#oneaday Day 265: Corporate Inefficiency

I have worked for Big Corporations before on a few occasions in my life, and while my experiences were… mixed, to say the least, there were some occasional good times. At one of them, anyway. The other was inoffensive at best; the last is a period of my life that I would set fire to if it was possible to do such a thing with an expanse of time.

But my God I do not miss corporate policy and procedure, also known as the three thousand steps you are supposed to take in order to get anything done.

I obviously can't give specifics for various reasons, but I have been contending with this sort of thing just recently. I work for a small company who, by virtue of its size, is able to Get Shit Done in a pretty timely manner for the most part. Occasionally we have setbacks, but we deal with them, we communicate directly with one another and, for the most part, we handle the challenges each day presents us.

Just recently, I have been having to deal with a large corporation. As noted, I can't say who, or what, or why, and I wouldn't even if I was able to. Let's just say it's a large company and leave it at that.

On the 7th of this month, I sent something over to our contact at this company for them to review, give their stamp of approval and let us get on with our jobs. It is now the 27th of this month, my contact is still "putting a team together" to look at one document I sent them twenty days ago and I'm just sitting here wondering what on Earth these people are doing all day.

In working with all manner of different companies to do what we do, I have encountered many different responses to "can you just give this document a quick once-over and let us know if everything's OK with it?".

The absolute best people to work with are the ones who go "yeah, that all looks fine, we trust your judgement" and let us get on with it, usually responding within a day or less. These are not as uncommon as you might think, but I do wish they were a bit more common. This usually happens when you are dealing with an individual rather than a company.

The next best people to work with are the ones who provide helpful and timely feedback. The ones where they might have a few specific "requirements" when working with them, but who are perfectly helpful and nice about the whole thing, and get back to you promptly. This usually happens when you have a single point of contact who you have a good relationship with at a reasonably sized company.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the ones who come back with an absolute mountain of last-minute feedback that it would have been nice to know a little bit earlier, but who are still remarkably understanding about the whole thing and often quite apologetic. This can be annoying, but at least it's workable. This tends to happen if there is a bit of a language barrier that precludes more "real-time" communication and feedback.

And then you have this situation, where you send out one document and twenty days later it doesn't appear that anyone has looked at it whatsoever because they're still arguing about who should look at it. This happens when you are dealing with a larger company, although the exact degree depends on the company.

This is by far the most frustrating experience I've had with this whole "getting sign-off" step in the grand scheme of what we do on a day-to-day basis, and I'm aware I'm being vague about all this, but I sort of have to be.

But I also wanted to express my frustration. Because it's really fucking annoying, not just for me but for the other people who need to use my document (once approved) to get on with their jobs. And there is no good reason for it. It will inevitably be some sort of Corporate Policy and Procedure that is bogging things down, some capital-P Process that is being followed internally their end while we are left completely in the dark as to why we've been left twiddling our thumbs for twenty sodding days.

If you're someone who replies to emails immediately, thank you. If you're someone who trusts professionals to do their job, double thank you. And if you're the one responsible for creating stupid, pointless, irritating corporate delays like this… well, I hope you step on a Lego brick in the very near future.

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#oneaday Day 263: Room service

It is, if you will pardon my deliberate misuse of a term typically used to mean something else, that time of the month again: the time when I get to drive two and a half hours from my home, hole up in a hotel for the evening and then go in to the office tomorrow.

The hotel I normally stay at, known as The Broadway, is quite nice. The rooms are pleasant and the beds are comfortable. My only real objection is that its bathrooms are very inconsistent. Sometimes I'll get a room with a lovely big bath, which it is a delight to luxuriate in after that long drive. And at others, you'll get ones like the one I have this time, featuring a shower cubicle far too small for a human being (let alone a larger gentleman such as myself) and a toilet placed in such a way that you have to lean around the toilet paper dispenser to be able to sit down and do a poo.

