#oneaday Day 877: A quiet life versus loneliness

Not for the first time, I find myself contemplating shutting down my social media accounts. I don't have many of them left any more; I have a Facebook account, which I was only really keeping around because I was an admin of the Evercade page, but no longer really have that responsibility, and a Bluesky account, which I'll talk more about in a moment.

Facebook, at this point, I probably can just get rid of. I'm not sure if my WhatsApp account is connected to it (I don't think it is?) but other than that, I have absolutely no reason to use it. No-one speaks to me on there, I don't like using it and it is, thus, largely useless to me. That should be fairly straightforward; my only real hesitation is the aforementioned professional responsibility, as there are times where I may have to hop in and cover moderation if no-one else is available to do so.

Bluesky is a more difficult one. For many folks, Bluesky has taken the place of Twitter, and that is the primary reason I have been using it. The combination of short-form posts and ease of starting conversations with people you follow has long been an appealing element, just like it once was with Twitter. But at the same time, Bluesky, being a heavily left-leaning platform, is very much home to some of the worst kinds of behaviour that turned me off Twitter in the first place. (The behaviours that are keeping me off Twitter now are, of course, from the opposite side of the political spectrum, and far more odious. But still.) While I, too, am a left-leaning individual, there's a particular breed of leftie that likes to make a lot of noise about whatever their hobby horse of the day is, and it can get very tiring when it feels like there is never a moment's peace.

Thing is, many of these issues are valid things to care about, but they often end up becoming "guilt by association" exercises, with other people and organisations getting drawn into the crossfire just because they might have once, in the past, crossed paths with whatever the target of the hour is. At that point, people start getting hurt; people who don't deserve to be hurt. And that's the biggest thing that makes me contemplate shutting things down. I am one of those people who have been hurt by situations like this, not because I (or any organisations I am attached to) have done anything wrong, but because at some point we have crossed paths with the target of someone's ire.

This might sound pretty cut and dry. I'm having negative feelings about Bluesky, so why don't I just jack it in?

Well, because for all its irritating features, it is the one and pretty much only place online where I feel like I have a connection to other people. There are a few people I know there; there are a few people I have got to know there; there are a few people I would like to know there. Cutting my connection to all those people because I am pissed off and exhausted at the behaviour of some other users feels… disproportionate and excessive.

The alternative, of course, is to take steps to remove the people whose behaviour I object to from my feed. Bluesky has numerous ways of doing that, including muting individual comment threads, muting users and blocking users. Honestly, that is probably the answer in this situation, but I'm always a bit hesitant about this, because in many cases, the people who have been exhibiting behaviour I object to aren't like that all the time; some of them are even folks that I like. But I don't feel comfortable confronting them on things like this, because, like I say, I don't necessarily think the core of what they're arguing is wrong; hurting other people unfairly, however, is. And that nuance often tends to get lost in online disagreements. I've had enough negative experiences in the past to know that for absolute sure.

So I sit here, with no particularly ideal solutions at hand. Close Bluesky, and end up feeling completely lonely and isolated, because no-one checks in on people if they're not on social media any more? (I've tried this before. It's like you cease to exist, even if you're doing something like I'm doing here, and updating a blog regularly.) Mute, unfollow or block the offenders and risk kicking off arguments that don't need to happen, and which will inevitably leave me feeling worse? Or just suck it up, recognise that I have a difference of opinion with some people, continue to catch occasional strays and feel miserable and uneasy?

I just want a Third Place where people are chill, man. There are fuck all left in the real world, and it's starting to feel like there are fuck all left online, either. I will never forgive them for taking 1up and its club pages from us.

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 851: Abandon ship?

Earlier today, the thoroughly lovely Quest 64 Official account on Bluesky (actually, in their own words, an account that has "spent nearly a decade attempting to rehab the way people view Quest 64/games in general", which is a sentiment I am 100% on board with) expressed frustration over a YouTube video they had seen cross their feed, which promised "12 longest N64 games that will take forever to beat!"

Now, that might not sound like a particularly offensive topic for a video, and it arguably isn't — even if it is both clichéd and clickbaity. What was offensive was… well, it was a lot of things. The video's thumbnail, which showed an obvious AI-generated approximation of Quest 64 rather than an actual screenshot. The fact Quest 64 was the poster boy for this topic in the first place (Quest 64 is approximately 12 hours long, which is very short by RPG standards). The fact that the channel, "Retro Pocket", very obviously uses an AI-generated logo — and thus it is not unreasonable to assume that the entire video may well be AI-generated.

"Now I have to not only fight the past," Quest said, "but future AI misinformation. It's becoming increasingly clear my Internet days are numbered, sadly." He went on to criticise the growing "Claudepuke" scene in the recompilation and modding scenes — something which has driven me to despair of late also.

