1574: Oh, to Click One’s Fingers

In case you missed the news, Andie and I now own a house. This is exciting and etc. etc. but it’s also a big ol’ pain.

To give credit where credit is due, Andie has been working a whole lot harder on the house than I have been. This is at least partly because I am woefully incompetent at DIY and will normally end up hammering a nail into myself rather than a wall… and that’s when I’m supposed to be painting it. Oh ho ho ho.

No, but seriously, I suck balls at DIY. I wouldn’t want to put anything on a shelf that I put up, I’m afraid of climbing ladders beyond the second step, I don’t know how most tools work and I’m the sort of person that will stand in the paint tray, flip it over so it splatters all over the carpet, then fall on my arse, bringing the curtain rails down with it and smashing the TV in the process.

I hasten to add: thankfully, none of that has happened, and I successfully managed to apply a coat of paint to our new living room earlier without anyone dying. It is quite satisfying to know that I am at least capable of this.

Where the frustration comes from, though — and this isn’t by any means exclusive to residences — is when you walk in the front door and it doesn’t look like a habitable place to live. (Because it isn’t, usually.) The only things lying around are paint pots and various tools, the fridge is empty, there’s rubbish everywhere and regardless of where you try to get to in the property, you’ll trip over something. It’s demoralising to see, and it’s something that doesn’t really go away until you stop dicking around with paint and start putting furniture in there. Only then does it start to feel like a home; a process that really comes to a head once you get your TV installed. I sometimes just wish I could click my fingers and it all be done.

Things are going quite well, though. The painting is proceeding apace — since Andie has this week off work, she’ll undoubtedly be doing some more of that without me over the course of the week — and I’m starting to get a mental picture of what goes where. Of course, there still comes the part I’m really not looking forward to — packing up all the shit in the flat I’m writing this in and transferring it to our new house — but at least this time around we’re hiring professional removal people to do all the really hard work. We just have to stick it all in boxes.

I am excited about having a place to call our own, I really am; the trouble is that with the bad news I had regarding my job recently, it’s taken the edge off the excitement somewhat. It’s hard to be super-excited and positive about it all when you’re not sure where your next paycheque is going to be coming from after June.

But I have to remember that I have a few irons in the fire and it’s possible that any of them could come to something. The next few months may not end up being particularly easy, but they’re probably going to be interesting, if nothing else.

Oh, and did I mention how much I appreciate the hard work Andie’s putting in to the new house while I mope around being miserable? I do. A lot. And now the Internet knows it. So there. <3

1571: Fork in the Road

I’m at one of those points in my life where I feel I’ve reached a definite “fork in the road” where I need to decide if I’m going to continue on my current path, or branch off in a different direction. Going backwards is not an option, but both paths ahead are fraught with trials and difficulties.

The road to the left is a continuation of the road I’ve been taking. It’s the road that proceeds merrily through the land of Gamindustri, looping and wending its way past anthropomorphised hillocks and clouds before taking occasional detours into explosive-devastated warzones, alien landscapes and racetracks. It’s a fun road, but you never know what’s coming next; over the next hill could be a pot of gold, or there could be a pit of spikes.

The road on the right I don’t know much about. Not long after the fork there’s a tunnel, and the lights inside seem to have failed. It’s difficult to tell how far the tunnel goes, too; there’s no way of seeing the light at the other end of it. But there are people coming and going, and they look if not actually happy then certainly at least vaguely satisfied with what is going on. None of them look as if they’re afraid about what’s happening either now or in the future, and it’s then that I notice that posted along the side of the road are a number of uniformed officers. They’re not armed and they carry kindly expressions on their face; I get the impression they’re there to keep everyone safe and protect them from the unknown. There is no such detail on the road to the left.

All of this is a rather pretentious way of saying that I think I’m going to have to make a decision soon: whether to continue pursuing life in the games industry, or whether to try and branch off in another direction. As I alluded to above, both roads carry their own fair share of potential pitfalls.

Were I to take the left road, it’s doing so on the understanding that I can’t relax. Even if I work my hardest, there’s no guarantee that I won’t simply wake up one day to discover an email politely informing me that I will soon be out of a job through no fault of my own. And when that happens, there’s no guarantee of being able to immediately score a new job; more often than not, it means a return to either begging for scraps as a freelancer or, were the unlikely to happen and I find myself with a new position straight away, having to work my way back up from the bottom, effectively starting my career over again. This has happened to me a couple of times now and it is already starting to get a bit old.

