#oneaday Day 595: A nice chat with my doctor

I went to the doctor today. My knee has been playing up for a while, and got particularly bad over the Christmas break when it was especially cold. I suspected it was little more than my knee going "you're too heavy, sort it out", but I just wanted to confirm that it wasn't anything more serious. (It wasn't. I am too heavy and need to sort it out.)

I came away from the appointment feeling oddly invigorated, though. I'd ended up being there for about half an hour in total, approximately two minutes of which were spent actually examining me. But my doctor apparently wanted to talk today. And I was happy to let him.

It started with a rant about politicians. I'd come to him as a result of one of those "e-consult" things because my surgery is apparently incapable of activating their online appointments system, and I hate doing the 8am rush to phone for an appointment. My doctor apparently doesn't think all that much of the e-consult system — I don't either, as it happens, but it seemed like the most reliable method of getting at the very least a call back without having to sit on hold on the phone for hours — and expressed some considerable frustration at how government guidelines have given him "quotas" of routine and emergency appointments to fulfil.

Now, I'm sure we're all familiar with the technique of requesting an "urgent" appointment for something that is absolutely not an emergency, and I suspect it's that sort of behaviour that has led to these quotas. But I was more than happy to let him go off on one about how politicians had no idea what it was like for actual surgery staff, particularly now that the practice he works at, originally intended for no more than 9,000 patients in total, is now serving more than 16,000 people, with more registering by the week, it seems.

After examining my knee and telling me I'm fat (in a more polite way than that, and he was apologetic about it) he then told me about his own personal history dealing with weight loss, a genetic predisposition towards being on the larger side, exercise and suchlike. It was an interesting conversation, even if it was a tad one-sided — like I say, the poor chap clearly wanted to talk to someone about absolutely fucking anything, and I was more than happy to let him. Although he was clearly frustrated about things, he's also a nice, friendly chap, and I know very well how helpful it can be to just have someone who is willing to listen sometimes.

So, all told, I have a feeling that my doctor may have got more out of my appointment today than I did. Still, it was reassuring to know that there's not actually anything wrong with my knee — I just need to lose some weight. And I'm working on that! It's been nearly a full week on the diet plan now, and it's been going pretty solidly so far. Let's hope that leads to some actual, tangible results.

And Dr. W? I hope you feel better soon. I know all too well how frustrating government interference in your profession can be from my time as a teacher, so you have my sympathies. I wish I could reassure you that things will get better from hereon, but… well, you can see the state of the world right now. Hang in there. You provide a vital service to the community, and I hope you know how much people like me appreciate your work.

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 592: Abstinence from AI

I, as I may have made clear on a few separate occasions on these hallowed pages, fucking hate generative AI. I do not use it. I do not need to use it. I do not want to use it. And I cannot wait for the whole bubble to pop and this whole shitshow to go the way of the NFT and the Metaverse.

In the last few weeks in particular, I've found that there are a lot more people seemingly trying to push AI as "sort of all right, really". You know the sort of thing, people just casually, jokingly drop into a Discord chat that "out of curiosity, [they] threw it into Gemini to see what would happen" and before you know it, all meaningful human conversation has been replaced with copy-pasted obsequious fawning over the prompter, bold-type section headers and bullet-pointed lists.

Not only that, but the press are at it, too; just today, Undark Magazine (which I've never heard of prior to today) posted a piece called "Abstinence from AI is Not the Answer", in which the authors, C. Brandon Ogbunu and Cristopher Moore, make the baffling assertion that refusing to engage with AI "puts vulnerable people at risk".

"Like many new technologies," they write, "AI can either amplify inequality or ameliorate it, depending on how it is deployed. And fears about the likelihood of it amplifying stratification and segregation are valid. But advocating for abstinence will deny communities access to the tools the privileged are already using to help them write college essays, do their homework problems and learn a second language. Puritanical stances leave people ill-equipped to use this technology responsibly and unable to benefit from it."

Okay, but… hear me out… generative AI is terrible at all of those things. AI writing can be spotted a mile off. It gets answers to basic problems wrong, making it useless for homework. Due to its propensity to hallucinate and fawn over the user, you can't necessarily guarantee that its use of a non-English language is correct, nor that it will correct you if you get something wrong. And, more importantly than all of those things, relying on generative AI to do any of those things strips you of the ability to do them yourself. Not only that, it kills your curiosity to learn and discover new things for yourself, because it's much easier to just ask the chatbot to do it for you rather than to put in the work to learn a new skill yourself.