The thing that made me most sad about this — and I feel sad and angry about all of it, make no mistake — is the fact that a person as thoroughly admirable and pleasant as Quest is should have to feel this way; like his contributions to online culture are no longer welcome, appreciated or worthwhile continuing with. I say this as someone who both follows the Quest 64 Official account, and has casually chatted with the person behind the account outside the context of public-facing social media: we need more people like this, not fewer.

It makes me sad, because I get it. As someone who still runs both a personal blog and an enthusiast, non-commercial video game website, I am a relic of a past age. I refuse to engage with short-form vertical video because I fucking hate it as a medium. I am tired of clickbait, AI slop, YouTubers covering the same few topics over and over again (I tried everything by BRAND! Testing VIRAL TIKTOK recipes! I bought AI SLOP PRODUCTS!) and headlines that refuse to name the proper noun that is the subject of the story. And yet with each passing day, I feel more and more like I cannot escape any of those things. I feel more and more like I am not welcome on an Internet I was once excited to be a part of. That offline existence feels increasingly appealing.

And yet I don't want to give up. I still remember that wide-eyed wonderment that my whole family had when we were first looking at Web pages in a crash-prone copy of Mosaic when CompuServe first added access to the broader Internet. I still remember the first time we ordered something online. I still remember the first time I chatted to someone online and formed a genuine friendship as a result. I refuse to accept that Internet is completely gone.

I feel like those of us who have been online since the beginning (or the beginning of it being relatively "mainstream", anyway) have just as much right to exist on the Internet as those who are systematically destroying everything that used to be great about it. In fact, if I'm honest, I feel like we have more right to exist than those who are systematically destroying everything that used to be great about it. I would be sad to see Quest 64 Official stop posting. I would be elated to never see anything from Sam Altman, Wario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg and their ilk ever again.

But I don't know what to do, other than to stubbornly Keep Posting. To keep writing this silly little personal blog here, to keep penning my in-depth thoughts about video games I've played, and to steadfastly refuse to get on board with technological trends that are actively, demonstrably harmful to the concept of "culture" in general. To prove that there is still a place for The Old Internet.

So that's all I can do, really. Just Keep Posting. I refuse to let the fuckheads win. I will, hopefully, still be here when all the AI companies collapse and the world endures a hitherto unprecedented financial crisis that brings the very concept of capitalism to complete ruin. And I will be laughing. And probably crying a bit. But mostly laughing.

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#oneaday Day 819: Comments sections are self-harm

"Don't read the comments. Never read the comments." It's one of the most enduring pieces of advice on the Internet, and it's always been sound advice. And I've always thought that to be a bit of a shame.

Well, let me qualify that somewhat: you shouldn't read the comments on public-facing, commercial sites. If you have successfully cultivated your own pleasant little community in your own comments section, you absolutely should not feel bad about reading your comments and continuing to encourage that sort of behaviour. You might even find yourself forming some genuine friendships.

Comments that are open to the broader Internet, though. No. Just… don't. Do yourself a favour, because wading in there is going to make you feel worse. You know that, I know that. And yet still we both do it, even though we both know, at this point, that it is a form of mental self-harm.

There's a website that I enjoy reading, which I won't name because I think it's a bit mean to draw attention to them for having a shitty comments section. But… well, they have a really shitty comments section, and it's immensely frustrating, because the subject matter of the site is something that I would like to engage with other people over! I would like to get to know more people who are into the same things I am into!

And yet, unfortunately, it seems that the subject matter in question — it's retro gaming, I might as well say it — attracts some of the most unpleasant people out there. I already knew this to a certain extent, with the amount of drama that often surrounds the retro YouTuber sector in particular, but it's frustrating that there can't just be a nice place for people who are interested in retro gaming to hang out without a variety of dipshits coming in and stinking the place up with some truly foul opinions.

I mean, come on. We're talking about a site focusing on retro gaming where one guy in the comments decided that A Really Cool Thing To Do would be to go off on one about how much he thought CRTs were shit, and how everyone who enjoyed using CRTs for their retro consoles were idiots, and how anyone disagreeing with him was a shithead and wrong. Come on, man. Know your audience. What sort of response were you expecting when you pulled something like that out of your arse?

Unfortunately, I know the answer to that: they did know their audience; they wanted to start conflict. They wanted to start arguments and make other people's lives miserable, even in one of the places where they should be able to feel like they can just enjoy their hobbies and interests. People like this have always been around, for as long as "Going Online" has been a thing. They get some sort of perverse gratification from it. And somehow, we can't look away, even though we know it hurts us to do so — and hurts even more if we rise to the bait and respond to these dickheads.

So yeah. Do yourself a favour and don't read the comments. There are better places to build a community over common interests than the comments section of a public-facing website. Although if you happen to find any relating to retro gaming, do let me know…?

