#oneaday Day 51: The Art of the Thumbnail

I'm in a Discord with some other (relatively) low-subscriber retro gaming and tech YouTubers, and we've had some interesting discussions over there. One subject that comes up frequently that I think I've derived the most value from is that of video thumbnails.

To put this in context, prior to joining this Discord, and for quite some time, my YouTube channel looked something like this:

I don't dislike this look. I was rather fond of how each "series" I was doing had its own distinct appearance, and I feel each thumbnail got nicely to the point: telling viewers that it was a video about a particular game on a particular platform.

But that's not really how YouTube works. However nice it looks to have a lineup of games with lovely consistent thumbnails Criterion Collection-style, it doesn't necessarily bring the views in. And so, with the advice and encouragement of the folks in the aforementioned Discord, I do things a little bit differently now.

This is how my channel looks today:

I'm pleased with this. Because I feel like these thumbnails do a much better job of intriguing and attracting the viewer's attention without assuming knowledge — i.e. "what is 'Atari A to Z'?" — while still allowing me a certain degree of consistency and coherence that makes my work immediately identifiable if you know what to look for.

Best of all, I haven't resorted to any of the more flagrantly transparent "clickbait" techniques, and "YouTube Face" is nowhere to be seen. The videos I make on YouTube are not for the same audience as Mr. Beast, so I make zero effort to court the sort of people who respond to those sorts of thumbnails.

And it works. At least I think so. Some of my videos perform about as well as what I considered a "solid performance" two or three years ago — that is to say, breaking three figures in the view count — but quite a lot more of them exceed that by two, three or even four times. And I've had a few breakout successes: my Super Woden GP 2 video sits at 86K views to date, my look at Ultima love letter Moonring has 21K views to date (and a very long tail), my video covering the announcement of The400 Mini attracted 14K views, and most recently a video on Project Gotham Racing 3 brought in a relatively modest but still impressive-for-my-channel 2.5K pairs of eyes.

I don't do this for the views, as I quite frequently state; I do it because I enjoy it. But I won't pretend it's not nice when a video does well — at least partly because it results in a bit of pocket money for me. That Super Woden GP 2 video made me over a hundred quid within a few days of it being posted. And now I get a small payout from YouTube earnings (i.e. the minimum payment threshold) every couple of months, whereas once it was a far-off goal I thought I'd never achieve. That's nice.

The secret behind those thumbnails? It's not really anything complicated. The most effective advice from the Discord I've followed is to keep text to just a few bold words, and present those words using at least two of the following: a bold outline around the letters; a bold drop shadow; and slightly rotating various parts of the complete text so that the eye is drawn to lines that aren't quite "straight". That's about it. I don't overuse colour; I don't overdo the "big red arrow" or "circling the obvious thing" tricks (although I put in a big red arrow occasionally as an in-joke to the group, which refers to itself as the "Big Red Arrow Club"); and, as noted, I don't do the "YouTube Face".

It works for me. The result is a channel full of videos I'm proud to call my own, and which a gradually (very gradually) growing number of people are coming to appreciate. That's pleasing to me.

YouTube and YouTube culture has myriad problems, but it's still the best place to create and share stuff like this. It's a valuable means of self-expression and sharing one's interests, and it's something I'm glad I decided to get stuck into exploring properly.

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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 50: Another Project Complete

As of today, I now have videos recorded for all 25 of the games included on The400 Mini, the miniature games console based around the Atari 8-bit. Not all of them have been published yet — the final one, which covers both Centipede and Millipede, will be out later in the week — but it's nice to feel like another creative project is "done". If you're interested, I set up a playlist on YouTube here:

As you'll note from the thumbnail, this playlist includes both videos that I've previously recorded that happen to cover the games on The400 Mini and new vids that I've recorded specifically to look at everything included on the system. The Atari 5200 games included in the playlist, covered during my "Atari A to Z Flashback" project, where I made videos for all 150 games on Atari Flashback Classics for Switch, are fundamentally identical to their Atari 8-bit counterparts, and a few others I'd previously covered on the 8-bit-centric "Atari A to Z" series.

