#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!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#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".

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 577: A non-comprehensive ranking of some slightly unusual crisps

Yesterday, we covered what I described as "regular-ass crisps". The crisps that you see that are just called "crisps", whether they're by Walkers or a supermarket's own brand. Thin slices of potato, deep fried and seasoned with some sort of flavouring powder.

But the crunchy snack sector is more than just regular-ass crisps, as anyone who had a lunchbox in the 1980s will know. There is a whole world of slightly unusual crisps out there, and today I wanted to celebrate some of my favourites — old and new — with another ranking.

To match yesterday, I will be choosing six slightly unusual types or flavours of crisps or crisp-adjacent snack (i.e. puffed corn snacks count) and ranking them in such a way that absolutely no-one will ever want to argue with me or tell me I'm wrong.

Let's begin!

6. Walkers Worcester Sauce

Now, I know this is technically a regular-ass crisp, but Worcester Sauce is also a "limited edition" flavour — although Walkers have done it so many times at this point that they might as well just make it part of the regular-ass lineup, because it's proven pretty much beyond a doubt at this point that people like it.

As for me, I like it a lot — it probably ranks above prawn cocktail, top of my regular-ass crisps ranking, if we're just talking about regular-ass crisps. But if we're talking about slightly unusual crisps, it ranks low because it's not especially unusual.

Flavour-wise, it does everything I like in a crisp or crisp-adjacent snack, which is to say it has enough sour flavour to make your cheeks turn inside out. If they'd just do Walkers Max, But Worcester Sauce Flavour, I think I'd die happy. From cholesterol-related heart failure.

5. Tangy Toms

I don't even know if you can get these any more (EDIT: you can), but these were a staple of the 1980s school lunchbox. Notable for being extremely cheap compared to regular-ass crisps, they also carried that super-sour artificial flavour that I like so much, but applied to a puffed corn snack rather than a potato chip. This time around, the flavour was supposedly tomato, but I ain't never tasted a tomato that tasted like Tangy Toms.

It was a good day any day these were in the lunchbox. I'm only ranking them so relatively low because the bag size was always a bit stingy, but I guess you get what you pay for when you're buying 10p crisps.

4. Wotsits Giant Prawn Cocktail flavour

Wotsits? Good. Prawn cocktail? Good. For a brief period in the '80s, you could get flavours of Wotsits other than the standard cheese, including beef and prawn cocktail, and they were both great, but got phased out after a while because we can't have nice things permanently, apparently. In more recent years, Wotsits have taken a cue from Cheetos with the Flamin' Hot flavour, which is good, but for their Giant variants (which are literallly just Wotsits, but bigger) they also reintroduced prawn cocktail.

And it's a good prawn cocktail flavour, in that it doesn't taste anything like prawns or Marie Rose sauce, but it is both delicious and dangerously addictive. I can happily demolish a big bag of these, and this is why I am fat. Better that than, like, heroin, though, right?

3. "Party Mix" from convenience stores

I don't know what brand makes this. I have a feeling it might be like a Happy Shopper own brand or something. But you hopefully know what I mean: comes in huge bags, contains a mix of all manner of different shaped potato and corn snacks, all liberally doused in flavouring powder, producing some of the most potent flavour explosions in the crunchy snacking space.

My main point of reference for these is that you can get them in the "ParcMarket" at Center Parcs, which I believe is technically a Co-Op, but I've also seen something similar in our local convenience store, which I believe is Happy Shopper-related. I think they even do a prawn cocktail one, which sounds like an exceedingly dangerous thing to provide me with a huge bag of.

2. Lay's All-dressed

I've had these precisely once in Canada and I've been kind of pining for them ever since. As the name suggests, they are supposedly "all of the flavours" on one crisp, and I'm not sure that quite comes across, but they are delicious.

Given that Lay's are basically the Walkers of North America (they're both owned by Pepsi), I'm surprised this particular flavour never made it over to the UK, because I think it would probably go down a storm here. I'll have to see if I can import some… although part of me is afraid to, just in case the second taste is more disappointing than the first!

1. Takis Fuego

A relatively recent discovery for me thanks to the fact our local convenience store carries them, these have quickly become my favourite crisp-adjacent snack of choice. For the unfamiliar, Takis are like what would happen if you rolled up a Dorito before cooking it. Their shape means they carry a lot of flavour, because there's flavour powder on all the rolled-up layers, and the Fuego flavour in particular is already pretty strong.

With an initial chilli kick, a bit of limey zing and a lingering heat, these probably aren't for everyone. But give me a choice of all the crispy things in the world, and I will probably gravitate towards these more often than anything else.

Conclusions? Crisps!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 576: A ranking of the regular-ass crisp flavours

Hello. I couldn't think of anything to write about today — at least not without threatening to be depressingly topical, which I'm keen to avoid — so I thought I'd fall back on something completely inoffensive and not at all controversial, which is my ranking of the regular-ass crisp flavours that you get in an average multipack.

