#oneaday Day 610: Sorry again, and an explanation

Hello there! I am once again very sorry to those of you who are subscribed via email who got a flurry of messages yesterday. As I mentioned, I was in the process of importing all the old blog posts I previously posted on my now-defunct Patreon page, and I didn't realise that it was going to publish each and every one of them as if they were a brand new blog post — which meant that it sent each and every one of them as a "newsletter", at least until I found a way to turn the damn thing off and make it go about its business quietly.

Anyway, that process is all done now, so things should hopefully return to normal — and there is now a bunch more Stuff for you to read on this site, should you feel so inclined. It's all conveniently categorised under the Patreon category — or, if you want to jump straight to the beginning of that particular "season" of #oneaday blogging, you can click here or use the link in the site menu.

The reason I wanted to bring that stuff across is because there was a lot more of it than I realised! I'd forgotten that I'd done another 1,000+ days of daily blogging as a Patrons-exclusive "perk" (if you can call it that), and having it all locked away in an unlaunched Patreon page seemed a bit wasteful. Not that I think I wrote anything of particular importance in those pages, mind.

No; the main reason I wanted to get those posts across is to fill a bit of a "gap" on this blog. There were a couple of years where I didn't really post anything on here because I was using Patreon instead, and that always bugged me a bit. Now, if you will be so good as to check the Archives section in the sidebar (it's right at the bottom of the page if you're on mobile), you'll see I now have a nice run of posts running from 2008 all the way up to today. Not all of that has been daily blogging and not every year has posts every month, even, but it is satisfying to look back over all that stuff and think "I did that".

Why did I do that? I don't really know, other than the fact I've always enjoyed it. There's just something about blogging about any old bullshit that I've always found immensely enjoyable; for me, it's always been much more fun to bash out a blog post than use social media, because you can go into as much detail as you want to hyperfixate on, and anyone who has a problem with that can just bally well bugger off because it's your site, dammit, and that means you make the gosh-darn-diddly rules.

The other reason I was interested to bring these posts over is because they cover the COVID years, and I think that was an important moment in history that we all lived through, for better or worse (mostly worse), and I'm interested to look back over what my brain was doing at that time.

Obligatory disclaimer: as I say, I have little to no memory of what I might have written during the Patreon years. I don't think I posted anything egregiously offensive — I still had to work within the rules of Patreon, after all — but I will say I can't guarantee I didn't say anything that 2026 Pete might regret in retrospect. But hey. If you're reading this, you've probably been with me through the exceedingly rough and the occasionally smooth, so little that dribbles out of my brain and onto the page will probably surprise you at this point. I just thought I'd mention that just in case, y'know.

Anyway, that is that. I hope you enjoy looking back through the archives — I'm certainly planning to — and normal business will now resume. Apologies again for flooding your inboxes!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 500: Meaningless milestone celebration

It's post 500 of my second time around on this nonsense! Hooray! We should celebrate, probably!

500 posts, of course, doesn't really mean anything, because it's not a year (it's more than that) and it's not two years (it's less than that). Although "500" is a nice round number, time's frustrating need to use non-round numbers means that doing something 500 days in a row (give or take a couple of missteps here and there, which have always been corrected and accounted for) doesn't mean anything other than the fact you reached an arbitrary milestone.

But a milestone it is, nonetheless, and so celebrate we shall.

I have been enjoying getting back to this daily blogging malarkey. Blogs are all but dead these days, of course, but as I've frequently noted on here, I don't write this for any sort of Internet approval or to watch numbers go up. I write this because I find it valuable and helpful to do so. It's a means of expressing myself that has only let me down on one occasion in the last 17 years, and that was the fault of the platform holder at the time rather than the medium itself. It's a means of, at times, processing complicated thoughts that I'm not sure how to talk to people about. It's a means of me helping to understand myself, I guess.

It took me a little while to get back into the rhythm of things, I'll admit. When I kicked things off again on June 8th last year, I wasn't in a great place mentally. It hadn't been long since we had lost our beloved Meg, and I was still reeling from that somewhat. I had just had a day of fun with some friends, though, and that had energised me somewhat, inspiring me to put "pen" to paper once more. I note with a grim expression that I have not heard a peep from any of those people since I got exceedingly frustrated and upset with them in May of this year, which is something I am not going to get into right now. Sigh. I digress.

