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 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.

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.

I’m completely burnt out with the intellectually, creatively and morally bankrupt world of clickbait.

Today’s post is inspired by a few things. Firstly, the culture of mistrust I wrote about the other day. Secondly, a YouTuber that my wife Andie and I used to like resorting to “I MADE THE MOST VIRAL TIKTOK RECIPES!” format. (Andie doesn’t have a problem with this. I emphatically do, as will become clear shortly.) And thirdly, some of the outright lies I’ve read online today while attempting to find a perfectly simple piece of information.

Let’s address these one at a time, as each of them are symptomatic of something slightly different.

I Played 100 Days of Viral TikTok Recipes

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As someone who does YouTube as a hobby, it’s infuriating to see the supposed “professionals” fall into a rut of simply baiting The Algorithm with the exact same types of “content” all day, every day.

I Played 100 Days of [Game]. I Made Viral TikTok Recipes. This is the Worst [x] Ever. Thrifting with My Completely Charisma-Free Mom.

There’s stuff on YouTube that I like and continue to watch. But this is the stuff that tends to languish in the wake of TOP CRINGE COMPILATIONS!! and FUNNIEST TIKTOKS I COULD FIND!! And this pisses me off. Because it demonstrates a complete and utter lack of creativity.

Yes, one could argue that there’s at least some creativity at play in editing these videos and picking the material to use in them — but even then, they’re incredibly predictable, regardless of who they are. You can expect to hear the Metal Gear alert noise, Kevin MacLeod’s Local Forecast, that “anime oooooh” noise in a significant proportion of popular videos out there, and you’ll see all the same visual tricks, too — jump cuts, crash zooms with a red tint on the screen and heavy screen shake, “A Few Moments Later” SpongeBob memes.

It’s infuriating. Like, it makes me genuinely angry. I know it shouldn’t. I know it’s dumb to get angry at people following trends. But it really does make me legitimately furious.

Why? Because I know there are lots of people working their arses off to make quality YouTube videos (note: not “content”) and getting very little reward, relatively speaking for doing so. Instead, the endless assembly line of identikit Content continues to churn, cluttering up everyone’s YouTube feeds with worthless garbage that provides precisely 0% more cultural enrichment value than simply staring at the wall for 12 minutes.

It particularly sucks to see video makers I used to like resort to this sort of thing — but I guess if you’re making a job out of it, it becomes an unfortunate necessity after a while. For every viewer like me who unsubscribes from a channel once it becomes a clickbait factory, it seems at least a hundred more take my place. So there’s zero incentive to change.

The PS5 Pro’s release date has NOT been “revealed”

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Earlier today, Andie and I were talking about how long various consoles were on the market, and as part of this discussion we looked up the release dates of the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, pondering if and when a PS6 might ever be a thing — and if it would have a disc drive, which was the main point of our conversation.

When Googling the latter case, I was promptly confronted by a wall of articles that claimed the PS5 Pro’s release date had been “revealed”.

Needless to say, it had not been revealed. Instead, what had happened was a single gaming site that no-one had ever heard of had claimed that “insider sources” (anonymous, of course) had “confirmed” the PS5 Pro was “in development” and would “probably” release in “late 2024”. This had then been parroted pretty much verbatim (albeit with some variation in the supposedly “revealed” release date) by a variety of other gaming sites you’ve never heard of, and this had happened so much that Google had figured it was worth showing to anyone who was searching for a simple piece of information: the actual, real PS5’s release date. You know, the one where a product that actually exists was actually released.

Essentially, what we ended up with was a page of search results that were nothing but speculation at best, outright lies at worst. And there will be no consequences whatsoever for any of the sites that were engaging in this behaviour; in fact, they will almost certainly have been rewarded with happy big traffic numbers, and you can bet those pages have ads coming out the wazoo on them, too.

As someone who, as a child, had aspirations of joining the games press, and hoped he would be able to do that more than pretty much anything in the world, this is heartbreaking to see. And it’s doubly frustrating when I run a site on which our writers take pride in composing honest, thoughtful, well-researched pieces rather than simply rushing to jump on the latest trend in order to squeeze out another few cents of ad revenue.

