#oneaday Day 588: Two-day report

As promised the other day, I have been following the diet and exercise plan for the last two days. It has been going well so far! I've been under my calorie budget both days (there is still some of today left, but I have enough calories left that if I want a little snack later, I can have one) and I've done 30 minutes on the under-desk elliptical trainer on both days.

Unsurprisingly, I don't feel any different and/or better as yet, but I am feeling quite positive about this particular attempt. I have some healthy and low-calorie snacks (that don't suck) in the house, and interestingly enough I haven't really been feeling "cravings" during the day — it's those cravings that inevitably do me in on other occasions, so it's a positive sign that I haven't particularly been feeling them over the last couple of days.

I even have some recommendations! Ryvita Snack-It Thins. These come in crisp-like flavours and are like 30 calories each. They're a nice crunchy snack by themselves, or you can put some cheese or something on them, or dip them in something. And unlike a lot of "flavoured" crispbreads and suchlike, these actually have a good amount of flavour to them. I got the prawn cocktail and salt and vinegar flavours, and they're both excellent. Better 30-60 calories for one or two of those than 100 calories or more for a bag of crisps. Although I'm not feeling guilty if I do fancy a bag of crisps at any point.

I also got a bunch of yogurts because I really like yogurt. I was never a big fan of it when I was a kid — particularly if it had "bits" in — and would never, ever pick yogurt from the daily dessert options of "fruit, cheese, yogurt, ice-cream" when offered by my mother. But these days I can happily enjoy even a tub of plain yogurt without anything in it — there's something about it I just find nice and refreshing, plus, again, it's probably better to pick a yogurt than a chocolate pudding. Yes, I know some yogurts have a shitload of sugar, fat and calories in them, but you have to allow yourself some pleasures if you don't want to go mad.

I bought a hazelnut yogurt from Sainsbury's yesterday. I wasn't sure what to expect — on one previous occasion when I've had a "hazelnut" yogurt it actually ended up being more "chocolate", but in this case, it actually was a regular yogurt with little bits of real hazelnut in it. I'm not sure it's something I'll buy again, but it was certainly interesting — and pretty low on the calories, too, since it was a low-fat yogurt.

For breakfast I've got myself some Weetabix and Sultana Bran because I'm a weirdo who unironically likes both of those things, and both of them go just as well with yogurt as they do with milk. Frustratingly, the bowl of Sultana Bran I poured myself this morning had I think one solitary sultana in it, but fortunately I like just plain ol' Bran Flakes too, so it wasn't a huge loss. The bag will be getting a good shake tomorrow.

The one thing I haven't done yet is reach out to seek some help from the psychotherapeutic angle. There's a big form I have to fill out and then I have to have a phone call with someone, and both of those things are daunting tasks that I don't want to face just yet. I'll see how I feel about tackling them over the weekend — before that, though, I have a nice relaxing Friday night to enjoy, and some HeroQuest to play tomorrow!

So there's your update. I know two days isn't long, but I wanted to acknowledge, as much to myself as anything, that I've made a solid start. Now to keep it up!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 587: Why are you doing that?

One thing I find quite interesting when looking at games from over the years is contemplating how, as time has gone on, we have become a lot more preoccupied with the "why" of what we are doing in a game than in the past. And, as part of these contemplations, I've come to realise that games which don't really give you much of a "why" beyond "this is what the game is" actually have their own very distinct appeal.

As a case in point, I've been playing some Nintendo 64 "collectathon" platformers recently. This is a type of game that very much fell out of favour at some point between the PlayStation/Saturn/Nintendo 64 era and the PlayStation 2/Xbox/Gamecube age. There are still some folks making games like that — most notably Nintendo — but they are by no means as common as they used to be. And a lot of it, I think, comes down to the apparent expectation that everything must have some sort of narrative context or justification.

