#oneaday Day 110: Listen to albums

I've been trying to make an effort, when I listen to music, to put a full album on and let it run all the way through. It's how I enjoyed listening to music as a teen and twentysomething — I had a big CD collection that I kind of wish I hadn't gotten rid of now — and I'm beginning to drift back into preferring that kind of listening now, too.

Y'see, I've become increasingly conscious of the "media as content" problem that we, as a society, have been enthusiastically plunging ourselves headfirst into. Music has become disposable, and streaming services have made it very difficult for career musicians to… well, have a career out of music. Not only that, there is a not-insignificant number of people out there now who simply don't respect music for its artistry; they just want "background noise". Doesn't matter what it is, so long as it's noise.

I had a 3+ hour drive to and from the office yesterday and today respectively, so I decided to listen to some music rather than putting a podcast on. And I deliberately set up my music queue to play several full albums in succession rather than just a selection of favourite tracks — or, worse, just sticking it on "Shuffle" or "Radio" and letting it do its thing.

I really enjoyed it. And there's still something very pleasant about listening to an entire album in the context it's supposed to be heard. Really good albums feel like they're taking you on a journey; it's not necessarily that they have a narrative (though, of course, some do) but they do have a definite sense of progression from track to track. This is particularly evident in the case of stuff like Prodigy's The Fat of the Land, which smoothly transitions one track into the next, making for one continuous soundscape that evolves in character and energy as it progresses through its complete runtime.

I will attempt to outline my enjoyment of several albums that I found to be particular highlights throughout both journeys.

WWDD – Dempagumi.inc

I can't remember how I first came across Dempagumi.inc, a Japanese idol group that has been around since 2008, but I remember being very struck with this particular album from 2015 the first time I heard it. The songs were catchy and it felt like there was a sense of narrative to it. I didn't understand a word of it, of course, with it being all in Japanese, but I felt like that didn't matter all that much; what does matter to the Dempagumi.inc experience is being swept along by the energy of the group.

One track that I particularly like is Dear Stage e Youkoso (above). It's not necessarily the song on the album that I would describe as the "best", but the narrative setup of a seemingly downtrodden-sounding man discovering the real-life idol bar Dear Stage really works well. The listener finds themselves inhabiting the role of this man who gradually discovers joy through surrounding himself with the energy of the idols, and it feels like the performance is just for you. Or him. Or both. Whatever. Anyway, it's good.

The whole album is energetic and enjoyable, and it's one I come back to a lot. Definitely a good.

These Nuts – Ninja Sex Party

I absolutely adore Ninja Sex Party, the musical outfit run by Dan Avidan (best known as half of Game Grumps) and theoretical physicist Brian Wecht. Their work captures an absolutely perfect balance between being perfect pastiches of classic '80s rock and ballads, and being utterly, hilariously absurd. I could pick any Ninja Sex Party album to go in this slot, but These Nuts, their album from this year, is the one that particularly stuck in my mind today.

The opening track (after Danny Sexbang's obligatory introduction) is one of my favourites. Get Ready (To Get Ready) is a brilliantly energetic piece about people who will never be quite ready to do something when you want them to be — there's always one little thing to do, an email to send or something like that. The whole thing is delivered with such overblown earnestness that it's hard not to enjoy it.

Sports Anthem is also brilliant just because of the mental image it conjures up. It doesn't matter what sport it's referring to — because it doesn't refer to any specific one, and one suspects that neither Danny Sexbang nor Ninja Brian being really into sports is definitely part of the joke — the sentiment of "don't fuck it up" is universal.

The Fat of the Land – Prodigy

I vividly remember when I "discovered" Prodigy. I was on a bus for a school trip of some description, and my partial namesake Peter Miles was listening to a CD single of Breathe by Prodigy. I asked him if I could have a listen, and was immediately taken by, more than anything, the immensely satisfying drumbeat.

I hadn't really thought much of Prodigy prior to this. I'd probably heard Out of Space in passing, and I absolutely detested Firestarter the first time I heard it — though this was, in part, reflected disgust from my parents who, quite understandably, didn't understand the appeal.

But Breathe resonated with me for some reason, even though I still don't know what the actual words are. And when The Fat of the Land came out, I listened to it a lot. I liked Firestarter in context, though it was probably my least favourite track on the album.

