She had loved that cat. Adored her. At times I’d even joked that she loved her more than me. I knew that wasn’t the case, of course, but it seemed like the feeling between her and the cat was mutual.
I didn’t mind for the most part, of course. I loved the cat, too, and I always appreciated any time she came and sat in the chair in my office while I was working. I knew that her priority was sitting somewhere comfortable and warm rather than necessarily enjoying my company, but it was nice to feel like she wanted to be in the same room as me now and again.
Now her real master was gone, though, and she was left with just me, forever second-best. I could see the sadness in her eyes. I could see it in the dejected-looking way that she sat on her cat tree. I could see it in the way that she just didn’t seem to have the energy she once did.
The cat’s obvious sadness made me feel miserable, too. It was an uncomfortable reminder of past times of joy, never to be repeated. Once we had been a family of sorts, always together, always sharing in the wonders of life. Now we were just a man and his cat.
And yet, at some point, I don’t know when… we bonded more than we ever had done. Our shared grief brought us together. Just as I recognised how the cat was suffering from her absence, so too did the cat recognise that it had hit me hard, too. And slowly, little by little, completely wordlessly, our relationship began to change.
I remember the first night it happened. I was lying in the bed which now felt entirely too large for me, tossing and turning, struggling to get to sleep. Suddenly, I felt something; a weight on the bed. And I heard something: a soft purring. In the dark, I could just make out the shape of the cat. She had come to see me in the night; she never used to do this, usually preferring to sleep in her comfy cat bed downstairs in the living room.
But now she was here, purring softly in my ear. She headbutted my outstretched hand until I began to pet her, and she rubbed her face on my hand as I tickled her cheeks and chin.
Then, she sat down. It was a decisive move, a declaration. She managed to mould herself so that she fit perfectly into the curve of my arm that was extended across the empty half of the bed, and quickly curled up, ready to fall asleep. Her soft fur felt good against my arm, and I felt a sense of relaxation wash over me — a feeling that I hadn’t really been able to enjoy for some time now.
From thereon, I had that feeling every night. Things were going to be all right, in their own strange way.
She loved me, too. This cat loved me. Perhaps it had taken our shared loss for her to really feel like she could show it, but I was left in no doubt whatsoever.
Neither of us wanted to be alone. And now, neither of us would be alone.
Please do not worry about me, everything is fine and this is not an autobiographical blog post! The above is a piece of creative writing following the prompt “A human and a cat who come to some sort of mutual understanding.”
I’m aware I’ve posted a fair amount of negative complaining of late, and while I don’t apologise for that — a lot of these things really need to be said, and by more people than just me — I don’t just want to be whingeing all the time. So today I thought I’d write about something I like.
The Cleaner is a new-ish TV series written by and starring comedian Greg Davies, who is probably best known these days as the titular Taskmaster in the excellent “famous people make fools of themselves” programme of the same name. Davies has starred in a number of comedy-drama titles in recent years, however, and I’ve always liked seeing him do his thing.
I believe my first encounter with him was as Mr Gilbert from The Inbetweeners, where I very much enjoyed how much his character resembled my own head of Sixth Form, Mr Watts, in terms of overall attitude and general disdain for anyone under the age of 18. More recently, I enjoyed his semi-autobiographical series Man Down very much — though I know opinions are somewhat divided on that one, particularly with regard to Rik Mayall’s role — and I believe that The Cleaner is his strongest series to date.
The show is apparently an adaptation of a German show known as Der Tatortreiniger, or simply Crime Scene Cleaner, but it’s clear from the script that Davies has very much taken the concept and made it his own along the way. It features recognisable elements of both the whimsical, occasionally cynical humour and pathos that Davies excels at, and holds together as an extremely well-produced show.
In The Cleaner, Davies takes the role of Wicky, a crime scene cleaner who has to deal with the aftermath of various horrible things happening. Each episode primarily unfolds as a “two-hander” between Davies and someone who was affected by the crime in question; the context is that Davies has shown up to clean up the mess left behind by the crime after the police have finished their investigation, and there is inevitably someone hanging around or left behind, with varying degrees of relation to the incident.
My favourite thing about the show so far, after seeing four episodes of it, is that each individual story has its own vibe to it, with Wicky remaining the one constant.
It’s clear that Wicky is a man who enjoys his job — in the fourth episode, he reveals that it is because it allows him to get a taste of how other people live, if only for a moment, and to set things right for those who had to depart before their time — and is, at his core, quite an intelligent man.
