#oneaday Day 162: Successful plans

I streamed yesterday, and my good pal Chris joined in. It was a successful stream — we both had a lot of fun. I haven't figured out how to share my gameplay privately with Chris with audio, but he could at least watch what I was doing while we talked, and it's so much easier to keep talking while playing when there's someone else there to interact with.

During the stream, I concentrated on playing Toaplan games from the upcoming Toaplan Arcade 3 and 4 cartridges for Evercade. There are some real bangers among these, but as with most Toaplan games, they're very hard! I reached an actual blockade in Dogyuun, which uses checkpoints, but we managed to clear the entirety of Fixeight and Snow Bros. 2 with judicious credit-feeding, both of which were a lot of fun.

I have the next couple of days off work so I think I'm going to take Sunday entirely for myself, perhaps to start having a look at 1000xRESIST, which a few people have recommended to me recently. I don't really know much about this game, but what little I've seen certainly seems to be intriguing, so I'm looking forward to checking it out. It's unfortunate there doesn't appear to be a physical release at present, so I'm going to nab the Steam version; there are rumours that there might be a physical Switch version at some point, but nothing concrete as yet.

Anyway, things are OK right now. If you were wondering about progress on the whole "eating well" thing, I'm 11 pounds down on when I started, which is good… what was less good was the amount of weight I'd put on after our week's holiday away, but at least that's coming off again now! We've had a few days of feeling a bit "eh" about dieting this week, but we're getting properly back into the swing of things on Monday. Sometimes you just need to get urges and cravings out of your system to continue being productive.

Oh, I know what else I need to do today. I need to write about Death Mark II, which I finished yesterday. More details will be forthcoming over on MoeGamer, but suffice to say for now that the entire Spirit Hunter series is absolutely magnificent, and anyone the slightest bit interested in top-quality, genuinely intelligent horror should definitely check all three games out. But like I say, I will talk more about the details over on MoeGamer.

In fact, I'm off to go do that right now. Ta-ta. If you missed the stream yesterday, here's an archive for you to watch!

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 161: Plans for Tomorrow

Tomorrow I'm going to do some streaming, as I have done the past few weeks. 8pm UK time, twitch.tv/pjedavison. Be there, or… don't be there, I guess. But it'd be nice if you were.

Rather than grinding through another layer of Mon-Yu, though, I thought it'd be a nice opportunity to play some shoot 'em ups and, assuming his availability lasts, have a bit of a chat with my good friend Chris, who enjoys a good shoot 'em up. We haven't had the opportunity to record a MoeGamer Podcast for a very long time, and while this isn't quite the same thing, it'll be fun to have a good chat. As an American, Chris is quite understandably a bit under the weather about… everything, so hopefully a bit of fun will take his mind off things for a couple of hours.

Anyway! I don't have overly specific plans other than "play some fun stuff", but I'm going to keep it limited to the Evercade Toaplan Arcade cartridges, of which there are now four. (Well, technically there will be four by the end of the year, but since I work for Blaze I have the last two already.) These are, for me, personal highlights of the complete Evercade library, and I'm thrilled to have worked on all of them.

The games are fantastic, and we were fortunate enough to have access to former Toaplan staffers such as Masahiro Yuge and Tatsuya Uemura to provide some additional commentary for the manuals. I even managed to get some commentary from Tim Follin for Toaplan Arcade 4, since that features the NES port of Sky Shark, which has a soundtrack by the great man himself — though he doesn't think it's his best work!

I'm not sure how well streaming copes with something as frenetic as a shoot 'em up, but it'll be an interesting experiment regardless. Rationally speaking, if a stream can cope with modern 3D games such as first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, I'm sure it can cope with spaceships going boom.

Like I say, I haven't decided specifically what I might play on stream as yet; I'll just take things as they come. I'll probably give the new collections some love, though, as they have a number of games that I think are particularly interesting and noteworthy. Toaplan Arcade 3, for example, has both Batsugun and Batsugun Special Version, which are spectacularly good games, but I want to give Vimana some love, too, as that's one very few people have heard of and I really like it.

