#oneaday Day 312: Memories of Me: the teachers who inspired me

I've talked before about how I think my schooldays, and particularly my time in Sixth Form (which was at the same school) were among the happiest times of my life. Once I'd got over an initial bout of bullying in Year 7, of course, which was resolved by me punching my tormentor firmly in the face just as the headmaster was coming around the corner.

One of the reasons I think back so fondly on my time at school — particularly secondary school, which is what I'm going to focus on today — is because I had a lot of great teachers who inspired me, encouraged me, recognised the things I was good at and generally did a great job of making me feel like I wasn't a completely worthless human being with terrible hair, atrocious dress sense and a complete inability to socialise normally. (Retrospectively, of course, I recognise that the latter aspect — and perhaps some of the others too — stem from my autism, but I didn't know that back then.)

I thought I'd describe a few of them today. I don't know what happened to any of them after I left school, as I didn't stay in touch with any of them — something I kind of regret a bit, now — but I can say, with confidence, that they made a positive impact on my life in some way, and the memories I have of the time I spent learning with them are some of my most treasured.

Let's think through subject by subject.

In the English department, I had a run of excellent teachers over the course of the years of both compulsory and post-compulsory education. There was Ms Derbyshire, who reminded everyone of Victoria Wood with her general demeanour and tone, and who had a delightful sense of humour. There was Mr Bowie, who was probably the "coolest" teacher in school, who knew his stuff and managed to be knowledgeable without being a nerd. He taught me about Jeff Buckley. There was Miss Idziacysyk (I think that's how you spell it — it's been a very long time since I wrote it and Google is no help!), who took no shit but was also a really knowledgeable teacher of both English Language and English Literature. And there was Mr Lack, who was a kind and gentle soul unless you pissed him off.

In Maths, I should give particular praise to Mr Wilbraham, who had a… strange reputation to anyone who had never taken classes with him — a reputation I shan't repeat out of respect for him… and the fact we never really knew if it was true or not — but who turned out to be an excellent, friendly, supportive and good-natured teacher. I disliked Maths intensely, but I put up with it and somehow managed to remain in the top group for it throughout the entire time I was forced to take it, and the lessons with Mr Wilbraham in Year 10 and 11 were probably the closest I had to "favourite Maths lessons".

In Science, I had a lot of great teachers, too. There was Miss Bartlett, who everyone fancied because she had long blonde hair and wore quite short skirts, but who also got us involved in doing practical experiments pretty much from our first lesson in Year 7. There was Mr Allured, who had a booming voice you could hear a mile off, and a personality (and moustache) that made him feel like everyone's dad. And there was Mr Maskell, who looked like Harry Secombe and was a cheerful soul, always keen to show us his "volcano" experiments in the fume cupboard.

Music was a focus of my time at secondary school, and I had a wonderful time studying with, at various times Mrs Choy-Winters, Mr Murrall, Mr Wrigley and Miss Garrick. Each had their own specialisms, but all were incredibly supportive of me, and keen to make use of the fact that my musical skills, particularly on the piano, were significantly ahead of pretty much all of the rest of the school. I ended up doing a lot of accompanying various musical groups during my time at school; school concert nights were some of my favourite times of the year. There's probably a whole post in me just on school concerts, so I'll save any further discussion of that for then. I will just add that I have recurring mild nightmares about disappointing my Music teachers and no-one else from this list.

I managed to wangle things at GCSE so I could do Theatre Studies alongside Music instead of having to do an Art or Technology class I really didn't want to do. There was only one drama teacher at our school, known as Miss Unsworth — although the headteacher Mr Cragg occasionally taught drama lower down the school — and she was quite the character. She was definitely a "theatre person", and she taught us a lot both through our lessons and in the productions of The Wizard of Oz and Twelfth Night I took part in during my time at school.

In Modern Languages, we had the good fortune to have a native German speaker known as Herr Haubert. We used to take the piss a bit because of his somewhat stern attitude, his rather severe moustache and the fact he perpetually smelled of spearmint — for some reason, our teenage selves became convinced that this was because he was always chewing mint flavoured condoms, not actual mints or gum, which would have made more sense — but I can't deny that he was a good teacher. Immersing us in the target language right from the first lesson, I can still remember a decent amount of German that I learned in those classes. Not enough to be confident or fluent, but definitely enough to get by in an absolute emergency.

In the Humanities, or "Hums", we had several great teachers. There was Mr Watts, who was our formidable head of Sixth Form, an excellent history teacher and someone who didn't believe anyone under the age of 15 had any right to exist in his line of sight; Mr Mason, an ageing hippie who taught Geography and could bring an entire class to silence by lowering the volume of his voice rather than raising it; and Mrs Lloyd, who helped make my A-Level Sociology studies entertaining and fascinating.

I had a look back at my school's website, knowing full well that I was there a very long time ago at this point and thus was unlikely to see any familiar names, and I was proven correct. I suspect many of the people I've just mentioned have retired or perhaps even passed on by this point, which is somewhat humbling to think about. Wherever they are and whatever they're doing, though, I hope they know that they had an impact on me, and that I still think about them very fondly. It's true that your school days play a crucial role in defining who you are — and the teachers who guide you through those school days are an incredibly important part of that.

