#oneaday Day 249: The Hankering

I'm getting a hankering to make a game again. I say "again", having only ever finished one game-making project (technically two, though one was a remake of the first). I'm not sure what triggered this — perhaps a recent post on Bluesky that I found quite striking:

Just make insanely self-indulgent shit. Quality does not matter. Quantity does not matter. "It's just [thing] yet again 🙄" does not matter. Whether or not you ever show it to anyone does not matter. Make self-indulgent shit because it's the only way to live and be happy.
— Lee 🌿 (@desertghosts.bsky.social) 2025-02-03T23:41:57.952Z

And… this is good advice. Being creative is fun, and the biggest mistake a lot of people make when pondering whether or not to be creative is "can I monetise this?" The modern Internet has made us all believe that everything we do should be to the end of making money from it, but it really doesn't work that way. Some of the most rewarding creative work I've ever done came about because I just… wanted to create it. (Frustratingly, one of my all-time favourite works in this regard, my epic, albeit unfinished, RPG Maker 2000 project The Adventures of Dave Thunder, has long been lost to the ghosts of PCs past.)

And so I've been pondering booting up one of the many different versions of RPG Maker I've acquired over the years. My specific thinking this time around is not to do what I always do — which is to get overly, stupidly ambitious, spend six months gathering plugins and reading half-finished, unresolved Reddit threads about how to do stuff, then never actually make a finished game — and instead to just do something simple, unassuming and straightforward. To that end, I have my eye on a couple of asset packs for RPG Maker MV that include Famicom-inspired graphics and music, and I kind of want to see if I can make an enjoyable game using just that and the stock RPG Maker MV mechanics.

I've been hovering over the "Buy" button for those asset packs all day. They're £50 in total, which is quite a lot to spend on what will almost certainly be little more than a vanity project, but I also feel like I'll probably get £50 worth of fun out of making something, even if the only person who ever plays it is me.

The other thing stopping me is pondering what sort of concept I should use. In past RPG Maker projects I've always had grand ambitions to do something unusual and expectation-subverting — but subverting players' expectations is almost a cliché in its own right these days, so just making a straightforward Famicom-style RPG feels like it would be more fun at this point. And, thinking back on my beloved The Adventures of Dave Thunder project, I had the most fun by just making the damn thing up as I went along, balls to any sort of coherence. Self-indulgence was the name of the game there, and I loved it.

So I think that might be the play. Just download those assets (perhaps waiting an hour to see if they go on sale in the RPG Maker event that's supposed to be starting today) and just make, and see where things end up. Who knows? I might even end up making something actually good. Or, indeed, finish something. But we'll see.

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 248: Bing biddly bing bongy bing boo

I watched the first episode of Friends over lunch today. By my reckoning, it's over 10 years since I last watched Friends all the way through, and I've had a bit of a hankering for it recently. It's nothing to do with the inexplicable rise of Friends merchandise (up to and including Krispy Kreme doughnuts) in the last year or so but rather simply the fact that Friends always was, more than pretty much anything else on television, my "comfort show".

I was always aware that Friends was going to age. Hell, when I first started watching it, the first season in particular already looked very dated in terms of the fashion sense and hairstyles. But there are ways in which it shows its age now that I wouldn't have considered back when I was obsessively watching it as a teen.

The laugh track, for example. Audience or canned laughter has completely fallen out of favour for TV shows over the course of the last 20-25 years or so, to such a degree that there are those who find it (if you'll pardon my use of GenZ vernacular for a moment) "cringe". Even people who were there for it first time around.

Honestly, I've never had a problem with a laugh track. In fact, with Friends, it was part of the experience — as emphasised by the YouTube videos that remove it and make Ross in particular look like a psychopath as a result. But it was more than just a signal of when something funny had happened; I really enjoyed hearing the audience reactions that were other than just laughter.

