I don't blame anyone for being a misanthrope in this day and age.

I've had a horrible week. I'm not going to talk about the details of it for a variety of reasons, but I did want to talk about the way I'm feeling right now, and how it's a sad symptom of quite a few things.

A few years back — make that more like a decade or so at this point, I guess — I was someone who very much wanted to believe in my fellow man. I wanted to assume the best intentions, I didn't want to believe that people could be awful to one another more often than not, and I certainly didn't like seeing entire groups thrown under the bus based on their affiliation towards (or against) something that had little to do with their actual personality.

To give some specific examples: back in the early 2010s, when games journalists were starting to have harsh words to say towards video game enthusiasts when they complained about Mass Effect 3's disappointing ending, I had rather mixed feelings about the whole thing.

On the one hand, I understood why many folks found the way the trilogy wrapped up to be disappointing; on the other, I felt the only people who really had any say in how it concluded were the people who actually made it. And on the third mutant hand, I really wasn't happy with the way games journalists and press outlets seemingly gleefully jumped at the opportunity to attack the very audience they were supposed to be serving.

This may sound like fence-sitting, and perhaps it is, but I felt that everyone had valid points, and all of them were worth hearing out. I honestly believed that people could discuss something like this in good faith and not resort to attacking one another. To return to my original point: I wanted to believe in my fellow man, and that we could all reach an understanding.

Fast forward a couple of years from that and we have the notorious "Gamergate" controversy. Again, I'm not ashamed to say I had mixed feelings about the whole situation. Without a doubt, there were people who were using the background of what had been happening as an excuse to harass people — but to my eyes, there was an equal if not greater number of people who had genuine, worthwhile things that they wanted to say, and they wanted to be heard.

To see the entire group who gathered under that particular banner tarnished with the same "harassing women and minorities" brush was… disappointing, particularly when I saw this attitude from people I knew personally. Again, I'll reiterate: I wanted to see the best in my fellow man, and I honestly wanted to believe that the people who felt passionately enough about a particular issue to effectively become "activists" in an online sense were doing so for a good cause.

At the same time, I'll also add that I never planted my own flag beneath the Gamergate banner, because I also saw that it was very much on to a losing battle in terms of public perception. Regardless of how many people did have legitimate complaints, and the few good things that did come out of the movement, that scarlet letter of "harassing women and minorities" was always going to be there for anyone even tangentially involved.

Unfortunately, most of you probably know how these situations ended up.

In more recent years, I've seen countless more incidents that have played out exactly like the Mass Effect 3 controversy and Gamergate, and with every incident, I feel like I've lost a bit of that faith in my fellow man — to such an extent that now, I have precisely none of it left.

I have no confidence that anyone attempting to make a seemingly "passionate" argument is doing so for the greater good or for altruistic reasons. Because very few people these days show their true faces online. Very few people actually stand up for what they believe in; instead, they just jump on whatever the trending topic of the hour is and proceed to harass anyone who is seen as being "in the wrong" for whatever reason.

And it is harassment. This is another thing that I didn't want to believe while I still had some remaining faith in my fellow man.

I used to believe that people wouldn't be so awful as to hound others over a single issue, to such an extent that it has a severe impact on their own feelings of safety and wellbeing. I used to believe that people would say their piece and then give their "opponent" the opportunity to make a move, to make things right, or to at the very least explain themselves.

After multiple instances over the course of the last decade where I've seen that this emphatically isn't the case — both involving me and incidents that I've just observed from outside — my only possible conclusion is simple. I was wrong to have faith in my fellow man. I was wrong to ever believe that people can be "good" to one another. I was wrong to believe that we can ever resolve our differences like decent… well, like decent human beings.

The default state for people to interact with one another these days, both on and offline, is aggressive, hostile and confrontational. The other person is always in the wrong, and it always has to be a fight. And you know what? I'm really tired.

I don't want to fight. Ever. I'm not one of those people who is "up for a good argument", and I never have been. I used to cry more than my parents when they had perfectly normal married couple arguments when I was a kid. If someone's rude to me, I end up thinking about it for the rest of the day (and sometimes longer) to such a degree that it ruins anything else I had to do. And, as someone who is already anxious about social interactions at the best of times, I never walk into a situation thinking "I'm going to start some shit".

Apparently this is no longer a "normal" way to be, however. And thus I cannot help but just sit here and be disappointed in that fellow man I once believed so vehemently in. Is it really any wonder I have so much hesitance in meeting new people when my experiences would seem to indicate that there's at least an 80% probability any new person I meet will end up being a complete arsehole that I'll never be able to get rid of as they repeatedly harass me over some stupid shit like what brand of underpants I wear?

The one positive, I guess, is that this does at least make me appreciate the few good people I do still have in my life; the ones I know I can genuinely rely on, and who rather wisely have always managed to remain high above this stupid shit. So if you're one of those people, and if you're reading this it's likely that you are, thanks. Please don't change.

The Age of Loneliness.

I'm having one of those evenings where I'm feeling a tad maudlin for a variety of reasons, but essentially it all boils down to one central issue: the fact that today, we live in a world that is more "connected" than it has ever been, and yet also where it is highly likely that any one given individual will be suffering from a crippling sense of loneliness and isolation.

