#oneaday Day 426: Dear me, I was...

Having finished No Sleep for Kaname Date, which I will try and make some time to do a proper write-up of soon, I decided, this evening, to play through Dear me, I was… from Arc System Works, a Switch 2 wordless visual novel type thing that is less than an hour long, and which I was pretty certain was going to be an emotional gutpunch. Sometimes you need a good one of those, and Dear me, I was… certainly delivers on that front.

I shan't say too much about the details of the game because, as I say, it's very short, and it's the sort of thing best experienced for yourself — so long as you're open to the idea of what is basically a short animated film with occasional very minor (but nonetheless meaningful in the context of the story) interactions.

The concept is simple: the game follows the life of an unnamed woman, from her earliest childhood memories up to her old age. Each chapter represents a particular part of her life, with each opening with one of the few interactive sequences in the game: her eating breakfast. It's surprising quite how much meaning is layered into these simple sequences, whether it's the way her breakfast evolves as she ages, or little things like how her child self leaves the tomatoes on the side of her plate.

Dear me, I was… is one of those games that is probably going to mean different things to different people, but at its core it's a story about the protagonist's relationship with art, and how she uses it to help process her emotions, connect with other people and reflect on her past. A number of things happen to our leading lady over the course of her life, many of which are rather mundane, but nonetheless meaningful to her as an individual. Some things are left a little ambiguous and open to interpretation, which will doubtless help each individual player to connect with the complete work in their own way, and other things are obvious, indisputable truths, but aren't dwelled on.

I feel like part of the point of the game as a whole is to reflect on the idea that life passes you by before you know it; while, when you're young, you might feel like an eternity stretches ahead of you, as you get older, things definitely feel like they start to accelerate in some ways. Sometimes this makes difficult events from the past easier to let go of or at least reflect on; at others, it makes it all the harder to process things.

The game definitely got me feeling things, and absolutely tearing up at numerous points throughout. I'm not sure I could tell you exactly what was making me feel the various emotions I felt over the course of the game, but it's testament to the game's excellent use of visuals and music to tell its wordless story that I felt those things at all. Of particular note is its use of colour; events unfold in three distinct "styles" as a reflection of the emotion of what is happening at any given moment — or perhaps the protagonist's mental state and feelings — and it hits surprisingly hard when, say, the colour fades from the world, and everything starts to be represented in shades of grey, or even just line art. Likewise, it's almost a relief when you see the beautiful watercolours return; a reflection of how everyone's life is full of ups and downs, and the only person who can truly understand one's own feelings is oneself.

To say too much more would probably be getting into spoiler territory, so I'll leave that there for now. Suffice to say that if you're the slightest bit open to video games as a storytelling medium — don't expect any sort of "mechanics", puzzles or challenge here — this is an essential play. Absolutely one of the most beautiful things I've experienced for quite some time, and highly recommended to those who like this sort of thing.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 425: Train crazy

For this month's trip down to the office, as I alluded to yesterday, I decided to take the train instead of driving. This is a somewhat more pricy option, but it takes a similar amount of time in total and means I don't have to drive on the M25. I do, however, have to get from London Waterloo to London King's Cross via the Underground, which is fine on the way there but a tad busy on the way back.

For the most part, though, I think it was a successful experiment. I enjoyed being able to just zone out for the longer portions of my journey (particularly the 90 minute train ride from Southampton to Waterloo) and I actually got a lot of reading done; I've been ploughing through Jane Eyre for a while, and I think I made more progress through it on this trip than I have in the last month of casually reading a chapter before falling asleep of an evening.

I've always liked travelling by train. I think part of this stems from some trips I took with my parents as a child. I have oddly vivid memories of slamming manual train doors at Royston station — this was the days before pretty much all passenger trains had automatic sliding doors like they do now — and I also recall my excitement at the prospect of getting "the Whizzer" (the then new-ish Intercity 125 high-speed train) for a trip to York to, among other things, visit the railways museum. (Apparently I enjoyed riding the Whizzer so much that upon arriving at York, I immediately wanted to ride it all the way home again.)

I also have fond memories of occasionally having the opportunity to get various types of train set out when I was a kid. I had a Brio wooden train set that I enjoyed making creative layouts with — my favourite was the time I made a fully functional rollercoaster using the fence posts from the "farmhouse" scenery I had as track supports — and if I'd been really good and asked my Dad nicely enough, we could get the Hornby train set out of the loft and have a play with that.