Returning to it today, it's a great album. An absolute punch in the face of noise for most of its runtime, of course, but it has that really great sense of progression I was talking about before. Wisely, the whole album doesn't rely on heavy basslines and driving rhythms as in Breathe; around the midpoint there are several more downtempo numbers including the famous Mindfields (probably known by most people due to it being in The Matrix), the Crispian Mills-fronted Narayan and the instrumental Climbatize, all of which I rather like (though I must admit I'd forgotten about Climbatize until today's listen). Definitely one I will likely pop on when I'm in the mood for something loud.

Album-making is definitely an art form, and I worry that it's something we're at risk of losing — as with so many forms of culture. I feel like in the last 25 years or so we've lost more forms of culture than we've gained; the vapid brain-rotting dogshit that is TikTok doesn't feel like a very fair exchange for listening to full albums being the norm.

Still, it's not as if those old albums have gone away. So I'm going to continue making a point of listening to full albums as much as I can. And if you haven't done it for a while, I recommend giving it a go — you might be pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable it is.

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 108: Punch punch punch

Because I'm sick of feeling like a decrepit old man and I can't quite muster up the mental wellbeing to head to the gym right now, I dusted off my copy of Fitness Boxing 2 for Nintendo Switch and have been giving it a go for the last couple of days. I considered grabbing the new Hatsune Miku version of the game, but it's £50 and I haven't yet established a good routine with the two previous entries in the series I have on my shelf. So I thought I'd do something about it.

The trouble with exercise is that it always feels like it's going to be a bloody nightmare to get started, particularly after a long period of inactivity, but then once you actually do it it's rather satisfying. My two sessions of Fitness Boxing 2 over the past couple of days have been hard work for someone as out of shape as I am — though my rhythm game skills have netted me a "Fitness Age" of 24 on both occasions, thereby proving once and for all that such a metric is, as everyone suspected, complete bollocks — but I've come out of both of them feeling like I've done something worthwhile, and something that, in the long run, will be good for me.

For those unfamiliar with Fitness Boxing, it's a game that somewhat follows the mould of Nintendo's classic Wii-era fitness games, only with a bit more of a specific focus rather than providing lots of minigames. At its core, it's a rhythm game, tasking you with using the Joy-Cons to punch in various ways and, in the more advanced workouts, ducking, weaving and suchlike, too — though pleasingly, given how dodgy the motion detection can be on movements other than punching, you can turn any troublesome exercises off, or set the game to automatically score you "Perfect" on them, regardless of what the Joy-Cons tell the Switch you were doing.

A full daily workout consists of several stages, beginning and ending with some simple stretches. In between, you'll have a series of specific workouts of varying degrees of intensity and difficulty, typically following your opening stretches and preceding your closing stretches with something relatively gentle and putting one or more fairly high-intensity (and longer) ones in the middle.

Each individual stage tends to unfold in the same way. You'll start in "orthodox" stance (left foot forward, right foot back) and gradually be introduced to a complete combo, usually one move at a time but sometimes a bit quicker in the shorter, lower-intensity stages. You'll gradually build up to performing the full combo, and in a special "Zone" sequence where you get more points, you perform the full combo multiple times in rapid succession — typically four, six or eight times in a row without a gap in between, depending on the length of the combo.

After that, you switch to "southpaw" stance (right foot forward, left foot back) and then do the exact same thing, but the other way around. In the higher intensity, longer workouts, you'll then do another combo, again both in orthodox and southpaw stances, and then you're done.

Typically a short stage lasts about 5-6 minutes, and longer stages are about 11-12 minutes apiece. The "Normal" intensity workout for a day consists of stretches, two short stages and two long stages, totalling about 35-40 minutes of activity altogether; you also have the choice of doing a slightly shorter or longer workout, which equates to about 25-30 or 45-50 minutes of activity respectively by varying the number of stages in the complete workout.

As someone who is desperately unfit, the pacing of the exercises seem OK to me at the moment. The longer stages definitely feel like an effort to endure, but that's good — they're not so difficult that I can't make it through them, but I do feel like I'm doing some actual work that will be beneficial.

