#oneaday Day 342: Palette Cleanser

Yes, I know it's "palate cleanser", but I'm making a Clair Obscur pun, see. 'Cause I finished it last night, and boy, was that ever a good game. So much so that I'm sort of sitting in this weird afterglow right now where I don't quite feel ready to go back to Xenoblade Chronicles X, but also feel mildly dazed and confused about what, if anything, I might want to play next.

I won't go into specific details about how Clair Obscur ends right now — that's probably a job for either a podcast or an in-depth article on MoeGamer — but suffice to say that I think, or I hope, anyway, that people will be talking about this game for a very long time. For me, it's the first game that has felt like a notable step forward in the medium for quite some time. Yes, technology has advanced, graphics have got better and load times have got shorter, but I'm not sure the games have got any better.

Clair Obscur, though, is one of the best RPGs I've ever played. Sure, if we're getting technical about things, almost the exact same game could have probably been made (with somewhat worse visuals) one, two, maybe even three generations of console hardware ago. We had the fundamentals of its game design, the way it tells its story, its mechanics and aspects of its presentation back in the PlayStation 2 era, but somehow, all of those elements have never quite come together in this exact form until just now.

In fact, I think one of the best things about Clair Obscur is that it takes influences from a number of different "eras" of gaming. It has the "world map" structure of PS1 and even 16-bit RPGs. It has turn-based combat that, in some regards, feels like it owes something to Final Fantasy X. It has timing-based parry and dodge mechanics that owe a debt to FromSoftware's work. And, of course, it all looks bloody lovely thanks to Unreal Engine 5. I think that's the reason we haven't seen something quite as sumptuous as Clair Obscur for quite some time, because we've needed all those previous generations of influences for them to be able to merge together into this piece.

Anyway, I said I wasn't going to talk a lot about Clair Obscur and then I went and did. What I'm mulling over as I type this is exactly what I might want to play next. And the reason I made the increasingly regrettable pun in the title of this post is that I'm feeling like I might want to play something fairly short as a palate-cleanser before I return to Xenoblade Chronicles X. Or perhaps to play alongside Xenoblade Chronicles X, because I feel like I should probably try and get out of the habit of only feeling "able" to play one game at once, particularly given how many of the bloody things line my walls.

I'm leaning towards something platformer-y. Maybe a Castlevania, or something like it. I have the Castlevania Advance and Dominus collections that I haven't explored yet, so that might be something. Or there's always a racing game. I like racing games. Fuel is currently in my PlayStation 3 because I've been playing that a bit recently, but I also think I maybe might want to play something different. Or maybe I do want to play Fuel. Fuel is good, after all.

In fact, yes. Decision made. I will play some Fuel. I like Fuel. It is a comfort game, and that is what I feel like I need right now. So let's go be comfortable!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 341: Rabbit (ass)holes

A random bit of Internet rabbithole-diving this evening brought me into the realm of "King Assripper". The name pretty much says it all, but in case you were in any doubt: this was a man who, as far as I can make out, became famous for eating a lot and farting. Particularly farting.

His most well-known work is "King Assripper Farts On His Roommate's Door", which, in this age of clickbait, is refreshingly honest about what it offers. Sadly, the originally posted video of this spectacular display of flatulence no longer exists — good old link rot strikes again — but, as with most things on the Internet, it has been archived for posterity by other people who, I'm sure, are more than happy to get some YouTube ad revenue from the hundreds of thousands of people keen to see a fat man guff really loud.

Except it goes deeper than that. I decided to look into whether there was any more information online about King Assripper, or if the above masterpiece was his one and only work. Besides a KnowYourMeme page on the "Farting On Roomate's [sic] Door", I also discovered what appears to be a complete archive of everything King Assripper has ever contributed to Internet culture, where else? The Internet Archive, of course.

The Internet Archive is a curious organisation, and I'm thoroughly grateful for its existence. It plays host to so much stuff, and it's fascinating to see what has been recorded in there. Looking for old magazines? Chances are you can find them in the Internet Archive. But, at the same time, you can also find the entire video output of a guy who liked to stuff his face and then fart thunderously.

In a sense, I guess it's important to archive stuff like King Assripper, because whatever you may think of his, uh, content, he has nonetheless had an impact on popular culture. This whole little adventure this evening was mostly set in motion by Arin from GameGrumps happening to mention "Farting On Roomate's Door" during an episode. My thought process ran something like "oh, I vaguely remember that", closely followed by a nigh-uncontrollable desire to see someone farting on their roommate's door.