We had enough track for that to build a reasonably complex layout on the dining table, a big station building that looked a bit like King's Cross circa 1985 (albeit without the hookers and drug dealers) and several trains, including a little green steam engine I called Percy (after the Thomas the Tank Engine character) and a scale model of the famous Flying Scotsman. I recall the Flying Scotsman actually being rather difficult to drive, because it was a big old beast that actually needed to slow down for corners. Percy, meanwhile, could zip around with relative impunity.

I've had a little go at some train simulator games, most notably Dovetail Games' Train Sim World series. I enjoyed the little I've played, but I'm always a bit conscious when playing one of those that there is a lot of sitting around not doing very much when riding the longer routes. Yes, this is authentic to the real thing — and is a criticism one can level at other simulators such as Microsoft Flight Simulator — but it always makes me wonder if I perhaps should be doing something else with my time. This is a mindset I should probably train (no pun intended) myself out of, because if you enjoy yourself and got something out of the experience — which I definitely have in past jaunts in Train Sim World — then it doesn't really matter how "efficiently" you spent your time.

In fact, yeah, I convinced myself. I should reinstall Train Sim World and spend some more time with it. Probably not tonight though. All that train travelling is, it turns out, surprisingly tiring!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 424: Baader-Meinhof's life-changing hot honey

I find the closely related phenomena of the frequency illusion (also known as the Baader-Meinhof effect) and the recency illusion to be quite fascinating, because both of them get you wondering if the things you're perceiving are actually accurate, or if your own particular perspective on the world has precluded you from seeing something that is quite passé to others.

For the unfamiliar, the frequency illusion is the phenomenon where you notice or learn something for the first time, and then feel like you're seeing or hearing it everywhere. The "Baader-Meinhof" name comes not from the person who discovered it, but rather from one of the first people to comment on it; back in 1994, someone named Terry Mullen wrote to his local paper, Twin Cities, and coined the phrase after learning of a German terrorist group (called Baader-Meinhof, obviously), then hearing it mentioned again within a day of his first learning it.

The recency illusion is closely related. In this instance, you learn a new term and assume that because you have not heard it before, it only came into general use recently, when this, more often than not, is not actually the case.

Thing is, Internet meme culture and Brands™ being desperate to latch on to every bit of silly vernacular the world likes to use when speaking casually (viz. McDonalds and McVities describing wraps and variants of chocolate Digestives respectively as "the (flavour) one", M&S proudly promising "picky bits" instead of having a delicatessen) means that these days it's actually very difficult to judge if you are actually experiencing frequency or recency bias, or if you're just encountering the latest "viral" (ugh) trend to be monetised out the wazoo.

I have two recent (natch) examples: "hot honey" as a flavour, and the phrase "life-changing".

I first noticed hot honey on a recent trip to Aldi. Andie and I had just had a trip to Ikea (fun!) and on the way back we had stopped to grab some groceries. I didn't pick up the hot honey, but I made a mental note that it might be nice to try — particularly in an Asian-inspired sticky beef recipe that I like to make semi-regularly. ("Hot honey", if it wasn't already apparent, is not honey that has been heated, but rather honey with a kick of chilli in it.)

Imagine my surprise, then, when stopping by Sainsbury's to pick up some new suitcases to replace the one Oliver the cat did a wee in and on (don't ask), there was a prominent advertisement outside for a new flavour of Jaffa Cakes. That flavour? German terrorism. No, I jest, of course it was hot honey.

This naturally made me wonder if hot honey is really a recent trend (and if it originated on TikTok I am going to be very upset) or if I had just happened to notice it recently.

As for "life-changing", this obviously isn't a new phrase or one I learned recently, but I do feel like it's come up a lot of late. I did the lottery the other day, and it promised the opportunity to win a "life-changing" amount of money. Not unreasonable or inaccurate. Then when I watched Destination X the other day, the £100,000 prize was described as "life-changing" (call me greedy if you want, but I feel like £100K isn't as "life-changing" as it used to be). The radio station Absolute Radio has a weekly competition called Make Me A Winner where the "life-changing" amount of prize money appears to go up a bit each week. And, stepping away from the fiscal side of things for a moment, a warning sign I noticed on the London Underground today warned that the electrified rails could cause "life-changing" injuries.

Now, I know what you're thinking: all of those would seem to be perfectly valid uses of "life-changing". And I agree! I just found it odd that I noticed so many of them so frequently, so recently, and I honestly can't determine if the phrase is actually being used more right now, or if it's just a big coincidence.

