One of the key characteristics of Asperger's — at least in most people I've encountered who have it, along with my own experience — is an inability to make "small talk". In my case, I actually find small talk actively uncomfortable, even cringeworthy at times.

What I mean by small talk is those conversations that people have for no other reason than to fill the silence. At my workplace, for example, every conference call tends to start with asinine conversations about the weather or what people are doing at the weekend or whatever. No-one really gives a toss what each other is saying; they're just saying things for the sake of it.

I think the reason this makes me uncomfortable is because it's communication without clear purpose; or, well, no. I know the purpose — to fill silence — but I don't understand the purpose. Consequently, in a situation that would generally demand small talk, I will either remain completely silent or, on a rare occasion where I have a bit of confidence, blurt out something awkwardly, inevitably fail to get the exact reaction I anticipated and promptly clam right up again.

As you might imagine, this makes me not a ton of fun to go out to restaurants with, to be waiting for a bus with or to have a long car journey with. Thankfully, most of the people with whom I would typically do those activities know me well enough to understand that if I'm quiet or silent, I'm not being cold or rude, I'm just not in a particular position to be able to adequately process the apparently meaningless conversation unfolding in front of me.

There's a self-confidence issue here, too. When conversation does start to take on a bit more structure and move past small talk, I find it quite difficult to spot cues and provide my own contribution to a discussion. In the time where I "wind up" to give a response — which is often quite a lengthy process in my head — I often second-guess the things I'm planning to say and end up talking myself out of saying anything at all, worrying about coming across as stupid, ill-informed or somehow inadequate.

All these reasons are why I tend to avoid one-on-one social situations, online voice chat and the like… and why it surprises (and pleases!) me that I'm able to cope with this enough to produce a podcast with a good friend on a semi-regular basis. That "good friend" bit is probably super-important.

It's not you, it's most definitely me!

I've seen several posts from my writer comrades on WordPress recently that have something in common: they find themselves contemplating the value of critics, the obligations and responsibilities that professional critics have, and whether or not that "professional" side of things is truly representative of various forms of media today.

From my perspective, although I've worked as one of those professional critics in the past, I personally don't particularly ascribe value to the work of professional critics today. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say I actively avoid the work of professional critics today. This isn't down to any of the accusations that sometimes get thrown around — "paid reviews" and the like — but quite simply because in terms of the media I'm interested in, the gulf between how professional critics approach things and how I approach things has become too wide.

Conversely, I now tend to make my media decisions based on a few factors. Top of the heap is quite simply whether or not I instinctively feel like the work in question is something I will enjoy. I know my tastes pretty well by this point, and I haven't steered myself wrong on many occasions in the past. I don't look at reviews of something that catches my attention; I just pick it up and make my own mind up before looking anything else up on it. If I'm writing about it, I'll write about it before I read anyone else's work on it — with the exception of anything I stumble across during research, and there I'll tend to emphasise factual articles and interviews over opinion pieces and reviews.

After that, I'll tend to seek out the thoughts of people I know and whose opinions I typically respect, even if they don't always line up exactly. I enjoy the work of people who give things a chance even if they're popularly regarded as "bad"; I wrote a while back about this being a particular reason I enjoy Game Grumps' work on YouTube, but it also applies to people I have a bit more of a personal connection to, such as bloggers I know on WordPress or people I've encountered on Twitter, Discord and the like.

And that's about it. I don't give a damn what the Metacritic score of something is, or whether [x] publication gave it [y] score. For me, scores are meaningless, and have been for a while; some of my favourite games of all time have sub-60 Metacritic scores, which is regarded by some as a kiss of death, but I just don't care. I support what I enjoy, and I'll continue to tell people about the experiences I've had, and the interesting things I've learned while finding out more about the sources of those experiences.

