One thing I’ve been meaning to do for a while is make using my NTSC-U (North American) PS2 more convenient, particularly now I have a RetroTink 5X to get a lovely picture on the big TV. I make the intended process sound more complicated than it really was: all I essentially needed to do was to get another video cable to connect to the American PS2, but for one reason or another I’ve been putting it off forever.
No longer! I grabbed a set of component cables from Retro Gaming Cables and hooked them up to the Tink today. The reason I went with component rather than RGB SCART is that I already have my PAL PS2 connected to the Tink via RGB SCART, and going with component means I can plug both in at once without having to change cables over — all I need to do is switch the input on the Tink. The quality is, from what I’ve seen so far, near-identical on both; the only sticking point I had was when I first plugged them in, I got sound and no picture, meaning I had to navigate the PS2 menu by sound alone (and with judicious referring to my working PAL one) to switch it to YPbPr mode. But once that was done, everything was fine and dandy.
I don’t have that many North American games, but the few I do have are quite precious to me. On the PS1 front, there’s Parasite Eve, Brave Fencer Musashi and Xenogears, three games that I originally picked up around the same time on a trip over to the States to visit my brother. The copies I have now are not the same ones I had as a kid, but they’re in almost as good condition, and I’m looking forward to revisiting them.
On the PS2 front, there’s Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy, which I played and adored a couple of years back, plus the first and third Xenosaga games because, inexplicably, we only got the middle episode here in PAL-land. I haven’t played those yet but would like to set aside some time for them at some point, as I know they are very well regarded.
Having all this up and running makes me want to seek out a few more North American titles I had back in the day. I’m tempted to try and track down the Lunar games, but since those are getting ports to modern consoles soon it’s probably not worth the expense. Final Fantasy Tactics is another tempting one; I know the PSP port is “better” in many ways, but I still have extremely fond memories of the PS1 original. Other NTSC titles I had back then — most notably Final Fantasy IX and Metal Gear Solid — are readily available in PAL format; I got them back in the day because back then, North American releases were months ahead of European releases, sometimes even years.
Then there’s a ton of RPGs that never made it to Europe that I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on at some point… trouble is, PS1 games have been steadily increasing in price for a while, particularly RPGs. So it’s entirely possible that I might never be able to get my hands on some of these, which will be a shame. (I’m also super-salty that I got rid of my excellent condition PS1 copy of Symphony of the Night back in the day, but at least there are multiple alternative options for playing that today.)
Still, it’s nice that I now have a solid solution for playing the games that I do still own on original hardware. Because as fun as emulation is, there’s still something altogether magical about having the originals of these games.
Anyway, it’s not as if I’m short of stuff to play. But options are always good! Now, should I revisit Brave Fencer Musashi, Parasite Eve or Xenogears first…?
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Now that I’m back from holiday — and had a thoroughly lovely time, aside from apparently putting my back out because I am an old man — it’s time to get serious about the ol’ weight loss. I’m fed up of treading water and making no progress, so I’m trying a bit of a different tack. Slimming World unfortunately hasn’t quite been working for me this time around, so I have instead decided to try the NHS weight loss app. This is pretty much just a glorified calorie tracker, but it has some helpful articles and things that pop up over the course of following a 12-week plan, plus encouragements to check your progress at sensible intervals rather than obsessing over things daily.
I’m also intending to get back into the gym when my back feels a bit better. I have a casual half-plan to alternate cardio and strength training days so I neither overwhelm myself with too much “stuff” on a single day, nor do I feel like I’m “taking up” too much of my personal time with exercise. I know I should consider exercise a valuable use of my personal time, but the reality of the situation is that I’m still in a position where I somewhat resent it. That needs to change, and it’s going to be a gradual process. So establishing a simple, manageable and minimally intrusive routine is what I think will work for me.
Same with the food. I’ve talked a little on here about my experiences with food and why I’ve ended up the way I am, and based purely on anecdotal evidence, I feel like I’m struggling with a kind of “addiction”. Y’see, I’ve seen people struggling with addiction (to substances other than food) and, as unpleasant as it is to think about and admit, I recognise a lot of similar habits in myself.