The London Underground one also struck me as a bit weird. As a phrase, "life-changing" tends to have positive connotations in my experience — often relating to money, as seen above. But I don't feel like the injuries you would sustain from licking the live rail at Cockfosters would be akin to a Lottery win. Assuming you survive the experience, perhaps the compensation would be. I don't know.

Anyway, that was your pointless I'm In A Hotel thought for the month. I will now bid you good night to play some NeoGeo, read some Jane Eyre and maybe even get some sleep. Adieu!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 423: Destination X

I watched a potentially interesting new TV show the other day. I've only watched one episode so far and I'm not 100% sure if it was actually any good or not, but the concept was, at least, interesting.

The show is on the BBC and is known as Destination X. I was mostly attracted to it by Rob Brydon being in the presenting role; I have a lot of time for Brydon and his work, and this looked nicely different from his usual panel show stuff.

The concept of Destination X is that a bunch of randos are thrown together and, via various circumstances, placed in a situation where they don't know where they are going and, at various legs of their journey, where they are. At the end of each episode, each contestant has to plop an "X" down on a map of Europe where they think they are, and whoever's X is the furthest away from where they actually are is booted out of the competition.

Naturally, numerous obstacles are placed in the competitors' way, but they also have the opportunity to earn clues as to where they are, too. There are "challenges" along the way, which can potentially provide clues to everyone, but which also give a particular advantage to whoever had the strongest individual performance in the challenge.

In the first episode, all the contestants were stuck in a box, with various items of imagery adorning the walls. The box was split into an "A" side and a "B" side, and the group was asked a series of questions with two possible answers. Each contestant had to stand on the side they believed was the correct answer, and, without revealing whether the answer was correct or not, they would then have the opportunity to look out of a tiny window of the box to see either a clue (if they were on the "correct" side) or a red herring (if they were on the "wrong" side).

There's also some artificial drama added, at least in this first episode, by the person who "won" the challenge having the opportunity to bring someone else along to gain their particular advantage — and they also have the option to earn another clue, on the condition that no-one else must learn that clue, otherwise they'll be immediately disqualified. It sounds complicated, but it makes sense in the moment.

It's an interesting format, for sure, though there are some rather mean tricks played on the contestants even with the supposedly "helpful" clues — the worst of which was having a helpful guide tell them about a building they were standing in front of them in German… when they were actually in France. The added "drama" just felt a bit gratuitous, too, particularly given that the person given the opportunity to conspire with another contestant and/or screw the others over clearly was not at all comfortable with this side of proceedings.

As with any show featuring (supposed) members of the general public, too, the cast appears to have been picked to have the maximum possible number of annoying dickheads in it. There's a particularly odious-seeming individual who is obsessed with social media, and they come across as a complete tool. I have little to no doubt that there is heavy scripting and editing involved in order to make these otherwise boring members of Joe Public into "characters", but, again, it feels a bit gratuitous, and not really necessary in a show where the basic format is already kind of intriguing.

I'm not sure if I'm going to watch any more of it, but I didn't dislike the first episode that I watched. I may watch another one or two episodes to see if it's worth sticking with; you never know, you might enjoy it, though, so that's what today's post was all about!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 422: Escape artist

We were quite surprised during dinner to see the outline of our cat, Oliver, on the other side of our living room window. Oliver is an indoor cat but has a curiosity about the outside world, so Andie built him (and Patti) a catio out the back so he can stay safe and secure while still being able to enjoy the feeling of being outside.

The concern we have is, as you might expect, exactly how the little bugger managed to get out, given that there are no windows open downstairs, and I'm pretty sure the only window we have open upstairs is the one we stick the air conditioning hose out of. This, to me, suggests that he jumped out of an upstairs window and, via some means that isn't yet entirely clear, made it down to our lounge window.

Thankfully, we got him to come back in without any difficulty, but this is, of course, a little worrying, particularly since we've kept all our cats inside ever since we lost Ruby on the road some years ago. He's never done this before, and we think he only did it this time because he saw another cat out the front and wanted to go and meet them — although, hilariously, despite this other cat being a pretty small, young thing, he seemed to be quite frightened of it — but still, it's obviously not behaviour we're particularly keen to encourage.

LIVE UPDATE! Andie has just checked our security camera footage, and it transpires that he just snuck out behind me when I was putting some things in the outside bin. He went out just as I was closing the door and I didn't notice, so he ended up shut out the front. Thankfully, it was only for a few minutes, and he seemingly knew that the front window was a good place to get our attention. So clever him, but also naughty him for sneaking out when he knows he's not allowed out the front!

