#oneaday Day 280: Connecting to oneself

I missed yesterday, but in my defence I also wrote over 2,000 words about EXPELLED!, so it's not as if I didn't write anything. I just forgot to write anything here before I went to bed. Oh well, not the first time it's happened and it almost certainly won't be the last time, either.

Anyway, today I thought I'd write something about a blog post I read yesterday from Norm of My Bad Take Space. The thrust of Norm's piece is that blogs played an important role in the development of the Internet, and their apparent decline is a significant loss for self-expression, because social media just isn't the same. Blogs are useful not only for connecting to other people, but also for connecting with oneself. I, as is probably abundantly clear already if you've spent any time over here whatsoever, agree heartily with this assessment.

One of the things that pisses me off about supposed modern "best practice" on the Internet is the assumption that people won't read anything too long, won't watch anything too long and don't have the attention span to devote to one thing for more than about 30 seconds at most. It pisses me off not because it's true, which it, regrettably, is, but because this is a problem entirely of our own creation. We spent so long assuming that this is how people behave that we normalised it. And now we're stuck in a rut where the only (supposedly) palatable content for people to consume is short, snappy videos of someone yelling at the camera.

Except… no. I cannot be the only person out there who detests attention-deficit content culture. I really like it when I discover something interesting and thoughtful to read online — like Norm's blog, for example — and I find myself getting annoyed when I read a piece from a news site and it just sort of seems to fizzle out before it gets to any sort of point, which seems to be an increasingly common occurrence these days.

There is a place for this sort of thing, and the apparent popularity of things like Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At? newsletter/blog on the shittiness of modern tech and the "rot economy" gives me a certain amount of hope, but it's still not quite where we were. We're not quite back to a point where someone can just start a blog, use it to post their long-form thoughts about life, the universe and everything, and people will read it. If you start a "newsletter" these days, it needs to be about something.

Now, I've said numerous times before that this blog isn't here for any reason other than because I like writing on it; it's certainly not here as an engagement farm or a means of earning ad revenue. (You will, hopefully, notice that there are no ads.) But I still find it a little strange to consider that a few years back (probably closer to a decade at this point, upsettingly) I was getting maybe three figures' worth of visitors a day here, while today I'm lucky to break 10.

While I don't really care about the figures, what that lack of views means is that this blog doesn't act very well as a means of starting conversations any more. When I was getting a couple of hundred people a day visiting, chances are that at least one of those viewers (many of whom were regulars) would read what I'd written and have something to say about it, and from there we could have a nice little chat in the comments.

Alternatively, someone I know enough to have on an instant messaging service might pop up and say "hey man, I read your blog, let's talk about that". That doesn't really happen any more, outside of a few notable occasions. And even in the case of that link, that really only got people talking because I made a specific effort to get it in front of certain people that I actually wanted to read it.

To put it another way, while this blog remains great for connecting with myself, the connecting with others part has become significantly more challenging.

I don't really know what can be done about this, if anything. One of the things I used to like about writing this blog… well, no. One of the things I still do like writing about this blog is expressing things that I find difficult or outright impossible to say "out loud" to someone's face. The "expressing myself" part hasn't changed, but with the lack of readers, those things that I confess or express simply aren't getting to the eyes of the people I might actually want to confess or express those things to, thereby making the whole thing a little less useful as a means of communication than it used to be.

But times change, I guess, and I just haven't kept up with them. And I don't really have any desire to. I find TikTok and YouTube Shorts distasteful, distracting and uncomfortable to watch, and feel actively repulsed any time I see a vertical video thumbnail that is just someone with their nose pressed up against their phone camera yelling something. That's not how I want to express myself, and I don't feel that we should abandon an entire medium such as long-form writing just because something else is popular.

When I trained to be a teacher, one of the things that was impressed on us repeatedly was the fact that different people learn in different ways. Some folks learn visually, by looking at things. Some folks learn aurally, by having things told to them. Some folks learn kinaesthetically, by doing things. And some folks learn best when given a book and told to study it themselves. The same is completely true for communication and self-expression. While some folks doubtless think the short-form video revolution is the best thing ever for their personal preferred form of self-expression, those of us who, like me, have always preferred writing our thoughts down in long form are left a bit out in the cold. The two (along with any other forms of communication and self-expression) should be able to coexist and thrive, and it's frustrating that they don't.