Oh, and they use those horrible office-style single sheet toilet roll dispensers, too. I have taken to bringing my own proper toilet roll rather than spend my poos here scrabbling away at sheets of toilet paper far too thin to have any practical purpose whatsoever.

The one thing I will particularly compliment the Broadway on is its food. In the morning, you get a lovely breakfast included, and it's much better than what you'd get in something like a Travelodge or Premier Inn, in that someone cooks it for you to order rather than batch cooking everything and leaving it to congeal under heat lamps.

I hadn't had dinner here before, so I thought I'd treat myself this evening, and it was excellent. I had a full rack of ribs followed by a chocolate sundae, and both were delicious as well as being generous portions. Bad for the diet, of course, but these trips away always mess with any good intentions to eat healthily, anyway. Back on track when I get home tomorrow.

Tomorrow's session at work promises to be interesting. Rather than just a regular day at the office, we're having a day of brainstorming product ideas, so I'm intrigued to see exactly how ambitious the organisers think we should be. I obviously won't be able to tell you anything that is decided or discussed tomorrow, but I have some fun ideas that it will hopefully be enjoyable to brainstorm a bit.

And with that in mind, it's probably time to get some sleep. So I'm off to do just that.

#oneaday Day 262: Just a little bit worse

I'm aware that the following is going to make me sound painfully middle-class, but I'm going to say it anyway, because it's important to the story.

When I was a kid, the ultimate treat for enduring a shopping trip with my parents was not a trip to McDonald's or a big bag of sweets. It was going to the Marks and Spencer food section, getting a prawn and mayonnaise sandwich and a can of Caribbean crush, and enjoying both of those in the car park before the drive home. I'm not exaggerating when I say those sandwiches were delicious, and I'd give anything to experience them again.

"So just go to Marks and Spencers and get one," you may well say. And to that I would simply say… they're not the same. Just as so many other things are not the same as they used to be; just as so many other things have been gradually, subtly, almost imperceptibly enshittified over the years, so too have Marks and Spencer prawn and mayonnaise sandwiches.

In fact, pre-packed sandwiches in general have been on a downward spiral for many years now. When I was a little old to be dragged around Cambridge shopping with my parents, my friend Plummer and I would often go out for a drive of an evening, perhaps stopping by a nearby "old man pub" that we enjoyed, then swinging by the 24-hour Tesco petrol station to enjoy some midnight sandwiches before going home. While those sandwiches were never quite of the same quality as the mythical Marks and Spencers prawn and mayonnaise sandwiches, they were still pretty good.

Nowadays, every time I stop by a shop and think "oh, I'll get a Meal Deal" I also accompany that thought with "maybe the sandwiches will be better this time". But they never are. The bread is always soggy and too cold, the fillings are always underseasoned, nigh-flavourless in many cases, and as someone who physically retches if he can taste raw onion, my options are often a bit limited, to boot.

The possibility had occurred to me that perhaps I was nostalgically romanticising the concept of pre-packed sandwiches, and particularly the Marks and Spencers prawn mayonnaise sandwich. But then I consider all the other things which are indisputably worse than they used to be, and it's hard not to feel like everything now costs more but is also considerably worse.

Take a Kellogg's Variety pack, for example. I used to love these, because it was a bunch of little cereal packets, one portion each, that meant you could have a varied breakfast each day. Some of them were "healthy" (and I use the term loosely with regard to breakfast cereal, I'm aware), such as Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies, but there were always some "treats" in there too: Frosties, Ricicles, Coco Pops. I used to love getting a Variety pack when I went to go and visit my Nan; she'd always get them in for me because she knew I enjoyed them, and she'd always make me jelly and ice cream. I miss her and my Grandad.

A while back, Andie and I went for one of our occasional holidays at Center Parcs. While I was there, I thought "hey, I'll get a Variety pack! I haven't had one for ages." I was disappointed to discover that not only to Ricicles just flat-out not exist any more, but the balance in the Variety pack was now overwhelmingly in favour of Rice Krispies, one of the most boring cereals on the planet. Two packets of regular Rice Krispies and a packet of Rice Krispies Multigrain Shapes, whatever ungodly abomination of the breakfast table those might be. (They're not awful. But they're also not interesting.)

Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes, too, used to be my all-time favourite cereal, but the last box of them I've had has been immensely disappointing as has the box of Weetos I got alongside them. Neither of them are so bad as to make me want to throw them out completely, but they're also both considerably inferior than they once were. They just seem to lack a lot of the flavour that they once had.

I know the answer, of course: it's sugar. Everything has far less sugar in it these days, because sugar is the great sin that has made us all fat. And perhaps there's some truth to that — but then I also find myself thinking that numerous previous generations had full-sugar, full-fat diets and came through the experience without ballooning into an obesity epidemic. So what went wrong? How is it that our bland, flavourless, low-sugar, low-fat, joy-free food of today is still making us fatter than we've ever been in our lives?

Reflecting on things, I think part of the problem might be that the lack of sugar in "staples" such as the everyday breakfast cereal specifically makes me crave some actual sugar. And that's when I go out and get a chocolate bar or a cinnamon bun or whatever. And because I feel that so frequently, and so often indulge myself, I am, not to put too fine a point on it, a fat fuck.

Would I feel differently if my everyday food had more sugar, more fat, more flavour to it? I don't know. I know that I have gradually gained weight over the course of the last 25-30 years or so, but the vast majority of that weight has been in the last five years, since COVID. In those last five years, I've felt far more cravings for things that are bad for me than ever before, and I think that's a big part of the problem. When your everyday foods are leaving you feeling unsatisfied and craving more, you're tempted to binge on the things you're craving just to try and feel a little more fulfilled.

It's a more complex situation than that, of course; as I've alluded to numerous times on this blog, my relationship with food is more akin to an addiction, and is tied closely to my mental wellbeing. But I do often find myself wondering that if our everyday food and drink was a bit less artificially bland, we might all paradoxically be a bit better off.

No way to know, really, I guess. All I'm left with is the absolute certainty that if I get a prawn and mayonnaise sandwich from Marks and Spencer today, I will be left disappointed thanks to soggy bread, flavourless prawns and reduced-fat mayo. Not a patch on the real thing from 30+ years ago. And I don't think we're ever getting that back.

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#oneaday Day 257: When it's bollocks, say it's bollocks

I am an avid reader of Ed Zitron's blog (sorry, newsletter, because apparently that's just what we call blogs now) Where's Your Ed At? If you're at all interested in the tech space, I highly recommend you subscribe or at least check in on it regularly, because Zitron is one of the only people in the space who has the balls to say it like it is: that an awful lot of what is coming out of the mouths of tech companies right now is complete and utter bollocks.

Today, a story went round about a research project at Microsoft where they were using generative AI for "game ideation", and also noted that they thought they could use their generative AI models for "preservation". This was reported on by Tom Warren, senior editor at The Verge, thus (screenshotted rather than embedded 'cause the coward deleted it after everyone dunked on it):

Now, if you know anything about video game preservation, you know that feeding an old game into a generative AI model and then hoping it will hallucinate at least a rough approximation of the original game experience is not "preservation". It's bastardisation at best, a completely useless endeavour at worst, and a massive waste of energy and money regardless of the result that comes out of the other end.

Game preservation is a problem that, for the most part, we have solved. We have excellent software emulation solutions, built over the course of decades of development. Hardware emulation via FPGA at an affordable cost for the general public has advanced hugely in just a few short years. Software libraries for pretty much any system you can think of are archived in their entirety at numerous places across the Internet, and strong strides have been made in providing commercial, legally relicensed versions of classic games for a modern audience, both on existing modern systems and on bespoke emulation-centric devices.

So why, then, why the fuck would we want a generative AI model to make a best guess at what a video game that already exists and has been preserved perfectly well might look like if you play it for longer than 10 frames?