Were I to take the right road, I have to deal with the true unknown, and there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to find my way to safety and security. My particular combination of qualifications and experience opens up a relatively narrow number of potential career paths to me, and looking at job site listings it can be challenging to determine exactly what type of job I should be looking for, or if it’s even worth applying to things that sound like they might fit the bill. There’s also the feeling that I’m walking away from something that, when it goes well, I do genuinely enjoy doing.

I love writing about games. But I hate — hate — how volatile the games journalism business is. I understand the reasons for it — and it’s a risk we all acknowledge when we enter into it — but that doesn’t make it suck any less when promising careers are cut short for reasons that aren’t any fault of the people in question.

Which is why, to be perfectly frank, I’m leaning towards the right road. I’ve already put in some applications to jobs that are nothing to do with games, with the intention of, if I successfully secure a position, continuing doing games writing purely for myself and those who wish to follow me through projects such as MoeGamer. Given that Andie and I have recently purchased a house — we get the keys tomorrow, in fact — I am getting to the stage where financial security and not having to continually worry on a week-by-week basis about whether I still have a job is worth far more than being able to say that my hobbies and passions are also my career.

That’s a sad and disappointing way of looking at the world, and I’m annoyed that I’m even thinking that way. But unless there’s a significant change in the way the games journalism business works, I’m not sure I can take going through this whole process again.

1569: Life Gets In the Way

I was chatting with my friend Lynette earlier about various things, and the subject turned, as it often does, to anime. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into a lengthy spiel on how emotional the ending of Angel Beats! was — though I did watch the last episode today, so expect some thoughts on that shortly. No, instead, it’s going to be about the frustrating feeling of discovering things that you really like when it feels like it’s almost “too late”.

I don’t mean that I’m too old for anime or related media, of course — I really hope the day never comes when I feel like I’ve “grown out” of the things I love today — but rather I feel like the opportunity to enjoy and share these things with friends has been, to a large degree, mostly lost.

I mention this because of my aforementioned conversation with Lynette. Aside from this blog — where, as we all know, I’m pissing in the wind — Lynette is one of the few people I have the opportunity to enthuse about anime with on a fairly regular basis. And it’s somewhat frustrating to both of us that we’re several thousand miles apart and consequently unable to get together regularly for cocktails, popcorn and a few episodes of some favourite anime series, perhaps educating one another on recent discoveries that we want to share. It’s something we’d both really like to be able to do — indeed, we have done it before, on the occasions when I’ve had the opportunity to visit her and her husband Mark (also a close personal friend, and also someone with whom I can enthuse about anime) in Toronto.

This is one unfortunate side-effect of the whole “global village” (hah, bet you haven’t heard that term since a ’90s issue of PC Format) thing the Internet has brought about. It’s never been easier to find like-minded friends who share the same interests and passions as you, but the thing people don’t mention about that seemingly great development in socialisation is how frustrating it is to not be able to get together with those friends on at least a semi-regular basis. (Unless you’re loaded enough to be able to simply hop on a trans-Atlantic flight at a moment’s notice whenever you fancy it, in which case I think I hate you a little bit.) I have friends literally all over the world — America, Canada, the Middle East, Japan, Australia — who I would love to hang out with and do all sorts of mutually enjoyable things with (no, not that sort of thing, pervert) but am unable to do so. I’m fortunate enough to have these friends in the first place, of course, but by gosh, I sometimes wish they were just around the corner so I could drop them a text, invite them over for an anime evening and subsequently have an enjoyable time.

Why not ask your local friends, you might wonder. Because my local friends all have their own passions and interests — and, with us being the age we are (we’re not in university any more!) a lot of them are doing distinctly “grown-up” things like grouting their bathrooms (whatever that means) or having children. I certainly don’t begrudge them any of those things, but it can be sad and frustrating when it’s difficult to get people together for anything more than the most cursory of social occasions. Life gets in the way, in other words.

So, uh, anyone local want to hang out and watch some anime? We have popcorn.

1564: Study Resume

Japanese classes started again this evening. I was a little nervous about going back, as I frankly haven’t done as much independent study as I intended, but I was pleased to discover that I had actually retained a fair amount of knowledge — including, to my pleasure, a significant amount of the hiragana and katakana character sets required for basic reading and writing in Japanese. (We haven’t looked at kanji at all yet; that’s something I’m saving for when I’m thoroughly familiar with the kana sets and basic sentence construction — I’m getting there.)

