#oneaday Day 413: Our tedious cyberpunk future

So, it seems like today is the day that the UK's "Online Safety Act" rolls out, which means all manner of sites and services, from Bluesky to PornHub via Discord, have started demanding that you "verify" your age, either by gurning into your device's camera (or, indeed, providing a photo of Norman Reedus from Death Stranding 2) or by — fuck this all the way to hell and back — sending over a photo of your ID, or registering your payment card details.

The reason for this is ostensibly to "protect children" from all the nasty, terrible awful things on the Internet, but as we've seen it can be circumvented by a few nerds on X, The Everything App or enlisting the services of a VPN — exactly the sort of thing these services are for — then it all seems a bit pointless really. Plus then you have to consider what might be the real reason this is all happening. It may sound a bit tinfoil hatty, but most people aren't entirely comfortable associating a photograph of themselves, their ID or their payment information with, among other things, something they fancy cracking one off to.

The ID verification services, of course, assure us that your photographs and data are deleted immediately after you've been verified, but we have no real way of knowing if that is actually the case, or if the deletion process simply copies them to a server somewhere offshore that isn't subject to GDPR. And if the latter is true, given that the services associate your ID information with your email address in most cases, it's probably straightforward enough to tie any sort of "unsavoury" (regardless of legality) activity back to an individual — be it hammering one out to stepsisters stuck in washing machines, looking up instructions on how to make a bomb or attempting to organise political protests.

Over the course of the last few years, with the rise of AI and all manner of other tech enshittification, I can't help but feel — and I'm not alone in this — that we're getting all the downsides of a cyberpunk future that authors warned about, and none of the upsides. Our city centres are not the sprawling, darkly beautiful neon landscapes they're supposed to be — though you might have a backlit, animated ad for Persil on your local bus stop — and no-one is going through life kitting themselves out with cybernetics to do interesting, unusual, creative, daring and illegal things.

Worse, and this is probably the biggest kicker, is that all the "villains" of the piece are so very boring. Cyberpunk villains are vibrant, exciting, dramatic — but not in reality. We have Trump, whose name literally means "guff", and Elon Musk, who is just a fucking idiot, and Sam Altman, who is a delusional cunt. None of them have the charisma to make them worth hating; they're just… there, making the world worse, bit by bit, one little nibble at a time. The world is suffering death by a thousand cuts, and it feels like there's not much we can do about it other than to subscribe to NordVPN (and feel weird about it after all the jokes about YouTubers shilling it) and just try to muddle on the best we can.

Perhaps this will mark a grand return to finding discarded porn mags in bushes. That'll be a blast from the past, won't it? Though hopefully not a blast you come into direct contact with.

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#oneaday Day 412: Garlic breath

I have garlic breath, the natural result of consuming garlic bread. Or, perhaps to be more accurate, garlic ciabatta, which we had to accompany our simple but enjoyable dinner of stuffed pasta thingies (tortelloni?) with a nice mushroom sauce. Sometimes simple is thoroughly pleasant; not every dinner needs to be an out-and-out feast, after all.

I have what I would describe as a complicated relationship with garlic. I like a lot of things that contain garlic, and one of my most enduring memories of childhood is, oddly, being outside probably the first Italian restaurant I ever went to, and being able to smell a distinctive combination of tomato and garlic that I don't think I've ever really smelled again since. I would immediately recognise it if I smelled it again, though.

On a trip to New York one time, some friends that we met up who lived there took us to this incredible little local place that doesn't appear in any of the tourist books and invited us to try the deep-fried garlic they did there. It was delicious, even if the very prospect of deep-fried garlic sounds utterly horrifying to you. (It did to me, but I tried it anyway, and did not regret it.)