I don't know what else I can really do at this point, honestly, other than continuing to write here because I still find it valuable to do so, and perhaps sharing what I've written on the one form of social media I actually use a little bit: Bluesky.

Anyway, that's that for today. I'm off to go have a nice relaxing weekend, and hopefully remember to write something for "today" a little later! Have a pleasant Saturday.

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 279: Criminal Records

I sort of miss the whole ritual of buying music from a shop. You know, going in there, agonising over whether or not you really want to spend twelve quid on a CD from a band you're not sure you like based on a song you've heard so much on the radio you basically Stockholm Syndromed yourself into convincing you were a fan of?

Back when we actually still did that sort of thing, I had a fairly shameless attitude towards buying music, even though I occasionally got the piss taken out of me when I was a teen. This attitude started pretty early on, when the first music album I purchased for myself with my own money was Oasis' Definitely Maybe… literally the day before (What's The Story) Morning Glory? came out. After earning the jeers of my peer group for that particular escapade, I pretty much decided to go "fuck it", and just buy stuff I felt like buying, without shame. Same approach I take with video games to this day, as it happens.

That's not quite the full story, mind. There were still CDs that I saw in the shops that I knew it would effectively be social suicide to purchase, if anyone ever found out I did so. Generally speaking, as a teenage boy, anything by a boy band was right out, as were any of the particularly cheesy pop acts like S Club 7 or Steps. And, of course, the Spice Girls.

I maintained this feeling of warding off potential musical shame for a while, but then I went along with my parents to a party at my "Aunty" Sue and "Uncle" Peter's house. (I put "Aunty" and "Uncle" in quotes because they're not actually related to me; they're the kind of "Aunty" and "Uncle" that means "friends of my parents") I forget the exact occasion, but it was definitely some sort of celebration. And Aunty Sue and Uncle Peter had a big house — it used to be a school, in fact, but they were also rather well off.

Anyway, I always thought Uncle Peter was kind of cool in that way you never, ever mention to your parents when you're an adolescent, because declaring someone who isn't a celebrity but is from a completely different generation to you is "cool" is absolutely unthinkable.

The reason I thought Uncle Peter was cool was because as part of furnishing their absolutely enormous house, he had an amazing hi-fi system, and an enormous collection of records on various media formats (including several ones that were "weird" by the early '90s, like reel-to-reel tapes and 8-tracks) that covered possibly the most eclectic selection of musical tastes I think I've ever seen.

While Aunty Sue and Uncle Peter were setting up for the party, I happened to wander into the room with the hi-fi, where Uncle Peter was browsing through a big pile of CDs. And, to my surprise, I saw several "criminal" records among them — most notably the Spice Girls' first album, Spice.

I don't know why I felt this way, but something in my brain changed at that point. The thought process was something along the lines of "well, if Uncle Peter can buy a Spice Girls album and not spontaneously combust, would it really be so bad if I did so, too?"

So, not long after that trip and the party, I went out and bought myself a copy of Spice for myself. And I listened to it. And I enjoyed it! I thought a couple of tracks were a bit poo (interestingly, the tracks I tended to like least were the ones that had become singles, like Wannabe, which I still don't like all that much) but I overall… didn't regret my purchase, and listened to it a good few times. And when Spiceworld came out the following year, I bought that, too, also without shame.

I still didn't tell anyone I was buying these albums, nor did I do it in front of them, of course — I still had a certain amount of pride. But I also didn't hide these albums when anyone came to visit, nor did I attempt to concoct any sort of stupid lie about not knowing how they got there, or someone sabotaging my CD collection, or whatever. It was just part of my musical tastes at the time — which grew to be rather eclectic as a direct result of my own willingness to buy "criminal" records.

I sort of miss that. I still like listening to music, particularly when I'm doing something dull, but the thought of just putting a CD on and listening to it as a self-contained activity now feels almost alien to me. There are times when I consider starting to collect CDs again in an attempt to rediscover that lost pleasure of just listening to music as an activity in and of itself… then I remember I have a house bursting at the seams with video games already, and thus not really anywhere to put CDs, so I have to content myself with streaming, like most of us do these days.

