Facebook, at this point, I probably can just get rid of. I'm not sure if my WhatsApp account is connected to it (I don't think it is?) but other than that, I have absolutely no reason to use it. No-one speaks to me on there, I don't like using it and it is, thus, largely useless to me. That should be fairly straightforward; my only real hesitation is the aforementioned professional responsibility, as there are times where I may have to hop in and cover moderation if no-one else is available to do so.

Bluesky is a more difficult one. For many folks, Bluesky has taken the place of Twitter, and that is the primary reason I have been using it. The combination of short-form posts and ease of starting conversations with people you follow has long been an appealing element, just like it once was with Twitter. But at the same time, Bluesky, being a heavily left-leaning platform, is very much home to some of the worst kinds of behaviour that turned me off Twitter in the first place. (The behaviours that are keeping me off Twitter now are, of course, from the opposite side of the political spectrum, and far more odious. But still.) While I, too, am a left-leaning individual, there's a particular breed of leftie that likes to make a lot of noise about whatever their hobby horse of the day is, and it can get very tiring when it feels like there is never a moment's peace.

Thing is, many of these issues are valid things to care about, but they often end up becoming "guilt by association" exercises, with other people and organisations getting drawn into the crossfire just because they might have once, in the past, crossed paths with whatever the target of the hour is. At that point, people start getting hurt; people who don't deserve to be hurt. And that's the biggest thing that makes me contemplate shutting things down. I am one of those people who have been hurt by situations like this, not because I (or any organisations I am attached to) have done anything wrong, but because at some point we have crossed paths with the target of someone's ire.

This might sound pretty cut and dry. I'm having negative feelings about Bluesky, so why don't I just jack it in?

Well, because for all its irritating features, it is the one and pretty much only place online where I feel like I have a connection to other people. There are a few people I know there; there are a few people I have got to know there; there are a few people I would like to know there. Cutting my connection to all those people because I am pissed off and exhausted at the behaviour of some other users feels… disproportionate and excessive.

The alternative, of course, is to take steps to remove the people whose behaviour I object to from my feed. Bluesky has numerous ways of doing that, including muting individual comment threads, muting users and blocking users. Honestly, that is probably the answer in this situation, but I'm always a bit hesitant about this, because in many cases, the people who have been exhibiting behaviour I object to aren't like that all the time; some of them are even folks that I like. But I don't feel comfortable confronting them on things like this, because, like I say, I don't necessarily think the core of what they're arguing is wrong; hurting other people unfairly, however, is. And that nuance often tends to get lost in online disagreements. I've had enough negative experiences in the past to know that for absolute sure.

So I sit here, with no particularly ideal solutions at hand. Close Bluesky, and end up feeling completely lonely and isolated, because no-one checks in on people if they're not on social media any more? (I've tried this before. It's like you cease to exist, even if you're doing something like I'm doing here, and updating a blog regularly.) Mute, unfollow or block the offenders and risk kicking off arguments that don't need to happen, and which will inevitably leave me feeling worse? Or just suck it up, recognise that I have a difference of opinion with some people, continue to catch occasional strays and feel miserable and uneasy?

I just want a Third Place where people are chill, man. There are fuck all left in the real world, and it's starting to feel like there are fuck all left online, either. I will never forgive them for taking 1up and its club pages from us.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 877: A quiet life versus loneliness appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Now, that might not sound like a particularly offensive topic for a video, and it arguably isn't — even if it is both clichéd and clickbaity. What was offensive was… well, it was a lot of things. The video's thumbnail, which showed an obvious AI-generated approximation of Quest 64 rather than an actual screenshot. The fact Quest 64 was the poster boy for this topic in the first place (Quest 64 is approximately 12 hours long, which is very short by RPG standards). The fact that the channel, "Retro Pocket", very obviously uses an AI-generated logo — and thus it is not unreasonable to assume that the entire video may well be AI-generated.

"Now I have to not only fight the past," Quest said, "but future AI misinformation. It's becoming increasingly clear my Internet days are numbered, sadly." He went on to criticise the growing "Claudepuke" scene in the recompilation and modding scenes — something which has driven me to despair of late also.

The thing that made me most sad about this — and I feel sad and angry about all of it, make no mistake — is the fact that a person as thoroughly admirable and pleasant as Quest is should have to feel this way; like his contributions to online culture are no longer welcome, appreciated or worthwhile continuing with. I say this as someone who both follows the Quest 64 Official account, and has casually chatted with the person behind the account outside the context of public-facing social media: we need more people like this, not fewer.

It makes me sad, because I get it. As someone who still runs both a personal blog and an enthusiast, non-commercial video game website, I am a relic of a past age. I refuse to engage with short-form vertical video because I fucking hate it as a medium. I am tired of clickbait, AI slop, YouTubers covering the same few topics over and over again (I tried everything by BRAND! Testing VIRAL TIKTOK recipes! I bought AI SLOP PRODUCTS!) and headlines that refuse to name the proper noun that is the subject of the story. And yet with each passing day, I feel more and more like I cannot escape any of those things. I feel more and more like I am not welcome on an Internet I was once excited to be a part of. That offline existence feels increasingly appealing.

And yet I don't want to give up. I still remember that wide-eyed wonderment that my whole family had when we were first looking at Web pages in a crash-prone copy of Mosaic when CompuServe first added access to the broader Internet. I still remember the first time we ordered something online. I still remember the first time I chatted to someone online and formed a genuine friendship as a result. I refuse to accept that Internet is completely gone.

I feel like those of us who have been online since the beginning (or the beginning of it being relatively "mainstream", anyway) have just as much right to exist on the Internet as those who are systematically destroying everything that used to be great about it. In fact, if I'm honest, I feel like we have more right to exist than those who are systematically destroying everything that used to be great about it. I would be sad to see Quest 64 Official stop posting. I would be elated to never see anything from Sam Altman, Wario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg and their ilk ever again.

But I don't know what to do, other than to stubbornly Keep Posting. To keep writing this silly little personal blog here, to keep penning my in-depth thoughts about video games I've played, and to steadfastly refuse to get on board with technological trends that are actively, demonstrably harmful to the concept of "culture" in general. To prove that there is still a place for The Old Internet.

So that's all I can do, really. Just Keep Posting. I refuse to let the fuckheads win. I will, hopefully, still be here when all the AI companies collapse and the world endures a hitherto unprecedented financial crisis that brings the very concept of capitalism to complete ruin. And I will be laughing. And probably crying a bit. But mostly laughing.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 851: Abandon ship? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The reason I can tell they are AI-generated spam is because they don't come from a person. Inevitably, they come from a "company", with the email address and website you can optionally include when leaving a comment linking to some sketchy website or other that wants you to download their new AI-powered tool to, I don't know, delete all the shit on your hard drive or some such shit.

The reason why these are infinitely more frustrating than good old-fashioned spam (and man, at this point I really miss the surreal narrative spam from 2009) is because, using the magic of AI, they might initially appear to be a genuine comment. In other words, the "agent" (spit) has taken a blog post as input, been tasked with composing a comment that might initially appear to be engaging directly with the subject matter, but which is actually just stating what you wrote back to you with slightly different wording, then attached a sketchy link and email address to it. The hope, presumably, is twofold: firstly, that the blog's owner will fall for the spam by clicking on the link or sending a message to the email address; and secondly, that the blog's owner will publish the comment, making the link public and thereby, potentially, tricking others into inadvertently clicking on it.

This is fucking scummy behaviour! Moreover, this is not convincing me that "agents" are in any way a net good for humanity! Not to the absurd degree that I think they're going to "destroy humanity" or any of that utter nonsense, but slowly but surely, generative AI in general is making the Internet harder and harder to use effectively — and, moreover, it's destroying our trust in one another.

Earlier today on Bluesky, I saw someone share a post from an "Atari news" account that looked interesting. Supposedly there's a project out there that is attempting (and starting to succeed) to get Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI, but not that one) games working on Atari 8-bit. They've supposedly already got King's Quest up and running, and the parallel C64 project is, it seems, a little further along.

However, I was immediately inclined to distrust everything about this news, firstly because of the amount of vibecoded bullshit that is out there at the moment — and apologies to the creators of the project in question if it has all been done by hand; you might want to put that very fucking prominently on your website — and secondly, because the Atari news Bluesky account that shared it in the first place is absolutely fucking infested with garbage AI-generated artwork, leading me to believe that the account is automated. An automated news-aggregating account isn't necessarily a bad thing in its own right, but when combined with the amount of AI imagery that account shares, every single one of my bullshit sensors starts going off.

Want another example? Time Extension, the retro gaming website, has recently been dealing with AI-powered plagiarism and harassment from an account calling itself "Generation Amiga", ostensibly a news site about… well, the Amiga. And yet if you ever accidentally have the misfortune to end up on Generation Amiga's website, you will discover that not one of the articles there (very few of which are actually Amiga-related) is written by a person. Their "exclusive reviews" consist of LLM-generated slop derived from marketing material. And they even had the gall to accuse Time Extension of being "Big Media" harassing a poor, innocent little independent creator who was just using an ickle-wickle bit of planet-destroying AI to construct a vibecoded website that has a net negative value to humanity — all because Time Extension's editor, Damien McFerran, quite rightly called this absolute bullshit out, for the benefit of anyone in retro gaming who had never had the misfortune of stumbling across these fucknuts.

You know, contrary to how it might appear, I don't like ranting and raving and complaining about this all the time! (All right, maybe a little bit.) I would much rather live in a world where it wasn't happening at all! But when I'm in a situation where I can no longer trust that comments on my fucking personal blog are written by actual people, I think I am more than justified in losing my patience. When I am in a situation where my first response to a potentially cool piece of retro gaming-related news is not "wow, that's cool!" but instead "is this AI bullshit…?" I think I am very fucking justified in losing my patience.

I'm so, so tired of this all. None of this is making the Internet better. None of this is making the world better. All it's doing is, at best, sowing division and mistrust, and at worst, completely obliterating what was once the world's most valuable repository of information, knowledge and human creativity. That's the "AIpocalypse" we should be concerned about.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 838: A shitty new trend appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Well, let me qualify that somewhat: you shouldn't read the comments on public-facing, commercial sites. If you have successfully cultivated your own pleasant little community in your own comments section, you absolutely should not feel bad about reading your comments and continuing to encourage that sort of behaviour. You might even find yourself forming some genuine friendships.

Comments that are open to the broader Internet, though. No. Just… don't. Do yourself a favour, because wading in there is going to make you feel worse. You know that, I know that. And yet still we both do it, even though we both know, at this point, that it is a form of mental self-harm.

There's a website that I enjoy reading, which I won't name because I think it's a bit mean to draw attention to them for having a shitty comments section. But… well, they have a really shitty comments section, and it's immensely frustrating, because the subject matter of the site is something that I would like to engage with other people over! I would like to get to know more people who are into the same things I am into!

And yet, unfortunately, it seems that the subject matter in question — it's retro gaming, I might as well say it — attracts some of the most unpleasant people out there. I already knew this to a certain extent, with the amount of drama that often surrounds the retro YouTuber sector in particular, but it's frustrating that there can't just be a nice place for people who are interested in retro gaming to hang out without a variety of dipshits coming in and stinking the place up with some truly foul opinions.

I mean, come on. We're talking about a site focusing on retro gaming where one guy in the comments decided that A Really Cool Thing To Do would be to go off on one about how much he thought CRTs were shit, and how everyone who enjoyed using CRTs for their retro consoles were idiots, and how anyone disagreeing with him was a shithead and wrong. Come on, man. Know your audience. What sort of response were you expecting when you pulled something like that out of your arse?

Unfortunately, I know the answer to that: they did know their audience; they wanted to start conflict. They wanted to start arguments and make other people's lives miserable, even in one of the places where they should be able to feel like they can just enjoy their hobbies and interests. People like this have always been around, for as long as "Going Online" has been a thing. They get some sort of perverse gratification from it. And somehow, we can't look away, even though we know it hurts us to do so — and hurts even more if we rise to the bait and respond to these dickheads.

So yeah. Do yourself a favour and don't read the comments. There are better places to build a community over common interests than the comments section of a public-facing website. Although if you happen to find any relating to retro gaming, do let me know…?

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 819: Comments sections are self-harm appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 722: Entering the ATmosphere appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 713: Portal charm appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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:

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.

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.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 705: Resist mediocre anti-intellectualism appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 701: Burnout and guilt appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 596: Sad little men appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 555: Silly things from around the Web appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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?

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 543: Tabbed browsing appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 502: Another reminder that traditional games journalism is all but dead appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

If you're in the UK, you might want to sign this.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 413: Our tedious cyberpunk future appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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…

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 397: Cool Sites: where are they now? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Earlier today, Dave Gilbert, renowned modern adventure game developer and publisher, happened to point out that Adventure Gamers, a website with a near 25-year history, had, at some point, sold out and become an online casino shilling site, leeching off the prior content — which, after 25 years, you can bet had some decent SEO juice, even with the myriad changes to such algorithms over the years — in order to hook people into shady gambling sites.

My immediate reaction to this was "ew, gross", shortly followed by "I bet I could make a really good adventure game site". Unfortunately, this thought was then almost immediately followed by "…but why should I bother?"

This isn't the first time I've thought something along these lines. The modern Web is killing, stifling any sense of ambition I might have once had. It's not one, single thing like generative AI causing me to feel this way — though you better believe the amount of AI slop out there is a big part of it — but rather a continual piling-up of little micro-enshittifications. Over the course of the last 10 years in particular, these micro-enshittifications have all accumulated into the garbage fire that is the Web of 2025: a place where it's hard to find reliable information, where it's even harder to verify whether what you're looking at is reliable information, and where the people with the power to make a difference don't seem to give a shit.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself, in case you've not been here on the previous occasions I've done so.

When I was a kid, I grew up surrounded by computers: specifically, the Atari 8-bit and ST, with MS-DOS and Windows PCs following along around the early '90s. For pretty much my entire childhood, my Dad and my brother were both regular contributors to an Atari magazine initially called Page 6 and later New Atari User, after it took over the name from a publication that was bowing out of the Atari 8-bit scene.

I loved getting a new issue of Page 6 every couple of months; I loved reading through all the features, even if I didn't understand all of them, and it gave me great pride to see my Dad and my brother's name in print pretty much every issue after a certain point. My Dad would cover flight simulators, productivity software and the use of music technology, while my brother would cover Atari ST games. We got a lot of free software out of this arrangement — much of which is now in my possession — and it's fair to say that this played an instrumental role in defining my interests and hobbies growing up.

When my brother left home, he had decided to forego university in favour of a staff writer position on a magazine called Games-X. This was a risky and ultimately unsuccessful venture on the part of publisher Hugh Gollner, but it was a nice idea: a weekly games magazine that covered new releases for the home computers and consoles that were around at the time — the tail end of the 8-bit era, the heyday of the ST and Amiga, and the days when the Mega Drive and SNES were just starting to get some attention.

I was immensely proud to have a family member in the games press, published every week in an actual magazine you could walk into a newsagent and buy. (Page 6 had a stint on newsstands, too, but it eventually went back to its roots as a subscription-only magazine, clinging on to dear life until 1998, impressively.) And my pride only continued after Games-X folded and my brother followed Gollner to the then-fledgling Maverick Magazines, where he initially worked as a staff writer on Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, while his girlfriend at the time held the same position on its Super NES counterpart Control.

It continued further still as he worked his way up the ranks, through several publications and publishing companies, until eventually he found himself in the United States working on the Official PlayStation Magazine and Electronic Gaming Monthly, and helping to launch the pioneering video game social networking site 1up.com — dearly missed.

Every step of the way, I followed his career with interest, conscious of the fact that I was 10 years younger than him, thinking "one day I'll get my chance; I really want to follow in his footsteps, and one day I'll have that opportunity if I just keep trying."

I did keep trying. I did some articles for Page 6, just as my brother had. I did some freelance contributions to PC Zone and the Official Nintendo Magazine, back in the days when one article would get you the money that two months' worth of news posts nets you today. I worked on some little sites, most of which have now disappeared, sadly, and I eventually had the opportunity to work on both GamePro and USgamer, two decent-sized but, admittedly, American sites.

For some reason I had found the UK games press perpetually impossible to crack after a certain point, and after attending a few PR events on behalf of both GamePro I understood why: there was very much a heavily cliquey, old boys' club thing going on, and as a socially awkward (and what I now know to be) autistic loser, that was not something I felt in any way able to crack my way into.

But still I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that GamePro was the start of something big, until we were told via email one morning just before Christmas that none of us had jobs any more. I wanted to believe that USgamer was another opportunity for something big, until I found myself screwed over and, once again, informed via email, this time on my actual birthday, that I no longer had a job.

After that, I didn't seek any further positions in the games press. I'd taken too many beatings. But I didn't want to give up. That's when I started MoeGamer, which initially began as a means of continuing some of the work I'd done at USgamer covering Japanese games that other publications didn't give the time of day. This was work that people in both the industry and from the "public" side of things told me that they found valuable and helpful, because I wasn't just going "ew, anime art" and writing things off as "pandering" or whatever.

Long-term, I wanted to build MoeGamer into something that really stood by itself: a site where you could look up information on a wide variety of games and find some thoughtful, well-considered writing about it. And I think I have achieved that, even if I don't have the time or energy to update it as often as I'd like; the one positive about my previous job, which was beyond tedious, was that it gave me ample time and energy to write new articles and make new videos.

I still never really "made it", though. Few people online know who I am; even fewer go "oh, wow, a Pete Davison article, gotta read that" — although I do have a pleasingly enthusiastic following in the Evercade community, at least, thanks to my work on the official site — and I just find myself wondering… was all this for nothing? Is there even any point trying any more?

The Adventure Gamers thing stings, because were it 10-15 years ago, I'm pretty sure I could have put together a banger of an adventure game-centric website, developed a decent following and kept it up and running for 25+ years without selling out to online casino shills. But now, from every corner of the Web I read horror stories about sites struggling for discoverability, struggling to earn the money to keep the lights on and struggling to get anyone to give a shit about the written word. There are rare outliers, and the rise of worker-owned, reader-supported initiatives such as Aftermath and Giant Bomb is encouraging — but both of those (and others like them) already had ready-made, built-in audiences thanks to the people involved and their prior positions; how long would a brand-new website with a specialist focus even last these days, if it wasn't "the next project from [insert big name site] alumnus, [name]"?

I feel utterly demoralised. I feel like what was once my dream career just doesn't really exist any more. I recognise that I'm extraordinarily fortunate to have fallen into the position I'm in now, where I get to work on games that I care about, crafting written material to help people understand and appreciate quite why I love them so much — and hopefully help said readers learn to love them, too — but there are days of increasing frequency when I wonder if anyone really gives a toss. The days when I have people screeching obscenities at me on social media because they can't buy a cartridge that is out of print. The days when I have to deal with endless, mind-numbing, Queen's Duck-level "feedback" from people who absolutely don't care about the games I'm working on as much as I do. The days when I'm genuinely fearful for the history and legacy of the hobby I love so much, and where I weep for the traditional, written-word games press, a side of the industry which almost doesn't exist at all any more.

I was born 10 years too late. And believe me, it really sucks to have spent a significant portion of your life thinking "I really want to do that", only to find out, much too late, that "that" just isn't really a thing any more.

The obvious answer to all this is something I've thought of and felt before — that even if there doesn't seem to be a "place" for something, you should do it anyway, because someone, somewhere, will appreciate it. But with every site sold to private equity companies and gutted to turn into an AI slop factory, the motivation and ambition to do something significant and meaningful diminishes, bit by bit. What was once a roaring flame of determination is now little more than a flicker. And I hate that.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 376: The death of ambition appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I remember when I was growing up, and I'd hear about life when my parents were young, and thinking "gosh, that was all jolly primitive, how on Earth did people get by without televisions and computers and the Internet?" Sitting here in 2025, thinking back to my own childhood, I feel like we've gone through shifts almost as big once again.

I grew up surrounded by computers. My Dad worked for IBM, and I'm pretty sure we had at least one Atari computer in the house from the moment I was born. I learned how to use computers from an early age — not just playing games, but also using them for productivity, programming and creativity. And my enjoyment of computing helped me make some friends, too.

But by modern standards, those computers were limited. They could run one program at a time, and you had to do everything using removable physical media. Want to play a game? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up. Want to do something creative? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up, then make sure you have another separate disk or tape handy to save your work onto. Hard disks existed, but they were something like £700 in '80s money for 20MB, and thus very few people had them — more to the point, not much software supported them, either, at least until the 16-bit era, when they became a little more commonplace.

"Going online" was something you could do from quite early on if you had the necessary hardware, and it was a very different experience to what using the Internet (really the Web) is today. To even get logged on you'd have to enter a cryptic string of commands to the modem, and sometimes it felt like a bit of a roll of the dice as to whether or not it would actually work at all. When you did get online, it was pages and pages of text, no pictures, and an understanding that you had a limited amount of time to do what you had to do before either 1) your family kicked you off for tying up the phone line for too long or 2) the SysOp kicked you off remotely for spending too long, preventing others from using the service.

When "online" spaces other than bulletin board systems came along — accompanied by computers that could do more than one thing at once — it was a revelation. I have immensely fond memories of exploring CompuServe on my Dad's account, spending time on the GAMERS forum, reading and replying to messages, and, on one memorable occasion, making $200 from some custom Wolfenstein 3-D levels. But it was still very different to today; CompuServe was a walled garden of curated stuff to explore, and access to the broader Web didn't come about until later. I remember us having great difficulty setting up the Mosaic browser to view simple websites, and how exciting it was when we finally got to look at, say, pictures from NASA for the first time.

I don't think anything tech-wise has changed things as much as the rise and growth of the mobile phone, though. Getting a mobile phone when I was in my late teens made me feel like I had a whole new degree of independence, free to communicate with my friends on my own terms when and how I felt like it (Pay as you Go credit permitting). I recall long, drunken text conversations with people important to me at university; there was even a time when I'd voluntarily phone people up for a chat. I used to have long phone conversations with my perpetually absent university housemate, for example; she was a good friend, but I didn't see her all that much for a variety of reasons.

Then, when smartphones arrived, everything changed. It didn't seem like it at first, because the earliest implementation of the iPhone was very limited. There were no installable apps; you had to do everything via the Web. But sites were starting to get savvy to the rise of this exciting new technology, and were starting to serve up "responsive" pages that looked nice on the small screen of an iPhone.

I was working at an Apple Store when the iPhone launched. It was an exciting time, for sure, and it only got more exciting when the App Store launched. Suddenly, there was this brave new frontier for software, and we'd all download and experiment with all manner of different apps; not just games, but productivity tools, creativity tools and silly joke apps — who can forget the "drinking a beer" one?

When in-app purchases were announced, my heart sank. We were already starting to see some nickel-and-diming in the console gaming space, and it was about to get much worse in mobile. Free-to-play became the default, and aggressive monetisation came along with it. And there were people who would make excuses for this. People who are still making excuses for it to this day, to such a degree that we're never going to get rid of free-to-play and microtransactions at this point.

But I think the biggest change was how addicted people became to those black plastic slabs. And I'm not excluding myself from that description, either; I could feel myself being compelled to fiddle with it constantly, and I didn't like it. I still don't like it. I'm better at controlling it today, but I still feel the "urges" near-constantly.

Things only got worse with the rise of content designed to be deliberately addictive, such as short-form videos. For quite some time now, I've found a lot of tech to be scary and unpleasant; definitely a far cry from the excitement I'd feel every day when I booted up the Atari 130XE to do some BASIC programming.

It's not all bad, of course. It's great having satellite navigation in your pocket when you're trying to find things. It's great being able to stay in touch with people via a whole host of different means. And it's great being able to quickly snap a photo or video of anything without kicking yourself for not bringing your camera with you.

But there have been some big changes. Whether or not they're as big as the differences between my parents' childhood and my childhood, I don't know. But I suspect the realisation that you've lived through some huge changes in the world and society is an important part of progressing through life; you often don't notice these changes while they're in the middle of happening, but when you look back on them you realise that they were pretty massive. And not always for the better.

Would I like to go back to earlier, less technologically advanced, less convenient days? Some days, I honestly do think that yes, I would. There are a lot of great things about our modern, connected society — and a lot of terrible things, too — but sometimes I just miss the simplicity of life as it was back then.

I find myself wondering exactly what I mean by "back then"; if it was possible to go back, exactly what point would be the optimal one? I think, for me, it would probably be the early 2000s. Mobile phones would exist but wouldn't be the life-consuming soul suckers they are today; computer and video game technology would be at a good point; and we might all see a bit more of one another in the real world.

I might not have this blog, though. Or maybe I would. Perhaps it wouldn't be in quite this form. Perhaps I'd be a trailblazer in the blogging space.

Who knows? You can't go back, more's the pity. So we're stuck with what we have, regrettably, constructed for ourselves. At least for the moment.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 339: Eras appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I like looking back over the mountains of nonsense I've posted on this site since 2010, but one thing that makes me a bit sad is quite how many of the links I posted years ago are now broken. You can tell at a glance, 'cause I have a plugin running that makes any broken links appear as crossed-out text, and the further back you go in my archives, the more likely you are to find these. (EDIT: I turned it off, because it was throwing up a lot of false positives.)

The same is true for YouTube videos I've posted. More often than not, any YouTube video I've posted that is more than maybe five years old has been taken down, made private or copyright claimed by someone. And, of course, with the mass exodus from Twitter since Elon went… the way he went, formerly embedded tweets that belonged to now-deleted accounts are just… gone.

One of the things I thought was supposed to happen with the Internet was that there would be a certain degree of permanence. You'd make something online, it would be your mark on the world. But, unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. There is no infallible means of making something on the Internet and having it stay as a permanent fixture. If it's your own website, it will cease to exist the moment you stop paying for hosting (or have something happen to you that precludes you from continuing to pay for hosting, like, say, dying) and if it's something you've hosted on someone else's service, such as a social media platform, your stuff is only as permanent as that social media platform.

There are exceptions to this, of course. The amazing work that the Internet Archive does with its Wayback Machine makes it possible to travel back in time and see websites as they appeared back in the day. Okay, it's not perfect — the archiving process often loses images and layout information, any interactive functions will inevitably be broken and anything built using defunct technology like Flash will remain inaccessible — but it's something, at least. I can still visit my website from 2004, for example. And, in slightly more broken form, my short-lived games blog from 2010.

But what about the stuff that, for one reason or another, has been impossible to archive? There is no longer any trace of the discussions the Squadron of Shame once had on the 1up.com Radio forums, for example, and while some of 1up.com itself has been archived, the Club pages, which is where a lot of our conversations took place, are not among that which has been saved from oblivion. Likewise, my old iWeb site, which I hosted on iCloud precursor .mac, no longer exists because at some point Apple discontinued the "iDisk" online storage that the site was hosted on. Those things are all long gone, and that's a bit sad.

This is one reason why I was so upset when WordPress.com made a hash of this site some time ago — against what some might call all odds, I have managed to keep this site in existence for 17 years, which is positively ancient in Internet terms, and the threat of having that all taken away based on a false positive from a stupid automated system was absolutely heartbreaking.

I guess the lesson is that if there's stuff you care about, back it up as well as having it online. Because one day, the online version might not be there any more, and it might not be through any fault of your own!

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday day 335: Broken links appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I, as you probably know, have a YouTube channel. I have had it for a grand total of about seventeen years at the time of writing, though I would say I've only really been actively, semi-regularly using it since about 2018, initially to host video versions of a podcast I was doing, and subsequently to kick off the series that I'm still running in one form or another to this day.

Over the course of those 17 years, I have picked up just over 3,600 subscribers at the time of writing, with the vast majority of those showing up since 2018. While that is obviously a drop in the ocean compared to big, successful channels out there, I am pleased with it, and honestly I don't particularly want my channel to grow any faster.

In order to acquire those 3,600 subscribers, I have done… nothing particularly special, to be perfectly honest. I have steadfastly ignored the advice of YouTube "gurus" to pursue trends, to be clickbaity with titles and thumbnails, and to "edit for engagement". In short, I consistently reject what is supposed "best practice" in favour of just doing whatever the hell I want — and I have seen some success doing just that. Could I see more success if I was following the supposed "rules" to the letter? Quite possibly. But then I don't think my channel would be mine any more.

One of the things I object to most about online culture in general these days — not just YouTube, but this applies all over — is how no-one really seems to have a personality any more. Everyone says the same things, everyone responds to things in the same way, everyone uses the same bank of reaction GIFs when they can't be bothered to use their words. In YouTube, this is best exemplified by the way you could watch five randomly chosen videos from five moderately sized channels, and I bet you'd hear the exact same sound effects and music clips, and see the exact same visual memes, in at least half of them — if not all of them.

This is because these things, supposedly, work. But in using that "best practice", you are eliminating a lot of the soul from your own work. You're making something that caters to the mysterious "algorithm" — or rather, an imaginary audience — rather than expressing yourself, as yourself. It's the same with the way people talk to one another online; because those reaction GIFs and snippy retorts like "skill issue" are universally understood by everyone, everyone uses them because they're seen as an efficient means of communication.

But, again, there's no personality there. Any time someone comes out with "skill issue" or "tourist" or whatever the derogatory term-du-jour is, I lose all interest in getting to know that person, just as I lose interest in a YouTube video the moment they start busting out the Metal Gear Solid alert noise, The X-Files theme and Spongebob "a few moments later" interstitial cards… and just as, at some point in the last 20 years, you've probably lost interest in someone who won't shut up about bacon, won't stop saying "the cake is a lie" or thinks declaring that pineapple on pizza is "weird" is a daring and brave opinion to express.

People like that don't have a personality of their own; their personality is The Internet, Circa 2025. And, as we've pretty comprehensively established at this point, The Internet, Circa 2025 is not someone you'd want to bring home to meet your parents. It's someone who deserves to be kicked into a ditch 50 miles from the nearest town and left to rot.

So, as much as there are probably things I could do "better" with my YouTube channel, I choose not to do them. I don't feel the need to. I didn't create that channel to be famous, I didn't create that channel to be a huge "thing", I created it as a means of expressing myself and sharing my own, personal enthusiasm for things that are important to me. That's it. That 3,600 people like what I do enough to want to follow it without me resorting to "best practice" says something to me: it says "if you're happy, just keep doing what you're doing".

So that's what I intend to do.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 244: Is "best practice" the enemy of expression? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I have to give a huge shout-out to Ross from Zume's support here, as he was inordinately patient with Bluehost's many, many attempts to make it as difficult as possible to just transfer your website from one place to another. Bluehost, like many other sites these days, seemingly insist on making you use a chat facility to get any sort of support, and, like most chat support services, seems to be staffed almost exclusively by people who don't really know what they're talking about. This meant it took several separate chat sessions by me to get them to do something approaching what we needed to perform the migration, and even then they still did it wrong multiple times.

I have confidence, though, that even if there are any lingering issues from the migration, Zume's support staff will be able to sort them out. Like I say, I'm hoping that most of these will be resolved by the DNS propagation completing, so I'm not going to worry too much about things for a few days. And in the meantime, it's nice to know that I can just get on with blogging here; I didn't even lose any posts from the last few days, which is great.

Anyway, that's that. If you happen to see any weirdness here or on MoeGamer for the next couple of days, that's why. Hopefully it will all be sorted soon, and we can return to business as usual!

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 195: Migration... almost complete? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As I may have mentioned once or twice recently, we're going on holiday tomorrow. We'll be away from Monday to Friday visiting Center Parcs in Elveden Forest, which has been a thoroughly nice place to have some time away on all the previous occasions we've visited.

My intentions for this holiday are to unplug almost completely. I will post on this blog daily because of the whole #oneaday thing, but outside of that, I intend to avoid any sort of attachment to the Internet whatsoever, except where absolutely necessary to research things. That means I am making the following promises to myself:

• I will not worry about writing anything for MoeGamer or making any sort of video for YouTube.
• I will not poke my head in on Discord channels that are likely to annoy me.
• I will not look at Twitter at all.
• I will minimise my use of Bluesky.

I haven't really talked about the last one at all, but as you may have surmised from the sidebar, I have been dipping my toe back into social media with Bluesky recently. And for the most part, I've found it a thoroughly pleasant environment that feels very much like Twitter did in the early days. It's very left-leaning, which can at times be a little insufferable, and wherever you look you're very likely to run into either a particularly horny furry or someone proud of the fact they're wearing a cage on their cock, but for the most part it has been a remarkably stress-free social media experience so far.

Part of the reason for this is that the platform is built to discourage "dunking", whereas Twitter outright incentivises it these days. The main way Bluesky differs from Twitter is through its absolutely nuclear block function, which means that if someone quote-posts or replies to someone they have subsequently blocked, if you are following the person who made the quote-post or reply, the original post will appear as blocked to you also. This discourages people from going "looking for trouble" because you can't even see the username of the blocked post. This can be frustrating at times if you missed the original context, but for the most part I think it's a positive thing.

So anyway, as a result of all that, and the fact I have a few friendly faces there, I have been using Bluesky a bit recently, and thus, if I'm going to share anything about the holiday that isn't on this blog, I'll likely do so there. If you're a Bluesky user and want to follow me, here.

But yes. Anyway, the main point of this post is to note that I will be disconnecting from the greater part of the Internet as much as humanly possible while I am away, because I need it. I need some time away where I just don't put any unnecessary pressure on myself, or potentially put myself in situations where I might end up getting annoyed. I'm tempted to outright leave a few Discord servers to remove the temptation altogether, but probably won't go that far.

This holiday is to rest, relax and genuinely get away from it all. My mental health has been in the toilet of late, and the Internet has played a big part in creating that situation. So instead I'm going to be among the trees, play some video games, go swimming and look at friendly deer. We might go and fire a crossbow (not at the deer) and play some pool, too. We haven't decided yet. But it's going to be nice.

