#oneaday Day 222: Dawn of the Second Day

Second day in a row of successfully getting up at 7.30, getting out of the house and having a little walk down to the shop. It was a little bit harder to successfully achieve this today, but I was expecting this. As outlined yesterday, my dreams were doing their best to pull me back into sleep, but I recognised them as being pointless (I was dreaming about Fire Emblem, and if I want to play Fire Emblem I can just go downstairs) and managed to get myself out of bed.

The fact that I was woken up by my phone ringing at 7.28 also probably helped. I was concerned that the call would be Bad News, as phone calls at vaguely unsociable hours tend to be, but it was, in fact, just a wrong number offering one "Jenny" a supply teaching position.

I have done supply teaching before; having to get up early and wait for a phone call like that is the absolute worst, because if you do get one you inevitably then have to get ready as fast as possible and get to whatever hellhole of a school you've been assigned to before the beginning of the school day. (Of course, one might say if you were reliant on such phone calls for your income, you should probably get up and get ready a little earlier on the assumption that you will get one; the worst that can happen is you don't get one and will have put on your "nice clothes" for nothing.)

I'm hoping this whole little routine will lead to some other incremental improvements in other areas of life. I actually feel like I slept a little better than usual last night, and eventually what I would like to do is start integrating a little more exercise than just a quick walk to the shop into the morning routine. As I have learned in the past, though, making such lifestyle changes is best handled gradually rather than trying to do too much, too soon. So I'm just concentrating on what has historically been the "difficult bit" — getting up — and celebrating my successes in that area first. Everything else can come later.

Anyway, I'm up and about now and there's still a full ten minutes before I actually need to start work. So that's nice. Here's hoping today is at least vaguely stimulating and entertaining. Knowing what's coming later, it should be fun, all being well, though I'm sure the wonder that is social media will find something to piss and moan about, as happens every day. Letting humanity at large comment online was a mistake. But you know this. You've read my posts, and many of them were most certainly a mistake.

Oh, also it's my brother's birthday today, so if you see him about, be sure to wish him happy birthday.

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 221: Little success

Reader, I did it. My alarm went off at 7.30 and I got up almost immediately. I add the qualifier because I lay there and listened to the radio for about 5 minutes, then got up and had a piss and seriously considered going back to bed for another half an hour on the justification that "the sun wasn't fully up yet" so going outside right then wouldn't be as beneficial as it would be when the day had properly started.

But I pushed through those thoughts, got dressed instead of getting back into bed, then went out to the little Tesco and got myself a coffee and a pastry. Then I came back and enjoyed them both. They both seemed to taste particularly great, perhaps because I wasn't in a rush to enjoy them before starting work, or perhaps because of the light exercise I'd just done, or perhaps simply because I hadn't treated myself to such things for a while. Anyway, they were good.

I have the yawns a little bit because this was, after all, quite a bit earlier than I usually roll out of bed, but like I said yesterday, it supposedly takes about three days to convince your body to fall into a new routine. I was actually surprised how easy it was to get out of bed at 7.30(ish); evidently that time is a good match for my existing circadian rhythms so hopefully that will just get easier.

I'll tell you one big reason I've always had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning: it's because of dreams. For some reason, I always seem to have the most vivid dreams first thing in the morning, almost immediately before I'm supposed to be getting up. And there are occasions where I'll wake up, still have memory of the dream and feel like I "have" to go back and "finish" the dream, even though that's an impossibility.

But there have been multiple occasions where my brain has felt that it is of critical importance that I finish the dream I was having, otherwise… you know what, I don't actually know what it thinks the consequences will be. Because there aren't any. A dream is just a dream; as enjoyable and interesting as they can be, they don't actually exist and they don't have any bearing on your real life, so prioritising them over actually living in the moment is, from a rational perspective, very silly.

As we all know, though, the human brain is prone to fits of irrationality at times, particularly if it's under any sort of stress or not feeling its best for one reason or another. And so, yes, there absolutely have been times where my brain has wanted to prioritise a fun or interesting dream over the drabness of everyday life.

No more, though! I will get up at a sensible hour, giving me enough time to have a nice chilled out morning before work starts, and this will be a Healthy Habit that will lead to other improvements! 2025 is the year.

Probably. Maybe.

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#oneaday Day 220: Morning person

I'm not a morning person. I can get out of bed early when I absolutely have to (to catch a flight, say), but left to my own devices, I will happily just lie comatose in my bed until an embarrassing hour. I will note that it's not quite as bad as during 2010, The Worst Year Of My Life, when I was staying up until 5am on Second Life and then not even waking up until 5pm the next day, but it's still… challenging to get out of bed at a reasonable hour, particularly at weekends.

I've been reading around and watching some YouTube videos in an attempt to fix this, because as nice as staying in bed can be, I do actually want to try and make a bit better use of my day — because if nothing else, I think it will probably make me feel better, too. There are few things worse for feelings of perpetual non-specific anxiety than getting up moments before you're supposed to start working… although annoyingly enough, it's often those feelings of perpetual non-specific anxiety that make me want to stay in bed.

Thus far, the chief pieces of advice that seem to recur frequently are as follows:

Get up when your alarm goes off. (This is the difficult bit.)
Get out into natural light as soon as you can. (This assumes you have succeeded at step 1.)
Get some exercise shortly after getting up. (Likewise.)
Try and delay your caffeine intake a bit. (Challenging, but also agreed to not necessarily be essential.)
Get some food into you, preferably something which releases energy gradually.
Get to bed at a reasonable time at night. (Doesn't have to be early, just a sensible time.)

