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?

1543: Secret Diaries

Sue Townsend apparently died today. As with any "celebrity" (or at least well-known person) death, I'm not sure whether I really feel "sad" about this, but it's certainly the end of an era, and I definitely have some very fond memories of her work.

The Adrian Mole books that she wrote are, I think, the books I've re-read the most number of times in my life. When I first acquired copies of the first two books — battered old hand-me-downs with pages falling out; copies that I imagine used to belong to my brother — I had literally no idea what to expect. I didn't even know whether Adrian Mole was a person or some sort of anthropomorphized Wind in the Willows-style character.

It wasn't very long before I was hooked. I started reading them at just the right age, and managed to catch the subsequent books at similarly relevant points throughout my life. While I've enjoyed the whole series over time, I feel that the first two books in particular — The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole — remain the highlights for me. I retain, to this day, something of a fascination with teenage life; a fascination that I can continually indulge thanks to anime, TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all manner of other media. I think it's the whole "coming of age" thing that appeals to me; seeing people go through genuinely formative experiences and changing as a result.

The events that transpire in the Adrian Mole books are all rather mundane in nature, but help to shape Adrian into the person he later becomes. While he ends up not exactly realising a lot of his potential in later life, he remains, for the most part, a relatable character with whom I often found myself identifying, particularly in the early books. His feeling of slight detachment from the rest of the world, particularly when it came to being "cool", making friends or talking to girls, was something that I also found myself experiencing, and while I stopped short of considering myself an "intellectual" at the age of 13, there were times that I felt I could have been writing that secret diary myself.

In fact, I did write several secret diaries over the years, beginning shortly after when I read the Adrian Mole books. Sadly, all of these (to my knowledge, anyway) have been lost to the mists of time, usually because I ended up writing something that embarrassed myself so much that I threw the whole thing away so there was absolutely no risk of anyone else ever having the chance of stumbling across it. I kind of regret that now; much as I regularly like browsing back over my entries on this blog — the Random Post button at the top is a vaguely fun time if you have nothing better to do — I also liked looking back over old diaries and reading my thoughts and feelings about things. During my teenage years, entries were often about girls and my various feelings towards them, inevitably unrequited. During my university years, entries were often about girls, too, but also, I feel, sparked the beginning of my coming to understand my own anxiety and depression issues — issues that I'm still coming to terms with today.

If nothing else, writing down thoughts and feelings about things — even the most mundane things — can prove to be an enormously cathartic experience. I know that the fact my romantic (and, uh, erotic) feelings towards several girls in high school were inevitably unrequited was made somewhat easier to deal with by having that "release" of writing down how I felt about these things at times; and when I tried my hand at writing a diary again a couple of times during my university studies, it proved to be similarly helpful.

What I'm doing with this blog is, for the most part, the same thing; the difference here is that it's public and digital rather than scrawled in biro and hidden under my mattress. Regular readers will know I'm pretty open about a lot of things, though, and the world hasn't ended as a result; perhaps if someone had inadvertently stumbled across those secret diaries — or, if they did, spoken up about them — it wouldn't have been all that bad.

Or perhaps it could have been the most mortifying experience in the world. I guess we'll never know, now.

Oh, and if, by any chance, through some twisting and turning of the worldlines, my 14-year old self ends up reading this? Give up on Nikki, mate; she's well out of your league.

1312: Hoarding

Occasionally I look around and wonder why I keep some of the crap I do.

I'm actually not that much of a hoarder — I've been fairly ruthless about throwing useless crap out on several occasions, usually when moving house — but there are some thing that, over the years, I just haven't been able to bring myself to part with.

One of the things that's stayed with me for over half my life now — well, several things, really, if we're being picky — is my old school work. Not all of it — reading through old school books would make me cringe — but some of it. Most notably, I appear to still have most of my coursework assignments from A-Level Sociology (and possibly GCSE Integrated Humanities, too), all my course notes from A-Level English Language and I even found one of my GCSE (or possibly A-Level… I forget) Music compositions the other day — a piano piece called "The Storm" that I momentarily contemplated giving a French title ("L'Orage", which I'm not even sure is grammatically correct) before mentally punching myself in the face with a silent admonishment to not be so fucking pretentious.