This is why I don't consider the things I write on MoeGamer to be "reviews" as such — although one thing I've learned from interacting with the broader anime blogging community is that the definition of "review" varies somewhat from person to person, with not everyone regarding it as "judgemental piece with score at the end" — and why I don't think I'd even really describe myself as a "critic" in the same way that writers for the big sites of the day do.

I just write about games. I play them, I take the time to find out more about them, I occasionally have the good fortune to be able to talk to the people who made them… and then I write about them.

I love what I do!

I feel like I'm suffering somewhat from post-holiday depression. Rather than feeling super-refreshed from my time away, I'm actually feeling kind of exhausted, and at several points over the last couple of days I've felt somewhat on the verge of tears for no apparent reason. Not a great place to be in.

I think it's probably just culture shock at going from a whole week of being able to do whatever I wanted in a pleasant environment to being back in mundane old, boring old reality.

It's kind of frustrating when my brain works in this way because my day job isn't a bad one or anything — indeed, I'd probably go so far as to say it's the best one I've ever had — but when I start feeling like this, all the little frustrating things about it start to mount up and become incredibly irritating. But I shall save discussion of those things for another day; no-one from my work reads this, so that's not a problem, but one of the annoying things is that the things which frustrate me are so specific to my job that my complaining about them probably wouldn't mean anything to anyone except one of my colleagues! Oh well.

As I mentioned the other day, I think it's just a matter of getting back into the rhythm of things and establishing some new habits. It didn't help that I ended up going to bed a bit early last night because I wasn't feeling particularly well, and subsequently I ended up sleeping a little later than intended, waking up at the time I'd normally aim to be leaving for work.

From next week, I'm going to make a concerted effort to try and get up much earlier than I need to, and to start going for a morning swim. This will hopefully achieve a few things: improve my mental state of a morning (and in general), allow me to feel like I've "done" something before the working day starts, get some much-needed exercise and enjoy some daily relaxation in the water. (Judging from my time in the pool on holiday last week, I think it's good for my skin, too, which is a bonus.)

It is, of course, going to be a major effort to haul my ass out of bed in the morning in time to do this, but I think it'll be a positive thing overall. Check back on Monday to see how I got on!

Hello! Today I'm giving you, dear Patrons, early access to a new project that will be kicking off "officially" on Friday: the Final Fantasy Marathon, which I've previously teased with my Final Fantasy XI videos.

Now I'm finally ready to kick off for real, so here's the first episode, featuring the PSP version of Final Fantasy. I'm quite happy with how this turned out, and I'm really looking forward to continuing my way through the rest of the series in this manner. It'll take a LONG time to get through everything, but it's something I've been wanting to do for the longest time, and there's no time like the present!

I hope you enjoy the first episode, and check back on YouTube every Friday for the latest.

I'm back at work today. Boo! The adjustment hasn't been quite as horrendously harsh as I expected it to be, but I do have a bit of a headache and would rather be in bed right now. Patti decided that I should wake up at 5.30am though, so my sleep from that point onwards was rather broken, to say the least; Patti likes to "tap" me in the face, and she knows how to open doors, so I can't just shut her out of the room. (For recent followers, Patti is my cat, not my wife. My wife could sleep through the Apocalypse.)

After my holiday, I'm feeling reasonably inspired in a few regards. Both Andie (my actual wife) and I had been struggling a bit with our slimming efforts prior to going away, but I think a week of being reasonably free and easy with what we want to eat has probably got a lot of the frustration out of our system, hopefully meaning that we'll find it a bit easier to get back "on plan" for the foreseeable future. Of course, we'll almost certainly have gained weight in the meantime, but we're seeing this week's session as a fresh start and a new beginning rather than any sort of "failure".

My time in the pool at Center Parcs also made me feel like I want to do some more swimming generally. Since I prefer to keep my evenings as free as possible to work on MoeGamer, make videos and enjoy some games, my goal is to get up and go swimming before work. There's a pool just around the corner from my house that does early morning sessions from 7.15am, meaning I could swim for 30-45 minutes before work, so I'd like to do that. My big barrier to doing that is the fact that I find it very difficult to get up before I absolutely have to in the morning, regardless of whether or not I'm being harassed by a cat (which I usually am).

