#oneaday Day 428: My home online

As I count down to deactivating all social media aside from the little bit I need for work, I find myself tinkering with this site to make it a more comfortable "home" online. After all, once I ditch Bluesky, I will have no feed- or algorithm-based social media at all, with only YouTube (which is algorithm-based, yes, but I don't really count it as "social media"), Discord and various other private chat solutions (depending on friends' preferred methods) remaining.

Honestly, at this point, I'm relishing the prospect of some peace and quiet. Bluesky was fun for a while, but it just doesn't really feel worth the effort. Absolutely no other social media whatsoever holds any appeal for me, and I long for (LONG for) the day when I can ditch the work social media accounts also, because I absolutely detest working on them.

There are plenty of people out there who, I'm sure, have made social media work for them and even have an enjoyable time scrolling their feeds. I haven't felt the same sort of joy in silliness that I did in the early days of Twitter for many years at this point; after online interactions in general sort of imploded on themselves around the Gamergate years, things were never quite the same again afterwards. They'd been building that way for a while — for me, I think the Mass Effect 3 ending "controversy" was the beginning of the end, and that was, what, 2012? — and ever since then, what little social media I've kept up and running has been for one of two reasons: fear of losing touch with people that I have only ever interacted with on social media, and the feeling of "obligation" that I had to share my work, be it personal or professional in nature.

I still fear losing touch with some people, although honestly so many people have just fallen out of my life completely over the course of the last decade or so, what's a few more at this point for an incredibly lonely middle-aged man? The people who really matter to me, I already have alternative means of getting in touch with. I have a pinned post on my Bluesky page making my intentions clear, and so far no-one has made any particular attempt to get in touch via alternative means, and thus I have to conclude that either no-one cares, or it's going to be a situation where two months down the line, someone goes looking for me, finds my account deactivated and goes "I wonder what happened to that guy?"

I'm here. I'm still here. I've always been here. And as I let go of more and more of the toxic "services" that have been poisoning my mental health for the last decade and a half, I look forward to this place (and my other sites) being my true "home" online.

You are, of course, welcome to visit, dear reader. I'll be very happy to welcome you in.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 421: Ch-ch-ch-changes

I'll write about this again nearer the time that I'm actually going to put this into practice, but I wanted to give some advance notice of what I'm planning.

On September 8, 2025, I'll be taking a big step back from social media for personal use. I'll be deactivating my Bluesky account, removing it and Discord from my phone, and leaving a bunch of Discord servers.

The reason for this is that social media in general — even the little bit I still hold onto for some inexplicable reason — continues to play havoc with my overall mental health, and honestly, there is really absolutely nothing left that makes me feel like I "need" it for anything other than occasional contact with other people. And there are other means of achieving that contact with other people.

This isn't intended to be a big dramatic "well I'm taking my ball and going home without you!" post, and it's nothing personal, particularly with regard to the Discord servers I will be disconnecting from. This is a me thing; it's about removing myself from situations that are continually self-destructive and unproductive — i.e. spending far too much time doomscrolling on Bluesky or just rotating around several Discord servers in case someone said anything vaguely interesting — and freeing up time and headspace for doing things that I want to do, that make me happy, and that are less inclined to have me staring into space of an evening.

Thus, as loathe as part of me is to isolate myself further from a world where I already feel somewhat abandoned by and/or alienated from most of my "real life" friends, I intend to take the following steps for the sake of my mental health and overall digital wellbeing:

I will be deactivating my Bluesky account, at the very least temporarily while I am on holiday, and likely permanently.
I will be leaving a significant number of Discord communities that I am currently part of. I emphasise, again, that there is nothing personal in this; I am just attempting to cut down on the "noise" and the self-destructive habits of continually scrolling around the same servers time after time, hour after hour. I will be keeping some small, "friendship group" servers, but that's it.
I will be deleting Bluesky and Discord from my phone for the duration of my holiday, possibly permanently.
I will be focusing the majority of my online presence on this blog, MoeGamer (my video game blog) and Scratch Pad (my creative writing site).
I will only be contactable via email (you can use the Get In Touch page on this site if you don’t know my email address), Discord messages in the communities I remain active in (plus Discord DMs if we are friends on that platform), Google Chat if you know my email address, or WhatsApp private message if you know my phone number.

If you would like to stay in touch — and there are a bunch of you I would very much like it if you did! — then you can feel free to use any of the means outlined above to have a chat. It'd actually be quite nice to have some private conversations with many of you, away from the chaos of social media, so if we've had some good times in the past and I seem to have otherwise disappeared from the social channels you tend to use on the daily, please feel free to drop me a line.

