#oneaday Day 593: A meaningfully revised roadmap

Ubisoft has announced today that they are cancelling six games, delaying seven more, closing two studios and forcing everyone back to five days a week in the office. Their justification for this is the usual mealy-mouthed, weasel word-filled business-speak nonsense:

In the context of a persistently more selective market as illustrated by the last quarter, and as part of the finalization of the Group's new operating model, Ubisoft has conducted a thorough review of its content pipeline over December and January. This has led to the strategic decision to refocus its portfolio, reallocate resources and comprehensively revise its roadmap over the next three years. This will support the objective to return to exceptional levels of quality on the Open-World Adventure segment and step-change the Group's position in the GaaS-native experiences segment, as illustrated by the recently acquired project, March of Giants.

In other words, Ubisoft is going back to focusing almost exclusively on the type of game people have been taking the piss out of them for years for — there's a reason people refer to open-world games where you hoover up icons from a map as "Ubisoft Game #[bigNumber]". And, when they're not doing that, they're going to jump headfirst into the exceedingly volatile live service arena, where the last decade or so has clearly demonstrated that if your name isn't Fortnite or Roblox you are almost certainly going to release an enormously expensive colossal failure of a game that will be shuttered in less than a year.

To put it another way, for every Fortnite there are hundreds of Concords. And most of them don't get the coverage Concord did. They just release to zero excitement, zero acclaim and zero passion from anyone, then quietly die in obscurity, destined to be forgotten forever.

All of this seems extraordinarily stupid, particularly since one of the cancelled games was the remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, whose original incarnation is one of the company's most well-regarded games from years gone by, and a title that would have doubtless reviewed and performed well among today's audience. But no; because it "does not meet the new enhanced quality as well as more selective portfolio prioritization criteria at Group level", it is kaputt. It is no more. It is an ex-game.

Ubisoft has, of course, been undergoing something of a turbulent time, so these "strategic decisions" to "refocus" (read: lay people off) are not a surprise to see. Business decisions like this are, at times, regrettably unavoidable.

However, what is eminently avoidable is charging headlong into sectors that the general public have clearly indicated that they're sick of. Not only "the Open-World Adventure segment" and "GaaS-native experiences", but also, unsurprisingly, they slipped this little bit into their "revised roadmap":

The new operating model will further empower the execution of the Group's strategy, centred on Open World Adventures and GaaS-native experiences, supported by targeted investments, deeper specialization, and cutting-edge technology, including accelerated investments behind player-facing Generative AI.

There it is! Of course there's fucking generative AI involved, because why wouldn't there be? The industry that is losing billions of dollars a year and is pretty much universally hated by anyone whose job isn't just "shareholder" is clearly the right thing for this ailing company to focus on! Surely the generator of what is commonly agreed to be called "slop" these days will help us make better games! Everyone loves AI! Don't they?

(silence)

(a quiet cough)

God fucking dammit. Living in this century is so fucking frustrating, like, all of the time. I haven't been much of a fan of Ubisoft stuff for numerous years at this point, but all this just makes it abundantly clear that they have zero respect for any of the actual creative work that goes into games. Look again at those quotes above, and count how many times artistry and creativity are mentioned.

That's right. Absolutely nothing whatsoever.

At least they're being honest about it, I guess.

I wonder how long they have left?

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 276: Writer's Block, Occurrence #976,425

I've been pootling through the "Random Post" option at the top of this blog for the last half an hour, trying to think of something to write about, and nothing has been particularly forthcoming, so I'm just going to do what I usually do in this situation, which is to start typing and just see where things go from there. Expect stream of consciousness, and nothing of any real consequence.

I have the farts this evening. I don't think I've eaten anything particularly fartworthy, but I am cracking off some rippers. I had a bit of a stomachache last night, so perhaps it's a remnant of that. It doesn't really matter. All that does matter is that I am trouser-trumpeting like a good'un, and I haven't even shat myself. Winner. Nothing worse than following through on a fart, which is something I have, to my knowledge, only done once, and in my defence I was already quite ill with something else at the time. (It was not, before you ask, being intoxicated in any way.)

