I honestly have to wonder if human beings have some sort of inexplicable, natural tendency to gravitate towards drama. Particularly online. Because I'm struggling to think of the last community I've been a member of that wasn't, at one form or another, rocked by utterly pointless drama that served no purpose whatsoever.

I say this as a Discord server that I'm a member of — not the rather quiet and peaceful MoeGamer one, I might add — has erupted into a couple of people yelling at one another for frankly rather unclear reasons, leaving everyone else not really feeling like they want to talk "normally" lest the nonsense spill out and derail further discussions.

I have no idea what caused this because everyone only talks about it in vague terms. At least one of the people involved has the unfortunate complication of self-pitying victim complex and the tendency to fly off into a rage whenever anyone points out that he might have contributed to the situation with his attitude. It makes it difficult to resolve and move past.

It's a colossal waste of time for everyone involved, and said people involved tend not to think about the broader consequences, which is that other people might no longer feel comfortable in what had, up until that point, been a place they enjoyed hanging out.

This is by no means exclusive to the online sphere, sadly. I'm sure at one point or another most of you reading this have probably had the misfortune of coming into contact with "office politics" — it's exactly the same sort of thing there. I've lost more than one job by being caught in the crossfire from this bullshit, where people just inexplicably decided to start treating their peers like absolute crap, making the environment unpleasant for everyone in the vicinity, not just those directly involved with the drama in question.

Perhaps you grew up in a small town or village, like I did. It happens in small local communities like that, too; I remember hearing all sorts of "he said, she said" stories from my parents when I was a young 'un — though in most cases there, everyone involved was generally old enough to know better than to linger on pointless nonsense. I recall the Village Pantomime often having a bunch of people all complaining about one another, though.

I do my best to not get involved with stuff like this, but it's a big ol' bummer when it involves communities or spaces that I've previously considered to be pleasant or "safe" places to hang out. I hope this latest episode in particular peters out soon, otherwise I think I'll be finding other places to chat with friends during quiet moments!

Morning. Sorry I'm already sucking at keeping up to date with these — a fine start to 2020, I must say! In my defense, I'm stressed, anxious, tired and fed up, and as anyone who has suffered any combination of those things will know, it's easy to let things slide when you let your brain get into such a condition — even things that you want to do.

Anyway. I'm here now, having got out of bed at 6.45am to discover "World War III" trending on Twitter. You ever get the feeling where waking up just doesn't feel like it's worth it? Yeah, that.

It doesn't really help that outside of the things I enjoy doing — MoeGamer, videos and that sort of thing — daily life is kind of feeling a bit meaningless and empty right now. I'm sure this is a pretty familiar feeling to anyone in full-time employment, but I'm feeling especially conscious of it right now. I'm the sort of person who likes to feel like he's working towards something rather than just… working, but it feels like the majority of jobs out there — not just my own, which, as I've said a few times before, is actually relatively good in the grand scheme of things — are endless busywork with no real "end goal" in sight. You're never "finished".

I guess that's a good thing, because if you are "finished" then you probably wouldn't have a job any more, but still. Sometimes it just feels like you're getting up, going out and doing stuff just for the sake of it.

Well, in those cases I guess you just have to think of the paycheck and all the nice things that can buy you, huh?

Making this a public post because I thought it might be nice to share it a bit more widely, for reasons that will probably become apparent!

Hello! Happy new year! Thank you, once again, to everyone who has supported my efforts in exploring, preserving and analysing overlooked, underappreciated and retro games over the course of the last year (and more, in some cases!) — and welcome to those of you who have never stopped by my Patreon page before. Do please check out the main profile page if you haven't already — it explains a lot more about who I am and what I do.

Anyway, for this official first post of 2020, I wanted to highlight the creators that I've thrown my support behind on this 'ere platform, because you might be interested in checking out their work, too!

In the order that they appear on my active memberships page, then…

CheapShow – A wonderfully anarchic comedy podcast from the delightfully creative minds of Paul Gannon and Eli Silverman, with occasional guest appearances from fine folks such as Paul "Mr Biffo" Rose, Stuart "ashens" Ashen and many more. Gannon and Silverman are clearly committed to making the most entertaining show they possibly can, and are very obviously great friends; this comes across in the amazing chemistry they have, which often sees them yelling insults at one another during episodes in the same way that one does with only one's very closest friends.

CheapShow is, in its own words, all about getting the very best out of the very worst, and delves into the charity shops, the bargain bins, the discount stores, the jumble sales, the bazaars and car boot sales of the world in order to find the treasure among the trash.