Well, all's well that ends well, I guess. At least now I don't have to have a sleepless night worrying if he's going to fling himself out of a second-storey window because he saw something interesting outside. And hopefully he learned something from this whole experience.

Who am I kidding? He's a cheeky little cat, is what he is. He will have learned nothing from this. But it doesn't matter. I love the stupid little dickhead anyway.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 421: Ch-ch-ch-changes

I'll write about this again nearer the time that I'm actually going to put this into practice, but I wanted to give some advance notice of what I'm planning.

On September 8, 2025, I'll be taking a big step back from social media for personal use. I'll be deactivating my Bluesky account, removing it and Discord from my phone, and leaving a bunch of Discord servers.

The reason for this is that social media in general — even the little bit I still hold onto for some inexplicable reason — continues to play havoc with my overall mental health, and honestly, there is really absolutely nothing left that makes me feel like I "need" it for anything other than occasional contact with other people. And there are other means of achieving that contact with other people.

This isn't intended to be a big dramatic "well I'm taking my ball and going home without you!" post, and it's nothing personal, particularly with regard to the Discord servers I will be disconnecting from. This is a me thing; it's about removing myself from situations that are continually self-destructive and unproductive — i.e. spending far too much time doomscrolling on Bluesky or just rotating around several Discord servers in case someone said anything vaguely interesting — and freeing up time and headspace for doing things that I want to do, that make me happy, and that are less inclined to have me staring into space of an evening.

Thus, as loathe as part of me is to isolate myself further from a world where I already feel somewhat abandoned by and/or alienated from most of my "real life" friends, I intend to take the following steps for the sake of my mental health and overall digital wellbeing:

I will be deactivating my Bluesky account, at the very least temporarily while I am on holiday, and likely permanently.
I will be leaving a significant number of Discord communities that I am currently part of. I emphasise, again, that there is nothing personal in this; I am just attempting to cut down on the "noise" and the self-destructive habits of continually scrolling around the same servers time after time, hour after hour. I will be keeping some small, "friendship group" servers, but that's it.
I will be deleting Bluesky and Discord from my phone for the duration of my holiday, possibly permanently.
I will be focusing the majority of my online presence on this blog, MoeGamer (my video game blog) and Scratch Pad (my creative writing site).
I will only be contactable via email (you can use the Get In Touch page on this site if you don’t know my email address), Discord messages in the communities I remain active in (plus Discord DMs if we are friends on that platform), Google Chat if you know my email address, or WhatsApp private message if you know my phone number.

If you would like to stay in touch — and there are a bunch of you I would very much like it if you did! — then you can feel free to use any of the means outlined above to have a chat. It'd actually be quite nice to have some private conversations with many of you, away from the chaos of social media, so if we've had some good times in the past and I seem to have otherwise disappeared from the social channels you tend to use on the daily, please feel free to drop me a line.

Anyway, like I say, I wanted to give some advance notice of this, and I'll be posting something very similar on September 7, the day before I have a week's holiday as a last reminder. Thanks for your time, and if you have any questions or whatever about the above, well, you know where to find me!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 420: Scratch pad

Well, I did what I said yesterday and set up a new site purely for creative writing shenanigans. You can find it at https://scratchpad.moegamer.net — there's nothing there yet, but feel free to bookmark or subscribe or whatever if you feel like it. I'm making no promises as to the regularity with which I'll post over there, but it is there for me to use when I feel like it. Long-term, I might like to try and make some sort of "commitment" to doing some creative writing on a regular basis, but as with anything, it's going to be a case of establishing the habit first of all before you can actually really make it into a full-on habit.

I've been thinking about what I might want to write over there. I think I might start with some short stories rather than attempting to do anything too complicated or ambitious right away. While complicated, ambitious stories are always a delight to get started on, it's easy to get bogged down in the middle section and never get around to finishing them. One thing I found with my "NaNoWriMo But Not Really (Especially Now They're AI Weirdoes)" posts on this site was that it was those middle parts which were the most challenging. You may have a strong opening (ooer missus) and a solid finale in mind, but it's getting from one to the other that is often the challenging bit. Particularly when you're trying to ensure you meet a word (or, in the case of those projects, post) count.

So short stories would seem to be a sensible thing to start with. I can perhaps use them to explore or establish some characters, and those characters can perhaps grow into something I want to do more ambitious things with. Perhaps a collection of short stories focused on a particular character or group of characters is a solid foundation for a longer work? Or perhaps what begins as unconnected short stories can end up telling a complete narrative? I don't know. It's been quite a long time since I've done this, so my mind is, frankly, fairly awash with possibilities at the moment.