At the same time, there’s a certain degree of “salt of the earth” to him; he quite openly admits that “my job lets me buy everything I need and still have enough to get hungover every weekend”, and there are often very minor threads running in the background of each episode about his love for curry night at the pub, his friends being sick in his shoes and suchlike.
It’s his interactions with the various characters where the show really shines, though, and the way in which all of these characters are very different from one another.
In the first episode, for example, Wicky is cleaning up after a wife murdered her husband in an extremely messy manner. Partway through the cleaning process, he is confronted with the wife in question (played by Helena Bonham Carter, who is still, it has to be said, exceedingly beautiful even when dressed down and covered in blood) and this leads to an extremely strained scenario in which he is very much aware that he is dealing with a murderer, but also finds himself forming something of a bond with her in the process.
In the second, meanwhile, David Mitchell does a wonderful job of portraying a tortured author whose grandmother has just been killed in a gas fire accident. Mitchell is almost certainly drawing on some of his own experience — or at least, that of the persona he perpetually puts across in public — to portray this writer as emotionally repressed to such a degree that he cried more over his cat running away than the gory, doubtless extremely painful death of his grandmother.
In the third, Wicky never gets to visit the crime scene at all, instead finding himself having to contend with the victim’s neighbour (Ruth Madeley) while waiting for someone to actually let him in to the crime scene. With his “partner” in this episode being both vegan and disabled, Wicky finds himself constantly putting his foot in his mouth to an exceedingly cringeworthy degree — but again, he forms a bond of note with this young woman.
And in the fourth, Wicky is called to a stately home in which an elderly woman (Stephanie Cole) interrupted a burglary attempt, which resulted in the death of the burglar by him falling down the stairs and breaking his neck. Cole’s character gradually reveals herself to have many layers of unpleasantness to her, but Wicky is faced with a variety of dilemmas to contend with along the way as, again, he forms a temporary but surprisingly strong bond with her.
One of the things I’ve noticed about the show in general is how Wicky always “leaves something behind” as a result of his visits; he always makes a mark on that person’s life in some form or another.
Sometimes, this is a positive thing, such as in the third episode, where he helps Madeley’s character come to terms with how she is still in love with the man she abandoned for not respecting her veganism. At others, however, it is very much not a good thing, such as where he accidentally drops a signed Dylan Thomas book belonging to Mitchell’s character into his bucket of water, thereby completely destroying the signature and personal message inside the front matter.
After four episodes, I’m very much convinced that this is an excellent show, and I’m a little disappointed I didn’t come across it sooner! But this is to be expected, as I tend not to follow what’s on TV right now these days; I only stumbled across this as the result of a short clip the BBC posted on YouTube the other day, featuring a snippet from Mitchell’s episode.
For everything I hate about short-form “content” and clip culture, and how it has collectively destroyed the attention spans of almost everyone, I have to at least be grateful for it in this instance, otherwise I might never have come across this genuinely excellent show!
You can watch The Cleaner on BBC iPlayer at the time of writing.
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.
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”
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
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.
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.
This is the stock image I got for searching “fart”, so this is what you get. Photo by Julissa Helmuth on Pexels.com
It really wasn’t a subtle one, either. It was the kind of sphincter-rippling, slack-anused report where you know that every inch, every ounce of buttock fat was involved in producing that triumphant fanfare, and where the moment after it has occurred, you know that there is absolutely no way you’re going to be able to pass it off as you knocking something over or scraping something along a floor.
There are two practical ways you can really handle a situation like this: either take ownership of the situation and have a good giggle about it with everyone around you, or simply pretend that it didn’t happen, implying that anyone who did happen to hear your eruption was somehow hallucinating. I chose the latter option; I don’t have nearly enough social confidence, particularly around strangers, to pull off some sort of “Good LORD! Did you hear that?!” routine around strangers, though I’m more than happy to parp thunderously in front of close friends and family.
Both responses place anyone near you in something of an awkward position, of course. If you take the former approach, then there’s the unspoken expectation that those nearby will participate in your routine, congratulating you on your impersonation of a baritone brass instrument and generally agreeing that having a good old guff is the peak of humorous funtimes. This, of course, does not take into account those who find bodily functions objectionable, particularly in public, and is likely to make those people feel uncomfortable.
If you take the latter approach, meanwhile, you place the responsibility on the people around you to either comment on the situation or remain quiet. And if you heard the noise that I emitted while swinging my carrier bag full of groceries around from the self-checkout into the trolley, I suspect some people would find it quite difficult not to comment.
