#oneaday Day 722: Entering the ATmosphere

I read yesterday that several blogging platforms are integrating the "AT protocol" or whatever it's called that powers services like Bluesky and the like, and one of those was WordPress. So today's post is primarily a big ol' test to see whether or not that functionality, implemented via the ATmosphere plugin, actually works, and whether or not it's something I actually want to use.

people holding different devices — Photo by fauxels on Pexels.com. These people are all enjoying my posts. You should, too.

I talked a bit about social media with my therapist yesterday. I discussed how conflicted I feel about existing online right now, what with the emphasis on short-form video and vapid content rather than longer-form, more meaningful material. I'm not saying that the stuff I post here isn't vapid nonsense, of course, but I have always said that I would far rather read someone's vapid nonsense than be delivered it as shouty-face-at-camera content, so this blog continues with that in mind. And if no-one is interested in my vapid nonsense, then at least I still have somewhere to bang out some words and express myself, which is what this has always been about.

Anyway, the kind-of-sort-of conclusion I came to was that at least a minimal presence on social media is somewhat desirable for me, because otherwise I just end up feeling completely isolated. While I enjoyed the total break from all social media, including Bluesky, that I took last year while I was on holiday, I found that I didn't want to maintain it afterwards, as it just left me feeling even more lonely than I already was. And I'm already feeling pretty damn lonely.

Still, the other thing that came to light in yesterday's session is that although I have always kind of feared social interactions and find myself overthinking conversations before I have them — sometimes to the extent that I never actually start the conversation in reality for the fear of coming across as boring or annoying — I am, in many respects, feeling kind of ready to challenge myself in at least attempting to make some new friends, to have some people that I can connect with and, basically, to stop feeling so danged lonely.

The challenge that I have found along the way is not so much initiating those interactions when the opportunity arises — although that is still a somewhat scary prospect for me — but rather finding those opportunities in the first place. I cited an example of when I first went to university and attended a pre-term music course, and I took the uncharacteristically bold step (for me) of introducing myself to someone I was in a lift with while we were transporting ourselves to our respective floors in the tower block where we were staying. That resulted in a longstanding friendship (albeit one that I will hold my hands up and say that I have been very poor at maintaining) and was proof that, as little as I think of myself at times, I can come across as someone that people actually do want to know and are not, in fact, actively repulsed by.

Those opportunities of being "trapped" in a lift with a stranger and the choice being either awkward silence or attempting to clunkily start a conversation just don't really seem to arise these days, though, because I'm never in that sort of situation. I work from home, I don't go out a great deal, I'm not a member of any "groups" or anything (and don't really know how one would go about finding a "group") and I do not have a publicly accessible elevator in my house.

What I am going to at least attempt to do a bit more, though, is to attend some in-person events where I know some people with whom I have at least a casual acquaintance will be attending. My trip to The Cave a few weeks back was a good example, and last year I went to the RetroFest show in Swindon — that is actually happening again this year, but I left it a bit late to organise a trip there. I mean, I could probably snag a ticket and go along tomorrow (today's tickets are sold out), but can I be bothered to do that?

Hmm, can I be bothered to do that…? I might have a think about that throughout the course of today. Swindon is a fairly long way to go, but it might actually be nice to go along and see some interesting things and clever people.

Hmmmmm.

Anyway, today we are going food shopping, so that's fun. Thank you for participating in this experiment of whether or not this thing actually posts correctly to Bluesky via the ATmosphere plugin. If it does, I'll likely hook up MoeGamer proper in the same way. Tatty-bye for now then.

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 713: Portal charm

Apparently Google is attempting to wind down its search feature. You know, the thing that they once did so well that their name became a verb for doing that thing. But we live in 2026, possibly the stupidest year in human existence, so they've decided that they want to stop doing the thing that they've always been well regarded for doing better than anyone else — although they have been enshittifying it for years at this point. Instead they're going to force on us the thing that C-suites the world over think everyone wants, and no-one except bootlicking cunts actually wants: the chatbot! Hooray!

person pulling a sack of garbage — Photo by Mumtahina Tanni on Pexels.com. The Internet, 2026

This is, obviously, garbage news, and anyone with any sense will already be looking for a new search engine to set as default on every device they own — even though I don't think there's a single one of them that has no AI whatsoever at this point — but there are interesting possibilities that present themselves as a result of this stupidity.

