#oneaday Day 167: What happened to plain ol’ fantasy?

This is a discussion I’ve had a few times on Discord of late, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here. So, being in need of something to write for today, I thought I’d ponder it here.

I grew up being rather fond of fantasy — you know, swords, magic, elves, goblins, that sort of thing. I attribute this primarily to my brother’s girlfriend of his teenage years introducing me to HeroQuest and the Elric of Melnibone role-playing game; I never played the latter but I did play a fair few sessions of the former, and even managed to convince my parents to get me Advanced Heroquest by Games Workshop for one birthday, which I think has successfully hit the table maybe two or three times in my entire life. (Lucky it has solid solo rules!)

Similarly, one (well, two, technically, I guess) of my favourite book series growing up was David Eddings’ Belgariad/Malloreon cycle, which chronicles the rise of young farm boy Garion into a god-slaying hero and powerful sorcerer. Also of note was Douglas Hill’s Blade of the Poisoner and its sequel Master of Fiends, both of which were really for kids, but which I enjoyed and re-read numerous times in my youth.

What do all the above have in common? They’re all simple, straightforward, old-fashioned fantasy. I add those qualifiers because I feel we don’t get a lot of simple, straightforward, old-fashioned fantasy any more. We get a shitload of “dark fantasy”, sure, and we also get a lot of “ironic parody fantasy”. But just straightforward, simple fantasy? That feels like a dying breed.

To clarify what I mean by these terms: by “dark fantasy” I mean a world where everyone is either miserable or fucking (often simultaneously), the streets are made of mud and the dwarves say “fuck” a lot. By “ironic parody fantasy” I mean “teeheehee, the heroes of this fantasy world know what a ‘level’ is and talk like they’re in a Marvel movie!”.

Both of these have their appeal — they must do, otherwise there wouldn’t be so fucking many of both of them — but I feel we’ve reached a point where “subverting the expectations of the fantasy genre” is now more of a cliché than… the fantasy genre itself. I hunger for a good old-fashioned tale of swords and sorcery where no-one says “well, that happened” or “fuck”, and which culminates in the plucky young hero, who came from humble beginnings, punching out some sort of god-like entity.

It doesn’t even feel like we get this in video games much any more. Final Fantasy has very much gone down the “dark fantasy” route in more recent installments and I think that has been a positive move for the series — Final Fantasy XVI and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin are particular highlights from recent memory — and a lot of anime-style RPGs play up the comedic angle somewhat. There’s nothing wrong with either of these things — I enjoy both when I’m in the mood for them — but sometimes you just want something a bit more… straightforward, I guess?

I’m intrigued to try out Metaphor: ReFantazio at some indefinite point in the future, though I suspect that veers towards “dark fantasy”, and I have several dungeon crawlers waiting in the wings that might fit the bill.

I’m not mad about this or anything — trends and tastes change, after all — but I just think it might be nice if we could see a bit more in the way of old-school barbarians-in-loincloths-and-wizards-with-beards fantasy. It was a defining influence on me growing up, and it would be nice to revisit that.

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.

#oneaday Day 166: Only seven years late… and then some

Longtime readers of my blog and MoeGamer will know that the visual novel series Grisaia has been something of a defining influence on my media tastes for quite some time. Indeed, over on MoeGamer there’s probably a book’s worth of words on the first two games that I invite you to read at your leisure.

And yet. And yet. For some reason, despite coming to the end of second entry The Labyrinth of Grisaia in 2017 and being incredibly excited about the cliffhanger it ended on, and curious on how it might end up… I have only just got around to making a start on the final part of the original trilogy The Eden of Grisaia. I say “the original trilogy”, because since The Eden of Grisaia’s release in English, there have been numerous non-canonical spinoff titles released in the series, plus an entire second series of games known as Grisaia Phantom Trigger which, I believe, is eight volumes long. (Granted, I believe one “volume” of Phantom Trigger is a tad shorter than one of the original three Grisaia games, but still.)

Anyway, like I say, I have finally got around to starting The Eden of Grisaia. I was concerned it would be tough to get back into after seven years away from the series, but almost immediately I was reminded why I love this series, and why I’ve always considered it so important to me. So I’m definitely going to make reading through this final volume from the first trilogy an absolute priority, because I am thrilled to be back in the company of these characters.