The smell, though, particularly if you're not using fresh stuff. For a while, my wife was making use of these weird frozen garlic cube things in recipes, and they smelled fucking rank when you cooked them. Same for the jar of "minced garlic" paste we have had in the fridge for quite a while now. But, strangely, the jarred, chopped garlic that I tend to use by preference when a recipe calls for garlic, doesn't bother me at all. I know some people are super sniffy about "jarlic", as it's referred to, but I guess that's my line. Jarlic is fine for me, but anything lower down the "naturality" chain than that is not. Especially not those fucking frozen cubes. I am glad we have no more of them. They made your hands stink just to touch them, even for a moment.

But yeah. There are some recipes we make semi-regularly that make use of garlic. Probably our favourite is a sort of stir-fried beef one that features a sauce made from soy sauce, mirin, beef stock and honey, plus a bit of garlic browned in the pan before the sauce is added to thicken it all up. The jarlic works great in that one.

So yeah. My relationship with garlic is… complex. Fitting, I guess, since one could argue it adds a certain "complexity" to a dish. It certainly doesn't need to be in everything. But it can be nice, once in a while, particularly when delivered in the form of garlic bread, especially if said garlic bread is topped with cheese.

Yes, that's right, today's post really was just about garlic. Hey, they can't all be winners. Sometimes I just have to go with what's on my mind (or on my breath) at any given moment, y'know…? Besides, I wrote something much more thoughtful over on MoeGamer earlier today, so go read that instead. I want to go to bed.

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#oneaday Day 411: Blogiversary

It is, according to WordPress, the 17th anniversary of me signing up for WordPress and starting this blog. This was not my first blog, but it is, by far, the one that has stuck around the longest, in that it still exists. I don't think any of my other blogs are still online, though several of them are archived in the Wayback Machine.

In my first post on here, I explained that I signed up with WordPress so I wouldn't have to rely on, I quote, "crappy, shit-arsed web hosts who don't reply to my emails when I politely (and subsequently, less politely) enquire exactly why they have absconded with £30 of my hard-earned for another year's hosting and domain name ownership". I can't remember the exact circumstances that surrounded this, but it would have been one of my previous self-hosted websites, which I had a domain name for.

Now, 17 years later, this blog is once again self-hosted, after an incident that is well-documented on this site. If you weren't around for that, the short version is that this site got mistakenly flagged as spam by WordPress.com's automated AI-powered bots, and rather than contacting me to enquire if, you know, everything was all right, they just shut the whole thing down — and, to add insult to injury, when your site has been shut down for supposed "terms of service violations", as in this case, you're not actually able to post in the Support forums to get an explanation.

It took multiple angry emails (very angry emails) to WordPress to get them to reinstate my site… which I then promptly uprooted and moved here. My traffic has been a fraction of what it once was ever since, but eh. On this site in particular, I don't really care; this place has always been my own personal little haven where I write what I want, and it's never been about getting people to read it. As perhaps exemplified by the fact I don't really share what I write about here; some people who have been hanging around for a while still read because they're still subscribed via email or RSS or whatever, and the rest of the Internet doesn't really know I exist. Honestly, I'm kind of fine with this.

I have changed a lot since that first post in 2008. I've been through a divorce and remarriage, I survived the COVID years, I've been through several different jobs and… well, frankly, it hasn't been an easy ride at all, for a whole mess of reasons you'll have to delve back into the archives to find out more about. But one near-constant in all that nonsense was this blog; even when I wasn't posting here daily, it was comforting to know that it was somewhere that I could come when I needed an outlet. And in some respects, it's nice to be able to look back on times gone by — good and bad — and reflect on how things have changed over the years.

There are things I regret, absolutely. There are also things I had little to no control over. On the whole, I'm in a mostly better place now than I was then — and especially during a particularly dark time in 2010 — though there are other ways in which life was better, simpler, back then. I certainly wasn't getting annoyed about AI back in 2008, and social media certainly didn't feel quite as toxic as it does today.

One thing hasn't changed since that first post, though, and that is the fact that I am "constantly shaking my head at the rancid, disgusting, despicable state that this country is in". How little I knew. If only I knew that things were going to get much, much worse nearly 20 years later.