My one hangover from those days is that even while streaming music, I tend to prefer to have full control over what I'm listening to, and I will more often than not listen to a full album rather than just putting it on a "Shuffle" or "Radio" setting. I still like that musical journey you take through a good album, but I do miss the whole ritual of buying the CD, taking it home, looking at the artwork, reading the sleeve notes and the lyrics and listening to the music intently and attentively.

I wonder if we'll ever come back around to that? There's already growing unrest and dissatisfaction with streaming video services, with some (including me) actually preferring a return to physical media. But can we go back? Should we? I don't know. But I'm definitely still tempted to rebuild that CD collection. I bet second-hand music CDs are dirt cheap these days.

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#oneaday Day 278: I've been Expelled!

I saw some reviews for a new game from Inkle called Expelled! earlier today and was immediately intrigued. I'm a sucker for a game with a school setting and I'd never played one of Inkle's games before, though I knew several of them were rather well regarded. And, indeed, having spent most of the evening playing Expelled! I can understand why. This game is great.

The game is set in a posh British boarding school in 1922, and you play a girl named Verity, who is from the North and is attending the school as a result of the school's charitable scholarship programme. Almost immediately, you are presented with the core mystery at the heart of everything: the school's Head Girl and hockey team captain Louisa has fallen (or been thrown) through a valuable 500 year old stained glass window in the library tower, and is now seriously injured. For reasons that aren't immediately apparent, Verity is immediately blamed for this and, on your first playthrough, expelled almost straight away.

The game is then framed as Verity attempting to retell the story to her sympathetic father, but continually getting details wrong and/or lying about things that happened. Thus, the game has a sort of "time loop" structure, whereby a single playthrough only takes about 30-45 minutes or so, but you have the opportunity to learn new things each time around. Indeed, a crucial moment in the game comes when you discover how to recover Verity's "notes" and memories of previous things she's learned, allowing you to carry information and knowledge from one playthrough to another without having to repeat the same actions over and over.

One of the interesting things about the game is that, early on, the school's headmistress encourages Verity to stand up for herself rather than being a meek, feeble and pathetic young woman who will always be servile to others. This is tacit approval for the player to go on and make all the obviously "nasty" or "bad" choices in order to build up a meter that reflects Verity's overall nastiness. Sometimes these choices are just mean, but on many occasions they represent her demonstrating strength of personality and determination — things that she will need if she hopes to get to the bottom of what really occurred.

The game uses a time-based mechanic, whereby Verity taking actions and moving around the campus takes varying amounts of time. Various things happen at set times throughout the day, including Verity's classes (which she can opt whether or not to attend) and characters moving around the campus for various reasons. Improving your knowledge of the situation involves getting a feel for who is going to be where (and doing what) when, and being able to take advantage of that fact, even if doing so makes Verity even more "naughty" than she already has been.

Thus far, I've played for about three and a half hours and uncovered several interesting pieces of information and am now trying to determine how best to use that information to ensure Verity comes out on top. I've had a couple of situations where Verity has successfully been able to survive to the next term without being expelled, but there's plenty more to explore and discover after that: the next item on the "checklist" you get at the end of each playthrough is to remove her rivals, which appears to involve "proving" (or framing?) one of the other characters for pushing Louisa out of the window.

There are lots of interesting decisions to make along the way. The game is very much a text adventure (albeit parser-free) rather than a visual novel, and you have a great sense of agency throughout, particularly once you've got Verity nice and comfortable with doing things that she "shouldn't". I'm intrigued to see where the plot goes now I've found out various potentially helpful pieces of information, and since there are no guides or walkthroughs available just yet (the game only came out today!) everyone is in the same "discovery" process right now, attempting to figure the game out for themselves.

If you enjoy text adventures, Expelled! is a great time. There's a lot of reading, sure, but there's also some lovely visuals and some exceedingly limited but very good voice acting. Pro-tip: be sure to turn the "Profanity" setting on (it's off by default), because hearing Verity going "oh, fucking hell" after a failed run will never get old.

I'll doubtless have more to say about this when I've seen things through to their conclusion. For now, though, this seems like a safe recommendation to me: grab it today and bring out your inner naughty 1920s girl!