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#oneaday Day 802: However bad you think Twitter is now, it's worse

Earlier today, Aftermath posted a review of Half is More, a new manga that explores the life of mixed-race characters in Japan. It sounds like an interesting read, and I may well pick it up — the last manga I read that was designed around the idea of sensitively exploring the life of someone who exists outside perceived cultural "defaults" was Love Me For Who I Am, and I feel like I really learned something worthwhile from reading that entire series. I get a similar vibe from this work.

As part of Aftermath's article, reviewer Isaiah Colbert remarked that the manga had had its "announcement treated like a Klan rally in the comments and quote-retweets of its English localization on Twitter". I was, sadly, unsurprised to hear this. But I'm not entirely sure why I did what I did next.

I found an old, defunct Twitter account that I once had that is still active, and I logged into Twitter to have a look. I haven't even looked at Twitter for months at this point; even while I was doing social media for the day job, I spent as little time on there as possible. The whole place just had seriously bad vibes for quite some time now, but I didn't stick around to find out quite how bad. And part of the reason I deliberately stepped away from social media for my work at the day job is because I didn't want to expose myself to that crap at all, let alone "any more than necessary".

Today, I confirmed: things are bad. They're real bad. We're talking blatant, unashamed, absolutely fucking disgusting racism, without even any attempts at plausible deniability. We're talking racist slurs in response to the post; we're talking edits of the cover image to turn it into a racist caricature; we're talking, inexplicably, a lot of antisemitism.

I feel like it takes a fair amount to shock me these days, given how many years I have breathed Internet fumes for, but today I was genuinely taken aback and disgusted by what that site has become. I have no regrets about jumping ship long before it got this bad — and now I have a complete understanding of anyone who has harsh words for those who stick around on the site at all.

The entire place has become a free-for-all cesspit filled with the absolute worst dregs of humanity, all of them feeling safe in the knowledge that they will see zero repercussions for their foul behaviour. Indeed, in the quote-tweets thread for the post in question, one user noted that they reported one of the racist caricatures to Twitter's laughable "safety" department, and got told that the post had, somehow, not broken any rules. At this point I'm not entirely sure Twitter has a safety department any more; there's a non-zero chance that a lot of moderation is left up to Grok, and given that Grok has proven itself to be quite happy to produce child sexual abuse material with minimal encouragement, that makes me feel like it's probably not going to be a good judge of whether something is racist or not.

It's kind of incredible how this has happened. Twitter was once, genuinely, the "town square" of the Internet. It was the "default" social media app for everything. TV shows had official hashtags. Brands had active presences. People actively wanted to be on there to be part of the conversation. And while it's always had its issues and its bad actors, for the most part the truly odious individuals were corralled off into their own little corners rather than being people you will almost definitely run into if you poke your head in there for more than five minutes.

It is no longer a safe place to hang out online. Everything that has happened on that site in the last few years has corrupted it into an utterly disgusting shadow of its former self. And Musk still wants to make it "The Everything App"? He wants people to trust a site like that with their money?

I don't know why I looked at Twitter tonight. I had no need to. But I guess I was curious quite how bad it had actually gotten since I last looked a long time ago; whether the things people had said about it were real, or if they were exaggerations.

They were not exaggerations. Get off that fucking platform if you're still on it.

And no, I will not call it "X".

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#oneaday Day 799: The exhausting town square

Social media was often positioned to us as being like a "global town square", where people from all walks of life and backgrounds could come together and argue about who was the best girl in Evangelion. Over time, I think we can say that experiment… hasn't exactly worked quite as intended.

I mean, sure. I won't deny that my various dalliances with social media — particularly the "public-facing" kind such as Twitter (as it was before… what it is now) and Bluesky — have exposed me to people I might not have otherwise had the opportunity to get to know, and even allowed me to make some friends… I think, anyway.

But sometimes I find myself wondering if there's a reason I might not have come into contact with certain types of people were it not for the "global town square" nature of public-facing social media. I am starting to feel, looking at my Bluesky feed, like I felt when I first fell out of love with Twitter. It feels less about the conversation, sharing and making new friends, and more about performatively saying the right things in order to ensure that you are seen as a "good person" with the "correct" opinions. And I'm really fuckin' tired of that shit.

I won't go into specific examples right now, because that will date this post immediately — plus I'm not altogether keen in getting embroiled in the current "discussions", however indirectly — but suffice it to say for the moment that as soon as you start feeling genuine trepidation about saying certain things, lest the Mob pounce on you for something you might not have actually intended from what you said, then that's the time you should probably start thinking about how you are using social media, and how you might be able to make it better for yourself.

The simple answer is, of course, mute, unfollow or even block the people who are making you feel that way. On Bluesky in particular, the "nuclear block" function means that it is hard (though not impossible) for anyone you have blocked to check up on what you are saying. But on the other hand, I feel like blocking sends a certain message that perhaps isn't exactly what you intend; there's an inherent message of disapproval to it that might not be what you want to say; the same is true for unfollowing, to an arguably slightly lesser extent.

