#oneaday Day 229: Mental shutdown

I'm back from my trip, and I'm absolutely exhausted. A full-day meeting followed by a 3+ hour drive is not my idea of Having A Brilliant Day, so I'm sitting here absolutely frazzled and seriously considering going to bed before it even hits 10pm. In fact, that's exactly what I'm going to do as soon as I'm finished with this nonsense.

The meeting itself wasn't a bad thing — it was actually quite worthwhile and productive, but I'm not sure it needed to be the entire day. I won't bore you with the details because they're not very interesting, but they should help me and the rest of the team I work on to do our jobs better. So that's nice.

No, it's the three-hour drive back in the dark that's the real killer, and to make matters worse my phone battery died with about 45 minutes left to go. I was listening to Ed Zitron's excellent(ly cynical) coverage of E3 on his Better Offline podcast and enjoying it a great deal, but I had to suffer with the radio for that last 45 minutes, because balls to driving in silence.

And to be sure, listening to Absolute Radio '90s is… well, not really suffering as such, but it has got markedly worse since Matt Berry's contract clearly expired, because their new idents featuring someone trying (and not doing a brilliant job) to imitate Matt Berry's distinctive cadence are just infuriatingly shit. Whereas Berry's idents were genuinely amusing — and, rather brilliantly, different every time they came on — they've fallen back on that old commercial radio standard, "where real music matters". And they go on and on and on about "real music matters", sometimes for several minutes at a time. There's no humour, no heart, no feeling that "real music" really matters. Just the usual soulless commercial attempts to be "funny" and failing miserably.

At least the music they do play is decent, since as the name suggests, they play a selection of '90s hits (with a "no repeat guarantee!" that unfortunately doesn't extend to "not playing the same songs at the same time each day") — although listening to a few tracks during the vinegar strokes of my journey this evening made me realise that more than a few groups commonly regarded as "good" are actually pretty dull. Like Nirvana. Boring. Always suspected they were when I was younger, but dutifully bought Nevermind because everyone was obliged to in the '90s. But no. Can't even remember the name of the song that I heard on the radio this evening but it was as dull as the piss of an old man with a yeast infection.

Anyway, my tiredness is clearly letting the grump out, so I think it's probably for the best that I put the bin out and go to bed. So I'm going to go do that right now. Don't wake me.

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 228: Hotel time again

I'm presently away from home for my monthly-ish visit to the office, so I'm in my regular hotel, a reasonably nice (and reasonably affordable) non-chain place in the town centre, approximately two minutes from work.

I like spending time in hotels because it's a chance to live a little bit differently for a brief period. You get to sleep in a different bed, enjoy the amenities and see life from a slightly different perspective, even if it's for just a moment. And that's nice to do every so often.

It's always a slight roll of the dice with this place when I come, mind you; sometimes I'm lucky and get a free "upgrade" of sorts to a double room with a bath; this time, sadly, I was unlucky, and have the single room with a bathroom that was not designed by a human being with a functional physical presence, judging by the absolutely baffling position of the shower and sink in relation to one another. One should not have to squeeze through a narrow gap just to get into the shower, and it's not as if there isn't space in the room for the shower to be somewhere slightly different, either.

But I can't complain too much. The bed, although single, is comfortable and the sheets nice and warm. And tomorrow morning I will enjoy a hearty breakfast before heading in to the office, having a hopefully pleasant work day, and not thinking about the 3 hour drive home at the end of the day.

For now, it's time to enjoy that bed.

#oneaday Day 227: Back on the Bionis

Having finished Fire Emblem Engage and entered my "waiting for Xenoblade Chronicles X" holding pattern in earnest, I couldn't resist any longer and started up Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition. It's a long time since I played the original Xenoblade Chronicles, and I feel like it will be good to revisit it before playing X, since X was actually the first "sequel" in the series; Xenoblade Chronicles 2 didn't come along until much later.

I'm not playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which I haven't played at all yet, because I will want to give that my full attention when I get to it, and I am reliably informed that with the way I play, I will likely take upwards of 150 hours to fully enjoy it. The original Xenoblade Chronicles, meanwhile, while still pretty massive, is a tad shorter, and I have faith I can get through it to my satisfaction before March 20, when X drops.

