#oneaday Day 71: New Piano Ownership

The new piano arrived yesterday, but as it was a working day and it arrived quite late in the day, I didn't have a lot of time to play around with it. Today, though? Today is the weekend. So I spent some time playing it earlier.

It is very shiny. And yes, you can see Oliver in the upper-left corner. He is sitting on his tree. He is less shiny, but he wanted to see what was going on.

In fact, I did something I haven't done for at least 20 years, which is practice all the scales. All the normal ones, anyway; I didn't go on and do the scales in thirds and sixths like you have to do at Grade 8, I didn't do any chromatics and I didn't do any arpeggios. Those can wait until I'm a bit more back into the swing of things.

The new piano was definitely a good choice. I feel like I have a whole lot more control over tone and dynamics than I had with the clapped-out old thing we had before. It's clear that the old one we had was a nice piano back in its day — Bechstein is a good make, I believe — but the fact it was nearly a hundred years old (possibly more) meant that it was definitely showing its age more than a little bit.

I'm definitely happy with it. It inspired me to pick up some classical pieces that I haven't touched for a long time and give them a shot earlier, plus the stuff I really like playing these days, which is piano arrangements from the Final Fantasy and Nier series of video games, all sound great on it.

I don't think anything is quite up to snuff for me to want to share at this point, but once I've done a bit of that mysterious thing known as "practicing" and knocked something into shape a bit more, perhaps I'll share a piece or two via my YouTube channel or something.

It's nice to share music, so long as it's on your own terms and you're not being strongarmed into it or forced to do it against your will or anything. Thankfully, I never felt like I was being "forced" into learning the piano when I was a kid; I discovered early on that it was something I was quite good at, and that I could impress people who otherwise wouldn't give me the time of day with my piano skills.

I'll be perfectly honest: being at university and studying music alongside people who were at my standard or even better knocked my confidence a bit. I'd probably got a bit complacent and comfortable in my abilities and my relatively "superior" position to my peers at school — I never lorded it over anyone, I hasten to add, but I did always enjoy the looks of admiration and appreciation I got from people who didn't expect a teenager to be able to play the things I was playing at the time.

I think it's been enough years away from all that, though, that I can start rebuilding my enjoyment of the instrument, and getting a nice-quality instrument to play is an important step in that process. Now I just have to develop the self-discipline to practice on a regular basis, and during those practice sessions to push myself a little bit rather than just falling back on the pieces I know I can play well without too much difficulty.

One step at a time. And today was definitely a good first step.

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 70: Attention Deficit Gaming

There's a guy (I assume it's a guy) in a Discord I'm in who is the most attention-deficit gamer I think I've ever seen, and I cannot imagine living life like he does. His entire contribution to the Discord in question is announcing what he has bought from a digital storefront today (and he buys a lot seemingly every week) and what he is reinstalling for presumably not the first time.

I get actual anxiety if I have more than one or two games on the go at once. I start feeling like I "should" finish one of the things I'm playing before I start something else. This is an entirely self-inflicted scenario that has come about at least in part from the habits I picked up while working in games journalism and running my own website, but I'm not particularly mad about it; the way I feel about things means that I'm much more likely to play things through to completion and get what I believe to be a full appreciation of them.

If there's one thing that doing my "Cover Game" thing on MoeGamer for several years taught me, it's that a significant proportion of games out there have considerable hidden depths that only truly reveal themselves to analysis when you've spent a protracted amount of time with the game. I like being able to talk about things in that much depth — even if, as I've bemoaned frequently over the last few years, it's fucking impossible to get anyone to give a shit these days — and thus I don't have any particular desire to change.

Being in those habits, though, just makes me confused as to what this person is getting out of their gaming time. By jumping back and forth between big games like Fate/stay night, Utawarerumono and numerous others, he's surely dooming himself to never making any substantial progress in any of them. And when you're talking story-centric games or visual novels like that, that seems like a… sub-optimal means of enjoying them.