It's this latter part that really concerns me about generative AI. I've seen so many people willingly hand off to a chatbot during normal discussions and arguments and think that's a shortcut to "winning". When our legal and medical professionals are caught using these unflinchingly awful tools, their own skills and knowledge atrophy because they have no need to retain them — the chatbot will do all the hard work for them.

And what happens when, as looks increasingly likely, the money runs out and all these monumentally wasteful services are no longer able to operate? We're going to need humans who can actually do stuff again. And I'm concerned we're going to struggle to find them, because just over the course of the last couple of years I've seen a frightening amount of people completely give up on seeking out reliable information, knowledge and training for themselves because they can just ask the chatbot.

To address Ogbunu and Moore's main point — that abstinence from generative AI puts vulnerable people at risk — I say, full-throatedly, bollocks. The Internet has been a constant presence in all our lives — whether we're privileged or vulnerable — for decades at this point, to such a degree that it is considered one of the basic utilities these days. It is rammed full of helpful, thoughtful, weird and wonderful information, and the only skill one needs to cultivate in order to take advantage of this is how to determine whether or not something is a reputable source. That is something that we learn to do in school — or we should learn how to do, anyway.

If you hand that job over to a chatbot which is demonstrably wrong a statistically significant amount of times you ask it a question, you are not making use of that skill. That is not democratising the delivery of information; it is filtering all that information through a technology that, at its core, has been designed only with the interests of its billionaire owners in mind. And not only that, to get the supposed "best" out of these chatbots, you're expected to pony up $200 or more a month for a subscription. That doesn't sound very inclusive to the most vulnerable of society.

"Choices we make now will determine whether AI will be a tool for the powerful, dazzling the rest of us with its hype and subjecting us to its harms, or whether it will be a tool — imperfect but useful — in everyone's hands," conclude Ogbunu and Moore.

If it's an imperfect tool, it's not useful. I repeat: I do not use it; I do not need to use it; I do not want to use it. My choice is made; if I see anyone "powerful" using generative AI, I will laugh at them, because they are depriving themselves of the joy of thinking, of learning, of discovering, of creating. And then I will pity them.

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#oneaday Day 591: Joyless healthiness

One of the reasons a lot of people — including myself — find it difficult to stick to a diet is because so much "healthy eating" advice out there is seemingly designed to suck all of the joy out of anything to do with food.

I read a particularly good (bad?) example of this on BBC Food earlier, after it was linked to from the front page of BBC News. "Are we getting breakfast all wrong?" the headline asked. "How much does it matter what we eat in the morning and when we eat it?"

Having read the article a few times, I'm not entirely sure what its actual point is, because there seem to be multiple threads running at once. Firstly is the fact that here in the UK, we tend to be quite set in our ways when it comes to breakfast, while in other cultures they tend to eat "leftovers or [food] similar to [that which] you would have for lunch and dinner", according to NHS GP and chef Rupy Aujla. Then there's the question of when you should eat breakfast, for which the advice seems to be "whenever the fuck you want, or miss it completely and have a decent lunch if you feel like it".

Then there's the usual health scares — people who eat breakfast are "also found to be likely to smoke more, drink more alcohol and exercise less", while there is apparently "convincing evidence that consuming breakfast, compared to skipping breakfast, has positive impacts on short-term cognition and memory". So if you have breakfast, you'll spark up a fag and get pissed while lounging on the sofa, but at least you'll remember all of it the next day.

At one point the piece attempts to convince us that "a breakfast of tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans and a glass of juice" is a "fry-up" and repeats the bizarre advice that "no matter how much [juice] you drink it will still only count as one portion", then goes on to shame the juice-drinkers because "fruit juice is basically as sugary as a typical candy bar". The piece then advises that we should "use an (environmentally friendly) straw to bypass your teeth" if you are drinking juice, but, of course, says that we should all just drink water because it's "a healthy and cheap choice" that "has no calories and contains no sugars that can damage teeth".

