STILL ILL. Well, this is probably unsurprising, since I posted about being ill this morning, but… yeah. Still ill. Possibly worse. Covered in Vicks Vapo-Rub (which my cat Meg appears to be frightened of) and drowning in Lemsip. Unpleasant.

Still, I got an article out, but I'm definitely going to bed now. Hopefully if I'm well enough there'll be a substantial feature on LAMUNATION! tomorrow; if not I'll try and post that over the weekend. I've also got an article in the last (well, actually first; the last I have to cover) of Stranga Games' short-form horror adventures in me, too, though I need to actually beat that first and I'm not sure my brain is up to point-and-click puzzling right now.

Sorry these posts have been a bunch of moany old crap lately; I'll try and be a bit more positive, as dwelling on the negative clearly isn't doing me any good — either physically or mentally!

With that in a mind, here is a picture of my cat Patti doing her best to convince us that she is not, in fact, a cat, and is, in fact, an Eldritch abomination from beyond time and space.

Sorry for the lack of post yesterday, I was in bed by about 7pm feeling like absolute garbage. I slept until about 5am this morning, and I don't feel any better today. But here I am at work trying to be a good little cog in the corporate machine because I'm not "allowed" to be ill any more for some indeterminate period of time.

Ugh. Sorry, I won't keep harping on about this, but it is one of the things really heavily weighing on my mind at the moment, and everything is sort of feeding into each other. The anxiety and depression make my physical symptoms worse, which makes me feel worse, particularly if I feel like I might be ill enough to take a sick day. And on days like today when I've dragged myself in despite being in bed probably being the best option… well, you can add a touch of bitterness to that mix, too.

A friend of mine recently took a job where he only has to work part-time and can do a lot of that from home. While I'm sure he's not earning the same as me, particularly on a part-time salary, I'm certainly envious of him — as he seems to be so much happier than he was when he was working full-time for a company he despised. I don't despise my company, but I do despise the corporate culture. This is a more general problem rather than something specific to this place, though.

Well, only two more days to go this week, at least, and then a free weekend. I'm even ahead of schedule on all my videos so I don't even need to make any time for recording. I think I'm going to be having a very relaxing weekend. Assuming I don't cough up my entire lung first.

Have a happy Thursday!!!!!

I'm really flagging a bit in terms of motivation for… you know, everyday life outside of the things that I actually want to spend my time doing. I'm having real trouble shaking off the cold and the cough that I had for most of my week off, and I'm feeling utterly miserable and unmotivated when I get up at 6.30 in the morning to go to a job I feel completely apathetic about. All of this is making me feel depressed and stressed, which is causing the physical symptoms to stick around, which… you get the idea. Round and round and round.

These feelings have been kind of festering in my head for a while. There are two specific occurrences that I think kicked it off, and I've never been the same since either of them. One of them is an understandable "trigger"; the other might sound stupid, but it definitely had an effect on me.

The first was the passing of our cat Ruby in an accident on the road. This was back in November 2018, but it hit me hard, and I think I've subconsciously made the association between the journey to and from work and remembering that horrible phone call where I found out she'd died. Sometimes I'll be driving home, and I'll remember how I felt that day; how I was driving home as fast as I could, crying my eyes out; how I felt that evening, seeing her lying there, lifeless; how hard it was to say goodbye to someone I loved so much, but who had spent far too little time in my life.

I haven't felt the same since her passing. Patti, who we got last February to help alleviate both Meg's loneliness and the hole left in our hearts by Ruby leaving us, has helped a great deal — particularly because I'm absolutely convinced that Ruby's spirit is present in that silly black cat, just from her mannerisms and the way she is sometimes. But I still miss Ruby herself; I miss her a great deal, and I still feel bad not being there for her, not being able to do anything to prevent what happened. I can't let go. There's still an emptiness inside me.

The second — and this will sound absolutely dumb after what I've just said — was all our seats being moved around at work. I used to have a lovely seat in a corner by a window, with no-one behind me. I repeat: I'm absolutely 100% aware that this sounds like a stupid thing to trigger depressive episodes… but it definitely had an impact. The reason? When I was in that old seat, I felt like I could be more "free". I felt like I could be myself. I felt like when things got quiet and/or boring, I could occupy myself and no-one would be any the wiser. I'm a firm believer in the concept that the freedom to be unproductive when you need or want to actually makes you more productive overall. I'm certainly feeling that way now; my present seat is literally right in the middle of the office, on the aisle down the middle, and I absolutely hate it. I constantly feel like I'm being watched — and this feeling certainly isn't helped by things like the company's stupid sickness policy. I find it demotivating rather than encouraging.

