Goodbye, Meg

This is a repost from MoeGamer for the sake of those who aren’t subscribed over there.

Today we lost our beloved Meg, our cat who joined our family back in 2016. She was just 12 years old, but sadly she was suffering with what looked like fairly severe liver cancer and had to leave us before what we all thought “her time” should be.

Much like when we lost her playmate Ruby — who we suspect may have been her daughter, though we have no real confirmation of this — I wanted to leave a permanent record of the mark Meg made on our family and lives, and celebrate how much she was loved.

Both Ruby and Meg came from a local rescue centre. They were very much a pair; while they contrasted quite significantly in personality, it was clear that they had spent their entire lives together. As such, when we lost Ruby unexpectedly to an accident, Meg was hit hard by it. But she soldiered on, and took well to Patti, a nervous little black cat who we took in to give Meg some company, since she was clearly pining for Ruby.

I say she “took well” to Patti; the first few weeks of them being together were interesting, to say the least. Patti expressed her nervousness by launching herself at Meg at high speed, causing Meg to initially be somewhat wary of her; as time went on, though, Meg grew to at the very least tolerate her and, though she would never admit this, love her.

For Meg was a Grumpuss, you see — or at least she liked to put that impression across. I don’t think she really was grumpy most of the time, but she had a face that looked like she disapproved of everything going on around her — particularly anything Patti had something to do with. But it was clear that it was just a front; any time Patti decided to hide or we had to take her to the vet or something, Meg made it very obvious that she was worrying about her.

And her caring nature applied to us, too. I loved Meg so much at least partly because she reminded me in attitude of my childhood cat Penny, who would always come and “look after” any member of the family who was suffering for one reason or another.

Meg had incredible empathy skills, and knew exactly when what you needed more than anything else was a cat to just come and sit with you. I’ve lost count of the number of times I was lying feeling hopeless and depressed in bed, and Meg came to come and look after me. She didn’t actually do anything beyond sit with me — usually either on me, or in such a way that she was pressed up against me — but that was enough. Her presence was comforting. And now it’s gone.

Meg reminded me of Penny in other ways, too, perhaps most notably in her love of “human food”. She would do anything for a little piece of ham or cheese, and on more than one occasion she sat down for Christmas dinner with us as a special treat. She was always well-behaved, though; while she would certainly “beg” for things when the fridge opened, she rarely went so far as to steal things.

Except for one memorable occasion, when Andie had made some sort of sausage-based casserole stew-type thing. We forgot that we’d left the pot out overnight, and when we came down in the morning, we found half a sausage sitting on the kitchen floor, along with a noticeable hole in the (rather thick) stew mixture, suggesting that Meg had precisely picked out a single sausage from the pot without disturbing anything else, consumed enough to satisfy herself, then left the evidence behind as if to say “and what are you going to do about it?”

I have any number of stories like that I could tell about Meg. She was such a strong personality, and beloved by everyone who came to our house. She was the kind of cat who could pick out the “person who didn’t like cats” from a lineup, and convert them to a cat-lover within five to ten minutes. She was more than just a pet; she was a beloved family member, and that’s why losing her hurts so much.

But we had to say goodbye; it was the right thing to do. She was so sick, to the point that she wasn’t eating, that it was heartbreaking to see her in such a sorry state. But at the same time, we knew that she was hanging on for our sake. We knew that she didn’t want us to be sad, so even though over time it clearly got to a point where it hurt for her to do anything, she would still come and spend time with us, and she stubbornly refused to let go and leave us behind. She would sit on a cushion next to me while I played games, or she would sit on Andie in bed, or she would just hang out in the same room as us, content to be in our company.

But sometimes, no matter how much you love someone and you wish your time with them could last forever, you just have to say goodbye. And while we wish Meg could have just passed peacefully at home surrounded by the warmth of family, we couldn’t bear for her to keep suffering for our sakes. I don’t know how long she would have clung on out of sheer stubbornness, but we had to let her go. It was the right thing to do. And as we laid her to rest, she looked happy.

Meg, we love you and we will never forget you. We’re sorry we occasionally called you Princess Professor Megatron Meowington the Third, but you brought out our childish, happy sides even during dark times. Our life was richer, more joyful and more colourful for your presence, and we hope — no, we know — you understand what an important part of our family you were. We hope you are at peace now and that, reunited with Ruby, you will continue to watch over us forevermore; in exchange, we’ll keep a watchful eye on Patti for you. She misses you already.

Goodbye, Meg. You deserve eternal happiness. I hope you have found it.

Attempting to process some bad news

You’ll hopefully indulge me for a while, as we had some devastating news today: our beloved cat Meg appears to have liver cancer, and there’s nothing we or the vet are able to do about it aside from attempt to make her feel comfortable and loved for the immediate future.

Meg is just shy of 12 years of age, and neither Andie nor I are ready to say goodbye to her. She’s been such an important part of our lives for so long at this point that I’ve been hit very hard by the sorrow of knowing that our time together is coming to an end. I won’t speak for Andie, because she doubtless has her own feelings on the matter, but I can at least talk through how I’m feeling in an attempt to process the situation.

A bit of background for those curious: we’ve had Meg since she was about 2 or 3 years old. She was a rescue cat, but she and her companion Ruby hadn’t been mistreated or anything like that; they’d simply been put up for adoption because someone in their former home turned out to be allergic to cats. We fell in love with both of them almost immediately, and they joined our family in 2016.

Ruby, sadly, had an accident in 2018 and left us well before her time, and Meg was clearly hit hard by the situation; she was clearly pining for the company of another cat. We suspect (though we’ve never known for sure) that Ruby may have been her kitten, which made the situation doubly sad. But we decided quickly to adopt another cat, both because we enjoyed having two cats around and we didn’t want Meg to be sad. And so Patti, a nervous little black cat who had something of a troubled start to her life from the sound of things, joined us.

The relationship between the pair was initially somewhat cautious. Despite being a complete scaredy-cat (no pun intended), Patti had a habit of launching herself towards Meg at high velocity when she first arrived, making Meg a little uneasy about her. Over time, they came to tolerate one another, though, and while I know Meg would never admit it, I’m pretty sure they even came to like one another.