Perhaps I'm the weird one. I know plenty of people who flit from Game Pass game to Game Pass game and think nothing of it. I just think it's a bit sad that the norm these days seems to be to get a surface-level look at something and then move on to the next new shiny thing. One could say that some games could stand to be a bit shorter — and that's certainly true — but that doesn't mean the long ones have no value or aren't worth sticking with over the long term. It just seems less and less likely that people will actually stick with those longer titles.

I hope that doesn't mean that we end up with a gaming sector that eschews long-form experiences altogether. I don't think that will happen — not least because the triple-A studios seem obsessed with "player retention" over the long term, even in single-player titles — but I would say, if you recognise yourself in what I'm describing here: take the time to focus on and complete one game. You might just be surprised what a rewarding experience it is.

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#oneaday Day 69: A Grand Day Out

We had a work day out today. Despite us not being based in London and none of us living in London, we went to London.

I haven't been to London for a very long time. For context, the last time I went to London they had not introduced the ability to "touch in" and "touch out" on the Underground with a credit or debit card.

My work colleagues went to The Crystal Maze Live Experience first of all, but I passed on that as I suspected I probably wasn't physically fit enough to take part. A shame, because it sounds like it was fun, but I don't mind too much. I'm knackered enough as it is!

Instead, I joined everyone for lunch at Covent Garden. We went to an "Asian fusion" place with touchscreen tables that didn't work very well, and had a selection of Japanese-style tapas. Pretty tasty, though I have been left with foul smelling burps.

I suspect that may have been more to do with the cocktails we had at our next destination, an arcade bar just off Oxford street. This was a dingy basement with lots of blacklight and some great arcade machines, though a few clearly needed a bit of TLC on the displays.

There was a great mix of classic stuff, including oldies like Galaga, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, along with later large scale stuff like OutRun 2 and all three Time Crises. It wasn't free play, sadly, you had to buy tokens (£9.50 for 15, and a lot of games took 2 tokens) but the CEO was kind enough to provide us a generous allowance. There were also plenty of consoles equipped with Everdrives and equivalents, and those were free for anyone to play.

It was an enjoyable hangout. A little loud for decent conversation — from the music rather than the machines — but there was a nice vibe, and it seemed to pick up and become quite lively as afternoon turned to evening. The gaming-themed cocktails were great, too, even if they were all at least £11 a pop.

I am, however, as previously noted, absolutely pooped, so now it is time to sleep. I suspect I will sleep well tonight!

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#oneaday Day 68: YouTube thoughts

I've been pondering my YouTube channel ever since I wrote this post. Indeed, I'm still firmly of the opinion that Not Everything Has To Be Content, but I also think I work best when I have some sort of "structure" to proceedings, to know what I'm doing when. So I've come up with something for myself.

This is not intended to be a completely rigid structure of [x] videos per week or anything like that, but more some guidelines for me to work within that allow me to cover my diverse interests, celebrate a variety of games and still focus on the things that I'm most passionate about.

So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to work on a four-week cycle, which will go as follows:

Week 1: Atari 8-bit. One or two videos on Atari 8-bit games. Now I've covered all the built-in games of The400 Mini, this will be pretty much anything.

Week 2: Atari ST. I love the ST, and there are sections of my audience who love it too, so I want to make sure I make some time for it. Like the Atari 8-bit week, this will be one or two videos on Atari ST games.

Week 3: Public Domain and Magazines. This is relatively "open" to interpretation each time it rolls around, but in this week I'd like to either take some time to read through a magazine on camera, or to cover some of the Page 6 Public Domain Library disks for Atari 8-bit and ST, as I enjoyed the few videos I made on those a while back.

Week 4: Wild Card. This can be absolutely anything I feel like doing. If I feel like playing some DOS games, I'll do that. If I feel like playing some SNES games, I'll do that. If I feel like playing some Amiga games, I'll do that.

I feel good about this; it lets me cover the things that I definitely want to keep covering on the channel, as well as the flexibility to do other stuff. And at any point, I won't feel guilt if I want to take a week off due to fatigue or the weather or anything like that… I'll just pick up where I left off!

