than 10 minutes long, though there were, of course, some bands who really did close out their album with 10+ minute prog rock-style epics. There were also, apparently, some bands who found ways to hide secret songs in the "pregap" before track 1, allowing you to "rewind" from the beginning of the CD and find something new. This is one thing I actually never knew existed, as I never came across any in my time listening to CDs — but, like secret tracks in general, they are a thing of the past.

Most streaming versions of albums have the "secret tracks" as a separate, discrete track, thereby making them no longer secret. This also eliminates the "surprise" element, where the CD ends but you're in the middle of doing something (typically homework, essays and suchlike at the time I was listening to CDs rather than digital music) and, ten minutes later, you get suddenly shocked by the appearance of a piece of music you weren't expecting.

It's a little thing, but it's a bit sad to think that such a phenomenon no longer exists. And the episode went on to describe some other things that don't really happen all that much any more, either — like getting together with pals and playing a split-screen game of something like GoldenEye.

Local multiplayer games still exist, of course, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of you reading this haven't engaged in one for quite some time — and if you have, you certainly don't do so regularly.

While I was at university, we had a definite routine. Get up, go to lectures (probably), get some lunch at the student union, head back to my friend Tim's house, where we'd drink and play N64 games, typically Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye or, later, Perfect Dark.

It's funny to think back on this time as I type this across the from from my 55-inch widescreen wall-mounted 4K television, because we were almost certainly playing these games on a CRT that was no bigger than 20 inches, likely even smaller. I remember getting (if I remember rightly) a 26-inch TV from a local second-hand store and being blown away by how enormous it was. (It was also a nightmare to dispose of when it finally gave up the ghost; I ended up illegally leaving it in the bottom of a dumpster outside the block of flats where I lived at the time. No-one ever traced it back to me, so I got away with it.)

These things may seem like little nothings, but I'm saddened to lose them. Of course, one can still experience secret tracks on CDs that still exist — and I'm sure some artists still releasing stuff on CD are still sneaking in secret tracks — but it's no longer something that's just part of regular mainstream popular culture. And one can still get friends over to play split-screen games on the Switch in particular — although given my experiences in recent years, good luck getting anyone to ever commit to anything, even a simple evening of gaming, less than 8 months in advance.

Those of us prone to nostalgia are that way not just because we pine for our younger days, when life seemed simpler and our minds and bodies were perhaps in better shape, but because there were things that existed back then that pretty much… aren't a thing any more. And so, we do our best to remember those things, and why we liked them. And now and again, we get a reminder of something like secret tracks on CDs, and it prompts some fond memories. (And, in some cases, a sudden desire to start collecting CDs again, I'm sure. I have remained mostly immune to this to date… though I will admit to being tempted on occasion!)

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#oneaday Day 209: Memories of Me: Primary School

Sometimes I wonder what pieces of actually helpful information go in one ear and out the other in favour of the long-term storage of memories I don't really need to (or in some cases want to) hold on to.

Chief among these are some memories of primary school that I just can't get rid of. Most people I know can't remember a lot about their primary school days, and for sure, there are doubtless many, many days at primary school that I cannot remember. But these particular instances — or perhaps just general vibes rather than specific memories — have stuck in my head over the long term, and they're not going anywhere.

"Lazy work. Very poor."

I learned quite early on that despite not being particularly terrible at it, I absolutely hated maths lessons. And so it was that in either Class 1 or Class 2 — definitely the Infants half of the school, either way, so I would have been no older than maybe 6 or 7 — that I had two, to me, utterly shameful pages in my maths exercise book.

On the left of the spread, a maths lesson where I had completed one (1) sum in the entire lesson. This has been marked as "Lazy work." On the right, a separate lesson where I had completed three (3) sums in the entire lesson, two of which I had got wrong. This, in turn, was marked "Very poor."

I was upset by this spread of pages, even though I knew both comments were completely and utterly deserved. I don't remember why I had such outstandingly bad performance in these two lessons in particular — as I say, I wasn't particularly bad at maths, overall, and was always in the "top group" for it — but that negative feedback shamed me into trying a bit harder in subsequent sessions. I don't recall having any work in my exercise books ever being so shameful ever again. So… I guess it sort of worked, despite making me feel like shit?