Firstly, if there's no Google search, that might finally mean we'll be free of search engine optimisation, which by extension means we might also end up free of clickbait and ragebait. Of course, the latter two options are driven as much by social media than search results — probably more so, if we're honest — but honestly, I can't say I'd be sorry to see the back of SEO. Ten Blue Links are no fun if all of them are jostling for position with articles titled "what time is Eurovision on?" or whatever.

Of course, another ugly possibility then presents itself: search engine optimisation will become chatbot optimisation, and I suspect that will be even worse. SEO can already be manipulated by bad actors to present confidently incorrect information as gospel — sometimes with nefarious intent — and chatbots are already renowned for picking up people saying obvious falsehoods as a throwaway comment in a Reddit thread, and then reporting those things as the truth. Remember glue on pizza? Yeah. Incidents like that are chatbot optimisation in its earliest incarnation.

So that brings us to the second point: what if this is what gets us to admit that the "World Wide" part of the "Web" has, in fact, been something of a failure. I think we can probably all agree that the US has dominated the Web for a significant portion of its lifespan, and it's US-based companies that are trying to reshape it in a fashion that will, they reckon, make billions for US-based billionaires who already have too many billions.

Of course, all of the businesses attempting to do this are failing miserably at that. Despite billions of imaginary dollars being thrown around on a seemingly daily basis, profitability appears to be something that continues to elude the generative AI space, and it only appears to be getting worse, with many providers switching to considerably more expensive token-based billing options for users who have, up until now, been costing these companies astronomical amounts of money.

But even if the entire generative AI space were to go tits-up tomorrow — and oh, gosh, I would love it if it did — I think a lot of damage has already been done to the original plan of the World Wide Web. The Internet is no longer a cool and exciting place to hang out and explore. It's become a sleazy, shitty inner city area where you shouldn't walk around after dark, and where you certainly shouldn't get your phone out on the street. So much of it is just there to if not outright scam you, then at least extract money from you in increasingly ridiculous ways.

I see it a lot, running a blog. I'll install a plugin that sounds like it performs a function that I would find helpful, only to find that the exact function I want to use is "only available in Premium", and of course you can't just buy Premium because it's 2026, you have to sign up for a subscription. And you can't pay monthly for that subscription because it's 2026, you can only pay for a year at a time, despite them quoting a "monthly" price on their order page. The Web in general is full of shitty, dark patterns like this designed to trick people into spending money they didn't need to spend. I have no objection to paying people for good, useful pieces of software, but not when the process of doing so is a minefield of potentially getting locked into having to shell out several hundred quid a year because you didn't see the tiny "*billed annually" at the bottom of the "BEST OFFER!" thrust in your face.

Anyway, I got a bit off the point. The main point was: the current implementation of "the World Wide Web" is shit, so what if this meant that we go back to the concept of "portals"? Portals, if you're unfamiliar, are how sites like Yahoo got started: they were designed to act as the first page you saw when you logged on to the Internet, and thus provided quick, categorised, curated sets of links that helped you to 1) find stuff that you were looking for and 2) discover interesting new stuff. Search engines developed out of portals; indeed, many former portal sites became search engines; Google itself was a bit of an outlier in this regard in that it launched as nothing more than a search engine; its intention to do one thing, really well.

I often think back to our early days of "going online" back home. After the BBS days, which we occasionally indulged in on both the Atari 8-bit and ST, we had a CompuServe subscription. And CompuServe was a ton of fun! It was a complete walled garden to begin with, and took a while to catch on to this whole "broader Internet" thing, but in many ways, retrospectively, I think that its curated way of doing things was very good. People rag on AOL for the bajillion free trial coaste… sorry, CDs that made their way around the world in the late '90s and early '00s, but they had a similar idea: present information in an interesting, clear, curated way for people to enjoy and engage with as they see fit.

Of course, this approach brings with it its own considerations: who is responsible for the curation? How does one get "noticed" with a personal project like a blog? Are these portal providers obliged to be "neutral" in terms of things like politics and suchlike? If not, how does one distinguish between a portal provider that places an emphasis on curating information that is actively harmful, and one that aligns with your own values? Probably the same way you pick a news source today, I guess.

Anyway, I don't really have an answer, but if Google is insistent on going the way of the chatbot, this is probably something we're going to have to grapple with in the next few years. The way the Internet is today just… isn't really working, at least not with the original intent of the technology in mind, so we should probably start thinking about how we can do something a bit different… a bit better.

Or we could just continue to moan on social media and never actually get anything done, I guess.

