#oneaday Day 326: It's officially my birthday

It is, as promised, Actually My Birthday now, since I have been to bed since last night's post and woken up since then. I have had today (and the days surrounding it) off work for reasons I've already outlined, so today has been mostly about playing more Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and then going out for a nice pub dinner with Andie this evening. I have simple tastes.

One thing many of you will have doubtless discovered as you get older is that people inevitably find it harder and harder to buy presents for you. Gone are the days when you could circle things in the Argos catalogue and hope that one of them would be your "main" or "big" present on the big day. Nope, much more common as a grown-up to get a few little bits and pieces from your Amazon wishlist — which I'm very grateful for, by the way, those who sent such things! — and "I'll just give you some money" from the parents.

I would like to reiterate: this is fine, and not in the "room is burning around me" sense. This is good, even! Much better that one is able to get something they actually want to celebrate their birthday rather than running the risk of getting gifts they already have, gifts they don't really want but are obliged to look like they like or any of the other situations in which people in 2025 are, in my experience, brazenly ungrateful.

I got some very generous monetary gifts from both my parents and my mother-in-law, both of whom are very clearly trying to spend some of their accumulated cash to minimise the impact of inheritance tax in the future. My parents' gift paid for my Nintendo Switch 2, which is nice, and my mother-in-law has bought (well, pre-ordered) me a MiSTer Multisystem 2 from Heber Electronics.

If you are unfamiliar with the latter, it's an all-in-one FPGA console designed for playing retro games from a wide variety of home computer, arcade and console systems. FPGA means something inordinately technical that I don't understand at all, but it basically means that it's the hardware pretending to be a classic system rather than a piece of software doing its best to imitate it. That means that the recreation of the experience is pretty much 1:1 of What It Was Actually Like without any sort of emulation quirks, but with modern benefits such as HDMI out, USB storage and suchlike. There are even addon thingies you can get to use original controllers and other peripherals.

To put it simply, the Multisystem 2 is a console that plays almost any retro game you can throw at it, making it a nice all-in-one, self-contained system for authentic-feeling retro game fun, on either a classic CRT or a modern HDMI display. (Or both at the same time, even!) With old gaming hardware and media becoming increasingly expensive and impractical to collect for a variety of reasons, this is a great option for just… enjoying retro games. Which, ultimately, is what I really want to do with all this stuff. And having the opportunity to easily hook it up to capture hardware via HDMI is even better, 'cause then I can share what I'm doing and what I'm interested in and the things I've discovered.

So yeah. My "big presents" this year are a Nintendo Switch 2 and a MiSTer Multisystem. Pretty great, I'd say. I know my child self would be thrilled, even if I have to wait until June for one and August for the other.

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 706: Merry Christmas!

It's Christmas! Well, actually, where I am, it stopped being Christmas Day about 38 minutes ago, but we'll let that slide for the moment.

I hope you all had a pleasant day out there and there weren't any family arguments around the Monopoly board. (You should all know by now that Monopoly is rubbish and you should never play it, not when there are so many good board games out there.) Much food and drink was doubtless consumed by all, and most of you (in European timezones, at least) will, if you have any sense, be tucked up in bed, thoroughly stuffed full of meat and, err, stuffing.

Some of you may, of course, be playing with whatever presents Santa decided to grace you with this year. And this is, of course, a perfectly acceptable way to spend the end of Christmas Day as Boxing Day comes along.

I had a good haul this year, which was pleasing. As I noted a few days ago, this was my first Christmas away from my own family for some time (disregarding the one I spent completely alone, tucked up in bed, ill) and so it was both nice and interesting to do things according to a "new" schedule. My family typically get up early, maybe have some breakfast and then get straight to opening presents, then have lunch and generally then spend at least part of the afternoon down at the home of local friend and Deep Purple keyboardist Don Airey. Meanwhile, Andie's family get up, have breakfast, maybe watch some TV, then have lunch and only then open presents. It didn't take as much adjusting to as I thought, and it made the anticipation of said presents rather pleasing — helped along by the opening of "stocking" presents the night before, which seems to generally involve a large bag full of food and silly little things. We now have enough Jaffa Cakes in our house to feed a small army.