Supposedly it takes about three days to convince your body that you're starting a new routine, which is all to do with your circadian rhythms. The first two days are almost certainly going to be excruciatingly difficult, but it's important to stick with them. And, as time goes on, this (in theory) gets easier.

I've already made a sort of step towards improving my morning routine, in that I've given up using my phone as an alarm and instead got a clock radio. I find it somehow more conducive to waking up without feeling like complete shite, perhaps because it's not just the same sound every day that you eventually come to resent. The actual getting out of bed when it first sounds is still the challenging bit, but that's the "wall" you have to push through in order to achieve anything.

So from tomorrow, I'm going to attempt to push through that wall and make some improvements. I've got my alarm set early (7.30am — I start work at 9) and I'm going to do my absolute damnedest to get up straight away, get dressed and then go straight outside. Not only that, I'm going to walk to the nearby Tesco, get myself some coffee and something nice (but not overly awful for me) for breakfast. That would seem to tick off several of the steps above in one fell swoop. Sure, walking to Tesco isn't exactly a "workout", but most of the stuff I've read and watched over the last couple of days suggests that you don't need your morning exercise to be a full-on workout, just moving a bit. And a walk of about a quarter of a mile each way would, I'd say, qualify as "just moving a bit".

When COVID hit, a lot of us introverts joked about how nice it was to have state approval for staying inside all day. But over the last couple of years in particular, I've started to really appreciate how important it is to just go outside and get some air sometimes. Doesn't have to involve interacting with other people or doing anything adventurous, just, as the kids say, touch some grass.

So that's the plan from tomorrow. Let's see if I'm able to actually stick to it.

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#oneaday Day 219: Getting it done

I finally managed to muster up the motivation to make some YouTube videos today. Three of them, in fact; they'll be up on the channel over the course of the next week or so.

To be clear, I wasn't putting off making these videos because I didn't want to make them; I was primarily putting them off because I had a cold in mid-December, and it's left me with a really annoying cough but no other symptoms. (I went to the doctor to see if it was an infection or anything, and it seems there's nothing to be concerned about; I just Have A Cough for a bit, frustratingly.)

I didn't want to start recording videos and collapse into a coughing fit partway through, so I'd been putting it off, particularly as a couple of weekends ago I started trying to record a The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough and had to stop because my throat wasn't up to it.

My cough is still here — mostly in the evenings, and especially annoyingly when I lie down to go to sleep — but I managed to hold it at bay for the duration of three videos earlier, which is nice. Those three videos are kicking off something I want to be doing throughout this year: exploring a variety of home computer stuff, including Spectrum, Amiga and C64 stuff as well as the Atari 8-bit and ST stuff I've primarily built my channel on.

It felt good to finally get them done. While I have no real "obligations" towards my YouTube channel and could just… stop making videos at any point with no real consequence, it would feel like a great shame to do so. I have somehow made 1,303 videos so far since I created my channel in 2007 (but didn't start Being A Creator until to any vaguely serious degree until 2017) and my channel has shown very slow but steady growth, particularly over the course of the last five years or so. I don't have any grand designs on Being A YouTuber as a career, particularly since the sort of stuff I do isn't exactly algorithm-baiting, but it is nice to be able to sit down, play some games, talk about them to an empty room and feel like at least a few people will, eventually, listen.

In some respects, being able to do that with YouTube has almost been a substitute for being able to spend time with friends talking about this stuff. Pretty much all of my friends who used to be into gaming to any degree have drifted away for one reason or another, and it really sucks to be enthusiastic about things and have no-one to share that with. So by handling my YouTube videos the way I do — as if I'm sitting playing it with the viewer there as a friend beside me — it at least helps a bit with that side of things, if not all of the loneliness I feel at times.

Anyway, like I say, those videos will be coming out over the next week or so. There's one Spectrum one, one C64 one and one Atari 8-bit one; I'm not necessarily going to do all that every week (at least partly because I want to do some ST and Amiga stuff in there too) but it's a nice spread to start the year with. And it's onwards to a whole new year of exploring classic home computers and the myriad weird and wonderful games they played host to!

If you're not yet subscribed, stop by my channel, watch a few vids and hit the dang subscribe button already. Here's a link. Go on, click it.

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#oneaday Day 218: Memories of Me: Sixth Form

I occasionally find myself pondering when I think the happiest time in my life was, and I always conclude with one of two closely related period: sixth form (for non-British folks, this is the optional "Year 12" and "Year 13" you take if you want to stay on in non-compulsory education after finishing secondary school, typically taken before going to university) and my four years at university (three on my BA in English and Music, one on my PGCE in Music). Today I want to reminisce a bit about the former.

There was absolutely no question as to whether or not I was going to stay on at school after I finished compulsory education. My life has, to date, followed the typical autistic/ADHD trajectory of performing very well in school, then sliding into tepid mediocrity in adult life, so at the point I was finishing my GCSEs, I knew that I wanted to stay on and keep studying. I ended up choosing English Language, English Literature, Sociology and Music as my four subjects; at my school, it was considered unusual to take four A-Levels (five if you count General Studies, but no-one in their right mind does, for reasons that will become apparent), but all my teachers agreed that I could handle it. So I did. (And I did.)