We knew something was wrong with Meg a few months back when we noticed she was looking obviously skinnier than she had ever done, and, taking her to the vet, it seemed that she had indeed lost rather a lot of weight. She had a blood test that came back without any real indication that anything was wrong, ruling out common causes of sudden weight loss such as hyperthyroidism and diabetes, but we were still a little concerned.

It took a couple more appointments, including today’s, where she was put under general anaesthetic and examined thoroughly, to discover what was actually wrong with her. And now we’re kind of at a loss. We don’t want to lose Meg, but we also don’t want her to suffer.

At present, she’s actually doing reasonably well considering the circumstances, but she hasn’t been eating as much as she has done in the past, which accounts for the weight loss. And, realistically, things are not going to get any better from here. But we’re not ready to say goodbye just yet, so we’ve got some medicine to hopefully make her feel a bit better for now, and we’ll have to see what happens from there.

I don’t know if I want to say that death scares me, because I’m not sure that it’s death itself that scares me. It’s more the knowledge that I do not handle grief well at all, and the difficulty I have in picturing a life without someone or something that has been such a major fixture in it for so long.

Meg is such a precious, loved part of our family that even contemplating moving forward without her is enough to bring tears to my eyes. And the prospect of telling someone else “yes, it’s time for her to die,” as you regrettably often have to do with pets, is near-inconceivable. I don’t know if I can do it. But it’s also not fair to lumber Andie with everything.

Part of my brain knows, rationally, that all lives come to an end, and often a lot sooner than we would like, particularly when animals are concerned. That same part of my brain knows that it is the right thing to do to just let her go when simply existing is too difficult or painful for her. But another part of my brain says “what right do I have to decide that for her?”

I think part of why I have so much difficulty dealing with and processing this sort of thing is that there are no answers. There is no “right way” to handle it. There is no person you can go to for help and get everything resolved neatly and without pain. There is just that period of grief, pain and sadness awaiting, and I unfortunately know from past experience that when you’re in the middle of it, it sometimes doesn’t feel like you’ll ever be able to break out again.

This is what scares me. I know that I will be completely devastated with grief for quite some time when it is finally Meg’s time to pass on. And I can’t help but worry about how I will cope when something even worse happens in the future. Because I know it will, one day. Hopefully not for a good long while yet, but it will.

The things I’m feeling are not, I suspect, unique to me by any means. But it’s difficult to talk about them, which means it’s difficult to find a suitable outlet to express and process the storm of emotions that situations like this bring to one’s mind. I have been in floods of tears off and on all day, and I don’t know what else I can do. Because there probably isn’t anything else I can do.

Writing those feelings down is as good a solution as any for now, then, I guess. At least then I can look back on them after the fact and perhaps learn something from them — and hopefully those close to me will also have a better understanding about how I’m feeling and why I’m struggling.

In the meantime, Meg is now home and doing as well as can be expected. She’s just had something to eat, as she hasn’t had anything since last night, and I’m sure she just wants to get some rest now. She will be loved for however much time we have left together, and anything beyond that we’ll just have to deal with as it happens.

The TikTokification of comedy

I fucking hate TikTok. I hate “short-form content” in general, which means I loathe YouTube Shorts, Instagram/Facebook Reels and anything anyone feels the need to send me that is in a 9:16 aspect ratio. So if you’re considering it… don’t. I won’t watch it.

My reasons for despising short-form content are numerous and varied, so I won’t go into all of them here, but one thing in particular vexed me so when I stumbled across it yesterday that I felt the need to get this particular rant out of my system. And that is what I call the TikTokification of comedy — or, to put it another way, the divorcing of comedic moments from context purely so that idiots can quickly and easily steal them and share them on their mindless social media.

I’ve actually been thinking about this for a while. The first time I was particularly conscious of it was when I started seeing that a number of comedians had started upping their YouTube presence. And all their videos had a few things in common. Take a look at these thumbnails:

All of these are completely transparent clickbait. And while a certain amount of clickbait is a necessity on a platform as saturated with material as YouTube is, I really detest the whole “half a sentence” thumbnail format. I didn’t click on this one, which has almost certainly floated across your YouTube recommendations at some point, either:

This, to me, is the YouTube equivalent of the Twitter engagement bait (that thankfully seems to have died a bit of a death… along with the rest of Twitter) where a brand would go “[our brand] is _________” and expect people to “fill in the blank”. And people, dumb consumers that they are, absolutely would. And it didn’t matter whether they were filling it in with obscenities or bootlicking nice things, it was engagement. It made the numbers go up. That’s all that mattered.

It’s the same with these comedy clips. I like all of those comedians above, but I don’t want to click on their videos because it’s rewarding manipulative behaviour, and also encouraging the main problem that I want to talk about today: encouraging people away from enjoying a creative work in its entirety and towards a grab-bag full of “best moments” that completely lack their original context.

Good stand-up comedy makes the entire show into an event, and runs a narrative thread through the whole thing. Not all comedians do this, but the best comedians, in my experience, make you feel like you’ve enjoyed a complete story by the time you’ve left the room. Sure, there may have been some deviations along the way, and the story may not have made all that much sense… but there was still a sense of narrative progression. A beginning, middle and end, if you will. For some great examples, check out Rhod Gilbert’s show Rhod Gilbert and the Award-Winning Mince Pie and pretty much anything by Eddie Izzard.

When you slice a show up into little bite-sized bits, you lose that context. Sure, the individual moments might be funny on a superficial level, but you lose the added depth of them being part of something bigger. And that’s a real shame. And this leads me on to the real reason I’m writing this today: my discovery yesterday that Friends, a TV show I absolutely adored during my formative years, has its own YouTube channel.

And yes, you guessed it, the Friends YouTube channel looks like this:

The stand-up comedy thing I can sort of forgive. While I much prefer seeing an entire stand-up set and enjoying that feeling of context and narrative, there are sometimes just single jokes or routines that you want to share with someone. And you can probably make the same argument about Friends.

But for me, and regardless of what you and/or the general public might think of it now in 2023, Friends was always about more than just the jokes. Friends was a phenomenon. Friends was about us spending 10 years alongside these characters in an important, turbulent part of their lives, and watching them grow and change. Friends was about us simultaneously being envious of these twentysomethings somehow being able to afford massive apartments in Manhattan, but also feeling like the moments they shared were relatable in their own ways.