So that's that. I'm going to start implementing this from this coming weekend and we'll keep moving from there. I hope you enjoy!

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#oneaday Day 67: The pleasure of organisation

Ahead of the new piano arriving on Friday, we bought a new filing cabinet. The idea was to replace the clapped-out old bookshelf we have in the back room that currently holds my music books, and to just generally tidy up that back room a bit now that there's going to be a nice shiny piano in there.

I derive quite a bit of pleasure from organisation. I often have a bit (all right, a lot) of trouble actually getting started, but once I do, I find it immensely satisfying to put everything into place, sort things into alphabetical order and know that everything has a "right place" to put things into. By the same token, our larder cupboard in our kitchen drives me nuts because it's a chaotic bomb site of a cupboard, where you take your life into your own hands any time you attempt to extract something from it without causing an avalanche of baking materials, cereal and cat food.

I know exactly why I derive such pleasure from organisation, of course; it is doubtless to do with the autism, what with one of the key characteristics of those of us On The Spectrum being an appreciation for orderliness, routines, patterns and suchlike. Even better if said orderliness is all your own work rather than a structure built by someone else that you're having to adapt to.

Going through the music books was nice for another reason: it made me realise that I have a lot of them, and there's a fair old chunk of music in them that I've just never played. For the most part, the music books I own fall into two categories: those which I acquired while I was actively having piano tuition, which are mostly "classical" books from historical art music composers; and those which I have acquired in more recent years, which tend to be piano arrangements of soundtracks from video games and anime that I particularly appreciate. I've been playing a lot more of the latter in more recent years, but with the new piano it might be time to revisit (or explore further) into the other stuff.

The reason why I own so much stuff and haven't played a lot of it is simple: when learning stuff while having piano tuition, my teachers would often suggest a piece of music to learn, which was only available as part of a larger book, usually of a single composer's work. So for example when I learned how to play Liszt's Consolation No. 3, I also acquired a book of other short piano pieces by Liszt (including, among other things, the other Consolations). When I learned a Mozart sonata, I then had access to all the Mozart sonatas because while you can buy some of these pieces as individual sheet music, it's generally more worthwhile in the long term to buy "The Complete Mozart Sonatas" or equivalent.

So I've got a lot of stuff to explore once the new piano gets here. I'm going to have to get back into the habit of playing more frequently, but I suspect with a decent-quality instrument readily available, that won't be too much of an ordeal. Getting myself back up to the standard I was once at might take a bit more work, but I'm sure it'll be worth it as another means of expressing and enjoying myself if nothing else.

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#oneaday Day 66: That One

I have an irrational hatred of any product that describes variants of itself as "The [x] One". Shreddies: The Frosted One. McDonalds Wraps: The Chilli Chicken One. Petrol: The Unleaded One.

I've been trying to pin down precisely why this annoys me, because it only reflects the way people talk about products with variants. When discussing what to buy from the supermarket, you don't say "Let's buy some McVities Digestive Biscuits, Caramel Flavour", you say "I really like the caramel ones, let's get some more of those". When ordering at McDonalds, you don't say "I would like a McWrap with Crispy Chicken and Sweet Chilli Sauce", you say "I want the sweet chilli one".

But I think that's sort of part of the problem; I've always felt like there should be a disparity in the way people talk about a product and the way the product presents itself. It's not customers' jobs to do the marketing for the products, yet as soon as you make the name of the product the same as how people refer to it in casual conversation, you are intruding on that division. You are refusing to allow the customer to refer to the product the way they prefer to, instead taking the opportunity to throw in some "chummy copy", as the folks on the excellent CheapShow podcast call it.

Chummy copy is the scourge of modern products. It's why we get boxes of Coca-Cola telling you to "remember to flatten me before recycling me!" and boxes of cereal that say inane platitudes like "BREAKFAST is the MOST IMPORTANT MEAL of the DAY", with every word in a different font. I don't want a product to be my friend, I want it to perform the function I purchased it for. Which, in the case of most things that feature chummy copy, is to shut up and let me eat or drink it.

