I remember when I was coming towards the end of secondary school, and lots of talk turned to "The World of Work". It was never just "getting a job" or "working", it was always "The World of Work". Some twenty years later, I feel like my initial reactions to this phrase — to cringe — was somewhat accurate.

I've been pretty disillusioned by "The World of Work" ever since I joined it, and I know I'm not the only one. If it's not being treated like crap by past places of employment, it's being subject to interminably pointless wastes of time like conference calls and meetings, or being made to feel like you did something wrong because you woke up one morning and have the uncontrollable vomity shits. "Return To Work" meeting, go fuck yerself.

I don't like to complain too much, though, because all things considered, my present place of work isn't particularly bad. I get paid a reasonable amount, don't get bothered too much ("Return To Work" meetings aside) and am reasonably good at what I do. I just don't enjoy it, feel any pride in it or any passion for it whatsoever. But I suspect that would be the case wherever I was.

When I consider the cases of several of my friends of late, I feel both lucky and a little despondent that The World of Work is such a universally shitty place to spend the majority of your days. If it's not being so tied up with work that you have little time (or energy) for yourself, it's being treated like crap by the people who are supposed to be encouraging you and nurturing your talents.

One friend in particular has had a real crappy time of it of late. He's been working a job that he's good at and has been underpaid for for quite some time. He's asked for a pay rise several times and been turned down, so he decided to look for another job. Last week, he successfully got another job, and handed in his notice today, at which point he was royally screwed out of his expected notice period and basically told to be out the door by the end of the week. You know, just before Christmas and New Year, one of the most expensive times of year for most people.

It really bums me out to see people treated this way — people who I know deserve better.

I'm still kind of at a loss as to how and why this happens. It appears to be human nature to treat your "direct reports" (ugh) like shit the moment you have a little bit of power. I can see that this is almost certainly counterproductive, since breeding resentment is a sure way to find yourself either with completely unmotivated workers, or without any workers whatsoever. And yet I've seen it time after time at this point.

It's times like this that I wish I had the resources and the wherewithal to do something for myself and be able to draw a reliable, living income from it. There are probably possibilities for what I could do in that regard, but it takes time and money to get established with everything I might be able to do.

Plus, frankly, I'm kind of afraid of the prospect. So, it seems, I will continue to be a less-than-enthusiastic denizen of The World of Work for the foreseeable future.

I spent all of yesterday absolutely convinced that I'd already written this post, and ended up forgetting to actually write it. Oops. Oh well.

While I was bored at the day job, I was browsing through a channel on YouTube that I've developed quite a fondness for. Said channel is called Dead Parrot, and is, from what I can determine, an official distribution source for a variety of excellent British comedy shows, including Peep Show, Black Books and The Peter Serafinowicz Show.

Dead Parrot has also done a bunch of original content, though, with seemingly their most well-known stuff being a short series called YouTube Comment Reconstructions. Here, arguments from YouTube comment sections are overdramatically acted out by a pair of very British actors in some beautifully directed pieces of black and white film.

I absolutely love these, because I'm a big fan of juxtaposition used as a comic device. The severity and the seriousness of the overall aesthetic and tone clashes wonderfully with the absolute absurdity of the arguments that are being made, and the fact that the scenes mostly consist of two middle-aged men reading out arguments that teenage girls made to one another in the heat of the moment just leads to absolutely delightful scenes of hilarity.

I love it. There's an example above; the whole playlist is here if you want a good giggle.

I've not had a great weekend, to be perfectly honest. I didn't sleep particularly well last night, being wracked with anxiety and panic attacks, and those continued through a lot of today. I ended up going back to bed to try and calm myself down a bit; I feel a bit better now, but it has consumed the best part of the weekend.

I did at least finish the main story of Pokémon and get four episodes of Atari A to Z Flashback recorded, though, so that's something. I was hoping to get a bit more done, but I guess sometimes your body and brain just needs you to chill out, relax and take some time to release some tension.

I'm still feeling a bit on edge, to be frank, but hopefully I'll be feeling a bit better tomorrow. It's just a bit annoying to have wasted the vast majority of the weekend with feeling like this. Oh for a couple of extra days off.

