#oneaday Day 231: Memories of Me: First Days at University

A while back, I talked about how when I think back on what the happiest times of my life might have been, I am inexorably drawn to two specific and closely related periods: my time at sixth form, and my time at university. Having previously talked about the former, I'd like to talk a bit about the latter today.

As always, I have almost certainly written about this before, but I don't care. Let's face it, you're almost certainly not going back through the archives to read nearly three thousand posts just to see if I've previously said these things before, and I wouldn't expect you to. So just, y'know, indulge me, even if any of this sounds familiar.

As my time in sixth form came to a close, I was excited but also terrified to go to university. I was going to a university far away from everyone I had ever known, and I didn't know how or if I was going to be able to cope with that. My mind filled with all manner of irrational anxieties, often emphasising things that I really didn't need to think about — like if I should take the opportunity to rebrand myself with a cool nickname when introducing myself to people — but as the big day ticked ever closer, I started to feel a little more at ease about things.

I spent my first year at university, as do many people, in a Halls of Residence. For those who have never been to university, this is basically like an old people's home, but for students. You have your own room plus some communal areas; the exact facilities and how much you are "waited on" (if at all) varies quite a bit from halls to halls, even within the same university. The halls I was going into, known as Hartley Grove, were self-catered, because both my parents and I agreed that it would probably be a good idea to learn how to be self-sufficient in a reasonably safe environment, and they were a new build, meaning (I think) our year was the first to stay in them.

And they were nice! Our rooms were a decent size, and they were en-suite, meaning we each had our own shower and toilet, which was nice. There was enough room for what little stuff I had to my name at that point in my life, a nice desk with space for my computer and hi-fi, room to put a small television to play games consoles on and a relatively cavernous wardrobe to store clothes in. It didn't take long for my room to feel like "home".

I started university in a slightly strange way compared to some of my peers in that I went there a week early to attend a "pre-term" orchestral course with the university symphony orchestra. Over the course of a week, we learned how to play movements from two symphonies — the first movement of Beethoven's 7th and the last movement of Shostakovich's 5th, as I recall — with the intention of performing them both for an audience of our tearful parents at the end of said week.

Because this course was prior to the regular term starting, those of us in halls (which was most of us) weren't able to immediately move all our stuff in to our new homes for the next year, so we had to travel light and take up residence in what was probably the grottiest halls in all of Southampton: a crusty old tower block known as Stoneham which, although shit, we all came to regard with some fondness by the end of the week. (It has since been knocked down; I'm not entirely sure when, but I was a bit sad to learn it's no longer there.)

Basically what we'd do was spend the day in Stoneham's large dining hall area rehearsing, then clear out, have dinner and then be free to do whatever in the evening. Sometimes we'd hang out, sometimes we'd investigate the local nightlife that was easily accessible within walking distance (not much) or a bus ride away — though of course, very few of us knew Southampton well enough at this point to know where was worth going, and where would get you stabbed.

Initially, I found my worst fears coming true as I wasn't sure how to approach new people and make friends with them. But, to my credit, one of my proudest moments as a human being came when I finally plucked up the courage to talk to someone in the lift that was taking us up to our rooms. Her name was Cat, and she was kind enough to give me the time of day. I don't know if she recognised I was struggling, but she became a close friend surprisingly quickly, and I was extremely glad that I at least had someone I could "rely on" during that initial week.

Through Cat, I met several other people — she was a lot more affable than me, but most folks were happy to include me in conversations if I sort of tagged along — and they all became good friends, too. It helped that most of us were going to go on to study music at Southampton for the next three years — though I was doing a split English and Music degree — so we had something in common. But it was still interesting to note how different we all were from one another.

The pre-term course came and went; our performance of both symphony movements went really well, and I ended up having a great time. By the time the course was over, we were able to move into our "forever homes" (for the next year, anyway) — it was still a few days earlier than most, but it gave us a chance to get properly settled, and to minimise the number of trips our parents had to make with cars full of crap.

My flat in Hartley Grove had six rooms. I was the first to arrive by several days, as expected, so by the time my flatmates started arriving, I was already quite comfortable and settled — to such a degree that when one particular flatmate named Chloe came in for the first time, she was greeted by me cooking a bacon sandwich in my dressing gown. She confided to me later that she thought I was a mature student and not, in fact, an idiotic 18 year old whose entire cooking repertoire consisted of bacon sandwiches and toast.

My flat eventually filled to capacity. I was in room number A333. To one side of me at the end of the corridor was the aforementioned Chloe; my other neighbour was the frankly gorgeous Beki, who sadly dropped out partway through her first year. Our mutual friend Katie replaced her in short order; previously, she had lived in another flat with foreign students that weren't particularly sociable, so she was glad to be among friends at last.

Further down the corridor on my side was Chris, a science student who we initially assumed to be one of the most stereotypical science nerds imaginable, but who came to be a close friend and confidant to all of us. On the opposite side was Sam, who had, for some reason, been the subject of a newspaper article about him "not studying Geography due to any burning love for the subject", and who became one of my best friends during my time at university and beyond, and Steph, a psychology student who, again, formed an important part of our overall "group".