It's been thoroughly refreshing to go back to Xenoblade Chronicles, and I'm reminded of quite how much I like it. It really is a game that goes "what if the open-world bits of an MMO, but single-player?" and runs with it. This is a marked contrast from something like Final Fantasy XIV, where the open world stuff is fun while you're going through the story, but it pretty much ceases to be relevant once you get to endgame and spend the majority of your time in instanced multiplayer scenarios.

What do I mean by "MMO, but single-player?" A few things, really. Firstly, a big world to explore, based on roughly level-stratified zones — though each zone does have a few high-level surprises scattered around the place to make later revisits worthwhile. Secondly, a heavily quest-based structure. You probably can blast through the main story of a Xenoblade Chronicles game pretty quickly, but the appeal is in getting to know the world as a whole and all the incidental characters that populate it, so if you don't do a bit of questing, you're missing out on a significant part of the fun.

Sure, some of those quests may fall into the "kill [x] [y]s" or "get [x] drops from [y]s" territory, but what these quests do is encourage you to visit different areas of the world and discover what there is to see. And while you're doing that, you'll almost certainly feel a bit of that "I wonder what that thing over there is" wanderlust… and chances are, you'll find something interesting there. Xenoblade Chronicles' world is specifically designed to reward exploration, so it's worth your while to go poking your nose wherever you can.

The third way that Xenoblade Chronicles resembles an MMO — arguably more so than some of its follow-ups — is in its combat system, which uses a hotbar of abilities (or "Arts", as they're called), which each have a cooldown before you can use them again. The emphasis is less on finding a "rotation" as in some MMOs, however, since your auto-attacks are a lot more formidable than in something like Final Fantasy XIV, and instead on using your Arts as effectively as possible, ideally by meeting additional conditions that allow them to do more damage or inflict status effects on enemies.

Take protagonist Shulk, for example, who is a solid fighter, but not a tank by any means; that role is ably fulfilled by the first party member you get, Reyn. This leaves Shulk free to deal damage while Reyn attempts to keep aggro off him as much as possible, and to further support that, many of Shulk's Arts are positional, meaning that you need to be standing to the side or back of an enemy to make full use of them. Thus you end up taking a very similar approach to how a lot of MMO combat works: the tank stands with the enemy facing them, while the rest of the party stands behind or to the side of the enemy and pelts them from there.

Each playable character in Xenoblade Chronicles handles rather differently despite all using the same hotbar system. The aforementioned Reyn, for example, needs to focus on generating aggro as much as possible, but he's also able of dishing out some decent damage while he's doing so, too. Contrast with Sharla, the second party member you get, who is a ranged combatant with solid healing skills. Sharla is able to disengage from the main melee and hit enemies from afar with her rifle, as well as flinging out healing and buff Arts on her party members. She also has to manage the heat of her rifle; as well as dealing with time-based cooldowns, using her Arts also causes her rifle to overheat, so you have to make sure she takes the time to vent the heat every so often.

The nice thing about Xenoblade Chronicles is that you can play any one of these characters, or just stick with one for the duration, since the AI that controls the other two party members while you fight as the third is pretty solid. There's no need to "program" the AI like in Final Fantasy XII's Gambit system — although fans of that game will probably agree that programming Gambits is fun — as under most circumstances, assuming they have a decent hotbar of Arts, they will perform their role in the party admirably.

Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition does actually add a little wrinkle to this in the form of its "Time Attack" challenges that are scattered throughout the world. These are strange portals that take Shulk and company to a mysterious temple where a Nopon "sage" challenges them to fend off several waves of enemies as quickly as possible. A selection of these challenges see you having to fight with a fixed party — and with the challenge dictating which character you control. This means that even those who play Shulk for the entire main game will need to take a bit of time to get to grips with the other playable characters, which is nice. The Time Attack challenges are, of course, completely optional — as is a lot of Xenoblade Chronicles — but they do offer some nice rewards, so they are worth engaging with.

Anyway, I'm having a real good time with Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition. It's a pleasure to revisit this world after more than a decade, and with the enhancements the Switch version offers. The game still looks great, particularly with its landscapes; it was one of the finest looking games on Wii, and the subtle enhancements made to bring it into the HD age on Switch mean that it's still recognisable, but looks better than ever — with only a few slightly wooden animations here and there betraying its real age.