For example, during that all-important moment in the second season where Rachel learns exactly how much Ross was in love with her in his late teens and ends up kissing him, there's an absolutely glorious moment as she walks across the room to him in complete silence, the only sound being her shoes echoing on the hardwood floor of Monica's apartment. Then, as she comes up to Ross and grabs his face in preparation to kiss him, there's an audible gasp from an audience member that feels completely genuine. Then, when the kiss happens a moment later, there is cheering, screaming and applauding. It's an amazing moment, made all the more amazing by how the audience had clearly been rooting for them, but were unsure if the writers were ever going to resolve that particular dangling thread.

Friends, like many shows of its time, was filmed in front of a live studio audience, and this allowed the cast to work around the laughter and other reactions. Supposedly Lisa Kudrow, who played Phoebe, absolutely hated it when the audience interrupted her lines with laughter, but she never let it show. At the other end of the spectrum, it's abundantly clear that the late, great Matthew Perry adored playing to the crowd, with much of his delivery reliant on pausing for reaction and playing off the audience's response. It's different from what TV shows today do, yes, but it's not an inferior way of doing things by any stretch of the imagination.

Sometimes this backfires for a non-native audience, such as when a guest star shows up to rapturous applause from the American audience, but no-one in the UK has any clue whatsoever who the person in question is. (Okay, I very rarely knew who the person was, outside of a few obvious exceptions like when George Clooney and Noah Wyle, riding the peak of ER's fame at the time, showed up.) But you can get something from that even if your response isn't the same as the audience's; it's a sign that Friends was huge, and Hollywood people were almost certainly queueing around the block to make a guest appearance in what was, for a long time, the hottest sitcom in town.

With the bizarre resurgence in Friends merchandise there has been recently, I wonder how much it really resonates with a modern audience — i.e. those who grew up after the launch of smartphones, and after the ubiquity of the Internet had been well and truly established. Very few people in Friends even have a mobile phone, and computer use is rare to see, often the subject of comedy. The way people develop interpersonal relationships has changed massively since Friends' time. Hell, even the concept of just hanging out with your friends in person at their place is likely to be completely alien to some people — I was there for it, and it even feels like a distant memory to me, to be perfectly honest.

But the strength of Friends wasn't necessarily that it was a snapshot of a time and place — although, many years after it was current, it functions quite nicely as just that — but rather that it was a show with some strong, well-defined and nuanced characters, with a wide array of interesting storylines, many of which were rather boundary-pushing at the time of the show's original broadcast. So far as I'm concerned, it still holds up very well as a "comfort show" for me due to its familiarity — and I suspect, so long as a younger viewer can get around the culture shock of certain ubiquitous aspects of 21st century life just being flat-out absent from much of the show's run, there's still a lot they can get from it, too.

There is, I'm sure, plenty you can criticise Friends for if you want to get on the tedious "everything is problematic" bus, but fuck that. I love Friends, I always have done, and starting this new rewatch afresh this lunchtime, I suspect I always will.

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#oneaday Day 247: Enjoying things as we used to

One thing I'm becoming increasingly conscious of as time goes on is how my attitudes towards enjoying my hobbies have… well, they've stayed the same, really, but other people are changing around me, even people who are older than me who I would have thought would be even more set in their ways than I am.

I'm thinking of two particular examples when it comes to this. First is the "I don't have time to play long games any more" person, who no longer wishes to commit to any game over the 20 hour mark because they'll "never finish it", ostensibly because they are "much too busy" now to be able to commit to it.

In some cases, this may be true, particularly if the person in question has started a family in the interim. But realistically speaking, I know a lot of people who say this actually have pretty much the same amount of free time as they had 20+ years ago, and are thus talking bollocks.

Why do they think they have no time, though? Because daily life has changed. We are so overstimulated with our daily lives — and particularly the ever-present nature of the Internet and its endless reams of Content™ — that it's easy to feel overwhelmed, like you simply don't have time to just switch off from all that and enjoy something that takes your full attention. What if you miss a pithy tweet from someone? (To that I would say "get off Twitter, it's a Nazi bar") What if you don't see breaking news happening as it breaks? (To that I would say "we used to do just fine with news bulletins on the TV at 1pm, 6pm and 9pm") What if you miss a message from someone you like? (To that I would say "most forms of online communication are inherently asynchronous, meaning it doesn't really matter if you reply now or in 6 hours' time")

But I get it. It's easy to get locked into that "loop" of cycling around the same three websites, hoping something interesting happens. And before you know it, several hours have passed — several hours you could have (and should have) spent doing something much more enjoyable. This is one of the biggest reasons I've tried to curtail my own social media activity as much as possible, and why I'm still not entirely convinced that signing up to Bluesky wasn't a big mistake. But we'll see on that. At least Bluesky isn't a Nazi bar now.