Today, meanwhile, it's last-minute packing and tidying up ahead of my mother-in-law coming to look after the cats — sorry burglars, the house will still be occupied while we're away — and perhaps finishing off Silent Hill 2 later.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 128: Imminent Holiday appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As if the scourge that is YouTube Shorts wasn't enough, the latest feature that it's impossible to dismiss permanently — telling it to go away only makes it disappear for a month at most — is "YouTube Playables", a range of bottom-of-the barrel mobile game crap designed to placate the ever more attention-deficit body of users who can't possibly just do one thing at a time.

I honestly don't get it. Who looked at YouTube and went "you know what this needs? Shitty mobile games!" Who looked at Netflix and decided that needed to be a gaming platform? For that matter, who looked at fricking Facebook and thought games on there would be a good idea?

The argument that usually gets trotted out with this sort of thing is that it "gets more people into gaming". Frankly, I've always thought this to be bollocks. Gaming has never been more accessible and affordable on platforms that are specifically built for it, and there is only one possible reason it is being shoehorned in everywhere that it doesn't belong: to monetise the crap out of it, be it through ads, in-app purchases or subscription price hikes.

At this point I'd almost pay YouTube a fee to not have to see garbage like Shorts and Playables ever again. There are fundamental features of their platform that still don't work properly and they waste time with this shit? Someone wants firing.

But I guess someone, somewhere has decided this junk "adds value", so here we are, stuck with it, in yet another example of the Web being enshittified. At least there's no "AI" features in YouTube… yet. Don't you love our cyberpunk dystopian future?

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 98: Feature Creep appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

To be perfectly honest, I've never been on board with social media marketing from a consumer's perspective. Facebook went from being tolerable to almost unusable once The Brands arrived, and it's only gotten worse year after year. And back when I was an active user of Twitter, I not only didn't follow any Brands, I actively went out of my way to block any that ended up in my feed through "promoted" tweets or whatever.

Y'see, I've always had the somewhat controversial viewpoint that social media is best used for socialising. I used to actually quite enjoy using Facebook when it was a place to interact with friends. Likewise Twitter used to be a ton of fun when it was just people hanging out and shooting the breeze. But today? Both of those platforms are nigh-unusable for different reasons. And with people jumping ship from both, I struggle to see how their usefulness as marketing tools can continue.

This comes particularly to mind after the recent news that the "live service" game Concord has taken the unprecedented step of not only ceasing its online features, but actively refunding anyone who bought the game just 11 days after it hit store shelves. The writing was already on the wall for it; reports shortly after its launch suggested it had made "just" $1 million and only about 25,000 sales; these might seem like big numbers, but they really aren't in today's gaming industry, particularly towards the big-budget end of things, which is the space Concord occupies.

This occurrence got me thinking: how much of Concord's disastrous launch was down to the troubled landscape of social media today? A few years back, a big game launch like this would be accompanied by a frenzied Twitter campaign in an attempt to drive "organic" (ugh) word-of-mouth promotion. To put it in non-marketing speak, the game itself would post something on social media, then other people would share it, gradually spreading word of the game through shares, replies and retweets.

Today, we live in a world where Twitter is fast becoming a dirty word, as Elon Musk's "X", as Twitter is now known, is increasingly becoming prone to the "Nazi Bar Problem", since his constant bleating about "free speech" and "wokeness" has meant pretty much the only people left there now are some of the absolute worst dregs of humanity imaginable. It's no longer fun or useful to the vast majority of people who used to hang out there, so a lot of people have jumped ship — either abandoning social media entirely, or moving to alternative platforms such as BlueSky. So one has to wonder how much value there is in marketing to what is rapidly looking like a room full of Nazis.

The same can often feel like it's true of other platforms that are less of a "problem". I talked recently about the issues we had attempting to enforce rules more specifically on a Discord I help manage, and it's hard not to think about that "Nazi Bar Problem". We don't have a problem with "Nazis" as such (the few who have shown inclinations in that vague direction have been shown the door) but there are a few people who have become so entrenched that they're a problem… and it's honestly making us wonder if the time, effort and mental health expended on said server is worth it.

Can a product or Brand survive without social media? The assumption has always been "no", but like I said above, I've found myself actively repulsed by Brand presences on social media for the most part, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Sure, there are some Brand accounts that post interesting things — and the one I'm in charge of I try and make an effort to use in such a manner — but are they really adding any value?

I'm not convinced they are. We are living in a peculiar time, and I don't think anyone quite knows what's going to happen next.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 88: Is social media marketing over? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's hard to understand quite how outrage over the murders has escalated to what it is, but it's fair to say that things have gotten A Bit Racist, to say the least. Last I heard of the situation, a Holiday Inn Express that was supposedly housing immigrants — immigrants completely unrelated to the murders, I might add — was besieged by exactly the sort of people you're probably picturing when talking about people who are A Bit Racist Against Immigrants.

I won't dwell on the situation because I haven't read up much on it, so I'll refrain from commenting further about specifics. But it's brought something into focus for me which is a tad worrying: the fact that despite how we're supposedly a lot more tolerant, progressive and understanding these days, as a society, a lot more of this horrible shit appears to be happening.

Whether it's racist riots against people who had nothing to do with a horrible crime, transphobia at the Olympics (against someone who isn't actually trans) or just general foul behaviour and intolerance, we seem to have hit something of a bump in the road in attempting to create a 21st century utopia.

Who am I kidding; we absolutely were not on the road to a utopia. Everything has been going to shit for a while, so it's perhaps not altogether surprising that people are starting to act up, even if their behaviour and attitudes are completely misdirected. So I have to ask myself: was ignorance actually bliss?

I think back to my time living through the '80s, '90s and '00s and I don't remember ever feeling the sense of existential anxiety and dread over the world that I do these days. It's entirely possible that this was entirely due to our collective ignorance of various groups of people who were downtrodden and oppressed, which of course carries its own problems, but I don't remember encountering anywhere near the sort of outright hatred that is expressed today towards certain groups.

And it wasn't as if we weren't aware of the people who come in for the brunt of the abuse today. I just legitimately don't remember the hatred being anywhere near as vicious as it is today.

At least some of that is down to social media, of course. It's entirely possible that hatred like this was going on, but no-one saw it because not everyone had the means to plaster all their odious beliefs over every available space online. There was no "collective public space" like Twitter once was (and I don't think it is that any more, since a significant portion of people have abandoned it completely, and the most active of those remaining tend to veer fairly hard right) and so people tended to stick to their own communities.

On the one hand, that probably allowed hate groups to thrive in private; on the other, well, you can see the result of everyone being thrown together just from a casual glance at Twitter on any given day. It's not pretty.

Part of the existential anxiety and dread I feel over this whole situation is whether or not I "should" be doing something more, or even if that's possible. I've always settled for some variation of "treat others as you would like to be treated", and even take that as far as not commenting mean things on YouTube videos I really dislike (because I hate it when I get horrible comments). But is that really enough today? And if not, what can one do, other than simply actively not be a racist transphobic shit, and not go deliberately seeking fights?

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 58: Was Ignorance Bliss? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Earlier today, a member of a Discord I'm in posted a link to the following tweet:

The screenshots are of Windows Defender supposedly finding a plain text file containing nothing but the text "This content is no longer available." to be a piece of malware — specifically a Trojan called Casdet!rfn. Obviously a plain text file is not malware, so this is ridiculous, and thus Microsoft must have made a silly mistake and we can all laugh at them, ho ho ho.

I tried it.

Windows Defender did not find it to be malware.

I Googled it and found several outlets reporting on this "story", including some that really should know better (looking at you, Tom's Hardware) — and not one of them had seemingly put in the minimal amount of effort required to verify that this was actually a thing. In other words, none of them had done what I did above: recreate the situation by composing a blank text file, putting the words "This content is no longer available." in it and then scanning it with Windows Defender. A two-minute job, tops.

No, instead the most rigour anyone put in was to look at the replies to the Twitter post, which are fairly slim in number, making me wonder exactly how this misinformation had spread in the first place. The tweet in question has nearly 700,000 views, though only 800 of whatever the Muskrat is calling "Retweets" this week, suggesting the majority of its minor virality has come about through situations exactly like the one I describe above: people sharing it via means other than Twitter.

Now, I don't blame the chap on Discord. He was just sharing something he thought was funny. I don't even blame the original Tweeter, because it's entirely possible that this was true once and it was quietly fixed in a Windows update. But I do blame all these people, and Google.

Not only for reporting on this without doing the absolute bare minimum of fact-checking, but for not correcting these stories if indeed it was once true and now is no longer correct.

Either way, the result is the same: a lot of misinformation gets spread very easily, often by people who have no ill intent. It's not the fault of the people who share this stuff — although I personally would check any sort of claim like this before resharing it myself — but it absolutely is the fault of outlets authoritatively sharing this as "news" without doing any sort of research beyond looking at a few Twitter posts.

Sadly, this is what "news" is these days. Get a good hook for a story that might be the slightest bit clickable and/or shareable, then write it up (with at least 600 words for SEO purposes, of course) and just make some shit up in the middle if you need to. Doesn't matter if the story is true or not; by the time people have clicked or shared, the article has done its job, and it doesn't matter if anyone twigs that it's bollocks or not.

In some respects, I'm sad that I'm no longer working the games journalism beat. But in others, I know that if I was still a newshound, I'd likely be gently encouraged into this sort of odious practice in order to get the numbers up.

I had more integrity and rigour when I was covering stuff for GamePro and USgamer. I'd find stories, research them myself and report on them only when I was good and sure that there actually was a story there. And I didn't have to make a big deal out of doing that at the time, because that was the expectation for someone working a News Editor position.

Now? Engagement above all. Who cares if something is true? Numbers go big, suits stay happy. Fuck the actual audience who might want the publications they read to be reliable and trustworthy; they are, after all, the least important part of the whole equation these days.

If you're looking for the Web as it once was, then I'm sorry to inform you that This content is no longer available.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 32: Lies, Damned Lies appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There are a few practical examples I'd like to give. First is a YouTube channel I was introduced to recently called Obscurest Vinyl. This channel is run by a designer and musician who found some joy in creating fake record sleeves for songs with names you definitely wouldn't have gotten away with in the eras they're parodying. Songs like the wonderful Pullin' Out My Pubes (She Loves Me Not) by The Sticky Sweethearts:

You'll notice from that video that the record label now has some music attached to it. I was initially a little perturbed to discover that the person behind the Obscurest Vinyl YouTube channel had been using AI music generation to create the tracks, though my mind was set somewhat at rest by how he had written the lyrics (which are generally far too offensive to be the product of the typically rather po-faced Large Language Model AI bots) and tinkered with the initial output to make it flow properly, incorporate all the filthy language and sound consistent with the other works from the same fictional "artists" on the channel.

Of course, what the YouTube algorithm then did was go "oh, you watched a video about a fake record with lyrics about someone gluing their balls to their butthole, HERE, HAVE A MILLION MORE OF THEM". And it became very apparent that Obscurest Vinyl has a lot of copycats out there, none of which have anywhere near the same magic; these other channels are just trying to ride a trend.

This, of course, is symptomatic of one of the main things that is killing the Web right now: excessive Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Have you ever searched for some information on something, only to find a billion unrelated websites all magically having articles headlined "What Time Is The Superbowl On?" or "Where Do You Unlock Pictomancer in Final Fantasy XIV?" That's SEO at work, and that's a problem that is only getting worse with the amount of AI sludge that is being fed into the Internet at large. Sites want quick and easy clicks, so they look at what people are searching for — the trends of the hour — then provide a hyper-specific article about the thing.

Helpful? Arguable. I hate it, because I'd rather have the information directly from the original source — in the latter case above, for example, it took me a fair bit of scrolling before I got past all the websites jockeying for SEO juice to the actual website for Final Fantasy XIV, the thing I was looking for.

More than being frustrating if you want the information straight from the horse's mouth, it just makes the Web boring as fuck, because every site (including a lot that should really know better) are doing the exact same thing. Daily Wordle solutions. Individual articles for things that would have been much better incorporated into an FAQ. Outright copying and plagiarism of other sites. It really is a shame to see what online media has become — and frustrating to see that certain portions of the creative types on sites such as YouTube are more obsessed in chasing trends with transparently copycat material rather than, you know, being creative.

I don't know what the endgame of all this is. I hope we're in a "things will get worse before they get better" kind of situation, but honestly right now, it feels unlikely that the "get better" part will happen. The Web gets demonstrably worse, less useful and less fun day by day. And we've all let it happen. I don't know if we can undo that.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 22: Trends Have Made the Internet Boring appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

People who grew up pre-Internet doubtless all have their own experiences to share. The listener who wrote in with the question described how while they did spend time with their computer playing games, they also played outside, rode their BMX bike and all manner of other things, while both Neil and Dave described their own experiences as being a bit different, both from one another and from the listener's recollection. So I thought I'd share my own experiences, with the benefit of hindsight.

I grew up in a country village that, at the time I lived there, had somewhere between 800 and 1,000 people living there. It was seven miles away from the nearest town, there was no bus service unless you went to the next village over (and even then, it was pretty much a "once a week" sort of affair) and… I guess you could look upon it as either being ideal or terrible for growing up in. Ideal because it was quiet, safe and full of places to go on childish "adventures"; terrible because, particularly once I reached adolescence, all of my friends were a car journey away.

I went back and forth on my feelings about living in that village. When I was of primary school age, I attended the village school, and as such my social circle was pretty much all people who lived nearby. I had a small group of friends, only one or two of whom I actually went to see outside of school time, but mostly kept myself to myself. In retrospect, my relative lack of socialisation compared to some of my peers was likely down to the social anxiety I felt as a result of my then-undiagnosed autistic spectrum condition.

But at the time, I didn't really begrudge living in the village. I knew it was a nice place, that I lived in a nice house with supportive parents and a stable home life. I enjoyed when my grandparents came to visit and we'd go for a walk, inevitably to landmarks around the village that had acquired nicknames; "The Kissing Gate" (one of those awkward gates into a farmer's field), "The Brook" (a pathetic little stream that, these days, has mostly dried up and smells awful), "The Bullocks" (the farmer's field beyond The Kissing Gate that sometimes, but not always, had bulls in it). Looking back on it now, I have lots of fond memories.

When I entered my teens and started attending school in the aforementioned town seven miles away, my feelings changed a bit. While I was still somewhat anxious about social situations, I started to feel a bit more left out. As I grew older, I started to feel like there were lots of things that I couldn't do because I didn't live close enough. These feelings persisted until I turned 17, passed my driving test and suddenly had a lot more independence… so long as my Mum didn't mind me borrowing her car of an evening.

I promise I'm getting to the video games.

Point is, I don't remember spending a lot of time as a kid or a teen "playing outside". I didn't learn to ride a bike until well after many of my peers — memorably, I suffered a rather large setback on my initial efforts when I came a cropper and skidded along a rough concrete farm road, shearing a significant chunk of skin off my legs and arms, which made me a little hesitant to try again for a while — and I didn't spend much time with many of my peers, except on rare occasions when I'd go over to a friend's house for one reason or another.

Throughout all that time, I was fascinated with computers. Not just games, but computers in general. I knew my Dad worked for IBM, but didn't really know what he actually did (and still to this day don't think I could actually tell you). I knew my brother and Dad both contributed to an Atari computer magazine that we got regularly known as Page 6. And I knew all of my family, at one point or another, were keen computer users for various reasons. My Dad used it for "serious" software and subLOGIC's Flight Simulator II (which he insisted was "not a game" and was thus still counted under the "serious software" category"); my Mum liked the occasional blast on Millipede and Space Invaders; my brother was the one who was into games, though he had a much more active social life than I did, helped at least partly by being ten years my senior.

Since I determined quite early on that I rather enjoyed — or at least felt most comfortable — in solitude, I was grateful for the company of the computers of our household: initially the Atari 8-bit and ST, then later the MS-DOS and Windows 3.1/95/98 PCs. In the early days of the Atari 8-bit, I devoured books and magazines about the computer, typing in listings and learning how to program in BASIC myself. I never really got what I'd call good at it, but I developed a basic (no pun intended) competence that was greater than that of someone who just used their computer to play games.

But I also played games. A lot of games. I learned a lot from those games, too. Text adventures helped me with my reading (and, indirectly, my writing); keyboard-based games played a significant role in developing the typing skills I still have to this day; puzzle games helped me with my general intelligence and problem-solving; action games helped me develop my imagination and my motor skills.

It's stereotypical to say that "games help with hand-eye coordination", but I was diagnosed dyspraxic in primary school, which basically meant I was a bit clumsy with certain things; video games helped me feel like I was competent at something, even if I was unable to hold a pencil "properly". Playing games, and more broadly "going on the computer", was important to me. It felt like it was something I could enjoy without compromise; I didn't feel like I had to make any sort of adjustments, or have people "go easy on me" as I did in activities like sports. It was just something for me to enjoy. And, as I moved into my teens and broadened my circle of friends at secondary school, they proved to be a good backdrop for social interactions, too.

More often than not, if I went over to a friend's house or had a friend over to mine, we would spend our time playing games together, or at the very least just using the computer. I have fond memories of spending time with several friends just messing around with speech synthesis programs on the Atari ST and Amiga, and even programming in STOS, a dialect of BASIC for the Atari ST, or making silly in-joke games with Clickteam's wonderful Klik and Play and The Games Factory. I was happy that my formerly solitary activity was something I could share my enjoyment of with others.

This continued as I came to the end of my time at school and moved into university. I made new friends, at least partly through computing and video games, and many of those folks are people I still make an effort to spend time with today — even if sometimes that effort doesn't feel like it's reciprocated with quite the same enthusiasm. Computing and gaming remained something that was important to me, even as the Internet came into its mainstream ascendancy in the late 1990s.

I have some fond memories of those early days of the Internet. Chatting with strangers on CompuServe's "CB Simulator", aka just a public chatroom. Posting messages on CompuServe's GAMERS forum, which eventually let to me earning $200 for making ten Wolfenstein 3-D levels that were included in an official expansion pack. Chatting with my friends from my course on MSN Messenger. Randomly getting into a conversation with a young woman on AOL Instant Messenger, only to discover that, completely by chance, she was the housemate of one of my existing friends.

Computing was always there as part of my life, but I think a key difference between then and now is that in my formative years, it was there as a backdrop to socialisation, rather than the means of socialisation itself. The This Week in Retro listener commented that their children feel genuine anxiety and FOMO ("Fear Of Missing Out") if they have gaming time privileges revoked for whatever reason, because rather than Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft being the backdrop for their socialisation, those activities are the socialisation.

There's also social media to take into account. I am genuinely glad that social media did not exist when I was a child, because I'm not sure I would have made it through my adolescence intact. Sure, there are positive aspects to it, such as being able to reconnect with people you haven't spoken to for a long time, but there's also the insidiously manipulative nature of all the major platforms today, and how none of them are really concerned with being a platform for communication; they are, instead, platforms for advertising.

The thing that really makes me feel like social media may well have done me in, though, is how easy it is for it to be used for bullying. I suffered a fairly significant amount of bullying throughout both my primary and secondary school life, and it was hell. It left me wary of trusting people; it made me frustrated about communicating with others; it made me feel like it was, at times, simply not worth making the effort to interact with people.

For a long time, I used to say that the Internet allowed me to "be myself" for the first time… well, ever, really. I could find like-minded people who understood me and respected me for who I was, and I felt like I was among friends. I don't feel that way any more; nowadays, I feel the same way about online interactions as I do about interacting with real strangers: genuine anxiety and fear. I dread getting notifications in apps or on websites where I've posted something publicly. And yet, I still do it — here I am, after all — because I feel like it's important to not let the bullies win, whether they're real or imagined. I need to feel like I can still express myself the way I want to express myself; to enthuse about the things I want to enthuse about. That's why I write here and on MoeGamer, and why I make videos over on my YouTube channel.

Even then, though, I feel a lot of frustration, because I know a significant portion of the world looks on the Internet, social media and general social interactions in a different way to me. That can often leave me feeling lonely and isolated. But the one thing I've always had as a constant is being able to immerse myself in a video game or other activity on the computer, and feel like I am, for once, at peace — even if, with each passing year, it feels like it's getting harder to share that haven of peace with others.

That went a tad deeper than I perhaps thought, and I'm not sure I have an answer to the original poster's questions or concerns. I do know, however, that spending time on the computer isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, particularly when it brings someone comfort and stability. It's when that "safe" activity starts to get "unsafe" things encroaching on it that you need to perhaps take action — but that's going to be something that is different for everyone. For me, it's meant largely removing myself from the public-facing part of the Internet except in places where I can very much control and curate my experience, and continuing to enjoy those things that I always have enjoyed in peace and quiet. No video game ever betrayed me, after all.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 16: The Youth of Yesterday appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One of the "innovations" of modern tech and software that I am most consistently baffled by is the concept of "Suggestions".

Don't get me wrong, I am under no illusions as to what "Suggested Content" really means on websites and social media platforms (it's advertising, in case you somehow weren't savvy enough to know that by now) but I'm talking more in contexts where it's not obviously advertising, or where it doesn't make sense for advertising to try and worm its way into places.

Places like, you know, just Microsoft Windows in general. Or Google Drive. Both of those have features where they provide you with a list of "Suggested" files, and I absolutely, genuinely do not understand why that feature is there or what it is for. Right now, for example, my Google Drive "Suggested files" list is a non-chronological index of things that I have opened or edited recently. Fine, you might say, except there is a perfectly good "Recent" option in the sidebar which does give me a chronological list of things I have opened or edited recently.

Likewise, the Windows 11 start menu on my "work" computer (it came preinstalled, otherwise I would have been quite happy continuing with 10 as I do with my "play" computer) appears to "suggest" applications almost completely at random, with its first two suggestions usually being the things I have installed most recently, and the others being… pretty much anything that I have installed, for no discernible reason.

Under certain circumstances, I get the idea. When it comes to media, a "suggestion" feature might inspire you to look at photos or listen to music that you haven't enjoyed for a while — though this can also backfire somewhat. Earlier today, my phone's "Gallery" app decided to send me an unasked-for notification that I presume someone somewhere thought was "cute", with the text "Feline footprints in Southampton". The attached image? Our dearly departed cat Meg. I'm still quite upset about Meg's passing, so I emphatically do not want my phone randomly bringing her up out of the blue for no apparent reason. I will look at pictures of her when I'm good and ready, thanks very much.

The push for "AI" in everything is only making this shit worse, too; the Gallery app on my phone recognising that the image in question was a picture of a cat is a result of improving image recognition technology, and I suspect as generative AI becomes more and more pervasive and invasive in our daily online life, situations like this are only going to become more and more common — because you can bet your bippy that all these "Suggestion" features are going to be turned on by default.

What happens when your phone decides to "suggest" a photo of something you'd rather keep private at an exceedingly inappropriate moment? Well, some might say you should keep your private photos private, but realistically, practically speaking, most people these days are not that organised, because we've made the mistake of trusting our software and online services to do the organisation for us. I actually like the fact that Google Photos can pick out, say, pictures of cats, or pictures that mention something specific in a piece of text, because that is indisputably useful — but what I don't want is my phone going "HEY REMEMBER YOUR CAT THAT DIED? HUH? HERE SHE IS, I PICKED HER OUT FROM ALL YOUR PHOTOS, AREN'T I SMART?"

There's a place for some — some — of the innovations that are currently going on in tech. But, as always, it seems we're going to have to endure a period of people pushing things to absolute breaking point before we settle into something approaching a useful routine. And, unfortunately, that period appears to have been going on for quite a while now… and people don't seem to be willing to push back against the more unreasonable uses of these features.

"Suggested Content" can get in the fucking bin. I know what I need on my computer and when. And, more often than not, when I'm browsing the Web, I know what I'm looking for, too. Sadly, it feels increasingly unlikely that I'm going to be left in peace these days.

If anyone mentions Linux, they are getting a slap.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 7: Suggested Content appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm sure discussing things with people online wasn't always as exhausting as it feels these days.

I have some extremely fond memories of time spent on 1up.com's forums and "club" pages talking about games with a varied crew of folk, all of whom had come together through our shared interest in the video game medium. We didn't always agree on things, but that made for interesting discussions as we strove to understand one another's viewpoints. There was no shaming, there was no telling each other we were wrong (apart from on one podcast, where a couple of participants got a little more heated than a reasonable person perhaps should over whether Fallout 3 was playable from the third-person camera) and there was just a nice atmosphere of mutual respect.

These days, it's becoming more and more of an effort to open my virtual mouth online in places supposedly made for "discussion", because to a disproportionately large number of people, "discuss" appears to mean "disagree vehemently and aggressively". And it's inevitably over something that simply doesn't matter, but the nature of such exchanges make it easy for hot heads to prevail and things to get stupidly, absurdly aggressive over an absolute nothing of a subject. (No, I'm not citing specific examples, for reasons that I hope are already obvious.)

This is a disappointing development to me, because 20 years ago, I would have sat here and quite confidently said that on the Internet, I could be my "real" self much more than I could be in "the real world". I actually do still feel that way to a certain extent — outlets such as this blog, MoeGamer and my YouTube channel allow me to express myself in the way I want to, rather than how I'm "supposed to" — but even in those places, there's always the risk of some weirdo turning up and getting weirdly angry about something which absolutely does not matter.

Thing is, I sort of get it. I get why those people exist, because there are times when I'll read something online and I'll feel my own heckles rising (you feel it start around the balls) and contemplate posting some sort of snippy remark in response. Most of the time, I've conditioned myself to not do that. Occasionally one slips through, and I pretty much always regret it, because it inevitably leads to a disproportionately furious argument over something I actually don't feel that strongly about, because the whole "sense of honour" thing kicks in and you want to save face, no matter the cost.

It's exhausting. It's exhausting when you get pulled into situations like this, and it's exhausting making an effort to avoid situations like this, because it's very easy to take things much too far and end up simply not wanting to talk to anyone. I have definitely reached that latter end of things, as there are times when I feel extremely lonely but unable to reach out to someone because I simply don't have the mental fortitude to be able to fully process how today's online interactions tend to work.

I think about this sort of thing quite a lot, and when I do, I always end up asking myself if it's really worse than it used to be, or if my perspective has just changed. And honestly, I'm not completely sure of the answer to that. I suspect it's a bit of both, because I know I have deliberately changed my online habits for the sake of a quiet life — but then I'll look at something like this legendary thread from Usenet circa 1997 and see that people getting really very cross about things that don't matter was still a thing back when I thought the Internet was much nicer.

I guess the difference is that there was a certain "barrier to entry" for the "tougher" parts of the Internet back then; I never went on Usenet, so I never saw any of that sort of thing. These days, that aggressive means of interacting with one another is just the norm; social media has become what Usenet was, only rather than being neatly segregated into interest groups, everyone has all been plunged into the same vat of boiling piss to fight it out among themselves and see who has the loudest voice. I'm aware that was an utterly tortuous metaphor but I don't care. My blog, my rules.

The other difference, of course, is that today I am aware of my own mental health conditions, including depressive and anxious episodes that occur sporadically, along with my underlying condition of Asperger's. Being aware of why I find certain things about socialising difficult is useful, but it can also make me feel more hesitant than I perhaps "should" be to engage with certain scenarios.

I don't really have a conclusion for all this; I just felt like thinking "out loud", as it were. And so there you have it. Now I'm off to go and eat chilli.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 3: Talking is Exhausting appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Firstly, Elon Musk's idiotic changes to the terms of the Twitter API, which has priced literally everyone out of being able to use it, have made the platform next to useless as a means of automatically sharing your work to an audience that supposedly signed up to follow your updates. It's both hilarious and tragic to see company after company sharing news posts that effectively say "lol, fuck Twitter".

Secondly, my previous justification of keeping my Twitter account around for the sake of friends and contacts just doesn't really feel like it's… justification any more. The friends in question rarely bother to get in contact, and there are other means for professional contacts to get in touch.

Thirdly, I'm just fucking sick of the most likely response you get to posting literally anything on there being vitriol and hate.

On the latter point, I recently posted an article about my negative experiences trying Ubisoft's Riders Republic via PlayStation Plus. The gist of the article, if you're one of those Internet denizens whose attention span has been shot too much to bother clicking on a link, was that the game was designed in such a way that it is genuinely insulting to the intelligence of anyone over the age of about 12. It doesn't let you just play; instead, you're bombarded with hours of mandatory tutorials and obnoxious zoomer slang, and this was enough to make me not even want to bother seeing if the game "got good" later.

I think this is something worth talking about, because it's the first time that I, as a 42 year old video game enthusiast who has been involved in the medium since the Atari days, felt completely alienated by a brand new, supposedly mainstream game. So I talked about it. Then I shared that article on Twitter.

One of the first responses I got was from someone who yelled at me, based entirely on the assumption that I'd said the exact opposite to what I'd actually written in the article. He'd obviously read the headline, made an assumption and then decided to shoot his dribbling, zit-encrusted mouth off at me, despite it taking nothing more than a single click and a minute or two of reading for anyone to see that he was talking complete horseshit. But you can bet anyone who "liked" his dumbshit comment wouldn't go and check whether or not he was right.

I spent a few hours last night and this morning feeling stressed and anxious about this. But then it just sort of dawned on me: fuck it. Why the fuck should I care what some obnoxious cunt on the Internet thinks? Why the fuck should I let one idiot have such power over my mental wellbeing, based entirely on the fact he's too much of a lazy shit to actually read something I wrote?

And the answer to that is that I shouldn't care; I shouldn't let one idiot do that. And since Twitter is the primary means of allowing idiots to do that, it needs to go. Completely. So it has.

On a related note, this news isn't finalised or official as yet, but it's pretty much confirmed that as of the beginning of July, I will be getting out of the professional "content creation" (ugh) game completely.

I won't go into details for now because things are still being hammered out, but suffice to say for now that it's nothing anyone needs to worry about — I'm simply changing my professional role in such a way that it means I can focus my attention entirely on the Evercade project, which I'm incredibly passionate about and is something where I feel genuinely valued by both my colleagues and by my "audience", such as they are.

I'm both happy and sad about this. I'm happy because it means that I can focus my professional life on something that I love, and because it means my free time will genuinely, completely be my own again. No more will I find myself "having" to play something for the sake of timely coverage; instead, I can just enjoy things at my own pace, and I'm really looking forward to that.

I'm sad, however, because I spent so much of my early life desperately wanting to follow in my brother's footsteps and be part of the games press — and yet by the time I actually managed to get there, it had changed irreversibly from what it used to be. And it only got worse from there.

Again, I won't go into details for now, as that's something to talk about in more detail once everything here has been finalised. But I'll say again, it's nothing to worry about — I'm proud of what I've worked on to date, will continue to work on things like this until the beginning of July, and this change is my decision rather than anyone else's.

I'm just tired. So very tired of "content creation" being such a completely thankless task. The modern Internet has set up a completely adversarial relationship between writers and their audiences, exemplified by the Twitter exchange I described above, and that is emphatically not why I got into this.

I got into writing about games because I love them. I got into games writing because I think they're culturally important. I got into games writing because I think despite that cultural importance, they're not being written about and analysed in anywhere near the depth they deserve.

And I got into games writing because while the big, dumb, obnoxious games like the aforementioned Riders Republic get to ride the wave of commercial success regardless of how shit they are, there are myriad games released literally every day that run the risk of languishing in obscurity without people telling others about them.

The trouble is, I've discovered over the last decade and a half or so, is that no-one really seems to actually care. Online, "content" is piss in the wind. It's only relevant for the day it's posted — if you're lucky enough to get anyone to notice it in the first place — and it's fucking impossible to get people to give a shit about something after the fact, unless, as I've seen on MoeGamer, you're literally the only person to have written something meaningful on a particular topic. (In my case, sex sim Honey Select Unlimited.)

Google is flooded by manipulative, exploitative, SEO-optimised sites posting vacuous individual "guide" articles for things they don't care about for no other reason than it brings in the clicks. And no-one at any point in the process gives a shit; the average Internet user doesn't have enough in the way of critical thinking skills to see the cynical way all this has been set up, and the writers at the sites themselves don't give a toss as long as the numbers go up.

All of this is the fault of everyone who has normalised the idea of "consuming content" rather than "reading interesting articles" and the like. You, collectively, have ruined both the games press specifically, and the broader Internet in general.

It's demoralising and infuriating, and if you've been around all this for as long as I have, seeing the way things have been going, it should be no surprise that I very much feel like stepping down from it all.

And so that's what I'm doing. From hereon, my professional work will be in something that actually matters, that I care about — and that other people actually care about, too. I suspect I'll be a lot happier as a result, but I can't help but feel a bit bad about that dream young me once had, and how it was never really possible.

The post I finally nuked my Twitter account completely. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Let's address these one at a time, as each of them are symptomatic of something slightly different.

I Played 100 Days of Viral TikTok Recipes

As someone who does YouTube as a hobby, it's infuriating to see the supposed "professionals" fall into a rut of simply baiting The Algorithm with the exact same types of "content" all day, every day.

I Played 100 Days of [Game]. I Made Viral TikTok Recipes. This is the Worst [x] Ever. Thrifting with My Completely Charisma-Free Mom.

There's stuff on YouTube that I like and continue to watch. But this is the stuff that tends to languish in the wake of TOP CRINGE COMPILATIONS!! and FUNNIEST TIKTOKS I COULD FIND!! And this pisses me off. Because it demonstrates a complete and utter lack of creativity.

