It must seem incredibly quaint to people who grew up after a certain point to know that when we wanted to watch something on television, we used to be beholden to an arbitrary schedule that wasn't decided by us, the viewers.
Sure, pay-per-view and on-demand services existed, but they were often extremely expensive and in some cases still beholden to someone else's schedule.
Today, of course, if you want to watch something you just call it up from any of the bazillion streaming services available, or raid your network-attached storage that is loaded up with pirated movies you've torrented over the course of the last decade.
Streaming services have their own drawbacks, of course, with the two main ones being that there are about as many streaming services as there used to be cable packages, and the dreaded "analysis paralysis", where being given complete freedom to choose anything often causes you to end up choosing nothing.
The reason I bring this up is because while we've been away on holiday, we haven't had any TV-connected streaming devices with us. And you know what? It's been kind of nice. We've watched a bit of telly while we've been here, and it's just been whatever happened to be on while we wanted to just zone out for a bit. And broadcast television as it exists today is more than happy to cater to this type of viewer.
You know the sort of thing: shows that require zero commitment or even attention, like game shows and reality TV programmes about traffic police. Mindless garbage, to be sure, but somehow to me will always feel less offensive than attention-deficit slop on services like TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Perhaps that's just my age talking — and to be clear, there's plenty of broadcast TV I find too offensively awful to even watch as background noise — but everything we've watched "by chance" this week feels like something I've actually got something from, even if it's just some general knowledge trivia. I absolutely do not get that from "pov: u ordered a large fish and chips at wetherspoons".
Anyway, it's time to go home tomorrow, so it will likely be back to not watching any broadcast TV at home. It's been a nice change, though, and a reminder that some forms of media still aren't quite as dead as some people would like you to believe.
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Well, I've been well and truly hit with the Mandela Effect today.
Earlier, I was playing Maniac Square, a puzzle game by Spanish arcade developer Gaelco. Andie overheard the music and asked, "why does that game have the Blue Peter music?"
"It doesn't," I said, absolutely convinced of this fact. Blue Peter, as everyone knows, has Sailor's Hornpipe (or, to give it its more correct name, College Hornpipe) as its theme. The same one they play at the Proms every year.
Except it doesn't.
Blue Peter, I have learned, actually uses a tune called Barnacle Bill. It's similar, but different. Have a listen.
Here's Sailor's Hornpipe, with a YouTube thumbnail that resembles the Blue Peter logo, just to add insult to injury:
And here is the Blue Peter theme in one of its more famous incarnations by Mike Oldfield of Tubular Bells fame:
You will hopefully forgive me for getting the two confused. But wait! What's this?
It's only bloody Mike Oldfield doing the Sailor's Hornpipe. And just to confuse matters, his rendition of Barnacle Bill for Blue Peter in the '80s is often misattributed to being a B-side to Tubular Bells called, you guessed it, Sailor's Hornpipe. Except that one actually is Sailor's Hornpipe.
For anyone reading this who isn't British, I'm sorry. I'm not sure I can adequately explain Blue Peter to you other than to say it was a children's TV show that, during my childhood at least, made a lot of things involving "sticky-backed plastic", and occasionally also had wild animals shitting in their studio. It's also the origin point, for a certain generation anyway, of the phrase "here's one I made earlier".
You're going to go and tell me that isn't true either now, aren't you?
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Well, that's our first "full" day of holiday over and done with, and we've had a pleasantly relaxing, chilled out day. The temptation when coming somewhere like Center Parcs is to want to be doing stuff all the time, but honestly we've had a very nice day today just visiting the swimming pool in the morning, getting some bits and pieces from the shop for lunch and dinner, and then just enjoying hanging out in our lodge.
It's strange, isn't it? Even when you're doing the sort of things you'd usually do at home, they somehow feel more "special" when you're doing them somewhere out of the ordinary. I had a cheese baguette at lunchtime and it was approximately 48% more delicious by virtue of the fact it was prepared and eaten by me in a forest cabin rather than our house.