And an important part of the entire experience was context. While Friends actually starts kind of in medias res, halfway through a member of this pre-existing friendship group telling a story in their favourite coffee shop, it still makes an effort to introduce us to everyone through the way Rachel enters the picture as a formerly estranged friend of Monica.

We feel included. We feel like we’re learning who these people are — and over the course of the subsequent ten seasons, we really get to know everyone. And while the age of the show means that life in general is quite different for most folks right now — look how infrequently anyone on the show uses a mobile phone or a computer, for example — it’s still relatable to anyone either going through that “20s to 30s” part of their life, or who has already been through it.

These characters grow and change as a result of the things that happen to them and the simple act of getting older. They enjoy amazing high points and some heartbreaking low points — although nothing too heartbreaking; this was a primetime comedy show, after all. But everything that happens helps to define these characters and make them more than simple, mawkish, two-dimensional representations of a single personality trait.

Slice all 236 24-minute episodes up into one-minute chunks, though, and you have content. You have individual moments that, in many cases, simply don’t really work as standalone “jokes” because they rely on you knowing and understanding the characters and their relationships. And you have no sense of that ongoing growth and character development, because all these clips are posted in a seemingly completely random order determined by whatever the person running the Friends YouTube account felt like putting up today.

I realise this is a bit silly to get annoyed and upset over, but it’s frustrating to me to see something that I loved so much in its original form and its original context be treated as fodder for the mindless content consumption machine of 2023. It irritates me to think that there are doubtless some people out there whose only contact with Friends will have been minute-long clips on YouTube, and through those they will likely have formed a totally different opinion of the show than someone who watched it from start to finish.

Is this elitist and gatekeepery? Not really, since Friends itself is easy enough to watch in its entirety via either streaming services or undoubtedly cheap DVD box sets that no-one wants any more. It’s just the latest symptom in a disease that blights society, where no-one believes they have “time” for anything any more, so watch badly cropped minute-long 9:16 clips on double speed while they’re doing their daily quests in Mindless Gacha Bullshit X, rather than settling down, taking some time to relax and just enjoying something in its entirety.

I hate it. Hate it. And while I’m aware there’s nothing stopping me from doing what I describe above — I think I even still have my Friends DVD box set somewhere — it’s exhausting just to be around all this short-form garbage, and frustrating to live in a world where seemingly no-one has an attention span longer than a TikTok video.

I bought a Sega Master System.

Now that I’ve stepped aside from the games press, I’ve resolved to myself to spend more time enjoying games just for the sake of enjoying them, not because I want to write about them or whatever. This doesn’t mean that I won’t write about them, of course — it just means that my priorities are not “get through as much shit as possible so I can write about something every week/day/hour”.

To that end, this week I’ve been spending some time with my retro systems, which have been going a bit unloved in their dedicated room upstairs for a little while. Yes, I have multiple emulation devices and complete ROM sets for everything up to Dreamcast on my PC downstairs, but there’s still something thoroughly pleasant about playing on original hardware.

In fact, in the case of systems like Nintendo 64, original hardware still provides a superior experience, since today’s N64 emulation still has a certain degree of jank about it — not to mention the fact that no modern controller quite feels like the N64’s weird three-pronged monstrosity.

One system I’ve been meaning to explore for a while is the Sega Master System. I’ve never owned one of these and don’t really know a whole lot about it — and as such, any time I’ve considered exploring the library of games for it that I have on my PC and emulation devices, I never really know where to start. Herein lies another benefit of playing with original hardware: rather than attempting to get everything, you can curate your own collection and discover new favourites one at a time rather than being overwhelmed by choice.

Anyway, my background with the Sega Master System is brief. Growing up, I only know one person who had one: someone I went to school with named Dale. Dale was a curious character in that he flip-flopped between being a cool guy to hang out with and someone I’d consider a friend, to full-on “school bully” status. And he’d do it without warning from day to day; I never quite knew what to make of him. He could burp like no-one else, though, and his mum was nice.

To my recollection, I only ever went over to Dale’s house once during my childhood, but while I was there we spent some time playing on his Sega Master System. I don’t think he had many games — the only one I remember playing was Alex Kidd in Miracle World — but I remember being quite taken with both the system and its games. And it’s sort of stuck in my head that I’d quite like to fiddle around with one ever since… only I’ve never gotten around to it for one reason or another.

Well, I’ve been chatting with some retro gaming YouTubers of late, and I finally got around to watching the work of one of them that I’d been meaning to check out for a while: Dudley of Yesterzine. Dudley’s “thing” on YouTube is taking an individual issue of an old games magazine, going through what it covered and diving deep into one or two of the games and features that were in that issue. It’s enjoyable viewing — plus attempting to anticipate the single “your mum” joke in each episode is always entertaining — but I digress.

The reason I bring up Dudley is that he’s a big fan of the Master System. He refers to it, only partly jokingly, as “history’s greatest console”, and knows a great deal about the system, its library of games and all manner of other things. And it was through seeing Dudley’s enthusiasm for the platform that I decided that now might as well be the time I jump on board the Sega Master System train. Particularly since he was kind enough to send me a couple of loose carts to get me started, even before I had anything to play them on.

I trawled eBay for a bit, looking specifically for a mk1 Master System, since that has an AV out port that allows it to be used with a nice SCART cable, and eventually came across a listing that had a Master System in good condition, one controller, the Phaser light gun and fifteen games, most of which were boxed and with manuals intact. It wasn’t cheap, but it also didn’t seem unreasonably priced, either. So I took the plunge, and it finally arrived today.

I’m thoroughly charmed with it so far. The selection of games I’ve acquired with the system cover a wide selection of bases — including three excellent Sonic titles — and I was delighted to discover that the specific model of Master System I have is the one with the built-in game “Snail Maze” rather than Sonic the Hedgehog or Hang-On. Nothing against either of those games, of course, but you can get them on cartridge; Snail Maze is a proper “exclusive” to that particular hardware revision.

Snail Maze, as a game built in to the ROM-based OS of an ’80s games console, is not a complicated affair — it’s literally just a maze game in which you have to beat the clock — but its simple existence gives the Master System a ton of character and personality. Hell, even the fact that the Master System has an OS that is visible to the end user, unlike any other non-computer console around at the time, makes it stand out — particularly with its friendly, helpful on-screen instructions that encourage you to “ENJOY!” if you switch on with no cartridge in the slot.