Probably the subtlest approach you can take is just to mute someone who is irritating you, but who you don't particularly want to send that message of disapproval to by blocking them. No-one knows when you've muted them, and you don't see their posts come up in your feed; you may, however, see that there have been posts from accounts you have muted, and the temptation is always to click that thing to see exactly what people have been saying. It's rarely anything worthwhile, and yet still we click. We always must click.

The trouble I find is that a lot of the absolute most insufferable people on social media are also people that I originally followed because I'm interested in the thing that their account suggested was their main interest! But at some point you have to ask the question: "am I still following this person out of a sense of obligation or the increasingly vain hope that they will post about the thing I followed them for, or because I want to see what they are actually posting on an hourly basis?" If the answer is the former, unfollowing or muting them is probably a good idea. Particularly if they aren't following you, in which case they probably won't even notice your absence.

But then that can, itself, be a bit disheartening. It can sometimes be frustrating to post something that I've worked hard on over on Bluesky and it seemingly pass by completely unnoticed, and then post some inane throwaway reply to someone about AI boosters being garbage people and get non-stop notifications of people liking and reposting that ultimately meaningless message for the next three days.

I think I'm just not built for social media. But, paradoxically, it's one of the only means I feel like I have of being able to connect with other people these days. And it sucks that it's that way. The alternative is just being alone, and I don't really want to do that — because I feel like I've proven beyond a doubt over the course of the last few years that if I just disappear quietly, absolutely no-one seems to notice or gives a shit.

And so, ever onward, until the end of time, I Post. Not because I want to, or because I enjoy it, but because I feel like I have to; like that is the only option to prove one's existence.

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#oneaday Day 795: Titties - deal with them

There's been Discourse happening today! Specifically on that strange intersection between the "cosy" and "wholesome" spaces, and weird misogynistic, sexphobic, neo-Puritanical behaviour.

Much has been written by people much smarter than me about how the "cosy" and "wholesome" spaces are actually not all that wholesome at all — and in fact can harbour some of the truly most odious, harmful outlooks on life it's possible to have. Fairly high on this list is the complete unwillingness to be challenged by fiction in any way whatsoever — and I don't even mean "avoids material with complicated and difficult themes that even the most strong-stomached would find uncomfortable"; I mean absolutely completely and utterly unwilling to deal with something perfectly normal on the grounds that it isn't "wholesome" by the exceedingly narrow definition they have inscribed inside their own head.

Here's the post that kicked off the whole discussion today. It apparently hails from a mod for the recently full-released Fields of Mistria that makes a character "SFW" (safe for work).

Screenshot from a "SFW" mod for Fields of Mistria, unattributed, which reads: "YES dude. pls pls pls make a SFW mod for Juniper too. i love this game so much but my autism makes me feel so uncomfortable about her sprites, and they don't really make sense with the otherwise wholesome tone of the game. seems like i'm in the minority for thinking that, but would be awesome if the devs made a "sex sexualized sprites" toggle, or if there was a mod that did that."

To be clear: Fields of Mistria is not a porn game. It is not even an ecchi game — one with mild lewdity that stops short of full-on, explicit nudity or sexual content. These are some characters from Fields of Mistria:

A screenshot from Fields of Mistria showing three pixel art anime-style women, including a tanned woman with pink hair and a low-cut top showing her cleavage, a conservatively dressed blonde, white woman, and a black woman with medium length hair dressed in a somewhat autumnal style.

And this is the specific character the commenter above is getting upset about:

Juniper, a sorceress with dark purple hair. She stands with a hand on her hip and is wearing a cropped top that reveals her cleavage and a sarong-like skirt.

Juniper, a sorceress with dark purple hair. She stands with a hand on her hip and is wearing an elaborate bikini that reveals -- gasp! -- sideboob.

Juniper, a sorceress with dark purple hair. She stands with a hand on her hip and is wearing a black bodysuit with a sheer, partially transparent underlayer. Her cleavage is visible in the plunging neckline of the bodysuit.

Busty? Moderately, but not excessively so. Provocatively dressed? Mildly, but I think we can infer from her facial expression, pose and general demeanour that this is a character that is supposed to be sexy — and moreover, one who is very comfortable with that. This is emphatically not the same as her sprites being "sexual". I know nothing about Fields of Mistria but I can immediately infer the intent behind this character just from looking at these three sprites. And, indeed, her official description backs up pretty much everything I suspected about her — and none of it involves her sexual proclivities:

Juniper is a mysterious sorceress drawn to Mistria when she learns that magical mists and monsters of legend have begun appearing in the area after the recent earthquake. She then starts up a bath house. The bath house is largely a cover for testing her newly empowered potions and spells on the player and other unsuspecting townsfolk, usually resulting in buffs (and occasionally funny accidents)

The crucial thing though? This is not porn. This is not even ecchi levels of provocativeness. (Not that there is anything wrong with either of those things in an appropriate context, anyway!)