How to find all the blue medallions in Resident Evil 4 Remake

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Speaking of which, one trend which was just starting to take hold when I left USgamer in 2014 was the odious rise of “guide content”. For the unfamiliar, this is an SEO-baiting tactic in which sites post individual articles that supposedly answer each and every possible question people on Google might have about anything vaguely relevant and popular.

It’s a completely unsustainable approach to “content generation”, particularly if you have any standards about the quality of the articles on your site whatsoever, and it means that, again, if you’re searching for specific pieces of information, you have to wade through 500 sites that have clickbaited their way to the top of Google’s search results, with no guarantee that their information is reliable or helpful.

I’ll give you an example. Prior to picking up my PS5, I was curious how the “PS4 Boost” mode worked. This is where the PS5 is able to run certain appropriately updated PS4 games with better performance than the original PS4 (and in some cases, PS4 Pro) would have been capable of.

The things I were curious about were simple: did this work with all PS4 games, or just select ones, and did I have to do anything to make it work?

The answers to these questions, by the way, are “no” and “no”.

While attempting to uncover these simple answers, I stumbled across a full-blown, surprisingly lengthy article entitled “How to Enable PS5 Game Boost”. Please recall that the answer to the question “do you have to do anything to make Boost mode work?” is “no”, and then marvel at the fact that multiple sites, not just the one I found, managed to spin this simple answer out into at least 600 words of complete garbage, because you need at least 600 words for SEO purposes, don’t you know.

I’m so tired of this. To the layman, it might seem like it’s very convenient. But as someone who has worked in the commercial press and now works on the more “indie” side of things, it’s infuriating, because I know these articles do not exist out of a desire to be helpful. As with all other clickbait — because that’s what these articles are — the aim is simple: gain traffic, and, by extension, ad revenue.

I’m so tired. So tired. The Internet was an exciting place when I was a kid and everyone was just getting to know it. Now, it’s nothing more than a mindless, soulless content factory where everyone is bidding for your attention so they can inject yet more ads directly into your eyeballs.

There are little havens where this isn’t the case, of course. But they become more and more difficult to find with each passing day. And it honestly worries me quite a bit.

But at this point, it’s also hard to know what to do, if anything. If I criticise this sort of thing, no-one listens. (I’m writing this today largely to vent my own spleen rather than to convince anyone else.) If I give up and engage in it myself just to join the rat race, I’m part of the problem. And if I abandon the Internet entirely, I deprive myself of something that is still, in some ways, a useful resource — and in some other ways, an essential utility for modern life.

So I guess I’ll keep doing what I always do. Do my own thing, occasionally complain about how much everything else sucks, then repeat until my inevitable death from a brain aneurysm.

Today’s culture of perpetual mistrust is exhausting.

The other day, I received an SMS text message. This in itself was fairly unusual, as the only texts I tend to get these days are automated confirmations of deliveries and suchlike, but there was another layer of unusual to it.

“Hi mum,” the text said. “My phone’s not working, so please contact me on WhatsApp at [number] xxx”.

Initially, I thought this might be an honest-to-goodness wrong number, which is a phenomenon that used to be widespread, but today, where we tend to do everything via pre-populated contact lists, doesn’t tend to happen much. Something about it made me feel a bit suspicious, though, so I decided to Google the text of the message.

Sure enough, it was a scam. I was both disappointed and unsurprised to discover this, but it got me thinking: I used to be someone who really, honestly wanted to believe the best about my fellow man, but these days, it feels nigh-impossible to trust almost anything you see.

That “wrong number” is actually a scammer trying to get you to send them money, or to steal your personal information. That heartwarming post you saw on social media is actually a viral marketing campaign. That “look at me I’m so empowered” sex worker doing hot tub streams on Twitch is actually being forced into exploitation by darker forces working behind the scenes rather than because she wants to.

It’s exhausting to think that, more often than not, these days what you see is most definitely not what you get. The world feels like a darker place that is full of mistrust, and aside from the necessity for constant vigilance being very tiring, it also makes it difficult for those of us who do want to go about our business in a genuinely honest sort of way.