The wildlife around here is insanely tame. Earlier in the day, a group of ducks came up to our window and actually started tapping on it. They somehow knew we'd just made sandwiches, and wanted to participate. At other times, we've had deer and squirrels come right up to the patio doors, clearly begging. It seems the advice to not feed the wildlife mostly falls on deaf ears. And the wildlife, it appears, is not above being cute in an attempt to get food.
For activities that don't involve going outside, I decided to play through Ufouria: The Saga on Evercade while I was here, and I beat it earlier today. That was thoroughly satisfying; it's a great game, and I'm glad I took the time to play it. Perhaps some words on MoeGamer about that one when I get back.
Anyway, it's now well after midnight and I should probably sleep. No real plans for tomorrow except to have dinner out, and perhaps do some "Adventure Golf". Toodle pip.
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We're on holiday! After a three hour drive earlier today — which honestly already feels like a lifetime ago — we are safely ensconced in our accommodation at Center Parcs.
The last few times we've been, we've stayed in the apartments that are near the main plaza of shops and restaurants, but this year it was only a little extra to get a two-bedroom lodge in the woods, so we've gone for that as a little extra added luxury. It's lovely having lots of space. Indeed, there's an entire (bed)room we probably won't use at all; presently, it's where I dumped my suitcase so it wouldn't clutter our bedroom.
We haven't done very much today. It's been nice to just relax with no worries or commitment to anything, so we've been enjoying that today. We had some nice dinner bought from the shop and an amazing cake, then the rest of the evening has been spent lounging, looking at the wildlife while the light was still present, then watching some TV (old school broadcast style!) and playing some video games.
Tomorrow we're likely going to hit the pool… sorry, the "Subtropical Swimming Paradise", and from there, who knows? We have some idle intentions of maybe going to the gym, playing some pool and going bowling, but we're just going to take each day as it comes and decide according to what we feel like.
The Lodge brings back some nice memories. When I came to Center Parcs as a teen with my family and some friends, we always stayed in a lodge (or a "villa" as they were known then) and while some things have changed — the appliances are more up to date and the TV is, of course, a wall-mounted flatscreen instead of a hulking great CRT — but aside from that, the layout feels comfortably familiar.
It's bringing back fond memories of my friend Ed attempting to explain the appeal of Wolfenstein 3-D to my parents over breakfast — as I recall, his 12 year old self arguing that you "just don't notice" the bloody violence after playing a whole didn't go down too well.
It's bringing back fond memories of my friend Craig and I watching MTV and realising that we both liked quite a bit broader a spectrum of music than the indie rock that was fashionable at the time — after that holiday, I remember going out and buying Madonna and Savage Garden albums on the strength of the tunes we liked on the TV.
And it's bringing back fond memories of a trip when I was young enough for my brother to still be living at home with us, and him bringing his friend Alex along. My enduring memory of that pairing was Alex, who thought he was God's gift to women, causing two girls to fall off their bikes by saying a distinctly Leslie Phillips-style "hell-O!" as they passed by.
A lot of good memories here, then, from both the recent and distant past. It'll be good to add a few more to the mix this year.
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As I may have mentioned once or twice recently, we're going on holiday tomorrow. We'll be away from Monday to Friday visiting Center Parcs in Elveden Forest, which has been a thoroughly nice place to have some time away on all the previous occasions we've visited.
My intentions for this holiday are to unplug almost completely. I will post on this blog daily because of the whole #oneaday thing, but outside of that, I intend to avoid any sort of attachment to the Internet whatsoever, except where absolutely necessary to research things. That means I am making the following promises to myself:
I will not worry about writing anything for MoeGamer or making any sort of video for YouTube.
I will not poke my head in on Discord channels that are likely to annoy me.
I will not look at Twitter at all.
I will minimise my use of Bluesky.
I haven't really talked about the last one at all, but as you may have surmised from the sidebar, I have been dipping my toe back into social media with Bluesky recently. And for the most part, I've found it a thoroughly pleasant environment that feels very much like Twitter did in the early days. It's very left-leaning, which can at times be a little insufferable, and wherever you look you're very likely to run into either a particularly horny furry or someone proud of the fact they're wearing a cage on their cock, but for the most part it has been a remarkably stress-free social media experience so far.