I was excited about sixth form. I had seen my brother pass through sixth form at the same school some ten years earlier, and I knew what a good time he'd had while he was there. He'd made some good friends, he'd had a band, he had a long-term girlfriend, and he'd studied some interesting-sounding stuff that wasn't anything like the boring old National Curriculum gubbins I'd gone through lower down the school. I was looking forward to the whole experience, though I was also nervous about a few things.

One of them was the fact that I'd have more contact with a teacher known as Mr Watts, who was renowned at our school as one of the most terrifying teachers there was. He taught History, had a severe-looking moustache that always make it look like he was furious and, to be fair, he often seemed to be furious — particularly at anyone under the age of 15.

I'd actually had a year of Mr Watts as a History teacher in… Year 9, I think it was? Kids of that age are just on the cusp of what he considered to be actual human beings, so we got a bit of a taste of what he was really like. He could still be terrifying if someone stepped out of line, sure, but he also had a wicked sense of humour, and was a genuinely excellent teacher.

That didn't stop me being nervous about the fact he was head of Sixth Form, though. I don't really know why, because I wasn't the sort of kid who got into trouble particularly regularly (I think I had a grand total of two detentions during my entire time at school, at least one of which I managed to wangle my way out of thanks to music rehearsals) but Mr Watts just had that sort of impressive aura about him that made you want to stay well and truly in line.

Thankfully, we quickly discovered that Head of Sixth Form Mr Watts was a completely different person to History Teacher Mr Watts. He was much more down-to-earth, much more willing to let that sense of humour shine through, and extremely supportive of anyone who came to him with questions or concerns. He was a comforting presence, in other words; it was a surprise to many of us, to be sure, but a welcome one.

Our year was the first to make use of the new sixth form centre that had been built on our school's campus. The Upper School Dining Hall (aka just "Upper Dining") had given its life so that the Sidney Banks Sixth Form Centre may live, and it was great. The building, being new, was in great condition, and it was outfitted with reasonably decent PCs for the period; prior to joining the sixth form, most of our computer-related lessons in school had been on Acorn Archimedes computers, but by the time we reached sixth form, proprietary platforms like the ol' Archie were falling out of favour as Windows 95-equipped PCs became the norm in homes, offices and society in general.

The sixth form centre mostly consisted of computer rooms, in fact. Each of its "classrooms" were in fact just rooms with tables and a bunch of PCs, and the main large room in the middle was split in half between the common room and a study area (with more computers), with a sliding divider door allowing for the rooms to be separated completely when necessary.

In the common room, we didn't have a lot of exciting facilities, but I recall we did have a stereo, and folks tended to bring magazines in and leave them for others once they were done with them. For the most part, though, the common room was a space for chilling out, hanging with friends and making use of any of your own entertainment that you had happened to bring.

As it happened, I ended up spending a lot of my time in sixth form in the Art room. My friends Ed and Woody were both studying Art, so in the times where I wasn't attending my own lessons, I tended to hang with them in there. Since the number of folks studying Art at A-level was relatively small, they had their own little common area in the corner of the art room; again, it wasn't really equipped with anything other than a few chairs, but it was a nice place to just hang out.

One thing we were supposed to do as part of our time at sixth form was attend General Studies lessons. We would, we were told, get another A-level out of these lessons, but after attending just one or two at the start of our time in sixth form, we realised that they were largely worthless, so we just… stopped going. And, as part of the whole "treating us as adults" thing that came along with joining the sixth form, no-one ever pursued us about it or queried us on it.

Well, that's not quite true. One General Studies period we did see Mr Watts out and about, seemingly looking for people, so we hid under the chairs in the Art room common area. But that was just once. We all did the exam at the end of our two years in sixth form; I don't know how anyone else did, but I got an "A" having attended one lesson in two years. That should give you a general idea of what General Studies is all about. (One of the questions on the final exam paper was "In Alice in Wonderland, the text describes the Cheshire Cat as 'disappearing tail first'. Assuming the cat did not simply vanish, which direction must he have moved to disappear in this way?")

I mostly enjoyed my A-level studies. I particularly enjoyed English Language, because we got to write essays about swearing, and English Literature exposed me to a variety of interesting novels and plays that I probably wouldn't otherwise have read. Sociology was a thoroughly interesting subject to study, too, and the overall "vibe" of those classes was quite interesting given I was the only boy present; the rest of the class was all girls, and our teacher, Mrs Lloyd, was, of course, a lady also. I wasn't made to feel out of place or anything, I hasten to add; in fact, throughout my time at secondary school, I'd become good friends with a lot of the girls in that class already, so it was nice to have some time where it was just me and them.

Music was a good time, also. At the time I was doing A-level Music, I was also preparing to take my Advanced Certificate practical exam, and doing so basically exempted me from having to do some of the Music A-level, which was pretty neat. The only bit of the Music course I didn't like was learning about how to do Baroque four-part harmony; it felt like it was frustratingly bound by rules rather than truly creative, and I didn't like the teacher much, either. He wasn't one of the regular Music teachers; he was actually the peripatetic strings teacher.

One of the best things about sixth form was how we weren't obliged to stay on the school campus all day if we didn't have lessons. That meant we often walked into town; it was probably about a mile's walk from the school to the town centre, and being young and (relatively) spry at the time, we could do this in a not-unreasonable amount of time.