So, if you’ll excuse me practicing for a moment…

はじめまして。わたしはピーターです。(I had to look up how to spell my name in katakana, but now I know. Yay me.) どうぞうよろしくおねがいします。

わたしはさんじゅさんさいですそしてジャーナリストです。わたしのかぞくはよにんです。ちちとははとあにとわたしです。

Or, you know, something like that.

It was actually a rather interesting lesson this evening as there was a second native Japanese speaker in the classroom for the second half of the session. Our teacher is a native Japanese speaker herself, but the addition of a second person — who, naturally, we all had to introduce ourselves to using something similar to the phrases I clumsily (and possibly incorrectly) constructed above — added an interesting dynamic to the mix. She was a teacher, too, so she was evidently well-versed in the clumsiness of English people attempting to speak Japanese, and thus supported any unfamiliar words and phrases she used with plenty of gestures and the like, allowing us to discern the overall meaning of what she was saying even if we didn’t quite know the exact words or would be able to recreate the sentence ourselves.

Language learning is really interesting. Despite my joking with school friends about German lessons slowing time down (I swear, those lessons always felt like they were twice as long as every other class at school) I actually quite enjoyed gradually picking up an alternative means of communication. Of course, the one time I went to Germany and attempted to speak the language to a vendor, they responded in perfect English, much to my chagrin. Now, school German lessons are literally half my life ago and I haven’t retained a huge amount of knowledge; the German I still know today is pretty much limited to Zug um Zug (the German name for the board game Ticket to Ride) and proudly singing Essen mein Scheiße whenever university music friends get together. (Don’t ask… and yes, I know it’s gramatically incorrect.)

Japanese has the added interestingness of not only having to learn a completely new spoken language with completely new grammatical structures — actually quite a bit simpler than English in its basic form, though I’m aware I’m still very much at “beginner” level — but also a completely new written language, too. Sure, German had umlauts and whatever the ß thing is called, but Japanese doesn’t have anything even vaguely recognisable. And those things that do look like English characters are almost inevitably something else. You think ヒ might be “t”? Wrong, it’s “hi”, unless you write it ビ, in which case it’s “bi”, or if you write it ピ, in which case it’s “pi”. Obviously.

I exaggerate for comic effect; knuckling down and actually attempting to translate and read these characters gradually burns them into your brain. I was delighted to find myself able to complete a revision sheet using entirely hiragana earlier this evening; granted, it was considerably slower than if I just wrote in Romanised characters, but in the long run it’s going to be beneficial to get as much practice as possible using the kana characters. And, when the time comes, kanji.

I’m currently torn on whether to continue classes in the new academic year, though — assuming a more advanced class is actually running, which I don’t know as yet — or simply to study myself. The book we’ve been using in class — Japanese for Busy People — has proven to be a well-designed textbook with plenty of good supporting material (the Kana Workbook in particular has been invaluable in drumming those characters into my mind) and that is suitable for both classroom and independent study.

Either way, though, this is something I’d like to take further. And who knows, it might even push me in the direction of a new career one day. But that’s a long way off as yet. For now, then, おやすみなさい！

1563: Sullen and Ill-Tempered

I’ll level with you, dear reader, I’m not entirely sure what to write today. The Black Dog has been creeping in somewhat over the course of the day, leaving me somewhat morose and not particularly in the mood for a great deal of communication. This feeling sucks, but I am taking some small solace from the fact that there are a few irons in the fire right now. Whether or not any of them will come to anything remains to be seen, but at least they’re there.

In the meantime, it’s largely been business as usual. I rediscovered the fun of Japanese doujin title Croixleur earlier through its new Sigma edition and would encourage anyone who enjoys a bit of hack-and-slash goodness to check it out. Then I spent some time moving towards cleaning up the rest of The Witch and the Hundred Knight. I’m torn on which ending to try for, since both the Normal and True endings are very straightforward to get, while the “Bad” ending actually takes significantly more effort to attain.