The aforementioned English Language notes actually moved binders during the course of my studies, but I still have the previous ring binder they were in before they got a bit too… big. Said smaller binder was decorated on the inside covers by my friends and I (mostly me) with a series of fake classified advertisements, many of which are in-jokes that I can still remember but which, going by past experience attempting to resurrect them with my old school friends, are probably remembered by only me. For example, I can remember exactly whom the advert "Ninja Assassin Wanted to Eliminate Annoying Twat in English Class" refers to; likewise, I remember who the phone number for the adjacent "Ninja Assassin for Hire" panel belonged to. Other jokes are a little more obvious: an advert inviting people to acquire fake identification to get served in pubs by writing to the local police station (postcode PE19 999, obviously); an advert for a new book called "How to Use Windows 95 Without Getting in a Stress" (judged "indispensible" by the Daily Mail, apparently); Poppets offering a new "Rabbit Poo" flavour.

Interestingly, the inside cover of my English Language folder also marks an instance of Capitalising Things to Make Them Sound Like Official Things that predates TVTropes by a good few years, and also displays a convincingly large amount of evidence that I held some sort of deep-seated grudge towards Cambridgeshire Careers Guidance for some inexplicable reason. It's also quite magnificently dated by the references made throughout the adverts — the ad for the fictional PC product Mr Volpe's MATHS! Is Not Boring… Honest proudly boasts of "16-bit colour video starring Mark Hamill and Patrick Stewart" and "music by Oasis" along with the fact it's "powered by Id's Quake Engine"; meanwhile the Hanson Interactive CD-ROM apparently came with "tickets to see Hanson live, a working sniper rifle with live ammunition (for use at concert) and actual footage of band members being dismembered horribly" (with no apparent realisation that if they'd already been recorded being dismembered then there'd be no-one to shoot at the concert).

It is, in short, a rather eye-opening glimpse into my psyche from when I was around 15. I'm not sure it's a healthy image, but eh. It helped make me the person I am to– WAITAMINUTE

1251: Bottomless Memory for Irrelevant Nonsense

I have, as the title suggests, a bottomless memory for completely irrelevant nonsense. I'm not sure how or why I have developed this particular characteristic, and it very rarely comes in handy, but there it is.

Occasionally it is a good icebreaker when hanging out with people that I have known for many years, as coming out with something that apparently only I remember often makes people laugh. And, as we all know, making people laugh is a good means of keeping a social situation going. (There are only so many times you can get away with starting a story with "Do you remember when…?" in a single gathering, however.)

I have no idea what causes my brain to remember the things it does, however. Let me give you an example, and you'll see that there's really no reason I should remember this particular incident.

When I was at school, a member of my main friendship group was a kid called Daniel. His main distinguishing features were his crooked teeth and his very outgoing, borderline insane nature — the latter of which frequently came to a head in Drama lessons. (An unrelated memory to the one I'm about to recount is the time my friends and I put together a short play called "The Time Trial of Dr. Paradox" in which Daniel played the titular villain, whose crowning moment was when he screamed "I want him tracked down by 2400 hours!" and knocked a small globe onto the floor, causing it to go rolling away and make our mutual friend Andrew almost piss himself with laughter.)

Our drama teacher for one year was actually also our school's headmaster at the time, one Mr Cragg. Mr Cragg was a pleasant sort of middle-aged man, all beard and jovial nature. He would have made a good Father Christmas if his hair was white. He enjoyed playing theatre games in Drama lessons, and one day we were playing one that involved fruit. I don't remember the exact game itself, but the bit of the memory I have inexplicably clung on to in the intervening 15+ years is the way in which Mr Cragg said the word "raspberry" ("Razzzberri!"), which my aforementioned friend Daniel found immensely amusing for weeks afterwards. He also found the word "Bilberry" similarly amusing, but that's fair enough; I found it quite amusing, too, because it sounded a bit like "dildo".