As I wrote a long while back, though, this sort of thing is all about establishing good habits. Good habits can be difficult to get going with, but once you establish them, the longer you keep them up the harder they become to break. I just need to make that initial "push" to get going in the first place, then I can very much see myself making (possibly daily) swimming part of my weekday routine.

This is all good intentions rather than actual good things right now, though, so I'll be sure to keep you posted on my progress in an attempt to keep me honest!

It's good to be back. I had a thoroughly pleasant time on my holiday and the subsequent visit to my family, but it's very nice to be back in my own house, using my own computer and my own television, and being harassed by my own cats. (Those who watch my YouTube work will probably be familiar with Patti by now; she's "helping" me as I write this.)

I'm glad I had the foresight to take tomorrow off work. It's a tired old gag to say that you need a holiday from your holiday when you take a break like this, but it's really true! It's good to have a bit of time to re-adjust, re-calibrate yourself to normality and get yourself back in the right mindset for the return to humdrum, mundane old everyday life.

Still, I've got lots of fun things to enjoy on my last Monday of freedom — besides Super Mario Maker 2, which I'll be writing about this week, my Kickstarter copy of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night came in, Super Neptunia RPG should be arriving tomorrow and MangaGamer kindly provided me with a review copy of The Expression: Amrilato, which will be the basis for the next Cover Game feature.

Now I think I need to go sleep in my own bed for a bit! Back to relative normality tomorrow, I guess!

The Switch has really been showing its value over the course of the last week or so. While we were away at Center Parcs, it provided the facility to both play games and watch YouTube videos on the television (albeit from behind Center Parcs' extremely strict "family-friendly" Internet filter, which forces Restricted Mode on YouTube and thus denies access to a good 95% of the content) and over the last couple of days with my family, it's provided a means for me to escape when the number of people around me gets a bit overwhelming, as well as a way for us to do something together with games like Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart 8.

"This'd be perfect for Switch" is something of a mantra for Chris and I on the MoeGamer Podcast, but there really are a ton of great games that absolutely are perfect for Switch: pick-up-and-play affairs that you can dip into or spend a more protracted amount of time with.

The recent release of Super Mario Maker 2 is a perfect example. There are a multitude of ways to play this game, including the single-player story mode (which I may have blitzed through, but which is nonetheless pretty substantial), the online "Course World" facility to search and download levels, the "Endless Challenge" mode where you get a stock of lives to see how many randomly selected online levels you can survive, the online multiplayer (which I haven't tried) and, of course, building your own stuff.

Each of these modes is suitable for different situations. The levels in Story Mode are pretty short and relatively easy to clear, making them great for a quick session. Course World can throw up whatever you want, from an impressive auto-playing level to a monstrously difficult challenge that will have you gnashing your teeth. Endless Challenge can stop and start as you please, and likewise online multiplayer, and building a course is something you can easily spend hours on if you want to.

And this is just one of many fantastic games you can enjoy wherever you want. There are a ton of things that wind me up about modern, always-connected, never-more-than-two-feet-from-a-screen life… but having easy access to great games (that aren't mobile games) isn't one of them.

Hello everyone! Sorry there wasn't a full-length article on MoeGamer today, but we spent a fair amount of today travelling (and stuck in traffic) and the remainder of the day has been spent being sociable with my family. Business will return to normal as of Monday, when we should be back at home with our cats, ready to face the trials and tribulations of life once again — hopefully refreshed from our time off!

I had the foresight to get my copy of Super Mario Maker 2 delivered to my parents' house instead of my own, so I've been able to give that a bit of a look today. Early impressions are very positive indeed — I've had a play with the course maker, the story mode and a couple of uploaded levels and had a lot of fun with each.