I could be doing them better, of course; the game suggests that when you're not punching, you bob back and forth in time with the music and I can't quite manage to keep that up constantly along with all the other stuff, but I'm sure I can get there over the long term. The important thing is, after all, getting started.

The trainer voices throughout are rather repetitive, but helpful in giving you cues and encouragement, and the visual demonstration of what you're supposed to be doing ("mirrored" so you can follow along more easily) is very helpful. The game-like feel to the whole thing makes it feel more "fun" than some other forms of exercise, and there's a wide range of musical accompaniments to go along with your workouts — including both instrumental versions of "real" songs and some original stuff composed specifically for the game. The original stuff is actually quite a bit better than some of the Kidz Bop-tier arrangements, but honestly part of the fun of the game is the absurdity inherent in aggressively throwing punches to something like Hot and Cold by Katy Perry or the frigging YMCA.

I have a long drive tomorrow afternoon after work, and then a long drive back home after work the day after, so I'll likely take a rest for at least tomorrow and possibly the day after also, depending on how I feel when I get back, but I intend to get back to this as soon as I can. It feels pitched at about the level I can deal with right now, and I think it'll just be helpful to get moving a bit in any way. Because I'm sick of waking up aching all over like someone twice my age, and I suspect a significant part of the reason that is happening is because I haven't been exercising.

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#oneaday Day 100: Do the Thing

As I reach 100 days of daily blogging for the second time around, this symbolically significant but practically unimportant milestone seems like a good place to reflect on the fine art of Doing the Thing, inspired by this video that I've seen floating across my YouTube feed a few times, and which I finally decided to have a look at.

For those disinclined to click on random video links — don't worry, I am too under most circumstances — the summary of the video is simple. A lot of us, particularly as we get older, find ourselves with more limited amounts of free time and, paradoxically, we seem to spend an awful lot of that "free" time agonising over what we "should" be doing. The focus of the video is on picking a video game to play, but really the principle applies to anything where you have a choice to make.

Analysis paralysis is the enemy. It's a peculiar form of anxiety where you get so overwhelmed by the possibilities that surround you that you find it impossible to decide to engage with just one of them on the grounds that it might be the "wrong" one.

The video maker uses the video game StarCraft II as an analogy. StarCraft II is a real-time strategy game, which means you control a bunch of little dudes and tanks and make them blow other little dudes and tanks up. Because it's real-time, it's rare you get the opportunity to stop and think, so the best StarCraft II players are those who make decisions quickly and decisively — to the tune of several hundred minor decisions per minute if we're talking about professional-grade players.

The secret is not to worry if the choice you make is the "wrong" one. If you make a choice and subsequently discover there was a more "optimal" thing you could have done, who cares? You made the choice, now all you need to do is deal with the consequences of it. And for the vast majority of decisions that we make in our day to day lives — particularly when it comes to our leisure time — neither those decisions nor the consequences of them are particularly important.

Let's take video games as the example again. Let's say you have about an hour and a half of free time before you need to go and do something important — and that thing is important, but up until it is time to do the important thing, your time is completely yours. You have, at least, made the decision that you would like to play a video game. This is one of those decisions where both your options and the consequences are unimportant. If you chose to play a video game, great, you get to play a video game. If you chose to do something else, great, you get to do that instead.

The only really "wrong" choice in this scenario is not making the choice in the first place, as sitting by yourself getting stressed out over something as inconsequential as what form of entertainment you want to spent 90 minutes of your day engaging with is the height of absurdity if you stop to think about it. This is supposed to be your time to enjoy yourself, not to put pressure on yourself about something that is supposed to be relaxing and enjoyable.

Most people can successfully make that first decision: "I would like to play a video game". The next step is, in many folks' minds, the harder one: "I would like to play this specific video game". And yet, really, that decision is just as inconsequential as the other one. No-one but you really cares what you're going to spend the next 90 minutes doing, so, again, the only "wrong" choice is not making a decision in the first place. Because then you've just wasted your 90 minutes, when you could have been doing something that relaxes or invigorates you.