I'm pleased with this, at least partly because it means I can now get on with exploring the broader Atari 8-bit library once again. The games included on The400 Mini are a fun cross-section of what was out there on Atari 8-bit, but they are just a fraction of the whole picture — a picture that today includes some incredible efforts from modern developers who are still putting out amazing stuff for the platform.

One of the things that I hope comes to light for people who watch my videos is that a lot of games that ended up being very famous across multiple platforms actually got their start on Atari 8-bit. Off the top of my head that I've covered already, there's Boulder Dash, Alley Cat, Spelunker, Lode Runner, M.U.L.E. and plenty of others besides.

All of these are arguably more famous in other incarnations (except perhaps M.U.L.E.) but I feel it's important to acknowledge where they came from in the first place; a lot of self-styled gaming historians don't give the Atari 8-bit the credit it is due, assuming it to be a niche system on the level of stuff like the Oric Atmos, Dragon 32 and suchlike. But no; while the Atari 8-bit never had the same widespread acceptance of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, it was still a lively, active and well-supported system (supported by everyone except Atari for significant portions of its lifespan, anyway) with some excellent capabilities that the platform's more talented programmers really got to grips with.

I realise this all might sound a bit fanboyish, but that's just because, well, I'm an Atari fan. Always have been. And I feel it's a bit silly for big chunks of computing and gaming history to be ignored just because they didn't happen on the most famous platforms.

And so I will continue to bang that drum on my YouTube channel. I have a platform there, and have amassed a following of quite a reasonable size. If the stuff I do convinces just one or two people to explore things a little beyond the usual scope of "retro" — or just to acknowledge that Atari home computers exist — then I'll feel like I've done a decent job.

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#oneaday Day 49: No Hate

I have little to no time for cynical negativity, and I've felt this way for quite some time. I've been trying to pin down exactly why I feel like I can't participate in a conversation where one or more of the participants has switched to "cynical negativity" mode, and I think I've just answered my own question: it's because it feels like those who are being negative are trying to close the conversation.

I don't always mean literally, as in "let's not talk about this any more", but I tend to find that a negative opinion about something almost certainly stops people from wanting to pipe up and say "actually, I liked it", because these days that often seems to lead to an unnecessarily heated argument. Both sides become entrenched in their respective positions, and both inevitably come out of the encounter feeling worse about the other person.

I know. I have been there on a frustrating number of occasions. There are Discord servers that I have come to feel less than welcome in because I liked something that someone with a louder voice than me didn't. And I feel it's genuinely quite hard to find a place where you can just go and be enthusiastic about something any more, without some killjoy jumping in and rattling off a laundry list of its "flaws". And the negative one always seems to come off better than someone who feels positively about something — even when the positive one clearly knows a lot more about the thing in question.

Once someone has opened that initial negativity valve, one of two things tends to happen: 1) the conversation ends, with the positive person left feeling like they can no longer talk about something they like, or 2) other people, some of whom have no experience with the thing under discussion, feel emboldened to jump on board with the person being negative, leaving the positive person feeling like they're being ganged up on.

There are responses to this, and I've heard them all.

"If you really love something, you criticise it." That may be true, but "criticising it" is not the same as shitting all over it and, in some cases, casting aspersions on those who do like it.

"Stop being so defensive." I am defensive because you are attacking something that is important to me.

"People are allowed to have different opinions." If that is the case, why do I now feel like I cannot open my mouth and express my support for the thing that "the room" has now decided is "bad"?

"Stop playing the victim." I'm sorry, but after probably over a decade of this at this point — of feeling like I have no place to really "belong" — I feel somewhat hard done by.

More than anything, though, it's just boring. I know we can all have a good laugh at the creative ways in which people talk about things they dislike — it's a lot harder to be "amusing" when you're being positive, it seems — but when no-one seems to like anything any more, it becomes extremely tiresome.

I'm not saying no-one is allowed to dislike things. I'm not saying no-one is allowed to hate things with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns. I'm saying I wish people would just be a little more considerate of those who like things, and want nothing more than to be able to talk about the things they like with other people.