Thankfully, the situation resolved itself with probably the optimal outcome. The only person nearby when the incident occurred was someone else who was packing their shopping, and they either chose to remain quiet or simply didn’t notice. There certainly wasn’t any sort of reaction, so if it’s the former I applaud them for their self-control; by the time I was out in the car park I was already in fits of giggles. I hope that when they meet up with their friends later, they enjoy telling the story about the fat man next to them in Marks & Spencer who let rip with a humdinger of a bottom burp without shame while finishing their shopping trip.
I mean it when I say it was uncontrollable, though; it was the sort of guff that doesn’t so much sneak up on you as it is suddenly present, without warning. There was no noticeable brewing time, no bubbling in the gut, no time to prepare — it was simply a case of me apparently moving in the wrong direction and releasing the explosion that had clearly been biding its time in my arse, trapped in a sweaty, fleshy prison, for quite a while.
I am pleased to report, however, that I did not “follow through”, as the vernacular has it. It was simply an extremely loud, explosive trump that was gone almost as soon as it arrived. And now I am home I can have a good laugh about it without worrying about funny looks from strangers. Except for all the strangers I’ve told about it on the Internet with this post.
It has been a strange few years, to say the least. Ever since the world went to pieces in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, things have not felt at all “normal” — even though for the most part, things these days seem to primarily be operating as they once were.
I still maintain that this isn’t necessarily a good thing, as the threat of COVID most certainly isn’t over, even if its impact is considerably lessened from what it once was. And I feel like society being forced “back to normal” too early likely made the whole recovery process more lengthy and difficult than it perhaps could have been. But, of course, there were plenty of additional considerations.
I feel like a lot of people have been feeling like 2023 will be a “better” year for one reason or another. There’s no tangible evidence to suggest this will actually be the case — I’m pretty sure we’ve all been thinking “surely next year can’t be as bad as this one” for as long as I can remember, even before killer viruses entered the equation — but I suppose it’s an attempt to bring oneself comfort. After all, proceeding forward thinking that things are miserable and awful and only likely to get worse is not really going to help matters.
A new year doesn’t really mean anything. Nothing magical happens at midnight as December 31st ticks over to January 1st. And yet it’s as good a time as any to decide that you want to have a fresh start, make some changes, improve some things about yourself and perhaps escape from things that have been holding you back for one reason or another.
In contrast to some of the previous years on this blog, I’m in a relatively “all right” position life-wise right now, and so I’m not in a position where I feel like I need to make any particularly radical changes in my life in order to be something approaching “happy”. I don’t feel like I need to change jobs — I love my current job — and I don’t want or need to change anything about my living situation, as my wife Andie and I are both in a good place; the excruciating rise in cost of living in the last year occasionally puts a bit of strain on our collective finances, but other than that we can’t complain too much.
All this means that we — well, I, as far as this post is concerned — can focus on the relatively “smaller” things to try and sort out. Chief among these for me is my overall health and wellbeing; I want to do something about my weight, and do something that hopefully lasts, because I’m fucking sick of having this hernia and not being able to have anything done about it because I’m too fat.
Slimming World worked for me a few years back, as past entries will show, but when Andie and I went back after various personal circumstances caused us both to have a fairly drastic “rebound”, we found that it didn’t really work for us. Calorie-counting didn’t really work for us either, and nor did self-directed Weight Watchers (or “WW”, as they now prefer to call themselves). Last time I saw my doctor, though, they did say that they could refer me to a “health coach” to help sort me out, but this was dependent on getting a blood test to ensure that there was nothing major wrong with me.
I’d never had a blood test before, so I was kind of perturbed by the whole experience. I don’t like hospitals at the best of times — my mind has them permanently associated as “the place where people die”, even though the rational part of my brain knows that this is a vastly unfair assessment to our hard-working healthcare workers — and the prospect of having mildly invasive procedures carried out on me was not helping matters.
This only got worse when they had a bit of trouble finding a vein on the inside of my elbow and had to draw from my hand instead, and as the whole process went on a bit longer that was comfortable I found myself having a cold sweat and feeling nauseated. Thankfully I didn’t throw up over the nurse who was working on me, but my condition did cause enough concern for her to get me a glass of water and give me a moment to recover after she was all finished. Thankfully, the results of the blood test showed nothing of concern, so hopefully I won’t have to deal with that again for a while.
Anyway, getting advice and/or referral from my doctor on what to do next was dependent on those blood test results, so now the holiday period is over I need to go back to them and figure out what to do next. I’m certain it will be a difficult process, but it’s something that needs to be done, as not only is my hernia continually bugging me, but I’m having a lot of joint pains and suchlike also, and I suspect losing some weight will help all those problems.