A word of caution: don't come to this stream expecting high-level play, or anything other than very basic competence. I love shoot 'em ups, but I'm not super-good at them. This is probably because, like many things, I don't put enough practice in to get good, which is where I think a stream like this might be fun. I can take some time to practice, chat, talk strategy and just generally shoot the breeze — and hopefully having an additional participant in the mix will present some fun topics of discussion. We'll try not to rant too much about the state of the modern world.

So yeah. That's the plan for tomorrow. I'll be going ahead with the stream regardless of whether Chris is available (but he's said he should be) so please do stop by for a bit if you feel like it! See you then!

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#oneaday Day 160: The death of Twitter

It seems like Twitter's day in the sun is finally coming to an end. With the deadline looming for the site to start scraping everyone's posts to train its AI models, Elon being an absolute fucking maniac (not in a fun way) and Trump being in office, a lot of people — including some well-established figures and brands — have been jumping ship and turning to Bluesky. Hell, even the Clifton Suspension Bridge has decided to ditch Twitter. And no, I'm not making that up.

I haven't been following the progress of all the "Twitter alternatives" that sprang up a while back too closely, but it seems like a lot of people are favouring Bluesky, which I must confess is one that I've been on for a little while now. Threads sounds like an absolute dead end of a social network — tech commentator Ed Zitron describes it as "Twitter made of Instagram comments" — and the less said about shit like Gab, Truth Social and Parler (does that one even still exist?) the better.

I'm interested to see where things will go. The vibe on Bluesky right now is very positive; many folks quite rightly describe it as feeling like Twitter from 10+ years ago, and they're absolutely right in terms of atmosphere. The users have collectively decided to not allow it to fall into negativity and ragebait like Twitter has become in recent years, and there is a shared understanding that "block early and block often" is the best approach to anyone being a dickhead.

This is helped enormously by Bluesky's "nuclear block" function, which means that if someone quote-replies a post then blocks the person they quoted, the quote will appear as blocked for everyone. That helps prevent dogpiling and discourages people from going around looking for trouble. Couple this with the "detach quote" function, where if you do find yourself quote-replied and you're getting grief as a result, you can simply unclip your post from the quote and be left the fuck alone. Much better than Twitter's woefully ineffective mute and block functions — oh yeah, Twitter made block work so that anyone you blocked can still see your posts, which is… great.

At this point, anyone still on Twitter is in absolute denial. The place is infested with bots, scammers, right-wing fucknuts and Elon sycophants who want nothing more than just a crumb of billionaire dick to suck. And with the impending "AI" shit looming, I'm not surprised people have finally had enough. I'm certainly never going back, and I think my boss and I need to have a serious conversation about whether we start focusing our professional social media efforts on Bluesky instead of Twitter. There are a lot of cool retro game peeps over there, and I think Evercade would fit in well there.

Of course, there's always the thing to ponder: do people really want "brands" on a social media site? And I guess it depends what they're doing. If all they're doing is engagement bait crap, probably not. But this might be a fun opportunity to experiment with doing something a bit different, in a place with an altogether different vibe.

Something to consider next week, certainly — my boss is off this week, otherwise I'd have a chat with him about it tomorrow. In the meantime, Bluesky seems to be a pleasant enough place to hang out from a personal perspective, and a fair few people I know have showed up there. It's social media how it used to be before all those sites made us want to kill ourselves every day, and I'm sure that won't last forever. But while it does, we may as well enjoy it.

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#oneaday Day 159: To upgrade... or downgrade?

I'm due an upgrade on my phone, and for the first time I'm holding off because I'm not sure I want one. All the new phones are rammed with AI bullshit and I don't want to encourage that crap in any way whatsoever, so the prospect of getting one makes me a tad uneasy.

