#oneaday Day 440: eBooks are a good

Considering my predilection for collecting physical releases of video games, I'm kind of surprised at myself with how readily I took up eBooks in favour of a physical library of books. I still have some physical books — mostly nice "coffee table" ones like the Bitmap Books stuff, plus a number from my childhood that hold sentimental value — but over the years, a huge pile of books I used to own have ended up in the book banks or charity shops. Some of them I've replaced with electronic versions; some I haven't. At this point, there are some books I've only ever owned as eBooks.

I enjoy reading; always have done. I grew up being supported and encouraged by my parents to read, and quickly established a "reading age" well ahead of where I was "supposed" to be at any given point in primary school. I vividly recall spending time reading books from the Ginn 360 Reading Scheme that were much higher in "level" than those of my peers, and being given special "reading comprehension" tests further up the school to test that my proficiency with reading was, in fact, the real deal. (It was.)

I had a lot of books at home, too. I collected the Roald Dahl books for quite a while, and read many of them repeatedly — including the two volumes of his autobiography, which were much more challenging than his work that was explicitly for children. I remember reading the Chronicles of Narnia books. Blade of the Poisoner, of course. Enid Blyton books. Choose Your Own Adventure books. All manner of different things — including some quite challenging titles as I grew older, like the complete Sherlock Holmes stories, recreated as they originally appeared in the Strand magazine, but slightly smaller and thus in obscenely tiny print. Bram Stoker's Dracula. The works of H.P. Lovecraft.

At secondary school, by the time I got to GCSE and A-levels, I was getting extra assignments in English Literature classes encouraging me to read beyond the standard syllabus. (I wasn't thrilled at having to read more John Steinbeck — Cannery Row, as I recall — after having just suffered through Of Mice and Men, but being pleased at being singled out for praise and attention by my teacher counterbalanced that somewhat.) At university, I enjoyed reading some of the books we were assigned, but found myself bouncing hard off anything that involved what I still regard as the "absolute bollocks end of philosophy".

As most of us do, once I was past compulsory education, my rate of reading for pleasure slowed somewhat, but I still enjoyed the odd novel here and there. But I moved house a lot over the course of the years between starting university and getting to a point where I felt vaguely "settled", and moving a big pile of books every time was getting increasingly tiresome. So, eventually, over time, I gradually shed those books, making sure they went to what was hopefully a good home rather than just throwing them in the bin. While I wasn't especially attached to the books themselves as collectibles, I at least wanted to show them the respect of passing them on to someone else rather than discarding them. To me, a book had meaning and value, and even if you didn't want it any more, someone else might still get some pleasure from it.

I can't remember when I got my first Kindle offhand. To my shame, I didn't use it all that much, and I felt a fair bit of guilt about that. A good few years later, I upgraded the Kindle I didn't use all that much to a newer Paperwhite model with a built-in light, and found myself reading a whole lot more. Even more recently, I splurged on a Kindle Scribe, primarily for its "endless notepaper" facility and lovely electronic pencil, but was pleased to discover that the Scribe's form factor is great for reading manga.

Now, while I don't read every single day, I wouldn't want to be without some form of e-reader. I know folks quite rightly have mixed opinions about anything Amazon related, and I don't begrudge them that. Not only that, but Amazon (and the Kindle store) is becoming increasingly filled with AI-generated slop, making "just browsing" for something new to read more of a pain. But if you have at the very least a rough idea of what you might want to read, it's hard to beat the experience of being able to look something up, hit the "buy" button and be reading it a moment later.

I'm honestly not really sure why I'm 100% fine with this when it comes to books, but much more precious about wanting to keep physical releases of video games. Both are essentially "collectible" in the same way, but I guess at some point my brain has just decided that for me, it's the contents of the book that is the most important thing, whereas with video games, the physical package and the tactile feeling of putting in a disc or cartridge is as important a part of experiencing the thing as it is actually seeing the thing on the television and interacting with it.

I suppose it doesn't really matter. I don't have room for a library of books and a library of video games in my house, and the video games have, to date, won. But that doesn't mean my Kindle library isn't bulging with cool and interesting things to read! Now, I just need to pick what I'm going to read when we go on holiday, because that seems like some prime reading time.