Anyway, like I say, I wanted to give some advance notice of this, and I'll be posting something very similar on September 7, the day before I have a week's holiday as a last reminder. Thanks for your time, and if you have any questions or whatever about the above, well, you know where to find me!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 415: Last time happy

Something got me thinking earlier: when was the last time I felt really, actually, genuinely happy? I feel like living through the 2020s (so far) in particular has given me such a sense of malaise and misanthropy that it's honestly quite difficult to remember what it felt like to just… exist in a sense of contentment and satisfaction.

A lot of blame can probably be laid at the feet of what I saw someone the other day describe as "breathing Internet fumes all day" — and I love that, apologies to whoever I stole it from — but it's also clear that even if I wasn't plugged in to online culture, it would still be readily apparent that these are not happy times we live in.

I often consider closing down every last bit of my social media and going completely off-grid. I don't have much of it left any more — the only standalone social media I still have is Bluesky, and some people also count Discord and YouTube as social media, though to me those are both a little bit different — so it's not like it would be a big effort to do so. But is that what I really want? Even with those few remaining connections to the "outside" world, I still feel isolated, disconnected and incredibly lonely on a daily basis. Surely it makes no sense to cut off what, from some respects, can be looked on as a lifeline?

I dunno. There are people I like talking to on Bluesky and Discord, and YouTube is a valuable creative outlet for me, just as this blog and MoeGamer are. The thing I find myself asking, though, is if anyone would actually notice if I were just to disappear from one or all of those services one day. I suspect that they would not, at least not immediately. Someone might, a few months down the line, think "oh, I haven't heard from that Pete guy for a while" and discover a closed profile page, but would they, then, feel inclined to reach out to me via other means? Again, I suspect that they would not, given that these days, if you are not on social media or in a WhatsApp group chat, you seemingly do not exist. The only person who emails me on a semi-regular basis is my mother; the rest of my daily emails are promotional offers, order confirmations or blogs/newsletters I've subscribed to.

Email used to be exciting. While my short-lived penpal relationship with a girl named Julia in my teens pretty much fizzled out when we finally met — at least partly my fault for being completely socially inept in person, for reasons I did not understand then but very much do now — I still have fond memories of the excitement I felt every time I received an email from her.

Going even further back, I actually still have a couple of hand-written penpal letters from a primary school friend that I was very close with, who subsequently moved away. I don't really know why I've kept those — I am unlikely to ever see or hear from her ever again, given the many years since we last had any contact whatsoever — but, I don't know. Something about the enthusiasm with which she asked me if I was still playing football (multiple times in one letter) and how I was getting on at Cub Scouts (which should give you an idea of how old I was when writing and receiving these letters) was… thoroughly pleasant. I felt like I mattered, like I had a place in someone's life, even if it was just as the recipient of an occasional letter.

The advice people normally give to this sort of situation is "get out there and meet people". And it's probably sound advice. Trouble is, with my general physical and mental state, I'm kind of… I guess "afraid" is the right way to put it. Honestly, at this point I don't really have anything to lose by trying it, but I'm still… afraid to lose whatever it is. Maybe if I'm able to work on some of my own problems first — and I am doing so — I might be able to tackle some of these broader issues. And, with any luck, I might actually feel happiness again by the time I'm 60.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 400: I can't do LinkedIn

After closing my original account a few years back — I'd never used it, I'd never got a job using it and I didn't see the value in it — I opened a new LinkedIn account a few weeks back. I still absolutely hate it.

Not only is its interface second only to Facebook in terms of general clutter, user unfriendliness and AI being rammed in your face everywhere, but the general tone of everyone on there is just insufferable. Every post is some great life lesson that they've learned from their time in business to business sales; every little happening at work is cause for twelve paragraphs of pontificating; every opportunity to brag about how you absolutely are not a "low performer" or similar is taken, and festooned with emoji.

I cannot imagine ever thinking at any point "I know, I think I'll check LinkedIn, that sounds like a fun use of my time". The fact the thing constantly emails me to let me know I have "1 new message" when all it is is some spam ad in my message inbox pisses me off. The fact it emails me to tell me I have "new notifications" when it's people I don't know starting jobs at companies I've never heard of pisses me off.

In short, I don't really know why I opened an account there again. I guess I was just curious to see if it was in any way "useful" for "networking", as some people like to say. And perhaps it is useful for that, if you're the insufferable business-speak type. But that is emphatically not me. I struggle to take posts even from people I know seriously, and I fear that if I spent any protracted amount of time on the platform, I would almost certainly tell at least one person (no-one specific) to stop being so up their own arse, and if they really think they have something worthwhile to say about "the world of work", as our careers advisors at school used to call it, perhaps they should try writing a self-help book that management consultants can put on their shelves and never read rather than inflicting their bilge on the broader Internet community.