Apologies, I thought I scheduled this to post yesterday but actually got the date wrong! Whoops. Here it is now, originally recorded/written on Saturday.

Not entirely sure where today has gone… I don't feel like I accomplished very much! Still, I guess sometimes it's sort of nice to just have a day where you chill out and don't do anything especially productive. And at least I managed to get a thing recorded for all you lovely people.

Have a pleasant weekend!

I've been listening to t.A.T.u this morning after an offhand comment on Twitter about the fact there was originally supposed to be an anime based on Lena Katina and Julia Volkova at some point in the past. How odd.

Anyway, this impromptu listening session reminded me that I actually unironically enjoyed t.A.T.u's music when it first came out, but it was one of those things that, at the time, I wasn't sure if I was "supposed" to like. And I think my changing attitude there is probably the biggest change I've gone through since my childhood and teenage years.

This was always a thing with music. At my school, you were judged by your musical tastes. One day, I went and bought Oasis' Definitely Maybe from the local record shop because lots of my friends were talking about it, and it seemed that liking Oasis made you marginally more socially acceptable. Trouble was, I bought Definitely Maybe literally a day before (What's the Story?) Morning Glory came out, exposing me as the ill-informed loser that I was.

Thinking back, though, I already had hints of my current "fuck what everyone else thinks" attitude back then. I bought a number of albums that most certainly weren't "cool" at the time, but which I thought I might like and, it turned out, in most cases I did. (In contrast, while I quite enjoyed Oasis, I certainly didn't find their music life-changing in the way I had been led to believe it would be.) I bought things based on things I'd heard on the radio and enjoyed; I bought things where I'd enjoyed a video I'd seen on TV; I bought things where I fancied the lead singer.

I bought t.A.T.u's first album because lesbian schoolgirls in the rain. And I was pleasantly surprised when the actual music on said album was exactly my sort of thing: tuneful, emotional, dramatic. I listened to that album a lot back in the day, but I don't think I ever told anyone I had it.

Today, I've been reading up on the rather turbulent story behind the band, including the question over whether or not the pair of them were actually gay or not (seemingly not, though they both claim to support people loving whoever they want to love) and an apparent ongoing off-on-off-on feud between the pair of them. It's been interesting to explore. And, today, of course, I feel like I'm much more able to talk about this sort of stuff, whatever other people might think of t.A.T.u and their music.

That's one thing that's definitely improved over time — both for me, and for the world at large. Shame about all the other things that are so massively and obviously worse! 🙂

I've been slacking a bit in my gym routine recently due to various instances of being ill, but I went last night and had what I felt like was a pretty good session. I deliberately decided to try and push myself a bit, particularly on the exercise bike, and it felt quite satisfying.

There's always a bit of a balance you have to find when it comes to this sort of thing. When pushing yourself further than usual, there's a distinct possibility you might not be able to do quite as much as when you're going more "casually", and indeed that was the case last night. While I can happily do half an hour of pretty casual cycling on the exercise bike, I managed ten minutes with a bit more intensity last night. I didn't feel too bad, though; I felt like I'd achieved something. And I think trying to push myself like that a little more often is the way to improve rather than just plateau.

I need to get my eating habits in order though. Andie and I took a break from Slimming World a while back because we were both feeling demotivated and kind of sick of the stuff you end up eating on that, but we're both still trying to be reasonably good. Operative word: trying. We're not as bad as we used to be, but we're also not particularly eating in a way that is conducive to losing weight, though.

If nothing else, I'm planning for a bit of a "reset" when the new year rolls around. Get into new, good habits — or re-establish old ones — and sort things out as much as possible. I'm also going back to the local counselling service to see if they can help at all; my mental health has been all over the shop of late, so having some means of hopefully stabilising it a bit will be worthwhile and helpful.

I've got this nagging sense in my head that I want… something to be "over", finished with, done. But there's nothing that really can be "over", finished with, done. It's just the ongoing challenge that is everyday existence in this modern world. I long for simpler, happier times.

I'm not a hugely super-organised person in my everyday life, as the "ring of chaos" (as my wife occasionally refers to it) around where I typically sit on the sofa will attest. But I do enjoy and appreciate some nicely organised shelves.