This has affected me to various degrees over the years. As someone on the spectrum and with social anxiety issues, there are most definitely times where I very much want to be by myself. I'd go so far as to say that I prefer the vast majority of my time to be spent by myself — or at least, in the company of others who are happy to get on with their own thing while I also get on with mine. (My relationship with my wife very much falls into that category.)

However, I've found that as I've gotten older, I've started craving a certain level of… interaction. I don't think I'm necessarily craving something more than what I used to enjoy — rather, I simply think that the opportunities I once had to just hang out with people that I liked are no longer present, both offline and online.

For me, probably my golden age of being "sociable" was between the ages of 16 and 22 or so — to put it another way, from sixth form onwards through university. There, I found I had a good balance between what one might call a relatively "normal" social life — in that I had both time to myself and time with friends.

Better times, probably. I'm the second one in from the left. I fancied the girl who is sitting on me.

In retrospect, this period was almost certainly the time of my life at which I was my happiest, even if it was also the time where I first started feeling somewhat conscious of my own mental health and that something wasn't quite "right". I felt I had people who liked me, who appreciated me for who I was, and who supported me when I needed it. I had people that I simply enjoyed spending time with, and that I wanted to know more about. I even fell in love once or twice, though I have to admit that none of those particular situations quite ended up the way I perhaps would have hoped.

But it didn't matter, because everything else was just… pleasant. It was good to see people. It was good to talk to them, share private jokes and just enjoy their company. It was sometimes difficult for me to take that step forward into a friendship group rather than simply observing from the periphery — but on those occasions I summoned up the courage and mental fortitude to do so, I never regretted it. (Well, except perhaps once.)

These days, though? There are days where it feels like I have no-one. I know that's not true — I'm fortunate enough to have a very supportive family and a wife who is inordinately patient with my numerous shortcomings as a human being, and there are friends I have where all it takes is a single message to get some sort of supportive acknowledgement back in response — but even so, there are days where it feels like that.

Days where I feel like people might just forget about my existence if I didn't prod them on WhatsApp or Discord every now and then. Days where I miss the ability to speak to them via some means other than ad-infested social media, which has become increasingly terrible for simple conversation as the years have advanced. Days where I miss having the equivalent of bundling around a friend's after lectures have finished, playing N64 games and drinking made-up cocktails until the small hours. And days where I miss people having conversations via means other that boring memes and GIFs. You know, with words and stuff.

I am exceedingly lonely, and what makes this feel all the more painful at times is that the numerous means I've tried to make myself "noticeable" in some way online all feel like they've failed in one way or another.

I've made a point of celebrating the things I love online in various ways — both written and through video — over the course of the last few years, in the hope that it might draw people with similar interests to me, or help the people I care about the most to understand me a bit better. But it often feels like hardly anyone gives a shit. In fact, it often feels like it's the absolute hardest to get the people supposedly closest to me to give a shit.

I don't blame anyone for this. Today's world makes ridiculous demands on our time and attention span, and when push comes to shove, most folks will end up choosing some form of professionally created "content" over something that some dude they know decided to make.

But it is getting to a point where I'm feeling both exhausted and out of ideas. And, to make matters worse, as my mind and general enthusiasm for existence has declined, so too has my body. The COVID years in particular knocked me about a lot, leaving me today a disgusting fat lump of a man who is in near-constant mild but nonetheless annoying and frustrating pain, finds it difficult to do pretty much anything relatively normal and is increasingly hesitant about going outside because he's so disgusted with the way he looks and feels all the time.

Change starts from within and all that. But when you're feeling crippling loneliness, that desire to change and improve things for yourself — because without a doubt, improving things just for myself would be a benefit — is constantly held back by that big, hanging question: "what's the point?"

So anyway! That's what I'm feeling this Sunday evening! Hope you're having a good one!

EDIT: Apparently I wrote a post with this exact same title in 2014. Good to know that things have improved.

My new TV show obsession is Inside No. 9.

After greatly enjoying The Cleaner — which, I'm pleased to say, I continued to really like after the first few episodes I wrote about in the post linked — I decided that I should really try and wean myself off mindless stupid YouTube videos and watch some more things with a bit of substance to them.

So I decided to take a look at Inside No. 9, which is a show I'd seen a number of people talking about, but knew absolutely nothing about. For some reason, I'd developed the assumption that it was something to do with politics (I think I'd made the unprompted mental leap from "No. 9" to "10 Downing Street" or something) and thus hadn't really paid it much mind.

But then I saw this news story shared by someone I know. (Caution: The Mirror. Also spoilers.) If that was the kind of show we were actually dealing with… then I was absolutely, completely on board. I love this kind of gleefully experimental, darkly humorous stuff, and it seems like I've missed out on rather a lot of Inside No. 9 since it first aired in 2014.

I'm going to try not to talk too much about specifics of the show in this post, because it really is one of those series where the less you know what to expect going in, the more effective it is at what it does. So for now I'll simply say that it is the work of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, two members of the League of Gentlemen, and it is some absolutely masterful television.

And I'll leave that there for those who are sufficiently intrigued to check it out for themselves. It's a BBC show, so you can watch it on iPlayer (or, presumably, BritBox in the States) and I think it has also had physical releases. Based on the three episodes I have watched so far, I have nothing but the highest praise for it, and highly recommend it.

For those who want to know a bit more and aren't too concerned about mild spoilers (which I'm still going to try and keep to a minimum), I'm going to drop in a "read more" tag here, and you can join me after the jump to find out a little more if you see fit.