This is a character in a fantasy game, dressed in a style that fits with the personality and aesthetic the writers decided that she should have, in the context of the fantasy world. There is nothing offensive about this character unless you specifically choose to make it offensive.

And that is precisely what the commenter above has chosen to do. Not only that — and this really pisses me off — but they have chosen to weaponise autism as their justification for this.

No! You do not get to do that! I am autistic and fuckin' love titties! Your autism has nothing to do with you feeling "uncomfortable about her sprites". And, furthermore, it is the height of fucking disrespect to an artist (and the writers behind that character) to request that a third party deface their artwork so you don't have to confront your inability to process a non-sexual image of a female character that happens to dress in a way that shows a bit of skin.

Go outside! There are people who dress like this! (Maybe not the last one, unless it's a special occasion.) There are people whose bodies look like this! If you go to a swimming pool or beach — shock, horror! — you may even see someone dressed like the image in the middle! If your brain's first response to seeing someone dressed like any of the women above — but particularly the ones with visible cleavage, who may or may not have above-average sized breasts — is to immediately start shouting "I AM THINKING ABOUT SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH YOU" and emitting the "awooga" sound from old Tex Avery cartoons via some unknown part of your body, you have a problem!

And, I hate to break this to you, but it is not autism. It is, at its core, an unwillingness to see a woman as anything other than a sexual object for your own potential gratification. You can try and make yourself out to be "wholesome" by very publicly shouting and screaming about how you don't approve of this and how it makes you so uncomfortable and how this lascivious temptation must be removed from your sight, lest you know not what you might do… but in reality you simply have a problem with a woman dressing the way she wants to dress, expressing herself the way she wants to express herself, and, highly likely, not having sex with you.

I will close with a quote on the matter from the Japanese translator, Thomas James:

Shit like this is why I give wholesome games as a movement a constant stink-eye because what that audience often wants isn't relaxed, low stakes fare. They want content with zero intellectual calories that won't challenge them for being emotionally stunted. What a miserably boring way to consume art.

Quite.

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#oneaday Day 736: The sewage of social media

In the hunt for Oliver, I have been obliged to make use of two sites that I have, up until now, generally avoided using at all costs — those being Facebook and Nextdoor. And my experiences attempting to make use of them now they might actually be useful have not done much to change my mind about them.

pipe with sewage — Photo by Joseph Russo on Pexels.com

Both of them suffer from pretty much the same problems, and both are a result of the now well-documented phenomenon that is enshittification. In fact, it's almost uncanny how similar the two platforms' problems are — with the only real difference being that Nextdoor isn't trying to push AI-generated softcore porn "Reels" at me every five posts.

One of the main problems with both of these sites — and with a lot of other social media sites in general — is their insistence on providing a non-chronological feed of Stuff. Instead, they decide to surface relentless parades of absolute sewage that their mysterious "algorithms" believe are "Relevant" to you. In practice, what this means is that you get bombarded with a bunch of stuff that you don't give a shit about — often repeatedly. And the stuff in question is, more often than not, spam or outright scams.

On Nextdoor, for example, there's a post that is supposedly from an alcoholic person that keeps showing up in my feed despite my having shown no indication of any interest in it. I don't know what the point of the post is and I don't really want to know, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's some form of advertising. Likewise, on Facebook, I'm continually confronted with "Suggested" posts that are very clearly adverts, but positioned in a way that is clearly designed to be incredibly deceptive towards those who aren't particularly Internet-savvy.

Then there's the notifications. Oh, God the notifications. Nextdoor is the worst for this by a significant margin. Given that the only thing I have posted on there is the request for people to look out for Oliver, one might naturally assume that the only notifications I might be interested in would be responses to that post. But no! Here's what my notifications look like as of this evening:

Last 7 days
Chris Peart: I'm fed up with parking, there is no consideration for people who use there drives!

15h
Claire Purdue joined about a km from you.

1d
Susan Coleman: To the irresponsible person who thought it was a good idea to leave a pile of dog poo...

1d

Karen Cousens: Anyone know what's going on with Lordswood Road? There are still signs up saying no...

2d
Emily Love: My brothers 2 cats have not been seen for a few days. Has anyone in the Bryanston...

4d

Beryl Macklin: Bin men just been . My garden bin was full but not over flowing or stuff caught in...

You will notice that none of these posts are anything to do with Oliver. You may also know that none of these posts are from people that I know. I'm not even convinced that they're all from people in the same area as me.

I get the intent behind this shit: the idea of Nextdoor is that it is supposed to build a community of neighbours, and one way of getting neighbours to recognise one another is to stuff them into each others' notifications, whether you want them or not. But this is not useful! The very point of notifications is so that you can get notified when something happens that you have been waiting to hear about! When you're dealing with a stressful situation like losing a pet, the last fucking thing you want is to see a notification pop up, think that someone might have a lead on your precious companion, only to find that it's someone who doesn't know which "there" to use whingeing about bin men or complaining about parking or some other such crap.