But what is Grisaia? I mean, my simple answer to that is “go read the MoeGamer articles linked above”, but you may not have the time to read a five-figure word count on the subject. So I will attempt to summarise the series thus:

Grisaia is, in part, a coming-of-age story about people finding their place in the world. This might not sound particularly unusual for a visual novel, and indeed Grisaia initially looks like it’s doing its very best to be a fairly conventional high school romance sort of affair. There’s an unvoiced male protagonist, a harem of young women who all come to adore him for one reason or another, nookie (in the 18+ version, anyway, which is absolutely the version you should be playing) and multiple endings.

But there’s one fairly large spanner thrown in the works almost immediately, and that is the protagonist in question: Yuuji Kazami. He is anything but a “self-insert” or cipher for the player, and right from the opening moments of the first installment The Fruit of Grisaia it’s clear that something is up with him. We join him just as he has walked 150km to get to his new school, Mihama Academy, and over the course of his interactions with the five main heroines, we come to learn that he has a mysterious “job”.

Initially, the details of this “job” are kept exceedingly vague, but it becomes apparent very quickly that Yuuji is no ordinary high school boy. He is wise — and cynical — well beyond his years, and he uses this experience to help the heroines in various ways. He by no means acts as a “magic bullet” to solve all their problems for them, but his experience in the ways of the world helps him form an incredibly close bond with all five of them. In the original The Fruit of Grisaia, these bonds are implied to be exclusive, and indeed there are even “After Stories” in second part The Labyrinth of Grisaia that continue on that assumption.

But the main story of Grisaia really gets started in The Labyrinth of Grisaia. It’s there we learn all about Yuuji’s background — which I won’t spoil here for the moment, but it’s fair to say he is cynical, jaded and experienced in some curiously specialised skills with very good reason — and the whole thing concludes on a dramatic moment that effectively seems to take Yuuji completely out of the picture.

Now, it’s a bold series that seemingly removes its protagonist from proceedings two-thirds of the way through, but that’s exactly how final part The Eden of Grisaia starts. We switch to third-person narration and follow, for the most part, the exploits of the five heroines as they leave Mihama Academy behind and take on the seemingly impossible task of getting Yuuji back. We have occasional cuts back to Yuuji’s present situation, but the focus is still very much on the heroines. At least it has been for as far as I’ve read so far.

This is a really interesting narrative technique, because it makes it abundantly clear that while The Fruit of Grisaia very much had a kind of “dating sim”-style setup in which you had to pick the right choices to get onto your favourite girl’s route and then pick the right choices to get her “good” ending, The Labyrinth and The Eden of Grisaia have a very specific story to tell. Indeed, the main narratives of both unfold as a kinetic novel with no player input whatsoever. It’s testament to the quality of the writing (and the translation) that Grisaia remains so thoroughly compelling, even after it takes away both the player’s already limited agency in proceedings and the character they were supposed to be “inhabiting”.

Don’t mistake the switch to third-person narration as being boring, though. The Eden of Grisaia’s narrator may be omniscient and non-participant, but they very much have a personality of their own, and they have some exceedingly entertaining remarks to make at times — usually at the expense of Michiru Matsushima, the group’s resident “idiot”.

Thus far I am very much back in Grisaia mode, and I can’t wait to see what happens next. I also know that Grisaia games are a very long read — honestly, it’s knowing there are probably 30+ hours of reading ahead that caused me to put off Eden for so long — but I am going to take my time and enjoy it.

In the meantime, if you’ve never explored the series for yourself, I still highly recommend it. Yes, it’s a bit of a commitment to read all of it, to say the least, but it’s a journey well worth taking. It’s regarded as an absolute classic of the medium with very good reason, and my “Complete Box” version of it that I have on my shelf is absolutely one of my prized gaming-related possessions.

#oneaday Day 165: A first look at Ludwig

Like many of us, I have become increasingly disillusioned with the role of police in today’s society. I’m not an “ACAB” (look it up… actually, don’t) type, but there have been too many instances in my personal experience of a clear crime being reported to the cops and them basically going ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ before spectacularly failing to do anything whatsoever. Despite this, I love a good detective drama, police procedural, anything like that. And so it was with some curiosity that I decided to start watching Ludwig from the BBC, a David Mitchell-fronted detective drama with a bit of a twist.