So thanks to all of the teachers of my youth, both the ones I've mentioned and the ones I've inevitably forgotten. My life may not have gone exactly as planned in numerous ways, but I always felt I had a solid foundation to build from, and it was all thanks to them.

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 311: Literary Minded

Every so often, I get really in the mood to Read Stuff. I'm in one of those moods right now; having finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow recently, I found myself having a curious hankering to return to a book I haven't read since my university days: Jane Eyre.

I like Jane Eyre. At least, I remember liking it when I studied it at both secondary school and university. I found its first-person narration compelling, its protagonist likeable and interesting, and its multi-phase narrative most enjoyable. I also enjoyed reading it alongside Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, a more modern (well, 1966) novel that tells the story of the woman who would become the "madwoman in the attic" wife of Jane Eyre's Mr Rochester. That novel was also the one which introduced me to "stream of consciousness" first-person narrative, which is a format I found immediately pleasing, and promptly made use of in the vast majority of creative writing projects I have done ever since.

I haven't read any "literature" for a while, though. By "literature" I, of course, mean "older works". Most people, I'm sure, have a bit of a mental block about reading older literature due to how the language has changed and evolved considerably over time, and how this makes them "difficult" to read. For sure, reading the first few chapters of Jane Eyre on the toilet this evening required a little fine-tuning in the ol' brain to get back into the swing of things, but I remembered that despite being obviously archaic in some of its turns of phrase and lexicon, Charlotte Brontë's (or perhaps Jane's) prose is relatively breezy by the standards of certain other works from a similar period, and once you reconfigure your base frequency to match that of a novel written in 1847, it's a surprisingly easy read.

I'm also starting to feel like it's of increasing importance to keep one's brain "fresh". With how disappointingly widespread bullshit AI-generated "summaries" are becoming, I genuinely fear a bit for the future of literary analysis and study. Now, I'm not particularly intending on doing any more literary analysis on Jane Eyre than I already have done in my life, but one thing I did find during my studies in earlier years is that having an awareness of certain things actually enhances your appreciation of various works when you read them purely for pleasure.

And thus, for the first time in quite a few years, I'm going to be diving back into the literary archives and reading both some books I remember enjoying (Dracula is on my list, and perhaps the Sherlock Holmes stories) as well as some that I have never actually read — Frankenstein and Wuthering Heighs spring immediately to mind. I don't remember having read those, anyway.

It's easy to be all doom and gloom about the state of the world today, and with good reason. But good literature has always been about being able to transport you to another time, place, even world, and I feel like that is going to be of increasing importance as the years go on and our real world becomes increasingly terrible and awful. I mean, Jane Eyre has it pretty rough at various points in her story. But at least she has a degree of agency in her life, and we know her tale is going somewhere. No-one knows where the tale of life in 2025 is going, and with each passing day the possible conclusions feel a little more scary.

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#oneaday Day 310: Low-effort post-midnight post

I have left it too late to write this. It's 25 past midnight and I really need to go to bed because I have to work tomorrow, and to make matters worse I have to do it with a somewhat improvised, cramped home office in our lounge because my wife decided a while back that she wanted to renovate my study.

I sound bitter, but I'm actually looking forward to seeing the end result of her work. She's stripping out the disgusting carpet that came with the house, fitting laminate flooring to match most of the rest of the house, repainting, putting up a nice blackout blind, putting some deliberately hideous wallpaper on at least one of the walls as what I believe is called a "feature wall", and generally just making the whole thing a bit nicer than it is. She's also removed the completely impractical chest of drawers from one of my desks, and I will be replacing that with something a bit more practical once the rest of the work is done.

Naturally, a project of this magnitude involves stripping everything out of the study as it currently exists, so of course I can't do my usual work in there this week while she does her thing. (She has this week off work specifically to do this project.) And so it is that I am relegated to the lounge on a tiny little folding desk that just about fits all the crap I need to do my job. I'm sure it will be fine. A change of scenery is nice every now and then, right?

It's been a busy few weeks at work. Naturally there's not a lot I can talk about that hasn't already been announced, but as well as working on the upcoming stuff we haven't told anyone about yet, I also need to come up with some stuff to promote the things we have announced. I have a lot to say about the impending Atari Arcade 2, for example; while there's a lot of largely unknown games on there, there are some absolute crackers if you like early '80s score-chasers.

My particular recommendation (besides the obvious Berzerk and Frenzy) is the excellent Tazz-Mania, which I had never encountered prior to working on this cartridge, but it's fab. Imagine TATE-mode Robotron but with the added time pressure of the walls of each stage closing in on you. I know nothing about this game or where it came from — and the Internet isn't much help either — but I do know that it's an absolute blast if you like that particular breed of colourful early '80s action, so be sure to spend some time with it when Atari Arcade 2 hits.

Right, I think that's probably enough for now. I need to go to bed. Apologies that this is such a half-arsed post, but I've spent most of my evening going through Digital Eclipse's fantastic Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story and really enjoying it, and the time just sort of ran away with me a bit.

So that's that. More coherent thoughts tomorrow, probably. Maybe.

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#oneaday Day 309: The most enduring game genres are the ones we used to think were too prolific

I settled down this evening to play some PC Engine games on my Coregrafx Mini, a delightful little mini system that I'm very fond of, but which I realised contains a number of games that I haven't explored at all as yet. The pull of Soldier Blade is, I'm afraid, often far too much to resist, as it was once again this evening — though I did at least spend some time with Lords of Thunder, which I've not got around to trying before. (It is hard.)