I've spent much of this evening chasing down additional endings in Tokyo Dark: Remembrance, which I've been playing on Switch. This is an adventure game that was recommended to me a while back, and happened to come up as a recommendation just as a limited-press physical release became available, so I snapped it up. Hearing that it was on the short side, I figured it would be an ideal game to squeeze into this gap between finishing Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles X arriving, and indeed it has been. I'll write in more detail about it on MoeGamer at some point in the next few days, but suffice to say for now that it's an interesting blend of detective work, a touch of yakuza shenanigans, and some Shinto-inspired ghost stories. Good times.

I reckon next up I'm probably going to work on finishing Soul Blazer on SNES. I'm into the fourth main chapter of that now — I believe there are seven, but I could be wrong — and have been really enjoying it. There's something about the tone of the whole thing that I really like; doubtless it's partly down to the relative limitations placed on the text (and the localisation) due to the platform it's on, but it has a strangely… earnest tone to its dialogue that I am finding rather compelling. Again, probably more about that on MoeGamer at some point in the near future.

More farts. And I've left this a bit too late to write anything of any real substance, so I think I'm going to go and have a poo (just in case, you know) then go to bed. Tomorrow is a new day that… will be much like this one. And now the robot vacuum has started up, so it's definitely time to go to bed. Good night!

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#oneaday Day 257: When it's bollocks, say it's bollocks

I am an avid reader of Ed Zitron's blog (sorry, newsletter, because apparently that's just what we call blogs now) Where's Your Ed At? If you're at all interested in the tech space, I highly recommend you subscribe or at least check in on it regularly, because Zitron is one of the only people in the space who has the balls to say it like it is: that an awful lot of what is coming out of the mouths of tech companies right now is complete and utter bollocks.

Today, a story went round about a research project at Microsoft where they were using generative AI for "game ideation", and also noted that they thought they could use their generative AI models for "preservation". This was reported on by Tom Warren, senior editor at The Verge, thus (screenshotted rather than embedded 'cause the coward deleted it after everyone dunked on it):

Now, if you know anything about video game preservation, you know that feeding an old game into a generative AI model and then hoping it will hallucinate at least a rough approximation of the original game experience is not "preservation". It's bastardisation at best, a completely useless endeavour at worst, and a massive waste of energy and money regardless of the result that comes out of the other end.

Game preservation is a problem that, for the most part, we have solved. We have excellent software emulation solutions, built over the course of decades of development. Hardware emulation via FPGA at an affordable cost for the general public has advanced hugely in just a few short years. Software libraries for pretty much any system you can think of are archived in their entirety at numerous places across the Internet, and strong strides have been made in providing commercial, legally relicensed versions of classic games for a modern audience, both on existing modern systems and on bespoke emulation-centric devices.

So why, then, why the fuck would we want a generative AI model to make a best guess at what a video game that already exists and has been preserved perfectly well might look like if you play it for longer than 10 frames?

That paragraph above is what tech journalists should be asking. And the reason I bring up Ed Zitron at the start of this post is because he's one of the only people to actually ask questions like this: to take a look at the utter garbage being spewed by today's tech companies and to say "this is complete horseshit, what the actual fuck are you on?"

And Zitron, being an outspoken type, is not afraid to call out today's tech journalism space for not doing this. And he's absolutely right to do so. It is the tech journalism sector's job to look at what it going on, to realise that it is complete horseshit and then have the confidence to say that it is complete horseshit.

But they won't do that, for a variety of reasons. Advertising deals. Exclusive access. PR partnerships. An inexplicable desire not to rock the boat, despite the fact the boat has a huge hole in it and has been steadily sinking for 15-20 years at this point.