Well, okay, not really, but we were in our early teens; I'm not even going to pretend we had a particularly sophisticated sense of humour.

What puzzles me is how and why that memory has endured for so long. Why on Earth do I remember the way my old headmaster said the word "raspberry," and the fact my friend Daniel found it incredibly amusing? I find it difficult to believe that if I ever saw Daniel again — I haven't seen him since leaving school — that if I walked up to him and went "Razzzberri!" he'd have the slightest fucking clue what I was on about.

Ah well. I suppose it makes for good stories. Or at least confusing ones.

1225: Red Wizard Needs Z's Badly

I'm exhausted. I'm not quite sure why I feel so utterly exhausted because I slept well last night and today hasn't exactly been a particularly strenuous day. We played a couple of short games this morning before departing the pleasant country farmhouse we'd been staying in over the weekend, drove back, then, presumably, did our respective "Things" once we got home rather than immediately falling into a coma like I feel like doing right now.

The only thing I can possibly attribute it to is the two gin and tonics I had last night. I don't really drink any more so even a tiny bit of alcohol tends to have quite a strong impact on me — disappointingly, this doesn't tend to take the form of getting amusingly giggly or wobbly any more; rather, it tends to just make me a bit tired, particularly the day after I've been drinking. I guess what I'm enduring is a sort of hangover, albeit a rather pathetic one that will be immensely disappointing to those who used to enjoy past drunken (and post-drunken) ramblings.

The other thing it could be, of course, is the fact that we stayed up until about 2 in the morning playing various combinations of board, card and computer games, then tumbled into bed (not together) before waking up relatively early (for a bank holiday Monday, anyway) today.

Either way, it's not a particularly good show, is it? I vividly remember the days when I'd happily stay up all night just for the hell of it (and regret it for the majority of the following day, particularly if there were any university lectures involved) and consume several gallons of alcoholic beverages before texting people I fancied messages with lots of X's on the end of them (the number of X's was typically proportional to how much I fancied them) and collapsing into bed, quite possibly fully-clothed.

Depressingly, the time when I was able to behave like that on a regular basis was over ten years ago now. Longtime readers will doubtless note that the posts I linked to above were from relatively early in this whole #oneaday lark, but they were isolated incidents rather than something I was doing on a regular basis.

Actually, I say "depressingly", but I don't really feel the need to stay up until ungodly hours in the morning and stagger in as pissed as a fart on a regular basis. At the tender age of 32, I'm more than happy to spend my evening lounging on the sofa watching some entertaining videos or playing a game. It doesn't stop me from indulging in a late night once in a while, of course — apparently I just have to be prepared to deal with the consequences the following day!

Now I am going to go to bed and possibly sleep for about a thousand years. (Note: It will probably not be about a thousand years. Probably more like 8 hours or so, I imagine.) Good night, and hopefully I'll have a more lively brain that is willing to talk about something a bit more interesting on the morrow.

1148: On the Stage

I happened to be online earlier when a university friend of mine posted a Soundcloud clip of a comedy set he performed recently on Facebook. (That was a clumsy sentence. I apologise profusely. He posted the set on Facebook, he didn't perform it there.) I had a listen and found it immensely entertaining. Here it is:

At least, there it is if the embed code works correctly.

(EDIT: It did not. Here is a link to it instead.)

Anyway. Listening to Mr Millerick strutting his stuff and yell at British Gas on the stage got me thinking rather nostalgically about the reason I know him, and one of my favourite parts of university, which was my involvement with the university Theatre Group.

The Theatre Group was known at various junctures as Theatre Group, Blow Up and Rattlesnake! (with an exclamation mark) and I cannot for the life of me remember where the latter two names came from. I first joined it in my first year during that period of time when you feel like you should join some sort of club and meet people. I had enjoyed the two productions I'd been involved in at secondary school (The Wizard of Oz and Twelfth Night, if you're curious) and so I figured I'd try out for the university's luvvies society. One of my flatmates was also involved in the group, so I was glad to know there'd be at least one friendly face there.