Someone liking or loving something is an opportunity to learn and grow. Even if you end up not feeling the same way about the thing in question, you can learn something about the person you were talking to, and why the thing might be important to them. Meanwhile, if you close them down by saying you hate the thing before they've even had a chance to express themselves fully, that's a potential relationship that is never going to go anywhere.

I feel bad that I even have to justify this. But with every passing day, I feel more and more alienated from people who should, in theory, be my friends, based on our shared interests. But when I'm confronted with negativity, I don't feel welcome. I don't feel like anyone wants to understand me. And I don't feel like anyone wants to be my friend.

That's a really shitty way to be feeling, let me tell you. And I hope it never happens to you.

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#oneaday Day 48: Not So Great

Today was not so good. I spent a significant proportion of the evening having a fairly major panic attack. I thought I was just having a depressive episode, but when I realised I was shaking, my heart was racing and I was just generally feeling "afraid" to do anything, it became pretty clear what it actually was.

I decided to try and sleep it off, and while I don't feel great now, I think the worst has passed, and in the meantime I certainly had what felt like some interesting dreams. They were the kind of dreams that evaporate as soon as you wake up properly so I unfortunately can't say any more than that — aside from the phrase "it's stunning, so long as you already have the suspension of disbelief required for modern VR", for some reason — but they were certainly interesting.

This, of course, has pretty much taken up my entire evening and prevented me from doing anything more interesting, but sometimes you just have to try and take care of yourself the best way you know how. And when you're suffering from some form of mental health breakdown, sometimes the best thing to do is just find a place or situation in which you feel comfortable, and ride the damn thing out. There's a reason why so many folks make a connection between mental health episodes and "storms" of sort; the principle behind surviving them with minimal harm is very similar, albeit with one being physical and the other being mental.

Anyway, all that regrettably means I don't have a lot of worthwhile things to say this evening. I'm hoping I feel better tomorrow — and I'm hoping the cat doesn't keep me awake as much tonight as she did last night. I feel my struggles today may be related to this, though I can't blame her or be mad at her; she wasn't being malicious or deliberately trying to cause harm.

On that note, then, back to bed I go.

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#oneaday Day 47: Making the Effort

I made it to the gym today. I didn't make it first thing in the morning because I don't feel that is going to work for me — at least not just yet. So I went a little bit after work instead. I walked for 20 minutes on the treadmill at 4mph (slightly faster than I usually walk, so enough to work up a bit of a sweat) and then did some stuff on the resistance machines.

And y'know what? It felt pretty good. I had that thing where three minutes into my walking I thought I'd made a terrible mistake, but I powered through that "wall" — helped along by having some entertaining stuff to watch on my phone and headphones — and made it to 20 minutes without too much difficulty. I could have probably done another 10 minutes, but the gym was reasonably busy, so I didn't want to hog the machine too much.

The resistance machines remind me that I have a lot of scope for improvement, but it is definitely satisfying to complete a few sets on them. I don't like all of them — and some of them are impractical or even impossible to use with my hernia — but the ones I do get along well with give me a decent workout in several different areas, which is good.

I haven't gone back to using the free weights just yet as I'm trying to just get back into the general gym groove. A few sessions on a semi-regular basis and I think I'll be back into a routine. I think I will rest tomorrow, then try and go again after work on Friday, then see how things go from there.

The trouble I've been having is that the weather conditions here right now are highly conducive to lethargy. The atmosphere is very stuffy both inside the house and outside, and it's a real drain on one's energy to just exist right now. I have somewhat reached the conclusion that you just have to sort of power through this, though, because waiting until it passes is a sure-fire route to doing absolutely nothing of use for a significant amount of time.

So it was a small step today, but I feel good about it. At times when I feel like I've been feeling, you have to take the little victories and celebrate them, because otherwise everything just becomes a bit overwhelming. So this is me, celebrating.

Yay?

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#oneaday Day 46: I Fucking Hate Emoji

I fucking hate emoji. And I judge you negatively if you use them. I can't control it. I hate the fucking things. And I firmly believe that using them, particularly to excess, makes you look like an absolute idiot.

I say this as someone who frequently still uses the ":)" emoticon from the early days of the Internet, though only in instant messages. I don't use any others except very occasionally a ":(" if something bad has happened, but I tend to feel like using something as flippant as an emoticon somewhat detracts from the perceived gravity of the situation under discussion, so there are times when I refuse to use them altogether.