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#oneaday Day 705: Resist mediocre anti-intellectualism

Every few months, it seems, the collective community of the social media platform Bluesky suffers from a minor existential crisis, usually relating to some commentator or other not having found an audience on the platform and thus writing what they probably believe to be a withering putdown, but which more often than not ends up coming across as a bit sad, desperate and pathetic.

The most recent case comes in the form of someone who posits that Bluesky, as a whole, has been bad for American political discourse, because it has effectively siloed off pretty much the entire "Left" into their own little bubble. This isn't an entirely inaccurate view of the situation, but you also have to bear in mind that this largely occurred because Twitter, under Elon Musk, made a specific effort to silo off pretty much the entire "Right" into their own little bubble. Consequently, Twitter is more of a shithole than it's ever been in the past, and Bluesky… well, it's occasionally all right, occasionally prone to the sorts of behaviour that made me sour on Twitter in the first place. At least for the most part you don't have to put up with Nazis and "grok what is this" underneath every post.

I'm not here to talk about the relative merits of Bluesky itself though; rather, I want to focus on a post from Ars Technica's Kyle Orland, itself a response to a post from journalist Faine Greenwood, semi-seriously commenting on what people really need to do if they want to use social media to get a political message out:

Kyle Orland: This is true in cultural criticism too, I'd argue. Writing in general (and longform writing in particular) is just an increasingly niche part of how people in general are consuming media and getting info.

I'm still proudly focused on that niche, but I'm under no illusions about my relative reach.

Quoting Faine Greenwood: I will reiterate the point made by Jamelle Bouie: if you really wanted online political influence, you'd be making vertical video. You'd be learning how to do little booty dances while talking about political theory. You'd be mastering doing BTS fan-cams while talking about anti-capitalism.

I see this viewpoint expressed a lot these days, and while it is disappointingly not entirely wrong about the situation, it does, to me, reflect a defeatist attitude to culture: the assumption that there can be only one dominant form of media, and that in this case, it is lowest-common-denominator, vapid, attention-deficit short-form video with karaoke-style captions updating one word at a time.

I, as I have made pretty clear on numerous occasions in the past, fucking hate lowest-common-denominator, vapid, attention-deficit short-form video with karaoke-style captions updating one word at a time. I find it actively insulting to my intelligence, and incredibly offputting when someone posts, like, say, "IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:" followed by a video of their face pressed up against the camera yelling whatever their important announcement is. I never find out, because I am actively repulsed by that kind of video.

Aside: in a Discord I frequent, one poster continually reposts this guy's stuff, and dear Lord I find it the most offputting thing imaginable. Nothing to do with the guy's appearance; I just don't want that many faces yelling at me.

A screenshot of "Randy Johnson's" YouTube channel, which consists entirely of vertical video clips of an elderly man talking about various topics.

Anyway, the thing I find frustrating about all this is: who the fuck decided that the only thing we're allowed to do now is lowest-common-denominator, vapid, attention-deficit short-form video with karaoke-style captions updating one word at a time? Who the fuck decided that writing is out, particularly long-form writing? Because I certainly fucking didn't.

I like reading! I like reading long things! I like writing! I like writing long things! As far as I'm concerned, a good piece of writing is much more likely to stand the test of time than vertical video of someone's grandpa wittering on about The Super Mario Galaxy Movie! And I find it near-impossible to believe that I am alone in this!

I am part of a generation who grew up with books, magazines, and websites that posted long-form writing. As far as I am aware, my entire generation hasn't suddenly dropped dead overnight, so why the fuck can't we have at least a basic bit of respect for our tastes rather than this content slurry that is shat out at great force and speed every day?

"Oh, but Pete, people are still serving your niche," you might say. Are they? Are they actually though? Because last time I checked, games media sites were being shut down or turned into thinly-veiled gambling advertisements at a frightening rate. I used to have magazines and websites that I read on a regular basis; today, even people who I used to respect as people who always seemed that they'd keep blogging, come rain or shine, have all but vanished from the Internet, leaving us with little more than the garbage left behind.

Perhaps those are the people who have the right idea. Give up on trying to "find an audience" on the Internet, and just retreat into a world where these issues don't exist. There are still a few magazines out there — although gaming-specific ones are thin on the ground. There are folks making fanzines and suchlike. New books continue to be written — some of them even without being AI-generated! So perhaps the answer is just to retreat, quietly, and continue to enjoy the few good things that do, apparently against all odds, still exist.