From another perspective, I guess one could look at it as a little worrying. Consider the cultural output of previous centuries, and how much of it has been painstakingly archived, reproduced and, on occasion, updated to make it more palatable or understandable to a modern audience. Then consider someone in 200 years' time (assuming we haven't boiled the planet by then) looking back on the culture from today that we've preserved, and stumbling across the complete archive of King Assripper's videos.

Now there's one thing you never see in sci-fi, eh? You never see them looking back at galactic history in Star Trek and Worf going "I learned that in the 21st century, humans communicated by farting on one another's doors", and Picard having to explain that no, that was only something that happened under particular circumstances, and should by no means be taken as representative of the entire cultural output of the 21st century.

I bet Riker farted on a few doors in his younger days, though.

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#oneaday Day 340: Forbidden

It's kind of weird how, as you go through your life, you inevitably develop the feeling that you're "not allowed" to do certain things, because people will judge you and mock you for doing them — and that your own individual window of tolerance for that sort of thing will inevitably change as your life goes on, you grow older and stop giving a shit what anyone else thinks.

One of the things that most readily springs to mind is the matter of taking a bath. When you're a kid, taking a bath is, for most people, probably the default for a full-body wash, simply because you may not be tall enough to be able to use the shower effectively, or because it's easier to supervise a child in a bath than it is a child in the shower. At some point, probably around your early teens, taking a bath — if you're a boy, anyway — becomes taboo. You have showers now; you're a big manly man. You don't even cry when you get shampoo in your eyes while washing your hair. No baths for you!

A few years back — I forget exactly when, but it was at some point in the last 15 years or so — I started taking baths as a default again. The first couple of times reminded me that sometimes, there's nothing nicer than just being able to luxuriate in some warm water that has something that smells nice in it. And now, it is by far my preferred means of getting myself clean — even if, as a larger gentleman, it would perhaps be nice to be able to fill the tub a little higher without risk of spilling water all over the floor.

I wonder where these attitudes come from? I don't remember anyone specifically telling me that I should no longer have baths — though I do remember Chandler on Friends being mocked by his male peers Joey and Ross for taking a bath at the suggestion of the girls — but I definitely had the feeling that I described above: I was a grown man now, so I "should" have showers. Why? Why "should" I have showers? Who is going to tell me that I'm not "supposed" to have baths? No-one. Because the idea that you're not supposed to do something like that is bollocks, of course.

I'm sure it happens with lots of other things, too. The alcoholic drinks that it's socially acceptable for one to order, particularly as a man. (To be fair, when I still drank semi-regularly, this is a "rule" I flouted pretty much all the time, because I don't like beer and much preferred alcopops as a general rule.) The food one eats. The media one engages with. The colours of clothing one can wear. The designs one can have on one's T-shirt.

I guess the one advantage of being mostly disgusted with my own appearance and general status is that I really don't give a shit about any of these things any more. I wear what I want, I engage with the media that I want to engage with and I certainly still order a Smirnoff Ice with no shame if I'm in a situation where drinking socially would probably make the evening more bearable.

And, yes, I take baths. In fact, I'm off to go and take one right now, because I smell, bits of me are sticking to other bits of me, and I think pretty much every muscle in my entire body aches. So I am going to go and have a bath, and I am going to go and enjoy it. And there's nothing any of you can do about it!

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#oneaday Day 339: Eras

I remember when I was growing up, and I'd hear about life when my parents were young, and thinking "gosh, that was all jolly primitive, how on Earth did people get by without televisions and computers and the Internet?" Sitting here in 2025, thinking back to my own childhood, I feel like we've gone through shifts almost as big once again.

I grew up surrounded by computers. My Dad worked for IBM, and I'm pretty sure we had at least one Atari computer in the house from the moment I was born. I learned how to use computers from an early age — not just playing games, but also using them for productivity, programming and creativity. And my enjoyment of computing helped me make some friends, too.

But by modern standards, those computers were limited. They could run one program at a time, and you had to do everything using removable physical media. Want to play a game? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up. Want to do something creative? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up, then make sure you have another separate disk or tape handy to save your work onto. Hard disks existed, but they were something like £700 in '80s money for 20MB, and thus very few people had them — more to the point, not much software supported them, either, at least until the 16-bit era, when they became a little more commonplace.

