#oneaday Day 532: Knackered

I'm absolutely exhausted, and I'm not entirely sure why. I guess this week has been a bit of a busy one with a trip to the office, and just before said trip I was ill, so I think I'm probably still feeling the lingering (after)effects of being ill. Or possibly just still being ill. Either way, it's 8pm and I just want to go to bed, so as soon as we've had some dinner, that's what I'm going to do.

Everything just feels so tiring these days — mentally, more than anything. I am beyond tired of the revolting end-stage capitalism hellscape we live in right now, and long for the AI bubble in particular to pop, if only so people can stop posting screenshots of Google's AI summaries and think that doing this, in any way, proves any sort of point. That and it would be super-cool if all the software everyone uses goes back to being functional and useful rather than having fucking chatbots everywhere.

It's frustrating. I was listening to Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron talking about the whole "enshittification" thing earlier, and their conclusion is that as individual consumers, there unfortunately isn't a whole lot that we can do to stand up to this nonsense, because it's all happening at a corporate or even governmental level so far beyond the scale of one individual, it's impossible to do anything about. They do, however, note that that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do; they cite the example of attending Town Hall meetings and voicing your concerns about financially and environmentally ruinous data centres being constructed. Even so, though, this seems largely like an American thing — I don't even know if "Town Hall meetings" are a thing here — and, again, it's hard not to feel like a little ant about to be crushed by corporate authoritarianism.

I'd ignore all this shit completely if I could, but it's everywhere — and particularly getting its tendrils into things I actually care about, such as the creative sectors and particularly video games. The new Call of Duty is absolutely riddled with AI art, for example; Ubisoft's latest Anno game has "placeholder" AI art loading screens that definitely aren't just being called placeholders because they got caught; and it seems like every day, a new corporation decides that yes, the absolute best thing to do, despite the general public reacting universally negatively to it every time it happens, is to pivot to an "AI-first" approach, inevitably laying off swathes of the workforce in the process.

I thank my lucky stars I have a stable (I hope) job in the middle of all this, and that AI doesn't interfere with my job any more than having to ignore annoying sparkly buttons in social media management tools and occasionally telling people off for getting ChatGPT to "write" minor things when I'm right here and can do that for them in a matter of seconds without burning a fucking lake down.

God. The "future" sucks. It's a cliché to say at this point, but we really have taken the exact opposite lessons from "cyberpunk" and futuristic dystopia literature than were intended by their authors. We have all the negative aspects of a corporate-dominated end-stage capitalism hellscape, and none of the cool stuff like consumer-grade bionic arms and sex robots. (Well, okay. They're almost certainly working on the sex robot thing, though if it ends up being LLM-powered I'm not sure anyone is going to want to fuck ChatGPT.)

Is it any surprise I'm knackered when just existing through all this nonsense is draining the life force and will to live out of all of us? Probably not. So I'm going to enjoy my KFC and then go to bed.

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 399: Tiresome

It is the weekend, and I am tired. It has been a very busy period at work for various reasons. It would probably be unprofessional of me to explain further, but suffice it to say for now that the struggles we've been dealing with have been external in nature, and the people who've been pestering us about certain things for years had better bloody well appreciate what we've been getting up to!

It's tiring, but it's also worthwhile. I spent a goodly portion of this afternoon just Getting Things Organised, and it was a lot more satisfying than I thought it would be. I had been putting off this particular specific task of Getting Things Organised for a while, but I had said I would get it done by the end of the week, and that's exactly what I've successfully done. My Things That Are Now Organised will hopefully help me out in the day-to-day running of my job, and, with any luck, make my life a bit easier. We shall see.

There's lots of exciting things coming up for Evercade. The new Super Pocket devices are out now, bringing with them a built-in selection of NEOGEO and Data East games. I've also got an early copy of our first NEOGEO cartridge, so I will be looking forward to sitting down and actually taking some time to enjoy these games, rather than writing documentation for them or testing them. I'll also be spending a bunch of time playing Roguecraft DX when that comes in, but we haven't had the advance copies for that just yet.

Then there's all the stuff we haven't announced yet! There are some great things coming later in the year and early next year. I've been working on some of the first cartridges that we have planned for 2026 recently, and it's going to be another fantastic year. Evercade really has gone from strength to strength since it launched against all odds in 2020, and I'm proud to be part of the whole thing. If you'd told child me that one day I'd be working on producing official rereleases of some of my all-time favourite games, I'm sure he'd be delighted. He might wish that this role had come about a little sooner in my life, but, well, we can't have everything, and at least I can enjoy it now. I am right in the target audience for the products I'm working on.

I'm looking forward to a nice break, though. I think I mentioned the other day that Andie and I are going to Center Parcs again later this year, in September. It's going to be lovely to have some time away, particularly as we're staying for a little longer than we have done on previous visits. It will hopefully be time to thoroughly unwind and relax before having to jump back into our respective job roles, both of which have been a tad stressful for a while!