You see it everywhere. Creative types being forced to churn out “content” with clickbait titles just to get eyes on their work. Workplaces and brands jumping on silly trends like TikTok for no discernible reason other than “it’s popular, so we should be seen to be doing it”. The growth in various forms of AI-generated text, images and sounds making misinformation and lies easier to spread than ever before.

On top of all that, the services we’ve come to increasingly rely on over the years actively make themselves worse over time, and we just sit back and take it. For example, it used to be that I could click “Publish” on this post and it would automatically share it to my friends on Facebook and Twitter, but that’s not possible any more because of supposed “improvements” that both of those services have made.

This happens outside the online sphere, too. My last car I bought was worse than my previous one in terms of the features it had, but cost more. This despite me telling the car salesman to their face that I wanted to spend “about the same” on the new vehicle and have the same features.

And no-one seems particularly bothered by all this. I mean, sure, people comment on it occasionally, but no-one actually does anything about it. They keep posting their wacky MidJourney images, increasingly believing that “they” created the image through stringing words together. Scam text messages are a way of life, with people just shrugging at them rather than attempting to report them.

And those supposed to be “in charge” don’t do anything anyway, so why bother? There’s a house down the road from us whose front garden is constantly filled with obviously stolen motorcycles, which local kids can frequently be seen riding around making a nuisance of themselves on, without wearing any sort of safety gear or having any concern for the people around them.

It increasingly feels like we are a people blighted by absolute apathy and laziness, and despite countless warnings from dystopian popular media and the arts over the years, no-one really cares. So long as you have your content to consume and your vacuous “approval” of your fake life on social media from other fake people living fake existences, nothing seems to matter to anyone.

I’m really fed up of it. And it doesn’t feel like there’s a way to escape from it all. Because this isn’t just “an Internet thing” any more. It’s a “this is the world we live in now” thing.

It’s becoming increasingly important to remember that the Internet — and social media in particular — presents a grossly distorted vision of how things actually are.

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People love to complain. This is a trait traditionally and historically associated with the British, but it’s most definitely not an exclusively British thing. Perhaps it once was, but it most certainly isn’t any more. And as with so many things, we can probably blame the way in which the Internet has brought people together — something which should, inherently, be a good thing, but which has somehow become corrupted along the way.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, I’m not spending a ton of time on Twitter any more due to a combination of the horrible atmosphere that seeps from every pore of that website and the constant ridiculous changes Elon Musk keeps making on a seemingly daily basis. But occasionally, I can’t help myself from clicking on one of the Trends out of sheer curiosity.

The other day, I happened to see that Evri was trending. Evri, if you’re unfamiliar, is the new name that the courier company formerly known as Hermes decided to adopt for themselves a while back. I don’t know the reasons for the rebrand and honestly I really don’t care, because they’re inevitably absolute bullshit and everyone knows that Evri is “really” Hermes anyway, so it’s largely irrelevant.

However, what I found when looking at the Evri trend was that everyone was complaining about Evri. Everyone had the same stories to tell of parcels being lobbed over their fence, of packages arriving broken or tampered with, or generally some tale of misfortune and woe related to getting their package delivered from this one specific carrier.

Here’s the thing: I’ve never had a problem with Evri or Hermes. I spent a brief period working for them while I was looking for a proper job and I know what it’s like “from the inside” also. While it was a time-consuming, underpaid and largely thankless task for the couriers, it was a reasonably well-run operation in general, and there were various ways in which said couriers were encouraged to do a good job, up to and including being “watched” through the scanny things they’re supposed to carry around with them.

As fortune would have it, for some reason during my brief time with the company I never actually got a scanny thing, so I never had to worry about such things — not that I had anything to particularly worry about anyway. But I digress.

I’m not saying no-one has ever had a problem with Evri or Hermes. But if you were to look at that trend on Twitter, the conclusion it would be easy to come to would be that they were a company that should be absolutely, completely and without doubt avoided at all cost, because literally every delivery they do is the absolute worst possible thing that has ever happened to someone, and they have ruined too many Christmases and children’s birthdays to count.