"Going online" was something you could do from quite early on if you had the necessary hardware, and it was a very different experience to what using the Internet (really the Web) is today. To even get logged on you'd have to enter a cryptic string of commands to the modem, and sometimes it felt like a bit of a roll of the dice as to whether or not it would actually work at all. When you did get online, it was pages and pages of text, no pictures, and an understanding that you had a limited amount of time to do what you had to do before either 1) your family kicked you off for tying up the phone line for too long or 2) the SysOp kicked you off remotely for spending too long, preventing others from using the service.

When "online" spaces other than bulletin board systems came along — accompanied by computers that could do more than one thing at once — it was a revelation. I have immensely fond memories of exploring CompuServe on my Dad's account, spending time on the GAMERS forum, reading and replying to messages, and, on one memorable occasion, making $200 from some custom Wolfenstein 3-D levels. But it was still very different to today; CompuServe was a walled garden of curated stuff to explore, and access to the broader Web didn't come about until later. I remember us having great difficulty setting up the Mosaic browser to view simple websites, and how exciting it was when we finally got to look at, say, pictures from NASA for the first time.

I don't think anything tech-wise has changed things as much as the rise and growth of the mobile phone, though. Getting a mobile phone when I was in my late teens made me feel like I had a whole new degree of independence, free to communicate with my friends on my own terms when and how I felt like it (Pay as you Go credit permitting). I recall long, drunken text conversations with people important to me at university; there was even a time when I'd voluntarily phone people up for a chat. I used to have long phone conversations with my perpetually absent university housemate, for example; she was a good friend, but I didn't see her all that much for a variety of reasons.

Then, when smartphones arrived, everything changed. It didn't seem like it at first, because the earliest implementation of the iPhone was very limited. There were no installable apps; you had to do everything via the Web. But sites were starting to get savvy to the rise of this exciting new technology, and were starting to serve up "responsive" pages that looked nice on the small screen of an iPhone.

I was working at an Apple Store when the iPhone launched. It was an exciting time, for sure, and it only got more exciting when the App Store launched. Suddenly, there was this brave new frontier for software, and we'd all download and experiment with all manner of different apps; not just games, but productivity tools, creativity tools and silly joke apps — who can forget the "drinking a beer" one?

When in-app purchases were announced, my heart sank. We were already starting to see some nickel-and-diming in the console gaming space, and it was about to get much worse in mobile. Free-to-play became the default, and aggressive monetisation came along with it. And there were people who would make excuses for this. People who are still making excuses for it to this day, to such a degree that we're never going to get rid of free-to-play and microtransactions at this point.

But I think the biggest change was how addicted people became to those black plastic slabs. And I'm not excluding myself from that description, either; I could feel myself being compelled to fiddle with it constantly, and I didn't like it. I still don't like it. I'm better at controlling it today, but I still feel the "urges" near-constantly.

Things only got worse with the rise of content designed to be deliberately addictive, such as short-form videos. For quite some time now, I've found a lot of tech to be scary and unpleasant; definitely a far cry from the excitement I'd feel every day when I booted up the Atari 130XE to do some BASIC programming.

It's not all bad, of course. It's great having satellite navigation in your pocket when you're trying to find things. It's great being able to stay in touch with people via a whole host of different means. And it's great being able to quickly snap a photo or video of anything without kicking yourself for not bringing your camera with you.

But there have been some big changes. Whether or not they're as big as the differences between my parents' childhood and my childhood, I don't know. But I suspect the realisation that you've lived through some huge changes in the world and society is an important part of progressing through life; you often don't notice these changes while they're in the middle of happening, but when you look back on them you realise that they were pretty massive. And not always for the better.

Would I like to go back to earlier, less technologically advanced, less convenient days? Some days, I honestly do think that yes, I would. There are a lot of great things about our modern, connected society — and a lot of terrible things, too — but sometimes I just miss the simplicity of life as it was back then.

I find myself wondering exactly what I mean by "back then"; if it was possible to go back, exactly what point would be the optimal one? I think, for me, it would probably be the early 2000s. Mobile phones would exist but wouldn't be the life-consuming soul suckers they are today; computer and video game technology would be at a good point; and we might all see a bit more of one another in the real world.

I might not have this blog, though. Or maybe I would. Perhaps it wouldn't be in quite this form. Perhaps I'd be a trailblazer in the blogging space.