I don't have a great deal of faith that either of these sites are going to help us find Oliver. The one vaguely positive thing I can say in Facebook's favour specifically is that members of "lost pet" groups are proactive in resharing people's posts to other groups that you might not have joined yourself. That increases the visibility of your original post and, in theory, makes it more likely that it might cross the path of someone who might be able to help — although that, unfortunately, has not happened as yet.

Still, it's something, at least, and posting on these places is something that I can at least monitor while we're away from the house. It hasn't come to anything as yet, but it only has to come to something once for it to have been worthwhile. So I guess we'll have to wait and see — but I suspect once we get home, it will be back to searching for him ourselves and hoping, wishing, praying for his eventual safe return.

It's our last full day away tomorrow, and that will also mark two weeks since Oliver went missing. I still don't know how to feel, other than sad, upset and frustrated. But in a couple of days' time, we're going to have to at least attempt to move on with our lives as best we can in the meantime, and whatever happens from thereon, happens.

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#oneaday Day 722: Entering the ATmosphere

I read yesterday that several blogging platforms are integrating the "AT protocol" or whatever it's called that powers services like Bluesky and the like, and one of those was WordPress. So today's post is primarily a big ol' test to see whether or not that functionality, implemented via the ATmosphere plugin, actually works, and whether or not it's something I actually want to use.

people holding different devices — Photo by fauxels on Pexels.com. These people are all enjoying my posts. You should, too.

I talked a bit about social media with my therapist yesterday. I discussed how conflicted I feel about existing online right now, what with the emphasis on short-form video and vapid content rather than longer-form, more meaningful material. I'm not saying that the stuff I post here isn't vapid nonsense, of course, but I have always said that I would far rather read someone's vapid nonsense than be delivered it as shouty-face-at-camera content, so this blog continues with that in mind. And if no-one is interested in my vapid nonsense, then at least I still have somewhere to bang out some words and express myself, which is what this has always been about.

Anyway, the kind-of-sort-of conclusion I came to was that at least a minimal presence on social media is somewhat desirable for me, because otherwise I just end up feeling completely isolated. While I enjoyed the total break from all social media, including Bluesky, that I took last year while I was on holiday, I found that I didn't want to maintain it afterwards, as it just left me feeling even more lonely than I already was. And I'm already feeling pretty damn lonely.

Still, the other thing that came to light in yesterday's session is that although I have always kind of feared social interactions and find myself overthinking conversations before I have them — sometimes to the extent that I never actually start the conversation in reality for the fear of coming across as boring or annoying — I am, in many respects, feeling kind of ready to challenge myself in at least attempting to make some new friends, to have some people that I can connect with and, basically, to stop feeling so danged lonely.

The challenge that I have found along the way is not so much initiating those interactions when the opportunity arises — although that is still a somewhat scary prospect for me — but rather finding those opportunities in the first place. I cited an example of when I first went to university and attended a pre-term music course, and I took the uncharacteristically bold step (for me) of introducing myself to someone I was in a lift with while we were transporting ourselves to our respective floors in the tower block where we were staying. That resulted in a longstanding friendship (albeit one that I will hold my hands up and say that I have been very poor at maintaining) and was proof that, as little as I think of myself at times, I can come across as someone that people actually do want to know and are not, in fact, actively repulsed by.

Those opportunities of being "trapped" in a lift with a stranger and the choice being either awkward silence or attempting to clunkily start a conversation just don't really seem to arise these days, though, because I'm never in that sort of situation. I work from home, I don't go out a great deal, I'm not a member of any "groups" or anything (and don't really know how one would go about finding a "group") and I do not have a publicly accessible elevator in my house.

What I am going to at least attempt to do a bit more, though, is to attend some in-person events where I know some people with whom I have at least a casual acquaintance will be attending. My trip to The Cave a few weeks back was a good example, and last year I went to the RetroFest show in Swindon — that is actually happening again this year, but I left it a bit late to organise a trip there. I mean, I could probably snag a ticket and go along tomorrow (today's tickets are sold out), but can I be bothered to do that?

Hmm, can I be bothered to do that…? I might have a think about that throughout the course of today. Swindon is a fairly long way to go, but it might actually be nice to go along and see some interesting things and clever people.

Hmmmmm.

Anyway, today we are going food shopping, so that's fun. Thank you for participating in this experiment of whether or not this thing actually posts correctly to Bluesky via the ATmosphere plugin. If it does, I'll likely hook up MoeGamer proper in the same way. Tatty-bye for now then.

