#oneaday Day 147: Saturday Night is for Streaming

Well, it is this week, anyway. Andie is going out for a friend’s birthday in the evening, so I thought I might take the opportunity to do a bit of streaming. You, dear reader, are welcome to stop by. Here’s my Twitch channel. I’ll be streaming from about 8pm UK time, all being well, and the duration will depend on how much fun I’m having and whether anyone is actually chatting. I plan to go for at least an hour or two, though.

The game I’ve picked to stream is one I deliberately haven’t started yet. It’s Experience’s dungeon crawler Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters and Gain Strong Weapons and Armor. You May Be Defeated, but Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be a Day When the Heroes Defeat the Devil King. I have picked this for several reasons:

I like Experience games.
I like dungeon crawlers.
It has a silly name.
As I understand it, it’s a fairly light and breezy take on the dungeon crawler, so it should be eminently suitable for chatting while playing.

Now I’m sure anyone who is all about “optimising” their Twitch experience would recommend I play something people have actually heard of. But if you’ve ever paid my YouTube channel a visit you will know that I don’t really give a shit about baiting the algorithm and getting huge viewing figures.

In fact, as I’ve discussed previously, I actually don’t like it when a video does well, because after you crash through a certain number of views, people start to get a bit more mean and I’m not a big fan of that. So I’d rather just host a nice little comfortable stream for friends to drop in on as they see fit — and perhaps a few newcomers can pop along and learn a bit about a game they haven’t seen before alongside me.

Streaming is something that, I know, you have to work hard at in order to get anywhere. To be honest, I’m not so fussed about trying to “make partner” or “go affiliate” or whatever — the thing that appeals to me about streaming more than anything else right now is the prospect of potentially making some human connections with people. I have been so bereft of good company beyond my wife and cats in recent years that I want to try various means of potentially meeting new folks. And streaming would seem like a potentially solid means of discovering people with similar interests that I might get along with.

I know that won’t happen immediately. I’m fine with that. I’ve recorded lots of Let’s Plays for YouTube, so I am intimately familiar with how to talk rubbish entirely to myself while playing a video game. But if some good conversation happens to come about? So much the better. We shall see, I guess.

Anyway, tomorrow evening, 8pm UK time. I’ll let you work out what that is in your region. Let’s hunt some monsters and have a good time!

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

#oneaday Day 146: Spooky scary brownies

It’s Halloween! I used to really enjoy Halloween, but as you get older it becomes more and more of a wet fart of a celebration, unless you have kids. For the last few years, we haven’t even had any Trick or Treaters visit — though we did have a couple tonight. For my sins, I spent the evening editing a 75 minute video about Atari games rather than actually playing the horror game I am in the middle of (Spirit Hunter NG) but such is the way of hyperfixating. I could have stopped partway through the project, but my brain kept saying “go on, you’re nearly done”, and before I knew it, I was done. I wish I could find that sort of motivation for anything that actually mattered.

Anyway, Halloween. I have a few fond memories from various years. The earliest one I can recall was from when we were in America. I talked a little about this trip to America when I revealed my longstanding (and mostly overcome) fear of the wimdotch wib hamdongs, but there were lots of other things that happened on that trip. One of them was spending Halloween with someone my parents knew. I can’t remember who the people were, what their names were or even if they were actually American or just British folks who had ended up living out there, but one thing I do remember is the lady of the house baking brownies.

I had never had brownies before this Halloween visit to this mystery family, and my introduction to them was with the most amazing home-made brownies I have ever tasted in my life. I have spent the intervening 35+ years trying various types of brownie from all manner of sources, and not one has ever matched the brownies I had that one October night in 1985. And I don’t know why. Surely a brownie is a brownie? All I remember that might be a distinguishing factor is that these home-made brownies had walnuts in, and as a fussy kid I didn’t think I liked walnuts. (I still don’t.) But baked into those brownies they were wonderful.

So yeah. I hope before I die I can have at least one brownie that is even half as good as the brownies I had that night. I will continue to feel unfulfilled until that happens.