This isn’t the first time a Japanese game has locked its worst ending behind a particularly complicated series of hoops to jump through, and it probably won’t be the last. The last time I encountered such a practice was with Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, where the “Conquest” ending — an incredibly dark affair that, despite featuring a huge tonal shift from the rest of the game managed to fit in quite well with the overall narrative — required a huge amount of faffing around to accomplish. And your reward? Feeling awful at what you had done to the characters. I am, frankly, glad I did it first, and it’s for this reason I’m contemplating getting The Witch and the Hundred Knight’s “bad” ending out of the way first.

Meanwhile, I continue to be enraptured by Demon Gaze. I adore the characters whom you get to hang out with while back at the inn between expeditions into the game’s sprawling dungeons, but I was surprised to discover that it’s the dungeon-crawling aspect I’ve been having the most fun with. Demon Gaze’s dungeons are relatively simple in terms of tech, being designed on a flat 2D grid, but their design is superb. The current dungeon I’m running through — Endless Road, a dungeon towards the end of the game — is a multi-floor monstrosity that demands you pay careful attention to the relationship between the different levels and areas, and search carefully for secret doors.

Secret doors! When was the last time you searched for a secret door in a video game? Demon Gaze is full of them. Granted, much of the old-school frustration of hunting for secret doors is mitigated by two things — the demon Comet, who, if equipped, marks them with a big flashing mark, and the fact that players tend to leave helpful Gazer Memos in front of them — but it’s still enjoyable to kick down a wall and discover a door behind it.

At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve been enjoying the aforementioned Gazer Memo feature a great deal, too. Somewhat similar to the messaging system in Dark Souls (in that you can’t type freely but instead pick from predefined words and phrases) but with a few more suggestive terms included along the way, the Gazer Memo system allows you to scrawl messages on the dungeon floor which are subsequently uploaded to the Internet and downloaded into the game of anyone else who happens to be playing. During the time I was reviewing the game, the messages were fairly sparse and mostly helpful; now, they’re still fairly helpful, but there’s been a clear explosion in players: the sheer number of messages making rather suggestive implications about spears and butts is testament to that, I feel.

It’s fun to leave these messages, too. At several points during the game, after overcoming a particularly challenging maze of one-way doors, I found myself deliberately going back and leaving memos to future adventurers helping them out. (I also left them a few sarcastic “Nope”s if they went the wrong way.) I also couldn’t resist a “Caution! Gigantic Butt Ahead” at the entrance to one particular dungeon — a message that I now see every time I happen to wander back to that area.

But anyway. I’m rambling on about nothing much in particular and it’s getting late. As such, I’m going to leave that there. Here’s hoping that tomorrow is a more positive day.

1562: Soul-Searching

Unsurprisingly, yesterday’s bad news has prompted a certain degree of soul-searching. The reality of the situation still doesn’t quite feel like it has hit me yet. I’m depressed, yes, but it doesn’t quite feel “real”, if you know what I mean.

I’ve been taking advantage of this calm before the inevitable storm to do a bit of pondering about what I might want to do next, or how I might want to do it. And so far I’ve pondered the following options.

