#oneaday Day 484: Comeuppance

I am going to leave names and specifics out of the following for reasons that will become obvious, but I wanted to talk about this today.

It is always satisfying to see someone you know is Not A Nice Person get their due comeuppance. And that has very much been happening over the course of the last few days.

The other day, I received a promotional email from a publisher extolling the virtues of their latest book. Again, I am redacting details for reasons that should hopefully become obvious, but those who follow these things will probably know exactly what I'm talking about.

Anyway, as part of that promotional email, the company boasted of its author, whom they described as "one of the most respected" in their field. I vaguely recognised the name, so I did a bit of Googling and confirmed that they were, in fact, the person who I thought they were: a thoroughly unpleasant individual with whom I had enjoyed a run-in or two in the past, and who I was exceedingly disappointed to see was now a published author with an actual book to their name.

I won't lie, I was initially a little despondent at this — my thought process was something along the lines of "if a person as awful as that can get published, I should probably get my act together and do something worthwhile".

For context, this person is someone whom I used to respect, probably about ten years ago at this point. I respected them even more after they went on a bit of a self-reflection trip and posted a rather moving blog post about how they recognised they had not treated some of the people around them terribly well, and that they wanted to do better from thereon.

I drifted away from their work for various reasons, and some years later I rediscovered them, finding them to be considerably more abrasive and downright unpleasant than they had ever been before. Wondering if I had imagined the self-reflective blog post that I had found so moving and admirable a few years back, I tried to look it up. It had gone. To make doubly sure that I wasn't imagining things, I found it on the Internet Archive. So this individual had reflected on their self-reflection, gone "nah" and turned back into the person they had once been, only infinitely worse.

I happened to politely disagree with their opinion on something at one point, only to find myself on the receiving end of a torrent of abuse. When I blocked them as a result of this, they took to harassing me with multiple sockpuppet accounts, ostensibly for their various "projects" but also clearly not the first time they had been used for this purpose. It was at that point — well before it, to be perfectly honest — that this person whom I had once respected was all but dead to me. Any respect I had once had for them was well and truly in the past; they were, for whatever reason, a completely changed person, and not for the better. They had become arrogant, abusive, bigoted and generally… well, Not A Nice Person.

And so I was gratified to see that their new book had ended up in the hands of someone absolutely willing to tear this person's work a multitude of new assholes. There's a truly epic thread over on Bluesky dissecting this book and its many failings — to such a degree that I no longer feel bad about the person in question having got themselves published. I know I can do better than that. I have done better than that. I will do better than that.

This thread seemingly acted as the catalyst for a variety of people to come out of the woodwork and admit they had always thought the individual in question was a bit of a wrong'un, and I felt vindicated in what I have been quietly feeling about them for the last few years. I felt pleased that other people finally saw them for the person they really are. And, I won't lie, I laughed when I saw that the person in question had quietly nuked their entire Bluesky presence following this thread and all the people who had raised their head to speak out against them.

I'm generally not a fan of dogpiling and harassment. But that's not what has happened in this instance; the person hasn't had abuse hurled at them, nor have they been harassed. It's just been a bunch of people explaining to others, curious about the book in question, how they had always had misgivings about this individual — and how they, like me, feel particularly vindicated in feeling that way, given what others have said.

You shouldn't bully and harass people. But sometimes people really deserve to get their comeuppance for behaving like a complete shit. And that is what has happened here.

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 465: Home again

We have safely returned home. It is good to see the cats again, both of whom are very pleased to see us, but it is a shame that our holiday is over. (Well, technically Andie has one more day, but she has to spend it taking her mother home, so it's not a day she's going to be able to enjoy to the fullest.) I am back to work tomorrow, and already not really looking forward to logging back in to Microsoft fucking Teams, the most depressing application you can install on any computer. But oh well. It's a living and all that.

I have, as should hopefully be abundantly clear at this point, very much enjoyed my time away. It was some very much needed rest, relaxation and complete disconnection from anything to do with the Internet aside from this here blog and MoeGamer, which I wrote a couple of things on over the course of my time off.

And it was nice! I didn't once find myself habitually reaching for my phone in the hope of checking Bluesky, which I had already removed from the device some days prior to us departing. I didn't even really check the news, RSS feeds, websites or YouTube all that much while I was away, either. It was a blissful reminder that many of us voluntarily (or by necessity) corral ourselves off into insular little pockets of existence on a daily basis, and sometimes it is helpful and healthy to break completely free of all that, remind yourself that the world is a much bigger and nicer place than anything accessible via a URL or an app might lead you to believe, and just take the time to take a bit of pleasure in your own existence, and that of the people you care about.

The main reason I'm not relishing the prospect of going back to work is that it effectively forces me back into that little bubble, though I'm not going to be reactivating my Bluesky account any time soon. It is tempting to do so just to share the things I write and the videos I make, but I know all too well that "just sharing things" all too quickly turns into that detestable dependence on social media in the search for apparent meaning to one's existence, and never finding it there.