Emoji, though, are the scourge of modern communication. Particularly any variation of the "laughing" emoji.

I'm talking about these cunts -> 😂🤣

Because inevitably they are used excessively, and usually in a context where they are mocking or patronising someone rather than expressing genuine amusement. I'm particularly not-fond of them on Facebook posts that use that annoying "auto e-card" setting or whatever it is where an unfunny joke by an annoying person is absolutely fucking surrounded by them. You know, like this.

I judge people who use that particular setting on Facebook even more negatively than people who just use emojis.

I think my absolute least favourite use of emoji, though, is when someone insists on punctuating every few words of a sentence with them, as if we're all too stupid to read the big scary words and need little pictures to go along with them in order to understand what's going on.

I had a book called Bunny Rabbit Rebus when I was a kid, and I found it kind of interesting, but also kind of annoying. For the unfamiliar, a rebus is when you represent a word (or part of a word) using pictures or symbols, and Bunny Rabbit Rebus used them for significant portions of its text. It was mildly amusing to the childish me at first, but by the time I'd figured out that a capital letter "E" coloured red meant "Ready" (Red E, geddit) I was already starting to think that this book thought it was much more clever than it actually was. And I was, like, five years old at the time.

Whenever I read a post from someone who insists on writing things like "Feeling 🙏 blessed because of my 👪 family 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣" I just think of Bunny Rabbit Rebus, and immediately assume that whoever typed that shit has reverted to being a not-particularly-intelligent five year old.

I think part of this stems from how I've always been a very competent reader, and these stupid little icons break up text and actively make it harder to read, particularly when they're jammed in the middle of a sentence. I also kind of resent the use of them to tell me how I'm supposed to be feeling when I read the thing — or, indeed, in the most common use of the "laughing" emojis, that I'm being patronised by someone who, for whatever reason, disagrees with me and thinks that is worthy of "rolling on the floor laughing". Because polite disagreement is not a thing we do online any more.

Anyway, the long and short of this is that if you use emoji excessively, I will judge you. And I will laugh at you. And I don't need 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣 to do it.

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#oneaday Day 45: Happy Wordiversary

Apparently, according to my notifications anyway, today is the 16th anniversary of me signing up on WordPress.com. Indeed, looking back at my very first post it does seem that I started blogging on here on July 22, 2008.

Back in those days, I posted sporadically. I wasn't really sure what to do with a blog at the time, I just felt like I wanted one. It actually wasn't the first blog I'd had, either, although it's the only one that's survived this long.

I did, at one point, post an anonymous "Tales from the Staffroom" blog on BlogSpot that recounted my experiences as a classroom teacher, but there appears to be no trace of that left on the current Internet. There is an archive of it from as recently as 2023, but Google appears to have gone on a "Blogger purge" at some point in the last year, so the address no longer works on the current Web. This is a shame, but at least archive.org caught it before it disappeared.

At the time I started this blog, I was still working at the Apple Store as a "Creative" — that is to say, I was one of the people whose job it was to provide training sessions for Mac users on the use of creative software. Technically our job was supposed to be confined to lessons on Apple software only, but we inevitably found ourselves having to deal with customers using all manner of weird and wonderful pieces of software for their very specific needs.

This was partly our own fault — one guy on the Creative team was a Photoshop expert, so him happily covering that set the expectation with customers that we should all be able to cover Photoshop, even though several of us had specialisms in other areas — but also it just felt a bit mean to have someone just turn up, ask for help (which, nine times out of ten, was pretty simple, given that most folks who signed up for the "One to One" programme were new Mac users and often elderly) and tell them "no".

I enjoyed that job for quite a while. I had a nice group of friends and I was good at it. The pay was… all right, considering it was a retail position, and the freebies and staff discounts were excellent. Unfortunately it ended badly when the management of the store inexplicably went into something of a decline and started being unnecessarily harsh on the folks working for them. I ended up losing my job after standing up for a colleague of mine who absolutely was unfairly dismissed, but given that both management and the folks above them closed ranks, he was never going to get fair treatment. And, as it turned out, I didn't, either. Thankfully, I resigned before they could fire me, but it left an extremely bitter taste in my mouth with regards to all things Apple.

