It's strange how negative things seem to all happen at the same time. It's enough to make someone think that there might be something to things like "fate", "destiny", astrology and the like.

In just the last 24 hours or so, I've had my own struggles with depression and anxiety flaring up particularly badly, and alongside that someone I very much like and respect has been dealing with the passing of a family member, a blogging comrade and friend discovered his mother has terminal cancer, there have been two appalling mass shootings in the United States and God knows what else is going on. It's hard not to feel sometimes like there's something at work making all the bad things happen at the same time.

Still, the most we can do at times like this is pull together and try to get on with things as we always have done. That's why I've been getting stuck into making videos today, and I'll be writing, writing, writing throughout the week as normal. In chaotic, scary, difficult times, it's important to have that one little bit of stability you can cling onto, whatever it might be.

Howsitgoin doooods. Apologies for the lack of post yesterday, but I wasn't feeling too hot; my head felt a bit foggy and I felt a bit dizzy, so I went for a lie down around 9pm and fell asleep. Evidently I needed a rest. I was up reasonably bright and early this morning, though, so I've managed to get some stuff done — there's some more I want to achieve by the end of the day, but there's still plenty of time to do that.

I've been pleased with the response to a few things I've written recently — both my depression/anxiety piece and my final piece on The Expression: Amrilato that I posted on Friday have both been read by a lot of people and the latter in particular has been shared quite widely. That's always a really nice feeling, and it's especially nice when you see someone you interviewed sharing a piece you wrote and (I think, anyway, I'm going off Google Translate) saying that they found it interesting to see some non-Japanese perspectives on their work.

This sort of thing reminds me one of the many reasons why I keep doing this. My main reason has always been — and probably always will be — because I love doing it. But knowing that your writing has reached out and touched someone is a pretty nice feeling, too. This is why I like to try and keep the tone of the things I write as positive and inclusive as possible, because that leads to other people feeling good about the things I write as well as myself.

I'm not here to develop a reputation as a "harsh critic" or whatever; I honestly don't understand why anyone would desire that reputation for themselves. Rather, I'm here to have a good time with experiences I enjoy — and hopefully to share at least some of the joy I've experienced along the way with the people who read my work and watch my videos.

Thanks as always for bearing with me through difficult times.

Thanks for bearing with me today. I realise that today's mental health post on MoeGamer was the sort of thing I'd typically confine to these more private posts… but I wanted to talk about it, and I wanted it to be seen by people.

It's certainly been seen; I've had a huge spike in views today. Evidently I wrote something that people could relate to, or at least wanted to read. Which is… good? I guess? I'd be happier if it was something a bit more positive, but one of the important things about mental health is that not enough people feel comfortable talking about it, so if I've done just a little bit to show it's okay to talk about those things, I'm glad.

I'm feeling pretty exhausted. I missed the gym this morning because I overslept and didn't feel like rushing around; I was intending to go this evening instead, but a general sense of mental exhaustion has left me feeling a bit lethargic. I'll probably go at some point over the weekend to make up for it. A day of resting my muscles will probably do me a bit of good anyway.

As for this weekend, it should be a quiet one, which should give me a bit of time to get ahead of schedule on videos, then I'm intending to get stuck into the new Neko Works visual novel Love Cube (which I think is pretty short, so I should be able to romp through quickly and write something about next week, hopefully) and also back into the Senran Kagura groove ahead of the next Cover Game feature.

I'm hanging in there. I'm not exactly what I'd describe as "okay" right now, but I'm hanging in there and surviving. Thanks to those of you who have sent kind messages of support today.

I hope you have a lovely weekend.

Let's focus on more positive things, then. I said that MoeGamer and my videos bring me joy and meaning, so let's concentrate on what's next in those regards!

First up, $5 Patrons, I'll get you a new wallpaper within the next few days — likely over the weekend.

Second up, I've got one more article about The Expression: Amrilato to post, but I'm waiting on some interview responses from SukeraSparo via MangaGamer, so I'm not sure when that will happen, since MangaGamer's staff has been at a number of conventions recently. I'll chase it up if I haven't heard anything by tomorrow.