The games themselves, too, have a very distinctive feel to them. The Master System’s ability to colour the entire “border” of the screen (much like how the Atari 8-bit and ST could) rather than simply confining the action to a smaller window in the middle surrounded by inky blackness is immediately recognisable, and there’s definitely a recognisable Master System “look and feel” — and certainly no-one would mistake the SMS’ PSG sound chip for the NES’ custom APU. (This isn’t a slight against either of them, just an observation that they are noticeably distinct.)

The control pad is surprisingly tiny, being even smaller than an NES pad but similar in shape, and features possibly one of the worst directional pads ever to exist. It’s not unusable by any means, but its squishy nature means that it’s much, much too easy to accidentally push diagonals, particularly the downwards ones, and in certain games this can be absolutely disastrous if done at just the wrong moment.

The buttons are nice, though, and, squishiness aside, the controller is, on the whole, responsive. It’s a little odd there not being a dedicated “Start” button — the first action button is also regarded as “Start”, and pausing is achieved by pressing a button on the console itself, rather than the controller — but given most games are designed around the two-button limitation it’s not a huge issue.

The Ninja

I haven’t got deep into any of the games just yet, but some early favourites are “Commando, but feudal Japan”, aka The Ninja, and “legally distinct from Pole Position”, World Grand Prix. I also already know that the Master System Sonic games are excellent from when I’ve previously covered them, but it will be great to finally play them through on real hardware.

In terms of collecting, while it’s tempting to try and go for a “complete set”, particularly since the Master System’s total library is relatively small compared to other platforms, I don’t really have the room to store that. Some would argue I didn’t really have the room to start collecting for another console in the first place, but I can make it work.

Anyway, what I’m intending on doing is simply curating a moderately sized but well-formed collection of games that I will genuinely enjoy. I’m not going to lose sleep over the fact Phantasy Star is over a hundred quid — I have multiple other ways to play that — and nor am I going to lust after things that are expensive just for the sake of it; I can live without 8-bit Streets of Rage II if it’s going to be that absurdly priced.

Instead, I’m going to take the opportunity to nab the games that are affordable, and which I feel like I will genuinely enjoy, and then be content with that. And I’m going to take the time to enjoy them just for the sake of enjoying them. I might write or make a video about them at some point, I might not. Point is, it’s completely my decision as to whether or not to do that now — and I’m not going to put any pressure on myself in that regard.

Now, question is, what to add to the collection next…?

I’m coming to the end of an era, and I feel both relief and sadness.

This week is my last week as Editor of Rice Digital, and it’s also my last week as part of the modern games press. I’m not ruling out occasionally writing something either here or on MoeGamer based on things that I’ve particularly enjoyed and want to share, but after this Friday, that’s the end for me on regular commitments to Writing Stuff.

It’s a bittersweet moment, but it’s a step I’ve chosen to take — and yes, just to reassure you, this is entirely my decision — for a variety of reasons. Today I’d like to talk about them a bit in what will likely be a bit of a lengthy post. But I feel like I need to… express some things, even if no-one else actually reads them.

Before we go on, I’ll clarify that my time with Rice coming to a close is because I’m going all-in on a project I absolutely believe in: the Evercade project, which I’ve been involved with for some time now, and which, from next week, I will be a completely full-time, 100% dedicated member of.

Anyway. Let’s start with a bit of Pete backstory for the benefit of those who are newer acquaintances, or who don’t know my full background.

As a child of the ’80s, I was there for the beginning of home computing. Our family were relatively early adopters of home micros, quickly gathering beneath Atari’s standard and remaining loyal to them right up until it simply became more practical to make the switch to IBM compatible PCs.

I don’t actually know the exact reason my family chose to go with Atari, or the circumstances that led to us acquiring our first computer, an Atari 400, as they happened before I was aware of pretty much anything that was going on. By the time I had a vague amount of consciousness and sentience, though, computing was already an important part of our day-to-day life — and that continued.

The early days of home computer culture sounded like they were exciting to be a part of. My Dad and brother would often attend a local “computer club” — inevitably returning with armfuls of pirated software — and my brother had a (relatively) nearby friend who also had Atari computers and was more than willing to share his software with us.

My Dad had been a subscriber to a magazine called “Page 6” since its first issue. This began its life as a newsletter for a Birmingham-based Atari users’ group known as BUG (Birmingham User Group) but the folks working on it decided that they could potentially make something more of it. As such, from the very first issue, they did their best to create something that would be of broad interest to Atari users nationwide, not just in Birmingham.

Page 6 was a great source of information on our computers. It was filled with interesting articles, tutorials and even programs that you could type in and save to disk or cassette. It helped emphasise the fact that a home computer was more than just a games machine, and that in the right hands, it could be a powerful creative tool and a real benefit to the household.

Indeed it was; our Atari computers were always more than just glorified games consoles. We played games, yes, but every member of my family used them for a variety of other reasons, too. My parents used them to help manage the household. My mother used them for creative writing. My father used them for music production. My brother used them for digital art. We all used them to create charming banners and cards with Broderbund’s Print Shop software. And me? I did a bit of everything.

One day, my Dad became fascinated with a new piece of software he’d acquired: Flight Simulator II by subLOGIC. As a lifelong aviation enthusiast, my Dad was incredibly impressed by the seeming accuracy of Flight Simulator II — even despite the technological limitations of the Atari 8-bit — and found himself compelled to pen an article for Page 6 about it. As an enthusiast publication, Page 6 relied on contributions from its readership — and as a longstanding reader, my Dad felt a good means of giving something back would be to tell the rest of the Atari 8-bit community about this remarkable piece of software.

The article was published in the following issue — even getting a bit of cover space — and thus began a long relationship between our family and Page 6. My Dad would continue to contribute pretty much right up until the magazine finally folded in the late ’90s, and my brother would kick off what has, to date, been a long and incredibly successful career in games-related media and surrounding environs by writing reviews of Atari ST games.

As an impressionable child, I was, of course, fascinated by all this — to such a degree that I’d often type up my own reviews of games in AtariWriter on the Atari 8-bit, print them out on our Star SG-10 dot matrix printer, then file them away in a ring binder. My parents would even go so far as to “edit” them for me — a fact that I feel probably played a significant role in my own fastidiousness when editing others’ work today, as well as maintaining my own work to a set of high standards.