Obviously I'm not saying that I was completely unproductive when I had my nice corner seat where no-one was watching me — but I felt much more relaxed and at ease while I was there. I got on with my actual work, I achieved it quickly and to a good standard — and then I got on with the things that were important to me rather than the company. An ideal situation, really. Now I feel like I need to be much more "careful" about this sort of thing, because while WordPress looks convincingly like something I'd be doing as part of my job anyway, doing something like Photoshopping a YouTube thumbnail would be harder to explain away!

It's hard to understand this. You'd think being in a position where you "need" to be more obviously doing your job would motivate you more, but it's had the precise opposite effect on me, to a point where I find a whole bunch of things about daily life actively annoying. The software tools are shit, the people I work with care far too much about things that don't matter and even people's daily routines make me irritable. I just don't like being there, and I want to be somewhere, anywhere else.

I don't know how to fix this, or even if it's possible. It's frustrating, because there's no "escape" from it, no easy way out. Changing jobs almost certainly won't help, because I know that I'd just end up feeling the same somewhere else — and besides, job hunting is something that stresses me out to a massive degree anyway.

Oh well. Apologies to unload like this, but perhaps talking about it to the amorphous masses online will help me process it all a bit better. Catharsis and all that.

Not making this live for a few weeks yet (hence the lack of proper thumbnail) as I want to prepare all the parts of the feature before posting, but I thought I'd share the first video adaptation of my recent MoeGamer articles on Shade's games Gun Gun Pixies and Bullet Girls Phantasia. Hope you enjoy!

I'm trying to make time to do more of this style of video as I go along, and also making sure I record (and back up) plenty of game footage to use for them, rather than finding myself wanting to make a video about, say, a massive RPG and realising I don't have any footage from any point before the ending.

This is a bit of a change to my workflow and required a bit of creative thinking — largely thanks to a lack of hard drive space! — but recording play sessions and immediately backing the footage up to Google Photos seems to be working nicely for me right now. When I come to do some video versions of the Atelier MegaFeature later in the year we'll see how well that works out! 🙂

Anyway, in the meantime… Shade!

It's back to the day job tomorrow. Boo! Illness aside, I've had a nice week off, and in the end I got everything on my "definitely want to do" list done, and actually most of the things in my "ideally want to accomplish" list, too. So that's cool.

Today actually ended up being one of my most productive days. I was mostly free of distractions, so I managed to get five episodes of Warriors Wednesday recorded, along with the voiceover and footage I need to put out a Fairune video, hopefully tomorrow evening.

The amount of enjoyment I've had from a week where I was pretty much completely free to just be creative cannot be overestimated. It drives home the ever-present rift between things we want to do and that we enjoy doing… and the things we have to do.

I attended the first session of a 12-week course on dealing with worry and anxiety on Saturday. I was both slightly reassured and disappointed by the number of people who cited work-related issues as leading causes of anxiety for them. Even when they know they have what is technically a "good" job, like I do.

It's enough to make you wonder why we put ourselves through this. Well, the answer is "because we don't really have an option", of course. We don't work, we don't get paid. We don't get paid, we can't buy food, pay for our accommodation, and we certainly don't have anything left over to be able to enjoy the things we love.

It just sucks that seemingly for so many people, "work" means "something I really don't want to do, and that I'm just doing for the money". I feel like it doubly sucks for me, having had a job I actually wanted to do in the past, and having had it snatched away from me without warning.

I don't hold many grudges, but five years later, I'm still upset about that, and the people responsible for making that happen will forever remain on my Shit List.

At least I know I'm not the only one feeling dissatisfied with day-to-day life, I guess. That's small comfort, though. And thus here I am at 12:45am, putting off going to bed because I don't want to get up in the morning and have to go to work.

As much as I wish I could avoid it forever, though, I know the longer I put it off the worse I'll feel in the morning. So I guess it's time to go!

I hope you had a great weekend and that Monday morning isn't too bad to you!

Another Patrons-exclusive playthrough of some PS2 silliness today — this time in the form of Archer Maclean's Pool Paradise: International Edition. Sorry the sound quality's a bit poop — the separate audio recording I normally do for Let's Play vids cut off after a couple of minutes for some reason (perhaps I accidentally hit a keyboard shortcut or something) so you're getting the glory of my phone's shitty microphone! Fun. Still audible, at least! 🙂

Anyway. Thanks as always for all your support, and I hope you enjoy!