Who knows? You can't go back, more's the pity. So we're stuck with what we have, regrettably, constructed for ourselves. At least for the moment.

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#oneaday Day 338: Bomb Reignited

Boy, it sure has been an… "interesting" time for the games media recently, as I've alluded to a few times recently. To catch you up: Valnet, the sweatshop of the media industry, has bought Polygon and laid off the vast majority of its staff, which, of course, suggests that Polygon is going to become yet another SEO slop factory where its writers are paid peanuts to produce nothing of any real cultural value.

For a time, it looked like the longstanding site Giant Bomb was going the same way, with upsets over "brand-friendly" (or, more accurately, "brand-unfriendly") shenanigans on streams causing a sudden halt to… seemingly everything the site was doing. Giant Bomb has changed hands numerous times over the years; until recently, it was in the hands of Fandom, the people who ruined Wikia with obnoxious autoplaying pop-over videos and links to "related content" that was not, in fact, related to the thing you were looking at in any way whatsoever.

You'll notice I say "until recently". That's because Giant Bomb is no longer under the Fandom umbrella; it was announced on a panel at PAX East yesterday that Fandom and the Giant Bomb staff reached an agreement for the latter to purchase the site and turn it into an employee-owned outlet, much like the growing number of other worker-owned arrangements that are really finding their feet these days.

This is excellent news. I must confess despite being in the official Final Fantasy XIV guild for Giant Bomb, I never really hung out there all that much, but I did know that Giant Bomb, for many folks, was all about the community — similar to the old 1up.com days. The site looking like it was going under thanks to corporate interference was really sad to see — and for once, the corporate interferers saw what was going on, had a seemingly genuine "oh, shit" moment and changed course. Strongly. You can criticise Fandom for many things, but the agreement they reached with the Giant Bomb staff is, to my knowledge, absolutely unprecedented in the online media biz.

I've decided to make an effort to join the Giant Bomb community a bit more. I've rescued my account that I apparently signed up for in 2010 (with a different email address that thankfully I still had access to) and pledged $10 a month to help the folks on the site out. I'm looking forward to seeing what it has to offer, getting to know the community and perhaps, hopefully, finally having a decent place to hang out and talk games.

What does this mean for all the other things I do online? Nothing. I'm still going to be blogging here, I'm still going to be writing about games on MoeGamer — it's just I might be posting a few more bits and pieces on Giant Bomb from hereon, in both the forums and using the site's blogging facility. If there's one thing I really miss from the Internet Gone By, it's 1up.com and its sense of community; I'm really interested to see if Giant Bomb can prove to be an adequate replacement, particularly for someone who is essentially "new" to proceedings over there. I'm intruding on 17 years of history (huh, the site is the same age as this blog) but the "Duders" are supposed to be thoroughly nice people, so we'll see.

Mostly I'm happy to see my pals Jeff Grubb and Mike "Tolkoto" Minotti back in action, because I know very well how hard those two chaps worked to claw their way up the mountain of shite that is the games media industry, and it was a massive bummer to see them seemingly kicked back to the ground. I've known both of 'em since the 1up.com, Bitmob and Squadron of Shame days, and it was wonderful to see that they'd made something of their passions — and that they will continue to be able to do that.

So yeah. Giant Bomb is back. Now, if we could just do something about the rancid degradation of everything else online…

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#oneaday Day 337: Lyrical Genius

Have you ever been on the website "Genius"? It's a site that hosts song lyrics, but it also has an annotation feature that allows the nerds of the Internet to highlight sections of the lyrics and post overly elaborate explanations of what they "really" mean.

I love sites like this, because inevitably you will stumble across people who take it really seriously, and that often leads to amusingly impassioned arguments about things that really don't matter. So let's have an explore, shall we?

Genius Annotation
3 contributors
Breakfast is one of the first things you do in the morning so if you burn you breakfast things are going “great”.

(As to why he’s making breakfast, knowing he’s two hours late for work, is beyond me!)

That one's from the second verse of I'll Be There For You, the theme from Friends by The Rembrandts. Elsewhere in the comments, someone points out that the theme song is sung from the perspective of first-season Rachel specifically, which honestly is not something I'd really considered before, but it would seem to apply for the most part.