I'm fully intending to play through all of Xenoblade Chronicles before Xenoblade Chronicles X arrives in March, and I will, of course, be writing about both over on MoeGamer, as I think it will be fun to compare, contrast and reflect on the series' evolution. Perhaps I'll revisit Xenoblade Chronicles 2 before playing 3… I'm feeling like we might be in for a good few months of Xenoblade at this point, and I'm not complaining.

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#oneaday Day 226: I wish the TikTok ban was worldwide

I fucking hate TikTok, and while I know there are all sort of "considerations" about the American ban of it that is happening right now — and which people seem to think Trump will overturn when he takes office — you are never going to convince me that it was a good thing for humanity as a whole. I feel like it is an app which has actively made the world more stupid, less inclined to pay attention to things and generally quite a bit shitter.

As an autistic person, I actively despise the idea of an app where a significant number of videos are either someone shouting directly "at" me, or outright sensory overload. Hell, a whole term was coined to describe the proliferation of these sensory overload videos, and that term is "sludge content". That is not something we should be celebrating.

A common pro-TikTok argument that people make is that "some people were reliant on it for income". If your sole employable skill is yelling incoherently into a camera, you should probably spend some time working on employable skills other than yelling incoherently into a camera. If you were using TikTok as a means of selling things, you should perhaps consider selling your things via a platform you actually have control over, like people had been doing for years before TikTok, and like people will continue to do for years from hereon. And if you really want to make money from videos, there are plenty of other means of doing so.

But then there's also the fact that people place a vast overemphasis on "monetising their content" online these days anyway. It's one of the major factors in the gradual degradation of social media as an actual means of socialising over the last decade and a half. A significant proportion of users are no longer interested in having conversations — you know, being social — on social media these days. Instead, they want to "create content" for others to "consume". How about you stop seeing dollar signs in everything you do and just do something because it's enjoyable, and because you might make some friends in the process? No?

"But you can watch sexy girls dancing on TikTok!" Brother, I'm not sure how to tell you this, but there are myriad ways to watch sexy girls dancing — and doing a lot more than that — on the Internet, and there has been pretty much since its inception. If your argument for Why TikTok is Good, Actually is that you can mindlessly dribble over something that makes your peepee hard, you are not providing a convincing argument.

"But what about BookTok?" What about all the myriad book-centric blogs that have been destroyed by the collective destruction of the world's attention span via shit like TikTok and YouTube Shorts? What about the fact that your average TikTok user almost certainly doesn't have the patience or brain power to sit down and read a book if they won't read a blog post? What about the fact that authors don't want to have to waste their fucking time yelling at their phone camera when they would much rather be writing something worthwhile?

TikTok is shit, and while I see and appreciate the arguments against the US banning it, I will be shedding precisely zero tears for it. It is one of the absolute worst examples of the enshittification of the modern Internet and people in general, and nothing you can say will ever make me change my mind on that fact. I just wish the fucking thing would go away here, too.

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#oneaday Day 225: The Secret Diary of Pete Davison, Age 43 3/4

Hello. Sorry about yesterday, I just had a bit of an internal explosion of existential dread and needed to express all that, although I was gratified to note that precisely no-one reached out to me to see if I was all right. Not that I'm particularly surprised or was expecting anyone to reach out and see if I was all right, because I'm under no illusions that anyone other than me is reading this blog, but still, y'know. Sometimes it's nice to know someone is looking out for you, and keeping an eye on the means you've been using to express the things you find difficult to say out loud for nearly 20 years.

But like I say, absolutely not blaming anyone. Really, I honestly mean that, no sarcasm. I posted yesterday's screed not because I particularly needed anyone to tell me things are going to be all right — and not just because I'd know they're lying — but because sometimes it just helps to get negative feelings out of your head and onto a page. It doesn't necessarily help you come to any conclusions about how to deal with them, but sometimes simply expressing them is all you need.

This, honestly, was the reason I kept a diary for much of my teenage years. I've talked a bit about this before, as with most subjects on this blog, but it sprung to mind today as I contemplate precisely why I'm still doing this: why I'm typing words into the virtual void for no-one to read, and why I'm still finding it a worthwhile exercise to do so.