One thing occurred to me while I was playing, and that is the title of today's post: the fact that game genres we used to think were overdoing it a bit have ended up being the most enduring; the ones that have "aged the best".

What I mean by this is that back in the 16-bit console era in particular — I'm talking Mega Drive, Super NES and PC Engine to an extent (yes, I know the PC Engine isn't actually 16-bit, but its capabilities put it pretty much up there with the Mega Drive, so shut up) — reviewers were often a bit jaded and cynical any time certain types of game showed up. There was a near-constant cry of "where's the originality?" among critics of the period, and this, to an extent, filtered down to members of the public who, at the time, only really had the word of the folks who wrote for the magazines to go on, since the Internet wasn't yet a thing.

There are several game genres that spring immediately to mind when I think about this: shoot 'em ups, fighting games and beat 'em ups. Yes, the latter two are different, despite the term "beat 'em up" being used interchangeably to describe both in the UK in the late '80s and early '90s. (If you're wondering, fighting games refer to competitive games where combatants — either human or computer-controlled — fight in closed arenas one-on-one, or perhaps in tag team battles, while beat 'em ups typically involve one or more players cooperating against a stream of enemy characters, often, though not always, going on a journey as they do so.)

Shoot 'em ups, beat 'em ups and fighting games reached a point where they elicited little more than groans from the jaded reviewers of the period. This led to situations that are laughable in retrospect, such as the TV show GamesMaster rating the UK release of the absolutely classic and genre-defining NES beat 'em up River City Ransom (known as Street Gangs over here) just 32%. In the show's defence (slightly), the game didn't show up over here until 1992, three years after its original release and well into the next generation of games consoles. Still, 32% is an embarrassing rating for a game that is quite rightly regarded as incredibly important to gaming development and history. But I digress.

The point is, members of the games press were — perhaps understandably — jaded at the number of shoot 'em ups, beat 'em ups and fighting games that were coming out, particularly from 1991 onwards, post-Street Fighter II. I say "perhaps understandably" because gaming back then didn't have quite the same breadth it does today; technology precluded certain types of game that we take for granted today from being made back then. Consequently, for someone whose job it was to look at the games coming out each month and then write about them, one could understand why it might get a bit tiresome if there didn't appear to be much variety — or originality, as was the constant refrain back then — in each new crop of new stuff.

But, as it turns out, there were a lot of shoot 'em ups, beat 'em ups and fighting games made for a very good reason: these are three very flexible genres that you can do a lot with, and all three of them have also scaled well with advancing technology.

Let's focus on shoot 'em ups, because that's what I've been playing this evening. You can go back to a shoot 'em up from 30-40 years ago (Xevious is 42 years old, fact fans, and Space Invaders is just shy of 50) and still have a good time with it today, even if you weren't there for it first time around. The genre has evolved over time, yes, in terms of both presentation and mechanics. But there's a timeless quality to it that means, outside of games that really didn't get it even when they were originally released — and there are plenty of those — the 30-40 year old games are just as playable and accessible today as they ever were. Likewise, if it were possible to take a game like, say, Eschatos back to the past, a Raiden fan would be immediately at home.

The same is true for both fighting games and beat 'em ups, too. I probably don't need to tell you that fighting games remain one of the most popular forms of competitive video game out there; while they have grown in complexity over the years, the fundamentals are still pretty much just as they were in 1991 with Street Fighter II. In fact, some fighting game pros even specifically recommend beginners should start with Street Fighter II to get accustomed to the genre without added complications like special meters and peculiarly named mechanics found in later titles.

The beat 'em up has had a slightly rougher ride over the years — at least it seems that way to begin with. It found favour until the early '90s due to it being a great means of showcasing beautiful character and background pixel art. It reached a particular high with Konami's excellent licensed arcade games such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons and Asterix (kudos if you played the last one, it remains my fave of those games), but then sort of fell off the map a bit for a while.

At least, it seemed to. What actually happened is that it became the basis for a whole bunch of other, brand new genres that were suddenly made possible thanks to the advent of the 3D age: action-strategy games like the Dynasty Warriors series; arena combat games like the Senran Kagura titles; character action games like the God of War, Devil May Cry and Bayonetta series. All are definitely their own discrete types of game these days, but they can all be traced directly back to beat 'em ups. And, in more recent years, the traditional belt-scrolling beat 'em up has made a triumphant comeback with excellent titles like Streets of Rage 4, Fight 'n' Rage and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge.

I think the difference people would point to today, as outlined above, is that these days, we have a lot more choice. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of new games come out each week, and they cover all manner of interactive experiences, ranging from the comfortably familiar to the gleefully experimental. Shoot 'em ups, fighting games and beat 'em ups are no longer seen as passé and unoriginal because they get more lost in the noise these days — and, with the possible exception of fighting games, they have somewhat declined in importance to the overall market. If a company wants to make money these days, they do a big open world game or a cinematic action game about a middle-aged white dude being sad. Shoot 'em ups and beat 'em ups in particular have become niche interest, and fighting games, although popular and doubtless very important to the bottom line of companies like Capcom, have a considerably higher barrier to entry than they used to.