The other situation that gives me pause these days is when coming across people who won't even consider starting to watch a TV series if they don't have access to every piece of information ever written about it immediately. In a couple of Discords I'm in, there are people who won't start a new TV show if there isn't also a YouTube channel of some boring GenZ type holding a lapel microphone in their hand (clip it to your shirt, for fuck's sake) giving "summaries" of what went on in a monotone drawl.

This latter one is absolutely alien to me, because it makes watching a TV show into a complete chore — to say nothing of how much time it adds to the complete series' runtime if you insist on watching BrackityPoop420 read out an AI/Wikipedia summary of what you literally just watched along with each episode. I watched all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine last year and the only time I looked at a wiki or any sort of commentary was to see if the actors I thought I recognised actually were the actors I thought they were. (They usually were.)

I feel like our overall sense of media literacy has taken a real tumble over the course of the last 20 years, and I feel it myself at times, too. Last night, I watched the first episode of The Wire, and I found it enjoyable, but a little hard to follow to begin with. By about halfway through, I'd settled a bit more into the rhythm of things and I think I'll find the rest of the series a little more palatable, but that first half an hour made me think "have I made a mistake here?"

20+ years ago, we would quite happily pick up a box set of some show that we liked and watch it repeatedly. This was partly down to how media was relatively expensive compared to what you can pick it up for these days, but I feel it also helped our overall sense of media literacy to be more willing to do the work ourselves and watch something again to see how we responded to it second time around. Today, there are two things standing in the way of that: one being the crippling fear of spoilers, and two being the constant desire to consume new content.

I've talked before on here about how much I object to the use of the word "content" (and "consume", for that matter) when we're talking about creative works and art. And nowhere is this more apparent than with folks' media literacy. It's not about watching something and understanding it deeply any more; it's about watching as much as possible, as fast as possible.

And this isn't an exaggeration; Netflix has gone on record as saying that numerous shows and movies on its service are specifically designed to be "second screen experiences" that people don't really have to pay attention to, and the proliferation of people who will quite happily admit to watching everything on 1.5x normal speed "just so they can get through more" is… well, I don't like it.

Just recently, I picked up a few box sets of DVDs from CEX because they were dirt cheap. I've grabbed The Wire, Angel, Scrubs and Friends — all complete runs. I already have Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica (which, probably 10+ years after acquiring, I must shamefully admit I am still yet to watch) and there's probably a couple of other series I might nab at some point (notably some Star Trek series, maybe Frasier and House) — and then I think I might be happy with just that. Watching new stuff is cool at times, but it can also be overwhelming — and it can also cause things you once loved and thought were a fixture in your head to just… fall out. I can't remember a lot of what happened in Angel, for example, and I fucking adored that series when it first came out.

I think it's okay if you don't "get" something first time you watch it, or if it takes a little while to get into the groove of a new series, like I suspect I'm going to be with The Wire. I'm going to consciously try to resist running straight to a wiki wherever possible, though; we used to live without these things and still be able to enjoy our media, so I'm pretty sure I still can live like that.

Also I still have time to play long RPGs. And I suspect I always will.

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#oneaday Day 246: They don't tell you anything

One thing I have been gradually coming to realise — or perhaps more accurately, accept — since I was diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder in (checks) 2017 is that… you seemingly don't get any help. At least not by default. I probably could get some help if I went and asked for it, but I sort of feel like being diagnosed with a condition should probably be some sort of automatic trigger for someone to get help, or at the very least, advice.

But no. While I am glad I got my diagnosis as it helps me understand a bunch of things about myself that I had always been a tad frustrated by in the past, there is still a whole lot that I don't know — and if I hadn't specifically gone looking for the information myself, I probably wouldn't have found out.