I can't do it. I struggle with social media at the best of times these days, but the fact it's pretty much the only way to get in touch with some people really rankles me. I miss the good old days of email chains where people put time and effort into the messages they sent one another; late-night chats on MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger; hell, even text messages felt more personal than what we have today.

It's one of the many ways I feel completely and utterly left behind by the world as it exists today, and I absolutely hate it. So don't expect to see any activity from me on LinkedIn any time soon. I can think of very few worse ways to spend my time.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 385: Hater Checkpoint

I have spoken many times on this blog about how I find needless negativity to be exhausting, unproductive and not conducive to good conversation, but on a regular basis, I am made to feel like I have something of a minority opinion on this subject. People are much more willing to hate on things than they are to say nice things about something.

Case in point: this week one of those interminable "quote tweet (but on Bluesky)" memes did the rounds, this time encouraging people to go through Wikipedia's list of "Video games considered the best" and hate on games of their choice. Naturally, given an opportunity to spew vitriol at things a fair few people like, everyone jumped at the opportunity:

The whole post is, of course, fairly transparent engagement bait, and people fall for this sort of thing every time. But, like I say, they're significantly more likely to fall for it if the opportunity to be negative presents itself. This post got 1.8K quote posts, with people jumping at the chance to complain about titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Skyrim, Overwatch, Fortnite, Mass Effect and even fucking Pong.

I… don't understand it. I've always been of the opinion that if you're engaged with and love a hobby, then you seek out and enjoy the things about that hobby which appeal to you. Expending energy on things that you, personally, do not like — and make no mistake, pretty much every one of those quote posts is not "this is bad and here are some solid reasons why" but rather "I don't like this" — just seems like a massive waste of time and energy.

You not liking Thing does not mean that Thing is bad. It just means that, for whatever reason, it didn't click with you. And that's fine! I just don't need to hear about it, and I don't need to see you smugly thinking Your Opinion Is Correct because ooh, so brave, you think Fortnite is "bad". I don't like Fortnite, either. And that's why you've never seen me write about it. I know I won't enjoy it, I know there are many things I don't like about it — so I just don't engage with it! It's really not hard.

I'm not mad with people who do enjoy Fortnite and I don't feel the need to try and convince people that my dislike of Fortnite is "the correct opinion". I simply don't care. I have a bajillion other games to enjoy that I do like, and I'd much rather 1) play them and 2) talk about them with others. I could go off on a 20-post thread about why I don't like Fortnite, but what is that achieving? Not very much, really. To me, someone going "I hate Thing" is just a means of shutting down a conversation, whereas someone telling me how much they like Thing and why can be the start of something wonderful.

Word of mouth works! So I'd much rather it be used for something positive — I can take some sort of action with that, like buying the game you're recommending — rather than negativity.

I realise that this post is, in itself, being negative, though, so I'll just tell you that you should go and play Raiden Nova because it's a lot of fun, and leave it at that. Good night to you!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 315: Short-form shite

I am once again inspired to write something by a piece over on Aftermath, this time on the subject of short-form videos such as Instagram/Facebook Reels and TikTok. The thrust of the piece is that the author decided to completely give up looking at this type of video online for the 40 days of Lent, and has felt considerably better as a result.

I am not surprised. I have noted on numerous other occasions how much I detest the push for short-form vertical-format "content" happening all over the Internet, and how frustrating I find it when I see people mindlessly scrolling through video after video without really taking anything in, just scrolling, over and over, for hour after hour.

I have never been sucked into this corner of the Internet. I've done the social media quasi-addiction thing, and it's not nice. I recognised short-form video as being kind of bullshit when it first started to be a thing — I still remember the now-deleted Glove and Boots video about how shooting vertical video makes you a terrible person — and I feel vindicated any time I see a piece like Riley's article on Aftermath concluding that yes, short-form video is a big pile of shit. I'm firmly of the belief that the format has done potentially irreversible harm to people's mental wellbeing in general, and specifically their attention span.

Do you know what the most depressing statistic on YouTube is? I've probably asked this before, but it's my blog, so I will ask the same rhetorical questions again if I feel like it. Anyway, the most depressing statistic on YouTube is the watch time or "retention" factor for your videos. This tracks how long people actually watch your videos for — in other words, if they sit down, click "Play" and watch the whole thing, or if they just tap onto it on their phone, watch ten seconds and then click on the next thing that catches their attention, without taking anything in whatsoever.