Now, I'll hold my hands up here and say that, in the past, I have been guilty of thinking that pretty much every game would be better if it had some sort of narrative context. In the earliest days of this blog, back when the people behind WordPress gave a shit about their community rather than going all-in on AI or whatever shit they're up to at the minute, I even had a post featured for making this very argument specifically about racing games — blissfully unaware, as I was at that point, of Namco's PC Engine conversion of their arcade game Final Lap Twin and the fact they added a Pokémon-ass RPG to it. I do actually still think there's scope for racing games with stories, but I also don't think all racing games need stories — and those which do have stories had better have bloody good ones if they expect me to sit through them rather than skipping right to the racing.

Err, what was I saying? Oh, right. Games didn't always feel the need to justify the things you were doing in the game in terms of narrative. Collectathon platformers are, in many ways, the quintessential example of this: they have characters, a world and indeed a plot, but none of those get in the way of the core "point" of the game: solving puzzles and overcoming challenges to acquire shiny things that let you access more of the game. No-one ever gave a shit about why Mario was collecting Power Stars in Super Mario 64, they just knew that he had to collect Power Stars, and that was enough.

This is one of the things I found quite refreshing about Donkey Kong Bananza recently. That's a game that strikes a very good balance between having an unfolding story and just giving you a basic objective to complete before getting out of your way and letting you accomplish it. For the vast majority of your time in Donkey Kong Bananza, you are looking for Banandium Gems. It doesn't matter why. Donkey Kong wants them, and that means you want them. That's all that matters. That's all that needs to matter.

I'm not saying that games with plots have no place. Hell, you know me, I'll gladly bury my head in a 100+ hour RPG, particularly if it makes me cry at least once along the way. But sometimes it's nice to play a game that is less concerned with wanting to be taken seriously as a great work of art or a masterpiece of characterisation and worldbuilding, and more with being a fun toy that just feels good to fiddle with.

I could have probably phrased that better. But I'm leaving it like that now, deliberately. And I'm off to go and acquire some more shiny things.

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#oneaday Day 586: Commitment

I'm back from The Day At The Office. I haven't set my office PC back up again yet though, so no tablet drawings for now. I'm tired and can't be arsed to faff around with wires right now, so it's plain text for today I'm afraid.

Anyway, as I said yesterday, I'm pretty determined to make 2026 the Year I Beat My Weight. Not, as in previous years, the year I beat my previous record for "highest weight Pete can be", but rather, the year I figure out exactly how to get on top of losing it.

I have a several-step plan that I will begin pursuing from tomorrow. (Today is a write-off due to all the travelling and the Wingstop we just had for dinner. We had the Wingstop with the full knowledge that we're both going to be Eating Healthy from tomorrow.) Here are the several steps:

I will use the Lose It! app to track my daily calorie intake, and keep below the daily recommended number of calories that will supposedly allow me to lose weight. In doing so, I will continue to enjoy the things I enjoy, but in better moderation. I will not be switching to a "half a banana and a handful of chia seeds for breakfast"-style diet, because that will probably make me want to kill myself.
I will count calories even if I go "off-plan" and have myself a "treat", to better educate myself in potentially how much damage I can do to my efforts if I "treat" myself too often.
I will do at least 30 minutes of exercise per day, on some combination of my under-desk elliptical machine and/or the treadmill that we have now set up in the spare room.
I will not use the calories burned during exercise as "bonus calories" to have additional Nice Things.
I will research and reach out to some form of psychotherapeutic support to help with my efforts.

That last one, I think, is going to be the big "different thing" I try this time, and I suspect it will be helpful. As I mentioned yesterday, while I mostly found my referral to the weight loss programme via the NHS to be unhelpful, the one aspect I really did feel like I was getting something from was the counselling aspect. Through talking therapy, I felt like I was able to start looking at my behaviours (conscious and unconscious) that have led me to this point, and to figure out ways I might be able to modify them. Unfortunately I had so few sessions that I don't feel like I really got anywhere — but I feel like if I had been able to spend more time with the therapist in question, we could have made some progress.