Yes, one could argue that there's at least some creativity at play in editing these videos and picking the material to use in them — but even then, they're incredibly predictable, regardless of who they are. You can expect to hear the Metal Gear alert noise, Kevin MacLeod's Local Forecast, that "anime oooooh" noise in a significant proportion of popular videos out there, and you'll see all the same visual tricks, too — jump cuts, crash zooms with a red tint on the screen and heavy screen shake, "A Few Moments Later" SpongeBob memes.

It's infuriating. Like, it makes me genuinely angry. I know it shouldn't. I know it's dumb to get angry at people following trends. But it really does make me legitimately furious.

Why? Because I know there are lots of people working their arses off to make quality YouTube videos (note: not "content") and getting very little reward, relatively speaking for doing so. Instead, the endless assembly line of identikit Content continues to churn, cluttering up everyone's YouTube feeds with worthless garbage that provides precisely 0% more cultural enrichment value than simply staring at the wall for 12 minutes.

It particularly sucks to see video makers I used to like resort to this sort of thing — but I guess if you're making a job out of it, it becomes an unfortunate necessity after a while. For every viewer like me who unsubscribes from a channel once it becomes a clickbait factory, it seems at least a hundred more take my place. So there's zero incentive to change.

The PS5 Pro's release date has NOT been "revealed"

Earlier today, Andie and I were talking about how long various consoles were on the market, and as part of this discussion we looked up the release dates of the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, pondering if and when a PS6 might ever be a thing — and if it would have a disc drive, which was the main point of our conversation.

When Googling the latter case, I was promptly confronted by a wall of articles that claimed the PS5 Pro's release date had been "revealed".

Needless to say, it had not been revealed. Instead, what had happened was a single gaming site that no-one had ever heard of had claimed that "insider sources" (anonymous, of course) had "confirmed" the PS5 Pro was "in development" and would "probably" release in "late 2024". This had then been parroted pretty much verbatim (albeit with some variation in the supposedly "revealed" release date) by a variety of other gaming sites you've never heard of, and this had happened so much that Google had figured it was worth showing to anyone who was searching for a simple piece of information: the actual, real PS5's release date. You know, the one where a product that actually exists was actually released.

Essentially, what we ended up with was a page of search results that were nothing but speculation at best, outright lies at worst. And there will be no consequences whatsoever for any of the sites that were engaging in this behaviour; in fact, they will almost certainly have been rewarded with happy big traffic numbers, and you can bet those pages have ads coming out the wazoo on them, too.

As someone who, as a child, had aspirations of joining the games press, and hoped he would be able to do that more than pretty much anything in the world, this is heartbreaking to see. And it's doubly frustrating when I run a site on which our writers take pride in composing honest, thoughtful, well-researched pieces rather than simply rushing to jump on the latest trend in order to squeeze out another few cents of ad revenue.

How to find all the blue medallions in Resident Evil 4 Remake

Speaking of which, one trend which was just starting to take hold when I left USgamer in 2014 was the odious rise of "guide content". For the unfamiliar, this is an SEO-baiting tactic in which sites post individual articles that supposedly answer each and every possible question people on Google might have about anything vaguely relevant and popular.

It's a completely unsustainable approach to "content generation", particularly if you have any standards about the quality of the articles on your site whatsoever, and it means that, again, if you're searching for specific pieces of information, you have to wade through 500 sites that have clickbaited their way to the top of Google's search results, with no guarantee that their information is reliable or helpful.

I'll give you an example. Prior to picking up my PS5, I was curious how the "PS4 Boost" mode worked. This is where the PS5 is able to run certain appropriately updated PS4 games with better performance than the original PS4 (and in some cases, PS4 Pro) would have been capable of.

The things I were curious about were simple: did this work with all PS4 games, or just select ones, and did I have to do anything to make it work?

The answers to these questions, by the way, are "no" and "no".

While attempting to uncover these simple answers, I stumbled across a full-blown, surprisingly lengthy article entitled "How to Enable PS5 Game Boost". Please recall that the answer to the question "do you have to do anything to make Boost mode work?" is "no", and then marvel at the fact that multiple sites, not just the one I found, managed to spin this simple answer out into at least 600 words of complete garbage, because you need at least 600 words for SEO purposes, don't you know.

I'm so tired of this. To the layman, it might seem like it's very convenient. But as someone who has worked in the commercial press and now works on the more "indie" side of things, it's infuriating, because I know these articles do not exist out of a desire to be helpful. As with all other clickbait — because that's what these articles are — the aim is simple: gain traffic, and, by extension, ad revenue.

I'm so tired. So tired. The Internet was an exciting place when I was a kid and everyone was just getting to know it. Now, it's nothing more than a mindless, soulless content factory where everyone is bidding for your attention so they can inject yet more ads directly into your eyeballs.

There are little havens where this isn't the case, of course. But they become more and more difficult to find with each passing day. And it honestly worries me quite a bit.

But at this point, it's also hard to know what to do, if anything. If I criticise this sort of thing, no-one listens. (I'm writing this today largely to vent my own spleen rather than to convince anyone else.) If I give up and engage in it myself just to join the rat race, I'm part of the problem. And if I abandon the Internet entirely, I deprive myself of something that is still, in some ways, a useful resource — and in some other ways, an essential utility for modern life.

So I guess I'll keep doing what I always do. Do my own thing, occasionally complain about how much everything else sucks, then repeat until my inevitable death from a brain aneurysm.

The post I'm completely burnt out with the intellectually, creatively and morally bankrupt world of clickbait. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

"Hi mum," the text said. "My phone's not working, so please contact me on WhatsApp at [number] xxx".

Initially, I thought this might be an honest-to-goodness wrong number, which is a phenomenon that used to be widespread, but today, where we tend to do everything via pre-populated contact lists, doesn't tend to happen much. Something about it made me feel a bit suspicious, though, so I decided to Google the text of the message.

Sure enough, it was a scam. I was both disappointed and unsurprised to discover this, but it got me thinking: I used to be someone who really, honestly wanted to believe the best about my fellow man, but these days, it feels nigh-impossible to trust almost anything you see.

That "wrong number" is actually a scammer trying to get you to send them money, or to steal your personal information. That heartwarming post you saw on social media is actually a viral marketing campaign. That "look at me I'm so empowered" sex worker doing hot tub streams on Twitch is actually being forced into exploitation by darker forces working behind the scenes rather than because she wants to.

It's exhausting to think that, more often than not, these days what you see is most definitely not what you get. The world feels like a darker place that is full of mistrust, and aside from the necessity for constant vigilance being very tiring, it also makes it difficult for those of us who do want to go about our business in a genuinely honest sort of way.

You see it everywhere. Creative types being forced to churn out "content" with clickbait titles just to get eyes on their work. Workplaces and brands jumping on silly trends like TikTok for no discernible reason other than "it's popular, so we should be seen to be doing it". The growth in various forms of AI-generated text, images and sounds making misinformation and lies easier to spread than ever before.

On top of all that, the services we've come to increasingly rely on over the years actively make themselves worse over time, and we just sit back and take it. For example, it used to be that I could click "Publish" on this post and it would automatically share it to my friends on Facebook and Twitter, but that's not possible any more because of supposed "improvements" that both of those services have made.

This happens outside the online sphere, too. My last car I bought was worse than my previous one in terms of the features it had, but cost more. This despite me telling the car salesman to their face that I wanted to spend "about the same" on the new vehicle and have the same features.

And no-one seems particularly bothered by all this. I mean, sure, people comment on it occasionally, but no-one actually does anything about it. They keep posting their wacky MidJourney images, increasingly believing that "they" created the image through stringing words together. Scam text messages are a way of life, with people just shrugging at them rather than attempting to report them.

And those supposed to be "in charge" don't do anything anyway, so why bother? There's a house down the road from us whose front garden is constantly filled with obviously stolen motorcycles, which local kids can frequently be seen riding around making a nuisance of themselves on, without wearing any sort of safety gear or having any concern for the people around them.

It increasingly feels like we are a people blighted by absolute apathy and laziness, and despite countless warnings from dystopian popular media and the arts over the years, no-one really cares. So long as you have your content to consume and your vacuous "approval" of your fake life on social media from other fake people living fake existences, nothing seems to matter to anyone.

I'm really fed up of it. And it doesn't feel like there's a way to escape from it all. Because this isn't just "an Internet thing" any more. It's a "this is the world we live in now" thing.

The post Today's culture of perpetual mistrust is exhausting. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

People love to complain. This is a trait traditionally and historically associated with the British, but it's most definitely not an exclusively British thing. Perhaps it once was, but it most certainly isn't any more. And as with so many things, we can probably blame the way in which the Internet has brought people together — something which should, inherently, be a good thing, but which has somehow become corrupted along the way.

As I've noted elsewhere, I'm not spending a ton of time on Twitter any more due to a combination of the horrible atmosphere that seeps from every pore of that website and the constant ridiculous changes Elon Musk keeps making on a seemingly daily basis. But occasionally, I can't help myself from clicking on one of the Trends out of sheer curiosity.

The other day, I happened to see that Evri was trending. Evri, if you're unfamiliar, is the new name that the courier company formerly known as Hermes decided to adopt for themselves a while back. I don't know the reasons for the rebrand and honestly I really don't care, because they're inevitably absolute bullshit and everyone knows that Evri is "really" Hermes anyway, so it's largely irrelevant.

However, what I found when looking at the Evri trend was that everyone was complaining about Evri. Everyone had the same stories to tell of parcels being lobbed over their fence, of packages arriving broken or tampered with, or generally some tale of misfortune and woe related to getting their package delivered from this one specific carrier.

Here's the thing: I've never had a problem with Evri or Hermes. I spent a brief period working for them while I was looking for a proper job and I know what it's like "from the inside" also. While it was a time-consuming, underpaid and largely thankless task for the couriers, it was a reasonably well-run operation in general, and there were various ways in which said couriers were encouraged to do a good job, up to and including being "watched" through the scanny things they're supposed to carry around with them.

As fortune would have it, for some reason during my brief time with the company I never actually got a scanny thing, so I never had to worry about such things — not that I had anything to particularly worry about anyway. But I digress.

I'm not saying no-one has ever had a problem with Evri or Hermes. But if you were to look at that trend on Twitter, the conclusion it would be easy to come to would be that they were a company that should be absolutely, completely and without doubt avoided at all cost, because literally every delivery they do is the absolute worst possible thing that has ever happened to someone, and they have ruined too many Christmases and children's birthdays to count.

This is nonsense. While it's foolish to assume that they're completely without fault — in any sort of "gig economy" sort of situation, you have a risk of bad apples, but this is also true for more formally structured corporations — it's also ridiculous to put across the impression that they're a complete failure that should never be trusted.

It's just one of many examples of the Internet painting the worst possible picture of something. And I could provide plenty of other examples at this point, but I'll refrain from doing so for the sake of time.

What I will urge you to do, however, is that if you see any sort of seemingly universally negative reaction towards something — particularly on any sort of standards-free platform such as social media or user reviews — then be cautious. Chances are the thing that is being ranted and raved about is nowhere near as bad as people are trying to put across — because let's face it, people are a whole lot more likely to complain about something than post about how they had no problems whatsoever with a company or service.

Perhaps we should change our outlook on such things. Perhaps we should start posting positive comments when a company does the right thing and does what is expected of them. Or perhaps that's ridiculous — after all, a service that is being provided to you conforming to your exact expectations should not be particularly worthy of comment at all, because, well, it's what you expected.

But then that means the negativity will always win, because the complainers will always speak up, while the satisfied customers will just quietly get on with their day, thinking nothing more of the company they've interacted with or the service they've received.

Perhaps the answer is just not to listen to anyone and make your own mind up.

The post It's becoming increasingly important to remember that the Internet -- and social media in particular -- presents a grossly distorted vision of how things actually are. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Earlier today, I was browsing through the digital editions of the old magazines I downloaded from AtariMania and came across a short series of articles written by my Dad about "going online".

This was pre-Internet "going online", however, involving a 64K Atari 800XL, a 300 baud modem and an external interface for plugging in such devices, and as such involved dialling up bulletin board services (BBSes) directly to access their information and files.

What struck me when reading my Dad's wide-eyed wonderment at being able to phone up a computer in Birmingham, read messages and download programs (a much more cumbersome process than we take for granted today, involving downloading the program into a "buffer" and then saving it to floppy disk or cassette afterwards) was the fact that any time he mentioned interacting with other people — usually through the BBSes' approximation of a "forum", which allowed people to post and reply to short, simple text-based messages — he was struck with how pleasant, polite and enthusiastic people were. These BBSes were generally run by enthusiasts rather than professional, commercial organisations and consequently tended to attract people in a similar vein.

Fast forward to today and I witness this somewhat sad, plaintive monologue from PR superhero Tom Ohle of Evolve PR:

I'm with Tom here, but I'm at a loss as to how we got from the enjoyably enthusiastic experience my Dad described in these articles to a situation where the default tone on the Internet is aggressive, confrontational, cynical and negative.

This isn't universal, of course — there are still plenty of community groups that are made up of genuine enthusiasts, and interestingly enough many of them are still centred around the Atari community — but even among such community groups you find trolls, naysayers and people who are always keen to see the negative in everything.

This is particularly apparent in the gamer community, who are seemingly never satisfied by anything — blockbuster triple-A games are too formulaic, indie games are too weird, imported games are too "censored" — but it happens right across the Internet, make no mistake.

It's usually explained away by the John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory:

And for a while that was plausible. But it's not as simple as that any more: the rise in services such as Facebook means that people are quite comfortable being total fuckwads even with their real name attached to the nonsense they're spouting. And it seems to be the default tone these days, which is disheartening; it's actually unusual when you find a community that isn't full of complainers.

Perhaps it's a consequence of throwing everyone from all different backgrounds all together into a melting pot, resulting in inevitable culture clash. Or perhaps the world of today really does engender negativity rather than positivity — I know that I certainly don't feel particularly happy about the way the world is these days, though my way of attempting to counter it is instead to focus on the things that I do love.

Whatever the explanation, I feel it's sad how things have developed since those innocent days of dialling up that BBS in Birmingham and having to explain to my mother why we were on the phone for so long. I feel we've gone backwards rather than forwards, and that it's probably too late to do anything about it now.

All an individual can do, I guess, is try their best not to be part of it.

The post 2436: Default Tone appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I poked my head on to Twitter earlier — not to participate or engage, because I think I've well and truly broken my former addiction to it, but instead simply to share the article on Ys that I spent all day writing.

Literally immediately — and yes, I do mean literally — I saw someone indulging in one of the reasons I stopped wanting to use Twitter in the first place: pointless, unnecessary handwringing and guilt over things that were nothing to do with them.

The person in question, whom I had previously thought to be a fairly level-headed, rational sort of individual, went on an 8-tweet tirade about how awful the 4th of July was and how Americans enjoying and celebrating what has become nothing more than a holiday — regardless of its history — was somehow racist.

I closed the tab straight after I shared the link to my work, because frankly I don't have time for that shit.

One might argue that it's a good thing the Internet has supposedly made us all more socially responsible and aware of all the terrible things in the world — and perhaps it is. However, one thing the Internet very rarely does is actually do anything about these terrible things in the world. Whether it's people changing their Facebook avatars to "raise awareness" for a charity (I think they'd rather have your bank details, thanks), someone painting their nails in protest against the amorphous concept of "toxic masculinity" or flaccid "protests" against whatever the issue du jour is, Internet activism achieves absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Actually, no, that's not true — it does achieve something. But it's not anything good.

The only thing Internet activism achieves is to drive wedges between people — alienating people from one another, and drawing very, very clear battle lines that you can only ever be on one side or the other of. Us and them. The "right side of history" and its respective "wrong side". If you're not with us, you're against us. That sort of thing.

The inherently divisive nature of self-proclaimed activists' behaviour online has had an overall enormously negative impact on online discourse as a whole. As I noted in my post where I decided to set Twitter aside, people who believe strongly in things (or at least consider themselves to believe strongly in things) have a tendency to take an "I'm right, you're wrong" approach with no middle ground. And this is true for everyone who holds strong opinions on one thing or another, whether it's "censorship" in games, the supposed epidemic of "misogyny" that the Internet is suffering, or who they think should win the Presidential election.

The general unwillingness to take other people's perspectives into account has ruined all sense of rational discourse on social media. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but it's certainly soured the experience for me; social media of all types (with the exception of this blog, if that counts, which I don't really feel it does) had just stopped being fun, and seeing that string of tweets today the moment I opened the Twitter page drove it home for me. There was a stark contrast between this and the private conversation I was having with my friend Chris at the time, whereby we disagreed on our opinions regarding the video game Limbo — he liked it, I hated it — and somehow, magically, managed to do so without feeling the need to convince the other person that they were wrong. We simply enjoy different things, and talking about those things you don't have in common as much as the things you do makes for some of the most interesting conversations.

You can enjoy your life, or you can spend your time getting pointlessly angry about things and people on the Internet. I've got games to play and things to write, so I know which one I choose.

The post 2360: A Life Without Social Media is a Life Without Pointless Outrage and Guilt appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Well, it's been a few days since I stepped away from Twitter, Facebook and social media in general (that includes my very, very occasional visits to Reddit) and I'm actually feeling pretty good about it. I'm not feeling especially isolated, since I 1) have other outlets through which I can talk about the things I want to talk about, and 2) have other means of talking to the people I actually want to talk to.

One experiment that I'm pleased with the progress of so far is my new Pile of Shame website. Here I'm using WordPress' P2 theme to basically fulfil one of the things I did still enjoy using Twitter for: sharing my thoughts and reactions on games that I'm playing, perhaps in the hope of convincing other people to check out said games after having seen a screenshot that piqued their interest or a description they found intriguing.

I guess what I'm essentially doing is microblogging a "Let's Play" of the games I'm playing, though I still far, far prefer the written/blog format for such things, even though video or streaming is probably a much more practical solution for doing it. When I think about what I'd be interested in seeing, though, should I ever find myself wanting to see what someone else's thoughts on a game are, video is very low down the list, particularly when it comes to looking at things on mobile. I'd much rather read something — even if it's bite-sized nuggets at irregular intervals — than watch a video and suffer through some idiot YouTuber's attempts to be a comedy god. (This is unfair, of course; I know plenty of people who make YouTube videos and stream who aren't immensely irritating, but sadly the ones who tend to get really popular are the ones who are immensely irritating. It's just like TV or other forms of popular media in that regard, I guess.)

But anyway. Check out the Pile of Shame site if you're interested in following what I've been playing — currently Ys Seven and VA-11 HALL-A — and feel free to leave comments.

Speaking more broadly, I'm not missing social media because it means no opportunity for me to get annoyed at all the things that are annoying on social media. These things differ from platform to platform: on Facebook it's the sheer amount of links I don't want to read that are shared by people I don't want to talk to — along with people thinking that they're suddenly God's gift to politics/economics/racism — while on Twitter it's the seemingly daily occurrence of one group or another getting upset, offended and/or angry about something or other. I don't care about any of it any more. I just want to exist in my own world, surrounded by people I actually care about and enjoy the things I enjoy without people crying about, by turns, censorship, misogyny, sexism, racism, People of Colour, Nintendo, Activision, EA, Japanese games, Western games, Gamergate, Call of Duty and whatever else has got people's respective goats this week.

The other positive feeling I have when not checking Twitter and/or Facebook every five minutes is the time and inclination to check out other sites on the Web. As any social addict will tell you, it's very easy to fall into the trap of feeling like Twitter and Facebook (and perhaps Reddit and its ilk) are the only sites on the Internet. Cut them out of your life, and there's a rich vein of interesting stuff you suddenly have time to explore; most notably, recently, I've finally been exploring the wonderful Hardcore Gaming 101, an admirably comprehensive site that covers hundreds of games in a delightful level of detail, including games from my youth that I don't think I've seen written about anywhere else on the Internet. Just last night I was reading a detailed rundown of the Dunjonquest series, for example, which I knew during the Atari 8-bit era through the games Gateway to Apshai and Temple of Apshai Trilogy. Tonight I'm reading about all the Asterix games that have been released over the years, and the site has also made for some interesting reading as I have been going through the Ys series for the first time.

There's a pleasantly wide world out there, and ditching the various virtual rooms full of people screaming at you for one reason or another makes it all the easier to see it. I'm very much enjoying the quiet.

(Note: My Twitter account is still live, sharing articles from both here and the Pile of Shame site, but it is not monitored. Please don't try and send me messages on Twitter because I won't see them! Instead, see this post for other ways to get hold of me. Or just leave a comment here.)

The post 2344: Life without Social appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

A significant proportion of the Internet has been up in arms over a recent copyright kerfuffle on YouTube recently, where a collective I've never heard of called the Fine Bros had apparently attempted to trademark the word "react". Digging deeper, it seems that the Fine Bros had done this ostensibly as a means of trademarking the concept of "reaction videos" and allowing others to make videos in the same format — one which the group have had plenty of success with in the past — while allowing themselves an opportunity to profit from licensing fees.

Leaving aside the whole ethical implications of attempting to trademark a common word such as "react" — one of several different "brands" that Fine Bros had attempted to trademark, theoretically as a catch-all term to encompass any specific series they might concoct in the near future — this whole debacle brought one thing into sharp focus for me, and that is that there are certain aspects of modern popular culture that I simply don't understand the appeal of whatsoever.

The concept of a reaction video is simple. You show some people — preferably from a specific demographic such as "teenagers" or "the elderly" — a thing that is Shocking in some way, then you film what they do while they're watching or looking at the thing that is Shocking. Early examples of reaction videos included various instances of people seeing the notorious "2 Girls 1 Cup" video (for heaven's sake, don't Google that if you've never heard of it) as well as well-known shocking scenes from TV or online videos such as Game of Thrones' "Red Wedding" scene.

Trouble is, in the few reaction videos I've managed to stomach, it all feels so painfully forced as to not be entertaining. No-one I know whoops and hollers at the television, bellowing "OH MY GOD!" as something shocking happens. The most I do when seeing something shocking is flinch and wince at something gory, particularly if it involves eyes, but I don't shout and scream or anything. (That said, given the general difficulty I have with expressing emotions clearly when I'm "in person", I may not be the most representative example, but none of the people I know are like this either.) In other words, it doesn't seem believable, with the whole situation being so contrived as to seem utterly pointless.

And aside from the implausibility of some reactions, I simply don't see the appeal whatsoever. Why on Earth would I want to watch a group of people gathered around a TV that I can't see all screeching and gesturing at something I may or may not already be familiar with? And, by extension, why on Earth would anyone want to trademark such an utterly inane concept on the arrogant assumption that other people would want to pay them for the dubious privilege of churning out more culturally bankrupt tat like this?

I guess you can just add reaction videos to the ever-lengthening list of things that I just don't "get" in modern online life. It joins the illustrious ranks of Twitch chat, Twitch in general (unless you're hanging out with an actual friend), MOBAs, unboxing videos and doubtless a whole bunch of other things I'm not even familiar with yet.

I'm 34 years of age. Some days I feel like I'm still 16. Today, however, I'm feeling every one of those years. Now get off my fucking lawn.

The post 2203: Pete Reacts to Growing Older appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I was helpfully informed by my WordPress dashboard that there's a new WordPress app available for the desktop, so I figured I'd put it through its paces. I've used the mobile app for both iOS and Android a fair bit, so I was interested to see what benefit — if any — making use of a desktop app would have over just loading the site up in Chrome and making use of it.

Well… frankly, there's not a huge number of benefits, at least not for those who primarily make use of blogs hosted on WordPress.com. The main benefit is that the app contains the whole of the main "new-style" WordPress dashboard in local format, meaning that you can theoretically 1) use it offline and 2) write without the distractions of other browser tabs. It's also responsive to the window size, so you can scale the display according to what, exactly, you want to do with it: do you want to keep an eye on notifications, or do you want to write a full-on post?

You'll notice I pointed out that it makes use of the "new-style" WordPress dashboard, and that's an important distinction to make, because the new-style WordPress dashboard is emphatically not the same as the traditional wp-admin view. It's a lot simpler and cleaner, sure, and you can do most of the things you can do in wp-admin in the new dashboard, but there are, frankly, a number of issues that WordPress so far hasn't fixed with the main site that remain — and arguably are even more prominent — in the app.

Most notably, there are a significant number of flaws in what WordPress refers to as the "improved posting experience". Having been using this a fair amount since my initial reactions to it, I've noticed that there have been a fair few improvements and additional functions added so that now it is, roughly speaking, in line with the wp-admin-based editor. There are still some irritating factors, however, chief among them (for me) being the fact that even with the window at 1920×1080, the word counter is scrolled off the bottom of the screen so I have to manually scroll down to view it — sometimes even if my post is longer than a screen in height. This is just plain bad design, and seems to have been fixed in the Web-based editor through the use of a floating word count window in the lower right of the viewport. Apparently the locally stored version of the editor page used in the app hasn't taken this particular update on board, however; as I type this, my word count is once again disappearing out of the bottom of the viewport.

Another big flaw that requires less discussion is the fact that the Insert Hyperlink option does not include the option that the wp-admin-based editor does to search through your previous posts and link to them without having to look up the URL yourself. The absence of this from the "improved" posting experience is mildly irritating, and I have to wonder exactly why it was removed, since this is the exact opposite of an "improvement".

A few things do seem to work a little better in the standalone app, mind; when using the editor in Chrome, I've found that sometimes the cursor keys and modifiers behave in somewhat strange and unpredictable manners: sometimes attempting to move to the previous character or word with keyboard shortcuts inexplicably jumps to the end of the paragraph or somewhere completely unexpected, particularly if there a few different items of formatting (such as links or italics) used in a paragraph. So far, at the time of writing, as I type this, I've encountered no such issues — that doesn't necessarily mean that they're not there, but they shouldn't really be in there in the first place, so I've tended to assume they're a Chrome issue rather than a WordPress issue.

Since I originally looked at the "improved posting experience", too, I was pleased to discover that drag-and-drop images now work as they should: in other words, you can drag an image directly into the editor window and have it appear where the cursor was, rather than this simply being a shortcut to opening the "Add Media" window. So good job there!

Elsewhere in the app, you have access to the other features the WordPress dashboard offers, most notably site statistics and insights, allowing you to see at a glance how your most recent posts have been performing, which days you've been posting on and suchlike. The WordPress Reader system is also integrated into the app, allowing you to catch up on WordPress blogs you've subscribed to all in one place rather than having to remember to visit a bunch of sites. This is a helpful feature, but like everything else in the app, I'm not entirely convinced of the benefit of having it in a standalone app rather than just visiting the WordPress site in my browser.

All in all, then, the main benefit of the new desktop app appears to be little more than speed and a slightly more stable experience than the website under Chrome appears to offer. I suppose offline use is a benefit to those who are composing blog posts on the go using a laptop — or, indeed, catching up on downloaded Reader posts — but for me, this is some minor, not especially useful functionality, since I tend to compose my blog posts immediately before publishing them, which tends to mean that I have a stable Internet connection wherever I happen to be at the time.

I'll continue using the app for a while and see how I get on with it. If nothing else, its "distraction-free" nature due to its lack of browser tabs is quite pleasant, so it may prove to be a helpful way to concentrate, whether it's on my daily blogging "duties" or more substantial projects.

You can find out more about the app and download it for free here.

The post 2197: Putting the New WordPress App Through its Paces appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

In response to The Daily Post's writing prompt: "No, Thank You."

"If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?"

I'm going to cheat a little here and not talk about a specific word, but more a general style of communication. There are numerous words that could be used to represent this style of communication, but not one that particularly stands out more than others, so I'm going to talk in more general terms.

As most of you know, the rise of the Internet over the course of the last few decades has made it easier than ever for people to communicate with one another. And with that ease of communication has come a relaxation of the rules of formality when communicating. In some ways, this is a bit of a shame, because the distinction between formal and informal use of language can often send implicit signals to the people in an interaction as to what is and is not appropriate to talk about. But in others, I'm actually very much relieved about this, because formal language is so mind-numbingly impersonal it's borderline offensive to be confronted with.

I'm thinking particularly in terms of "professional" email messages here, and I'll give you an example of the distinction. I've been doing some freelance work for a company for a while. When I started, the company was very much in its infancy, with relatively few employees and a single point of contact for the work I was doing. Said point of contact was a delightful young woman who was always chatty, helpful and charming whenever we spoke to one another. It was a pleasure to interact with her, even though for the most part we were only ever exchanging standard pleasantries and details of work assignments. But just little things like her squealing enthusiasm for me when I told her I was getting married, or chats about the extremes of weather we've seen this summer — all of those things were nice, and gave me a feeling of being "connected" to her and, by extension, a feeling of "belonging" to the company as a whole, despite simply being an outside contractor.

A few weeks ago, my former contact was replaced as she (presumably) moved on to other duties in the company as it has started to grow. She's still with the company and tends to get copied in on email messages, but I haven't heard a peep out of her since. Her replacements are like robots. And I mean that pretty much literally — every message I get from them absolutely stinks of copy-and-paste, email-by-template communication… largely because they clearly are copy-and-paste emails-by-template, and it's easy to tell this due to the fact that there are the exact same words in each one.

There's a good reason for this sort of thing, of course; as companies grow and have to communicate and collaborate with more and more people, it's not considered to be particularly efficient to manually type out each and every message. So in come the templates, the form letters, the copy-and-paste boilerplate text.

Efficient it may be, but that feeling of "connection" is gone as a result. I don't know these people, and even having sent messages to them in the same tone as I spoke with my previous contact, they've made no effort to engage with me in any way; I may as well be downloading assignments from an automated message board.

This is frustrating enough by itself, but combine it with the passive-aggressive tone that business communications tend to take — all "gentle reminders" and "looking forward" to something you haven't done yet — and it's not something that I feel is particularly conducive to a good working relationship.

It doesn't really bother me all that much, to be honest; the company in question is a means to an end (said end being "getting money") for me right now, and ultimately a personal connection with it isn't all that important to me. I just find it a little sad that what was once friendly, personal interactions between two people now feels like sending commands and requests to an automated system. You're human beings; act like it!

So, to (sort of) answer the original question, then: I would ban business-speak, form letters and email templates from general usage and insist that everyone communicate with everyone else as an individual. It would help make the world just a little bit friendlier as a result, and I feel that would work wonders for making people feel more positive about all sorts of things.

The post 2044: No, Thank You appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I have a few examples in mind. First, and most prominent, is Twitter. I've drifted from group to group a bit since I originally joined Twitter a number of years back. Originally, my use of Twitter was primarily to have a means of talking to my online friends with whom I used to interact on 1up.com. After "The Great Exodus", when 1up's specialised forums were mashed together into a NeoGAF-style monstrosity of just "Games" and "Not Games", a significant proportion of the community left the site's forums, and many of them found themselves on Twitter. Over time, people changed, moved and became involved in different things. Some gave up on Twitter altogether; others started using it for professional purposes; others still "rebranded" themselves.

I fell somewhat into the latter category. After suffering a fairly serious instance of doxxing and harassment back in 2013 — see, it's not just women it happens to, contrary to what the media would have you believe — I left Twitter, initially intending not to return, but after realising what a pile of crap Facebook is for actually interacting with people in a meaningful manner, I returned. After realising that the interminable social justice yelling on Twitter was setting off my depression and anxiety, I left again. This time when I came back (they always come back) I decided to "reinvent" myself a bit, and follow fewer of the people I felt I "should" be following, and instead focused on people who posted things I found interesting or enjoyable to interact with. Consequently, these days I find myself on the fringes of "anitwitter", a subculture on the social network that discusses, posts screencaps and generally enthuses about anime and games. I, as you might expect, fit right in.

Elsewhere on the Internet, the Discord server I mentioned the other day (which, dear reader, you're still welcome to come and join) has been developing slowly but surely, but it's our Final Fantasy XIV Free Company server that is perhaps the more interesting example. Taking cues from the in-game friend who introduced me to Discord in the first place, I added an "NSFW" (Not Safe for Work) channel to the server. It immediately became the most active channel in the place, though initially people weren't quite sure what to post in there, i.e. whether or not it was okay to post filth. (It was, though someone stumbled accidentally into it and complained a bit at being confronted with a wall of hentai, so we've since made it invite-only — community management at work!)

What's interesting about the NSFW channel is that the usual boundaries of "politeness" that are up when interacting with other people online in real time — in my experience, anyway; I tend not to hang around with the sort of people who hurl insults and abuse at one another — are nowhere to be seen. I don't mean that people are rude to one another; quite the opposite, in fact. The NSFW channel is a place where everyone can be open and honest about the things that they like, and where no-one judges one another for the things they talk about and post. (Or, if they do, they keep that to themselves.) It's pretty refreshing and liberating, actually, and makes it abundantly clear that there should probably be more places for people — particularly, it has to be said, men — to be able to talk about things like sex, fetishes and all that sort of thing without fear of judgement or anything like that. I shan't go into any further details than that, but suffice to say we're all having a jolly old time in there.

Anyway, yeah. Online communities. Just as interesting as real communities, I think you'll agree…

The post 2014: Making Connections appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Besides high-quality voice chat, Discord is also pretty great for creating text chat servers with custom channels (each of which can have their own permissions set if you so desire) and various other bits and pieces here and there. The app is clearly largely designed with the Final Fantasy XIV community in mind, given its built-in commands to search sites like XIVDB and Gamerescape, but it's also a flexible, lightweight, easy-to-use and cross-platform chat app that is super-easy to get signed up for and really easy to use.

So I'd like to invite you along to come and chat! I created a server named after my other website MoeGamer, along with a bunch of channels. The server is primarily intended for people to talk about Japanese video games, anime, manga and the like, but there are a selection of other channels for people to talk about what they might be interested in. I've had a few people sign up over the course of the day, but not really much participation as yet; understandable, really, since no-one wants to be the first person to say something!