But none of them have gone away. None of them have declined in importance so much as to be completely unviable as a commercial prospect today, or completely unknown to those who came to gaming in more recent years. And many of those games that were decried as unoriginal, boring takes on crowded genres back in the early '90s are judged much more generously and accurately today.

And that's good. When the day comes when there's a gaming system with no good shoot 'em ups or beat 'em ups (I can personally take or leave fighting games, to be honest, but I do respect them), that's the day I don't buy that gaming system. Thankfully I don't think that day's coming any time soon — and even if it did, there is a vast library of stuff from the years that have led us up until this point to explore, both through emulation and official rereleases for modern platforms. I think I'll probably be OK.

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#oneaday Day 308: The apparent need to hate

It's been interesting to see the public response to Blue Prince since it came out yesterday. A bunch of folks on Steam, the absolute worst place to talk about video games, seem oddly resistant to the idea that it might actually be quite good.

(For the record, I'll note that for now, after about 6 hours of play, I'm definitely enjoying Blue Prince, but I'm not yet convinced of all the "Game of the Year!" accolades it's already getting. I am open to it convincing me, however.)

Earlier, I saw someone praising a negative review by saying "finally, an honest review", and others noting that the "positive reviews are suspicious", despite the vast majority of them being articulate and knowledgeable about the game and its appeal elements. In the Discussions tab, which is where hope really goes to die, there are some folks getting legitimately angry that some people are enjoying the game more than they do.

I'm not entirely sure why this is occurring, either. Blue Prince is not, to my knowledge, a particularly — and you'll pardon me for using this obnoxious word — "woke" game in that it doesn't force Gamers™ to acknowledge the existence of black, female, homosexual or transgender people. (If it does later, it certainly doesn't within its first 6 hours of play. This is not a criticism — more a side-effect of the way the game is designed and structured, since you are alone while you play, and the other characters appear in photographs, notes, journal entries and suchlike.)

I mention this because the attitude I'm seeing from some people is normally reserved for the "anti-woke" crowd when they want to tear a game down for challenging their narrow-minded perceptions of the world. But… there's seemingly nothing like that in here, which makes the sheer passion with which some people seem to hate this game on principle all the more confusing.

Now I will admit that Blue Prince is probably not a game for everyone. It is slow-paced, thoughtful and contemplative. There's nothing that one would call "action". It requires that you learn its rules through play rather than having your hand held through tutorials. And it is a game where, despite there being no real "skill" involved from a hand-eye co-ordination perspective, you will still fail a lot before you roll credits on it — and where you will doubtless fail even more after those credits have rolled and there is more to discover.

I get that. When I encounter a game like that, my response is to go "Eh, okay, I see why some people like that but it's not for me." Then I turn it off, uninstall it, whatever, and I don't play it again. I might return to it when some time has passed — there are several games I've come to appreciate many years after I bounced off them when I first encountered them — but, in most cases, I won't be mad at the game. I think the maddest I've got at a game was with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, because I found the single-player campaign in that singularly insulting to my intelligence, but even then I just… did what I outlined above. I uninstalled it, then I didn't play it again. Job done.

The funny thing about the people getting absolutely frothing mad about Blue Prince right now is that in most cases, they are revealing themselves to have not understood what the game is doing. Blue Prince is deliberately obtuse in some ways, yes, but I am particularly stupid when it comes to things like this and I got the general vibe of what's expected of me pretty quickly. The people getting most upset by it are the ones who seemingly want a simple, straight line to the finish, to max out all the achievements and say they're "done" with it. Rather delightfully, Blue Prince is not at all forthcoming with achievements and trophies; it eschews the usual "started the game!" and "got a Game Over!" achievements in favour of a small collection of awards that demonstrate you've made meaningful progress. The fact that this is probably making some people mad is quite enjoyable.

Also whiny little babies pissing and moaning about "no ultrawide support" can get in the bin. Buy a normal person monitor, or play the game in 16:9. No-one gives a shit about your "no ultrawide, no buy" policy.

Anyway, Blue Prince has been a good time thus far. Like I say, so far I remain unconvinced of its "Game of the Year" status, but I'm willing to keep plugging away at it to see what I can discover, because there's enough here that I do like. And if I end up tiring of it? I won't be mad, and I won't feel like I've wasted my time. It's nice to be part of the current conversation for once and to experience something that has clearly resonated with a lot of people for one reason or another.

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#oneaday Day 307: Blueprints to my brain

After seeing the glowing praise it's been getting recently, I decided to give the new indie darling Blue Prince a go. I've been suspicious of sudden indie darlings ever since I absolutely detested my time with Jonathan Blow's Braid, but everything I was hearing about this one made it sound thoroughly interesting. As such, I was more than happy to forego my usual suspicion and give it a go.

For the unfamiliar, Blue Prince positions you in the role of an heir to a rather curious mansion. Said mansion supposedly has 45 rooms… except it doesn't, and there's actually a super-secret hidden 46th room somewhere. Your dead uncle has challenged you from beyond the grave to find said 46th room. Succeed, and you inherit all his stuff; fail, and you're doomed to perpetual roguelike hell.

Yes, Blue Prince is a roguelike of sorts in that it's based around repeated runs of the same thing with a heavily randomised element. But it's not a combat-based game, nor a role-playing game; instead, its focus is purely on exploration. While the roguelike descriptor is apt, Blue Prince is perhaps better thought of as being akin to tabletop games such as Betrayal at House on the Hill.