Our typical town routine involved wandering down there, getting a steak slice and a Belgian Bun from The Baker's Oven, then visiting the CD shop Barneys and computer shop First Compute. Inevitably, upon a visit to the latter, I would be encouraged by my friends to pick up a new game, which I often did, and then we'd head back to school. The reason I was able to grab so many new games at the time was because I'd done some occasional freelancing for PC Zone and the Official Nintendo Magazine, and back in those days you'd get £500 for one article — an absolute fortune to a teenage kid, and, hell, an absolute fortune to anyone involved in freelancing for the games press today.

On one trip to First Compute, I happened to see that a budget rerelease of a piece of software called Klik and Play for PC was on one of the racks. I recalled reading a fun review of this in PC Zone by the one and only Charlie Brooker; a review that had attracted numerous complaints (as did many other pieces Brooker contributed) for using a game in which you knocked a decapitated Frenchman's head around the screen as its demonstration project.

I was attracted to Klik and Play because it promised programming-free game making. I'd previously learned to program in BASIC on Atari 8-bit and STOS on Atari ST, but had never really got into the upper echelons of "knowing how to code", and by this point in the late '90s, "coding" had moved into realms like C and Java, and I didn't really understand those at all. Klik and Play promised to allow creativity without needing to get super-technical, so I was excited to give it a go.

And boy did we love it. Not just me, but my friends Ed and Woody, too, since of course I let them borrow the disc and install it on their own PCs. We made so many stupid games with Klik and Play, many of which remained unfinished, but our crowning achievement was, without a doubt, Pie Eater's Destiny.

This was a game where we'd started with the title, which was intended to take the piss out of our mutual friend Andrew, who was a big lad and enjoyed the game Fighter's Destiny on Nintendo 64. It grew a life of its own after I was demonstrating how to use Klik and Play to Ed and Woody one day, and I imported a scanned image of Andrew's face as an enemy sprite, then added a ripped Contra sprite for the player to move around and shoot at the giant head.

Something about this stupid, humble beginning captured our imagination, and we ended up making a full game with full voice acting, with each level unfolding as a single boss fight against a digitised head of someone we knew, culminating with a battle against the most powerful force in the galaxy: Mr Watts.

Naturally, once Pie Eater's Destiny was completed, we brought it in to school to install on the sixth form computers, and we ended up showing it to Mr Watts. We were initially nervous about this, but the moment he saw that he was the villain, with his introductory line being simply "YOU PATHETIC BASTARDS, YOU WILL NEVER DEFEAT ME! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA", he was absolutely delighted with it.

My time at sixth form is full of wonderful memories like these. I don't recall a single moment of being unhappy while I was at sixth form, and dear Lord, I miss living that life and being that person.

But you can't go back, can you? So these memories have to remain just that: memories. Still, I will always have them, and when times get tough I can think back to a time where life just seemed simpler, easier, more full of possibilities. Not everyone has the luxury of good memories like this, so I should treasure them. And you'd better believe that I do, as the preceding 2,000 words has hopefully made clear.

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#oneaday Day 217: Fuck Facebook, and fuck Meta

I don't know if you've been following the recent news about Meta, Facebook's parent company, but if you still have an account over there for any reason, I thought you might be interested to learn the following.

A few days ago, Meta (which covers Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp Messenger) published some substantial changes to its Hateful Conduct policy, ostensibly a policy that was devised in order to, among other things, help marginalised groups feel safe using their services as a means of online socialisation. You can see the changelog at this link (click the "7 Jan 2025" link on the left of that page to see the changes highlighted), but here are some notable parts for your convenience:

The green highlighted stuff is newly added, the red strikethrough stuff has been removed. Note that the banning of "dehumanising speech in the form of comparisons to or generalisations about animals, pathogens or other sub-human life forms, including women as household objects or property or objects in general; black people as farm equipment; transgender or non-binary people as 'it'" has been removed. This was previously a "Tier 1" violation, among the most serious on the platform, and yet now it is A-OK.

Elsewhere:

In this section, you will see that Meta now "allows allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like 'weird'."

Elsewhere still:

So you're cool to, like, blame the Chinese or whatever group of Johnny Foreigners you think created COVID, if you even believe COVID existed at all in the first place because you're a nutcase who believes vaccination programmes are about Bill Gates trying to fit you with a microtransmitter.

I shouldn't have to point out that these changes are Bad, regardless of whether or not you fall into one of the "protected" categories. It's particularly telling that amid the parts people are mostly focusing on — the stuff about homosexual and transgender people — they snuck in a bit about regarding women as objects and black people as farm equipment. You know, just to make sure everyone except white straight cis men gets their own share of a kicking. On top of that, they have deleted the trans and non-binary themes for Facebook Messenger, as well as the blog post announcing them.

This is not a "freedom of speech" thing; this is deliberately courting the worst people in the world and giving them carte blanche to be as sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic as they desire with zero consequences. And you all know exactly why this has happened: because of the election result in the US.

The world's billionaires have been flocking to kiss Trump's ringpiece ever since the election, and of course Mark Zuckerberg is at the head of the queue. Social media is a veritable breeding ground for the worst kind of right-wing attitudes and has been for a while; all Zuck is doing is making it explicitly okay for this sort of thing to go on, much like Elon Musk has done with Twitter, destroying its value as social media in the process.

This isn't the only thing wrong with Facebook, of course. If you're still using it (again, I ask, why?) you have almost certainly seen how the News Feed or whatever it is called has declined over the years. Chances are yours has multiple "Suggested" posts (i.e. ads) in a row before you see anything from someone you actually care about, and many of those posts will be filled with AI-generated garbage slop like the infamous "Shrimp Jesus" and the many, many images of crying multiple amputee soldiers who don't exist saying it's their birthday. And rather than Facebook seeing this as a problem, it is being encouraged.