I'm not sure exactly where both of these things started. "The [x] One" can probably be at least indirectly attributed to the popularity of the sitcom Friends, whose episode titles were all The One With [An Individual Element of the Episode as a Whole] — and before you point out that Friends was a late '90s/early '00s phenomenon that couldn't possibly be relevant 25+ years later, I would just point out that Krispy Kreme have just brought out a range of Friends-themed doughnuts, and "How You Doin'?" is still very much part of the popular vernacular — even if, I suspect, many people using it don't know its origin.

For some reason it didn't bother me in Friends, at least partly because Friends was the kind of show where the episode title didn't matter. It was never displayed on screen at any point during the episode, for one thing, and it was an interesting novelty at the time, particularly compared to the dramatic episode titles shows like Star Trek were using in the same period.

Now, though? Chummy copy feels kind of weirdly insidious. Contrary to what I presume is its intention, which is to make products feel more approachable and trustworthy, I am disinclined to trust a product that makes such a big deal out of how amazing it is, or which tries to ingratiate itself with me by going "haha, look, we gave our product a SUPER CASUAL name like what you call it!"

Anyway, yeah. Time to open Microsoft Teams: The Work One and crack on with actually getting something useful done.

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#oneaday Day 65: Retro Games Aren't Bad

It seems we've reached the point in gaming history where everything over a certain age is automatically "bad". I'll be honest, as an enthusiast of gaming from the 8, 16 and 32-bit eras, this is a massive bummer to see, because it makes it a huge uphill struggle to convince people that it's worth exploring gaming history.

I'm sure this is a temporary thing, and that the people who would get something from acknowledging and exploring gaming history will always find their way into the classics of yesteryear, but it's still frustrating and annoying. Particularly when people start spouting their opinions as fact.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of home computer games rather than console games. Home computer games were of massive importance to the games industry in Europe, but to see folks so casually write so many of them off because they are perceived as "worse" than console titles from the same period is a huge fucking bummer. Plus we get the old "inverse hype" problem: games that were popular back in the day are now lambasted as "actually not being that good after all", rather than any consideration being given to why they might have been popular and so well-received back in the day.

A good example is pretty much anything by The Bitmap Brothers. On their original release, to home computer fans, a Bitmap release was an event. These were games that were slickly produced, good-looking and, particularly unusually for the period, sounded great, too, thanks to their use of sampled intro music.

Yes, there were cases where the hype definitely got the better of everyone, with Xenon 2: Megablast probably being the best example of this, but there are other cases where hate is thrown for reasons I genuinely don't understand. Probably the best example of this is Gods, a well-presented platformer with some interesting levels, plenty of secrets and a lot of replayability.

Speak to someone today about Gods and chances are they'll brand it as "bad". Having been playing Gods quite a bit recently due to the impending release of The Bitmap Brothers Collection 2 for Evercade, though, it absolutely is not "bad" at all. To say so is ridiculous. Are there elements of it that might be an acquired taste, or for which game design has moved on? Absolutely. It has stiff controls, an inexplicable inability to jump straight upwards and some of the most obtuse secrets in all of gaming. Like most European-developed platformers, it has no concept of invincibility frames other than immediately after respawing. And it doesn't scroll or move as smoothly as games developed for console.

But none of those things make Gods a "bad" game. They might make it a game you need to put a bit of time in before you understand it, sure, but again, that's not "bad".

There are plenty of other examples of this, too. The James Pond series springs to mind. This is a series that certainly does have a stinker in its midst in the form of The Aquatic Games, but the most commonly cited game from the range that people think is "bad" is James Pond 2: Robocod, which is probably the best of the bunch. And it's a game that is still pretty good to this day.

Again, though, context is everything. You have to understand that in Europe, console ownership was by no means the "norm" — and those folks who did have consoles maybe only had three or four games. For those who didn't have a console at all, Robocod was a revelation. Here was a scrolling platform game that, to ST and Amiga owners, offered many of the same appeal elements as titles like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog. Is it as good as either of those games? No. But that absolutely doesn't make it "bad", either. It makes it especially noteworthy that it was among the best platformers we had on 16-bit home computer platforms at the time.