Aside from this, I feel like I might need to shake things up with regard to friendships and personal relationships also. Over the course of… probably the last decade or so, really, I’ve been dismayed at how far a lot of people with whom I used to be very close have drifted away for one reason or another. In some cases this was down to lives going in different directions, in others it was down to misunderstandings and in others still it can be attributed to some seemingly being more willing to make a bit of an effort to maintain a relationship than others.
I can’t pretend that I’m not at fault in some of these situations, but there are also plenty of cases where I have been the one who has been making an effort, only to get things either thrown back in my face or met with silent indifference. I won’t go into specifics right now as this isn’t about naming and shaming or anything like that, but when discussing a couple of instances privately with some more recent acquaintances, I felt somewhat vindicated when these relatively neutral “outsiders” (to the situation in question, anyway) confirmed my suspicions that yes, indeed, the things that I had previously felt were a bit out of order were indeed out of order.
It’s hard to know what to do in cases like this, though. Do you just cut and run? That’s probably the sensible thing to do; if you’re the only one willing to make an effort, that’s not a friendship, and it’s really not worth trying to maintain something that isn’t there. But at the same time you have to ask if you’re having unreasonable expectations of people whose circumstances have changed, as your own have. In that instance, is it appropriate to “punish” them for just the natural process of your lives going down different roads?
There isn’t really a right answer, but I do feel like in this new year I want to have another go at rekindling some of these friendships where possible. There are, I’m sure, multiple instances where I can still do more to try and fix things, but equally there are also plenty of cases where I’m sure the situation is beyond “help”, for want of a better word. And that’s sad, but it’s also supposedly a natural part of life. I vaguely recall reading something the other day that suggested men of my age generally only have one honest-to-goodness friend that they feel they can rely on — and I’m certainly in this position now.
Well, just make new friends, you might say. But, well, social anxiety tends to put paid to such plans when you explicitly make them — although in the last year or so I have added a number of new people to my personal acquaintances through both work and online socialisation. So I suspect it’s probably going to be worth cultivating those friendships further rather than continuing to make an effort in cases where I feel increasingly excluded.
But anyway. That’s enough rambling for today. Because aside from all of the above, I’ll also be making more regular use of this blog in 2023, too. With the general collapse of my enthusiasm for social media — coupled with the right hash Elon Musk has been making of Twitter — it’s probably the optimal means for me to freely express myself and communicate with others. So if you’re not already following me here, hit up the links at the side (or wherever they are on your screen) and stay up to date with me that way. This place is probably going to be the most reliable means of “seeing” me online from hereon.
Happy new year. And may your own “fresh starts”, however small or grand they might be, bring you joy and satisfaction.
I love dreams. I’ve found the concept of them fascinating since an early age, to such a degree that when I was a child I used to deliberately try and think about something really hard before falling asleep in the hope that I would subsequently dream about it. It rarely worked quite so simply, although I have had enough dreams about, say, the video games I was playing immediately before bed to make me think that there probably is something to influencing your own subconscious while you’re still conscious.
My favourite dreams are the ones for which there is no rational explanation, which make no logical sense and which sound ridiculous when you talk about them. Take the example of the dream from the title above as just one of many.
Like most memories of dreams, my recollection of the circumstances leading up to the incident in question are hazy at best. But I do vividly remember the conclusion, which was, as has already been noted, the fact that I was ejaculating like a firehose all over my childhood bedroom.
I also vividly remember the fact that I knew I was about to ejaculate, and that I was thinking two things: firstly, the slightest bit of pressure on my todger would set me off, and secondly, that if I aimed carefully I’d probably be able to clean things up without anyone ever knowing that I’d done anything quite so obscene. The reality of the situation became abundantly clear shortly after an inadvertent mild impact caused the incident to commence in earnest, and before long, the question of cleaning things up was… well, it wasn’t a question any more.
I’d started by firing at the window. This seemed logical and sensible, as I thought it would be easy to clean up the glass. It apparently did not occur to me to open the window and simply aim out through it — hoping that there were no unfortunate passers-by in the street below, of course — but it made sense in the heat of the moment. Before long, though, it was clear that a single rather narrow sash window was to prove an inadequate receptacle for my product, and I somewhat lost control of the situation.