One thing that came out of those few conversations, and something that I find my thoughts returning to, is that some of my behaviours are consistent with a pattern of addiction. Anecdotally, having had experience with other people dealing with addiction, I would be inclined to agree. I recognise this. I recognise patterns in myself that I have seen in other people who were struggling with addiction. And I feel that is an important starting point. As with any addiction, though, the struggle will always be in breaking it, little by little. Because you can't really go "cold turkey" (so to speak) with food — unlike various forms of chemical abuse, you still need food to operate normally, and thus breaking any sort of food-related addiction is more about developing a healthier relationship with food rather than completely breaking your "attachment" to it.

But I'm probably getting ahead of myself there. Fact is, I think having some sort of Professional Help would be… well, helpful. Up until now, I've been hesitant, because Professional Help is 1) relatively expensive and 2) daunting to find your way into. 2) applies doubly in my case, because my social anxiety makes it a huge effort to be able to make contact with a stranger, but also it's overwhelming to see the sheer number of therapists that are out there, and having absolutely no idea who might be "right" for me.

Thus I think rather than taking the "roll of the dice" approach and just stabbing randomly at a huge list of therapists in my area, I'm going to try making use of an organisation known as The Empathy Project that operates in my area. This is a small, non-profit organisation based in the town I call home, and I can't remember how I stumbled across them, but I seem to have added myself to their mailing list at some point. What I have read about them online seems positive, however, and thus referring myself to them seems like it would be a solid starting point, if nothing else.

So, tomorrow, I am kicking all this off. I will be counting calories, I will be exercising, and I will be referring myself to someone who might be able to help me through this. I'm feeling oddly positive about this right now, so let's just hope I can keep this mental momentum.

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#oneaday Day 585: Hotels and their unflattering mirrors

It's that time of the month again, when I haul myself down to sunny Letchworth in preparation for A Day In The Office. And as such, I am coming atcha from my usual hotel, typing on my phone.

This hotel is, as I've alluded to in the past, All Right. It's reasonably comfortable, but its rooms vary quite a lot in quality, so it's always a bit of a roll of the dice when you get here as to whether or not you, for example, have a bath or not. This time I have been unlucky — no bath, plus a bedside table that looks like it last saw a lick of paint at some point in the 1970s.

I don't mind these little idiosyncrasies, though. They add character, and this place has become quite familiar to me from my numerous visits. Not quite enough that I know from my room number whether or not I have a "good" room, but enough that it is comfortably familiar here.

One thing I do dislike, though, is that pretty much every room seems to have mirrors, like, fucking everywhere. And there's something about hotel mirrors that always seems infinitely more unflattering that the ones you have at home.

I never feel more disgusted with my own body than when I see it in a hotel mirror. I think part of it may be the knowledge that I am away from home and thus not able to "do anything" about the way I look — not that I can really do anything at home, either, but I always feel just a bit more… grounded and in control when I'm at home.

I can't continue like this. This year has to be the year that I beat this problem. It's not going to be an easy process, and there are going to be times that I want more than anything to give up, but there is nothing I want more for 2026 than to be able to look at myself in the mirror and say "good work — you still have a way to go, but you're doing good". (I am a realist about this stuff if nothing else.)

That hard work has to come from me, though. I have to want it. Seeking external help has only worked on one previous occasion, and I never recovered from my relapse. Granted, there were external factors beyond my complete control that caused said relapse, but the approach I took back then — Slimming World — is clearly not quite right for me now.

I've been to the doctor about this, too. I was referred to an organisation who offered nutrition advice and counselling, but I found most of the course to be useless. The nutritional advice came once a fortnight and amounted to "eat less" (no, really?) and the counselling was even less frequent — though I did find the couple of sessions I had in that regard to be quite helpful, so that might be something I pursue independently and privately. It costs money, yes, but if investing in yourself isn't a good use of your funds, what is?

I'm keen to avoid drug-based approaches as although I'm sure they work, I am exceedingly squeamish about poking myself with needles and am not sure I would be able to do it — and I don't want to force Andie to have to do that, either.

During my time with the nutritionist and the counsellor, I was also continually asked if I wanted bariatric surgery, and while I have seen people get great results with that, that is not something I want for myself.