I get why all these things are said. We do all eat too much and do terrible things to our health, but the solution to having issues with food is not to make eating a joyless chore, because in my experience all that does to you is increase cravings for things you "shouldn't" have. And in the worst cases, that can lead to bingeing way more than you would have under normal circumstances.

As with anything, the real answer seems to be moderation. It is difficult to keep cravings under control, particularly if your brain chemistry is particularly prone to taking things to excess, but so far as I'm concerned, far better to have a good, solid breakfast that fills you up and makes you feel good first thing in the morning than a handful of nuts, berries and wood chippings that will have you reaching for the crisps and Penguin bars by 10am.

As for me, today I've eaten pretty much what I want and I still have a bunch of calories left over if I fancy something a little later in the evening. And that has happened because I have taken care with moderation in what I've eaten so far today. I don't feel deprived of anything and I don't feel like I "need" to demolish a packet of biscuits, say — but at the same time, I also know that if I do fancy a biscuit or a cake or something, I have enough calories left in the budget that I can have one if I want.

So you know what? I might just do that. I might just do that.

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#oneaday Day 590: Noodle Report: Shin Ramyun Spicy Chicken and Toomba Flavours

I love a good noodle, at least partly due to my enjoyment of Paul Gannon and Eli Silverman's CheapShow podcast. And in recent times, it seems to have become much easier to find interesting noodles — not only via online ordering and specialist "Asian supermarkets", but also in regular old Sainsbury's, Morrisons and the like.

On my most recent trip to Sainsbury's, I picked up a few unfamiliar packets of noodles to give them a try — specifically, two from the Nongshim "Shin Ramyun" range. I've never tried the basic Shin Ramyun flavour that appears to have become quite widespread and accepted as yet, but these two looked intriguing, so I thought I'd give them a go. Shin Ramyun, if you're unfamiliar is just the Korean term for "spicy noodles", so most varieties of the range have a certain degree of zinginess to them.

The first one I tried was the "Toomba" variant. This didn't offer any real indication of what it was supposed to taste of other than that it was "Spicy & Creamy". Thus I had no idea what to expect — I didn't even really know if it was going to be a soup-style or stir fry-style noodle until I actually started preparing them.

As it happens, the Toomba variant is quite similar to Samyang's Carbonara-style Buldak noodles, which are a stir-fry type: you boil the noodles for about 4-5 minutes, drain them, then add a packet of sauce and a packet of powder and stir vigorously while still applying a bit of heat until the noodles turn an angry red colour. The result is a glossy noodle with a pleasantly sticky sauce, but no soup.

The flavour profile is similar to the Carbonara Buldak, also, only the spice level is somewhat milder. There's still a bit of a kick, but it's much less in-your-face than the Buldak ones, making these a much easier recommend to someone who doesn't mind a bit of spice, but doesn't want their head blowing off and their lips to be numb for several hours afterwards. I actually overall liked the flavour a lot more than the Carbonara Buldak, too — although that is a popular Buldak variant, it's one of my least favourite from the range — and can give these an easy recommend. There's a nice blend of spice, cheese and garlic, and they both smell and taste pretty great.

Why Toomba, though? Well, apparently it's a tad convoluted, but as Sporked reports, it is apparently down to a common method of customising standard Shin Ramyun noodles with milk, American cheese, sauteed onions and garlic, which is supposed to make them taste like a pasta dish served at South Korean branches of Outback Steakhouse. The dish itself is called Toowoomba Pasta after a city of the same name in Australia; it actually has no connection whatsoever to the city, as apparently South Korean Outback Steakhouses just like naming things after Australian cities for some reason. These noodles, whose packet of powder basically takes care of the "customising" for you, are called "Toomba" as a contraction that draws the mind to "Toowoomba" without running any obvious risk of upsetting Outback Steakhouses' lawyers. Clear? Not really? Don't worry. All you need to know is that they're pretty tasty.

The Spicy Chicken Shin Ramyun, meanwhile, are a soup-type noodle that come with a packet of powder and a packet of dried vegetable flakes. The result of cooking up a packet of these is a generous bowl of noodle soup that is, once again, an angry red colour. The flavour is quite nice, blending a bit of chicken, a bit of herbiness and a kick of spice. Again, like the Toomba noodles, they aren't overwhelmingly spicy to the same degree as Buldak noodles, but they have a pleasantly warming kick to them, and they'll make your lips tingle a bit.