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#oneaday Day 277: Pretending to have a Mega CD

My Mega Everdrive Pro arrived today. For the unfamiliar, this is a flashcart for the Sega Mega Drive that supports Mega Drive, Master System, and perhaps most intriguingly, Mega CD games. More on that in a moment.

I haven't spent much time with it as yet, as I was working, then I had to make dinner, then eat dinner, then I needed a poo and now here I am, responsibly writing this post before I go off and do something "fun". (Not that this isn't fun, but this is a self-imposed obligation, whereas what I intend to do next is pure recreation.) I loaded up an SD card with everything I wanted to put on it earlier, fired it up briefly and checked it was working, and all seemed in order (aside from a bit of rolling interference on my screen that the Internet tells me is the fault of a crappy aftermarket power supply for the Mega Drive, so I'm replacing that soon). But aside from that, it's up there waiting for me right now.

Obviously a big part of the appeal here is easy access to both Mega Drive and Master System games (for the unfamiliar, the Mega Drive actually contains most of the necessary guts to run Master System games pretty much natively) but one thing I'm particularly intrigued to explore is Mega CD compatibility. Or, more accurately, Mega CD hardware emulation. The Mega Everdrive Pro features some FPGA shenanigans that I don't really understand the workings of, and the upshot of it is that you can make it convince your Mega Drive that you have a Mega CD connected, even if you have nothing of the sort plugged in. (You cannot do the same with the 32X; you still need a real 32X if you want to go down that road.)

I've always been curious about the Mega CD, because it's one of a few consoles from the era that I had absolutely no contact with whatsoever. I had friends with Mega Drives and my brother often brought one home when he came to visit but I didn't know anyone with a Mega CD. I remember reading articles about the games on Mega CD in the magazine my brother was working on at the time (Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, if you were curious) and thinking they sounded really cool, but I have never gotten around to exploring that library at all… yet, anyway.

Of course, retrospectively we all know that the Mega CD wasn't a particularly successful add-on, and there aren't a ton of Mega CD games that are particularly worth playing. But there are a few, and I'm excited to try them. (I'm excited to try some of the "bad" ones too, just to understand the platform a bit better!)

With the addition of this to my collection, I now have Super NES, Mega Drive/Master System (outside of the few incompatible games) and N64 all hooked up and ready to play pretty much anything I would care to throw at them. Just the thing for when I'm in the mood for something short and sweet, like I talked about the other day. And like I'm feeling right now.

So I think I can't put it off any longer. It's time to go get Blast Processed. With Compact Disk power!

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#oneaday Day 276: Writer's Block, Occurrence #976,425

I've been pootling through the "Random Post" option at the top of this blog for the last half an hour, trying to think of something to write about, and nothing has been particularly forthcoming, so I'm just going to do what I usually do in this situation, which is to start typing and just see where things go from there. Expect stream of consciousness, and nothing of any real consequence.

I have the farts this evening. I don't think I've eaten anything particularly fartworthy, but I am cracking off some rippers. I had a bit of a stomachache last night, so perhaps it's a remnant of that. It doesn't really matter. All that does matter is that I am trouser-trumpeting like a good'un, and I haven't even shat myself. Winner. Nothing worse than following through on a fart, which is something I have, to my knowledge, only done once, and in my defence I was already quite ill with something else at the time. (It was not, before you ask, being intoxicated in any way.)

I've spent much of this evening chasing down additional endings in Tokyo Dark: Remembrance, which I've been playing on Switch. This is an adventure game that was recommended to me a while back, and happened to come up as a recommendation just as a limited-press physical release became available, so I snapped it up. Hearing that it was on the short side, I figured it would be an ideal game to squeeze into this gap between finishing Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles X arriving, and indeed it has been. I'll write in more detail about it on MoeGamer at some point in the next few days, but suffice to say for now that it's an interesting blend of detective work, a touch of yakuza shenanigans, and some Shinto-inspired ghost stories. Good times.

I reckon next up I'm probably going to work on finishing Soul Blazer on SNES. I'm into the fourth main chapter of that now — I believe there are seven, but I could be wrong — and have been really enjoying it. There's something about the tone of the whole thing that I really like; doubtless it's partly down to the relative limitations placed on the text (and the localisation) due to the platform it's on, but it has a strangely… earnest tone to its dialogue that I am finding rather compelling. Again, probably more about that on MoeGamer at some point in the near future.

