Well, we're officially locked down. Well, okay, we're not quite locked down, but it's as near as dammit.

From this evening onwards, we apparently are not allowed to leave our homes except for "essential shopping, as infrequently as possible", one form of outdoor exercise per day, any medical need and "essential" work. (This means not you, GameStop… not that we actually have you here, but whatever.)

This is an interesting time to be living through, for sure. As I mentioned a few days ago, I feel oddly calm about the whole situation, despite the risks — and last night's realisation that I may have actually already had this thing probably helps with that — and that allows me to sort of observe what's going on with a certain amount of curiosity.

And, of course, frustration that people not taking the situation seriously means that we have to have Big Daddy Boris tell us all that we're grounded. I wonder if this will have any impact on the stupid shop situations; I went to Tesco earlier to go and pick up a prescription and the toilet paper shelves were completely bare. Like, not a single pack there. We presently have eight and a bit rolls left. I may have to ration my poos. Unthinkable.

Anyway. That's what's going on. Outside of that, hopefully tomorrow I should have another article going live on NintendoLife — it was originally supposed to go live on Friday, but they wanted to clickbait the shit out of Animal Crossing, so it's been pushed back several days, much to my frustration (and my considerable apologies to poor old localisers Fruitbat Factory, who are quite keen to see the review!).

But hopefully it absolutely definitely probably should happen tomorrow, and regardless of whether it does or not, I'll also be writing about the work in question on MoeGamer tomorrow, too.

On that note, I guess we better lock the doors or something. Have a happy quarantine!

I'm wondering if I've already had coronavirus, COVID-19, whatever you want to call it.

A few months back, I had a pretty unpleasant few days with a dry, "non-productive" cough and general feelings of… unwellness. It was something that went around a bit and didn't quite feel like a normal cold or the flu.

The reason I'm wondering this is that some people seem to think that coronavirus has actually been around since about January or so, and that the current pandemic is the result of not taking the potential threat seriously. Whether that's a conspiracy theory or not, I don't know, but the supposed timeline would certainly match up.

I guess it doesn't really matter now, what with the measures in place right now and Our Illustrious Leader Boris warning that stricter measures will become necessary if people don't start taking the situation a bit more seriously.

It's going to be strange to look back on this time when it's all over. It's also strange to think that we have no idea how long this situation is going to last. I'm pretty fine with the necessary measures right now, to be honest — as I've noted previously, it's not especially a huge change to my lifestyle generally, since I'm not big on going out and socialising anyway. I guess I might feel differently in a few weeks… or months.

Ah well. Not worth worrying about right now. And now I have a cat sitting on me, so I'd better pay her some attention. Hope you had as pleasant a weekend as possible under the circumstances!

There has, for obvious reasons, been a lot of discussion over "panic buying" and people "stockpiling" things due to uncertainty over how long this whole pandemic thing is going to last. And, indeed, if you head on down to your local big-name shop (Tesco Express in our case) you'll find empty shelves, stressed-out employees and, more than likely, signs politely informing customers that they really should think about not being dickheads to retail workers.

I popped over to the shop Andie and I affectionately refer to as "Funny Shop" earlier. Funny Shop is your proper traditional British local convenience store, packed with a random assortment of crap — including the kind of sweets you probably haven't seen since the '90s — and, generally speaking, far fewer customers than your average Tesco Express.

They also had both toilet roll and bread, which Tesco Express is notably lacking right now. I guess when "panic buying" people just go straight for the big-name stores and don't think to support local little family-run franchises. Well, I know where I'm going when I need some more bits and pieces — it'll take some of the pressure off the poor folks at Tesco and it'll support the local community. Double whammy of win, no?

I hope retail workers end up acknowledged as some of the real heroes of these trying times. Having worked retail several times in my life, I feel their pain right now… and they absolutely should be drawing a much more substantial salary than minimum hourly wage for what they're having to put up with!

Among gamers of a certain age, I feel like the PS2 is a greatly beloved system… but strangely, I also feel like there are a lot of specific games for that platform that don't get talked about with the same fondness as similar titles from the PS1 era.

I'm particularly thinking of RPGs here. Speak to anyone who grew up with the PS1 and at least one of them will wax lyrical about how much they loved stuff like Grandia, the Final Fantasies (including Tactics), Legend of Dragoon, Lunar and all manner of others. But speak to that same person about the PS2 and, despite the fact that PS2 plays host to some amazing games, you're unlikely to hear much about anything other than FFX (certainly not FFX-2) and maybe FFXII now everyone's admitted it's actually good.

