#oneaday Day 480: Post-hotel

Realised I forgot to write something last night. It is time for my monthly trip to the office, y’see, and as such I was spending the evening in a hotel. I was so caught up in watching Police Interceptors and then ProJared playing Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon that I completely forgot to blog. Oh well. Life goes on. I’m sure all none of you who thought “hang on, Pete didn’t blog today” will get over the immeasurable disappointment.

But I am here now! It is lunchtime in the office, so I am banging something out before everyone else gets back from lunch. Today I have had a Meal Deal from Boots. It was adequate, though I am pleased to see that you can get those Walkers Extra Flamin’ Hot crisps in an individual bag now rather than having to use willpower not to eat an entire big bag in one go. Diet is mostly on pause for the time while I’m away — back to normality once I get home this evening.

We were discussing plans for next year in the office this morning. Lots of exciting things on the way — and for once we’re well ahead of schedule on getting a bunch of them ready, too. It’s going to be interesting to see how some folks react to the things we have on the way — I think a fair few people are going to be very pleasantly surprised at what we have coming!

Anyway, people are starting to filter back into the office now, so I guess lunch break is over. There’s only so long I can type away at this before people wonder what I’m doing, plus I have some meetings scheduled for this afternoon. And so, on that half-hearted note, that is that for now. I will be back this evening to catch up properly!

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 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?

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 327: Catch-up club

I missed yesterday in all the excitement. We went to Ikea and had meatballs. Yes! What a tremendously exciting day that was. I joke, of course, but it was a perfectly nice day, and the last of my time off for my birthday, so I enjoyed just having time to relax.

Today, it’s back to work, although it’s only a couple of days and then a long weekend for the May Day bank holiday, so it’s not so bad, even if I have to endure a bunch of meetings in the meantime between now and then. I’d much rather just get on with my work, y’know?

Meetings are a scourge of modern existence. I hate Microsoft Teams and find waking up to Teams notifications one of the most depressing things imaginable, but at least if your meetings are on Teams you can get on with other things while other people are rabbiting on about bollocks you don’t care about or which aren’t relevant to you.

I have to give a little credit to my job here: the meetings are, for the most part, reasonably helpful and productive, and there aren’t too many of them. It’s not like my last job, where we would have a meeting called the “Good Morning Call” every Tuesday morning, which involved sometimes up to two hours of listening to our French colleagues very slowly reading out everything from our project management tool. When COVID hit and we all started working from home, I actually took to going back to bed while this meeting was on speakerphone (and turning my microphone and camera off, obviously) — I literally slept through pretty much every one for about six months, and no-one ever noticed.

I feel like if meetings were completely eliminated from the weekly work calendar, everyone could get so much more done. Since more often than not, meetings are used as a means of going “what stage are we at and what needs doing?”, it would be far more productive for everyone to just agree that, say, on a Monday morning they just send out an email saying what they’re going to be working on and if they need anything from other people. “This meeting could have been an email” is a meme for a reason, after all.

Also, people who want a “quick call” to confirm something with you rather than just putting what they want in the chat or an email can get to fuck, too. I’ve got shit to do, and the last thing I want to spend time doing is sitting in an environment I feel uncomfortable (video chatting) when I could be just getting on with the big pile of shit that is continuing to build up while these distractions are happening.

Ahem. Anyway. Those are my thoughts on meetings. If you can successfully run a company without endless, pointless meetings, you have my respect. Keep it up. Your employees with thank 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 295: The sky isn’t falling

I’ve had a pretty stressful week, the reasons for which I won’t get into for now, but suffice it to say they were work-related issues. (Nothing anyone who cares should be worried about, I hasten to add; part of the problem is my own disproportionate sense of panic-stress to even slight mishaps. And that is, essentially, what happened this week.)

I don’t like getting stressed out or annoyed at my current job because, for the most part, I actually like it and want to stay there. At this point I think it’s the job I’ve held on to for the longest without going insane, but I do find myself worrying that The Way My Brain Is is just sort of fundamentally incompatible with… work.