Where someone with an alcohol addiction can’t resist buying a bottle of vodka from the shop and hiding it upon getting home, “self-medicating” with it in secret even if other people know that’s what they’re doing, I, too, will find myself at the shop telling myself I “deserve” something that is bad for me. Often multiple things that are bad for me, compounding the problem. And I know they’re bad for me, because I’ll inevitably scarf them down before I return home and take care to throw away the evidence of my secret shame before doing so.
And it absolutely is a form of “self-medication”. I eat to relieve all sorts of things. Boredom, sadness, tiredness, loneliness; any sort of vaguely negative emotion, my body’s conditioned response has become “eat something”. And that’s got me into a terrible situation that with every passing day it feels harder and harder to escape from. I’m ashamed of myself and disgusted with myself, and yet still these behaviours persist.
But I am, at least, aware of them. And gradually changing those behaviours is what I’m trying to do with this new, simpler approach. Today I have come in under my calorie goal and still have enough remaining for a nice glass of milk to accompany bedtime. I haven’t accompanied every trip downstairs with a chocolate biscuit or a bag of crisps, and honestly I haven’t really missed them. I had a decent breakfast, a perfectly acceptable lunch and a good dinner, none of which were the depressing sorts of things you read in slimmers’ “success stories”. And approaching things this way has not left me feeling like I’m “missing out” on anything.
Because that was one of the problems I was having with Slimming World this time around. While their plan is effective if you can follow it, if you get into the mindset that you’re “not allowed” certain things, that just leads you to crave them more. And then you indulge those cravings a little bit “because just one won’t hurt”, and before you know it you’re completely sabotaging your own efforts, completely conscious of the fact that you’re doing so.
That’s what happened to me this time around. I had got myself into the mindset that I could “get away” with the odd little “cheat” here and there, but the odd little cheat here and there turned into near-constant cheating, to such a degree that I was actively hampering my own efforts.
And honestly, there is nothing more depressing than reading something like this:
What I used to eat for breakfast:
Bacon sandwich
Fried Egg
Sausage
Beans
2 slices of toast
Large cup of coffee
What I eat now:
Small handful of chia seeds
Berries I foraged from the weeds in the back garden
A couple of twigs
Pond water
It is possible to lead a comfortable, healthy lifestyle without living exclusively off bits of old wood chippings and leaves. It has to be. There are myriad normal people around the world who happily exist on a day-to-day basis, able to enjoy an occasional coffee and a cake and a Tesco Meal Deal for lunch without ballooning to an absurd size. The key, as with anything, is not to do the “treats” to excess. And that is the difficult bit, because treats are delicious and can often induce a temporary feeling of what appears to be happiness and satisfaction
But it’s temporary. Then comes the regret, and the self-loathing, which you end up wanting to… you get the idea.
Anyway. This is a fresh start. Nothing that came before matters. There shall be no guilt, no regret, just determination. I will see how things go from here. It can’t hurt to try.
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As I type this, I can overhear my wife listening to some YouTuber I hate the sound of promising to “review every celebrity brand make-up”. And this reminded me of a weird trend that is specifically a YouTube thing, whereby it seems like looking at just one thing is never enough, you’ve always got to do every instance of a thing.
I Ate At Every Margaritaville In the Country. I Watched Every Barbie Movie. I Played Every Poorly Reviewed Soulslike Game on Steam. This particular “style” of video always seems to be combined with some sort of deliberate suffering — both for the presenter and the viewer, I’d wager — and honestly, it just doesn’t appeal to me at all. I’m the sort of person who would much rather take their time over exploring something sprawling in depth and detail than attempting to cram it all into one video — because I can’t help but feel if you’re cramming a massive amount of things into one video, each individual thing isn’t going to get much of a look-in, is it?
I realise this is the point of some of these videos, either to highlight the fact that the many instances of Thing are almost identical to one another and thus can’t really be distinguished, but it still irks me somewhat — especially when it comes to a lineup of things that is quite varied such as, say, the output of a particular software company. A video along the lines of “I Played Every Blizzard Game” feels like it would do none of the games any real justice, because each one is very different from the last and deserves its time to shine. Hell, even “I Watched Every Barbie Movie” is probably doing at least some of the Barbie movies a disservice.