The first production I was involved in was Macbeth. The Matrix hadn't long come out, so this marked the beginning of that phase when it was seemingly obligatory for everyone doing Shakespeare to do something Matrix-inspired, particularly if you were a student theatre group. By all accounts our production was pretty spectacular (and massively over budget) — it was a hugely enjoyable experience, though to be honest I didn't feel I got to know that many people that well at the time. The fun of being on stage was enough to make up for that, though.

Over my time at university, I was involved in several other productions, including a double-bill of French play L'Epreuve (A Test of Character) by Marivaux and Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer; Turgenev's tragic love story A Month in the Country (which we took to the Edinburgh Fringe to modest success); Alan Ayckbourn's Round and Round the Garden from The Norman Conquests (which we also took to the Edinburgh Fringe to more noticeable success — turns out punters are more interested in relatable, gentle comedy in proper theatres rather than tragic Russian love stories performed in botanical gardens several miles away from the main Festival area); and doubtless some others that have slipped my mind along the way. As time passed, I got to know a lot of the Theatre Group peeps well, and they became close friends.

One of my favourite things that the group did, though, was our Monday night improvisation sessions, where we all showed up, played some theatre games that we normally used for "warmups" in rehearsals for shows, then went out and got really drunk. Although these sessions weren't particularly structured, everyone got involved (even shy, retiring wallflowers like myself) and everyone was immensely supportive of each other's efforts. So successful were these events that they eventually spawned a semi-regular event in the Theatre Group's calendar — Count Rompula's Showcase. It had a more grand title which I've sadly forgotten, but Count Rompula was certainly involved in there somewhere.

Count Rompula brought us a variety of memorable performances, including one known as The Web of Dan. The Web of Dan started as a running joke among the group at Edinburgh, if I recall correctly, in which we figured it would be amusing if we did some sort of experimental theatre that was just Dan (obviously) trapped in a web and saying vaguely profound things. Count Rompula helped make this a reality, and it was glorious — though I do have to wonder what those people who showed up and had no idea what the big in-joke was thought.

Of all the aspects of university, Theatre Group is the thing I miss the most. One day I might actually succeed in getting these people back together for some sort of entertaining improvisation session (or, more likely, a drinking session) but in the meantime, I have very fond memories that I believe will stay with me for many years.

1129: Disc of Memories

For the longest time, I've kept a specific CD-R hanging around. Somehow it's survived all the different house moves I've gone through since leaving home and is still intact. I'm more impressed that I haven't lost it or accidentally thrown it out than by the fact it still works, but I guess that's pretty cool, too.

The raggedy inlay lists a few bits and pieces on the front, but gives relatively little indication to its contents. "PETE'S STUFF" it proudly announces in green felt-tip pen. "\PIERRE\ (GENERAL), \KNP\ (KLIK GAMES), \FFCOLLECTION\ (FINAL FANT.)" it elaborates, also in green felt-tip pen. The last entry is simply a collection of emulators and ROM files for all the Final Fantasy games up until VI, including a translated Japanese ROM for the NES original version of III. But it's the other two that are more interesting.

The "Pierre" folder is from my first PC, which was a mighty Pentium 133 that could run Doom and Quake like nobody's business. It had both a DVD-ROM drive and a CD rewriter, and I also eventually installed a Sound Blaster Audigy into it, which took up another drive bay with a ridiculous front-panel audio interface that looked pretty cool. Said folder contained a wide variety of almost-organised bits and pieces, consisting almost entirely of MIDI files downloaded from CompuServe and the Internet at large — mostly music from Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, with a brief break into Wild Arms, Xenogears and Zelda territory — as well as saved walkthroughs from an early incarnation of GameFAQs. This was the age of dial-up networking, you see, and thus it wasn't possible to simply "quickly" hop onto GameFAQs to check a walkthrough; it was much more efficient to save it. (If you're wondering, my saved guides included Alundra, Bust-a-Groove, Rival Schools, Wild Arms and Xenogears.)

Also in this folder is an early form of a tabletop roleplaying game system called "The Returners," based on Final Fantasy, along with original text files for some of my earliest pieces of freelance writing work — a two-part guide to Final Fantasy VII for PC Zone, a 3,000 word Discworld II guide, a Lands of Lore II guide that was an absolute nightmare to put together, and a walkthrough to Turok 2 using the Official Nintendo Magazine's curious internal system of markup to include special characters and other layout bits and pieces.