It just feels like giving up a space where I always felt like I could "be myself" and express myself freely has been taken over, completely, by the supposedly "cool kids" who are actually vapid fuckheads with nothing of any real substance to contribute to culture. And that really sucks. "The Internet" used to be somewhere that felt like I was home, where I was among my people. I haven't felt that for a long time now.

I don't feel like we should have just rolled over and let this happen — but that is what happened, and there doesn't appear to be any way to turn back from it now. And no-one appears to be in any great hurry to correct this situation.

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#oneaday Day 701: Burnout and guilt

Every weekend for about the last month and a half, I've found myself thinking "I should make some more YouTube videos", closely followed by "but I don't really feel like it".

Photo by Zulfugar Karimov on Pexels.com

To a normal, well-adjusted mind, the follow-up thought that should then occur should be "so I'm not going to do any". But when you have sort of got into the habit of doing something, it's difficult to take a step away from. You feel obligations to continue. You feel guilt that you're not doing something. And those aren't healthy things to be feeling about something that is supposed to be a fun hobby more than anything else.

An oft-repeated refrain of the casual, hobbyist YouTuber is "when it stops being fun, I stop doing it". But it's not always that easy. You feel like you're letting down your audience, however small that might be — the people who tirelessly show up every video and leave a supportive comment or just a Like. You feel like you're letting down yourself, too; you've invested time, effort and, often, money into doing this, so shouldn't you keep doing it?

And there's always part of you that still wants to keep doing it for the reason you originally started doing it. In my case, it's to show off interesting games that I don't feel get the attention and love that they deserve, particularly on platforms that don't get the love they deserve — like the Atari 8-bit and ST. I am particularly conscious of this due to how, on a recent visit to The Cave, someone actually came up to me and said that they not only enjoyed my YouTube videos, they specifically enjoyed the way I do them.

As regular readers will know, this is something that I have mentally gone back and forth on lots of times — I started doing Let's Play-style videos, where I give a brief introduction to a game and then just play it while talking over it, but have found that scripted, more review-like videos tend to do better numbers for the most part. I enjoy doing both; the Let's Play ones are less hassle to do in terms of editing, but I think the scripted videos are probably "better" videos, whatever that means. I say I don't really care about the numbers — and I don't, really, otherwise I would put more effort into the tedious "marketing" side of running a YouTube channel — but it's hard to ignore when you get over a thousand views (sometimes much more than a thousand) on a scripted, edited review of a modern indie game or an Xbox 360 compared to just about three figures when providing a guided tour of an Atari 8-bit game no-one has heard of except longstanding enthusiasts.

This person telling me that they specifically enjoyed my Let's Play-style stuff for exactly the reasons I do it — to provide the illusion of sitting with a friend, enjoying a game together — kind of threw me a bit. I'm pleased, obviously, but it's the first time someone has specifically come up to me and said "yes, I like specifically what you are doing, rather than the usual algorithm-baiting stuff". And it's given me a certain amount of pause.

The other reason I'm kind of feeling a bit burnt-out with YouTube is that I'm doing some writing stuff that I'm enjoying right now. It's a very (very) long-term project that I'm working on, so it's going to take a considerable period of sustained effort to bring to a conclusion — and I really would like to bring it to a conclusion — and all that is sort of sapping my enthusiasm and energy for making videos a bit.

I do like making videos. I am always satisfied when I've put out some videos. But I'm just sort of not feeling it right now. And I feel guilty about that, for all the reasons outlined above. This, in turn, can lead me into a bit of a self-destructive cycle, where I get locked in a loop of worrying about what I think I "should" be doing, and then sitting staring into space worrying about the fact I don't feel like doing that thing.

Perhaps this is a signal that for today, at the very least, I should just rest, relax, take a break and enjoy myself, and then see how I feel about things tomorrow. And if I feel like making some videos tomorrow, great. If I don't, that should also be fine. We'll see.

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#oneaday Day 596: Sad little men

I've had two angry emails this week, one from someone who was upset I was covering Wolfenstein over on MoeGamer and drawing some parallels between the alt-history 1960s Nazi world order depicted in the game and the heinous shit going down in the United States right now, and another, likely a sock puppet, from someone who was angry that I said mean things about a particularly notorious revolting little troll that occasionally tries to start shit with the UK retro gaming YouTube community.