Still, rather what I've been doing than… well, pretty much anything else I've done in what can laughably be called my "career" to date. I'm doing something I (mostly) enjoy in a field I care deeply about, my contributions are appreciated, and I'm paid well for the privilege. Not a lot to complain about, aside from people being rude on social media. Things could be (and have been, at various points in my past) a lot worse!

Anyway. I'm off to go start enjoying my weekend, perhaps with a few of those NEOGEO games. I never have finished Metal Slug before… perhaps it's time I gave it a proper shot?

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#oneaday Day 229: Mental shutdown

I'm back from my trip, and I'm absolutely exhausted. A full-day meeting followed by a 3+ hour drive is not my idea of Having A Brilliant Day, so I'm sitting here absolutely frazzled and seriously considering going to bed before it even hits 10pm. In fact, that's exactly what I'm going to do as soon as I'm finished with this nonsense.

The meeting itself wasn't a bad thing — it was actually quite worthwhile and productive, but I'm not sure it needed to be the entire day. I won't bore you with the details because they're not very interesting, but they should help me and the rest of the team I work on to do our jobs better. So that's nice.

No, it's the three-hour drive back in the dark that's the real killer, and to make matters worse my phone battery died with about 45 minutes left to go. I was listening to Ed Zitron's excellent(ly cynical) coverage of E3 on his Better Offline podcast and enjoying it a great deal, but I had to suffer with the radio for that last 45 minutes, because balls to driving in silence.

And to be sure, listening to Absolute Radio '90s is… well, not really suffering as such, but it has got markedly worse since Matt Berry's contract clearly expired, because their new idents featuring someone trying (and not doing a brilliant job) to imitate Matt Berry's distinctive cadence are just infuriatingly shit. Whereas Berry's idents were genuinely amusing — and, rather brilliantly, different every time they came on — they've fallen back on that old commercial radio standard, "where real music matters". And they go on and on and on about "real music matters", sometimes for several minutes at a time. There's no humour, no heart, no feeling that "real music" really matters. Just the usual soulless commercial attempts to be "funny" and failing miserably.

At least the music they do play is decent, since as the name suggests, they play a selection of '90s hits (with a "no repeat guarantee!" that unfortunately doesn't extend to "not playing the same songs at the same time each day") — although listening to a few tracks during the vinegar strokes of my journey this evening made me realise that more than a few groups commonly regarded as "good" are actually pretty dull. Like Nirvana. Boring. Always suspected they were when I was younger, but dutifully bought Nevermind because everyone was obliged to in the '90s. But no. Can't even remember the name of the song that I heard on the radio this evening but it was as dull as the piss of an old man with a yeast infection.

Anyway, my tiredness is clearly letting the grump out, so I think it's probably for the best that I put the bin out and go to bed. So I'm going to go do that right now. Don't wake me.

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1711: Soporific

I have… a problem.

Said problem is that if I have to sit still and do nothing while concentrating on someone else talking for any length of time, I get extremely sleepy, regardless of how tired I actually am. My eyelids start to get heavy, my body gets tired and all I want to do is just curl up and get comfortable for a bit of a nap.

This is a problem because the times when I am supposed to sit still, do nothing and concentrate on someone else talking for any length of time are generally occasions where it would be impolite to fall asleep. Weddings and funerals, for example, but also meetings.

I've suffered with this issue for as long as I can remember — certainly for as long as I've been an adult. I remember it happening on occasion at university during lectures, but more often than not this could be attributed to a heavy night out the previous evening and a hangover weighing on my mind. (My peers found it terribly amusing when I had to quietly slip out of our weekly piano workshop to go and be a bit sick. Well, I didn't want to throw up all over the Turner Sims concert hall.) At other times, I could fend it off by occupying my brain somewhat: either taking notes if I was actually interested in the subject of the lecture, or doodling the lecturer getting sucked off by some sort of sinister vacuum cleaner-like contraption if I wasn't. (This happened once; it wasn't something I found myself drawing on a regular basis.)

It's mildly embarrassing, but fortunately I've never managed to actually completely fall asleep before. I've come perilously close, I must admit, but I always manage to maintain my faculties and remain in the land of the living. I came perilously close on more than one teacher training day while I worked in schools, too, particularly since said training days tend to ignore everything we're ever taught about engaging people and helping them learn and instead tend to consist of someone waffling on and on and on for hours about something which is, quite possibly, a load of old bollocks.

The peculiar thing is the moment I step out of the situation where I'm supposed to be concentrating on someone else droning on about whatever, I can be back to full alertness in a matter of seconds, with no trace of tiredness. It's just that while I'm sitting there, expected to take in everything that is being said and actually retaining very little of it at all — usually because it's not relevant to me and thus immediately filtered out by my brain — my body appears to go into its shutdown sequence. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Or am I? That would be awful, and even more difficult to explain than falling asleep in a meeting already would be. But I guess we'll cross that bridge if — yes, if — we come to it!