If you're someone who does creative stuff online, I'm willing to bet you're probably prone to that second point of analysis paralysis, because there's that constant lingering thought in the back of your mind that you "should" do something that you can write an article or make a video about. But the thing we all need to get well and truly fixed in our mind is that deciding to Do the Thing is not the important part of the process; actually Doing the Thing is the important bit. And if you never get as far as even Starting the Thing, then you're probably going to be annoyed with yourself, regardless of whether or not the Thing you decided on is "productive" or not.

I'm trying to be better about this. I think back to how I enjoyed games before social media, blogging, the Internet and YouTube, and I want to recapture that feeling. I want to be able to be decisive enough to say "tonight I am going to play Yakuza 5" and not spend the next 90 minutes second-guessing myself.

Because taking time to engage with something you enjoy — and to take care of yourself — is never time misspent. Time agonising over things you're supposed to be enjoying absolutely is wasted time, however.

So, y'know, cut it out. Stop it. Stop it. And go enjoy something. Anything. I don't care what. Just go and do it now.

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#oneaday Day 98: Feature Creep

One of the things that really annoys me about modern websites is the obsession with feature creep, and nowhere is that more apparent than on social media and adjacent sites, with YouTube being a particularly prime example.

As if the scourge that is YouTube Shorts wasn't enough, the latest feature that it's impossible to dismiss permanently — telling it to go away only makes it disappear for a month at most — is "YouTube Playables", a range of bottom-of-the barrel mobile game crap designed to placate the ever more attention-deficit body of users who can't possibly just do one thing at a time.

I honestly don't get it. Who looked at YouTube and went "you know what this needs? Shitty mobile games!" Who looked at Netflix and decided that needed to be a gaming platform? For that matter, who looked at fricking Facebook and thought games on there would be a good idea?

The argument that usually gets trotted out with this sort of thing is that it "gets more people into gaming". Frankly, I've always thought this to be bollocks. Gaming has never been more accessible and affordable on platforms that are specifically built for it, and there is only one possible reason it is being shoehorned in everywhere that it doesn't belong: to monetise the crap out of it, be it through ads, in-app purchases or subscription price hikes.

At this point I'd almost pay YouTube a fee to not have to see garbage like Shorts and Playables ever again. There are fundamental features of their platform that still don't work properly and they waste time with this shit? Someone wants firing.

But I guess someone, somewhere has decided this junk "adds value", so here we are, stuck with it, in yet another example of the Web being enshittified. At least there's no "AI" features in YouTube… yet. Don't you love our cyberpunk dystopian future?

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#oneaday Day 96: Lower Decks

I was resistant to the idea of watching Star Trek: Lower Decks for quite some time. I was put off by a combination of some truly terrible trailers, the fairly generic-looking "adult animation" art style it uses, and the fact that its creator had some involvement in Rick and Morty, a show I couldn't even make it through the first episode of without feeling mildly ill.

But then I got thinking: I fucking hate it when people write stuff off based on superficial things like art style, so I should endeavour to not do that either. And, discovering that the complete run of Star Trek: Lower Decks to date appears to be on Prime Video, I decided to watch an episode or two, just to see what it was like.

And you know what? It's all right. The first couple of episodes are a bit heavy on the Gen Z-baiting manic energy, but after that it settles down a bit and starts to be a lot more witty and fun. There's still a certain amount of that 2024 "energy" to it, which I'm sure will turn some people off, but it's by no means a tedious Seth McFarlane-alike show. In fact, despite having a very different tone to live-action Star Trek, it actually manages to do quite a good job of feeling plausibly like what a comedy set in the Star Trek universe would feel like.

Because that's what it is. It still has many of the elements of classic Trek: characters with a bit of depth to them; relationships that come to light over the course of several episodes; creative takes on alien races; and, of course, the all-important technobabble. It just has a rather more overtly irreverent tone than live-action Trek; this isn't to say that live-action Trek was never funny, but rather it tended to be a more gentle, subtle sort of humour, whereas Lower Decks is rather more self-conscious about it.

Of the episodes I've watched so far, I think my favourite has been the third one, Temporal Edict, which is a funny take on something my wife and I discuss rather frequently: the amount of time wasted in an average day at a full-time job.