Besides being scared shitless of surgery in general — something I will have to confront when I do eventually manage to lose some weight, in order to get my long-standing hernia fixed — I also worry that the surgery won't fix the main problems, which I have pretty strong suspicions are as much psychological as physiological.

To put it another way, I'm worried that even if they remove the use of part of my stomach or whatever it is they do, I still wouldn't be able to control myself. And if you overeat when you've had that treatment, you can really fuck yourself up.

So that leaves me with good old-fashioned willpower, which hasn't done me too proud up until this point. But I really do want this. I want this to be the year I can look at myself and say yes, I am on the road to recovery.

Sorry for the rather TMI post, but sometimes it helps to just express these things and get them out in the open, as much for your own benefit as anyone else. I don't need anyone's help, I don't want advice — all I do need is some understanding and quiet support. And thankfully, that is something that I do have already.

#oneaday Day 584: Paint chase

"Are you going to paint them?" Andie asked, looking at the wealth of miniatures in the big-box HeroQuest set that arrived today.

"Probably not," I said. "I don't know how."

This probably isn't quite accurate — as Andie pointed out, the how of painting something is pretty bloody obvious. But what I meant by that was I have no idea how to do it in such a way that it doesn't look absolute shite.

Now, granted, I am basing this on my previous attempts to do this, some 30+ years ago, when I had a Citadel Miniatures starter paint set and a single brush that was, frankly, woefully inaccurate for the job at hand. The results were, as you might expect, Not Very Good — not least because I only ever really got as far as doing base colours, and never got into doing highlights and shadows. I always got hung up on the how of those bits — how do you know which bits need highlights and shadows? (Obviously, you shine a light on it, and put shadows in the bits that have shadows in them, and lighter bits on the bits that have light on them — I realise that now.)

With this in mind, I've been pondering whether I should try again. And I was surprised and pleased to discover that miniature painting technology has, unsurprisingly, moved on quite considerably in the intervening 30+ years since I last attempted it.

I'm especially interested in some curious little gizmos called Speedpaint Markers by a company called The Army Painter. This is, in turn, a spinoff of a type of paint this company creates called Speedpaint, which purports to do all the highlighting and shadowing for you to a certain extent. It does this through a particularly blended paint, whose properties mean that when it gets into cavities it takes on a darker tone, while on flatter, more raised areas it has a lighter tone, and on everything in between it has a… well, kind of "normal" tone, whatever that means for the specific colour you're using. It's a different sort of idea to acrylic-based paint, which is what I had previously experimented with, and looks like being a very beginner-friendly approach to painting minis.

The Markers take things a step further. Rather than requiring a specialist brush, palette and other equipment, they're a little brush-pen hybrid that delivers the paint right onto the miniature without any other equipment required. Obviously you still need to prime them beforehand, but that's simple enough that even I can do it.

I'm tempted to give them a try. It's a bit of money to get a decent starter set of colours (and, annoyingly, the one thing the "starter set" of markers lacks is a regular flesh tone) but if it really is as easy as it looks to use these things, I might finally be able to enjoy something that has, to date, eluded me.

I dunno. I'll think about it. But it would be cool to have painted minis for HeroQuest.

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#oneaday Day 583: Heroic leap

(Experimenting with some different techniques today. The above isn't what I'd call a "finished" image but I feel like I can probably build that into something.)

We were originally supposed to be having some friends over to play HeroQuest today, but the collective illness of me, Andie and at least one of the friends in question over the course of the last week caused us to postpone to next weekend. So I can't really offer a recap of what occurred in our first session, but I can take a moment to ponder exactly why I'm looking forward to jumping into this.

HeroQuest was an important part of my childhood. I was introduced to it through my brother's girlfriend at the time, who was big into heavy metal, fantasy role-playing and suchlike. Her Dad was into miniature wargaming, also, so I wonder how much that was an influence on her — though, of course, Warhammer and its ilk was always a lot cooler than the sort of "historical re-enactment" miniatures her father collected. Perhaps it was a case of "oh, I kind of like those, but I don't want my Dad to think he's cool, so I'll get into something tangentially related".