Expect plenty of doot-doodoo-doo-doot sauce reports, discussions of Cheap Eats, the official League of Snacks (and crisps) plus, of course, Eli's Country Urban Noodle Testlab Kitchen. People love noodles, all right? It's a fact of CheapShow you're going to have to learn to fuckin' accept. Check out CheapShow here. 

Paul Rose – Mr Biffo here was a defining influence on a generation of British teens who were interested in video games, thanks to his delightfully offbeat Digitiser pages on teletext. In recent years, Biffo has been flexing his creative muscles with a variety of projects, including the wonderfully bizarre Mr Biffo's Found Footage and, of course, the return of the Digitiser brand as written articles, full-length TV-style shows on YouTube and, most recently, hilarious "minis" on YouTube. Biffo is a constant inspiration who always wants to push himself further — too far, sometimes, one might argue — and is more interested in expressing his own creativity and offbeat sense of humour than appealing to a particular "market".

Digitiser as a "brand" (such as it is) has evolved somewhat from just covering video games to more broad nostalgia and grown-ups being free to indulge in childish, imaginative play. You often come away from a modern episode of Digitiser Minis on YouTube not being quite sure what you just watched, but well aware that you had a very good time while your brain was being systematically melted. It's the craziness of early '90s Saturday morning children's television for the over-30s… or perhaps more accurately, the over-30s who have never shown any desire whatsoever to grow up. Find Biffo on YouTube here. 

Rob Caporetto – Known as "hellfire64" on YouTube, Rob is an enthusiastic and knowledgeable retro gamer who specialises in 8-bit home computer platforms — particularly, as his username suggests, the Commodore 64. His Beyond the Scanlines series of videos provide well-researched documentary-style presentations about games or series that he finds particularly noteworthy or interesting — not necessarily the biggest or most famous names out there, but for me, that's precisely what makes Beyond the Scanlines worthy of note itself.

Rob's been a tremendously supportive presence on my Atari A to Z project in particular, so I was glad to throw my support behind his own work. He clearly throws a huge amount of dedication and passion into it, so if you have the slightest interest in retro microcomputers, I urge you to give him a follow. Find Rob on YouTube here.

The Well-Red Mage – Moses at The Well-Red Mage and his veritable army of contributors are doing their absolute best to genuinely redefine what a large-scale, collaborative video game site should be all about. Much like MoeGamer, Red and the team don't necessarily cover the latest or the greatest games — but that's what makes their coverage consistently interesting and a pleasure to read.

Red is also immensely supportive of the enthusiast gaming blogger community; many of his contributors are drawn from around the WordPress community at large, and he runs frequent donation drives where anyone throwing their support behind The Well-Red Mage can nominate a particular creator for Red to support in exchange.

The Well-Red Mage's recent site redesign looks lovely, and it's clear the whole team are in this for the long haul. I wish them every success, and we need more fine folks like them out here. Pay them a visit! 

 

Liana Kerzner – Liana has been kind enough to support some of my work in the last year, particularly my piece on MoeGamer about how we need to get better at talking about sex. I've always enjoyed every conversation I've had with her, and she was also good enough to put me in touch with Lori and Corey Cole, creators of the Quest for Glory series, so I could pick their brains about their upcoming new Hero-U project. You can read that interview here!

Liana provides commentary on gaming and popular culture via her YouTube channel, and is presently putting the finishing touches to her new series called BOSSFIGHT, which is about video game myths. She's an insightful, knowledgeable commentator who is able to respect a variety of viewpoints while expressing her own opinions with confidence and without shame — and she's often what feels like a lone voice of sanity in the more mainstream side of the modern gaming sphere online. Check out her YouTube channel here. 

I'd also like to give a shout-out to Matthew of Normal Happenings, who is no longer accepting Patreon donations, but who has been kind enough to support my work here on the platform even after he stopped taking his own income here. Matt is a wonderfully supportive presence in the WordPress community, and now we're in 2020, his most ambitious collaborative project, The Characters That Define Us, will be kicking off very soon! I'm a part of this, and it's going to be fascinating to see it unfold over the course of the coming year.

If you're a writer, Normal Happenings also plays host to daily writing prompts known as Daily Inklings, so if you're ever struggling for something to write about, be sure to check the archives — these are starting up again soon after the site's ambitious redesign, so subscribe to get your daily inspiration!

That's everyone for now, then; I do shift my Patreon pledges around every so often according to my own financial circumstances and if there are any other creators that I particularly want to support at any time, but at the time of writing, these are the people I'm currently pledged to. Do please check out what they do — they all do fantastic work and deserve both plenty of success and your support.

Once again, happy new year, and thank you for your support as we move into 2020.