My thinking along these lines is why I handled the “Atari A to Z Flashback” series on my YouTube channel as I did. Atari Flashback Classics for Nintendo Switch had 150 games, so I made 150 videos. It took a long time, but I came out of it feeling like I’d completed a worthwhile project — and I absolutely gained some new appreciation for a bunch of games from among that 150 that I otherwise wouldn’t have if I’d just given them all a cursory glance and been done within 20 minutes.
Now I’m not saying that everything has to be an epic, long series or anything, and I suspect what I’m describing is more of a “me problem” than anything else. But I know that I, personally, would much rather take my time going through something with a lot of component parts, giving each piece time to digest and myself the opportunity to come to some conclusions that I might not otherwise have been able to if I was racing through to meet my “content deadline”.
I guess that isn’t what people want these days, though. They want short, quick-fire, snappy — because the modern Web has been set up to pander primarily to those with no attention span. But, as I’ve argued on several previous occasions, I fear that this just creates a vicious cycle, whereby people’s attention spans get shorter and shorter, and the quality and depth people go into when writing or producing videos suffers as a result.
If someone doesn’t have the attention span to stick around for more than 3 seconds, that’s not my problem; that is very much their problem. I am gratified to see the recent growth in “newsletters” (or blogs, as we used to call them) that present long-form articles intended to be sat down with and savoured; they’re not for everyone, sure, but it does please me to know that there are other people out there who enjoy life on the verbose side of things, and they don’t care if they “lose” some people due to the sheer length of what they post. As I say, that’s a reader problem, not a writer problem. No-one told Charles Dickens not to spend so many fucking pages describing fog — instead, he just gave anyone who couldn’t handle it the finger, and his work continues to be regarded as a classic regardless. No-one’s going to remember the names of any YouTube Shorts or TikTok creators in 50 years.
I think I got off the point somewhere. But yeah. Review one thing at a time, please. Then I might take your opinions seriously.
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I finished the Silent Hill 2 remake this evening. Aside from some truly infuriating boss battles towards the end — which is, at least, true to the source material — it was a fantastic, respectful experience that pays wonderful tribute to a horror classic while adding enough mechanical tweaks to make it a bit more palatable to a modern audience. But I don’t want to talk about that today. Instead, I want to talk a bit about fear, because while I was playing Silent Hill 2, I got thinking about things I’ve been irrationally afraid of over the years.
Fear is a strange thing — and, indeed, often irrational, hence the existence of the word “phobia”. I suspect there’s a lot for psychologists to unpack by looking at the things we are irrationally afraid of — or even the things that we feel a bit uneasy about.
When I was a child, I was afraid of quite a few things. The main one was spiders. I still don’t like spiders and will likely do anything in my power to get myself out of a situation involving a particularly large hairy spider, but I have mellowed a little in that regard over the years. That’s a pretty common, boring one though; most people spend at least some time in their life being afraid of spiders, and it’s not a particularly unreasonable fear, I don’t think; while obviously little house spiders aren’t going to do anything to harm you, the aforementioned large hairy spiders can absolutely do some serious damage to you, and thus I think it’s just fine to want to say “fuck that” to all spiders.
A more unusual fear I had was a fear of passing by my bedroom window in the middle of the night. In my childhood bedroom, my bed was in a sort of little “alcove” at the side of the room, and in order to leave the bedroom (to visit the toilet, say) I had to climb out of the alcove and pass by the window. For some reason, I was absolutely convinced that there was something lurking somewhere in the vicinity of that window, so if I needed to get up and go for a wee in the middle of the night, I’d often leap past the window so I spent as little time as possible exposing myself to the unknown evil that was lying in wait.
An equally bizarre fear that I think was related to the window thing was a fear of a plush toy pajama case I owned, known as American Brown Bear, because he was from America and he was a brown bear. I was absolutely fine with American Brown Bear in the daytime, but at night-time I was convinced he was possessed by some unknown evil presence, and I suspect at least one of the things I feared with regard to my bedroom window was American Brown Bear jumping out and “getting” me.