Now, I'm kind of hesitant to do this, because I simply don't trust the Internet at large to provide reliable medical advice these days, but there are sources that, one would hope, set themselves up to be reputable and authoritative, so if I do go looking for information, I seek out those sources wherever possible.

One thing I learned about today is known as a "shutdown" or, to some, an "autistic implosion". This is where an autistic person, when confronted with an uncomfortable situation, a high level or stress or overstimulation in general, closes themselves off, puts their shields up and seemingly becomes quite non-responsive in terms of interpersonal interactions, emotions and suchlike.

I've been aware that I do this for a long time — up to and including very recently — but it had never really occurred to me that it, too, is a symptom of being on the spectrum. But sure enough, as I read this piece from an Australian autism charity earlier — one of those sources that I judged to (hopefully) be reputable — I found myself recognising more and more things, including behaviours that I had engaged in long before I knew that I was autistic.

Experiencing a shutdown is very strange, because you're often conscious that you're doing it. You're aware that everything is becoming too much, but rather than wanting to lash out at it (which leads to the opposite, but equally possible, reaction known as a meltdown) you just want to… retreat. Hide. Get out of there as soon as possible.

And this reaction, this desire to flee the situation I was in… that is all too familiar. I'm pretty sure this also ties in with the bouts of depression I have where I just feel like I'm suspended in a bubble, barely aware of anything that is going on around me, only half-conscious of the fact that I'm just staring into space, my mind constantly going around and around and around the same thing over and over, even though doing so is what is driving me deeper into that shutdown.

I kind of wish that, having been diagnosed, I could have had some proper time with a therapist who knows and understands autism, who could explain the various situations and behaviours that I'm likely to encounter and be more conscious of, now I better know who I am — and perhaps how to cope with them. Because there's no "curing" these situations; it's just part of the person I am. But there are ways to manage my environment and the situation I'm in to make them less likely to happen — and to cope with them more effectively when they do arise.

Perhaps it's time to bite the bullet and seek out some sort of private therapy. Two things have, up until now, discouraged me from doing that, though: the cost, and the choice paralysis that comes with deciding exactly who would be an appropriate therapist for me. Because it turns out there are a lot of them. I've also not really been sure what I'm looking for when seeking a therapist — but I think today's revelations are telling me that what I should really be seeking out is exactly what I describe above: someone who knows about and understands autism, and who can help me understand the behaviours and feelings I'm likely to experience, and suggest some ways to manage and cope with them.

Food for thought. I will mull it over.

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#oneaday Day 245: Unplug

It is the end of what has been a long and stressful week, but I think today was actually reasonably productive, so hopefully next week I will feel a bit better about things. I still want to take a bit of time off sometime soon, but I'm feeling somewhat less in the "I need to get out right now" panic that I feel like I was in the other evening.

I mean, don't get me wrong, the world is still burning around me, but at least in my own little haven of calm here, things are pretty peaceful. Andie is painting the stairs, the cats are sitting either side of me napping, I have no other commitments besides this blog this evening, and I don't have to get up tomorrow if I don't want to. Not a lot to complain about there, really.

It's important to take a step back from the chaos of life in the 21st century every now and again and consider How Things Really Are. A good means of visualising this is imagining what life would be like if you unplugged the Internet and had no means of being contacted besides someone calling you on your phone or stopping by your house. If you can look at your life from that perspective and see that things are, for the most part, Okay, then you should probably do your best to keep seeing things from that angle when you plug the Ethernet cable back in.

Because ultimately, as shit as some of the stuff going on in the world can be, there's little you can probably do about it, particularly if you're far away from the Bad Things. Take the situation in America, for example; I am concerned for the safety and wellbeing of the people I know over there, of course, but practically speaking, there's absolutely nothing I can do to affect that whole situation. Things are different for those in the middle of that whole shitshow, of course — and I'm gratified to see that at least some folks are waking up to the fact that posting disapproving messages on a social network is not the same as getting out there and Doing Activism — but from where I'm sitting, all I can really do is be a supportive ear if people need it and not be a jerk to those who are Dealing With Shit.