Genius Annotation
1 contributor
This is likely a reference to being high on Methamphetamine, which is sometimes refered to as “Scooby snacks”

This one's from, unsurprisingly, Scooby Snacks by The Fun Lovin' Criminals. The downvotes are due to the fact that "Scooby Snacks" refer to ecstasy, not methamphetamine, and while the two share some chemical bits and pieces in common, they are not the same thing. Underneath, someone posted this alternative explanation, which I think I like a bit more anyway:

Comment by TiwakingTiwakingTiwaking, 6 months ago:

"Huey Morgan came up with lyrics about drug-addled bank robbers, an idea inspired by a security guard who handed out Valium to rowdy patrons at a New York City club called The Tunnel.

“On Sunday nights they had this crazy hip-hop party called Mecca,” Leiser explained. “There were fights and people trying to sneak weapons in, guns and knives, so the security guards were always on edge. One of the guards was a crazy dude and he’d be giving everyone Valiums so at least they were all chilled out. He’d hand them around and say, ‘Does anyone want a scooby snack?’ That’s where got the idea for the chorus from: what if this dude and some of his meathead friends were robbing banks, all high on these scooby snacks?”"

Here's some actual insight on MMMBop by Hanson:

Genius Annotation
1 contributor
Via Vulture:

Zac: “MMMBop” was started as a background part during the making of our previous independent album, called Boomerang. We were looking for background parts for a song, and somebody started singing what became the “MMMBop” chorus.

Ike: We were trying to come up with a catchy background part, and it was too catchy — like, “Oh, that’s really a foreground part.”

And some on Barbie Girl by Aqua, too:

Genius Annotation
2 contributors

The singer lives a life similar to the famous Barbie, where people live carefree, easy lives.

This line spawned one of the more hilarious court cases in music history, where Mattel, parent company to Barbie, sued Aqua for damaging the doll’s reputation. The judge ultimately sided with Aqua, leading to the now infamous ruling:

“The parties are advised to chill.”

"Oh baby, baby, the reason I breathe is you (Oh yeah)" from …Baby One More Time by Britney Spears prompted this discussion:

Genius Annotation
2 contributors
She’s addicted to her lover, and he’s the only reason she’s alive.

In 2003, 5 years after “…Baby One More Time,” Britney released a song called “Breathe on Me,” where breathing has less to do with survival and more to do with sex.

You know, I launched into this post thinking I would mock Genius and its community for taking things far too seriously, but a lot of these are actually surprisingly insightful. Maybe I should just pick something really stupid, dumb and obvious. Hmm.

Genius Annotation
1 contributor
“I need some love like I never needed love before.” The chorus erupts—a primal plea for connection. She yearns to make love, to explore every crevice of desire. Her past love was a mere appetizer; now, she’s back for the main course. The chorus repeats, a mantra of longing, urging her lover to set their spirits free—the only way to truly be.

This, from 2 Become 1 by the Spice Girls, is getting there, but I don't know. It's not wrong as such. It's just written in spectacularly flowery language, but then this is nothing unusual for music criticism, and I'm getting the increasing sense that Genius commentators would like nothing more than to be published music critics.

I was hoping that a song like Don't Stop (Wiggle Wiggle) by The Outhere Brothers would offer some gold, but disappointingly, there are no annotations on this song at all. I guess the lines "Put yo' ass on my face / I love the way your pussy tastes / Girl, you know you are the one / Take that ass and make me cum" are fairly self-explanatory, after all. Let's keep looking.

Okay, this one has a diagram. (Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!! by Vengaboys, if you were wondering.) Good work. But, again, neither wrong nor particularly worthy of mocking. What are you doing to me, Genius? Stop providing genuine value and a good sense of humour! You have no place on the Internet of 2025!

Genius Annotation
3 contributors

In this part of the song, Rick is saying that he will be loyal to his girl and, as the lyrics says, he’ll never give up on her, neither let her down, etc.

The chorus is remembered by a lot of people because of the “Rick Rolled” meme.

(Pie chart showing Rick Astley, indicating the things he would never do, including Give You Up, Let You Down, Run Around and Desert You, Make You Cry, Say Goodbye, Tell a Lie and Hurt You. Proportionally, Give You Up has the largest portion of the pie.)

Okay, I think we're done here. You win this round, Genius. But I will find you. I will find the most stupid annotation on your stupid website, and I will share it and I will mock it.

But in the meantime, I will probably just continue looking up lyrics on you, because you seem like a pretty reliable source for that and, with adblockers and all that shenanigans set up, you also don't appear to want to fill my computer with malware, so good job on that, I guess.