That paragraph above is what tech journalists should be asking. And the reason I bring up Ed Zitron at the start of this post is because he's one of the only people to actually ask questions like this: to take a look at the utter garbage being spewed by today's tech companies and to say "this is complete horseshit, what the actual fuck are you on?"

And Zitron, being an outspoken type, is not afraid to call out today's tech journalism space for not doing this. And he's absolutely right to do so. It is the tech journalism sector's job to look at what it going on, to realise that it is complete horseshit and then have the confidence to say that it is complete horseshit.

But they won't do that, for a variety of reasons. Advertising deals. Exclusive access. PR partnerships. An inexplicable desire not to rock the boat, despite the fact the boat has a huge hole in it and has been steadily sinking for 15-20 years at this point.

I'm not one of those people who thinks that journalists are taking bribes for positive reviews in literally all circumstances — I have experience in the industry, remember, and the most I had to worry about in that regard was a mild admonishment from my editor for criticising a Mortal Kombat game's DLC plan when Mortal Kombat was the cover game for that issue of GamePro.

But come on now. Tech journos should be looking at this utter garbage that keeps getting flung our way, and instead of declaring it "interesting" and doing the stupid looky-eyes emoji that makes their post immediately look like a 14 year old girl wrote it, they should be going "hang on a minute, what does that actually mean?" then exploring it further, asking some probing questions (which inevitably won't get a response, but that in itself says something) and then confidently declaring the latest generative AI "innovation" to be what it is: complete and utter horseshit doused in the finest snake oil.

And people wonder why the entire journalism sector is floundering. Could it perhaps be because very little actual journalism seems to be getting done?

Shout-out at this point not only to Ed Zitron's aforementioned blog, but also the excellent coverage of the Elon Musk nonsense in the States by Wired's politics department, 404 Media being a rare example of tech journalism that actually asks those hard-hitting questions, and Aftermath for doing something similar with games journalism. There are still people doing good work out there. But the people on the big, well-known mastheads, like Warren above, need to step their game up, stop being so incredulous and start acting like actual journalists.

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#oneaday Day 254: Nothing Much

I've had a nice quiet weekend that has been almost entirely occupied with Xenoblade Chronicles. I thought about making some videos, but decided that I didn't really have the mental fortitude to sort that out, so I have just had a completely relaxing weekend where I thought about nothing of any importance whatsoever, and just enjoyed myself.

This is a valuable thing to do now and again, particularly if you are feeling any sort of burnout or stress, which I most certainly have been of late. Honestly, I feel like I am starting to come out of the other side of the funk I've been in for the last while. I'm not completely out of it by any means just yet — and I'm sure the first time I look at social media for work on Monday I will suffer a mental health setback — but I am feeling a bit better, partly for having spent some time just relaxing, partly for having got some things off my chest with the post the other day, and partly… well, these things just pass eventually, usually.

That, honestly, is one of the things that's kept me holding on through difficult times — the knowledge that "this, too, shall pass". It always has done. Sometimes there have had to be difficult decisions made in order to encourage this, too, to indeed pass, but for the most part, just gritting your teeth and hanging on in there generally allows one to pass any number of this, toos, that might find themselves coming your way. And thankfully this most recent bout of the blues appears to have fallen into that category.

One thing I try to do when I'm feeling low is to ponder the things I do have that I should be — and am — grateful for. I'm not saying that just because you have things to be grateful for that you shouldn't be sad, of course — processing one's emotions is important and healthy — but rather, I think I'm saying that when things get hopeless I find it helpful to remember that I do not, in fact, have nothing, and that as difficult as it can be to appreciate that when you're down the bottom of a depression hole, those things you do have are a welcome sight when you eventually clamber back out.

That was a tortured metaphor, I know, but I'm just bashing things out on fumes here. Early night tonight and an attempt to get back into a routine of feeling like a vaguely normal human being. I don't know if I'm quite ready to return to the super-early mornings and going for a walk down to the shop, but I can at least look to tomorrow with good intentions if nothing else.