In Ludwig, Mitchell’s character John Taylor is a renowned puzzle author who goes by the name “Ludwig”, a nom de plume he adopted when first developing puzzles as a child while listening to Beethoven symphonies on vinyl records.

As the series opens, he is contacted by his identical twin brother’s wife Lucy, who has booked a taxi for him to take the 150-mile drive to come and see her, but refuses to tell him anything. John, we quickly learn, is not a sociable type, and dislikes leaving the house at the best of times; Lucy, having known him (and his brother) since childhood, knows very well that presenting him with incomplete information will drive him nuts enough to actually leave his house and discover what mystery awaits his solution.

Turns out that Lucy’s husband, John’s brother James, has gone missing. He left behind a curious note basically telling his family to flee as quickly as possible; Lucy, being a headstrong type, refuses to do this and instead recruits John to pose as James — they are identical twins, remember — in an attempt to discover the truth of what happened to him. The only slight snag in this? James was a detective working at the local constabulary, meaning John must sneak into an environment he has no professional knowledge of and attempt to find some information from under the noses of people that, presumably, James knows quite well.

Matters are further complicated where, upon John’s arrival at the police station, he is almost immediately dragged off to go and look at a crime scene. Caught in a situation where he is simply not able to refuse his partner, he ends up attending the scene of a murder and is completely out of his depth. After briefly fleeing the scene on the pretence of “getting some air”, he realises that the case is nothing but a logic puzzle; putting on his “puzzling” hat, he then proceeds to solve it in the same manner he would solve one of those old logic puzzles from the books with the guy in his pyjamas on the front.

His unorthodox methods net him a suspect and a confession, though his colleagues and superiors note that had the confession not been forthcoming, the complete lack of evidence would have made the case impossible to prosecute.

What then follows is John continuing to pose as his brother, working on several cases while attempting to ascertain the truth of what happened to his brother. It gradually becomes apparent that his brother left a trail of puzzle-like “breadcrumbs” to follow, leading John to believe that his disappearance was not accidental or circumstantial; it was planned out in advance. And cracking a cipher James left behind in his notebooks is going to be key to getting to the bottom of the case.

So far I’ve watched two episodes of the series with Andie and we’ve both enjoyed it a lot. Mitchell is, of course, playing a variation on the bumbling, socially awkward character he always plays, but it works well in the context. The positioning of an obviously autistic character in a professional role he is absolutely not comfortable with (or trained for) is, at times, borderline farcical, but suspension of disbelief allows you to simply enjoy the spectacle of what unfolds. They mysteries presented are intriguing and keep you guessing, and John’s tendency to follow through on his “hunches” keeps things interesting and pacy.

The music throughout each episode is absolutely excellent, too; perhaps predictably for a show called Ludwig, it’s all based on themes by Beethoven. Rather than just using the themes straight, however, they are all interesting rearrangements, with variations on Für Elise making up the majority of the soundtrack and the show’s main theme.

Genre critics might argue that each individual episode maybe wraps itself up a little too neat and tidily to be truly plausible — in both the episodes so far, the case being solved was dependent on one of the suspects “cracking” under the pressure of John’s logical deductions — but honestly? I don’t care. For the most part, I don’t engage with any form of fiction, regardless of medium, to ponder its realism; I engage with it to be entertained and to get to know interesting characters. And Ludwig certainly provides both in spades. It’s good, old-fashioned, entertaining television that strikes an excellent balance between drama and moments of levity, as one has surely come to expect from anything with Mitchell involved at this point.

It’s a short series — just six hour-long episodes — so I’m looking forward to seeing where things go. I’m definitely glad I started watching it, and if you enjoy a good mystery, I’d recommend you give it a look, too.

#oneaday Day 164: Random access memories

It’s peculiar exactly what memories your brain — or, well, more accurately, my brain — chooses to hold onto. One would think that your most “sticky” memories would be those that were defining influences on you; those which played a key role in shaping you into the person you are today. But I find that very difficult to believe when I contemplate some of my most vivid memories from years gone by.