More farts. And I've left this a bit too late to write anything of any real substance, so I think I'm going to go and have a poo (just in case, you know) then go to bed. Tomorrow is a new day that… will be much like this one. And now the robot vacuum has started up, so it's definitely time to go to bed. Good night!

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#oneaday Day 275: The quantum shift in engagement with games

I have been rewatching a lot of some of my favourite YouTube videos recently: the back catalogue of Mark "Classic Game Room" Bussler, who was a big inspiration to me back when I started doing YouTube things. Throughout his various runs of his show Classic Game Room, Mark primarily focused on what we today describe as "retro games" — meaning, in his instance, pretty much anything from PS2 backwards, though primarily focusing on 8-bit and 16-bit consoles such as the NES, SNES and Mega Drive.

One thing that strikes me any time I either go back and explore games from this era either by myself or when I do it vicariously through a show like Classic Game Room is that the way we engage with video games has fundamentally changed at some point. I don't mean the way we interact with them — though control schemes have, of course, become more refined as time has gone on and "best practice" has become established — but rather what we consider to be a "worthwhile" experience.

For many years, the majority of my gaming has focused on long-form games like role-playing games and visual novels. This started back in the PlayStation era, where I discovered Final Fantasy VII for the first time and promptly started devouring pretty much every RPG I could get my hands on. But it wasn't always that way; when I think back to the time I spent playing games on the Atari 8-bit, Atari ST and Super NES, the games were (typically by necessity, as a result of their technology) more short-form, immediate experiences. And, back then, I derived just as much value from those as I did the longer-form stuff I started playing with the PlayStation.

Okay, I do recall my sessions on the Atari 8-bit often involving booting up one game, playing for a bit, then loading something else up, playing that for a bit and so on — like most early home computer owners, we had a big disk box full of pirated games, so I wasn't exactly short on choices — but I also feel like it was a lot easier to become engaged and invested in something simpler, shorter and less narrative-focused. I'd spend a lot of time playing Super Mario World, Starwing and SimCity on my SNES, for example; while one might argue both Super Mario World and SimCity are each in their way "long form" games of a sort, they're a different breed to your average RPG, and neither focus on an unfolding story; they use nothing but their mechanics to keep you engaged, and SimCity in particular flat-out just doesn't have an end.

These days, I feel like I'm easily falling into… I don't know if I want to call it a "trap" as such, so let's call it a "routine" instead… where I tend to focus on one "big" game at a time, and that "big" game is something with a lengthy storyline. Over the last couple of months, I spent 120 hours playing through Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition and its expansion Future Connected, for example. And that's the main thing I played during that period; I had the odd diversion for a few bits and bobs along the way, but for the most part, I was focused on that one game.

There's value in those shorter games, though, and finally fixing up my retro consoles with Everdrive units and equivalents (as well as all the stuff I work on for the day job with Evercade) is really helping me rediscover that, as there's a definite magic to playing on the classic hardware that emulation still just doesn't quite capture perfectly. (Mostly the scrolling. Real hardware scrolling is flawless; emulation still has just enough tiny hiccups, even on a powerful system, to remind you that it's not quite perfect.)

Beetle Adventure Racing on N64 was a real pleasure to finally explore, as previously discussed, and I've always had a very soft spot for Tetrisphere. I had a pretty limited library of SNES games back in the day — Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, Super Mario Kart, Starwing, SimCity and Zelda — so there's a lot to discover on SNES. And when my Mega Everdrive Pro arrives for the Mega Drive hopefully later this week there's a whole other library of 16-bit goodness to play with, too.

The danger, of course, is giving yourself too much choice, which can lead to the dreaded Analysis Paralysis, which in turn leads to enjoying nothing at all. But I've got a nice expanse of time between having finished Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition and Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition coming out later this month. So I intend to make good use of that time to explore some short-form fun.

And finish Soul Blazer. I'm already halfway through that, and that's sort of a Big Game, but also kind of not. I'm enjoying it a lot, either way, so I will probably try and bash that out before Xenoblade X day on the 20th. That and I finished Tokyo Dark: Remembrance today, too. I'm doing well!