I hope you've had a pleasant and appropriately relaxing weekend, and that your week ahead isn't looking too stressful or chaotic. I am very much ready for a break, but I have a couple of weeks to get through before I can enjoy that break. That's feeling eminently doable at this point, though, so here's to Getting Back Into Things.

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#oneaday Day 253: Why do I need software to make my keyboard charge

I've been having an issue with my fancy, expensive Razer keyboard for a while. I've had it plugged in to USB, but as soon as I take the USB cable out, it seems to completely forget that it's been on charge and just die. This meant that I couldn't use it wirelessly, which was one of the keyboard's main selling points: it was a rare example of a mechanical keyboard that was also wireless. It didn't used to do this.

For a while, I just thought the battery was dead. Then I remembered that I'd uninstalled the Razer software a while back, because a shonky update process had made it cause my computer to pitch a shitfit and completely lock up for ages. So, out of curiosity, today I reinstalled the Razer software, plugged in the keyboard to charge and went off to play Xenoblade Chronicles for a couple of hours.

I am now typing this with the keyboard's USB cable unplugged, and the battery reading 100%. So it was the fucking software. My keyboard officially will not charge its battery unless you have Razer's stupid software installed.

Thankfully, they seem to have fixed whatever the locking-up issue was when I uninstalled it, so it's not a huge inconvenience to have it installed again. But it's pretty annoying to have spent several months thinking that my keyboard was broken in some way, or that it needed a new battery, only to discover that a completely arbitrary piece of software was preventing my keyboard from doing something that, you'd think, it should be able to do without any software intervention whatsoever. I mean, USB charging is a fundamental part of most of our tech these days, and most pieces of tech can charge without a piece of software running. You just plug them into a wall, the device goes "ooh, there's power coming in, I should route that to the battery" and that's that.

But no. Not for Razer, apparently, and I suspect there's other manufacturers who do the same thing, too. Logitech, for example, pissed people off when they tried to install some weird AI software into people's mouse drivers a while back, and the general enshittification of tech is, at this point, extremely well documented — though the number of people actually doing something about it, or even acknowledging that it's a problem, is rather slimmer than it perhaps should be.

Now, I'm not saying that my £150 keyboard not charging when its software isn't installed is really making my life significantly worse in the same way that Facebook and Instagram's abusive practices are systematically destroying the mental wellbeing of individuals in the name of perpetual corporate growth, but it's still symptomatic of the age we're living in. 20 years ago, if I had a wireless thing with a rechargeable battery, I could just plug it in and be safe in the knowledge that it would, y'know, charge. Today, apparently, that is not the case. And that seems stupid. Really stupid.

But I guess that's the world we live in now. So, for now at least, we just have to live with the stupidity.

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#oneaday Day 252: Lighter fare

Whew, that was heavy going yesterday huh? I am pleased to report that it resulted in some healthy and worthwhile discussions, so I'm pleased I plucked up the courage to write it. But I figured I should probably go a little lighter this evening. And not just because I've left it until 1am to write this.

I've been enjoying working my way through the first season of Angel as some bedtime viewing, and I'm now about halfway through the fourth disc of the set. I'm glad that this show is just as good as I remembered; I'm always a little concerned when revisiting an old favourite after many years, but thinking back on things, there's been very few, if any, occasions when I've felt let down by something I used to love.

Perhaps this is because in a lot of ways, I've never really left the past completely behind. I often think back fondly on my school and university days, for example, which is when I was enjoying shows like Friends and Angel, and hell, I still play a lot of the video games I played from before I was even ten years old.

There have only been a couple of things that I'm hesitant to go back to, and they're all things that raging transphobe Graham Linehan was involved in — stuff like Father Ted and The IT Crowd. But then I haven't had a problem going back to Angel knowing that Joss Whedon is a bit of a tool, because "his" shows were much more about the writers, the directors and the actors than just him. So I'm sure if I went back to Linehan's shows I'd be separating art from artist in no time, because they, too, are all about their casts and their performances.