I sort of know where that one came from. And I mean “sort of”, because the thing that I think caused that fear couldn’t have possibly happened, making me think that it was some sort of dream, hallucination or other false memory. Or perhaps it’s an actual memory of something someone did that I’d come to have peculiar associations with. Either way, it’s a strange one. Are you ready?
I was convinced that when American Brown Bear would jump out and “get” me, he would shout “MRS. LINCOLN PUPPIES”. And for some reason, I found this absolutely terrifying, despite it obviously making no sense whatsoever. I have no idea who Mrs. Lincoln is, or indeed why I should care about her puppies — or what American Brown Bear had to do with the puppies, for that matter. But what I do know for sure is that that phrase struck the absolute fear of God into me as a young’un.
For the record, American Brown Bear never “got” me, to my knowledge, and likewise the ancient evil lurking in the vicinity of my bedroom window never showed itself, either. And, as a result, I eventually left those fears behind — particularly once my brother left home and I was able to move into the larger bedroom at the back of the house. The windows in that room weren’t scary.
Another completely irrational feeling — I’m not sure I’d call it a “fear” as such — that I’ve had for as long as I can remember is another oddly specific thing, and that is that I feel distinctly uneasy around toilets with a very high cistern. You know, the kinds you get in sort of Victorian-era houses that have never really been updated; the kind of toilet that looks ridiculous if you draw it, because the cistern is comically high up compared to modern toilets.
I don’t know why I have this sense of unease around them. I don’t know what I think is going to happen. Perhaps it’s more a fear-by-association sort of thing; toilets like this tend to be in old houses, which tend to be in varying states of disrepair and often have lots of spiders lurking in dark corners. Whatever the reason, I don’t like them and will generally avoid having to spend any time in a toilet with a high cistern. I’ll have a wee in one no problem, but I’d rather not go for a poo on a toilet like that. I have no idea why, but that is the reality of the situation.
A related fear that I had as a child which I subsequently got rid of was an irrational fear of extractor fans in bathrooms. Oddly enough, I remember the exact circumstances under which I developed this fear. At the time, my language skills were still developing — I was about 4 or 5 years old at the time — and we were visiting America. My Dad had, I think, been doing some work out there, but because he was out there for some time he was able to bring the rest of the family along. It was a great (and long, from what I recall) trip, during which we took in, among other things, Disney World in Florida.
The reason I mention my language skills developing at the time is because I didn’t know what an extractor fan was called, so I called it a “dotch”. More accurately, an extractor fan which came on when you pulled a cord to turn the light on in a bathroom was a “wim-dotch wib hamdongs”; “dotch”, meanwhile, was a more generic term that could just mean “ominous-looking air vent”, as seen in the bathrooms of my grandparents’ houses.
Anyway, the reason I became frightened of the dotch was because of a Muppets movie we had watched on television. The Muppet Movie, as it happens, and specifically this scene:
Yes, that is Kermit the Frog being put into what is essentially an electric chair — sorry, an “electronic celebrectomy” machine. I found this scene intensely traumatic when I saw it as a kid, and I was horrified to discover that the bathroom light in the motel we were staying at at the time — the Edison Motor Inn, Poughkeepsie, NY, if you were curious — resembled the glowing circular light at the top of the “electronic celebrectomy” machine. For some reason, that then led me to associate the wim-dotch wib hamdongs that came on at the same time as the light with this “electric chair”, which then caused me to be afraid of dotches for a good few years afterwards.
I don’t think I ever told anyone the specifics of that because even then I knew it was a ridiculous association to make in my head — in fact, for many years, I was convinced that I had completely made up the above scene, and wasn’t able to confirm it was real once and for all until YouTube came along. But that’s the thing with irrational fears: they are completely irrational, and make no sense. However stupid you know they are, if they’ve taken a hold, they will still frighten you, even as part of your brain is frantically telling the scared part “you are being ridiculous“. And it seems I was particularly prone to this sort of irrational fear as a kid.
You will be pleased to know that I am no longer afraid of dotches. Spiders, no thanks. Toilets with high cisterns, only if I have to. But dotches? I think I’m fine now. Probably.