I forget exactly what age I was when I started keeping a diary. I'd estimate maybe around 13 or 14 or so. I had recently read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, which I believe my mother had recommended to me as "worth reading" considering the age I was. I absolutely adored that book and its follow-up The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, and am long overdue a re-read of it all. I recognised that Adrian was a bit of a twat — and this only gets worse in the later installments as he moves into his adult life — but I also recognised parts of myself in him.

So I decided to do as he did, and start a diary. While I forget how old I was when I eventually started, I do remember the circumstances. We had been on a visit to, of all places, the National Stone Centre in Derbyshire, and had gone along with, if I remember rightly, my parents' friends Margaret and Mick. This detail isn't particularly important, but it adds a nugget of context, which was how I was young enough to still go along on visits like that to My Parents' Friends and not just be left at home.

Anyway, the reason I specifically remember that we went to visit the National Stone Centre is because while we were there, I ended up purchasing (or having purchased for me) a lovely hardback journal. It had nice quality paper, it had really nice material on the cover and binding, it was just a lovely book. My parents had encouraged me to use it as a scrapbook of sorts — a book for keepsakes from trips such as the one we'd just been on, as dull as it might have been. And so I did, for a while.

Then, one day, after I had not used it for the above purpose for quite some time (primarily due to having not really done anything worth scrapbooking) I thought that I might start using it to write down… things. I didn't have anything particularly specific in mind when I first started writing in it, I just felt like the experience of writing diary entries had seemed valuable to Adrian Mole in the books I loved so much, and thus I decided to give it a go for myself.

It didn't take long before I started using that diary to express things I found difficult to talk about "out loud", as it were, primarily relating to matters of emotions and feelings towards other people. As noted in my tales of The Rough Book, as a hormonal teenager I fell in love with a lot of girls over the course of my time at secondary school. And I found it difficult enough to admit my feelings about all this to my closest friends at the time, let alone my family. So I told the diary.

I told the diary a lot of things. One of my favourite things to do in the diary was to have "fantasy conversations", where I'd imagine how, in an ideal world, my confessing of my feelings to whatever the object of my affections was that week might go. I'd write these non-existent interactions (because they never actually happened) as a script, because I'd been enjoying looking at plays during English lessons at school, and, later in my school career, had parts in our productions of The Wizard of Oz and Twelfth Night.

I realise this might sound a bit creepy, and it probably is. But what you have to understand is, as an autistic teenager who didn't know he was autistic, social interactions, particularly with someone for whom you didn't really know where you stood and lacked the self-confidence to ever believe they might be interested in you, were very difficult. I wrote those "conversations" down because I knew I'd never be able to pull them off in reality. They were a comforting fiction, in a way; they allowed me to indulge my imagination and think about something which I believed to be impossible in reality.

There was one exception, as I recall. On one of the numerous occasions I had plucked up the courage to declare to my friends that I fancied a girl named Nikki, my friends practically forced me to tell her how I felt. They got me and her out onto the school field, essentially pushed us together and left me to get onto it. And, to my credit, I successfully managed to confess my feelings to Nikki, who, bless her heart, at least let me down exceedingly gently and pleasantly.

That evening, I decided to "analyse" the situation. I wrote a script based on what had actually happened. I drew diagrams, with a little picture of a lightbulb representing how much I was blushing through the whole experience. I attempted to determine if there was anything I might have been able to do differently and, of course, came up short; no means no, as it were, and that is something I have always respected.

As that lovely little journal started to fill up with my innermost feelings, I started to become uneasy. I'd taken to placing it in a position on the desk in my bedroom where it was inconspicuous and unlikely to be picked up and read by someone coming in, but something in the back of my mind was still gnawing away at me, worrying that my Mum or Dad would pick it up, read it all and… well, take the piss, frankly, because there was a lot in there that one could probably take the piss about.

So one day I snapped. I took the journal and I threw it away. I took care not to throw it away in the kitchen bin, where it might have been noticed, but rather to throw it away in the outside bin, concealed in a bag beneath a large black bag of rubbish: somewhere no-one would even think to consider taking it out and rifling through it.