Anyway, yes. I was not in an amazing place mentally, but I was also conscious of not wanting every single post on here to be moaning about something, or to keep retreading the same subject matter over and over again. On my past time in the #oneaday mines, I managed to put out some of my most creative blog posts — and often during some of the bleakest periods of my life, too. Hardship breeds creativity or something. That's not a saying, but you know what I mean.

Over time, I think I've settled back nicely into a reasonably good rhythm of being able to write about personal things, write about things I enjoy like books, games and music, and write complete and utter nonsense. Some may say that a blog needs to have a "specialism" if you want readers, and to that I say two things.

One: I've already said that I don't particularly care about readers. No, that sounds too harsh; it's not that I don't care, but it's more that… this place is primarily for me, and anyone who happens to stumble across it, read it and enjoy or get something out of it is a happy bonus. I'm not going to actively discourage anyone from reading, but I'm also not going out of my way to promote it or try and get people to read, either. I don't even share most of these posts on what little social media I still have remaining.

Two: I have a blog with a specialism. It's called MoeGamer. You might already follow it. If you do, thank you, and that's great! This blog is, and always has been, unfiltered Pete. It's my online scrapbook of sorts, where I can just write whatever nonsense is in my head on any given day, and then perhaps look back on it in a few years time and recall some things that I might have otherwise forgotten. That is actually something I do quite often.

So anyway. After 500 days on this second trip around the block, I'm happy with where this blog is and what I'm doing with it. It's a shame that we'll likely never see the same sort of blogging community as we once had in the early days of the #oneaday project first time around — there are some people I met from that period in time that I really miss, and have no idea where to find them any more! — but this place is fulfilling the purpose that, more than anything, it was always designed for.

So here's to 500 days of this rubbish, and maybe another 500 more after that, and maybe many more 500s after that. Meaningless milestone it may be, but it is still a milestone. So happy 500 to me!

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#oneaday Day 365: A year of this

Yes, it appears I have been doing this nonsense (again) for a whole year. And with it, I feel a curious sense of… well, not a lot at all, really. The world, both online and offline, has changed a great deal since the first time I did a daily blogging project, and the purpose of this blog has, by extension — and not necessarily deliberately — changed somewhat, too.

When I started doing #oneaday first time around, it was an attempt to be part of a community. The people who kicked off the "challenge", as it were, were people who I wanted to get to know a bit better, mostly from in and around the games press. Unfortunately, that never really happened, as most of them dropped out pretty early, and some of them actually got rather abusive towards the entire #oneaday project at various points. So that was unfortunate.

I persisted, though. There were other people who decided to get involved that I did enjoy reading the posts of. Several people who I got to know through their posts, and enjoyed interacting with through their comments sections. Out of all of them, I'm not sure any of them even still have their blogs that they started back in the 2010s — I know I've been looking for several of them, and they're just not there any more. I hope they're doing well; it saddens me a little to think that they'd take something they'd created and just cast it aside for one reason or another, but I also understand that today, you often can't be too careful about your "Internet footprint" lest something that seemed innocuous at the time ends up getting dug up to be used against you maliciously.

That's not all, though. There are also a number of people from the anime, manga and video game enthusiast communities who I got to know a few years after I stopped doing #oneaday on a regular basis, and most of them have abandoned their blogs, too. There are a few still knocking around, to be sure, but a lot of the ones I most enjoyed reading and chatting in the comments sections of are simply no longer online at all. Again, that's a real shame; I miss those people, and since our only real point of contact was our blogs, chances are I won't hear from them ever again.

I've spoken before elsewhere about how viewing figures for personal websites are in the absolute toilet these days. I'm lucky to break double figures in views on this site these days, whereas ten years ago I'd maybe get a couple of hundred. Not particularly impressive compared to a commercial site, no, but considering all I do here is waffle on about whatever pops into my head on a given day, I thought it was quite a noteworthy achievement. MoeGamer, as a site with a tighter focus, still gets a decent number of views per day, but most of them are confined to just a few pages and articles, many of which I wrote several years ago and thus successfully acquired the SEO juice for.

As I've also said before, this blog has never been "for" anyone other than myself. I write here because I enjoy writing, because I've always enjoyed keeping a journal, and because I find it a valuable means of expressing myself. The fact that hardly anyone is reading it any more is a shame, sure, but getting people to read this site has never been a priority. If it was, I'd be sharing posts every day on social media, and I just can't be arsed with that.

