2541: Farewell

This is my last daily post on this blog, to coincide with the last hour of the last day of 2016. I’m not going to rule out posting on here again when I feel like it, but this is the last of my daily entries. I feel that the exercise has run its course, and I’m definitely satisfied with what I’ve accomplished over the last 2,541 days.

Why am I stopping now? Well, it’s part of a broader plan I outlined a few days ago. I want to unplug and get away from the constant noise of online culture in 2016. It stopped being fun a good while ago — roughly coinciding with the rise of the outrage brigade who love nothing more than using their social media clout to shame people for enjoying “problematic” material — but it’s also been becoming increasingly apparent that the reasons I’ve been keeping my social media accounts active for as long as I have simply don’t seem to be the reasons other people keep them active.

On previous occasions when I’ve considered deactivating my Facebook and Twitter accounts — Facebook in particular — the thing that has always stopped me is the thought that “oh, people won’t be able to get hold of me easily, since everyone uses Facebook nowadays rather than anything else.” But over time it’s become apparent that while everyone does indeed use Facebook, pretty much the last thing they use it for is keeping in touch with other people. Rather, the inherent encouragement of narcissism in modern social media encourages people to post everything about their lives — or rather, everything in a heavily edited, idealised version of their lives — in an attempt to make other people feel like they should be having more fun/sex/babies/delicious meals/strong opinions about Donald Trump. And while that occasionally leads to heated debates in comment sections, it very rarely seems to lead to good conversations.

Twitter comes at it from a different angle. I’ve heard Twitter described as being like going to a party where everyone is shouting things at the room in general hoping other people will come and join the conversation, and that’s a fairly apt description. The particular trouble with Twitter is that its original selling point — its 140-character limit, intended to encourage people to “microblog” rather than post walls of text — isn’t conducive to nuanced discussion and debate, which leads to particularly obnoxious behaviour when people of differing ideologies and/or opinions about which anime girl is hottest come into contact with one another.

In short, I’ve been finding social media to be more trouble than it’s worth, so I’m unplugging from the noise in the hope that those people who do value my friendship will make use of other, more private and personal means of contacting me rather than everything being aired in public. And this blog comes under that header, too.

This blog has been valuable “therapy” for me over the course of the last few years, which have been, to say the least, rather challenging and difficult for a variety of reasons. I’ve faced many obstacles — some of my own creation, some by other people being colossal jackasses and my not really having any power to do anything about that — and, while I wouldn’t say my life is where I want it to be in the slightest, I feel that I’ve grown stronger as a person as a result.

But I feel like I need to start a new chapter. Leave behind the past, and look forward to a hopefully brighter future. It’s not easy to shed emotional baggage — not to mention the physical baggage that mental stress can leave you with — but severing my ties with the past, be they social media accounts or indeed this blog, feels like the right thing to do right now.

I’m not disappearing entirely, mind you; as I mentioned in my previous post, I still intend to keep writing weekly on MoeGamer, which will become my main place to write about games I’ve found particularly interesting or exciting, so I encourage you to subscribe over there if you like what I’m doing. And for more general writing, I’m starting up a weekly TinyLetter — effectively a small-scale mailing list — for personal notes to those of you who have been kind enough to show me friendship and support over the last few years. If you’re interested, you can sign up for that here. (Those of you for whom I have email addresses already, I’ll be taking the liberty of signing you up automatically at some point on New Year’s Day; I hope you don’t mind, and if you do, please rest assured that if you decide you don’t want to receive my notes, you can unsubscribe easily.)

Aside from that, though, at this point in my life I feel like broader Internet culture just doesn’t hold the value it once did for me, so out the window the unnecessary crap goes for 2017. I’m not encouraging any of you to follow my lead and I’m certainly not casting any judgement on those of you who still find value in social media and Internet culture at large; I’m simply saying it’s not for me, and explaining where I’ll be going if you do want to find me.

If you’d like to stay in touch more privately, please either subscribe to my TinyLetter — which you can reply to just like a normal email — or drop me a message via my Get In Touch page with your email address and/or any other contact details you’d care to share.

For those who have supported this blog for any period of time — be you lurker or regular commenter — thank you, good night, and I wish you a happy, healthy and hearty New Year. Here’s to 2017 being a better year for everyone.

2500: Traditional 500-Post Pondering

So, post 2,500. I was going to try and write something meaningful, but then I worked a 12-hour shift (voluntarily) and now I’m knackered and my feet are killing me, so my heart’s not quite in it. Still, onward we go.

Occasionally in recent months I’ve found myself wondering if I should keep this blog going, and/or if so, how long for. Why am I still doing it, who is it for and am I getting anything out of the experience?