Given the slightly up in the air nature of that last part of the feature on The Expression: Amrilato, I'm thinking about moving on and just posting that piece whenever it eventually happens. It'll ultimately end up categorised correctly on the Hub Page for The Expression: Amrilato, it'll just miss out on some time featured on the front page. Or I might leave it featured there anyway; it's not like there's a rule that all the featured content needs to be from the same game or series, I've just stuck to that so far.

Moving on to what? Well, I'm pretty sure that the next feature I've got in me is Catching Up with Senran Kagura, which is something I've been putting off for a long time, but the recent release of Peach Ball made me want to actually get off my bum and cover the games I haven't written about yet. Specifically, those are Bon Appetit, Peach Beach Splash, Burst Re:Newal and Peach Ball. Senran Kagura is a perfect "summer series" so now is the time, I'd say.

In the near future, I have a number of things in mind that I'd like to cover, both drawn from recent releases and slightly older stuff that I've had on my shelf for a while. I haven't "prioritised" these or anything yet, but these are the ones that are at the forefront of my mind when I think about "what's next?"

• Dragon Star Varnir

• Date a Live

• Super Neptunia RPG

• Dark Rose Valkyrie

• Song of Memories

• Worldend Syndrome

• Death Mark

• Unlimited SaGa

• Trinity Universe

I've been thinking about all these games for a while; some I want to cover because they're recent releases, some I want to explore because they've been on my shelf for a while, and some are ones I just think will be interesting to talk about.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of what I intend to cover, mind; I may well find myself changing my mind on what's next depending on my mood and what comes out! If you have anything you're particularly interested in me exploring as a Cover Game feature, though, do please feel free to let me know — last year's Project Zero feature ended up being so detailed and thorough because of Patron feedback, so please do speak up if I happen to offhandedly mention anything you'd like to hear more about.

Anyway, I should probably get some day job work done. Thank you once again for your support, and I'll speak to you soon.

Sorry, forgot to write yesterday. Too much Custom Order Maid 3D 2. I was expecting to do a quick runthrough of its main features, assuming it would be almost identical to Custom Maid 3D 2 with some minor additions, but instead… well, this happened and before I knew it it was midnight. Whoops.

I am having… a bit of a variable time in terms of wellbeing right now, I'll be honest.

On the one hand, I'm pleased that I'm managing to stick to my new early-morning routine of getting up by 6.30am at the latest (ideally earlier… though that doesn't always happen) and going to the gym. At the time of writing, I've been to the gym every weekday morning since last Monday. I'm at the point where I'm actually quite enjoying myself there. It helps, of course, that I watch some short-form anime such as Magical Senpai, Why the Hell Are You Here, Teacher!? and Are You Lost? while I'm doing cardio and have How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? opening theme Onegai Muscle on loop while I'm doing weight training, but I'm also just… quite enjoying it. Who'd have thought it?

On the other hand, I'm feeling very down right now. Depression and anxiety are really doing their best to do a number on me, frequently giving me feelings of bleak frustration and stress over nothing in particular. I'm feeling somewhat bored and unfulfilled at my day job — largely exacerbated by these feelings — but I'm also frustrated because I know that 1) it's a good job and 2) if I go somewhere else I'll almost certainly end up feeling this way there, too.

I'm just trying to focus on the things I love doing, which are making videos and writing stuff for MoeGamer. Those things consistently make me happy, satisfied and creatively fulfilled, so even if I'm feeling dissatisfied with the rest of my life to a degree that it's making me feel bad for quite a lot of the time, I can rely on those things to bring me joy when I have the opportunity to work on them.

With that in mind, I thank you all once again for your ongoing support and for believing in what I do enough to want to help me out. It really means a lot.

I wrote back in December about a series of recurring dreams I'd had about what Project Zero 3 made me think of as my own personal "Manor of Sleep". Last night I had a dream where I was reminded of another recurring "setting" — I believe this one is completely separate from the "Manor", but given dream logic, I can't rule out the possibility that they're connected somehow.