Part of the reason for this is that the platform is built to discourage "dunking", whereas Twitter outright incentivises it these days. The main way Bluesky differs from Twitter is through its absolutely nuclear block function, which means that if someone quote-posts or replies to someone they have subsequently blocked, if you are following the person who made the quote-post or reply, the original post will appear as blocked to you also. This discourages people from going "looking for trouble" because you can't even see the username of the blocked post. This can be frustrating at times if you missed the original context, but for the most part I think it's a positive thing.
So anyway, as a result of all that, and the fact I have a few friendly faces there, I have been using Bluesky a bit recently, and thus, if I'm going to share anything about the holiday that isn't on this blog, I'll likely do so there. If you're a Bluesky user and want to follow me, here.
But yes. Anyway, the main point of this post is to note that I will be disconnecting from the greater part of the Internet as much as humanly possible while I am away, because I need it. I need some time away where I just don't put any unnecessary pressure on myself, or potentially put myself in situations where I might end up getting annoyed. I'm tempted to outright leave a few Discord servers to remove the temptation altogether, but probably won't go that far.
This holiday is to rest, relax and genuinely get away from it all. My mental health has been in the toilet of late, and the Internet has played a big part in creating that situation. So instead I'm going to be among the trees, play some video games, go swimming and look at friendly deer. We might go and fire a crossbow (not at the deer) and play some pool, too. We haven't decided yet. But it's going to be nice.
Today, meanwhile, it's last-minute packing and tidying up ahead of my mother-in-law coming to look after the cats — sorry burglars, the house will still be occupied while we're away — and perhaps finishing off Silent Hill 2 later.
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Well, I've done it. I've made it through all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine at last, and I'm pleased to report that it was fantastic. A consistently excellent show from start to finish, and a real demonstration of why '90s Trek is so fondly regarded to this day.
I should probably add at this point that there may be spoilers ahead. I have somehow managed to go this long without having any of the latter part of Deep Space Nine (which I hadn't seen prior to this watchthrough) being spoiled to me, so on the offchance there's anyone in the world still left in that position, I thought I'd give you due warning. After this image of Doctor Bashir and Garak smouldering with unresolved sexual tension, anything goes discussion-wise.
One of the things I've always liked about Star Trek is that it strikes a good balance between being convincingly "sciencey" and having quasi-mystical elements. That's the kind of sci-fi I like: where there's a high level of technology and cool spaceships, but also where there's still stuff that science can't quite explain, or which feels like it drifts somewhat into the realm of fantasy. As someone who enjoys nothing more than an RPG where you kill God (or equivalent) at the end, I always have time for pseudo-mystical fantasy, even in a sci-fi setting; in fact, I tend to find that particularly "hard" sci-fi — that is to say, sci-fi that paints an overly practical, "realistic" image of the future without any overtly fantastical stuff, is a bit of a turn-off.
Deep Space Nine had this right from its very first episode, where leading character Ben Sisko encounters "The Prophets", aka the noncorporeal entities that live outside of linear time inside the Bajoran wormhole. And this element runs as a constant thread through the entire series, right up until its climactic confrontation, placing Ben Sisko, Emissary of the Prophets, up against his most fearsome foe: the Emissary of the Pah-wraiths, who, of course, turns out to be Gul Dukat.
Gul Dukat is a thoroughly interesting character throughout the entirety of Deep Space Nine, and played brilliantly by Marc Alaimo. Beginning as a somewhat smarmy individual that is clearly bitter about the Federation occupying the space station he used to be in charge of, the episodes that involve him reveal a character with a considerable amount of depth and complexity — and one who goes through almost as much shit as Miles O'Brien. Sadly for Dukat, he doesn't pull through in the way O'Brien tends to; his eventual fate is unglamorous, but for him to be the "final boss" of the series, defeated by Sisko flinging himself into the fire with a Pah-wraith-possessed Dukat in tow, is entirely appropriate.
