I'm exhausted. Busy day at work, big lunch, long and tiring drive home. A mostly good day, though, aside from the twat driving at 45mph in the middle lane of the M3.
Lunch was good. The boss treated us to a meal at a local (to the office) Turkish place. I had calamari as a starter followed by lamb moussaka. It was really good, but it made me just want to nap for the afternoon!
On the way back, I listened to some stuff from Sbassbear, a musical collective on YouTube that are probably best known for their Game Grumps remixes, which are consistently hilarious and incredible in their quality.
Tonight I listened to two of their more "conceptual" albums. The first was GrumpWave, which was a series of 30+ minute lo-fi tracks with some of Arin and Dan's more thoughtful conversations overlaid. It was a rather contemplative listen, and I really enjoyed it.
The other thing I listened to was Fever Dream Radio, an ADHD nightmare of an album designed around the concept of a restless, anxious soul constantly channel flipping on the radio. It's a lot to take in but was frequently hilarious. Musical comedy is tricky to do well, because to really succeed you have to absolutely commit to The Bit, but Sbassbear has always taken even their most ridiculous compositions and arrangements very seriously. If you think you can handle it, I recommend giving it a listen in its entirety.
Oh, also we have no Internet at home so I'm writing this from bed on my phone. And on that note, time for some very well earned sleep!
I've been doing this wrong all this time. I'm on my umpteenth monthly visit to the office, blogging from a hotel room, and somehow it has only just occurred to me that you can, in fact, plug a keyboard into a phone and type on that rather than using the touchscreen. Altogether a much more pleasant experience, and much more conducive to actually writing something of substance.
Of course, I cannot actually promise that anything following will actually be of substance, but at least I won't be complaining about how much I don't like typing on my phone, because right now I'm typing on my nice keyboard.
I don't really know why this has never occurred to me before. I think at least part of it is down to the fact that plugging a keyboard into a device that is considerably smaller than the input device always felt… "extravagant" somehow, to an unnecessary degree. But I guess it's not that strange. On a trip up to the Edinburgh Fringe with the university Theatre Group (many years ago at this point), I purchased a portable wireless keyboard to use with my Palm handheld, and that was perfectly acceptable to me. So, since I have my keyboard in my bag anyway because I'm bringing my computer to work, I figured I might as well use it for this.
So what have I got to report today, other than the usual long drive down some of the worst roads in the country? (The M25 sucks, as has been well-established on these very pages on numerous occasions, but the A1 is full of potholes now, too.) Well, I decided for my food this evening I'd do something a bit different; rather than loading up on a big bag of portable junk from the nearby Morrisons, I thought I'd try a local Korean place that I've walked past many times and been intrigued by, but never actually given a go.
So I decided to give it a go — and this was, it seems, a very good idea, because the food was delicious. I don't know Korean cuisine particularly well, but the lady behind the counter was extremely helpful, even going so far to ask me if I'd ever eaten the food they had on offer before, and offering me some suggestions and recommendations accordingly. I eventually plumped for Korean chicken kim bab (I think that's spelled right), which is essentially Korean sushi rolls.
This is what they look like:
They were delicious! As well as the Korean fried chicken with a delicious sweet but spicy sauce, there also appeared to be some combination of cucumber, cabbage, carrot and (I think) white daikon radish. And, thankfully, no onion or onion-adjacent stuff. I've found that Korean food doesn't seem to have a lot of onion in it, unlike cuisine from some other areas of east Asia, so I'm absolutely fine with that.
So yeah. That was a good decision, and I will be going there again — perhaps to try something a bit more adventurous next time. It was definitely a substantial, satisfying meal, and at £9 for a generous portion it wasn't excessively expensive either. Sure, it's more than a supermarket sandwich, but it was also several orders of magnitude more tasty. And probably not terrible for you, either.
So that was a nice discovery, and has put me in a relatively pleasant mood for the remainder of the evening. Now I'm just killing time in my room until it's time to sleep, then we have a Big Exciting Meeting (that I've been reassured doesn't mean anything Bad) tomorrow, and the boss is taking us all out to lunch, which will be nice. I know I complain a lot about having to do this monthly visit, but honestly, it's nice to actually see everyone semi-regularly, and if we get treated to something tasty, so much the better.
On that note, then, I think I'm going to spend an hour or two playing some Activision games on Evercade, then hopefully get a good night's sleep for what should be a busy but rewarding day tomorrow. Have a pleasant evening!
I hate Mondays. I mean, I hate getting out of bed most days, but on Mondays it's always particularly challenging, for a variety of reasons. The most obvious, of course, is that getting out of bed on a Monday is an acknowledgement that the weekend is, in fact, over, and that you are going to have to do something vaguely useful with your existence for the next five days.