The episode concerns the captain becoming aware of the crew's use of "buffer time", a concept where they tell a superior that a particular job will take much longer than it will actually take, allowing them to look like a "hero" when they complete it in a fraction of the time they said they would, and also affording them time to slack off without anyone noticing. The episode explores the disastrous situation that would arise if everyone was well and truly "on the clock" at all hours of the day, and how it would almost certainly be counterproductive to try and micromanage people to this degree. It was a clever episode that, like classic Trek, takes a look at a real-life concept through the lens of sci-fi and invites us to have a good old think about it.

In short, I'm rather impressed with Lower Decks so far, and am pretty sure I'll watch it all the way through on Prime Video at the very least and perhaps even pick up the series on disc to keep. I guess it remains to be seen whether or not it wears out its welcome by the end of five 10-episode seasons, but everything I've heard from people who are already fans seem to suggest that it only gets better from hereon. I'm certainly willing to give it the chance to prove itself further.

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#oneaday Day 94: Streaks are unhealthy

I know, I know, it's pretty rich saying that while I'm tracking how many non-stop days of blogging I've done, but my opinion stands. Streaks, as implemented everywhere from Wordle to Duolingo, are unhealthy. They're transparent attempts to get "engagement metrics" up, designed to guilt-trip people into doing things on the assumption that getting people addicted to something is the same as encouraging them to develop a healthy habit.

My daily blogging here? Something I'm doing by choice, and not punishing myself if I happen to fail to live up to. Forget a daily lesson on Duolingo, though, and you can expect to be on the receiving end of multiple guilt-tripping notifications (assuming you haven't turned notifications off for everything like I have) and emails with crying owls suggesting in no uncertain terms that you are an awful person for forgetting to study a foreign language today.

I tried Duolingo for a bit a few years back, and found it quite good, but eventually got annoyed with this. It's always bugged me about Wordle, too, because it doesn't just encourage you to play every day — it encourages you to cheat. Because you break your streak if you don't get the word. And what person in their right mind would break their streak when they can just Google "five letter words that end in READ"? (Me, that's who, though I am making no attempt to position myself as being in any way "of sound mind".)

Building healthy habits is, as I've said elsewhere on this blog, a good thing. It is also a difficult thing, and I think the prevalence of "streaks" everywhere these days actually makes things more difficult. The original intent behind this sort of thing — incentivise and reward continued engagement — may well have been honourable, but now it just feels cynical and manipulative, with Duolingo being by far the most obnoxious implementation of it by a long shot.

Streaks, as implemented via technology these days, are designed to get you addicted to the Skinner Box mentality: to get you checking in regularly so you make Number Go Up. More often than not there's no actual incentive to do anything beyond checking in to the service in question to keep your streak unbroken — though some sites (Duolingo again is guilty of this) also implement things like "leaderboards" to make things really unhealthy.

How do I know this is unhealthy? Because I've experienced it. Duolingo isn't incentivising you to do well by guilt-tripping you into checking in every day, or even by inviting you to attempt to top the leaderboards. It's encouraging you to game the system, because inevitably these systems are intensely, deeply fallible and can be manipulated without too much effort. And once you figure out how to do that — and a lot of people do — any value these systems might have once had in building healthy habits goes right out of the window.

If you need further evidence of how such systems are fundamentally broken, look at the PlayStation Trophies/Xbox or Steam achievements systems. In theory, these systems should enable people who are good at a game to be rewarded for that. What actually happens is that people deliberately purchase games where they can get an "easy Platinum" in order to buff up their statistics. More often than not, this takes the form of a visual novel that the person in question will just stick on fast-forward mode, ignore completely and then claim their completely pointless virtual shiny thing.

It's the same with Duolingo, or anything else that uses such a system. Why bother with letting the things you're learning truly sink in when you can just check in, quickly click through the answers until you get the right ones, then enjoy Number Go Up?

I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule — people who do find streaks helpful in motivating themselves. If that's you, and you use them honestly, fair play to you. Keep it up. But I've seen enough of how people behave in 2024 to know that is not the norm at all. If there's a way to cheat — even if doing so provides no real benefit whatsoever — then people will find and use it.

Now I'm off to go watch some Deep Space Nine. Wouldn't want to break my streak, now, would I?