Pleasingly, one thing that I have found among all this crap is a folder containing a bunch of half-finished creative writing works from a long time ago. There's a sci-fi epic I started working on that was loosely based on Sierra's excellent spacefaring strategy game Alien Legacy (kudos if you remember that, it was awesome) along with a piece I wrote for my A-Level English Language coursework. I liked it so much when I wrote it that I extended it somewhat. It's also probably my earliest example of writing creative prose in "stream of consciousness" style — we'd not long covered Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea in English Lit class, and the curiously disjointed method of writing had proven to be quite appealing to me, so I experimented with it. It paid off with a good mark, as I recall, though I'm not sure it holds up quite so well to further inspection some fifteen years later. Still, it's nice to have it.

(Oh, also, there's a subfolder in the "Pierre" folder just labelled "ANNA KOURNIKOVA IS FIT", which I think is fairly self-explanatory.)

The "KNP" folder is an interesting one, as it contains a selection of half-finished (yes, I have a habit of half-finishing things) games made with Clickteam's excellent software Klik and Play, later superseded by The Games Factory and Multimedia Fusion. This folder contains the earliest ever incarnation of the story "Dreamwalker", which I still fully intend to get out of my head and into some form of creative medium before I die. The original version of Dreamwalker was more an experiment to see if it was possible to make a Zelda-style action-adventure using the rather limited Klik and Play tools, and indeed it was, with a bit of creativity. Once I'd started making it, though, I found myself getting quite attached to the characters involved, even if I'd borrowed the basic concept (if not the setting and characters) from Alundra on PS1, which I'd played around the same time. I also actually composed some music for Dreamwalker, which I still have the MIDI files for, and which are in dire need of mixing properly. Perhaps that can be a project sometime — the tunes themselves are actually pretty solid, in my humble opinion.

The KNP folder also includes the original version of Pie Eater's Destiny, one of the only four complete video games that I have ever made. (The other three are London Taxi Chase, London Taxi Chase II and… a remake of Pie Eater's Destiny) Pie Eater's Destiny holds a fond place in my heart because it was a collaborative project between me and my two best buds in the late stages of school, and it's a running joke among us that one day we'll make a sequel. We've started several times, but somehow, well over ten years later, we're yet to get anywhere. Pleasingly, the data files for Pie Eater's Destiny also include the original .WAV file recordings of us doing voice acting for the game, including the outtakes which we saved. There are also .WAV files of us experimenting with pitch shifting and other special effects, including several alarmingly-convincing "Jabba the Hutt doing things he was never supposed to be depicted doing" files. JABBAWNK.WAV, indeed.

Anyway, I was happy to rediscover some of the useless crap on this disc when I opened it up on a whim today. It's missing a few things that I hoped I'd find on there, but I'm glad I found the other stuff. Perhaps when I can be bothered I might share some of it here. Those voice acting outtakes are crying out to be edited into some sort of YouTube clip.

1108: Countdown to Internet

We finally get Proper Internet installed in our new flat tomorrow. If you are, at this point, scratching your head and pondering how on Earth I am writing this post when I do not have Proper Internet installed in our new flat already, fortunate circumstances meant that our new neighbours have BT as their service provider and thus have part of their bandwidth set aside as a public hotspot. Because we're also with BT, it means that we're able to make use of this hotspot for free.

You may think that sounds ideal, and it's certainly been better than nothing — without it I'd have spent about a billion pounds on working from coffee shops by now, or have struggled on with a data-capped 3G dongle — but it's had its share of annoyances. The main issue is that our neighbours' router is just slightly too far away for a reliable connection on devices like the iPhone and iPad — it's been fine on my laptop, but my Mac steadfastly refuses to stay connected for more than five minutes at a time. Since my day job requires me to download a lot of stuff from the App Store, I need my phone to have a reliable connection, because apps over a certain size are impossible to download over a mobile data connection — and besides, my mobile data connection has a bandwidth cap, too, which I hit last billing month thanks to the very issues I'm describing here.