For example, I vividly remember one lunchtime at primary school, my friend Matthew and I went to the rear of the school fields and did shoulderstands because we thought it would make us more likely to fart. I will freely admit that as a 43 year old man I still find farting far more amusing than I probably should, but I’m not sure that specific memory played a particularly developmental role in appreciating toilet humour. I haven’t done a shoulderstand for probably more than 30 years and I doubt I could right now.

I have several other primary school memories, and unfortunately not all of them are particularly positive ones.

I remember playing one lunchtime with a girl I was friends with; we were doing some sort of “pretend play” involving swordfighting using sticks, and my mother happened to walk by the back of the field during lunchtime (it was a public right of way) and saw this play, misinterpreting it as me hitting the girl in question with a stick. I got in trouble for that, despite me knowing very well that I was perfectly innocent.

I remember one P.E. lesson at primary school — very early, infants level, class 1 or 2 — where I really needed to go to the toilet, but I wasn’t allowed, and I ended up pissing myself in the playground. Rather than being embarrassed, I found it oddly fascinating how the piss would actually come out through my shorts.

Another P.E. lesson from the same “infants” period, so year 1 or 2, I somehow managed to shit myself without realising it. I didn’t notice until I got home and my mother asked why there was a brown stain on my arse. Genuinely not knowing that I’d actually shat myself, I suggested that I must have fallen in some mud at some point. The contents of my pants a little later revealed this to not be the case, though to my mother’s eternal credit, she simply made a comment along the lines of “it must have been some very strong mud to go all the way through your pants”. To this day, I genuinely don’t know how I shat myself without realising it.

Another time at school, again in the infants period, I felt sick during storytime, and yakked all over the floor. Once again, I found myself oddly contemplative about the experience rather than particularly embarrassed.

None of these experiences are what I’d necessarily call “formative”. I mean, yes, I have low self-esteem and I’m sure none of those particular events helped in the development of that particular personality trait, but I don’t think any of them were the root cause of it. Why do I hold on to those memories? They’re not particularly “precious” or anything, though at a pinch I might suggest that I hold onto them because recounting them as an adult is at least slightly amusing.

There are others from later years, too. I’ve recounted the tale of “not remembering how to make friends” on my first day at secondary school numerous times.

Then there was the time I overheard someone I thought was my friend taking the piss out of me while sitting behind me in the county concert band, and when I jokingly confronted them about it, not wanting to believe that they’d actually been being mean, and them not exactly denying it.

There was the one time I did step out of my comfort zone and introduced myself to someone at university.

The time I sat, all dressed up and ready to go out, brooding in the window of my hall of residence kitchen, hoping someone would find me and I could unleash the hormonal sadness I was feeling because the girl I liked had got with a guy from downstairs.

That one Halloween I felt an incredible sense of self-confidence and liberation after completely hiding my entire body and face. Another Halloween where I dressed up as a monk and ended up not being entirely sure if I’d scored with a girl or not, since she had taken me back to her house, let me in and given me her phone number, then just sort of vanished.

That one evening in grotty student nightclub Kaos where a random bloke asked me if I’d ever done ecstasy, then almost immediately afterwards I scored with a veritable Amazon of a woman (my friend Owen called her “Xena”, but her actual name was Beki) and the same bloke shook me by the hand, giving me a knowing wink and a smile, saying “yeah, mate, you’d definitely enjoy ecstasy”. (I’ve never done ecstasy.)

I could go on. There are myriad little snippets of my life that are lodged away in my long-term storage that I don’t really know why. I feel like these are the things that will flash before my eyes before I die, and I doubt I’ll be any clearer on the reason why they’re there at that point, either. Hopefully I won’t have to think about that for a while, yet.

I don’t really have a conclusion to these musings. I just think it’s interesting all the useless memories our brains seem to hold on to. If there is a reason for it, I don’t know what it is. Perhaps all those memories did shape me in some way and helped turn me into the gibbering wreck of a human being I am today. In which case… aren’t I better off forgetting all of them?

#oneaday Day 163: A thousand resistances

Having finished Death Mark II last night, I kicked off a recommendation today: 1000xRESIST, which is a game title I have no idea how to say out loud.