A request, then, dear reader. If you'd like to have a chat with me and hopefully some other like-minded individuals, please do two things for me.

Firstly, join the server here. (You can use Discord via the Web, but I recommend downloading the standalone app for the best and most flexible experience.)

Secondly, participate! Jump into a channel you like the sound of — the invite link I've provided will take you to a "welcome" channel that gives you a summary of what all the other channels are all about — and start talking. Even if no-one seems to be saying much to begin with, people who join the server and channels will see the conversation history when they come along for the first time, so if there are some comments, thoughts and even pictures for people to respond to when they sign up, new members will be more inclined to start participating themselves.

I'd love to build this server into a nice little community where we can chat, share stories, share pics and share our thoughts on all things anime, gaming, manga and whatnot. Discord is a great means of doing just that, and I'd love to see more people making use of it and supporting the great work the developers are doing — it's currently only in alpha, and is already a really well put together piece of software. And who knows? You might even make a few new friends or discover a few new interests in the process.

See you there!

The post 2011: Let's Talk! appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

What, I hear you ask? The fact that someone, somewhere in the world, is probably doing the same thing you are at the exact same time as you.

I don't often think about this, but it occurs to me when I fire up a multiplayer game that isn't the current "flavour of the month" or Call of Duty. For example, I downloaded Tetris for my PlayStation 4, as it's a long time since I seriously played Tetris and I fancied something that I could play together with Andie. The PS4 version of Tetris has an online mode where you can play any of the game modes with up to three other people playing at the same time as you. In the case of the "Battle" modes, you can directly interfere with one another, as is the tradition in Tetris multiplayer, but there are also a number of modes where you're pretty much just playing alongside other people, perhaps to compare performance or pick up tips.

Now, Tetris is one of the most well-known, loved and respected games in the world, but I still find it surprising that there are people out there who make time to sit down and compete online. I'd ask "why?" but then I'd be forced to ask myself why I had chosen to play it online, too — and their answer would probably be the same as mine: to have some sort of "connection" with another person, even if it's a non-verbal one that is as simple as a shared interest. (Aside: Online Tetris players are frighteningly good.)

It's not just Tetris, either; I can sit down and play a mobile game like Brave Frontier, Love Live! School Idol Festival or Drift Girls and jump into one of the online modes in those and still find a live opponent to compete against. Again, in most cases, communication isn't direct — most of these games don't have a chat facility due to the impracticality of it in a mobile game — but it's oddly heartwarming to be sharing an experience with other people, even if it's only for a few short minutes as you attempt to full-combo Snow Halation or raise your ranking in the Drift Girls world tour mode.

Anyway. It's kind of cool to occasionally connect with people in passing like this; with gaming often being a relatively solitary pursuit, it is sometimes nice to feel like there are other people out there who are into the same things as you — and perhaps even to share an experience with them.

Now I've probably got time for a quick Love Live! score match…

The post 1972: Togetherness appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This isn't a question of "victim blaming", as the buzzword has it, but it's an actual phenomenon that I've observed — and, in my younger days, even engaged in myself. I can't explain why I did such a thing, but I know I did it, I know that I was aware I was doing it even at the time, and yet I simply couldn't stop myself.

I suffered dreadfully at the hands of bullies in primary school. I'm not sure what it was about me — my hair, my accent, the fact my ears appeared quite large in comparison to my head (I've since "grown into" them, I think) or some combination of all of the above and a few other things besides — but I was a regular target for some of the schools more notorious troublemakers. And it wasn't to do with my friendship group, either, as on a number of occasions my supposed "friends" actually sided against me in an attempt to win favour points with the bullies (who, inevitably, were the "cool" kids). Perhaps it was self-preservation, perhaps they'd really had enough of me; either way, it was a betrayal, and it hurt.

But I know that I was partly to blame for some of the incidents that happened. I recall deliberately goading the bullies on more than one occasion — swearing at them, insulting them, trying to attack them — and inevitably being knocked to the ground, winded and crying. The teachers on duty would do their usual "come over and look concerned" bit, but then nothing would ever happen to the people who had assaulted me. And so the cycle would repeat, over and over again.

Perhaps it was an attempt to claw my own little bit of "power" on the playground, because I was very much at the bottom of the food chain. Perhaps it was an attempt to let out my frustration about what I now recognise as social anxiety and difficulty interacting with some people. Perhaps I was just a little cunt. I honestly don't know the reason. But what I do know is that despite the fact I was the "victim", I was also genuinely to blame for a goodly proportion of those incidents — not all of them, mind, but a fair few of them.

And I'm reminded of this as I watch interactions on social media today. Mr Brandon Orselli, the chap who runs NicheGamer, an independent games site that I've become quite fond of, regularly has to fend off people who start attacking him, his work and his staff without any sort of provocation. Their reasoning? His site has, at times, been sympathetic to the consumer revolt known as "GamerGate", which has now been raging for some ten months and, despite a considerable amount of evidence to the contrary, is still regarded as a "hate group" of "misogynists".

Now, I'm not here to talk about GamerGate and whether or not it's right (largely because I know it's a topic of discussion that tends to become irrational very quickly — both "sides" are very much at fault in this regard, and frankly I want nothing to do with the perpetual arguments and finger-pointing) but one glance at the front page of NicheGamer will tell you that it's absolutely not any sort of GamerGate propaganda rag. Rather, it's an up-and-coming independent site with a clear focus, a staff that is obviously passionate about their work — including some highly knowledgeable specialist writers — and an editor-in-chief who is not afraid to stand up for himself, his work and his site.

Orselli does admittedly, at times, come across as a little arrogant on social media — but you know what? I understand the pride he takes in his work, and the pleasure he feels when things go well for his site. And I very much respect his choice to take the bull by the horns and engage these "critics" in an attempt at conversation even as they are, at times, spreading information that simply isn't true.

Why am I reminded of my own playground experiences? Well, the sort of people who are attacking Orselli and his staff remind me of the young me. They poke and they poke and they poke and they goad and they goad and they goad… and then they call foul (or, more accurately, "harassment") when the person they've been poking and goading bites back. (It has to be said, mind you, that it's not quite the same situation: Orselli is not a "bully", has shown admirable self-restraint and civility in these interactions, and has been a lot more calm and collected about them than I probably would be!) In other words, observing from the outside and recognising this behaviour as something I once did (as a child!) makes it seem very much like those attacking Orselli, his site and others like them are specifically going out and looking for trouble so they can further their "harassment" narrative.

Certainly nothing I've seen of NicheGamer's output — and since I've pretty much stopped following big games sites as they don't cover many of the games I'm interested in these days, it's one of the few sites I do check in on semi-regularly — warrants the sort of unpleasantness I've seen hurled at Orselli and his team on a seemingly daily basis, whatever your feelings on GamerGate (which, as previously noted, is not the same thing as NicheGamer). If anything, NicheGamer should be applauded for trying something different in a world of identikit big magazine-style or blog-type games sites, and catering to a specific audience rather than casting a very wide but very shallow net.

But anyway. It hopefully goes without saying that this isn't any attempt to diminish any instances of genuine harassment that actually goes on on social media — after all, I've dealt with it myself, so I know how shitty it is. But this sort of behaviour — deliberate provocation — just rubs me up the wrong way, particularly as I've suffered at the hands of bullies many times over the years, both by bringing it on myself and through no fault of my own. So in the words of Twitter's favourite anti-bully ranger:

https://twitter.com/antibullyranger/status/609751052125016064

Or, to put it another way, don't be a cunt.

The post 1971: don't bully!! appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The article makes a lot of good points, but the one which stood out most strikingly to me was the suggestion that "via clickbait, many companies believe they can do away with the concept of demographic". And it's absolutely true: the concept of a "target demographic" when it comes to Internet-based publications is fast becoming a thing of the past in favour of casting a wide net in the hopes of snagging as many people as possible.

It feels like it's getting more and more transparent, too; I don't know if this is simply because I'm aware of it from the inside — during my latter days at USgamer, I spent a lot of time publishing walkthroughs for new games to draw in the clicks, so believe me, I know clickbait — or whether outlets really are getting more and more transparent. But when, for example, sites like Forbes Games (games, note) are publishing articles about something that happened in last night's Game of Thrones (a TV show), or sites like Polygon and Kotaku are trying their level best to relate real-world events to video games in as ham-fisted a manner as possible, something is very, very wrong.

I've mentioned before that I very much miss the "golden age" of magazines in the mid-to-late '90s. Magazines each had a distinctive voice, style and target audience. Some, like the Official Nintendo Magazine, were aimed at kids, and used layout, language and presentation to match. Others, like Zero, were aimed at slightly older people who enjoyed a bit of irreverent humour. Others still, like ACE, were aimed at the general games enthusiast, not someone loyal to a particular platform. And others still, like Page 6/New Atari User, which my father, my brother and I all used to contribute to, had a tightly focused target audience of platform enthusiasts who were into more than just games.

While certain sites do still have "voices" to an extent thanks to well-known writers, there's less and less to distinguish between them, particularly as the default "thing to care about" for these publications these days appears to be Social Issues like sexism and racism. But I find it hard to take these articles seriously when they clearly very much fall into the clickbait category — Polygon's recent piece on The Witcher 3 maybe possibly probably being racist was a double whammy, in fact, combining two pieces of bait: the name of a popular current release, and an accusation that said popular current release is, in some way, bad and wrong. Whether or not it's "right" to read the piece in that way — or in a manner which suggests If You Like The Witcher You're Okay With Racism — is kind of besides the point; people do read it that way, and they quite understandably take umbrage with the implications suggested by articles like this. Same with Kollar's piece on Dungeon Travelers 2 from a while back, though in that case the game was largely unknown and it was the publisher Atlus that was the "household name" to draw people in and then slap people around the face with a bit of This Is Problematic bullshit.

I remember before this dark period of games journalism started when a lot of people were attacking Kotaku for different reasons to today. In fact, there's a relevant entry on this very blog from that very period, in which I explored the possibility that Kotaku might have actually been doing what I'm arguing for here: pursuing a specific demographic.

Targeting a specific demographic isn't a negative thing, and we need to stop thinking that it is, because if you spread yourself too thin, you don't serve any of your audience to their satisfaction. One size does not fit all, and not everyone wants to read about the same things. And that's fine! What we need is more diversity of opinion and more places for people to go and get different viewpoints. And that's something we're not getting at the moment — at least not from the commercial sites. It's pretty telling that the small, independent sites out there are doing a far better job of this than the big names — and it's absolutely criminal that sites like this are, at present, unable to make money thanks to the business' continued reliance on the clickbait model rather than something more fair and less manipulative.

Ultimately it's best to find places you enjoy reading that you feel "speak" to you, but if I may give a recommendation to those of you who are into similar sorts of games to me: do check out Digitally Downloaded; editor-in-chief Matt Sainsbury and his team work hard to provide interesting, thought-provoking and well-written pieces of criticism about a diverse array of games as well as anime, manga, film and literature. They manage to produce pieces of relevant social and cultural commentary and criticism and relate them to games without pointing fingers or pandering to anyone; its writers are passionate and believe in the things they write, and the result is a site I continue to enjoy and respect even as I've switched off from reading most of the mainstream games media these days. It'd be great to see sites like this grow, and the industry as a whole evolve.

Will it happen? Well, that's partly up to you, isn't it?

The post 1966: Yes, Please Kill Clickbait appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This PAX weekend has been pretty much everything I hoped it would be. I had a great time with my friends, I saw some cool stuff at the show and I picked up some fun swag.

Most importantly, we successfully carried a number of formerly Internet-only relationships into the offline realm. Doing this is always a nerve-wracking experience — regardless of whether said relationship is platonic, romantic or anything else — and so it's always a pleasure when things come together and we all get along.

I actually wasn't too worried this time around, though. Something brought us all together in the world of Final Fantasy XIV and the fact most of us have been together for nigh on two years now says something positive about us and what we mean to one another. There have been tough times, as with any relationship, and people have come and gone over time, but the people with whom I spent my weekend represent a core group that I have always very much enjoyed spending virtual time with — and it turns out I enjoy spending real time with, too. It's just a pity we're all so scattered.

"I'm glad everyone is exactly how they seem to be," said one of our number last night, possibly slightly fuelled by a beer or two. "It means that everyone's genuine. And that we're all as fucked up as each other."

That latter point is key, and not necessarily a bad thing. Almost without exception, we've all had Shit to Deal With to varying degrees over the years, and our adventures in Eorzea have provided not only some much-needed escape at times, but also an outlet through which we can talk about the things that have been bothering us with like-minded individuals.

And that is immeasurably valuable; in an age where it seems people are drifting further and further apart from one another for various reasons, it's comforting to have a group that is pretty much always there for you. I know I'm grateful for these friends, and I'm sure they are too.

Now coffee is calling, closely followed by a connecting flight, a taxi ride back home and then almost straight back out (hopefully with time for a shower first!) to go and teach clarinet to kids. It's all go, huh. I shall sleep well tonight, for sure.

The post 1876: Connecting Flight appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Why? Because whenever I consider purchasing something, one of the first things I do is have a look at the user ratings and reviews and determine whether or not they're 1) genuine 2) worth listening to and 3) something that might need to make me reconsider or confirm my purchase.

Of course, user reviews are very much open to abuse. You only have to look at some of the more notorious examples on Amazon or Metacritic to see the system at its worst… although these incidents can often provide a certain degree of amusement. (There's at least one Twitter account devoted to amusing Amazon reviews alone.)

But when they work, they can be extremely useful — and every time I write one, I'm reminded how much I have always enjoyed reviewing things. Not necessarily critiquing them in depth or from any sort of theoretical perspective, but providing a simple, straightforward analysis of how much I liked something, how it made me feel, whether I think other people would like it and all that sort of good stuff.

It's also really fun to write a negative review, though it's also very easy to be extremely unfair when you're doing so, which is why I try and remain positive most of the time. (People are also more inclined to disagree with something negative than positive in my experience, too, and I really don't enjoy arguing with people.) I have made one fairly consistent exception over the years, though, and that's with mobile games that have been truly, truly awful, particularly those that have desecrated beloved franchises like Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park and SimCity. (Oh, hi, EA.)

But I've decided as a belated and rather lame resolution that I'm going to start making an effort to review things that I've bought, played, used, whatever. Because if I make use of user reviews for their intended purpose — to find out what the average Joe on the street thinks of something that I'm considering purchasing — then I'm sure other people will do too. And, not to blow my own trumpet too much, but I feel like I'm quite good at expressing myself about the things I do and don't like about something.

I give it a couple of weeks before I stop doing it, but for now it's a little something I can do to help make the Internet as a whole a slightly better place. I made a start this evening by reviewing HuniePop on Steam; see if you can spot my review if you're pondering whether to drop some cash on a pornographic puzzle game!

The post 1834: Rate Us Five Stars appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It kind of sucks that social media is the default means of people communicating with one another today. I'll grant that it's a convenient and easy means of people to talk to each other without sharing completely "personal" details like email addresses or phone numbers, but I sort of miss the days of sending lengthy emails back and forth with people. I know the option is still there to do that, but how many people would actually respond, I wonder?

This is a preamble to the fact that I have rejoined Twitter in an attempt to reconnect with the people I effectively severed social ties with when I went dark a while back. I don't regret doing that — remaining clear of some of the most ridiculous Internet drama in years has been thoroughly pleasant, and it makes me glad to have the close friends I do have who have stuck by me even as I was harder to get hold of — but I have found myself somewhat wanting for conversation at times.

And so we come to this, then: an attempt to recapture whatever it was that attracted me to Twitter in the first place, and kept me as an avid user for a long time until I became thoroughly disillusioned with the whole thing.

The temptation with Twitter is to follow everyone and everything. A follow isn't the same as a friendship request on other forms of social media: it's not reciprocal. You can follow someone and they remain completely unaware of your existence. This isn't necessarily as harsh (or creepy) as it sounds, since many Twitter users make use of the social network primarily as a broadcast medium for keeping people up to date on the latest happenings or pointing them in the direction of posts, forums and articles that are a better place to hang out and talk in detail. Twitter is, after all, shit for nuanced discussion, as anyone who has ever attempted to discuss anything deeper than how nice the sausage you're currently eating is will have undoubtedly discovered.

I'm not going to do that this time, though. I'm not going to use Twitter as the noisy, messy hodgepodge of microblogging tool, text messaging service and RSS reader that it once was: the emphasis for me now is on the thing I always enjoyed using it for most: talking to people from all over the world.

I'm not going to follow hundreds of people. I'm not going to feel obliged to follow people who follow me unless I find them interesting. If people start retweeting things that upset or annoy me, I'll simply turn off their retweets — retweets, after all, are by far the most irritating feature of Twitter in my experience since it's a means of someone shoving a third party's opinion in your face — and if they remain annoying or upsetting after that then, well, maybe I don't really want to be following them after all.

My account is public at present, but once I have a nice little collection of followers gathered once again, I'm turning my account back to private, which means my tweets won't be public and people will have to request to follow me rather than just being able to do so. My professional life is now completely separate from my online existence, and as such I have no need to "network" online by sucking up to "important" people and trying to make them aware of my existence by building up as much "social capital" (to co-opt a phrase that means something else) as I can.

I can instead concentrate on using Twitter as a means of talking with friends and — hopefully, anyway — having a bit of fun. And with any luck, this will help at least partly deal with the feelings of isolation and loneliness I've been feeling recently.

The post 1774: Last Chance, Twitter appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One of the most interesting things about Internet culture is how small it makes the world seem at times. I recall when online connectivity was just starting to become a thing — beyond the old-school world of direct-dial bulletin board systems, that is — and as well as the obnoxious phrase "information superhighway" being coined, a second, lesser-known but rather accurate phrase came into brief usage: "global village".

The concept of the Internet — or, perhaps more accurately, the Web — as a global village is an interesting one, and if you spend some time wandering around online, you'll come to recognise the village's various haunts. There's the village hall that hosts everything from coffee mornings to neo-Nazi rallies (Facebook). There's the pub where everyone is always talking over everyone else and no-one's really listening to one another (Twitter). There's the deceptive village shop that looks small but actually carries a frighteningly comprehensive array of products of all descriptions (Amazon). There's the coffee shop where socialites of all descriptions like to hang out and have in-depth discussions about everything from literature to their sexual conquests (Reddit). And there's that dark, unlit back alley that very few people go down, but down which you'll find either an army of like-minded outcasts or a horde of terrifying monsters, depending on your outlook (4chan and its successor 8chan).

There's far more to the Internet than this, of course; the global village has become more of a town over the years, but it's never really lost that sense of having "landmarks" around the place: easily recognisable places from which you can easily get your bearings and which, should you choose to make them your regular hangouts, provide a sense of comfortable (or sometimes uncomfortable) familiarity.

They've all evolved over time, too. Take Facebook; when it originally launched, it was designed for college students. Then it expanded to take in young, cool people in general, and allow them to keep in touch with their close personal network of friends easily. Then it expanded again to become more public and open. And today, of course, almost everyone is on Facebook to some degree or another, regardless of age, gender, interests and even level of computer literacy.

Change hasn't always been for the positive, of course — although how you regard these changes, positive or negative, is partly down to your own individual feelings and how you want to communicate online. Twitter and I, for example, parted ways when it was becoming increasingly apparent that the microblogging service was being used by a lot of people more as a broadcast medium — and sometimes an echo chamber — than a means of communicating effectively. Its inherent limitations started to strain at the seams as people, for some inexplicable reason, started to think that it was an appropriate medium for having in-depth debates about complex issues. (It really isn't.) Then the marketers found it, trying to encourage us to tweet using the hashtags for their products seen on adverts or TV shows — who does this? And over time the noise built and built and built until, much like Facebook, it was not what it once was. For some people, it's still fun; for me, it had lost much of the charm that caused me to use it a great deal in the first place.

There's a lot going on behind the scenes in a lot of places, too. Take Wikipedia, for example; at face value, it appears to be a perfectly reputable source containing a vast array of information about pretty much anything you would care to name. Ostensibly being a reference work, much of it is written in an impartial, unbiased manner — though there are exceptions. And it's in those exceptions you start to see that yes, this is something that is put together and constantly maintained by humans, many of whom are doing it simply because they enjoy doing it. Dig further and take a peek at the inner workings of Wikipedia and you'll see that it's far from a solo effort; teams of editors are constantly discussing, debating, arguing and even fighting over the most peculiar of topics; in order to deal with such situations, the site has formed its own quasi-government to arbitrate disputes, with unfortunate instances going through strict, formal procedures managed not by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, but by councils of users. It's fascinating to observe.

There are billions of people on the planet, a significant proportion of whom now have some form of access to the Internet. With that in mind, it's kind of crazy how small the Internet feels sometimes. That "global village" really is a thing and, while just like any other village, not everyone gets along with everyone else, the virtual world we've all helped build together is a fascinating thing indeed.

Just be careful if you venture into some of those dark corners. You might not like what you find… but on the other hand, there's always the possibility of being pleasantly surprised, too. Explore at your own risk!

The post 1772: Around the Virtual World appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As much as it was a historic moment for humanity, then, imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt as a significant portion of his life's work finally came to fruition as the probe successfully touched down and began transmitting data back to Earth.

Then imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt when confronted with a giddy press more concerned with his sartorial choices than with the scientific milestone he had just passed — the shirt in question being a rather loud Hawaiian-style number featuring rather vivid, camp, retro-style imagery of women in PVC outfits shooting guns and generally looking pretty badass. (A shirt, I might add, made for and given to him as a gift by his friend Elly Prizeman.)

"I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet," read a headline on The Verge put together by the two-person team — yes, this garbage took two people to put together — of former Polygon editor Chris Plante and his colleague Arielle Duhaime-Ross, "your shirt is sexist and ostracizing." And this was far from the only article published that day attacking him and his wardrobe rather than celebrating his achievements.

We don't have to imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt. Because it was captured on film.

Can you imagine. Can you imagine reaching the culmination of a ten-year project, making such a significant step forward, and then some blowhard on the Internet telling you that your shirt is directly responsible for women not wanting to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics? Can you imagine having to deal with abuse seemingly supported by the mainstream media, whom you previously thought would be keen to celebrate your achievement but now are, quite rightly, somewhat wary of?

Welcome to a world dominated by bullies.

The Internet has brought with it many great things, one of the most powerful being the principle that "everyone has a voice". The Internet has done more to advance the concept of free speech than pretty much anything else in the world, but while some people use this for good — to share information, to reach out to people who need help, to make friends in far-flung corners of the world without having to physically travel there — there are others who use it for ill. To lie, to cheat, to accuse, to blow things out of proportion, to bully.

This particular breed of unpleasant individual has been seemingly growing in numbers — or, if not numbers then certainly prominence — in the last few years, largely thanks to social networking sites Twitter and Tumblr. Ostensibly concerned with admirable-sounding concepts such as "social justice" and feminism, these individuals purport to be progressive thinkers who want to make the world a better place for everyone, but in actual fact are nasty, narrow-minded bullies who simply attack anyone who doesn't see the world in the same way they do.

When you have Boris fucking Johnson calling you out on your bullshit, you should probably rein it in a bit:

The mission is a colossal achievement. Millions of us have been watching Philae's heart-stopping journey. Everyone in this country should be proud of Dr Taylor and his colleagues, and he has every right to let his feelings show.

Except, of course, that he wasn't crying with relief. He wasn't weeping with sheer excitement at this interstellar rendezvous. I am afraid he was crying because he felt he had sinned. He was overcome with guilt and shame for wearing what some people decided was an "inappropriate" shirt on television.

Why was he forced into this humiliation? Because he was subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the Internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.

And so I want, naturally, to defend this blameless man. And as for all those who have monstered him and convicted him in the kangaroo court of the Web — they should all be ashamed of themselves.

Sadly, Dr Matt Taylor's trials were far from the first time this sort of outrage has erupted, and it will be far from the last time this happens, too. These supposed advocates of social justice — referred to in the vernacular by their opponents as "social justice warriors" or "SJWs" — are renowned for two things: taking offence at everything it's possible to take offence at, and then bullying people into submission, often until those suffering the bullying end up apologising, as Dr Taylor did.

This sounds ridiculous, but it's all too painfully familiar for me. I was bullied repeatedly throughout primary and secondary school — and once again at one of my previous workplaces — and the execution was exactly the same. Wear down the victim's defences with repeated, unprovoked, unwarranted attacks until they snap in one way or another — be it violently, at which point the bullies can point at the victim and say "look how violent they're being!", or tearfully, as in Dr Taylor's case, at which point the bullies can point and laugh at the victim and claim that they're only upset because they know they did wrong — and then move on in the knowledge of a job "well done".

It keeps happening, too, and these people never get called on it because they wield a considerable amount of influence and power — influence and power that lets them get away with a whole lot of nonsense.

Consider, if you will, the recent case of Independent Games Festival judge Mattie Brice, an outspoken, anti-men feminist who has claimed to be "leaving" the games industry on several occasions due to the abuse she was supposedly receiving.

Brice tweeted that she was "automatically rating low any games with men in them" during the course of her IGF judging duties and that she was "loving all this power". Understandably, this tweet — whether or not made in jest — upset a number of people, who complained to the IGF, who subsequently, admirably and promptly asked politely that she, you know, stop doing that lest people think that their judging was rigged. Brice then complained publicly to her Twitter followers about how she was being "harassed" and how the IGF were treating her poorly, and continued until the IGF issued an apology, not her. Her defence in all this? "It was a joke" — the last fallback of the bully, and an excuse I heard many a time when working as a teacher. It was never, ever, true, and you'll forgive me for being skeptical of this particular instance being a "joke" when we're talking about a person who made a game called "Destroy All Men" and has often posted anti-men rants on Twitter.

And lest you think I'm singling out Brice here, she is far from the only one; she's simply one of the most recent examples. I've thankfully remained largely free from this sort of nonsense up until now (though it remains to be seen if this blog post will attract zealots) but I've witnessed friends and former colleagues being attacked too many times over the last few years for me to sit here continuing to bite my lip.

YouTuber and PC gaming enthusiast TotalBiscuit demonstrated a good understanding of the issue in a recent post, and came to what is quite possibly the crux of this whole social justice thing and why it bugs me so much:

It's so goddamn American.

A lot of this social justice stuff seems to be focused on a very American set of ideals and circumstances that doesn't take into account much going on outside the country's borders. I mean the idea that racism against white people doesn't exist: let's take that one on for a second. [Fellow YouTuber and Irishman] Miracle of Sound accurately pointed out the genocide perpetrated against a portion of the Irish population and the hundreds of years of oppression that they suffered under the English. Sounds pretty damn racist to me.

The concept of white privilege is very American, too. You'll find a lot of British people, particularly Northerners like myself, bemused by it. I grew up in pit towns, or should I say, ex-pit towns, because Thatcher destroyed our economy when she broke the miners' unions and put a lot of people out of work. Our towns were vast white majorities but I can safely say we had no privilege, no advantages for being white. Some of the richest and most successful people in our towns were Indian and Pakistani.

He's absolutely right. These social justice types take a very American — specifically, West Coast — view of the world and assume it is the correct one, then shout down anyone who doesn't agree with them. They release the hounds on Twitter; they publicly shame them on Tumblr; they encourage the media to buy in to the narrative, and, worryingly, they succeed. Compare, for example, the media portrayal of consumer revolt "Gamergate" as a misogynist hate campaign that wants to drive women out of gaming with the reality of it being one of the most articulate, passionate, genuine, diverse, intelligent and inclusive — albeit at times somewhat ill-focused — groups of gamers of all genders, races and creeds that I've ever observed. (As an aside, I haven't involved myself in Gamergate's activities — as a former member of the press I don't agree with everything they stand for, though I feel they do have a number of fair points to be made — but I have spent a couple of weeks lurking around their regular online haunts to see what made them tick. It's been eye-opening to see the dissonance.)

It is worth clarifying at this juncture — and it pisses me off that I have to add this disclaimer — that I am not against the concept of "social justice" or, more accurately, equality. Quite the opposite; I believe in equal opportunities and equal, fair treatment for everyone, and my behaviour towards other people in my own life reflects this. Meanwhile, however, these keyboard crusaders make themselves immune to criticism by simply responding to any critics with "so you're against social justice, are you? You're against progressiveness?" but there is a right way and a wrong way to go about things — and bullying people until they seemingly agree with you is very much the wrong way to go about it. That is what this post is about, not about standing against the very principles of progressiveness.

All this has been going on for several years now — longtime readers will doubtless recall a number of posts where I've alluded to this in the past, and I've seen more friends than I'd care to mention either fall victim to these Internet bully mobs for a careless word at the wrong time or get swept up in their twisted ideology, never to have a rational word to say ever again — and it's time it stopped.

Why do I bring this up now? Why do I feel that this one lone blog post can make a difference?

Well, frankly, I don't; I am but one voice shouting into the void, and I would doubtless be argued to be a textbook example of a white cishet male privileged neckbeard shitlord (yes, this is genuinely something that these believers in "social justice" call people), but it's worth mentioning — particularly as the debacle over Dr Matt Taylor's shirt has brought this whole sorry situation very much into the public eye. I hope that this helps more people to see what has been brewing in online culture for a few years now — and I hope it helps put a stop to it.

This is not a move towards a progressive society. It's a move towards 1984-style Thought Policing, and it's not the direction that we as a society should be moving.

The bullying needs to stop. And it needs to stop now.

The post 1766: Time for the Bullying to Stop appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

But not every improvement in the Internet has been a positive one. In fact, one thing specifically appears to be on the rise, and it's not at all a positive thing, despite usually being implemented with good intentions.

I am referring to websites that, within moment of you arriving, pop up a Google Hangouts-style chatbox in the corner of the screen, often featuring a photograph of some overly-chipper looking person, and invite you to "chat" if you need help.

Now, in principle this isn't a terrible idea. Those who are less familiar with the Internet will probably appreciate having guidance on hand — immediately, and without having to seek it out — should they run into difficulties. (That said, assuming that "those less familiar with the Internet" are too dim to determine that clicking on a link that says "Help" — as most (vaguely useful) websites offer — will actually provide them with assistance is, to be honest, rather insulting towards those who are "less familiar with the Internet". And yes, I'm primarily talking about old people.) Having a live person on hand is, theoretically, a great thing, as it means you can ask questions without having to work out what the specific search terms to describe the problem you're having are — and then discover the only vaguely useful search result is an unanswered forum post from three years ago of someone having the exact same problem and never resolving it, of course.

The implementation, however, leaves something to be desired. Take WordPress here, for example. I started composing this post and not five seconds after the post editor had appeared, up popped a little blue box in the corner of the screen cheerfully enquiring "Hello! How can we help?" It's distracting, it's annoying, it's patronising and it is, in this case, unnecessary: I have been using WordPress for… (checks) quite a long time now, and thus it's probably reasonable to assume I know my way around most of it — and that anything I don't know how to do I'm perfectly comfortable with looking up in help files and forums.

That doesn't stop this silly little box from popping up every few times I start creating a post, however — yes, it's not even every time I start writing a post. No, apparently WordPress believes that maybe two or three times a week I'll reach some sort of existential blogging crisis and rather than, as most bloggers would do, pontificate about it for a thousand words in a self-indulgent stream-of-consciousness post, I would like to "chat" with someone about it. I do not want to "chat" with anyone from WordPress. I would like them to be on hand if I have a specific question, but I'm more than happy to use the already established channels for that — I don't need live support.

And it's not as if this "live" support is particularly live, anyway. Owing to the fact that most chat support people are juggling a number of different conversations at the same time — each of which is with someone who has a markedly different thinking and typing speed from everyone else they're interacting with — it can often take minutes at a time to get a response. Not exactly "instant" messaging. And, okay, it's still quicker than waiting a day or two for an email response — or more, if you ever have the misfortune to deal with any sort of government agency via email — but the benefit of instant messaging is supposed to be that you can get an immediate response, and if that one benefit isn't even present in these ever-present "How can we help?" boxes, then there's no fucking point them being there in the first place.

I might write a letter. That's always seemed like the most satisfying — albeit least time-efficient — means of expressing your dissatisfaction. Although sadly, it's also one of the easiest to ignore in this digital age. But the recipient actually receiving and reading it isn't necessarily the point in many cases; often putting pen to paper is a cathartic experience that makes the frustrated party get a few things off their chest and calm down a bit. It may not resolve anything in the long run, but, speaking from personal experience, by golly does it sometimes make you feel better.

So that's how you can help me, WordPress. You can bugger off with your patronising little chat box, otherwise you might just find yourself on the receiving end of a sternly-worded letter written on actual paper.

Or not. I might just stop getting worked up over stupid little things like this and go and do something fun instead. Hah! That'll be the day, eh?

The post 1754: Yet Another Exhortation for Websites to Stop Bugging Me appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

That particular rant — kind of shocked how little things have changed in two years, to be honest — was inspired by the amount of time certain people spent pontificating on Twitter about how awful certain groups were towards other groups. Whether it was racism, sexism, ableism or any of the other bad -isms, there was always someone on hand to loudly denounce anyone who displayed one or more of these traits as The Worst Person Ever.

I've tended to find over the years that the more I find myself seeing the same things said over and over — and the more hyperbolic those things are — the less I'm inclined to care about them, until eventually you cross some sort of apathy event horizon and find yourself feeling completely and utterly unmoved by even the most tragic of human suffering. Desensitisation is very much a real thing — although I'll qualify that at this stage by saying that I am by no means desensitised to things like violent imagery or things happening to those who are close to me and that I care about.

I was reminded of this feeling today when a friend got in touch and told me about some dude I'd never heard of supposedly sexually assaulting a whole bunch of people, the dodgy things he'd said on Facebook and the rather specific, creepy details that his alleged victims had said independently of one another. Now, I knew that I was probably supposed to feel outraged about this apparent miscarriage of justice, but the fact is, I just couldn't bring myself to care even a little bit about it. I couldn't bring myself to Google who this dude I'd never heard of was; I couldn't bring myself to look at the news stories; it just didn't matter to me.