Anyway, for now, bed. Perhaps with a little bit of 16-bit action before that…

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#oneaday Day 274: You should have a blog. And you should read more blogs. And you should share your blogs with me

Time moves on, and things change. I didn't really notice the gradual disintegration of the "blogosphere" because it was just that — gradual. But with social media taking its place as many folks' primary means of self-expression online, it's hard to deny that, now, the age of the personal blog would, at first glance, appear to be over.

I look at my WordPress reader and it's a bit sad; folks that I used to enjoy reading the posts of on a near-daily basis haven't updated for a year or more, and since their blog was the primary means through which I kept up with them, I don't know what they're up to now, or even if they're okay.

Sure, there are a few still happily going about their business — particular shoutouts to Infernal Monkey's thoroughly NSFW but hilarious wanking blog, Kresnik258gaming's retro Sony games site and Ernst Krogtoft's excellent in-depth explorations of retro gaming for just a few sites I've been following for years that are still actively updating at least semi-regularly — but my Reader is no longer the active community hub that it once was.

I miss seeing folks like Irina of I Drink and Watch Anime, Leth of Lethargic Ramblings (which appears to no longer be online) and the whole #oneaday crew; various others that I once knew by name and considered friends, but who, in many cases, appear to have vanished into the ether. That's their choice, of course, and I don't blame them for wanting to just quietly retreat with the way the Internet is these days, but I still miss them.

Going along with that is the fact that people just don't seem to be reading blogs any more. This place used to get a few hundred views a day, which is obviously peanuts in the grand scheme of the Internet, but it always felt like a noteworthy number of people who were interested in the daily life of a relative nobody like me, particularly when I was never making a particular effort to SEO optimise this place or write about trending topics.

D'you wanna know how many page views I had yesterday? Five. This isn't really a complaint, because the only reason I'm writing here is more as a journalling exercise than anything else, and that's how it's always been — but those figures are a stark contrast from when I started daily posts first time around here, when #oneaday was a community effort.

And the more I think about this, the more I wonder why this has happened. Sure, social media is good for a quick dopamine hit if a post does numbers, but you are, by design, limited in what you can say — and the sites that are still the biggest in the world despite both having gone down the right-wing toilet are both algorithmically driven to an abusive degree, making it near-impossible to actually see something you might be interested in rather than something which is "suggested".

Blogs, meanwhile, are completely freeform. There's no algorithm at play. You follow a person's blog, you get that person's blog. When they update that blog, you get that post. When you want to respond to what they said, you can comment right on that post, assuming they've left comments turned on. Over time, you can really get to know the person who owns that blog, even if, in the case of larger sites, you never become "friends" with them as such.

But even then, there's a personal touch that social media simply doesn't match. I remember years back I wrote a post about how inspirational I found Allie Brosh's hilarious (and, at the time, enormously popular) Hyperbole and a Half blog, and the lady herself came and commented on my blog to say thank you.

That was amazing to me at the time, but nowadays, I suspect that sadly, relatively few people know who Allie Brosh is; her one lasting legacy on the Internet is the "[x] all the things!" meme, which began its life in an innocuous post from 2010 about how hard it was to be a functional adult with depression and ADHD, but which I suspect is not known by a lot of people using the funny cartoon of the gremlin with the broom to make some sort of "hilarious" point online.

One strange development I've witnessed recently is that blogs have sort of come back, except folks don't call them "blogs" any more. They call them "newsletters", based on the assumption that most folks will subscribe to them via email. And while there are some excellent examples of those — my favourite is Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At?, which is a sole voice of sanity in a tech world that seems to be going increasingly insane — I kind of don't like the name change. "Newsletter" implies something of some importance; something that you follow in order to keep up with important things. And as such, it feels kind of silly to sign up for a "newsletter" from some random person online that you don't know. Newsletters are things you get from the local church, or that one place you bought PC parts from that one time, or a software company you like. They're something that organisations send out, not people.

And I think it's important to make that distinction. Because if you're positioning your work as a "newsletter", you're automatically placing a certain amount of pressure on yourself to make everything you write "newsworthy". Your newsletter needs to be about something, and you need to stick to that subject, lest you lose those all important subscribers and Number No Longer Go Up.