Anyway, I don't want to dwell on that too much because that's probably a whole other story I can tell another day. That was the context in which I was writing those first posts, though: I was, for a time, genuinely quite happy and satisfied with the way things were going. My life perhaps wasn't proceeding in the direction I had initially intended — after a nervous breakdown, I decided that classroom teaching really wasn't for me — but it was proceeding, at least. And having a blog was a nice breezy way to ponder on all sorts of things without any sort of real "pressure". I can't even remember if I'd joined Facebook or Twitter in 2008; I think I probably had, but social media certainly wasn't the all-encompassing force of shittiness that it is today back then.

It's interesting to look back and see things that no longer exist, such as PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game, where you earned experience points and other RPG-style benefits for simply browsing the Web. And it's also gratifying to see that so far as my tastes are concerned, some things never change.

You are, of course, always welcome to browse back into the archives via the dropdown in the sidebar. (I'm not sure where it is on mobile, probably at the bottom?) I'm not the same person I was back then — but every experience I've had, everything I've written about, has helped make me who I am today, for better or worse.

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#oneaday Day 44: What's Next?

Do you ever get the feeling that you're just sort of waiting for the next "major" thing to happen in your life, and that you're unsure exactly how you might go about triggering such a thing, if indeed it is trigger-able?

I feel this quite a lot. It's disconcerting. It's like a constant sense that I should be doing something, but I have no idea what. It's a feeling of unease that creeps up on me and whispers "Don't you think you should…" and then trails off before saying the important part of the sentence. It is, in short, just a general feeling of discontent.

Considering the situation rationally, I'm not sure I have any real reason to feel like this. I have a comfortable living situation, a good job, a loving wife and two wonderful cats. I have an enormous video game collection, likely more than enough to see me entertained until my dying day. I have creative outlets in the form of this blog, my website MoeGamer and my YouTube channel.

And yet something still doesn't feel quite right. I am dissatisfied. I am restless. And I think a significant part of my reason for feeling like this is plain ol' loneliness. While the aforementioned wife and cats are wonderful company on a daily basis, I do mourn past eras of my life when social activities feel like they came a bit more naturally and easily.

Going to a friend's house after school. Dropping by the coffee shop on the way to lectures with a university friend (and sometimes not quite getting around to leaving the coffee shop for said lecture). Evenings spent couch-surfing between numerous different friends' houses because my own house was a significant distance from where everyone else I knew. Habitually dropping by Hoffers Bakery for a roll and a cake, then settling in for an afternoon of multiplayer N64. Weekly board game sessions. Going out, like, anywhere.

All of those are things that are well and truly in the past, and were already going that way before COVID hit — and once COVID did hit, nothing ever really recovered. I've seen the people who are supposedly my closest friends maybe three or four times in the last few years. There are people online with whom I used to be extremely close that I can't remember the last time I heard from. There are people that I once thought would be "lifelong friends" that I feel have probably forgotten about me.

At least some of the blame for this can be laid at my own feet, of course. But honestly, my own efforts in these regards tailing off stemmed from growing frustration that I would often want to do something fun with people I liked, and for one reason or another, it seemed like that was never possible. Scheduling conflicts. Family commitments. Illness. Simply not being arsed. I got to a point where I felt like I was putting in effort that wasn't being reciprocated proportionally, and it just didn't feel worth it any more. That, in turn, did a number of my self-confidence, meaning that more often than not my brain just doesn't want to let me try and reach out to people for fear of them just rejecting me — or worse — once again.

As such, the end result of all this is a 43 year old man sitting in front of his computer in the dark typing about how he feels lonely to the maybe 5-10 people who still actually bother to read this site. Admitting you were lonely amounted to social suicide in my teenage years — you were a "Larry" (for "Larry Loner") — but now, it feels like an increasingly inevitable part of life in 2024. And it sucks.

I think that, more than anything, is why I'm dissatisfied. I want that "next thing", that amorphous "major event" in my life, to be the end of this horrible loneliness. But at this point, I simply don't really know how to make that happen.