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 427: Reader, I married him

I finished reading Jane Eyre last night. I can't quite remember exactly what prompted me to read it again — for it was the third time I've read it in my life, having read it once at school, once at university and a third time now — but I'm glad I did read it. I suspect it was most likely on my mind after playing, writing about and making a video about the rather fabulous adventure game, The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, which is very much steeped in the ideas of "the female Gothic" and particularly that style of literature's distinctive breed of heroine.

But I feel like it was also a bit of a challenge to myself; in recent years, all I've really read in book terms are modern English novels and serialised (translated) light novels that originated in Japan — not that there's anything wrong with either of those, but they're not exactly one might call a challenging read for the most part. And that's fine; sometimes you don't want to have to work to enjoy something.

Going back and reading literature from the past, though, is always interesting. I found with this most recent re-read of Jane Eyre that, as I expected, it took a while to get back into the swing of 19th century English. This is a particularly interesting time for the language when there is a lot that is perfectly recognisable and parsable to a modern audience — we had reached a point where most words were spelled as they are today, for example — but there are a lot of more subtle things, like structural elements, turns of phrase and the way sentences are constructed, which can be challenging to dive headlong into. Take a look at this, for example, which is technically all one sentence:

He was, in short, in his afterdinner mood; more expanded and genial, and also more self-indulgent than the frigid and rigid temper of the morning: still, he looked preciously grim, cushioning his massive head against the swelling back of his chair, and receiving the light of the fire on his granitehewn features, and in his great, dark eyes—for he had great, dark eyes, and very fine eyes, too; not without a certain change in their depths sometimes, which, if it was not softness, reminded you, at least, of that feeling.

(Jane Eyre, Chapter XIV)

I'm willing to bet that, unless you make a habit of reading 19th century literature on the regular, it probably took you a scan or two to read and fully parse that single sentence. There's nothing there that is particularly difficult in and of itself — there are no complex, archaic words to decipher, no random untranslated French phrases (which do occur elsewhere in the book) and not even any particularly complicated concepts to understand — but the sheer number of subordinate clauses, semicolons, colons, dashes and suchlike means that the sentence, as a whole, goes several "layers" deeper into nested punctuation marks than a 21st century copy editor would be altogether comfortable with.

And so it was for me when I started re-reading Jane Eyre. I remember having this struggle when first I beheld it for (I think) A-level English Literature, and being actually quite relieved when it came up early in my university studies, as it was still fairly fresh in my mind, meaning I wouldn't have to go through the whole "calibration" process again. But it had been long enough since those university studies and today that this time around, I did have to recalibrate my mind somewhat — and I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it at first.

But, to my surprise (and delight) it happened a lot quicker than I thought it would. The thing with pre-20th century literature (heck, anything from before the mid-20th century, even) is that you kind of have to bang your head against it repeatedly until it yields enough to let you in. And when it does — because it will, eventually, given sufficient perseverance — you will be rewarded. Because as complicated as that sentence quoted above is, it's also terribly evocative. If you're the sort of person who can derive mental pictures from the words you read — and I'm aware not everyone can do that — then you probably got a pretty strong one from the above description of Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester.

The thing that makes Jane Eyre particularly enjoyable to me is its first-person narration. You're not just listening to a disinterested narrator explaining what has happened; you are, instead, listening to a participant of the story recount and reflect on the things that happened to them. I've always been rather drawn to first-person narratives — many of my own prior creative works are written in first-person — and I suspect that Jane Eyre was one of several influences on me in that regard. For me, a first-person narrative style really allows you to get to know the protagonist of the work; it's why I resonate so well with Japanese visual novels and light novels today, I think, which are also typically written from the first-person. It gives you the sense of separation that you are not the star of the story — this is a contrast between visual novels and traditional adventure games, for example, as the latter use second-person narration — but also allows you a particularly intimate relationship with the protagonist; one that even the protagonist's closest confidantes in the narrative itself don't enjoy, in many cases.