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#oneaday Day 92: The Dominion War

I have watched so many episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine over the course of the last few days. I can't remember the last time I was quite so hooked on a TV show to the exclusion of almost everything else — even gaming — but Deep Space Nine definitely has its hooks in deep.

Of course, part of the reason I've been able to enjoy so many episodes over the course of the last few days is because I've had a couple of days off work. Andie was having a long weekend away with some online friends, so I decided to take a couple of days off to just decompress and unwind also. And it turns out enjoying some quality TV and mostly staying away from the Internet has been exactly what I wanted and needed.

I'm currently on the third disc of season 6 of Deep Space Nine — yes, I'm doing this old-school, on DVD (not quite as old-school as when I was first watching the show on VHS, mind!) — and I think I'm into stuff I haven't seen before. I say "I think" because the episode I just watched seemed quite familiar — or perhaps it's just because it reminded me of another episode. I can't be quite sure. I'm fairly convinced that I haven't seen beyond season 5 before, but… well, I guess it doesn't really matter. I'm enjoying it either way.

It saddens me a bit that TV isn't made like this any more. Sure, there are Netflix series and what have you, but those are shot and budgeted in a completely different way, and it leads to quite a different feel. It's rare for a new streaming show to last more than a couple of seasons, and some folks describe them as "8 hour movies". One of the reasons Deep Space Nine in particular works so well is that while it is serialised and has definite arcs — particularly at this point in its run — it also isn't afraid to spend an episode on just being a character piece, or doing something a bit weird.

This is good for the mood and helps the show feel varied. The Dominion War overarching storyline could easily have just gone unrelentingly bleak and worked well, but I feel it works even better with interludes like Worf and Dax's wedding, or Kira dealing with the Mirror Universe counterpart of her deceased lover, or Julian contending with genetically modified humans who didn't end up quite as well-adjusted as him.

I'm looking forward to seeing how some aspects of the series end up. Gul Dukat being utterly broken by the death of his daughter was without a doubt an incredibly significant moment for the series, so I'm looking forward to see what happens with him from there. And of course, there's still plenty to resolve with Sisko that I suspect will continue right up until the very end.

It's easy to see why this is such a well regarded series, and one which many people consider Star Trek's absolute peak. I do find it quite funny that when it first started airing, some people considered it "the boring one", though, and many of those folks didn't come around until season 4. Part of the show's strength is that slow build; while I'm sure it could have told a similar story over far fewer episodes, it wouldn't be the same show without us just having the opportunity to live with these characters for so long.

I suspect I will cry at the finale, whatever form that takes. I have remained unspoiled on that for many years now, though, so I'm looking forward to finally experiencing it for the first time when I do eventually get that far.

Should probably sleep now, though. Or maybe one more episode…?

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#oneaday Day 91: Let Me Be Good To You

I know that Disney is the megacorporation everyone loves to hate these days — and with good reason — but when I was a kid, I really enjoyed Disney movies. And however much of a mess modern-day Disney makes of today's entertainment sector by attempting to monopolise all of it, it doesn't take away from the fact that Disney's classic movies are still a good time.

I haven't watched any Disney movies for a while so, following a discussion on them the other day, I decided to grab a few Blu-Rays. They were like a fiver each on Amazon, so I snagged two of my all-time favourites from back in the day — Robin Hood and The Sword in the Stone — along with one that I've never seen but always wanted to see: Basil The Great Mouse Detective — or, as I've since learned it's actually called, just The Great Mouse Detective.

Prior to today, when I got around to watching Basil The Great Mouse Detective, my sole experience with this particular Disney property was 1) the Atari 8-bit game by Gremlin Graphics, which was a rather obtuse arcade adventure sort of affair, and 2) this video, which I suspect created almost as many furries as the entirety of Robin Hood did.

Basil The Great Mouse Detective (I know that's not what it's called, but nearly 40 years of calling it that are a hard habit to break, so I'm not going to) follows the adventures of Basil of Baker Street, a mouse who lives in a hole beneath the home of Sherlock Holmes.

The story opens with a toymaker mouse being kidnapped by a bat called Fidget, and taken to the lair of the villainous Professor Ratigan for some initially unknown purpose. The toymaker's daughter Olivia successfully hid herself while the kidnapping was taking place, and ends up encountering Dr. Dawson, the film's Watson analogue, shortly after his arrival in London. Together, the pair seek out Basil of Baker Street, a renowned and somewhat eccentric detective.