Teaching. No. Nope. No no no. Never. No. I may have all the relevant qualifications, but the last two times I tried teaching it had an enormously negative impact on my mental health. I enjoy teaching, but all the other stuff that goes with it — primarily to do with behaviour management — is just too stressful to even contemplate.
Private music teaching. Possible, but difficult to become established, plus the fact that I don’t have 1) my own transport (Andie and I currently share a car), 2) a real piano to teach at home or 3) a particularly suitable space to teach in. So I think that’s out, at least for now.
Attempting to return to a previous career in a certain tech-related retail chain. That door closed a long time ago, despite the fact that I’m clearly eminently qualified and good at it. This was evidenced by the fact that I made superb progress on a previous attempt to return, the management of the store I was applying to were enormously enthusiastic, then they abruptly and bluntly turned me down without giving a reason after contacting my previous management. (We parted on poor terms after I made an official complaint about certain managers’ workplace bullying.) That copy-book is forever blotted.
Freelancing. Not a terrible idea, but it brings with it a considerable degree of hassle, plus an unreliable paycheque each month. Successful freelancing involves endless pitching and hoping, writing content to tight deadlines if you do happen to be successful, having to do your own taxes (ugh) and occasional sleepless nights of despair as you note your bank balance is going steadily down and hasn’t gone up for a very long time indeed.
A permanent position on another site or magazine. Obviously this would be the ideal solution, since it would make for a relatively seamless transition from what I’m doing now. The trouble is, very few places are hiring right now; even new sites such as Kotaku UK already have a staff in place, while others have a well-established network of writers; others still prefer to recruit quietly from their extended network rather than prominently displaying their available positions. So while achieving this would be ideal, actually doing so may be challenging. Still, feelers are being put out.
Broadening my remit. I write about games. I haven’t written about anime, TV or tech professionally but I’ve had plenty of practice on this site and know I could do a good job. Question is, do I want to?
The shift that all games journalists seem to make at one point or another. A lot of games journalists end up in PR for some unknown reason — the better pay probably being a significant contributing factor. I know I could do a good job of PR with the skillset I have; the difficulty here is in convincing recruiters of that fact when I don’t have any practical experience.
Taking a risk, Part 1. I have a number of books in me, both fiction and non-fiction. I could try and write those, but actually “making it” — i.e. being able to make enough money to survive — with one will be a challenge, particularly in today’s crowded marketplace. It would have to be something great, unusual or both to stand out. Or perhaps I should write some vampire teen romance. Is that still fashionable?
Taking a risk, Part 2. One thing that came out of my announcing that I was leaving USgamer was that a lot of people reached out to me on Twitter and said that they were thankful for the unique perspective (among mainstream games journalism, anyway) that I provided on Japanese gaming. One went so far as to say that I understand the games they like and why they like them, which is exactly what I was hoping to achieve with my work. These people got me thinking: is there a market for specialist writing like this? Could I somehow do it full-time (or near-as-dammit) through something like Patreon? I don’t know how viable Patreon is as a platform — I’m yet to really see any successful projects from it — but it’s an interesting possibility at least. It’s also a big risk.

So that’s where I am now. There are also a number of options that have flowed through my mind but which are impractical at this particular juncture due to my lacking some relevant skills — things like working in localisation for Japanese games, for example. I don’t know where I’ll end up or what I’ll end up doing, but I sincerely hope it is sooner rather than later.

Wish me luck. Oh, and wish me happy birthday while you’re on.

1561: End of Another Era (Or: Please Hire Me)

I was informed today that, owing to various circumstances that I won’t go into right now — it would be unprofessional of me to do so, but suffice to say it’s not anything to do with something I’ve done, nor is there any ill will there — my position on Eurogamer’s US counterpart USgamer would be coming to an end within 4-8 weeks, depending on how long I want/need to stay on.

To be frank, I haven’t quite processed this news yet. I fully expect that when I do I will burst into tears and be a dribbling, horrible mess for at least an hour or so but that hasn’t happened just yet. It will come, though. In the meantime, while I’m still feeling reasonably rational, I wanted to compose a post explaining where I’m at in my career and where I’d like to head from here. Hopefully then anyone reading this as part of the traffic spike my blog is currently enjoying will have a better idea of who I am and what I can offer.

The biggest thing that has come out of my announcement that I would be leaving USgamer is the confirmation (via direct messages and mentions) that I have built up a solid reputation as someone who not only knows his stuff about Japanese games, but that I am also someone who treats them with respect. You might not think this is a particularly unusual characteristic for a games critic, given the importance of Japan to console gaming throughout video game history, but in recent years, Japan’s turn towards the moe side of gaming has caused many Western commentators to take its output considerably less seriously — even going so far as outright derision at times.

Attitude and tone are, of course, the prerogative of the individual publication or writer in question, but I had been feeling for some time that there was a significant gap in the market for respectful, non-disparaging coverage of niche Japanese games such as RPGs and visual novels, and set out to provide that, first with my experimental columns over on Games Are Evil, where I served as Managing Editor for a short period, and later at USgamer, where I ran a weekly Japanese gaming column called JPgamer. This column attracted a regular audience who were both appreciative and vocal about my support for Japanese gaming, my positive attitude towards it and my willingness to look beyond the most superficial elements — an attitude perhaps best exemplified by my piece on “The Hidden Depths of Otaku Games” and my review of the widely derided Time and Eternity as well as JPgamer at large.

J-gaming isn’t the only niche I attempted to fill, though. I’d recently also launched a board game column on USgamer called BOARDgamer, and past coverage of board and card games had proven somewhat successful. Alongside this, I made a point to cover interesting, unusual games rather than the same things other sites were looking at. I’d accept reviews of games that other sites would either ignore or pass off with a cursory quick look — titles like The Witch and the Hundred Knight and Demon Gaze — and I’d treat them with the same amount of respect afforded to the big triple-A titles. I hope I don’t sound arrogant when I say I feel I was fulfilling an important role that helped me to stand out somewhat.