I don’t mean that I don’t want to do anything, or that I just want to sit around all day doing nothing. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and it’s nowhere near as much fun as you might think. I am grateful for my current position, and I believe that if I were to leave (I’m not planning on doing so!) I would be missed, which is more than can be said for some positions I’ve held in the past.

But still, there’s the stress. I’m beginning to feel like work-related stress may simply be an unavoidable part of literally every position out there, and that kind of sucks. Because if I can still be feeling the kind of stress that makes me not want to get out of bed in the morning at a job I actually like and want to keep, it really doesn’t feel like there’s a way to escape it at all, short of winning the lottery, jacking it all in and living purely for whatever you, specifically, want to do.

Even then, though, the modern world manages to bring in stress. If I were to win millions and be able to quit my job comfortably, I would almost certainly want to continue writing and making videos. And I would not be doing those in an attempt to make money; I would be doing it purely because I want to. But I just know from bitter experience even if you’re doing something you absolutely love doing and expressing pure, unbridled enthusiasm for it, there’s always someone lurking around a corner waiting to make your day miserable with an unpleasant comment or a wilful misinterpretation of something you say.

The only escape, really, is to completely cut yourself off from everything and live off the grid from a social perspective, only making use of the Internet for essential things. Because at this point, I feel like completely living without the Internet at all is probably impossible.

But anyway. The stress this week was not pleasant, but I survived it, and I need to tell myself every time something like this happens that the world is not, in fact, ending, regardless of anything that has happened. Instead, it seems that Shit does indeed Happen, whether or not you think it “deserves” to, and the only real way to stay standing is just to weather the storms that come your way every so often, learn any lessons that can be learned from the situation, and hopefully come out of the other end stronger.

That’s what I should tell myself when this happens. But we all know that’s probably not going to happen. The next time Stress Happens, it will have the exact same effect on me, and I will come to this same vaguely philosophical conclusion after the fact once again. It has happened before, and it will happen again.

Oh well. Something about recognising a problem is the first step and all that.

Time for bed, I think!

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 292: Thriving within limitations

Most of you reading this who are at least A Certain Age will probably think back on your school days with varying degrees of fondness, but I suspect pretty much all of you are glad that those days are behind you for one reason or another — the chief one being the freedom you have once you are no longer constrained to an institution’s timetable and rules.

As I get older, this is probably the rose-tinted nostalgia talking, but I increasingly miss that whole sense of structure that the school day had. I’m talking as a student here, not as a teacher; as a teacher, the school timetable was nothing but a source of stress, particularly when I forgot I was supposed to be “on duty” (whatever that actually means) and ended up on the receiving end of snarky comments from dickhead colleagues. But I digress.

No, I’m talking about the sense of structure you have when you are a student: the knowledge of exactly what is going to happen when for the day ahead, and the fact that you know your time is most likely going to be spent in at the very least a vaguely productive manner for the next 8 hours.

Sure, there were always the lessons that summoned up the inevitable sense of dread — Maths for me — and, of course, there was always the blind panic you’d feel when you realised you hadn’t done the homework for the lesson that was scheduled for immediately after break, leading to frantic completion of said homework outside, leaning on a wall and hoping your teacher for the next period doesn’t wander past and clock what you’re doing.

But for the most part, it was nice to wake up of a morning and know what to expect. It was nice to have “favourite days” because that’s when your best lessons were. It was nice to know exactly when you’d have the opportunity to work with your friends, or learn from a favourite teacher.

If this all sounds insufferably swotty, I don’t know what to tell you; outside of some bullying incidents (where I was the victim, I hasten to add) I mostly thrived in secondary school in particular, and I enjoyed having things that I was good at, and which got acknowledged as things I was good at. Because heaven knows I wasn’t “cool”, and I knew that wasn’t likely to change, ever.