To both of these individuals, I extend my middle finger in an unmistakeable gesture and invite them, politely, to eat an entire bag of dicks. Because neither of these people were up for any sort of discussion — not that I wanted to discuss their odious viewpoints with them — and just wanted to spew a wall of vitriol at me before flouncing off into the sunset, likely to never think of me ever again. And I'm 100% fine with that last bit.

The first bit is a shitty thing to have to deal with, though. I, unfortunately, know quite a few people who have been on the receiving end of abusive messages from people like these two fucknuggets, and none of them have deserved what they have gotten. The people who spew this kind of hatefulness are, without exception, bigoted, intolerant fuckheads who are angry that the world doesn't cater specifically to them. They don't like that certain types of people who are different from them exist, whether those differences come in the form of their skin colour, gender identity, sexuality or how many YouTube subscribers they have. They are angry at the simple existence of people they see as different from them; they think these differences make those people somehow dangerous.

They fear them, and that's why they lash out in the way they do — they hope to break the spirit of people they have decided that they dislike. They have no endgame; no real purpose in mind. They just want to hurt people. And it's fucking pathetic. Particularly because the targets they pick, like me, are, frankly, completely harmless individuals who they likely never would have come into contact with were it not for the increasingly potholed Information Superhighway.

It sucks that we have to tolerate the existence of pathetic little trolls like this, because practically speaking, there's not a lot that can really be done about them. Law enforcement aren't interested in some mean messages on the Internet, social media platforms are increasingly lawless zones, and hosting your own sites means you have the joy of having to deal with moderation tasks yourself. At least WordPress and YouTube make it easy enough to block commenters via various means.

It's a shitty world out there, both online and offline, and there are days when it doesn't feel like there's anything worth "saving" any more. If you encounter any little shits like the ones I've described today, my best advice is to remember that their pathetic little lives are almost certainly full of more self-inflicted misery than you can possibly imagine, and that they're lashing out precisely because of that fact because they're unwilling to admit that they're at fault. Once you start down the path of being an Internet Dickhead, it's very difficult to pull yourself back and save face. Because, frankly, even if these two clagnuts came to me with a genuine apology tomorrow, I would not have the time of day for them.

You get one chance in life to make a first impression, and if that first impression is violently shitting yourself while screaming and waving a knife around, I'm not going to let you into my house, ever.

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#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!

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#oneaday Day 543: Tabbed browsing

I like browser tabs. I think they were a good invention, and a good addition to modern user interfaces in general — although not universally, as some application and website designers seem to think.

I find it convenient to be able to switch back and forth between things I might need to keep looking at. But I quite regularly come into contact with opinions that make me feel like I'm not using them in the same way as a lot of other people on the Internet.

For example, these are my tabs that are open right now:

Yes, that's all of them.

And yet just a few minutes before I started writing this entry, I saw this Bluesky post from Aidan Moher, one half of the delightful FunFactor Podcast that I've extolled the virtues of previously on this site. (Twice, in fact.) The fact the post is from Aidan isn't particularly relevant to what I'm talking about here. I just thought I'd take the opportunity to plug the excellent podcast he's involved in.

What Aidan's talking about here is by no means unusual, but it is completely alien to me. I have never left a browser tab open longer than 24 hours, and even then it's only to remember something that I will need in the very immediate future; in most cases I will use either a bookmark or a note in Google Keep instead and close a tab when I'm not using it.

This is the bit where I, apparently, differ from the "norm": when I'm done with the contents of a tab, I close it. Why would I leave it open if I no longer need that information right now?

These are my tabs right now, incidentally:

A few more, due to me checking the links on things that I've mentioned above, but all still mostly relevant to what I'm doing right now. In fact, hold on.

There. I don't need my email right now, so I closed it. See how easy that is? In fact, you know what?

Fuck yeah. Two tabs. One window. I probably don't even need Bluesky right this moment. In fact, yeah. Let's remove all distractions.

Hoo boy. I bet some of you are getting the collywobbles right now. How can this human being function with only one tab open? Quite easily, as it happens! The Thing I Am Doing Right Now is Writing A Blog Post, so that's all I need to have open. If I needed to research something specific while I was writing, I would have a tab open for it (or perhaps a separate window so I could see the research materials side-by-side with my post while I was writing it) — but since I don't, I don't have anything else open.