There are people I've enjoyed chatting with on Bluesky, for sure. But I'm also thoroughly over the "public town square" model of social media, with everyone vying for attention in the same frustratingly predictable ways. As good as it is that Bluesky has mostly remained resistant to the more obnoxious end of the horrible people that now dominate Twitter, there are still plenty of odious behaviours on display over there, and I'm just so tired of it all. I feel no need to engage with it; no enjoyment from engaging with it. And so I'm just… not going to.

In an ideal world, I'd be able to disconnect completely from social media from a professional perspective, too. I would love to be able to abandon social media responsibilities for the day job because I absolutely fucking hate doing those rounds each week and feel my time could be pretty much infinitely better spent doing literally anything else. That's probably a difficult conversation I'm going to have to raise carefully, though. Something to aim for, at least.

In the meantime, it will be nice to sleep a night in my own bed again, and enjoy the dearly beloved company of my wonderful cats. They were the only thing missing from a truly heavenly week away, so it is good to be back with them.

Now, onwards to life once again.

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#oneaday Day 457: A statement of intent

Hello! Tomorrow I am going on holiday, and I am using this as something of a "cutoff point" in an attempt to improve my own mental health and get me out of a rut I've been feeling for a long time at this point. I have written about this previously, but please consider this a "final warning" of sorts.

This isn't intended to be a dramatic flouncing off into the sunset in the hope that someone will take pity on me. It is simply a statement of what I intend to do, because my present online existence is absolutely crippling my mental health, and I need to do something proactive to resolve the situation.

Day in, day out, I feel beaten down and depressed by the constant negativity online, and a big part of it is my own fault for engaging with platforms where negativity gets rewarded. But it's not just that; everyone has been exceedingly down for a long time now, at least partly due to the disruption we all suffered during the COVID years, not to mention the horrible things going on in politics and society in general right now. And that, unfortunately, often means that communities I would otherwise enjoy being a part of often find themselves being relentlessly negative.

It's not a malicious attempt by anyone to drag everyone else down, but that often ends up being the net effect. And continually being surrounded by that has not been healthy for me.

And so, as loathe as I am to further isolate myself in a world where I already feel like I've lost most of my "real life" friends, I am going to be taking the following steps for my own digital wellbeing:

I will be deactivating my Bluesky account for at the very least the duration of my holiday.
I will be leaving a significant number of Discord communities that I am currently part of.
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. I also occasionally pop in to the Giant Bomb forums as "angryjedi".

I am sorry to disappoint the two people who were enjoying my #365games thread on Bluesky.

I would also like to add that none of this is personal and that none of this has been triggered by a particular individual. This is all a "me" thing that I've been thinking about for a while; an attempt to reclaim my own life and brain from the digital realm.

As noted above, it's not as if I am going to disappear completely. I can still be contacted via the above means, and I encourage you to do so! It'd be nice to have a private conversation with some of you, away from the noise of social media, so drop me an email or a direct message if that sounds like something you might like. I would certainly appreciate it.

Anyway, that's that. I will be taking the above steps this evening before I go to bed, so I can start my holiday "fresh" in the morning. Thanks for your time and attention, and I hope I'll hear from some of you via non-social media means soon!

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#oneaday Day 438: Increasingly glad I kept this place

If you breathe as many Internet fumes as I do on a daily basis, you are probably aware of the ongoing campaigns against Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Stripe deciding that they are the arbiters of good taste, and causing big problems for anyone producing any sort of creative work that is even remotely sex-adjacent. I wrote a bit about the early days of what was going on here, but things have continued to escalate since I wrote that, and there are plenty of other people who can do a much better job than I can on reporting the ongoing saga.

An especially worrying development is that Patreon, long regarded as the "standard" for those who wish to financially support their favourite creatives on an ongoing basis, has started stepping up its intolerance of what it regards as "sexually gratifying media". This language is very deliberate, because it mirrors what payment processors have started to regard as "unacceptable" — despite the fact that, in their role as payment processors, it is absolutely not their place to judge what people are spending their money on.

Add this to the fact that Patreon recently sent around a rather worrying survey relating to generative AI, whose questions basically amounted to "can we pweeeeze steal all your precious content so we can train our AI?", and I am feeling increasingly glad that I have, over the last 17 years, stayed pretty much where I am in terms of my online presence. Sure, social media accounts have come and gone, but between this blog and MoeGamer, I'm feeling increasingly vindicated in keeping "my" parts of the Web mine.

There's a growing move towards (or should I say back towards) this in the form of the "indie Web movement". Honestly, the whole shtick there makes it sound a lot more complicated than it really is — much of the "official" IndieWeb site feels like it was written by Linux nerds… which I guess sort of tracks — because all you really need to carve out a piece of the Internet as your own is some means of hosting your own website, and some means of showcasing your… whatever it is you want to use as a means of expressing yourself.

There are some delightfully creative "indie Web" sites out there, with a lot of people seemingly getting right back into the depths of programming cool interactive things for people to explore, but honestly, the humble blog is all a lot of people need — and those are dead easy to set up, given the number of easily accessible, straightforward to use and often open-source options in that regard. I am, as I have been for the last 17 years, still using WordPress here, and while there are some things I very much do not like about the direction WordPress has taken in the last few years — particularly with regard to shoehorning in the obligatory "generate with AI" crap in several places — the software is still, on the whole, some of the best and most flexible in the business.