I didn't mind these. They didn't wow me in the same way as some other noodles that I've had, but they're a perfectly acceptable bowl of noodle soup — a nice winter warmer, and I can imagine them being very pleasant if you're fending off a mild cold. I wasn't overly enamoured by the herbiness of the flavour, though; it overwhelmed the chickeniness of the broth somewhat in a way that I didn't completely love.

In summary then, these were both good bowls of noodles, but in future I'd feel a lot more inclined to go for the "Toomba" ones again; the Spicy Chicken ones were all right, but I don't feel immediately inclined to rush out and buy more of them. They do make me curious to try the regular ol' Shin Ramyun flavour, though, as apparently a lot of people rate those quite highly. I will be sure to report back on my findings when I've given them a go.

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#oneaday Day 588: Two-day report

As promised the other day, I have been following the diet and exercise plan for the last two days. It has been going well so far! I've been under my calorie budget both days (there is still some of today left, but I have enough calories left that if I want a little snack later, I can have one) and I've done 30 minutes on the under-desk elliptical trainer on both days.

Unsurprisingly, I don't feel any different and/or better as yet, but I am feeling quite positive about this particular attempt. I have some healthy and low-calorie snacks (that don't suck) in the house, and interestingly enough I haven't really been feeling "cravings" during the day — it's those cravings that inevitably do me in on other occasions, so it's a positive sign that I haven't particularly been feeling them over the last couple of days.

I even have some recommendations! Ryvita Snack-It Thins. These come in crisp-like flavours and are like 30 calories each. They're a nice crunchy snack by themselves, or you can put some cheese or something on them, or dip them in something. And unlike a lot of "flavoured" crispbreads and suchlike, these actually have a good amount of flavour to them. I got the prawn cocktail and salt and vinegar flavours, and they're both excellent. Better 30-60 calories for one or two of those than 100 calories or more for a bag of crisps. Although I'm not feeling guilty if I do fancy a bag of crisps at any point.

I also got a bunch of yogurts because I really like yogurt. I was never a big fan of it when I was a kid — particularly if it had "bits" in — and would never, ever pick yogurt from the daily dessert options of "fruit, cheese, yogurt, ice-cream" when offered by my mother. But these days I can happily enjoy even a tub of plain yogurt without anything in it — there's something about it I just find nice and refreshing, plus, again, it's probably better to pick a yogurt than a chocolate pudding. Yes, I know some yogurts have a shitload of sugar, fat and calories in them, but you have to allow yourself some pleasures if you don't want to go mad.

I bought a hazelnut yogurt from Sainsbury's yesterday. I wasn't sure what to expect — on one previous occasion when I've had a "hazelnut" yogurt it actually ended up being more "chocolate", but in this case, it actually was a regular yogurt with little bits of real hazelnut in it. I'm not sure it's something I'll buy again, but it was certainly interesting — and pretty low on the calories, too, since it was a low-fat yogurt.

For breakfast I've got myself some Weetabix and Sultana Bran because I'm a weirdo who unironically likes both of those things, and both of them go just as well with yogurt as they do with milk. Frustratingly, the bowl of Sultana Bran I poured myself this morning had I think one solitary sultana in it, but fortunately I like just plain ol' Bran Flakes too, so it wasn't a huge loss. The bag will be getting a good shake tomorrow.

The one thing I haven't done yet is reach out to seek some help from the psychotherapeutic angle. There's a big form I have to fill out and then I have to have a phone call with someone, and both of those things are daunting tasks that I don't want to face just yet. I'll see how I feel about tackling them over the weekend — before that, though, I have a nice relaxing Friday night to enjoy, and some HeroQuest to play tomorrow!

So there's your update. I know two days isn't long, but I wanted to acknowledge, as much to myself as anything, that I've made a solid start. Now to keep it up!

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#oneaday Day 586: Commitment

I'm back from The Day At The Office. I haven't set my office PC back up again yet though, so no tablet drawings for now. I'm tired and can't be arsed to faff around with wires right now, so it's plain text for today I'm afraid.