The stat makes for grim reading on longer videos, as you might expect, but I find it especially frustrating and upsetting when I see it being in the toilet on videos that are a couple of minutes long at most, like a trailer or something. And I suspect the "pivot" to short-form video on multiple social media platforms has played a significant role in this situation, because none of the platforms that host short-form video encourage their users to show any sort of respect for the creators of those videos. All they want you to do is keep scrolling through the never-ending feed, helping them build their algorithmic picture of Who You Really Are, all so they can better advertise to you.

This isn't to say the short-form video creators are entirely blameless in this, either. I never "got" Vine when it was a thing, either, and every time I'm inadvertently subjected to a short-form vertical video with sped-up footage of someone ranting and raving about something to the camera, I find myself never wanting to see anything from that creator ever again.

This might be a "me" thing, it might be an "autistic" thing, but I find so much short-form video to be incredibly aggressive and confrontational. Whether it's someone bellowing at the top of their lungs about the terrible customer service experience they had in B&Q last Wednesday or someone giving an impassioned plea to support a cause that actually matters, all I feel when I see a thumbnail or a video of someone's face right up against their phone camera is the same sort of discomfort I would feel if that person was invading my personal space, getting right in my face and shouting so close I could smell their breath.

I genuinely do not understand. I do not see the appeal. I do not find the supposed "jokes" funny. I do not find the "skits" funny. And anyone who thinks TikTok is a good place to go to get recipes or DIY guides is fucking delusional. How, in any way, is a looping video in any way an optimal means of learning how to cook something or build something? We've had these things sorted for years at this point.

And don't get me started on all the YouTube videos who make their entire content strategy "I saw this thing on TikTok and now I'm going to do something with it". Testing "viral" TikTok recipes. Trying "viral" TikTok AliExpress plastic landfill. Attempting to perform a "viral" TikTok dance. At least by not being on TikTok I can avoid all this shit at the source, but when it starts spilling over into other forms of media that I do still engage with, like YouTube, it's very annoying.

I am glad I never stuck my head into TikTok and found anything even the slightest bit worthwhile. On my one foray into the service just to see what the retro gaming scene looked like on there, I found an American guy gurning at the camera and explaining that "back in the day we had to plug our consoles into the TV and the wall!", immediately closed the app and deleted it. There was nothing there for me. I am better than that. You are better than that. And, as with everyfuckingthing else in the world at this point, the AI garbage that is starting to fill these platforms is just making them even worse than they already are.

"Oh, it's harmless," people say. "It's just a bit of fun. I like to watch the girls dancing. Sometimes there are really good recipes on there."

No. Stop it. You do not need that shit in your life. All of those things you just described can be accessed via other means that aren't destroying your attention span and your ability to focus on anything for more than 20 seconds at a time. And there are even ways to do all of them that don't involve feeding advertising algorithms.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 298: Can you give up your phone?

I watched a good video earlier, and I recommend you do too if you have a spare 46 minutes and 4 seconds. It's by a chap called Eddy Burback, who makes videos that are just… about stuff. He always puts in a decent amount of research to the topics he talks about, he makes his discussions both interesting and personally relevant, and he's genuinely entertaining. If you've never watched his stuff before, this video is a great place to get to know him.

For those too lazy or disinclined to click that video and actually watch it, his aim was to go 30 days with his smartphone locked up in a safe so he couldn't use it at all. He wasn't denying himself access to the Internet, social media or anything like that, and he set up an old Mac laptop in the corner of his living room to access iMessage if he needed it, but only allowed himself a cumulative total of 5 minutes across the entire month to check it. He found, among other things, that after checking it once, he decided he didn't really need to check it at all.

The other things he did were deliberate, conscious steps "backwards". He set up a landline with an on-device answering machine. He made plans with friends over the phone, and then just showed up at the place he said he'd be at the time he said he'd be there, rather than constantly checking in via text or chat. He navigated by looking things up on the computer at home, then either writing things down in a notepad or just remembering them. He bought a physical pre-payment card to ride the bus rather than using an app. He handled electronic "tickets" for events and facilities such as the cinema by printing out a hardcopy.

And he seemed happy. I'm sure part of this was to aid with the storytelling — you tend to go into a project like this with a hypothesis that you kind of want to prove — but I don't doubt that spending a month without habitually, obsessively checking one's phone is a healthy thing to do. And as time goes on, I increasingly find myself wanting to do just that.