One thing I am going to take care of on the new site is to ensure that things are categorised nicely. I'm envisioning a page where you can just browse through short stories, then anything which ends up being more ambitious can, of course, have its own page also so anyone who cares to do such a thing can read from the beginning to the end without interruption. And it goes without saying that this site will remain ad-free for the foreseeable future — given that I don't have any ads on my most successful site, MoeGamer, I really don't think having them on a creative scratch pad is really going to achieve anything.

And, of course, the site will remain proudly AI-free. Not a single bit of generative AI will go anywhere near that page, and absolutely definitely not for text generation. The whole point of the site is for me to indulge in some unadulterated creativity for the first time in quite a while, so dicking around with AI kind of defeats the object there, doesn't it? Also there's plenty of quite convincing evidence right now that using ChatGPT turns you into a dribbling cunt that is totally incapable of thinking for itself, so there's that, also.

Anyway, yeah. That's the announcement, I guess. Now to figure out something to write over there!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 419: I wanna write a story

It's been far too long since I actually did some proper, honest to goodness creative writing that isn't burbling stream of consciousness blog posts or video game analysis, and I have to admit, I've been feeling an increasing hunger to just write something recently.

But what? I don't really know. There are lots of possibilities in my head, ranging from simple slice-of-life affairs to ambitious sci-fi epics — plus, of course, the Dreamwalker story I've had in my head since a teen but never quite got around to figuring out how it would finish, particularly as it started life as a Klik 'n' Play game — and I think it would probably be fun to write a murder mystery, given how many of them I've been watching of late.

I am beset with the odd mind goblin*, though. I feel like I can't write a murder mystery because I can't think through a crime logically enough to make it convincing — although honestly, with some of the absolute nonsense they get up to on Death in Paradise, I feel like particularly elaborate, bafflingly complicated murders are perfectly fine in the genre.

I feel like I can't write slice-of-life because it would either be too boring, or too unconvincing, or come across too much like wish fulfilment — although, again, thinking about the slice-of-life anime and TV shows I've enjoyed over the years, none of those things are necessarily a problem.

I feel like I can't write sci-fi because I don't know enough science to make it convincing — although, again, if you lean hard on the science fantasy angle you don't necessarily have to worry about.

Mostly, my biggest mind goblin, though, is the big question: who would read it? And its closely related question, does that matter? No-one reads this fucking blog and I'm still tapping away every night, so surely if I'm taking some time on the semi-regular to write some fiction and I feel satisfied with what I've achieved, that should be enough, no?

I think that's probably the case. So I think I'm going to figure out what I might want to write, then set up a place where I can post it easily — likely another blog, separate from both this and MoeGamer. And then all I have to do is write, whenever I feel like it. And who knows? Maybe something will come of it in the long term.

^{*Mind goblin deez nuts? Yes, I got you good. Don't try and pretend like I didn't.}

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 418: A little flutter

I am not, generally speaking, a betting man, but I do have an occasional flutter on the National Lottery. This usually consists of me loading up my account with £10, playing two lines of whatever the next draw game is, then using the rest of the £10 to play a few of the "instant win" games. If, at any point, I go above the £10 I started at, I cash out. If I hit zero, I stop playing. This is how you stay in control of things.

The instant win games do frustrate me, though, because it's painfully transparent that they've worked everything out in advance of you even starting to play them, making the actual "playing" process feel more than a bit pointless at times. I don't know if this is just the side of me who understands how video games work talking, but there are a number of observations I have which make playing these games particularly annoying:

If a game has multiple ways to win a prize and you win a prize on one of them, none of the others will yield a prize, even though you have to keep playing "just to see" if you win anything else.
If a game is dependent on "random chance" such as virtual dice rolls or pulling letters out of a bag, at least one case of you taking that chance will be completely useless to you — for example, in the National Lottery's Cashword games, there will always be at least one letter you draw that doesn't appear anywhere on the board.
If a game should theoretically be based on recognisable odds — such as, say, the frequency with which different letters appear in English words — then the game will almost always be manipulated in such a way as to subvert those odds. Looking at Cashword again, don't count on pulling an "E" being particularly good for your chances, despite it being one of the most commonly used letters in English.
If a game offers you what appears to be a "1 in something" chance — e.g. a 1 in 3 chance of revealing your token beneath three thimbles, as seen in the National Lottery's Monopoly Gold Classic game, more often than not the chance is actually 0 in 3, because your token just isn't there at all.
A game will quite frequently present its outcome as being that you "nearly" won — for example, in the case of Monopoly Gold Classic, it's not at all unusual to end the game just needing one additional colour card to get the £100,000 prize. This does not mean you actually nearly won. It is, in most cases, the game artificially attempting to make itself more exciting.
Games which appear to be based on skill and timing are nothing of the sort. What a spinning wheel lands on has been determined even before you started spinning it.
Games which appear to let you use your intelligence are, likewise, nothing of the sort. They are pure chance.
Most instant win games barely qualify as "games" at all; you might as well just be paying £1 to click a button that says "DID YOU WIN?"