In fact, Meta announced plans to introduce AI-driven profiles to both Facebook and Instagram, presumably in an attempt to hide the fact that users are (correctly) leaving their services in droves. People stumbled across one of these AI-powered profiles on Instagram recently, discovering it to be, of course, full of images that never happened and hosting a chatbot that was little more than racial stereotyping. Meta were quick to say that this was an experiment from a few years back, but this is exactly the sort of shit they want to introduce.

Along the same lines, some Instagram users have found themselves presented with AI-generated images of themselves in their own feed, without having asked for them. In most cases, this is because Instagram's AI features count "using them once" as "perpetual consent to use your likeness", even if you don't want or need AI-generated images of yourself. Which no-one does.

Facebook is a shithole, and it's only going to get worse. If I haven't convinced you enough, I urge you to read at least some of the following links (plus the ones I've peppered throughout the above) for more on the story, because these folks report on this stuff for a living and can provide a lot more detail on what is going on.

Never Forgive Them by Ed Zitron – a comprehensive breakdown of how, over the last 10-15 years in particular, big tech has been systematically making life worse for everyone online under the guise of "growth". And it seeps into all areas of life, be it Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media, or a cheap laptop you buy from Amazon.

AI Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide by Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media. Not directly related to Meta, though it is a tale of why AI-powered anything relating to advertising (a category which Meta stuff firmly falls into) is a pile of shit. I will say 404 Media has been doing some of the absolute best reporting on all this for quite some time now.

Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. About how Zuckerberg doesn't believe the AI sludge that is taking over Facebook is a problem, and how he actually wants to encourage it.

Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. Self-explanatory, though you may be surprised at the answer to the headline and the reasons why.

Mark Zuckerberg, Recipient of World's First Rat Penis Transplant, Announces Meta Will Stop Fact-Checking by Matt Husser, The Hard Times. Also self-explanatory. The fact-checking thing is actually where all this started; Zuck is putting this side of things in the hands of the users via a Twitter-style "Community Notes" system, rather than having fact-checkers to combat disinformation on staff. Things just got worse from there.

Meta has 'heard the message' from Trump, says whistleblower Frances Haugen by Dan Milmo and Robert Booth, The Guardian. Some insider knowledge on the situation and how it's happening exactly because of the reasons you thought.

Look, I get it. I appreciate that some of you might not be able to delete your Facebook accounts because it's the only means you have of getting in touch with some people. I can't really delete mine either, because I have to use it for work, though I haven't used Facebook "personally" for years now because I saw it enshittifying a long time ago and jumped ship. The only Meta service I use these days — and that's irregularly — is WhatsApp.

But I would urge you to look over all of the above, and consider whether that is a company you still want to have any involvement with. Not only are the policy changes above actively harmful, the service as a whole has, as Zitron explains in his piece linked above, gradually been getting worse and worse, abusing its users in the name of profit and growth, for years at this point.

There are always alternatives. You can email people, just like in the good old days, or alternative messaging solutions like Discord, Zoom and Skype exist. They all have their issues, yes, but they're not actively being harmful like Meta is now. You can build a website to share your photos. Hell, if you're hooked on social media, there are plenty of better alternatives to Facebook now. (Just don't join TikTok.)

Online is a garbage fire right now, and it's only getting worse. One day, we might be able to look back on this whole sorry situation and laugh, but right now it's getting to a point where it's outright dangerous for some folks online. And I would hope that you, dear reader, don't want to be part of making that problem any worse.

If you didn't know anything about any of this prior to today, I hope you feel a little better informed now. And if you did, I'd urge you to take that step and move well away from Meta as soon as you are able.

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#oneaday Day 216: I've probably written all of this before

There are, as I type this, 2,850 posts on this blog. 2,851 including this one. As such, I've almost certainly written things multiple times. Yesterday's story about The Rough Book is one I've told before, for example, and even found myself using some of the same turns of phrase to describe various incidents.

But I think it's interesting to reflect back on things multiple times, many years apart, because doing so can cause you to look at those situations from a new perspective, perhaps with different life experiences under your belt. In the case of The Rough Book, I last wrote about it in 2012, when I didn't know I was autistic. Or, perhaps, when I hadn't been diagnosed as autistic. Because even in those innocent, pre-COVID days, I think I always knew that something was "up", as it were.

Hell, I mean, even COVID. Life has not been the same on Planet Earth since the pandemic hit, and many folks (including, I suspect, me and my wife) are still feeling the aftereffects (or perhaps it's more accurate to say ongoing effects) of the situation, thanks to the lack of understanding around things like "Long COVID" and suchlike.

It's hard to say if my life has got better or worse as time has gone on, looking back at these old posts and realising all the topics I've previously written about. I think, on the whole, I'm in a much better situation than I ever have been in every regard except for my physical health; I've had lower lows of mental health in particular (catastrophically low lows on multiple occasions) and I certainly have very little to complain about with my present employment situation.

I have found a niche and I'm damn well staying there as long as possible; I have no desire to ever go back to the periods of joblessness I've endured over the years. Even with the experience I've built up over the course of the past few years, I still feel like if I was suddenly out of work that I would struggle to cope in today's volatile, competitive job market. I have been very fortunate with the situation I've ended up in from that perspective. I took some risks to get here, in some ways it took an uncharacteristic amount of persistence, and I actually think the pandemic helped me secure the position I'm in now thanks to how it made remote working feasible for everyone.