I hear horror stories about people having literally thousands of tabs open at once, and all I think when I hear that is… how the hell did you get yourself into that situation? This, for me, is the threshold of when it is Time To Close The Entire Browser And Start Again:

You know, the point where if you don't know a site's favicon, you're never going to find the right tab again? (It probably says something that I actually found it very difficult to find enough websites to open that many tabs without resorting to stuff like PornHub and Wikipedia.) Honestly even this is uncomfortable:

Basically I reach that right margin — the point where tabs start to contract and become less useful — and I find myself contemplating existence. Once you get to this point — which is everything on my Bookmarks bar, incidentally — I feel like you really start questioning whether you can feel God's light any more:

Like… help me out here. How is that useful? This isn't even a lot of tabs before it becomes a nigh-unusable mess of icons, and there are people out there using hundreds or even thousands of tabs at once? How do you function? How do you sleep at night?

There, that's better. Sorry, was hyperventilating a bit.

But seriously, I don't understand this peculiar relationship some people seem to have with tabs. Are you the sort of person who reads a magazine or a book and then just leaves it lying around randomly in your house, open on the page you last read? Do you open all your emails in individual windows and then leave them all open? Do you have over a hundred active WhatsApp messaging groups?

I ask these questions because I know there are people who do those things. And yet I, as someone who can often be disorganised and messy, is definitely autistic and quite possibly has ADHD tendencies (though those are undiagnosed, so I don't wish to concretely label myself in that regard) feel physically uncomfortable if more than about five tabs are open at once — and the concept of leaving some tabs open for a week or more is completely alien to me.

Browser tabs might have been a mistake for some people, apparently. But I feel like I'm using them "correctly", if such a concept exists. Put your shit away when you're done with it. It's very easy to do that in the digital realm. Just click that little cross button!

And mobile browsers who think I might want "tab groups"? I do not want "tab groups". Please stop adding new tabs to "tab groups" seemingly at random based on some indeterminate (and possibly inconsistent) context clues that I am not privy to. Just follow the basic rules of the Old Web: open a new tab if you're taking me off the website I'm on; just change the page if you're taking me to a different page on the same website.

Am I the only one who remembers that?

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#oneaday Day 502: Another reminder that traditional games journalism is all but dead

It emerged today that the entire Features team of the gaming website TheGamer has been laid off, after owner Valnet decided that it likes money more than having actual employees who are capable of writing.

I'll admit that I was never a particular fan of TheGamer for a variety of reasons, but regardless of my own personal feelings about the site, this sucks. It's the latest instance of something that has continued to suck for a while now, with even big names of the games journalism industry — if such a thing even exists any more — suffering widespread layoffs, cutbacks and significant worsening of what they offer for their audiences. Enshittification, if you will. And yes, even longstanding behemoths like IGN and Eurogamer have been subject to this. According to VideoGamesChronicle and PressEngine, more than 1,200 journalists have left the business entirely in just the last two years — and that's not taking freelancers into account. (That puts the figure nearer 4,000.)

Honestly, seeing this happen to TheGamer isn't a surprise, though. This is just what the site's owner, Valnet, does. They buy up sites that were once successful, rip out everything that made them distinctive and unique — i.e. the people who worked hard on establishing the site's identity — then proceed to replace everything with slop. I would not be surprised at all if in short order we start seeing casino advertorials and AI-generated garbage on what remains of TheGamer.

Valnet and their big rival, Gamurs, are a scourge on what was once a thriving sector. They both take this model: they buy "verticals" (ugh) that they want to add to their portfolio, and then think that just because they now own, say, Polygon, that they have unlocked an infinite money glitch. But they have not — for a variety of reasons, not which is the model on which ad-supported commercial games journalism has been forced to operate for years now.

This article by Luke Plunkett of Aftermath sums it up nicely: these sites had been stuck in operating in the same way as 2000s-era Kotaku, which is to post as much as possible, as often as possible, and it didn't matter too much if nothing of any real substance was being said. It was all about the content.

I've been through this, too. During my time on both GamePro and USgamer, I was specifically hired to be someone who operated on a different time zone to the rest of the staff, with my responsibility being to ensure that there were things ready to read on the site by the time North America woke up. These typically end up being "news" posts, which, in the churn of having to produce so much content every day, often end up being little more than you could learn from just following a company's social media account or signing up to their mailing list.

"Guide content", that odious practice where every single site has to have 5,000 articles explaining every minutiae of every hot new game (and often badly, to boot), is also at play here, with the entire Internet gradually being flooded by "what is today's Wordle solution?" posts, individual articles explaining each and every shrine in The Legend of Zelda (often badly) and inconclusive, vapid answers to questions no-one was really asking with any great seriousness. It's all about the pursuit of endless, relentless content, and it doesn't matter if it's any good or not, it just has to be fresh, constantly updated and now.