The other thing that is causing me to hold off is a growing desire to break my attachment to smartphones. I don't like being dependent on a smartphone. I don't like having that stupid black rectangle follow me everywhere I go. I don't like feeling like I compulsively "have" to fiddle with it if I don't have anything to say or anything to do.

There are a few things stopping me from immediately ditching my smartphone and "downgrading" to a modern feature phone. I thought I'd ponder each of them in turn. I probably won't come to a conclusion, but it might help me sort some things out in my mind. And maybe it'll be helpful for you, too, I don't know.

I don't use WhatsApp as much as a lot of people, but I do have a few ongoing chats that are my sole means of connection with friends I haven't seen for a while. On top of that, the people from my job use WhatsApp for communication outside of work — for example, when we're having a group social trip together.

Giving up WhatsApp would mean giving up a connection to people I don't want to "disconnect" from entirely, and would also make life inconvenient for my work colleagues. That last one I'm not super concerned about, but I do like my job and my colleagues, so I don't really want to be a pain.

Beyond those maybe two group chats (both of which have declined in activity anyway) and my work colleagues, I'm not super attached to WhatsApp. I could probably live without it.

The camera

Phone cameras these days are pretty excellent. I shoot anything that isn't direct capture from gaming hardware on my phone. Upgrading my phone would mean I can get an even better camera.

However, two things: 1) I can still use the camera on my existing phone even if it doesn't have a SIM card in it (I think, anyway). And 2) I could just, y'know, buy a nice camera.

So while it's certainly convenient to be able to snap photos and take video with a device that is with me anyway, it's probably not actually a dealbreaker in this situation.

Music and podcasts

I am, I'm afraid, "part of the problem" with music, though not out of any belief that streaming is "better" than having your own collection of tunes. It's just a lot more convenient to be able to stream music (I use YouTube Music, because I have YouTube Premium and might as well use the additional benefit) and podcasts from, again, a device I have with me anyway. Plus my phone's Bluetooth connects to my car stereo with no difficulty, making it easy to queue up entertainment for long journeys, such as my monthly drive to the office.

I haven't looked at standalone MP3 (or equivalent) players for probably 20+ years at this point. I'm sure they exist. In fact, hold on.

It seems I can get a cheap Chinese shitbox for £20-£30, or I can spend three thousand pounds on a gold Sony thing (just £659.80 a month!) if I'm feeling particularly insane. What the actual fuck.

Uh… anyway. MP3 players do indeed still exist, and many of them have Bluetooth. Some of them even have WiFi, and some of them take the iPod touch approach where they're basically a phone without the "phone" bit. I will steer clear of those, at least, because that would just be replacing one problem with the same problem, but mildly less convenient.

So an MP3 player with a decent capacity is not expensive. That would require me to organise my MP3 library, though, which has been in a right state since Google Music (RIP) invited me to upload it all "to access anywhere", then promptly closed down and was replaced with the considerably inferior YouTube Music… and when I downloaded it all again the organisation was all fucked.

It wouldn't be the end of the world to have to do that, but I'd rather not have to. So I think we can consider the music player side of things covered.

Navigation

In-car navigation is easily solved: buy a satnav. But I also use Google Maps when I'm on foot to see what's nearby and figure out how to get to places. That is a problem that is a little trickier to solve. GPS devices for on-foot navigation certainly exist, but they're primarily geared towards hiking and cost more than I'd be willing to spend on something that I'd only use occasionally, particularly if I had already bought a satnav for the car.

I can't see an easy solution to this one. I believe some feature phones are able to access a Web-based form of Google Maps, but I don't know how useful or effective that is.

I mean, I guess I could kick it really old school and just buy an A to Z of wherever I happened to be going. I can't check what time Sainsbury's closes with one of those, though, unless they've considerably enhanced the level of detail they go into since I last used one.

Conclusion?

I could probably find solutions to all of the above problems, except WhatsApp. I believe there are some feature phones that are capable of using a text-only version of WhatsApp, but from a cursory glance around earlier today it seems a lot of them don't work in the UK for some reason.