Another completely unrelated memory is from a Halloween night at university. Scary Movie had just come out, and Scream was still fashionable, so, being a shy sort, I figured dressing up as the Scream killer would be a great Halloween costume. And it was! The really interesting thing I found was that by completely hiding my entire appearance, I suddenly had way more self-confidence than I had ever felt in my life. I was laughing and joking with complete strangers, doing the “WAZAAAPP” thing from Scary Movie, and I was having a thoroughly lovely time.

I can’t remember anything else about the evening other than the walk into Portswood, Southampton dressed as the Scream killer — I suspect once I arrived at my destination I proceeded to get absolutely twatted off my face on cheap cocktails — but that feeling of being nigh-invincible on the walk to the venue is something that has stuck with me ever since… and is a feeling I’d love to recapture at some point, somehow.

Anyway, my Halloween has been mostly uneventful, as you can probably tell, but it’s now ten past midnight, my video has finished rendering and I still have to work tomorrow. So I should probably go to bed, huh.

Sweet screams or whatever.

#oneaday Day 145: The love of a good cat

Apologies for last night’s bleakness. Not entirely sure what came over me. I think it was just the fact I turned the TV on to watch something while I was having something to eat and I was immediately confronted by a “Dell AI” advert that… didn’t advertise anything whatsoever. But anyway. That was then, and this is now, and now I am back from my overnight stay and monthly visit to the office, and I have been welcomed home by my wife and cats.

My wife is jealous of how much our cats love me. And not just our current two; I was clearly favoured by both Ruby and Meg also. I haven’t particularly done anything special to make any of them favour me in particular, but I can confirm that both Oliver and Patti have been all over me ever since I returned home.

And it’s nice. There is something wonderful about the completely (well, mostly) unconditional love you feel from an animal. Both Oliver and Patti simply like being with me. We don’t have to be doing anything “together”; they both just like to be in the same room as me, knowing that I’m nearby, and that if they feel like jumping on me to harass me for some attention and/or treats, I’m right there, nice and convenient.

I’d always known that having a cat around was a genuine joy. I grew up with two of the most wonderful cats you ever could imagine, for starters, and I still miss them both dearly. I have doubtless told this story many times before, but our first cat Penny was very much my “nursemaid” when I was very little, and as I grew up I felt very close to her.

After Penny passed on peacefully one night, it wasn’t long before my family decided that we didn’t want to be without a cat, and so Kitty (we didn’t name her) joined us. She was a wonderful bundle of joy who loved nothing more than jumping into your lap and lying down, regardless of if you were trying to do anything. Sadly she left us, well before her time, after an accident in the road outside our house.

I still think of both Penny and Kitty, and love them both dearly.

And having pets of my own has brought me immeasurable amounts of joy. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have been blessed with such wonderful pets consistently — though the fact that every pet I have had has turned out to be such a wonderful companion makes me wonder if the way you nurture them as their carer has as much impact on their overall personality as their general nature. If so, that hopefully says something positive about me.

The only thing I wish is that I’d explored the possibility of having my own pets sooner in my adult life than I did; right from when Andie and I first adopted a pair of rats because we thought it might be fun up until the fussy little mogs who are currently adorning various surfaces in my living room, pet ownership has been a wonderful thing.

There are challenges, of course, and it is sad when you have to say goodbye to a beloved pet. But the possibility of those sad times in the future should never take away from the amount of joy pets can bring you. And, as with Penny and Kitty, the pets we have lost over the years are still with me in their own way, too. Willow, Lara, Lucy, Socks, Clover, Ruby, Meg… I will never forget any of them.

Pets are wonderful companions, excellent listeners and never judge you. And now, I cannot imagine ever being without them.

#oneaday Day 144: Are we fucked?

With each passing day, I feel like it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the feeling that we, the humans, are completely and utterly fucked.