The majority of the time, it was me, Chris, Sam and Steph in the flat. Beki left after not very long, as previously noted, and Chloe was an absolute socialite, to such a degree that she barely slept in her own room and often brought strange and interesting men back to our flat. Our collective favourite of these was probably "Raf", a charming and pretty chilled out gent who, it occurs to me now, I really don't know anything else about.

We enjoyed socialising as a flat, particularly if said socialisation involved going to Chamberlain Bar, our nearest drinking establishment. Hartley Grove didn't have its own bar, but Chamberlain was attached to one of the other nearby halls, so it was open for all of us to make use of, and we did. Several of us even spent a few nights working there; we didn't get paid in anything other than beer tokens, but it was a good experience.

Chamberlain Bar was pretty shit, but it was ours. All of us from the flat had a certain degree of awkwardness to us, so we didn't really interact with people from outside our group much, and took to referring to other people by nicknames based on their most prominent characteristics. The one that sticks in my mind was a young lady known only to us as Breast Girl; a conventionally attractive and moderately well-endowed first year who seemed to hang out at Chamberlain Bar almost as much as us. We never exchanged a single word, though I believe Steph, at one point, learned what her actual name was.

Chamberlain Bar occasionally held special events. Two of these stick in my mind: firstly, a '70s night, where we all went around the local charity shops and party stores to find the most hideous clothing and wigs we could; and secondly, a "Hawaiian" night, where all they did was turn the heating up full, and where our flat were the only people who came in fancy dress.

Chamberlain Bar's specialism was shit cocktails. The two we spent the most time drinking were the Juicy Lucy (pint glass containing a shot of vodka, a shot of blue curacao, a double shot of Taboo, then topped up with equal parts lemonade and orange juice) and the Passion Wagon (a shot of Passoa topped up with a bottle of Reef, possibly the laziest cocktail ever invented). I don't know exactly where Juicy Lucy originated, but we got the impression it was a "Southampton" thing; notoriously shit but popular watering hole Clowns and its companion nightclub Jesters would serve them by the 4-pint jug for less than a tenner, making them a great way to get absolutely off your fucking face for not very much money.

So yeah. You can hopefully see how all this was a good time. I will hold that there for now, since I've rambled on for nearly 2,000 words and I haven't even started talking about my actual time at university yet, let alone some of the funnier happenings that transpired during just that first year.

I really miss those magical first few weeks, though, and would give anything to feel that way again. But with each passing day, they feel further and further away to an exponential degree. At least I'll always have the good memories of them.

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#oneaday Day 225: The Secret Diary of Pete Davison, Age 43 3/4

Hello. Sorry about yesterday, I just had a bit of an internal explosion of existential dread and needed to express all that, although I was gratified to note that precisely no-one reached out to me to see if I was all right. Not that I'm particularly surprised or was expecting anyone to reach out and see if I was all right, because I'm under no illusions that anyone other than me is reading this blog, but still, y'know. Sometimes it's nice to know someone is looking out for you, and keeping an eye on the means you've been using to express the things you find difficult to say out loud for nearly 20 years.

But like I say, absolutely not blaming anyone. Really, I honestly mean that, no sarcasm. I posted yesterday's screed not because I particularly needed anyone to tell me things are going to be all right — and not just because I'd know they're lying — but because sometimes it just helps to get negative feelings out of your head and onto a page. It doesn't necessarily help you come to any conclusions about how to deal with them, but sometimes simply expressing them is all you need.

This, honestly, was the reason I kept a diary for much of my teenage years. I've talked a bit about this before, as with most subjects on this blog, but it sprung to mind today as I contemplate precisely why I'm still doing this: why I'm typing words into the virtual void for no-one to read, and why I'm still finding it a worthwhile exercise to do so.

I forget exactly what age I was when I started keeping a diary. I'd estimate maybe around 13 or 14 or so. I had recently read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, which I believe my mother had recommended to me as "worth reading" considering the age I was. I absolutely adored that book and its follow-up The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, and am long overdue a re-read of it all. I recognised that Adrian was a bit of a twat — and this only gets worse in the later installments as he moves into his adult life — but I also recognised parts of myself in him.

So I decided to do as he did, and start a diary. While I forget how old I was when I eventually started, I do remember the circumstances. We had been on a visit to, of all places, the National Stone Centre in Derbyshire, and had gone along with, if I remember rightly, my parents' friends Margaret and Mick. This detail isn't particularly important, but it adds a nugget of context, which was how I was young enough to still go along on visits like that to My Parents' Friends and not just be left at home.

Anyway, the reason I specifically remember that we went to visit the National Stone Centre is because while we were there, I ended up purchasing (or having purchased for me) a lovely hardback journal. It had nice quality paper, it had really nice material on the cover and binding, it was just a lovely book. My parents had encouraged me to use it as a scrapbook of sorts — a book for keepsakes from trips such as the one we'd just been on, as dull as it might have been. And so I did, for a while.

Then, one day, after I had not used it for the above purpose for quite some time (primarily due to having not really done anything worth scrapbooking) I thought that I might start using it to write down… things. I didn't have anything particularly specific in mind when I first started writing in it, I just felt like the experience of writing diary entries had seemed valuable to Adrian Mole in the books I loved so much, and thus I decided to give it a go for myself.