I will continue to mull it over. The prospect of truly breaking free from the smartphone becomes increasingly appealing day by day… I'm just not quite sure I'm truly ready to pull the plug. My main concern is suddenly running into a use case that I haven't thought of while farting this blog post out of an evening, and then being kind of fucked when I'm stuck with a modern-day Nokia and no means of fulfilling the function I suddenly, urgently require.

But really, what might that even be? It can't be that important, or I would have thought of it by now, surely.

Anyway, I haven't reached a definitive conclusion. But I have definitely convinced myself that there are at least some of the features I use on my smartphone that I absolutely can live without. Is that enough, though?

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#oneaday Day 158: Obligations from 30+ years ago

I have a recurring dream. I am told it is quite a common one — or variations on it are, anyway — but I'm going to talk about it regardless, because I've been sitting staring at a blank page for half an hour and haven't been able to think of anything else to write today. So indulge me, if you will.

In my recurring dream, I am back at my secondary school. I am hanging out with my friends from that time, which is 30+ years ago. And I am not attending one of the music group rehearsals that I'm supposed to be participating in after school. I am, apparently, deliberately not attending it, and I am standing in a place with my friends that is within line of sight of the music block. My music teacher Mr. Murrall is standing outside the music block with his arms folded, just staring at me with a disapproving expression on his face. I feel bad. I feel guilty. And yet I do not — cannot — walk over there, apologise for whatever reason I have not showed up to rehearsals, and get back involved.

This dream is sometimes complemented or accompanied by a scenario in which I am preparing to go on stage, either to perform a piece of music or act, and I absolutely have not practiced the thing I am supposed to be performing. If I'm supposed to be acting, I don't even know my lines a little bit. If I'm supposed to be performing, I don't really know the piece of music and, usually, my instrument is not in any condition to be played. For some reason, the musical variation of this dream always involves the clarinet, which was always my "second instrument", and the problem is usually that the only reeds I have for it are in an absolutely awful state that would make playing near-impossible.

These sorts of dreams are clearly anxiety-related. I suspect they may also stem from a sense of mild guilt that I don't do as much music in my free time as I used to — though I have been a bit better since we got the new piano, and my Mum has been kind enough to purchase me a frankly absurdly expensive new stool as an early Christmas present, so that will make me even more likely to make time to play. I haven't touched the clarinet or saxophone for years, however; since both are instruments best played in a group situation and I have no suitable group to be part of, I haven't used either of them for a long time.

Times and lives change, of course, but music has always been an important part of my life, even when it comes to my other interests. One of my favourite things about video games, for example, is listening to their music and coming to understand all manner of different styles — and, if I'm lucky, tracking down some piano arrangements to be able to pay homage to my favourite tracks in my own way.

Once that nice piano stool arrives (which may be as soon as tomorrow), I wonder if I will be free of those dreams? I doubt it, I suspect, as dreams are rarely so literal; I suspect these particular scenarios come from a more general sense of anxiety than something specific. But at least I can say to myself that I'm making an effort to make the time for something that has always been — and always will be — important to me.

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#oneaday Day 157: A happy ending (not in a sex way)

I'm pleased to report that all of us kicking up a stink over RoseTintedSpectrum's YouTube channel being wrongfully terminated yesterday has proven successful: our lad managed to finally get through to a human being at YouTube, and his channel has been reinstated, with just an obviously insincere, automated "apology" of sorts from YouTube attached.

This is obviously a good resolution to what was a stressful and upsetting situation for Rosie, and it should bring a few things into sharp focus for everyone. Corporations are not your friends. Corporations can and will take things that you have created away from you at a moment's notice. Corporations do not care, particularly when they rely on automation and "AI" to do their work for them.

Human beings are your friends. Individuals that you make a personal connection with are how you get by in this increasingly horrible world that we live in. Friendship groups and communities can get things done — the last 24 hours has clearly proven that, with Rosie's story not only spreading across Twitter and temporarily drowning out at least some of the white supremacy thanks to the few creators with a decent following who are still there, but also making some noise on BlueSky and even getting a writeup on the retro gaming website from the NintendoLife folks, Time Extension.

