#oneaday Day 555: Silly things from around the Web

Yes, that's the NCSA Mosaic logo. I am that old.

I can't think of anything in particular to write about today, so I'm going to just talk about a few random things I happen to have seen around the Web recently, or perhaps not-so-recently in a few cases. Hopefully that will at least provide me with some inspiration to say something about each of them. So let's begin.

Lord Heath's farts

This is one of those things that I don't remember the specifics of how I stumbled across it, but I was thoroughly glad that I did. There's a chap on YouTube who goes by the name "Lord Heath", and his channel primarily consists of him doing short, light-hearted review videos of various soft drinks.

However, at various points in his past, he has also committed to video some of the most impressive flatulence ever emitted by a human being. I present to you exhibit A, which still makes me literally cry with laughter every time I watch it (and, more importantly, listen to it):

Everything about this is perfect. The earnest explanation. The explosive opening. The gradual howling of descending pitch. The crescendo towards the end as it comes in to land. The final thrust that accompanies the last burst. The fact that he's naked. Absolutely no notes whatsoever.

Five years I have been pissing myself laughing at that specific video. And I suspect I will continue to do so for many more years to come.

Jucika Daily

Jucika Daily originated on Twitter before migrating over to Bluesky when everyone realised that the place had become a Nazi bar. It's an account that posts Jucika strips, with Jucika being a mostly wordless Hungarian comic strip that ran from 1957 up until its creator's death in 1970.

Jucika centres on the life and times of an attractive young woman called Jucika and the various misadventures she has. She is depicted as being somewhat saucy, risqué and romantically forward, but the comic mostly parodies sexist attitudes rather than objectifying Jucika herself. Indeed, more often than not, Jucika is shown taking advantage of the sexist attitudes of the men around her in order to put herself at an advantage.

The Jucika Daily account posts comics from the 500 strip strong Jucika archive every day, and often includes helpful context in the alt text for each image. While the comics are almost always entirely free of dialogue, there are occasional Hungarian terms that appear on signs and suchlike, so the creator goes out of their way to explain these things where necessary.

At the time of writing, the account's creator is facing a large medical bill for an emergency kidney operation, but they are continuing to post strips while promoting their crowdfunding efforts. Even if you have no intention of handing over money to a complete stranger on the Internet, do at least go and check out the comic strips — they will make you smile.

CheapShow

The CheapShow podcast is ostensibly a show about going through the bargain bins and Poundlands of Great Britain and coming back with the treasure from amongst the trash, but really it's an excuse for best friends Paul Gannon and Eli Silverman to hang out and get very silly with one another — and to include us, the audience, in with their nonsense.

CheapShow has a number of regular features, including The Price of Shite, where Paul and Eli have to guess the prices of various pieces of tat purchased from charity shops; Off-Brand Brand-Off, where one or the other does a blind taste test of branded and unbranded variants of a particular product to determine which is best; and Eli's Country Urban Noodle Test-lab Kitchen, in which the pair taste-test different varieties of instant noodles. Alongside these, which tend to rotate in and out with each episode, the pair also often go on real-life "walkabout" episodes, where they decide to follow a walking tour on a route that falls outside of the usual "tourist" spots in London, and perhaps learn something along the way.

CheapShow works so well because Paul and Eli have magnificent chemistry with one another, and brilliant senses of humour that will resonate well with anyone around the age of 40 or so — particularly those who enjoy a good bit of old-fashioned British toilet humour. Paul and Eli are also both thoroughly lovely chaps outside of the podcast, and they deserve your support.

That'll do for today. I hope you find some enjoyment from these — I certainly have!

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 465: Home again

We have safely returned home. It is good to see the cats again, both of whom are very pleased to see us, but it is a shame that our holiday is over. (Well, technically Andie has one more day, but she has to spend it taking her mother home, so it's not a day she's going to be able to enjoy to the fullest.) I am back to work tomorrow, and already not really looking forward to logging back in to Microsoft fucking Teams, the most depressing application you can install on any computer. But oh well. It's a living and all that.