It's difficult to keep your mind trained to think in this way, particularly when the buzz of Online is always there, encouraging you to check in on things and "just see how bad things have gotten". You can tell yourself all you want that you're doing it because you find it darkly humorous rather than utterly terrifying, but deep down, you, of course, know that all you're doing is deliberately and wilfully making your own mood darker for no real discernible benefit to your life as a whole.

That may sound callous. That may sound uncaring. But at some point you have to disconnect. At some point you have to focus on yourself and the people directly around you. At some point you have to remember that as enriching and fulfilling and exciting as an online life can be, it will always have to play second fiddle to your Real Life. Your Real Life is in the here and now, surrounding you, defining you. Your online life can be made to go away by just pulling out that Ethernet cable. And, as long as you haven't stumbled into any situations where your online life has seeped into your Real Life — which is an increasing risk these days, I will concede — you can just go about your day.

That's what I'm going to attempt to keep telling myself, anyway. The alternative just feels like perpetual misery.

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#oneaday Day 244: Is "best practice" the enemy of expression?

I, as you probably know, have a YouTube channel. I have had it for a grand total of about seventeen years at the time of writing, though I would say I've only really been actively, semi-regularly using it since about 2018, initially to host video versions of a podcast I was doing, and subsequently to kick off the series that I'm still running in one form or another to this day.

Over the course of those 17 years, I have picked up just over 3,600 subscribers at the time of writing, with the vast majority of those showing up since 2018. While that is obviously a drop in the ocean compared to big, successful channels out there, I am pleased with it, and honestly I don't particularly want my channel to grow any faster.

In order to acquire those 3,600 subscribers, I have done… nothing particularly special, to be perfectly honest. I have steadfastly ignored the advice of YouTube "gurus" to pursue trends, to be clickbaity with titles and thumbnails, and to "edit for engagement". In short, I consistently reject what is supposed "best practice" in favour of just doing whatever the hell I want — and I have seen some success doing just that. Could I see more success if I was following the supposed "rules" to the letter? Quite possibly. But then I don't think my channel would be mine any more.

One of the things I object to most about online culture in general these days — not just YouTube, but this applies all over — is how no-one really seems to have a personality any more. Everyone says the same things, everyone responds to things in the same way, everyone uses the same bank of reaction GIFs when they can't be bothered to use their words. In YouTube, this is best exemplified by the way you could watch five randomly chosen videos from five moderately sized channels, and I bet you'd hear the exact same sound effects and music clips, and see the exact same visual memes, in at least half of them — if not all of them.

This is because these things, supposedly, work. But in using that "best practice", you are eliminating a lot of the soul from your own work. You're making something that caters to the mysterious "algorithm" — or rather, an imaginary audience — rather than expressing yourself, as yourself. It's the same with the way people talk to one another online; because those reaction GIFs and snippy retorts like "skill issue" are universally understood by everyone, everyone uses them because they're seen as an efficient means of communication.

But, again, there's no personality there. Any time someone comes out with "skill issue" or "tourist" or whatever the derogatory term-du-jour is, I lose all interest in getting to know that person, just as I lose interest in a YouTube video the moment they start busting out the Metal Gear Solid alert noise, The X-Files theme and Spongebob "a few moments later" interstitial cards… and just as, at some point in the last 20 years, you've probably lost interest in someone who won't shut up about bacon, won't stop saying "the cake is a lie" or thinks declaring that pineapple on pizza is "weird" is a daring and brave opinion to express.

People like that don't have a personality of their own; their personality is The Internet, Circa 2025. And, as we've pretty comprehensively established at this point, The Internet, Circa 2025 is not someone you'd want to bring home to meet your parents. It's someone who deserves to be kicked into a ditch 50 miles from the nearest town and left to rot.