I find it kind of hilarious, tragic and frustrating that there are some folks who took glee in this whole situation. People such as the odious George "FunkySpectrum" Cropper, who has made his entire online life about spreading hatred of people he doesn't like. And people like one anonymous stroppy twat who goes by "GlamorousAlpaca" in Time Extension's comments, who just made shit up about Rosie for no apparent reason. But as frustrating as the sad, pathetic existence of these people is, they will never know the joy that Rosie is undoubtedly feeling right now: the understanding that there are people out there who like him, care about him and will fight for him when he has been wronged.

I'm glad that all this has been successfully resolved, but I'm concerned that this sort of thing seems to be happening a lot more of late. The cynic in me blames the rise in the use of "AI" in big corporations like Google; despite these systems being demonstrably fallible and prone to hallucinations, it seems big business is willing to trust its judgement, even going so far as to give it the power to completely remove someone's hard work from the Internet for a perceived (and, I reiterate, non-existent) infraction. It happened to me with WordPress.com, it happened to Rosie on YouTube and I'm sure we'll hear about it happening to other people, too.

The Internet continues to enshittify itself, but we can still find havens of sanity amid groups of like-minded, sensible, supportive and caring people. If you have been fortunate enough to find a group like that online, be sure to hold on to them with everything you have. I feel like they will only become more valuable to you as time goes on.

Oh, while you're here, go pop RoseTintedSpectrum a subscribe if you haven't already. Watch a few vids and leave a couple of nice comments, too. The lad could do with a smile after the last 24 hours.

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#oneaday Day 156: A reminder that automated moderation solutions suck

Hello. Bit of a serious one today. Many of you reading this will likely be familiar with the YouTube channel RoseTintedSpectrum. He has suffered an extremely unfortunate happening today in that YouTube has seen fit to completely obliterate his entire channel. Their reasoning? He supposedly violated their policies about "spam, scams and deceptive practices". Needless to say, he did not.

For the unfamiliar, RoseTintedSpectrum is someone who's been doing YouTube for a few years now. As the name of his channel suggests, he started out doing videos about old Spectrum games, and his dry humour and cynical wit won him a small but dedicated following of folks who enjoyed what he put out. Over time, he branched out into a niche that is somewhat underserved: providing commentary on "classic" TV shows, beginning with ITV's show about video games and computer culture, Bad Influence. Most recently, he has been doing huge retrospectives on the legendary GamesMaster, and these videos caused his channel to have a huge and well-deserved surge in popularity.

Well, they did, anyway. For reasons known only to YouTube's automated moderation algorithm, his channel has now been banished to the shadow realm, and he is unable to get a human response out of anyone. He attempted to appeal the "decision" and got a negative response back within 5 minutes, suggesting that no human being has been involved at any step in this process. And they have the gall to say on Twitter that "these decisions are made very carefully" and "thoughtfully". Are they fuck.

If all this sounds a little familiar, it's very similar to what happened with me and WordPress.com a while back — the reason this blog is now self-hosted rather than hosted with WordPress.com. That was almost the exact same situation: my hard work of many years (nearly 20 in my case!) was accidentally and incorrectly branded as "spam", and immediately removed from circulation without warning or any attempt to contact me. Thankfully, my repeated badgering and yelling at WordPress.com meant that it was back up and running again the next day, but the whole situation spurred me on to move my blog off-site.

There's a key difference there, though; while I could do that with my blog, YouTubers do not have that luxury. People who make videos are pretty much locked in to YouTube for life, because self-hosting videos is completely unworkable from both a storage space and bandwidth perspective. There are other video-hosting solutions out there, but they all have issues — no-one gives a shit about Vimeo (particularly now it's branded itself as "AI-powered") and Rumble is full of the absolute worst shitheads on the planet. So for most folks, it's YouTube or nothing.