The way it works is like this: each in-game day, you begin a new run with 50 "steps" of stamina available to you. Each time you cross the threshold from one room to another, whether you're making progress or backtracking, you use up a step. Your initial aim is to make it from the entrance hall in "rank 1" of the mansion to the antechamber in "rank 9"; things get a little more complex later, but I haven't got that far yet, so I can't talk about that side of things with any great authority as yet.

Each time you open a door in the mansion, you pull three room "cards" from the deck you have available and can pick one to draft. This room then attaches to the door you just opened, and you gradually build out the mansion map from there. Rooms are automatically oriented based on the direction the door you opened is facing, and in this way you can plan out your route to a certain extent; as time goes on, you'll familiarise yourself with the "deck" of room cards and know which ones work better where. For example, you might want to find a means of safely ditching "dead end" rooms as soon as possible so they don't come up later in your run, but various rooms have special effects (both positive and negative), too, so you'll need to bear those in mind.

As you progress through the mansion, you'll acquire various resources. Keys are used to open locked doors. Gems are used to draft certain particularly powerful or helpful rooms. Coins are used to purchase items in special "shop" rooms. Dice allow you to redraw three room cards if none of the ones you initially drew tickle your fancy. And then there are a variety of items that show up along the way, too; for example, the metal detector makes it easier for you to locate keys and coins, while the shovel allows you to dig in patches of dirt to find additional resources and items.

You'll run into puzzles of various types in the mansion. These appear to take two basic forms: firstly, there are self-contained puzzles that always show up in specific rooms, and these usually reward you with resources or items if you solve them correctly. Secondly, there's the overall meta-progression puzzles, which involve you figuring out the somewhat convoluted means through which you can actually move forward and, once you reach it, get into the Antechamber.

Blue Prince does have a few things that carry over from run to run, but the main thing is knowledge. Information you learn in one run can be used in the next; there's no not being able to do something because your character hasn't seen a particular piece of info in this particular run. As such, it pays to take notes and/or screenshots as you play, because as you discover new pieces of information, you'll eventually find a use for it. It might not be right away, but you'll get there in the end.

The game also isn't completely randomised. As previously noted, you can learn the deck so you can have a good idea of what rooms you should burn early on in order to draw more helpful ones as you get deeper into the mansion. Certain rooms will only show up in certain positions on the map, or display particular scenery elements if positioned in the right place. A "coat check" room allows you to stash an item in one run and pick it up in the next; under normal circumstances, you lose everything at the start of each new day, aside from the knowledge you, the player, have accumulated.

I've played for about three or four hours tonight and I'm starting to get a feel for it. It's a really interesting game. Some folks claim to have spent upwards of a hundred hours playing this and this intrigues me; the central gameplay mechanic is intriguing and enjoyable, but I am very much under the impression that "winning" the central challenge is just the beginning of what makes Blue Prince so interesting. Right now, everyone is being deliberately obtuse about things — partly at the developer's request, and partly just not to spoil it for everyone else — but I am definitely intrigued to see where things go.

My only concern is that I fear I may be too stupid to figure this game out by myself. But that's what talking about it with friends online is for, right?

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#oneaday Day 306: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

I finally got around to reading a novel my mother has been bugging me to read for ages now. It's by Gabrielle Zevin and is called Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which is one of those titles that looks more and more wrong the more times you type it out in succession. I didn't know much about the book going in other than that it was somehow related to video games, and I deliberately didn't read anything about it prior to starting it, so I had gone in with the (mistaken, as it turns out) assumption that it was going to be another Ready Player One sort of situation.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is rather different, though. While it does indeed draw inspiration from the world of video games, it is not a sci-fi novel, and the games are used more as a backdrop to what is going on rather than in-your-face references. The main story concerns two individuals who meet as children in a hospital: Sam Masur is a traumatised young man with a mangled foot after a car crash that killed his mother, while Sadie Green is an intelligent young woman who had initially been attending the hospital to visit her sister, who had leukaemia, but who subsequently managed to strike up a friendship with Sam.

The pair bond over video games, something which was clearly already important in both of their lives; Sam displays himself to be a skilled player of Super Mario Bros. when Sadie first encounters him, while Sadie has long exchanged in-jokes relating to The Oregon Trail with her sister. Sadie discovers that her interactions with Sam have caused him to speak for the first time in a very long while, and she is encouraged to see him regularly as part of the "community service" requirements for her bat mitzvah. Sam eventually discovers this — helped along by Sadie's rather jealous sister — and, understandably, begins to doubt Sadie's friendship, causing a rift between them that lasts for several years.

The pair meet again by chance several years later, when they are both nineteen years old and studying at institutions in Cambridge, Massachusetts — Sam at Harvard, Sadie at MIT. They once again bond over video games; Sadie introduces Sam to a video game she composed called Solution. Solution is an early example of an "art game"; it positions players in the role of someone working at a factory, but "completing" the game reveals that one was actually producing weapons for the Nazis in World War II. Players can alternatively complete the game by uncovering "the truth" about what they are actually up to earlier on.

Aside: real-life developer Brenda Romero believes that Solution is based a little too closely on her board game Train, which had a similar concept of going "surprise! You're a Nazi!" at its conclusion, but, as the name suggests, a different focus. I can see how she arrived at that conclusion — particularly as Zevin acknowledged the game's influence — but Sadie's Solution approaches the matter from a somewhat different angle, and Sadie, rather than Romero, being the creator is important to the story. So I think we can maybe let that slide for now.