Lunchtime fury

I don't know why (or rather, I've forgotten why) but in my later years at the primary school I went to, I spent a lot of my lunchtimes being furious and taking out my aggression on one of the "dinner ladies", actually a volunteer who would keep an eye on the kids in the playground at lunchtime.

I vividly recall deliberately getting furious about something in front of her and trying to provoke her, on multiple occasions, but not why. I would kick over the bin, I would yell at her, I would, inevitably, get in trouble. I feel like I was trying to achieve something or make a point, but that point is long lost, leaving me with just memories of ill-focused fury.

Perhaps it was a defence mechanism of sorts. I got bullied a lot at primary school, particularly by the older kids when I was still in the Infants classes, so perhaps I thought if I was extra annoying to the dinner lady, I would be taken into a sort of "protection", despite being "in trouble" myself. Retrospectively, that seems like the most logical conclusion, but I can't be sure that was ever the reason at this point.

Pissing myself in P.E.

For some reason, having to go to the toilet during lesson time at school has always been the ultimate taboo. In secondary school, it's discouraged because it's often assumed that those who "escape" lessons, ostensibly to go to the toilet, will take the opportunity to skive off, go for a smoke or otherwise do something they shouldn't be doing. In primary school, it is perhaps a little less justifiable.

And so it was that I commenced a school P.E. lesson in my '80s shorts, urgently needing the toilet and being told I couldn't go. This was an inaccurate assessment of the situation, because I could, in fact, "go", and did so right there on the playground. Oddly enough, I don't remember being mocked or anything for it; I just remember being curiously fascinated by how pissing with clothes on could still result in piss going everywhere, not just "wetting your pants", as the vernacular had it.

The Log

At primary school one day, we were inexplicably provided with a large log, ostensibly as something to play on and around. And The Log was, for quite a long time, a really cool place to play.

The more daring kids would climb atop it and run along it, but for many, the greatest appeal was "making piggy dust", which involved getting a twig and scraping away at the wood to create sawdust. Over time, we carved the shit out of that damn log, making it so it had natural platforms and footholds along the way; the poor thing lost all its external bark as part of this process — and, I recall, the teachers and dinner ladies often made half-hearted attempts to discourage us from "making piggy dust".

I don't know what ultimately happened to The Log. I'm pretty sure it remained in its place at the edge of the playground for the entire time I was at primary school, but it, unsurprisingly, was no longer there the last time I happened to pay a visit to the school in question.

It

Most of you reading doubtless have variations on Tag (or "It", as we called it) that you played in the playground. The ones I can recall are thus:

It: One person is "It". They have to tag someone else, who then becomes "It". Sometimes the semicircular areas at the ends of the netball court on the playground were considered "homey", where you couldn't be tagged, sometimes they were not.
Bulldog: One person starts as "It". When they tag someone, that person also becomes "It". The game continues until everyone is "It". "Homey" was more commonly in use in Bulldog than in It.
Chains: As Bulldog, but all the Its had to hold hands, making an increasingly long human chain the longer the game went on. This game inevitably turned dangerous, leading to it being discouraged by most teachers and dinner ladies who were on duty.
Top Gun: The rules for this one were ill-defined, but it was mostly It, but instead of tagging you had to repeatedly punch someone in the arm. (That was you "hitting them with your machine guns").

To determine who was "It" to begin with in any of these games, some variant of "Foot In" was used. For the unfamiliar, this involved someone yelling "FOOT IN FOR BULLDOG!" or whatever we were playing, and everyone who wanted to play standing in a circle with one foot in the middle. Then, whoever started shouting "FOOT IN FOR [whatever]" would perform one of the following rhymes, pointing to each foot in turn according to an accepted rhythm that wasn't necessarily matched to the syllables or words:

"Ibble obble black bobble, ibble obble out." (Whoever was declared "Out" would not be it and would remove their foot from the circle. The process would then repeat until everyone except one person was "Out", and that person would become "It".)
"Ip dip dog dip, you are not it." (Officially this was supposed to be "ip dip dog shit" to better rhyme with "It", but we knew better than to swear in earshot of teachers and dinner ladies. As with "ibble obble black bobble", this resulted in a gradual elimination of people until you were left with one "It".)
"Ip dip dog dip, you are it." (A surprise variation that usually occurred when the caller calculated the least popular member of the group would end up as "It" if they said the rhyme this way. Almost always resulted in arguments.)