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#oneaday Day 712: Cognitive surrender

I wouldn't say I check in on Penny Arcade regularly, but when I do, I am always entertained — and I always find myself scrolling through quite a few comics and blog posts. Today, my attention was captured by this post from Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, and particularly this paragraph:

Sometimes I don't know how to feel about something because my moral superiors have not yet made a super long video. They don't always make a video about the thing I need, though. Like, I don't know if someone is still bad or if they've been exonerated. Since we don't trust any structure that would provide exoneration, and objectivity is illusory, since the law is merely another arena to sift power dynamics anyway, my guess is that their good opinion, once lost, is lost forever. Speaking of power dynamics, It must be neat to have the reins of a parallel legal system whose norms kaleidoscopically shift at a rate of one million shibboleths per second. The main issue is that it's not clear which games I'm allowed to buy. All I can do – all anyone can do – is spin very quickly in place while refreshing YouTube for the next sermon. I'm currently ablur.

man in blue crew neck shirt wearing black framed eyeglasses — Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com. I choose to believe this guy's hair only does this when he shouts.

Tycho is specifically referring to the hoohah over Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, the recent new game from ZA/UM, the company behind the exceedingly brilliant Disco Elysium, and a company mired in controversy for the way it subsequently treated the actual people who made Disco Elysium. I don't really know much more about it than that, and to be perfectly honest, I don't really give enough of a shit to look into it further. I'm sorry, I just don't.

You see, as you might expect in such a situation, moral grandstanding over the way ZA/UM has behaved in the past has been overshadowing any meaningful discussion of Zero Parades itself, with the reviewers who took it on its own terms and gave it a positive assessment — apparently it's very good! — getting lambasted by people who think they are The Most Correct Person in the Room.

The phenomenon Tycho is talking about is the disconnect one eventually starts to feel when constantly confronted by this: the situation where you want to talk about how much you like something that you have taken on its own terms, divorced from "context" — regardless of whether this was a deliberate move, or just because your particular life and social circumstances meant you had never come into contact with any "controversy" — but find yourself having to bite your tongue, because you know it's not "acceptable" to like the thing for one reason or another.

I'm not even talking about particularly controversial material here — like, even the most perverted hentai connoisseur knows when not to bring up his collection of Rias Gremory boob bouncing gifs — but rather, situations like we have here, where an entity that is tangentially connected to the thing in question is deemed to have done something so unconscionably unacceptable that it taints anything and everything associated with itself, regardless of whether the thing itself is any good or not, and regardless of whether the people who actually made the thing had anything to do with the controversy.

A lot of this stuff spreads via social media and, as Tycho says, via video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. A lot of people look to "influencers" (ugh) as opinion leaders, and wait to learn whether it's "acceptable" in the eyes of someone they believe in before even considering engaging with it. Essentially it's a form of cognitive surrender; they willingly give up their own ability to make their mind up about something in favour of blindly following everything their opinion leader of choice says and does. And this sort of person tends to hold a grudge for a very long time indeed; as Tycho says, it's exceedingly rare for anyone branded with a scarlet letter to be exonerated, while the reverse is also true: someone who has been a beloved figure for years can be quickly turned on, torn to shreds and then left to rot, never to be forgiven and never to regain their former regard, regardless of whether or not they clearly make an effort to make amends for past wrongs.

Honestly, at this point it's exceedingly tiresome. There are certain people on Bluesky I've had to mute just because their constant response to people Just Enjoying The Thing is to bring up the controversy du jour and, in many cases, cast exceedingly unflattering and negative aspersions on the people who continue to Just Enjoy The Thing. In just the last week it's happened not only with Zero Parades, but also with Forza Horizon 6, and I'm sure there will be plenty more. There have certainly been plenty of prior examples, including numerous instances of the "we will never forgive them" situation.

Look, I get it. In this revolting, shitty world we live in, it's nice to think that you have some principles and that you're willing to stand up for them. Everyone should have at least a few issues that they're willing to stand up and be counted on. But there comes a point where you're just being a tedious scold at people who are simply trying to derive some joy out of existence, and who really do not have the time or energy to give a shit about every single little issue in the world, particularly when the issues that you supposedly care about are in the extreme periphery of the thing they are trying to enjoy — and seemingly not even directly connected at all, to the average person who is not huffing Internet fumes 25 hours a day.

I'm sorry, but it is just like that. If you do try and give a shit about every single little issue in the world, you will quickly end up driving yourself insane, driving everyone who might have once been your friend away, and never, ever experiencing a day of happiness in your life ever again.

On top of that, if your idea of Being A Good Person is scolding random strangers on Bluesky rather than actually getting out into the world and making some sort of meaningful difference to the lives of people who need it, then you might not actually be A Good Person. You just want people to believe that you are.

Life is too short for that. So if you want to play Zero Parades, I don't care. If you want to play Forza Horizon 6, I don't care. If you want to boycott everything ZA/UM and Microsoft ever put out, I don't really care, either. But if you start actively getting in the way of people who simply want an escape from the shittiness of life in 2026 — or to build a warm, kind community of people who want a collective escape from the shittiness of life in 2026 — then I'm sorry, but I don't really want to know you.