And, you know what? I don't actually think that's necessarily a bad way to be thinking about things. While it would be nice if all the good people in the world could wave their respective magic wands and make all the bad people's dicks fall off (where applicable), we all know that isn't the way things work. And it's all very well and good and probably morally admirable to get upset on other people's behalf, but there are an awful lot of bad people out there and only so many hours in the day. I know I'd much rather be concentrating on my own life and the wellbeing of those immediately around me (in social, not necessarily geographical terms) than wasting time — yes, I do think it is a colossal waste of time — getting angry on behalf of people I've never met, will likely never meet and have absolutely no means of relating to, helping or indeed having any impact on the lives of whatsoever.

Why do I say this is a good thing? Doesn't that make me some sort of woman/ethnic minority/disabled person-hating narcissist? Well, no, of course not — although a woman/ethnic minority/disabled person-hating narcissist would say that, wouldn't they? The simple fact is this: very few people are real "heroes". Very few of us have the power to make a true difference in the lives of people we've had absolutely no contact with whatsoever. And it's not good for one's mental health to continually get upset and angry on behalf of everyone who is wronged in the world. I've seen one friend go down that road, and frankly they became rather insufferable as a result. More than that, though, it seemed impossible for them to ever be happy, because there was always something new to get upset and angry about; they were perpetually in a state of anguish and fury, because there was no way to fix this broken world we live in. It was heartbreaking to see, and there was nothing I could do to help them.

Ultimately all most of us do is try to be the best people we can be to the people who do matter to each of us: family, friends and the acquaintances we come into contact with on a regular basis through work or other activities. If everyone simply tried to be a bit more excellent towards one another in their own social circles, the world would probably be a much more pleasant place overall.

Unfortunately some people simply appear to be hard-wired to be as un-excellent as possible to the people around them. And that's not at all cool, but if you have nothing to do with those people, harsh as it may sound, they're not your problem. They have to either recognise the problems they have themselves and do something about it, or the people who are close to them and care about them have to take action. You, as some random stranger on the Internet, have no influence, no power and, moreover, no real right to interfere with that person's life. Concentrate on dealing with your own issues, because everyone's got them to varying degrees, and if you're one of the lucky few to be in a place of relative contentment? Enjoy it, for fuck's sake; don't go looking for trouble.

So, to sum up: I Still Don't Care. And, I have to say, ditching social media has made it a whole lot easier to do just that. While my own issues mean that I'm still a way off feeling truly, completely 100% happy and content with my own life, I sure feel a lot closer to that ambition than I once was. And, should I ever reach it? I'm damn well going to enjoy every minute of it.

The post 1747: I Still Don't Care appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

He said that as human beings, we crave information. It doesn't matter what that information is, we're just hungry for it; forever consuming, devouring any input we can get our brains wrapped around, however mundane, stupid or fury-inducing.

After he said this, I took stock of my online existence since leaving Facebook and Twitter behind. I still haven't looked at the former at all; I've peeped at the latter once or twice to see if I had any mentions or direct messages — I didn't (apart from a share of this post by a dentist who clearly hadn't read it at all), which, I won't lie, smarted a bit, but I'll live.

What I have done, however, is almost immediately replace them with other things. I was always intending to make more active use of the Squadron of Shame forums, for example, but they have become my primary go-to hangout online — which makes their occasional lack of activity a little frustrating. (Come join up and talk in a chin-strokey fashion about games!) But that's not all I'm doing: instead of relying on what Twitter is talking about for a picture of the day's news — a practice which tends to give you an inherently biased picture of what is going on, due to the political tendencies of some of Twitter's most vocal users — I'm specifically seeking out sites like the BBC and the Guardian to read about stories at my own pace. (I still skip over anything that just offers me a video and no text, though; fuck video.)

I am not, however, reading a great deal about video games. This is less about losing interest in them — which my marathon Xillia 2 session this evening will emphatically attest that I am not — and more about feeling there aren't really any sites out there that speak to (or for) me. I've discussed this with a number of people with whom I share similar proclivities, and many of us tend to feel the same way: while the ad-based revenue model for these sites continues to be in place, we're never going to see the sort of coverage that we're interested in seeing. Those sites that do try different things — like Polygon with its now-defunct features section, or 1up with its community-driven nature — end up either closing down altogether, or at the very least shedding the things that made them unique and becoming yet another identikit site of daily triple-A and indie darling news churn.

But I digress. The point is, the information void I left when I cut social media out of my life was immediately filled by something else. It's a compulsion; an uncontrollable urge. As a human being, my brain demands information; it needs input. More input.

I'm not entirely sure if that's a healthy compulsion, since as I noted above, the 21st-century brain doesn't appear to be all that selective about what it wants to absorb into itself. Perhaps if the brain craved nothing but new knowledge — information that would allow it to let its host function as a better human being — that might be absolutely fine.

But no. The 21st century brain is interested in menstrual menaces and megachile perihirta (commonly known as the Western leafcutting bee); in cats drinking from squirt bottles and… oh, you get the idea.

The human brain is a mysterious thing. Whatever you may feel about the information you stuff into it on a daily basis, though, I think we can probably all agree that the Internet has had a profound impact on how we perceive, seek out and consume information these days, hmm?

The post 1716: Desperately Seeking Information appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

That situation comes in the form of apps and services begging you to use them. It's obnoxious, obtrusive and, more to the point, makes me disinclined to make use of that app or service ever again. In fact, in most cases, if an app or service begs me to use it or come back, I will simply uninstall it or unsubscribe from their mailing list.

The most egregious example I can think of recently was an app called TuneIn Radio. I was recommended this as a good means of listening to both streaming Internet radio and podcasts, but was dismayed to discover after firing it up just once that it then insisted on reminding me of its own existence at least once a day via a push notification that was usually recommending something I had absolutely no interest in whatsoever. ("Listen to TalkSport!" Oh, how little you know me.) However good the app is, notifications bug me enough at the best of times, so in the bin it went.

I'm still getting email messages from services I had to sign up for when I was reviewing endless reams of shitty mobile-social apps for Inside Mobile Apps, too. Eventually I simply registered for these services with an email address I don't use any more, and this mitigated the problem somewhat, but there are still times where there are services that I haven't touched for a year or more feel the need to email me and remind me that they exist.

Worse, when you unsubscribe from these mailing lists you inevitably end up signed up to, you're often questioned as to why you'd ever want to stop your inbox being cluttered up with this meaningless crap. I had one email the other day from a service called AppData, a ludicrously expensive analytics service that was attached to the Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps sites I used to write for, which asked whether I had unsubscribed "by mistake". Seriously. Look.

The sheer arrogance of this is absolutely astonishing. "Oh, no, whoops, I unsubscribed from your marketing spam by mistake. I actually do want you to try and sell me things! Sign me back up, quick!" Or, indeed, "oh no, the pointless marketing spam I forwarded on to my friend [who does this?] annoyed them so much that they tried to unsubscribe themselves and instead unsubscribed me! Sign me back up, quick!"

I kind of understand why this happens. As I said at the beginning, the sheer amount of competition between mobile app and online service providers these days is ridiculous, so they have to resort to ever more drastic measures to retain their users, and hopefully convert them into paying customers — or at least people who will click on ads.

I can't say I feel much sympathy, though. Surely having to resort to this is not a signal that you should market harder. Surely having to resort to this is, instead, a sign that there is far too much pointless, useless crap on the market, and maybe you should try a bit harder to come up with an idea that is actually innovative and helpful to people rather than a rehash of other things people already use? Harsh as it may sound, these days I find myself smiling a little with every email I receive that informs me a pointless, stupid mobile-social service that I reviewed a year or more ago is closing down. I'm glad; there's too much noise in our lives anyway even with just the well-established services like Twitter and Facebook, so stop adding to it.

The post 1706: Bug Me and I Leave You appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

And yet here I am making a largely similar post, and not for the first time. I shall try and keep the egocentric narcissism to a minimum, however — though I'm making no promises.

This post is about two things: 1) why I don't intend for Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to be part of my daily routine any more, and 2) how you can reach me if you'd still like to talk to me online — because despite the things I'm going to say under heading 1, I can't deny that I've made a lot of good friends across all three networks over the years, and it would be a shame to abandon that completely.

To begin at the beginning, then. There are a lot of words ahead, but I would appreciate you sticking around to read them — particularly the last section about keeping in touch.

Why I don't intend for Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to be part of my daily routine

Those of you who have been following this blog recently will know that I decided to subject myself to a voluntary social media blackout this week. Specifically, I logged myself out from Twitter, Facebook and Google+, deleted the relevant apps from my phone, ensured that anything that might bug me with notifications from them was well and truly switched off and finally settled down to a week of peace.

It's now a week since I started that blackout, and the time at which I decided I was going to review whether or not I needed social media in my life any more. And the conclusion I've reached is that I don't think I do. I opened Twitter earlier today to see how I felt, and felt no urge to scroll down to see if I'd missed anything — I closed it straight away without even scrolling off the first page of tweets. I didn't even feel the urge to open Facebook or Google+ at all. I have broken the "habit", it seems, and I don't feel like I "need" to develop it again.

Because it is a habit. It's compulsive behaviour — at least it was for me. You may do it yourself without realising it; you reach a quiet moment in the day, and out comes the phone or up comes the web browser, and you do your "rounds" of your social networking sites of choice. You scroll through the reams and reams of content the millions of members of these sites worldwide have made, rarely taking anything in, rarely stopping to appreciate, say, the composition of a photograph on Instagram, or the witty headline that someone came up with for a news story on Facebook. It's page after page of noise, little of it meaningful, all of it vying for your attention with equal fervour. And yet still around and around and around you go.

Some people deal with this noise better than others. Some people can discipline themselves to set aside a little bit of time to check their networks, then put them aside for hours or even days at a time. That can be a valid strategy, but with the speed at which modern social networks move, if you're not there when something happens, your contribution to the "discussion" — and I use that term loosely — is likely worthless, since conversation will have moved on by then.

This matter of "discussion" is worthy of consideration, so let's ponder that a minute.

One of the things that drove me to start my week-long blackout a couple of days earlier than I intended was the whole #GamerGate thing on Twitter. For those who don't follow the video games field — or those who simply aren't on Twitter — in simple terms, this was an argument between video game journalists (particularly those who err on the "feminist" side of the sociopolitical spectrum) and those who self-identify as "gamers", i.e. people who play, enjoy and are passionate about video games and would rather not be told they're awful people whenever possible.

I don't really want to get into the details of the events surrounding #GamerGate as that would be long, tedious and, more to the point, has already been summed up in a great amount of detail elsewhere on the Internet. (As always, note that there are two sides to every story — something that both sides on this particular argument have been guilty of forgetting.)

Suffice to say, however, that #GamerGate brought out the very worst in a lot of people. It brought out some of the most unpleasant trolls the Internet had to offer, who, predictably, went after a number of people who — let's be honest here — often court controversy to make a point. On the other side, those loud-voiced members of the press and their numerous sycophants continued down a path that I've been unhappy to see them proceeding down for the last year or two: belittling, ridiculing, publicly shaming and even outright insulting the very people they are supposed to be writing for.

Whatever fair points both sides had — and make no mistake, both sides had fair points — were lost amid the noise, and discussion never got anywhere. It was frustrating to watch; I tended not to participate as much as possible as I learned a while back that any attempts to call for moderation in such matters tended to result in accusations of "tone policing" — which, ironically, is itself a form of deflection attention away from a point being made — rather than genuine attempts to calm down and discuss things like rational adults. And thus nothing was ever resolved.

As I said above, different people deal with different things in different ways. My frustration with these endlessly circular arguments — in which no-one was really listening to anyone else and in which any fair points were inevitably lost in all the blind anger and insults being thrown in both directions — manifested itself as anxiety, stress and depression. I was genuinely afraid to contribute to these discussions for fear of attracting the wrath of one, the other or both of the angry mobs involved. And it was having an effect on my mental health.

If you can take yourself out of a situation that is causing you problems with your mental health and not cause yourself further problems, you should do. So that's exactly what I did. I extracted myself from the whirling miasma of rage, quietly slipped away for a while to reflect, contemplate and heal — and now, here I am, a week later, with no desire to jump back into the fray.

This isn't to say that Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are nothing but whirling miasmata of rage and other negative emotions, but frankly, the other stuff there has seemed of little value to me for some time, too. There's only so many "You Won't Believe What Happened Next!" videos you can take seeing before you just don't care What Happened Next; only so many "adorbs" pictures of cute things you can see before you never want to see another squirrel again; only so many baby photos you can scroll past before your only reaction to a friend enjoying a new addition to the family is… well, nothing.

It's all noise to me, in other words; an overwhelming swathe of constant content; a never-ending stream of consciousness in which meaningful life events are ascribed equal importance to a video of a cat drinking water from a squirt bottle. I don't need that. I've always been one for social anxiety, but right now I'd rather hear important things from the lips of the people involved rather than read it on Facebook or Twitter; I'd rather actually hang out with friends than hope I get more than a couple of "Likes" on the picture of the bag of chips I'm about to eat, or a couple of comments on a post I made about how much I'm enjoying Tales of Xillia 2.

I'm not saying there's no place for these sites in society at all — clearly a lot of people get great joy, excitement and enjoyment out of them. But for me, their value has dwindled significantly over the last year or two, so it's starting to make sense to cut them out of my daily routine and instead seek other means of staying in touch with the people I actually care about.

Which brings us neatly on to the second part of this post.

How to stay in touch with me

I'm not retiring from the Internet altogether. Rather, I'm being more selective with how I communicate and with whom. Consequently, I'm focusing on ways of communicating that allow me to take more control over my online presence, and which are more inherently personal than just shouting into the void of social media.

Note that I'm not closing down my Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts — they'll be used to broadcast these blog posts — but I won't be actively checking any of them, so please don't @mention or comment via any of those means if you want a reply from me.

Here are the main ways through which you'll be able to contact me in future:

• This site. I post one blog entry here every single day, and have done for the last 1,699 days. Leaving a comment on my most recent post is a good means of getting a message to me. I'll try and be better about replying than I have been in the past!
• Email. Close friends probably already have my email address. I don't mind sharing it, but I'm not putting it out in the open on this site. If you'd like to chat via email, you can start a private conversation via the contact form on my About Pete page and, assuming you're not some sort of crazy stalker, I'll probably get back to you.
• Google Hangouts. For real-time chat, I use Google Hangouts almost exclusively. I don't do voice and I don't do video, but text chat is something I'm happy to engage in with you, assuming I know who you are before you just pop up saying "hi" and nothing else. If you don't already know my Google Hangouts info, drop me a message via the aforementioned contact form.
• The Squadron of Shame forum. Most of my "public" conversations — "broadcast-type" messages, I like to think of them as — will now be found over on the Squadron of Shame forum. Although the Squad was originally set up as a small but well-formed group back in the 1up.com days, the modern Squad is very open to new members, with the only requirements for membership being that 1) you're interested in games, particularly those a little off the beaten track and 2) you're respectful to other people's tastes in games, even if they don't coincide with your own. Come and sign up and say hello, since that forum is where I'll be spending most of my online "social" time these days.
• Final Fantasy XIV. If you happen to play Final Fantasy XIV and find yourself on the Ultros server, look up Amarysse Jerhynsson and say hello.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post; I appreciate it. To those of you that I've only interacted with on social media in the past: I'm sorry to leave you behind just as, in some cases, we're starting to get to know one another (I'd like to give particular, specific shoutouts to @FinalMacstorm and @SonyofLastation here, both of whom I've very much enjoyed talking to recently) — but I hope you'll consider staying in touch via one of the means above, and I hope you understand my reasons for wanting to eliminate stressful, anxiety-inducing and unnecessary noise from my personal life. To those of you who are already firm friends beyond the boundaries of social media — well, the same, really; I hope you'll respect my decision here, and that you'll stay in touch via other means.

Onwards to a brighter future, then: one largely free of pop-up notifications, pointless arguments and unnecessary stress. I'm looking forward to it very much indeed.

The post 1699: A Note to Anyone Following Me on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Anyway, I digress.

My epiphany was that I felt like a new person today. I felt like I was in the middle of a new beginning, like I was getting a chance to pretty much "start over" and try again.

Of course, this isn't strictly true, what with me being 33 and thus on that ever-downward slope towards middle age, old age and eventual death rather than a fresh-faced (I'm not sure I was ever fresh-faced) youth in my early twenties looking forward to the future. But I'm glad I did get this new chance to start again, and I don't intend to squander it.

The trigger for feeling this way is, of course, the fact that I really have made a new beginning by starting a new job and hopefully a new career. In just two weeks on the job, I feel like I've made some new friends, learned some new skills and made a good first impression.

And it's put a lot of things in perspective, too. Most prominently, my feelings surrounding the echo chamber of social media.

My typical working day now looks very different to how it did when I was working from home. I no longer have Twitter perpetually open on screen or on my phone; I don't check Facebook at all; Google+ has fallen totally by the wayside, particularly since the Squadron of Shame jumped ship to its own forum a while back; and I spend most of my time either actually doing work, interacting with people through internal emails or speaking with them face-to-face.

And it's blissful. Blissful, I tell you. You might call it wilfully shutting out issues that need to be addressed; I call it a haven of calm, and I can already feel my mental health improving because of it.

Being constantly bombarded with the noise of social media at all hours of the day — as I voluntarily subjected myself to when I was working from home — is actively stressful, anxiety-inducing and even depressing. It shouldn't be — it should be a positive thing — but it is.

Part of this is down to who you follow, of course — like real life, putting the people you interact with regularly through a rigorous filtering process until you're left with the people you genuinely like is important — but with the nature of modern social media, sometimes you get things thrust in your face without you going looking for them. The clearest example is Twitter's Retweets, which can expose you to people and opinions so far divergent from your own as to create genuine anxiety (and also people who go on to become firm friends, it must also be said), but it also happens whenever Facebook makes one of its inexplicable decisions to show you a post from someone you don't know that one of your friends commented "lol" on forty-seven comments back from where the argument is now raging.

This is why I'm enjoying the peace and quiet of not being permanently plugged in to social media, and why I feel like a new person. I can switch off, focus on the people around me and the work I'm supposed to be doing, and I can enjoy it. It's pleasant. Very pleasant indeed. And it makes me wonder why the hell I've been voluntarily putting myself through all this for the last few years.

And this doesn't mean that I've lost interest in the things I previously immersed myself in. On the contrary, it means I can just enjoy them for what they are. I can enjoy games purely on the virtue of them being great games; I don't have to give a shit about whether The Internet thinks something I enjoy is terrible and wrong, or whether I find the latest indie darling to actually be rather tedious.

In short, I feel like my rebirth has been a wonderful thing all round, really. I'm still in the honeymoon period, of course, and I'm sure my new life will bring with it a torrent of new things to be anxious about, but for now I'm enjoying it very much indeed; long may it continue.

The post 1691: Reborn appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've mentioned before that I'm actually quite looking forward to starting my new job. It's a daunting prospect, of course — it's a new place of work, new people to work alongside, a new role and a whole new industry to be a part of — but it's something that I'm eagerly anticipating, rather than dreading. Why? Well, partly because it's something new to do, and something that will help me feel like I'm leading a more "normal" existence — as pleasant as the freedom of working from home can be, it's a lonely existence that can become surprisingly stressful and trying after a while, particularly when you have no-one around you to bounce ideas off or just vent a bit of stress — and actually building a career rather than just constantly treading water.

The other reason is something that's become readily apparent since I stepped back from the games industry. In fact, it was already becoming apparent when I was still involved with it. And that "something" is the confrontation that seems to be at the heart of the various parts of the industry's interactions with one another on a daily basis.

Frankly I don't want to get into a discussion of what's been going on recently because it's all been done to death elsewhere, and it tends to lead to frayed tempers on all sides. If you're that curious, I'll point out that it started here, passed through here and will hopefully end here and leave you to make your own mind up, perhaps with some of your own research filling in the blanks. If you're shocked at what you read — if indeed you can be bothered to read all of it, since there's a whole lot there — then good, you should be; there are plenty of things under discussion that need examining without one side complaining about "social justice warriors" and the other complaining about "neckbeards". But unfortunately that's never going to happen because the games industry has a collective mental age of about 14 — and yes, I count all sides of the debacle in this group in this instance — and is thus unable to discuss anything reasonably or rationally without immediately jumping to the most extreme viewpoints possible.

I'm happy to be out of it, frankly. My new job may be in a somewhat more stereotypically "boring" sector — utilities — but I can pretty much guarantee that said "boringness" (and I use that term relative to the dynamism of the games industry) will bring with it a lovely atmosphere of calm in which people don't feel the need to aggressively state and restate their views on a daily basis; in which Internet hate mobs aren't dispatched to harass and belittle other people; in which I can just get on with my work, come home in the evening, switch off and just enjoy some video games.

Two more days to go then. Hopefully my posts towards the end of this week will continue with a positive outlook!

The post 1679: Countdown appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

All this may seem somewhat harsh, particularly for a platform as open and public as Twitter is. But some reflection has revealed to me that it's really the only way to handle it and stay sane. And it's not, in fact, all that harsh at all, really, when you compare it to real life: after all, we carefully cultivate our real-life friendship groups and, over time, tend to whittle them down to groups of people that we particularly like, enjoy spending time with and have something in common with. We — well, I — don't try to be friends with people just because I feel that I "should" be friends with this person. That's high school stuff, trying to get "in" with the gang of cool kids; that way lies only madness, or at the very least a life where you're unwilling to be able to just be yourself with confidence.

And so Twitter is the same for me, now, particularly now I don't "need" it for industry networking and the like. My Following list has been whittled down to the people I actually enjoy interacting with — a healthy mix of game enthusiasts, game developers whom I have some sort of personal connection with (even if that's just having met them and enjoyed a chat with them), anime fans, and a few people I know in "real life". I'm no longer following people I feel "obliged" to follow — people who are often held up on a pedestal as being "important" to some cause or another — and I'm not following any celebrities. Insufferable arseholes who get retweeted into my feed are quickly blocked without mercy — no sense feeling guilty about it, since I probably wouldn't want to follow them anyway — and those who do nothing but indulge in lame hashtag games for hours on end are also swiftly removed from my following list, at least temporarily; permanently if I haven't actually spoken to them for a while.

It's kind of sad that we've got to the stage where this level of "friendship curation" is necessary, but it's a side-effect of the social media age and the fact that the Internet has brought us in touch with far more people than we'd ever be able to have met in reality. I'm pretty sure there's an "optimum" number of friends or acquaintances for a person to have, and over and above that level everything just starts contributing to an overall, growing amount of white noise — noise that occasionally becomes intolerable. I'm gradually — hopefully, anyway — finding a good balance that hopefully won't drive me mental, and which hopefully won't necessitate me abandoning the genuine friends I have managed to make via Twitter.

In the meantime, I'm trying my best to migrate a lot of gaming discussion over to the Squadron of Shame forums, which you can find here. While the Squadron of Shame was originally a group of people who came together on the 1up forums, I know I for one would be very happy to see some new blood over there, too — particularly if you are, like me, the sort of person who'd rather have a lengthy, wordy discussion about a favourite, underappreciated game than think that "lol" or "cool story bro" is in any way a valid contribution to a debate.

Hopefully I won't have to write about this sort of thing again for a while.

The post 1676: Cleaning Up appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I shan't get into details as the latest spate of Twitter outrage is plastered all over the Internet and really doesn't need any more publicity, but I will say that, as usual, both sides of the argument in question are acting like complete tools. There's the aggressive, unpleasant, filthy undercurrent of the Internet supposedly harassing people for their beliefs and supposed transgressions, and on the other side, the people defending themselves and their friends often stoop to personal insults, hypocrisy and outright ranting. Anyone left in the middle, wanting to take a rational viewpoint on the whole thing, is left branded as an awful person regardless of how much sense they're actually speaking — if you don't stand on the side of the group that has painted themselves as the "good guys" then you're worthless human garbage, no better than those that are supposedly sending "death threats". (And don't even get me started on the semantics of how that term is liberally misapplied.)

At the core of this never-ending parade of outrage, argument and public shaming is a group of people who claim to believe in "social justice". Who wouldn't want to stand up for social justice, right? The trouble is that the term "social justice warrior" has picked up severely negative connotations owing to the behaviour of some of these people supposedly fighting on the side of equality, freedom, all that good stuff. Which is daft, when you think about it — as previously noted, who would say they were against social justice?

And yet the criticisms of many of these "social justice warriors" and the way they go about their business are often valid. They use aggression, harassment, sweeping generalisations, public shaming — many (though, it must be said, not all) of the tactics they are quick to condemn the seedy underbelly of the Internet for — to get what they want. Disagree with the way they do things and you're "tone policing". Disagree with some of things they are saying and you are a misogynist, sexist, transphobic, terrible person who should be hounded until the end of time until you apologise, and then hounded further when you are forced into an apology because it somehow wasn't good enough. The people involved make this group huge, influential — and quite often in possession of a really quite unpleasant mob mentality.

I'm utterly sick of it. I don't care. It sets me on edge. It makes me anxious. I'm nervous about even posting this in case one of these armchair activists gets hold of it and decides to twist my words into something that doesn't even resemble what I originally said — as happened to YouTube personality "TotalBiscuit" earlier today.

This surely isn't what these people want. This surely isn't a good way to go about raising awareness of social issues. Certain quarters of Twitter now scare me and make me feel like I can't talk about certain things for fear of reprisals — from the side that paints themselves as the forces of Good. I've done my best to ignore, unfollow and even block the people who are most unpleasant about all this, but it's still not the friendly, welcoming place to hang out that it once was. And that really, really sucks.

I've culled my Following list by a hundred people this evening. If that doesn't filter out this never-ending, anxiety-inducing noise, I'm setting my account to private. If that doesn't work, then it's time to say goodbye to Twitter — for good this time. I wouldn't be the first from among my group of friends to do so — for these exact reasons — and I probably won't be the last.

The post 1675: Two Negatives Make Even More Negatives appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I have numerous feelings about this, not least of which is the fact that as a former member of the gaming press, it smarts to see my particular skillset — writing compelling words about my specialist subjects — being sidelined in favour of video, but as a consumer of online content, it also frustrates me immensely, too.

Put simply, I like to read. I prefer to read. If I see an interesting-sounding link on social media, I'll read it if it's text, but if it's video I will, nine times out of ten, not watch it. And this is true whether I'm sitting at my computer or browsing on phone or tablet — though it's particularly true when I'm browsing on a mobile device, since due to patchy network reception and exorbitant data charges, watching video on the go is often, to say the least, a somewhat subpar experience. Text is much more desirable in these circumstances. (This is to say nothing of live broadcasts, which are even less desirable than video on demand to me.)

There are types of content where it's simply easier to refer to text, too. Take game guides or tutorials in general, for example; while video can show you the things the creator is trying to teach you in context, it's difficult to refer back to specific points or cross-reference things, whereas this is a snap to do with text. Again, if I'm using a mobile device to browse this information, I much prefer having the information open in front of me to keep referring back to, rather than watching a video and having to take as much in as possible, perhaps over the course of several viewings. It just doesn't seem like a very efficient means of delivering information — particularly when that information is complicated.

This isn't to say video can't work, of course. Video is a great means of delivering educational content that you passively absorb rather than actively refer to while working on something. Crash Course on YouTube, which my friends Mark and Lynette introduced me to recently, is a good example of this.

And video is great for comedy, when said comedy has been written to be performed in the form of video. Glove and Boots is my current favourite example of this:

I just get a bit annoyed when people make sweeping declarations about video being "the future" of online content, as if those of us who still like to read words on a page rather than watch and listen are somehow irrelevant. Like so many other things, there are plenty of different tastes out there, and lots of different ways of doing things. Rather than only pursuing one to the exclusion of all others, let's accept that fact: continue to provide relevant, interesting content to all people and all tastes, not just the fashionable, young market who, at this point, are obsessed with video. My individual opinion may not matter all that much, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person out there who will close a tab without checking out an "awesome" link if the link turns out to be just another video.

The post 1662: Moving Pictures appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I do not know what the tongueface smiley — a colon followed by a P — means. Or rather, I have the odd feeling that a significant number of other people in the world think it means something different to what I think it means.

To me, tongueface smiley represents someone sticking their tongue out, and that in turn is something that I've always considered to be a mild rude gesture — a childish, non-offensive and somewhat light-hearted alternative to flipping someone off. You'd perhaps use it as a response to someone gently mocking you, or revealing a piece of information that, while not earth-shattering or mortifyingly embarrassing, you'd still prefer wasn't public knowledge.

Here's an example of how I expect it to be used:

Phillipe: You're putting a shelf up? Can you even do that? I thought Andie wore the pants when it came to DIY.

Pete: :p

Or possibly:

W'khebica: Hey, everyone, did you know Amarysse fell off Titan Extreme on the first Geocrush?

Amarysse: :p

You see? Both situations where, were the conversation happening face to face, you might want to actually stick your tongue out, assuming you are seven years old.

However, I've noticed an increasing use of tongueface smiley as a form of punctuation — a la the use of "lol", which thankfully seems to be dying down a bit — and I honestly can't get my head around it, much how I couldn't get my head around how people could possibly be laughing out loud at the most seemingly mundane and stupid things.

I'm not against the use of smileys per se — I use them myself quite a lot as a means of making things like flippant comments abundantly obvious — but I remain confused by the current and widespread (arguable) overuse of tongueface smiley.

Perhaps I'm just too old to understand. :p

The post 1646: Tongueface appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Anyway, the point is: Calin is, if you must put a label on such things, a "gamer". And yet he confessed to me that he's not entirely comfortable admitting that any more, for fear of being lumped in with what he regards as "gamers". His definition of gamers, it transpires, are those who are the most vocal on the Internet, and often the worst examples of the gaming community. They who shout loudest get the most attention and all that.

This is, of course, a gross generalisation about the entire community of people who enjoy computer and video games, and I said as much in our conversation. The IGN and Gamespot comments sections are not representative of the entirety of humanity who enjoy computer and video games, in other words; there are plenty of other people out there who don't rage and swear at one another, who don't tell writers to kill themselves over reviews they disagree with, who don't act like spoiled children when things that they, personally, aren't interested in show up.

And yet I can understand Calin's position somewhat. As I noted above, those who shout loudest get the most attention, and it's entirely natural to start believing "gamers" as a whole are the scum of the Earth if the representatives of the community you seem to hear the most from are the ones who are acting like complete tools.

In vaguely related news, earlier today I observed a Twitter exchange between the members of Witch Beam, developers of the excellent upcoming arcade-style shoot 'em up for PC, PS4, Vita and Wii U, Assault Android Cactus. They were feeling disheartened by a tweet from a member of the Gamespot community who made some disparaging remarks about Sony "only" having titles like Assault Android Cactus — smaller-scale, lower-budget but no less interesting or enjoyable games — to show at E3, while Microsoft was promising that its Xbox One-centric E3 presentation would focus on games, presumably triple-A by implication. I commented to them that it's not worth worrying about the opinion of people who believe that triple-A is all there is to video games. In a way, those people are also judging something in its entirety by a small subsection of it — in this case, that anything outside the big budget triple-A space is somehow unworthy.

The important thing in all this is to remember that not everyone agrees on everything, and not everyone behaves in the same way. For some people, trash talk and being a jackass online is just part and parcel of the way the modern Internet-connected world works. For others, they prefer to spend their time actually playing games rather than typing comments or tweets to each other online. And for others still, they prefer to engage in intelligent, lengthy discussion about things some people may not have heard of. (I kind of straddle the latter two categories.)

Of those groups, the people acting like jackasses are but a small part of the whole. They're a problem, for sure, and it's difficult to know what — if anything — it's possible to do about their behaviour. (Hint: It's not posting lengthy social justice-themed editorials on the sites they frequent; that just makes them defensive and even more inclined to be obnoxious.) But here's the important thing: they are not everyone. They do not represent an entire medium. They do not represent the entirety of people around the world who are interested in games. Chances are, in my experience, there's a considerable amount of crossover with those people who believe in nothing but triple-A.

Fuck those guys. If you enjoy games — however you enjoy them — enjoy them in your own way, and never, ever feel ashamed of something you enjoy because of the behaviour of people you probably have nothing to do with on a regular basis. In an extreme case, simply think back to how it all was before the Internet came along and ruined rational discourse for a lot of people; everyone could enjoy video games without feeling ashamed, guilty or disgusted then, because you never, ever came into contact with the more objectionable parts of humanity. Simply stay out of comments sections and only talk about games with your friends, just like things used to be. Works out pretty well for me, personally.

And if you're one of the jackasses I've mentioned in this post? If you've ever told a writer to kill themselves over giving a game an 8 when you thought it deserved a 9? (For those who don't frequent gaming sites, this actually happens on occasion, though it's usually over more extreme differences of opinion.) If you believe there is only one "true" way to game, and that everyone else's interests and passions in one of the most diverse creative mediums in the world is somehow invalid? Take a good, long, hard look at yourself and decide whether or not that's the person you really want to be.

The post 1601: On Not Assuming the Worst is the Most Representative appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I don't mean that I'm too old for anime or related media, of course — I really hope the day never comes when I feel like I've "grown out" of the things I love today — but rather I feel like the opportunity to enjoy and share these things with friends has been, to a large degree, mostly lost.