It didn't take long before I started using that diary to express things I found difficult to talk about "out loud", as it were, primarily relating to matters of emotions and feelings towards other people. As noted in my tales of The Rough Book, as a hormonal teenager I fell in love with a lot of girls over the course of my time at secondary school. And I found it difficult enough to admit my feelings about all this to my closest friends at the time, let alone my family. So I told the diary.

I told the diary a lot of things. One of my favourite things to do in the diary was to have "fantasy conversations", where I'd imagine how, in an ideal world, my confessing of my feelings to whatever the object of my affections was that week might go. I'd write these non-existent interactions (because they never actually happened) as a script, because I'd been enjoying looking at plays during English lessons at school, and, later in my school career, had parts in our productions of The Wizard of Oz and Twelfth Night.

I realise this might sound a bit creepy, and it probably is. But what you have to understand is, as an autistic teenager who didn't know he was autistic, social interactions, particularly with someone for whom you didn't really know where you stood and lacked the self-confidence to ever believe they might be interested in you, were very difficult. I wrote those "conversations" down because I knew I'd never be able to pull them off in reality. They were a comforting fiction, in a way; they allowed me to indulge my imagination and think about something which I believed to be impossible in reality.

There was one exception, as I recall. On one of the numerous occasions I had plucked up the courage to declare to my friends that I fancied a girl named Nikki, my friends practically forced me to tell her how I felt. They got me and her out onto the school field, essentially pushed us together and left me to get onto it. And, to my credit, I successfully managed to confess my feelings to Nikki, who, bless her heart, at least let me down exceedingly gently and pleasantly.

That evening, I decided to "analyse" the situation. I wrote a script based on what had actually happened. I drew diagrams, with a little picture of a lightbulb representing how much I was blushing through the whole experience. I attempted to determine if there was anything I might have been able to do differently and, of course, came up short; no means no, as it were, and that is something I have always respected.

As that lovely little journal started to fill up with my innermost feelings, I started to become uneasy. I'd taken to placing it in a position on the desk in my bedroom where it was inconspicuous and unlikely to be picked up and read by someone coming in, but something in the back of my mind was still gnawing away at me, worrying that my Mum or Dad would pick it up, read it all and… well, take the piss, frankly, because there was a lot in there that one could probably take the piss about.

So one day I snapped. I took the journal and I threw it away. I took care not to throw it away in the kitchen bin, where it might have been noticed, but rather to throw it away in the outside bin, concealed in a bag beneath a large black bag of rubbish: somewhere no-one would even think to consider taking it out and rifling through it.

I regret that, now. I think it would be interesting to go back and look over those journal entries my teenage self made, as embarrassing and weird as some of them might have been. I don't know that it would have been helpful to do so, but thinking back, my school days (or, specifically, my time at secondary school and sixth form) are a time in my life I look back on with great fondness, where I was, retrospectively, very happy and satisfied with my lot in life, even if I had very little in the way of luck with women.

Thinking back on that diary is one of the reasons I've kept this blog around for so long. There's things I look back on that I'm not so proud of having written, and there's things I'm glad I wrote about. The one constant is that this blog is completely, honestly, unabashedly me, and it always will be.

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#oneaday Day 215: Memories of Me: The Rough Book

Life changed for me and my friend Ed in secondary school when we discovered that the school library would sell you a new, blank exercise book in the colour of your choice for something like 30p. Ostensibly the option was there for those who had lost their exercise books and were replacing them at their own expense (the school would provide new ones for free when old ones were full, they weren't that stingy) but the librarian, Mrs Miller, didn't ask too many questions.

Mrs Miller was an interesting character, actually. As is often the case for school librarians, she developed something of a reputation for being a stickler for the rules and wanting to ensure everyone was silent at all times in the library. Of course, much of this was exaggerated by playground gossip, and Mrs Miller was, in fact, a thoroughly lovely person with a fun, dry sense of humour, and she was much more willing to demonstrate this side of herself to those who were further up the school.

But I digress. The important thing is that Mrs Miller would sell you a new exercise book for pocket change, and this meant you could use that book for whatever you pleased. Ed and I took to branding these quasi-illicit exercise books our "Rough Books", and they were used for all manner of things — primarily doodling, playing silly games and comic strips. It was in Rough Books that we established several fixtures of our teenage sense of humour, including:

The German Stickmen. A four-frame comic in which two German stickmen would get into an argument over something stupid, culminating in them going "Nein!" "Ja!" repeatedly at one another until one of them bellowed "ACHTUNG!" (like in Wolfenstein 3-D, you know) and inflicted some form of horrible (usually explosive) violence on the other. My favourite ran "Ich bin Fred." "Nein, du bist James." "Nein!" "Ja!" "Nein!" "Ja!" "ACHTUNG!" (nuclear explosion).
The X-35 Plasma Gun. Actually a creation of our mutual friend Daniel, the X-35 Plasma Gun didn't have a fixed form, but there was one constant in all its depictions: it was a gun one would hold with a pistol grip, but which carried a comedically large variety of attachments atop it, including not just additional weaponry such as bazookas and '50s-style laser guns, but also practical functions such as a washing machine and full-size bath. I will have to draw one of these again someday to truly get across what I mean, because I feel that description doesn't really do the X-35 Plasma Gun justice.
Adverts for games that we were making with Klik and Play. One day I acquired the budget release of Clickteam's Klik and Play, and thus began a new obsession of us trying to make our own games. We only ever finished one — Pie Eater's Destiny, a game that featured idealised versions of me and my friends (actually ripped and recoloured Contra III sprites) battling giant digitised heads of our classmates in space. But that didn't stop us from drawing fake adverts for the many, many half-finished games we made that are now, sadly, almost definitely lost to time.
Edlock Holmes and Watson. I talked about this in my video on The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, but the gist is this: Ed and I were obsessed with The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, so we made a comic that cast us in the role of "Holmes and Watson", and sent our virtual selves on various comedic adventures. There's probably an entire post of Edlock Holmes lore in me at some point, but that will have to do for now.