I want to emphasise this key point: it is completely unacceptable for automated moderation tools to have the power to take a creator's hard work offline without even attempting to contact them. It is completely unacceptable that this occurs without any human input whatsoever. And it is completely unacceptable for YouTube's support team, when contacted about this issue, to say there is "nothing more they can do" because the automated appeal response to the automated channel deletion decided within less than five minutes that no mistakes had been made at any point in the automation process.

If a channel is flagged as being in violation of some sort of policy, that should be an immediate signal for an actual human to look at it. It should have taken anyone human less than five minutes to determine that there was nothing on RoseTintedSpectrum's channel even remotely related to "spam, scams or deceptive practices", and this whole situation should have never happened in the first place.

But no. Because big corpos like Google are all-in on AI and automation, they trust the clearly and demonstrably fallible machines to handle it all themselves — including any attempts to appeal the decisions. And the result is situations like we have now, where a dedicated and hard-working creative type is left with absolutely nothing to show for years of hard graft.

RoseTintedSpectrum puts an unbelievable amount of effort into each and every video he has ever made, and that should be abundantly clear to any human being looking at his channel.

But sadly, because no human being at YouTube has looked at his channel, we're left with the situation we're in now. Which is completely unacceptable.

If you're still clinging on to your Twitter account in the vain hope that the last week or so has all been a bad dream, I urge you to contact @TeamYouTube and @YouTubeLiaison over there to let them know they have made a huge mistake — RoseTintedSpectrum's YouTube account, if you want to copy that in, also, is @SpectrumTinted. With any luck, this will all be resolved sooner rather than later.

And if you're reading this and happen to be in any sort of position to make big decisions at your place of work: automated moderation solutions are fucking bad and should always have human oversight. So don't fucking delete people's hard work before you even attempt to contact them.

Sort it out, YouTube.

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#oneaday Day 155: Four things you probably shouldn't put on a sandwich (but you actually should at least once)

The British tendency to make crap food is well-documented. But a lot of it comes from an honest place: the desire to eat something which is both delicious and absolutely terrible for you. Therefore, today I present you with an exclusive lineup of four sandwich recipes that you should probably try late at night without telling anyone, lest they think less of you for even contemplating trying one of these.

Me, meanwhile, my self-esteem can't really get much lower, so I don't mind admitting that I have tried and loved all of these at various points in time. So take it from me, an absolute complete and utter loser, that these are just the thing for when you fancy a cheeky supper but you 1) don't want to order from the kebab shop for the fifth time that week and 2) don't have very much in the cupboards.

The sauce sandwich

This tangy little number is just the thing for when you want a little bit of a kick — or a lot, if you elect to use some form of hot or chilli sauce. My personal preference is for HP sauce, as its somewhat "sweet and sour" nature complements the savoury nature of the buttered bread nicely, but you can use any condiment sauce you happen to have knocking around in your cupboard. I do not recommend attempting this with non-condiment sauces such as fish sauce.

Ingredients:
White bread (2 slices)
Butter or similar spread
Bottle of sauce

Method:
1. Arrange two slices of bread on a plate side by side.

2. Butter both slices of bread with the spread of your choice.

3. Apply a liberal helping of the sauce of your choice. The pattern in which you apply the sauce is up to you, but I personally favour a sort of spiral pattern.

4. (Optional) Spread the sauce across the bread with a knife for even coverage.

5. Close the sandwich and enjoy.

The crisp sandwich

This delightful recipe is all about texture and juxtaposition. The softness of the bread and the smoothness of the spread gives way to the jagged, brittle crisps contained within — and the same happens with the flavour. The simple, uncomplicated, savoury bread opens each bite, which then concludes with an explosion of taste from the crisps. For the best possible crisp sandwiches, use that kind of crisps that clearly has too much flavouring powder on them; the kind that makes your tongue numb. I recommend Seabrook's prawn cocktail flavour.

Ingredients:
White bread (2 slices)
Butter or similar spread
Bag of crisps

Method:
1. Arrange two slices of bread on a plate side by side.