Eventually, when I was in my early teens, I finally got the opportunity I’d been waiting for: my Dad had negotiated with Page 6’s editor Les Ellingham (who, incidentally, had remained in charge of the magazine from its very first issue to its absolute final moments) and agreed to let me pen a couple of short pieces for the following issue. It was nothing major — half-page reviews of two budget rereleases from Psygnosis’ “Sizzlers” label — but the feeling I got when I finally saw my words in print was like nothing else.

Over the years, I contributed to a number of other publications, including PC Zone and the Official UK Nintendo Magazine. It never got any less magical to see my words on the page of a magazine you could buy on the newsstands — and back in those days, freelance writer rates were very generous indeed, it has to be said, particularly compared to the pittance offered by most websites today.

Things were changing, though. Internet connectivity was becoming more and more the norm for everyone, and websites were becoming more complex and interactive. One which my brother helped launch was known as 1up.com, and it showed the massive potential there was in building a publication that didn’t just have a passive “writer -> reader” relationship, but rather building a community where not only could the regular staff pen their expert opinions, but community members could also publish their own stuff and discuss it with one another.

It was through 1up.com and the community I found there that I started to find myself seeing a much broader gaming landscape. No longer did I feel constrained to only seek out the games that got good reviews from monthly magazines; discussing things with friends and sharing experiences together helped show me that sometimes it was much more interesting to explore the quirky, weird or flawed games that didn’t get much love from the press — or which passed by completely ignored, in some instances.

Magazines, which were already starting to die off by this point, still held an appeal for me — but this brave new online world seemed fascinating; it looked like a bright future was ahead for video games and the discussion surrounding them.

Over the years, though, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. We’ve gone from a world where enthusiastic, specialist, knowledgeable writers share their well-informed thoughts about a variety of interesting games to one where outlets are unironically advertising for someone to oversee an AI churning out 200-250 articles per week just for the sake of having “content” on the site.

We’ve gone from a world where a “big release” remains relevant and interesting for months at a time, to one where a title that should be absolutely huge is forgotten about by the afternoon of release day.

And we’ve gone from a world where folks like to share their experiences in the hopes of convincing others to join them on a magical journey, to one where cynicism, bitterness and needlessly aggressive confrontation rules the roost.

Over the last decade or so in particular, I’ve done what I can to try and remain a positive force, celebrating the games that I’ve found particularly fascinating along the way, and especially when they’ve either got a raw deal from the mainstream press or been ignored completely.

I’ve done this both on a personal, passion project basis with MoeGamer, and professionally over at Rice. And I stand behind each and every thing I’ve written.

But I’m exhausted. You know why? Because it feels like no-one gives a shit. I tell people enthusiastically about a relatively unknown game I’ve enjoyed recently, and I’m greeted with silence at best, cynical or outright dismissive responses at worst. Hell, at the best of times I can’t even get the slightest reaction out of people who are supposedly my closest friends when I share something I’ve written.

This is, I don’t mind admitting, deeply saddening, particularly as someone who spent a significant portion of his life desperately wanting to be part of the games media; desperately wanting to be someone who helped chronicle this fascinating creative medium and celebrate its weird and wonderful creativity.

But when it seems that people would rather read SEO-optimised garbage like “Wordle Solution #756” or “How to Beat the K’ok Piz Shrine in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” than an in-depth analysis of how a narrative-centric game successfully delivers on the ambitious themes it attempts to tackle? It’s hard to drum up the motivation any more. I don’t feel that same pride I once did when I saw my work in print — because I know that these days anything I write is just destined to be lost in the never-ending online “content” noise.

“Content” is king. People don’t “read” any more, they “consume”. And part of the difference between those two verbs is the amount of attention you pay. If you’re reading, you’re actively engaging; you’re learning something; you take something away from it. If you’re consuming, you’re just skimming over something for the sake of it without really taking it in. It’s just another way to fill time, to make existence feel a little less meaningless.

It’s not just writing that this affects, either. Look at the shift towards short-form video that has been happening for the past few years. This is the result of people demanding more and more mindless content and less in the way of things that actually enrich their lives in some way.

People’s attention spans are so shot from garbage like TikTok these days that stand-up comedians are now posting their jokes as individual 2-5 minute YouTube videos rather than expecting people to sit through a 90-minute set. And longer videos are regarded as “good background noise” rather than something you might want to pay attention to.

I detest it. It makes me sad, not just for the folks who have, in the past, worked hard on producing quality creative works for people to enjoy, but also for the idea of “culture” in general. I feel like if we’re living in a world where a significant portion of the population would rather watch some “influencer” bellowing at the camera on TikTok than engage with a thought-provoking work of art, that we’ve gone terribly, terribly wrong somewhere along the line.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps I’m missing something. Perhaps I’m old now, and I’m just having that same moment previous generations had when things like television and video games came along for the first time.

But as someone who has long believed in the validity of the video games medium as a legitimate form of art and a formidably flexible creative medium, I can’t help but feel like we’re going through a bit of a cultural dark age.

And, having spent so much time trying to resist that tide to seemingly little effect, I’m sure you won’t blame me for wanting to step back and just enjoy things for myself while, through my work, attempting to do good things for the medium in a somewhat different manner.

A little positivity: gradual improvements.

As I’ve alluded to a number of times recently, the COVID years have really done a number on my body and mind. The enforced isolation from the initial lockdowns caused me to be even more inactive than I had previously been, and my weight and general wellbeing declined considerably as a result. (Well, my weight inclined. My general bodily wellbeing declined. You know what I mean.)

Given that decline, it’s been very hard to 1) motivate myself to try and improve the situation and 2) actually improve the situation.

Andie and I have joined the local gym a couple of times in recent months/years, but we always ended up making excuses to not go, so I feel like that wasn’t right for me — not in my present state, anyway. I needed something that was just plain relaxing and enjoyable, but which would do me some degree of “good”, so I decided to start going for a walk a few evenings a week.

I’ve done this before and I’ve always found it quite pleasant; my hesitance to do it more often largely stems from the fact that we live on the top of a big hill and, as such, whichever direction you set off from, you always finish a walk having to climb quite a steep incline. Which, again, in my current state, is not particularly desirable. I know pushing yourself is good, but I don’t think you appreciate what a terrible state my muscles are in.