Anyway, Solution made people in Sadie's game design class absolutely furious, as you might expect, but Sam sees something in it. And thus begins a rather tempestuous working relationship, as the pair decide to make games together — some of which are huge successes, and others of which are big fat flops.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about video games, but it's also about the creative spirit and the balance young professionals often have to find between truly expressing themselves and doing something that will actually make them some money. It's about the wild mood swings the creative temperament can bring, and about how different ideals can sometimes lead to seemingly irreconcilable differences — and how the truly strong friendships can weather those storms, even if it takes years to do so sometimes.

The games are used as a backdrop to the main story of the relationship between Sam, Sadie and the other people who are part of their lives, both personally and professionally. Author Gabrielle Zevin admits that there are a few anachronisms in terms of the games she mentions and the times at which people are playing or discussing them, but notes that this is all in service of the story. We are, after all, talking about a fictional world that refers to a variety of things that exist in the real world — ranging from the classic arcade game Donkey Kong to the gaming lifestyle website Kotaku — and couples them with events that never actually happened. In this sense, it's an "alternate history" novel of sorts, only this history is about video games rather than, say, Hitler never having been born.

It's an interesting approach. The novel's perspective jumps around in time and in terms of which character it is focusing on at any given time. Sometimes you're "in the moment" as the events of the past are occurring; at others, the narration presents Sam and/or Sadie being "interviewed" by a real-life site (such as Kotaku) about something that never actually happened in the real world, but which was an important occurrence in this alternate history. Aside from a few early hiccups where Zevin refers to "3.25 inch floppy disks" on more than one occasion (which made me wince slightly every time), the effect is mostly very convincing; it doesn't take long before you're swept along with this account of something that could have happened in this world, but which didn't.

The novel is not just about how video games have changed over time. It's also about how attempts to introduce progressive themes into games have, at times, met with uncomfortable challenges. The novel takes this to something of an extreme — more so than anything that has, to my knowledge, happened in the real world — but the point it makes is convincing. As far as I'm aware, no-one has gone and shot up a game company in the real world over the inclusion of gay and transgender characters in a video game, but the idea is depressingly plausible. From a broader perspective, the inclusion of a sequence in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow where one of the major characters is shot dead following such an encounter can be looked on as criticism of gun culture and violence in America, and how more often than not mass shootings are the result of a disaffected white dude who has snapped about something in his life or society.

Some of the most effective sequences in the book are where Zevin isn't afraid to get a bit weird. After the aforementioned shooting sequence, there's a peculiar second-person sequence presented as the reader occupying the role of the fatally shot character in the present tense as their life slips away. There's another sequence later where a depressed Sadie is playing a massively multiplayer online game, but it never actually mentions the character we're following is Sadie; everything is presented "in character" and "in world". Like the world of video game development, the literary techniques that Zevin uses throughout Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow never remain constant; they're always changing, developing, moving on, advancing.

It's also a novel about how women struggle to be taken seriously in what is still perceived to be a "boys' club", even with more and more evidence to the contrary that women have always been a part of gaming. Sadie continually struggles to be seen as the artist she is because Sam is better at the business aspect. Despite being depicted as somewhat awkward in the early hours of the book, he ends up becoming a confident "face of the company" when promoting their work, suggesting that there may be some sort of mental health issues in an autistic/ADHD-adjacent area at work with Sam's character; his behaviour is very consistent with hyperfixations and intense, deep passions for very specific things.

But Sadie struggles too, despite being less obviously "broken" than Sam is. She may not have suffered the traumatic, violent loss of a parent, she may not have physical mobility issues and she may come from a background of relative privilege, but there are times when she struggles. There are times when she finds herself swept up in an abusive relationship because she thinks its benefits outweigh its drawbacks. There are times she falls into an inconsolable depression, when even those closest to her cannot reach her. There are times when she simply doesn't know what to do, despite her intelligence. She suffers, too — perhaps even more than Sam does — and the story of her own trials are an important part of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

I'll refrain from spoiling too much more of the details of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, because I do recommend it, even if you're not "a gamer". Having the context of and an understanding of the video games referenced throughout is helpful, certainly, but this is not a story that is specifically about those video games. Instead, they're used to support the narrative and its approach to a fairly mundane but nonetheless impactful alternate history; the thrust of the story is, instead, about love, friendship, creativity, artistry and the range of challenges creative types (with varying degrees of mental health struggles) have faced over the course of the last 30-40 years or so.

So there we go. Now my mother can stop asking me if I've read it yet, because now I have!

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#oneaday Day 305: In the Attic

I am doing my monthly(ish) visit to the office, so you join me once again from a hotel room. This time around I have had mostly good luck: while I am technically stuffed into the "attic" on the third floor, my room is next to the lift and stairs and it has a bath.

So I had a bath. It's always nice to have a bath in a hotel, because their baths tend to be much bigger than ours. And as a large gentleman, it is nice to have a large bath to match. Even if I miscalculated, as I always do, the amount of water displacement my fat arse causes, leading to me semi-flooding the bathroom. I managed to mop most of it up with one of the towels, but the annoyance of that threatened to put something of a dampener (pun intended and not apologised for) on my evening.