Which is why I’m so sad that my time with USgamer has to come to an end. Between us, Jaz Rignall, Jeremy Parish, Mike Williams, Cassandra Khaw and I — plus the various contributors who have come and gone over the months — were building USgamer into something distinctive and interesting; a site that celebrated long-form magazine-style articles as well as the usual daily grind of news. We each had our own interests and specialisms, and we were each afforded the opportunity and a platform to talk about those things as well as the latest hotness in gaming news and reviews. That’s an immensely valuable thing not only for readers, but for writers, too. And, yes, I’m sad and upset that I will no longer be part of that once my time on the site comes to an end.

As previously noted, I have between 4 and 8 weeks left on the site depending on how quickly I can find a new position. I am happy to continue doing what I’ve been doing — writing about games, and hopefully letting some of my passion shine through — but I am also interested in getting involved on the editing side of things. I’ve been doing this a long time now; it would be nice to move on up and take a little more responsibility if the opportunity is available.

If you happen to hear of anything — or if you’re hiring — then please reach out and get in touch. You can send me an email via the About Pete page on this site if you don’t know my email address, or just leave a comment. You can also follow me on Twitter if you don’t already, and check out my professional history via LinkedIn.

Here’s hoping I have some good news to share sooner rather than later; 1) it’s my birthday tomorrow and 2) Andie and I are buying a house. Also, you know, 3) I don’t like being unemployed.

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any help you can offer in the job search.

1559: Life Walkthrough: How to Defeat the Big Breakfast

You’ll probably encounter the Big Breakfast on a weekend, particularly if you finish a Friday low on HP, MP or Sanity. If you want to guarantee an encounter with one, do one of two things: either ensure the fridge-freezer is stocked with Bacon, Eggs, Sausage, Hash Browns or Waffles and that you have at least one Beans in the cupboard; or alternatively, ensure that the fridge-freezer and cupboard have a complete lack of the aforementioned, in which case you’ll fight a Big Breakfast in the wild rather than at home. The latter case is slightly advantageous in that you have a little longer to shake off the Sleepy status effect before the confrontation begins, but the former gives you the Home Turf boost.

There are a number of ways to defeat the Big Breakfast, but following this strategy is one of the most effective and efficient. Prepare for battle!

As the battle begins use the SAUCE — either brown or ketchup according to the preference you set during character creation — on Big Breakfast. Using the wrong sauce will provide you with smaller benefits.

Next up, grab the BUTTER and apply it to the TOAST using the KNIFE. Don’t attack the TOAST yet, though; we’ll come back to that later.

Equip the KNIFE and FORK and attack the TOMATO. This is the weakest part of the breakfast, but also has the potential to do the biggest damage to your Sanity. Try and defeat it in two attacks at most.

Follow up by attacking the MUSHROOM. This is likewise weak, and its status effects can be mitigated if you applied the SAUCE correctly.

Once the TOMATO and MUSHROOM are down, you’ll need to begin attacking the SAUSAGES, but don’t jump straight in to pure attacking. Instead, use STAB on a SAUSAGE and then attack the EGG with it — you’ll be pleased that you did. After you’ve done this on both EGGS, you can commence normal attacks. Each attack will drain your MP significantly so don’t be afraid to take a turn or two to rest if you need to.

Follow up the assault on the SAUSAGES by attacking the EGGS. Weakening them with the SAUSAGES beforehand will make this part of the battle much easier.

Attack the BACON once the EGGS have been defeated. The bacon should quickly fall to a concerted assault, but keep a close eye on your MP. You should find that your HP is steadily increasing as you defeat each opponent.

Following the BACON it might be tempting to go for the next target in the list — the HASH BROWNS — but pass them by for the movement in favour of an attack on the BEANS. Characters with low agility will need to take a few turns to defeat these, but they’re nothing too much to worry about.

After the BEANS have been defeated, you’ll notice that they’ve left a pool of BEAN JUICE behind. This cannot be defeated with normal weapons, so instead you must use the STAB move on a HASH BROWN to attach it to either your KNIFE or FORK — preferably FORK, since using the KNIFE carries a risk of damaging your own HP — and only then attack the BEAN JUICE.