I played it for a good 6 hours or so in total, so I think it’s safe to say I’m having a good time. I thought I’d reached the end, but then a whole new bit started, and with it being half past 1 in the morning I thought I’d probably better stop.

I don’t want to spoil too much about the game because it’s very much a “story game” that is light on what we’d call traditional “gameplay” beyond moving around various beautifully presented environments, but I thought I’d pen a few words at least.

In 1000xRESIST, you play the role of Watcher, a clone of the mysterious “ALLMOTHER”, the sole survivor of a global crisis that wiped out the rest of humanity. An entire society of the ALLMOTHER’s clones has apparently sprouted up and is functioning about as well as can be expected in a futuristic post-apocalyptic dystopia where breathing the unfiltered air causes all your bodily fluids to leak out through your eyes.

What’s particularly interesting about this game is that you get to see the “past” of the ALLMOTHER via various means, and because your character is from a time period that is completely unfamiliar with concepts like “high school” and “boys”, there’s a marvellously “uncanny” feel to everything you do and see.

It’s not overdone, but it is almost intoxicatingly disorienting to begin with. As time goes on, you get used to it, though; you learn the curious little phrases that have come about as a result of generations’ worth of worshipping the ALLMOTHER, and you start to understand why this peculiar society functions the way it does.

There’s definitely a lot to unpack in the narrative as a whole, as there’s a swathe of different themes tackled at various times. It’s intelligently written, never patronising, and dear Lord is it (apparently) compelling, given the amount of time I’ve spent on it today.

Thankfully, I have a couple of days off work tomorrow and Tuesday, so I should hopefully be able to polish it off in that time. I’m keen to talk more about it, as I suspect pondering it on “paper” will help me process the many varied themes it brings to the table.

For now, though, sleep beckons.

#oneaday Day 162: Successful plans

I streamed yesterday, and my good pal Chris joined in. It was a successful stream — we both had a lot of fun. I haven’t figured out how to share my gameplay privately with Chris with audio, but he could at least watch what I was doing while we talked, and it’s so much easier to keep talking while playing when there’s someone else there to interact with.

During the stream, I concentrated on playing Toaplan games from the upcoming Toaplan Arcade 3 and 4 cartridges for Evercade. There are some real bangers among these, but as with most Toaplan games, they’re very hard! I reached an actual blockade in Dogyuun, which uses checkpoints, but we managed to clear the entirety of Fixeight and Snow Bros. 2 with judicious credit-feeding, both of which were a lot of fun.

I have the next couple of days off work so I think I’m going to take Sunday entirely for myself, perhaps to start having a look at 1000xRESIST, which a few people have recommended to me recently. I don’t really know much about this game, but what little I’ve seen certainly seems to be intriguing, so I’m looking forward to checking it out. It’s unfortunate there doesn’t appear to be a physical release at present, so I’m going to nab the Steam version; there are rumours that there might be a physical Switch version at some point, but nothing concrete as yet.

Anyway, things are OK right now. If you were wondering about progress on the whole “eating well” thing, I’m 11 pounds down on when I started, which is good… what was less good was the amount of weight I’d put on after our week’s holiday away, but at least that’s coming off again now! We’ve had a few days of feeling a bit “eh” about dieting this week, but we’re getting properly back into the swing of things on Monday. Sometimes you just need to get urges and cravings out of your system to continue being productive.

Oh, I know what else I need to do today. I need to write about Death Mark II, which I finished yesterday. More details will be forthcoming over on MoeGamer, but suffice to say for now that the entire Spirit Hunter series is absolutely magnificent, and anyone the slightest bit interested in top-quality, genuinely intelligent horror should definitely check all three games out. But like I say, I will talk more about the details over on MoeGamer.

In fact, I’m off to go do that right now. Ta-ta. If you missed the stream yesterday, here’s an archive for you to watch!

#oneaday Day 161: Plans for Tomorrow

Tomorrow I’m going to do some streaming, as I have done the past few weeks. 8pm UK time, twitch.tv/pjedavison. Be there, or… don’t be there, I guess. But it’d be nice if you were.