Because they are fucking worse, aren't they? Not only is late-stage capitalism destroying lives on a regular basis, we have an insane paedophile rapist in the most powerful office in the world, we've taken about a million steps back in terms of not being racist, homophobic and transphobic, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and no-one knows how to behave like a decent human being any more because they spent all their fucking time staring at TikTok instead of interacting with other people.

Still, this blog will remain a constant. And, in these challenging times, that thing about it being a helpful outlet for me rings especially true!

Happy birthday, blog. Thanks for listening.

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#oneaday Day 410: #StopKillingSoftware

There's been a lot of attention on the #StopKillingGames movement of late, and with good reason: they have a good point, and they've also had said point misrepresented quite severely on a number of occasions, but I think most people are starting to get it.

That's all very well and good for games, but what about software?

For various reasons, I decided to reinstall Windows today. I haven't lost anything important — the computer just needed a "refresh", plus it seemed like a good opportunity to finally take the plunge to update to Windows 11 (and then promptly "debloat" it).

Any reinstall is typically followed by trying to remember which applications you had on the computer that you actually need, and then going about reinstalling them one by one. This is one scenario in which I am grateful for the digital age, rather than requiring that I hunt down a million and one CD-ROMs, though it is still quite tedious having to download everything again — and, in some cases, find license information buried deep in your email archive.

One snag I ran into today is one that I thought I might come across at one point or another: the fact that the video editing software I use, Hitfilm Express, no longer exists. Moreover, it appears that the company which made Hitfilm decided to… stop doing Hitfilm in January of this year. In fact, I get the impression they stopped doing anything.

I had been using an old version of Hitfilm for some time, because upgrading to a newer version would mean abandoning the "pay what you want" copy I had, which was perfectly fine for my needs, and instead moving to the company's new subscription-based Software as a Service model. I was disappointed to see Hitfilm move to this model, but with the amount of other software packages out there doing the same — and the original developer of Hitfilm getting acquired by a larger company — I wasn't altogether surprised. But the old version still, at least, worked.

When I went to reinstall said old version today — which I used to be able to do from my account page on the company's website — that was no longer possible. All I could do was download the subscription-based version… or so it said. The downloads page had buttons to download it, but they weren't actually linked to anything. So the software was just… gone, basically.

If I had been paying a subscription, I would have been a bit annoyed, but recognised that this is always a risk when using Software as a Service. But I paid for a perpetual license to that software — granted, I didn't pay much for it, but I still paid for it, and expected it to remain available.

But no. Hitfilm Express has ceased to be. It is an ex-parrot. My only option was to either download the subscription-based one and then do some faffing around in the hope that a subscription would actually somehow "convert" to a perpetual license for that version, or to… well, to pirate it, frankly.

I know how to use Hitfilm. I like Hitfilm — at least I did before it went all Software as a Service. I don't really want to change to using something other than Hitfilm. I know DaVinci Resolve is well-regarded, but it's also several orders of magnitude more complicated than Hitfilm Express, and I'm not sure I want or need that.

So, well… I'll leave you to imagine which of the above options I went for.

Stop Killing Games has an excellent point. It also applies to software. If one buys a piece of software for a particular purpose, one should reasonably expect that software to be left in working order even after official support ends. That doesn't seem particularly unreasonable, and that's certainly how it used to work. Hell, I can still plug in an AtariWriter cartridge to my Atari 8-bit and use that, or load up Cubase on the Atari ST. If I still had a Mac, I bet I could still get my copies of Final Cut Pro and Logic Studio working, too.

So Stop Killing Software as well as Stop Killing Games, please. And if you could just generally Stop Making Everything Worse while you're on, that'd be great also.

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#oneaday Day 409: Beneath the Old Skies

I've talked a bit recently about how the adventure game genre is probably in a better place than it's ever been — in fact, I think I'd even argue that now, it's better off than it was in its supposed heyday of LucasArts and Sierra in the early '90s.