You see, a post "gaining traction", as Internet vernacular has it, is a bit of a double-edged sword. Yes, it's nice to see people reading your stuff, but it also means that you're likely to run into that particular type of person online who does nothing other than arbitrarily disagree with everything you write. In many instances, one gets the impression that they don't even particularly care what they're arguing about — just that they're arguing. And when something you post online gets viewing figures outside of the circles it normally moves in, you get an exponentially greater number of people like this. And it can be exhausting.

So that's why I'm not too bothered about no-one reading this except me. I derive value from this site from being able to look back at my entries from various different times, and see how I was dealing with particular situations. I enjoy looking back over this semi-permanent record of my own memories, both good and bad. And I feel like I occasionally learn something from reflecting on things that I wrote in the past — both things that I'm proud of, and things that I regret. All of those things helped make me the person I am today, and they're all here on this one site, as a complete reference guide to Pete.

So yeah. I've been doing this daily for the second time, for a year. And I have no intention of stopping just yet. If you happen to be following along, thanks for being a member of an increasingly exclusive club. If you're new here, hi, if you have any questions chances are many of them have been answered at some point in the last three thousand posts. And if you're one of those lapsed bloggers I mentioned earlier, do say hi — it would be great to hear from some of you.

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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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#oneaday Day 4: Upward Slope

Been feeling mildly better today. Had a small boost in mood from this week's Slimming World visit; although I haven't undone all the "damage" from last week I have lost some weight, and thus I count that as a success. It is important to celebrate the small victories, as they add up; I'm still down quite a bit on what I started, even though I still have a long way to go.

Today has been a pretty uneventful day all round. Work was quiet, as it's likely to be for a little while, and I spent a bit of time this evening playing some Steam Next Fest demos. That's a subject for MoeGamer though, so check over there in the next few days for some thoughts.

I've been spending my late evenings before bed watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which my brother kindly bought me a box set of for my birthday. I've never watched this right through to the end, so I'm looking forward to finally doing that. While it was tempting to try and watch all the Star Trek series chronologically, that's a mammoth undertaking that I'm not entirely sure is desirable anyway. I do want to at least see Deep Space Nine and Voyager all the way through, though, so I'm going to tackle those one at a time.

No header image today as I've left the Kindle Scribe downstairs and I'm typing this from bed. The post editor in the Jetpack app is actually surprisingly good, though I still prefer typing on a proper keyboard. Good to know I can do some decent posting from mobile, though; the WordPress app used to be kind of pump.

Anyway, that'll probably do for now. It's quarter past midnight and I am tired. Tomorrow is another day, and there is work to be done, so to sleep I go.

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#oneaday Day 1: Blogging Therapy

Good evening. If the header looks familiar, you've doubtless been following this blog for quite some time and will remember that time, starting in January of 2010, where I decided to participate in a loosely organised blogging project. Dubbed "One A Day" or, more commonly, "#oneaday" due to its origins on Twitter, it was a collective effort by all the participants to write something — anything — every single day for a year.

I joined the project a little late, but ended up going the distance considerably more than some of the other people who started alongside me — including the original organisers, several of whom gave up after less than a month. I eventually managed 2,541 posts, eventually calling it a day on December 31, 2016.

Sometimes I think about that project and the value it had for me. Ultimately, I don't think I really got a great deal out of the "community" side of things — on the contrary, when I decided to step forward and encourage a group of bloggers to do a year of #oneaday in aid of charity, I got a fair chunk of abuse from the original organisers, who still felt some weird sense of "ownership" over the concept of daily blogging, despite having dropped out of the whole process very early. But what I did get out of it was a sense of… I guess "therapy" is probably the best word for it.

My starting #oneaday first time around coincided with one of the absolute worst times of my life, during which I suffered bullying at work, culminating in me being dismissed from a job I loved because I stood up for a colleague who was also being bullied; a period during which my first marriage broke down irreparably and left me alone, without an income and staring down what I saw back then as the humiliating possibility of having to return home to stay with my parents; a time when my anxiety and depression were enjoying a particular "peak" (or is that a trough?), to say the least.

One of the things that got me through that period mostly intact was making the time each evening to sit down and write something. It didn't necessarily have to be about what had happened that day or even how I was feeling at that point; just the act of being creative was somehow comforting. It seems that the human mind is often at its most creative when it is suffering, and I was most definitely suffering around that time. And indeed on several other occasions during those 2,541 posts.