The whole Dominion War arc, which takes up a significant portion of Deep Space Nine's complete runtime, is kept consistently interesting by allowing us to see it from a variety of different perspectives. Even the Dominion's grunt soldiers, the Jem'Hadar, are given some complexity through episodes such as "Hippocratic Oath" and "Rocks and Shoals". And the sinister twist of Section 31, while relegated somewhat to background lore, provides a good means of giving the Federation a bit of interest, too.
One of the things Deep Space Nine shows repeatedly is that even the forces we have previously been led to believe are the "goodies" have their dark sides — and likewise, traditional "baddies" can have solid redemption arcs, too. The narrative arc of Dumar, set up to be a character the audience is supposed to loathe when he kills Dukat's daughter Ziyal — one of the few indisputably "good" characters in the series — is thoroughly fascinating, with his descent into alcoholism and bitterness and his emergence on the other side with a new-found determination to cast off the shackles of the Dominion's oppression. It's fitting that he die a martyr.
Kai Winn is another character who I was pleased to see eventually get their comeuppance. I wasn't sure if they were going to go full-on "Evil Space Pope" with her during the finale, but it is, again, entirely fitting that she have all the power and glory denied to her at the last minute as Dukat steals the show. She was a consistently loathsome character throughout her entire run in the series, so seeing her fall to evil out of her lust for power and end up incinerated for it was thoroughly satisfying.
It's kind of sad that the end of the series marked so many "farewells" from the regular cast, but it makes sense; Deep Space Nine was not the kind of Star Trek that would necessarily lend itself well to a movie in the same way as The Next Generation was, and so it felt appropriate for most people to go their separate ways at the conclusion. I was surprised at the inconclusive fate of Sisko himself — I was expecting him to pop back into existence, Q-style, towards the end of the episode — but again, with the buildup of him being part Prophet throughout the latter seasons, it made sense for him to at least temporarily be "at one with them", if not actually dead.
Anyway, I'm relieved, as finishing Deep Space Nine now means I feel like I can engage with Trek media produced since that series finished. The Dominion War was such an important event in Star Trek canon that I had always been hesitant to engage with anything post-Deep Space Nine for fear of inadvertently spoiling myself, but now I feel like I'm free to explore the wider Trek universe, be that through other series or video games. And there are a fair few Trek video games I'm interested in trying.
That said, I do kind of want to see how Voyager goes for its whole run. That's another one I haven't seen all the way through, so as far as my Star Trek journeys go, that one might well be next on the list.
Later, though. We're off on holiday on Monday, and I wanted to finish Deep Space Nine before then, as it would have been frustrating to have just a couple of episodes left and no means of watching them while we were away! Now I just need to finish Silent Hill 2 before the end of tomorrow and I can go away with no regrets…
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You may recall a little while back I had an issue with my WordPress.com blog, the original incarnation of this site. The site's "automated anti-spam" system had flagged my blog and taken it offline. I hasten to add that there is, of course, no spam or any other sort of inappropriate, objectionable or illegal content either on the original form of this site or this present incarnation. It was a mistake on their part, brought about by WordPress.com's parent company Automattic increasingly relying on "AI" (spit) for more and more of their functionality.
This was the first time I'd had an issue with WordPress.com since joining in 2006. But it was serious enough that it made me move my site over to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation, which is what you're reading right now.
For those unfamiliar with the distinction, WordPress.com is a free-with-paid-options blogging service where you can set up a blog or other website quickly and easily. Its free offering has gradually gotten worse over the years, now placing a rather obtrusive "Made with WordPress" banner on new sites created, but for the most part, I've always been satisfied with it for my purposes, particularly because, having been a user for so long, I had been "grandfathered" in to not having things like that banner ad.
WordPress.org, meanwhile, is an open-source project that maintains WordPress itself, which is a content management system and blogging platform you can install on any website. The main distinction is that WordPress.com is a service provided to you, while WordPress.org is both a piece of Web-based software and the community surrounding it. And one of the key differences is that while with WordPress.com, you're stuck with preset configurations unless you pay through the nose for their extortionate "Business" plan, with WordPress.org you can tinker with and customise the core software as you see fit, either by fiddling with the code yourself, or by installing plugins.