The reason is games like Wadjet Eye's Old Skies, which I've played a good four hours of this evening. This is a masterfully put together adventure game in terms of involvement, emotional engagement and just being a plain compelling interactive narrative. While there are some who have criticised it for not having interesting "mechanics" — by that, what they really mean is that it doesn't have any puzzles they got stuck on — I think there's a strong argument to be made that the genre has moved beyond the necessity for being overtly and deliberately obtuse for the sake of inflating playtime.

Y'see, while Sierra and, to a lesser extent, LucasArts games put in deliberately complicated and sometimes baffling puzzles as a means of hiding the fact that their total runtimes were, in many cases, only one or two hours at most, today's adventure game developers have the resources, budget and ability to put together games that are much longer. As such, there's no real need for these games to artificially inflate their length through obtuse puzzles, because the core of what they offer — their narrative, and the player's involvement in it — is compelling enough to stand on its own merits.

This is definitely the case for Old Skies, which has a thoroughly interesting and enjoyable premise. You take on the role of Fia Quinn, a time-travelling agent who accompanies clients on recreational jaunts to the past in order to ensure that they don't get up to mischief or cause any paradoxes that are too significant. The nature of time travel means that there will always be a certain amount of impact on the future, reflected in the game world by flashes of purple light that signal a "Chrono-Shift", where something notable changes in the "present" due to interference in the past, but the Earth depicted in Old Skies also has sufficient technology to "Chrono-Lock" anything that is particularly important, protecting it from such instances.

Each main chapter of Old Skies focuses on one of Fia's jaunts to the past with her client. The first is a relatively short trip back to the New York of 2024 as a renowned scientist hopes to resolve some lingering regrets. Things… do not go entirely according to plan, setting what one would anticipate to be a template for the rest of the game. But interestingly, the second immediately subverts that expectation by being much longer, more involved and more complex, both mechanically and narratively. In this chapter, set in the "Gilded Age" of the late 19th Century, something still goes "wrong", but in an entirely different way, forcing both Fia and her client to work through a complex series of events in two closely related time periods (six months apart) in order to set things what is, to their best interpretation, "right".

The whole thing raises some interesting questions about the very ethics of something like time travel. How do you ensure someone's selfish actions don't make a real mess for everyone in the future? How, exactly, do you police such things? Who decides who and what is "important" to the coherence of the overall timeline — and how? Why were they given that opportunity?

I'm looking forward to seeing how the story evolves, and it also appears that this game is going to be pretty substantial by adventure game standards. At four hours to complete the first two chapters, and I believe at least seven in total, this is looking like a fairly beefy adventure, though its chapter-based structure also means that it feels nicely episodic, so you can leave it at a natural break and come back to it another day.

Thus far, I haven't really seen the problem that some reviewers argue is the game's "weak mechanics"; the game doesn't rely much on using inventory items on things in the game world to progress, but instead prompts you to think carefully about the pieces of information you gather, how they relate to one another and, in some cases, how closely related time periods might relate to one another, too. There are some particularly clever sequences in the second chapter, requiring you to jump back and forth to revisit the same locations six months apart and manipulate the information you find in order to secure an advantageous outcome for everyone involved… as much as is possible, given your own interference, anyway.

The game is beautifully presented, with some absolutely stellar voice acting and music, and some really nice animation on the main characters. It's also nice to see an adventure game breaking free from the seeming "obligation" that some developers feel to use '90s-style pixel art; Old Skies instead adopts a true high-definition look that feels like a true successor to the brief period of "Super VGA" adventures during the winding-down of the Sierra and LucasArts "golden age".

Anyway, I'm sure I'll have more to say in the coming days/weeks as I work my way through it on evenings where I feel like something a little more chilled out than Donkey Kong Bananza. In the meantime, if you're a point-and-click type, I can highly and confidently recommend Old Skies; it's another fantastic game from Wadjet Eye (developed by them this time, as opposed to the numerous other titles they've published in recent years) and well worth the £17 it costs. Take that, £75 video games!