Anyway, as I said yesterday, I'm pretty determined to make 2026 the Year I Beat My Weight. Not, as in previous years, the year I beat my previous record for "highest weight Pete can be", but rather, the year I figure out exactly how to get on top of losing it.

I have a several-step plan that I will begin pursuing from tomorrow. (Today is a write-off due to all the travelling and the Wingstop we just had for dinner. We had the Wingstop with the full knowledge that we're both going to be Eating Healthy from tomorrow.) Here are the several steps:

I will use the Lose It! app to track my daily calorie intake, and keep below the daily recommended number of calories that will supposedly allow me to lose weight. In doing so, I will continue to enjoy the things I enjoy, but in better moderation. I will not be switching to a "half a banana and a handful of chia seeds for breakfast"-style diet, because that will probably make me want to kill myself.
I will count calories even if I go "off-plan" and have myself a "treat", to better educate myself in potentially how much damage I can do to my efforts if I "treat" myself too often.
I will do at least 30 minutes of exercise per day, on some combination of my under-desk elliptical machine and/or the treadmill that we have now set up in the spare room.
I will not use the calories burned during exercise as "bonus calories" to have additional Nice Things.
I will research and reach out to some form of psychotherapeutic support to help with my efforts.

That last one, I think, is going to be the big "different thing" I try this time, and I suspect it will be helpful. As I mentioned yesterday, while I mostly found my referral to the weight loss programme via the NHS to be unhelpful, the one aspect I really did feel like I was getting something from was the counselling aspect. Through talking therapy, I felt like I was able to start looking at my behaviours (conscious and unconscious) that have led me to this point, and to figure out ways I might be able to modify them. Unfortunately I had so few sessions that I don't feel like I really got anywhere — but I feel like if I had been able to spend more time with the therapist in question, we could have made some progress.

One thing that came out of those few conversations, and something that I find my thoughts returning to, is that some of my behaviours are consistent with a pattern of addiction. Anecdotally, having had experience with other people dealing with addiction, I would be inclined to agree. I recognise this. I recognise patterns in myself that I have seen in other people who were struggling with addiction. And I feel that is an important starting point. As with any addiction, though, the struggle will always be in breaking it, little by little. Because you can't really go "cold turkey" (so to speak) with food — unlike various forms of chemical abuse, you still need food to operate normally, and thus breaking any sort of food-related addiction is more about developing a healthier relationship with food rather than completely breaking your "attachment" to it.

But I'm probably getting ahead of myself there. Fact is, I think having some sort of Professional Help would be… well, helpful. Up until now, I've been hesitant, because Professional Help is 1) relatively expensive and 2) daunting to find your way into. 2) applies doubly in my case, because my social anxiety makes it a huge effort to be able to make contact with a stranger, but also it's overwhelming to see the sheer number of therapists that are out there, and having absolutely no idea who might be "right" for me.

Thus I think rather than taking the "roll of the dice" approach and just stabbing randomly at a huge list of therapists in my area, I'm going to try making use of an organisation known as The Empathy Project that operates in my area. This is a small, non-profit organisation based in the town I call home, and I can't remember how I stumbled across them, but I seem to have added myself to their mailing list at some point. What I have read about them online seems positive, however, and thus referring myself to them seems like it would be a solid starting point, if nothing else.

So, tomorrow, I am kicking all this off. I will be counting calories, I will be exercising, and I will be referring myself to someone who might be able to help me through this. I'm feeling oddly positive about this right now, so let's just hope I can keep this mental momentum.

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#oneaday Day 585: Hotels and their unflattering mirrors

It's that time of the month again, when I haul myself down to sunny Letchworth in preparation for A Day In The Office. And as such, I am coming atcha from my usual hotel, typing on my phone.

This hotel is, as I've alluded to in the past, All Right. It's reasonably comfortable, but its rooms vary quite a lot in quality, so it's always a bit of a roll of the dice when you get here as to whether or not you, for example, have a bath or not. This time I have been unlucky — no bath, plus a bedside table that looks like it last saw a lick of paint at some point in the 1970s.

I don't mind these little idiosyncrasies, though. They add character, and this place has become quite familiar to me from my numerous visits. Not quite enough that I know from my room number whether or not I have a "good" room, but enough that it is comfortably familiar here.