On the whole, I think that yes, I do find it to be a valuable and helpful experience on the whole. It’s a means for me to express myself to people who know me in a way that I might not find particularly easy or practical to do so in person. It’s a means for me to talk about the things I love without having to worry about boring people in the same room as me — if you’re not interested in something I talk about for a post or two, simply don’t read it. And, of course, it’s a means to continue practicing the craft of writing, not that there’s a “right” way to do it. (Except for those people who insist on writing all their posts in lower-case letters. Those people are wrong.)

There are things on here that I’m glad I’ve talked about, and things I wish I’d never brought up. There are good times and bad times; there are things I’m happy about and things that make me infuriated.

More than anything, though, this blog is me. It’s a record of, frankly, what has ended up being a rather turbulent period in my life, and it’s been something I can focus on each day even if everything else around me might have been shit. It’s been a great outlet and a good means of broaching difficult topics as well as a place where I can happily vent my feelings, good and bad, on a daily basis.

So yes, I’m carrying on. Until when, I can’t say. But 2,500 daily posts in, it kind of seems like a shame to stop now, huh?

2212: The Stat Connection

“Go to your Stats page and check your top 3-5 posts. Why do you think they’ve been successful? Find the connection between them, and write about it.”

Daily Post, February 9, 2016

All right. Let’s have a look, then. Since we’re not that far into 2016 and WordPress doesn’t appear to have an “all time” function to search top posts, I’ll provide the top five posts (excluding the homepage, which makes up the majority of pageviews but doesn’t tell me much) for both 2016 so far and 2015. In other words, these are posts that people saw the title of (probably on social media or via a search engine) and directly clicked through to, rather than simply checking my front page each day.

Here’s 2016 so far:

And here’s 2015:

All right. So let’s get analysing.

Since I write about a wide variety of topics on this blog — regular readers will know that it’s my personal outlet for venting about whatever is on my mind on any given day rather than any attempt to provide a coherent editorial experience — it’s perhaps not surprising that not all of the entries in these two lists have something in common, but there are a few common themes along the way.

How to Do Stuff

Let’s look at 2016, first. Both How to Win at Omega Quintet and Helping your Squad in Xenoblade X were written in 2015 (indicated by them not having the orange bar next to them), yet have remained consistently popular since I wrote them. The reason for this is that they are instructional content: guides for video games. Instructions or guides are consistent traffic magnets, regardless of the subject matter of your site, because one of the most common things people search the Internet for is how to do something. Video games sites often use guide content for current popular games to attract visitors to their site and guarantee a baseline of ad revenue, then cross their fingers that readers will click through to other, less “baity” content. It doesn’t always work like that, of course, which is why we’ve seen a rise in deliberately provocative “clickbait” content across the board, not just in games journalism.

Anyway. The reason that my guide content for both Omega Quintet and Xenoblade X proved popular is that these were both games that had a specific audience, but neither of them were “big” enough for a commercial site to want to devote time and column inches to them. In other words, those searching for help when playing Omega Quintet and/or Xenoblade X would be out of luck when searching the big video games sites, but a cursory Google search would doubtless throw up my posts here fairly early on — indeed, at the time of writing, my post on Omega Quintet appears sixth in my (admittedly personalised) Google search results, embarrassingly with a typo in the preview text which I have now corrected:

It’s for this reason that a couple of my other previous posts have proven popular over time: my post on How to Play Pocket Academy, for example, detailing the baffling and frankly illogical mechanics of Kairosoft’s mobile-based school sim, rode high in my rankings for quite some time. I tell you: if you want traffic, write posts that tell people how to do stuff, and preferably how to do stuff that mainstream sites haven’t covered.

The Power of Sharing

My most popular posts are always several orders of magnitude more popular than their nearest rivals, with perhaps the most impressive example being 2015’s An Open Letter to Paul Glass, Slimming World Consultant, Upper Shirley. This post was pretty far from my more regular subject matter on popular media, particularly video games, and yet it was my most popular individual post for 2015. Why? Because it had the absolute shit shared out of it.

Paul Glass was the consultant at our local Slimming World group when I first joined, and his enthusiasm and belief in the programme was and is a big part of why I’ve stuck with it and had so much success over the course of the last year — I’ve lost six stone in a year, hopefully with more still to come off. When he revealed that he would be leaving the group to spend more time with his family in far-off climes, I felt it important to express my feelings about what he had helped me accomplish in such a way that I could be clearly understood. I’m shy and socially anxious by nature, and at the time I wrote this I’m not sure how confident I would have felt saying all those words in person, but writing them down on paper is no big deal: I can “fire and forget” that way.

Something told me that I should probably share this post a little wider than just my Twitter followers, though, and so I decided to make one of my extremely irregular visits to Facebook to post a link to the letter on the Facebook group for the Slimming World group in question. That one simple action caused that one single post to absolutely explode in popularity, as it was shared by group members, Paul himself, and subsequently by other people I’d never met involved with Slimming World in various capacities, either as group members or staff.