And I mean this in a variety of ways. For one, it’s impossible to ignore the wilful ignorance “big tech” is demonstrating in the current “AI” gold rush. After years of getting things like carbon emissions and sustainable energy production into a good place — likely far too late, but still, the effort was happening — it seems all the big players in the tech space have just gone “haha! Fuck that, we’ve got a new toy, and bollocks to the frankly unnecessary amount of energy it consumes to power it”.

And this is about the third or fourth energy-inefficient tech gold rush at this point, after cryptocurrency and NFTs. The one thing those things and “AI” have in common is that they’re hawked by people who are completely unable to explain how their supposed benefits outweigh the absurd cost in resources required to use them. At worst, they’re used as outright scams.

AI is even worse at this point. In the last few weeks, I’ve seen several adverts for “AI”. Not an AI product, not a revolutionary and groundbreaking use case for AI… just adverts for “we are a tech company and we’re doing… something… with AI because every other fucker is”. It is absolutely telling that not one of these adverts has been able to depict AI doing anything remotely useful, and that none of them even attempt to explain why AI is a good thing. Because, as most people who have been paying attention will know at this point, there is no product.

Seriously. There is no compelling use case for AI that isn’t already covered in a more energy-efficient format by existing tech.

Want to find information? Search engines exist, both for the whole Web and within a single site.

Want to write code? Well, you’d better learn, because ChatGPT is going to spit out bullshit that is full of errors that you won’t know how to spot without knowing how to code.

Need an image? There are billions of images online, many of which are royalty free or suitable for use via fair use provisions. There are free art packages available. And there are lots of artists who will draw whatever the hell you want — yes, even that — if you give them some money.

Can’t write an email? Bullshit you can’t. If you can write a ChatGPT prompt you can write a fucking email. Stop being a lazy cunt.

Need AI to “summarise” something for you? Just read the fucking thing, it’s not hard, and as a species we’ve spent several thousand years mastering that basic skill.

So that’s a concern, both for the environmental impact and for how it will affect the job market. I’m also rather concerned about how medicine seems to be super-keen to use AI rather than, you know, human doctors. I’m sure that’s going to be a fun few lawsuits in the near future.

And outside of all this nonsense, we have the current state of world politics, particularly the US. I have friends in the States who are — quite rightly, I feel — legitimately terrified about what the upcoming election will result in. And while I thought people were overreacting somewhat back in 2016 when this situation last presented itself, having seen how utterly deranged Trump and his most obsequious sycophants are behaving in the run-up to this election… yeah. I get it.

So the inevitable conclusion to all this is to find myself sitting alone in a hotel room asking myself “are we fucked?” Cause I think we might be, y’know. I think we might be.

#oneaday Day 143: You should consider a mini PC

I realised that I don’t think I’ve talked about this on this ‘ere blog before, so now’s as good a time as any.

You should consider a mini PC. You know, those little square things that are much too small to put anything in and don’t have graphics cards. Yeah, them. I got this one and it has completely taken over from “the gaming PC” (which is hooked up to the TV in the living room) as my daily driver for work, and also for video capture and streaming. (I still do video editing on the gaming PC, though, because having an actual graphics card is helpful there.)

I’ve been very pleasantly surprised how capable that thing is, even if I continually want to call its brand name “Beedrill” instead of “Beelink”. (I had to look up my order to check.) It’s a nippy little thing when running Windows 11 — which is nowhere near as bad as naysayers think, particularly when you turn off/forcibly remove all the AI shit — and for anything other than bang up to date graphically intensive polygonal games, it performs admirably. It is superb at emulation, for example.

Its small form factor makes it very portable — I now take it to the office when I have to go in, instead of a laptop — and it has plenty of connectivity, including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. I’ve added a powered USB hub to mine just for maximum flexibility — I have a lot of things hooked up to it — but if all you need is a wired mouse and keyboard and maybe some additional USB storage, you’re sorted with just the included ports.

I hadn’t even considered mini PCs prior to picking this one up, but when I decided I wanted to move my day-to-day work from home out of the living room and up into my study, something made me give them a look. And I was surprised to read plenty of positivity about them — it seems these little things are quite fashionable at the moment. And, having now owned one since May of this year (it feels like longer already — it’s a fixture now!) I am delighted with how it’s performed and how flexible the damn thing is.