I'm not one of those people who thinks that journalists are taking bribes for positive reviews in literally all circumstances — I have experience in the industry, remember, and the most I had to worry about in that regard was a mild admonishment from my editor for criticising a Mortal Kombat game's DLC plan when Mortal Kombat was the cover game for that issue of GamePro.

But come on now. Tech journos should be looking at this utter garbage that keeps getting flung our way, and instead of declaring it "interesting" and doing the stupid looky-eyes emoji that makes their post immediately look like a 14 year old girl wrote it, they should be going "hang on a minute, what does that actually mean?" then exploring it further, asking some probing questions (which inevitably won't get a response, but that in itself says something) and then confidently declaring the latest generative AI "innovation" to be what it is: complete and utter horseshit doused in the finest snake oil.

And people wonder why the entire journalism sector is floundering. Could it perhaps be because very little actual journalism seems to be getting done?

Shout-out at this point not only to Ed Zitron's aforementioned blog, but also the excellent coverage of the Elon Musk nonsense in the States by Wired's politics department, 404 Media being a rare example of tech journalism that actually asks those hard-hitting questions, and Aftermath for doing something similar with games journalism. There are still people doing good work out there. But the people on the big, well-known mastheads, like Warren above, need to step their game up, stop being so incredulous and start acting like actual journalists.

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#oneaday Day 149: Late night ravings

Hello. It is nearly 2am and I have forgotten to write a post. Because my brain works the way it does, I will now be unable to sleep until I write something, so here I am. I am writing on my phone and without my glasses on so please excuse any typos.

I finished Spirit Hunter NG this evening. That's the sequel to Death Mark, and an excellent horror adventure in its own right. I'm looking forward to playing the final game in the series; will likely start that tomorrow.

One thing these games have reminded me is my fondness for games that attempt to imply things are "mechanics" when they're really not anything remarkable. In both Death Mark and NG the best example of this is probably the "time limit that is not a time limit".

In both games, narrative pressure is placed on the protagonists to solve the various cases before the ghostly curse that has been placed upon them brings their lives to an unfortunate end. This is positioned to the player as it becoming increasingly urgent to solve things, but it's a purely narrative thing. There is no time limit and actually no means of dying from the curse expiring.

NG has another example in the form of its "Survival Escape" sequences. These are where you confront a ghost and must use the right items on the right objects in the scene to survive and fend off the spirit. Mechanically you're not doing anything different from the point and click investigation sequences, but the game's positioning of these sequences as being urgent — and the fact you die if you take the wrong action — sets them apart.

There's probably a more substantial article in this somewhere — I vaguely recall Final Famtasy XIII-2 having an overdramatic name for what was essentially conversation trees, for example — but right now I'm very tired and I must sleep. So I'm going to sleep.

2028: Obstacle Course

0028_001

In response to The Daily Post's writing prompt: "Obstacle Course."

In yesterday's look at the sad archive that Plinky.com has become, I stumbled across the fact that WordPress.com now has a "Daily Post" writing prompt. I'm not hugely involved with the overall WordPress community, really, but thought this might be an interesting means of finding some new people — or at the very least, providing myself with some inspiration on what to write day in, day out.

This is today's prompt, then:

Think about what you wanted to accomplish last week. Did you? What are the things that hold you back from doing everything you’d like to do?

Well, this is going to be a fairly bleak post as I'm in a fairly bleak mood today, but as regular readers will know, sometimes the act of getting those thoughts and feelings out onto the page can prove to be a form of "therapy" in their own right. So we'll see. Expect honesty.

No, I did not accomplish what I wanted to accomplish last week, though this is partly due to the fact that I didn't really have anything I wanted to accomplish last week. The trouble I have at the moment is that I'm just sort of "drifting" with occasional freelance work and nothing concrete to occupy my time and thoughts day after day.

In some ways, this is pleasant. Not having any "commitments" as such means that I can essentially do what I want to do, though it's not long before anxieties over things like money start creeping in and making me feel that I should be doing "more". More what, I'm not exactly sure, to be honest; the feeling that overtakes me at these times is always simply "you should be doing more" without any specifics attached.