For clarity, this means the following flavours:

Ready salted
Salt and vinegar
Cheese and onion
Roast chicken
Prawn cocktail
Smoky bacon

Now, the exact "goodness" of each of these varies according to manufacturer, but based on a sampling of two ends of the market — Walkers (a "prestige" brand of sorts) and Lidl "Snaktastic" own-brand — I feel pretty confident in my rankings. So let us begin immediately.

6. Cheese and onion

I will grant that I am biased in this regard, because I do not like onion or onion-flavoured things, but it continually mystifies me that this is, supposedly, the most popular crisp flavour in the United Kingdom, according to multiple surveys.

I wouldn't mind if it was a little bit cheesy, but I've decided to give these a chance on multiple occasions and simply cannot get past the revolting onion-ness of them, with the "cheese" part seemingly being totally overpowered by it.

By contrast, I absolutely love the sadly defunct beef and onion flavour crisps that Walkers used to do in the brown packets. Those, to me, didn't taste oniony at all, but the artificial beef flavour (which doesn't really taste like beef at all) came through perfectly well. But I don't think you can get those any more — I haven't seen them for a good while, anyway — so they're out of the rankings for now.

5. Ready salted

These may be ranked low on my list, but not because I don't like them; on the contrary, sometimes it's nice to have a simple salted flavour. They're just a bit dull though.

To my shame, on one occasion at primary school where I found I had a packet of ready salted crisps in my lunchbox, I became so inexplicably furious that I didn't have one of the "good" flavours that I crushed them angrily rather than eating them. I don't really know why I did that, and it's a memory I firmly wish I could eject from my long-term storage.

These days, I am not infuriated by ready salted crisps. But they are usually the last to go. Andie ranks them quite highly, though, so it's not as if they go to waste.

4. Smoky bacon

The next few are all a tough call to rank, as I specifically like all of them, but out of all of them, I think I'd probably put smoky bacon flavour at the bottom of the heap.

There's nothing wrong with smoky bacon and, like ready salted, the intense saltiness of the flavour is sometimes exactly what you're looking for in a crisp. But, when presented with an array of different crisp flavours to choose from, smoky bacon is rarely the one I reach for first.

3. Roast chicken

Likewise roast chicken. I rank this flavour slightly higher because it feels like you don't see these as often as you used to, and thus sometimes I will pick them as a "novelty" option.

There are also some truly excellent "luxury" roast chicken options available, with the one most people are likely familiar with being Walkers Sensations. To my recollection, the roast chicken flavour of these was the first to become widely available, and they are very good crisps.

They don't taste anything like chicken, of course, but very few crisp flavours do actually taste like their name — with the exception of ready salted and salt and vinegar, for obvious reasons.

2. Salt and vinegar

Salt and vinegar is one of my favourite crisp flavours. I particularly enjoy a strongly seasoned salt and vinegar crisp — the kind that is surprisingly, intensely sour. Regular old Walkers are decent in this regard, but I think the best salt and vinegar flavour outside of explicitly luxury brands like Kettle Chips is probably the Walkers Max ridged variants.

Crinkly crisps tend to have stronger flavours anyway, and when you have something that is already fairly pungent, like salt and vinegar, crinkling them and putting them on a thick crisp makes them even better.

It was a close-run thing between this and the top spot, I can tell you. But ultimately this is where the results fell.

1. Prawn cocktail

Another crisp flavour that has the dubious honour of not tasting anything like what it's supposed to, prawn cocktail crisps have always been, for me, the ultimate flavour. They combine everything I like about an artificial crisp flavour. You've got the saltiness. You've got the sourness of vinegar. You've got a touch of sweetness.

It all comes together to create a flavour that makes my mouth water to imagine. Prawn cocktail is an awesome flavour, regardless of what type of crisp it is applied to, and is pretty much always my top pick when given an array of different flavours to choose from.

So there you have it. Those are my rankings, and nothing you can do will change my mind. If you're lucky, I might rank some "unusual" flavours tomorrow!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 574: Characters, remastered

For today's doodle, I thought I would reimagine the "characters" that occasionally appear on this blog in a new style, courtesy of my new drawing tablet and the capabilities of Clip Studio Paint. I think they all probably need some refinement, but I enjoyed making this initial sketch, and each new thing I draw gives me some ideas on what I might need to focus on when developing my skills. I don't have any grand designs on becoming an illustrator or anything, but it would be fun to develop if not "technique" then at least "a distinctive style".

Honestly one of the biggest challenges is fundamentals! Drawing a circle is surprisingly hard! Drawing a circle with roughly equal pen pressure all the way around is even harder! (And, as you can see, I have consistently failed in this regard across the entire image.) Part of me wants to figure out a way to refine that somewhat, but another part of me feels like those individual quirks and "brush strokes" (of a sort) give a piece some individuality and a sense of identity — and that's where a distinctive personal style stems from.

I'm not 100% sure where all the characters came from, to be honest, other than "my own brain". Obviously there's the version of me, which is a little bit less fat than me and a lot cooler than me.

Phillipe (the one who is 80% mouth, and who will almost certainly get his cock out at some point) was primarily introduced to the blog as an homage to a fellow blogger and Twitter enthusiast first time around the #oneaday train — and I was pleased to note recently that he appears to have made something of a name for himself as a voice actor. The character wasn't intended to resemble him in any way, either looks- or personality-wise; he was just named after him, which I recall us all finding quite amusing, given that in stickman form, Phillipe was always the most wilfully offensive of all of them.