Continue reading →

I finally nuked my Twitter account completely.

There are a few main reasons for this, and I'd like to talk about them a bit today.

Firstly, Elon Musk's idiotic changes to the terms of the Twitter API, which has priced literally everyone out of being able to use it, have made the platform next to useless as a means of automatically sharing your work to an audience that supposedly signed up to follow your updates. It's both hilarious and tragic to see company after company sharing news posts that effectively say "lol, fuck Twitter".

Secondly, my previous justification of keeping my Twitter account around for the sake of friends and contacts just doesn't really feel like it's… justification any more. The friends in question rarely bother to get in contact, and there are other means for professional contacts to get in touch.

Thirdly, I'm just fucking sick of the most likely response you get to posting literally anything on there being vitriol and hate.

On the latter point, I recently posted an article about my negative experiences trying Ubisoft's Riders Republic via PlayStation Plus. The gist of the article, if you're one of those Internet denizens whose attention span has been shot too much to bother clicking on a link, was that the game was designed in such a way that it is genuinely insulting to the intelligence of anyone over the age of about 12. It doesn't let you just play; instead, you're bombarded with hours of mandatory tutorials and obnoxious zoomer slang, and this was enough to make me not even want to bother seeing if the game "got good" later.

I think this is something worth talking about, because it's the first time that I, as a 42 year old video game enthusiast who has been involved in the medium since the Atari days, felt completely alienated by a brand new, supposedly mainstream game. So I talked about it. Then I shared that article on Twitter.

One of the first responses I got was from someone who yelled at me, based entirely on the assumption that I'd said the exact opposite to what I'd actually written in the article. He'd obviously read the headline, made an assumption and then decided to shoot his dribbling, zit-encrusted mouth off at me, despite it taking nothing more than a single click and a minute or two of reading for anyone to see that he was talking complete horseshit. But you can bet anyone who "liked" his dumbshit comment wouldn't go and check whether or not he was right.

I spent a few hours last night and this morning feeling stressed and anxious about this. But then it just sort of dawned on me: fuck it. Why the fuck should I care what some obnoxious cunt on the Internet thinks? Why the fuck should I let one idiot have such power over my mental wellbeing, based entirely on the fact he's too much of a lazy shit to actually read something I wrote?

And the answer to that is that I shouldn't care; I shouldn't let one idiot do that. And since Twitter is the primary means of allowing idiots to do that, it needs to go. Completely. So it has.

On a related note, this news isn't finalised or official as yet, but it's pretty much confirmed that as of the beginning of July, I will be getting out of the professional "content creation" (ugh) game completely.

I won't go into details for now because things are still being hammered out, but suffice to say for now that it's nothing anyone needs to worry about — I'm simply changing my professional role in such a way that it means I can focus my attention entirely on the Evercade project, which I'm incredibly passionate about and is something where I feel genuinely valued by both my colleagues and by my "audience", such as they are.

I'm both happy and sad about this. I'm happy because it means that I can focus my professional life on something that I love, and because it means my free time will genuinely, completely be my own again. No more will I find myself "having" to play something for the sake of timely coverage; instead, I can just enjoy things at my own pace, and I'm really looking forward to that.

I'm sad, however, because I spent so much of my early life desperately wanting to follow in my brother's footsteps and be part of the games press — and yet by the time I actually managed to get there, it had changed irreversibly from what it used to be. And it only got worse from there.

Again, I won't go into details for now, as that's something to talk about in more detail once everything here has been finalised. But I'll say again, it's nothing to worry about — I'm proud of what I've worked on to date, will continue to work on things like this until the beginning of July, and this change is my decision rather than anyone else's.

I'm just tired. So very tired of "content creation" being such a completely thankless task. The modern Internet has set up a completely adversarial relationship between writers and their audiences, exemplified by the Twitter exchange I described above, and that is emphatically not why I got into this.

I got into writing about games because I love them. I got into games writing because I think they're culturally important. I got into games writing because I think despite that cultural importance, they're not being written about and analysed in anywhere near the depth they deserve.

And I got into games writing because while the big, dumb, obnoxious games like the aforementioned Riders Republic get to ride the wave of commercial success regardless of how shit they are, there are myriad games released literally every day that run the risk of languishing in obscurity without people telling others about them.

The trouble is, I've discovered over the last decade and a half or so, is that no-one really seems to actually care. Online, "content" is piss in the wind. It's only relevant for the day it's posted — if you're lucky enough to get anyone to notice it in the first place — and it's fucking impossible to get people to give a shit about something after the fact, unless, as I've seen on MoeGamer, you're literally the only person to have written something meaningful on a particular topic. (In my case, sex sim Honey Select Unlimited.)

Google is flooded by manipulative, exploitative, SEO-optimised sites posting vacuous individual "guide" articles for things they don't care about for no other reason than it brings in the clicks. And no-one at any point in the process gives a shit; the average Internet user doesn't have enough in the way of critical thinking skills to see the cynical way all this has been set up, and the writers at the sites themselves don't give a toss as long as the numbers go up.

All of this is the fault of everyone who has normalised the idea of "consuming content" rather than "reading interesting articles" and the like. You, collectively, have ruined both the games press specifically, and the broader Internet in general.

It's demoralising and infuriating, and if you've been around all this for as long as I have, seeing the way things have been going, it should be no surprise that I very much feel like stepping down from it all.