For example, consider the relationship between Jane and Rochester in Jane Eyre. Many of their interactions between one another take the form of verbal sparring, with Jane's sharp wit matched by Rochester's sarcasm; both spend a significant portion of the novel trying to get the full measure of the other, with each concealing their true feelings for reasons that are their own. If this were presented from a disinterested outsider's perspective, we might not get the same understanding of the situation, as to someone who doesn't know at least part of what is going on, their interactions might look like genuine snippiness with one another.

In the case of us, the audience, we only get to learn the absolute truth of Jane's take on the situation, which is that part of her wants to keep Rochester at arm's length because she senses a certain degree of danger from him (which, it turns out, is not entirely unjustified) but also because she detects he enjoys their repartee. We later, of course, learn from Rochester himself that he has been playing his own little game with Jane — with certain members of high society forming his playing pieces — but without Jane's suspicions about the situation or Rochester's eventual admission, it would have been very easy to misinterpret everything.

It's interesting to contemplate the book's viewpoints on certain matters, given how society has changed since the time it was written. Jane Eyre is often cited as one of the first great feminist works, for example, and it's not hard to see why. Jane herself is a powerful figure who is, for the most part, in control of her own destiny; she learns and grows stronger from hardships and adversity, and it's only at one point in the narrative — where she flees Thornfield Hall after learning of Rochester's mad wife in the attic, then accidentally leaves her meagre worldly possessions in a coach before getting stranded on the Moors in the middle of nowhere — that we ever see her display what one might call "weakness". Even during that time, however, she's shown to have a good head on her shoulders, and makes some wise decisions that ultimately pay off, despite the indignity of collapsing on a stranger's doorstep.

The book is surprisingly scathing about religion — a fact which caused some critics to baulk at it on its original release — but it makes a solid argument. The figure of St. John Rivers, a character from the latter part of the narrative, presents an interesting challenge for Jane; up until now, she has attempted to live her life in a good, Christian sort of way, but St. John shows that one can perhaps take things in that regard a little too far — particularly once he starts proposing a loveless marriage to Jane (who, we have learned by this point, is actually his cousin) on the grounds that she would "make a good missionary's wife". Jane is having none of that shit, of course, and tells him so; even so, the fact that she does start to wonder if she might be coming around to his way of thinking by one point presents a surprisingly potent exploration of how abusive relationships work, because this crack in her resolve is the result of St. John's unrelenting dickishness towards her after her initial rejection of him. St. John is a cunt and I'm glad he died alone in India. There, I said it.

Anyway, yeah. Jane Eyre was a good read. This is, of course, something of an understatement given what a classic work of literature it is considered to be — and how it ranks highly in various "greatest books of all time" polls — but I think it's easy to forget that pre-20th century literature can just be "enjoyable" as well as "great" and "important".

I certainly enjoyed re-reading Jane Eyre. Now I have to determine whether to continue riding this wave of enthusiasm for classic literature, given that my brain has been successfully recalibrated for 19th century prose, or if I should read something for a bit of light relief. I haven't quite decided yet, but I will definitely be making more time for reading.

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#oneaday Day 395: A place for authors

One thing I've found myself wondering about a fair bit of late is whether the world still has a place for authors. By that, I mean people who primarily write books as their main contribution to existence; people whose job it is to write things that are, by their very nature, more long-form than your average 500-word Internet article.

Because, you know, I'm a little concerned. I'm a little concerned that a lot of people simply don't seem to have the mental capacity to digest anything written that is more than 250-500 words these days. Worse, there are people out there who genuinely believe that getting ChatGPT to "summarise" books for you is the same as "reading" them.

Part of me wants to write a book, or perhaps more accurately, multiple books, both fiction and non-fiction. I've always wanted to do this, and to my shame I've never pursued it to any particular degree, when I probably should. But these days I find myself wondering if I haven't left it too late. Is anyone even reading books any more? If I were to write a complete book that was all me, conjured up from the depths of my imagination, would anyone even believe that it wasn't AI-generated these days?

There's also the question of what to write about. There are numerous things I've started writing over the years, but only a few I've actually finished. Some of them you can read on this blog; one I even turned into an actual, physical self-published book. But that big question always hangs over my head: would anyone give a shit? Would anyone care enough to read it? Does that even matter?