With this in mind, I looked around the local parks for some suitable walking routes. I’ve been for walks on the big Common here in Southampton a number of times previously, and that’s always very pleasant, but I fancied a bit of a change. So I decided to check out Riverside Park (not pictured in the header — that’s a stock image!), an area that seems to be quite fondly regarded by local residents (those who are inclined to leave Google reviews on patches of grass, anyway) and have found it to be a nice place to try and build myself up a bit again.

I’ve been kicking off with a basic “circuit” of part of the park that comes out to a little over a mile in length. Not much, I know, but again, I’m not in a great state, so I wanted and needed to start relatively gently. Already, after just three trips doing along this route, I’ve felt an improvement. Not a huge one — it’s very early days, of course — but an improvement nonetheless.

One thing I will note is that I’m very deliberately not quantifying or “gamifying” my walks. In fact, I’m making a specific effort to completely disconnect when I go for them. I leave my phone behind and carry nothing but my car key so it really is just me. No music, no podcasts, no distractions, no GPS tracking, no step counting — just me.

The reason for this is that I feel you can over-quantify the things you do. Yes, it can be motivational to have hard data and see how much you’re improving — but equally, it can be demoralising to learn what you thought was an impressive achievement actually wasn’t all that great. So I’ve ditched all that in favour of good old fashioned feelings. And, halfway through my walk this evening, I felt surprisingly good.

The reason for this was that I reached the “halfway point” (I say this in inverted commas because it’s not really halfway, it just feels like it) a lot more quickly and easily than I have done on my previous couple of trips around this route. In fact, it almost felt like the initial part of the route flashed by almost inconsequentially, whereas on the first day I tried, it was a struggle to get moving at all.

I still felt like I’d had a reasonably decent workout (by my standards; please remember I am very unfit and very heavy) by the end of my walk. Things started to get noticeably more difficult on the “return journey”, which I take on dirt paths rather than the paved outward bound route, but I made it back to my car without wanting to die, and with a sense of some satisfaction that I’d made some progress. A miniscule amount by the standards of someone who has a basic level of human fitness, sure, but a significant victory by my own standards.

I’m going to continue with this for a while and see how things go. Perhaps at some point I’ll feel up to adding an additional “lap” to the circuit for an easy means of going a little further and pushing myself a little harder. For now, I think I’ve found my pace — and while it might not look like much to a bystander, it’s definitely something to me.

I don’t blame anyone for being a misanthrope in this day and age.

I’ve had a horrible week. I’m not going to talk about the details of it for a variety of reasons, but I did want to talk about the way I’m feeling right now, and how it’s a sad symptom of quite a few things.

A few years back — make that more like a decade or so at this point, I guess — I was someone who very much wanted to believe in my fellow man. I wanted to assume the best intentions, I didn’t want to believe that people could be awful to one another more often than not, and I certainly didn’t like seeing entire groups thrown under the bus based on their affiliation towards (or against) something that had little to do with their actual personality.

To give some specific examples: back in the early 2010s, when games journalists were starting to have harsh words to say towards video game enthusiasts when they complained about Mass Effect 3’s disappointing ending, I had rather mixed feelings about the whole thing.

On the one hand, I understood why many folks found the way the trilogy wrapped up to be disappointing; on the other, I felt the only people who really had any say in how it concluded were the people who actually made it. And on the third mutant hand, I really wasn’t happy with the way games journalists and press outlets seemingly gleefully jumped at the opportunity to attack the very audience they were supposed to be serving.

This may sound like fence-sitting, and perhaps it is, but I felt that everyone had valid points, and all of them were worth hearing out. I honestly believed that people could discuss something like this in good faith and not resort to attacking one another. To return to my original point: I wanted to believe in my fellow man, and that we could all reach an understanding.

Fast forward a couple of years from that and we have the notorious “Gamergate” controversy. Again, I’m not ashamed to say I had mixed feelings about the whole situation. Without a doubt, there were people who were using the background of what had been happening as an excuse to harass people — but to my eyes, there was an equal if not greater number of people who had genuine, worthwhile things that they wanted to say, and they wanted to be heard.

To see the entire group who gathered under that particular banner tarnished with the same “harassing women and minorities” brush was… disappointing, particularly when I saw this attitude from people I knew personally. Again, I’ll reiterate: I wanted to see the best in my fellow man, and I honestly wanted to believe that the people who felt passionately enough about a particular issue to effectively become “activists” in an online sense were doing so for a good cause.

At the same time, I’ll also add that I never planted my own flag beneath the Gamergate banner, because I also saw that it was very much on to a losing battle in terms of public perception. Regardless of how many people did have legitimate complaints, and the few good things that did come out of the movement, that scarlet letter of “harassing women and minorities” was always going to be there for anyone even tangentially involved.

Unfortunately, most of you probably know how these situations ended up.

In more recent years, I’ve seen countless more incidents that have played out exactly like the Mass Effect 3 controversy and Gamergate, and with every incident, I feel like I’ve lost a bit of that faith in my fellow man — to such an extent that now, I have precisely none of it left.

I have no confidence that anyone attempting to make a seemingly “passionate” argument is doing so for the greater good or for altruistic reasons. Because very few people these days show their true faces online. Very few people actually stand up for what they believe in; instead, they just jump on whatever the trending topic of the hour is and proceed to harass anyone who is seen as being “in the wrong” for whatever reason.

And it is harassment. This is another thing that I didn’t want to believe while I still had some remaining faith in my fellow man.

I used to believe that people wouldn’t be so awful as to hound others over a single issue, to such an extent that it has a severe impact on their own feelings of safety and wellbeing. I used to believe that people would say their piece and then give their “opponent” the opportunity to make a move, to make things right, or to at the very least explain themselves.

After multiple instances over the course of the last decade where I’ve seen that this emphatically isn’t the case — both involving me and incidents that I’ve just observed from outside — my only possible conclusion is simple. I was wrong to have faith in my fellow man. I was wrong to ever believe that people can be “good” to one another. I was wrong to believe that we can ever resolve our differences like decent… well, like decent human beings.

The default state for people to interact with one another these days, both on and offline, is aggressive, hostile and confrontational. The other person is always in the wrong, and it always has to be a fight. And you know what? I’m really tired.