I wasn't feeling great anyway. The drive down here was stressful. Occasionally I find myself… I don't know if "dissociating" is the right word, but I'm going to use it anyway. I feel sort of "detached" from myself, like I'm watching things going on but as if I'm sort of a step "back" from them. Then, inevitably, I become conscious of my dissociation, which inevitably occurs at an inconvenient time, such as when driving, and that freaks me out and makes me stressed. So I end up in a bit of a cycle.

Still, I made it here safely, accompanied by the second episode of the Fun Factor Podcast, which I can highly recommend if you're as interested in classic video game magazines as I am. This time around they take a look at a magazine I'm not familiar with, not being from North America, but a lot of the stuff discussed was familiar — including the full postal addresses of actual children being published in a continent-wide magazine and no-one seeming to think that might be a bit of a dodgy idea.

Anyway, I'm here now, I've eaten Hotel Snacks and now I'm ready to just sit and vegetate a bit before going to sleep. The usual Police Interceptors garbage is on TV and I have some video games and ebooks with me, so I think I can safely stave off any further stress or dissociation with either or both of those.

Oh, I did finish a book last night, but I want to talk about it a fair bit and there ain't no way I'm going to battle my phone's keyboard to do that right now. So perhaps tomorrow (and tomorrow, and tomorrow)…

#oneaday Day 304: Web maintenance at the worst times

I found it very hard to get out of bed this morning. The reason for this is simple: I stayed up until 2AM doing maintenance activities on this site and MoeGamer that could have almost certainly waited until a more sociable hour, but once I'd started, I wanted to see them through.

Y'see, both my sites have gone on a bit of a journey. They were both originally hosted on WordPress.com, with this blog being on a free account and MoeGamer being on a "Premium" paid tier. I was starting to reach the limits of what I could do with the Premium account in particular — most notably with regard to media storage space — and thus I moved MoeGamer to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation on a Bluehost hosting account.

Before anyone jumps in to decry Bluehost as being shit: believe me, I know. That is the reason neither of my sites are hosted with Bluehost at this point. But we'll come back to that.

As anyone who has ever tried to migrate a large site from WordPress.com to WordPress.org will tell you, the supposedly simple and straightforward migration process is anything but. What is supposed to happen is that you hit "Export" on your WordPress.com site, which spits out your site's contents as XML files, then you hit "Import" on your WordPress.org site, wherever you've hosted it, and it will recreate your site. Posts, pages and comments will go right back in, and the import process is supposed to look for any media you posted and automatically go and retrieve it from your old site, then transfer it to your new one.

Notice how I emphasise "supposed to". Because in the multiple times I have done this over the years, not once has it ever worked how it is, apparently, supposed to. Not only that, but the documentation on WordPress' own site refers to features and options that do not actually exist. Take these instructions for exporting your Media Library, for example. By following these instructions, even if the "automatic" process described above didn't work, you should be able to just tell WordPress.com to export all your media files into a big ol' .zip file, then import them all in one go to your WordPress.org installation.

Just one problem: the options they tell you to click on do not exist. Maybe they once existed and now do not, but right now — and for multiple years at this point, since I've done this several times with different sites — they do not exist, making them completely useless as instructions.

There are plugins that are supposed to help with this sort of thing. You can't install plugins on a WordPress.com site unless you're subscribed to the obscenely expensive "Business" plan, but you can install plugins on WordPress.org. Except you then run into the minefield of whether or not the plugins in question actually do what you think they're supposed to do, or if they're just some dodgy, shady thing trying to get you to sign up to their "Pro" account because the one vaguely useful option they have is paywalled.

And this is to say nothing of most web servers' tendency to crash if you throw too much data at them in one go. I have several thousand posts on both here and MoeGamer, and attempting to import them all at once would crash the import process every time. I ended up having to go a hundred at a time, which took a very long time, I can tell you, particularly as it would still crash on occasion. And amid all that, if it wasn't already clear, it didn't automatically import my old media and transfer it across to the new site; instead, it just left links to the old media and then… didn't do anything else.

So what I ended up with was two sites that were full of images that were hotlinked from an account I wasn't paying for any more, and which I wanted to close down. And it took me until last night to figure out some possible solutions.

For the record, I used two distinct plugins. Firstly, I used the Auto Upload Images plugin, which actually does do what the media import process is supposed to do: it looks for externally hosted images, then it imports them to your media library and updates the <img> tags to point to your new media library copies. The one downside I found with this plugin is that rather than importing the old images under the same date structure as the old site, it imports them all "today". This is down to a limitation with how WordPress handles files, I think, so no big deal — but it did cause an issue.

On both my sites, a lot of older images had automatically been set to allow people to click on them to see the full size versions. The links were now pointing at the old version of the image, while the <img> tags were showing the new versions. Not only that, but the mismatch in dates meant that some of these clickable links were just completely broken.

To resolve this, I took something of a nuclear option: I used the Broken Link Checker plugin to scan my site for all its links, searched those links for anything that was pointing at the old wordpress.com site and then just batch "unlinked" them. That means that the new images would be safely in place, the broken links would be removed and everything from thereon should, in theory, be hunky-dory.