I regret that, now. I think it would be interesting to go back and look over those journal entries my teenage self made, as embarrassing and weird as some of them might have been. I don't know that it would have been helpful to do so, but thinking back, my school days (or, specifically, my time at secondary school and sixth form) are a time in my life I look back on with great fondness, where I was, retrospectively, very happy and satisfied with my lot in life, even if I had very little in the way of luck with women.

Thinking back on that diary is one of the reasons I've kept this blog around for so long. There's things I look back on that I'm not so proud of having written, and there's things I'm glad I wrote about. The one constant is that this blog is completely, honestly, unabashedly me, and it always will be.

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#oneaday Day 224: Hopeless

It's honestly really hard to feel any hope for the future right now. The world is burning; far-right extremism is on the rise; the Internet has degraded to a point where it's unpleasant to use at best, actively dangerous at worst; Big Tech is continually abusing its users in the name of unsustainable perpetual growth; the odious AI fad won't go away; everything is too expensive; and the people about to take control of one of the most powerful nations on the planet are pure, unabashed evil.

I have no solutions. I have no words. I have no comfort for those who are suffering more than I am. I have little more than a sense of despair about how everything seems to have been getting worse in front of our very eyes for a decade or more, how we could have most certainly done something about it before it got this bad, and how if anything is ever going to improve, it's almost certainly going to get worse before it gets better.

I've never felt like anyone particularly important who makes a difference, and I've never striven to be such. At times like this I feel particularly helpless, powerless and alone, and I can't even begin to imagine how much worse it must be for people in the direct firing line of everything that is going on.

The only thing I can say is that I, personally, have always striven to not be a shitty person, and that's what I intend to keep doing for as long as I am able to. I'm afraid that's about all I really have the energy to write this evening. Tomorrow will be another day of this shit, but at least it's the weekend, so that's nice I guess.

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#oneaday Day 223: The Old Internet

As the rot economy continues apace, more and more people are starting to recognise the modern Web for what it is: an unpleasant place, in which commercial interests and venture capitalists come first, and making an actually pleasant, enjoyable and educational place for the actual users is far, far down the list. As a result, "the old Internet" is often romanticised, perhaps to an overly nostalgic, rose-tinted degree, but I have to kind of concur; things did used to be much more enjoyable online before our daily routine was nothing but scrolling through the only two or three websites that actually exist to most people.

I think about this a lot when I'm writing on here or MoeGamer. I used to get fairly decent numbers on both blogs, even though I was just posting daily nonsense on this one. Now, I get maybe double figures daily on here, if that. MoeGamer still pulls in about a thousand views a day, which is nice, but a lot of those views are for things I wrote about several years ago at this point, and rarely for things I've written about recently.

Now, I don't do either this blog or MoeGamer for the views, but I feel the trajectory this site has taken in terms of numbers is symptomatic of the way the Web has changed over the years. People just don't do blogs any more, either as writers or readers. Part of this is down to the fact that RSS readers just aren't a part of people's daily online routine any more (though I'm aware they still exist) — and even those "magazine-style" apps that were never really a good replacement for Google Reader seem to have died a bit of a death. Not only that, but the usefulness of search engines has declined considerably, too.

Instead, it is, of course, all about social media. It's all about having a presence on the "important" social networks — though even that has seen something of an upset over the last few years, and particularly in the last few months. Twitter was already circling the drain in terms of usefulness for sharing stuff even before Elon took over and did… whatever the fuck he's doing there; Facebook has been such a horrible experience to use for so long now that I question the sanity of anyone who is still using it — to say nothing of the frankly quite disturbing policy changes they've had recently; and the less said about TikTok, the better.

So what, exactly, is someone looking to express themselves online to do today? If you want to get seen, you seemingly have little choice but to sign your soul over to one of these companies and plunge your data into the mire that is "The Algorithm". Telling people that they should start their own website is a noble and proper goal, and one I stand behind, but the fact is… a lot of folks just don't and won't leave social media — and many of the social media companies are doing their best to keep those folks on their platform as much as possible.

Look at Twitter (no, I'm not calling it "X") and how Elon is desperate for people to "post content" on it, completely failing to see that it is a platform woefully ill-equipped for anything other than that which it was originally designed for: microblogging. No-one in their right mind is going to set up a video-centric Twitter account instead of a YouTube channel, even if the site wasn't infested with the worst bigots the Internet has to offer. And no writer is ever going to use Twitter as their primary means of posting their work.