Well, of course it matters to a certain degree. Writing a book is a significant amount of work, and putting all that effort in only for no-one to actually read it is… a suboptimal outcome, to say the least. And the trouble is, I feel, that the longer I leave it, the more likely that suboptimal outcome is to come true. The fewer people will be reading books. The fewer people will ever care about me, a nobody in the grand scheme of things, having found some means of expressing my creativity.

I've just been back and had a rummage through my "Creative Writing" folder that I have on my Google Drive. There's a few things in there that are the start of a good idea. Perhaps I should develop some of those. Perhaps I should try and start something completely new. Perhaps I should try and actually finish the story I've had half-complete in my mind since the age of about 15.

Or perhaps I should just accept the world as it apparently is today, recognise that I have maybe left it too late, and attempt to content myself with the other creative things I do.

I dunno. That last one doesn't feel altogether satisfactory. I still clearly have some thinking to do in this regard, it seems.

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#oneaday Day 311: Literary Minded

Every so often, I get really in the mood to Read Stuff. I'm in one of those moods right now; having finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow recently, I found myself having a curious hankering to return to a book I haven't read since my university days: Jane Eyre.

I like Jane Eyre. At least, I remember liking it when I studied it at both secondary school and university. I found its first-person narration compelling, its protagonist likeable and interesting, and its multi-phase narrative most enjoyable. I also enjoyed reading it alongside Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, a more modern (well, 1966) novel that tells the story of the woman who would become the "madwoman in the attic" wife of Jane Eyre's Mr Rochester. That novel was also the one which introduced me to "stream of consciousness" first-person narrative, which is a format I found immediately pleasing, and promptly made use of in the vast majority of creative writing projects I have done ever since.

I haven't read any "literature" for a while, though. By "literature" I, of course, mean "older works". Most people, I'm sure, have a bit of a mental block about reading older literature due to how the language has changed and evolved considerably over time, and how this makes them "difficult" to read. For sure, reading the first few chapters of Jane Eyre on the toilet this evening required a little fine-tuning in the ol' brain to get back into the swing of things, but I remembered that despite being obviously archaic in some of its turns of phrase and lexicon, Charlotte Brontë's (or perhaps Jane's) prose is relatively breezy by the standards of certain other works from a similar period, and once you reconfigure your base frequency to match that of a novel written in 1847, it's a surprisingly easy read.

I'm also starting to feel like it's of increasing importance to keep one's brain "fresh". With how disappointingly widespread bullshit AI-generated "summaries" are becoming, I genuinely fear a bit for the future of literary analysis and study. Now, I'm not particularly intending on doing any more literary analysis on Jane Eyre than I already have done in my life, but one thing I did find during my studies in earlier years is that having an awareness of certain things actually enhances your appreciation of various works when you read them purely for pleasure.

And thus, for the first time in quite a few years, I'm going to be diving back into the literary archives and reading both some books I remember enjoying (Dracula is on my list, and perhaps the Sherlock Holmes stories) as well as some that I have never actually read — Frankenstein and Wuthering Heighs spring immediately to mind. I don't remember having read those, anyway.

It's easy to be all doom and gloom about the state of the world today, and with good reason. But good literature has always been about being able to transport you to another time, place, even world, and I feel like that is going to be of increasing importance as the years go on and our real world becomes increasingly terrible and awful. I mean, Jane Eyre has it pretty rough at various points in her story. But at least she has a degree of agency in her life, and we know her tale is going somewhere. No-one knows where the tale of life in 2025 is going, and with each passing day the possible conclusions feel a little more scary.

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#oneaday Day 306: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

I finally got around to reading a novel my mother has been bugging me to read for ages now. It's by Gabrielle Zevin and is called Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which is one of those titles that looks more and more wrong the more times you type it out in succession. I didn't know much about the book going in other than that it was somehow related to video games, and I deliberately didn't read anything about it prior to starting it, so I had gone in with the (mistaken, as it turns out) assumption that it was going to be another Ready Player One sort of situation.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is rather different, though. While it does indeed draw inspiration from the world of video games, it is not a sci-fi novel, and the games are used more as a backdrop to what is going on rather than in-your-face references. The main story concerns two individuals who meet as children in a hospital: Sam Masur is a traumatised young man with a mangled foot after a car crash that killed his mother, while Sadie Green is an intelligent young woman who had initially been attending the hospital to visit her sister, who had leukaemia, but who subsequently managed to strike up a friendship with Sam.