A blog, meanwhile, is just a public diary. Sure, it can be more than that, and yes, of course you can specialise its topic — that's what I've done with my other site MoeGamer — but at its heart, it's a public diary: you write something, you date-stamp it, you post it out into the void. That thing you write doesn't have to be important, it doesn't have to be thought-provoking, it doesn't have to be funny, it doesn't have to be anything. But the one thing it will always be is personal. Anyone reading it is getting a glimpse into your mind, your personality, your soul.

Newsletters are not replacements for blogs. Social media is not a replacement for blogs. And fucking Discord absolutely is definitely not a replacement for blogs.

I miss your blogs. And you're missing out by not reading more blogs. So if you have a blog — or indeed if you are, for some inexplicable reason, inspired to start one after everything I've written above — please let me know. I'll happily add it to my subscriptions. Because heaven knows social media hasn't been fun for a long time, and while Bluesky is definitely an improvement over Twitter for the most part, it still lacks the magic that blogs once had.

So c'mon, let's hear it. Let's build up a kickass blogroll and party like it's 15 years ago.

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#oneaday Day 273: On the Spectrum

One of the things I've been keen to do with my YouTube channel for a while is branch out into areas that are less familiar to me. I've done a lot of championing Atari stuff, and while I don't see that going away any time soon, the fact it's so easy to play with all manner of different platforms today through emulation and suchlike means that I really don't have an excuse for not educating myself on things like the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga libraries. (Especially since I have modern recreations of all of them!)

I've already covered a couple of Spectrum games previously on my channel, but the one I published today is one that I had been oddly worried about spending some time with. Here's the video if you fancy following my journey:

Ant Attack is an all-time classic for the Spectrum, frequently appearing in "Best of Spectrum" lists and suchlike. But Lordy is it hard to get started with. Keyboard controls which were clearly designed by a madman. Mechanics that are baffling and unpredictable. An engine that often struggles to keep up with what you're doing. I honestly would not blame anyone for trying it out for five minutes, going "fuck this" and booting up a NES emulator to play Super Mario Bros. 3 for the umpteenth time.

I've never been about that on my channel, though. My philosophy is always to "find the fun" — an idea that, if I remember rightly, I borrowed from Mark "Classic Game Room" Bussler, an influential early gaming YouTuber who, among others, was a big inspiration on me getting into YouTube in the first place.

Finding the fun isn't always easy, but I always make a point of giving a game a bit more of a chance than most people might. I'm aware that in a lot of cases, old games are all well and good if you grew up with them, but if they're brand new to you, they can take a bit of effort before they show their true charms. And, indeed, this is very much the case with Ant Attack.

My first couple of attempts went badly. I didn't know what I was doing wrong, it was frustrating and I was a little tempted to give up. But I didn't; I kept going, I kept exploring, I kept an open mind. And while I won't say I came away from the game loving it, I can at least say with honestly that I appreciate and quite like it now.

Possibly more than any other vaguely popular retro platform, I think the Spectrum library rewards this kind of persistence. If the Spectrum was all you had growing up, doubtless you learned to live with QAOP control schemes and all the other little idiosyncrasies the system had to offer — but I bet even for some folks who were hardcore Speccy fans back in the day, it's difficult to go back to some of these games. It's even harder if you have no nostalgia for these games; you're coming at them blind from a modern perspective, and so there are a lot of things "against" the experience from the outset: garish colours, the notorious "colour clash", screechy beeper music, sluggish controls and game design from an era where people hadn't quite figured out "good" game design yet.

Honestly, though, for me, all that is what makes it so interesting. The early days of computer games were a wild and experimental time, and no, not everything worked. But you have to make mistakes in order to make progress, and the popularity of the Spectrum means that it was absolutely instrumental in shaping modern game development for a significant portion of the world.

That's why I stuck with Ant Attack for nearly an hour. I wanted to "get" it. And, by the end, I think I did. And I'm looking forward to exploring other parts of the system's library over the long term.

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#oneaday Day 272: A productive day!

One of the troubles I am sure anyone with any sort of "online presence" will be familiar with is the feeling that you "should" be doing something "productive" with any free time you happen to have. Such is the case with me; I've been on holiday all week, and I've had the lingering sensation that I should make some videos for my YouTube channel, since it's something I enjoy doing, and having a bunch of free time available is, surely, the ideal time to do such a thing.