One thing I do dislike, though, is that pretty much every room seems to have mirrors, like, fucking everywhere. And there's something about hotel mirrors that always seems infinitely more unflattering that the ones you have at home.

I never feel more disgusted with my own body than when I see it in a hotel mirror. I think part of it may be the knowledge that I am away from home and thus not able to "do anything" about the way I look — not that I can really do anything at home, either, but I always feel just a bit more… grounded and in control when I'm at home.

I can't continue like this. This year has to be the year that I beat this problem. It's not going to be an easy process, and there are going to be times that I want more than anything to give up, but there is nothing I want more for 2026 than to be able to look at myself in the mirror and say "good work — you still have a way to go, but you're doing good". (I am a realist about this stuff if nothing else.)

That hard work has to come from me, though. I have to want it. Seeking external help has only worked on one previous occasion, and I never recovered from my relapse. Granted, there were external factors beyond my complete control that caused said relapse, but the approach I took back then — Slimming World — is clearly not quite right for me now.

I've been to the doctor about this, too. I was referred to an organisation who offered nutrition advice and counselling, but I found most of the course to be useless. The nutritional advice came once a fortnight and amounted to "eat less" (no, really?) and the counselling was even less frequent — though I did find the couple of sessions I had in that regard to be quite helpful, so that might be something I pursue independently and privately. It costs money, yes, but if investing in yourself isn't a good use of your funds, what is?

I'm keen to avoid drug-based approaches as although I'm sure they work, I am exceedingly squeamish about poking myself with needles and am not sure I would be able to do it — and I don't want to force Andie to have to do that, either.

During my time with the nutritionist and the counsellor, I was also continually asked if I wanted bariatric surgery, and while I have seen people get great results with that, that is not something I want for myself.

Besides being scared shitless of surgery in general — something I will have to confront when I do eventually manage to lose some weight, in order to get my long-standing hernia fixed — I also worry that the surgery won't fix the main problems, which I have pretty strong suspicions are as much psychological as physiological.

To put it another way, I'm worried that even if they remove the use of part of my stomach or whatever it is they do, I still wouldn't be able to control myself. And if you overeat when you've had that treatment, you can really fuck yourself up.

So that leaves me with good old-fashioned willpower, which hasn't done me too proud up until this point. But I really do want this. I want this to be the year I can look at myself and say yes, I am on the road to recovery.

Sorry for the rather TMI post, but sometimes it helps to just express these things and get them out in the open, as much for your own benefit as anyone else. I don't need anyone's help, I don't want advice — all I do need is some understanding and quiet support. And thankfully, that is something that I do have already.

#oneaday Day 581: Another experiment with references

I present you with the author's self-portrait, in which he is a bit more generous to himself than he normally is, and which was based, once again, on a 3D reference pose. This was also an experiment at adding noses and ears to a character.

I still have a lot of fundamental techniques I need to work on — getting my pen pressure consistent as I draw something is a big one, though there are tweaks one can make to one's tools to mitigate that somewhat — but I'm quite happy with how things are going, and feel like I'm definitely learning some things every time I draw something. And I'm not taking a ton of time over these right now, as is probably readily apparent — so I'm sure if I were to take a lot more time over a single image, things might come out better.

I'm actually keen to experiment with some other ideas, too. I have vivid memories of "Computer Art" classes back at school, where I got very good marks for a digital recreation of an Impressionist painting, achieved on an Archimedes computer. The toolset on the art package we were using there was limited, but I was able to make creative use of it to produce a satisfyingly good image that looked vaguely authentically Impressionist — as close as one can achieve with a limited resolution and colour palette, anyway!

One of the nice things about Clip Studio Paint is that it has a lot of nice built-in tools — virtual pens, pencils, paintbrushes and painting methods. Thus far I've been keeping it simple for the doodles I've been doing on here, but I kind of want to fiddle around with drawing some completely different sorts of images — maybe something more abstract, maybe something a bit more landscapey, maybe something completely imaginative. That will be a project for another day, which I will chronicle on here for sure, but for now, I'm definitely having fun dabbling in the visual arts.