I wonder why that is? Stuff like the Atelier Iris games and Ar Tonelico appear to be the nichest of niche-interest, while I feel like they would have been celebrated as all-time greats if something roughly equivalent had come out back in the PS1 era.

I did wonder if it was to do with the fact that the PS2's library is vast, and thus a lot of things simply fell between the cracks, never to be seen again. But the PS2's North American library (according to Google) is 1,850 titles strong, compared to 1,300 for PS1; that's a reasonable difference, but not huge.

Perhaps it's to do with changes in gaming culture. But then the PS1 was when Sony started its big push to make gaming "cool" with stuff like Wipeout and its appearances at the Ministry of Sound and suchlike, so I feel like it's not that either.

Was it the shift to "triple-A"? I don't think so, because I don't feel like what we know today as "triple-A" really established itself until the following generation with the Xbox 360 and PS3.

What, then? I do wonder. Still, at least it means there's a huge amount of overlooked and underappreciated stuff to explore, even 20 years after the console first showed its face. And that's 100% fine with me!

Over the years, I've noticed one thing about my own anxiety: it's usually about the stupidest things. Here we are right now in the middle of a genuine crisis — a global pandemic — and I don't really feel anything about it. Sure, it'd suck to actually get struck down with Corona-chan, but I'm not losing any sleep over it; with my lifestyle, I think it's fairly unlikely at this point, unless we're unfortunate down at Tesco Express.

I wonder why this is? Anxiety is a bitch at the most inconvenient of times, and yet the one time you'd think I would/should be anxious… nothing. This has been a bit of a pattern for me; if something genuinely bad is happening, I'm usually the one who will want people to calm down a bit and look at things rationally. Sometimes I even find myself getting frustrated at people getting overly hysterical… much as I'm getting pretty fed up with all the "panic buying" going on right now. Couldn't get a loaf of sliced bread earlier, and the running joke that is toilet roll remains nowhere to be seen.

I think my frustration stems from the fact that I can see how people are being stupid in situations like this. In the case of the bread in particular, there's absolutely no point in stocking up on bread because it goes off. Toilet roll… maybe there's a case for stockpiling, but it's simply inconsiderate to do so. Other things… buy what you need, leave what you don't for someone else.

I wonder how long this is all going to last… and if it does look like lasting a while (which it might… I've heard the figure "12 weeks" going around today) if people will chill the fuck out a bit before it's all over. I certainly hope so. Because this eerie calm in my heart probably won't last forever!

Second full day of working from home today, and it's not too bad at all. I mean, obviously as anyone else working from home will doubtless have realised already, maintaining your focus on a tedious day job when you're surrounded by all your home comforts can be a challenge, but other than that, it's perfectly doable. In fact, I kind of hope we'll have the opportunity to continue working from home after this whole thing blows over… but I doubt that will happen. We'll see.

As for the other side of the whole "social distancing" thing — i.e. not being able to go out and do stuff — it hasn't really bothered me all that much, because to be perfectly honest I tend not to go out and do stuff a lot anyway. I reached a point a good few years back now where I realised I never had any fun going "out" to the pub or clubs or whatever, so I stopped, and I haven't regretted it. I don't waste my money on drinks I'll probably chunder back up the next morning, which of course means more money available for video games!

The only thing I'm really missing out on is our supposedly fortnightly board gaming evenings, but given that those have been extremely sporadic and prone to short-notice cancellation ever since two of our number foolishly went and procreated, it honestly doesn't feel like much of an adjustment there, either.

I'm sure I'll go stir crazy before long, but I have plenty of things here at home with which to keep myself occupied until that happens!

Make sure you take good care of yourselves, too, and try not to be too anxious; all this will pass before long, and it will be nothing more than a rather unusual memory!

First full day working from home today. Wasn't too bad, although it does make one realise 1) how little "offices" are needed today and 2) how little you generally get done on an average workday. I definitely won't complain about being able to endure my weekly gauntlet of Tuesday morning conference calls from bed, however.

I wonder how long all this stuff going on with the pandemic right now is going to last. There are a lot of jokes going around about how introverted nerds have been mastering "social distancing" (why does it need a fancy name?) for many years now… but, y'know, as an introverted nerd I am genuinely kind of appreciating the opportunity to be able to do my day job from a comfortable environment, and without having to interact directly with other people.

It won't last, of course, so I'm going to make the best of what is, rationally speaking, a fairly bad situation for the world as a whole to be in. Every cloud has a silver lining and all that; I know I certainly don't miss my morning commute, which isn't long, but it is annoying.