And so that's what I'm doing. From hereon, my professional work will be in something that actually matters, that I care about — and that other people actually care about, too. I suspect I'll be a lot happier as a result, but I can't help but feel a bit bad about that dream young me once had, and how it was never really possible.

The Cat and the Human.

She had loved that cat. Adored her. At times I'd even joked that she loved her more than me. I knew that wasn't the case, of course, but it seemed like the feeling between her and the cat was mutual.

I didn't mind for the most part, of course. I loved the cat, too, and I always appreciated any time she came and sat in the chair in my office while I was working. I knew that her priority was sitting somewhere comfortable and warm rather than necessarily enjoying my company, but it was nice to feel like she wanted to be in the same room as me now and again.

Now her real master was gone, though, and she was left with just me, forever second-best. I could see the sadness in her eyes. I could see it in the dejected-looking way that she sat on her cat tree. I could see it in the way that she just didn't seem to have the energy she once did.

The cat's obvious sadness made me feel miserable, too. It was an uncomfortable reminder of past times of joy, never to be repeated. Once we had been a family of sorts, always together, always sharing in the wonders of life. Now we were just a man and his cat.

And yet, at some point, I don't know when… we bonded more than we ever had done. Our shared grief brought us together. Just as I recognised how the cat was suffering from her absence, so too did the cat recognise that it had hit me hard, too. And slowly, little by little, completely wordlessly, our relationship began to change.

I remember the first night it happened. I was lying in the bed which now felt entirely too large for me, tossing and turning, struggling to get to sleep. Suddenly, I felt something; a weight on the bed. And I heard something: a soft purring. In the dark, I could just make out the shape of the cat. She had come to see me in the night; she never used to do this, usually preferring to sleep in her comfy cat bed downstairs in the living room.

But now she was here, purring softly in my ear. She headbutted my outstretched hand until I began to pet her, and she rubbed her face on my hand as I tickled her cheeks and chin.

Then, she sat down. It was a decisive move, a declaration. She managed to mould herself so that she fit perfectly into the curve of my arm that was extended across the empty half of the bed, and quickly curled up, ready to fall asleep. Her soft fur felt good against my arm, and I felt a sense of relaxation wash over me — a feeling that I hadn't really been able to enjoy for some time now.

From thereon, I had that feeling every night. Things were going to be all right, in their own strange way.

She loved me, too. This cat loved me. Perhaps it had taken our shared loss for her to really feel like she could show it, but I was left in no doubt whatsoever.

Neither of us wanted to be alone. And now, neither of us would be alone.

Please do not worry about me, everything is fine and this is not an autobiographical blog post! The above is a piece of creative writing following the prompt "A human and a cat who come to some sort of mutual understanding."

Let's talk about something a bit more positive for once: I'm really enjoying Greg Davies' The Cleaner.

I'm aware I've posted a fair amount of negative complaining of late, and while I don't apologise for that — a lot of these things really need to be said, and by more people than just me — I don't just want to be whingeing all the time. So today I thought I'd write about something I like.

The Cleaner is a new-ish TV series written by and starring comedian Greg Davies, who is probably best known these days as the titular Taskmaster in the excellent "famous people make fools of themselves" programme of the same name. Davies has starred in a number of comedy-drama titles in recent years, however, and I've always liked seeing him do his thing.

I believe my first encounter with him was as Mr Gilbert from The Inbetweeners, where I very much enjoyed how much his character resembled my own head of Sixth Form, Mr Watts, in terms of overall attitude and general disdain for anyone under the age of 18. More recently, I enjoyed his semi-autobiographical series Man Down very much — though I know opinions are somewhat divided on that one, particularly with regard to Rik Mayall's role — and I believe that The Cleaner is his strongest series to date.

The show is apparently an adaptation of a German show known as Der Tatortreiniger, or simply Crime Scene Cleaner, but it's clear from the script that Davies has very much taken the concept and made it his own along the way. It features recognisable elements of both the whimsical, occasionally cynical humour and pathos that Davies excels at, and holds together as an extremely well-produced show.

In The Cleaner, Davies takes the role of Wicky, a crime scene cleaner who has to deal with the aftermath of various horrible things happening. Each episode primarily unfolds as a "two-hander" between Davies and someone who was affected by the crime in question; the context is that Davies has shown up to clean up the mess left behind by the crime after the police have finished their investigation, and there is inevitably someone hanging around or left behind, with varying degrees of relation to the incident.

Greg Davies and Helena Bonham Carter in episode 1 of The Cleaner

My favourite thing about the show so far, after seeing four episodes of it, is that each individual story has its own vibe to it, with Wicky remaining the one constant.

It's clear that Wicky is a man who enjoys his job — in the fourth episode, he reveals that it is because it allows him to get a taste of how other people live, if only for a moment, and to set things right for those who had to depart before their time — and is, at his core, quite an intelligent man.

At the same time, there's a certain degree of "salt of the earth" to him; he quite openly admits that "my job lets me buy everything I need and still have enough to get hungover every weekend", and there are often very minor threads running in the background of each episode about his love for curry night at the pub, his friends being sick in his shoes and suchlike.

It's his interactions with the various characters where the show really shines, though, and the way in which all of these characters are very different from one another.