Let's ponder the things I did achieve, at least: since the Slimming World job I mentioned a few posts back isn't going to happen for the moment (I need to be a bit closer to my target before I'll be considered, which is fair enough) I applied to another job. Just a part-time job in retail, so nothing particularly exciting, special or indeed well-paid, but if I'm successful it will be something that provides at least a bit of reasonably predictable income each month that I can use to support the sporadic freelancing I've been doing. From there I can decide if I want to pursue that in more depth and attempt to make a career out of it — probably not, but we'll see — or if I simply want to keep it as one of several things I have on the go at once. I'm inclined to think that the way I can be "happiest" (for want of a better term) is to have a number of different things to do rather than getting bored and frustrated with just one thing — or, worse, getting bored and frustrated with nothing.

One of the awkward things, though, is the fact that I've picked up some piano pupils and have been enjoying teaching them so far — and both they and their parents seem to like me, too. This in itself isn't awkward, of course, but with the current timing of the lessons I have with them, it would make a "regular" job on "normal" hours a little tricky on the day of the week when I teach them. This is proving to be a bit of a mental block for me, to be honest; the prospect of either having to tell a prospective employer that I can't work on a specific day after a specific time is anxiety-inducing, and at the other end of the spectrum, the prospect of having to juggle around commitments that I've already made is also anxiety-inducing. Still, it's a bridge I will no doubt cross if I ever reach it.

Other achievements? Well, I lost another pound. Slow and steady wins the race, as they say; some people in our Slimming World group aren't particularly satisfied if they "only" lose a pound in a week, but me? Having not been able to lose any weight for years and now consistently losing at least one pound every week, I'm happy with that. It's one of the very few things I feel that is going right at the moment, so I cling onto these small victories for all they're worth.

To answer the second part of the question, then, I think it's probably pretty clear from what I've already written above that the thing holding me back the most from achieving things is anxiety. I had been taking anti-anxiety meds for a little while, though I don't feel like they'd been having much effect. On reflection, though, now I've run out, it's quite possible that the way I'm feeling today is proof that they had been doing at least something; if not alleviating the anxiety altogether, then at least keeping it at bay somewhat. I'm going to attempt to make a doctor's appointment tomorrow morning and refresh my supply to see if that helps. I would look into proper therapy, too, but while I don't have a stable income the prospect of having to pay up for that, ironically, fills me with further anxiety.

So all in all, then, things are a bit fucked at the moment. My "obstacle course" doesn't feel like it's altogether fair; it feels like I'm surrounded on all sides by impassable objects, and the only way past them is to do something difficult, unpleasant or outright painful. It's a rubbish feeling and I sincerely hope it passes soon.

For now, though, it's an evening of stewing in my own bleakness, I guess; it's not the first time and it won't be the last. Thanks, as always, for giving ear to my problems, and I hope that one day — preferably soon — I have something a bit more positive to share with you all.

1864: Trying Times

It is, as they say, a Difficult Time in my life, as regular readers will know. I also find it somewhat unfortunate that said Difficult Time in my life is coming, as with the previous Difficult Time back in 2010, shortly prior to my heading off to something that should be fun, exciting and pure escapism: my trip to Boston for PAX East. (I hasten to add that this Difficult Time is for different reasons to the 2010 Difficult Time, thankfully; I'm not sure I could go through another 2010.)

But, as difficult as it is to stay positive sometimes — and believe me, it is extremely difficult to stay positive right now — I need to focus on the things that I'm doing that are worthwhile, and that could potentially (hopefully!) lead to future happiness.

I have a real piano in my own house for the first time since I left home, for one thing. That's pretty cool, and as I suspected I vastly prefer playing it to my electric piano. The electric, though awesome and great-sounding, simply doesn't "feel" right thanks to being on a somewhat wobbly keyboard stand, and the sound of it coming out of an amplifier isn't the same as the real thing at all.