I mention this because of my aforementioned conversation with Lynette. Aside from this blog — where, as we all know, I'm pissing in the wind — Lynette is one of the few people I have the opportunity to enthuse about anime with on a fairly regular basis. And it's somewhat frustrating to both of us that we're several thousand miles apart and consequently unable to get together regularly for cocktails, popcorn and a few episodes of some favourite anime series, perhaps educating one another on recent discoveries that we want to share. It's something we'd both really like to be able to do — indeed, we have done it before, on the occasions when I've had the opportunity to visit her and her husband Mark (also a close personal friend, and also someone with whom I can enthuse about anime) in Toronto.

This is one unfortunate side-effect of the whole "global village" (hah, bet you haven't heard that term since a '90s issue of PC Format) thing the Internet has brought about. It's never been easier to find like-minded friends who share the same interests and passions as you, but the thing people don't mention about that seemingly great development in socialisation is how frustrating it is to not be able to get together with those friends on at least a semi-regular basis. (Unless you're loaded enough to be able to simply hop on a trans-Atlantic flight at a moment's notice whenever you fancy it, in which case I think I hate you a little bit.) I have friends literally all over the world — America, Canada, the Middle East, Japan, Australia — who I would love to hang out with and do all sorts of mutually enjoyable things with (no, not that sort of thing, pervert) but am unable to do so. I'm fortunate enough to have these friends in the first place, of course, but by gosh, I sometimes wish they were just around the corner so I could drop them a text, invite them over for an anime evening and subsequently have an enjoyable time.

Why not ask your local friends, you might wonder. Because my local friends all have their own passions and interests — and, with us being the age we are (we're not in university any more!) a lot of them are doing distinctly "grown-up" things like grouting their bathrooms (whatever that means) or having children. I certainly don't begrudge them any of those things, but it can be sad and frustrating when it's difficult to get people together for anything more than the most cursory of social occasions. Life gets in the way, in other words.

So, uh, anyone local want to hang out and watch some anime? We have popcorn.

The post 1569: Life Gets In the Way appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Firstly, despite what I said in that piece, it transpires that I did eventually go back to Twitter. Why? Because, to be frank, I was lonely; I have a lot of friends on that social network, and it was difficult to stay in touch with them via other means. It's also a particularly convenient means of reaching out to people for my current profession.

So I went back. However, I did so under a new username and a new email address — and being much more mindful of what I shared in my 140-character bio.

This is in itself kind of silly, really; I have to effectively "silence" an aspect of my personality based on my previous experience, and cannot be fully open about the things I enjoy or love, because it might attract organised bile and vitriol not just towards me, but towards people close to me, too. Thankfully, on the few occasions I have happened to mention ponies recently, things have passed without incident — I suspect the charmers at the "GNAA" have moved on to new victims by now.

Thinking of all this brings up an important consideration that I don't believe a lot of Internet commenters stop to think about before spraying vitriol over an article they disagree with: the fact that the words you read on the Internet are, for the most part, written by an actual person with a brain, a heart, a soul and, you know, feelings. People disagreeing over various things is a fact of life — the world would be a boring place if everyone felt the same way about everything, as The Lego Movie suggested in a somewhat hamfisted way — but it's the way you go about those disagreements that is important to consider, because arguing your case in the wrong way — or wilfully misreading or misunderstanding something someone has said — can have a severe impact on their mental health.

I've been fairly open on this blog about my own self-esteem issues and occasional feelings of "imposter syndrome" — the feeling that one day, you might be "found out" and have everything taken away from you. I consider myself hugely lucky to have the job I have, working alongside people I have respected enormously for many years — since childhood in at least one case. There are days when I feel like I'm even quite good at what I do — but there are also days when I seriously consider throwing in the towel and going to do something "invisible" with the rest of the drones in the daily workforce.

The difference between those two types of day can often be just a single comment. Just one, regardless of how many otherwise positive or supportive comments you might have that day — one single, unpleasant, negative or abusive comment can completely ruin the day of someone like me.

I'm not saying all games journalists are like me — though from some conversation during the establishment of TakeThis.org, which Russ mentioned in his post, mental health issues of various descriptions are alarmingly widespread in our profession — but it's surely just basic human decency to not, in effect, walk up to someone and start hurling abuse at them. And yet it happens. And not just from inconsiderate gamers angry about the score you gave Titanfall, either; sometimes even people who claim to be fighting for worthy causes can be needlessly aggressive, confrontational or even abusive, too. It's a plague across the whole Internet.

This leads to what I call The Fear, which in turn leads to what Russ talks about in his post: the assumption that "do not engage" is the only way to deal with bullying, abuse or even just plain unreasonable comments. There are days when I write things and I'm genuinely afraid to look at the comment section — it's an irrational fear, I know, but it's what this age of anonymous abuse has wrought.

And what a ridiculous situation that is, when you think about it. People who write for a living — many of whom are considerably more talented than I am — are subject to The Fear on a daily basis. You never can tell what it is that's going to attract the next batch of abuse, or death threats, or defamation, or simple spitefulness. It's a horrible feeling.

And yet we still stick around, for the most part. Why? Because even amid all this, we love what we do, and we love engaging with those people who like to have a reasonable discussion about things without necessarily agreeing on everything — those people who, if we're honest, make up the majority of our feedback. Sometimes we even become friends with those people.

But as I say, it only takes one nasty comment to undo all the good those people do for us. Just one.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could live in a world where we could just love what we do without having to worry about The Fear ever again?

One day, perhaps. But there's a long road ahead before we get there.

The post 1507: Why I Went Back, and The Fear appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm not going to say "this has to stop" because that causes people with a stick up their arse to start bleating about "tone policing". Instead, I'm going to try and follow Keri's example and remain focused on the positive things in life: the things I enjoy, the things I feel passionately about, the things I want to share with people. Things I don't like? Fuck 'em; I've got better things to do with my time than waste on discussing things I have no interest in or attempting to have rational debates with people who have no interest whatsoever in being rational. Such is the way of the Internet.

As it happens, making such a pledge for positivity isn't all that far removed from what I generally try and do day in, day out on the Internet anyway. I steer well clear of whatever issue-du-jour people are angry about on Twitter today, and instead focus on talking with the people who share similar interests, but not necessarily identical tastes. Enjoyable discussions inevitably result; just the other day I had a lengthy discussion with someone who didn't like Final Fantasy XIII as much as I did, in which we remained rational, civil and articulate throughout. Neither of us changed the other's mind, but that's not what it was about — we both came away from the interaction feeling like we'd learned a little about the other's position. And that is a far more valuable result of communication than coming away understanding that, say, someone is angry but not really knowing what they want you to do about it.

As such, you can expect the things I talk about to continue much in the same mould as they have been previously — positively. On here, I'll continue to talk about things I am enjoying and having fun with, or things that I am excited about. In my professional capacity, I tend to concentrate on things that are interesting or noteworthy rather than deliberately controversial — the most controversial thing I wrote recently was a positive piece noting that Final Fantasy XIII perhaps wasn't all that bad and people should maybe give it another chance (note: NOT "anyone who doesn't like Final Fantasy XIII is a douchebag who should probably be killed" or something similar) — and I'd much rather write something praising the interesting things that have been done well than tearing something a new arsehole for one reason or another.

Of course, the latter part sometimes comes with the territory — some stuff is genuinely simply unmitigated crap, though it's significantly less likely to come across something with absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever today than it once way — but even then I tend to try and look for the positive where I can. Take my review of Time and Eternity, a game that was reviled by most of the games press, but which I had a good time with despite its flaws. Rather than focusing on its flawed aspects, I chose instead to concentrate on what I did like about it, and as a result produced a review that I'm still pretty pleased with today.

Why am I talking about this? Well, aside from Keri's post, I was also pointed in the direction of this excellent article about the upcoming Senran Kagura Burst for 3DS — a game branded "damaging to the industry" by people who haven't played it. The Tiny Cartridge post was something I found particularly admirable and all too rare in the modern business — it was someone returning to an issue and proving willing to educate themselves, and being pleasantly surprised in the process. In this case, it was taking another look at Senran Kagura Burst and discovering that no, it's not just about boobs and fanservice; it's actually about some well-defined characters with realistic, human flaws — something which I've argued in the past in relation to similarly misunderstood games, too — titles such as Ar Tonelico that people are all too willing to dismiss for nothing more than their art style.

Looking for the positive is a much more pleasant way to approach life. I can't imagine how utterly miserable the lives of these people who seem to spend all their time being angry must be. In some cases, they may well have valid reasons for their ire, and that's fine; others are angry for the sake of bandwagon-jumping. Both groups would benefit from a step back and some time alone with the things or people they genuinely do love. Works for me. Chill the fuck out and enjoy yourself for a change.

The post 1494: Another Pledge for Positivity appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This isn't to put down any of the hard work that genuinely talented video producers, editors and performers do, of course. It just makes me worried — particularly given my occupation — and also frustrates me as someone who still likes to, you know, read things.

You see, I don't like video as a generic means of consuming information. It's intrusive, it's noisy, it's disruptive and it demands your full attention for a fixed period of time. This is fine if what you are specifically doing is sitting down to watch a video, but when you want to get a piece of information quickly, video quite simply can't compare to a simple piece of text and possibly a Find function.

Video is not particularly portable, either. While mobile phone data networks — and the devices with which to access them — have improved considerably over the last few years, there's still a significant chance that if you're out and about on the go, you may not be able to watch a video link, and even if you do, there's the risk of running afoul of your mobile provider's data limits and/or fair use policies. A simple text link, meanwhile, is something that is quick to download and, perhaps more importantly, easy and discreet to browse in public or while doing other things.

It also makes me a little sad to see people well-known for their entertaining writing skills stepping back from penmanship in favour of video content. Let's take Jim Sterling, for example. This isn't specifically to "pick on" Sterling; he's just a good example of what I'm talking about.

Sterling's work around the Web has historically been somewhat provocative, but to an entertaining degree rather than any attempt to deliberately cause offence. He's mellowed somewhat from his quasi-"shock jock" nature of a few years back and become someone who can bellow well-informed vitriol without alienating people — or at least, without alienating people who don't deserve to be alienated. His reviews and opinion pieces over on sites like Destructoid were always a good read — he wrote in a distinctive voice, but from a well-informed perspective, and even if you didn't agree with his points, he usually made a convincing argument.

Now, Sterling is primarily doing video content, in which he does much the same thing. No bad thing, you might think, and indeed I've specifically sat down and watched a good few Jimquisition episodes when I wanted to have a giggle at the game industry's expense. But I'm significantly less likely to watch a Jimquisition video than I am to read an article simply because of the time involved — and now he's taken to variations on Let's Play videos I now have even less interest in his content whatsoever. It's a bit sad, though I also recognise that I am but one person and he is simply doing what there is apparently demand for.

I've made my thoughts on Let's Plays reasonably clear in previous posts, but I'll reiterate and perhaps reinforce them, since I've had a while to think about them as the format has grown in popularity: I'm not a fan. At all. Particularly Let's Plays of story-based games, which, to me, completely defeat the object of a story-based game. People already get pissy at the slightest hint of a spoiler about games, movies and other media, and yet there are people out there doing nothing but spoiling games… in more ways than one. This is baffling to me; I understand the basic concept of a Let's Play as an opportunity to see how a game plays and get some commentary about it, but to watch a story-based game with someone babbling over the top of it rather than playing it is just, frankly, the absolute last thing I want to do with my time. Again, though, I recognise that the format has popularity and there's apparently demand for it.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't want traditional media to go away. I don't want to see the death of long-form articles about games — or even short, snappy news pieces, though I wouldn't mind seeing the back of two-sentence placeholder pieces. I want to see talented writers continue to have the opportunity to express themselves in a medium that they're comfortable with; I don't want to be forced to watch a video just to find out what a voice I trust thinks about a particular game or issue in the industry, particularly when I'm out and perhaps want to share it with friends.

By all means, then, video content producers and consumers, keep doing what you're doing; just don't forget that the way you do things is not the only way to do things.

The post 1379: Press Pause appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Imagine if the two scenarios were reversed, though. That'd be weird, wouldn't it? Get your maths homework back with "lol fake and gay" written after it; read a New Statesman article and discover the entire comment section is nothing but people writing variations on "You have the beginnings of a good argument here, but your overuse of the word 'problematic' displays a disappointing lack of creativity that ultimately hurts the piece's credibility. See me to discuss."

Actually, I think in the latter case, that'd probably be preferable, to be honest.

I joke, but I do genuinely feel like I'm being "marked" when I see that there are comments on things that I've posted. In some senses, when you put something up for public perusal — particularly on something with a wider audience than this teeny-tiny personal blog — you are being marked, particularly if you've written something contentious.

A lot of writing on the Web is designed to persuade people of something or other, whether that's that the reader should go and buy Gone Home (you probably should) or that the art in Dragon's Crown is going to bring about the downfall of society as we know it (it's probably not), and as such when someone feels compelled to leave a comment, they're going to be going through your arguments, deciding whether or not they agree with them and then leaving their "judgement" on the piece. If someone agrees with you, it's like getting a nice big tick, a "Good." and a gold star; if someone disagrees with you — particularly if they do so aggressively — it's like not only having a lengthy teacher comment that you hope your parents don't catch a glimpse of, but it's like having that comment publicly read out to the rest of the class.

Except there's one key difference between comments and marks — comments are (theoretically, anyway) a dialogue; marks from your teacher are a one-way thing. (At least they were when I was at school; I wouldn't be at all surprised if modern education invited pupils to "respond" to their teacher's comments and/or "appeal" if they didn't feel they'd been treated fairly.)

That's a pretty big difference. Even if someone gives you a "bad grade" through a negative comment or a complete disagreement/dismissal of your opinion, you can attempt to engage with that person and start a conversation. Sometimes interesting discussions can arise; other times, utterly pointless shouting matches can result, leaving you wishing you'd never written the fucking thing in the first place.

Are comments valuable? There's no easy answer to that question. I don't think they're valuable in all circumstances — it's extremely rare to find a helpful YouTube comment, for example, and comments left on Facebook are 95% pointless, regardless of whether they're left on personal posts or adverts — but at other times they can be the source of thought-provoking discussion and even the fostering of friendships. (Comments on this site have certainly fallen into that latter category, which I'm happy about, and over on USgamer we've mostly enjoyed respectful, well-considered discussion and debate from our commenters so far, which is immensely encouraging to see.)

Would the Internet be a better place without comment sections? Quite possibly; but it would also remove a lot of the ability to converse and engage with things that we take for granted today. So, for better or worse, they're clearly here to stay.

Just remember to give your favourite writers a good mark every now and then!

The post 1306: Mark Book appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Then the game was released, and I decided to take a peep at the Steam Community page to see what the rest of the world thought of it.

Big mistake.

It seems that Sanctum 2 is the latest victim of elitist players expecting one thing from a game and getting something slightly different, then throwing all their toys out of the pram, demanding refunds and hurling abuse at the developers. Because Sanctum 2 is not the same game as the original Sanctum, it seems, it is worthy of scorn and vilification. Because Sanctum 2 incorporates a number of features that not only make it workable on console — it's also being released on Xbox Live Arcade — but change the game balance significantly from the original, apparently it is worthy of review-bombing on Metacritic and endless, endless whining on forums.

You know what, though? I've played a good 4 or 5 hours of Sanctum 2 today in total, and it's great. It isn't the original game, no, but why would you want it to be? Sanctum is still available for download, so if you like that, go play that. Sanctum 2 is a distinctive experience that, while in possession of a couple of strange design decisions, is a lot of fun to play both solo and cooperatively with other people. It is both strategic and action-packed; challenging and fun; and it offers a significantly greater amount of content and depth than the original game did when it came out of the gates.

The complainers' biggest issues with the new game seem to be the fact that resources to build towers are now delivered as "drops" that have to be picked up manually, and that there is a hard limit of ten towers per level. The "drop" system means that everyone playing has to either agree on who is going to be in charge of building what — or charge off and race to be the first to pick up the resources. If you're playing with friends or people with whom you can communicate well, no problem. If you're playing with griefers and trolls, potential problem, but not insurmountable. (For what it's worth, I always prefer playing cooperative games with people I actually know anyway, and I'm sure I'm not the only one — and as such I probably won't run into this problem personally.)

The ten-tower limit also simply isn't an issue in practical terms. I am yet to hit said limit, because plonking down "tower base" blocks to create a maze to hold up enemies does not count towards this limit, and the limited quantity of resources on hand means that it's only really practical to build a few towers per level anyway — you have to support your towers with your own gunplay in order to succeed. It's a true hybrid, in other words; you can't win without your towers, and your towers can't win without you.

Some complainers have also whinged about the fact that you supposedly can't make complex mazes in this new game. To those people, I would invite them to have a go at the level Mark and I were playing before we wrapped up for the evening, in which we were defending two cores simultaneously from assault, and built impressive mazes on both sides of the level in order to keep the enemies away from our precious charges as long as possible. Careful tower placement and resource management was a must, and the nature of many of the enemies that came along made it necessary to cooperate, communicate and use skill and tactics to take them down rather than simply firing blindly at anything moving.

In short, Sanctum 2 is a very good game if you enjoy both first-person shooters and tower defense games that demand a slightly heavier degree of thought and strategy than normal. It's an excellent fusion of two fairly disparate game genres, and while there are a few things that could be tweaked here and there, it's perfectly enjoyable as it is. Not only that, Coffee Stain Studios have demonstrated that they are open to constructive feedback, too, and will likely continue to improve the game after its release. Given the abuse and vitriol that has been hurled their way today, they would be perfectly within their rights to just say "fuck you" to all the ungrateful gamers who are bitching about their new release, to be honest, so I have to admire them for their self-restraint in dealing with these people.

It is, essentially, yet another case of a not-insignificant number of people suffering under the assumption that Their Way is the Right Way, and that anyone who disagrees with them is somehow an awful person. These people preferred the original Sanctum to its sequel and that's absolutely fine; their behaviour towards Coffee Stain Studios and anyone who has expressed a liking for the new game is not.

The post 1214: Inner Sanctum appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

In other words, I yearn for the days when social media was simple and straightforward — when its sole intended purpose was to allow people to stay in touch with each other and perhaps, occasionally, share a photograph or two with them.

Looking back on this blog, I see I have written about this subject at least twice in the past, and my disillusionment with it has only grown over the last year or so — perhaps due in part to the fact that as part of my job I come into contact with some of the most utterly pointless examples of social media that I've ever seen.

These days, there are social media apps to share anything you can think of. I mean, there are literally (YES LITERALLY) apps and services that allow you to share anything you can think of. There are also more specialised ones with questionable usefulness to society as a whole. I reviewed one recently where the entire purpose was to share what your current mood was — you couldn't add any text explaining said mood, only an emoticon — and another where you could share the weather in your local area, then "like" or comment on the weather in other places. Another still allowed you to send a video or photo to someone, but they were only allowed to look at it for ten seconds, after which it locked itself and became useless (I swear I'm not making this up).

The trouble with these things is that despite their pretensions towards being "social media," they're not actually all that social at all in terms of the way in which people use them. They're a means of broadcasting things and seeking approval of other people rather than a means of actually engaging in conversation with anyone. Take a look at the average comments thread on an Instagram picture of a moderately-attractive person (usually a woman) and you'll see what I mean. No-one's actually talking to each other — everyone's just dropping an asinine opinion bomb and then never coming back. The poster of the selfie is seeking approval from commenters telling them how attractive they are; meanwhile, the commenters are seeking approval from the poster and hoping that their specific compliment is the one that will get them some specific attention.

This isn't the case universally, obviously. There are still some actual conversations that go on on Facebook, for example, but these can easily be lost in the torrent of people resharing crap from pages like "I fucking love science" (do you? Then go do some rather than recycling endless fucking memes) and "LIKE AND SHARE!!" (NO!!). Twitter is a reasonable platform for discussion at times, but conversations are easily derailed and, as has been proven hundreds of times in the past year alone, 140 characters is really not enough to make a coherent argument about a complex issue. It's also incredibly easy to be taken out of context on Twitter.

Google+ perhaps fares the best out of all of these services in my experience, though even that's variable. Join a good, small community that has a clear focus and whose moderators keep a tight leash on discussion and you'll have a good experience chewing the fat with people who may well become good friends. Follow Felicia Day or Wil Wheaton and you might see some interesting content, but the quality of discussion goes out of the window. Follow Google+'s own page and all you get are blithering idiots making ill-informed political rants any time the team behind the page even dare to mention the President.

I think the thing that's been striking me most heavily recently is "do I really need to share this? Do people really need to know this?" And more often than not, the answer is "no". I don't feel the need to collect an arbitrary set of "Likes" with services like CircleMe or GetGlue. I don't feel the need to "check in" to places with Foursquare. I don't even really need to use stuff like Raptr to broadcast my gaming activity, but that has, on occasion, sparked some good discussions — as, I'm sure, the other services do in some cases. Just not mine. Not any more. Perhaps once in the past — I met some good friends through Foursquare's now-defunct competitor Gowalla — but not now.

Consequently, since quitting Twitter a while back (and not really missing it, to be honest — though I do miss some of the people) I've been paring back my personal social media use hugely. I've closed my Tumblr account — I never really understood the point of that site, and these days all it seems to be used for is white people shouting about how guilty they are about being white and how we should all stop being such racists/misogynists/fedora-wearing perverts — and I've unistalled the vast majority of social apps from my phone, including Twitter and Instagram. Facebook made the cut, because as much as I dislike it at times, it's still a good way of staying in touch with a lot of people, and Google+ also survived, as it's the new home of the Squadron of Shame and serving our needs well.

Obviously this blog is still going, too (and will be for a long time to come, hopefully!) and I still comment on friends' blogs — but I don't really count that as "social media" in the same way, particularly as the discussions had tend to be (for the most part, anyway) wordy and thought-provoking rather than inspiring little more than a knee-jerk "lol".

Everything else, though? Out the window. And life is much calmer and more pleasant as a result.

The post 1139: Just Shut Up appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The word "bullying" is an incredibly loaded one that brings to mind images of schoolkids taking the piss out of each other for the most ridiculous reasons. When I was a young child at primary school, it was my ears. They stuck out and looked quite large, so naturally I was picked on and ridiculed for that — not just occasionally, but pretty much daily. The experience left me with mental scars that  are yet to heal, and which manifest themselves in my cripplingly low sense of self-esteem.

But bullying isn't just something that children suffer from. Adults can suffer bullying, too, in a variety of forms. It could be workplace bullying such as that described in my previous post, where those in a position of "power" or "authority" use their influence to negative, unfair ends; it could be one group of people taking an irrational dislike to another group and expressing that dislike through verbal or physical abuse; it could be organised campaigns of hatred using the Internet.

The latter is an option that didn't exist when I was a youngster. The Internet wasn't a widespread thing until I was well into my teenage years, and social media certainly was nowhere to be seen. As such, any instances of bullying tended to confine themselves to the "real world" where they could normally be dealt with relatively easily, since there was usually an identifiable perpetrator to pin the blame on. It wasn't always easy for the victim to come forward and report the perpetrator, of course, for fear of reprisals — that "knowing them in real life" thing worked both ways — but if they could muster up the courage to do so, then the situation could often be dealt with.

With online bullying, though, it's a much more difficult proposition. There isn't always a visible perpetrator, because they often choose to hide behind a veil of anonymity. Some particularly arrogant online bullies do so under their real name because they've also taken steps to ensure that they will never get caught, and herein lies part of the problem: the very nature of online crime makes it extremely difficult to police, meaning that more often than not the groups responsible for making some people feel really, really shitty go completely unpunished and thus receive the message loud and clear that what they are doing is Okay.

The worst thing about bullying in all its forms is the degree of self-doubt it can instill in its victim. Am I worthless? they'll think. Do I deserve this? Are those things they're saying actually true? Do people really think that about me? Is that how other people see me? These are, of course, all things that I've found myself thinking at various points in my life.

It's useless and irrational to think that way, of course, but sadly, often the sort of people who are affected the worst by the actions of bullies are those who, like me, turn irrational when they have to deal with a difficult situation like this. Because it's not easy to stay rational in the face of totally irrational, unprovoked hatred, either, for in many cases these instances of bullying are born from little more than boredom rather than feeling particularly strongly about the person or group in question. It becomes a sport for the bullies, more about the chase and the observation of the victim's behaviour than specifically trying to hurt a person. This is particularly apparent when it comes to online bullying, where it's very easy to conveniently forget that the target of your vitriol is actually a real person with real feelings, and that any hurtful things you send off into the ether after you click that "Send" button may have a very real impact on that person's emotional, mental and, in some cases, physical wellbeing.

There's no easy solution, either. And that's sad. What's even more sad is the fact that we seem to have got to a stage as a society where we just accept that this sort of thing happens, and we don't do anything about it. I don't have any suggestions or solutions, either, mind you, but surely by the year 2013 you'd think humanity might have gotten over irrational hatred by now.

But apparently not.

(Sorry for the lack of comic today. I'm emotionally exhausted and there's no real way I can make all this shit funny.)

The post 1125: Low Ebb appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As I grow older, I find myself less and less tolerant to the tactics of marketing people. I can't quite work out if this is simply my own intolerance building up as a result of my advancing years, or if adverts really are significantly more annoying than they were in the past. I have a feeling there's a touch of both, because there's a whole lot of new technology to make advertising more annoying these days.

Specifically, let's consider Internet-based advertising. Now, the vast majority of content on the Internet is available for free (connection charges notwithstanding) so it has to make its money somehow — and it just so happens that advertising is a reasonable way to do that. (Whether or not it's a "good" way is a matter of some debate, as traditional advertising models seem to be becoming less and less effective among savvy Internet users, many of whom use ad-blocking software to make their life considerably less intruded-upon by marketing people.)

I have no real problem with advertising being used as a means of keeping content free. I'll sit through a couple of pre-roll adverts when watching, say, 4OD on YouTube. I'd have to sit through adverts on TV, and there are actually fewer adverts on YouTube than when it's broadcast live on TV. No problem there.

What I do have an issue with is when adverts start to get too big for their boots and start engaging in any of the following behaviour:

• Making noise without me telling them to
• Monopolising my web browser and/or actively getting in the way of what I'm trying to do
• Urging me to "interact" with them
• Urging me to share them on Facebook.

All of these things are monumentally irritating, albeit for different reasons.

In the case of noisy adverts, they are a pain simply because they make noise and it's usually difficult to shut them off. And there tends to only be a couple of them available at once, meaning that it's entirely possible that several times in a session you'll hear that stupid woman from the air freshener advert whingeing about being "stuck in bad odours" or something. You can stay there, love.

Monopolising my web browser is something that really pisses me off because it ruins the experience of the site. The most recent example I've seen is on GameFAQs' mobile site, which occasionally gets completely taken over by a Samsung advert. You'll be looking at the page, trying to tap on a link when suddenly these stupid arrows appear, inviting you to "swipe". "Fuck off," you'll say — possibly out loud — until you realise that you can't do anything on this page until you do as it says, and then you're stuck in a stupid interactive "experience" about a phone you probably don't give a shit about. (Alternatively, you refresh the page until it goes away.)

This brings me on to another point: interactive adverts. Why? Why would I want to play your stupid game where I get to actually clean the grime off the filthy worktop? Why would I want to pick which one of your vapid Z-list celebrities tells me about your awful product? "Get ready to interact!" they'll say. "Get ready to fuck off!" I'll say, particularly if, as they so frequently are, are also browser-monopolising and noisy ads.

Finally is the seemingly-obligatory necessity to connect everything to Facebook and Twitter. I've lost count of the number of adverts I've seen recently that include hashtags, Facebook pages or even, in some cases, buttons to share the advert on Twitter or Facebook directly. Pro-Tip: if you click either of those buttons, you are a dickhead. And if you don't know why, well, I don't think I can help you.

Advertising serves a purpose, and if it keeps out of my way I'm happy to let it sit there to help pay the bills for a particular site — I don't use an ad-blocker and will probably keep it that way for the moment. But the moment advertising starts actively obstructing what I'm trying to do, that's when I start thinking about installing one. And that's not going to make me think positively about your product; it means I'm not going to see it at all.

The post 1058: Badvertising Revisited appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As always, though the experience was, for me, tinged with a certain hint of bittersweetness. Said friends, you see, all live back in the Southampton/Winchester area, which is where I used to live before the rather inconvenient and upsetting collapse of almost my entire existence over two years ago. I, however, am not located there; instead, I am nearly two hours' drive away in Chippenham, Wiltshire. It's not a difficult drive, to be sure, but it isn't something I can particularly do on a sudden whim. Well, I can, but I do need to have plenty of time on my hands before I do it, and there are other considerations as well.

It's frustrating, though. Regular readers will know that I am not an especially "social" person a lot of the time, but I do appreciate and enjoy the time I get to spend with these friends. We've built a strong Social Link as a group together in recent years, and most of us have had to take on some difficult challenges in that time. Although in a lot of cases, said group of friends didn't necessarily help and support directly, the fact that they were simply there was often enough. I know I certainly felt that way, though naturally I can't speak for the others.

It's hard to feel that way when you're two hours away, though; when you have to make full on capital-P Plans to see them rather than just sending a text and asking if people are up for something. I miss being able to do that, and not just with the particular group of friends I saw last night, either; there are ex-colleagues still in the area whom I used to love being able to just call up (well, text up) and hang out with.

I feel more than a tad isolated, in short.

And in more ways than one, if I'm honest. Leaving aside the geographical issue that gets in the way of seeing "real life" friends for a moment, there's also the whole issue of having like-minded friends who are into similar things that you are. I have a number of interests that I am perfectly willing to describe as "niche", and at times it can be difficult and frustrating to be a fan of these things when there's no-one nearby to share the experience and enjoyment of them with. It's not as if I have absolutely no-one, obviously — Andie is good at taking an interest in the things I like (for the most part, anyway!) and aforementioned friends share at least some of my interests.

The "simple" solution seems obvious — take an interest in more "mainstream" things so you can more easily share the enjoyment of things that everyone enjoys. But it's not that simple. I have tried on a number of occasions to engage with things I know various friends and acquaintances are interested in — everything from football to The X-Factor — and every time I have come away feeling like I'm forcing myself to try and enjoy something I dislike immensely, and it just doesn't seem worth it. Apparently your tastes are hard-wired into your head somewhere, and it is very difficult to change them. I am predisposed to like the things I like (board games, video games, anime, soundtracks, music, writing, The Internet, My Little Pony) and similarly to dislike the things I despise (too many to list).

Knowing that doesn't help with those feelings of isolation, though. Knowing that the things I enjoy are only appreciated by certain specific subcultures can be a difficult pill to swallow at times, but it's the situation that my own tastes have gotten me into. Don't get me wrong, I don't regret or feel embarrassed about anything that I enjoy; it'd just be nice to be able to enthuse about it with people who are a bit closer sometimes.

But at least I can enthuse about it with people thanks to the trappings of modern society. I can chat with my friend in Canada about anime; I can discuss strategies for failing to beat the hideously difficult secret boss in Persona 3 with another friend in the States. I can rant and rave in private about the things that are getting my goat to someone in yet another disparate geographical location; I can share my pride in something I have achieved with yet someone else entirely.

Things could be worse, in short — but it doesn't stop those occasional feelings of loneliness and isolation. I've been having more than a few of them recently, and it's getting me down a bit, so apologies if the tone of these posts may be a bit on the melancholy side at times.

Oh well. I'll deal. I always do.

The post 1003: Isolation Chamber appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

All right, I didn't have anything hugely profound to say and even if I did I could clearly still say it from my phone, but the Internet has gone down, which is, as everyone thoroughly immersed in 21st century living knows, incredibly annoying.

Given its prevalence in our everyday lives, it's very easy to forget what life without the Internet was like. Something as simple as checking the news or finding out what time something was on TV relied on you having… oh, it's back. I'll return when I finish watching this episode of The World God Only Knows. Ja ne!

… … … …

20 minutes later…

There we are, that's better.

Shit, now there's pressure on me to write something meaningful. Umm…

Nope, I got nothing. And fuck all that Internet talk. I've written that exact same post at least five or six times already in the last 989 days.

I finished watching Welcome to the NHK today. The last few episodes were major-league Feels territory. It was a fascinating show, all-told, that I may write about in more detail at some point in the near future. What I particularly liked was that it wasn't particularly easy to pigeon-hole into a specific category of genre. It had elements of comedy, drama, romance, surrealism and all manner of other stuff too. On the whole it was quite an emotional experience for me — I'm not sure how much it would resonate with someone who couldn't relate to some of the issues therein, but I certainly found it to be an excellent, worthwhile, enjoyable and moving watch.

Tonight, as I mentioned earlier, I've started watching The World God Only Knows after recommendations from several people. I'll blog in more detail about this when I've watched more than two episodes, but it seems to be highly entertaining so far.

The premise, for the unfamiliar, is that dating sim addict Keima inadvertently enters into a contract with the unfeasibly cute and broom-wielding demon Elsie to help round up "Loose Souls", runaway spirits that hide themselves inside the hearts of girls. Keima is thus tasked with making said girls fall in love with him, thus releasing the Loose Soul for Elsie to catch. Keima, sadly, is more than a little socially awkward, having spent all his time dating 2D girls rather than interacting with real people. However, since reneging on the contract means that both he and Elsie will be decapitated by the magical collars placed upon them, he has no choice but to go along with the outlandish plan. Consequently, he attempts to use his knowledge of dating sim tropes to figure out girls in the real world and, of course, Hilarity Ensues.

I've watched two episodes so far and already I want my own Elsie to hug. Certain characters just nail the whole adorableness factor, and she has this particular characteristic in spades. The show as a whole is rather endearing, too, though, regularly lapsing into heavily-stylized and chibi sequences rather than trying to remain too grounded in reality. The concept is, after all, ridiculous, so rather than trying to take itself too seriously the show appears to very much embrace its silliness. I'm fine with that, and am looking forward to exploring the rest of the episodes.