2. Butter both slices of bread with the spread of your choice.

3. Empty the entire bag of crisps onto one of the slices of bread. Make sure you don't lose any.

4. Close the sandwich and apply pressure to crush the crisps slightly. Enjoy!

The pie sandwich

This truly indulgent feast is ideal for when you just can't get enough carbs. The exact nature of the pie isn't super-important, though something like a meat pie, Ginsters steak bake or something along those lines tends to work the best. The important thing is that you are damn well putting an entire pie in a sandwich, and you are going to love it.

Ingredients:
White bread (2 slices)
Butter or similar spread
A pie

Method:
1. Arrange two slices of bread on a plate side by side.

2. Butter both slices of bread with the spread of your choice.

3. (Optional) Warm the pie according to its instructions, ideally in the oven, but the microwave will suffice if you can't wait.

4. Lay the pie on one of the slices of bread.

5. Close the sandwich. If the pie is tall, apply pressure to flatten it down to better fit in the sandwich. A steak bake is already the ideal size and shape for a sandwich.

6. Enjoy. If you warmed the pie, be careful, as the filling will be hot!

The sugar sandwich

Time for dessert with this sweet treat! You don't have to wait until after your main meal to enjoy this one, as it makes an excellent snack at any time of day, particularly 1am, and especially after you've been drinking.

Ingredients:
White bread (2 slices)
Butter or similar spread
Sugar to taste (golden or brown sugar is best)

Method:
1. Arrange two slices of bread side by side on a plate.

2. Butter both slices of bread with the spread of your choice.

3. Apply sugar liberally across one of the slices. Then add a bit more just for good measure.

4. Close the sandwich and enjoy your sweet treat.

Disclaimer

If you die or suffer any sort of mishap as a result of consuming any one of these sandwiches, it absolutely wasn't my fault. I also take no responsibility for anyone judging you if they happen to walk in on you making or consuming one of these. If you have even contemplated making any of these, you already know what you're getting yourself into, so you can get yourself out of it, too.

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#oneaday Day 154: If you can't create without AI, you shouldn't be creating

YouTube recommended me a video earlier. I'm not going to share it because it's shit. But I will tell you about it. It was a video supposedly "reimagining" the video game series Streets of Rage as a "movie". If you've spent any time on social media in the last year or so, you already know what's coming: yes, it's entirely AI-generated drivel, and the complete content of the "movie" consists of nothing but people staring moodily at the camera while there's a slight pan around them, and people walking towards the camera in slow motion.

The video has a quarter of a million views, and a comments section full of people gushing effusive praise over the "creator". This is not the first video that this channel has put out like this; to date, over the last year they have spaffed out 215 videos that are all like this. And not only that, their About section on their channel is very transparently written by ChatGPT.

I hope you don't think it controversial of me to say that if you can't create without using AI, you shouldn't be creating at all. I will, under extreme duress, concede that there are certain uses of AI tools which might be useful as part of the creative process. AI music tools, for example, can be quite effective if you feed them some lyrics you've written yourself. (Getting AI to write lyrics results in extreme garbage.)

But if all you do is put shit into an AI video generator and then spaff it out on YouTube — and you can't even be arsed to write your own bio — you are not a creative person.

The standard argument that insufferable AI types like to trot out at this point is that generative AI "democratises" creativity by allowing anyone to "create". Except it doesn't, because the output is not your own work; you haven't created anything. The result is a pile of plagiarised crap that is immediately identifiable as the product of generative AI.

And anyway, creativity is already democratised. There is tons of free software out there that anyone can download and use, for computers, phones and tablets. YouTube is full of video tutorials on how to get started, improve your techniques and take on some advanced challenges. There are several decades' worth of text tutorials archived across various websites from over the years.