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We’re back home! Boo! Although honestly, we’re both kind of knackered, so it’s nice to get back home, see the cats and have the prospect of our own bed waiting for us. It’s been a lovely break, and we enjoyed a final dip in the pool before we departed early this afternoon, but now we both need a day or two to get ourselves back in working order for a vaguely normal existence from Monday onwards!
I was pleased to see that my cat Patti has been getting along with my mother-in-law while we were away. Patti is a very shy, scared cat when confronted with anyone other than us, but it seems that she’s learned to trust my mother-in-law over the course of the last few days. The pair have spent some time together before and they had a similar outcome; Patti hid for the first little while, but eventually came out and became quite friendly and sociable once she determined once and for all that there was no threat, and, in fact, there was the distinct possibility of being spoiled with treats.
Oliver, meanwhile, has seemingly had a lovely time. He’s already a very sociable cat, and it sounds as if my mother-in-law has had a nice time playing with him. We reckon he’s probably about a year and a half old at this point, and he still loves to play for hours; we’ll often hear him kicking his toys around well into the early hours of the morning once we’ve gone to bed, and he is showing no signs whatsoever of slowing down just yet.
A few packages arrived while we were away. One was a pair of swimming shorts that I paid for next-day delivery on in the hope that they would arrive before we left; needless to say, they did not, in fact, arrive on the next day thanks to Yodel being fucking idiots. “We need some more information about your address,” they said. “Please contact us.” They did not provide any means of contacting them, so I had to go ferreting through their support pages until I found the dreaded “Live Chat” option, then had to endure the obligatory Indian person with broken English copy-pasting set phrases and platitudes from their handbook, only for the outcome to be “we don’t actually need any information about your address, we just fucked up and didn’t even attempt to deliver it”, which was nice. But at least I have a spare pair of swimming shorts for future excursions, I guess.
The one package I was hoping to arrive hasn’t come yet, though: a box of all the Atari-branded sauces. As someone who enjoys sauce, I’m looking forward to trying these, and I also think it will make a fun video to try them all for the first time on camera, so I’m hoping these will arrive sometime soon. Sadly, they’re not here yet and don’t look like they’ve even been dispatched as yet, so I will have to wait a little longer to learn exactly what Yars’ Revenge tastes like.
Anyway, I’m pooped and my back hurts, so I’m going to bed, in my own bed. I suspect I will not wake up until quite late tomorrow. And that’s fine. I’m technically still on holiday, even though I’m back home. And I intend to continue enjoying that holiday until work starts again on Monday!
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It must seem incredibly quaint to people who grew up after a certain point to know that when we wanted to watch something on television, we used to be beholden to an arbitrary schedule that wasn’t decided by us, the viewers.
Sure, pay-per-view and on-demand services existed, but they were often extremely expensive and in some cases still beholden to someone else’s schedule.
Today, of course, if you want to watch something you just call it up from any of the bazillion streaming services available, or raid your network-attached storage that is loaded up with pirated movies you’ve torrented over the course of the last decade.
Streaming services have their own drawbacks, of course, with the two main ones being that there are about as many streaming services as there used to be cable packages, and the dreaded “analysis paralysis”, where being given complete freedom to choose anything often causes you to end up choosing nothing.
The reason I bring this up is because while we’ve been away on holiday, we haven’t had any TV-connected streaming devices with us. And you know what? It’s been kind of nice. We’ve watched a bit of telly while we’ve been here, and it’s just been whatever happened to be on while we wanted to just zone out for a bit. And broadcast television as it exists today is more than happy to cater to this type of viewer.
You know the sort of thing: shows that require zero commitment or even attention, like game shows and reality TV programmes about traffic police. Mindless garbage, to be sure, but somehow to me will always feel less offensive than attention-deficit slop on services like TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Perhaps that’s just my age talking — and to be clear, there’s plenty of broadcast TV I find too offensively awful to even watch as background noise — but everything we’ve watched “by chance” this week feels like something I’ve actually got something from, even if it’s just some general knowledge trivia. I absolutely do not get that from “pov: u ordered a large fish and chips at wetherspoons”.
Anyway, it’s time to go home tomorrow, so it will likely be back to not watching any broadcast TV at home. It’s been a nice change, though, and a reminder that some forms of media still aren’t quite as dead as some people would like you to believe.