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#oneaday Day 408: Don't spoil yourself

One thing that I've become quite frustrated with in the last 10 years or so is the prevalence of "guide content" on video game websites. Guides and walkthroughs have always been a thing, of course, and I completely understand why sites feel the need to get guides up day-one when a big new video game comes out: they are freshly-squeezed, ready-mixed SEO juice just waiting to be taken advantage of, and if you're a site that makes the majority of its money from ad impressions, you would probably be foolish not to take advantage of the immediate thirst for knowledge that comes with the release of a new game.

Now, I won't be hypocritical and say I've never looked at a guide for a game. Some games, one feels, were designed in such a way that looking at a guide — particularly the Official Strategy Guide, back when those were still a thing — is near-essential if you want to see everything that the game has to offer. Take something like Final Fantasy VII's chocobo breeding, for example; while you probably could work all that out yourself, it would take a very long time to do so, and it would be hard not to end up resenting the time you'd spent on failed experiments.

But I feel like the deliberate, immediate posting of Guide Content the second a new game releases is destroying the sense of wonderment and discovery we should have with a brand new game. Hell, game developers themselves are absolutely spoiling their own games — one can't help but feel that Pauline's reveal in Donkey Kong Bananza would be a thousand times more impactful if we hadn't had it completely spoiled weeks in advance by Nintendo's own trailers — but all Guide Content does, for me, is instil a sense of FOMO, and that one should be playing the game as "efficiently" as possible. Consume content until next product, then get excited for new product, or whatever the quote was.

I've been deliberately trying to avoid looking at guides for Donkey Kong Bananza while I'm playing it, and I'm having a good time doing so. Of course, the game featuring a "checklist" of all the things you have and haven't found also instils that same sense of FOMO, even though you absolutely do not need to "find everything" in order to 1) have a good time with or 2) beat Donkey Kong Bananza. As such, I've found it very hard to resist just sneaking a peek at a guide or two just to fill in the few frustrating spaces I have left in my list. But that stops here and now! I'm going to get through the rest of the game at my own pace, and then use the game's own built-in features — you can buy maps with the in-game gold to show you where the collectibles are, but you still have to determine how to get there yourself — to finish the game to my own satisfaction.

Games shouldn't feel like work, and the risk you run when having a guide by your side at all times is turning them into a chore. Games like Donkey Kong Bananza, Zelda and suchlike are made to be enjoyed, savoured, experienced at the player's own pace; you absolutely lose something if all you do is immediately look up where everything is.

I will add at this point that none of this is to take away from the sterling work good guide creators do. IGN's guides are particularly impressive, featuring interactive maps and checklists so those who do want to play the game in that way can not only read the guide, but also mark off their progress. I just wish there weren't so many of them, and that looking up information for a game around launch didn't immediately bombard you with the temptation to spoil the shit out of it for yourself.

I guess it's all about self-control. GameFAQs has been a thing almost as long as the Internet has, after all; all that's happened now is that commercial sites are using guides to juice their own SEO. Which makes commercial sense, but also, speaking as someone who was laid off from a publication and immediately plonked on "Guide Content" duty to keep him out of trouble during his notice period, is immensely demoralising and frustrating to see.

There are amazing writers out there crying out for opportunities to do good criticism and analysis. And yet it feels like nine opportunities out of every ten posted online in the games biz these days are to be a "guides editor" — a job that, in most cases, is underpaid, utterly thankless and easy to blame if the site's traffic figures aren't where they should be.

Anyway, back to Donkey Kong Bananza. Without a guide.

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#oneaday Day 407: More Death in Paradise

My slide into middle-age is ongoing as I find myself continuing to watch Death in Paradise, the murder mystery show about a fish-out-of-water detective from jolly old England finding themselves solving murders on a Caribbean island with probably the highest murders per capita figure in the entire world.