There are, as Burback talks about in the video, drawbacks. If you're not someone who likes talking on the phone, a landline isn't going to do you much good — and likewise if your friends tend to interact with you primarily via text message or chat applications. On top of that, landlines attract spam calls even more than mobiles do. This means you can very easily find yourself feeling even more isolated than you were already, which is probably counter-productive to the intent of the experiment: the aim is to get off your phone so that you can enjoy living your life a little more, and part of that is spending time with friends. If you can't get in touch with those friends via any means other than a text or chat message, that's a problem.

Most other things, there are ways round, though. For navigation, you can still print out maps and directions from sites like Google Maps and Mapquest (which, yes, still exists!). For convenient payments, most places accept contactless cards now, particularly since the pandemic almost outlawed cash altogether. For public transport, pre-paid cards exist, even if you have to go digging to a retailer who actually remembers where they keep them after not selling one for a decade or more. And for making arrangements with friends? Well, if they're good friends, they'll respect your lifestyle decision and be willing to interact with you and make plans via whatever means you are allowing, such as the phone; the fact that people were perfectly fine with adapting to his situation is one of the things Burback seemed most surprised about.

One thing Burback found was that without the constant connectivity a phone in your pocket brings, he was much less likely to cancel plans on a moment's notice or suddenly decide he wasn't in the mood for something. Instead, if he'd made plans, he'd made a commitment to another person, and not showing up for that commitment would be letting them down. Of course, sometimes these things are unavoidable — but that's why you still have means of communicating like the landline or email. It's not like locking your smartphone away completely cuts you off from society altogether. It just means that you are reachable on your own terms.

And I think that's the important thing. It allows you to really take control of your own life. It means you are not beholden to social media algorithms and the arbitrary schedules of whether or not "interesting" people are online posting mindless content that doesn't really enrich your life in any way. It means you're more likely to pick up a book and read it all the way through, instead of scrolling through 50 TikTok videos, not taking anything in from any of them.

Completely getting rid of your phone is obviously a drastic option. But the conclusion Burback came to was that while there are undoubted conveniences — and pleasures — to having a smartphone accessible at all times, having a month completely disconnected from it allowed him to develop a more healthy relationship with it. He was less inclined to doomscroll through social media, less inclined to experience the world through a camera app rather than his own eyes, and more inclined to having fewer but more meaningful interactions with the people who are important to him. And that, in turn, left a lot more time for doing things that he found enjoyable and pleasurable: watching movies, reading books, all that sort of thing.

I won't lie: that sounds nice. I have already cut back on using my phone a lot compared to what I used to do with it, but there are still times when I really resent its presence. Perhaps I should try a similar experiment sometime.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 287: European video game history discourse is happening again

As the title says, European video game history discourse is happening again. I'm not going to link to the post in question, because I like the chap who inadvertently kicked this off and I don't want him to have to put up with any more angry Europeans than he already is contending with. But I will comment on the whole subject, because it's a topic worth discussing with some commonly held assumptions that need challenging.

So here we go.

"The Great Video Game Crash" didn't happen in Europe

This point is one that, I think, is finally getting through to a lot of people. The notorious "crash" of 1983 following the absolutely flooded market of third-party Atari 2600 games was a purely North American phenomenon, and it only affected the console market.

It was a bad thing, to be sure, putting a lot of developers and publishers out of business, and it can probably be pointed at as the main reason that platforms like the ColecoVision and Intellivision didn't survive. And it's definitely true that the arrival of the NES on the scene marked a renaissance for the console games market in North America.

But it just didn't happen in Europe. I didn't even know it was a thing until the Internet came about. The reason? Because most of us in Europe were happily making use of home computers at the time, and we continued to do so throughout most of the '80s and early '90s.

Europe's console game sales are a miniscule fraction of those seen in the States

The same reasoning can be applied to this. Yes, I entirely believe that considerably fewer console games were sold in Europe than in North America. This is because consoles weren't nearly as widespread as home computers were. Growing up, I didn't know anyone who had a console for many years. I didn't even know for sure if the ColecoVision came out in Europe until quite recently when I found an ad in an old home computer magazine.

But I did know people who had home computers. We had Atari 8-bits. My best friend in primary school and a girl I moderately fancied both had BBC Micros. Another friend had a Spectrum. Another still had a Commodore 64. One even had an Electron.

There are a few considerations here. One, home computer games were often much cheaper than console games — though this wasn't always the case, particularly for games distributed on ROM cartridge. Cassette-based games were very cheap, though, particularly on the Spectrum and C64, and disk-based games weren't crazy expensive for the most part — though disk drives were, since back then they essentially had a whole other computer inside them to control the damn things!