You never can quite tell what the next big viral sensation is going to be, but there is one thing that all my popular posts do tend to have in common:

The Passion of the Post

It is, I feel, no coincidence that my most widely shared, most popular posts are those in which I feel most passionate about the things that I am writing about. I am a person who, I feel, can express their passion for something pretty clearly through my writing. And indeed, due to the aforementioned shyness and social anxiety mentioned above, I find writing to be the easiest means through which I can express that passion to an audience that can — hopefully — appreciate what I’m saying, or at least respect it.

2015’s most popular posts were all about passion, from my letter to Paul to Perhaps We Should Stop Insulting Fans of Japanese Games. Four out of the five posts above were about video games — four out of the five posts were pretty much about the same thing, in fact, which was critics’ regular dismissive and unfair treatment of both Japanese game developers and the fans of the games they make — but these posts all resonated deeply both with myself and with the circle of friends I’ve cultivated on social media, most of whom share the same interests as me.

Consequently, much as my letter to Paul got shared far and wide, so too did The Joyless Wankers of the Games Press (actually written the year before in response to an absolutely atrocious review of Fairy Fencer F on my former stomping grounds of USgamer), Some Thoughts for Critics (a response to Jim Sterling’s dreadful and ill-informed review of Senran Kagura 2), Hi Games Journalism, It’s Time We Had Another Chat (a response to Mike Diver’s equally dreadful and ill-informed review of Senran Kagura 2, a game which is a ton of fun but which proved to be a whipping boy for self-described “progressive” types on the grounds of the female characters’ big jiggly breasts) and the aforementioned Perhaps We Should Stop Insulting Fans of Japanese Games (a response to an extraordinarily narrow-minded editorial on USgamer by my former editor Jeremy Parish, and almost certainly the reason he has me blocked on Twitter). I saw these posts get shared and reshared, not only on Twitter, but also on Facebook and Reddit, the latter of which I don’t really use myself.

The things I had written had clearly got the strength of my feelings across, and other people felt like they could relate to them in some way — either agreeing or disagreeing — and this caused them to explode in popularity, at least in terms of numbers. The same, too, can be said for 2016’s Why It Would Be A Mistake to Not Localise Valkyrie Drive Bhikkuni, an impassioned plea for the progressive loudmouths not to stop Senran Kagura creator Kenichiro Takaki’s new game making it over to Western shores.

Bovril?

I’ll be honest, I have no idea why a post from 2013 about beef-and-yeast-extract black sticky substance Bovril is my third most popular post this year so far, but oddly enough this post has been consistently popular: it finished 2015 in sixth place, just after my various rants at the games journalism industry and also ranked sixth in 2014, but only managed 19th place in its original year of publication.

It’s not even a particularly exciting post: it simply describes what Bovril is and how I feel about it. It doesn’t even appear on the front page of Google results for Bovril. But I guess it meant something to someone somewhere. Perhaps not many people write about Bovril on the Internet, and my post offered a safe space for Bovril fans to convene and share in silent contemplation of salty beef drinks. Or perhaps it’s just one of those things that can’t quite be explained.

So what can we learn from this?

There are a few things you can probably see my most popular posts have in common. To my eye, these things are:

A clear, conversational title that makes it clear what the post is about — i.e. a simple subject line rather than a “title” that tries to be clever or funny
Passion for the subject — clear emotion, either positive or negative, is infectious and relatable
Scope for sharing — be it a topic that a lot of people feel strongly about, or something that is written in such a way that presents a strong argument in favour of or against something
Complete honesty — even at the expense of a few “bridges” if necessary
Instructions on how to do stuff — particularly if nowhere else has published instructions on how to do that stuff

Not all of my most popular posts have all of the above elements — although I do make a specific effort to apply the “complete honesty” element to everything I write — but these are, by far, the most common factors that all of my most popular posts have between them.

I hope that’s proved as enlightening for you as it has for me: it’s certainly given me some food for thought with regard to what to write about going forward from here, so I’d say both as a writing exercise and an analytical investigation, this post has been a great success.

Thanks, Daily Post!

2049: Dear Diary

There are times when I wonder whether this blog is the best way to handle getting thoughts out of my head in some form or another.

I used to keep a diary when I was younger. I’m not really sure why; I think it was partly due to the fact that I very much enjoyed the Adrian Mole books and fancied myself as being a similar sort of person to him in some ways. (I later realised that Adrian was a bit of a twat — or at least became a bit of a twat in the later books — and rescinded my earlier appraisal.) Mostly, though, it was about the fact that I enjoyed writing and found it cathartic, particularly if there were things bothering me.

I remember my first diary. It was a really nice leather-bound book with lovely paper, and it said “Journal” on the side of it. It was a souvenir from somewhere or other; I forget exactly where, but my first entry recounted a trip with my parents to the thrilling-sounding National Stone Centre, and subsequent entries had a touch of the “scrapbook” about them, with bits and pieces stuck in and all manner of things.