If you happen to find anything particularly ridiculous in your own explorations of Genius, please do share!

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#oneaday Day 336: The new old

I am presently awaiting two new games consoles with "2s" in their names: the Nintendo Switch 2, and the MiSTer Multisystem 2. And I think I might be more excited about the latter.

I've never used anything FPGA, but I'm led to understand that it's a marvellous thing. And the sheer number of different things that the MiSTer supports is exciting me. With the setup I intend to slot it into, I'm looking forward to being able to use it as a retro computer as well as every games console ever up until the PlayStation, Saturn and N64.

Now, the one difference between the Nintendo Switch 2 and the MiSTer Multisystem 2 is that the latter is going to require a lot more setting up and fiddling around with than the Switch 2 will. But I am hoping that any tinkering will be a one-time process, and that once it is done, the MiSTer will be able to just sit there and do whatever I want it to. Within reason, obviously.

I'm going to hook up a keyboard and mouse to the system as well as a controller, so it can be used for actual computing as well as just playing games. I'll probably get another one of the 8bitdo retro-styled keyboards for this purpose — the C64 one would certainly be thematically appropriate, in the absence of an Atari ST or Atari 800XL one, though the one that looks a bit like an IBM Model M is also quite nice.

I'm also probably going to invest in some nice speakers rather than relying on the single mono speaker of my trusty Trinitron CRT. That built-in speaker is surprisingly decent considering its size and placement, but it would be nice to be able to give console games in particular a bit of oomph.

So all told, I think the setup will probably look something like this, but with less wobbly freehand mouse-drawn lines.

With that, I should be sorted for some retro gaming and computing fun for quite some time. At some point I might consider looking into the various solutions available for using real classic controllers on the Multisystem 2, but I don't think I'll make that a priority to begin with. Let's get it up and running and working — and doing what I want it to do — and then we can talk customisation. Because there's a lot of customising you can do with a MiSTer, I'm led to understand!

It's an exciting new world that I can't wait to get involved in. I have a bit of a wait before that happens — the Multisystem 2 is coming out in August — but I guess I can occupy myself with the Switch 2 and Mario Kart World in the meantime…

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#oneaday day 335: Broken links

I like looking back over the mountains of nonsense I've posted on this site since 2010, but one thing that makes me a bit sad is quite how many of the links I posted years ago are now broken. You can tell at a glance, 'cause I have a plugin running that makes any broken links appear as crossed-out text, and the further back you go in my archives, the more likely you are to find these. (EDIT: I turned it off, because it was throwing up a lot of false positives.)

The same is true for YouTube videos I've posted. More often than not, any YouTube video I've posted that is more than maybe five years old has been taken down, made private or copyright claimed by someone. And, of course, with the mass exodus from Twitter since Elon went… the way he went, formerly embedded tweets that belonged to now-deleted accounts are just… gone.

One of the things I thought was supposed to happen with the Internet was that there would be a certain degree of permanence. You'd make something online, it would be your mark on the world. But, unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. There is no infallible means of making something on the Internet and having it stay as a permanent fixture. If it's your own website, it will cease to exist the moment you stop paying for hosting (or have something happen to you that precludes you from continuing to pay for hosting, like, say, dying) and if it's something you've hosted on someone else's service, such as a social media platform, your stuff is only as permanent as that social media platform.

There are exceptions to this, of course. The amazing work that the Internet Archive does with its Wayback Machine makes it possible to travel back in time and see websites as they appeared back in the day. Okay, it's not perfect — the archiving process often loses images and layout information, any interactive functions will inevitably be broken and anything built using defunct technology like Flash will remain inaccessible — but it's something, at least. I can still visit my website from 2004, for example. And, in slightly more broken form, my short-lived games blog from 2010.

But what about the stuff that, for one reason or another, has been impossible to archive? There is no longer any trace of the discussions the Squadron of Shame once had on the 1up.com Radio forums, for example, and while some of 1up.com itself has been archived, the Club pages, which is where a lot of our conversations took place, are not among that which has been saved from oblivion. Likewise, my old iWeb site, which I hosted on iCloud precursor .mac, no longer exists because at some point Apple discontinued the "iDisk" online storage that the site was hosted on. Those things are all long gone, and that's a bit sad.