So, as much as there are probably things I could do "better" with my YouTube channel, I choose not to do them. I don't feel the need to. I didn't create that channel to be famous, I didn't create that channel to be a huge "thing", I created it as a means of expressing myself and sharing my own, personal enthusiasm for things that are important to me. That's it. That 3,600 people like what I do enough to want to follow it without me resorting to "best practice" says something to me: it says "if you're happy, just keep doing what you're doing".

So that's what I intend to do.

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#oneaday Day 243: I think I'm stressed

I think I am, as the title says, stressed. I yelled at the robot vacuum cleaner earlier because it was being a dimwit and chewing up loose threads rather than going back to its charging base. I get infuriated by stupid little acts of clumsiness that really shouldn't be as annoying as I am feeling they are right now. And at work today I felt more overwhelmed than I've felt for a long time, for a variety of reasons.

I probably just need a good break to get away from… everything, so I'm going to see about getting a bit of time off in the not-too-distant future. Everything just feels like… a lot to deal with right now, and I'm not coping with it very well. It's the combination of a particularly busy patch at work, coupled with a few annoying specific stressors related to that (which I won't go into now), with The Situation in the world (particularly America) piled on top of that, and a general sense of helpless frustration at how, with every passing day, I feel less and less like I really "belong" in the world we're apparently building.

Take the AI thing. As time goes on, more and more people seem to have resigned themselves to the fact that the lake-boiling plagiarism machines don't appear to be going away, so we "might as well" embrace them because you shouldn't get "left behind". As far as I'm concerned, the ones being "left behind" are the ones wilfully giving up their own skills — and the opportunity to learn new ones — in favour of typing a fucking prompt into a dumbshit autocorrect that hallucinates complete bullshit a statistically significant proportion of the time.

Earlier on, someone posted (mockingly, thankfully) a "tool" that allowed people to generate Bluesky posts using AI. If you're too much of a lazy cunt to think of 280 characters you want to share on a social network, you shouldn't be using that social network. Now, granted, I absolutely fucking hate the vast majority of the time I have to spend doing social media posts for work, but I'm still not going to use AI to generate them, because I know it'll be just as much work checking through all the dross it produces to ensure it's not saying anything fucking stupid or completely fabricated.

I checked in on LinkedIn for the first time in like 15 years the other day, and was horrified to see how much generative AI is all over the place on that platform. LinkedIn is already a place that joy goes to die, so it doesn't surprise me to see tools for generating vapid slop placed front and centre there. I can't think of anywhere I want to hang out less. It was already insufferable before people could just get a machine to generate their "inspirational" posts about what the coffee they had that morning taught them about B2B sales, and now… God.

I'm wound up, I'm irritable, and I just want to… escape for a bit. So once I've dealt with my most pressing commitments, I'll be doing everything I can to ensure that I can take a bit of time to get my shit together and calm down a bit. Because feeling like this probably isn't good for me. I've seen the endpoint of feeling like this, and it's not pretty. I don't want to end up there again.

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#oneaday Day 242: City of Angel

I finally got around to starting to watch the DVD box set of Angel I nabbed for cheap from a CEX a while back.

Aside: I still object to the use of "box set" to describe a run of something being on a streaming service. One, because there's no fucking box. Two, because "box set" implies that you own it, and we all know that streaming services often "lose" shows with little to no warning. And three, because there's no fucking box.

Angel and its predecessor Buffy the Vampire Slayer are two of my favourite TV shows from "back in the day", and I haven't revisited either for a long time. To be honest, in recent years I'd been feeling a little odd about them given that Joss Whedon is apparently not a very nice person, but at some point you have to 1) separate art from artist and 2) remember that Whedon was just one part of what made those shows so good.

And so it was that I found myself watching two episodes of Angel back-to-back last night. And I enjoyed them a lot. It's always a pleasure to go back to what is probably now considered "old TV", because it's a reminder of how much things have changed… and how, although we do have some legitimately great series these days, I still, on the whole, prefer that blissful late '90s-early 2000s era. And y'know the really great thing? You can nab DVD box sets of the complete runs of all these series for a fraction of the cost buying one season of them would have cost back in the day.