This is nonsense. While it’s foolish to assume that they’re completely without fault — in any sort of “gig economy” sort of situation, you have a risk of bad apples, but this is also true for more formally structured corporations — it’s also ridiculous to put across the impression that they’re a complete failure that should never be trusted.

It’s just one of many examples of the Internet painting the worst possible picture of something. And I could provide plenty of other examples at this point, but I’ll refrain from doing so for the sake of time.

What I will urge you to do, however, is that if you see any sort of seemingly universally negative reaction towards something — particularly on any sort of standards-free platform such as social media or user reviews — then be cautious. Chances are the thing that is being ranted and raved about is nowhere near as bad as people are trying to put across — because let’s face it, people are a whole lot more likely to complain about something than post about how they had no problems whatsoever with a company or service.

Perhaps we should change our outlook on such things. Perhaps we should start posting positive comments when a company does the right thing and does what is expected of them. Or perhaps that’s ridiculous — after all, a service that is being provided to you conforming to your exact expectations should not be particularly worthy of comment at all, because, well, it’s what you expected.

But then that means the negativity will always win, because the complainers will always speak up, while the satisfied customers will just quietly get on with their day, thinking nothing more of the company they’ve interacted with or the service they’ve received.

Perhaps the answer is just not to listen to anyone and make your own mind up.

I thought your teenage years were the time to not conform, but as I get older, non-conformity becomes more appealing.

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As the stereotype of growing up goes, when you’re a teenager you’re supposed to decide that you want to “rebel” and be something other than the person that your parents took great effort attempting to craft you into.

For me, I don’t think that really happened. I mean, sure, I had plenty of the obligatory stroppy teenager moments, when I’d get angry with my parents for what I saw as irrational or unfair decisions, but I never really stepped into the realms of what I’d describe as “counterculture” in any way other than that which I already was: a computer nerd.

And, in our household, that wasn’t really counterculture or rebellion at all; our whole family were interested in computers and video games, since they’d been part of our culture at home since before I was born. Not only that, but my father and my brother regularly contributed to the Atari magazine Page 6 (later New Atari User) — and as I moved into my teenage years, I started to contribute a bit also.

But I digress. Nostalgia for times gone by isn’t the point of what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about how homogeneous “Internet culture” has made people today — and how, at the age of forty-one years old, I crave nothing more than rebellion against that homogeneous culture, and feel nothing but frustration at the hordes of people all acting and talking the exact same way.

I’m sure this has always happened in some form or another, but the global nature of the Internet makes it feel like people are losing their own unique (often local) identities. Now, wherever you go, it feels like everyone describes things in the same way, and uses the same often nonsensical turns of phrase.

Every opinion is someone “lowkey thinking” something, even though that doesn’t really make any sense.

Every misunderstanding is confronted with “Tell me you haven’t [done thing] without telling me you haven’t [done thing].”

Every vaguely energetic YouTube video is accompanied by people going “me on the way to school [doing something urgent].”

I feel constant embarrassment at the prospect of linguists of the future looking back at this age and seeing people unironically using the word “pog” at every opportunity.

And there are myriad more, which I’m sure you can think of yourself if you’re in a similar position to me.

I can understand why everyone wants to “conform”. It’s the thing of not wanting to be the outlier, and of wanting to be understood by everyone. But it’s boring. If everyone talks about things the same way online — and often has the same opinions, spoon-fed to them by their favourite YouTuber, as often happens — then speaking to one person is much like speaking to any other. You might as well not bother.

Which is why I find myself making a point of very deliberately making use of outdated, very local British slang whenever possible. Yes, it’s contrarian, yes, it’s childish and stupid, but it’s my own little way of feeling like I’m actually my own person rather than being subsumed by the festering, slimy monster that is “Internet culture”. Even though I completely recognise that what I’m doing is essentially the exact same thing, only using ’90s games magazines as my model.

I think also part of it stems from my Asperger’s. Since my diagnosis a few years back, and understanding what that means for my mental health, I feel like I’ve become much more conscious of the things that sort of “set me off”, as it were. And one of those things happens to be predictable, formulaic, repetitive structures, particularly in speech and written communication.