I don’t want to fight. Ever. I’m not one of those people who is “up for a good argument”, and I never have been. I used to cry more than my parents when they had perfectly normal married couple arguments when I was a kid. If someone’s rude to me, I end up thinking about it for the rest of the day (and sometimes longer) to such a degree that it ruins anything else I had to do. And, as someone who is already anxious about social interactions at the best of times, I never walk into a situation thinking “I’m going to start some shit”.

Apparently this is no longer a “normal” way to be, however. And thus I cannot help but just sit here and be disappointed in that fellow man I once believed so vehemently in. Is it really any wonder I have so much hesitance in meeting new people when my experiences would seem to indicate that there’s at least an 80% probability any new person I meet will end up being a complete arsehole that I’ll never be able to get rid of as they repeatedly harass me over some stupid shit like what brand of underpants I wear?

The one positive, I guess, is that this does at least make me appreciate the few good people I do still have in my life; the ones I know I can genuinely rely on, and who rather wisely have always managed to remain high above this stupid shit. So if you’re one of those people, and if you’re reading this it’s likely that you are, thanks. Please don’t change.

The Age of Loneliness.

I’m having one of those evenings where I’m feeling a tad maudlin for a variety of reasons, but essentially it all boils down to one central issue: the fact that today, we live in a world that is more “connected” than it has ever been, and yet also where it is highly likely that any one given individual will be suffering from a crippling sense of loneliness and isolation.

This has affected me to various degrees over the years. As someone on the spectrum and with social anxiety issues, there are most definitely times where I very much want to be by myself. I’d go so far as to say that I prefer the vast majority of my time to be spent by myself — or at least, in the company of others who are happy to get on with their own thing while I also get on with mine. (My relationship with my wife very much falls into that category.)

However, I’ve found that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started craving a certain level of… interaction. I don’t think I’m necessarily craving something more than what I used to enjoy — rather, I simply think that the opportunities I once had to just hang out with people that I liked are no longer present, both offline and online.

For me, probably my golden age of being “sociable” was between the ages of 16 and 22 or so — to put it another way, from sixth form onwards through university. There, I found I had a good balance between what one might call a relatively “normal” social life — in that I had both time to myself and time with friends.

Better times, probably. I’m the second one in from the left. I fancied the girl who is sitting on me.

In retrospect, this period was almost certainly the time of my life at which I was my happiest, even if it was also the time where I first started feeling somewhat conscious of my own mental health and that something wasn’t quite “right”. I felt I had people who liked me, who appreciated me for who I was, and who supported me when I needed it. I had people that I simply enjoyed spending time with, and that I wanted to know more about. I even fell in love once or twice, though I have to admit that none of those particular situations quite ended up the way I perhaps would have hoped.

But it didn’t matter, because everything else was just… pleasant. It was good to see people. It was good to talk to them, share private jokes and just enjoy their company. It was sometimes difficult for me to take that step forward into a friendship group rather than simply observing from the periphery — but on those occasions I summoned up the courage and mental fortitude to do so, I never regretted it. (Well, except perhaps once.)

These days, though? There are days where it feels like I have no-one. I know that’s not true — I’m fortunate enough to have a very supportive family and a wife who is inordinately patient with my numerous shortcomings as a human being, and there are friends I have where all it takes is a single message to get some sort of supportive acknowledgement back in response — but even so, there are days where it feels like that.

Days where I feel like people might just forget about my existence if I didn’t prod them on WhatsApp or Discord every now and then. Days where I miss the ability to speak to them via some means other than ad-infested social media, which has become increasingly terrible for simple conversation as the years have advanced. Days where I miss having the equivalent of bundling around a friend’s after lectures have finished, playing N64 games and drinking made-up cocktails until the small hours. And days where I miss people having conversations via means other that boring memes and GIFs. You know, with words and stuff.

I am exceedingly lonely, and what makes this feel all the more painful at times is that the numerous means I’ve tried to make myself “noticeable” in some way online all feel like they’ve failed in one way or another.

At least my cat likes me.

I’ve made a point of celebrating the things I love online in various ways — both written and through video — over the course of the last few years, in the hope that it might draw people with similar interests to me, or help the people I care about the most to understand me a bit better. But it often feels like hardly anyone gives a shit. In fact, it often feels like it’s the absolute hardest to get the people supposedly closest to me to give a shit.

I don’t blame anyone for this. Today’s world makes ridiculous demands on our time and attention span, and when push comes to shove, most folks will end up choosing some form of professionally created “content” over something that some dude they know decided to make.

But it is getting to a point where I’m feeling both exhausted and out of ideas. And, to make matters worse, as my mind and general enthusiasm for existence has declined, so too has my body. The COVID years in particular knocked me about a lot, leaving me today a disgusting fat lump of a man who is in near-constant mild but nonetheless annoying and frustrating pain, finds it difficult to do pretty much anything relatively normal and is increasingly hesitant about going outside because he’s so disgusted with the way he looks and feels all the time.

Change starts from within and all that. But when you’re feeling crippling loneliness, that desire to change and improve things for yourself — because without a doubt, improving things just for myself would be a benefit — is constantly held back by that big, hanging question: “what’s the point?”

So anyway! That’s what I’m feeling this Sunday evening! Hope you’re having a good one!

EDIT: Apparently I wrote a post with this exact same title in 2014. Good to know that things have improved.

My new TV show obsession is Inside No. 9.

After greatly enjoying The Cleaner — which, I’m pleased to say, I continued to really like after the first few episodes I wrote about in the post linked — I decided that I should really try and wean myself off mindless stupid YouTube videos and watch some more things with a bit of substance to them.

So I decided to take a look at Inside No. 9, which is a show I’d seen a number of people talking about, but knew absolutely nothing about. For some reason, I’d developed the assumption that it was something to do with politics (I think I’d made the unprompted mental leap from “No. 9” to “10 Downing Street” or something) and thus hadn’t really paid it much mind.

But then I saw this news story shared by someone I know. (Caution: The Mirror. Also spoilers.) If that was the kind of show we were actually dealing with… then I was absolutely, completely on board. I love this kind of gleefully experimental, darkly humorous stuff, and it seems like I’ve missed out on rather a lot of Inside No. 9 since it first aired in 2014.