The pair bond over video games, something which was clearly already important in both of their lives; Sam displays himself to be a skilled player of Super Mario Bros. when Sadie first encounters him, while Sadie has long exchanged in-jokes relating to The Oregon Trail with her sister. Sadie discovers that her interactions with Sam have caused him to speak for the first time in a very long while, and she is encouraged to see him regularly as part of the "community service" requirements for her bat mitzvah. Sam eventually discovers this — helped along by Sadie's rather jealous sister — and, understandably, begins to doubt Sadie's friendship, causing a rift between them that lasts for several years.

The pair meet again by chance several years later, when they are both nineteen years old and studying at institutions in Cambridge, Massachusetts — Sam at Harvard, Sadie at MIT. They once again bond over video games; Sadie introduces Sam to a video game she composed called Solution. Solution is an early example of an "art game"; it positions players in the role of someone working at a factory, but "completing" the game reveals that one was actually producing weapons for the Nazis in World War II. Players can alternatively complete the game by uncovering "the truth" about what they are actually up to earlier on.

Aside: real-life developer Brenda Romero believes that Solution is based a little too closely on her board game Train, which had a similar concept of going "surprise! You're a Nazi!" at its conclusion, but, as the name suggests, a different focus. I can see how she arrived at that conclusion — particularly as Zevin acknowledged the game's influence — but Sadie's Solution approaches the matter from a somewhat different angle, and Sadie, rather than Romero, being the creator is important to the story. So I think we can maybe let that slide for now.

Anyway, Solution made people in Sadie's game design class absolutely furious, as you might expect, but Sam sees something in it. And thus begins a rather tempestuous working relationship, as the pair decide to make games together — some of which are huge successes, and others of which are big fat flops.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about video games, but it's also about the creative spirit and the balance young professionals often have to find between truly expressing themselves and doing something that will actually make them some money. It's about the wild mood swings the creative temperament can bring, and about how different ideals can sometimes lead to seemingly irreconcilable differences — and how the truly strong friendships can weather those storms, even if it takes years to do so sometimes.

The games are used as a backdrop to the main story of the relationship between Sam, Sadie and the other people who are part of their lives, both personally and professionally. Author Gabrielle Zevin admits that there are a few anachronisms in terms of the games she mentions and the times at which people are playing or discussing them, but notes that this is all in service of the story. We are, after all, talking about a fictional world that refers to a variety of things that exist in the real world — ranging from the classic arcade game Donkey Kong to the gaming lifestyle website Kotaku — and couples them with events that never actually happened. In this sense, it's an "alternate history" novel of sorts, only this history is about video games rather than, say, Hitler never having been born.

It's an interesting approach. The novel's perspective jumps around in time and in terms of which character it is focusing on at any given time. Sometimes you're "in the moment" as the events of the past are occurring; at others, the narration presents Sam and/or Sadie being "interviewed" by a real-life site (such as Kotaku) about something that never actually happened in the real world, but which was an important occurrence in this alternate history. Aside from a few early hiccups where Zevin refers to "3.25 inch floppy disks" on more than one occasion (which made me wince slightly every time), the effect is mostly very convincing; it doesn't take long before you're swept along with this account of something that could have happened in this world, but which didn't.

The novel is not just about how video games have changed over time. It's also about how attempts to introduce progressive themes into games have, at times, met with uncomfortable challenges. The novel takes this to something of an extreme — more so than anything that has, to my knowledge, happened in the real world — but the point it makes is convincing. As far as I'm aware, no-one has gone and shot up a game company in the real world over the inclusion of gay and transgender characters in a video game, but the idea is depressingly plausible. From a broader perspective, the inclusion of a sequence in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow where one of the major characters is shot dead following such an encounter can be looked on as criticism of gun culture and violence in America, and how more often than not mass shootings are the result of a disaffected white dude who has snapped about something in his life or society.