I have, as should hopefully be abundantly clear at this point, very much enjoyed my time away. It was some very much needed rest, relaxation and complete disconnection from anything to do with the Internet aside from this here blog and MoeGamer, which I wrote a couple of things on over the course of my time off.

And it was nice! I didn't once find myself habitually reaching for my phone in the hope of checking Bluesky, which I had already removed from the device some days prior to us departing. I didn't even really check the news, RSS feeds, websites or YouTube all that much while I was away, either. It was a blissful reminder that many of us voluntarily (or by necessity) corral ourselves off into insular little pockets of existence on a daily basis, and sometimes it is helpful and healthy to break completely free of all that, remind yourself that the world is a much bigger and nicer place than anything accessible via a URL or an app might lead you to believe, and just take the time to take a bit of pleasure in your own existence, and that of the people you care about.

The main reason I'm not relishing the prospect of going back to work is that it effectively forces me back into that little bubble, though I'm not going to be reactivating my Bluesky account any time soon. It is tempting to do so just to share the things I write and the videos I make, but I know all too well that "just sharing things" all too quickly turns into that detestable dependence on social media in the search for apparent meaning to one's existence, and never finding it there.

There are people I've enjoyed chatting with on Bluesky, for sure. But I'm also thoroughly over the "public town square" model of social media, with everyone vying for attention in the same frustratingly predictable ways. As good as it is that Bluesky has mostly remained resistant to the more obnoxious end of the horrible people that now dominate Twitter, there are still plenty of odious behaviours on display over there, and I'm just so tired of it all. I feel no need to engage with it; no enjoyment from engaging with it. And so I'm just… not going to.

In an ideal world, I'd be able to disconnect completely from social media from a professional perspective, too. I would love to be able to abandon social media responsibilities for the day job because I absolutely fucking hate doing those rounds each week and feel my time could be pretty much infinitely better spent doing literally anything else. That's probably a difficult conversation I'm going to have to raise carefully, though. Something to aim for, at least.

In the meantime, it will be nice to sleep a night in my own bed again, and enjoy the dearly beloved company of my wonderful cats. They were the only thing missing from a truly heavenly week away, so it is good to be back with them.

Now, onwards to life once again.

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#oneaday Day 435: Performative tediousness

As time advances ever-onwards towards my holiday and my (possibly permanent) break from social media, I find myself considering starting the whole thing early. Bluesky in particular has started showing worrying signs of the sort of passive-aggressive, performative annoyingness that plagued Twitter in the mid-2010s — this was, for me, what really set me on a path to disliking social media in general — and it's just not really fun any more.

There are aspects of Bluesky I do like. The "nuclear block", which prevents anyone seeing the specific posts you're replying to or quoting when you blocked the original poster, remains the platform's best feature, and is a good — albeit imperfect — solution to dogpiling. But dogpiling still goes on, because there are other ways of doing that.

But the passive aggressive thing, known in a past life as "subtweeting", where you post something obviously intended for the attention of a specific person, but one that you're not replying to explicitly, has seen a marked uptick recently. You know the sort of thing, posts that start "If you think [not-particularly contentious opinion, like thinking trans people should have rights], then just unfollow me now" or "When someone says [exceedingly obvious and hyper-specific red flag that clearly someone has mentioned in the last ten minutes], that tells you everything you need to know about that person" — posts that are intended to wind up a very specific person, but in a "not touching, can't get mad" sort of way; posts that encourage a "well, if you think this might be about you, you might be the problem" sort of attitude.

Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't confront hateful bigotry when it comes up. Particularly these days, when the significant progress we've made over the course of the last decade in terms of tolerance and acceptance with regard to race, gender and sexuality appears to be coming undone at a frighteningly rapid rate. But there are better ways to do it than posting passive-aggressive statements into the void. If you want to have an argument with someone, just go ahead and fucking have the argument. It might make you feel better for five minutes, until you realise how much time and energy you have wasted trying to change the mind of someone else on the Internet.