In fact I think these days it's much too easy to get hung up on whether the creator of a former favourite is actually an awful person or not. In some respects, I think I was happier just not really knowing anything about anyone, and just letting the creative works speak for themselves. But that's not really an option these days.

Anyway, regardless of all that, Angel is still good. And I think that's all I really want to say today!

#oneaday Day 250: A whimper

It's day 250 of this bullshit, which feels like a significant milestone, and I feel like I don't really have anything to write about. Inevitably, I will almost certainly now proceed to churn out at least 500 words on nothing in particular as I always do when I claim to have "nothing to write about", but I at least wanted to set expectations up front.

I am feeling exceedingly burnt-out right now, and I use that phrase deliberately. After my reading up on autistic shutdowns the other day, I also ended up reading a bit about autistic burnout, which is not a "medical" term, but it is one that has come to be commonly used among autistic people and those who care for them. And it's definitely something I feel like I am contending with right now. Persistent tiredness? Check. Random irritability? Check. Inability to concentrate? Hell to the yes. Desire to just shut down completely? Absolutely.

I should probably talk to someone about this, but I don't really know where to begin, and don't want to come across like I'm making excuses or anything. It's a busy and stressful time for everyone at work right now, and I don't want to leave anyone else in the lurch by just noping out of life for a few days, but at the same time I feel like if I don't put my hands up and say "I need a fucking break" I will almost certainly involuntarily end up noping out of life for a few days. And I don't really want that.

As I've alluded to on previous days, the current happenings around the world aren't helping, and I'm also becoming frustrated with the few online communities that I have remained a part of in a vain attempt to feel any sort of social connection with anyone. There's one in particular that I'm very close to just ditching completely because I'm tired of the moaning negativity that goes on in there, but I like the people who run it so I don't want to upset them by appearing to go off in a huff or anything like that. (Who am I kidding, I suspect no-one will actually notice if I leave.)

I am finding distraction from my own negative thoughts through a combination of Friends, Angel, Xenoblade Chronicles and, yes, I bought the RPG Maker DLC the other night and have made a start on making a stupid self-indulgent project. So that is something. At least I am not sitting staring at a wall or anything like that. But I would like to feel, y'know, better about things generally. And I'm not entirely sure where to start with that.

Oh well. The week is half over. I can, at least, look forward to the weekend. We have nothing in particular planned, but that is nice. I fully intend to sleep in, play some video games, perhaps record some videos and just forget about all this for a couple of days. And once my commitments for this month are over, perhaps I will finally take that time off I clearly owe myself.

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#oneaday Day 248: Bing biddly bing bongy bing boo

I watched the first episode of Friends over lunch today. By my reckoning, it's over 10 years since I last watched Friends all the way through, and I've had a bit of a hankering for it recently. It's nothing to do with the inexplicable rise of Friends merchandise (up to and including Krispy Kreme doughnuts) in the last year or so but rather simply the fact that Friends always was, more than pretty much anything else on television, my "comfort show".

I was always aware that Friends was going to age. Hell, when I first started watching it, the first season in particular already looked very dated in terms of the fashion sense and hairstyles. But there are ways in which it shows its age now that I wouldn't have considered back when I was obsessively watching it as a teen.

The laugh track, for example. Audience or canned laughter has completely fallen out of favour for TV shows over the course of the last 20-25 years or so, to such a degree that there are those who find it (if you'll pardon my use of GenZ vernacular for a moment) "cringe". Even people who were there for it first time around.

Honestly, I've never had a problem with a laugh track. In fact, with Friends, it was part of the experience — as emphasised by the YouTube videos that remove it and make Ross in particular look like a psychopath as a result. But it was more than just a signal of when something funny had happened; I really enjoyed hearing the audience reactions that were other than just laughter.