Some of the most effective sequences in the book are where Zevin isn't afraid to get a bit weird. After the aforementioned shooting sequence, there's a peculiar second-person sequence presented as the reader occupying the role of the fatally shot character in the present tense as their life slips away. There's another sequence later where a depressed Sadie is playing a massively multiplayer online game, but it never actually mentions the character we're following is Sadie; everything is presented "in character" and "in world". Like the world of video game development, the literary techniques that Zevin uses throughout Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow never remain constant; they're always changing, developing, moving on, advancing.

It's also a novel about how women struggle to be taken seriously in what is still perceived to be a "boys' club", even with more and more evidence to the contrary that women have always been a part of gaming. Sadie continually struggles to be seen as the artist she is because Sam is better at the business aspect. Despite being depicted as somewhat awkward in the early hours of the book, he ends up becoming a confident "face of the company" when promoting their work, suggesting that there may be some sort of mental health issues in an autistic/ADHD-adjacent area at work with Sam's character; his behaviour is very consistent with hyperfixations and intense, deep passions for very specific things.

But Sadie struggles too, despite being less obviously "broken" than Sam is. She may not have suffered the traumatic, violent loss of a parent, she may not have physical mobility issues and she may come from a background of relative privilege, but there are times when she struggles. There are times when she finds herself swept up in an abusive relationship because she thinks its benefits outweigh its drawbacks. There are times she falls into an inconsolable depression, when even those closest to her cannot reach her. There are times when she simply doesn't know what to do, despite her intelligence. She suffers, too — perhaps even more than Sam does — and the story of her own trials are an important part of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

I'll refrain from spoiling too much more of the details of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, because I do recommend it, even if you're not "a gamer". Having the context of and an understanding of the video games referenced throughout is helpful, certainly, but this is not a story that is specifically about those video games. Instead, they're used to support the narrative and its approach to a fairly mundane but nonetheless impactful alternate history; the thrust of the story is, instead, about love, friendship, creativity, artistry and the range of challenges creative types (with varying degrees of mental health struggles) have faced over the course of the last 30-40 years or so.

So there we go. Now my mother can stop asking me if I've read it yet, because now I have!

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#oneaday, Day 217: "Book? LOL!"

I forget the exact circumstances of when I came across the quote in this post's title. It may have been on some form of social networking website, or dating site, or something like that. But it was a good few years back now.

The context of the quote was in one of those sections you get on pretty much all online profiles that asks you to list your favourite music, films, TV shows and books. This person's favourite books were listed as "book? lol".

That struck me as rather sad, but perhaps a little unsurprising given the general attention span of most people these days. Why sit down with a book which delays gratification and requires active use of the brain when you can be immediately bombarded with information via TV and the Internet?

It's an age-old argument of course, and one which has probably been running ever since every new information-giving technology came along. However, it seems particularly ironic in the context of the Internet, given that much of it is, in fact, text. Sure, there are pretty pictures and buttons that fart when you click on them and pornography, but it's still fundamentally built on text. You're reading text right now. Is your head hurting yet?

The fact that everyone has a voice on the Internet is one of those things that is debatable as to whether it is a Good Thing or not. But as part of having that voice, everyone has the opportunity to give their thoughts and expand on them as much as they want to. The sad thing is, though, in many cases, people don't feel like they have the time to read (or write) a full, well-considered argument. Instead, they denounce it as a "wall of text" and choose not to read it.

It happens in video games, too. A friend of mine once said that he couldn't get through Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney because there was "too much reading". It's a game about a lawyer. I'm not sure what else he was expecting.

As a writer, as someone who crafts language and bends it to my will in the name of pretentiousness, self-expression, catharsis and humour, this is sad. The English language is a powerful tool that can say many things. As, indeed, are other languages. But it seems that for many these days, the priority is for quick, snappy, "efficient" communication. And sure, there are situations in which this is entirely appropriate. But I say that shouldn't be the norm. People shouldn't be afraid to speak their mind in as much length as they wish.

My mind is particularly drawn to the early days of the Squadron of Shame. Long before we started producing our podcast, we ran lengthy discussion threads on a variety of games on 1up.com's Radio forum. We'd started as a result of one of the 1up Radio features, so that was our spiritual home. Many of the people who populated that forum were articulate sorts who agreed with my thoughts above, so there were plenty of like-minded individuals there who enjoyed taking part in our discussions and posting their own "walls of text".