Learning the word "Shit"

One time in Class 2, we were doing some… form of class work. I forget what. I was in Blue Group, which was a group of the most "able" kids, and we were being taught by Mrs Powell, who wasn't our regular teacher but who would often cover things when Mrs Robson, our usual teacher, was not present. This was one of those days.

I think we were doing some sort of English exercise. Like I say, I don't remember exactly what. What I do remember is Natalie Forster, the only girl in Blue Group, spelling out "S – H – I – T" to herself while writing something down. Having never heard the word before (I was like 6 and my exposure to even PG movies had been somewhat limited) I promptly said the unfamiliar word out loud.

"Shit?" I enquired, confused. I thought she was trying to spell "ship" but had gotten it wrong somehow. I genuinely didn't know it was a swear word at the time. But the rest of Blue Group did. "Ummmmm!" came the inevitable cry of kids around you about to tell tales on you. One of Blue Group — it may even have been Natalie Forster herself — reported my inadvertent transgression to Mrs Powell, who yelled at me.

"I certainly hope you did not say that, Peter Davison," she bellowed, loud enough for the whole class to be looking at me. "Or I shall have to wash your mouth out with soap and water!"

Ah, public shaming and threats of physical abuse. They don't make 'em like they used to.

Bundle

One kid would shout "BUNDLE!" and jump on another kid. Then everyone else would jump on him. (It was always a "him", as girls never got involved in Bundles.) The result was a large and painful pile of boys. There was no game here, it was just something we did. This is one of those things that I understand was quite common, but I have no idea how the concept is transmitted from one schoolyard to another. I don't remember being explicitly "taught" it, it was just something that one day we knew we had to do whenever someone shouted "BUNDLE!"

Dizzyland

This was a game of sorts that involved putting both arms out to your sides, shouting "DIZZYLAND!" while giggling, then spinning around as much as you could for as long as you could without falling over. Bumping into each other was encouraged. Theoretically whoever stayed standing the longest was the "winner", but I don't recall it ever really getting to that point, as we were usually gently discouraged from doing this by teachers and dinner ladies on duty.

Bumper Cars

Fold your arms. Then run as hard as possible at another person. Ideally they will have folded their arms also, so you "bounce" off each other, but there was often a certain amount of catching people by surprise involved. There was no real "game" here, again, it was just something we did for a while. Eventually, someone would get bored, and Bumper Cars would cease.

Mr. Edwards

Teacher of Class 3 (years 3 and 4) at my primary school when I was there was Mr. Edwards, a rather hippie-like individual with a mullet and a moustache. I remember him being a good teacher who was always pretty calm about things, and we used to have a nice regular "Circle Time", where he'd get out his guitar and we'd sing stuff like Worried Man Blues together.

I don't remember a lot about lessons under Mr. Edwards, but I remember his class having a thoroughly nice vibe to it all.

Mrs. Barratt

Mrs. Barratt was in charge of Class 4 (years 5 and 6) at my primary school, and everyone who was not in those classes was terrified of her. She was a severe older lady who drove a Mercedes and spoke posh, like. She had a reputation for cracking down on troublemakers with an iron fist, so most people were afraid of ever crossing her. In fact, I remember coming to the close of my time with Mr. Edwards and being genuinely scared of joining Class 4 the following school year; I desperately wanted there to be a shift round of which teachers did which classes (as there had been a couple of times while I went through the years) and Mrs. Barratt to avoid our cohort altogether, but it was not to be.

Happily, Mrs. Barratt turned out to be one of the absolute best teachers. She was clever, she was funny, she encouraged everyone to do their best. She absolutely didn't take any shit from anyone, but it was rare anyone in her class gave her shit, because they respected rather than feared her.

I attribute at least some of my love of learning and writing to Mrs. Barratt, because she would set us interesting research tasks for a bit of light homework to bring in the next day, and in carrying out those assignments I learned a lot about topics I otherwise wouldn't have known anything about. I also vividly remember somehow incorporating "antidisestablishmentarianism" and "floccinaucinihilipilification" into the Daily Spellings lessons (and spelling them correctly), which got me some credit.

Mrs. Barratt's class is also the first time I remember doing a lot of things, with two of the chief ones being making cakes and science experiments. We wouldn't actually bake the cakes ourselves, but we'd do all the prep work, mixing and putting into tins and suchlike in class, then they'd be baked in the school's oven in the staff room for us to take home at the end of the day.