However, what you also have to consider is that many games had considerably wider reach than their commercial, officially recorded sales figures might suggest due to piracy. Piracy was absolutely rife in the early home computer sector, and while this probably wasn't good for the overall health of the industry, it somehow never caused a "crash". Piracy has also, long term, been amazing for preservation purposes, because pirated disks (pretty much always disks) often had pre-release or beta versions of games on them, and in many cases these particular versions of these games were not preserved by their original developers and publishers.

Thirdly, home computers were programmable. And, outside of dedicated games magazines, which were in a minority compared to "general computing" magazines for quite a few years, most publications encouraged computer users to get involved in programming their machines themselves. Magazines published type-in listings each month, allowing you to get "free" software in exchange for the cover price of the magazine, a bit of your time and some blank media to save it on. Public domain libraries appeared and thrived. And many folks simply wrote their own software to do something their computer couldn't already do. With BASIC built-in to pretty much every 8-bit machine, anyone could become a programmer just by turning the damn thing on.

Home computers continued to thrive even with the advent of consoles

The NES didn't "save" gaming in Europe in the same way that it did in the States. It was present, sure, but the only person I know who had one was my Uncle Peter (or perhaps more accurately, his daughter Gemma). We certainly didn't have one. I knew one guy who had a Master System, but I think he only had one game for it and he certainly didn't consider himself a gaming nerd.

Console gaming really started to pick up in Europe — or at least in the UK, from my experience — with the advent of the 16-bit era. That's when we really started to get a glut of specialist gaming magazines focusing on individual platforms, and that's when I knew more people who started to get Mega Drives and SNESeses.

But those consoles never replaced home computers. My best friend in high school, Edd, had a Mega Drive, but he spent much more time on his Amiga 500. I had a SNES, but I still spent much more time on the Atari ST and even the Atari 8-bit, which we still kept out and in use for many years. And the press reflected this, also: multiformat magazines tended to prioritise Amiga and Atari ST, with console games often relegated to their own little section, like they were a curiosity. And just as there were specialist gaming magazines for platforms like the SNES and Mega Drive, there were also individual mags for the ST and Amiga, too. And in many cases, those mags were more substantial than their console counterparts — often aimed at a slightly more mature audience, too.

Not only that, but the "free software" sector continued to thrive, too. While the ST and Amiga didn't ship with built-in BASIC like their 8-bit predecessors, there were still plenty of easily accessible packages for both that allowed anyone to get programming. Public domain software, likewise, continued to thrive, with public domain titles distributed through magazine coverdisks, through public domain libraries and through early online services such as bulletin boards.

Particularly notable from this era are STOS and AMOS, flavours of BASIC for Atari ST and Amiga respectively, which featured game-centric features such as sprites, sound generation, interrupt-based music and all manner of other good stuff. Both, as you might expect, were widely used to make both public domain and commercial titles by enthusiast developers. STOS and AMOS were made by Francois Lionet and Constantin Sotiropoulous, the former of whom founded Clickteam. Clickteam made Klik and Play, which saw several follow-ups, the latter of which, Multimedia Fusion (or just Clickteam Fusion now), is still in use to this day to make commercial games. Played Freedom Planet? You've played a game whose lineage can indirectly be traced back to STOS.

Things only really shifted firmly in favour of consoles when the PlayStation showed up, but even then, MS-DOS PC gaming had already hit its stride with the advent of 256-colour VGA graphics and sound card support.

Without the European home computer scene, there's a lot of today's developers that wouldn't exist

This is the most important thing to bear in mind, I think. So many of today's developers and publishers can be traced directly back to '80s home computer labels.

Codemasters? They used to specialise in budget-priced cassette games made by teenagers in their bedrooms. Rare? They started out making Spectrum games. Sumo Digital? They can be traced back to Gremlin Graphics, who were there from the very early days of 8-bit home computer games. And there are countless more; if you were to go through everyone Of A Certain Age in today's European games industry, you will almost certainly find a significant portion of them who cut their teeth working on home computer games.

Hell, this is even the case in the States, too. Folks who were making home computer games in North America, in many cases, continued on into careers in the later console sectors. I learned the other day that Cathryn Mataga, maker of the excellent Shamus and Zeppelin on Atari 8-bit, also made the frankly incredible port of Dragon's Lair to Game Boy Color, to name just one example.

Revenue isn't the whole story, not by a long shot

It keeps coming back to this. Sure, the money numbers might look smaller for the European games industry throughout the '80s. But in terms of the usage of these systems, the passion, the things that are harder to track through anything other than anecdotal evidence and the lived experiences of folks who were there? Absolutely nothing beat the home computer scene of the 8-bit and 16-bit era in Europe.