Anyway, on that note I think it's probably time I hit the sack. Hopefully tomorrow will see a more coherent entry and less in the way of Internet outages.

The post #oneaday Day 989: Blackout appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

My earliest experiences were with CompuServe which, for the unfamiliar, was somewhat like an online "walled garden". It included much of the things we take for granted on the Internet today — email, topic-specific forums, places to download stuff, real-time chat and probably, if you looked hard enough, something which could be used by someone as porn. Initially, you were limited to talking only to other CompuServe subscribers, but over time access opened up: firstly to allow emailing to Internet email addresses, and eventually to access the Web proper. I remember vividly trying (and failing) to get the browser Mosaic to work with CompuServe.

At this time, since I was just a kid and living at home, my Internet (or equivalent) access was severely limited. I had to plan out what it was I was going to look at (usually the Gamers' Forum and occasional delves into the "CB Simulator" — aka real-time chat rooms — to try (and fail) to pick up girls. (a/s/l?)

Over time, the Internet opened up to all, and we were all able to gain access to the information we wanted and some we didn't. The best free porn sites were (apparently) passed around in the schoolyard; the best sites to download shareware games were common knowledge; little communities started to spring up as people figured out things like "forums", "personal homepages" and "search engines".

Fast forward to today and, with an Internet that is growing at a frightening rate, I find myself limiting what I'm doing to a very small number of sites. Despite becoming increasingly irritated with it, I check Facebook. I check my GMail. I check in on the Squadron of Shame Squawkbox if there's been a new post. I write this blog. Occasionally I might check a gaming site for news of something I'm interested in, but that's really about it. I tweet from my phone and everything else that I really want to do is covered by those sites — and Google if I can't find the information I'm looking for straight away. I find myself going around and around and around the same sites over and over, hoping that something new and interesting has come up in the five minutes since I last looked. (It never does.)

One thing I've found myself not using anywhere near as much as I used to is dedicated, specific communities. Every time I find a forum that looks vaguely interesting, I might check it out and post there for a few days and then promptly forget all about it — even if it's a community I have little doubt that I'd really enjoy being a part of. This is kind of sad, since it limits my contact with people who are specifically in to the exact same things as me, but it's primarily a result of the fact that forum software tends to not play overly-nice with mobile devices — which, nine times out of ten, is the place where I want to be casually browsing. (Okay, a lot of forums bring up that annoying popup about Tapatalk, which I've never tried and might be the best thing ever, but still.)

It's mostly a time issue. I have lots of things I want to do every day, and I rarely (no, make that never) get to do all of them. So far as "priorities" go, checking forums, posting things and getting to know yet another online community is not particularly high up the list.

Perhaps it should be. There are a lot of things I am into that I would like to talk more about with others. Without thinking very hard, I can immediately point to both My Little Pony and The Secret World as communities I would like to be more involved with. And there are doubtless more out there. When I think about how vapid and pointless 95% of the conversations on Facebook are, I do sometimes wonder if my "social" time online could be better spent in a more focused community rather than browsing creepy baby photos posted by people I haven't seen since school.

Perhaps I should leave my own prejudices at the door and jump in to one of these communities to see what will happen. You never know where new friends are lurking, after all.

The post #oneaday Day 909: The Internet Is As Big As You Make It appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I have mentioned these issues a couple of times over the past few days but I've come to the conclusion that they're actually making me feel a bit depressed. I know that there's little point in getting depressed or upset over "the way the world is" and there are far bigger problems in the world, etc. etc. but, I mean, wow. Something really needs to be done.

I am referring primarily to the treatment of Anita Sarkeesian, better known on the Interwebz as Feminist Frequency, the author of a number of feminist perspective critiques on popular culture. Sarkeesian recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund her newest piece of research and criticism, dubbed simply "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games". The proposed series of videos Sarkeesian is intending to produce will deconstruct the most commonly-seen female character tropes in video games, highlighting recurring patterns and discussing them rather than simply pointing the finger and going "LOOK! THIS IS BAD."

The response to Sarkeesian's campaign was both good and bad. On the positive side, the campaign was fully funded in the first 24 hours, and since that time a number of "stretch goals" have been smashed, allowing Sarkeesian to produce a much larger amount of content than initially proposed.

On the negative side, this happened. And this happened.

I really shouldn't be astonished by things that people say on the Internet any more, given that it is widely regarded as a wretched hive of &c &c despite all the lovely and intelligent people who also populate it. But these incidents really bothered me. They happened quickly and relentlessly… and they were clearly organised — likely by noted Internet cesspits 4chan and 9gag. This fabulous piece by Foz Meadows sums up the key aspect of the problem, I think: in attempting to defend themselves against accusations of sexism, misogyny and the promotion of a rape culture, those who deliberately and maliciously harassed Sarkeesian resorted to, you guessed it, sexism, misogyny and the promotion of a rape culture.

Sarkeesian's suffering isn't in any way the only time this has happened, of course, though it may have been the most high-profile one in recent weeks. The Hitman: Absolution trailer I mentioned a few posts ago stirred up plenty of controversy, and anyone speaking out against it tended to get shouted down by people who couldn't see the problem with it in the most abusive manner possible. Disagreements and differences in taste; threatening others and calling them abusive names because of those disagreements is not.

Even princess of geekdom Felicia Day wasn't immune to this bullshit. Her recent video "Gamer Girl, Country Boy", released as part of her entertaining "Flog" series on Geek & Sundry, attracted a swarm of completely unprovoked hateful comments. The hornets' nest had already been stirred up, so another target for their ire was just a happy bonus. Whatever you think of Day's past work, it should be clear to most people that there's clearly not a malevolent bone in her whole body, and the whole incident clearly upset her very much. I'm not "white knighting" here, it's a clear and simple fact. Who wouldn't be upset by an organised campaign to troll and flame something you'd worked hard on?

All of this is just a bit much to take. I've always been someone who likes to try and see the best in people — to a fault, really — but to see that some people hiding behind that ever-present veil of anonymity prove themselves to really be complete and utter cunts doesn't make me feel great. Obviously my own take on the matter pales in comparison to what Sarkeesian, Day and anyone else who has suffered at the hands of these trolls must be feeling about all this, but it's genuinely upsetting to know that there are people that vile and disgusting out there — people who supposedly share the same passions and hobbies as I do.

It needs to stop. That will only happen with concerted efforts from everyone involved, and it goes back to what school always told you about handling bullies. Be assertive, but not aggressive. Tell the bully that what they are doing is upsetting and unpleasant. And tell someone else. Don't be afraid to talk about it. Don't suffer in silence. Because while someone (or, indeed, a thrown-together Internet lynch mob) being a complete arsehole can utterly ruin your day, week, month, year, it's infinitely worse if you have no-one to turn to for support.

Let's stamp this odious attitude out. Freedom of speech is one thing; using said freedom to intimidate, harass and silence others is not its intention. I fully support and endorse Sarkeesian's Kickstarter campaign, and while I won't insist that you do so too, I would certainly like to encourage you all to stand up to bullying when (not if, sadly) you see it happening — even if it's not directly involving you. Good Samaritan and all that.

Above all, don't be a dick. And if it all gets a bit much, then pay this site a visit.

The post #oneaday Day 876: Gamers, Men, Everybody... Stop Being a Dick appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

If you've ever started a conversation with "I heard that…" and then gone on to explain exactly how you heard somewhere/from some guy in the pub/from "The Internet" that something awesome/awful is going to happen, then I urge you to think before you speak in future. Because if you continue with that sentence, you're simply feeding the rumour mill, and the rumour mill doesn't produce good things and help us make the Bread of Truth. It produces garbage and poo, and then squishes it all out into the world's most unpleasant pâté.

Tortured (and gross) metaphors aside, it's a fact that I wish more people — particularly in the press — would cotton on to.

Today, for example, saw news that Liberty X "might be" reforming for a new album and a tour. Firstly, I don't think anyone wants that, and secondly, the only evidence that such a reunion "might be" happening is the fact that they were photographed together outside the ITV studios and — get this — they were smiling. Stop the fucking presses.

There are a ton of journalism sectors that are particularly prone to this. Showbiz columns report who might be sleeping with whom. Sports columns report who might be moving to some other club for a disproportionately enormous amount of money. Music and arts columns report who might be working on what. And then, of course, there are the tech-related industries.

Anything related to Apple is accompanied by an inordinately huge amount of rumourmongering, for example. In the run-up to the company's announcement of the third-generation iPad, all sorts of nonsense was flying around. This ranged from suggestions that it might not have a Home button to the frankly astonishing assertion that the reason iOS apps had started having textures like leather and the like in the background was because the new iPad would have a haptic display — i.e. one where you could feel textures as well as see them.

The video games industry is far from immune, either. Rarely a week goes by without one outlet reporting on some rumour from a mysterious, anonymous source and the "story" then being picked up by every other news site on the Web as if it were fact. This particular rumour mill goes into overdrive as a hardware generation starts to wind down and people start wondering what the next generation of consoles might look like. Inevitably, the vast majority of stories turn out to be absolute bollocks, and on the rare occasions when an outlet or reporter writes something that turns out to be true, there's at least a day's worth of smug, self-satisfied cries of "Called it."

No you didn't. You were throwing darts blindfolded, and you happened to hit a lucky bulls-eye. Your other fifteen darts are embedded in the barman's testicles, the barmaid's left boob, the right ear of that hard-looking dude who drinks absinthe by the pint and the TV that was showing the Bolton v Wigan match. (Everyone is angry. I'd run, if I were you.)

So why do we persist on reporting on these festering sores on the very arse of journalism? Because they attract attention, particularly if they're controversial. If one site prints a story that Liberty X is reforming, or that the next Xbox will feature a system to prevent used games from working on it, or that the iPhone 5 really, totally, absolutely positively is coming out this time, then that will attract commenters like flies around shit. And that means page hits, advertising revenue and the little graphs that make the men in suits happy moving in an upward direction. Who cares if it's absolute nonsense dreamed up by someone who cleans the toilets at Microsoft? Print it!

I make a point of not reading any stories that start with the prefix "RUMOUR:" now. And should I ever find myself back on the news desk for a popular gaming website, I will most certainly do everything in my power to avoid reporting on such nonsense — unless some actual investigation turns up something interesting, of course. But blindly parroting another site's "anonymous source"? No. Just no.

So, then, I reiterate: think before you speak/write/publish. Because rumours are rarely helpful. Remember that time it spread around the whole school year that you'd shat your pants when in fact you'd just sat in some mud?

Yeah. That.

The post #oneaday Day 834: RUMOUR: Rumours 'Rumoured', Says Rumour-Monger appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Disclaimer: I'm aware that I wrote almost exactly the same post as you're about to read at this time last year, and for that I make absolutely no apologies.

It's PAX East time! Yay! I'm not there! Boooo.

I've not been to many conventions or big shows like that over the years, so I have very fond memories of those I have been able to attend. My decision to attend PAX East in 2010 was very much a spur of the moment thing — I'd decided I wanted to leave my primary school teaching job because I'd given it a chance and determined it wasn't for me, I was trying as hard as I could to pursue a career in the Writing Words About Games industry, and I was feeling a bit miserable and lonely. So, with a little financial help, I flew across the pond to Boston and went to my first big show in America.

It was an exciting time for a number of reasons. I'd just started working for Kombo.com which, while it didn't pay particularly well, provided me with a position where I could legitimately say I was a professional member of the games press. I knew that a large number of my buddies from communities such as Bitmob and The Squadron of Shame would be in attendance, so I'd have the opportunity to meet some people face to face. And I always love the opportunity to visit the States. I'd never been to Boston before, and while I was under no illusions that I'd be seeing much of the city while I was there, I was looking forward to being Somewhere New.

It was also terrifying. As a sufferer of social anixety at the best of times, the prospect of meeting people I'd only ever talked to on the Internet in the past was a scary one. What if we didn't get on? What if it was a massive disaster and it destroyed the carefully-cultivated relationships we'd built up with one another? What if I had nothing to say? What if I got lost and it was actually because they wanted to lose me? All these thoughts whirled around my head as I was on the plane, but I was very happy to discover that PAX was, in fact, a happy, inclusive and wonderful place for geeks of all descriptions to call home — whether they were someone who just liked video games or was also into collectible card games, role-playing games, board games, cosplay, the history of technology… anything like that.

That word — "home" — is an important one. Because it felt good to be there. It felt like a world which I wanted to belong to, surrounded by people that I wanted to be with. It was a world that accepted and embraced each other's differences and brought people from many different walks of life together in the name of common interests. Perhaps most importantly, it made friendships real. It's all very well chatting to people online on a regular basis, but once you've spent time with those people in person — seen them, heard them, hugged them, tickled their beards in a homoerotic manner where applicable — your friendship is on a different level. I haven't seen some of those people I met at PAX East 2010 in person since that weekend two years ago, but in many ways I feel closer, more connected to them than many of my — for want of a better word — "real" friends. Perhaps it's because they're also "Internet friends" that I speak to most days via Twitter, Facebook and G+.

Whatever the reason, knowing that lots of people I know are at PAX East right now and undoubtedly having a great time (and/or queueing for hours) makes me a bit sad — not that they're there, obviously, but that I'm not there with them.

I propose a pact, then, faraway friends: PAX East 2013. Be there. You have a year to prepare. Get cracking.

The post #oneaday Day 809: PAX Pact appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Proper Internet for us is still about two weeks away. I've never quite understood exactly why it takes so long for Internet access (and a phone line, for that matter) to reach your house. After all, in most cases the infrastructure is already in place. Okay, sure, sometimes they have to "send an engineer out" but the last few times I've set up my own Internet access said engineer has done very little besides bring some equipment. While the personal touch is nice, I'd be happier with receiving it by post if someone can just flip a switch a bit quicker.

I know, I know, it's probably considerably more complicated than that, and with all the households in the UK, the finite stock of engineers which can be sent out at any one time only goes so far. But have a heart; how will I watch endless cat videos, play stupid Flash games and indeed download the gigabytes of updates my reinstalled (again) Mac insists are absolutely necessary?

That said, where we are now is certainly a far cry from just five to ten years ago. I recall struggling on with dial-up Internet for a few weeks when moving in to a new place, and inevitably forgetting to disconnect it at one point only to confront the next person to pick the phone up with digital squealing. And even further back than that, I recall dial-up Internet being the only Internet. Getting some time on the Internet (after 6pm, naturally) was a real treat, and downloading a file of 1MB or more was something you had to plan ahead for.

In some ways, I miss those days. It made browsing the Web seem like a "special" experience — particularly with the pain in the arse it was to get some browsers working with certain ISPs. Nowadays, we just take our Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia for granted.

I guess it's one way of the human race showing how adaptable it is. Give the people a new tool to use and it won't be very long in the grand scheme of things before its widespread adoption worldwide. Perhaps our bodies have stopped evolving, and all future evolution will be done in the digital space?

Perhaps. It sounds like an exciting sci-fi future. But it's all very well until there's a power cut.

The post #oneaday Day 591: Proper Intarnetz Plz appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The fact that you can do this is pretty impressive, though. Laptops have been around for donkey's years, but the ability to sit in another country, outside, on the floor, getting pins and needles in your legs, and access the Internet is pretty remarkable when you think about it. It's certainly changed the way a lot of people can do their jobs. Journalists used to sit in offices, now they sit on the floor of German streets like netbook-wielding tramps. (Given the wild growth of my facial hair during my trip, that might not be an altogether inappropriate comparison. I'd shave, but I can't be arsed at the moment.)

Gamescom is coming to a close, with today being the first of two days that are only for the public. The "entertainment halls", as the public section is called, are markedly different from the relative peace and organization of the business area. Where the business area is clean, bright, not crowded and with no crap all over the floor, the entertainment area is the exact opposite in every sense. It's dirty, dark, crowded and the floor is carpeted with discarded leaflets from a thousand different vendors trying to promote their products.

It's interesting to see, though — having only really been to PAX and Eurogamer, there's a marked difference in the way the public presentations are handled. For starters, rather than holding behind closed doors panel discussions like at PAX, game developers and publishers get up on stage and put on a show for the audiences right there in the show hall. There's a lot of shouting, a lot of "call and response" audience interaction, and a lot of scantily-clad women flinging T-shirts into the crowd. I haven't caught a T-shirt yet, but I did take advantage of the English language Guild Wars 2 presentation to sneak a go on NCSoft's new WildStar MMO today — it's really rather good and I suggest you check it out if you get the chance.

I never thought I'd say this, but I am tiring of sausage. Currywurst is awesome, and I really wish we had that curry ketchup easily available in the UK, but when sausage is the only kind of food that's within easy reach (as appears to be the case once you're inside Koelnmesse — easier said than done with the German security guards today bringing a whole new dimension of Jobsworthness to their interactions with the public) you start to tire of it surprisingly quickly, particularly when it appears to be a staple at breakfast time, too — honestly, I saw a guy yesterday having a plate piled high with nothing but about ten sausages. The guy obviously needed his protein.

I fly back tomorrow evening and I feel like I'm ready to. Cologne is nice and all, but I'm tired of being self-conscious about my German and the fact I don't appear to know any nouns. It will be nice to have a rest in my own bed — but not for long, as very shortly I'll be moving house, which is exciting and awesome.

For now, though, it's time to go and find some food that isn't sausage for dinner.

The post #oneaday Day 579: The Littlest Hobo Journalist appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Well, the other thing about these glory days is the fact that we didn't have the Internet. And these days it's easy to take that fact for granted, given that most of the things we do throughout the course of every single day involve the Internet somehow, from the smallest little things to huge, life-changing events.

It wasn't always that way, and oddly enough it's a piece of educational software that really drives the difference home. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? was a game that tested your geographical knowledge and encouraged you to find out about the wider world. And you had to do it without the aid of Wikipedia, a website which means you can rattle through the Facebook version in a matter of minutes. Sure, it was often necessary to use reference material to pass the game's missions, but there's something a little different about using an encyclopaedia or atlas to find things out rather than typing things into Google.

For me, though, there's no going back to those dark days. I think about all the people I have in my life right now, and I bet over half of them are in my life because of the Internet, whether it's directly or indirectly. Some people I initially met face to face and then ended up getting to know via email or IM chat sessions. Some people I met online first and then met face to face later. Some people I've only ever met online, but want to meet face to face. And a few people I know online and am more than happy to keep them at a very long arm's length!

It's difficult to imagine how the events of the last year would have gone without the Internet. For starters, the situation wouldn't have arisen in the first place, for many reasons. But let's assume it had for a minute; the people from whom I had the most support were people I knew because of the Internet. A couple of them happened to be physically close to me, but a lot of them were on the other side of the planet. How different would it have been without them?

Perhaps if there was no Internet then I'd have more friends who are physically close to me. But then would that lead to a "compromise" sort of situation, where you hang out with people you don't really like because it's convenient?

Who knows? All I know is that I'm pretty damn grateful the Internet exists, and I'm equally grateful that the people I know because of it exist. You rock, so keep being awesome, and on that day when I win a bajillion pounds on the Inordinately Generous Lottery for People Called Pete (which doesn't seem to have started yet, sadly) I will be travelling around the world to meet each and every one of you, buy you a drink and/or call you "dick-tits" to your face.

The post #oneaday Day 60: Just Imagine... appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The other thing it gives you is people.

As a kid at school, I often wondered what it would be like to meet people outside the local community where I lived. I grew up in a small village in the countryside that had a pretty close-knit community. You could probably name most of the local "characters" off the top of your head if you had a good think… largely because pretty much everyone got involved with everything. And, just to add to every country stereotype ever, there was even a semi-regular "village show" which was inevitably filled with middle-aged men and women making jokes that were smutty and/or at the local vicar's expense. It's pretty neat to see a close-knit community like that, actually, though I question how much it actually happens these days. It probably does, though I doubt to the same degree.

I remember when the Internet came to town, though. Or, more specifically, in the form of CompuServe, which wasn't the "proper" Internet—that was a mysterious and difficult thing that no-one quite understood at the time. CompuServe was a window onto the rest of the world; people who were potentially far away that we all had access to for the first time.

CompuServe had one of the earliest chatrooms around—this was so long ago that the term "chat" hadn't taken on the widespread meaning it had today. No, in keeping with the times (or possibly not), CompuServe elected to call their chatroom facility the "CB Simulator". You know, because it was like CB radio in that you could talk to random strangers. Only it was completely different because you were just typing things.

I remember "meeting" a few people through this facility, with one in particular springing to mind. Her name was Julia, and she was from somewhere near Manchester. We got chatting and hit it off pretty quickly, and thus began a long campaign of emailing each other back and forth. I can't remember any of the things we talked about—the usual teenage things, I imagine—but I remember that we were getting on well and it felt like we were pretty "close".

So eventually, we had the opportunity to meet. She was going to Alton Towers with her friends, and as it happened, my friends and I were planning a similar trip. So we decided to make our trips coincide. I was pretty excited about the whole thing. She'd sent me a couple of (clean!) photos which seem to have managed to travel from computer to computer with me completely unintentionally, and she hadn't promptly cut off all contact when I sent her a photo of myself looking slightly uncomfortable in a dinner jacket on prom night. Which was a good sign.

I'm not sure what happened. Perhaps it was shyness, perhaps it was the presence of all our other friends "cramping our style", perhaps it was the fact that one of my friends was hitting on one of her friends (and doing quite well, from what I could tell), perhaps I wasn't what she'd expected or hoped for (she totally was what I was hoping for, she was a hottie)… but we found it pretty difficult to talk to each other in "real life". It was weird; we'd told each other lots of things, including plenty of "secrets", but as soon as we were faced with one another it was suddenly like starting over… and it became a missed opportunity, sadly. We drifted off and lost contact after that. There was no "breakup" or words spoken in anger; things just… "stopped".

I think about Julia every so often and wonder what she's doing with her life. I hope she's happy, wherever she is.

The post #oneaday, Day 30: Julia appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

People on the Internet are dickholes. Well, not all of them. I know a lot of very nice people who live in the Internet. Many of them are writing blogs like this one—hello!—but then there is another breed out there—the breed who thinks it's appropriate to hurl unwarranted abuse at others. Others that they've never met or spoken to, in some cases.

Ever been on Formspring? It's pretty fun. People can submit questions to you, either anonymously or under their username, and then you can answer them. That is the sole purpose of the site. I've had a lot of fun with it, thanks mostly to my very creative friends who are excellent with coming up with bizarre, thought-provoking questions. And somehow the questions are much more fun when you're not quite sure who they're from. It becomes a game in itself to work out who submitted the bizarre question about the robots and the cabbage.

Unfortunately, as we've seen many times by now, the potential anonymity that the Internet offers causes some people to think that they can say absolutely anything. So it was earlier on when my lovely Twitter-friend @Cilllah was bombarded with violent and pretty offensive nonsense from some nutjob banging on about his "garden" and about how he was going to rape and kill her.

Now, given all the nonsense over the #TwitterJokeTrial a while back, I don't for a second believe that this moron was actually going to do these things. But how is it in any way appropriate to say things like that to someone who's just going about their business on the Internet? Hiding behind the veil of anonymity to throw out abuse to strangers? That's kind of pathetic.

This sort of thing shouldn't annoy me so much—it's been going on for years after all. It doesn't make it right, though. I've been using the Internet and related technologies since the early days—a 300 baud modem on an Atari 8-bit, then on the Atari ST, then CompuServe under Windows 3.1, up through various incarnations of the "proper" Web to the stage we're at today. And at no point have I ever felt the need to pick on some poor person and be an asshole to them.

Perhaps I'm just too nice of a person to understand why people do the things they do. But I can live with that; I'd much rather be a person that the vast majority of people like and respect (and perhaps a few assholes think is a bit of a pussy) than someone who gets their kicks from threatening rape and violence on strangers.

The joke's on them, of course. The mental image that springs to mind as soon as anyone starts trolling like that is one of a Jabba-esque freak in his (you know it's a he) piss-and-cum-stained pants, probably with their semi-erect penis clasped firmly in their left hand (right hand is for mousing) and a folder called "HOTTYZ" on his desktop containing profile pictures of all the women he's harassed.

And if you're not that person? You can feel pretty good about yourself.

The post #oneaday, Day 6: Public Service Announcement appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As such, it's easy to forget that there's a wider web out there, filled with sites that you may not have ever come across during your daily browsing routine. Some sites you would never have wanted to discover, ever. And some are real gems that you'll be happy you came across.

So what better way to explore the web than to make it into a little game? There used to be a website devoted to this very philosophy. Called ShuffleTime, it allowed players to jump around the web seemingly at random, answering trivia questions about the pages they were seeing. Correctly answering the questions allowed the players to collect cards and coins and purchase rewards and entries into prize draws. Sadly, it didn't last very long, but I thought it was a great idea.

So here's a variation on it. I can't promise any kind of reward (short of discovering something horrendous/wonderful) but it's a good time waster. Probably not safe for work, but if you're reading this at work then you're probably not concerned about that, either. Here is a picture of Rise from Persona 4 in a bikini to make you feel uncomfortable about reading this at work.

Well, it serves you right. Get on with what you're supposed to be doing and I won't have to embarrass you again.

Alternatively, you could embarrass yourself further by playing TinyURLette, a game of discovery. The rules are very similar to The TwitPic Game which I informed you all of a few days ago (and no-one participated, boo) except this time we're dealing with websites.

So here's what to do. Visit your link-shortening service of choice and simply add whatever you like after the URL. I will attempt this with both TinyURL and bit.ly links to demonstrate.

So first up, we have http://bit.ly/blargh, which takes us to a page of YouTube comments for this video. It is a Scottish guy who has obviously been studying phonetics recently. He also says hello to a lot of people. And goes off on a rant against one of the members of his channel. He also does that irritating "quick-editing" thing that people are doing all the time on YouTube. "Hello! I am [edit] a person [edit] who is [edit] talking [edit] to you about [edit] rubbish." Enough of him.

http://tinyurl.com/ihateyou, conversely, is appropriately named and takes you to a picture you really don't want to see. Especially if you're at work. You have been warned. It's not porn or gore.

http://bit.ly/arse takes us to BioEthics Bytes, a blog about multimedia resources for teaching bioethics. An unfortunate URL for a page that looks quite interesting.

http://tinyurl.com/what takes us to an article from the San Francisco Chronicle about the death of Margaret Singer, an expert on brainwashing and cult activity. The obituary is an interesting read, actually, with some quotes from Singer herself.

By extension, http://tinyurl.com/whatisthisidonteven takes you to a page clearly intended to RickRoll you. Unfortunately for them, the video they have been using for RickRolling purposes is a broken link, meaning that this page is, in fact, a failed RickRoll. A RickStumbleAndFallOnYourAss, if you will.

http://bit.ly/yourface features a news headline from Twitter very literally about your face.

http://tinyurl.com/stopit gives us a blog post in Russian about Lifespring, the now-defunct "human potential training" company. Or, as Google Translate puts it, "Layfspringe", which is a much better name.

Finally, http://bit.ly/borednow takes us to a page from McCarthy Psychology Services from Australia about care provision for the elderly.

I'm a little disappointed. Out of 8 different pages, only one of them is the slightest bit inappropriate. You are not doing your job properly, Internet.

Found any entertaining TinyURL or bit.ly shortlinks through playing this stupid game? Let me know in the comments.

The post #oneaday, Day 337: Internet Games #2: TinyURLette appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

So today, I present to you a simple and fun game which you can play whenever you've read the whole Internet and are at a loss for what to do next. It's a simple game, and there's no real "winning" as such. But it can be played solo, or as a social game with the aid of additional participants on Facebook, Twitter or the social network of your choice. You can even play local multiplayer with people in the same room, either hotseating on one computer, or with a collection of different computers.

The game is very straightforward to play. The image-sharing website "TwitPic" is used to share images on Twitter. The URL format for TwitPic is http://twitpic.com/stringoflettersandnumbersgoeshere. You can probably guess the rest, but for those of you who haven't cottoned on yet, simply replace "stringoflettersandnumbersgoeshere" with a code of your choice (keep it no more than 5 letters or numbers in most cases) and then see what out-of-context images you can discover.

Here's some samples from a quick go today:

http://twitpic.com/spack comes up with this delightful image of someone's dinner. The plastic tray and plastic cutlery seem somewhat at odds with the battered shrimp, corn and unidentifiable green shit in the corner.

http://twitpic.com/felch comes up with this image, with the caption "THIS. My cousin is me all over", worryingly, though as the astute commenter beneath the picture observes, there is no actual felching in the picture.

http://twitpic.com/crunk displays this disappointingly dull image of someone on their way to Charlotte for training. Unless Charlotte is a person, in which case the implied "training" which will be going on can take on an altogether more interesting meaning.

http://twitpic.com/arse gives us more food. People really love to show each other what they're eating on Twitter, it seems. It appears that one of the stereotypes about Twitter users is true.

http://twitpic.com/butts gives us a sleeping man. Why is he asleep? No-one knows. But the cameraperson is certainly very close to this sleeping man. Sleeping man also appears to not be wearing a shirt and have slightly flabby shoulders.

And finally, http://twitpic.com/dirty gives us a collection of jazz music, thereby confirming something we've all known for a very long time: the fact that jazz music is dirty. The internet has proved it.

This game also works with a variety of other sites, including imgur, yfrog and numerous others. For the truly brave, you could also try it with URL shorteners such as bit.ly and tinyurl. There's no telling where you might end up with those, and so that, dear friends, is a game we shall save for another day.

Found any awesome TwitPic URLs yourself? Do let me know. That's what them thar comments are for.

The post #oneaday, Day 333: Internet Games #1: The TwitPic Game appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Just think how much more we could all get done without all this waiting. Consider how long it takes someone from any Government agency to write back to you, drawing out what is usually an unpleasant process (why else would you be writing to an arm of the Government, were it not to complain about something?) even longer than necessary. Perhaps your question was a simple one that can be answered with one word—the words "yes" and "no" were invented for exactly this situation—but no. More often than not you'll receive a letter back informing you that they're "unable to action your correspondence" or, in English, "not able to reply to your letter" and demanding further details that you've already given them at least fifteen times.

This sort of thing is annoying and, in this age of instant communication, bordering on inexcusable. Who writes letters any more, anyway, for starters? Wake up and smell the electronics.

The trouble with taking this attitude, though, is that it starts to filter into other parts of your life. You find yourself wondering why the text message you sent thirty seconds ago hasn't been replied to yet, without thinking that the recipient may just have better things to do than respond to a message that simply says "COCK! PISS! PARTRIDGE!" because they might, in fact, have a job to do. You forget the context of a reply on Twitter because someone replied to something you posted four hours ago. And in the meantime, you sit staring at your computer screen, iPhone or, in the worst possible scenarios, your wall or ceiling. Because you might get that response you need in the next thirty seconds/minute/half an hour/hour/day and you couldn't possibly do anything useful in the meantime. But of course you can't send another message following it up because that's pushy and rude and you don't want to look like an asshole.

Well, bollocks to it. We need an inversion of this situation, where "important" things get resolved quickly rather than are "endeavoured to be responded to within 72 hours", and where it's okay for your friends, family and/or that hottie you texted to be quiet for a few seconds/minutes/hours/days at a time. Because let's face it, staring at a wall is marginally less productive than staring at a toaster waiting for it to pop.

Because at least if you stare at a toaster, you end up with some delicious toast. What's your wall ever going to give you?

The post #oneaday, Day 307: Wait. Terry Wait. Overwait. Call The Wait-er. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

However, yesterday, I felt differently. Spurred on by this article, which several people had posted to Twitter seemingly independently of one another, I decided to give the community another look. I decided to just dive in and start looking at things, rather than getting analysis paralysis whilst looking at the front page.

And that, seemingly, is the way to do it. There is so much content on Reddit that it is impossible (and probably undesirable) to read it all. So you pick and choose the things that you're interested in.

Now, I know that there are several people amongst those who follow me who are still utterly bewildered as to what Reddit is and what its appeal is. So, with apologies to those of you who are already well familiar with what Reddit is and how it works, here is, erm, what Reddit appears to be and how it appears to work, after a mighty one day's experience of use.

Perhaps the easiest way of thinking about it is that it's the world's biggest forum. Users can post things, which are either links to other sites or "self posts", which are simple messages. Attached to each post are two things: upvote and downvote buttons, and a comment facility. Upvoting or downvoting something promotes or demotes the content, making it more likely to rise to the top of the page (or not, as the case may be). And then the comments underneath are threaded, just like on most blogs these days.

It's in these comment sections that the excellence of Reddit shows itself, though. A far cry from your average YouTube commenter ("u suck!!!!! lol!"), Reddit contributors and commenters appear to be, for the most part, mature, articulate, literate individuals with fantastic senses of humour and some of the quickest punning minds I've ever come across. It's a community that, after lurking for a few days, I certainly wanted to be a part of. Discussion is (from what I've seen so far, at least) mature, thought-provoking but not afraid to lapse into a bit of silliness from time to time.

And diverse. Good God, Reddit is diverse. If you have a particular niche interest, you can pretty much guarantee there will be a "subreddit" for it. Whether you're into gaming, gardening, FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU- comics, porn, music, Uzbekistani sledgehammer dancing… chances are you will find someone there with the same freaky tastes as you. And for those embarrassing questions that you really want to ask people, the creation of "throwaway" sock puppet accounts is actively encouraged to help everyone feel comfortable enough to say what they feel. Many Redditors use their main accounts, though, as the atmosphere of help and support in the appropriate subreddits is, at times, a shining example of what the Internet can be.