Alex, the redhead, has changed her style a bit from her stickman form, sporting some '80s frizzy hair instead of the straight bob she previously had. I primarily created her because I like redheads. She was often designed to be something of a "foil" or "straight man" to me, tending to be something of a voice of reason and rationality even when things were taking a turn for the bizarre. She has canonically slept with Phillipe on more than one occasion, however, much to her disgust.

Lucy, the blonde, I believe first came about in this post, albeit as a brunette. She was initially intended as an embodiment of mindlessly chipper retail workers who stick rigidly to a script even when it's abundantly clear that all you want is a cup of normal coffee and minimal interaction with other human beings. Over time, she developed into what I freely admit is a blonde stereotype of being a ditzy dumbass who is painfully naive about pretty much everything, but she's actually one of my favourite characters to draw because her overly exuberant personality encourages me to make her as expressive as possible. For her new look, I gave her a bit more detail in the bow that ties up her ponytail, her key identifying visual feature.

Other characters that have put in more occasional guest appearances, and who are not pictured above, tended to be more explicitly based on people I actually know. These four, though, I think have always subconsciously represented parts of myself.

The "me" character is, obviously, partly represented by my own self-image, with a little more generosity than I would usually provide myself with. Humour in past images and comics I've used "me" in tends to be at my expense, but I have also used "me" to express my thoughts, worries and feelings about things.

Alex, I think, represents part of me that wants to be cool and popular and liked. I'm not especially desperate for this or anything (although to be perfectly honest, some more friends who live nearby and actually care about me would be nice) but there is part of me that thinks "if I wasn't so fat, ugly, stupid, socially awkward, cripplingly self-conscious and generally inept at living on this planet, I'm sure I could be a riot at parties". Or, you know, something to that effect.

Lucy, then, represents the part of myself that acknowledges that I, myself, am indeed fairly dumb and naive about things one probably should know better about by the time one is 44 years old.

So that's that. You will be seeing a lot more of all of them, particularly once I figure out how to do full-body shots of each of them without them looking weird. That's something to figure out another day, though!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 573: Welcome to 2026

You get an old-school Paint.net sketch today as it's cold, I'm tired, I've just written 3,000 words about Wolfenstein 2009 (read 'em here!) and I have to work tomorrow. Also I can't be bothered to go upstairs to draw something on the tablet, even though I will have to go upstairs in order to go to bed at some point. Look, it's the first day of the new year, cut me some slack, okay?

New years are, of course, times for new beginnings and a sense of refreshment and renewal. As I've commented on before, there's no real magical reason that the last digit of the date increasing by one should have any real sort of "meaning", but it always does feel like a nice time to take stock of one's situation and figure out how one might want to improve one's lot, if indeed one is in a position where one's lot needs improving.

My lot does indeed need improving in numerous ways, so while I'm not sure I want to say that these are "new year's resolutions" as such, I do at least want to set out some things I want to achieve this year:

I will recommence dieting and stick to it for more than two weeks at a time. Two weeks appears to be something of a mental roadblock for me, so if I can survive past that, I can probably go for a lot longer. The latter half of the year hasn't really helped with all sorts of commitments that make sticking to a diet plan quite difficult, but new year, new you and all that, so both Andie and I have decided: starting from our next food shop (i.e. once all the remaining holiday "treats" are out of the house) we are both going to make a real go of it, as we could both really do with making that effort — me more than her by a considerable margin, I hasten to add.
I will get into the habit of doing some sort of daily exercise for at least 30 minutes. This, initially, will take two different forms: using my under-desk elliptical machine to give my legs a bit of a workout and, once we have Sorted The Spare Room Out, which is a job for the imminent future, using the at-home treadmill Andie bought a while back, but which neither of us have used all that much because there isn't really a good place to put it. Sorting The Spare Room Out will involve rearranging it in such a way that said treadmill can have a semi-permanent place to live, and thus we will both (hopefully) use it a lot more.
I will go to the doctor and see if they can do anything about my knee hurting. This is a lingering issue that is probably related to my lack of exercise and my weight problems, but it's got noticeably worse over the last couple of weeks, so I figure I should get it looked at properly.
I will make time to play the piano for at least half an hour at a time on at least three occasions per week. Long-term I will extend the individual sessions and aim for daily practice, but I am starting with a relatively humble goal that seems achievable.
I will do at least one piece of creative fiction writing per week.
I will practice my drawing with the tablet.
I will plan and begin writing an Evercade-related project that I've been milling over in my head for a long time.

There are probably some other things that I want to do, but I think that lot is a good starting point. Specific, measurable, attainable and all that nonsense. My overall "life situation" in terms of work, money and suchlike isn't in a terrible place right now, so it's the more "personal" side of things that I need to work on and fix. And while the "professional" and "financial" sides of things are comfortable, it would seem like a good time to make the "personal" comfortable too, non?

Oh, also, happy new year.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.