David Mitchell and Greg Davies in episode 2 of The Cleaner

In the first episode, for example, Wicky is cleaning up after a wife murdered her husband in an extremely messy manner. Partway through the cleaning process, he is confronted with the wife in question (played by Helena Bonham Carter, who is still, it has to be said, exceedingly beautiful even when dressed down and covered in blood) and this leads to an extremely strained scenario in which he is very much aware that he is dealing with a murderer, but also finds himself forming something of a bond with her in the process.

In the second, meanwhile, David Mitchell does a wonderful job of portraying a tortured author whose grandmother has just been killed in a gas fire accident. Mitchell is almost certainly drawing on some of his own experience — or at least, that of the persona he perpetually puts across in public — to portray this writer as emotionally repressed to such a degree that he cried more over his cat running away than the gory, doubtless extremely painful death of his grandmother.

In the third, Wicky never gets to visit the crime scene at all, instead finding himself having to contend with the victim's neighbour (Ruth Madeley) while waiting for someone to actually let him in to the crime scene. With his "partner" in this episode being both vegan and disabled, Wicky finds himself constantly putting his foot in his mouth to an exceedingly cringeworthy degree — but again, he forms a bond of note with this young woman.

Stephanie Cole and Greg Davies in episode 4 of The Cleaner

And in the fourth, Wicky is called to a stately home in which an elderly woman (Stephanie Cole) interrupted a burglary attempt, which resulted in the death of the burglar by him falling down the stairs and breaking his neck. Cole's character gradually reveals herself to have many layers of unpleasantness to her, but Wicky is faced with a variety of dilemmas to contend with along the way as, again, he forms a temporary but surprisingly strong bond with her.

One of the things I've noticed about the show in general is how Wicky always "leaves something behind" as a result of his visits; he always makes a mark on that person's life in some form or another.

Sometimes, this is a positive thing, such as in the third episode, where he helps Madeley's character come to terms with how she is still in love with the man she abandoned for not respecting her veganism. At others, however, it is very much not a good thing, such as where he accidentally drops a signed Dylan Thomas book belonging to Mitchell's character into his bucket of water, thereby completely destroying the signature and personal message inside the front matter.

Greg Davies and Ruth Madeley in episode 3 of The Cleaner

After four episodes, I'm very much convinced that this is an excellent show, and I'm a little disappointed I didn't come across it sooner! But this is to be expected, as I tend not to follow what's on TV right now these days; I only stumbled across this as the result of a short clip the BBC posted on YouTube the other day, featuring a snippet from Mitchell's episode.

For everything I hate about short-form "content" and clip culture, and how it has collectively destroyed the attention spans of almost everyone, I have to at least be grateful for it in this instance, otherwise I might never have come across this genuinely excellent show!

You can watch The Cleaner on BBC iPlayer at the time of writing.

I'm completely burnt out with the intellectually, creatively and morally bankrupt world of clickbait.

Today's post is inspired by a few things. Firstly, the culture of mistrust I wrote about the other day. Secondly, a YouTuber that my wife Andie and I used to like resorting to "I MADE THE MOST VIRAL TIKTOK RECIPES!" format. (Andie doesn't have a problem with this. I emphatically do, as will become clear shortly.) And thirdly, some of the outright lies I've read online today while attempting to find a perfectly simple piece of information.

Let's address these one at a time, as each of them are symptomatic of something slightly different.

I Played 100 Days of Viral TikTok Recipes

As someone who does YouTube as a hobby, it's infuriating to see the supposed "professionals" fall into a rut of simply baiting The Algorithm with the exact same types of "content" all day, every day.

I Played 100 Days of [Game]. I Made Viral TikTok Recipes. This is the Worst [x] Ever. Thrifting with My Completely Charisma-Free Mom.

There's stuff on YouTube that I like and continue to watch. But this is the stuff that tends to languish in the wake of TOP CRINGE COMPILATIONS!! and FUNNIEST TIKTOKS I COULD FIND!! And this pisses me off. Because it demonstrates a complete and utter lack of creativity.

Yes, one could argue that there's at least some creativity at play in editing these videos and picking the material to use in them — but even then, they're incredibly predictable, regardless of who they are. You can expect to hear the Metal Gear alert noise, Kevin MacLeod's Local Forecast, that "anime oooooh" noise in a significant proportion of popular videos out there, and you'll see all the same visual tricks, too — jump cuts, crash zooms with a red tint on the screen and heavy screen shake, "A Few Moments Later" SpongeBob memes.

It's infuriating. Like, it makes me genuinely angry. I know it shouldn't. I know it's dumb to get angry at people following trends. But it really does make me legitimately furious.

Why? Because I know there are lots of people working their arses off to make quality YouTube videos (note: not "content") and getting very little reward, relatively speaking for doing so. Instead, the endless assembly line of identikit Content continues to churn, cluttering up everyone's YouTube feeds with worthless garbage that provides precisely 0% more cultural enrichment value than simply staring at the wall for 12 minutes.

It particularly sucks to see video makers I used to like resort to this sort of thing — but I guess if you're making a job out of it, it becomes an unfortunate necessity after a while. For every viewer like me who unsubscribes from a channel once it becomes a clickbait factory, it seems at least a hundred more take my place. So there's zero incentive to change.

The PS5 Pro's release date has NOT been "revealed"

Earlier today, Andie and I were talking about how long various consoles were on the market, and as part of this discussion we looked up the release dates of the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, pondering if and when a PS6 might ever be a thing — and if it would have a disc drive, which was the main point of our conversation.