I often find myself thinking whether the daily grind of work could be made better if I split it into discrete “periods” like the school day, with specific times set aside to do specific things. I suspect it actually might, but actually developing that schedule has been my sticking point. As a lot of my work is pretty self-directed, I’d be responsible for both setting and sticking to that schedule, and I’m not sure that’s what worked well for me back when I was at school. Rather, I think I thrived because I had a schedule set by someone else, and during that schedule I was told exactly what to do, and exactly what was expected of me — again, by someone else.

I know part of “growing up” is being able to do those things for yourself, but lest we forget, I am what is politely termed these days as “neurodivergent”, and thus I find myself wondering if I wouldn’t just be better off in a situation where someone sits me down, says “9am-10am, you’re doing this. 10am-11am, you’re doing this. Then go have a bit of a break. Then 11.15-12pm, you’re doing this…” and so on.

Sure, we have weekly Teams meetings (God, I hate Teams meetings… scratch that, I hate meetings in general) but those aren’t exactly what one might call “engaging” in the same way a good old-fashioned school lesson was. Perhaps I was just fortunate enough to have, on average, very good teachers, and in other places, school is, in fact, ideal preparation for a life of adult misery in Teams meetings. But I doubt it.

Anyway, perhaps I should actually make an effort and try the “schedule” thing for myself. Who knows, it might actually work? Can’t hurt to try, right?

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 263: Room service

It is, if you will pardon my deliberate misuse of a term typically used to mean something else, that time of the month again: the time when I get to drive two and a half hours from my home, hole up in a hotel for the evening and then go in to the office tomorrow.

The hotel I normally stay at, known as The Broadway, is quite nice. The rooms are pleasant and the beds are comfortable. My only real objection is that its bathrooms are very inconsistent. Sometimes I’ll get a room with a lovely big bath, which it is a delight to luxuriate in after that long drive. And at others, you’ll get ones like the one I have this time, featuring a shower cubicle far too small for a human being (let alone a larger gentleman such as myself) and a toilet placed in such a way that you have to lean around the toilet paper dispenser to be able to sit down and do a poo.

Oh, and they use those horrible office-style single sheet toilet roll dispensers, too. I have taken to bringing my own proper toilet roll rather than spend my poos here scrabbling away at sheets of toilet paper far too thin to have any practical purpose whatsoever.

The one thing I will particularly compliment the Broadway on is its food. In the morning, you get a lovely breakfast included, and it’s much better than what you’d get in something like a Travelodge or Premier Inn, in that someone cooks it for you to order rather than batch cooking everything and leaving it to congeal under heat lamps.

I hadn’t had dinner here before, so I thought I’d treat myself this evening, and it was excellent. I had a full rack of ribs followed by a chocolate sundae, and both were delicious as well as being generous portions. Bad for the diet, of course, but these trips away always mess with any good intentions to eat healthily, anyway. Back on track when I get home tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s session at work promises to be interesting. Rather than just a regular day at the office, we’re having a day of brainstorming product ideas, so I’m intrigued to see exactly how ambitious the organisers think we should be. I obviously won’t be able to tell you anything that is decided or discussed tomorrow, but I have some fun ideas that it will hopefully be enjoyable to brainstorm a bit.

And with that in mind, it’s probably time to get some sleep. So I’m off to do just that.

#oneaday Day 205: Last weekend of 2024

The last hours are ticking away on the last weekend of 2024 as I type this. I have two days of “work” (and I use that term loosely during this ever-curious interstitial period between Christmas and the new year) and then a day off for New Year’s Day, and then it’s back to normal existence.

I have enjoyed the Christmas break, overall. I haven’t done very much with it — the fact I have nearly beaten The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom will attest to that — but the period of just straight-up rest and relaxation has been good for me. It’s easy to just sort of “tune out” the stresses of everyday working life until you take a step back from them for a little while, and it’s most definitely been nice to be away from work social media and the never-ending moaning that goes on there.