But one day, the Powers That Be at 1up decided that it would be a great idea to merge all the forums into "Games" and "Not Games". This meant that lengthy, in-depth discussion threads from groups such as the Squadron were crammed into the same space as "OMG HALO IS BETTR THAN KILZONE". Naturally, this led to problems. In one of the last discussions we had on those boards—on the subject of the peculiar PS2 game Psi-Ops—the posting was almost immediately derailed by a particularly notorious troll who posted "OMG FUCKING MASSIVE WALL OF TEXT" in giant red letters. Said "wall of text" was maybe six or seven paragraphs long and was interesting to read, but as soon as troll boy showed his face, the discussion went off track, not helped by many people (including myself) rising to his bait.

It's a pity that to some people the desire to speak in detail, at length and to produce a coherent argument is seen as a negative thing. Personally I would have thought that a forum—by its very nature an asynchronous method of communication in which people can take their time to consider their responses—was the ideal environment in which to have these lengthy discussions. But apparently not.

This is perhaps an unnecessarily negative picture, of course. There are still people who read books. There are still people who like to post more than five words at a time. There are still people who don't decide to ignore all the rules of spelling, punctuation and grammar "just because it's the Internet"—who came up with that stupid idea, anyway? It's just a pity that, at times, they seem to be declining in number.

Oh well. If you read through all that, you can count yourself amongst the élite!

One A Day, Day 12: It's pronounced B-O-LL-O-CK-S.

Good evening! Since my wife's viewing of televisual car crash Popstar to Opera Star precludes my playing of Mass Effect and its sequel on the TV, and Star Trek Online has decided to update itself with a patch that will take 5 hours to download on Steam (despite the fact I was playing it earlier with no problems), now's as good a time as any to get today's entry done.

Today I would like to rant about phonics, since I had a long, boring, pointless and patronising training day on this very subject today.

For the uninitiated, phonics is the theory which suggests that children should learn reading by sounding out individual phonemes in words, then learn how to "blend" them together where appropriate. It also suggests that it's sensible to teach six-year olds the words "morpheme", "phoneme", "grapheme", "digraph" and "trigraph" – words which I didn't come across until I studied English Language at A-level (age 16-18) and again at university.

The flaw, in case you haven't spotted it, is that English isn't a phonetic language. We have so many different ways of pronouncing each letter in our alphabet that using phonics to teach reading quickly becomes useless – and in the meantime, it fucks up spelling ability.

As if to emphasise this point, the official materials for teaching phonics from the government include an appendix of the most "high-frequency" words in the English language. Out of the thirty most-used words in the English language, fourteen of them are designated "tricky" words, which means that the phonics rules don't apply to them. Well, if the phonics rules don't apply to almost half of the most common words in the language, exactly what use is it to anyone?

The funny thing is, I can't remember how I learned to read. I imagine that's not an uncommon thought – childhood memories fade over time, after all – but I'm pretty sure it didn't involve phonics at any point. I can tell this because I can spell, and don't think that because "rough" is pronounced "r-u-ff" that it should be spelled that way too, which is what I see kids doing on a daily basis.

It's difficult to know what to suggest, though. Phonics is fashionable. Someone somewhere said it was "good" and it stuck. As with most fashions, this is nothing to do with how good it is. It is simply the "in" thing at the time.

It doesn't help, of course, that the leader of today's training day was a patronising, aggressive middle-aged harpy who clearly had a chip on her shoulder about something. Her holier-than-thou attitude towards phonics and teaching reading and her steadfast refusal to consider any alternatives (even doing an arrogant "shaking head" movement whenever anyone raised a point she didn't agree with) made everyone resent the process even more than its inherent stupidity already did.

This video pretty much sums up the problem:

(Thanks to Jeff Parsons for bringing this to my attention.)

Here's a poem, too. Don't say I'm not good to you.

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead –
For goodness sake don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose –
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart –
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five!

Quoted by Vivian Cook and Melvin Bragg 2004,
by Richard Krogh, in D Bolinger & D A Sears, Aspects of Language, 1981,
and in Spelling Progress Bulletin March 1961, Brush up on your English.