I’m going to try not to talk too much about specifics of the show in this post, because it really is one of those series where the less you know what to expect going in, the more effective it is at what it does. So for now I’ll simply say that it is the work of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, two members of the League of Gentlemen, and it is some absolutely masterful television.

And I’ll leave that there for those who are sufficiently intrigued to check it out for themselves. It’s a BBC show, so you can watch it on iPlayer (or, presumably, BritBox in the States) and I think it has also had physical releases. Based on the three episodes I have watched so far, I have nothing but the highest praise for it, and highly recommend it.

For those who want to know a bit more and aren’t too concerned about mild spoilers (which I’m still going to try and keep to a minimum), I’m going to drop in a “read more” tag here, and you can join me after the jump to find out a little more if you see fit.

I finally nuked my Twitter account completely.

There are a few main reasons for this, and I’d like to talk about them a bit today.

Firstly, Elon Musk’s idiotic changes to the terms of the Twitter API, which has priced literally everyone out of being able to use it, have made the platform next to useless as a means of automatically sharing your work to an audience that supposedly signed up to follow your updates. It’s both hilarious and tragic to see company after company sharing news posts that effectively say “lol, fuck Twitter”.

Secondly, my previous justification of keeping my Twitter account around for the sake of friends and contacts just doesn’t really feel like it’s… justification any more. The friends in question rarely bother to get in contact, and there are other means for professional contacts to get in touch.

Thirdly, I’m just fucking sick of the most likely response you get to posting literally anything on there being vitriol and hate.

On the latter point, I recently posted an article about my negative experiences trying Ubisoft’s Riders Republic via PlayStation Plus. The gist of the article, if you’re one of those Internet denizens whose attention span has been shot too much to bother clicking on a link, was that the game was designed in such a way that it is genuinely insulting to the intelligence of anyone over the age of about 12. It doesn’t let you just play; instead, you’re bombarded with hours of mandatory tutorials and obnoxious zoomer slang, and this was enough to make me not even want to bother seeing if the game “got good” later.

I think this is something worth talking about, because it’s the first time that I, as a 42 year old video game enthusiast who has been involved in the medium since the Atari days, felt completely alienated by a brand new, supposedly mainstream game. So I talked about it. Then I shared that article on Twitter.

One of the first responses I got was from someone who yelled at me, based entirely on the assumption that I’d said the exact opposite to what I’d actually written in the article. He’d obviously read the headline, made an assumption and then decided to shoot his dribbling, zit-encrusted mouth off at me, despite it taking nothing more than a single click and a minute or two of reading for anyone to see that he was talking complete horseshit. But you can bet anyone who “liked” his dumbshit comment wouldn’t go and check whether or not he was right.

I spent a few hours last night and this morning feeling stressed and anxious about this. But then it just sort of dawned on me: fuck it. Why the fuck should I care what some obnoxious cunt on the Internet thinks? Why the fuck should I let one idiot have such power over my mental wellbeing, based entirely on the fact he’s too much of a lazy shit to actually read something I wrote?

And the answer to that is that I shouldn’t care; I shouldn’t let one idiot do that. And since Twitter is the primary means of allowing idiots to do that, it needs to go. Completely. So it has.

On a related note, this news isn’t finalised or official as yet, but it’s pretty much confirmed that as of the beginning of July, I will be getting out of the professional “content creation” (ugh) game completely.

I won’t go into details for now because things are still being hammered out, but suffice to say for now that it’s nothing anyone needs to worry about — I’m simply changing my professional role in such a way that it means I can focus my attention entirely on the Evercade project, which I’m incredibly passionate about and is something where I feel genuinely valued by both my colleagues and by my “audience”, such as they are.

I’m both happy and sad about this. I’m happy because it means that I can focus my professional life on something that I love, and because it means my free time will genuinely, completely be my own again. No more will I find myself “having” to play something for the sake of timely coverage; instead, I can just enjoy things at my own pace, and I’m really looking forward to that.

I’m sad, however, because I spent so much of my early life desperately wanting to follow in my brother’s footsteps and be part of the games press — and yet by the time I actually managed to get there, it had changed irreversibly from what it used to be. And it only got worse from there.

Again, I won’t go into details for now, as that’s something to talk about in more detail once everything here has been finalised. But I’ll say again, it’s nothing to worry about — I’m proud of what I’ve worked on to date, will continue to work on things like this until the beginning of July, and this change is my decision rather than anyone else’s.

I’m just tired. So very tired of “content creation” being such a completely thankless task. The modern Internet has set up a completely adversarial relationship between writers and their audiences, exemplified by the Twitter exchange I described above, and that is emphatically not why I got into this.

I got into writing about games because I love them. I got into games writing because I think they’re culturally important. I got into games writing because I think despite that cultural importance, they’re not being written about and analysed in anywhere near the depth they deserve.

And I got into games writing because while the big, dumb, obnoxious games like the aforementioned Riders Republic get to ride the wave of commercial success regardless of how shit they are, there are myriad games released literally every day that run the risk of languishing in obscurity without people telling others about them.

The trouble is, I’ve discovered over the last decade and a half or so, is that no-one really seems to actually care. Online, “content” is piss in the wind. It’s only relevant for the day it’s posted — if you’re lucky enough to get anyone to notice it in the first place — and it’s fucking impossible to get people to give a shit about something after the fact, unless, as I’ve seen on MoeGamer, you’re literally the only person to have written something meaningful on a particular topic. (In my case, sex sim Honey Select Unlimited.)

Google is flooded by manipulative, exploitative, SEO-optimised sites posting vacuous individual “guide” articles for things they don’t care about for no other reason than it brings in the clicks. And no-one at any point in the process gives a shit; the average Internet user doesn’t have enough in the way of critical thinking skills to see the cynical way all this has been set up, and the writers at the sites themselves don’t give a toss as long as the numbers go up.

All of this is the fault of everyone who has normalised the idea of “consuming content” rather than “reading interesting articles” and the like. You, collectively, have ruined both the games press specifically, and the broader Internet in general.

It’s demoralising and infuriating, and if you’ve been around all this for as long as I have, seeing the way things have been going, it should be no surprise that I very much feel like stepping down from it all.

And so that’s what I’m doing. From hereon, my professional work will be in something that actually matters, that I care about — and that other people actually care about, too. I suspect I’ll be a lot happier as a result, but I can’t help but feel a bit bad about that dream young me once had, and how it was never really possible.