This is one reason why I was so upset when WordPress.com made a hash of this site some time ago — against what some might call all odds, I have managed to keep this site in existence for 17 years, which is positively ancient in Internet terms, and the threat of having that all taken away based on a false positive from a stupid automated system was absolutely heartbreaking.

I guess the lesson is that if there's stuff you care about, back it up as well as having it online. Because one day, the online version might not be there any more, and it might not be through any fault of your own!

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#oneaday Day 334: Shine on Me

Any time I have a long drive, I always agonise for at least a short period over What I Should Listen To. On the way down yesterday, this was pretty simple: I had two episodes of the excellent Fun Factor podcast to catch up on, so I did that. On the way back this evening, though, I had a momentary pause. Did I want to listen to more podcasts, did I want to listen to a playlist on shuffle that will inevitably surface the same tracks it always does, or did I want to do something a bit different?

Last September, I made the argument that you should listen to albums more. I stand by that, but I will extend my suggestion to say that by "albums" I also include specifically curated compilations. Because for my journey back this evening, I listened to nothing but the two-CD compilation Shine 7 (well, a digital version of it, anyway).

Shine 7 is, as the name suggests, the seventh in a series. Specifically, it was a series that ran throughout the 1990s by Polygram TV that focused on indie rock — primarily of the "Britpop" variety, but also incorporating some American artists such as Green Day and Soundgarden. There does not appear to be a record of why the series was called Shine, but I always chose to believe that it was because Liam Gallagher singing the word "Shine" as a three-syllable word ("Sheeee–eeeeyyyyeeeee–nnnnneh") in multiple Oasis songs was an iconic sound of the 1990s indie rock scene, and Oasis, of course, appeared on every Shine compilation except Shine 10. Sometimes, as in the case of Shine 7, multiple times.

Shine 7 in particular is a compilation that carries some personal nostalgia for me, because it was through Shine 7 specifically that I started to develop some of my tastes in popular music. I was a bit of a latecomer to buying and enjoying music of contemporary bands — indeed, I made a terrible faux pas when purchasing a CD album with my own money for the first time: I bought Oasis' Definitely Maybe literally the day before (What's the Story) Morning Glory? came out. Naturally, I copped a fair amount of ribbing from my school friends for that one, but I didn't regret it; I enjoyed Definitely Maybe and in some respects I think I still like it more than Morning Glory.

Anyway, I knew that it was "cool" to be into "indie" at the time, even though I didn't really know what "indie" meant, and I'm not sure anyone else did either. I did know that Stacey, a girl I had struck up a friendship with while participating in a school play, and, as it happened, a girl I rather fancied, seemed to know her stuff about music, though, so I asked her for some recommendations. And she recommended Shine 7 to me, as she'd recently got a copy and was impressed with the two CDs, which contained a nice mix of both very well-known and lesser-known groups from the time.

Aside: this is a story I'll probably tell in more detail another time, but for quite some time I was known as "non-pulling Stacey freak" by my friend Woody for an utterly failed attempt to seduce her at a party I was hosting. Largely because, as a socially awkward (and, retrospectively, autistic) teenager, I had absolutely no idea how one would go about such things. And ultimately decided that I valued my friendship with her more than my apparently indescribable, incommunicable desire to kiss her on the mouth. But I digress.

So anyway, I bought myself a copy of Shine 7, thinking that this might bring me a little closer to Stacey, and also thinking that this might be a good means of getting to know a few names in the "indie" space. It didn't bring me any closer to knowing what "indie" meant — it was an embarrassing number of years later that I discovered it meant "independent", which was probably a misnomer for a significant number of names on Shine 7 — but it did introduce me to a variety of interesting music that I enjoyed listening to.

And I enjoyed the curation of the compilation; there wasn't a particularly running "theme" through it or anything, but the progression of the songs was pleasing to me. You'd get some well-known stuff you'd heard on the radio, then some stuff you probably weren't familiar with, then maybe some stuff that had only released as singles, not on albums (Oasis' Whatever was my first contact with this type of release) and then back to the really well-known stuff. It didn't sit still or become complacent, and everything felt like it had equal "importance". There were, of course, some tracks I came to like a lot more than others — and some that I tended to skip on subsequent re-listens — but for the most part, I appreciated Shine 7 as a complete work in and of itself.