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#oneaday Day 43: Regrets, But Not Why You Think

I had a few drinks this evening, and I am now feeling regrets. Not because I've drunk too much or are smashed off my face or anything, but because it just felt like a big waste of time, and it's a whole lot of "bad stuff" that probably won't help the weight loss.

I've been feeling a curious… absence of anything any time I've tried drinking in the last few years. The most I feel is getting a bit hot and flushed after a couple of whatevers, but I can't remember the last time I felt genuinely merry, tipsy or drunk.

On balance, this is probably a good thing, because being drunk tends to lead to doing and/or saying stupid things, but it's also a bit of a shame that drinking appears to have become an activity that I derive no joy from whatsoever, whereas back in my student days it was inevitably a central part of social occasions, and I have plenty of stories involving drunken nights out.

I attribute this to a few things. Firstly, I'm not getting any younger, though I know age doesn't necessarily preclude anyone from enjoying a drink or two to the degree that they feel they're affecting them. Secondly, I haven't been really fucking drunk for… probably at least ten years at this point, possibly more. I would have thought that would make my tolerance drop to rock bottom, but as noted above, I just feel… nothing, really.

Probably the most significant reason that I derive no joy from drinking is because I've seen what overreliance on alcohol can do to a person and the people around them, on more than one occasion. Thankfully all the people I have known with such a problem are all comfortably recovering now, but I still can't help but be reminded of the things I saw and heard when things were really bad.

In fact, I'd probably go so far as to say that I'm probably traumatised by such things. I hasten to add that nothing irreversibly bad happened to or was done to me by or as a result of the person who had the problem, but I will say that you should never assume the person directly suffering with alcohol-related issues is the only one who needs support. I went through some rather dark times of my own, and I suspect residual feelings towards those dark times have resulted in me drawing no joy from alcohol today.

As I say, it's a bit of a shame, because I always used to enjoy a boozy night out with friends, and indeed there are almost certainly entries in the depths of this blog's archives that outline exactly how and why I enjoyed such occasions. But for any and/or all of the reasons outlined above — plus the fact I rarely see "friends" in general at all these days, particularly post-COVID — that's just not something that is anywhere even vaguely near the top of my priority list these days.

Every time I've had a drink or two in the last few years, I've felt something like this. So I think it might just be time to say that enough is enough, I don't need or want alcohol in my life, and leave it at that. I guess that part of my life is passed.

Which, as I say, is probably a good thing, on balance.

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#oneaday Day 42: Melting

It is so hot here right now. The sun's gone down but it's still sweltering. Those who live in typically warmer climes often like to mock us here in the UK for complaining about the heat when it gets anywhere over 25 degrees C, but this is a country built on the assumption that your average day will be grey and miserable, probably drizzling slightly. Consequently, all our houses are built to trap heat and stay warm, even when you emphatically do not wish them to.

We made the wise investment of a portable air conditioner a couple of years back, and that lives in the bedroom, meaning that we can at least get some sleep in a bearable temperature. The rest of the house is festooned in fans, too, which help a little bit but not quite enough. There comes a point where all they're doing is blowing the hot air around a bit, which is better than it just sort of hanging there in that suffocating way it does, but not enough to really cool you off.

It's these kinds of conditions that make you wish you'd remembered to put some of your cans of drink in the fridge rather than leaving them in the back room, a room with a lot of windows which, unsurprisingly, gets very warm at times like this. (I have now put a bunch of drinks in the fridge, so at least in a few hours I can have something actually cold.) I tell you: warm Irn Bru Xtra is not good.

The one vague positive is that it's time for ice cream. Ice cream is a great delight and joy, and I sincerely doubt the words of anyone who doesn't say they feel at least a bit of the same joy they felt as a child when the ice creams come out. Despite owning a breadmaker and an air fryer, we haven't quite reached the middle class status where we're making our own ice cream; just a well-stocked freezer with a selection of both creamy and fruity treats is just the ticket at a time like this.

Now, my brain is dribbling out of my ears somewhat, so I think I'm going to go and have one of those aforementioned ice creams and do something that requires minimal thought.

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