We’ve got an exciting year coming up at work. We’ve got some great licenses in the pipe for Evercade, one of which (SNK) we’ve already teased, but there are several more lined up and ready to go, too. I’m looking forward to revealing these at the appropriate times (you won’t get any clues here, sorry!) but not looking forward to, once again, revealing something cool and being immediately hit with a torrent of “you should get [x]” comments. I swear, a significant number of people involved in this hobby don’t actually care about the thing itself, they only want to know “what’s next”.

I was actually thinking about this quite a bit towards the end of the working year. Evercade cartridges are super-cool and good value because they collect together a bunch of interesting games in one place, but this unfortunately means that reviews of them tend to suffer. When you get maybe 150 words in a publication like Retro Gamer to cover a cartridge with multiple games on it, there’s not really any time for the reviewer to talk about anything in great depth. And online review sites aren’t much better, either; inevitably, when we get a cart reviewed, it’ll be a general overview of the whole thing without really going into much detail about any of the individual games.

This is a real shame, I think. If I wasn’t working for Blaze directly, I’d be wanting to do comprehensive reviews of each cartridge, covering each game in detail. In fact, as it happens, I may be doing something along those lines for both the Evercade blog and YouTube channel in the new year — we want to celebrate some of our back catalogue as well as the most up-to-date stuff, and there’s a lot to talk about at this point.

I know “company that makes the thing writing about the thing” isn’t quite the same as a professional review, but honestly, a lot of the reviews out there aren’t really providing much in the way of helpful information. What I strive to do in my articles and videos for Evercade is provide some decent quality research, some historical and social context for the games — and just an outline of why they’re cool, y’know?

So more of that in the new year. In fact, that’s what I might just fill my days with on Monday and Tuesday this coming week. While there’s not much in the way of “production” stuff going on, I may as well get ahead of the game with writing some bits and pieces, no?

I didn’t intend this post to be so work-centric when I started, but, well, that’s happened now, and it’s not as if I had much else of note to write about, really. I mean, I could write about Echoes of Wisdom, but like most gaming-related things, I’m going to save my conclusive thoughts about that for MoeGamer once I’ve actually beaten it — which will be in the next couple of days, I reckon, possibly even tonight, depending on how hard I can resist looking at a guide to find the last few Heart Pieces and Might Stones.

Anyway. If you, like me, are back to work for a couple of days tomorrow, I hope you’ve had a nicely restful holiday season and that those two straggling days aren’t too stressful. 2025 is yet another opportunity for a “fresh start” for all of us, and while many people around the world are staring down some significant challenges (I’m glad I never made it to America at this point, frankly) we can all just take each day as it comes and see how things go.

For now, more Zelda.

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.

2526: Quiet Weekend

0526_001

I’ve been working all week, and I now have two full days — a proper weekend — to look forward to. And I am indeed very much looking forward to it.

In particular, I’m looking forward to spending some more quality time with Final Fantasy XV and Pokémon Moon, both of which I’ve had the chance to play sporadically throughout the week, but not for particularly protracted periods of time due to the necessity of getting up the next day in time for work.

I’ve always appreciated free time with no commitments, but nothing really makes you appreciate it quite like a week of hard work, whatever form that hard work takes — whether it’s getting out of the house and doing something in exchange for money, or simply doing something useful at home.

Although the work I’m doing is just temporary — it’s the same seasonal position in retail I held last year — I’m enjoying it, and I’m noticing a few positive things about myself in the process. In particular, I’m finding it a lot easier to quite simply talk to people and feel like “part of the group”. Whether this is a result of working with the same people I worked with last year and consequently not having to build new relationships from scratch, or if it’s something to do with the new medication I started on about a month back, I’m not sure — it’s probably a combination of those two things — but I am, on the whole, feeling uncharacteristically satisfied with certain aspects of myself at present.

There are plenty of things I’m unsatisfied with too, of course — most notably having put a bunch of weight back on since losing a bunch with Slimming World last year, though since changing medication I have subsequently discovered part of the blame for that can be laid at the feet of the pills I was on earlier in the year — but for now I’m trying to enjoy life as much as I can. I don’t doubt that in January when my temporary position comes to an end that things will get a little difficult and tight once again, but I have a few plans in place for things to do and some potential opportunities to pursue.