The only thing — besides triple-A gaming — that I’ve found it’s not really up to is simultaneously running a reasonably modern game and recording/streaming it at the same time. It’s fine doing this with emulation — my last few Atari ST videos were done on this machine — but when I thought about streaming UFO 50 a few weeks back, it wasn’t quite up to the job. Which is a shame, but not the end of the world, because I also have an Elgato hooked up to it, so I can just stream/record from other devices such as the 400 Mini, Evercade VS and, soon, Switch — I’ve bought a second Switch dock specifically so I can dock my Switch and stream from it.

So if you’re in the market for a new PC and you know that your uses aren’t going to be super-demanding — and yes, this even includes games, so long as they’re not, like, super-fancy ray-traced gubbins — I can confidently say a mini PC is a good investment. They’re particularly ideal if you want to set up some sort of emulation box or a system primarily used for entertainment — video streaming, music, that sort of thing. They’re small, compact, quiet and, best of all, cheap.

So yeah. That’s my sales pitch. You should consider a mini PC. I’m glad I did!

#oneaday Day 142: More sound novels, please

Playing through Death Mark and now its sequel NG, I’m once again struck by how much I like the “sound novel” approach to Japanese-style adventure games. I last encountered this style of presentation back when I looked at 428: Shibuya Scramble, and I liked it a lot there, too. And I’d like to see more of it.

For the unfamiliar, a “sound novel” is usually a form of visual novel in which audible character speech (as in, voice acting) is eschewed in favour of presenting narration and dialogue exclusively (or almost exclusively in the case of Death Mark and NG) through text. To counterbalance the “loss” of this aspect that is normally found in most visual novels these days, sound novels place a much stronger emphasis on ambient audio.

That means unlike many other visual novels, which tend to have continuous background music as their main accompaniment to the action, sound novels attempt to create a sense of “immersion” in the game environment via a slightly different means. It’s a uniquely “video game” way of doing things, and the more I experience it, the more I really like it.

Part of the reason I appreciate it is because I’m a fast reader, and when I’m playing a visual novel with full voice acting, I find it very difficult to make myself advance the text before the speech has finished playing — even if the speech is not in a language I understand. This is because I know that there is often some very good voice acting in visual novels — it tends to be where a lot of the budget goes — and I worry that I might miss out on some particularly dramatic or emotional moments if I skip the sound.

The game that got me into this habit was Corpse Party on PSP, which is kind of sort of a visual novel, only with RPG-style exploration. The voice acting in that game was so good that I not only listened to every line in its entirety, even though I don’t speak Japanese, I also made listening to the Japanese voice track my norm in most games (well, those that originated in Japan, anyway) I played from thereon.

But I’m always just a bit conscious of the fact that all that lovely voice acting is slowing me down, and since I inevitably read a line faster than it’s spoken — particularly if we’re dealing with one of those characters that speaks incredibly slowly — I can occasionally feel my attention wandering. Now, I could just skip the dialogue and move on to the next line, but like I say, there’s a little switch in my brain that’s flipped, and I can’t flip it back; it just doesn’t feel right to do that.

Sound novels, though, present no such difficulty. I can romp through Death Mark and NG (and indeed 428: Shibuya Scramble before them) at completely my own pace. I don’t need to wait for a voice actor, I don’t need to wait for a dramatic moment, I just read and advance. And I really like it.

This got me thinking more broadly about how I’m settling into a place where I feel like I actually prefer the games that deliberately hold themselves back from trying to be “realistic” in various ways. I played Death Mark immediately after the Silent Hill 2 remake, and while the Silent Hill 2 remake was indisputably excellent, I think I’m actually drifting into a place where I enjoyed Death Mark more in terms of the way it was presented to me. And I’m enjoying NG even more than Death Mark, because it’s doing a lot of the same things, only it feels a bit more polished and refined.