Said piano is hopefully going to be the centrepiece of at least some of my future work, and I'm making all the efforts possible to make the music teaching happen. I'm getting business cards printed, I have a listing on one of the biggest online music teacher directories in the country, I have my own website and, once the business cards arrive, I'll be giving them out to local music shops and other establishments in the hope of drumming up some business.

I'm also going to be doing some work for the local Music Service. I only have a couple of hours of this secured so far, but hopefully that will lead to more regular future things. While a couple of hours certainly isn't going to pay the bills, it's a foot in the door, which is good.

Then there's a few writing-related possibilities in the pipeline. I don't know if any of these will come to anything just yet, but hopefully they will.

And then there's a few other potential means of making some money out there, too, all of which I'm exploring in the hope of finding something that will allow me to support myself and remain at least reasonably happy for some of the time. In practical, realistic terms, it's probably more likely I will end up mixing and matching lots of different things, which maybe isn't ideal from a "stability" perspective, but will certainly keep things interesting and exciting — and more importantly, allow me to work on my own terms, which is something that I've come to crave.

I am trying to remain positive. I really am. There are good days, and there are bad days, and there are days that are sort of in the middle that can go either way. Today has been one of the latter kinds; let's hope tomorrow is a good day. Only one way to find out though, huh.

1671: Whoopsy

The astute among you will have noticed that there was no post yesterday — or at least, there didn't appear to be. In fact, what happened was that I wrote the post, saved it as a draft, went to do something else — possibly eat dinner, have a poo or go to bed — then promptly forgot to publish the bloody thing. Whoops. Oh well. "Caught up" now — not that the original "rules" of #oneaday really matter now that it's just me still beavering away at this blog every day.

I'm glad I still do, though, for numerous reasons. For one, it's satisfying to see that number at the start of each post, and to think that I have been writing something of varying quality every day for nearly 1,700 days in succession. Over the course of those 1,700 days, my life has been through some significant changes. I've held several jobs, moved house several times, just about lived through the end of a marriage and the total collapse of my life that resulted from it — seriously, make sure you marry the right person and avoid all that shit happening to you — and now find myself pondering what might happen in the next 1,700 days.

For starters, I have not just a new job but a new career ahead of me — ten days from now, I'll be starting my new position that I secured a while back. I'm hesitant to go into too many public details at present — never sure why this is the norm, but I'll go with it for now — but suffice to say that it's a position that will actually make use of the skills and experience I've built up over the past few years, even if it isn't precisely what I pictured myself doing a few years back. Still, as I noted around the time my position on USgamer came to a close, I've come to the conclusion that pursuing your "dream job" is an exercise in frustration that only, in very rare cases, leads to something stable you can do for years to come. Much better to nail down something that you know you can do well, and that will still have a chair ready for you each morning rather than unceremoniously dumping you at a moment's notice. (At least I hope that's what I'm going to get with this new position!)

I have a new car, too, but I'm sure that will be the subject of a whole other post some day in the not too distant future. All I'll say for now is that I like it very much, and hopefully it will be a suitable means of conveying my person from my house to my place of employment on a daily basis, starting ten days from now.

Aside from that, there isn't really that much interesting going on in my life at present. Which, to be honest, I'm kind of cool with. While "interesting" periods of your life can certainly provoke plenty of interesting things to talk and write about, they're also exhausting, both mentally and physically. At present, I'm quite enjoying the feeling of "nothing" — the fact that things are slowly falling into place, and I don't need to do anything else for now. I can just sit back, relax and enjoy myself for a few days — and I think I've earned that.

1565: Pressure Valve

If you'll pardon me, I need to vent some pressure in my head. I don't know whether or not it will make me feel better, but I feel like I need to do it anyway.

I feel like shit today with regard to the situation in which I find myself. I can't, in good conscience, say that I know everything is going to be okay because I don't know that everything is going to be okay, and that's frankly kind of scary. Andie and I have bought a house; that is not something you can just abandon if things get a bit difficult. If you mess things up with regard to money, that's a shitload of cash down the drain with nothing to show for it. While I doubt it will get to that stage — I at least have a little cash saved, though I had hoped I'd be able to hold on to it for a bit longer — it is still a concern.