It's not an exaggeration to say that daily blogging helped get me through that time. It's not an exaggeration to say that daily blogging is a significant part of why I am still here to write this right now. Because believe me, things inside my head were bleak for quite some time on several separate occasions.

Today, on the 8th of June, 2024, I'm not in anywhere near as bad a situation as any of those previous instances, but my mental health most certainly has been dipping down into a bit of a trough for quite some time. So I thought it was time to kick the tyres on this here ol' blog, which is still humming away, and make a commitment to writing something every day in the hopes that it might help, even a little.

I will hasten to add that my sudden inclination to write something on here is nothing to do with the events of today specifically, which were actually rather pleasant; some friends who I haven't seen for some time were all finally available to come and have a day of playing video games and chatting. We haven't done this for a long time — I've tried to make it an annual tradition of sorts, since our respective lives make it difficult to do anything more regularly — and it was nice. But some of the conversations we had got me thinking, and that indirectly led me back here to the "Compose" page.

So anyway. That's what this is. I've rambled on for long enough for today, so perhaps we'll talk a little bit more about my present situation and what I really hope to get out of all this another time. For now, let's just say it's good to be back, and I'll see you again tomorrow.

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2541: Farewell

This is my last daily post on this blog, to coincide with the last hour of the last day of 2016. I'm not going to rule out posting on here again when I feel like it, but this is the last of my daily entries. I feel that the exercise has run its course, and I'm definitely satisfied with what I've accomplished over the last 2,541 days.

Why am I stopping now? Well, it's part of a broader plan I outlined a few days ago. I want to unplug and get away from the constant noise of online culture in 2016. It stopped being fun a good while ago — roughly coinciding with the rise of the outrage brigade who love nothing more than using their social media clout to shame people for enjoying "problematic" material — but it's also been becoming increasingly apparent that the reasons I've been keeping my social media accounts active for as long as I have simply don't seem to be the reasons other people keep them active.

On previous occasions when I've considered deactivating my Facebook and Twitter accounts — Facebook in particular — the thing that has always stopped me is the thought that "oh, people won't be able to get hold of me easily, since everyone uses Facebook nowadays rather than anything else." But over time it's become apparent that while everyone does indeed use Facebook, pretty much the last thing they use it for is keeping in touch with other people. Rather, the inherent encouragement of narcissism in modern social media encourages people to post everything about their lives — or rather, everything in a heavily edited, idealised version of their lives — in an attempt to make other people feel like they should be having more fun/sex/babies/delicious meals/strong opinions about Donald Trump. And while that occasionally leads to heated debates in comment sections, it very rarely seems to lead to good conversations.

Twitter comes at it from a different angle. I've heard Twitter described as being like going to a party where everyone is shouting things at the room in general hoping other people will come and join the conversation, and that's a fairly apt description. The particular trouble with Twitter is that its original selling point — its 140-character limit, intended to encourage people to "microblog" rather than post walls of text — isn't conducive to nuanced discussion and debate, which leads to particularly obnoxious behaviour when people of differing ideologies and/or opinions about which anime girl is hottest come into contact with one another.

In short, I've been finding social media to be more trouble than it's worth, so I'm unplugging from the noise in the hope that those people who do value my friendship will make use of other, more private and personal means of contacting me rather than everything being aired in public. And this blog comes under that header, too.

This blog has been valuable "therapy" for me over the course of the last few years, which have been, to say the least, rather challenging and difficult for a variety of reasons. I've faced many obstacles — some of my own creation, some by other people being colossal jackasses and my not really having any power to do anything about that — and, while I wouldn't say my life is where I want it to be in the slightest, I feel that I've grown stronger as a person as a result.

But I feel like I need to start a new chapter. Leave behind the past, and look forward to a hopefully brighter future. It's not easy to shed emotional baggage — not to mention the physical baggage that mental stress can leave you with — but severing my ties with the past, be they social media accounts or indeed this blog, feels like the right thing to do right now.