One of the most significant features of multiple Rough Books, though, was My Friends Hijack the Middle Pages and Write The Name of the Girl I Fancied That Week in Giant Letters. I feel the title for this is probably self-explanatory, but let me elaborate.

At school, I fell in love with a lot of girls, often for the most mundane reasons, like them acknowledging my existence, holding a conversation with me or allowing me to work in a group with them in class without being physically repulsed by my presence. I was too much of a socially awkward (retrospectively: autistic) teen to ever be able to express my feelings adequately to any of these girls, mind you, and thus most of my teenage years were spent feeling like a doomed poet, forever to suffer unrequited love from afar.

I secretly quite enjoyed the feeling of "being in love", though, regardless of whether or not anything actually happened. There was something about that teenage "butterflies in the stomach" feeling which was oddly… addictive, almost, and so, over time, I would flit from girl to girl, deciding that this time, she was absolutely the one for me, despite in most cases me not actually knowing that much about her at all, because that would involve talking to her and not making a complete idiot of myself, which my brain successfully convinced me on a daily basis was a complete impossibility.

Any time I fancied someone new, I would keep it quiet for a while, but after some time the feelings inside me would "boil over" to such a point that I had to admit it to one of my friends, even though I knew they would almost certainly take the piss out of me for it. And one of the ways they took the piss was getting hold of my Rough Book, then performing the sacred art of My Friends Hijack the Middle Pages and Write The Name of the Girl I Fancied That Week in Giant Letters.

The ornateness of how the name would be written varied from one occasion to another. Sometimes it would be in beautifully crafted, pencilled block letters. Sometimes it would be scrawled in multiple colours of felt-tipped pens. On one particularly memorable occasion, my Rough Book was returned to me with the name "NIKKI" (my affections returned to Nikki on multiple occasions; she was, to my teenage eyes and hormones, feminine perfection and, retrospectively, possibly the source of a mild tights fetish) beautifully painted in watercolours, which I feel was rather more grandiosity than the situation warranted, but such was the nature of my curious little friendship group.

I say they did this to take the piss. In their own way, I think they were showing a funny kind of "support" for my feelings. They knew that I was extremely unlikely to ever actually go up to any of these girls and ask them out, so they did what they could to make my feelings feel… "special". Sometimes they even went out of their way to try and put me in a situation with the girl in question — situations I would tend to squander due to my social ineptitude — and I don't think every one of those was an attempt to embarrass me in a malicious way.

Some of them absolutely were, mind. I have vivid memories of our class having been studying Romeo and Juliet in class, learning the expression "taking one's maidenhead" and numerous puns surrounding that phrase as euphemisms for taking a young lady's virginity. One lunchtime, one member of our class — Luke, a peripheral member of our friendship group at best — bellowed at the top of his voice "PETE WANTS TO CHOP DANIELLE'S HEAD OFF" while the Danielle in question (who I was, of course, exceedingly attracted to at the time and would have concurred privately with Luke's assessment had I not considered it a little disrespectful to contemplate the status of others' maidenheads) was most certainly well within earshot.

Thankfully, Danielle was cool, and someone I counted as an actual friend as well as someone I fancied, so on that occasion I actually successfully plucked up the courage to talk to her about it, apologise for Luke's outburst and successfully block myself off from ever being able to really admit I liked her by, in effect, friendzoning myself. (I also knew that she was, at the time, already going out with someone a bit older than her, and that fact intimidated me somewhat, as I did not want to end up on the receiving end of a beating from "Carmine", I believe his name was. Why do I remember this shit?)

Anyway. I got off the point there a bit, but I hope you enjoyed my memories of the Rough Book. I wish I still had some of them. I have a few bits of miscellanea from my teenage years, but sadly the Rough Books are not among them. By their nature, they were a transient form of media, doomed to end up in the bin so my parents and teachers didn't find them. But while they lasted they were a wonderful part of my secondary school days, and, as odd as it may sound, a big reason why I mostly look back on those days with fondness.

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#oneaday Day 211: Things that don't exist any more

I was watching a Game Grumps episode where they were playing Supermarket Simulator earlier, and, as is often the case with that series, discussion got well and truly off the topic of the game and onto other matters.

One of the subjects they talked about was "secret tracks" on CDs. The existence of these used to be common knowledge, but with digital music having been A Thing for so long now, it was pretty much necessary for Dan to explain what one of these actually was.

I doubt anyone reading this is young enough to not know what a secret track on a CD is, but on the off-chance you are (or if you've just forgotten), it's where the last track on the CD would end, but the CD would keep playing, often for 10-15 minutes of complete silence, before cutting in with an unexpected new song that wasn't on its own individual track.