Those of you who have been following for a while will doubtless have seen my game shelves at least once by now. Well, by no means anywhere near as impressive, but already giving me a thoroughly pleasant sense of happiness when I look at it, is my fledgling manga shelf.

It occurred to me while stowing away this small collection that one of the things I particularly enjoy about being a collector of physical media is simply how pleasing a well-organised set of anything vaguely uniform looks when on a shelf. And I'm pretty sure manga publishers know this; look at all those spines.

Each series has its own distinct look that makes it immediately identifiable without even reading the title. Each series has a distinct colour scheme, logo design, use of fonts and pattern that makes it nice to look at by itself, but lovely to look at when there's more than one there. Look at those Monster Musume volumes. Look at Komi Can't Communicate.

In some respects this is probably both dangerous and manipulative, because it encourages people (like me, I guess) to want to expand their collections in order to improve the way they look on the shelf, and to derive satisfaction from "complete" (or at the very least expansive) sets of various series.

But in others, it's also showing understanding of the sort of person who might be interested in following a manga series over the long term. It'd be irksome if every volume of Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro had a different form factor, for example — although just blame that on Nagatoro herself and it would actually be rather thematically appropriate — so publishers appear to take care to keep the various volumes of their series consistent over the years — far more so than various editions of Western books.

I've had those two volumes of Fruits Basket for probably more than ten years at this point, for example, and yet if I were to walk into a manga shop today to try and expand or complete that set, they'd still look like that. Compare and contrast with a popular Western series like Harry Potter or His Dark Materials and, if you left a few years between volumes, you might well find yourself with a radically different looking book on yourself that doesn't "fit" with the earlier volumes. Whether or not this bothers you, of course, is down to your own personal tastes and character!

Anyway. Manga. I'm pleased with what I've got so far, and after payday rolls around I'm going to pick up a few more bits and bobs — the second volume of Interspecies Reviewers and more Plus-Sized Elf are definitely first on the list, but I also have a few other series and one-offs that I'm interested in reading, too. This is an exciting (kind of) new world for me to explore, and I'm feeling great enthusiasm for it right now… so doubtless more photos of this shelf will follow in the future 🙂 Thank you for indulging me and my Aspergers!

I read a news article on the BBC this morning where World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee attacked the UK's Conservative party over a recent bit of controversy. During a recent leaders' debate ahead of the upcoming General Election, one of the party's Twitter accounts had apparently rebranded itself "Factcheck UK", suggesting that it was some sort of official fact-checking service for the claims made at said debate — when, of course, it was nothing of the sort.

"What the Conservative Party has done is obviously a no no. That's amazingly blatant," said Sir Tim.

And it is. And this got me thinking… as the man credited with creating what we know the World Wide Web as today… what does he think of what the modern Internet had become?

As it happens, the BBC had already got there before me. Speaking in March of this year, Sir Tim said that he felt the Web was in a "downward plunge to [a] dysfunctional future", and that this needed to be stopped, perhaps through programmes such as Contract for the Web, which he played a part in creating.

Trouble is, the Web seems to be a bit of a Pandora's Box at this point; its lid has been left open for so long now that it's impossible to put everything back inside the box, and any attempts to regulate it in any way will inevitably be met with resistance. Said regulation would probably be unenforceable anyway.

It's hard to argue with Sir Tim's concerns, though, of which he has three main ones:

• malicious activity such as hacking and harassment

• problematic system design such as business models that reward clickbait

• unintended consequences, such as aggressive or polarised discussions

All of these are things that are very much in evidence today, and just sort of accepted as part of everyday life. While actual hacking remains a relatively unusual occurrence for most people to come into contact with — by "actual hacking" I mean something beyond someone getting hold of your password and posting offensive things on your Facebook page — few can argue that harassment is very much part of the modern Internet.

And not just in the way that it is most commonly argued, either. While I'm not denying that harassment against specific groups does exist — it absolutely does — there's also lots of it going on under the guise of "activism" and "progressiveness". Just yesterday I saw someone participating in a "controversial food opinions" thread on Twitter — lightweight, throwaway fluff, by anyone's measure — and then get extremely publicly dragged over hot coals by a variety of people for saying that he didn't like Indian food and didn't understand why it was so popular. His words, which were pretty straightforward — and which I don't personally agree with, but I understand where he's coming from — made it pretty clear what he was talking about, yet numerous people took the opportunity to use this as evidence of racism.