I think being aware of all these things and keeping them in mind any time I have a little flutter on the Lottery website is what keeps me from ever getting sucked in to anything gambling-related. Being aware that everything you do on the National Lottery website is nothing more than a prize draw, whether it is declared one or not, makes it a lot easier to set yourself some limits, have a brief little dopamine hit from thinking "it could be me!" and then not being all that disappointed when your £10 has vanished.

I appreciate that some people find it a tad harder to stop gambling once they start. I'm glad I've never fallen into that particular trap. And hey, you never know. One day it could be me. That'd be nice.

For now, though, it absolutely isn't.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 417: This content is not available

As I mentioned the other day, the UK's "Online Safety Act" came into force recently, forcing everyone to "verify" their age for everything from sending private messages on Bluesky to looking at the nastiest porn you can think of.

Just recently, I have run into age verification gates in multiple places. Discord made me do it to continue accessing channels marked "NSFW", even if there was no actual pornography in there — and then automatically enabled image blurring on "sensitive content" despite me never having given any indication that I might not want to see that. Bluesky made me do it to continue having access to the site's direct messaging feature. And, of course, it's on the porn sites.

It doesn't stop there, though. I went on Mobygames to look something up earlier, and was unable to view the cover for the game Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors on Nintendo DS without putting in my birthday; thankfully I didn't have to provide any "proof", unlike in the other cases mentioned above, but it still specifically mentioned that this was "to comply with EU law". The UK isn't the EU thanks to the shitshow that was Brexit, but I suspect it still gets lumped in with the EU in stuff like this.

Just to be clear, the cover for Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, which I was age gated from viewing immediately, looks like this:

Now, I'm open to anyone who can tell me what, there, exactly, needs age gating. The game itself is violent (and has one character with a massive honking pair of tits), but there's nothing in that cover image itself that is objectionable — and it was specifically this cover that Mobygames age-gated me from being able to see.

Elsewhere online, there are concerns that Wikipedia may find itself age-gated due to the Online Safety Act, due to the fact that the some of Wikipedia maybe possibly might not be suitable for children. It's a fucking encyclopaedia! We were looking up "sexual" in the Collins Dictionary at primary school and tittering at it talking about "penis" and "vagina"; exactly what purpose does plopping surveillance state age verification on a site like Wikipedia serve, exactly?

Well, I've said it already, haven't I. It is — it must be — at least, in part, about surveillance. You already can't speak out in support of certain groups in the Middle East without putting yourself at risk of being branded a "terrorist" and being prosecuted for hate speech. Just imagine the glee the government would probably have at knowing what porn you've been looking at, what knowledge you've been attempting to arm yourself with, who you've been talking to and how you've been communicating with them.

I hate that saying all this makes one sound like a conspiracy nut, but this stuff is actually happening. I don't trust any of these "age verification" services an inch, and everyone in the UK should be very concerned right now, regardless of what they look at online. As has often been said of late — particularly with regard to the currently unfolding Visa/Mastercard situation — it really is the pornographers and the sex workers who are the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to this. You don't have to enjoy looking at filth online to be affected by this in the long term; I'd say everyone is looking at a very dark time for the Internet, unless something is done.

You can, at least, make your discontent known, if you're a UK citizen, with this online petition, which has already attained over 400,000 signatures. It's probably worth writing to your MP, too. Beyond that, I don't know. Like I say, it's kind of scary — particularly not knowing where any of this is going to end, and what the longer-term consequences are going to be.

Anyway, this site will continue to exist, and I will continue to say what I want here, so a hearty fuck you to everyone involved with the Online Safety Act, and you can take your "robust but proportionate regulation" (which in reality is anything but) and jam it very firmly up your arse, until it comes out of your nostrils.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.