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#oneaday Day 705: Resist mediocre anti-intellectualism

Every few months, it seems, the collective community of the social media platform Bluesky suffers from a minor existential crisis, usually relating to some commentator or other not having found an audience on the platform and thus writing what they probably believe to be a withering putdown, but which more often than not ends up coming across as a bit sad, desperate and pathetic.

The most recent case comes in the form of someone who posits that Bluesky, as a whole, has been bad for American political discourse, because it has effectively siloed off pretty much the entire "Left" into their own little bubble. This isn't an entirely inaccurate view of the situation, but you also have to bear in mind that this largely occurred because Twitter, under Elon Musk, made a specific effort to silo off pretty much the entire "Right" into their own little bubble. Consequently, Twitter is more of a shithole than it's ever been in the past, and Bluesky… well, it's occasionally all right, occasionally prone to the sorts of behaviour that made me sour on Twitter in the first place. At least for the most part you don't have to put up with Nazis and "grok what is this" underneath every post.

I'm not here to talk about the relative merits of Bluesky itself though; rather, I want to focus on a post from Ars Technica's Kyle Orland, itself a response to a post from journalist Faine Greenwood, semi-seriously commenting on what people really need to do if they want to use social media to get a political message out:

Kyle Orland: This is true in cultural criticism too, I'd argue. Writing in general (and longform writing in particular) is just an increasingly niche part of how people in general are consuming media and getting info.

I'm still proudly focused on that niche, but I'm under no illusions about my relative reach.

Quoting Faine Greenwood: I will reiterate the point made by Jamelle Bouie: if you really wanted online political influence, you'd be making vertical video. You'd be learning how to do little booty dances while talking about political theory. You'd be mastering doing BTS fan-cams while talking about anti-capitalism.

I see this viewpoint expressed a lot these days, and while it is disappointingly not entirely wrong about the situation, it does, to me, reflect a defeatist attitude to culture: the assumption that there can be only one dominant form of media, and that in this case, it is lowest-common-denominator, vapid, attention-deficit short-form video with karaoke-style captions updating one word at a time.

I, as I have made pretty clear on numerous occasions in the past, fucking hate lowest-common-denominator, vapid, attention-deficit short-form video with karaoke-style captions updating one word at a time. I find it actively insulting to my intelligence, and incredibly offputting when someone posts, like, say, "IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:" followed by a video of their face pressed up against the camera yelling whatever their important announcement is. I never find out, because I am actively repulsed by that kind of video.

Aside: in a Discord I frequent, one poster continually reposts this guy's stuff, and dear Lord I find it the most offputting thing imaginable. Nothing to do with the guy's appearance; I just don't want that many faces yelling at me.

A screenshot of "Randy Johnson's" YouTube channel, which consists entirely of vertical video clips of an elderly man talking about various topics.

Anyway, the thing I find frustrating about all this is: who the fuck decided that the only thing we're allowed to do now is lowest-common-denominator, vapid, attention-deficit short-form video with karaoke-style captions updating one word at a time? Who the fuck decided that writing is out, particularly long-form writing? Because I certainly fucking didn't.

I like reading! I like reading long things! I like writing! I like writing long things! As far as I'm concerned, a good piece of writing is much more likely to stand the test of time than vertical video of someone's grandpa wittering on about The Super Mario Galaxy Movie! And I find it near-impossible to believe that I am alone in this!

I am part of a generation who grew up with books, magazines, and websites that posted long-form writing. As far as I am aware, my entire generation hasn't suddenly dropped dead overnight, so why the fuck can't we have at least a basic bit of respect for our tastes rather than this content slurry that is shat out at great force and speed every day?

"Oh, but Pete, people are still serving your niche," you might say. Are they? Are they actually though? Because last time I checked, games media sites were being shut down or turned into thinly-veiled gambling advertisements at a frightening rate. I used to have magazines and websites that I read on a regular basis; today, even people who I used to respect as people who always seemed that they'd keep blogging, come rain or shine, have all but vanished from the Internet, leaving us with little more than the garbage left behind.

Perhaps those are the people who have the right idea. Give up on trying to "find an audience" on the Internet, and just retreat into a world where these issues don't exist. There are still a few magazines out there — although gaming-specific ones are thin on the ground. There are folks making fanzines and suchlike. New books continue to be written — some of them even without being AI-generated! So perhaps the answer is just to retreat, quietly, and continue to enjoy the few good things that do, apparently against all odds, still exist.

It just feels like giving up a space where I always felt like I could "be myself" and express myself freely has been taken over, completely, by the supposedly "cool kids" who are actually vapid fuckheads with nothing of any real substance to contribute to culture. And that really sucks. "The Internet" used to be somewhere that felt like I was home, where I was among my people. I haven't felt that for a long time now.

I don't feel like we should have just rolled over and let this happen — but that is what happened, and there doesn't appear to be any way to turn back from it now. And no-one appears to be in any great hurry to correct this situation.

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