So I think I’m in a place where the “sound novel” approach is fast becoming one of my favourite ways to present an interactive narrative. It’s got the descriptive text and well-crafted dialogue I enjoy, it’s got incredibly atmospheric ambient sound to feel “immersive”, and I can play through it at completely my own pace, rather than being arbitrarily limited by my inability to skip through voice-acted lines.

Of course, in the other games I suppose I could just turn the voice acting off. But then I feel like I’m deliberately depriving myself of an important part of that game’s presentation.

Oh, woe is me. I realise, of course, that this is a completely pointless problem to be worrying about, and, to be honest, I’m not actually worrying about it at all. It just struck me as something interesting while I was playing NG this evening, and I hope I can find some more sound novels to enjoy once I’m done with the Spirit Hunter series.

#oneaday Day 141: Progress report

It’s been nearly a week that I’ve been following the NHS 12-week “Weight Loss” app programme so far, which basically just means I’ve been counting calories for 6 days. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a few things. I’m yet to weigh myself to see if anything has happened as a result of this week as yet — I’ve set “Monday morning after the really long morning piss” as the weekly weigh-in — but as with most things like this, the programme is as much about getting yourself into decent habits as it is about making number go down.

The thing I’ve been most pleasantly surprised about is how possible it is to eat “normally” and enjoyably without breaking the calorie bank. In the last week, I don’t feel like I’ve really had to “give anything up”; when I’ve fancied some crisps, I’ve had some crisps, when I’ve fancied some chocolate, I’ve had some chocolate. The important thing is paying attention to those things and ensuring you don’t do them to excess, and being honest about counting them. As such, even though I’ve had crisps and chocolate and a few other bits and pieces most diets would probably count as “naughty” on some diet plans throughout the week, I’ve still come to the end of each day below the calorie allowance I have.

Now part of this is because I’m a big lad and thus need a few more calories than someone who is normal-sized, but I figure cutting back can be a gradual process. In thinking about what I’m eating and counting the calories, I’m already finding myself thinking “well, I can probably do without that and it will save me 250 calories”. For example, with lunch today I eschewed a bag of crisps and I didn’t really miss them. I suspect long-term I can retrain myself to think that lunchtime doesn’t have to involve a bag of crisps, and thus a bag of crisps can be mentally moved from “expected part of lunch” to “occasional treat”. That seems like a positive step, for sure.

This is a positive move. One of the reasons I have found myself struggling with more “plan-based” approaches in recent years is the feeling that I’m “giving things up” and “missing out” on them. When you specifically rule out certain things from your diet, it turns out that you really crave them. And while when I did Slimming World 10 years or so back I could handle that, this time around I’ve really struggled. And thus it was time to try something different.

As I say, so far it remains to be seen if what I’ve done this week has actually had any tangible effect or if I need to step my efforts up a bit, but from next week I’m planning to start being a little more active again.

Y’see, part of the reason I’m in the state I’m in is due to the COVID years. The whole lockdown thing, coupled with general laziness, caused me to gain a bunch of weight, stop doing any sort of exercise and even start feeling a bit uneasy about going outside generally. That’s not a good place in which to find yourself, so I need to start taking additional steps to sort that out, and getting back into a gym habit will be a good means of doing that.

The reason I haven’t done that this week alongside starting the calorie counting is I did my back in somehow while we were away on holiday, and it’s just starting now to feel like it’s a bit better. I didn’t want to agitate it with exercise, so I’ve been waiting until whatever the problem was appears to have “healed”, and I think it’s pretty much there. So from Monday, I’m going to make an effort to go to the gym at least three times throughout the week.

I think I talked about this elsewhere, but I also plan to not overwhelm myself by suddenly starting a long, intense exercise routine. I’m going to begin by just going and doing, say, 20-30 minutes walking on the treadmill. I have a bit of a mental block where I feel like “just” doing that is a waste of time, but when you’re in the state I’m in, it’s absolutely not. Ideally what I’d want to do is maybe one day 20-30 minutes on the treadmill, then the next day just do the strength training machines, then alternate back and forth between them. That way, over the course of the week, I can end up having done the “recommended” amount of exercise, and I’ll have also done a bit of both cardio and strength.