I'm up to the fifth season now, which is well into second lead Kris Marshall's tenure on the show. His arrival at the start of the third series, thanks to the impressively ballsy move of murdering the former lead, DI Poole (played with aplomb by Ben Miller), marked a notable shift for the show, but it handles it well. Most crucially, it continues to be enjoyable and appealing for much the same reasons as when Miller's Poole character had the leading role, and I suspect that later changes in the core cast will continue this trend.

It's not just the lead that changes, either. While Danny John-Jules' excellent Officer Dwayne Myers remains in place for a significant portion of the run — I believe he finally stops being a regular around the seventh season or so? — the other "main characters" shift around a bit. The lead detective's second, initially a young woman named Camille (Sara Martins), departs the show partway through the fourth season after having been a failed love interest for both Miller and Marshall's characters, and is replaced by Florence (Joséphine Jobert), who initially takes the place of Fidel, one of the uniformed officers in the show, and is subsequently promoted to take Camille's place after the latter takes a job in Paris. The open "second uniformed officer" slot is then taken up by JP (Tobi Bakare), who stays in place, as far as I can make out, until the end of the show's present run.

Anyway, point is, the cast undergoes some quite substantial changes over the course of the show's complete run to date, but it still feels coherent. There's a good sense of "handover" from prior cast members to new ones, and the overall "feel" of the show remains remarkably consistent.

Part of this is entirely deliberate, and somewhat lampshaded by the structure of the show — especially the denouement, during which the lead detective gathers all the main suspects and witnesses together, then dramatically explains whodunnit, how and why. Early in Marshall's run on the show, he is introduced to this format as being how DI Poole did things, and there are plenty of jokes in subsequent episodes when certain individuals talk about going to arrest a suspect, only to be told "that's not how we do things around here".

It's intensely, extremely formulaic, but in many ways that's what makes it so comforting. The details of each case are different enough to keep each episode feeling fresh, but the structure of the storytelling is always the same. It's a structure that works, and is effective at telling a fun murder-mystery story over the course of each hour-long episode.

I've always had a real spot for detective stories. I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories as a youth, in a book that basically reprinted all the old Strand magazine pages they originally appeared in, in extremely tiny print. I played a bunch of detective-style adventure games with my mother as a kid — and continued to do so into my adult life. And I don't think there's a detective-style TV show that I've watched to date that I haven't enjoyed.

There are some today who would probably argue that this sort of show is "copaganda", and I get that. There are many things one can criticise the real-world police for, and in more recent years I really feel like I understand why some people feel quite so aggrieved at the very existence of police forces.

But at the same time, a good old murder mystery is a classic story format with good reason, and a cast of police officers is an ideal vehicle for telling a story like that. So I don't feel the slightest bit guilty in unironically enjoying shows like Death in Paradise simply for what they are. The real police may, in many ways, suck, but that doesn't mean you can't root for fictional detectives to crack each case!

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#oneaday Day 406: Kong for me

My copy of Donkey Kong Bananza arrived today, and I've spent most of the evening playing it. It's really good! As with most things video game-related, I'll likely do a full write-up on MoeGamer once I've beaten it, but for now I wanted to give a few immediate impressions based on a few hours' play this evening.

The first thing I'll note is that in exploratory games, I am almost certainly absolutely insufferable to watch, because I will never go straight for where I'm "supposed" to go. You drop me into a discrete level, the first thing I will do will be turn around and see if there's anything behind the starting point. I will deliberately run off in the opposite direction to any objective markers, and in many cases find myself running into obstacles well before the game considers that I'm "supposed" to encounter them, often resulting in me having to work out how to use controls that haven't been explained to me yet — or in some cases, finding creative exploits to overcome obstacles without the player's full toolset available.