Everyone knows this. And yet it's so difficult to get people to notice you if you're not spending all day "building your personal brand" or some such bullshit. Artists struggle to get commissions without social media. Writers struggle to get publishers without social media. Video makers struggle to get views on their videos without social media. It all sucks, and it feels far too late to be able to do anything about it.

All you can do, really, is just be stubborn. Keep plugging away at your own personal passion projects, and do those projects for the passion, not for the potential of monetising them. I keep doing this blog because I like writing and it's good therapy for me — nothing more. It's always a thoroughly welcome sight when I see someone I recognise in the comments, but that's becoming an increasingly rare occurrence these days. Family and friends who used to read on a regular basis just… don't any more, and the worst thing is, I completely understand why. The modern Web simply isn't built to support personal sites any more, and that's a real shame. It feels like we're very much at risk of losing an important part of our collective culture — because what happens to everyone's "content" (ugh) when one of these social media companies eventually implodes?

Anyway, close your Meta accounts, get off Twitter and read more blogs. That's my advice for surviving online today.

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#oneaday Day 222: Dawn of the Second Day

Second day in a row of successfully getting up at 7.30, getting out of the house and having a little walk down to the shop. It was a little bit harder to successfully achieve this today, but I was expecting this. As outlined yesterday, my dreams were doing their best to pull me back into sleep, but I recognised them as being pointless (I was dreaming about Fire Emblem, and if I want to play Fire Emblem I can just go downstairs) and managed to get myself out of bed.

The fact that I was woken up by my phone ringing at 7.28 also probably helped. I was concerned that the call would be Bad News, as phone calls at vaguely unsociable hours tend to be, but it was, in fact, just a wrong number offering one "Jenny" a supply teaching position.

I have done supply teaching before; having to get up early and wait for a phone call like that is the absolute worst, because if you do get one you inevitably then have to get ready as fast as possible and get to whatever hellhole of a school you've been assigned to before the beginning of the school day. (Of course, one might say if you were reliant on such phone calls for your income, you should probably get up and get ready a little earlier on the assumption that you will get one; the worst that can happen is you don't get one and will have put on your "nice clothes" for nothing.)

I'm hoping this whole little routine will lead to some other incremental improvements in other areas of life. I actually feel like I slept a little better than usual last night, and eventually what I would like to do is start integrating a little more exercise than just a quick walk to the shop into the morning routine. As I have learned in the past, though, making such lifestyle changes is best handled gradually rather than trying to do too much, too soon. So I'm just concentrating on what has historically been the "difficult bit" — getting up — and celebrating my successes in that area first. Everything else can come later.

Anyway, I'm up and about now and there's still a full ten minutes before I actually need to start work. So that's nice. Here's hoping today is at least vaguely stimulating and entertaining. Knowing what's coming later, it should be fun, all being well, though I'm sure the wonder that is social media will find something to piss and moan about, as happens every day. Letting humanity at large comment online was a mistake. But you know this. You've read my posts, and many of them were most certainly a mistake.

Oh, also it's my brother's birthday today, so if you see him about, be sure to wish him happy birthday.

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#oneaday Day 221: Little success

Reader, I did it. My alarm went off at 7.30 and I got up almost immediately. I add the qualifier because I lay there and listened to the radio for about 5 minutes, then got up and had a piss and seriously considered going back to bed for another half an hour on the justification that "the sun wasn't fully up yet" so going outside right then wouldn't be as beneficial as it would be when the day had properly started.

But I pushed through those thoughts, got dressed instead of getting back into bed, then went out to the little Tesco and got myself a coffee and a pastry. Then I came back and enjoyed them both. They both seemed to taste particularly great, perhaps because I wasn't in a rush to enjoy them before starting work, or perhaps because of the light exercise I'd just done, or perhaps simply because I hadn't treated myself to such things for a while. Anyway, they were good.

I have the yawns a little bit because this was, after all, quite a bit earlier than I usually roll out of bed, but like I said yesterday, it supposedly takes about three days to convince your body to fall into a new routine. I was actually surprised how easy it was to get out of bed at 7.30(ish); evidently that time is a good match for my existing circadian rhythms so hopefully that will just get easier.