Rather than grinding through another layer of Mon-Yu, though, I thought it’d be a nice opportunity to play some shoot ’em ups and, assuming his availability lasts, have a bit of a chat with my good friend Chris, who enjoys a good shoot ’em up. We haven’t had the opportunity to record a MoeGamer Podcast for a very long time, and while this isn’t quite the same thing, it’ll be fun to have a good chat. As an American, Chris is quite understandably a bit under the weather about… everything, so hopefully a bit of fun will take his mind off things for a couple of hours.

Anyway! I don’t have overly specific plans other than “play some fun stuff”, but I’m going to keep it limited to the Evercade Toaplan Arcade cartridges, of which there are now four. (Well, technically there will be four by the end of the year, but since I work for Blaze I have the last two already.) These are, for me, personal highlights of the complete Evercade library, and I’m thrilled to have worked on all of them.

The games are fantastic, and we were fortunate enough to have access to former Toaplan staffers such as Masahiro Yuge and Tatsuya Uemura to provide some additional commentary for the manuals. I even managed to get some commentary from Tim Follin for Toaplan Arcade 4, since that features the NES port of Sky Shark, which has a soundtrack by the great man himself — though he doesn’t think it’s his best work!

I’m not sure how well streaming copes with something as frenetic as a shoot ’em up, but it’ll be an interesting experiment regardless. Rationally speaking, if a stream can cope with modern 3D games such as first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, I’m sure it can cope with spaceships going boom.

Like I say, I haven’t decided specifically what I might play on stream as yet; I’ll just take things as they come. I’ll probably give the new collections some love, though, as they have a number of games that I think are particularly interesting and noteworthy. Toaplan Arcade 3, for example, has both Batsugun and Batsugun Special Version, which are spectacularly good games, but I want to give Vimana some love, too, as that’s one very few people have heard of and I really like it.

A word of caution: don’t come to this stream expecting high-level play, or anything other than very basic competence. I love shoot ’em ups, but I’m not super-good at them. This is probably because, like many things, I don’t put enough practice in to get good, which is where I think a stream like this might be fun. I can take some time to practice, chat, talk strategy and just generally shoot the breeze — and hopefully having an additional participant in the mix will present some fun topics of discussion. We’ll try not to rant too much about the state of the modern world.

So yeah. That’s the plan for tomorrow. I’ll be going ahead with the stream regardless of whether Chris is available (but he’s said he should be) so please do stop by for a bit if you feel like it! See you then!

#oneaday Day 160: The death of Twitter

It seems like Twitter’s day in the sun is finally coming to an end. With the deadline looming for the site to start scraping everyone’s posts to train its AI models, Elon being an absolute fucking maniac (not in a fun way) and Trump being in office, a lot of people — including some well-established figures and brands — have been jumping ship and turning to Bluesky. Hell, even the Clifton Suspension Bridge has decided to ditch Twitter. And no, I’m not making that up.

I haven’t been following the progress of all the “Twitter alternatives” that sprang up a while back too closely, but it seems like a lot of people are favouring Bluesky, which I must confess is one that I’ve been on for a little while now. Threads sounds like an absolute dead end of a social network — tech commentator Ed Zitron describes it as “Twitter made of Instagram comments” — and the less said about shit like Gab, Truth Social and Parler (does that one even still exist?) the better.

I’m interested to see where things will go. The vibe on Bluesky right now is very positive; many folks quite rightly describe it as feeling like Twitter from 10+ years ago, and they’re absolutely right in terms of atmosphere. The users have collectively decided to not allow it to fall into negativity and ragebait like Twitter has become in recent years, and there is a shared understanding that “block early and block often” is the best approach to anyone being a dickhead.

This is helped enormously by Bluesky’s “nuclear block” function, which means that if someone quote-replies a post then blocks the person they quoted, the quote will appear as blocked for everyone. That helps prevent dogpiling and discourages people from going around looking for trouble. Couple this with the “detach quote” function, where if you do find yourself quote-replied and you’re getting grief as a result, you can simply unclip your post from the quote and be left the fuck alone. Much better than Twitter’s woefully ineffective mute and block functions — oh yeah, Twitter made block work so that anyone you blocked can still see your posts, which is… great.