You could generally identify a CD with a secret track by if its last song was more than 10 minutes long, though there were, of course, some bands who really did close out their album with 10+ minute prog rock-style epics. There were also, apparently, some bands who found ways to hide secret songs in the "pregap" before track 1, allowing you to "rewind" from the beginning of the CD and find something new. This is one thing I actually never knew existed, as I never came across any in my time listening to CDs — but, like secret tracks in general, they are a thing of the past.

Most streaming versions of albums have the "secret tracks" as a separate, discrete track, thereby making them no longer secret. This also eliminates the "surprise" element, where the CD ends but you're in the middle of doing something (typically homework, essays and suchlike at the time I was listening to CDs rather than digital music) and, ten minutes later, you get suddenly shocked by the appearance of a piece of music you weren't expecting.

It's a little thing, but it's a bit sad to think that such a phenomenon no longer exists. And the episode went on to describe some other things that don't really happen all that much any more, either — like getting together with pals and playing a split-screen game of something like GoldenEye.

Local multiplayer games still exist, of course, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of you reading this haven't engaged in one for quite some time — and if you have, you certainly don't do so regularly.

While I was at university, we had a definite routine. Get up, go to lectures (probably), get some lunch at the student union, head back to my friend Tim's house, where we'd drink and play N64 games, typically Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye or, later, Perfect Dark.

It's funny to think back on this time as I type this across the from from my 55-inch widescreen wall-mounted 4K television, because we were almost certainly playing these games on a CRT that was no bigger than 20 inches, likely even smaller. I remember getting (if I remember rightly) a 26-inch TV from a local second-hand store and being blown away by how enormous it was. (It was also a nightmare to dispose of when it finally gave up the ghost; I ended up illegally leaving it in the bottom of a dumpster outside the block of flats where I lived at the time. No-one ever traced it back to me, so I got away with it.)

These things may seem like little nothings, but I'm saddened to lose them. Of course, one can still experience secret tracks on CDs that still exist — and I'm sure some artists still releasing stuff on CD are still sneaking in secret tracks — but it's no longer something that's just part of regular mainstream popular culture. And one can still get friends over to play split-screen games on the Switch in particular — although given my experiences in recent years, good luck getting anyone to ever commit to anything, even a simple evening of gaming, less than 8 months in advance.

Those of us prone to nostalgia are that way not just because we pine for our younger days, when life seemed simpler and our minds and bodies were perhaps in better shape, but because there were things that existed back then that pretty much… aren't a thing any more. And so, we do our best to remember those things, and why we liked them. And now and again, we get a reminder of something like secret tracks on CDs, and it prompts some fond memories. (And, in some cases, a sudden desire to start collecting CDs again, I'm sure. I have remained mostly immune to this to date… though I will admit to being tempted on occasion!)

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#oneaday Day 139: Non-specific ramblings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 129: Current holiday

We're on holiday! After a three hour drive earlier today — which honestly already feels like a lifetime ago — we are safely ensconced in our accommodation at Center Parcs.

The last few times we've been, we've stayed in the apartments that are near the main plaza of shops and restaurants, but this year it was only a little extra to get a two-bedroom lodge in the woods, so we've gone for that as a little extra added luxury. It's lovely having lots of space. Indeed, there's an entire (bed)room we probably won't use at all; presently, it's where I dumped my suitcase so it wouldn't clutter our bedroom.

We haven't done very much today. It's been nice to just relax with no worries or commitment to anything, so we've been enjoying that today. We had some nice dinner bought from the shop and an amazing cake, then the rest of the evening has been spent lounging, looking at the wildlife while the light was still present, then watching some TV (old school broadcast style!) and playing some video games.

Tomorrow we're likely going to hit the pool… sorry, the "Subtropical Swimming Paradise", and from there, who knows? We have some idle intentions of maybe going to the gym, playing some pool and going bowling, but we're just going to take each day as it comes and decide according to what we feel like.

The Lodge brings back some nice memories. When I came to Center Parcs as a teen with my family and some friends, we always stayed in a lodge (or a "villa" as they were known then) and while some things have changed — the appliances are more up to date and the TV is, of course, a wall-mounted flatscreen instead of a hulking great CRT — but aside from that, the layout feels comfortably familiar.

It's bringing back fond memories of my friend Ed attempting to explain the appeal of Wolfenstein 3-D to my parents over breakfast — as I recall, his 12 year old self arguing that you "just don't notice" the bloody violence after playing a whole didn't go down too well.

It's bringing back fond memories of my friend Craig and I watching MTV and realising that we both liked quite a bit broader a spectrum of music than the indie rock that was fashionable at the time — after that holiday, I remember going out and buying Madonna and Savage Garden albums on the strength of the tunes we liked on the TV.

And it's bringing back fond memories of a trip when I was young enough for my brother to still be living at home with us, and him bringing his friend Alex along. My enduring memory of that pairing was Alex, who thought he was God's gift to women, causing two girls to fall off their bikes by saying a distinctly Leslie Phillips-style "hell-O!" as they passed by.

A lot of good memories here, then, from both the recent and distant past. It'll be good to add a few more to the mix this year.