I was dismayed to see how much "AI" rot had infested WordPress.com, and it made me no longer want to associate with the platform. Now, it seems, there is trouble with WordPress.org too, as reported by the excellent tech blog 404 Media.
I have not followed this whole saga, but it seems Automattic is having a bit of a spat with a company called "WP Engine", which is a service that hosts websites built using WordPress. Apparently Automattic's CEO Matt Mullenweg branded WP Engine a "cancer to WordPress" and complained about them and their investors not contributing "sufficiently" to the open source project, and that WP Engine's use of the "WP" brand might confuse users into thinking it is an official WordPress thing.
I can sort of see his point on that last thing — though WP Engine maintains their usage is covered by fair use — but this whole thing appears to escalated beyond reasonable proportion at this point. WP Engine sent Automattic a cease and desist letter telling Mullenweg to stop having a tantrum, and Mullenweg responded with what he calls a "scorched Earth nuclear approach", sending his own cease and desist letter to WP Engine.
It didn't stop there. Mullenweg banned WP Engine from accessing resources on WordPress.org, including, among other things, the plugin directory and the ability to automatically update plugins and themes. Not only that, he has raised a significant number of eyebrows by adding a peculiar checkbox to the WordPress.org login page, asking users to confirm that they are "not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise".
This, of course, has had people asking what the consequences are for not ticking that box. And it seems a few individuals who have been longtime contributors to the WordPress.org project have been banned from the community simply for asking "what the hell, bro?", to paraphrase.
This is concerning. Not being able to access the WordPress.org community doesn't preclude anyone from building their site using the WordPress.org software, but it is a problem for those who have been helping to maintain and update it. On top of that, some contributors are quite reasonably concerned about potential legal repercussions if they do not tick the box, believing Mullenweg to be just that petty.
My simple question is… well, it's "what the hell, bro?"
WordPress, in both its .com and .org incarnations, powers a significant chunk of the modern Web. And while blogs have somewhat fallen out of favour since the rise of social media, there are still thriving communities of both WordPress.com and WordPress.org bloggers regularly posting — and who, more to the point, likely have a significant body of work hosted on some form of WordPress derivative at this point, which it will be a pain to move somewhere else.
It's depressing to see both incarnations of WordPress fall foul of enshittification and CEO arrogance. Because that's what this is. Whether it's the AI garbage being rammed into WordPress.com or whatever the fuck Mullenweg thinks he's doing with WordPress.org right now, the WordPress name is being dragged through the mud right now. And that's unfortunate because, AI garbage aside, WordPress is still a great product.
I hope this situation is resolved sooner rather than later. And in the meantime, if you're still blogging on WordPress.com, you might want to pop into your Site Settings menu and tick this checkbox just so your blog isn't scraped for AI shite.
This site is staying where it is and in the incarnation it presently has for the moment. I really hope I don't have to migrate again, and that I can go back to recommending WordPress like I always used to. Right now, though, Automattic is a company I would advise most folks to avoid like the plague.
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During quiet moments at work, I, as most people do these days, I suspect, like to pop on a YouTube video or two to cheer myself up and distract from a gradually growing sense of how existence is futile, we're all sitting atop a doomed planet, and that any "legacy" we might leave behind is largely meaningless.
Today I decided to watch a clip of comedian Jon Richardson talking about men pissing. I present it below for your consideration.
It's true. Men can't aim. Well, they can, but they can't aim well, and at any given moment one is at great risk of one's penis refusing to accept the commonly agreed laws of physics, and just do something completely unexpected with one's piss stream. And, inevitably, as Richardson points out, this always happens when you are not at home, making it an embarrassing situation that you have to determine exactly how to deal with.
The most embarrassing time it happened to me was on a trip to hospital. I'd been suffering some pains, so I'd gone along to the walk-in centre, and they'd taken me in to the emergency room, as is seemingly fairly standard procedure with abdominal pains.