Teddy bears, books, old cloths that had been draped over things, the wardrobe door — before long, everything was covered, and there was no sign that the tide would be stemmed any time soon. I began to panic — up until this point, for some reason the situation had not appeared to be all that unusual — and, oddly, found myself less concerned about my apparent inability to switch off the flow from my apparently bottomless ballsack but rather more worried about how I was going to explain the situation once it had concluded.
I never got an answer to that, as I woke up shortly afterwards — dry as a bone (no pun intended), if you must know — thoroughly confused by what I had just witnessed and/or experienced.
Since “dream science” is hardly an exact art, there almost certainly isn’t a “fixed” definition for this, but most people who claim to know what they are talking about claim that dreaming of ejaculation in some form or another, unsurprisingly, represents a desire for “release” of some description — not necessarily sexual, but perhaps emotional. Specifically, one article I read noted that dreaming of “excess ejaculation” is a sign that you are “in immediate need of emotional and sexual release” and that you are feeling a “loss of control and power over your life”.
But then elsewhere on the page it notes that dreaming of “male ejaculation” is a “bringer of good luck and success”. Which suggests to me, as I already suspected, that any and all interpretations are largely bollocks (again, no pun intended) and that dreams like this are just your subconscious having a bit of fun with things that would never happen in reality.
Just to be safe, though, I probably better go have a quick wank.
Those of you who have known me for a while will know that I have long been an advocate of the “comfy sim” — a specific type of video game where, generally speaking, the pressure is off and the emphasis is very much on simply enjoying the experience of doing something that you perhaps might not have the opportunity to do on a regular basis.
My appreciation for the comfy sim started right back in the days of the Atari 8-bit and Atari ST, when my Dad introduced me to subLOGIC’s Flight Simulator II, the precursor to what we know today as Microsoft Flight Simulator. There was no “point” to Flight Simulator II — to such a degree that my father refuses to refer to it as a “game” to this day — but there was something compelling about it. The experience of flying a plane, of going on adventures, of making use of supplementary material (books, in the case of FSII) to enhance the experience — all of it was a powerful stimulant to the imagination.
There were, of course, military flight simulators also, and I enjoyed those a lot too — particularly because many of them were considerably easier to fly than the hyper-realistic Flight Simulator II! They also tended to have much more of a “game-like” structure to them, in that you’d have objectives to complete, merits to earn, medals to acquire and all manner of other things. But at their heart, they were still pretty comfy experiences about imagining you were doing something that you don’t get the opportunity to do on a regular basis.
My comfy sims of preference today are SCS’ excellent Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. I’m hard-pressed to tell you which of them is my favourite, because they’re both excellent and have their own distinct appeal elements — but what I do know is that when I want to relax and just not really think about stuff for a while, driving a truck is one of the best things I can possibly do, particularly as I have a nice wheels and pedal setup that really helps with the sense of immersion.
For the unfamiliar, in ETS2 and ATS (as we shall refer to them hereafter), you begin life as an aspiring trucker who owns a run-down old garage in the city of your choice, but who doesn’t have a truck to their name. You begin your adventure by running “quick jobs” for local companies, who provide trucks and trailers for you, and pay any fees you might incur along the way such as road tolls and fuel costs. After a while, though, you’ll crave the freedom that owning your own truck provides — so you can either grind your way up to affording one out of your own pocket (which takes a while) or take out a loan with which to purchase a nice starter truck.
From there, the choice of what you want to do is up to you, within reason — remember that if you took out a loan to pay for your truck, you’ll need to repay that a bit at a time. But if you just want to cruise the roads exploring, you can do that; if you want to take jobs from the companies you stumble across, like a freelance trucker-for-hire, you can do that; if you want to systematically search out the most profitable opportunities in the local area, you can do that; if you want to buy your own trailer and pick up freight directly from the source, you can do that. As you progress, you can even buy and expand more garages, grow your fleet of trucks, expand your empire and be rolling in more money than you know what to do with.
The nice thing, though, is that ETS2 and ATS don’t put any pressure on you to do any of those things that you don’t want to. If the one thing you enjoy is simply driving around, do that — maybe taking the occasional job to cover your daily loan installments. If you enjoy the structured experience of taking jobs, you can focus entirely on that. If you enjoy the management aspect of attempting to build up your company and dominate the entire map with your business empire, you can do that. Or you can do a bit of everything.
There’s no “wrong” approach to ETS2 and ATS, and that’s the core of the comfy sim. It provides a framework and a playground in which you can have fun, but the exact details of that fun are left up to you. It is essentially an imaginative toy in software form — and sometimes it’s just what the doctor ordered.
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.
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!
I'm Not Doctor Who 