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#oneaday Day 121: Tedious Nostalgia

I'm all for nostalgia — hell, most of my online presence is built around it these days — but I'm becoming increasingly tired of social media accounts that are nothing but what I'm going to call "nostalgia fluff". What I mean by this is that they post something that effectively says "This is a thing that existed." and then don't provide any sort of additional commentary or context. To put it another way, they are indulging in the exact behaviour depicted in this excellent video from the one and only Mr Biffo of Digitiser:

There's a simple explanation for this, of course: it's engagement bait, as is 90% of anything on any social media platform these days. By posting "Count Duckula is a cartoon series that was once on television", the poster is counting on people showing up in the replies by the score to say "Wow! I remember this!" and "SO NOSTALGIC!" and suchlike.

Trouble is, all of that is completely fucking meaningless. It rarely starts a meaningful discussion, and the person who posted the thing in the first place certainly isn't interested in leading a discussion, otherwise they would have posted something more substantial in the first place. So why do it at all?

Number go up, of course. Those sweet likes and shares. The cynical would note that many engagement bait accounts aim to attract large numbers of views, comments and shares so they can then sell on the account to someone else, but this doesn't always happen. Some people really are convinced that their context and commentary-free acknowledgements that something indeed existed at some indeterminate point in the past are "good content". Some of these people will even get snippy if someone "steals" their "content", by which I mean posting something about the same thing they posted.

There's a difference between this sort of thing and what I do. When I write an article or make a video about something, I'm not doing so just to go "this existed, look how knowledgeable I am for knowing this thing existed". Rather, I do so for one of two reasons: one, to introduce the thing to other people, and that requires some additional context and commentary to explain why the thing is noteworthy; and two, to share my personal recollections of the thing in question, which often ties in with the first point.

That takes effort, though. That requires researching beyond a simple glance at Wikipedia to make sure you got the date right. That requires actual knowledge and experience, and a willingness to do something beyond the bare minimum to cater to the lowest common denominator online.

I often find myself annoyed at the perception that you "shouldn't" post anything too long or in-depth online, "because people won't bother to read/watch it". This, to me, just leads to a situation where you are encouraging something undesirable. By assuming everyone is as stupid as an attention-deficit social media addict who can't read more than a paragraph without wanting to Alt-Tab into Roblox, we just make that the norm. And that's what these low-effort nostalgia engagement bait accounts are doing: making the bare minimum the norm.

I find the idea that you should make things as short as possible "because people will click off within 3 seconds" or whatever kind of insulting. It's insulting to the people who don't click off within 3 seconds to assume that everyone's attention span is as addled as the worst people on the Internet, and it's insulting to me to suggest that if the thing I've done isn't "interesting" within 3 seconds it has no value. So far as I'm concerned, if someone is incapable of reading more than a paragraph of text or digesting a video that is more than 30 seconds long, I don't really want them looking at my stuff anyway. It's not for them.

That may sound gatekeepery but honestly I don't give a shit any more. I hate how much the Internet has become a race to the bottom, and I fear it's reached a point where it is actively harmful to both community and culture.

So I will keep going into things in as much depth as I damn well please, and if you don't have the attention span to deal with it, that is 100% your problem.

(I know none of you reading this fall into this category, of course. Keep being excellent.)

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#oneaday Day 30: A Milestone?

Is 30 days a milestone? I guess you can look at it that way, depending on if you consider nice round numbers a milestone. You can also look at 30 days as "about a month", too, so I guess it's significant from that respect. It's a long way off the 2,541 daily posts from last time around, of course, but that all started with baby steps, too. And then it just kept going.

Now and again I like to hit the "Random Post" button on this site to jump to one of the myriad posts in the archives. I often find myself surprised how often it throws up the same things, given how many of them there are, but computerised randomisation is, as we hopefully all know by now, imperfect.

That gives me an idea for today's post. I'll hit Random a few times and see what I think of what shows up. Are you ready? Then let's begin.

First up, Day 693 from first time around, and a post named Endings. In it, I contemplated the fact that I had just finished L.A. Noire, a game that I enjoyed a lot at the time but which I have forgotten almost everything about since. I pontificated on particularly effective endings that had stuck with me over the years — particularly downer endings. And Conker's Bad Fur Day was one that stuck with me, due to it coming after all the foul-mouthed ridiculousness that had come before.

I still agree with this. Conker's Bad Fur Day ends absolutely perfectly. It's a huge bummer in a lot of ways, of course, what with our hero losing his true love, but it also provides something of a sense of "reality catching up with him". The strange journey that Conker goes on over the course of Conker's Bad Fur Day starts silly and cartoonish, but gets darker and darker as you progress through things. By the last few sequences in the game, things are still silly, but there's a definite sobering undercurrent. The World War II-inspired sequence may have you fighting against teddy bears, but it's still World War II, and a lot of people get hurt and die.

The ending of Conker's Bad Fur Day is as much a signal to the player as it is to Conker. "Wake up," it says. "The time for play is over. Now it's time to get back to the grim reality of life." Sobering, to be sure.

Next up, post 850 from first time around, entitled Diablolical [sic]. In it, I lay out how I'd been having a good time with the then-newly released Diablo III, and that I didn't have as much of a problem with it being "always online" as the rest of the Internet seemed to. And that's because I recognised that Diablo III, far more than its predecessors, was actually an MMO. A well-disguised one, yes, but still an MMO.