I don’t yet know if my mental wellbeing and willpower is quite up to that as yet, but it’s something to aim for at least. For now, I’m going to count “went to gym at least three times” next week as a success, and anything more than that is a happy bonus. And that will kick off on Monday, giving me tomorrow to relax a bit, make sure my back is in working order and mentally prepare myself for what’s ahead.

I want to beat this. I know it’s possible, and I know it’s going to be hard work. Right now I’m feeling oddly motivated, so I wanted to put pen to paper and actually express that. Whether I feel the same way on Monday remains to be seen, but these sorts of things always have to be one step at a time, slowly but surely.

And so here I am, taking those slow but sure steps. Here’s hoping they prove to be both worthwhile and sustainable.

#oneaday Day 140: Pepsi Electric: a taste journey

I must admit, I am a sucker for Established Brands doing some sort of Limited Edition gimmick. So when I saw the local Tesco Express had refrigerated Pepsi Electric, which is blue Pepsi, I was immediately intrigued and knew I had to indulge in what would almost certainly be an incredibly disappointing experience. Particularly as Pepsi Electric is a zero sugar soda and therefore will almost certainly taste like it has never been near anything that has been anywhere vaguely in the vicinity of “nature”.

But come on, blue Pepsi! What’s not to like? I will now take you on a semi-visual journey of my thought process while exploring this bottle of inevitable disappointment.

Okay, here we go. I have a small degree of trepidation, but I’m sure it can’t be that bad.

Cap off, mild amount of fizz. Promising, inasmuch anything can be promising at this stage of proceedings.

The first sip. I am immediately hit by something almost, but not entirely, unlike Pepsi.

My immediate reaction was pretty much what this face suggests.

“The fuck is this actually supposed to taste of?” It’s “Citrus cola” apparently. It tastes (and looks) a little bit like cleaning fluid. Or, you know, what I imagine cleaning fluid to taste like based on the smell.

Another glug to make sure. Despite my “cleaning fluid” comment above, I’m not completely repulsed by the experience so far.

The initial belch from this bottle is disappointing, both in terms of length and girth.

I continue the assignment. I have, after all, started, so I should finish. I don’t like wasting food and drink I’ve paid money for, even if it’s not something I like. The only exception to this is anything which tastes heavily of raw onion, which will actively repulse me and make me want to throw it away. Thankfully “Onion Pepsi” has so far remained in the purely conceptual stages.

Ladies, try not to get too excited. I am a happily married man. But Pepsi Electric does indeed turn your tongue blue.

A new belch emerges! This one has a little more body to it, but it’s still disappointing compared to fizzier fizzy drinks, particularly in terms of length and overall volume.

At this point, I’m contemplating whether I should rethink my “finish what you start, unless it tastes of onion” policy.

In for a penny…

…in for a pound. I do try and chug the remainder of the bottle in one go, but as with most drinks that are artificial sweetener-forward, I find it difficult to drink a lot at once. Full-sugar Coke or Pepsi I could quite happily down a 500ml bottle in one go (and produce some absolutely thunderous belches afterwards) but this is proving challenging.

Eventually it takes two “chugs” to drain the rest of the bottle, and I am left with a slightly lingering sense of regret.

One final burp. I was hoping this would be “the big one”, but it disappoints.

Final conclusions: not actively unpleasant, but not particularly pleasant, either. Not something I will buy again. As with most “flavoured colas”, I find that the “flavour” actively takes away from the enjoyment of just drinking a cola.

Zero sugar cola — specifically Coke Zero, Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max — has a distinctive flavour that I am on board with. Coke Zero in particular tastes enough like regular Coke that I don’t feel I’m “missing out”. Any time you add some sort of “flavour” atop the basic cola flavour, though — or if you’re just Diet Coke, which is fucking disgusting — you amp up the artificial sweetener taste, which is gross.