The Tower of Dreams, as I'll call it, has a fairly opulent-looking — if somewhat dated — lower floor. It's all rich red carpets, wood panelling and ornate staircases. I actually don't really know the specifics of what is on the ground floor, because in my dreams I inevitably find myself going upstairs. It feels somewhat like a hotel, but as you'll see, I'm pretty sure that it isn't.

Ascending the stairs leads to a balcony that overlooks the majority of the ground floor's main hall, and a corridor runs around what appears to be the perimeter of the building. Every so often, there are a few stairs up and the corridor opens up into an area with several rooms coming off it; these areas remind me strongly of the halls of residence I lived in in my first year of university, and indeed on some occasions I've opened one of these doors and found my university room behind them.

I'm usually in a hurry when I'm passing through this part of the Tower, for some reason, so I tend not to stop and look in any more detail at what's going on in these "flats". Eventually, I find myself coming to an elevator. I get in and ride it to the 18th floor — which I believe is the top of the building. For some reason, every time I ride this lift I feel like I have something I urgently need to do before it arrives at its destination; the exact task varies from visit to visit, but suffice to say they are typically not the sort of things one would want to be caught doing in a lift.

Last night, when I reached the 18th floor I was planning to immediately ride the elevator back down again, but two thuggish-looking men got in. One of these men bore an uncanny resemblance to someone I knew back in secondary school; I wouldn't necessarily describe him as a "bully", but he had a bit of a reputation for being a hardnut, so I tended to keep my distance. As such, I decided that spending 18 floors of descent in a lift with them might not be safe, so I disembarked, and thankfully they stayed in the lift and departed.

The 18th floor of the Tower is very different from the opulence of the ground floor. It's akin to a council estate block of flats; all raw concrete, open-air balconies and unwelcoming-looking front doors with chipped, faded paint. The unusual thing about it is that one side of it appears to be completely covered with glass, looking out onto a steep slope covered with dry, dead grass and small rocks.

There's another elevator in this glass wall. It's likewise almost entirely made of glass, though its floor is opaque. Stepping into it reveals something unusual: it doesn't work in the way you'd typically expect an elevator to operate — in other words, it doesn't go up and down. Rather, it seems to operate more like a train; it follows a track, ascending the hillside visible beyond the glass wall of the 18th floor and gradually picking up speed as it continues its journey.

I don't actually know where this elevator ends up, as I either wake up before it gets there, or I simply don't remember. But last night was my first visit there for quite some time, and it left something of an impression on me; so much so that it almost felt like I was actually remembering something rather than just dreaming it.

I wonder what it's all about? The unconscious is a mysterious place, for sure.

I watched this video by Kate, aka Esperdreams, earlier. It was a difficult watch, but I really appreciated the fact that she made it.

It's a Let's Play of a game called Drowning, which is a pretty simple and straightforward "walking simulator", but Kate's commentary really adds a considerable amount of meaning to the whole experience — because the way she describes things makes it look as if the game was written specifically for her.

Drowning is a story about living with depression. It's a candid look at the way someone suffering with depression feels about life; how they perceive the world, themselves and other people. It's extremely accurate. Much of Kate's commentary relates to how she felt similarly to the game's narrator in her teenage years, and how she has been able to learn and grow from those experiences since then. And, I have to say, I related to most of the narrator's commentary — and Kate's story, too.

As a "game", Drowning isn't terribly interesting, as most walking simulators aren't. However, Kate's Let's Play of it here, where she uses it as a prompt to talk about her own experiences and explore her feelings with the viewer, gives me a new appreciation for what this type of game might actually be "for".

It's a long video, but it's worth watching all the way through. Kate's story is all too familiar these days, sadly, and in its entirety it's something that anyone living with depression will be able to relate to — and anyone who knows someone living with depression absolutely should listen to and perhaps be able to understand their friend or family member a bit better.

Well, we're about to start another week. Last week I successfully managed to make it to the gym every weekday, which I'd say is well on the way to establishing a new habit.

This week will be crucial in cementing this routine as a healthy new habit. Although as I type this I'm not feeling overly enthusiastic about the idea of going to work tomorrow, I am at least, surprisingly, looking forward to hitting the gym.