I'm not disappearing entirely, mind you; as I mentioned in my previous post, I still intend to keep writing weekly on MoeGamer, which will become my main place to write about games I've found particularly interesting or exciting, so I encourage you to subscribe over there if you like what I'm doing. And for more general writing, I'm starting up a weekly TinyLetter — effectively a small-scale mailing list — for personal notes to those of you who have been kind enough to show me friendship and support over the last few years. If you're interested, you can sign up for that here. (Those of you for whom I have email addresses already, I'll be taking the liberty of signing you up automatically at some point on New Year's Day; I hope you don't mind, and if you do, please rest assured that if you decide you don't want to receive my notes, you can unsubscribe easily.)

Aside from that, though, at this point in my life I feel like broader Internet culture just doesn't hold the value it once did for me, so out the window the unnecessary crap goes for 2017. I'm not encouraging any of you to follow my lead and I'm certainly not casting any judgement on those of you who still find value in social media and Internet culture at large; I'm simply saying it's not for me, and explaining where I'll be going if you do want to find me.

If you'd like to stay in touch more privately, please either subscribe to my TinyLetter — which you can reply to just like a normal email — or drop me a message via my Get In Touch page with your email address and/or any other contact details you'd care to share.

For those who have supported this blog for any period of time — be you lurker or regular commenter — thank you, good night, and I wish you a happy, healthy and hearty New Year. Here's to 2017 being a better year for everyone.

2540: Royalty Free

I was surprised to discover that a device exists purely for the purpose of streaming shit music into shops.

Actually, let me correct that: a device exists purely for streaming royalty-free music into shops. There's a good reason for this, of course: music in the background generally makes for a livelier, more pleasant atmosphere, but not all businesses find it practical or desirable to pay up for PRS and suchlike in order to use copyright-protected music, and as such we have the rise of the royalty-free artist and their music to fill this apparent gap in the market.

The aforementioned device isn't, shall we say, a perfect bit of kit; the available music on offer is relatively limited, and its shuffle algorithm is so unsophisticated that it's not at all unusual to hear the same song five or more times over the course of a single hour, but it does at least perform its basic function reasonably effectively. And more to the point, through a bit of the old Stockholm Syndrome, finding yourself in an environment where this nonsense is all you are able to listen to means that after a while you might actually start liking some of these songs.

Songs like Kady Z's Game Over.

Or indeed Kady Z's Beautiful Disaster — apparently Kady Z, whom I had never heard of prior to actually investigating the dreadful but catchy lyrics to Game Over, is pretty much the queen of royalty-free music.

Interestingly, of all the musical monstrosities that belch forth from the aformentioned streaming box, Kady Z's are the only ones that I seem to be able to find easily on the Internet. I'm sure the others are out there somewhere, but Game Over is the only song I've so far managed to find by Googling the one line of the lyrics I can actually remember. ("Game over, you and me, game over, finally free.")

All this is perhaps because in particular the two songs I've mentioned above I actually don't mind all that much. As I say, that may well be the Stockholm Syndrome talking, but from a bit of additional cursory research this evening, Kady Z appears to be 1) quite attractive and 2) actually not a terrible pop artist either, seemingly drawing influences from a number of other artists including Ke$ha (most apparent in Game Over), Katy Perry and numerous other "upbeat white chick" kind of affairs.

I wouldn't say she's a particular artist I'm going to rush out and buy all the albums of, but sometimes it's kind of nice to accidentally stumble across some reasonably inoffensive new music that's a bit outside the mainstream pop charts, which remain mostly dominated by bullshit these days — yes, I am getting old, and I'm not at all ashamed of it.

So there you have it. Make an hour-long playlist with Game Over in it at least five times punctuated by other stuff and you, too, can experience roughly what my day has been like.

2539: Hipster Coffee

I was a little early going into town for work this morning, so I stopped for a coffee. The Starbucks I usually stop at was pretty heaving, so I went over the road to a place that has relatively recently opened but which I hadn't tried before: an apparent chain (I've seen at least two in various parts of Southampton) called Coffee #1. And I think it's the most hipster place I've ever been in.

If I were to say the words "hipster coffee shop" to you, picture what you think I mean for a moment. Chances are you're imagining a place with wooden floors, eclectic art lining the walls and overly familiar, jocular writing on the menu. And, of course, lots of 20-year old mean with beards and overly elaborate moustaches browsing Instagram on their iPads. And blue-haired, slightly overweight women staring morosely at their mobile phones, flipping idly through social media rather than actually talking to the person sitting across the table from them.