And it sucks! It's not doing anyone any good! It's not making the writers on these sites look good, it doesn't make the games they're covering look good, it doesn't make the site look good, and it doesn't inform the readership of anything worthwhile. It just means those readers have something new to scroll through every time they refresh the page while they're staring, glassy-eyed, at their phone for the 14th consecutive hour that day.

It sucks that it has to be this way, too, because the presence of a specialist press is important. The idea that we might, one day, be completely without a games press altogether is absolutely baffling, but with every round of layoffs like the one we've seen today, we get closer to that dystopia.

Reader-supported sites such as Aftermath, 404 Media (not games, but relevant) and Giant Bomb are doing great work, but it remains to be seen how sustainable that model is — particularly as so many of the bloody things are starting to pop up that it is no longer possible or affordable for anyone to be "widely read" when it comes to good-quality games coverage. That's not necessarily a bad thing, given that back in the '80s and '90s we tended to be loyal to individual magazines rather than reading all of them, but it's a big shift in how the Internet has traditionally worked.

I don't even know what to think any more. It's bleak out there. And I wonder if it's ever going to get better again. I just want to have some fun websites to read again, by people who know their craft and are passionate about it. We used to have that — why can't we have that again? Why can't we have 1up.com again?

Those are rhetorical questions.

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#oneaday Day 413: Our tedious cyberpunk future

So, it seems like today is the day that the UK's "Online Safety Act" rolls out, which means all manner of sites and services, from Bluesky to PornHub via Discord, have started demanding that you "verify" your age, either by gurning into your device's camera (or, indeed, providing a photo of Norman Reedus from Death Stranding 2) or by — fuck this all the way to hell and back — sending over a photo of your ID, or registering your payment card details.

The reason for this is ostensibly to "protect children" from all the nasty, terrible awful things on the Internet, but as we've seen it can be circumvented by a few nerds on X, The Everything App or enlisting the services of a VPN — exactly the sort of thing these services are for — then it all seems a bit pointless really. Plus then you have to consider what might be the real reason this is all happening. It may sound a bit tinfoil hatty, but most people aren't entirely comfortable associating a photograph of themselves, their ID or their payment information with, among other things, something they fancy cracking one off to.

The ID verification services, of course, assure us that your photographs and data are deleted immediately after you've been verified, but we have no real way of knowing if that is actually the case, or if the deletion process simply copies them to a server somewhere offshore that isn't subject to GDPR. And if the latter is true, given that the services associate your ID information with your email address in most cases, it's probably straightforward enough to tie any sort of "unsavoury" (regardless of legality) activity back to an individual — be it hammering one out to stepsisters stuck in washing machines, looking up instructions on how to make a bomb or attempting to organise political protests.

Over the course of the last few years, with the rise of AI and all manner of other tech enshittification, I can't help but feel — and I'm not alone in this — that we're getting all the downsides of a cyberpunk future that authors warned about, and none of the upsides. Our city centres are not the sprawling, darkly beautiful neon landscapes they're supposed to be — though you might have a backlit, animated ad for Persil on your local bus stop — and no-one is going through life kitting themselves out with cybernetics to do interesting, unusual, creative, daring and illegal things.

Worse, and this is probably the biggest kicker, is that all the "villains" of the piece are so very boring. Cyberpunk villains are vibrant, exciting, dramatic — but not in reality. We have Trump, whose name literally means "guff", and Elon Musk, who is just a fucking idiot, and Sam Altman, who is a delusional cunt. None of them have the charisma to make them worth hating; they're just… there, making the world worse, bit by bit, one little nibble at a time. The world is suffering death by a thousand cuts, and it feels like there's not much we can do about it other than to subscribe to NordVPN (and feel weird about it after all the jokes about YouTubers shilling it) and just try to muddle on the best we can.

Perhaps this will mark a grand return to finding discarded porn mags in bushes. That'll be a blast from the past, won't it? Though hopefully not a blast you come into direct contact with.

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#oneaday Day 397: Cool Sites: where are they now?

Earlier today, prompted by some discussion online, I found myself pondering the concept of the Cool Website. You know the kind of thing: the places you used to point your browser at on a semi-regular basis before everyone collectively agreed (apparently) that the only websites worth a damn now are social media, "newsletters" and whatever "legacy media" rag people are angry at this hour.