I guess a lot of this is a side-effect of the way that online discussion seems to have precisely zero nuance to it these days, whether you're talking politics or video games. Everything is an us-vs-them situation, and there are accepted "correct" and "wrong" opinions. And the lack of nuance means that it's near-impossible to have a viewpoint that takes a little from column A, a little from column B, because both columns want to hand you a flag and make you stand in line glaring at the other group.

I won't get into political examples, because that's a sure-fire route to starting some arguments — though I will say that Disco Elysium, which I played recently, handles the "shades of grey" quite nicely — but in the case of video games, there's very much a divide between those who think console games are the only retro worth preserving, and those who acknowledge that home computer gaming is a thing that actually existed, and in many cases prefer it to what consoles offered.

I occupy a space between those two viewpoints. A lot of my online work focuses on home computer games precisely because there's not nearly enough discussion about them compared to console games, but that doesn't mean I reject console games altogether. On the contrary, in more recent years in particular I've had a lot of fun exploring parts of the NES, Master System, Mega Drive and SNES libraries that I never had access to back in the day. And those systems are technically superior to the general-purpose home computers of the time.

But that doesn't mean home computer stuff should be rejected either. There's value there. There's cultural history there. Sure, they might not scroll as smoothly, sound as nice or play as well as some console games, but they're not "bad". They are part of gaming history, too. And it's starting to genuinely annoy me when people just reject things they've arbitrarily decided are "bad" for one reason or another.

So if that's you, knock it off. And if it's not you? Well, I've got a bunch of videos you might be interested in…

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#oneaday Day 64: Alexa, Enshittify Yourself

I got an Echo Show at some point. I think it was a birthday or Christmas present. I don't really know what it's for. I don't like voice-activated tech and I legitimately don't understand how a device that says things out loud is better than one with a screen and keyboard for anyone except blind people.

I do know, however, that said Echo Show has been gradually and subtly making itself worse ever since I first turned it on, and it's been sitting on my bedside table ever since, the world's most technologically advanced bedside clock.

Since I actually quite like it as a bedside clock — it has an excellent light-responsive display so it doesn't overwhelm you with glare in the dark — I turned most of its "helpful" features off. These features mostly came in the form of "Suggestions", and I'm pretty sure I've previously covered why I detest "Suggestions" from tech.

However, one thing I've noticed is that not only does the device sneak in new Suggestions that have to be turned off separately on a fairly regular basis, it also turns things back on that I've previously turned off. This is annoying.

However, this evening its enshittification reached a whole new level: it started serving me ads. Yes, the clock display was interrupted by a "Sponsored" display inviting me to find out more about the Nissan Qashqai. I do not need a new car. I have given no indication that I need a new car. I have not spoken about getting a new car in earshot of Alexa. And I certainly didn't turn on "Show Me Ads" anywhere in the device's settings.

Hopefully you can turn them off, but I suspect you can't. If it's magically turned into a bedside ad-serving machine with no opt-out possible, I think it may finally get retired. And I'll just buy a nice digital clock with a radio and an LED display, like I had 20 years ago.

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#oneaday Day 63: Late-Night Disco

Finished Disco Elysium this evening. I think I will save more in-depth thoughts for a proper write-up on MoeGamer, but I came away very satisfied with the whole thing, and impressed that the game as a whole managed to successfully carry a highly replayable 30+ hour RPG without a single combat sequence. If you've been hanging fire on giving this one a go, don't; it's absolutely great, particularly if you enjoyed Planescape: Torment's approach to the CRPG: dialogue-heavy, emphasis on the story and on having the flexibility to really "play" your character in a number of different ways, despite following a canonical storyline that focuses on them.

Anyway, that has… been the majority of my day, to be perfectly honest. It's the last full day of my week off work, so I thought I'd take a day to just do "nothing" in particular, just enjoy something. So I did. And I'm glad I did; it's always satisfying to reach the conclusion of an enjoyable game, and especially if you can do so while not under any real sort of time pressure to do anything else.