YouTube videos that are always the same drive me bonkers. RuPaul’s Drag Race drives me insane for the same reason. And, as I’ve described, people who all communicate in the exact same way frustrate me also.

I guess in some ways we should perhaps celebrate the way in which people have found how to be near-universally understood online, but I can’t help just finding it a bit dull and annoying. I’ll keep describing bad things as “bobbins”, thank you very much, and replacing the phrase “okay, I understand” with “bonza, Toadie”. And there’s nothing you can do about it!

My Twitter replacement

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Those who have been following the saga of social media for a while will know that Twitter is a right old mess right now. Between Elon Musk’s incredible ego and a series of bizarre policy changes and introductions (most of which are likely related to Musk’s ego in some form or another) it’s certainly been interesting to watch the world’s most popular social media platform (for how much longer?) go through some trials and tribulations.

But those of you who have been following me for a while will know that Twitter hasn’t been much fun for a long time now. When I first joined (which must have been around 2007 or so, maybe?) it was a great place to make new friends, enjoy good conversation and just generally have a good time. But as the years have gone on — and particularly since the significant online upheavals that can be at least partly attributed to the “Gamergate” mess of 2014 — it’s become a less and less desirable hangout, for a variety of reasons.

Chief among them for me is the combative, confrontational tone the site as a whole has taken on. While it is still possible to have civil conversations there, it feels like it’s much more likely that if you post an opinion of your own someone will come along and shout it down before long. Even if your opinion is not, in the grand scheme of things, particularly important or worth getting upset over.

Anger seems to be the default state for many posters on Twitter, and this is often expressed through some seriously unpleasant behaviour. Anyone who is into Japanese games, for example, will doubtless have seen the disgusting vitriol that gets thrown the way of localisation staff (more specifically, female localisation staff) on a fairly regular basis, regardless of whether or not any “mistakes” have been made. And the same is true in all fields; the quote-tweet dunk is a universal constant, and it does not make for a friendly environment where one wants to hang out.

But alongside all this, Twitter itself has been changing in functional, mechanical terms. The rise of “The Algorithm” on all manner of social sites — with the most notorious being YouTube, of course — has meant that no longer can you count on your social media experience being your own, if indeed it ever was. Rather than showing you the things that your friends have been posting in the order that they were posted, you now get shit you didn’t sign up for pushed into your feed as “recommendations”, based on the ill-defined assumptions that Twitter makes about “quality content”.

I never signed up to Twitter for “quality content”. I signed up to chat with folks from a forum we all used to frequent that we weren’t able to use any more due to the site’s closure. That’s all I really wanted. And that’s emphatically not what the site provides these days.

So between the change in atmosphere, the change in the way the whole site works and the whole Musk fiasco, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s simply not worth wasting time pissing around on Twitter any more — if indeed it ever was. Rather, I think it’s high time that I brought this blog back, since it’s a much better means for me to express myself — plus the comments section is a much nicer way to hold a conversation in most cases. (Unless those people find their way here, but you know how it is.)

So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll be keeping my Twitter account open because it’s still useful for things like news aggregation and PR contacts, but pretty much all I’ll be posting on there is links to stuff I’ve done, either for work or for pleasure. When I want to actually talk about something, I’ll do it here, like in the good old days.

I’m not making any grand promises about posting frequency or anything like that, this is just going to be an “as and when I feel like it” sort of thing. I’m also not going to commit to doing silly comics or anything, even though I know one particular reader (whom I hope is doing well, given that I haven’t heard from her for a while) is a big fan! This is my scratch pad, my brain dump and my place to express myself. No “algorithm” rules the roost here, and as such it’s a much better means of getting to know me than the toxic bird site.

So see you around here, I hope!

2531: Planning to Unplug

After some discussion with my friend Chris recently — partly inspired by my recent post on mobile phone apathy — I’ve made the not particularly difficult decision to try and “unplug” as much as possible from the general noise of the Internet in 2017.