This ties in with clickbait, too. I've seen numerous examples of deliberately provocative content presented by commercial websites deliberately followed up by the writers complaining about "how much harassment they received" — when they knew full well that people were going to respond negatively to their Hot Take of the Day when they posted it. It's manipulative and deceptive… and people fall for it every time. It drives me nuts to see.

And then, of course, we have the most difficult to define one; his third point about "unintended consequences". It's difficult to establish exactly how this happened, given that the Web was always intended as an open marketplace of ideas, ideologies and opinions. But as time has passed — and over the last decade in particular, I'd say — people have set up camp in very specific areas, erected fortifications and made it a lot more difficult to exchange ideas and interact with one another. Aggression is the default response to disagreement; many people feel that they have free reign to insult and belittle people with whom they disagree, and this further poisons overall discourse online, because it makes people less willing to share their ideas — and less willing to discuss and help one another understand them.

It's not all bad, of course, The modern Web allows people to express themselves as never before, and have an important outlet for the things that mean something to them. At this point I can't imagine what sort of life I'd be leading if I didn't have my various creative projects to use as an outlet… though I also can't help but think that if the Internet wasn't a thing in the first place, there's a lot of stress and anxiety I wouldn't have come into contact with at all.

In summary, I can entirely understand why Sir Tim might feel a bit… disappointed in what his creation would go on to become. It's like seeing your kid grow up to be a delinquent… only instead of one kid, there's several billion of them.

Bleak? Maybe. But I'm feeling hugely anxious today so just wanted to offload some random thoughts. Thank you for listening!

I have recorded… counts ten videos this weekend. Two Atari A to Z, two Atari ST A to Z, two Atari A to Z Flashback (one of which went out yesterday), two Warriors Wednesday and two Final Fantasy Marathon. I have had a blast doing so, even if it is both time-consuming and tiring.

It's amazing how productive you can be when you actually enjoy what you're doing… and how demoralising it can be when you're stuck somewhere having to do things that you don't really want to do, that you can't really feel the benefit of doing and that sometimes you don't entirely feel like you get the recognition you're sometimes due.

Don't get me wrong, I've said on numerous occasions that I don't hate the day job; I'm actually rather grateful that it's not worse than it is, and that I can get things done to a good standard in a reasonably short timeframe, allowing me enough time during many working days to be able to actually get some posts done on the sly.

But I don't love it. It's a chore. It's not something I look forward to getting up for every morning. I'll reiterate: I'm not at a point where I dread getting up for it every morning, like back when I was teaching, or when I worked for SSE, but I am at a point where getting out of bed feels like just another installment in a long and interminable series of… something that simply isn't going anywhere. A series with no entertainment or cultural value along the way; it's just sort of there. Like Eastenders, only with less murder and adultery, and the world's most boring Christmas special.

Still, as I say, I shouldn't be too mad about it, because it keeps me paid each month, with enough money left over to be able to do some of the things that I want to do — and then, of course, you wonderful people help me out by providing me some very welcome pocket money with which I can further explore those things through investing in new hardware, software and whatnot.

I can't pretend after weekends like this that it's not nice to dream, though. I remember how much I enjoyed getting out of bed in the morning to work on USgamer and GamePro; it was something that I genuinely loved doing, much as I genuinely love doing what I do now with MoeGamer and Atari A to Z. Wouldn't it be amazing to be able to do that every day? If I can be this productive over two days of a weekend, imagine how much I could get done if I had the whole week available to me!

Still, it remains just a dream for now. One that I don't know whether or not it will ever be achieved; this sort of thing often feels like it's up to the whims of fate and destiny more than it is up to the time and effort you put in yourself. So sometimes you just have to keep plugging away and hope for the best!

So that's what I'll keep doing.

Hello everyone! On time this week, here's your weekly vlog thingummy wotsit. Hope you enjoy. And if you know anyone who works for a private parking company (I'm not convinced anyone actually does; it didn't actually appear to be possible to speak to a real person when I tried earlier) please give them a swift kick in the nadgers for me. Thank you muchly!