I don't feel like shit in the sense that I want to just break down and cry, though. I mean, I sort of do, but it's not coming right now. Instead, I'm in that sort of bleak, nothingness phase of depression; that phase where all you really want to do is stare into space, but the things going on around you are irritating. It took a considerable amount of mental strength to haul myself up off the bed and come to write this post, and I'm not entirely sure that doing so is helping matters any. But we'll see. I've started, so I'll finish and all that.

I hate being laid off. I mean, I seriously doubt there's anyone out there who loves it, but it's shit, and I've been through it several times in my life. I at least have a little under two months to find myself something new to do this time around rather than waking up one morning to discover the site I write for is immediately closing (alas, poor GamePro), but the immediate reaction is one of being upset and disappointed. It is, in effect, being told that you're not needed or useful any more, so kindly off you go, on your way, off you pop. This is a fact of life and business, of course, but it doesn't make it any more pleasant to deal with. Being told that you're suddenly surplus to requirements doesn't do a great deal for the self-esteem, after all; it makes you question whether you've been useful for the time you were employed.

This isn't fishing for compliments, by the way; I know that the exaggerated emotions in my mind are just that — exaggerated — and that I was useful throughout my time at USgamer; I also hope I will continue to be so for my remaining weeks there. It just feels extremely weird to still be part of a team and yet not; I don't feel like I belong any more, and that, too, is a horrible feeling.

Still, I haven't been resting on my laurels. I have been gradually putting together a side project to tinker with while I look for new work. I'm not quite sure it's ready to reveal to the world just yet — perhaps over the weekend or early next week, depending on how much time I have to work on it, or perhaps I'll just say "fuck it" and flip the switch later tonight. We'll see.

Said project is not something that's going to make me any money in the short term, but it might be a useful means of gauging interest for something I might be able to do in the future, whether on the side or even — stranger things have happened — full-time. While I'm not expecting overnight (or even overmonth) success with it, it's something that I personally am pleased with so far, and am enthusiastic about developing further. As I say, we shall see if it actually goes anywhere. (In the meantime, if any of you reading this have any success or horror stories about Patreon as a funding platform, I'd be interested to hear them.)

For now, though, we have reached the weekend, and here in the UK it is, thankfully, another three-day weekend. Tomorrow morning I'm heading off to Kent to get away from things for a few days; some friends and I are going to hang out, play a ton of board games, play some Street Fighter, play some TrackMania, drink, eat and fart. I will be blogging over the weekend, Internet signal permitting, and will be back on Monday.

Here's hoping things look up a little next week; I made the mistake a short while ago of feeling like things were going along quite nicely. Now I'm back to sleepless nights filled with anxiety again. Fuck that shit.

1459: What the Person in That Car is Trying to Say

Jan 16 -- Driving During particularly long and boring drives — down a particularly tedious stretch of motorway, for example — I often find my mind wandering in various ways, pondering various subjects.

One of the things that occasionally pops into my head is a sort of "what if?" scenario about how communication between vehicles could work. If you've ever played a '90s or '00s space sim, you'll know that it's implied that most spacecraft have an always-open communication channel allowing them to be hailed by other pilots and installations, and it always feels fairly natural.

Were we to have an equivalent for our roadgoing vehicles today, the results would be anything but natural, since it would provide those with road rage with the ability to directly yell at people without having to stop and get out of their car, and it would also open the real world up to griefing and trolling. Of course, it might also facilitate helpful communication, but, well, the Internet has taught me to be something of a pessimist when it comes to forms of communication.

But if we consider the way that people in cars communicate with each other now, it's clear that there's something of a problem. Allow me to elaborate.