Plus there wasn’t nearly enough fizz. When I drink a nice cold bottle of cola, I want to be able to summon up a belch from the very depths of Hell afterwards. The post-Pepsi Electric burps were impotent, however, making the whole experience feel rather underwhelming.

Overall, a resounding shrug of the shoulders and general sense of indifference. 73%

#oneaday Day 139: Non-specific ramblings

I’ll level with you, dear reader, I don’t really know what to write about tonight, and it’s already twenty past midnight, so I decided I would just start typing and see what came out. I had been looking for inspiration in past blog posts, but ended up just reading them rather than taking any actual ideas from them. It’s times like this that I’m glad I’ve managed to keep this one site up and running for so long — even though it has had a few challenges in the last year in particular.

But anyway. Looking back at the blog posts I wrote more than 10 years ago — I was idly browsing through entries from January 2011 — I found it striking to ponder how some things have very much stayed the same (depression, anxiety, loneliness) and others have changed quite a bit.

In one post, for example, I noted a modest ambition of mine as being able to one day buy a brand-new car. To date, I have done that not once, but twice. Well, kind of. I got roped into one of those hire-purchase schemes because I am not good at talking to salespeople, and when the term on one was concluded, I was faced with either paying up several thousand more pounds to keep the car I’d already paid several thousand pounds into on a month-by-month basis, or switching to another new car and continue paying for that on a month-by-month basis.

Not having several thousand pounds to spare at the time, I chose the latter option, which resulted in me getting a worse car for more money. But at least when that one was up, I did have the money to spare to just finish purchasing it outright. Regrettably, it was due to my inheritance from my last remaining grandparent passing away — thanks, Nan D — but that same car is still sitting comfortably on my driveway and will hopefully last a good few years more yet.

Back in 2011, I don’t think I would have ever contemplated having a nearly-new piano, which I do now. Of course, 2011 was right when I was in the middle of one of the worst periods of my life, having recently separated from my first wife and started enduring what, at the time, I thought was the great indignity of having to move back in with my parents. (My mental state was not good at the time. I mean, it’s not good now, but it was really bad then. I am now, at least, genuinely and honestly grateful for that safety net I had and wouldn’t like to think of what might happened to me had my parents not saved me from a very bad situation. But enough of that for now.)

On the whole, my life in 2024 is in a much better place than it was in 2011. I have a stable job that I like in a field I’m proud to be part of, a decent income, an incredibly supportive and understanding wife whom I love very much, two wonderful cats whom I also love very much, and a game collection that would blow the mind of my teenage self. In terms of general “life situation”, I can’t complain all that much.

But I miss people. As a socially anxious and introverted person, I’m sure that’s not something the me of a decade or two back would have ever thought I’d say, but man. Loneliness fucking blows. And the longer it goes on, the harder it feels like it is to do something about it. There are people I probably could reach out to and attempt to rekindle past friendships, but what does one say in that situation, and via what medium?

I feel like I’ve had about a decade of everyone I know drifting away from me for one reason or another — or perhaps me drifting away from them, or perhaps both — and now I just don’t really know how to handle that. I would like nothing more than to return to the good old days of the “Squadron of Shame” club on 1up.com and our later website and podcast, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin recapturing those good old days — or even if it’s possible to do so.

The one positive thing I’ve found in recent months is that social network BlueSky has a pleasing “early 2010s” Twitter vibe to it right now, and that is gradually helping me to build up a sense of online confidence that has been severely knocked over the course of the last decade or so.

That’s a start, at least, as loathe as I am to rely on a social network website for interacting with people, knowing as I know now that all these services eventually go down the route of enshittification. Real-life, meanwhile, I have a lot more work to do in, as my present physical condition means that I’m afraid and/or ashamed to see anyone I used to know in person because of the amount of weight I gained over the COVID years, so that’s going to be a harder, more long-term project, but, well, I guess I have plenty of time on my hands.