It was New Year's Eve last night, and I was so caught up in all the excitement that I forgot to post! No, actually, I was recording a video playthrough of Neighbours for Atari ST and then waiting three hours for a Chinese takeaway, and somewhere in that lengthy process I forgot. Apologies. Oh well, that means I can say "happy new year" to you twice today!

It's 2020. As usual, it doesn't really feel any different as yet, and it probably won't be especially different. Here in the UK we have the nonsense that is Brexit to look forward to, led by the government we apparently voted for despite everyone I know saying that we wanted them out, and beyond that? Who the hell knows. Or cares, really! I predict that everyone will make a lot of noise over Brexit and then it either won't happen at all (as with a lot of things our country tries to do) or it won't really affect anything that normal people notice in the slightest. We shall see, I guess.

Anyway, I'm not going to make any particularly grand resolutions or anything because they're mostly a waste of time, but one thing I am going to make a specific effort to do is to both avoid and avoid responding to the more ridiculous bad takes on Twitter. The whole "quote tweet to shame" thing is really getting out of hand, and I want to ensure I have no part in it whatsoever; it's having a really unpleasant effect on online discourse, and in most cases it has the exact opposite effect to what you probably intend by it. So I intend to continue my work on MoeGamer and Atari A to Z with positivity, enthusiasm and passion.

$5 Patrons, I'll get you a New Year's wallpaper today since I don't have work at the day job to endure! Everyone else, I'll give you another post later to make up for missing last night.

Thank you as always for your ongoing support of what I do; it really, genuinely means a ton, and absolutely does mean that I'm able to develop my projects beyond what I'd be able to do by myself. As we enter this new year and I have all sorts of things I want to do, I'm very conscious of that… and extremely grateful. Thank you so much for standing by me and what I do.

And happy new year! I hope 2020 is a good one for you.

Anxiety has been kind of through the roof recently; not really sure why, but it was enough to get me to want to get back in touch with the local counselling service a week or two back. In late January, I'm starting some sort of "course" that will hopefully be helpful; I'm skeptical and nervous about it, because it's a group session, but I guess we'll have to see. Sometimes you need to try new things.

In the meantime, something — which I can only assume to be said anxiety — has been causing very strange, vivid (in the moment), quite upsetting and often rather "angry"-feeling dreams. Like most dreams, they tend to fade once I'm up and about, but they leave something of a lingering impression and aren't the best way to start the day.

Last night's was particularly weird. The details are already hazy and fuzzy and what I do remember didn't make any sense. I remember being in a situation where I was getting along very well with someone — like, potential intimate relationship well — but, before things escalated into anything intense, I told them that I needed to admit something to them. That "something" was that I was already in a relationship, but I wasn't able to get that far; they quickly became irrational and unreasonable. And I forget how, but the situation rapidly escalated into me fleeing for my life while a significant number of people I knew from my past were chasing me with fury in their eyes; I didn't want to find out what would happen if they caught me.

Several peculiar things stick in my mind about this: firstly, the fact that I'm quite conscious that, despite people I know being involved in the situation, I wasn't myself in the dream; I was inhabiting someone else's body… consciousness… whatever. I can't tell who, but I know it wasn't myself; I didn't recognise myself, and I was conscious of the fact I wasn't "in the right place", as it were. I can't even tell if it was male or female, but I do know that the person who was the trigger for the whole situation was male, so I can only assume I was either a woman or a gay/bi man.

The other bizarre thing was how it was all resolved, because thankfully it was resolved before I woke up rather than leaving things hanging with fury and fear in the air.

I resolved the situation through time travel. Specifically, I travelled back in time to earlier in the day and prevented a mug from being broken, and for some inexplicable reason that ensured the whole situation didn't arise in the first place. What was perhaps even more odd was the fact that when I travelled back in time, I felt like I was back in my own body and consciousness again, almost as if the events weren't related at all. But something inside told me that they were.

Brains are weird, huh?

Been enjoying Saboteur! and its sequel on Switch recently — we talk more about this on The MoeGamer Podcast tomorrow, but I thought I'd treat you all to a bit of exclusive gameplay for this week's Patrons Only! video.

Hope you had a smashing Christmas and, as always, thank you so much for your ongoing support.

Video done! Looking forward to posting this one, I'm really pleased with how it came out. Next I need to record a bunch of Gun Gun Pixies and Bullet Girls Phantasia footage to go with the "readings" of the other articles, but hopefully that shouldn't take too long. I think I will leave that until another time though; it's now half-past midnight and I'm pretty tired. I probably shouldn't mess up my sleep schedule a couple of days before going back to work, huh?