I like having this blog, and being able to look back over the posts, particularly with the "Random Post" button at the top, then following a rabbit hole of "related posts". Of course, I have a big gap between the end of my first #oneaday stint and this one, but other things online — like MoeGamer and YouTube, for example — fill that gap to some degree. This is why I was so upset when WordPress.com pulled their whole "your blog has been deleted, teehee" shit a while back. This site isn't useful from a perspective of… well, anything, really, other than giving me a semi-private outlet to muse on whatever subjects I feel like writing about. But, goddammit, it's mine, and it's not beholden to any platform holders who can arbitrarily take it away from me. Not any more, anyway.

I don't get anywhere near the readership I used to with this blog. I don't even think my family and friends read it any more. I don't think anyone reads blogs any more, because they're too busy doomscrolling on social media or shit like TikTok. And while I hate that personally, I can't really tell other people what they "should" be doing, when the stuff I'm posting here is probably just as vapid as all the people yelling at the camera on TikTok.

Or is it? There's probably a whole discussion for another post in this, but I can say with complete honesty that what I've written here over the years has been an accurate reflection of me. I've always made a point of being honest — to myself as much as anyone who might be reading — while TikTok, from my admittedly limited experience to it, feels obnoxiously performative. Oddly, despite TikTok in theory being more "personal" thanks to being video-based — you see and hear the person — I still feel much more like I'm getting to know someone when I read what they write, rather than seeing them yelling breathlessly into their phone camera like the world's least scary follow-up to The Blair Witch Project.

It saddens me a bit that blogs aren't what they used to be. Hell, most people don't even call them "blogs" any more; these days they tend to be described as "newsletters", and most of them seem to be read via email rather than actually on their websites. But I'm still resolutely old-school in how I do things; this is my blog, and has been since (checks) 2008. And there's no real point changing up how I do things now, is there?

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#oneaday Day 215: Memories of Me: The Rough Book

Life changed for me and my friend Ed in secondary school when we discovered that the school library would sell you a new, blank exercise book in the colour of your choice for something like 30p. Ostensibly the option was there for those who had lost their exercise books and were replacing them at their own expense (the school would provide new ones for free when old ones were full, they weren't that stingy) but the librarian, Mrs Miller, didn't ask too many questions.

Mrs Miller was an interesting character, actually. As is often the case for school librarians, she developed something of a reputation for being a stickler for the rules and wanting to ensure everyone was silent at all times in the library. Of course, much of this was exaggerated by playground gossip, and Mrs Miller was, in fact, a thoroughly lovely person with a fun, dry sense of humour, and she was much more willing to demonstrate this side of herself to those who were further up the school.

But I digress. The important thing is that Mrs Miller would sell you a new exercise book for pocket change, and this meant you could use that book for whatever you pleased. Ed and I took to branding these quasi-illicit exercise books our "Rough Books", and they were used for all manner of things — primarily doodling, playing silly games and comic strips. It was in Rough Books that we established several fixtures of our teenage sense of humour, including:

The German Stickmen. A four-frame comic in which two German stickmen would get into an argument over something stupid, culminating in them going "Nein!" "Ja!" repeatedly at one another until one of them bellowed "ACHTUNG!" (like in Wolfenstein 3-D, you know) and inflicted some form of horrible (usually explosive) violence on the other. My favourite ran "Ich bin Fred." "Nein, du bist James." "Nein!" "Ja!" "Nein!" "Ja!" "ACHTUNG!" (nuclear explosion).
The X-35 Plasma Gun. Actually a creation of our mutual friend Daniel, the X-35 Plasma Gun didn't have a fixed form, but there was one constant in all its depictions: it was a gun one would hold with a pistol grip, but which carried a comedically large variety of attachments atop it, including not just additional weaponry such as bazookas and '50s-style laser guns, but also practical functions such as a washing machine and full-size bath. I will have to draw one of these again someday to truly get across what I mean, because I feel that description doesn't really do the X-35 Plasma Gun justice.
Adverts for games that we were making with Klik and Play. One day I acquired the budget release of Clickteam's Klik and Play, and thus began a new obsession of us trying to make our own games. We only ever finished one — Pie Eater's Destiny, a game that featured idealised versions of me and my friends (actually ripped and recoloured Contra III sprites) battling giant digitised heads of our classmates in space. But that didn't stop us from drawing fake adverts for the many, many half-finished games we made that are now, sadly, almost definitely lost to time.
Edlock Holmes and Watson. I talked about this in my video on The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, but the gist is this: Ed and I were obsessed with The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, so we made a comic that cast us in the role of "Holmes and Watson", and sent our virtual selves on various comedic adventures. There's probably an entire post of Edlock Holmes lore in me at some point, but that will have to do for now.

One of the most significant features of multiple Rough Books, though, was My Friends Hijack the Middle Pages and Write The Name of the Girl I Fancied That Week in Giant Letters. I feel the title for this is probably self-explanatory, but let me elaborate.

At school, I fell in love with a lot of girls, often for the most mundane reasons, like them acknowledging my existence, holding a conversation with me or allowing me to work in a group with them in class without being physically repulsed by my presence. I was too much of a socially awkward (retrospectively: autistic) teen to ever be able to express my feelings adequately to any of these girls, mind you, and thus most of my teenage years were spent feeling like a doomed poet, forever to suffer unrequited love from afar.