I was there for pretty much the whole day, largely because the combination of my own anxiety and what are apparently some incredibly stubborn veins meant that a gradually escalating series of medical professionals were completely unable to draw any blood from me via conventional means, and there was a very long wait between one giving up and them bringing in someone higher up the doctors' food chain.
At some point as afternoon was turning into evening and I was developing increasing discomfort and unease about the cannula jammed into my hand, it was decided that I Must Piss. I was presented with one of those bedpans made from like eggbox material and invited to get on with it.
At this point I should say that I am not a regular hospital attendee. In fact, I have never been admitted to hospital, which is one of the main contributing factors to my anxiety over them. The other is the print ad for the computer game Life and Death by The Software Toolworks (below), which traumatised me as a child and has ensured that I am, and always have been, absolutely terrified at the prospect of Having An Operation.
Anyway, I'm drifting off the point somewhat. We were here to talk about piss. Fact is, I wasn't sure what the, err, "etiquette" was for using this bedpan. And, given that I had a pointy thing stuck in my hand that was becoming both increasingly uncomfortable and a growing source of considerable anxiety, I wasn't entirely thinking straight. So rather than doing the sensible thing of toddling off to the bog to piss in the egg box, I just whipped it out in the little cubicle and thought I'd do it there and then. The curtains were closed, I figured, and no-one was making any indication of coming by to check on me, so I thought I'd just piss and be done with it.
My knob had other ideas. It chose that moment to enter full on "lawn sprinkler" mode, spraying almost everywhere except the direction I was actually pointing it. I was absolutely mortified as soon as the whole hideous process started, but of course, I was powerless to prevent that which had already happened. Thankfully, I managed to wrestle it back under control soon enough to be able to provide a convincing sample in the receptacle, so that was one job taken care of.
Now, there was a more pressing matter to deal with: the fact that I had pissed all over the bed (which, thankfully, was covered with one of those thick black sheets that fluids just sit on top of, which I suspect is precisely for situations like this) and it was dripping onto the floor. I had to act quickly, less the proof of my shame flow out underneath the curtains into the adjacent cubicle, so I frantically looked around for something with which to deal with the situation. I settled on a box of tissues conveniently placed on the shelves at the back of the cubicle, and began mopping up. I supplemented the initial mop-up with the antiseptic wipes one of the numerous attempts to draw blood from me had left behind, and after a bit of effort, I suspect no-one would have ever known that I had, just moments earlier, sprayed the entire room like a particularly horny un-neutered tomcat.
Not long after, the hospital let me go, my eventual diagnosis being effectively a shrug of the shoulders and the vague suggestion it might be a small kidney stone, but it was probably nothing and I should just go home and rest. No mention was made of any smell of piss there may or may not have been in the cubicle, and the cannula came right back out, unused.
And so that was that. My worst pissing shame, a completely wasted day and a sore hand. Have a pleasant evening.
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I'm all for nostalgia — hell, most of my online presence is built around it these days — but I'm becoming increasingly tired of social media accounts that are nothing but what I'm going to call "nostalgia fluff". What I mean by this is that they post something that effectively says "This is a thing that existed." and then don't provide any sort of additional commentary or context. To put it another way, they are indulging in the exact behaviour depicted in this excellent video from the one and only Mr Biffo of Digitiser:
There's a simple explanation for this, of course: it's engagement bait, as is 90% of anything on any social media platform these days. By posting "Count Duckula is a cartoon series that was once on television", the poster is counting on people showing up in the replies by the score to say "Wow! I remember this!" and "SO NOSTALGIC!" and suchlike.
Trouble is, all of that is completely fucking meaningless. It rarely starts a meaningful discussion, and the person who posted the thing in the first place certainly isn't interested in leading a discussion, otherwise they would have posted something more substantial in the first place. So why do it at all?