I've got a fair amount done during this week I've had off from the day job. Let me just take stock of things, so I can see it in black and white in front of myself, because I think I need to see it spelled out for me:

• Finished playing all the main routes in LAMUNATION! (just After Story left to go now)

• Wrote about Kamiko

• Wrote about Horizon Chase Turbo

• Wrote about My Big Sister

• Wrote about how much I love Katrielle Layton

• Wrote an in-depth article about one of LAMUNATION!'s narrative routes

• Published an Atari A to Z video on Viro-Mania

• Published an Atari ST A to Z video on Pengy

• Published a Warriors Wednesday Video

• Recorded and published a new Final Fantasy Marathon video

• Recorded four new episodes of Atari A to Z Flashback

• Recorded four new episodes of Atari ST A to Z

• Recorded four new episodes of Atari A to Z

That's a decent amount of stuff for a week's work, right? So why does my brain fixate on the things that I haven't done yet — the additional episodes of Warriors Wednesday and Final Fantasy Marathon that I want to get done, the voiceovers and footage I wanted to get sorted for some Fairune videos and some footage I wanted to record for some video versions of my Shade articles?

I mean, I still have two more full days before I have to go back to the daily grind of the day job. And yet I find myself wracked with increasing feelings of anxiety; that I somehow haven't made the maximum possible use of the time I had available to me.

It didn't help that I was ill at the beginning of the week, of course. And it doesn't help that I'm not enjoying the day job much at the moment, either. In fact, the prospect of going back is actually filling me with a feeling that is something akin to "dread", but I know I have to go back, because I have to pay bills and annoying adult shit like that. As much as I'd like every week to be like this week — perhaps without the "being ill" part — I am, sadly, a few thousand dollars a month short of that being possible.

I'm attending some sort of counselling… anxiety… thing tomorrow morning. It's a group session, which I'm not super-thrilled about, but I'm willing to give it a chance and see if it helps. The person I spoke to about it a while back seemed to think it was one of their more effective forms of treatment… but we'll see. I wonder if it will be treating the symptoms rather than the cause.

Oh well. Sorry for the incoherent ramble; the ol' noggin's just not in a very good place right now. Which is why I'm grateful for the opportunity to escape into, say, a ridiculous blue-sky soda-pop world filled with pretty girls and traditional fizzy drinks. Perhaps that's what I should spend the rest of the evening doing.

Something Chris and I talked about on a recent episode of the MoeGamer Podcast (I forget exactly which one, otherwise I'd link it) was the fact that, with the advent of the limited-run "boutique" publisher in the last generation of gaming hardware or so, it is no longer really possible or desirable to have a "complete collection" of games for a single platform.

I mean, with several thousand games available for the PS2 alone, I'd argue that hasn't been particularly easy or practical to do for a long time now anyway, but the fact that a lot of games are now released as either "get 'em while they're hot" or digital-only means that people are more likely to have completely unique collections of games, rather than everyone having the same old predictable things as each other.

In some respects, this can be a bit of a pain; I'm still salty that I didn't really get into Shantae until well after Limited Run Games had published both Risky's Revenge and Pirate's Curse for PS4 — though I did at least manage to snag Pirate's Curse for Switch, which is fine by me because everything is better on Switch and all that. If you get into something late and you missed the limited print run… well, you're pretty much out of luck, unless you want to pay exorbitant prices to eBay scalpers, and I refuse to do that on principle.

On the other hand, though, I think this is neat, because it encourages people to be individuals, and to express themselves through their game collections. If you have gaming enthusiast friends over and they look through your collection, do you have games that will make people go "hmm, I never heard of that, what is it?" I have loads of titles like this — not all of them are limited-run affairs, of course, but a goodly proportion are, and that excites me.

I'm not 100% sure why, to be honest, because I'm not going to sell my collection and I don't have anyone to "pass it on" to in the event of my untimely (or indeed timely) demise… but I just like knowing that I have this stuff. It's a symbol of the things that are important to me; of how I've spent a significant portion of my life; of friends I've made along the way; of experiences I've had, and experiences I'm still yet to have.

I don't really have a point with which to conclude this other than "games are pretty cool". So I guess we'll leave it at that!

I'm delighted to announced to anyone who cares that I have successfully fought a "Parking Charge Notice" issued by a private parking company and got myself out of having to pay £100. I thought this was going to be much more of a pain in the arse than it actually ended up being, and I'm thankful for that. I really didn't want to have to waste my time assembling evidence packs and taking photographs and potentially even going to court.

Here's the full story, for anyone interested.