As for the presents themselves, I had a rather good haul. I had a selection of board games, including the full four-player version of Blokus; cooperative and nightmarishly difficult disease-curing game Pandemic and its expansion On The Brink; and zombie-bashin' B-movie-inspired adventure Last Night on Earth (one of the only games I know that comes with a soundtrack CD). I also got a copy of Ready Player One, which I've been wanting to read for a while. And there was a Minecraft creeper T-shirt, so I can now publicly endorse Mojang's creation while out and about. There were other bits and pieces, too, including an iTunes voucher which I'm looking forward to spending, and a number of digital gifts from a variety of sources, which I shall enjoy investigating when I can tear myself away from both Minecraft and The Old Republic, both of which are proving enormously entertaining at the moment.

Star of the show for the day, I believe, though, was a Kindle from Andie. I've been pondering whether or not I want one of these for quite a while, as I also want an iPad. The Kindle is, however, 1) cheaper and 2) considerably smaller and lighter than an iPad, so it has its own benefits — not least of which is a well-established infrastructure in the form of the Kindle Store. Having used it a little bit today, I can confirm that it is a very nice device, with a lovely readable screen — the only real downside to it compared to an iPad (when looking at it purely as an e-reader, obviously) is its lack of backlight, meaning you can't read it in the dark. However, this is counterbalanced by the fact that it's much easier to read in bright light than the iPad or iPhone is. I've already bought my first book on it — Wil Wheaton's Just a Geek, which seems to be highly entertaining and thought-provoking at the same time, much like the man himself. I shall look forward to doing a lot more reading now I have a device specifically designed for it and no longer having to rearrange the bookshelves to fit new acquisitions on.

In summary, then, I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas. I certainly did. Here's to 2012 being a year of great things.

#oneaday Day 703: Ding, Dong

I think there's something to be said for "ceremony" and "ritual". Not in the creepy hooded robe "I'm going to sacrifice you to Mara the penis monster" sense, but particularly with regard to Christmas.

I say this upon some reflection on my own lack of enthusiasm for the festive period which I've been suffering for the past few years. At least some of this general sense of ambivalence towards the holiday season can be attributed to my depression, I'm sure, but perhaps it goes deeper than that. Perhaps it's the fact that for the last [x] years, I just haven't really "celebrated" Christmas as I used to when I was younger. I rarely bother with cards, considering them something of a waste of time and money; I don't go out carol singing; I don't write letters to Santa; though I must confess I do enjoy giving presents.

Perhaps I should re-adopt some of these pre-Christmas rituals to get me into the spirit. For example, I fondly recall the whole Christmas cards thing from my schooldays. It was a time to quite literally take stock of how many friends you had — and back in those days we didn't have Facebook to make this process easier. No; you had to sit there with a notepad and a Tesco pack of 5 bajillion cards, writing each of them by hand and saving the "best" ones for the people you quite fancied. The following day at school, you'd give them out to people in person or, for those people you didn't really care about that much (harsh, but true) you'd put them in the school's "post box" system for some poor year 7s to come and collect and distribute later in the day. Following this, you'd eagerly grab every card you received, inevitably reading far too much into the fact that the girls you quite fancied put "love" in their cards while conveniently ignoring the fact that they'd put "love" in their cards to everyone, not just you.

And the whole Santa thing, too. The whole process of writing a letter listing all the things you'd like for Christmas, ending it with "I HAVE BEEN GOOD" while trying not to think about the thing you got told off for last week, leaving it by the chimney, eagerly awaiting a reply and then leaving a mince pie and glass of sherry by the fireplace on Christmas Eve; all that gave the whole experience a degree of magic that just isn't there as an adult. I'm not saying we should all start believing in Santa Claus (or perhaps we should?) but I am saying that Christmas as a kid was clearly better.

It was, though, wasn't it? You could always think of awesome things you'd like to get as presents. There'd be a "big present" to unwrap, possibly with smaller presents providing clues as to its identity. And you'd sit there smugly, thinking that you'd got the "best" gifts. (If TV is to be believed, you'd also have burst into tears if anyone had bought you a Soda Stream, but possibly not for the reasons the advert implies.)

So how to recapture that magic? I don't know. I'm spending my first Christmas with the girlfriend's family this year, and they have their own set of interesting rituals and ceremonies to take on. Will it be fun? I'm sure it will, but I doubt that magic of Christmas as a kid will ever be there again.

We'll see!