I actually stand by this assessment, though my opinion on Diablo III itself has soured somewhat for a variety of reasons. Firstly, after playing it a bunch, I realised that its setting and unrelenting grimness was just plain boring to me. The world of Diablo is a world in which there is no hope; one in which you defeat the Big Bad of the hour and there's inevitably an even bigger bad lurking just around the corner. And once you've beaten all the Big Bads, they all come back, because that's what Big Bads do in Diablo-land.

Secondly, it's hard to get the various revelations about working conditions at Blizzard Entertainment out of my head. I'm not about to go on a big crusade about it or anything, but given that the Diablo series is already one I'd been feeling a bit "ehhh" about since the very beginning, knowing that some of the staff at the developer are shitheads makes it a lot easier to just go "fuck it" and never play anything from them again… particularly as all of their last few releases have some combination of loot boxes, battle passes or predatory "free-to-play" monetisation. So yeah, fuck Blizzard and fuck Diablo. Diablo III is still an MMO, though.

Next up, an earlier post: number 303, from 2010, in which I ponder the nature of Panic Stations. Specifically, through some exceedingly heavy-handed masking, I outline the things that cause me a sense of irrational anxiety, even when I know they're not anything really worth getting het up about. 2010 was before I'd really sought any sort of help for mental health, and well before I'd been diagnosed with either anxiety or Asperger's, but I still recognised anxious feelings in myself — and my brain's tendency to blow things out of proportion.

This post is one I should probably return to now and again to remind myself not to get so wound up about stupid things.

Finally for today, an even earlier post from 2010: number 57, Look into the Eyes, in which I talk about the Derren Brown show my ex-wife (who was, at that point, just my wife) and I had been to see at the Mayflower theatre in Southampton. I really enjoyed that show, and both of us had a lot of time for Derren Brown. I feel like we don't see much of him these days; I wonder what happened to him? Looking on Wikipedia, it seems he's still active, but I guess the changing nature of how we look at media these days makes him less visible — I don't watch "TV" any more, for example, and that tended to be where I saw him the most.

All right, that's enough looking back for one day. My cat has just been sick and the other cat is eating it. I think that's as good a cue as any to just go to bed.

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2321: Treading the Boards

0321_001

Watching popular British topical panel show Mock the Week, which has an inexplicably large number of episodes available on Netflix — peculiar to me due to the topical, timely nature of it, not because of any particular lack of quality — reminds me somewhat of one of my favourite activities at university: participating in the university Theatre Group.

We did all manner of things as part of the Theatre Group. We put on plays, of which I was in several, including Macbeth (which we rather edgily revamped to make it look like The Matrix, like no-one had ever done that before), Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country (which we took to Edinburgh, only to discover that the Edinburgh Fringe audience wasn't as receptive to tragic Russian love stories as we would have liked) and Alan Ayckbourn's Round and Round the Garden from the Norman Conquests cycle (which we also took to Edinburgh and discovered that the Edinburgh Fringe audience was a lot more receptive to Alan Ayckbourn).

I also directed an entertainingly chaotic production of Twelfth Night after my co-director sent me an email one morning informing me that she would be late back to university at the start of the spring term because she'd decided to go skiing, and would I mind awfully directing the show by myself because she didn't want to? (That production gave me more nosebleeds than I've ever had in my life, but it was one of the most memorable experiences of my university career, in a good way.

We also threw great parties, usually (but not always) after a production, and had a regular night out at local grotty (but cheap) club Kaos. But the thing that I miss the most, I think — and the thing I'm reminded of when watching shows like Mock the Week and Whose Line is it Anyway? — is the regular improvisation sessions we had just prior to the regular nights out at local grotty (but cheap) club Kaos.

The improvisation sessions grew out of the warm-up activities that had become a Theatre Group tradition when starting rehearsals. These tended to be simple but fun activities that could double as drinking games in a pinch, but were often also designed to get our minds warmed up as well as our bodies and voices, and so quite often incorporated improvisation of various types.

Theatrical improvisation games are a lot of fun if you let yourself get drawn into the experience. This is something I always enjoyed about acting ever since secondary school Drama lessons: getting swept up in a role and feeling like you really were, just for a moment, someone else. And in improvisation you're not confined by a script: you can take things to some very strange places indeed.

In fact, these improvisations eventually grew into a semi-regular improvisation-based show that the Theatre Group put on called Count Rompula's Showcase. When you showed up to a Count Rompula's, you never quite knew what you were going to get. On one particularly memorable occasion, the audience was subjected to The Web of Dan, a rather avant-garde piece that the eponymous Dan and some of his friends had joked about in rehearsals for other shows. I wasn't directly involved with this eventual production, though I was at least present for the genesis of the idea in the rehearsals.

I miss those days a great deal. I'm occasionally reminded of them when we play Final Fantasy XIV, usually on patch day, and devolve into a series of cringeworthy puns based on the environment and enemies we're fighting in a new dungeon. (The introduction of the icy dungeon Snowcloak was particularly good for this, as you can imagine.) But nothing will quite match the magic of those days when we sat in a circle, miming the action the previous person had said while saying a completely different action we wanted the next person to perform. Or performing scenes based on silly props. Or, indeed, playing Deutsche Erotika, which sadly is not quite as entertaining as its name might suggest.