When Googling the latter case, I was promptly confronted by a wall of articles that claimed the PS5 Pro's release date had been "revealed".

Needless to say, it had not been revealed. Instead, what had happened was a single gaming site that no-one had ever heard of had claimed that "insider sources" (anonymous, of course) had "confirmed" the PS5 Pro was "in development" and would "probably" release in "late 2024". This had then been parroted pretty much verbatim (albeit with some variation in the supposedly "revealed" release date) by a variety of other gaming sites you've never heard of, and this had happened so much that Google had figured it was worth showing to anyone who was searching for a simple piece of information: the actual, real PS5's release date. You know, the one where a product that actually exists was actually released.

Essentially, what we ended up with was a page of search results that were nothing but speculation at best, outright lies at worst. And there will be no consequences whatsoever for any of the sites that were engaging in this behaviour; in fact, they will almost certainly have been rewarded with happy big traffic numbers, and you can bet those pages have ads coming out the wazoo on them, too.

As someone who, as a child, had aspirations of joining the games press, and hoped he would be able to do that more than pretty much anything in the world, this is heartbreaking to see. And it's doubly frustrating when I run a site on which our writers take pride in composing honest, thoughtful, well-researched pieces rather than simply rushing to jump on the latest trend in order to squeeze out another few cents of ad revenue.

How to find all the blue medallions in Resident Evil 4 Remake

Speaking of which, one trend which was just starting to take hold when I left USgamer in 2014 was the odious rise of "guide content". For the unfamiliar, this is an SEO-baiting tactic in which sites post individual articles that supposedly answer each and every possible question people on Google might have about anything vaguely relevant and popular.

It's a completely unsustainable approach to "content generation", particularly if you have any standards about the quality of the articles on your site whatsoever, and it means that, again, if you're searching for specific pieces of information, you have to wade through 500 sites that have clickbaited their way to the top of Google's search results, with no guarantee that their information is reliable or helpful.

I'll give you an example. Prior to picking up my PS5, I was curious how the "PS4 Boost" mode worked. This is where the PS5 is able to run certain appropriately updated PS4 games with better performance than the original PS4 (and in some cases, PS4 Pro) would have been capable of.

The things I were curious about were simple: did this work with all PS4 games, or just select ones, and did I have to do anything to make it work?

The answers to these questions, by the way, are "no" and "no".

While attempting to uncover these simple answers, I stumbled across a full-blown, surprisingly lengthy article entitled "How to Enable PS5 Game Boost". Please recall that the answer to the question "do you have to do anything to make Boost mode work?" is "no", and then marvel at the fact that multiple sites, not just the one I found, managed to spin this simple answer out into at least 600 words of complete garbage, because you need at least 600 words for SEO purposes, don't you know.

I'm so tired of this. To the layman, it might seem like it's very convenient. But as someone who has worked in the commercial press and now works on the more "indie" side of things, it's infuriating, because I know these articles do not exist out of a desire to be helpful. As with all other clickbait — because that's what these articles are — the aim is simple: gain traffic, and, by extension, ad revenue.

I'm so tired. So tired. The Internet was an exciting place when I was a kid and everyone was just getting to know it. Now, it's nothing more than a mindless, soulless content factory where everyone is bidding for your attention so they can inject yet more ads directly into your eyeballs.

There are little havens where this isn't the case, of course. But they become more and more difficult to find with each passing day. And it honestly worries me quite a bit.

But at this point, it's also hard to know what to do, if anything. If I criticise this sort of thing, no-one listens. (I'm writing this today largely to vent my own spleen rather than to convince anyone else.) If I give up and engage in it myself just to join the rat race, I'm part of the problem. And if I abandon the Internet entirely, I deprive myself of something that is still, in some ways, a useful resource — and in some other ways, an essential utility for modern life.

So I guess I'll keep doing what I always do. Do my own thing, occasionally complain about how much everything else sucks, then repeat until my inevitable death from a brain aneurysm.

Today's culture of perpetual mistrust is exhausting.

The other day, I received an SMS text message. This in itself was fairly unusual, as the only texts I tend to get these days are automated confirmations of deliveries and suchlike, but there was another layer of unusual to it.

"Hi mum," the text said. "My phone's not working, so please contact me on WhatsApp at [number] xxx".

Initially, I thought this might be an honest-to-goodness wrong number, which is a phenomenon that used to be widespread, but today, where we tend to do everything via pre-populated contact lists, doesn't tend to happen much. Something about it made me feel a bit suspicious, though, so I decided to Google the text of the message.

Sure enough, it was a scam. I was both disappointed and unsurprised to discover this, but it got me thinking: I used to be someone who really, honestly wanted to believe the best about my fellow man, but these days, it feels nigh-impossible to trust almost anything you see.

That "wrong number" is actually a scammer trying to get you to send them money, or to steal your personal information. That heartwarming post you saw on social media is actually a viral marketing campaign. That "look at me I'm so empowered" sex worker doing hot tub streams on Twitch is actually being forced into exploitation by darker forces working behind the scenes rather than because she wants to.

It's exhausting to think that, more often than not, these days what you see is most definitely not what you get. The world feels like a darker place that is full of mistrust, and aside from the necessity for constant vigilance being very tiring, it also makes it difficult for those of us who do want to go about our business in a genuinely honest sort of way.