Sure, for that price you probably won't get a fancy-pants Blu-Ray version, but in many cases I think that honestly might be preferable; there have been all too many examples of Blu-Ray upscales being a bit of a mess, and while standard definition shows can look a bit grimy at times, that sometimes adds to their appeal somewhat. It certainly does with Angel, and I'm sure it will with other shows, also, such as The Wire, which I've never seen, just remembered I'd never seen, and now have an £8 box set of the entire thing headed my way before I'd even finished writing this post.

But anyway. Angel. On the off-chance you're not familiar, here's the gist. Angel was a recurring character in the early seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was a thoroughly good-looking young man in the "smouldering, brooding" mould and, of course, he was a tragic hero in that he was a vampire who had been cursed with a soul. That effectively put him on the side of the "good guys", and our heroine Buffy ended up falling hard for him. One thing led to another, they boned, and we learned exactly what the release conditions of Angel's curse — that he would return to his vampiric form if he ever experienced "one moment of true happiness" — really meant.

Long story short, Buffy managed to successfully re-curse Angel, moments before he was dragged into Hell for quite some time, and when he came back he quite understandably decided that he probably needed a bit of space. So he left Sunnydale, the setting of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and headed off to Los Angeles to start his own spin-off series. There, he became a sort of supernatural private investigator, initially supported by Doyle, a demon that has premonitions supposedly sent by the "powers that be", and Cordelia Chase, the "spoiled rich girl" character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer who had something of a humiliating crash back down to Earth when she, too, moved to LA, hoping to find fame and fortune.

It would have been easy for Angel to simply become Buffy, But Somewhere Different, but it quickly distinguished itself with a much darker tone. It went heavier on the gore — though not excessively so — and didn't shy away from looking at the bleaker side of life in the city. Don't get me wrong, Buffy got pretty dark, too, particularly in its later seasons, but Angel's 18 certificate is there with good reason.

I can't remember a lot about the complete run of Angel, which is why I'm keen to revisit it, and I really enjoyed the couple of episodes I watched last night — particularly since, as you can probably tell from yesterday's post, I was feeling pretty bleak and dark myself.

In some respects, it's obviously aged — no-one in Angel has a smartphone, for example, because it predates them, and any computer use is on a big chunky desktop PC with a CRT monitor, which is always a delight to see — but that's no bad thing. The nice thing about Buffy and Angel when they originally released was that they felt very much "of their time" — not in a way that they would age poorly, but in that they represented a good snapshot of what life was like during the years they were broadcast. Retrospectively, that makes these shows particularly interesting to look at, and contemplate quite how seismic some of the changes we've seen in society in the last 25 years have really been. (And not for the better in a lot of cases, I'd say.)

Anyway, I'm not going to rush through Angel — I'm probably going to put it on a rotation with the aforementioned The Wire and some other things I nabbed in an impromptu CEX order not ten minutes ago — but I am going to enjoy it. And if you've never seen it, I'd encourage you to seek it out; it's a great example of TV from that era, and deserves more recognition than it tends to get.

And yes, I heard the recent story about there being a possibility of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot. Not sure quite how to feel about that right now, but we'll see. For now, the original (and Angel) still exists, and is still good, and whatever ends up happening with any sort of modern reimagining won't change that.

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#oneaday Day 241: So very tired

I don't really understand what is happening in the United States right now, but it seems… worrying. And it's just one of many things going on in the world right now that is just leaving me feeling completely and utterly exhausted, wondering how the world went so very, very wrong, and how on Earth we can drag ourselves out of this pit we appear to have willingly dug ourselves into.

You've got an unelected billionaire apparently being given free rein to gut the actually useful bits of the U.S. government, ostensibly in service to his senile God-Emperor, whose answer to anyone disagreeing with him is to impose 25% tariffs on them. You've got the scourge of generative AI perpetually over… everything, and seemingly more and more people taking the defeatist attitude that "the genie is out of the bottle" (that's the exact phrase they all use) rather than actually making a principled stand against it. You've got the gradual decline in usefulness of everything on the Internet, and the concurrent decline in behaviour from people who feel emboldened to just be a shithead at every opportunity. And you've got just… the general struggle to exist in the world of today.