At this point, anyone still on Twitter is in absolute denial. The place is infested with bots, scammers, right-wing fucknuts and Elon sycophants who want nothing more than just a crumb of billionaire dick to suck. And with the impending “AI” shit looming, I’m not surprised people have finally had enough. I’m certainly never going back, and I think my boss and I need to have a serious conversation about whether we start focusing our professional social media efforts on Bluesky instead of Twitter. There are a lot of cool retro game peeps over there, and I think Evercade would fit in well there.

Of course, there’s always the thing to ponder: do people really want “brands” on a social media site? And I guess it depends what they’re doing. If all they’re doing is engagement bait crap, probably not. But this might be a fun opportunity to experiment with doing something a bit different, in a place with an altogether different vibe.

Something to consider next week, certainly — my boss is off this week, otherwise I’d have a chat with him about it tomorrow. In the meantime, Bluesky seems to be a pleasant enough place to hang out from a personal perspective, and a fair few people I know have showed up there. It’s social media how it used to be before all those sites made us want to kill ourselves every day, and I’m sure that won’t last forever. But while it does, we may as well enjoy it.

#oneaday Day 159: To upgrade… or downgrade?

I’m due an upgrade on my phone, and for the first time I’m holding off because I’m not sure I want one. All the new phones are rammed with AI bullshit and I don’t want to encourage that crap in any way whatsoever, so the prospect of getting one makes me a tad uneasy.

The other thing that is causing me to hold off is a growing desire to break my attachment to smartphones. I don’t like being dependent on a smartphone. I don’t like having that stupid black rectangle follow me everywhere I go. I don’t like feeling like I compulsively “have” to fiddle with it if I don’t have anything to say or anything to do.

There are a few things stopping me from immediately ditching my smartphone and “downgrading” to a modern feature phone. I thought I’d ponder each of them in turn. I probably won’t come to a conclusion, but it might help me sort some things out in my mind. And maybe it’ll be helpful for you, too, I don’t know.

I don’t use WhatsApp as much as a lot of people, but I do have a few ongoing chats that are my sole means of connection with friends I haven’t seen for a while. On top of that, the people from my job use WhatsApp for communication outside of work — for example, when we’re having a group social trip together.

Giving up WhatsApp would mean giving up a connection to people I don’t want to “disconnect” from entirely, and would also make life inconvenient for my work colleagues. That last one I’m not super concerned about, but I do like my job and my colleagues, so I don’t really want to be a pain.

Beyond those maybe two group chats (both of which have declined in activity anyway) and my work colleagues, I’m not super attached to WhatsApp. I could probably live without it.

The camera

Phone cameras these days are pretty excellent. I shoot anything that isn’t direct capture from gaming hardware on my phone. Upgrading my phone would mean I can get an even better camera.

However, two things: 1) I can still use the camera on my existing phone even if it doesn’t have a SIM card in it (I think, anyway). And 2) I could just, y’know, buy a nice camera.

So while it’s certainly convenient to be able to snap photos and take video with a device that is with me anyway, it’s probably not actually a dealbreaker in this situation.

Music and podcasts

I am, I’m afraid, “part of the problem” with music, though not out of any belief that streaming is “better” than having your own collection of tunes. It’s just a lot more convenient to be able to stream music (I use YouTube Music, because I have YouTube Premium and might as well use the additional benefit) and podcasts from, again, a device I have with me anyway. Plus my phone’s Bluetooth connects to my car stereo with no difficulty, making it easy to queue up entertainment for long journeys, such as my monthly drive to the office.

I haven’t looked at standalone MP3 (or equivalent) players for probably 20+ years at this point. I’m sure they exist. In fact, hold on.

It seems I can get a cheap Chinese shitbox for £20-£30, or I can spend three thousand pounds on a gold Sony thing (just £659.80 a month!) if I’m feeling particularly insane. What the actual fuck.

Uh… anyway. MP3 players do indeed still exist, and many of them have Bluetooth. Some of them even have WiFi, and some of them take the iPod touch approach where they’re basically a phone without the “phone” bit. I will steer clear of those, at least, because that would just be replacing one problem with the same problem, but mildly less convenient.

So an MP3 player with a decent capacity is not expensive. That would require me to organise my MP3 library, though, which has been in a right state since Google Music (RIP) invited me to upload it all “to access anywhere”, then promptly closed down and was replaced with the considerably inferior YouTube Music… and when I downloaded it all again the organisation was all fucked.