The other irritant is the hotspot's "fair use policy", which means that "unlimited" use is, in fact, not unlimited at all — instead, once you hit a certain number of minutes used on your account (cumulative between all devices which have logged in using those details) you get put in a special Naughty Corner for people who use the Internet too much, and disconnected without warning every half an hour. This is especially infuriating if you've been typing an article into a web-based content management system such as WordPress, idly hit Publish without remembering to check if the connection is still active and promptly run the risk of losing all your work. (Fortunately, Chrome seems to cache the body of your text when this happens, but tends to lose headlines, tags and that sort of thing.) I have taken to both copying the entire body of my text before publishing and opening a new tab to any old site — usually Facebook, since I only have to type the letter "F" into the address bar in Chrome for it to suggest that to me and it loads quickly — just to make sure the connection hasn't gone tits-up.

It could, of course, be significantly worse. I've been re-reading some old issues of PC Zone recently, and they hail from the pre-broadband days when getting unlimited Internet access via your phone line was a new and exciting thing, but most people were struggling on with 0845 numbers that charged them the same rate as a local phone call while they were online. The letters page of one issue features a letter from someone who wished that multiplayer-focused games would go away — not for the same reason people say this today (oversaturation) but because, in the UK at least, it was a relative minority of people who could play these games at a practical speed and without their phone bill going through the roof.

I remember vividly trying to get a two-player game of Quake going via a direct modem connection a while back, and it was just impossible to do so. And all the while I was trying to get this going, the phone line was tied up and pissing off my parents. (You young 'uns don't know you're born, I tellsya.) We got direct-connect games of Command and Conquer and Red Alert going a few times, but Quake continually eluded us. It wasn't until I got to university and managed to figure out a way to use our free phone calls between rooms in our hall of residence to fake a Windows network connection that I was able to play a PC-based first-person shooter against another person for the first time. (Not coincidentally, those days spent playing Half-Life against my flatmates Sam and Chris are some of my fondest gaming memories of all time.)

Still, as I say… Proper Internet tomorrow. You don't realise how much you miss it until it's not there. It's such a big part of everyone's daily life now that the fact we used to only be able to use the Internet for short periods of time at specific times of day (phone calls were cheaper after 6pm!) is all but unthinkable. Nowadays, I'm bitching about the fact I can't watch Netflix and Crunchyroll over breakfast.

The perils of living in The Future, I guess.

1100: The One where Pete Watches 'Friends' for the First Time in Quite a While

I went through a phase a few years back of watching just two or three different TV series over and over again on a cycle. They were my passive-consumption "comfort food", if you will — things I turned to when I didn't really want to do anything, but didn't really want to fall into that pit of depressed ennui that normally ends up with staring at the wall for hours at a time. Those shows included Spaced and Black Books, which are two series I still own the DVDs for and will never get rid of, and Friends, which I have never owned a complete collection of but have had scattered home-recorded VHS tapes and a few purchased DVDs and videos over the years — also, for many years, it was on a constant cycle of repeats on E4 alongside Scrubs.

Friends is something that I've watched so many times now that I can pretty much recite it word for word along with any episode that's on. It kind of fell out of favour with the public in its latter stages as many people saw it as outstaying its welcome, but I enjoyed it consistently all the way through. As I say, it was comfort food; you knew what to expect with every episode. It was never anything adventurous, but the characters were both relatable and attractive, the situations they got into often personally relevant, and the quips and jokes memorable and, yes, genuinely amusing.

I started re-watching Friends again the other day having come into possession of a complete collection, only this time around I'm watching the "extended cuts" that came out a few years back. These aren't Lucasesque "special edition" versions, they're simply about 5 minutes longer per episode, with numerous scenes restored to their full length and, in many cases, adding a whole bunch of additional context and depth to the characters and setting that simply wasn't there before due to the constraints of the TV scheduling.