The reason I note this is because Super Mario Odyssey, the spiritual precursor to Donkey Kong Bananza (they're by the same people), was absolutely built for me. At every point I went climbing around the levels into places I wasn't "supposed" to be going, I'd find a Moon waiting for me, rewarding my curiosity. It felt like the game's designers had anticipated players like me exploring the game to the fullest, and they had ensured that there were plenty of rewarding things available if you did choose to play that way.

Donkey Kong Bananza is, it will doubtless not surprise you to learn, exactly the same. Only this time, you have the option of pummelling a significant portion of the level geometry into oblivion while hunting for hidden secrets. While bashing a tunnel through a mountain often isn't the best way to get somewhere — and the game does have enough "indestructible" materials to mean you can't just dig your way around the whole map — it is often an option. If you have a general idea of where to go but are struggling to find the route you're "supposed" to take… just make your own. Nine times out of ten, you can do that.

Another Nintendo series that I'm very fond of due to it catering to my very worst, most obsessive tendencies in this regard, is Splatoon. While the various single-player campaigns in the Splatoon games and their DLC were all discrete, relatively small levels, they again rewarded player curiosity and willingness to diverge considerably from the critical path. There's some of that DNA in Donkey Kong Bananza, too, because as well as the large, quasi-open world "layers" you explore for the majority of the game, there are also a variety of special challenge missions that you access through special doorways and hatches around the place.

While the combat-centric challenges are usually pretty straightforward — and there's usually a "trick" to each one to complete it efficiently — the more "platformy" challenges typically have three Banandium Gems, the game's main doohickey, to find. Two of these will usually be straightforward: there's usually one at about the halfway point of the challenge and one at the end, the other one is typically concealed a little more deviously. You'll need to peer over the edge of levels, look under things and get creative with your exploration, just like tracking down the optional objectives in Splatoon campaign levels. And it's great.

So yeah. I'm having a lovely time so far. Down to the second "layer" now — didn't quite get all the bananas in the Lagoon layer, but I think I was only missing about four or five in total, so I'll go back for them at some point. That's my weekend sorted, I guess!

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#oneaday Day 405: No Kong for me

I was hoping to have been playing Donkey Kong Bananza for several hours by this point in my life, but sadly, it seems the Royal Mail have let me down. Despite my copy having been shipped from Nintendo HQ on Monday, it is currently milling around the North West Midlands mail centre, and has been since yesterday. Joy!

Still, no biggie. As my wife said earlier, at no point will I look back on my life and wish I'd had the chance to play Donkey Kong Bananza a day earlier than I actually got to. Assuming I don't die or lose the use of my hands tomorrow, obviously.

Anyway, I spent much of the evening playing Scar-Lead Salvation, a third-person shooter roguelike-esque thing from Compile Heart. This arrived along with Death end re;Quest Code Z a few weeks back and I gave it a quick go one evening when I fancied playing something a bit different. Honestly I wasn't super taken with it from that first session, but playing it this evening feels like it's "clicked" somewhat.

I'll write in more depth about it over on MoeGamer when I've beaten the main story mode — it looks as if that involves two runs through the game, but since there are only three main "areas" to progress through, that shouldn't be too bad, assuming the difficulty level doesn't ramp up too drastically. Which it's entirely possible that it might, what with this being a game with somewhat vaguely roguelike tendencies.

What Scar-Lead Salvation is at heart is a game about spotting enemy patterns and then successfully dealing with them, sometimes with several going off at the same time. Each enemy type has a very distinctive silhouette that you will come to associate with its distinctive attack pattern, and success in the game involves knowing what each enemy is going to do — and how to handle it. This involves a bit of target prioritisation, a bit of careful aiming and a bit of nimble dodging. It's not a particularly out-of-the-ordinary combination of elements, but it works well, the controls are tight and responsive and the encounters are satisfying.

Where the game falls down a tad is in its environments, which are drab and boring, albeit thematically appropriate for the narrative, which I won't get into right now. This isn't a game where "exploring" is particularly fun — largely because, so far, each level has been a completely linear path, and I don't yet know if that changes — but, to be fair to it, it sets expectations pretty clearly up front that the main focus here is going to be the combat and the progression, and both of those aspects are pretty good.