I've been trying to think of some Cool Websites that I used to visit at various points in my long-term Internet history, and I thought it might be interesting to see what happened — if anything — to each of them that I can remember. Sound like fun? No? Well, I'm doing it anyway.

1up.com

I must confess familial bias here: since my brother helped launch it and was a key part of its team that helped to establish what we know today as The Gaming Podcast, 1up.com will always be special to me. But it will always be special for another reason, too: it's where I met a number of like-minded folks that I enjoy discussing video games in great depth and at great length with. Honestly, I always spent at least as much time on 1up.com with the community features as I did with the staff's writing, but it was just a damned good website all round, really.

Where it is now: 1up.com officially closed in July of 2013, but everything that had once made it special had disappeared long before that. I put it probably around 2008-2009 or so when most of us made a grand exodus off the site to try and find a new collective home; we never quite settled in one place since, more's the pity, though most of us had at least brief dalliances with Facebook, Twitter and even Google+. 1up.com itself though is long-gone, now, though; not even a holding page remains, and the nature of how the site was programmed means that archive.org can't even get particularly reliable snapshots to pull out of the ether. So this one is, sadly, long dead.

Persian Kitty's Adult Links

Picture, if you will, a land and a time before PornHub. Indeed, a time before YouTube. A time where watching a pornographic video meant a significant commitment in order to download a 10-second video that filled a quarter of your screen, because no-one was streaming filth over dial-up connections. In that environment, Persian Kitty's Adult Links became legendary for me and my friends after one of us saw it mentioned in a magazine. This was a site that updated daily with new links to free galleries of ladies with their kit off. Sometimes there were even videos. Most of these galleries were trying to get you to sign up for a pay site, but there was plenty of material available that was perfectly suitable for a wafty crank of an evening.

Where it is now: Astonishingly (or perhaps not, given the enduring nature of online pornography), Persian Kitty's Adult Links still exists as a website… though it is a shadow of its former self, consisting of little more than some banner ads for various adult livestreaming sites. Four, to be exact, two generic "sex/adult cam" sites, one BDSM-themed site and one MILF-themed site. I'm happy that the Persian Kitty flag still flies, but less thrilled at what the site has become. It always kind of was a big ad, but now it's not trying to hide that.

Kongregate

For quite a while, Kongregate was the place to go for online Web-based games. All the big Flash game makers posted their stuff there, and the site had a bunch of interesting features like achievements, real-time chat, online multiplayer and even a site-wide metagame where you could collect trading cards by playing individual games, then battle other players with those cards in its own self-contained area. While I never got as big into Flash games as some others did, there were some legit all-time classics on Kongregate, with Desktop Tower Defense being the one that springs most readily to mind.

Where it is now: The site still exists and still offers many of the features I mentioned above, but the distinctive Web-based nature of the old Flash games has disappeared with the retirement of Flash as a commonly used Web technology. What we have now are pretty much the same free-to-play games you'd see on your average storefront, including licensed junk and a bajillion Raid: Shadow Legends knockoffs. Of greater concern is the site's new tagline at the bottom, which states "Kongregate is an open platform for all web games and a pioneering game developer in the blockchain space." Yeah. Fuck that.

hairytongue.com

I don't even remember what the main point of this site was — I think it was just a general "Internet humour" site similar to b3ta.com (which still exists and I don't think has updated its design since about 2005, but which still appears to be quite active) — but I do recall there being an extensive gallery of photoshops based on the easily provable hypothesis that Jamie Oliver is a flabby tongued Mockney wanker.

Where it is now: It is nowhere, save for a GoDaddy holding page. Thankfully, archive.org just managed to grab its last wheezes of life on this Earth. I was surprised and saddened to discover that it was as long ago as 2003-2004 that this site apparently ceased to exist. Oh, and if you were wondering, it was a site about hangovers. But mostly about mocking Jamie Oliver.

Weebl's Stuff

This was, among other things, the home of badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger mushroom mushroom, and was a mainstay of popular Internet culture for many years. As with several of these other sites, the decline of Flash meant there's now a whole generation who (probably) haven't grown up with the adventures of Weebl and Bob, Magical Trevor and numerous other pieces of absolute nonsense.

Where it is now: It's still there! Not only that, but Weebl himself is still making videos, and from the sounds of some recent posts on Bluesky, has found himself a creatively fulfilling Actual Job involving writing.

I think that's probably a nice place to leave this, isn't it? Definitely a subject I might return to at some point, though… once I can remember what websites used to exist, that is…

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