I'm really enjoying them so far. This extra footage means that watching the show again after a few years' break strikes a wonderful balance between the comfortably familiar and the brand-new — and, given how well I know the original versions, I can immediately recognise when something is new. In many cases, scenes that had rather awkward and obvious edits on TV now make much more sense, and in some cases there are scenes that I simply don't think were even there at all in the first place — Joey's first meeting with his colourful agent Estelle, for example.

More than the pleasure of getting some "new" Friends to watch, though, I'm overwhelmed with the feeling of comfortable nostalgia that watching this show always infuses in me. I've spent so much time with these characters inside my TV over the years that I feel like they're my friends, too — a fact helped by the fact that I still, to this day, tend to group people in my mind according to which one of the main cast they most remind me of. (Shh. Don't tell anyone.)

One thing I'd forgotten about is that the show appeared to coin the term "friend zone" back in its first season, where Joey uses it to describe Ross having waited too long to make his move on Rachel. I shan't get into any of that endless discussion over people who use the term "friend zone" today because it's inordinately tedious and frustrating, but I wonder how many people remember where it actually came from and its original context. A few years back, I would have deemed it unthinkable for someone to not have knowledge of Friends, but a lot of years have passed since then.

And yet, I struggle to think of a recent TV show I've been quite as attached to as Friends. I've enjoyed various American comedies that have come since — How I Met Your Mother was originally sold to me as something of a successor to Friends in many ways, and I have major soft spots for Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock — but for me, nothing will ever be quite the same as the time I spent with Monica, Phoebe, Rachel, Ross, Chandler and Joey. However well (or otherwise) you think it may well have aged, there's little denying that for many people of a similar age to me, Friends was and is a touchstone of popular culture that will always carry at least some degree of personal resonance.

This is my 1,000th daily post on this blog

Well, there we are. 1,000 days of non-stop daily blogging. I am the best, I win, etc. Sorry this post is so late, but once you've read it you'll hopefully appreciate that it took a bit of time to put together. I felt I should make the effort, you know. Special occasion and all that.

Of course, I'm well aware that I'm not the first person to reach a thousand days — as I mentioned a few days back, Mr Ian Dransfield got there first due to… well, starting before me. I joined the initial #oneaday crowd a little late, on January 19, 2010, whereas the people who actually started the whole thing off began closer to New Year's Day. As I noted in that post I just linked to, however, I am officially the Last Man Standing and I don't mind admitting that I feel more than a little proud of that fact. Through thick and thin, I've stuck by this self-imposed project with no end and no goal, and I have enjoyed the experience immensely.

And, more importantly, I plan to continue enjoying it from this point onwards. Post number 1,000 — that's this one — is most certainly not a fond farewell and a hanging up of the… whatever implement best exemplifies blogging. (My computer keyboard, I guess.) No; it's a significant milestone, for sure, but I see no reason to stop. There are plenty of things to write about. And while they may not always be the most interesting or universally appealing, as I've noted on this blog a number of times before, the original intention of #oneaday was not to be interesting or universally appealing. It was simply a kick up the bum to get those of us who enjoyed writing to do more writing. Writing for ourselves, rather than for someone else. Writing without limits, without the necessity of sticking to a style (though those of us in it for the long haul naturally developed our own personal styles), without word counts, without anyone deciding whether or not the thing we were writing about was worth writing about. And, of course writing without editing.

Yes, these are the pure, unexpurgated contents of my brain you're reading every day. Unfiltered, uncensored, completely truthful. (Well, okay, regarding the latter, I might omit to mention a few things, but that's not exactly the same as lying.) A couple of people have commented to me over the course of the past thousand days that they're impressed by my ability to just lay my soul bare on the page like that, to confess to things that others might find difficult to talk about. For me, though, it's actually something of a relief to be able to talk about a lot of these things, be it my depression and social anxiety or my enjoyment of visual novels that, in many cases, have bonking in them. This blog has been a good "friend", as it were, providing me with a place to empty my brain of all the thoughts that have been floating around with it over the course of each day, and in the process I have made a few actual friends who have either related to the things I've written or just found them interesting. Which is, you know, nice.

More after the jump — it's a long one. (That's what she said, etc.)

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