Anyway, like I say, I'll have more to say on that once I've actually beaten it — though if Donkey Kong Bananza arrives tomorrow, that will delay any completion efforts significantly — so please look forward to that. In the meantime, if you like third-person shooting with shoot 'em up-style bullet patterns to deal with, consider giving Scar-Lead Salvation a look. It won't knock your socks off or anything — it is a Compile Heart game, after all — but it is pretty solid at its core.

Now, since I spent much longer than I intended playing it this evening — told you it "clicked" — I should probably go to bed. I will almost certainly feel like death in the morning, given that it's nearly 1am, but I feel like death every morning, so I guess it doesn't matter all that much. Either way, I'm off to bed now, so there.

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#oneaday Day 404: Today's AI idiot story

The latest hilarious story from the world of artificial "intelligence" is the sorry saga of a Redditor who "worked on a book" (and I use the term "worked" loosely) with ChatGPT and found that they couldn't download it.

You want to know why? This is the best bit. It's because ChatGPT hadn't actually created anything, because it can't do that. It had outright lied to the person because, as a large language model — which, let's not forget, is essentially fancy predictive text, not actual intelligence — it believed, based on the data it had ingested, that telling the user it had successfully created 487MB of book was what the user wanted to hear.

To be fair, it was what the user wanted to hear, only they wanted that 487MB of book to, you know, actually exist.

The Redditor's eventual conclusion was thus:

After understanding a lot of things it's clear that it didn't [generate the book at all]. And it fooled me for two weeks.

I have learned my lesson and now I am using it to generate one page at a time.

Several other Redditors commented, quite correctly, that this is perhaps not the ideal takeaway from this lesson. This is my absolute favourite response, though. This response deserves to be framed and put in a museum as a monument to how utterly stupid the age we're living in is:

At least you're finally admitting that ChatGPT is working on creating this fictional thing instead of you having "worked on it together". lol. Meanwhile real writers don't need this nonsense to be creative.

As a wise person once said: why would I invest more time reading something than the author spent writing it? Best of luck on something literally no one, including you, will read.

Absolute perfection.

Even more hilarious is the fact that the original poster was supposedly trying to create "a collection of a lot of children [sic] stories with moral lessons that [they] wanted to present in a colourful manner with underprivileged kids of [their] area". They claimed that the text was "all theirs" and that they were using ChatGPT to "refine the flow"… and generate 700 images.

Because what the world needs is an AI-edited book of children's stories almost certainly ripped off from existing tales, illustrated with AI slop images.

Dear Lord. I absolutely despair that we're living in an age where people are this fucking stupid.

Let me be 100% clear on this: if you're using ChatGPT to generate or "refine" anything you want to publish, you are not an author. You are certainly not the illustrator.

Learn to write. Practice it. It is a craft like any other. Develop your own unique, distinctive voice, because AI very much has a "voice" of its own — a particularly obnoxious, hand-wringing, obsequious, simpering one — and it is immediately recognisable. And, if you want to improve, hire a fucking editor. Or, at the very least, just give it to another sodding human being to look at.

ChatGPT is not an editor. ChatGPT gets things wrong a significant proportion of the time. And, as this story shows, ChatGPT just fucking makes things up quite a bit, too. You cannot trust it. You should not trust it. It is not a person. It is not intelligent. It doesn't "know" anything.

And if you need art? Two options: one, learn to do it yourself, which can be rewarding and fulfilling in its own right. Or two, and you'll like this, can you guess what it is yet? That's right, it's hire a fucking artist.

I truly despair for the fucking dumb age we live in right now. I can't wait for the AI bubble to pop and all this stupid shit to go the way of the Metaverse and NFTs. Because it's actually driving me insane what it's clearly doing to people. We're going to end up completely incapable of producing cultural artefacts if we're not careful. And that's not a world I want to live in.

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