Anyway, fact is, I was introduced to HeroQuest by my brother's girlfriend, who did an admirable job of putting up with her boyfriend's annoying younger brother by letting me look at her stuff. I don't think I ever actually played HeroQuest with her, but I was so enamoured with it that I asked my parents to get me a copy of Advanced Heroquest one birthday or Christmas, and I got it. Still have it, in fact.

To my frustration over the years, I've actually had relatively few opportunities to play either the original HeroQuest or Advanced Heroquest with real people. Fortunately, Advanced Heroquest includes some very robust solo play rules, so it wasn't a complete waste, and I did manage to play it a few times with people over the years. But the original HeroQuest was always something I really wanted to play with other people over the long term — ideally with me in the role of the games master, taking the players through a full campaign of adventures.

HeroQuest, for the unfamiliar, is a fairly straightforward dungeon-crawling board game. The original MB Games version from the late '80s was developed in conjunction with Games Workshop's Citadel Miniatures brand, and thus was regarded as part of the Warhammer universe; Advanced Heroquest made this much more explicit. A few years back, however, Hasbro and its Avalon Hill brand, now rights holders for the HeroQuest license, decided to resurrect the game with a crowdfunding campaign.

The new HeroQuest has had a few changes since its late '80s release. The new version is now universal worldwide, being based on the previous incarnation's North American rules, rather than having European and North American variants. This means a few things. Firstly, the games master player is now called Zargon instead of Morcar, which to my mind is an infinitely worse name, but it seems "Morcar" is being reintroduced to New HeroQuest with an upcoming expansion, so I'm not too mad about it. Secondly, the game is a tad more difficult — in the European original, all monsters had just one Body Point, so you just had to hit them in order to kill them, even in the case of "bosses". Thirdly, there are some differences and variations in how the quests are composed.

I initially bought the First Light standalone "starter" set for HeroQuest but, having seen a good price on the full-size core set, I've splurged on that too. (Christmas money!) It's actually worth having both, though, because First Light has a completely different campaign of quests to take on as well as a double-sided board with a new map layout that isn't in the original. The downside of First Light is that as a lower-cost starter set, it only has five miniatures: the four Heroes and a dragon boss that recurs throughout the First Light campaign; the remainder of the Stuff is implemented either as flat cardboard tiles, or cardboard standees. Conversely, the full core set has miniatures for all the main monster types in both the First Light and original core quests, plus plastic 3D furniture to put in the rooms.

I'm really looking forward to getting into playing this, because as much as I have had fun with some subsequently release dungeon crawler games such as Descent: Journeys in the Dark, The Legend of Drizzt, Gloomhaven and another one I've completely forgotten the name of, a lot of those feel like they get a bit bogged down in being tactical wargames rather than exploration-focused dungeon crawlers — and it's the exploration and storytelling that has always attracted me to HeroQuest and its surrounding works.

Hopefully at this point next week I'll be able to provide a report on how our first session went. I'm looking forward to it a lot, and hope it will be able to become a semi-regular activity. We shall see!

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#oneaday Day 582: Getting some mojo back

No drawing today as I've been doing other creative things, as I shall talk about in a moment.

I have not felt at all like making any videos for a while, which is a little bit frustrating to me, because the first two episodes of my Space Rogue playthrough actually did surprisingly decent (for my channel) numbers, and I reckon there's just one or two episodes more of The Granstream Saga to do before that's all finished. I just haven't quite been able to summon up the energy to continue those recently, not helped by a week of feeling ill that I'm just getting over.

However, with a soft embargo date approaching for Super Woden Rally Edge, a game I wanted to cover — the video I made on this game's previous installment is the best-performing video on my channel by a long shot — I felt a bit more inspired to actually do something today. So I recorded a bunch of voiceovers: both for this, and for some other things that I've previously written articles for, but wanted to turn them into videos. All in all, I've recorded voiceovers for Super Woden Rally Edge, Old Skies, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein 2009 and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, which should result in a nice spread of 15-20 minute videos for each. I've even edited the Super Woden Rally Edge and Old Skies ones already, but I'm going to leave the Wolfenstein ones to another time — maybe tomorrow, maybe later in the week, depending on how I'm feeling.