And I’m talking about more than just stepping away from Twitter and Facebook like I have done a few times in the past, as positive as those experiences turned out to be for me. I’m talking about a pretty thorough purge, and a return to a simpler, quieter life with fewer external stressors.

You see, the allure of the Internet and its ability to connect people from all over the world has kind of worn off somewhat for me. The last few years have demonstrated that there are a significant number of people out there who are more interested in conflict, oneupmanship and narcissism than actual meaningful interaction. The fall from grace of the games press — and many game journalists’ pretty much unveiled hatred of their audiences — is just one of many examples of this, but the overall negativity that infuses what feels like the vast majority of online communications these days is just proving to be more trouble than it’s worth.

I don’t need that. It’s not adding anything to my life — nothing good, anyway — so, I figure, why continue to put up with it? There’s no need to.

As such, starting on New Year’s Day, I’m going to begin a process of unplugging as much as I possibly can. Twitter and Facebook are both going completely, since the annoyance both of those bring to my life far outweighs the benefits of both of them. More significantly, I’m planning on ditching the smartphone age in favour of an older, simpler phone that doesn’t bug me every five minutes with updates and notifications. At this point, I’m strongly considering picking up a second-hand N-Gage I’ve seen on Amazon, since that has the added benefit of being an underappreciated and increasingly rare gaming platform as well as a phone I very much enjoyed using when I originally had one.

I’m also going to draw my time with this blog to a close. I’m satisfied with what I’ve achieved here since I started, but the time has come to move on. I’m not going to give up regular writing, mind you; I’m still going to post weekly articles over on MoeGamer, since those have a clear focus, and I’m also intending to start a weekly TinyLetter as a more private, more personal substitute for my daily updates here. I’ll post details on how to sign up for that towards the end of the year, so those of you who want to continue to follow what I’m up to can do so.

I’ll be keeping more personal means of communication open. My email address and Google Hangouts accounts will still be active, as will my gaming accounts on Steam, Xbox Live and PSN. But the shouting into the void that is public social media will, hopefully, become a thing of the past. It’s no longer enjoyable, useful or fun, so I have no need for it.

I’m not going to put my personal email, Google Hangouts and gaming account addresses in this post for obvious reasons, but if you are interested in staying in touch via any of these means, please feel free to drop me a line via my Contact page explaining who you are and how you know me. If we’ve chatted before in the past, great, no problem; if we’ve never spoken before, however, please do include a bit about yourself in your message.

That’s the plan, then. And I anticipate that it will lead to a happier, more peaceful and less stressful 2017 for me. At least I hope it does, anyway!

2500: Traditional 500-Post Pondering

So, post 2,500. I was going to try and write something meaningful, but then I worked a 12-hour shift (voluntarily) and now I’m knackered and my feet are killing me, so my heart’s not quite in it. Still, onward we go.

Occasionally in recent months I’ve found myself wondering if I should keep this blog going, and/or if so, how long for. Why am I still doing it, who is it for and am I getting anything out of the experience?

On the whole, I think that yes, I do find it to be a valuable and helpful experience on the whole. It’s a means for me to express myself to people who know me in a way that I might not find particularly easy or practical to do so in person. It’s a means for me to talk about the things I love without having to worry about boring people in the same room as me — if you’re not interested in something I talk about for a post or two, simply don’t read it. And, of course, it’s a means to continue practicing the craft of writing, not that there’s a “right” way to do it. (Except for those people who insist on writing all their posts in lower-case letters. Those people are wrong.)

There are things on here that I’m glad I’ve talked about, and things I wish I’d never brought up. There are good times and bad times; there are things I’m happy about and things that make me infuriated.

More than anything, though, this blog is me. It’s a record of, frankly, what has ended up being a rather turbulent period in my life, and it’s been something I can focus on each day even if everything else around me might have been shit. It’s been a great outlet and a good means of broaching difficult topics as well as a place where I can happily vent my feelings, good and bad, on a daily basis.

So yes, I’m carrying on. Until when, I can’t say. But 2,500 daily posts in, it kind of seems like a shame to stop now, huh?