There is no excuse for taking the lazy option and just feeding a prompt into the lake-boiling plagiarism machine. If you want to be creative, be creative. But know that it takes work. And that work is worthwhile, because people will be able to tell when you have put that work in. Those who follow you will see your work improve, adapt and change over time. You'll find your own unique "voice". And there really is nothing quite like being able to express yourself in your own distinctive way; being able to sit back and look at something you made and think, with a slight smile on your lips, "I made that".

With generative AI, there is none of that. You get derivative, immediately identifiable slop that all looks the same and all contains the same basic errors. You never have the experience of refining and improving your own work, because you haven't done any work. You never find your own unique voice, because you are beholden to the algorithms and training data that the LLM you're using has stolen from all over the Internet. And you never, really, truly, express yourself.

In the meantime, until you come to the realisation that all you're doing is spaffing out hollow, soulless pieces of crap that look like creative works but are actually anything but, you are poisoning the entire Internet with your garbage… and, judging by the comments section on the video in question, poisoning the minds of people who aren't familiar with just how fucking easy it is to tell the magic art-stealing machine to steal some art to your specifications.

The planet is doomed. And no-one gives a shit. Sleep well!

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#oneaday Day 153: Sharing stuff

Hello. If you follow me here, it's relatively likely that you follow me in other places, too. But I realise that there is the possibility you don't. As such, I would like to devote today's post to sharing a few things I've done over on YouTube. If you would like to follow my YouTube channel, here's the link. Over there, I make videos on video games, primarily retro stuff but with occasional dalliances into more recent stuff I feel like talking about. And also related topics, which brings me to the first video I would like to share.

Exactly what does Yars' Revenge taste like? I decided to find out. Yes, I am someone who is foolish enough to see a range of 10 sauces with "Atari" written on them, and then to spend £70 on purchasing all of them. I partly did this because I like Atari, partly because I like a good sauce, and partly because I thought it might make a fun video. I am pleased to report that these ten sauces have fulfilled all of their obligations, and you can see my first reactions to them in the video above.

You probably know this, but for my day job I work for Blaze Entertainment, makers of the Evercade range of consoles and the HyperMegaTech! Super Pocket devices, which are also Evercade compatible. When I learned we would be doing an Atari handheld, I was, of course, delighted — even more so when I learned we would be doing a special edition woodgrain model. In this video, I give a quick overview of all 50 games on the system. I was not paid to do this by either my employer or Atari — I just wanted to, because there's some cool stuff on there, and I'm an Atari nerd.

Atari attracted some raised eyebrows when they announced Yars Rising, a follow-up to the famous 1982 Atari 2600 title. I played the demo one Steam Next Fest and was very taken with it — helped enormously by the fact I'm very fond of the other games developer WayForward have previously worked on. I bought the full game and really enjoyed it, so I made a video about it, based on my write-up over on MoeGamer. It did quite well by the standards of my channel, too, which was nice.

This video didn't do very well, at least initially, and it's still sitting on the low side of the view count compared to some of my other stuff. But I wanted to share it because it's about a thoroughly interesting game: The Missing by SWERY65. This is a platformer in which you play a woman who can't die; she can survive being decapitated and dismembered and, indeed, it's necessary to endure both of those things in order to solve the game's various puzzles.

Far from being a weirdly violent horror game, though, The Missing is actually a thoroughly fascinating, deeply personal story about gender identity and finding acceptance — both in yourself, and from those around you. The game was so striking to me I really wanted to talk about it, so I'm glad I made this video, even if not that many people watched it.

Let's close with this one. I went into this thinking that doing a video on a text adventure would be a silly idea, but ended up really enjoying the whole thing. Narrating the whole thing makes for (in my humble opinion, anyway) a relaxing, pleasant video, and I don't mind admitting that I've fallen asleep to the sound of my own voice in this video on multiple occasions. Plus I think Moonmist is a thoroughly interesting game from Infocom that rarely gets talked about.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy those. Please do feel free to subscribe over on YouTube if you want to see more. My wife Andie is away for a couple of days from tomorrow lunchtime, so I'm going to use the time to record a bunch of stuff, I think, and probably do some streaming, too. Join me!

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