For example, during that all-important moment in the second season where Rachel learns exactly how much Ross was in love with her in his late teens and ends up kissing him, there's an absolutely glorious moment as she walks across the room to him in complete silence, the only sound being her shoes echoing on the hardwood floor of Monica's apartment. Then, as she comes up to Ross and grabs his face in preparation to kiss him, there's an audible gasp from an audience member that feels completely genuine. Then, when the kiss happens a moment later, there is cheering, screaming and applauding. It's an amazing moment, made all the more amazing by how the audience had clearly been rooting for them, but were unsure if the writers were ever going to resolve that particular dangling thread.

Friends, like many shows of its time, was filmed in front of a live studio audience, and this allowed the cast to work around the laughter and other reactions. Supposedly Lisa Kudrow, who played Phoebe, absolutely hated it when the audience interrupted her lines with laughter, but she never let it show. At the other end of the spectrum, it's abundantly clear that the late, great Matthew Perry adored playing to the crowd, with much of his delivery reliant on pausing for reaction and playing off the audience's response. It's different from what TV shows today do, yes, but it's not an inferior way of doing things by any stretch of the imagination.

Sometimes this backfires for a non-native audience, such as when a guest star shows up to rapturous applause from the American audience, but no-one in the UK has any clue whatsoever who the person in question is. (Okay, I very rarely knew who the person was, outside of a few obvious exceptions like when George Clooney and Noah Wyle, riding the peak of ER's fame at the time, showed up.) But you can get something from that even if your response isn't the same as the audience's; it's a sign that Friends was huge, and Hollywood people were almost certainly queueing around the block to make a guest appearance in what was, for a long time, the hottest sitcom in town.

With the bizarre resurgence in Friends merchandise there has been recently, I wonder how much it really resonates with a modern audience — i.e. those who grew up after the launch of smartphones, and after the ubiquity of the Internet had been well and truly established. Very few people in Friends even have a mobile phone, and computer use is rare to see, often the subject of comedy. The way people develop interpersonal relationships has changed massively since Friends' time. Hell, even the concept of just hanging out with your friends in person at their place is likely to be completely alien to some people — I was there for it, and it even feels like a distant memory to me, to be perfectly honest.

But the strength of Friends wasn't necessarily that it was a snapshot of a time and place — although, many years after it was current, it functions quite nicely as just that — but rather that it was a show with some strong, well-defined and nuanced characters, with a wide array of interesting storylines, many of which were rather boundary-pushing at the time of the show's original broadcast. So far as I'm concerned, it still holds up very well as a "comfort show" for me due to its familiarity — and I suspect, so long as a younger viewer can get around the culture shock of certain ubiquitous aspects of 21st century life just being flat-out absent from much of the show's run, there's still a lot they can get from it, too.

There is, I'm sure, plenty you can criticise Friends for if you want to get on the tedious "everything is problematic" bus, but fuck that. I love Friends, I always have done, and starting this new rewatch afresh this lunchtime, I suspect I always will.

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#oneaday Day 247: Enjoying things as we used to

One thing I'm becoming increasingly conscious of as time goes on is how my attitudes towards enjoying my hobbies have… well, they've stayed the same, really, but other people are changing around me, even people who are older than me who I would have thought would be even more set in their ways than I am.

I'm thinking of two particular examples when it comes to this. First is the "I don't have time to play long games any more" person, who no longer wishes to commit to any game over the 20 hour mark because they'll "never finish it", ostensibly because they are "much too busy" now to be able to commit to it.

In some cases, this may be true, particularly if the person in question has started a family in the interim. But realistically speaking, I know a lot of people who say this actually have pretty much the same amount of free time as they had 20+ years ago, and are thus talking bollocks.