If the HASH BROWN attached to your weapon breaks, use STAB again on one of its remaining companions. Repeat the process until the BEAN JUICE has been defeated. If you fail to defeat it before the HASH BROWNS have been defeated, however, don’t worry, you still have a final weapon up your sleeve.

Unequip the KNIFE and FORK and pick up the TOAST. Equip it in either hand, then attack any remaining BEAN JUICE. If none is left, simply open your Item menu and USE the TOAST like any other item. If you find your MP are too low to be able to use the TOAST, rest for a turn or two until they restore. To restore them more quickly, either use the COFFEE or get up from the table and visit the TOILET. Note that if you pick the latter option you will need to be partied up with at least one other player, otherwise upon your return you will find that Big Breakfast has been taken away, and you will not receive full XP value since parts of it were left undefeated.

Once Big Breakfast has been defeated, sit back and enjoy the cutscene, then save your game. The true weekend begins here.

1557: Got the Number Right This Time

Can’t believe no-one told me that I’d done three posts with the same number (1554, if you were wondering) — it’s an irrational and largely not-terribly-important fear I have that one day I will completely bollocks up the numbering system on this blog and celebrate, say, my 2,000th post when I’ve actually written 2,003 or something.

Not that it really matters, obviously; the original people who were following this blog as part of the #oneaday movement have almost certainly long since moved on as I’ve continued to babble on for somewhere in the region of 500-1,000 words per day for the last 1,557 (that’s 1,557, not 1,554… I think… I hope) days and I remain here largely talking to myself and the few people who stop in regularly or semi-regularly. (Thanks!)

After yesterday’s rant, I saw a few things today that kind of made me want to go off on one again, but I’m going to resist for now since it’s one of those subjects which will almost certainly be wilfully misinterpreted by certain people on the Internet and shared with the inevitable “THIS IS NOT OKAY” in an attempt to attract the usual crowd of shamers. (And I’m not talking about members of the Squadron of Shame.) It’s kind of disappointing to sometimes feel like I can’t truly speak my mind on certain subjects for fear of inciting the wrath of the Moral Outrage Committee, but having seen a number of friends fall victim to said Committee on a couple of occasions, I’m in no hurry to join them in being publicly shamed for saying something that, frankly, was absolutely fine in the first place. (I guess I’m kind of ranting here again after saying I wouldn’t. Apologies.)

Anyway, the upshot of feeling like I’ve had my lips zipped like this is that I feel… I don’t know, “backed up” for want of a better word, like I need some sort of release. It’s a stressful feeling, and it’s not a pleasant one, but at the same time I don’t want to really let rip because I know it will be ultimately unproductive.

So when I felt myself getting stressed out earlier, I booted up Final Fantasy XIV and escaped for a little while. It worked. I wasn’t alone; I got to hang out with the friends I’ve made in that game and even play some stuff together. (I’m getting quite good at Garuda Hard Mode and slightly better at Titan Hard Mode, but I’m still not great.) It was a nice means of getting away from it all for a little while, and when I was done I was able to log out feeling a little bit calmer about the world. Which was nice.

Anyway, I’m aware this has been a largely aimless post but I didn’t have a lot of things worth talking about happen today, frankly, since my mind has largely been occupied by being stressed and trying not to explode. Which it hasn’t, so that’s good. But anyway. Tomorrow is another day, and, more to the point, the end of another week, and I’m looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend. Apart from the part where I need to go and shout at Novatech because my laptop’s battery has died again for the third time in a not-very-long period of time. Sigh.

Anyway. That’s that. It’s 1:20 and I need to sleep, so that’s precisely what I’m going to go and do.

1556: Your Regular Reminder to Not Be a Dick

It saddens me to occasionally have to write posts like this, but today has been One of Those Days when you just want to pick significant portions of the Internet up by its collar and shake it about a bit.

Put simply: don’t be a dick.

Put more specifically: don’t make sweeping generalisations that might upset or hurt people.

This is good advice for interacting with the rest of the human race in general, and it applies to numerous situations on the Internet, the most common of which is the increasingly frequent discussions surrounding gender — and rightly so.