You see it everywhere. Creative types being forced to churn out "content" with clickbait titles just to get eyes on their work. Workplaces and brands jumping on silly trends like TikTok for no discernible reason other than "it's popular, so we should be seen to be doing it". The growth in various forms of AI-generated text, images and sounds making misinformation and lies easier to spread than ever before.

On top of all that, the services we've come to increasingly rely on over the years actively make themselves worse over time, and we just sit back and take it. For example, it used to be that I could click "Publish" on this post and it would automatically share it to my friends on Facebook and Twitter, but that's not possible any more because of supposed "improvements" that both of those services have made.

This happens outside the online sphere, too. My last car I bought was worse than my previous one in terms of the features it had, but cost more. This despite me telling the car salesman to their face that I wanted to spend "about the same" on the new vehicle and have the same features.

And no-one seems particularly bothered by all this. I mean, sure, people comment on it occasionally, but no-one actually does anything about it. They keep posting their wacky MidJourney images, increasingly believing that "they" created the image through stringing words together. Scam text messages are a way of life, with people just shrugging at them rather than attempting to report them.

And those supposed to be "in charge" don't do anything anyway, so why bother? There's a house down the road from us whose front garden is constantly filled with obviously stolen motorcycles, which local kids can frequently be seen riding around making a nuisance of themselves on, without wearing any sort of safety gear or having any concern for the people around them.

It increasingly feels like we are a people blighted by absolute apathy and laziness, and despite countless warnings from dystopian popular media and the arts over the years, no-one really cares. So long as you have your content to consume and your vacuous "approval" of your fake life on social media from other fake people living fake existences, nothing seems to matter to anyone.

I'm really fed up of it. And it doesn't feel like there's a way to escape from it all. Because this isn't just "an Internet thing" any more. It's a "this is the world we live in now" thing.

I let out a gigantic, unmistakable, uncontrollable fart at the self-checkout in Marks & Spencers.

This is the stock image I got for searching "fart", so this is what you get. Photo by Julissa Helmuth on Pexels.com

It really wasn't a subtle one, either. It was the kind of sphincter-rippling, slack-anused report where you know that every inch, every ounce of buttock fat was involved in producing that triumphant fanfare, and where the moment after it has occurred, you know that there is absolutely no way you're going to be able to pass it off as you knocking something over or scraping something along a floor.

There are two practical ways you can really handle a situation like this: either take ownership of the situation and have a good giggle about it with everyone around you, or simply pretend that it didn't happen, implying that anyone who did happen to hear your eruption was somehow hallucinating. I chose the latter option; I don't have nearly enough social confidence, particularly around strangers, to pull off some sort of "Good LORD! Did you hear that?!" routine around strangers, though I'm more than happy to parp thunderously in front of close friends and family.

Both responses place anyone near you in something of an awkward position, of course. If you take the former approach, then there's the unspoken expectation that those nearby will participate in your routine, congratulating you on your impersonation of a baritone brass instrument and generally agreeing that having a good old guff is the peak of humorous funtimes. This, of course, does not take into account those who find bodily functions objectionable, particularly in public, and is likely to make those people feel uncomfortable.

If you take the latter approach, meanwhile, you place the responsibility on the people around you to either comment on the situation or remain quiet. And if you heard the noise that I emitted while swinging my carrier bag full of groceries around from the self-checkout into the trolley, I suspect some people would find it quite difficult not to comment.

Thankfully, the situation resolved itself with probably the optimal outcome. The only person nearby when the incident occurred was someone else who was packing their shopping, and they either chose to remain quiet or simply didn't notice. There certainly wasn't any sort of reaction, so if it's the former I applaud them for their self-control; by the time I was out in the car park I was already in fits of giggles. I hope that when they meet up with their friends later, they enjoy telling the story about the fat man next to them in Marks & Spencer who let rip with a humdinger of a bottom burp without shame while finishing their shopping trip.

I mean it when I say it was uncontrollable, though; it was the sort of guff that doesn't so much sneak up on you as it is suddenly present, without warning. There was no noticeable brewing time, no bubbling in the gut, no time to prepare — it was simply a case of me apparently moving in the wrong direction and releasing the explosion that had clearly been biding its time in my arse, trapped in a sweaty, fleshy prison, for quite a while.

I am pleased to report, however, that I did not "follow through", as the vernacular has it. It was simply an extremely loud, explosive trump that was gone almost as soon as it arrived. And now I am home I can have a good laugh about it without worrying about funny looks from strangers. Except for all the strangers I've told about it on the Internet with this post.

Oh well. I can't see your faces.

There's no real practical reason that the beginning of a new year should be a "fresh start", but it's as good a time as any. And so...

It has been a strange few years, to say the least. Ever since the world went to pieces in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, things have not felt at all "normal" — even though for the most part, things these days seem to primarily be operating as they once were.

I still maintain that this isn't necessarily a good thing, as the threat of COVID most certainly isn't over, even if its impact is considerably lessened from what it once was. And I feel like society being forced "back to normal" too early likely made the whole recovery process more lengthy and difficult than it perhaps could have been. But, of course, there were plenty of additional considerations.

I feel like a lot of people have been feeling like 2023 will be a "better" year for one reason or another. There's no tangible evidence to suggest this will actually be the case — I'm pretty sure we've all been thinking "surely next year can't be as bad as this one" for as long as I can remember, even before killer viruses entered the equation — but I suppose it's an attempt to bring oneself comfort. After all, proceeding forward thinking that things are miserable and awful and only likely to get worse is not really going to help matters.