Or you could do something yourself that is more positive. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that. Calling someone bouncing off the walls going "I HATE THE JEWS" a "Nazi" is not suddenly going to make them go "shit, I am? I am, aren't I? Thank you for setting me straight". Setting a good example yourself, meanwhile, up to and including getting involved in activism if you feel strongly enough about the issue in question, is a much more productive use of everyone's time. It won't stop the Nazis being Nazis, but if there's one thing several decades of Internet discourse should tell you at this point, it's that very little will.

One technique I've found extremely useful in training myself out of getting into annoying situations online is that if I see something which, for one reason or another, angers me, I will fully type out an indignant reply, look at it for a moment, take ten seconds to think "do I actually want to post this? Is the potential fallout from posting this worth it?" and then, more often than not, delete it, because the answer to both questions is inevitably "no". Just recently, this has been happening with such frequency that I find myself asking a follow-up question: "do I really still want to be part of this community, if situations like this keep arising?" And the answer there, too, is often turning out to be "no".

This is the thinking behind my great "unplug" in early September. I'm going to disconnect completely from all forms of "discourse" online for the duration of my holiday. I'm still going to keep my phone with me, of course, and I will do things like keep up to date on the news and suchlike with RSS, but social media and any sort of "open" chat (read: Discord) is off the table for me.

I'm just glad I've never got involved with TikTok. My overwhelming feeling from my thankfully limited exposure to TikTok is that TikTok is hell for this sort of performative crap, except now you have to see someone yelling things into their phone camera instead of posting indignant text messages. And TikTok never ends. God, what a fucking nightmare proposition.

I realise this entire post could itself be seen as performative and passive-aggressive. But, frankly, this is my own website, and I'm not pushing this out into the wider world in the hope some very specific person is going to see it. I'm just writing it for myself. And possibly my cat, who has been cuddling my leg for the entire time I've been writing this. I hope you enjoyed it, Patti.

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#oneaday Day 385: Hater Checkpoint

I have spoken many times on this blog about how I find needless negativity to be exhausting, unproductive and not conducive to good conversation, but on a regular basis, I am made to feel like I have something of a minority opinion on this subject. People are much more willing to hate on things than they are to say nice things about something.

Case in point: this week one of those interminable "quote tweet (but on Bluesky)" memes did the rounds, this time encouraging people to go through Wikipedia's list of "Video games considered the best" and hate on games of their choice. Naturally, given an opportunity to spew vitriol at things a fair few people like, everyone jumped at the opportunity:

The whole post is, of course, fairly transparent engagement bait, and people fall for this sort of thing every time. But, like I say, they're significantly more likely to fall for it if the opportunity to be negative presents itself. This post got 1.8K quote posts, with people jumping at the chance to complain about titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Skyrim, Overwatch, Fortnite, Mass Effect and even fucking Pong.

I… don't understand it. I've always been of the opinion that if you're engaged with and love a hobby, then you seek out and enjoy the things about that hobby which appeal to you. Expending energy on things that you, personally, do not like — and make no mistake, pretty much every one of those quote posts is not "this is bad and here are some solid reasons why" but rather "I don't like this" — just seems like a massive waste of time and energy.

You not liking Thing does not mean that Thing is bad. It just means that, for whatever reason, it didn't click with you. And that's fine! I just don't need to hear about it, and I don't need to see you smugly thinking Your Opinion Is Correct because ooh, so brave, you think Fortnite is "bad". I don't like Fortnite, either. And that's why you've never seen me write about it. I know I won't enjoy it, I know there are many things I don't like about it — so I just don't engage with it! It's really not hard.

I'm not mad with people who do enjoy Fortnite and I don't feel the need to try and convince people that my dislike of Fortnite is "the correct opinion". I simply don't care. I have a bajillion other games to enjoy that I do like, and I'd much rather 1) play them and 2) talk about them with others. I could go off on a 20-post thread about why I don't like Fortnite, but what is that achieving? Not very much, really. To me, someone going "I hate Thing" is just a means of shutting down a conversation, whereas someone telling me how much they like Thing and why can be the start of something wonderful.