I secretly quite enjoyed the feeling of "being in love", though, regardless of whether or not anything actually happened. There was something about that teenage "butterflies in the stomach" feeling which was oddly… addictive, almost, and so, over time, I would flit from girl to girl, deciding that this time, she was absolutely the one for me, despite in most cases me not actually knowing that much about her at all, because that would involve talking to her and not making a complete idiot of myself, which my brain successfully convinced me on a daily basis was a complete impossibility.

Any time I fancied someone new, I would keep it quiet for a while, but after some time the feelings inside me would "boil over" to such a point that I had to admit it to one of my friends, even though I knew they would almost certainly take the piss out of me for it. And one of the ways they took the piss was getting hold of my Rough Book, then performing the sacred art of My Friends Hijack the Middle Pages and Write The Name of the Girl I Fancied That Week in Giant Letters.

The ornateness of how the name would be written varied from one occasion to another. Sometimes it would be in beautifully crafted, pencilled block letters. Sometimes it would be scrawled in multiple colours of felt-tipped pens. On one particularly memorable occasion, my Rough Book was returned to me with the name "NIKKI" (my affections returned to Nikki on multiple occasions; she was, to my teenage eyes and hormones, feminine perfection and, retrospectively, possibly the source of a mild tights fetish) beautifully painted in watercolours, which I feel was rather more grandiosity than the situation warranted, but such was the nature of my curious little friendship group.

I say they did this to take the piss. In their own way, I think they were showing a funny kind of "support" for my feelings. They knew that I was extremely unlikely to ever actually go up to any of these girls and ask them out, so they did what they could to make my feelings feel… "special". Sometimes they even went out of their way to try and put me in a situation with the girl in question — situations I would tend to squander due to my social ineptitude — and I don't think every one of those was an attempt to embarrass me in a malicious way.

Some of them absolutely were, mind. I have vivid memories of our class having been studying Romeo and Juliet in class, learning the expression "taking one's maidenhead" and numerous puns surrounding that phrase as euphemisms for taking a young lady's virginity. One lunchtime, one member of our class — Luke, a peripheral member of our friendship group at best — bellowed at the top of his voice "PETE WANTS TO CHOP DANIELLE'S HEAD OFF" while the Danielle in question (who I was, of course, exceedingly attracted to at the time and would have concurred privately with Luke's assessment had I not considered it a little disrespectful to contemplate the status of others' maidenheads) was most certainly well within earshot.

Thankfully, Danielle was cool, and someone I counted as an actual friend as well as someone I fancied, so on that occasion I actually successfully plucked up the courage to talk to her about it, apologise for Luke's outburst and successfully block myself off from ever being able to really admit I liked her by, in effect, friendzoning myself. (I also knew that she was, at the time, already going out with someone a bit older than her, and that fact intimidated me somewhat, as I did not want to end up on the receiving end of a beating from "Carmine", I believe his name was. Why do I remember this shit?)

Anyway. I got off the point there a bit, but I hope you enjoyed my memories of the Rough Book. I wish I still had some of them. I have a few bits of miscellanea from my teenage years, but sadly the Rough Books are not among them. By their nature, they were a transient form of media, doomed to end up in the bin so my parents and teachers didn't find them. But while they lasted they were a wonderful part of my secondary school days, and, as odd as it may sound, a big reason why I mostly look back on those days with fondness.

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#oneaday Day 214: Anticipating Xenoblade... again

I'm a big fan of the Xenoblade Chronicles series from Monolithsoft and Nintendo, though I must confess I am very behind; I haven't yet played Torna, The Golden Country (the spinoff to the second game) or Xenoblade Chronicles 3 yet, nor have I replayed Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition on Switch. And yet here I am, gradually getting hyped for the return of Xenoblade Chronicles X in March.

Xenoblade Chronicles X is kind of special, see. While most of the rest of the series is pretty well-known to be awesome, outside of the few folks who can't handle anime-style aesthetics, Xenoblade Chronicles X has always been more of a cult favourite. For starters, it came out on Wii U, which means only a few people bought it, and it's also quite a different beast to the mainline Xenoblade Chronicles titles, arguably making it a bit more of an acquired taste for some.

Lest you're unfamiliar, the Xenoblade Chronicles series are a range of vast, open-world RPGs that take the concept Final Fantasy XII kicked off — MMO-style mechanics and structure in a single-player game — and run with it. For miles and miles and miles.

The mainline Xenoblade Chronicles titles are beloved not just for their expansive, beautifully crafted worlds, but also for the wonderful characters that make up the main cast. Each of them feature a wonderful balance between player freedom and in-depth storytelling, allowing you the opportunity to experience a truly epic narrative while also getting to know the complete, vast world very well.

Xenoblade Chronicles X differed a little from what was, at the time, its only predecessor, in that it downplayed the central narrative somewhat. Indeed, it's possible to blast through the entire main story of Xenoblade Chronicles X much quicker than any other game in the series. And this led some people to think that it "wasn't as good" as the original Xenoblade Chronicles.

In fact, Xenoblade Chronicles X isn't any lighter on story content than its predecessor. It's just structured very differently, primarily because of its overall concept. Rather than going on a long "hero's journey"-style quest, you're simply part of an organisation. Sure, you end up being the one who does some important and noteworthy things, but when it comes down to it, you're just another cog in a machine much bigger than you are.

Xenoblade Chronicles X's concept is that you, and a chunk of other humans, have crash-landed on an alien planet called Mira, and there's absolutely no hope of getting your spaceship back into space; moreover, there's likely no Earth to go back to, since the whole reason you were in space was escaping an alien invasion.