A new year doesn't really mean anything. Nothing magical happens at midnight as December 31st ticks over to January 1st. And yet it's as good a time as any to decide that you want to have a fresh start, make some changes, improve some things about yourself and perhaps escape from things that have been holding you back for one reason or another.

In contrast to some of the previous years on this blog, I'm in a relatively "all right" position life-wise right now, and so I'm not in a position where I feel like I need to make any particularly radical changes in my life in order to be something approaching "happy". I don't feel like I need to change jobs — I love my current job — and I don't want or need to change anything about my living situation, as my wife Andie and I are both in a good place; the excruciating rise in cost of living in the last year occasionally puts a bit of strain on our collective finances, but other than that we can't complain too much.

All this means that we — well, I, as far as this post is concerned — can focus on the relatively "smaller" things to try and sort out. Chief among these for me is my overall health and wellbeing; I want to do something about my weight, and do something that hopefully lasts, because I'm fucking sick of having this hernia and not being able to have anything done about it because I'm too fat.

Slimming World worked for me a few years back, as past entries will show, but when Andie and I went back after various personal circumstances caused us both to have a fairly drastic "rebound", we found that it didn't really work for us. Calorie-counting didn't really work for us either, and nor did self-directed Weight Watchers (or "WW", as they now prefer to call themselves). Last time I saw my doctor, though, they did say that they could refer me to a "health coach" to help sort me out, but this was dependent on getting a blood test to ensure that there was nothing major wrong with me.

I'd never had a blood test before, so I was kind of perturbed by the whole experience. I don't like hospitals at the best of times — my mind has them permanently associated as "the place where people die", even though the rational part of my brain knows that this is a vastly unfair assessment to our hard-working healthcare workers — and the prospect of having mildly invasive procedures carried out on me was not helping matters.

This only got worse when they had a bit of trouble finding a vein on the inside of my elbow and had to draw from my hand instead, and as the whole process went on a bit longer that was comfortable I found myself having a cold sweat and feeling nauseated. Thankfully I didn't throw up over the nurse who was working on me, but my condition did cause enough concern for her to get me a glass of water and give me a moment to recover after she was all finished. Thankfully, the results of the blood test showed nothing of concern, so hopefully I won't have to deal with that again for a while.

Anyway, getting advice and/or referral from my doctor on what to do next was dependent on those blood test results, so now the holiday period is over I need to go back to them and figure out what to do next. I'm certain it will be a difficult process, but it's something that needs to be done, as not only is my hernia continually bugging me, but I'm having a lot of joint pains and suchlike also, and I suspect losing some weight will help all those problems.

Aside from this, I feel like I might need to shake things up with regard to friendships and personal relationships also. Over the course of… probably the last decade or so, really, I've been dismayed at how far a lot of people with whom I used to be very close have drifted away for one reason or another. In some cases this was down to lives going in different directions, in others it was down to misunderstandings and in others still it can be attributed to some seemingly being more willing to make a bit of an effort to maintain a relationship than others.

I can't pretend that I'm not at fault in some of these situations, but there are also plenty of cases where I have been the one who has been making an effort, only to get things either thrown back in my face or met with silent indifference. I won't go into specifics right now as this isn't about naming and shaming or anything like that, but when discussing a couple of instances privately with some more recent acquaintances, I felt somewhat vindicated when these relatively neutral "outsiders" (to the situation in question, anyway) confirmed my suspicions that yes, indeed, the things that I had previously felt were a bit out of order were indeed out of order.

It's hard to know what to do in cases like this, though. Do you just cut and run? That's probably the sensible thing to do; if you're the only one willing to make an effort, that's not a friendship, and it's really not worth trying to maintain something that isn't there. But at the same time you have to ask if you're having unreasonable expectations of people whose circumstances have changed, as your own have. In that instance, is it appropriate to "punish" them for just the natural process of your lives going down different roads?

There isn't really a right answer, but I do feel like in this new year I want to have another go at rekindling some of these friendships where possible. There are, I'm sure, multiple instances where I can still do more to try and fix things, but equally there are also plenty of cases where I'm sure the situation is beyond "help", for want of a better word. And that's sad, but it's also supposedly a natural part of life. I vaguely recall reading something the other day that suggested men of my age generally only have one honest-to-goodness friend that they feel they can rely on — and I'm certainly in this position now.

Well, just make new friends, you might say. But, well, social anxiety tends to put paid to such plans when you explicitly make them — although in the last year or so I have added a number of new people to my personal acquaintances through both work and online socialisation. So I suspect it's probably going to be worth cultivating those friendships further rather than continuing to make an effort in cases where I feel increasingly excluded.

But anyway. That's enough rambling for today. Because aside from all of the above, I'll also be making more regular use of this blog in 2023, too. With the general collapse of my enthusiasm for social media — coupled with the right hash Elon Musk has been making of Twitter — it's probably the optimal means for me to freely express myself and communicate with others. So if you're not already following me here, hit up the links at the side (or wherever they are on your screen) and stay up to date with me that way. This place is probably going to be the most reliable means of "seeing" me online from hereon.

Happy new year. And may your own "fresh starts", however small or grand they might be, bring you joy and satisfaction.