And y'know what? Listening to it in full for the first time in probably more than 30 years on the drive home this evening, it really took me back. I haven't heard some of these songs for a very long time, but pretty much all of them were comfortably familiar despite that long period away from my lugholes. I listened to Shine 7 a lot when I first got it — you have to remember that we didn't have music streaming services or even digital music stores like iTunes then, so you were stuck with whatever CDs you had — and I think it imprinted itself on my soul.

I'm not going to tell you that Shine 7 is a work of great genius or anything. If anything, it was a cynical attempt to cash in on the Britpop and indie rock craze that was sweeping the nation in the 1990s — the fact that there are 10 numbered Shine albums plus two Best of Shine compilations-of-compilations should tell you that — but back then, it was simply an enjoyable part of my CD collection that I liked a lot. I don't know if it really brought me any closer to Stacey or not, but I'd like to think it did.

And in listening to it on the way home this evening, I thought fondly of Stacey for the first time in many years. I hope she's doing well.

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#oneaday Day 333: Scribus Interruptus

Yes, I know that's almost certainly not correct Latin. No, I don't care. I just wanted a post title that wasn't just "catching up" again, because I missed yesterday and, as such, you are getting two loads of nonsense today instead of just one. Aren't you lucky?

The reason I forgot to write anything was because yesterday and today were my monthly trip down to the office, meaning last night I was staying in a hotel and, after having spent a long drive getting there, I doubt I would have felt like typing much of anything meaningful on my phone even if I had remembered to write something. But anyway, enough of that. You know by this point that my stays in hotels tend to result in short posts that either involve me talking about cop shows on TV or ranting about AI adverts I saw in between cop shows on TV.

Instead, today I want to call back to something I wrote about in the previous post: my previous creative writing projects. I actually went back and read the one I said I didn't remember writing or remember anything about. Turns out I did actually remember writing it and what at least some of it was about, though the exact details were actually something of a surprise to me come the conclusion. So I guess that did its job, or something.

I have decided to dub that particular work my name. for reasons that will be apparent to anyone who has read it. I actually rather enjoyed revisiting it, and while I think there's probably a bunch of work I could do to it before "publishing" it, I'm overall satisfied with it. Judging by the time I wrote it (November 2012), it was almost certainly as much a therapeutic exercise as anything else, and there are a lot of things about the main character's journey in particular that I can directly relate to my own experiences. I, unsurprisingly, do that in my own creative writing rather a lot; it's a means of processing the things I've felt and the things I've experienced, and by exploring them through another character, even if I'm writing from a first-person perspective, I can sort of take a step back and contemplate them from a slightly different angle.

One thing I do enjoy playing with when creative writing is perspective. I went through a phase of writing a lot of things in first-person present tense, and it's a style I still like very much. I forget exactly what inspired me to first do this, but I'm pretty sure it was something we were looking at in English Literature classes in school — likely something along the lines of Jane Eyre (which isn't first-person present, but is first-person) or its companion piece Wide Sargasso Sea (which introduced me to "stream-of-consciousness" narrative, a form I was also rather taken with, if that were not already very apparent.)

Out of curiosity, the other evening I happened to look up if there have been any novels written using second-person perspective — i.e. placing the reader in the role of the protagonist by narrating using the "you" pronoun. Of course, things like Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy automatically fall into this category, but no; I was thinking something more "conventional" and non-interactive.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover there are, in fact, several novels that have been written at least partially in this style. One that I found particularly intriguing was an Italian piece by Italo Calvino known as If on a winter's night a traveler. This novel is about you, the reader, attempting to read a novel named If on a winter's night a traveler and continually getting distracted. The story apparently jumps back and forth between what "you" are doing — which is the main plot — and the first chapter of a variety of other novels that, for one reason or another, keep distracting you. Supposedly the themes of the various novel extracts are weaved into the main narrative, and it all sounds very clever and, yes, post-modern. It may well be completely insufferable to read — and I'm not going to try until I've finished my Jane Eyre re-read that I started recently — but it definitely intrigued me, and made me think I might try something with second-person perspective at some point.

Anyway, I think that's probably enough for the first post of today. Please feel free to go and read my name. now I've given it a name, or indeed any of my other past creative writing pieces, which you can find in the menu bar at the top. I've even set it so they display in chronological order rather than the usual reverse chronological order — though WordPress' limitations mean that when you want to read the next page you have to press the "Older Posts" button rather than "Newer Posts". But I'm sure you can figure that out.

Enough! I have another post to write. So it's time to do that!

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