Consequently, rather than sitting around crying and gradually turning into cavemen, the former crew of the spacecraft decide to repurpose what's left of the ship as a city, then set about exploring the planet and making the best use of the resources that surround them. To that end, you're recruited as a BLADE: a Builder of the Legacy After the Destruction of Earth. This means you need to go out, find resources, build things to exploit those resources, deal with the local fauna, collect things and just generally make a big ol' map of Mira as a whole. And Mira is very big.

While playing Xenoblade Chronicles X, there's a really nice feeling that you're playing a game that is as much strategy/management game as it is RPG. On the Wii U, the Gamepad's second screen featured a hex-based map of the planet that you could use to plan your expeditions, build things and invest in areas; the long-term gameplay of Xenoblade Chronicles X involves "conquering" each of these hexes in various ways, be it through completing missions, discovering landmarks, defeating powerful foes or various other objectives.

And every time you come back to the city of New Los Angeles, as it becomes known, you will have new people to talk to, new sidequests to discover, new little stories about humanity's home away from home. It's a massively immersive game that I feel like I barely scratched the surface of back when I played it on Wii U, and I'm really looking forward to giving it another go when the Switch version rolls around.

Couple that with some interesting and quite innovative online features — which will be much easier to take advantage of on a platform people actually own — and you have a game that promises to take up a lot of your life.

Oh, and it has an amazing soundtrack that you will either love or hate.

I'm sure there's plenty more about the game that I've forgotten, but I do remember the game as a whole with great fondness from when I first played it and declared it my Game of the Year nearly ten years ago… and bemoaned the fact that it didn't get anywhere near the press attention and general praise that it clearly deserved, likely primarily because it was a Wii U game, and what kind of idiot bought a Wii U? (Hi.)

So yeah. Expect great enthusing about Xenoblade Chronicles X when it comes out. I'm just wondering whether or not I can fit in Torna, The Golden Country and/or Xenoblade Chronicles 3 before that happens… given that I'm playing through Fire Emblem Engage also right now.

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#oneaday Day 213: Knotwords is a Mobile Game That Isn't Shit

Mobile games are, to me, mostly absolute bobbins. I have no desire to engage in tap-and-wait non-gameplay, I don't want to play rigged puzzles designed to get me to cough up money for "boosts" and I absolutely want nothing to do with fucking gacha. On top of that, I have zero desire to play "console-quality" experiences on my phone because touchscreens fucking suck for games like that.

As a result of all of the above, there are very few mobile games that I will give any time to whatsoever. One of them is Take It Easy by Ravensburger, an adaptation of a tabletop game that I think works a lot better as a video game because you don't have to do any of the maths or checking for valid moves yourself, but that's not what we're here to talk about. (I talked about it at length here, and I am always pleased to note that it is still supported after originally being released in 2015, which is practically caveman days in smartphone gaming terms.)

No, today I want to talk about Knotwords, a simply presented game by Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger. This is a game that is, for me, an ideal mobile game. It has short play sessions, it's easy to control using nothing more than the touchscreen, and perhaps most importantly, it's not trying to shake you down for your life savings or make you endure ads every ten minutes. No, in fact the game is ad-free, and simply monetised via either an optional subscription (£4.59 a year) or a one-off purchase (£11.49).

The free version of Knotwords allows you to play the daily "Mini" and "Classic" challenges (the difference simply being the size and complexity of the complete puzzle) as well as a monthly "Puzzlebook" (though I would add that at the time of writing, the Android version of the game has broken this feature, asking for an update that doesn't exist). Paying up allows you to access a mode called "Twist" (which I don't know anything about because I haven't paid) as well as the archived previous Puzzlebooks, plus a couple of extra benefits such as additional hints, if you need them.

So what is Knotwords? It's a word puzzle based on crosswords, but also drawing influences from sudoku (or perhaps more accurately, kenken) and anagram puzzles. You're presented with a blank crossword divided into areas, with each region telling you which letters go in it, but not the order those letters should be in. Your job is to untangle these "knots" and solve the crossword using valid words, ideally as quickly as possible. That's it — at least for the Mini and Classic puzzles; I don't know if Twist is any different.

The pleasant thing about Knotwords is that it's simple to understand, but it gets you thinking. Supposedly the puzzles are easy on Mondays and ramp up in difficulty as each week approaches Sunday, but I haven't been playing the game regularly enough to notice the differences as yet.

I have been playing the game, though, which is more than I can say for pretty much any other mobile game released since… well, 2015, when Take It Easy came out. I appreciate a game that makes good use of the platform it's on, doesn't constantly bug me to pay up, and which is simply a fun little challenge. A Knotwords puzzle is the sort of thing you can do on the toilet or before going to bed; it doesn't demand a lot of commitment, but it does get your brain working in a way that doomscrolling the shitty end of the Internet absolutely does not.

The only thing I don't like about it is its use of "streaks", a la Wordle, because that's a shitty way to engage players and I dislike it intensely. But it's also easily ignored, so I'm not particularly mad about it. I do feel sorry for the people online who seem to have a genuine addiction to anything with a "streak" involved, though, including this. You should be playing things like Knotwords because you want to, not to Make Number Go Up.

Anyway, Knotwords is A Good, and I'm happy to have randomly stumbled across it the other day. If you're burnt out on Wordle (or just feel weird giving the New York Times any of your time and/or attention, regardless of reasons) then I highly recommend giving it a shot.

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