I recognise that I will almost certainly never be as good as someone who has been practicing this stuff their whole life — but you also never know what you're capable of until you try it, which is partly what this was all about. I haven't even really tried drawing of any description outside of a few idle doodles since I was a teenager; I didn't study Art or any related fields at GCSE, so my "formal" education in such things stopped around year 9. And I tended to find Art classes a little frustrating at times, since I never really got on well with real paint. I was bad at mixing colours — whatever I mixed, I always seemed to end up with brown — and I didn't have particularly good command over brush strokes. My paint would drip and dribble and my eventual compositions would end up looking a bit messy.

There were parts of it I enjoyed, though. I do remember enjoying sketching still lifes with pencils, and the brief period we did a bit of technical drawing was something I took to quite well. I'm sure I will rediscover some other things eventually, too. For now, though, like I say, I'm continuing to feel like this tablet was a good "investment". And by "investment", I mean "put on my Amazon wishlist so someone would buy it me for Christmas".

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#oneaday Day 580: Make Bad Art (But With References)

A recurring refrain I hear online among creative types is "Make Bad Art". The sentiment behind this is that one shouldn't be afraid to do something that, by the standards of the day, is Not Very Good. Because it is only through being Not Very Good for quite some time that you have any possibility of ever graduating to Vaguely Good, and beyond.

Today, with that in mind, I decided to do a little experiment. Rather than drawing completely freehand as I usually do, I today decided to experiment with Clip Studio Paint's reference features. This allows you to do things like import 3D models of objects and people, then draw over them to produce your own finished works.

After a little tinkering with the 3D models to get the exaggerated proportions used by the characters I've previously drawn, I then traced over the outlines for a basic bit of line art, then added some features such as their faces, clothes and hair. Then I coloured using the basic method I have been using up until now.

The result… isn't amazing, I will freely admit, and I think at this point my freehand sketches are probably "better". But I did find the experiment valuable, and there are things I have already learned from doing this for just one session.

Firstly, even if using exaggerated big head proportions like I did here, it's tricky to get the balancing of a face right, particularly if you're using stylised eyes (and no noses) as I have been up until this point. But one thing that is very helpful when using reference models is the "centre line" on the head, which gives you an idea of where the eyes are supposed to go. It's easy to forget that our eyes are actually a good halfway down the front of our head, since the top part of many people's heads is covered by hair. But if you can get the eyes in the right place, that's a good start.

Some experimentation with adding additional detail to Alex's hair taught me an important lesson: if you're going to do dangly fringy front bits, draw them first. You will likely want the back to look at least a little bit like it is attached to the front bits, which is not something I have succeeded with in the above image. And with the way I composed that image — drawing the head and the "back hair" together as one layer — this is something that would have been difficult to correct without completely redoing the head. Lesson learned for future reference.

It's also clear that the simple, abstract hair I have been using for "me" doesn't quite work when using marginally more realistic proportions, or at least a reference model. I've been left with a huge forehead, which is not something I actually have. Hell, the stringy hair I have been using for a while now is supposed to represent a shaved head, which is not actually accurate to how my hair is right now. So I will have to rethink that a bit if I want to continue on like this.

However, difficulties aside, I also found using the reference models enormously helpful to get vaguely convincing human shapes. Simple things like getting the length of arms right, or having legs positioned in a convincing manner, or where a lady's boobs actually are — all of those things can be learned by tinkering around with a reference model.

Now, part of me feels like drawing over a 3D model like I've done today is sort of "cheating". But in reality, it's a valid method that I'm pretty sure many people use — and my Not Very Good efforts today show that there is still plenty of skill involved in making a trace of a reference model into something that looks Actually Good. And, as previously noted, it is only through Making Bad Art that one learns to get better — particularly if you are trying something new to see what techniques it teaches you.

I don't know if I will stick with using the reference models long-term — to me, someone who is "good at drawing" is someone who can work without things like this; the correct proportions, shapes and suchlike just come naturally — but I think it's a worthwhile experiment for at least a few more attempts. I know some things to try and concentrate on now, so let's just see what happens with a bit more tinkering!

Most importantly, though, I'm having fun. I'm glad I decided to give this a go with a proper tablet, as I'm enjoying myself. Even if I never get anywhere close to being Actually Good, it's always nice to have various ways to express yourself.

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#oneaday Day 579: Fresh hell

No drawing today; it doesn't quite feel appropriate.