Plus I get to hang out with my cats while I work, which is something to be celebrated!

You always feel like reports of people around the world behaving like morons are exaggerated… but then you witness it for yourself, and you lose a bit of faith in humanity.

This whole pandemic thing is quite worrying… not for the disease itself, but for the way people are behaving. The most major issue by far has to be the panic-buying; I went over to our local Tesco the other day and saw a middle-aged woman walking out with three huge packs of toilet paper from the already mostly depleted stock; no-one needs twenty-seven rolls of toilet paper at that short notice.

I went again yesterday and happened to overhear some of the Tesco employees quite openly expressing their understandable frustration with people decimating their shelves. And this is just a tiny little local Tesco Express; I shudder to think what the larger stores are having to deal with.

Panicking doesn't help anyone, and acting in an inconsiderate manner just makes matters worse. I like to try and believe that I'm someone who can assume the best intentions from people, but it feels like it gets harder and harder to do that every day.

I've spent pretty much the whole day reading the visual novel that I'm reviewing for Nintendo Life this week. I was concerned I wouldn't have the time to make it all the way through, but I'm pretty close to the end now, so all is good.

It's been quite a while since I spent this much coherent time immersed in a long VN, but this one has really been a pleasure. It's been quite hard work, too; as an "NVL-style" (full screen of text) visual novel there's a lot more reading in one go than those that take the "ADV" (dialogue box) approach, and that requires a certain amount of mental fortitude to maintain your attention — but the quality of the writing and the narrative in this one is such that I've been thoroughly immersed.

Some of you will already be familiar with the VN in question (which is embargoed until Thursday, hence my not mentioning it by name) as it's a Switch port of a game that came out on PC a while back, but this is my first encounter with it. I remember its original release being a moderately big deal (for a VN, anyway) for various reasons; hopefully it will see some success in its Switch incarnation, too, since the Switch is such a lovely platform to play VNs on, whether you want to see them on the big screen or go for the truly immersive reading experience of playing in handheld mode on headphones.

Anyway. I should hopefully polish that off tomorrow evening, which means I can get back on track for my own projects! You can expect some more detailed writeups for Dead or School and NinNinDays on MoeGamer this week, as I reviewed both for Nintendo Life last week, and there's plenty of scope for more to talk about with both. And the VN I'm on about here will also have a detailed write-up, too, as there's a lot to pick apart which simply won't be possible to explore in a thousand-word review!

Anyway. I'm off to bed. I still have to go into work tomorrow, though it'll be a ghost town as most people are being encouraged to work from home. Since I and one of my teammates don't have the facility to do that, however, we have to go in still. Yay. Still, a quiet office probably means not a lot will be going on, which will be nice.

Hope you had a fine weekend!

I happened to stumble across this image earlier today, and it struck a bit of a chord with me:

I've not come across this quote before, nor have I ever consciously thought about it — but it's spot on. One thing I do think about quite a bit when I write is the "sound" of what I write; I tend to write in the style of speech. Not necessarily my own speech, mind, because I don't speak like I'm making some sort of grand proclamation all the time (however much my wife would like to convince me that I am a "posho") but… as if I'm reading it out loud, I guess. Making a presentation. That sort of thing.

It's for this reason that I've found my articles often find themselves making for good videos with minimal adjustments to the actual words. Because I've already written them in a manner that could be spoken aloud in most cases — unconsciously, usually — they translate perfectly well into the video format.

On a related note, I recorded a bunch of videos today and I've come to a bit of a decision: since I'm doing quite a lot of video per week at the moment, have all my MoeGamer stuff and now occasional Nintendo Life freelance assignments, I'm going to retire Warriors Wednesday at the end of the current playthrough of Warriors All-Stars. Not that I care about numbers, but it's always been my least-performing series; the majority of the people who come to my channel are there for Atari A to Z, it seems so that's certainly not going anywhere!

I'm not going to immediately replace it with anything, either; I just want to take a little bit of pressure off myself. I normally record two episodes of everything in one go, and cutting back on Warriors Wednesday will allow me to free up at least an hour and a half of time to do other things, which would be very welcome right now! Among other things, it will provide me with some more time where I could do some more "video articles", which I'd like very much to do some more of; I was particularly pleased with my 198X one from a little while back, so more stuff in that mould for sure!

Anyway. It's Saturday night ramblings; I should probably go to sleep so I can spend tomorrow cramming in the visual novel I need to review for Nintendo Life next week! And perhaps even finding some time to actually play Atelier Iris 2… who knows?!