As for the science experiments, the one that sticks in my mind is one where we'd put an empty tin on a little electric camping stove and put cling film over the top, and we'd see the cling film "bulge" out as a visible demonstration of how hot air rises. I don't think we actually performed this one ourselves, as I suspect we wouldn't have been trusted with camping stoves at the age of like 10, but I do remember being so struck by the stern warnings that "if you don't take this off soon enough, it will explode" that I incorporated "exploding can-stove-cling-film" traps into some of the first ever custom HeroQuest quests I created for myself, not realising that "explode" meant "the cling film will pop" rather than "action movie-style explosion with fire and smoke".

So it's fair to say my time at primary school was… mixed at best. I have some good memories and some awful ones. Certain aspects of the experience helped shape who I am today, for better and worse. But regardless of all that, it seems these memories are there to stay, for one reason or another.

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#oneaday Day 208: Yet another new beginning

Yes, it's 2025! Hooray and all that. I'm sure all of you are winding down after the holiday period, and I suspect many of you are not relishing the idea of returning to work tomorrow. I know I'm certainly not — and I like my job. Still, at least it's only two days before another weekend, then we have to get properly back to the grindstone as normal.

Doubtless many of you are contemplating new year's resolutions, too. I certainly have been, even though I know they generally don't lead anywhere particularly productive. I am determined, though, to make this the year that I have a positive impact on my physical and mental wellbeing. I have been in a sorry state since the COVID lockdown years, and I want to get back to a state where I'm feeling vaguely human again.

To that end, tomorrow is a fresh start on Being Sensible With Food. I'm not jumping into anything like Slimming World or WeightWatchers or anything — just doing what the wife and I were doing before the holiday period, which is counting calories and being sensible about what we put in our mouths each day. I'd also like to make an effort to drink much more water each day, too; it is commonly cited that when you think you feel hungry, you're actually thirsty, and drinking plenty of water throughout the day helps deal with that very well indeed.

Only trouble is that the water which comes out of our taps is rank. It's always been kind of minging thanks to us living in a hard water area, but just recently it's really started reeking of chemicals, too. Actually, just recently it hasn't been so bad, but back in November or so it was barely drinkable. (Then we completely lost water for about a day and a half in mid-December, so that was nice.)

So yeah. My plan for action is to get up early, kick off this process by weighing myself before breakfast, and taking care to record everything, ensuring I don't go over the calorie limit each day. I was actually doing pretty well with this before the holiday season hit, so I think it will be fine to get back to this. I just need to stick to it over the long term, which is where the NHS app that helps you track calories comes in. That aims to get you following the programme non-stop for 12 weeks to see what an effect it has, so my first and only resolution this year is to do that 12-week programme.

That is, as they say, a Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-based goal. SMART, if you will. From there, we'll see how it goes. I'm feeling vaguely positive right now, so time to knuckle down and get on with it.

If you're in a similar situation, where you want (or need) to achieve something to better yourself, best of luck with it. I suspect the year ahead is going to be challenging for many, but if you take care of yourself, that's one fewer thing to worry about, ain't it?

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#oneaday Day 207: Happy new 2025!

I'm writing on mobile and you hopefully know by now how much I hate doing that, so I'll keep this brief.

A very happy new year to each and every one of you.

We all know that, practically speaking, the turn of a new year is not particularly "meaningful" or important. But we, collectively, have ascribed a symbolic importance to January 1st and the beginning of a new year.

It's a time for fresh starts, new beginnings and, yes, resolutions. I'll get into those tomorrow, but for now let's just say that if you've been putting off some sort of Big Project, be it a creative work, home improvement or self-betterment in some way… now is as good a time as any to get stuck into it and start making some progress.

You may not necessarily be able to maintain momentum for the whole year, and that's fine. The important thing is to make that start, and the symbolic time of "rebirth" that is a new year is the perfect time to make that start.

I know we're all facing our own challenges, and folks in the States in particular are facing down a particularly miserable period in their history. On top of that, we have the scourge of AI devastating the planet and ruining the economy. It is, I'm sure, easy to feel hopeless.

But do what you can — just for yourself if for no-one else. You may not be able to make a difference to all the shit going on in the greater world right now, but you can make a difference for both yourself and those close to you.

Best of luck for another year of this shit. We're going to need it — but we've also survived this long, so what's another year?