A poster I read earlier described Reddit as 4chan 3 days late with a filter for all the disgusting, gross and/or illegal crap. Which isn't exactly high praise, but I can see their point. 4chan, love it or hate it, originates (or at least popularises) many of the words, phrases and memes we take for granted on the Internet today. But then those who are too scared to delve into the murky waters of 4chan (like me… I'm not ashamed) can come across this stuff without unwittingly stumbling into gore porn via Reddit. Everyone's a winner.

Oh, just one tip, though… if you're not interested in seeing a wide selection of user peens (interspersed with a few boobies) then just steer clear of /r/gonewild.

The post #oneaday, Day 301: I've Read It appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Fast forward to today and we have much the same issue with the word "like", a word which is rapidly losing all meaning thanks to its total domination over the social networking space. Every day on Facebook, it's a fair bet that there is at least one entry in everyone's news feed that says "Amber likes OMG!! Where did you get you're shoes LOL! on ." or "Bob likes I hate it when your trying 2 go 2 sleep and u cant on Likebook." Not only do these sentences make no sense, they're a symbol of a peculiar shift in communication styles that has taken place in recent years, particularly amongst teens and tweens.

Essentially, rather than just typing "I hate it when you're trying to go to sleep and you can't" and sharing that particular inanity with the world (not to mention spelling it correctly), it seems that it's now much more the done thing to go and find a website which lists hundreds of said inanities for the sole purpose of allowing people to Like them on Facebook. There's a kind of "distancing" involved. Anyone can click "Like" on something. As soon as you write it yourself, it becomes more personal, and harder to do.

Trouble is, the word "Like" is being used so much that it stops making sense sometimes. Or its context is completely inappropriate. Take the latest "check-in" craze, GetGlue, which is actually a pretty neat idea. Users tag the things that they, yes, like as well as the things that they dislike and can then get suggestions of other things they might like based on other users' tastes. Fair enough. However, when a site offers you the opportunity to not only "Like" ebola but also check into it, you have to question if the correct terminology is really being used in this instance.

And where's the opportunity to dislike things? GetGlue is unusual in that it does specifically allow people to say "I don't like this". There's no opportunity to do that on Facebook. If a friend posts a status update that informs everyone that, say, their leg has fallen off and their family are dead and not only that, someone posted a bag of poo through their letterbox then the only things to do are to "Like" it, which seems rather tactless and inappropriate, or to actually leave a comment which will probably start with "I wish there was a Dislike button" and end with too many exclamation marks.

Perhaps Facebook is attempting to make us all more positive. Instead of writing "I'm so sad. My family are dead, my leg has fallen off and someone posted a bag of poo through my letterbox" which, let's face it, no-one is going to click "Like" on, perhaps you should put a positive spin on it. "My family are dead, my leg has fallen off and someone posted a bag of poo through my letterbox. But at least I found 76p in small change in my jacket pocket, Snickers later ftw!!!"

aplenty from there on, I feel.

The post #oneaday, Day 254: Be The First Of Your Friends To Like This appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Having an argument is a great way to ruin an otherwise perfectly lovely day. The argument could be over anything. It could be over whether or not you think the latest changes that Facebook have made to their site are good or not. It could be whether or not you think raspberry ripple is the best flavour of ice-cream. It could be over whether or not you think the Pope is a massive douchebag. And, if it's on the Internet, it's probably over something utterly irrelevant and useless.

So here's a few steps on how to do it better.

Step 1: State your hypothesis

"PS3 sucks!"

Step 2: Offer convincing evidence for your hypothesis

"Because Xbox 360 rulez!"

Step 3: Offer a source for your evidence

"My mate Joe said so, too."

Step 4: Await response

"PS3 doesn't suck!"

Step 5: Respond to response

"Yes it does!" (Return to Step 4 until both sides have been made abundantly clear. This should take approximately 30 minutes, or five pages of forum posts.)

Step 6: Make up a statistic and quote it

"80% of people who tried both consoles said that PS3 sucks!"

Step 7: Await response

"Well I think Xbox 360 sucks!"

Step 8: Quote Nietzsche

"Admiration for a quality, art or rival games console can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it."

Step 9: Await response

"You're a douche, do you know that?"

Step 10: Respond to response

"Your face is a douche."

Step 11: Await response to response

"Your mom is a douche."

Step 12: Respond with nonsensical, illogical response

"That's not what she said last night."

Step 13: Await confusion

"What?"

Step 14: Take advantage of confusion

"So it's settled then!"

Step 15: Gloat

"I win. Douche."

And so it goes. One of the strange things about this always-connected, everyone-has-a-voice society is that everyone feels the need to have a contentious opinion on something. This happens (albeit not always to the degree described above) on all manner of topics, from the most irrelevant of fanboy conflicts to far-reaching opinions on matters such as racism. And no-one will ever back down, because there's always another website that "proves" their point, always another statistic from some made-up society somewhere.

It baffles me sometimes, because all this time that gets wasted arguing could be far better used enjoying both things that are being argued over. Of course, part of the issue in some cases revolves around people defending the camp they placed their flag in first. In many cases, people can't afford to buy both, say, a PS3 and a 360. So they stake their claim to one or the other and then justify their choice to anyone who will listen, and a bunch of people who won't also. That way, by branding the thing they haven't got "crap", they feel better about not owning it, even if they're secretly bitter that they can't make use of its exclusive features, software or delicious strawberry flavour.

Of course, some people are just asses and feel the need to disagree with everyone and everything. And those people are called assholes.

(If you're wondering about the inexplicable German in the cartoon above, you can blame both me and RothDog. Drawing nonsensical cartoons involving German stickmen arguing was always an excellent way to pass the time in tedious German lessons back at school. This strip is a recreation of the first ever one we drew.)

The post #oneaday, Day 222: I'm Right, You're Wrong appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The context of the quote was in one of those sections you get on pretty much all online profiles that asks you to list your favourite music, films, TV shows and books. This person's favourite books were listed as "book? lol".

That struck me as rather sad, but perhaps a little unsurprising given the general attention span of most people these days. Why sit down with a book which delays gratification and requires active use of the brain when you can be immediately bombarded with information via TV and the Internet?

It's an age-old argument of course, and one which has probably been running ever since every new information-giving technology came along. However, it seems particularly ironic in the context of the Internet, given that much of it is, in fact, text. Sure, there are pretty pictures and buttons that fart when you click on them and pornography, but it's still fundamentally built on text. You're reading text right now. Is your head hurting yet?

The fact that everyone has a voice on the Internet is one of those things that is debatable as to whether it is a Good Thing or not. But as part of having that voice, everyone has the opportunity to give their thoughts and expand on them as much as they want to. The sad thing is, though, in many cases, people don't feel like they have the time to read (or write) a full, well-considered argument. Instead, they denounce it as a "wall of text" and choose not to read it.

It happens in video games, too. A friend of mine once said that he couldn't get through Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney because there was "too much reading". It's a game about a lawyer. I'm not sure what else he was expecting.

As a writer, as someone who crafts language and bends it to my will in the name of pretentiousness, self-expression, catharsis and humour, this is sad. The English language is a powerful tool that can say many things. As, indeed, are other languages. But it seems that for many these days, the priority is for quick, snappy, "efficient" communication. And sure, there are situations in which this is entirely appropriate. But I say that shouldn't be the norm. People shouldn't be afraid to speak their mind in as much length as they wish.

My mind is particularly drawn to the early days of the Squadron of Shame. Long before we started producing our podcast, we ran lengthy discussion threads on a variety of games on 1up.com's Radio forum. We'd started as a result of one of the 1up Radio features, so that was our spiritual home. Many of the people who populated that forum were articulate sorts who agreed with my thoughts above, so there were plenty of like-minded individuals there who enjoyed taking part in our discussions and posting their own "walls of text".

But one day, the Powers That Be at 1up decided that it would be a great idea to merge all the forums into "Games" and "Not Games". This meant that lengthy, in-depth discussion threads from groups such as the Squadron were crammed into the same space as "OMG HALO IS BETTR THAN KILZONE". Naturally, this led to problems. In one of the last discussions we had on those boards—on the subject of the peculiar PS2 game Psi-Ops—the posting was almost immediately derailed by a particularly notorious troll who posted "OMG FUCKING MASSIVE WALL OF TEXT" in giant red letters. Said "wall of text" was maybe six or seven paragraphs long and was interesting to read, but as soon as troll boy showed his face, the discussion went off track, not helped by many people (including myself) rising to his bait.

It's a pity that to some people the desire to speak in detail, at length and to produce a coherent argument is seen as a negative thing. Personally I would have thought that a forum—by its very nature an asynchronous method of communication in which people can take their time to consider their responses—was the ideal environment in which to have these lengthy discussions. But apparently not.

This is perhaps an unnecessarily negative picture, of course. There are still people who read books. There are still people who like to post more than five words at a time. There are still people who don't decide to ignore all the rules of spelling, punctuation and grammar "just because it's the Internet"—who came up with that stupid idea, anyway? It's just a pity that, at times, they seem to be declining in number.

Oh well. If you read through all that, you can count yourself amongst the élite!

The post #oneaday, Day 217: "Book? LOL!" appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's easy to assume people who didn't "get" Wave are just a bit slow. But the fact is, Google never did a great job of explaining what the technology was for in the first place.

"Yay, collaborative editing!" they'd say.

"Yay, we can do that with Google Docs!" everyone else would say.

"Yay, you can see people typing!" they'd say.

"Yay, who gives a shit?" everyone else would say.

"Yay, it's like a combination of email, Twitter and a word processing document!" they'd say.

"Yay, I've never wanted to combine those three things together!" everyone else would say.

It's a pity, as I've seen some genuinely interesting uses of Wave out there. One particularly cool Wave I was invited to took the form of a moderated "text adventure", where participants could direct the protagonist (played by the moderator in the role of an interactive fiction-style narrator) by inserting commands. Eventually, the non-linear nature of Wave allowed two parallel storylines to develop at once—one happening in the present, another as a flashback. Wave's ability for anyone to edit and insert new content at any point in the "conversation" meant that these two things could continue going on without becoming overly confusing.

Then there were all the possibilities for things like education. But then you have to deal with your average teacher's technophobia.

When I was working in schools, I had a grand idea that Wave could be used for the preparation of interactive resources. The fact that media such as YouTube videos, flash thingies, pictures, text, hyperlinks and even iFrames could be inserted meant that Wave could have been an ideal tool to use on interactive whiteboards during lessons, and also a good means of collaborative planning if teachers in question weren't able to meet and discuss things. As they frequently aren't.

As a result of many of these things, I had a Wave account which largely went unused because no-one else was using it. This is a shame, as I could see the potential in the service. But the fact the service was invite-only for so long, and then by the time it went public people were still scratching their heads and wondering what to do with it—these things meant that it didn't have a particularly "mass market" appeal for the average Internet user.

All is not lost for the moment, anyway. Wave is going to remain open—Google have just said they're stopping development on it. They've also open-sourced a goodly proportion of the code, so enterprising clever people with mathematics in their brains will be able to pull it apart and make it better, faster, stronger, I'm sure.

So it was a swing and a miss for Google on this one. To be honest, though, I think it's good to see them experimenting with different technologies as a company. It would be very easy for Google to just think "Right. We do these things. And we do them well. Let's just stop there and make bundles of money and stick them in our ears." But no; they seem to be on a constant quest to make the lives of the Internet's denizens better. Sometimes these things work. And sometimes they don't.

So raise a glass to Google Wave, the web app that couldn't. And start speculating on what they might be up to next!

The post #oneaday, Day 199: Waving Goodbye appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

"Would you like to go to the shops?" becomes "would u like to go 2 the shops lol"

"I went to the shops to buy some butter, but they had run out." becomes "I went 2 the shops 2 buy sum butter lol but they had run out lol"

"Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York; / all the clouds that lour'd upon our house / In the deep bosom of the ocean buried." becomes "now is da winta of our discontent lol made golrius summer by dis sun of york lol all da clouds that lourd upon our house lol in da deep bosom of da ocean buried lol"

Ouch, that actually hurt.

Anyway, the fact is, "LOL" is meaningless. Coming up quickly behind it in the meaningless stakes are other acronyms such as "LMAO" and "PMSL". So I feel, Internet, it is time to educate you in the ways of laughter which uses more characters but is infinitely more expressive. You'll find there's a laugh for every occasion.

"Hehe"

Mild amusement. This can be used for something that was only intended to be a little bit funny, or perhaps something that you didn't find that funny yourself but don't want to offend the other person by not laughing at it. It's also less girly than some other alternatives. An optional trailing full stop may be added.

CORRECT USAGE: "I thought I'd forgotten my keys earlier. But they were in my pocket the whole time!" — "Hehe"

INCORRECT USAGE: "YARR HARR FIDDLEDEDEE, BEING A PIRATE IS ALL RIGHT TO BE! DO WHAT YOU WANT CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE, YOU ARE A PIRATE!" — "Hehe"

"Heehee"

Flirtatious laughter. Perhaps someone has said something a little bit contentious or naughty and you want to giggle with them. "Heehee" is the perfect laugh for this purpose.

CORRECT USAGE: "Well, we went back to her house and then, well, I'm sure you can imagine what happened…" — "Heehee"

INCORRECT USAGE: "Lindsay Lohan is like a child with ADD! Neither of them can finish a sentence!" — "Heehee"

"Teehee"

The naughty laugh. An upgrade from "heehee", often used when slagging someone off behind their back, making illicit plans or making thinly-veiled references to something filthy the two of you—or indeed someone you mutually know—got up to recently.

CORRECT USAGE: "Well, last night certainly didn't suck… but someone sure did." — "Teehee"

INCORRECT USAGE: "The Master is rising! And soon the world will be ours!" — "Teehee"

"Haha(hahahahahahahahahahahahaha)"

The all-purpose "that's funny" laugh. The minimum number of "ha"s is two, otherwise it's a "Ha!" which is not a laugh at all, more a triumphant call of… something. The more "ha"s which are added to the end of the "haha", the funnier the thing is. "Haha" is mildly funny. "Hahahahahahahahahaha" is extremely funny. Optional additions may include all-caps or exclamation marks. These are both intensifiers.

CORRECT USAGE (mildly funny thing): "Knock knock." — "Who's there?" — "Doctor." — "Doctor who?" — "You just said it!" — "Haha"

CORRECT USAGE (exceedingly funny thing): "[insert most things that @DRUNKHULK says on Twitter]" — "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

INCORRECT USAGE: "Sir. The rebels have been crushed!" — "Haha"

"Mehehe(hehehehehe)"

The "mildly evil" laugh. Are you about to do something that's wrong, and you just don't care? Are you talking smack about someone? Have you made plans to do something which may cause mild embarrassment, discomfort or itching to a third party? Have you just witnessed something unfortunate occurring to someone you don't like much? Then this is the laugh for you. The number of "hehe"s on the end may again be varied. All-caps and exclamation marks are not usually added to an instance of a "mehehehehe".

CORRECT USAGE: "I'm going to invite them over, but then I won't answer the door!" — "Mehehehehe"

INCORRECT USAGE: "A man walks into a bar and says 'ouch!'" — "Mehehehehe"

"Mwahaha(hahahahaha)"

The "moderately evil" laugh. Are you about to do something very wrong? Or perhaps you're joking about doing something wrong that you'd never actually do but think would be quite entertaining, if evil, if you did? Have you successfully got one up on someone you moderately-to-extremely dislike? Then this is the laugh for you, complete with variable-length "hahahaha" on the end. All-caps and exclamation marks may be adopted for this laugh if appropriate, depending on the evility of the situation. However, in extremely evil situations, consider upgrading to "Muhahahahahaha!"

CORRECT USAGE: "And then I told her 'by the way, your skirt is TOTALLY tucked into your panties'. She looked mortified!" — "Mwahahahaha!"

INCORRECT USAGE: "Aww, look at that cute little kitten!" — "Mwahahaha!"

Not to be confused with "Mwah", which is blowing a kiss.

"Muhahahahahahaha!"

The "very evil" laugh. You are an evil overlord, emperor or other figure who strikes fear into the hearts of your enemies. You are either about to do something terribly evil, have just done something terribly evil or take delight revelling in your evil-ness. Whatever the reason, this laugh is part of your arsenal of verbal weapons with which you may strike fear into the aforementioned hearts of your aforementioned enemies, along with sentences such as "I am afraid it is YOU who are mistaken" and "No, Mr Protagonist, I expect you to die". All-caps and exclamation marks are frequently applied for intensification purposes.

CORRECT USAGE: "MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

INCORRECT USAGE: "Oh look, your baby cousin is smiling for the first time!" — "MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

DISCLAIMER: I am not aware of any legitimate historical evidence which quotes Hitler as saying "MUHAHAHAHAHA!" But I bet he did.

"Bahahahahaha!"

The belly laugh. This is a hearty chuckle at something you find genuinely amusing. The kind of laugh that Father Christmas or a Viking would use whilst sitting in front of a roaring log fire. Works well with a smoker's cough.

CORRECT USAGE: "I want a bicycle like in E.T. so I can follow you through the skies, Santa!" — "Bahahahahaha!"

INCORRECT USAGE: "That duck just fell over." — "Bahahahahaha!"

"Gahahahahahahaha!"

The Brian Blessed laugh. I don't think anything else needs to be said about this one. Usually combined with all-caps and exclamation marks.

CORRECT USAGE: "CRY HAVOC! AND LET SLIP THE DOGS OF WAR! GAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

INCORRECT USAGE: "I posted a rude message on that forum." — "GAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

"Kyahahahahaha!"

The witch's laugh. An evil cackle if ever there was one. Doesn't really work when men do it. Even evil wizards don't tend to go "kyahahahahaha".

CORRECT USAGE: "And now, my pretties, into the pot you go! Kyahahahahaha!"

INCORRECT USAGE: "Do you remember that time my pants fell down?" — "Kyahahahahaha!"

So as you can see, there is a laugh for pretty much any situation. I trust this will be the last time I ever see you using acronyms to represent laughter and/or punctuation.

Please feel free to share any additional variants you may be aware of in the comments.

The post #oneaday, Day 186: How To Laugh On The Internet appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This rumor is a nice thought, so everyone has been retweeting it like crazy. Pity it's unlikely to be true, since the BTTF movies were set in 1985, 1955, 2015 and 1855. None of those are 25 years in the future from the film's original release date. The closest is 2015. But that's clearly 5 years away.

The interesting thing about this is how quickly it spread across the Internet without a shred of proof to back it up. No-one, at the time of writing, has posted a still from the film. Not even a bad Photoshop job. But somehow, everyone's just accepted this blindly.

I know that ultimately it doesn't really matter in this case, but isn't it a little scary that thousands, possibly millions of people across the world blindly stated this as fact without bothering to question it or research it?

Twitter is like a global game of Chinese Whispers sometimes. All it takes is one influential tweeter to post something contentious and the world will jump on it. Sometimes this is a good thing – the huge display of generosity from the public upon the death of Frank Sidebottom's creator Chris Sievey, for example, raising well over £20,000 for his funeral costs.

And sometimes this is a bad thing. How many times has Twitter been swept by false announcements of someone's death? It's a common joke now that any time someone's name comes up in the Trending Topics that they might have died.

What happens if something seriously untrue spreads this way though? Serious accusations about someone in high office? Reports of a disaster which never happened? Earth-shattering news which is just an outright lie?

It's an alarmist way of looking at things, of course. But the Internet has proved time and time again that it can make the most stupid shit into a star, or the most outlandish fact seem like reality.

So think before you RT, kids! Winners don't use Wikipedia!

The post #oneaday, Day 169: Wrong Again, Internet appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Screw this motion control crap – I just watched a press conference on the other side of the world while lying in bed with my phone.

That was a tweet from Alex Martin that I received a few minutes ago. And when I think about what I've done today, it's pretty clear that we are most definitely living in the future.

I started my day feeling a bit lonely as I hadn't seen any actual real people for a little while. So I went out to the coffee shop and took my netbook with me. While I was there, I gratuitously solicited questions for my Formspring account (which people were more than happy to furnish me with) and also dropped in on the freshly-created Squadron of Shame Squawkbox.

I ended up sitting in that coffee shop for about four hours, discussing things with people from all over the world – some deep and profound, other things less so. Then it was time to come home, because as part of my job as a News Editor for Kombo.com I was on the "home team" for the E3 coverage.

I'm gutted that I'm not actually at E3. But the experience I've had throughout the course of this evening is the next best thing. I've had IM windows open with people frantically telling me to cover stories. I've had the Squawkbox open to see the Squad's reactions. And I've had Twitter open to see everyone else's reactions. As sad as it sounds, despite sitting on my own in my study in front of the computer, I've not been alone tonight. There have been many people with me, all following the same things, watching the live streams on their computers. It's as if we were all in the audience together, making sly comments to one another.

Whenever Microsoft showed off the ability to watch, say, Netflix movies as an Xbox party, I always thought it seemed a bit pointless. But after sitting watching the E3 conferences with a group of friends who aren't even on the same continent let alone in the same room as me, I think I've reconsidered a little bit.

Obviously there's no substitute for real human interaction. But when the real thing isn't possible, the fact that we live in the future makes a very adequate substitute. So big love, kudos and respect to everyone who's helped make today a huge amount of fun, and I look forward to doing it all again very soon.

I have plenty of thoughts about what's been shown at E3 so far but I've been posting news articles all day and frankly I'm completely burnt out. So I'll save further thoughts until I'm a bit more awake.

Job interview tomorrow. Quite looking forward to it. It may not be the ideal job for my current situation, but it's a foot back on the ladder and has the potential to lead onto better things. So right now I'll take what I can get.

One thing's clear to me right now as it approaches 3AM where I'm sitting: I'm certainly feeling a lot more positive than I did when I woke up this morning. And it's thanks to you, Internet. Big love to you all.

The post #oneaday, Day 148: We Live In The Future appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I jest. Actually, no I don't, really.

I spent today doing supply teaching work for a local school. A local secondary school, to be as specific as I'm going to get in this post. As far as days at school go, I've had worse. Largely because I knew I was leaving at 3pm and that I was only there for a day, which meant that even if it was a nightmarish experience, I was going to escape pretty quickly anyway. This meant I could take a fairly relaxed attitude to the whole day and not get wound up by children who obviously do their very best to drive their teachers nuts at every opportunity. Water off a duck's back. It was a new feeling. I liked it.

What I didn't like so much was the discovery that Year 7 are into hardcore pornography, and aren't shy talking about it in rather loud voices in the middle of a music lesson.

Now, I may have led a somewhat sheltered existence being a rural, country village boy, but I don't think I even knew what "hardcore pornography" meant when I was in year 7. As I recall, most of my conversations in Year 7 revolved around whether the Sega Mega Drive or the Super NES was the best, and whether it was pronounced "Rye-oo" or "Ree-oo". Much like today, in fact. The most anything even vaguely sex-related came into conversation was if someone fancied someone else – and even then, it was never talked about in terms of sex, just in terms of an Alan Partridge-esque "ooh, I'd like to… kiss her". Oh, and there was the one time someone put a condom over a shower head in the boys' PE changing rooms and turned the water on. We were all delighted to discover that said prophylactic would reach all the way down to the floor if you kept filling it with water.

But no porn. At least, no-one talked about it, anyway.

Part of the reason for this shift in the, ahh, "interests" of 11-year olds is clearly due to the Internet. Most of the discussion that these kids were having (and ignoring requests to please shut up about it, I might add) revolved around the sites that they liked to visit. There was no shame in this discussion, no taking the piss out of each other that "urrgh, you're doing that so you can have a wank!" – just pure, unadulterated filth. From 11-year olds.

Now, all right, the area that the school in is, shall we say, not the best. But I was still pretty surprised and shocked to hear these sorts of things come out of the mouths of 11-year olds.

The regular teachers at this school seemingly weren't, however. "Miss says this class is sex-mad, sir. Sex-mad! Sex sex sex," one helpful young man informed me. I wasn't arguing.

The moral of this story, dear readers, is clear, then. If you're a parent, then for God's sake take an interest in what your kids are doing on the Internet. Talk to them about what is and isn't appropriate for them. By all means talk to them about offensive content and what they should do if they come across it (get your mind out of the gutter) but don't just leave them to their own devices. From that springs porn-addicted, shit-talking, ill-informed arseholes who will inevitably grow up to become /b/. And do you really want to create an entire generation of /b/?

The post #oneaday, Day 94: Year 7, Years Later appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The subject is virtual worlds – online spaces where tens, hundreds, thousands of people can log in and join a virtual community for one reason or another… it may be purely to socialise, it may be to battle monsters, it may be to have fun, it may even be to have sex. And I'm not talking about community or social networking websites here, as those are a different beast entirely. No, I'm talking about actual virtual worlds, where you can wander around as an avatar, explore the world, meet other people and interact with them in any of the ways described above.

There's literally hundreds of virtual worlds available for people to use nowadays, of many types – some are more "gamey", others are more "social", others still are focused on the less salubrious side of online interactions. Today I want to focus particularly on the virtual world of Second Life and its appeal to me, despite its many, many flaws.

I remember first hearing about Second Life while I was big into The Sims. My whole flat at university became obsessed with The Sims shortly after I built our first house, made virtual representations of all six of us in the flat, then realised that we didn't have enough money to buy beds to begin with, so the whole "family" slept in recliners. Over the years – yes, I was that guy – I bought most of the expansions and later moved on to The Sims 2.

I was, like many other fans of the series, extremely excited at the prospect of The Sims Online, offering the opportunity to have the same kind of fun, but with other people involved. It never made it over here to the UK – at least, not in any prominent way – so I never got the opportunity to try it. I forget exactly how I came across Second Life as a result of this, but it was something I stumbled across without hearing anything about it beforehand, and I thought that the concept sounded rather like The Sims Online, with players being able to design their own virtual person and "live" in a virtual world. As it happens, it has very little to do with The Sims Online, but I wasn't to know that at the time.

For the uninitiated, Second Life is an ambitious virtual world project by Linden Lab, offering "players" (and I use the term loosely, as it's really not a "game" as such… unless you choose to make it as such, which we'll discuss later) the opportunity to enter a world that is almost entirely user-generated. Buildings, textures, landmasses, interface features, animations, body parts, clothing – everything is created by the residents of the virtual world, and this is the thing that initially fascinated me. I couldn't comprehend the idea of being able to log into something where the content was so fluid, where there wasn't a static virtual world that was always the same every time you logged in, with monsters in the same place, prime "camping spots" and so on. So I signed up and signed in, not really knowing what to expect.

Second Life is a peculiar experience the first time you log in, especially if you're more used to aforementioned online games with static content, such as World of Warcraft. You quickly become used to the concept of "rezzing", which is the process whereby you enter a new location and you can see things downloading and appearing around you. This is disconcerting the first time it happens (and more than a little irritating if you find yourself stuck against a wall which hasn't appeared yet) but, like many things in the world, you become used to it the more it happens. Similarly, you become used to the fact that other residents' avatars also go through this rezzing process in front of you, so it's entirely possible that someone could appear in front of you with no hair and no face until the textures and shapes have downloaded. Rezzing accidents are the subject of many a good laugh amongst SL residents, but they are accepted as part and parcel of life in the virtual world. People more used to traditional MMOs will likely find it a complete turn-off though – at least until they accustom themselves to it.

Upon arrival in SL, the question on many residents' lips is "what on earth am I supposed to be doing?" And the answer is not simple. Explore, interact, build things, take photographs, join groups, play games, look at art, shop, fuck, roleplay, pretend to be a vampire… the list goes on for a mile, and all of these interactions are built using the basic engine of the Linden Lab-developed software, with extensions built, designed and scripted by residents of the world, just like everything else. People make in-world money either by paying out of their own pocket to buy "currency" – or by working a job, just like real life (albeit with MUCH better hours). It's always interesting to hear how seriously people take their SL jobs, whether they're a DJ in a club streaming their music through something like ShoutCast, a live musician, a virtual performer, a dancer, a greeter, a builder, an estate agent, a facility manger, a prostitute, a Game Master for roleplaying areas – again, the list of things goes on, and people have the opportunity to completely subsidise their virtual existence through virtual hard graft if they so desire.

Another thing that is almost immediately noticeable about SL is the sheer diversity of the avatars present. And we're not talking a set choice of races here, with arbitrary "body size" sliders. We're talking complete customisation. We're talking this situation here:

This wasn't anything particularly special happening – it was a discussion group where we sat down and had a civilised chat about a set topic. Like a real-world discussion group in fact.

And that's the thing with Second Life. It has this immensely odd (yet perfectly natural-feeling once you've been there a while) ability to combine the mundane and the absurd. Everyone is distinctive in Second Life – because you're not limited to hard-coded appearance options, you can be whoever you want to be. You don't even have to be human. I picked up an awesome Pac-Man avatar the other day that allows you to spawn dots and ghosts and turn any place you go into a game of 3D Pac-Man.

In fact, the question of not being human is one of the more interesting sides to Second Life that I haven't explored yet. It also happens to be the side that there's a lot of sordid assumptions about, particularly around the "furry" avatars. Yes, there are people who choose to represent themselves as furry animals and then have simulated sex whilst masturbating furiously at the sight of their interlocked pixels. But equally there are people who choose to represent themselves as furry animals just because they like them. On one memorable occasion I was spending some time at a hangout with my earliest friends in SL (who are still good personal friends to this day, I might add) and I was introduced to an immensely clever man from a university who was working on lots of exciting things to do with AI. My friend Lyndy, who introduced me, assumed that because I "knew about computers" I'd be able to chat to this guy no problem. However, he was explaining concepts that were way over my head… but they were interesting to hear. The really peculiar thing, though, was that he was dressed as a fox. Not a foxy lady, no, an actual fox. In a waistcoat. If anyone remembers a really old DOS point-and-click adventure called Inherit the Earth… the main character from that? Fox-in-a-waistcoat called Rif? That's about it.

Why do I remember that? I never even played it.

Second Life is flawed in many ways. I've talked about this many a time with Jennatar, and she suggested the notion that virtual worlds are a much younger technology than the Internet. Currently with virtual worlds, she says, we're at a similar sort of stage to the Internet was in in the early 90s in that there's a lot of stuff out there to explore, but navigation, user interfaces, efficiency and practicality haven't quite reached the level of stability you'd need to be completely "mainstream". This means that titles like Second Life are, at least for now, going to be "niche" interests. However, interestingly, the "niche" for Second Life perhaps isn't what you'd expect – an oft-quoted "statistic" is that of the many residents of the world, a significant majority of them are female and over 30. This is certainly true amongst my circle of online friends – I think there's one guy and about thirty gals on my friends list. This is also backed up by the fact that the "retail" sector in the world is very much female-dominated, with vast business empires and shopping malls devoted to female clothing, hair, animations and the like, with male products often relegated to the virtual equivalent of a dusty old cellar. One may argue that this may lead to a lot of males representing them as females, and of course this goes on – given the opportunity to live out a fantasy life, I'm sure there's plenty of men out there who wonder what it would be like to be a woman – and a hot one at that (no-one is ugly in SL unless you make a specific effort to do so!) – and give it a try.

There's a kind of implicit understanding amongst residents though – don't ask, don't tell. If someone doesn't want their "first life" brought into it, then you don't ask. If it's a female on the screen, then as far as you're concerned, it's a female you're dealing with. I actually don't have a problem with this. Perhaps it's because I'm not spending my time going around having sex with these people, but it certainly doesn't bother me – if they choose to represent themselves in that way, for whatever reason that might be, then that's their business.

Despite its many flaws and its perceived "niche" interest, I have a lot of time for Second Life. It's an experience that is very much made by the people you interact with. Without people to meet, talk to and interact with you're relying on stumbling across interesting content solo – and while there is plenty of interesting stuff to do by yourself, it's always better to share with other people. Much like real life, in fact.

I'll certainly be very interested to see how virtual worlds develop over the years. Will Second Life remain in its pioneering position of almost entirely user-generated content? Will it be overtaken by something else? Who knows. I do know that I have made some genuinely close friends in its strange world, many of whom I am unlikely to ever meet face-to-face. And I'm fine with that. By having their "virtual" face in front of me on the screen – even if it's nothing like their real-life face – I still feel like I "know" them better than people I interact with on the Internet in less direct ways. Perhaps "know" is the wrong word – it's difficult to describe, but knowing someone's avatar feels a lot more "physical" (for want of a better word) somehow than a username on a page of text.

It's not an experience for everyone by any means. It would bore the pants off someone expecting to play an exciting game, because it's not a game. But as a means for virtual social interaction, it's an interesting experiment… one that still has a long way to go, but also has an incredible amount of potential.

I blog about my experiences in the world in more detail here. I post my photos from the world here. Feel free to check them out if you're the slightest bit interested.

The post On Virtual Worlds appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

PMOG stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game and I guess it's one of those Web 2.0 thingies that you always hear people rabbiting on about. I was intrigued by the title, to be honest, so I decided to check it out.

PMOG takes the form of a Firefox extension that you install and it does all kinds of interesting things while you're just going about your normal daily life on the Web. Firstly, you gain Datapoints for browsing websites. Secondly, players sometimes leave items on webpages including Crates, which can contain Datapoints, Mines, which cause players to lose Datapoints (and which cause Firefox to wobble around like it's having a spaz attack), Portals, which link to another website with only a little hint about what it might be (though there are NSFW tags on ones which… well… aren't) and some other bits and pieces.

The great thing is, these things only pop up if you're running the PMOG toolbar, so you can make it leave you alone whenever you like. But then you'll miss out on the mysterious portal which has appeared on your Facebook page, linking you to a video of, I don't know, some dancing kittens or something.

It's an interesting idea and it's already made me check out a number of sites I'd heard of but never got around to investigating in any great detail.

Crap. As if I need another excuse to waste time on the Web.

The post Weirdness of the Web: PMOG appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.