Tomorrow I might go into town for a bit to have some lunch with Andie and a couple of her friends, then I think I might record a few more videos. I had sort-of planned to make a bunch of videos during this week off, but that didn't happen for one reason or another. I'm not annoyed about that, mind; part of the reason for having this week off in the first place was just to decompress and unwind somewhat from the daily grind and stress of work, so loading myself up with self-imposed "work" to do may not have been the best thing to do.

But anyway. Now Disco Elysium is safely ticked off the list, I can think about other things. I got a few retro treats through the post today — Jungle Strike and Urban Strike for SNES (I already have Desert Strike), Golfamania for Master System and Rad Racer for NES. I'm excited to give all of these a go for various reasons. But that can probably wait until tomorrow. For now, I need a poo, then to go to sleep. So that's what I'm going to do. In that order.

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#oneaday Day 62: Enormous Instrument

I bought a piano today. Those who have been following this blog for a while will know that this is the second time I have done this, with the last being about nine years ago. Back then, I noted that the piano we bought was relatively cheap (about £250) and the seller noted that, since it was quite old, it wouldn't necessarily last very long — but it would be fine for a few years.

Well, turns out he was correct; the piano was consistently going out of tune around the E-flat below middle C — interestingly, the exact same note my childhood piano consistently went out of tune on — and after a visit from a local tuner, it became clear that getting it fixed up was going to cost more than we paid for it in the first place.

I have been somewhat lax on my piano-playing for a while, and this is at least partly because when you have an instrument that isn't quite right like this, it doesn't incentivise you to want to play because you know you have to deal with the boingy out-of-tune notes. It's weirdly "embarrassing", even though it's not the player's fault.

But I had been feeling like I want to play some more again, and if I wanted to do that something had to be done about the poor old piano. The repair option didn't seem worthwhile, so I started looking into replacements and/or a means of getting the old one responsibly removed — a piano isn't the sort of thing you can just take to the tip (and not just because of its size) and the council won't take it away as "bulky waste", so you generally have to hire a specialist to get rid of it.

Thankfully, I found a good piano place about 40 miles from us in the form of Chamberlain Pianos. This is a company over in Haslemere, Surrey, not far from where I used to work as a teacher, and it seemed they offered part-exchange deals. So I enquired as to whether the old piano — which dates back to the 1920s — would be worth anything in part-exchange, and expressed an interest in a couple of the pianos they had on offer.

As it turns out, our old piano was not worth anything in part-exchange — which I was not surprised about, as it's very old — but the company would be able to take it away when delivering a new one. So I made an appointment to go pay them a visit. And today was that appointment.

I was initially interested in an "Essex"-brand piano that had Steinway connections — I technically "have" a Steinway grand piano, but we don't really have anywhere to put it right now, and I'm sure my parents are loathe to part with it anyway, which is perfectly fine as it has been a feature of their living room for a long time at this point. I gave it a go and it was… not bad, but not as mindblowing as I thought it might be.

Thankfully, the chap showing me around Chamberlain Pianos, sales director Dominic Barnett, knew his stuff about pianos and was keen to show me some other pianos around a similar price point that I might be interested in. These included a couple of Kemble-brand pianos that were about 10-15 years old (which are basically Yamahas without the badge and consequently half the price) and a brand new Kawai. I tried them all, and there was definitely a difference between them; I would have probably been happy with any of them, but the one I eventually plumped for was the Kemble "Conservatoire" model — so called because of its use in music schools, apparently — that had a winning combination of a nice action and a lovely tone.

So that should be with us next Friday, which is exciting! It's shiny and black. I've always kind of wanted a shiny black piano ever since I played my secondary school's shiny black Yamaha piano in Music Room 1. So I'm looking forward to putting that through its paces and hopefully making a bit more of a habit of playing and practicing again. I'm long overdue for doing that.

I am exceedingly grateful to my ever-generous parents for providing a contribution towards this new piano; it allowed us to plop down a deposit on a piano that is a bit nicer than we might otherwise have been able to afford by ourselves. So I guess I better make good use of it, huh?

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