Well, then, how about that. “Nothing to write about,” he says, then goes and rambles on for nearly a thousand words. I guess that’s the approach to take when I can’t think of anything, then. Just sit down and write. That’s what #oneaday has always been about. And that’s what I’ll continue to do.

#oneaday Day 138: Marked

I’m currently playing Death Mark, a game I’ve had on my shelf (along with its two sequels) for quite a while now, but have never gotten around to. I’ve been meaning to play it for “spooky season” for a few years now, but for one reason or another the timings have never quite lined up. This year, I made it happen!

As with most things, I’ll do a full writeup on MoeGamer once I’ve finished it, but four chapters in now I can offer some reasonably well-informed thoughts on what I think so far.

For the unfamiliar, Death Mark is a horror adventure game by Experience Inc. Experience Inc. is a developer primarily known for making dungeon crawlers with beautiful artwork such as the excellent Demon Gaze series. Death Mark eschews most of the role-playing game trappings in favour of adventure game mechanics — though Experience haven’t completely left behind what they’re known for.

The premise of the game revolves around individuals suddenly finding they are “Marked” with a strange scar that looks like a bite mark. This indicates that very soon, they are going to lose their memories and then die horribly. The game consists of a series of discrete cases, during which you, as the Marked amnesiac protagonist, are tasked with helping out one or more companion characters and hopefully giving a restless spirit — the source of the Mark — some peace.

This involves exploring an area from a first-person perspective, discovering clues, solving puzzles and, when the time comes, confronting the spirit directly.

The first-person exploration is where Death Mark is closest to Experience’s dungeon crawlers, though the locations you move between are static images rather than polygonal environments. If you know a pathway exists, you can simply hit a direction on the D-pad to go that way, but in some cases you’ll need to investigate the environment in a point-and-click style with your torch to find hidden routes.

As you explore, you’ll start to learn more about the Ghost of the Week. In the tradition of Japanese ghost stories, all the restless spirits have been wronged in some way, and they are designed to have rather sympathetic stories — even if their ordeals turned them into vicious, violent monsters. And this is relevant when it comes to confronting the spirit at the end of each chapter.

A “battle” with a spirit unfolds in a turn-based fashion. Each turn, you and your companion can use one of the items you’ve found during the chapter. Some items can be used repeatedly, others have a limited number of uses. And some items can be used in combination, allowing you and your partner to cooperate and achieve something.

The process of the battle generally consists of a couple of rounds of you finding ways to counter the spirit’s attacks, and then, when they get close enough, you have the option of either killing them violently, or doing something that will pacify them and lay the troubled soul to rest once and for all. Taking the former option is usually a more obvious, easier choice, but will usually result in the death of your companion. Taking the latter option requires that you really have searched the environment thoroughly and acquired all the necessary clues to resolve the situation.

It works really well. The game is good about not allowing you to get into “unwinnable” situations, as if you mess up you can simply restart from a previous decision point or, in the case of the spirit battle, from the start of the confrontation. This means that even if you’ve reached the “finale” of a case, you can still wander off and make sure you haven’t missed any important clues before taking on the spirit.

It’s a game that is, for the most part, creepy rather than “scary” — there aren’t many in the way of “jump scares”, and the horror mostly comes from the gradual realisation of what has happened to the poor souls you’re laying to rest. There are some gory, violent scenes, though, and many of these have a somewhat fetishistic angle, which, as you might expect, caused more than a few people to sniff and tut when it was originally released.

As anyone with basic media literacy knows, though, sex and horror are inextricably linked, and have been for the longest time in both the eastern and western traditions of the genre. So Death Mark is just doing what comes naturally for the genre; while this leads to some genuinely uncomfortable scenes, it’s also good to see a game that doesn’t feel like it has to hold back from showing you these things.

Anyway, that’s enough for now. I’ll have much more to say when I’ve beaten the whole thing. I believe I have two more cases to go, so I reckon I’ll probably have it done by the end of the week. We shall see, though; in the meantime, it’s been a great pick for Spooky Season so far, and I’m looking forward to exploring the follow-ups!