Some of these things, like whatever the fuck Elon Musk is up to right now, are well out of my control, and probably will not affect me, personally, directly — at least not immediately, anyway. But I can't help but worry. I have friends and family in the United States, and what is going down right now makes me feel quite afraid for them. I know there's nothing I can do, but that doesn't stop me worrying.

Some of these things, like generative AI, may well be a "genie out of the bottle" moment, but I've read enough well-considered criticism (and outright condemnation) of generative AI to know that in its present form, I want no part of it, and seeing people I know and respect involved with it gives me a significant amount of pause. In this instance, I can do something; I can not use it, and I can endure those who would brand me a "Luddite" for feeling that way. Frankly I'd rather keep my integrity and my ability to think for myself than stand alongside the odious techbros who have had Silicon Valley in their grasp for years now.

Likewise, in terms of the Internet, I can do my best to stay out of places that I know will be counter-productive to my mental health — except I can't really, because I have to Do The Social Media for work — and, at the very least, try to be as decent a person I can, as much as I can.

As for the struggle that is existence… well, I've been through personal struggles far worse than this before, and my own life has been in a far worse place than it is right now. So I should probably be grateful for what I do have, and how long I have been able to enjoy a relatively stable existence in my own little bubble.

So why, then, do I want to burst into tears rather than getting out of bed every morning? Why am I sitting here feeling as bad as I've ever felt? Why can I not just "switch off" from the Bad Things that, we've established, have little to do with my day-to-day life?

I don't know. If I did, I wouldn't be writing this post.

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#oneaday Day 240: Fair and Balanced Critique

Hello! First of all, here:

That's the first of the two videos I recorded this weekend. Please enjoy a full playthrough of King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne on Atari ST.

Part of the reason I'd felt inspired to play this (and Space Quest) this weekend is because I've been watching the videos of a channel called Space Quest Historian. This is a chap who absolutely loves adventure games, but had little experience with the King's Quest series prior to a donation drive on his Patreon, where he said he would play through each and every King's Quest game for reaching various donation milestones. He also doesn't really like "fantasy" as a genre.

I have been absolutely loving his entertainingly scathing teardowns of the King's Quest games, and I adore those games for the most part. And I've been racking my brains trying to think why I'm enjoying these vids so much when sometimes I feel oddly upset and defensive when someone is negative about something I love.

And it all comes down to intent. Space Quest Historian isn't malicious about these games at all, even when ripping them a new one for their more absurd elements. Instead, he's inviting us to be in on the joke; inviting those unfamiliar and existing fans alike to come along on a ride where he entertainingly points out all the ridiculous things in these games. And, to be clear, as a fan of King's Quest, I can quite happily admit that there are a lot of ridiculous things in those games.

Where this differs from, say, reviews of Japanese stuff that have upset me in the past, is that Space Quest Historian is not being mean about these games, nor is he being mean about the people who like them. He's not suggesting that you are a bad person for liking the games, nor is he suggesting that you are wrong for liking the games; instead, he is simply providing some light-hearted commentary in a series of videos that it should be abundantly clear from the very opening seconds should not be considered serious critique or analysis. And he's often the first to say as much.

Compare and contrast that approach with, say, reviews of Japanese games that outright call people who like them paedophiles, or suggest that people who enjoy a particular series are sex pests, or that they only like anime women because no real woman would ever want to touch them. That crosses a line. That's mean, and uncalled for. All of the games I'm thinking of with those examples have plenty about them that can be poked fun at, but without it being at the expense of those who genuinely love them and have found meaning in them.

It can be a fine line, of course, between being hyperbolically nitpicky about something and the audience feeling like you're attacking it. And indeed, some commenters on Space Quest Historian's channel feel he veers too far in the "bad" direction. But as someone who is normally quite sensitive to this sort of thing, I've been really enjoying his work, and I'm looking forward to seeing more. It doesn't stop me from enjoying the King's Quest games; in fact, I probably find these videos funnier precisely because I recognise all the things that he's discussing.

Anyway, just fancied saying all that — and sharing my King's Quest II playthrough above. Please enjoy!

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