I continue to go back and forth on what is "best" to do for my YouTube channel. Up until now, I've built it on Let's Play-style playthroughs of games, and I think a lot of my viewers like that sort of thing, particularly as I make an effort to explain how to play the game, why it's interesting, why it's still relevant (if it's an old game, which it usually is) and what I, personally, think of it. These are fairly easy to record and edit, but they are time- and energy-consuming to produce, since they do involve me sitting and playing a game, often for quite a long time, and attempting to find meaningful things to say for the duration.

At the same time, the pre-scripted videos tend to overall do better, particularly over the long term. I think I'm probably more "proud" of those overall, too, since they involve more in the way of editing, and delivering a voiceover is a different skill overall to off-the-cuff, unprepared commentary while playing "live". However, they take a lot more time to both prepare and edit, since there is often a lot of miscellaneous footage required to capture along with the footage of the main thing I'm covering, and the editing process involves a lot more in creatively finding ways to visually represent the things I'm talking about.

Part of me wants to commit to one or the other of these approaches, because I feel it would probably be a good idea to. At the same time, I think there's value in both approaches; you can show things in "live gameplay" that you can't show in a "video essay"-style production, and vice versa.

I do, however, think that kicking off long playthroughs again might have been a mistake. The videos for The Granstream Saga have performed more poorly than anything I've done for a long time, although, as I say, the first couple of episodes of Space Rogue did surprisingly well. So I'm inching towards abandoning those, though I feel like at this point I probably should finish The Granstream Saga at the very least.

Anyway, that's something to think about another day. I have enough on my plate with these new videos for now, so watch for them coming soon to my channel!

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#oneaday Day 581: Another experiment with references

I present you with the author's self-portrait, in which he is a bit more generous to himself than he normally is, and which was based, once again, on a 3D reference pose. This was also an experiment at adding noses and ears to a character.

I still have a lot of fundamental techniques I need to work on — getting my pen pressure consistent as I draw something is a big one, though there are tweaks one can make to one's tools to mitigate that somewhat — but I'm quite happy with how things are going, and feel like I'm definitely learning some things every time I draw something. And I'm not taking a ton of time over these right now, as is probably readily apparent — so I'm sure if I were to take a lot more time over a single image, things might come out better.

I'm actually keen to experiment with some other ideas, too. I have vivid memories of "Computer Art" classes back at school, where I got very good marks for a digital recreation of an Impressionist painting, achieved on an Archimedes computer. The toolset on the art package we were using there was limited, but I was able to make creative use of it to produce a satisfyingly good image that looked vaguely authentically Impressionist — as close as one can achieve with a limited resolution and colour palette, anyway!

One of the nice things about Clip Studio Paint is that it has a lot of nice built-in tools — virtual pens, pencils, paintbrushes and painting methods. Thus far I've been keeping it simple for the doodles I've been doing on here, but I kind of want to fiddle around with drawing some completely different sorts of images — maybe something more abstract, maybe something a bit more landscapey, maybe something completely imaginative. That will be a project for another day, which I will chronicle on here for sure, but for now, I'm definitely having fun dabbling in the visual arts.

I recognise that I will almost certainly never be as good as someone who has been practicing this stuff their whole life — but you also never know what you're capable of until you try it, which is partly what this was all about. I haven't even really tried drawing of any description outside of a few idle doodles since I was a teenager; I didn't study Art or any related fields at GCSE, so my "formal" education in such things stopped around year 9. And I tended to find Art classes a little frustrating at times, since I never really got on well with real paint. I was bad at mixing colours — whatever I mixed, I always seemed to end up with brown — and I didn't have particularly good command over brush strokes. My paint would drip and dribble and my eventual compositions would end up looking a bit messy.