Word of mouth works! So I'd much rather it be used for something positive — I can take some sort of action with that, like buying the game you're recommending — rather than negativity.

I realise that this post is, in itself, being negative, though, so I'll just tell you that you should go and play Raiden Nova because it's a lot of fun, and leave it at that. Good night to you!

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#oneaday Day 160: The death of Twitter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 139: Non-specific ramblings

I'll level with you, dear reader, I don't really know what to write about tonight, and it's already twenty past midnight, so I decided I would just start typing and see what came out. I had been looking for inspiration in past blog posts, but ended up just reading them rather than taking any actual ideas from them. It's times like this that I'm glad I've managed to keep this one site up and running for so long — even though it has had a few challenges in the last year in particular.

But anyway. Looking back at the blog posts I wrote more than 10 years ago — I was idly browsing through entries from January 2011 — I found it striking to ponder how some things have very much stayed the same (depression, anxiety, loneliness) and others have changed quite a bit.

In one post, for example, I noted a modest ambition of mine as being able to one day buy a brand-new car. To date, I have done that not once, but twice. Well, kind of. I got roped into one of those hire-purchase schemes because I am not good at talking to salespeople, and when the term on one was concluded, I was faced with either paying up several thousand more pounds to keep the car I'd already paid several thousand pounds into on a month-by-month basis, or switching to another new car and continue paying for that on a month-by-month basis.

Not having several thousand pounds to spare at the time, I chose the latter option, which resulted in me getting a worse car for more money. But at least when that one was up, I did have the money to spare to just finish purchasing it outright. Regrettably, it was due to my inheritance from my last remaining grandparent passing away — thanks, Nan D — but that same car is still sitting comfortably on my driveway and will hopefully last a good few years more yet.

Back in 2011, I don't think I would have ever contemplated having a nearly-new piano, which I do now. Of course, 2011 was right when I was in the middle of one of the worst periods of my life, having recently separated from my first wife and started enduring what, at the time, I thought was the great indignity of having to move back in with my parents. (My mental state was not good at the time. I mean, it's not good now, but it was really bad then. I am now, at least, genuinely and honestly grateful for that safety net I had and wouldn't like to think of what might happened to me had my parents not saved me from a very bad situation. But enough of that for now.)

On the whole, my life in 2024 is in a much better place than it was in 2011. I have a stable job that I like in a field I'm proud to be part of, a decent income, an incredibly supportive and understanding wife whom I love very much, two wonderful cats whom I also love very much, and a game collection that would blow the mind of my teenage self. In terms of general "life situation", I can't complain all that much.

But I miss people. As a socially anxious and introverted person, I'm sure that's not something the me of a decade or two back would have ever thought I'd say, but man. Loneliness fucking blows. And the longer it goes on, the harder it feels like it is to do something about it. There are people I probably could reach out to and attempt to rekindle past friendships, but what does one say in that situation, and via what medium?

I feel like I've had about a decade of everyone I know drifting away from me for one reason or another — or perhaps me drifting away from them, or perhaps both — and now I just don't really know how to handle that. I would like nothing more than to return to the good old days of the "Squadron of Shame" club on 1up.com and our later website and podcast, but I wouldn't even know where to begin recapturing those good old days — or even if it's possible to do so.

The one positive thing I've found in recent months is that social network BlueSky has a pleasing "early 2010s" Twitter vibe to it right now, and that is gradually helping me to build up a sense of online confidence that has been severely knocked over the course of the last decade or so.

That's a start, at least, as loathe as I am to rely on a social network website for interacting with people, knowing as I know now that all these services eventually go down the route of enshittification. Real-life, meanwhile, I have a lot more work to do in, as my present physical condition means that I'm afraid and/or ashamed to see anyone I used to know in person because of the amount of weight I gained over the COVID years, so that's going to be a harder, more long-term project, but, well, I guess I have plenty of time on my hands.

Well, then, how about that. "Nothing to write about," he says, then goes and rambles on for nearly a thousand words. I guess that's the approach to take when I can't think of anything, then. Just sit down and write. That's what #oneaday has always been about. And that's what I'll continue to do.

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