Hell, our favourite Atari computer magazine ran from 1982 until 1998. That's an astonishing achievement for a publication that covered the Atari 8-bit platform from its very first issue right up until its sad finale. And Atari 8-bits were a niche platform; the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad all did way better in the market.

Look, I'm not saying American video game history isn't important. It is. It's where video games as we know them today were born, after all. But we've gotta get over this assumption that anything that happened outside of North America or Japan was somehow not important. '80s home computing was — is — much more than just a fad or a scene. For many folks, it was video games. For many folks, it was life. And acknowledging that doesn't make Pong, the Magnavox Odyssey, the Atari 2600 or the NES any less cool or revolutionary.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 274: You should have a blog. And you should read more blogs. And you should share your blogs with me

Time moves on, and things change. I didn't really notice the gradual disintegration of the "blogosphere" because it was just that — gradual. But with social media taking its place as many folks' primary means of self-expression online, it's hard to deny that, now, the age of the personal blog would, at first glance, appear to be over.

I look at my WordPress reader and it's a bit sad; folks that I used to enjoy reading the posts of on a near-daily basis haven't updated for a year or more, and since their blog was the primary means through which I kept up with them, I don't know what they're up to now, or even if they're okay.

Sure, there are a few still happily going about their business — particular shoutouts to Infernal Monkey's thoroughly NSFW but hilarious wanking blog, Kresnik258gaming's retro Sony games site and Ernst Krogtoft's excellent in-depth explorations of retro gaming for just a few sites I've been following for years that are still actively updating at least semi-regularly — but my Reader is no longer the active community hub that it once was.

I miss seeing folks like Irina of I Drink and Watch Anime, Leth of Lethargic Ramblings (which appears to no longer be online) and the whole #oneaday crew; various others that I once knew by name and considered friends, but who, in many cases, appear to have vanished into the ether. That's their choice, of course, and I don't blame them for wanting to just quietly retreat with the way the Internet is these days, but I still miss them.

Going along with that is the fact that people just don't seem to be reading blogs any more. This place used to get a few hundred views a day, which is obviously peanuts in the grand scheme of the Internet, but it always felt like a noteworthy number of people who were interested in the daily life of a relative nobody like me, particularly when I was never making a particular effort to SEO optimise this place or write about trending topics.

D'you wanna know how many page views I had yesterday? Five. This isn't really a complaint, because the only reason I'm writing here is more as a journalling exercise than anything else, and that's how it's always been — but those figures are a stark contrast from when I started daily posts first time around here, when #oneaday was a community effort.

And the more I think about this, the more I wonder why this has happened. Sure, social media is good for a quick dopamine hit if a post does numbers, but you are, by design, limited in what you can say — and the sites that are still the biggest in the world despite both having gone down the right-wing toilet are both algorithmically driven to an abusive degree, making it near-impossible to actually see something you might be interested in rather than something which is "suggested".

Blogs, meanwhile, are completely freeform. There's no algorithm at play. You follow a person's blog, you get that person's blog. When they update that blog, you get that post. When you want to respond to what they said, you can comment right on that post, assuming they've left comments turned on. Over time, you can really get to know the person who owns that blog, even if, in the case of larger sites, you never become "friends" with them as such.

But even then, there's a personal touch that social media simply doesn't match. I remember years back I wrote a post about how inspirational I found Allie Brosh's hilarious (and, at the time, enormously popular) Hyperbole and a Half blog, and the lady herself came and commented on my blog to say thank you.

That was amazing to me at the time, but nowadays, I suspect that sadly, relatively few people know who Allie Brosh is; her one lasting legacy on the Internet is the "[x] all the things!" meme, which began its life in an innocuous post from 2010 about how hard it was to be a functional adult with depression and ADHD, but which I suspect is not known by a lot of people using the funny cartoon of the gremlin with the broom to make some sort of "hilarious" point online.

One strange development I've witnessed recently is that blogs have sort of come back, except folks don't call them "blogs" any more. They call them "newsletters", based on the assumption that most folks will subscribe to them via email. And while there are some excellent examples of those — my favourite is Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At?, which is a sole voice of sanity in a tech world that seems to be going increasingly insane — I kind of don't like the name change. "Newsletter" implies something of some importance; something that you follow in order to keep up with important things. And as such, it feels kind of silly to sign up for a "newsletter" from some random person online that you don't know. Newsletters are things you get from the local church, or that one place you bought PC parts from that one time, or a software company you like. They're something that organisations send out, not people.