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Well, I’ve been well and truly hit with the Mandela Effect today.
Earlier, I was playing Maniac Square, a puzzle game by Spanish arcade developer Gaelco. Andie overheard the music and asked, “why does that game have the Blue Peter music?”
“It doesn’t,” I said, absolutely convinced of this fact. Blue Peter, as everyone knows, has Sailor’s Hornpipe (or, to give it its more correct name, College Hornpipe) as its theme. The same one they play at the Proms every year.
Except it doesn’t.
Blue Peter, I have learned, actually uses a tune called Barnacle Bill. It’s similar, but different. Have a listen.
Here’s Sailor’s Hornpipe, with a YouTube thumbnail that resembles the Blue Peter logo, just to add insult to injury:
And here is the Blue Peter theme in one of its more famous incarnations by Mike Oldfield of Tubular Bells fame:
You will hopefully forgive me for getting the two confused. But wait! What’s this?
It’s only bloody Mike Oldfield doing the Sailor’s Hornpipe. And just to confuse matters, his rendition of Barnacle Bill for Blue Peter in the ’80s is often misattributed to being a B-side to Tubular Bells called, you guessed it, Sailor’s Hornpipe. Except that one actually is Sailor’s Hornpipe.
For anyone reading this who isn’t British, I’m sorry. I’m not sure I can adequately explain Blue Peter to you other than to say it was a children’s TV show that, during my childhood at least, made a lot of things involving “sticky-backed plastic”, and occasionally also had wild animals shitting in their studio. It’s also the origin point, for a certain generation anyway, of the phrase “here’s one I made earlier”.
You’re going to go and tell me that isn’t true either now, aren’t you?
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Well, that’s our first “full” day of holiday over and done with, and we’ve had a pleasantly relaxing, chilled out day. The temptation when coming somewhere like Center Parcs is to want to be doing stuff all the time, but honestly we’ve had a very nice day today just visiting the swimming pool in the morning, getting some bits and pieces from the shop for lunch and dinner, and then just enjoying hanging out in our lodge.
It’s strange, isn’t it? Even when you’re doing the sort of things you’d usually do at home, they somehow feel more “special” when you’re doing them somewhere out of the ordinary. I had a cheese baguette at lunchtime and it was approximately 48% more delicious by virtue of the fact it was prepared and eaten by me in a forest cabin rather than our house.
The wildlife around here is insanely tame. Earlier in the day, a group of ducks came up to our window and actually started tapping on it. They somehow knew we’d just made sandwiches, and wanted to participate. At other times, we’ve had deer and squirrels come right up to the patio doors, clearly begging. It seems the advice to not feed the wildlife mostly falls on deaf ears. And the wildlife, it appears, is not above being cute in an attempt to get food.
For activities that don’t involve going outside, I decided to play through Ufouria: The Saga on Evercade while I was here, and I beat it earlier today. That was thoroughly satisfying; it’s a great game, and I’m glad I took the time to play it. Perhaps some words on MoeGamer about that one when I get back.
Anyway, it’s now well after midnight and I should probably sleep. No real plans for tomorrow except to have dinner out, and perhaps do some “Adventure Golf”. Toodle pip.
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.
We’re on holiday! After a three hour drive earlier today — which honestly already feels like a lifetime ago — we are safely ensconced in our accommodation at Center Parcs.
The last few times we’ve been, we’ve stayed in the apartments that are near the main plaza of shops and restaurants, but this year it was only a little extra to get a two-bedroom lodge in the woods, so we’ve gone for that as a little extra added luxury. It’s lovely having lots of space. Indeed, there’s an entire (bed)room we probably won’t use at all; presently, it’s where I dumped my suitcase so it wouldn’t clutter our bedroom.
We haven’t done very much today. It’s been nice to just relax with no worries or commitment to anything, so we’ve been enjoying that today. We had some nice dinner bought from the shop and an amazing cake, then the rest of the evening has been spent lounging, looking at the wildlife while the light was still present, then watching some TV (old school broadcast style!) and playing some video games.
Tomorrow we’re likely going to hit the pool… sorry, the “Subtropical Swimming Paradise”, and from there, who knows? We have some idle intentions of maybe going to the gym, playing some pool and going bowling, but we’re just going to take each day as it comes and decide according to what we feel like.