Then one day I decided to change things up a bit. I decided to use my diary as something a little more personal. Rather than effectively doing what I would do in a school English class — “today we went to [x] and did [y], it was [z]” — I decided that I would use the diary as a means of expressing the thoughts, feelings and emotions that I felt unable or hesitant to talk about with anyone, be it my friends or relatives.

My mental state throughout my school years was a little turbulent, to say the least. I suffered dreadful bullying at primary school, and this continued in secondary school until I punched my main tormentor in the face just as the school principal was coming around the corner. (I largely got away with it, because frankly he had it coming.) Although the instances of outright bullying calmed down somewhat after this watershed moment, my social awkwardness and inability to understand the concept of being in any way fashionable — a trait I maintain to this day, though it matters a bit less now — meant that I was occasionally still the butt of jokes, even from people who were my friends most of the time. If the cool kids were around and there was the opportunity to make a joke at my expense, people normally took it, and this didn’t do much for my self-confidence.

I learned quite early on in my life that I was the sort of person who was prone to falling for people pretty quickly. My crippling self-doubt meant that I was ecstatic anyone would even give me the time of day, and even more so if said person was a girl. Having little to no understanding of relationships, though, I didn’t really know how to approach girls and try to take things anywhere beyond friendship; this was about the time Friends was airing on TV, so I found myself relating very much to David Schwimmer’s Ross character, and would watch the episode where he and Rachel got together over and over again while fantasising about one day being in that situation myself.

Anyway. The upshot of all this is that I found it difficult to express my feelings about people that I found myself liking. I was embarrassed if anyone found out who I “fancied”, and my friends would often take advantage of my squirming by hijacking the middle pages of my exercise books, scrawling my beloved’s name in huge letters and decorating the page overly flamboyantly. I’d protest, but secretly I actually quite appreciated the fact that they were acknowledging my feelings, and in their own strange, mocking way, I think they were trying to make me feel better, because it almost certainly became clear to them over time that regardless of my feelings towards any of these girls that I fell for during my time at school, I would never, ever do anything about it.

It’s not that I didn’t want to, though, and that’s where the new part of my diary came in. I would use the diary to express myself and try to figure out my feelings about the people that I liked. I’d even — and I realise that this is probably depicting me as a weird sort of creepy psycho — plan out how an “ideal” encounter with my beloved at the time would go. I’d script a conversation — like a play — as if everything was going exactly the way I would want it to, and on one memorable occasion I even drew diagrams of how I’d get my friends to occupy my beloved’s friends so I could get her by herself and talk to her alone. (I actually followed through on this on one occasion of uncharacteristic courage; it didn’t work, though I did get a hug and a “let’s be friends” out of it.)

None of the romances I dreamed of in my diary came to fruition — I had precisely two girlfriends in secondary school, one of whom I became involved with when I was actually trying to get it on with someone else, who cheated on me at the school prom (and is now, so far as I know, married to the dude she cheated on me with, so, err, good job, I guess?) and another with whom I got together during a recording of the BBC’s Songs of Praise at the local animal shelter, kissed precisely once, didn’t see for three days and then got dumped by proxy because she “wanted things to go back to the way they were before”. And, at times, this lack of “action” got to me a bit, particularly as I saw some of my friends getting started with what would turn out to be pretty long-term relationships. But the diary helped. In some ways, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t muster up the courage to go and talk to these people that I was attracted to, because my diary provided me with a means to express myself without having to put myself on the line, without risking humiliation, and without threatening my real-life friendship with the objects of my affections; my greatest fear was telling someone that I liked them, and them promptly never speaking to me ever again after that. In retrospect, this was a silly fear, but it was a big deal to teenage me.

I’m not sure when it happened, but one day I looked back over my diary and I suddenly felt ashamed of myself. It was a fantasy world, I knew; these conversations I’d script, these scenarios I’d describe, these fancies I’d indulge — none of them would ever be real, and that got to me. I also became absolutely terrified at the prospect of my diary ever being found by someone I really didn’t want to read it, so one day while I was alone in the house, I took one last look through that lovely leather-bound journal’s pages, stared at it for a few moments, then took it outside to the dustbin and buried it beneath a number of stinky, empty cans of cat food. I can only assume it ended up on a rubbish dump or landfill site somewhere, but occasionally I wondered if anyone would ever actually find it and read it — and what they would think of the clearly troubled mind that scrawled in its pages on an almost daily basis.

To my knowledge, though, no-one ever did read it. And for that I’m sort of grateful, because it would have been mortifying; but at the same time, I wonder if I might not have been able to make myself a little more understood if people had read it. And I guess that’s partly what this blog is about; it’s not quite the same as my diary and I’m certainly not going to start scripting fantasy conversations between me and people I fancy (largely because I’m married to the person that I love and thus have no need to), but it lets me get the weights off my mind at times, and, since it’s public — the journal left lying open on my desk, as it were — I hope it makes me at least a little more understood to others.

And if not, well, you can have a good old giggle at how messed up I am, huh. Either way, thanks for reading.