Anyway. Putting this video together has me very excited for the coming year in creative things. I say this a lot, but I absolutely love writing and making videos; it's always been a big part of my life but I'd say in the last couple of years specifically, those things have become my main hobby and the things that I'm more passionate and enthusiastic about than anything else out there.

As we approach the New Year, I'd just like to say another heartfelt "thank you" to those who believe in what I do enough to want to support it here on Patreon. It really is massively appreciated, and believe me, your money is very well spent on a variety of things to write and make videos about, or equipment with which I can do those things.

New vlog coming tomorrow if I'm not too exhausted. Now I'm off to sleep, and hope that I don't have quite as weird dreams as I had last night!

I missed yesterday, didn't I? I got kind of distracted recording videos and found myself up until about 2.30am. Consequently I didn't get up until well after midday today, and then I was recording an episode of The MoeGamer Podcast with Chris earlier. That's getting edited tomorrow and should be with you on Monday to round out the decade nicely.

I'm currently working on some of those promised "scripted" videos. Right now I'm putting together some video versions of the recent Cover Game feature I did on the Shade games, Gun Gun Pixies and Bullet Girls Phantasia. As I type this, I'm putting together a video on the history of Shade (and, by extension, Quintet) which, naturally, necessitated capturing a bunch of ActRaiser, Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma and The Granstream Saga footage. I now want to spend all night playing all of them at once. But needs must and all that! I'll definitely be returning to them, though; they're a fascinating bunch of games.

Not looking forward to going back to the day job on Monday. I might have to take a bit of holiday in January to properly unwind; I've not had a particularly huge Christmas break so it might be nice to have a few days I can enjoy without any other sort of commitments. We'll see. Certainly writing stuff and making videos is very much keeping me sane right now; they're both things I enjoy doing massively, so they will both continue to be a major part of my life in 2020!

Anyway. I'm gonna crack on with this video and if I remember before I go to bed I'll grace you with another post to "catch up" later this evening! Hope you're having a pleasant break… assuming you've had one. And if you happen to work retail over this hellish period… I can only doff my hat and say "I'm very, very sorry".

So here it is, that day after Christmas where everyone sits around full of food, refusing to do anything particularly useful (and why should they?) and — hopefully at least — enjoying their Christmas presents in good company with leftovers from the previous day.

That's pretty much what we've been doing today. Andie's been playing the Switch game I got her for Christmas, which is the new Layton puzzle adventure — it looks like a lot of fun, and Katrielle Layton is super-cute, so that's a pleasant bonus. Meanwhile, I've been playing a bit of LAMUNATION! along with more Saboteur! and its sequel; all told, a pretty pleasant day.

Andie's doing the parental duty and going to visit her mother tomorrow, so I have a day and a bit to myself to record some videos and write some articles. I have nothing against Andie's mother and she has nothing against me, but we needed someone to stay home and look after the cats, so that is my official role. I'd only have ended up sitting in the corner playing Switch games if I'd gone along anyway, because, as we all know by now, I am Bad at Small Talk for Legitimate Psychological/Medical Reasons.

It's been a pretty low-key Christmas, but that's always the nicest kind, to be honest; no stress, no obligations, no panicking over 300-part meals not being timed to the absolutely perfect second. Just a few nice days to relax and enjoy oneself without having to think about all the boring, annoying and/or upsetting things in the world.

Once again, I hope you've had an equally pleasant holiday period!

Okay, technically speaking it's not Christmas Day any more because it's 1AM, but I've been sitting up playing Saboteur! and its sequel for the last few hours, so I'm sure you'll forgive me.

It's been a good day. I didn't have a ton of presents because I'm 38 and thus tend to get money from people, but I had a few cool things — most notably on the gaming front I had Bubble Bobble 4 Friends from Andie and Fire Emblem: Three Houses from my brother and his family. I've been playing the former a fair bit today and, outside of one absolutely rage-inducing boss, it's been a lot of fun. Fire Emblem I'm saving until I have time to give it the attention it deserves; I'll probably do a feature on it at some point in the near future.

It's been nice and peaceful. Andie and I decided to have Christmas on our own this year, so we just had a nice (keto friendly) roast for our lunch and… well, I didn't need to eat anything else for the rest of the day, to be frank! For most of the rest of the time we've just been chilling out; I recorded and edited a few bits and pieces for videos to publish in the new year and, as previously mentioned, played a bunch of Saboteur! and its sequel — look forward to some writeups and videos on that very soon, as they're fascinating games I'd love to talk about.

Anyway, it's pretty late, so I should probably sleep. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and that you have a bit of a chance to relax before getting back to the daily grind of work, school or whatever it is you do. I'm certainly going to make the most of my break!