1717: The Story of Your Mail Archive

During a quiet — and, I won't lie, somewhat bored — moment today, I decided to take a look back in my GMail archive and see exactly when I started using that account. I've had a number of different email accounts over the years, some of which have lasted longer than others, but I had a feeling that GMail had stuck with me longer than anything else. (Except perhaps for Hotmail, which I keep around to sign up for things I don't want to sign up my "real" email address for. And for my Xbox Live account, because in Microsoft's wisdom, they don't allow you to change the email address associated with your account, meaning I was forever stuck with it, not that email really matters to Xbox Live anyway.)

Sure enough, my GMail account has been with me for somewhere in the region of four or five years or so. Prior to that, I made use of a .mac/MobileMe/iCloud account (the name has changed several times since I opened the account in 2007 as part of my employment at the Apple Store), and before that, I was using Yahoo. Prior to that, I was using various different proprietary addresses that I got with Internet service providers, and since I moved every year while I was at university — and quite frequently thereafter, too — I changed email address a lot, much to, as I recall, the annoyance of my brother, who never knew which address to contact me on.

Anyway, I digress; my GMail account hails from 2009, and it was interesting to take a look back to what was going on in my life around then. I can use this blog for that too, of course — and often do, as narcissistic as that might sound — but looking back at past emails is a little different because it's not just a record of my thoughts spilling out on the page as I saw fit to express them; it's my thoughts spilling out on the page as I saw fit to express them to another specific person.

As those of you who have been reading this blog for a few years will recall, 2010 was Not A Good Year for Pete, and indeed the early pages of my email history reflect that to a certain degree.

Before that, however, was an email from a former colleague containing nothing but this image:

It still makes me giggle.

Anyway, the first few pages of my GMail are actually made up of messages imported from my .mac/MobileMe account, which I was running in parallel with GMail for some time (and indeed still am, though I don't really use it any more). In those early messages, I can see the first time I was hired as a professional games journalist — Joey Davidson and Brad Hilderbrand were good enough to take a chance on me and hire me for the now sadly defunct Kombo.com. The pay was crap, but it was something at a time when I had nothing else, and I got something far more valuable out of that experience: friends. People I still speak to today — indeed, just today I had a quick chat with Joey via instant message, which was nice.

Around that time, I was preparing for a trip to PAX East in Boston, at which I'd have the opportunity to meet a number of members of the Squadron of Shame for the first time — and to catch up with some I'd had the pleasure of meeting once or twice before. I was also looking forward to the opportunity to cover a big event as a journalist, though sadly I wasn't enough of a bigshot at this time to be able to score a proper press badge, and as such had to write about things at the show largely from a consumer perspective.

Shortly after my return from PAX East, you may recall that my life fell to pieces, and you can see almost the exact moment this happens, since there's a sudden flurry of sympathetic messages from friends and family alike. Thus began a very dark period in my life, and one that still, I must admit, brings tears to my eyes to relive, even when looking at it through the cold, clinical view of plain text.

So let's not do that.

Instead, fast forward a bunch of pages and I was very surprised to spot an email from a familiar name: Shahid Ahmad, who is now best known as Sony's most enthusiastic employee, and champion of the Vita. Shahid apparently commented on one of my posts somewhere — I can't quite tell where from the email exchange, but it was a post about the game Mr. Robot, which I recall enjoying a great deal — and we'd evidently had a discussion about Chimera, a game which he made back in the days of the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 home computers, and which he has trying to remake ever since. (He was talking about a remake a while back on Twitter; apparently, he's been trying to make this happen since at least 2010.)

Somewhere around the 37,000 email mark (still in 2010), I seemingly start using GMail a bit more for communicating with people and signing up for things. There's still a bunch of stuff coming in via MobileMe, but messages without that tag are starting to appear more and more.

Around the 35,000 email mark, I start working for GamePro. Of all the sites I've worked on over the years, I think GamePro is the one that I think of most fondly and am most proud of. I feel I struck a good balance with my news coverage, and there was tangible proof that I — specifically me — was responsible for bringing in a significant amount of new traffic with the work I was doing. Unfortunately, this seemingly wasn't enough to prevent the site from being unceremoniously wiped off the face of the planet some time later, but it was nice to know at least.

Aside from my own developments, it's also interesting to see what names I still know today have been up to over the years. It's nice to see Tom Ohle of Evolve PR's name crop up a bunch of times, for example — that man's one of the hardest-working PR folks in the business, and also someone who always put across the impression of genuinely believing in the games he was representing — as well as folks I've worked alongside moving from outlet to outlet.

And then, of course, there's the first appearance of Andie in my Twitter direct messages (Twitter's email notifications used to look a whole lot different!) and… well, we all know what happened there. (She's sleeping upstairs in the house we own together right now as I write this.)

So anyway. Having rambled on for over a thousand words about nothing more than my email archives, I think I'm ready to call that a night. It's been an interesting trip back along memory lane — not always pleasant or comfortable, but certainly interesting — but I think I've sated my curiosity for now, at least.

So what's the earliest email you still have, dear reader?