There are a few things that have broken along the way, like any Gallery posts I hosted have lost all their images and I don't see any means of fixing that aside from doing them all manually, plus there's been the usual "link rot" of old copyright-infringing YouTube videos no longer being available online. Plus any audio media seems to have gone walkies, too, but again, no big deal, really; I don't think anyone expects a website that has been around for nearly 20 years to suffer from no link rot whatsoever.

But anyway. I got rather involved in this process last night, starting around 11pm. I knew, looking at the clock, that I shouldn't start doing something like this so late in the evening. But then I did, and hyperfixation kicked in, and I kept going until everything was, so far as I can tell, sorted. I mean, my galleries and audio bits are still broken, but I can live with that. What I didn't really want to live with was several thousand broken image links that led nowhere. And I think I've fixed that issue.

If you happen to notice anything wrong with any old posts you find yourself reading, do let me know and I'll see if it's possible to fix them. In some cases, that may be possible; in others, less so. As I say, it's part and parcel of a site being live for this long, even if it has moved hosting and domain names multiple times in its lifespan. But hopefully it's going to stick around right here for quite some time, so I wanted to fix as many of the annoying little issues as possible. So here we are!

I hope the three or four of you who actually read this appreciate the work I put in!

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#oneaday Day 303: Uhoh, new hyperfixation

The thing with being autistic, I have both been led to believe and experienced first-hand, is that every so often you get a Great Idea in your head about something you are going to be Into. Sometimes these Things That You Are Now Into stick around and become long-term hobbies and interests, at other times they fall by the wayside. But in my experience, they're usually worth following along with for at least a little while, unless they involve a major uprooting of your entire life. Which they usually don't.

While at the Portsmouth Anime and Gaming Con yesterday, our friend Dan spoke a little about collecting stickers. For some reason, Dan's enthusing about this tripped something in my brain, which suddenly and uncontrollably exploded with a chorus of "I want to be into collecting stickers!".

I actually used to be into collecting stickers when I was a kid. For two separate years, I collected stickers for the Panini sticker album themed around The Beano, and I used to swap stickers with my friend Joanna. Joanna herself is probably a story for another day — and one that, for once, I don't think I've actually told here previously — but all you need to know for now is that we were both pretty avid Beano sticker collectors, but I don't think either of us ever actually completed one of those albums 100%.

Panini stickers were, of course, one of the original "booster packs", and doubtless our parents grit their respective teeth any time we asked for a pack of stickers to go in our albums, particularly if a significant number of them ended up being duplicates of ones we already had. But it was a fun thing to do as a child, and an opportunity to socialise, too; I don't remember anyone else collecting Beano stickers, but I always enjoyed the chance to spend some time with Joanna. As I say, though, story for another day.

So anyway, with that in mind, my brain decided that Now I'm Into Stickers, so I immediately took the opportunity to wander off and buy a few packs of stickers that had caught my eye earlier. And, today, I dug out one of the lovely "journal"-style notebooks I've had in my drawer for ages but never really done anything with, and I started sticking stickers in it. Not only did I stick the stickers I bought yesterday in it, but I stuck some stickers I've had hanging around for ages in there, too; I had, up until this point, resisted sticking them anywhere because I was worried about the "permanence" of whatever I might have stuck them on.

This is actually something that Dan expressed yesterday, too, and thus my immediate solution was to stick them in a book. What's more permanent than a book! Unless you throw it away, obviously. But I'm not planning on throwing this away any time soon.

Anyway, do you want to see? Of course you do. Here:

I like doing title pages in the style of Victorian novels. I have done this for many years now, and I have no intention of stopping.

On the first page, a Neptunia sticker that's been floating around various rooms in my house since Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution showed up. I finally stuck it in something. So to speak. On the second, one of the first batches of stickers we did as a bonus extra in Evercade cartridges: a selection of sprites and artwork from Indie Heroes Collection 1, a compilation of "modern retro" games made by today's indie developers for vintage systems.

On the next page, some stickers from Piko Interactive Collection 2 for Evercade, which technically came out before Indie Heroes Collection 1 and thus was the trigger for me to add the "in no particular order" caveat to the title page of this volume. On the following page, a selection of stickers from the Goodboy Galaxy/Witch n' Wiz dual cartridge for Evercade, focusing on the former game. If you've never played Goodboy Galaxy I highly recommend it; it's an excellent exploratory platformer.

Then we have the stickers that came with Toaplan Arcade 3 and Data East Arcade 2 for Evercade, mostly based on the original cabinet or marquee art for these games.

And the same deal for these stickers, from Toaplan Arcade 4 and Atari Arcade 2.

Then a bumper crop of stickers from the Strictly Limited Games release of Sisters Royale, a shoot 'em up by the folks who made the Castle of Shikigami series. A lot of folks have beef with Strictly Limited for the amount of time they take to make their physical editions of games — I have some orders that have been outstanding for multiple years — but they always come through eventually. Their special editions are some of the highest quality but most affordable special editions I have on my shelves.

A bit of overflow of Sisters Royale stickers here, plus the first of the sticker packs I bought yesterday from the Portsmouth Anime and Gaming Con. This "Pretty Girls Sticker Pack" is by an art studio called Kumigaki.

And finally, for now, anyway, a few Final Fantasy VII-themed stickers I nabbed from a local outfit known as Taroball Studios.

So there we go. Stickers! And none of the dissatisfaction with empty spaces you got with Panini albums. I wonder if I'll ever fill this book? Only one way to find out!

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