When I'm being… sedentary, I never really feel like exercise is something I enjoy, but any time I hit the gym I remember that I actually quite like it and find it satisfying. Well, specifically, I enjoy the strength training side of things; I still don't really like cardio, primarily because my stamina is so poor that it's the most exhausting, painful part. (I know that probably means it's the bit I should work on the most, but eh)

I don't know if I get what I'd describe as a particular "high" from the gym as some people describe, but I definitely feel a sense of satisfaction when my muscles are aching and stiff. It's like your body saying "yes, you achieved something, and here's the proof".

I anticipate over the long term I'll also feel the satisfaction of improving and getting stronger. I have a long way to go; just the standard bench press bar is too heavy for me right now, but I'm sure I'll be able to work on that!

And I have the cute girls of How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift to motivate me, too. How could I go wrong? 

Siiiiiigh.

Anyway. Today Chris and I are recording a new episode of The MoeGamer Podcast, and we're going to be talking about arcade racers. This should be an interesting discussion, as it's a genre that I've had a lot of time for over the years, and which Chris has always enjoyed but doesn't know a ton about. We're not aiming for a super-comprehensive discussion or anything, rather to celebrate some of our favourites from over the years — and, where applicable, why they are noteworthy in some way.

I love me a good arcade racer. I have done ever since Pole Position on the Atari 8-bit, which I think was probably my first ever encounter with them. We had (well, I still have!) an original cartridge copy of Pole Position for the 8-bit, which apparently was extremely expensive and difficult to track down for my parents, even back in the '80s but my brother really wanted it. Here it is:

The cardboard boxes of these old Atari games get a bit weathered over time — even if they've been taken care of, as these have — but it's still cool to have them. They're an interesting relic of a different time; you'll notice that the cartridge and the manual are both considerably smaller than the box, but they are all that is contained in that massive package! Moreover, there's an insert in the box clearly designed to hold a cassette rather than a cartridge, so I'm not sure exactly what Atari was smoking when they designed these.

Mind you, if you have any familiarity with '80s Atari, you'll know that 1) they probably were smoking something and 2) they were not good at the more practical side of things like, you know, marketing their home computers.

I'm looking forward to our discussion later. All being well, it should be live on Monday as it usually is after a podcast recording session. We hope you enjoy the show when it releases!

Oh, Bethesda. Bethesda, Bethesda, Bethesda. How do you fuck up Doom, of all things?

Well, I think we all already know the answer to that: you place intrusive online-dependent DRM in all its console ports, including the one specifically designed to be taken on the go to, say, places that you don't have a stable Internet connection.

Weirdly, there are some people defending this. I posted a tweet on the subject last night and there were people wilfully misunderstanding what I said about it as well as saying things like "just use a mobile hotspot".

Yes, you can just use a mobile hotspot, but that's not exactly an ideal solution — particularly if you're somewhere that doesn't have a good data signal. Which is still quite a few places here in the UK. Or what about if you're going on a trip and you're on a plane that doesn't have Wi-Fi, as many still don't? If you'd downloaded Doom ahead of your trip and hadn't had the foresight to start it up once beforehand at home (which is not something you should need to do with a 25-year old game) then you literally wouldn't be able to play it, because the game requires you to sign in to Bethesda's stupid servers at least once.

For a game. With no. Online. Features. Not even multiplayer!

Whenever I wonder if I should step back into the triple-A space just to see what's going on, situations like this remind me that I'm quite happy where I am. Doom from 1993 isn't a triple-A game, obviously, but Bethesda are a triple-A publisher, and so this sort of ridiculous behaviour can be expected in most of their titles. As such, I have no interest in supporting them whatsoever.

Still, at least this whole situation has resulted in some amusing memes, for once; generally I tire of topical memes within less than five minutes, but these made me chuckle.

 https://twitter.com/balmut_/status/1154860181064491015 

 https://twitter.com/qazimod/status/1155019820724883456 

 https://twitter.com/grisevg/status/1155018226406961157 

 https://twitter.com/BradicalPrime/status/1155019883274371073 

Now, I think, an hour or two of Lapis x Labyrinth, which fired up the moment I put it in my Switch, didn't require any updates and doesn't need to be connected online for anything…