2025: Building Character

So, since I “rebranded” this place on day 2000, you’ve probably (maybe, possibly not) been wondering who on Earth the people who appear in the images of questionable quality that appear at the top of each post are. So today I’m going to explain who they are and not at all make up backstories and personalities for them on the fly. No sir,

(Layout of this post might look a bit weird if you’re not viewing the site at its full width. I apologise.)

This is me. You all know me. You may wonder why I am never facing the “camera” and the reason absolutely, positively is not that Manga Maker ComiPo! doesn’t have any “beard” attachments for character faces. Rather, it is simply to maintain an air of mystery about my person and to reflect the fact that I am someone who tends to enjoy watching things unfold rather than necessarily taking an active part in them — at least when it comes to things like social situations and the like.

My choice of appearance is due to the fact that I quite like wearing suits (although damn, they are hot and unpleasant to wear in the summer) and I have messy hair and glasses. I’m somewhat larger than this depiction, but I’m on the way to a slimmer, leaner self thanks to Slimming World.

This is Midori. She’s named after my Japanese evening class teacher from a while back; while I’m not taking those classes any more, Midori inspired me and encouraged me and made me believe that one day I might actually be able to understand the Japanese language. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m on the way.

Midori is 16 years old, and an energetic, enthusiastic, sociable girl, albeit one who isn’t the sharpest tool in the box. She makes up for her overwhelming lack of common sense with the amount of passion she exhibits when throwing herself into an activity — any activity. She reflects the part of me that enjoys enthusing about things with people who share my hobbies and interests, and the part of me that wishes it could just “let go” a bit and be a little less up-tight and highly-strung at times.

This is Yumi. I originally created her to effectively be the “opposite” of Midori in almost every way besides gender, but she started to develop a bit of her own personality in her own right as a natural result of this process.

Trope-wise, I’d describe her as a combination of kuudere and tsundere tropes; she’s quiet and softly spoken, yet prone to impatience at times and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Despite this, she’s been best friends with Midori since childhood, and tolerates her friend’s quirks because she secretly finds dealing with her more fun than she’d ever let on in her own right.

Yumi represents the part of me that is concerned with doing things that are “right” and “respectable”, and the part that sometimes just wants to get on with life without anyone else interfering.

This is Luther. He’s just a prick. Also I apparently forgot to give him any shoes when I created him, so that just makes him even more of a prick.

Luther doesn’t represent any part of me in particular (except, perhaps, the part that can be a prick) and instead largely exists as a character that can be on the receiving end of various unpleasant happenings because I feel bad making bad things happen to Midori and Yumi. (Although I did run over Midori with a spaceship in yesterday’s post, so…)

He was originally created so “I” had someone to punch in the face for the post I wrote about arcade games a while back. He was subsequently also kicked in the bollocks by Midori in my post about Heroes of the Storm a couple of days later.

There you go, then. I hope that was enlightening, or at least fun. Now it’s time for bed for me!

1602: Search Terms

It’s been a long time since I pored over my blog’s stats — largely because I don’t particularly care about them, since I’m writing more for myself than anyone else — but it’s occasionally interesting to take a peek at the search terms that show how people have arrived at this ‘ere site.

For the longest time, my blog’s most popular post was this one, which features animated GIFs of stickmen doing various offensive things to one another. People would show up at my blog through search terms like “stickman sex gif” and the like — why on Earth were so many people searching for this sort of thing when there is far better porn available on the Internet? — and this, consequently, led to that post being consistently popular. Alongside that, some things I wrote ages ago about classic PC games Divine Divinity and No-One Lives Forever proved consistently popular, as did my guide on how to play Kairosoft’s mobile game Pocket Academy.

It’s only been fairly recently that those consistently popular posts have finally fallen off my top search terms — although, looking today, Pocket Academy is still there. Instead, we have a few newcomers.

First up was this post, in which I bemoaned the repetitiveness and utter stupidity of “[brand] sponsors [programme] on [channel]” bumpers on commercial TV channels — specifically, the infuriatingly asinine “Alpen Sponsors Characters on Dave” campaign, which features a middle-aged, bearded man speaking with a funny accent and saying painfully unfunny lines clearly written by a bored advertising executive who was apparently once told by someone that they were “really funny” more to shut them up than anything else. Since said advertising campaign is still running on Dave, it seems there’s a certain degree of interest in this campaign — search terms include people asking who the guy is (I have no idea) and, so far as I can make out, why the fuck it exists.

It seems I’ve become a source of information on certain types of games and types of entertainment, too. Someone arrived today looking for a map of the Endless Road dungeon in Demon Gaze (while I am playing Demon Gaze right now, you won’t find any maps here, sorry), while another person wanted to find out which of the in-game races had the most HP. (I have no idea there either.)

Alongside that, there are just plain bizarre pairings of search terms, the oddest of which is kiss x sis and doctor who, an unholy fusion of a somewhat ecchi anime and the classic, resurrected BBC sci-fi series from which this blog takes its name, but which I do not.