And yet. And yet. There's always a part of your brain at times like this that says "no, fuck that, you booked time off so you don't have to work, so just relax and enjoy yourself". Of course, making YouTube videos is a relaxing and enjoyable activity, but it also requires effort, so you can see the quandary.

Anyway, I made some time to get some stuff done today. I'd already scripted the intro sections for several vids yesterday, so all I had to do was set aside a few hours to record the intros and gameplay sections, and there we were.

I'd been meaning to do several of these videos for a while, but had put up a bit of a mental block towards a couple of them, because they involved games and a platform that are unfamiliar to me: specifically, two Spectrum games that had the potential to be rather challenging to cover.

And they were challenging to cover, but I found a solution. Mostly dogged determination, to be honest, though in the case of one of them, copious use of save states and rewind functions. And the result is, I hope, some videos where I demonstrate how a lot of Spectrum games can be something of a "slow burn", particularly if you didn't grow up with them, but if you are willing to put in the time and effort, there are potentially rewarding experiences that await you.

All in all, I got five videos done altogether today: three Spectrum vids and two Atari games as a palate-cleanser. Want specifics? Oh, all right then; on the Spectrum front, the two I was worried about were Ant Attack and Army Moves, the latter of which is where the majority of the save state/rewind "cheating" took place, because fuck that game's first four levels, plus Auf Wiedersehen Monty, which I knew probably wouldn't be an issue and, sure enough, wasn't. The two Atari games were Lode Runner's Rescue (which is a really interesting game I'd never heard of until very recently!) and Frogger II (which I just like).

That's pretty danged productive, so I should be pleased with myself. So I am! I'm looking forward to sharing these videos with you, as I think they're all a lot of fun. Watch out for them over the course of the next couple of weeks.

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#oneaday Day 271: Caught on camera

The other day, I was caught on camera doing something I shouldn't have. Nothing serious, I might add, but the whole event concluded in a rather more positive way than I have typically come to expect from situations like this.

Here in Southampton, there's an area known as Portswood which has a bunch of little shops, a supermarket that has changed hands/brands several times (I think it's currently a Waitrose, which seems remarkably out of keeping with how the area is primarily students) and is one of the main routes from the outskirts of town (where the university is) to the town centre.

At least it was. At some point in the last six months, they have changed the main bit of Portswood into an area that only buses, taxis and "authorised vehicles" can go into, and it's camera-protected.

The other day, I was giving my wife a lift to the hospital (nothing to worry about, just a routine test) and, on the way back, I drove through this area, completely missing the signs indicating that I'm not actually allowed to drive through there any more. I didn't notice until my second journey through, when I was picking my wife up. And my heart sank; I knew that I'd gone through when I really shouldn't have, and that it was my own fault I hadn't seen the actually quite clear and prominent signage. There was no defending this in the same way you can get out of parking charge notices on private land (which is something I have successfully done in the past).

So I braced myself for a fine or whatever punishment was coming my way. Nothing happened for a few days, so I started to wonder if the "camera" signs on the area were just a deterrent rather than, you know, telling the truth.

Today, I got a letter. I saw it was from "Southampton Parking Services" on the return address, and I thought this is it, I'm going to be hit with a fine, or points on my license, or something.

But no!

I was very surprised to discover that the letter was just a "warning", telling me that I had indeed broken the rules, but that because it was less than six months since these new measures had been put in place, I wouldn't be fined or punished in any other way, so long as I didn't do it again.

I'm not accustomed to local councils or those in charge of traffic measures being so reasonable, but I assume there's some sort of legal situation in place that requires them to implement a "grace period" like this when they make some sort of drastic change to the traffic restrictions in an area. After all, I doubt I'm the only one who made an honest mistake and passed through, completely oblivious to the signs because I had no reason to be looking out for anything different to how things were the last time I'd driven through there. And while if they fined everyone who passed through when they weren't supposed to I'm sure they would make absolute bank, I suspect they don't want to be dealing with the inevitable court cases and legal wrangling that would result.

Whatever the reason for it, I'm grateful for it; it means that I avoided a £70 fine. I would have gladly paid the fine if I had been required to, since I will hold my hands up and say the situation was my own fault for not paying enough attention. But I am happy to have been let off with a warning and no further consequences. And I'm pretty certain I won't accidentally make the same mistake again!

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