There were parts of it I enjoyed, though. I do remember enjoying sketching still lifes with pencils, and the brief period we did a bit of technical drawing was something I took to quite well. I'm sure I will rediscover some other things eventually, too. For now, though, like I say, I'm continuing to feel like this tablet was a good "investment". And by "investment", I mean "put on my Amazon wishlist so someone would buy it me for Christmas".

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#oneaday Day 580: Make Bad Art (But With References)

A recurring refrain I hear online among creative types is "Make Bad Art". The sentiment behind this is that one shouldn't be afraid to do something that, by the standards of the day, is Not Very Good. Because it is only through being Not Very Good for quite some time that you have any possibility of ever graduating to Vaguely Good, and beyond.

Today, with that in mind, I decided to do a little experiment. Rather than drawing completely freehand as I usually do, I today decided to experiment with Clip Studio Paint's reference features. This allows you to do things like import 3D models of objects and people, then draw over them to produce your own finished works.

After a little tinkering with the 3D models to get the exaggerated proportions used by the characters I've previously drawn, I then traced over the outlines for a basic bit of line art, then added some features such as their faces, clothes and hair. Then I coloured using the basic method I have been using up until now.

The result… isn't amazing, I will freely admit, and I think at this point my freehand sketches are probably "better". But I did find the experiment valuable, and there are things I have already learned from doing this for just one session.

Firstly, even if using exaggerated big head proportions like I did here, it's tricky to get the balancing of a face right, particularly if you're using stylised eyes (and no noses) as I have been up until this point. But one thing that is very helpful when using reference models is the "centre line" on the head, which gives you an idea of where the eyes are supposed to go. It's easy to forget that our eyes are actually a good halfway down the front of our head, since the top part of many people's heads is covered by hair. But if you can get the eyes in the right place, that's a good start.

Some experimentation with adding additional detail to Alex's hair taught me an important lesson: if you're going to do dangly fringy front bits, draw them first. You will likely want the back to look at least a little bit like it is attached to the front bits, which is not something I have succeeded with in the above image. And with the way I composed that image — drawing the head and the "back hair" together as one layer — this is something that would have been difficult to correct without completely redoing the head. Lesson learned for future reference.

It's also clear that the simple, abstract hair I have been using for "me" doesn't quite work when using marginally more realistic proportions, or at least a reference model. I've been left with a huge forehead, which is not something I actually have. Hell, the stringy hair I have been using for a while now is supposed to represent a shaved head, which is not actually accurate to how my hair is right now. So I will have to rethink that a bit if I want to continue on like this.

However, difficulties aside, I also found using the reference models enormously helpful to get vaguely convincing human shapes. Simple things like getting the length of arms right, or having legs positioned in a convincing manner, or where a lady's boobs actually are — all of those things can be learned by tinkering around with a reference model.

Now, part of me feels like drawing over a 3D model like I've done today is sort of "cheating". But in reality, it's a valid method that I'm pretty sure many people use — and my Not Very Good efforts today show that there is still plenty of skill involved in making a trace of a reference model into something that looks Actually Good. And, as previously noted, it is only through Making Bad Art that one learns to get better — particularly if you are trying something new to see what techniques it teaches you.

I don't know if I will stick with using the reference models long-term — to me, someone who is "good at drawing" is someone who can work without things like this; the correct proportions, shapes and suchlike just come naturally — but I think it's a worthwhile experiment for at least a few more attempts. I know some things to try and concentrate on now, so let's just see what happens with a bit more tinkering!

Most importantly, though, I'm having fun. I'm glad I decided to give this a go with a proper tablet, as I'm enjoying myself. Even if I never get anywhere close to being Actually Good, it's always nice to have various ways to express yourself.

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#oneaday Day 579: Fresh hell

No drawing today; it doesn't quite feel appropriate.

So much for new year, new beginnings. Just the last week has seen all manner of fresh hell being served up, particularly across the pond in America, but these things have the potential to affect everyone in the world, directly or indirectly.