Then there’s the person asking “is bovril good for you” — I have no idea, sorry, though with how salty it tastes, I doubt it — and “waiting for the phone to ring” which, I assume, led them to this post, or possibly this one.

It paints an interesting picture of the people I am somehow attracting to this site — or at least, the type of people that Google feels is appropriate to send over here. Everyone is welcome, one and all; I can’t promise you’ll find what you’re looking for, but hopefully you’ll stumble across something fun in the meantime.

1433: Search This

In the absence of anything particularly interesting to talk about today, I once again braved the pit that is this blog’s search terms to see exactly how people are finding me.

Yesterday’s search terms were less than enlightening, consisting of one instance of “your minge smells”, one instance of “ayakashi ghost guild hot girls” and twenty-two search terms that the search engines in question didn’t pass on to WordPress.

I’m not entirely sure how the first one led someone here, since actually searching the site itself for “your minge smells” reveals that, as I suspected, I have never used that particular combination of words in any of the 1,498 posts I’ve written on here since July of 2008. I can’t think why I would use that particular combination of words on a post here, save for the fact that it’s an amusing way to tell someone they have an unpleasantly fragrant vagina. That said, there aren’t all that many people I feel comfortable enough with to comment on the scent of their lady-parts, so I don’t honestly see myself breaking it out all that often.

As for “ayakashi ghost guild hot girls”, I can only assume this was a reference to the time when I briefly tried to understand the Japanese card-battling phenomenon by spending a bit of time with Zynga’s take on the genre, the aforementioned Ayakashi Ghost Guild. While noting that most of these card-battling games are full of hot girls in various provocative outfits isn’t entirely inaccurate, it’s not something I commented on in my original post, nor is it a game that I’ve returned to or deemed worthy of further discussion since then. So to the person who came here searching for the hot girls of Ayakashi Ghost Guild, I can only apologise and send you on your way. (And if you’re after sexy pics of anime girls, believe me, there are a lot better places to look than a mobile card game. Uh, apparently.)

What about those mysterious hidden search terms, though? I kind of want to know what they are now, though there’s no real way of finding out as far as I can tell. I do know that for some inexplicable reason the top search term on my blog of all time is “BioShock”, a game I didn’t like all that much, closely followed by “teaching sucks”, a viewpoint I still very much stand by.

But then “monster cock” is pretty high up the list too, so I don’t really know what to think any more.

Anyway, I’m getting tired and slightly delirious so I think that’s a good place to leave that.

1260: Which Way?

To be perfectly frank with you, dear reader, I sometimes feel like I’m running out of things to write about on this ‘ere blog.

It’s not true at all, of course — there’s always something to write about, however niche interest it might be. But on more than one occasion I’ve sat down to write and wondered if it was really worth talking about the thing I feel like talking about. My usual response to this particular mental block is just to say “fuck it” and write it anyway, with the usual disclaimer that anything I write here is my own personal opinion and does not reflect the opinions of etc. etc. you know the drill from a million and one Twitter bios.

I do sometimes question why I’m still writing this. This is the 1,260th day since I started writing something on this blog every single day, and my reasons for writing have changed considerably over that time.

Actually, I’m not sure that’s entirely true; my reasons for writing here have always been nothing more noble than “for personal satisfaction” and “to have something interesting to do”. My feelings towards the things I’m writing have obviously changed in parallel with my life situation at various times, however: when I first started blogging daily, I was still working in teaching and having a thoroughly miserable time; this then proceeded through my 2010 trip to PAX East, a mini-vacation that I maintain is one of the most carefree, happy times I’ve ever experienced; through the breakup of my marriage; the general collapse of my life as a whole and the subsequent rebuilding thereof.

I find it quite interesting to look back every so often and see the course my life has taken, whether that’s through manually navigating to fondly-remembered posts — yes, even with 1,260 daily posts, I still have specific favourites and can usually navigate to them fairly quickly — or clicking the “Random Post” button at the top of the screen.

One thing I have found is that I was at my most creative when I was at my most miserable. I won’t lie to you, dear reader, I most certainly haven’t shaken off the Black Dog of depression by any means, but I’m a lot better than the emotional wreck I was during the downfall of my marriage. But while I have absolutely no desire to return to those dark days, I do find it intriguing that I found it a lot easier to come up with creative, funny, off-the-wall posts when I was suffering. Perhaps it was a defence mechanism: putting up a barrier around the pain I was feeling in an attempt to not “bring down” everyone around me; perhaps it was just a way of attempting to make myself feel better. I don’t know. Whatever it was, I miss it in a perverse sort of way; the flashes of inspiration I had in those days don’t come quite as often as they once did.

Said flashes of inspiration were three years ago, though, so it’s entirely possible that I’m just older and wiser(?) or, at the very least, just older. I don’t really feel that different, though; perhaps it’s a subtle thing. The evidence is there, after all.