Back in… October, I think it was, I went to our local post office delivery office to pick up a parcel I hadn't been home to receive. Said delivery office shares a site with a local gym, and apparently — I didn't know this at the time — a specific part of the car park is managed by a private parking company known as Premier Park. This part of the car park, despite being closest to the customer door of the delivery office, is supposedly for gym members only, and is enforced by automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) cameras tracking people coming and going.

Not being aware of any of this at the time — I had mistakenly assumed the whole car park was for both the post office and the gym, like a sane, rational person would — I had parked in the "forbidden" zone and, as luck would have it, a long queue at the delivery office and a customer whingeing and complaining at the front of it meant I was stuck there for 15 minutes — five minutes longer than the statutory "grace period" parking companies are supposed to provide you with when it comes to issuing these parking charge notices.

Eventually, I picked up my package and went about my business. Over a month later, I received the parking charge notice through the post, informing me that I would have been liable for a £60 charge if I'd paid it within 14 days of the infraction, but was now liable for £100. Notice that I said the notice arrived over a month after the supposed infraction, meaning that the (still outlandishly expensive) £60 charge was never actually an option for me.

Incensed, I attempted to phone up the parking company to shout at someone, only to discover that they're one of those companies that seemingly doesn't actually have any human employees, and thus it's impossible to speak to anyone. So, unwilling to part with £100 for the convenience of picking up a package, I decided to do some research online.

As often happens with incidents of this nature, I ended up on the Money Saving Expert forums — specifically, this thread, which explains exactly what you should do in exactly the situation in which I found myself.

The process is essentially thus:

• Do not admit you were driving, deny keeper liability and take any opportunity you can to discredit the parking charge notice — in my case, this was easy, since it arrived well outside of the statutory 14 days required for ANPR-enforced cases.

• If they deny your initial appeal, get a "POPLA" code and appeal directly to POPLA with as much detail as possible. At this point you generally win on technicalities such as signs not adequately indicating the parking terms and conditions in a way that is visible from a vehicle entering the car park. If my appeal hadn't been upheld at the first stage as it was, I would have definitely won here on these grounds.

• If they send debt collectors after you, write a sternly-worded refusal to pay and accuse them of harassment.

• If you end up having to go to court, you'll probably win, because most of the legal system and government in this country thinks that private parking companies are the worst kind of money-grabbing scum, and thus will do anything to give them a swift punch in the balls.

Thankfully, I only had to do the first step here, and I received acknowledgement that they had upheld my appeal. They evidently knew that they had fucked up this time, and thus I don't have to pay £100.

This feels pretty good. But I would also encourage you all to be wary of this sort of thing in the future! The appeal process doesn't always run this smoothly, from what I can gather — so take great care to avoid these "managed" car parks wherever possible!

I think I'm finally over the worst! I did some recording earlier today and only descended into a couple of coughing fits, and said coughing fits don't hurt as much as they did a couple of days ago. So I reckon I should be good to go to get a bunch of stuff done from tomorrow onwards. I might not get everything I hoped to do done in this week off, but I should at least get my "bare minimum" list of things done. Which will be nice.

I got three Atari A to Z videos done today. I've got three more I'd like to get in the bag, which shouldn't be too much of a problem. Then I have at least two episodes of Warriors Wednesday I'd like to record (ideally more) — and thankfully I have one all ready to fire off tomorrow, so I don't have to rush recording one in the morning, along with at least two more episodes of Final Fantasy Marathon. I'll be happy to get one done in that case, however, since we're doing long episodes with Final Fantasy II to try and get 'er done in a reasonable total timeframe.

On top of that, I'm hoping to get some more "feature" videos done, too. Specifically, I want to get some done on Fairune and Kamiko, and I've also been preparing some video versions of the recent Shade feature on Gun Gun Pixies and Bullet Girls Phantasia. I just need to record some footage for those; the voiceover recording is already done, so hopefully that shouldn't take too long. I wonder how much "Intensive Drilling" footage I can get away with on YouTube, heh. "Not for kids", indeed.

And alongside all that, of course, I still need to continue ploughing through LAMUNATION!, which is proceeding at a good pace, and preparing for the kick-off of the Atelier MegaFeature. Busy, busy, busy, for sure! But you know I love it — it's times like this, though, that I really wish I could devote my full time to what I do. One step at a time, though; Patreon has already seen a bit of growth this month, which is great to see — thank you and hello to any new Patrons, by the way, your contributions are very much appreciated! — so you know, things are moving in a nice direction.

I'm just trying not to think about the things I've been stressing out over. I'll deal with those when this week off is over and done with. And hopefully I'll find I've been stressing out over nothing, as I usually do.

Anyway. Thanks as always for bearing with me through my illness, and I'll see you around tomorrow!