Number go up, of course. Those sweet likes and shares. The cynical would note that many engagement bait accounts aim to attract large numbers of views, comments and shares so they can then sell on the account to someone else, but this doesn't always happen. Some people really are convinced that their context and commentary-free acknowledgements that something indeed existed at some indeterminate point in the past are "good content". Some of these people will even get snippy if someone "steals" their "content", by which I mean posting something about the same thing they posted.
There's a difference between this sort of thing and what I do. When I write an article or make a video about something, I'm not doing so just to go "this existed, look how knowledgeable I am for knowing this thing existed". Rather, I do so for one of two reasons: one, to introduce the thing to other people, and that requires some additional context and commentary to explain why the thing is noteworthy; and two, to share my personal recollections of the thing in question, which often ties in with the first point.
That takes effort, though. That requires researching beyond a simple glance at Wikipedia to make sure you got the date right. That requires actual knowledge and experience, and a willingness to do something beyond the bare minimum to cater to the lowest common denominator online.
I often find myself annoyed at the perception that you "shouldn't" post anything too long or in-depth online, "because people won't bother to read/watch it". This, to me, just leads to a situation where you are encouraging something undesirable. By assuming everyone is as stupid as an attention-deficit social media addict who can't read more than a paragraph without wanting to Alt-Tab into Roblox, we just make that the norm. And that's what these low-effort nostalgia engagement bait accounts are doing: making the bare minimum the norm.
I find the idea that you should make things as short as possible "because people will click off within 3 seconds" or whatever kind of insulting. It's insulting to the people who don't click off within 3 seconds to assume that everyone's attention span is as addled as the worst people on the Internet, and it's insulting to me to suggest that if the thing I've done isn't "interesting" within 3 seconds it has no value. So far as I'm concerned, if someone is incapable of reading more than a paragraph of text or digesting a video that is more than 30 seconds long, I don't really want them looking at my stuff anyway. It's not for them.
That may sound gatekeepery but honestly I don't give a shit any more. I hate how much the Internet has become a race to the bottom, and I fear it's reached a point where it is actively harmful to both community and culture.
So I will keep going into things in as much depth as I damn well please, and if you don't have the attention span to deal with it, that is 100% your problem.
(I know none of you reading this fall into this category, of course. Keep being excellent.)
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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I slept terribly last night and consequently woke up this morning feeling like absolute garbage. It didn't improve much as the day went on, but I feel vaguely more human now, just as it's about time to head to bed.
I can, at least, console myself with the fact that the wife and I have booked a much-needed holiday for in a couple of weeks. We're going to Center Parcs in Elveden Forest again. This is, I believe, the third time we've been to Center Parcs together generally, and the second time we've been to Elveden Forest. It's actually the fourth time I've been to Elveden Forest, as I went twice when I was a kid: once with my parents, my brother and one of his friends, then again some years later with my parents and one of my friends.
Center Parcs can be a pricy holiday, particularly if you start getting involved in the activities they offer, but honestly even if you do pretty much nothing for the time you're there, it's still a thoroughly pleasant getaway. This time around, we're taking a two-bedroom villa (or "lodge", I believe they call them now) as it was only fifty quid more than the apartments we usually go for. That should provide plenty of space to spread out, relax and enjoy ourselves.
I was kind of hoping that the next time we went away on holiday, I'd be in a better physical condition, but that's very much a slow process that has kind of stalled a little bit of late. I'm still down in weight from where I was, but I've been really struggling with motivation, so I've decided to take a short break from attending Slimming World meetings, at least until after our holiday, and then decide what to do after that. I have been deriving some satisfaction from the Fitness Boxing sessions I've been doing, though, so once I feel a bit better after today's crappy feeling, I'll be back on that.
Anyway, regardless of the state I'm in, I'm looking forward to some time away. It's good to get away from it all now and again, have a change of scenery and spend some time in an environment where there's zero pressure. And I well and truly intend to "unplug" as much as possible from the Internet while I'm away. I'll still post my daily blog there, and we'll almost certainly take some gaming equipment with us, but other than that, I intend to pretty much completely ignore that the rest of the world exists for a while, and I'm very much looking forward to that.
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.
If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.