Anyway, I’ve pontificated for long enough about nothing at all, but at least it’s given me an entry for today. I am tired now. I think it is time to go to sleep. Good night!

1142: Hello

So after publishing last night’s post (which, I’ll be honest, was composed somewhat in haste after a lengthy Ridge Racer Unbounded session prompted it, immediately before my bedtime) I was rather surprised to receive an email from someone named Michelle at WordPress, who informed me that my post was going to be featured in the Freshly Pressed section of WordPress.com. Thank you, Michelle, that was very nice of you, and it was even nicer to receive an email that was clearly from an actual person rather than an automated robot. Big love to all of the WordPress team.

Taking Michelle’s email to heart, though, it’s entirely possible that there might be a few new visitors around here in the immediate future, so I thought I’d take today to (re)introduce myself for the umpteenth time, and explain a little about what this blog is for and why I number all my posts.

So, then. Hello. I’m Pete. I’m a 31-year old bloke from the grey and miserable isle that is Great Britain. I live in Southampton, which is a city that has been the focal point of my life ever since I left home in 1999 to go to university there. Over the years, I’ve flitted around a bit for various reasons (mostly work) but always ended up coming back to Southampton either temporarily (to see friends) or, as happened just before Christmas, permanently. Or as “permanently” as any place I’ve lived since 1999 has been.

I live in a nice flat with my girlfriend Andie. Technically I’m married to someone else, though the circumstances of why the person I’m living with is not the person I’m married to are terribly complicated and not something I feel particularly inclined to go into here. Suffice to say, if you look at blog posts from around May of 2010 you’ll get a general idea of how I was feeling when that all went down, and besides, all of that will be resolved this year. (I will also note that there is no bad blood there — forgive and forget and all that — it’s just something I have found difficult to deal with until quite recently. And no, I don’t want to talk about it further.)

The above sort of brings me onto the subject of this blog, which you may have noticed I update on a daily basis. I actually posted a number of pieces on this site before beginning to post daily, but it was in January of 2010 (the 19th, to be exact) that I started a personal tradition that I still keep to this day: daily blog posts. Originally, these daily posts were part of a Twitter-based movement known as “#oneaday”. This was a group who banded together in an attempt to post something — anything — once per day as a means of continually flexing our collective writing muscles. Many of the original participants — including the person who started the whole thing — dropped out of the running very quickly, but there were a number of us who kept it up all the way through 2010. In 2011, I attempted to coordinate a larger effort to get as many people posting regularly on their blogs and encouraging their readers to donate to charity. It was moderately successful — we raised about £200 or so, I think, which wasn’t too bad considering the number of people involved — but ultimately most writers lost interest. It also became a bit too much work for me to manage by myself, but I’m not ruling out the possibility of organising something along the same lines again in the future.

Anyway, all that aside, I’m still going, and this post you’re reading right now is my 1,142nd daily post in a row. I cover a variety of different topics on this blog according to what I’m thinking about at any given moment and, to a lesser extent, whether or not my girlfriend has complained that I’m being “boring”. My strongest interests are video games (particularly Japanese role-playing games and visual novels, though if you mention TrackMania to me I can go for hours); music (I play the piano, clarinet and saxophone and occasionally compose stuff); board games; and, as 1,141 previous posts will attest, writing. I also use this blog as an “outlet” when I need to get some raw, honest words or thoughts out of my head and onto the page. I suffer with depression and anxiety (personified by the big black cloud “Des” in the header image) and find it helpful to talk about these things.

If this blog and its crudely-drawn stickmen aren’t enough Pete for you, then you can check out my professional work every day at Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps, and my “pet project” at Games Are Evil. I also hang out a lot with my video gaming buddies the Squadron of Shame on Google+, and if you either 1) would like to hear my delicious, fruity, full-bodied English accent or 2) are interested in “underappreciated” video games , then I suggest you have a listen to the Squad’s irregularly-occurring podcast, the Squadron of Shame SquadCast. You can find the archives here, and a new episode on the subject of Spec Ops: The Line is coming soon.

#oneaday Day 895: Clip Show, Part 2

That’s right. Not only am I doing my own personal “clip show” (which actually proved a surprising amount of effort to compile yesterday), I am also making it a two-parter. Oh yes. Today’s look back looks at some posts from my first forays into daily posting and beyond.

For the uninitiated, the whole One A Day thing came about towards the beginning of 2010. A number of writers from diverse corners of the Internet decided to try their hand at posting something on their blog every single day. I came to the whole thing a little late — my first post was on January 19 — but have kept it up ever since, which, it has to be said, is more than can be said for the vast majority of participants in the 2010 experiment. (The only other one I’m aware of who is still going is Play Magazine’s Ian Dransfield, who remains consistently ahead of me in terms of “number of posts”, though has resorted to the “miss a few days and catch up later” strategy a few times.)