For me, I have the added annoyance that Monday is Meetings Day. I have one at 10am, another at 11am, sometimes another at 2pm and yet another at 3pm. Somewhere amid all that I have to figure out a week's worth of stuff to get done in the space of a couple of hours so that I can actually use the rest of my week in a manner that is productive and useful to the rest of the team.
I despise meetings. I always have. I'm not sure I've ever had a meeting that I walked out of where I felt "that was an excellent use of my time". I got in trouble at one job for finding a meeting so boring that I actually fell asleep in it. When working from home started, I discovered that I could literally go to bed and fall asleep during the 60-90 minute long "Good Morning Call" meetings we had every Tuesday at the job I was working at the time, and no-one ever noticed. I am the embodiment of the concept "This Meeting Could Have Been an Email".
And yet certain people are obsessed with the idea of having meetings. I'm talking generally here, not about anyone specific at my current or previous jobs — these are just some observations that I've seen over the course of various occasions of employment. But yes. Some people are obsessed with the idea that having everyone looking bored on Zoom or Teams several times a week is somehow productive, when in fact everyone would be much more productive if they were left alone to get on with their job, and only got bothered when someone specifically needed their attention on something.
I sort of get the justification. The idea is that if you all get together — preferably face-to-face — on a semi-regular basis, you will communicate better with one another because you are more likely to think of one another as actual people. But I can't help but feel there are much, much better ways to do this than Having A Meeting.
I don't know anyone who relishes the prospect of weekly meetings, at any job I have ever worked at. I know plenty of people who dread it, particularly if they have been forced into having to speak or present something, but no-one who actually enjoys these things. So why do we continue to insist on them?
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Yep, it's that time when I come at you live from a hotel room in sunny and fragrant Letchworth, ready and waiting for an invigorating day in the office tomorrow.
It took me over four fucking hours to get here today due to traffic on the sodding M25, but I did at least have some entertaining listening material in the form of a couple of Fun Factor podcast episodes that I hadn't yet gotten around to. And I've said it before, and will probably say it again, but this show is a great listen for anyone who, like me, grew up with video game magazines in the '80s and '90s.
I had a Taco Bell on the way down, though, so that was nice. Taco Bell in this country doesn't generally make one want to shit one's pants, and it's a nice change from the usual service station fare. I have also got a bag of freeze-dried sweets, because I saw them in Morrisons and was curious. They're quite nice, but also a bit like eating polystyrene. I don't dislike the experience, but I probably won't be in a hurry to get another bag.
I have brought a companion with me this time. This is Geoff:
Geoff was hastily hand-made for me by my wife after I got her a Valentine's Day gift and she had forgotten what date it was. (I wasn't mad, I wasn't expecting anything in return — I just like buying gifts!) When I say hastily, I mean it — she bashed him out in just a couple of hours, which is seriously impressive, and she is a wonderful person I am lucky to have in my life.
Why Geoff? Because Andie thought his mouth looks like a moustache, and from that I thought he looked like our head of sixth form, Mr Watts, whose first name was Geoff. So he's Geoff.
Anyway, that's about all for today because I'm typing on my phone and I hate doing that. So that's all you get for now. Have a lovely evening!
It's the Work Christmas Do tomorrow. As is (apparently) usual, we're going to London to go and Do a Thing, then Eat Some Things, then Drink Some Things. I suspect I will probably bow out of the latter quite early like I did last year, as London bars are rather overwhelming. But we shall see.
I don't really know what to expect this time. The Do a Thing step for tomorrow is "Monopoly Life-Size", which I have heard is a lot more fun than actual Monopoly, because each of the "spaces" has a little room where you have to go and Do Stuff. I can see there being potential for some fun there, and my work colleagues are always a good laugh to hang out with on occasions like this.
For dinner in the evening, we are seemingly going to some sort of steak-centric restaurant. I am all for this, as I love a good steak, and it's something we tend not to have all that often at home. I think it will be a tad less pretentious as a meal than the last time we got together, where we went to one of the numerous The Ivy restaurants — the one in Covent Garden, rather than the famous club, though they are run by the same group — but I anticipate it will still be tasty. Plus being fed and not having to pay for it is always a great thing.
It's been a very tiring year work-wise, but it's been a good one — and I'm looking forward to the future. At some point relatively early next year, my role at the company will be changing somewhat; I'll be stepping aside from the social media duties I currently have and do not enjoy in the slightest, and becoming more involved in the development side of things, primarily on the testing front. I'm excited about this, as it means I can have a direct impact on the quality of the stuff we put out, plus I anticipate I'll get to learn a fair bit, too.