The eccentricity of Basil is obviously designed to mirror that of Sherlock Holmes, and Basil The Great Mouse Detective does a great job of reflecting this. One of the first things we see Basil do is pile up a big load of cushions and then fire a pistol right into them — initially it looks like he's just doing this for fun, much to the annoyance of his housekeeper, but before long it becomes apparent that he wanted to fire a bullet from that specific gun in order to compare its rifling markings with that of one he had retrieved from another unspecified crime scene that related to Basil's arch-nemesis, the aforementioned Ratigan.

Basil is initially resistant to paying any attention to both Dawson and Olivia, but as soon as they mention Fidget — a known henchman of Ratigan — he takes on her case with enthusiasm. Thus begins an adventure across London that successfully incorporates elements of the classic Holmes stories — most notably the ever-reliable dog Toby, here presented as a Basset hound rather than the half-spaniel, half-lurcher mutt described in the original Holmes stories.

Basil The Great Mouse Detective hails from 1986, putting it in a category that I still think of as "more recent" Disney films despite it actually being 38 years old. Some critics point to this era of Disney as a time when their animated features contained markedly less in the way of peril and threat than earlier work from the animation studios, but I can see elements of Basil The Great Mouse Detective as being potentially scary for young kids. Fidget in particular is quite threatening despite also being a bit of a comic relief character, and he delivers a few mild jumpscares over the course of the movie.

Ratigan, too, is often cited as being quite a threatening Disney villain, showing zero hesitation or remorse for putting one of his own henchmen to death (via consumption by cat) in the relatively early moments of the movie. It's got that classic Disney balance of appealing silliness with a dark undercurrent that really works, perhaps best exemplified by a sequence where Basil and Dawson are attached to a distinctly Heath Robinson-esque trap that, were it to go off, would not only strangle them in a mousetrap, it would also blast them with a human-sized pistol, drop an axe on them and finally crush them beneath an anvil.

I enjoyed the movie as a whole and am glad I've finally seen it. It felt somewhat light on musical numbers compared to some Disney films — there are only three real songs in it, with only one of them (The World's Greatest Criminal Mind) being a traditional "song and dance" number, with the others being diegetic numbers in the form of a live performance (the above Let Me Be Good To You) and a phonograph recording (Goodbye, So Soon) that also acts as the end credits theme. That's not necessarily a bad, thing, though; the format of Basil The Great Mouse Detective meant that excessive musical numbers would have probably dragged the pace down a bit, and the ones that were present were worthwhile and made sense. Given that the aforementioned "execution" occurs in the middle of The World's Greatest Criminal Mind, one could argue that Disney was attempting to subvert its own formula somewhat.

Basil The Great Mouse Detective is actually the first full-length movie I've made time to sit down and watch for a long time, and I enjoyed it. I think I might have to invest in some more Disney Blu-Rays, as spending an hour and a half just enjoying the movie with zero distractions was a pleasant experience I wouldn't mind having a bit more often. Plus I don't think Andie's seen that many Disney movies, so this might be a fun opportunity to educate her a bit!

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#oneaday Day 89: Under the influence

I'm not entirely sure when exactly "influencer" became a widely accepted job title, but I do vividly remember when I first heard it that I felt "…we probably shouldn't make that a thing". And in 2024, I stand by that. I find it horrifyingly dystopian that we live in a world where people are unironically referred to as "influencers" — and, perhaps even worse, there are people out there who see "influencers" as somehow inherently more trustworthy than traditional media.

The traditional media has its problems, of course, and it always has done. But there has always been a certain separation between editorial and commercial content — and when there isn't, it is clearly demarcated. There are no such demarcations when it comes to "influencer marketing" — and, from where I'm sitting, there appears to be absolutely zero scrutiny or oversight of how "influencers" are doing business, with minimal obligations for them to share the fact that they're being paid to say things.

The scourge of "influencers" is a universal one, but obviously my most direct experience with it is in the world of gaming. One of the most common criticisms thrown at old-school games journalists is that they've been "paid off" by publishers to do things a certain way — either to inflate a product's review scores above what it is perceived to "deserve", or perhaps to disparage rival products.