Anyhow, the guiding principle of One A Day was very simple: just write. No rules, no minimum length, no set topics, just write. For you. If other people happened to enjoy it, so much the better, but it was primarily an exercise in churning out content on a regular basis and keeping those “writing muscles” well and truly exercised.

It’s been an interesting experiment for me, as the things I’ve talked about on here have grown and changed over time according to my life situation and my own mental state. In the early days, for example, I was very much of the opinion that my career in the teaching profession was probably going to kill me, but I was also excited by the fact that I was going to escape my (temporary) position in time to go to PAX East. PAX East, as it turned out, was an amazing experience and remains, to this day, my Favourite Thing I’ve Ever Done.

It was around this time that I found myself with a lot of free time on my hands. I’d left my job and didn’t have anything else to go to, and I was (foolishly, as it turned out) hoping that I’d be able to support myself with freelance writing and private music teaching. I got a bit of income coming in thanks to the fine folks at Kombo.com (most of whom I now count among my most beloved online friends) but that, unfortunately, didn’t last forever.

Neither, to use a hideous segue that I don’t particularly like thinking about, did my marriage. I was an absolute fucking wreck as a result of the events which came to a head in May of 2010, though in retrospect it helped me produce some fine, emotional work such as — bear with me — this rather personal ode to a bacon sandwich. It also encouraged me to unscrew my head and put it on a different way just to try and stop myself thinking about Bad Things. Or just to get really, really pissed and then take stock of the disastrous attempts at texting and social media I’d made while inebriated. Let’s do itcagsin sometime.

Fortunately, I had Stick-Pete to keep my mind off things. (His first appearance was here.) Stick-Pete was a conscious decision to try and give my blog a distinctive aesthetic, and I make no secret of the fact that my decision to incorporate poorly-drawn visuals rather than the stock photography I’d been using previously was entirely due to my discovery of Allie Brosh’s rather wonderful blog Hyperbole and a Half, which I extolled the virtues of here. I was initially worried that people might think I was ripping off Brosh’s work, but I developed my own distinctive look over time which has, itself, changed and adapted as time goes on.

Stick-Pete and a series of characters I plucked out of my imagination seemingly at random were excellent ways to clumsily illustrate the things I was writing about, and a number of posts were designed with illustration in mind, such as this guide on How To Laugh on the Internet. Certain characters were, I noticed, making appearances more regularly than others, so I thought it would be an interesting experiment to start drawing a comic to illustrate my posts. Here’s the first post in which that appeared. I kept that up for a surprisingly long time, though eventually guilt at not being able to post if I went away for a weekend (my comic-making tools of choice were on my non-portable Mac) got the better of me and I eventually stopped. Now I just feel guilty that Alex, Lucy and Phillipe aren’t getting regular outings and opportunities to insult me, so it’s entirely possible they may return at some point in the near future. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, this post from the start of 2011 helpfully reintroduced them all.)

As time went on, the years passed and my life situation started to gradually improve once again, so I tried a couple of things, some of which you’ll find linked to in the sidebar. Wasteland Diaries was a 30-day “improvised narrative” experiment, for example, in which I attempted to write a coherent(ish) story over the course of a month, similar to what those NaNoWriMo people do. (I had wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo for a while, but various circumstances had always made it impractical. This was my less-structured, less-disciplined approach — but I saw it through.)

I also cemented my view that writing on this ‘ere blog was a good personal outlet. Obviously I don’t mean that in the sense that I use it to badmouth people (I don’t! You can look back and check!) but rather that it was a good place to get things out of my head and onto “paper” — things that other people might feel somehow “ashamed” to talk about. One such subject was the visual novel Katawa Shoujo which is, for those of you who don’t know, a rather wonderful interactive love story set in a Japanese school for the disabled. It was a fascinating, well-written game worthy of some deep analysis and criticism, so not only did the Squadron of Shame take it on for a lengthy podcast, but I also felt inspired to write about it a great deal. It touched me deeply, and the subjects explored therein resonated hugely with me. I’m not disabled, but a lot of the underlying themes in the game’s various narrative branches were actually nothing to do with the characters’ disabilities, and really got me thinking.

As you can see, I’ve been busy. And somehow there’s been something to write about every day, even if it hasn’t been very interesting. (For that I make no apologies. Although I seem to have picked up a small but dedicated readership over time, I’m still writing this primarily for my own benefit.) There’s plenty more interesting times in the future — good and bad, no doubt — so I’ll look forward to sharing them (or avoiding thinking about them) via this page for a long time to come yet, I hope.

Now, to just resist the temptation not to post tomorrow and make everyone believe I’m dead…

Hah. Just kidding. Writing this blog is so entrenched in my daily routine now that I’m not convinced I could give it up, even if I wanted to. So like it or not, you’re stuck with me. (And thanks for sticking around this long. Incidentally, if you want some more links to past material, here’s another “clip show”-type post. Enjoy.)