I won't be leaving aside the more creative parts of my job, though. I'll still be producing manuals for Evercade cartridges, and supporting those with material for the website and YouTube channel. Those are the parts of my work that I really enjoy — even if in 2025 it's an absolute fucking nightmare to get anyone to read anything. Still I persist, however; I still like to read stuff, so I'm sure there are at least a few people out there who appreciate some written material! (If you've never seen my written Evercade stuff, check out the Evercade Blog and you'll see all my stuff is marked with my name.)
Over the long (long!) term I'd like to put together something like a book on Evercade and its games, but while I've had all the other responsibilities to juggle, this is not something I feel like I've been able to make a ton of progress on planning and proposing, let alone realising. We'll see if that changes in the future. My goal is something along the lines of Limited Run Games' "The Complete Run" books, which will go through all the Evercade releases sequentially and provide Something Interesting To Read about all of them, be that historical information, tips on playing or just some interesting things to look out for. In essence, it'll be like my blog posts, but more formalised. If I can achieve that, I think I'll be satisfied that I've done something good for the world, on balance.
But anyway. All this is stuff to ponder in the future. Right now I smell bad so I need a bath, but I have a chat to moderate first. After that, it's off to bed, and then on to sunny London tomorrow daytime. I will doubtless be reporting in from the hotel tomorrow evening, so I shall see you then.
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I had my annual appraisal at work today. Honestly I always dread this because of just… everything going on inside my head most of the time, not least of which is ever-present impostor syndrome, but I was especially dreading it this time because I knew I would have to have a Difficult Conversation about aspects of my job that I was struggling a bit with. The details are not important, but nothing you need to worry about — my career is fine and I have not murdered anyone!
Why should this make me feel dread, rather than hope about having an open conversation that both I and my colleagues can move forward from? Because on multiple occasions in the past, attempting to have a Difficult Conversation like this has resulted in a less-than-supportive atmosphere from my immediate superiors and employers. On multiple occasions it has led to me leaving a role altogether. And, as I'm sure you're aware from my general enthusiasm for what I do now, I did not want that to happen this time around.
I had no reason to believe that speaking my mind and being frank about my mental health would result in disastrous consequences for my job and career in this particular instance, of course — I get along very well with my colleagues, immediate superiors and even senior management. That's the advantage of working for a relatively small company: you can get to know everyone, and they can get to know you.
But still I felt it: that dread. What if it was misinterpreted as me being lazy, or not wanting to do my job, or something like that? Impostor syndrome is a terrible thing, as it means you live in constant fear of being "found out". Exactly what you fear being "found out" is often not entirely clear, but the end result is often that familiar feeling of dread when you're in a situation where the right thing to do is to confront something that's been worrying you, and seek support if needed.
As should hopefully already be clear from the title of this post, the Difficult Conversation went well, and I now feel a lot more confident and hopeful about the future. I won't go into details because you don't really need to know — it's nothing any of you need to worry about, I should add, however — but suffice to say that we have a Plan for the immediate and mid-to-long-term future that will hopefully result in me feeling a lot better about a lot of things, and feeling a lot less in the way of the burnout I have been suffering a bit over the course of the last while.
It's all about thinking about where your particular strengths and skills are, and considering how you can best use those as part of your overall team. Go into a situation like this thinking "I don't want to do this any more" and the whole thing is probably going to end sub-optimally. Go into this thinking "these are the things I'm good at, and I don't think my current responsibilities make the best use of those skills", however, and you can look to the future with hope and positivity. This is, it should not have to be said, a good thing.
Because ultimately, we have to work. That's the way society is. In the absence of any sort of universal basic income scheme — which is a whole other topic of discussion — we all have to work. And if you have the opportunity to make a change for the better and not find your mental health ebbing away at least partly as a result of daily responsibilities that aren't a good fit for you, it pays to take that bold step, say "I'm not entirely happy right now", and try to figure out a good solution for yourself.
I am painfully aware that not everyone has the luxury of being able to do this. I have been in situations where I have not had the luxury of being able to do this in the past, and it really sucks. So I was beyond pleased when the end result of the discussions today was positive, helpful and hopeful, and I'm glad I had the courage to stand up and admit that I had been struggling a bit. I am incredibly thankful for the opportunities I've been given, and the position in which I find myself. It took me a very long time to get here, so I am keen to make it work as well as I can.
So that's what I'm doing. And I'm grateful that I can do that.
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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.
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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?
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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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.
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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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!
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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