So much for new year, new beginnings. Just the last week has seen all manner of fresh hell being served up, particularly across the pond in America, but these things have the potential to affect everyone in the world, directly or indirectly.

The first thing I want to acknowledge is America's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terror group murdering someone in cold blood in Minneapolis today. I have no real words to express what I feel about the continually declining situation in the States right now, and as someone who has relatives who live there, I am frightened. I can't even begin to imagine how people who live there in the knowledge that this horrendous shit is going down must be feeling right now.

That's about all I can say about that for the moment, because that situation is still ongoing. I at least wanted to acknowledge it, however, because it's just one of many things that have been going horribly, horribly wrong recently, making it clear that 2026 is not going to offer any sort of respite from the general shitshow the 2020s have been so far. I hope the perpetrator of this heinous act is brought to justice, and that this can be the starting point for the people of the United States to take their country back — by force, if necessary — from an increasingly, dangerously unhinged administration.

The main thing I want to talk about today is Grok, the generative AI large language model attached to X, the child sexual abuse material and revenge porn platform formerly known as the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Grok has been trouble ever since Elon Musk, idiot-in-chief of The Everything App, decided that he needed to make it Cool and Based, and not subject to those pesky guardrails that the boring folks at OpenAI and Anthropic were doing. (Guardrails which, I will add, are consistently failing, as people keep dying as a result of following chatbot "advice" when it comes to drugs and suicidal ideation. But that's beyond the scope of what I want to talk about today.)

If you've somehow missed what's been going on, Grok, ostensibly an on-platform AI able to provide additional context and explanation to a post if someone asks it to chip in, is being used to a frightening degree to produce non-consensual pornography based on real people's photographs — including those of minors. And it has been complying with these requests, posting uncensored nude and lingerie-bikini clad images of women and girls who had previously posted perfectly normal, innocent images of themselves online.

Not only that, but the "community" has been quickly finding ways around what little guardrails Grok does have in place, as reported by the excellent 404 Media, one of the best, most rigorous sources in tech journalism today. For example, Grok supposedly won't generate an image of someone covered in cum, but it will happily comply with a request to "donut glaze" someone, as reported by Eliot Higgins in a lengthy thread on Bluesky earlier today.

There's been disturbingly little critical reporting of this from the media, too. There was a half-arsed attempt to cover the situation during which multiple news outlets unironically said that "Grok apologised" for producing the inappropriate material, when, as a large language model, it is not capable of doing such a thing. The "apologies" posted were simply responses to further prompts, and the insincerity of them was emphasised by someone also prompting it to basically post a Cool and Based "deal with it" kind of response immediately after the initial "apology".

X, The Everything App, so far appears to have done little to curtail the issue. Indeed, if you go click on Grok's profile right now — don't do that — and look at the replies tab, you will almost certainly see a request to put a non-consenting woman in a bikini within two or three posts, if not as the very first post you see. This has been done to a vast number of people so far, including celebrities, public figures, individuals just posting selfies and, yes, minors. And, as one might expect, it has been overwhelmingly women that have received this treatment.

This has been absolutely revolting to see, and although I left Twitter behind myself long ago for a variety of reasons, I am still obliged to check in on it every so often for the day job. And I kind of feel sickened to have to do that; I have absolutely no desire to associate the brand I work for, which I actually care about, with a platform that is seemingly okay with the material I've just been describing. If it were up to me, I would remove the brand from the platform entirely, but unfortunately that is not my decision to make — and thankfully, at some point hopefully not too long away, I will be stepping away from having to deal with social media entirely, in favour of some new responsibilities at the company I will enjoy a lot more.

But if you still have a Twitter account on the grounds that "your audience is still there", let me be blunt: no, they are not. Anyone with any decency abandoned that hellsite long before this latest nonsense started to be a thing, because they could see how things were going a mile off. I wish I could say I was surprised that Grok ended up being used for non-consensual deepfake revenge porn of minors, but I am not.

Back in 2023, I wrote about how I'm not surprised so many people become misanthropes in this day and age, and how I had pretty much lost faith in my fellow man. Things haven't gotten any better since then. In fact, they've become much, much worse. If you've ever thought "ah, no, that's ridiculous, there's no way that'd ever happen", then I'm sorry to say that it probably has already. And then some edgelord shithead has "donut glazed" it just to add insult to injury.

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