Coffee #1 was exactly like this, and then some. The art on the walls seemed to have no coherent theme whatsoever, running the gamut from an enlarged diagram of how to correctly hitch a horse to a post to framed covers of Tintin comics and Tolkien novels. The furniture wasn't much better; I'm pretty sure there wasn't a single matching chair in the entire place. And this wasn't the case that you find in some coffee shops where maybe a chair breaks so they have to bring out an "emergency chair" from the back room to fill a gap; no, this seemed like a distinct effort to make everything mismatched. It was sort of impressive in a faintly insufferable sort of way.

Coffee #1 wasn't a bad place to go for coffee by any means; the coffee itself was nice and at least came in proper mugs rather than artisanal blown glass jars or something, but the whole experience I had while I was there was just one of the place itself trying far too hard. "Look at me!" it seemed to say. "I'm quirky and kooky and wacky!" It felt like whoever had designed the chaotic aesthetic of the whole place was desperately trying to ensnare to coerce the millennial market into coming for a cup of overpriced, overly complicated coffee while taking selfies with their insufferable friends to plaster all over an Instagram feed that no-one in their right mind would give a shit about, regardless of how many cat GIFs and screenshots of the Notes page on their iPhone featuring supposedly profound "showerthoughts" they interspersed their irrepressible narcissism with.

Entertainingly, I got the distinct impression that the staff at Coffee #1 were a little weary of the whole thing, too. The woman serving me wandered off to take a piss (in the toilet, thankfully, at least I assume that's where she went) halfway through taking my order, and the guy who appeared to be in charge looked a little flustered, to say the least. I'm not sure whether this was simply a side-effect of the Christmas rush (which I can attest to as being exhausting) or if working in an environment that practically screams "ME! ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK HOW QUIRKY I AM!" simply fatigues the mind after a while.

Either way, I'm not averse to going back to Coffee #1 again in the future, since the important part of its service — y'know, the coffee — was nice enough and no more obnoxiously priced than its peers. The mismatched, chaotic decor didn't even really bother me that much, despite the words I've expended describing it above — it was simply rather striking, since it was my first visit. It all just seemed like rather a lot of wasted effort — and believe me, to ensure that every single chair in your establishment doesn't match any other chair in your establishment has to take a certain amount of effort — when I can't help but feeling most people would be happy with comfy chairs, muted and relaxing decor, and perhaps some light, calming music playing in the background.

And good coffee, of course.

2537: Treasure Tracker

I started playing a game I've been meaning to check out for a while today: Captain Toad Treasure Tracker, a spin-off title from one of the Wii U's best games, Super Mario 3D World, and a fantastic game in its own right.

For the unfamiliar, Captain Toad is based on the occasional levels in Super Mario 3D World where instead of controlling Mario, Luigi, Toad and/or Princess Peach, you take on the role of Captain Toad, an intrepid explorer from the Toad race who is carrying so much crap in his backpack he can't jump. Consequently, his means of navigating levels is very different from the relatively conventional platforming of Super Mario 3D World's regular levels, and his stages tended to be rather more puzzly in nature.

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker takes the idea of these stages and builds a whole game out of them. With each stage being formed as a three-dimensional diorama, usually in a cube shape, you need to carefully navigate Captain Toad around and rotate the camera in all directions to find hidden items and passageways as well as determine the best way to proceed.

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker features a great deal more variety in its stages than the Captain Toad stages in Super Mario 3D World, and in true Mario game tradition there are a wide variety of unique mechanics and gimmicks that are introduced and explored in a couple of stages before being set aside before they wear out their welcome. Powerups from Super Mario 3D World put in an appearance, too, most notably the cherries which spawn a clone of your current character, which you then control simultaneously with your original one. You'll then be tasked with navigating these characters together in such a way that you do things like simultaneously press switches or proceed down two separate routes at the same time.

In true Nintendo tradition, there are several degrees of depth that you can play the game in. At its simplest level, you can make your way through Captain Toad by simply determining the path to the star that completes the stage. Then there are three hidden gems in each stage, and finally a hidden bonus objective. Not all of these objectives need to be completed at the same time or even in a single playthrough, but they add a great deal of depth and replayability to the levels.

Most of all, though, Captain Toad Treasure Tracker is simply an utterly charming game that doesn't have a drop of maliciousness or cynicism about it whatsoever. It's endearing, cheerful, colourful and relaxing to play, and already, after just 11 stages (out of a reported 70+) it's becoming one of my favourite Wii U games that I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck further into.