Why do they think they have no time, though? Because daily life has changed. We are so overstimulated with our daily lives — and particularly the ever-present nature of the Internet and its endless reams of Content™ — that it's easy to feel overwhelmed, like you simply don't have time to just switch off from all that and enjoy something that takes your full attention. What if you miss a pithy tweet from someone? (To that I would say "get off Twitter, it's a Nazi bar") What if you don't see breaking news happening as it breaks? (To that I would say "we used to do just fine with news bulletins on the TV at 1pm, 6pm and 9pm") What if you miss a message from someone you like? (To that I would say "most forms of online communication are inherently asynchronous, meaning it doesn't really matter if you reply now or in 6 hours' time")

But I get it. It's easy to get locked into that "loop" of cycling around the same three websites, hoping something interesting happens. And before you know it, several hours have passed — several hours you could have (and should have) spent doing something much more enjoyable. This is one of the biggest reasons I've tried to curtail my own social media activity as much as possible, and why I'm still not entirely convinced that signing up to Bluesky wasn't a big mistake. But we'll see on that. At least Bluesky isn't a Nazi bar now.

The other situation that gives me pause these days is when coming across people who won't even consider starting to watch a TV series if they don't have access to every piece of information ever written about it immediately. In a couple of Discords I'm in, there are people who won't start a new TV show if there isn't also a YouTube channel of some boring GenZ type holding a lapel microphone in their hand (clip it to your shirt, for fuck's sake) giving "summaries" of what went on in a monotone drawl.

This latter one is absolutely alien to me, because it makes watching a TV show into a complete chore — to say nothing of how much time it adds to the complete series' runtime if you insist on watching BrackityPoop420 read out an AI/Wikipedia summary of what you literally just watched along with each episode. I watched all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine last year and the only time I looked at a wiki or any sort of commentary was to see if the actors I thought I recognised actually were the actors I thought they were. (They usually were.)

I feel like our overall sense of media literacy has taken a real tumble over the course of the last 20 years, and I feel it myself at times, too. Last night, I watched the first episode of The Wire, and I found it enjoyable, but a little hard to follow to begin with. By about halfway through, I'd settled a bit more into the rhythm of things and I think I'll find the rest of the series a little more palatable, but that first half an hour made me think "have I made a mistake here?"

20+ years ago, we would quite happily pick up a box set of some show that we liked and watch it repeatedly. This was partly down to how media was relatively expensive compared to what you can pick it up for these days, but I feel it also helped our overall sense of media literacy to be more willing to do the work ourselves and watch something again to see how we responded to it second time around. Today, there are two things standing in the way of that: one being the crippling fear of spoilers, and two being the constant desire to consume new content.

I've talked before on here about how much I object to the use of the word "content" (and "consume", for that matter) when we're talking about creative works and art. And nowhere is this more apparent than with folks' media literacy. It's not about watching something and understanding it deeply any more; it's about watching as much as possible, as fast as possible.

And this isn't an exaggeration; Netflix has gone on record as saying that numerous shows and movies on its service are specifically designed to be "second screen experiences" that people don't really have to pay attention to, and the proliferation of people who will quite happily admit to watching everything on 1.5x normal speed "just so they can get through more" is… well, I don't like it.

Just recently, I picked up a few box sets of DVDs from CEX because they were dirt cheap. I've grabbed The Wire, Angel, Scrubs and Friends — all complete runs. I already have Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica (which, probably 10+ years after acquiring, I must shamefully admit I am still yet to watch) and there's probably a couple of other series I might nab at some point (notably some Star Trek series, maybe Frasier and House) — and then I think I might be happy with just that. Watching new stuff is cool at times, but it can also be overwhelming — and it can also cause things you once loved and thought were a fixture in your head to just… fall out. I can't remember a lot of what happened in Angel, for example, and I fucking adored that series when it first came out.

I think it's okay if you don't "get" something first time you watch it, or if it takes a little while to get into the groove of a new series, like I suspect I'm going to be with The Wire. I'm going to consciously try to resist running straight to a wiki wherever possible, though; we used to live without these things and still be able to enjoy our media, so I'm pretty sure I still can live like that.

Also I still have time to play long RPGs. And I suspect I always will.

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