The first thing I want to acknowledge is America's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terror group murdering someone in cold blood in Minneapolis today. I have no real words to express what I feel about the continually declining situation in the States right now, and as someone who has relatives who live there, I am frightened. I can't even begin to imagine how people who live there in the knowledge that this horrendous shit is going down must be feeling right now.

That's about all I can say about that for the moment, because that situation is still ongoing. I at least wanted to acknowledge it, however, because it's just one of many things that have been going horribly, horribly wrong recently, making it clear that 2026 is not going to offer any sort of respite from the general shitshow the 2020s have been so far. I hope the perpetrator of this heinous act is brought to justice, and that this can be the starting point for the people of the United States to take their country back — by force, if necessary — from an increasingly, dangerously unhinged administration.

The main thing I want to talk about today is Grok, the generative AI large language model attached to X, the child sexual abuse material and revenge porn platform formerly known as the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Grok has been trouble ever since Elon Musk, idiot-in-chief of The Everything App, decided that he needed to make it Cool and Based, and not subject to those pesky guardrails that the boring folks at OpenAI and Anthropic were doing. (Guardrails which, I will add, are consistently failing, as people keep dying as a result of following chatbot "advice" when it comes to drugs and suicidal ideation. But that's beyond the scope of what I want to talk about today.)

If you've somehow missed what's been going on, Grok, ostensibly an on-platform AI able to provide additional context and explanation to a post if someone asks it to chip in, is being used to a frightening degree to produce non-consensual pornography based on real people's photographs — including those of minors. And it has been complying with these requests, posting uncensored nude and lingerie-bikini clad images of women and girls who had previously posted perfectly normal, innocent images of themselves online.

Not only that, but the "community" has been quickly finding ways around what little guardrails Grok does have in place, as reported by the excellent 404 Media, one of the best, most rigorous sources in tech journalism today. For example, Grok supposedly won't generate an image of someone covered in cum, but it will happily comply with a request to "donut glaze" someone, as reported by Eliot Higgins in a lengthy thread on Bluesky earlier today.

There's been disturbingly little critical reporting of this from the media, too. There was a half-arsed attempt to cover the situation during which multiple news outlets unironically said that "Grok apologised" for producing the inappropriate material, when, as a large language model, it is not capable of doing such a thing. The "apologies" posted were simply responses to further prompts, and the insincerity of them was emphasised by someone also prompting it to basically post a Cool and Based "deal with it" kind of response immediately after the initial "apology".

X, The Everything App, so far appears to have done little to curtail the issue. Indeed, if you go click on Grok's profile right now — don't do that — and look at the replies tab, you will almost certainly see a request to put a non-consenting woman in a bikini within two or three posts, if not as the very first post you see. This has been done to a vast number of people so far, including celebrities, public figures, individuals just posting selfies and, yes, minors. And, as one might expect, it has been overwhelmingly women that have received this treatment.

This has been absolutely revolting to see, and although I left Twitter behind myself long ago for a variety of reasons, I am still obliged to check in on it every so often for the day job. And I kind of feel sickened to have to do that; I have absolutely no desire to associate the brand I work for, which I actually care about, with a platform that is seemingly okay with the material I've just been describing. If it were up to me, I would remove the brand from the platform entirely, but unfortunately that is not my decision to make — and thankfully, at some point hopefully not too long away, I will be stepping away from having to deal with social media entirely, in favour of some new responsibilities at the company I will enjoy a lot more.

But if you still have a Twitter account on the grounds that "your audience is still there", let me be blunt: no, they are not. Anyone with any decency abandoned that hellsite long before this latest nonsense started to be a thing, because they could see how things were going a mile off. I wish I could say I was surprised that Grok ended up being used for non-consensual deepfake revenge porn of minors, but I am not.

Back in 2023, I wrote about how I'm not surprised so many people become misanthropes in this day and age, and how I had pretty much lost faith in my fellow man. Things haven't gotten any better since then. In fact, they've become much, much worse. If you've ever thought "ah, no, that's ridiculous, there's no way that'd ever happen", then I'm sorry to say that it probably has already. And then some edgelord shithead has "donut glazed" it just to add insult to injury.

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