What is happening: The brake lights on the car in front of you are flickering.
What it means: The car in front is being driven by an old person.
Or: The car in front is suffering from a loose connection to its brake lights.
Or: The driver of the car in front isn't quite comfortable with exactly how hard you need to press the brake pedal to keep it under control.
Or: The driver of the car in front is trying to send you some sort of message using Morse code.

What is happening: The car in front is continuing to drive forwards, but it has put its hazard warning flashers on.
What it means: There is a hazard.
Or: The car in front has broken down and is coasting to a smooth stop.
Or: "Thank you."
Or: "Fuck you."
Or: If the car in front is of German origin and costs more than £10,000, this also means "I am parking here," regardless of whether parking is permitted here.

What is happening: The car in front is approaching a junction and its indicators are not flashing.
What it means: The car in front is going straight on.
Or: If the car in front is of German origin and costs more than £10,000, this may mean "I am turning left" or "I am turning right".

What is happening: The car behind you is flashing its headlights.
What it means: "Hello!"
Or: "You're going too slowly."
Or: "You're going too fast."
Or: "Thank you."
Or: "Fuck you."
Or: "Look at my headlights, I bought them at Halfords, aren't they bright?"
Or: "You should probably turn on your headlights, it is dark after all and I nearly ran into the back of you, you cretin."

What is happening: The driver of the car in front is making a gesture that looks like he is tenderly stroking two invisible, curved penises.
What it means: I have no fucking idea, but I saw this once and it's haunted me ever since.

1254: I Typed This Post (Except the Title) With My Eyes Shut

Jun 25 -- Eyes Shut I've always been pretty good at touch-typing, so I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see how well I could type a blog post with my eyes shut. This is the result. I apologise in advance if it is completely indecipherable.

It's interesting, doing this, because it makes me realise how much I rely on muscle memory while I'm typing. I can visualise where the keys are in my head, which is all very well and good, but I can't tell whether or not I've made any typos in the process.

Actually, I sort of can. I can "feel" when I've typed something incorrectly (assuming my hands were in the right place in the first place) but going back to correct it when you're not looking at the screen is actually somewhat difficult.

I wonder how well I'm doing. More to the point, I wonder how many words I've typed so far.

I learned to touch-type when I was very young. I learned through the use of an Atari 8-bit computer and the use of computer magazines, which in the 80s tended to include type-in listing s for games and various other bits and pieces each month.

If you're too young to know what a type-in listing is, it's this: a program is printed in the magazine, and if you copy it into your computer's programming language BASIC and run it, you'd have a fully-functional program of some sort to play with — usually a game.

Usually these programs were written in BASIC so you could see how they worked and adapt them for your own purposes. However, sometimes they were written in machine code, which meant they were nothing but a string of numbers in hexadecimal format. Not something you can decipher at all, really.

Anyway, the reason I am so good (hopefully) at touch-typing today as I (possibly) am is because I spent so long copying these listings into my Atari. I'd type with my hands on the keyboard while simultaneously looking at the magazine. The magazines I read came with a special program that checked for typos when you were copying out listings, so you could make sure you'd copied everything exactly.

Anyway, through the process of copying out these programs while not looking at either the keyboard or the screen, I learned to touch-type pretty well.

I hope I haven't embarrassed myself by this post being completely indecipherable. I am also coming up with this nonsense on the spur of the moment like a freewriting exercise; I didn't plan anything beforehand. So hopefully you'll forgive the stream of consciousness that is currently erupting from my fingers.

I wonder how many words this is now. It feels a bit weird to be sitting here with my eyes closed. I'm actually quite sleepy, so I hope I don't suddenly fall asleep in the middle of typing this. I've had a few cups of coffee at my friend Tim's house this evening, though, so that's probably unlikely for an hour or two at least.

We'll see.

Anyway, I think I'm probably running out of patience for this little exercise, so I'm going to sign off at this point and publish the post as-is. If you can't read it because I've made too many mistakes, please bear in mind that I was typing it with my eyes closed. Can you do any better? Show me in the comments if so.

That's enough. Enough. STOP!