And I think it's important to make that distinction. Because if you're positioning your work as a "newsletter", you're automatically placing a certain amount of pressure on yourself to make everything you write "newsworthy". Your newsletter needs to be about something, and you need to stick to that subject, lest you lose those all important subscribers and Number No Longer Go Up.

A blog, meanwhile, is just a public diary. Sure, it can be more than that, and yes, of course you can specialise its topic — that's what I've done with my other site MoeGamer — but at its heart, it's a public diary: you write something, you date-stamp it, you post it out into the void. That thing you write doesn't have to be important, it doesn't have to be thought-provoking, it doesn't have to be funny, it doesn't have to be anything. But the one thing it will always be is personal. Anyone reading it is getting a glimpse into your mind, your personality, your soul.

Newsletters are not replacements for blogs. Social media is not a replacement for blogs. And fucking Discord absolutely is definitely not a replacement for blogs.

I miss your blogs. And you're missing out by not reading more blogs. So if you have a blog — or indeed if you are, for some inexplicable reason, inspired to start one after everything I've written above — please let me know. I'll happily add it to my subscriptions. Because heaven knows social media hasn't been fun for a long time, and while Bluesky is definitely an improvement over Twitter for the most part, it still lacks the magic that blogs once had.

So c'mon, let's hear it. Let's build up a kickass blogroll and party like it's 15 years ago.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 244: Is "best practice" the enemy of expression?

I, as you probably know, have a YouTube channel. I have had it for a grand total of about seventeen years at the time of writing, though I would say I've only really been actively, semi-regularly using it since about 2018, initially to host video versions of a podcast I was doing, and subsequently to kick off the series that I'm still running in one form or another to this day.

Over the course of those 17 years, I have picked up just over 3,600 subscribers at the time of writing, with the vast majority of those showing up since 2018. While that is obviously a drop in the ocean compared to big, successful channels out there, I am pleased with it, and honestly I don't particularly want my channel to grow any faster.

In order to acquire those 3,600 subscribers, I have done… nothing particularly special, to be perfectly honest. I have steadfastly ignored the advice of YouTube "gurus" to pursue trends, to be clickbaity with titles and thumbnails, and to "edit for engagement". In short, I consistently reject what is supposed "best practice" in favour of just doing whatever the hell I want — and I have seen some success doing just that. Could I see more success if I was following the supposed "rules" to the letter? Quite possibly. But then I don't think my channel would be mine any more.

One of the things I object to most about online culture in general these days — not just YouTube, but this applies all over — is how no-one really seems to have a personality any more. Everyone says the same things, everyone responds to things in the same way, everyone uses the same bank of reaction GIFs when they can't be bothered to use their words. In YouTube, this is best exemplified by the way you could watch five randomly chosen videos from five moderately sized channels, and I bet you'd hear the exact same sound effects and music clips, and see the exact same visual memes, in at least half of them — if not all of them.

This is because these things, supposedly, work. But in using that "best practice", you are eliminating a lot of the soul from your own work. You're making something that caters to the mysterious "algorithm" — or rather, an imaginary audience — rather than expressing yourself, as yourself. It's the same with the way people talk to one another online; because those reaction GIFs and snippy retorts like "skill issue" are universally understood by everyone, everyone uses them because they're seen as an efficient means of communication.

But, again, there's no personality there. Any time someone comes out with "skill issue" or "tourist" or whatever the derogatory term-du-jour is, I lose all interest in getting to know that person, just as I lose interest in a YouTube video the moment they start busting out the Metal Gear Solid alert noise, The X-Files theme and Spongebob "a few moments later" interstitial cards… and just as, at some point in the last 20 years, you've probably lost interest in someone who won't shut up about bacon, won't stop saying "the cake is a lie" or thinks declaring that pineapple on pizza is "weird" is a daring and brave opinion to express.

People like that don't have a personality of their own; their personality is The Internet, Circa 2025. And, as we've pretty comprehensively established at this point, The Internet, Circa 2025 is not someone you'd want to bring home to meet your parents. It's someone who deserves to be kicked into a ditch 50 miles from the nearest town and left to rot.

So, as much as there are probably things I could do "better" with my YouTube channel, I choose not to do them. I don't feel the need to. I didn't create that channel to be famous, I didn't create that channel to be a huge "thing", I created it as a means of expressing myself and sharing my own, personal enthusiasm for things that are important to me. That's it. That 3,600 people like what I do enough to want to follow it without me resorting to "best practice" says something to me: it says "if you're happy, just keep doing what you're doing".

So that's what I intend to do.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.