The Lodge brings back some nice memories. When I came to Center Parcs as a teen with my family and some friends, we always stayed in a lodge (or a “villa” as they were known then) and while some things have changed — the appliances are more up to date and the TV is, of course, a wall-mounted flatscreen instead of a hulking great CRT — but aside from that, the layout feels comfortably familiar.
It’s bringing back fond memories of my friend Ed attempting to explain the appeal of Wolfenstein 3-D to my parents over breakfast — as I recall, his 12 year old self arguing that you “just don’t notice” the bloody violence after playing a whole didn’t go down too well.
It’s bringing back fond memories of my friend Craig and I watching MTV and realising that we both liked quite a bit broader a spectrum of music than the indie rock that was fashionable at the time — after that holiday, I remember going out and buying Madonna and Savage Garden albums on the strength of the tunes we liked on the TV.
And it’s bringing back fond memories of a trip when I was young enough for my brother to still be living at home with us, and him bringing his friend Alex along. My enduring memory of that pairing was Alex, who thought he was God’s gift to women, causing two girls to fall off their bikes by saying a distinctly Leslie Phillips-style “hell-O!” as they passed by.
A lot of good memories here, then, from both the recent and distant past. It’ll be good to add a few more to the mix this year.
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.
As I may have mentioned once or twice recently, we’re going on holiday tomorrow. We’ll be away from Monday to Friday visiting Center Parcs in Elveden Forest, which has been a thoroughly nice place to have some time away on all the previous occasions we’ve visited.
My intentions for this holiday are to unplug almost completely. I will post on this blog daily because of the whole #oneaday thing, but outside of that, I intend to avoid any sort of attachment to the Internet whatsoever, except where absolutely necessary to research things. That means I am making the following promises to myself:
I will not worry about writing anything for MoeGamer or making any sort of video for YouTube.
I will not poke my head in on Discord channels that are likely to annoy me.
I will not look at Twitter at all.
I will minimise my use of Bluesky.
I haven’t really talked about the last one at all, but as you may have surmised from the sidebar, I have been dipping my toe back into social media with Bluesky recently. And for the most part, I’ve found it a thoroughly pleasant environment that feels very much like Twitter did in the early days. It’s very left-leaning, which can at times be a little insufferable, and wherever you look you’re very likely to run into either a particularly horny furry or someone proud of the fact they’re wearing a cage on their cock, but for the most part it has been a remarkably stress-free social media experience so far.
Part of the reason for this is that the platform is built to discourage “dunking”, whereas Twitter outright incentivises it these days. The main way Bluesky differs from Twitter is through its absolutely nuclear block function, which means that if someone quote-posts or replies to someone they have subsequently blocked, if you are following the person who made the quote-post or reply, the original post will appear as blocked to you also. This discourages people from going “looking for trouble” because you can’t even see the username of the blocked post. This can be frustrating at times if you missed the original context, but for the most part I think it’s a positive thing.
So anyway, as a result of all that, and the fact I have a few friendly faces there, I have been using Bluesky a bit recently, and thus, if I’m going to share anything about the holiday that isn’t on this blog, I’ll likely do so there. If you’re a Bluesky user and want to follow me, here.
But yes. Anyway, the main point of this post is to note that I will be disconnecting from the greater part of the Internet as much as humanly possible while I am away, because I need it. I need some time away where I just don’t put any unnecessary pressure on myself, or potentially put myself in situations where I might end up getting annoyed. I’m tempted to outright leave a few Discord servers to remove the temptation altogether, but probably won’t go that far.
This holiday is to rest, relax and genuinely get away from it all. My mental health has been in the toilet of late, and the Internet has played a big part in creating that situation. So instead I’m going to be among the trees, play some video games, go swimming and look at friendly deer. We might go and fire a crossbow (not at the deer) and play some pool, too. We haven’t decided yet. But it’s going to be nice.
Today, meanwhile, it’s last-minute packing and tidying up ahead of my mother-in-law coming to look after the cats — sorry burglars, the house will still be occupied while we’re away — and perhaps finishing off Silent Hill 2 later.
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.