It’s perhaps a tiny bit early to review the whole year, though most people will probably agree 2016 has largely been a big pile of shit. That said, this last couple of months have proven to be a little better than the rest of the year, at least, so all I can really hope for at the moment is that the worst is over and that this is the start of the long climb back out of the abyss into something resembling a normal, satisfying, happy life.

It remains to be seen what 2017 has to hold, but I’m not worrying about that too much for the moment. Right now, I have a full weekend to look forward to. And I intend to enjoy it as much as possible by doing as little as possible.

2502: Black Friday

Spare a thought for the retail workers of the world, who have to work on days like today.

I’m still not 100% clear on where Black Friday came from — and, moreover, why it crossed the pond from America to Europe — but I have pretty mixed feelings about it on the whole.

On the one hand, it’s nice to have a period of time when you know you can rely on getting low prices and decent deals on things that you might be interested in buying. In the online sector, events such as Steam sales and “Cyber Monday” deals demonstrate this clearly.

On the other hand, compressing aforementioned low prices and decent deals into a single weekend — or, in some cases, a single day — seems a little counterproductive when it comes to brick-and-mortar operations in particular.

An event such as Black Friday means that stores are probably going to be rammed full of people, making it a less pleasant experience for everyone shopping and significantly harder work for those people working the store who have to try and answer questions, ensure everyone gets served, keep the shop looking as presentable as possible and ensure no-one is wandering out of the door in possession of things they haven’t paid for.

At the same time, though, an event such as Black Friday may encourage people to pick up things that they otherwise wouldn’t have thought to purchase or been able to purchase at their normally higher prices. I personally haven’t bought anything this Black Friday — at least partly because I was working the damn thing — but if I was going to buy something like an Xbox One (the one “next-gen” console I still don’t own), Black Friday would appear to be a decent time to do so.

Like I say, mixed feelings. And if you’ve been out there in the rush and the chaos of people trying to get a hot deal, as I say, spare a thought for the folks who are rushed off their feet trying to make sure everyone leaves satisfied.

Now I’m going to bed to pass out and wait for my feet to stop hurting.

2498: Contributing Something

I went back to “proper” work today for the first time in quite a while. It’s nothing fancy or exciting — just a seasonal retail job in our local video game emporium — but I enjoyed my time there last year and was fortunate enough to be called up to help out over the impending holiday season.

While retail is fairly mundane work for the most part, it is at least a nice opportunity to get out of the house, do something and actually interact with human beings, which is something I feel like I’ve been sorely missing for a while. Don’t get me wrong, social anxiety is still present and correct, but I feel like I can usually cope better with interactions in a structured environment such as retail, where both parties involved in a conversation are there for a specific reason. The customer is there to either get some information or buy something, and I am there to provide whatever it is they are asking for, or to provide them with a suitable alternative if the thing they want isn’t available.

It can be quite rewarding, too — not financially, since retail pay remains fairly poo across the board, but in terms of knowing that you’ve helped someone. At this time of year in particular, a lot of people come into shops they might not normally go into wanting to buy presents, and this means that they often need advice. Well, that exhaustive knowledge of video games had to be useful for something, didn’t it?

Since I worked my first retail job — I’ve done several over the years — I’ve found that the way I communicate with customers usually puts them at ease and encourages them to trust what I am saying. I’m not sure exactly what it is — perhaps it’s the fact I display genuine enthusiasm for the things I’m talking about, or perhaps my teacher training lets me explain things suitably for all levels of knowledge — but it usually seems to go down well, and I’ve sent many a customer on their way with a smile on their face over the course of the last few years.

I’m not sure I’m cut out for anything more than working the floor, keeping things tidy and ringing up sales — although I guess you don’t know until you’re in a position to take a bit more responsibility and try it for yourself — but for now at least, this is providing both something to do and some money coming in, which is what I needed.

What will happen to me next year is anyone’s guess. But I suppose that’s the holiday period covered, at least.