It wouldn’t be the end of the world to have to do that, but I’d rather not have to. So I think we can consider the music player side of things covered.

Navigation

In-car navigation is easily solved: buy a satnav. But I also use Google Maps when I’m on foot to see what’s nearby and figure out how to get to places. That is a problem that is a little trickier to solve. GPS devices for on-foot navigation certainly exist, but they’re primarily geared towards hiking and cost more than I’d be willing to spend on something that I’d only use occasionally, particularly if I had already bought a satnav for the car.

I can’t see an easy solution to this one. I believe some feature phones are able to access a Web-based form of Google Maps, but I don’t know how useful or effective that is.

I mean, I guess I could kick it really old school and just buy an A to Z of wherever I happened to be going. I can’t check what time Sainsbury’s closes with one of those, though, unless they’ve considerably enhanced the level of detail they go into since I last used one.

Conclusion?

I could probably find solutions to all of the above problems, except WhatsApp. I believe there are some feature phones that are capable of using a text-only version of WhatsApp, but from a cursory glance around earlier today it seems a lot of them don’t work in the UK for some reason.

I will continue to mull it over. The prospect of truly breaking free from the smartphone becomes increasingly appealing day by day… I’m just not quite sure I’m truly ready to pull the plug. My main concern is suddenly running into a use case that I haven’t thought of while farting this blog post out of an evening, and then being kind of fucked when I’m stuck with a modern-day Nokia and no means of fulfilling the function I suddenly, urgently require.

But really, what might that even be? It can’t be that important, or I would have thought of it by now, surely.

Anyway, I haven’t reached a definitive conclusion. But I have definitely convinced myself that there are at least some of the features I use on my smartphone that I absolutely can live without. Is that enough, though?

#oneaday Day 158: Obligations from 30+ years ago

I have a recurring dream. I am told it is quite a common one — or variations on it are, anyway — but I’m going to talk about it regardless, because I’ve been sitting staring at a blank page for half an hour and haven’t been able to think of anything else to write today. So indulge me, if you will.

In my recurring dream, I am back at my secondary school. I am hanging out with my friends from that time, which is 30+ years ago. And I am not attending one of the music group rehearsals that I’m supposed to be participating in after school. I am, apparently, deliberately not attending it, and I am standing in a place with my friends that is within line of sight of the music block. My music teacher Mr. Murrall is standing outside the music block with his arms folded, just staring at me with a disapproving expression on his face. I feel bad. I feel guilty. And yet I do not — cannot — walk over there, apologise for whatever reason I have not showed up to rehearsals, and get back involved.

This dream is sometimes complemented or accompanied by a scenario in which I am preparing to go on stage, either to perform a piece of music or act, and I absolutely have not practiced the thing I am supposed to be performing. If I’m supposed to be acting, I don’t even know my lines a little bit. If I’m supposed to be performing, I don’t really know the piece of music and, usually, my instrument is not in any condition to be played. For some reason, the musical variation of this dream always involves the clarinet, which was always my “second instrument”, and the problem is usually that the only reeds I have for it are in an absolutely awful state that would make playing near-impossible.

These sorts of dreams are clearly anxiety-related. I suspect they may also stem from a sense of mild guilt that I don’t do as much music in my free time as I used to — though I have been a bit better since we got the new piano, and my Mum has been kind enough to purchase me a frankly absurdly expensive new stool as an early Christmas present, so that will make me even more likely to make time to play. I haven’t touched the clarinet or saxophone for years, however; since both are instruments best played in a group situation and I have no suitable group to be part of, I haven’t used either of them for a long time.

Times and lives change, of course, but music has always been an important part of my life, even when it comes to my other interests. One of my favourite things about video games, for example, is listening to their music and coming to understand all manner of different styles — and, if I’m lucky, tracking down some piano arrangements to be able to pay homage to my favourite tracks in my own way.

Once that nice piano stool arrives (which may be as soon as tomorrow), I wonder if I will be free of those dreams? I doubt it, I suspect, as dreams are rarely so literal; I suspect these particular scenarios come from a more general sense of anxiety than something specific. But at least I can say to myself that I’m making an effort to make the time for something that has always been — and always will be — important to me.