But that’s not the only place where these sweeping generalisations can hurt people. Those who have found solace in certain forms of entertainment and/or subcultures should not be ridiculed for the things they enjoy, so long as they’re not hurting anyone. Those who sport a particular type of headgear should not be automatically assumed to be sex pests. And on the rare occasions when someone from a particular subculture does step out of line or do something stupid, for heaven’s sake don’t get on your high horse and start painting the entire subculture as some sort of disgusting deviant cult.

Those who have been following me for a while will now that I identify as being on the periphery of the “brony” subculture — that is, adult-age fans of the TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I count myself in this collective due to the simple fact that it’s an excellent show, and the extent of my fandom is that my desk is adorned with a few figures, my wall is adorned with a giant Rainbow Dash picture that Andie bought me for Christmas, and Andie and I enjoy playing the My Little Pony collectible card game, which is actually a really solid and enjoyable little two-player game. I don’t really engage with the rest of the community any more than that; I had a brief stint posting on a pony forum, but that shut down temporarily and I never went back after the relaunch. I don’t make videos, I don’t write fanfic, I don’t make pony-related art, and I’m not into “rule 34” stuff. (If you don’t know, for heaven’s sake don’t Google it.)

Which is why I was so upset earlier on to be greeted by a tweet from someone I follow that simply read “destroy all bronies” (in that slightly annoying, all lower-case, unpunctuated sort of way that a lot of people seem to be favouring these days) without any sort of context. It turned out that the tweet in question was to do with an unpleasant (and, it turned out, seemingly debunked) story that had been circulating regarding a recent pony convention: a Tumblr user had claimed that an unaccompanied 11 year old girl was being stalked by an older dude (oh, and he was a fat guy, too; how convenient!) and this subsequently degenerated into a discussion of how bronies were the scum of the Earth, how they were corrupting something “meant for little girls” and all manner of other nonsense that assumed everyone in the entire fandom behaved in exactly the same unpleasant manner.

I’m not going to deny there are some aspects of the fandom that delve into territories I’m not interested in exploring — see the aforementioned “rule 34” — but the fact is that the fandom as a whole is a large and diverse one made up of both men and women, and the creed it holds itself to, on the whole, is “love and tolerate”. Which, in my experience, it does. Tarring the whole lot with the same brush is completely unhelpful, and of course people are going to get defensive if you start lumping them in with perverts, deviants and outright criminals.

The irony of today’s few “bronies should just leave My Little Pony for the little girls” discussions is that also in circulation today was an article, video or some other piece of “viral” media explaining how men shouldn’t be “gatekeepers of culture” for women and girls; if that’s the case, it works both ways, surely. Just don’t gate off aspects of culture at all, regardless of gender or age. Girls can be geeks. Boys can like My Little Pony. And, as one post I read earlier pointed out, it’s actually kind of cool for kids and adults to have something they can both engage with and enjoy together rather than deliberately segregating themselves from one another.

All this happens with anime, too. You only have to mention something vaguely moe for the “anime fans are paedophiles” crowd to come out and start making wild assumptions and accusations. I had a brief but interesting discussion with a Japanese otaku on Twitter the other night who was surprised, confused and disappointed to see that Western mainstream media discussion of the moe side of anime culture largely seemed to paint it as some sort of sexual deviance for perverts rather than simply what it is: an aesthetic designed to elicit an emotional reaction, and not necessarily sexual at all. (This isn’t to deny that there is sometimes a sexual aspect to moe, but to make it all about that is a gross oversimplification.)

What I find infuriating about a lot of the times you see ridiculous discussions like today — whether they’re about the creepiness of bronies, the paedo factor of anime fans, the rapey nature of men who choose to wear hats or whatever else Tumblr is angry about today — is that they often stem from people who are the first to jump atop the soapbox the moment there’s a perceived injustice against women, or people from non-white ethnic backgrounds, or transgender people, or those with a disability, or any number of other groups. It’s important to fight for justice in these areas, but doing so doesn’t give you “social justice credit” to be spent on being a dick towards groups of people who gather together based on something they enjoy or something they have in common. It’s a different situation, of course — you can choose what you’re a fan of, but you can’t choose your gender, race or all manner of other aspects about yourself — but the principles of love and tolerance still apply. People are different and diverse, both in terms of their non-negotiable characteristics and the things they choose to identify with, and that’s wonderful. Celebrate this diversity rather than trying to tear it down.

To put it another way: don’t be a dick, and I hope I never have to write a post like this again.