I'll tell you one big reason I've always had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning: it's because of dreams. For some reason, I always seem to have the most vivid dreams first thing in the morning, almost immediately before I'm supposed to be getting up. And there are occasions where I'll wake up, still have memory of the dream and feel like I "have" to go back and "finish" the dream, even though that's an impossibility.

But there have been multiple occasions where my brain has felt that it is of critical importance that I finish the dream I was having, otherwise… you know what, I don't actually know what it thinks the consequences will be. Because there aren't any. A dream is just a dream; as enjoyable and interesting as they can be, they don't actually exist and they don't have any bearing on your real life, so prioritising them over actually living in the moment is, from a rational perspective, very silly.

As we all know, though, the human brain is prone to fits of irrationality at times, particularly if it's under any sort of stress or not feeling its best for one reason or another. And so, yes, there absolutely have been times where my brain has wanted to prioritise a fun or interesting dream over the drabness of everyday life.

No more, though! I will get up at a sensible hour, giving me enough time to have a nice chilled out morning before work starts, and this will be a Healthy Habit that will lead to other improvements! 2025 is the year.

Probably. Maybe.

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#oneaday Day 220: Morning person

I'm not a morning person. I can get out of bed early when I absolutely have to (to catch a flight, say), but left to my own devices, I will happily just lie comatose in my bed until an embarrassing hour. I will note that it's not quite as bad as during 2010, The Worst Year Of My Life, when I was staying up until 5am on Second Life and then not even waking up until 5pm the next day, but it's still… challenging to get out of bed at a reasonable hour, particularly at weekends.

I've been reading around and watching some YouTube videos in an attempt to fix this, because as nice as staying in bed can be, I do actually want to try and make a bit better use of my day — because if nothing else, I think it will probably make me feel better, too. There are few things worse for feelings of perpetual non-specific anxiety than getting up moments before you're supposed to start working… although annoyingly enough, it's often those feelings of perpetual non-specific anxiety that make me want to stay in bed.

Thus far, the chief pieces of advice that seem to recur frequently are as follows:

Get up when your alarm goes off. (This is the difficult bit.)
Get out into natural light as soon as you can. (This assumes you have succeeded at step 1.)
Get some exercise shortly after getting up. (Likewise.)
Try and delay your caffeine intake a bit. (Challenging, but also agreed to not necessarily be essential.)
Get some food into you, preferably something which releases energy gradually.
Get to bed at a reasonable time at night. (Doesn't have to be early, just a sensible time.)

Supposedly it takes about three days to convince your body that you're starting a new routine, which is all to do with your circadian rhythms. The first two days are almost certainly going to be excruciatingly difficult, but it's important to stick with them. And, as time goes on, this (in theory) gets easier.

I've already made a sort of step towards improving my morning routine, in that I've given up using my phone as an alarm and instead got a clock radio. I find it somehow more conducive to waking up without feeling like complete shite, perhaps because it's not just the same sound every day that you eventually come to resent. The actual getting out of bed when it first sounds is still the challenging bit, but that's the "wall" you have to push through in order to achieve anything.

So from tomorrow, I'm going to attempt to push through that wall and make some improvements. I've got my alarm set early (7.30am — I start work at 9) and I'm going to do my absolute damnedest to get up straight away, get dressed and then go straight outside. Not only that, I'm going to walk to the nearby Tesco, get myself some coffee and something nice (but not overly awful for me) for breakfast. That would seem to tick off several of the steps above in one fell swoop. Sure, walking to Tesco isn't exactly a "workout", but most of the stuff I've read and watched over the last couple of days suggests that you don't need your morning exercise to be a full-on workout, just moving a bit. And a walk of about a quarter of a mile each way would, I'd say, qualify as "just moving a bit".

When COVID hit, a lot of us introverts joked about how nice it was to have state approval for staying inside all day. But over the last couple of years in particular, I've started to really appreciate how important it is to just go outside and get some air sometimes. Doesn't have to involve interacting with other people or doing anything adventurous, just, as the kids say, touch some grass.

So that's the plan from tomorrow. Let's see if I'm able to actually stick to it.

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