The course maker is mildly less intuitive than the original Wii U version simply by virtue of the fact that if you're playing it on a TV, you're no longer "drawing" things with the touchscreen, but I imagine that intuitive aspect returns if playing using the Switch in handheld mode — particularly if you have a stylus suitable for capacitive touchscreens. I did manage to knock up a quick course earlier and get it uploaded — I enjoyed the challenge of putting together one of the "objective-based" levels rather than the usual "get to the end", and this sort of thing will probably be my main focus with any levels I create.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the community takes to this new game. Despite being on such a niche platform, the original Super Mario Maker brought a community of people together to create some absolutely extraordinary things, so I have no doubt the same will be true of this game. I guess we'll have to wait and see!

There will, of course, be a proper writeup on MoeGamer next week when I get back onto a normal schedule. In the meantime, I hope you're all having a thoroughly pleasant weekend, and I will, as ever, speak to you soon!

Today's main activity was Adventure Golf, better known as crazy golf or miniature golf, depending on your preferred nomenclature.

This was good fun! I don't play minigolf very often, but I always enjoy it when I do, even though my putting skills leave something to be desired. It's difficult applying my knowledge of golf games to the real world! You don't have a handy grid with moving lines showing inclines in the real world, okay?

The minigolf course here at Elveden Forest is pretty neat — it's on an actual island in the middle of the lake we went boating on yesterday, and the island itself is heavily wooded, so the whole course is beneath a pleasantly shady canopy of trees. This is good, because today was a brightly sunny day — not overly hot and nicely breezy, but still the sort of weather that would probably burn and/or give you sunstroke if you spent too long out in it.

After the golf, we spent some time lounging in the pool again. There's a really nice little pool as part of the overall complex called the "Lagoon Pool", which appears to be salted water. It's thoroughly pleasant to relax in, and really good for floating aimlessly around in. It's also probably the closest I'll get to an anime-style "hot spring" over here in the UK.

Tomorrow we have to be out of our accommodation by 10am, so we're going to have some breakfast, pack up then spend a couple of hours enjoying the pool before we leave. Then it's off to my parents' place for a kind of "second holiday" — it'll be the first time pretty much the whole Davison clan has been in one place for quite some time, so it'll be good to see everyone, including my brother and his family.

S'pose I should probably get some sleep then!

Fun day today. Disappointingly, we discovered that the owls we were hoping to see are, for some reason, not available right now, so we decided that we'd do something else we'd been considering instead: taking an electric boat out on the lake for half an hour and having an enjoyable drift around.

I mentioned yesterday that I enjoy being in or on the water, so this boat trip was very enjoyable. Being an electric boat, there wasn't a lot to think about; all you had to do was use a joystick to steer left and right, press a button to choose between very slow and quite slow, and flip a little switch to choose between forwards and backwards.

Our half hour on the lake was thoroughly pleasant. The lake itself is fairly small, so half an hour was enough to do a good three laps of it, but each time we got to see some slightly different things — mostly various types of bird, to be honest, including Canada geese, mallard ducks and moorhens — as well as admiring the bravery of those people crazy enough to do the zipline over the lake. I did a zipline once when I was a Cub Scout, if I remember correctly, and it was fun; even if I wasn't too heavy for it as I am now, I'm not sure I'd do it today!

We followed up our little boat trip with a late lunch at The Pancake House, which appears to be a fixture in all the Center Parcs sites. Here, you can get Dutch or American-style pancakes with a variety of sweet and savoury toppings, and they're always delicious. Andie went for a Mexican-inspired one today, while I went for a "Dutch Apple" one with baked apple slices, sultanas, cinnamon sugar, whipped cream, ice cream and toffee sauce. Very, very good indeed.

Tomorrow we're probably going to go and play some minigolf and spend some time in the pool. And eat cake. This week is going by far too quickly for my liking, but I think we're making the most of the opportunity to relax!