Having spent several years in the industry, I don't doubt that there have been occasions where that goes on. And there have been plenty of related incidents, too, with probably the most famous being "Gerstmanngate", where a writer was let go from Gamespot for giving a bad review to a game whose publisher had spent a considerable amount on advertising said game.

Most people would agree that a games journalist being in the pocket of a publisher is a bad thing. I don't believe it goes on nearly as often as the most insufferable people on the Internet think it does, but I think we can all agree that if money changes hands in this way, the "journalism" on the thing in question is compromised.

And yet the same people who would take a games journalist to task for accepting money from a publisher to cover a game are all over the world of "influencers", believing that having your face on YouTube makes you inherently more "real" and "trustworthy" than those people who hid behind all those pesky written words. And "influencers" (no, I'm not going to stop with the scare quotes, I fucking hate the term) are openly accepting paid promotional deals, then covering the products in question. Some of them remember to disclose this; not all do. But regardless of whether or not any disclosure is going on, how is that any fucking different?

I find it absolutely unfathomable that "influencers" accepting money for coverage of things is apparently just tickity-boo, whereas the exact same thing was one of the worst accusations you could throw at a games journalist. How does that make any sense whatsoever?

I feel mostly immune to influencer marketing, but it's very clear that the younger generation in particular are very susceptible to it. And it's dystopian. It's horrible. And it's one of those things that we can't just "walk back" any more, because the influencer "industry" has become so massive over the course of the last decade or so.

I saw someone argue earlier that we're probably overdue for a brand new "segment" of the Internet, like how we once had stuff like Telnet and Gopher alongside the World Wide Web. If the Web has become this utterly devastated late-stage capitalism wasteland, perhaps it's time for people to move on to something else? And no, not the fucking Metaverse. Honestly, at this point, I'd welcome the ability to engage with a fully text-based Internet that wasn't 99% controlled by advertisers. Then we can leave all the "influencers" and their mindless zombie followers to it, and build something better elsewhere.

And then wait for that to be ruined. Still, it might be fun for a few years at least, before the Brands find it.

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#oneaday Day 85: Find another word than "weird"

It seems that people of a certain — I don't even know if it's age, but it's definitely a specific social group of some description — are incapable of describing something via any word other than "weird". This is particularly apparent on YouTube, where there is a veritable surfeit of videos called, simply, "[x] is weird".

Here's one:

And another:

Here's a brand new one with no views:

And here is part of what is apparently a whole series of the bloody things:

What these videos inevitably go on to describe is something that is emphatically not weird, usually rather mundane and which could have probably been better served with a more descriptive title.

At this point I'm sure someone desperately wants to bring up the American left-wing tendency to refer to anyone on the right of them as "weird", which is a current trend in the run up to the next U.S. presidential election. This is a separate issue — and one which, I have to say, I'm kind of on board with, because nothing shuts down a raging idiot like telling them they're being weird and making an idiot out of themselves — so I am not including it in the trend I am describing above, which has been around a lot longer.

I often find that the "[x] is weird" trend goes hand in hand with the tendency for Certain Types of People (again, not necessarily age-specific, but a definite type) to write things all in lower-case. You can see this in the first video example above. Nothing in the video title or the text on the thumbnail uses a capital letter, even when one is really needed (such as in the word "I", on the name "Tony Hawk" and the abbreviation "THPS" for "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater"). And, again, the people who do this sort of thing often like to make out that exceedingly mundane things are somehow outlandishly remarkable.

I'm not even entirely sure why this bothers me so much. I think it's that "[x] is weird" does the video (it's usually a video), the subject matter the video is covering and the creator of the video a disservice. I'm sure many of these "[x] is weird" videos are actually quite interesting, but I am, at this point, completely put off from clicking on them almost as much as if I see "I played 100 days of [game]".

I guess it's just another example of Stuff That Isn't For Me. And judging by the viewing figures on a couple of those videos I posted above, it seems I'm in a bit of a minority. But still. If you ever catch me posting a video with the name "[game name] is WEIRD" you have full permission to slap me. Even if I'm covering a French home computer game from the early '90s. Now those really WERE weird.

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