The difficulty, of course, is getting people to see your little corner of the Web without social media to promote it. Because it's harder than ever to get noticed on social media — and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) isn't much help, either. Not only because Google sucks now. Not only because a lot of search engines are pushing AI hard — and in the process discouraging people leaving the search site to go and visit individual websites. But also because heavily SEO'd text sucks to such a degree that it's almost as much of a waste of time as flat-out AI-generated text.

The answer, of course, is just to not really care. I don't. The value for me in writing on here and on MoeGamer is in having a place for me to just write. Sometimes people show up to read what I've written, and that's often (though not always) nice. But that's not why I do this. I'm not trying to be famous or some great authority on any subject. I am, as the header of this site says, just a nobody trying to make my way in an increasingly fucked-up world, and getting some thoughts out of my head onto the virtual page helps me to process things. A bit. I can say pretty much what I want here, within reason. And so I do.

I shan't pretend I don't still fall into pits of soul-sucking despair and depression, particularly when I'm feeling as burnt out as I do right now. But without this outlet, this safe place for myself, this little corner of the Internet that is my online home, more than any other social media profile page ever has been, I shudder to think what state I'd be in.

So yes. I am glad I have stuck with this place, and I will continue to stick with it for as long as it is practical to do so.

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#oneaday Day 435: Performative tediousness

As time advances ever-onwards towards my holiday and my (possibly permanent) break from social media, I find myself considering starting the whole thing early. Bluesky in particular has started showing worrying signs of the sort of passive-aggressive, performative annoyingness that plagued Twitter in the mid-2010s — this was, for me, what really set me on a path to disliking social media in general — and it's just not really fun any more.

There are aspects of Bluesky I do like. The "nuclear block", which prevents anyone seeing the specific posts you're replying to or quoting when you blocked the original poster, remains the platform's best feature, and is a good — albeit imperfect — solution to dogpiling. But dogpiling still goes on, because there are other ways of doing that.

But the passive aggressive thing, known in a past life as "subtweeting", where you post something obviously intended for the attention of a specific person, but one that you're not replying to explicitly, has seen a marked uptick recently. You know the sort of thing, posts that start "If you think [not-particularly contentious opinion, like thinking trans people should have rights], then just unfollow me now" or "When someone says [exceedingly obvious and hyper-specific red flag that clearly someone has mentioned in the last ten minutes], that tells you everything you need to know about that person" — posts that are intended to wind up a very specific person, but in a "not touching, can't get mad" sort of way; posts that encourage a "well, if you think this might be about you, you might be the problem" sort of attitude.

Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't confront hateful bigotry when it comes up. Particularly these days, when the significant progress we've made over the course of the last decade in terms of tolerance and acceptance with regard to race, gender and sexuality appears to be coming undone at a frighteningly rapid rate. But there are better ways to do it than posting passive-aggressive statements into the void. If you want to have an argument with someone, just go ahead and fucking have the argument. It might make you feel better for five minutes, until you realise how much time and energy you have wasted trying to change the mind of someone else on the Internet.

Or you could do something yourself that is more positive. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that. Calling someone bouncing off the walls going "I HATE THE JEWS" a "Nazi" is not suddenly going to make them go "shit, I am? I am, aren't I? Thank you for setting me straight". Setting a good example yourself, meanwhile, up to and including getting involved in activism if you feel strongly enough about the issue in question, is a much more productive use of everyone's time. It won't stop the Nazis being Nazis, but if there's one thing several decades of Internet discourse should tell you at this point, it's that very little will.

One technique I've found extremely useful in training myself out of getting into annoying situations online is that if I see something which, for one reason or another, angers me, I will fully type out an indignant reply, look at it for a moment, take ten seconds to think "do I actually want to post this? Is the potential fallout from posting this worth it?" and then, more often than not, delete it, because the answer to both questions is inevitably "no". Just recently, this has been happening with such frequency that I find myself asking a follow-up question: "do I really still want to be part of this community, if situations like this keep arising?" And the answer there, too, is often turning out to be "no".

This is the thinking behind my great "unplug" in early September. I'm going to disconnect completely from all forms of "discourse" online for the duration of my holiday. I'm still going to keep my phone with me, of course, and I will do things like keep up to date on the news and suchlike with RSS, but social media and any sort of "open" chat (read: Discord) is off the table for me.

I'm just glad I've never got involved with TikTok. My overwhelming feeling from my thankfully limited exposure to TikTok is that TikTok is hell for this sort of performative crap, except now you have to see someone yelling things into their phone camera instead of posting indignant text messages. And TikTok never ends. God, what a fucking nightmare proposition.

I realise this entire post could itself be seen as performative and passive-aggressive. But, frankly, this is my own website, and I'm not pushing this out into the wider world in the hope some very specific person is going to see it. I'm just writing it for myself. And possibly my cat, who has been cuddling my leg for the entire time I've been writing this. I hope you enjoyed it, Patti.

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#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.

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#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!

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#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.

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#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.

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#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!

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