Don't Forget to Breathe

Wanted to find time to talk about this last night, but got a little sidetracked and when I did write something it was pretty late, so, you know how it goes. Listened to episode 1086 of Uhh Yeah Dude, they're 20th anniversary episode, and couldn't help being a little emotional over it all. I know it's a little bit silly, but UYD has been such a constant in my life through a lot of ups and downs, moves, general life changes, all of it. Those guys started when I was 15, and in a lot of ways I've grown up listening to them. I still regularly dip back into the archives and relive some of those old bits. They haven't all aged well - 2006 was a very different time after all - and the guys themselves acknowledge that, but there's still so many wonderful old gags that still make me laugh just as hard as they did when I was a teenager. UYD for life.

Yesterday was also Valentine's Day, which I tried my best to ignore. One of the worst parts about being an immigrant in a country where you don't speak the language well is the reduced social opportunities. I miss dating, I miss getting to meet people, and I hope this is the last time I'm alone on the 14th for a while. I probably need to come up with a healthier way of coping with it in the future.

Been getting back into watching pro wrestling as well. Used to be a really hardcore super fan as a kid and through college, even through the first year or two after where I was faced with perpetual underemployment. But I fell off it pretty hard once I had stable work, and never really went back. It just demands so much of your free time, and the WWE's ties to shitty demagogues was also offputting in a huge sense. So I've been trying out AEW instead. Some folks there who I recognise, some I don't, but I'm immediately a big fan of both Thekla and Kyle Fletcher. We'll see how long I stick to watching it, but Dynamite and Grand Slam were both a lot of fun.

Never got around to talking about State of Play from Thursday, but I thought it was a pretty killer showcase. I'm a huge DOA fan, and I'm so excited that they're bringing the series back; I just hope they do the right thing and remove the stuff that is so offputting about the game while maintaining what makes it so much fun and so accessible. It's shaping up to be a great year for fighting games with Tokon and Invincible coming out too, and at some point, I wanna give 2XKO more of a shot. I liked what I played, but Nioh took up all my gaming time. I think Beast of Reincarnation and Saros both look awesome too, and the release calendar as a whole is so stacked. My backlog only gets bigger.

Picked up Final Fantasy Tactics after beating Nioh. Never played it back in the day and always wanted to, so that's on the docket for this evening. Hopefully helps distract me from the dread of going back to the office tomorrow.

Seatbelts.

Woke up this morning in a great fucking mood, so excited about the first day of this mini-holiday, only to have it last all of about 30 seconds. My replacement had already sent me several messages in a panic over a problem he couldn't figure out, so I wound out having to boot up my work laptop and do it for him; couldn't wait due it being an urgent request from our partner studio in Korea, and they're about go on break for Lunar New Year. Guy's been in the department for two years now and still can't be trusted to do anything by himself. I don't know why our lead isn't doing more to get him up to speed, but it put such a huge dampener on my day. Got it sorted out in the end and then logged back off to eat and do some yoga. Seems all quiet again, so I hope the rest of this break is free of unwanted work messages.

Otherwise, I'm feeling okay. Had a reduced band practice last night, only three of us showed up, and we didn't actually play anything. The new mixer gave us some issues, and we spent three hours troubleshooting it, just trying to get everything working again. Managed to get it all set up properly in the end, just have to hope when we have a full complement of six people that everything is fully functional. 

Recent news about Discord's pending age verification stuff has me pretty concerned. I assume most of the people I'm in contact with will move off the platform and migrate somewhere else, but I have a feeling it might be a little bit scattered and tough to keep up with everyone. I really hope I don't lose touch with people I've known for decades in some cases. Maybe David Liebe Hart was right, and email's the way to go.

Will probably finish Nioh 3 during my break, getting what feels like super close to the end now. It's still great! 

It's the weekend finally, and I am just so, so ready to detach from work for a couple of days. Counting down the days until Wednesday next week and a nice, long, five-day weekend. I need it so badly.

Ordered delivery today. I've been pretty good so far about eating well this year, and I've been keeping up my workout routine, so I convinced myself it'd be fine. Realised at some point as I watched the tracker on the website that there is almost certainly nothing in the world that's more perverse, more pure ideology, than sitting in an apartment, watching in real time as some badly underpaid and almost definitely exploited gig worker crosses the city to bring you shitty food that you paid too much for. It made me feel totally gross, especially when he stopped to deliver someone else's food first and spent what felt like an eternity going in circles afterwards, trying to get out of whatever side street. It's really kind of fucked up and disgusting if you think about it all. 

Today was a lot better. The guys on my team who usually cause problems for various reasons all got their stuff done today, without hurling insults at one another (or yelling about each other to me). There are some things we cannot 100% know worked until tomorrow morning, but at least we didn't hear of any disasters, so that's progress! The last couple of months have been such a horrible cycle of releasing work, realizing after the fact that someone forget to check something properly, and then having to scramble to deal with the fallout, over and over and over again. So a quiet day is absolutely welcome.

Was kinda bummed out after work, though. It's still pretty cold, and I'd planned to make some chili. Second time in the last three weeks though that I opened a can of kidney beans to find they'd already gone nasty. Obviously whoever is supplying these things to my local supermarket isn't doing a great job. Still make some rice and what amounted to fake meat-and-chili sauce anyway. The fake meat's pretty good, but it doesn't satisfy the way the real thing did, and without the beans, the whole thing lacks that real *meal* feeling, you know? God this is so boring.

Also managed to stay away from screens after work yesterday! Went and had band practice instead. We've been having trouble with our old, third-hand mixer for a while now, and we just bought a new one, so I stayed behind after with one of the others to set it up and test everything out. Really excited to mess around with it more, the software has a ton of effects and cool shit built into it, and it's been so long since I got to do some real audio stuff that I'm already having a blast.

Knocked down another couple bosses in Nioh 3, too. I'm pretty sure I'm about to clear the first map. Still think it's great, and really hoping my gut instinct about it being too easy isn't how the wider community feels. 2026 is shaping up to be such a packed year for games, didn't think I'd have much of a shot at getting this done before Resident Evil comes out, but the week head star might be enough.

First post on Dreamwidth. Excuse the likely poor prose, it’s been forever since I’ve written anything, and I gotta shake off the rust.

Do you ever have a memory you suspect might be fake?

For years now, I’d occasionally have a picture pop into my mind. A website, from somewhere vaguely in the time period of the late 2000s or very early 2010s, small but lively, filled with people I liked or even loved, burning bright but with a flame that was rapidly running low on oxygen. Black and grey, simply designed even for the time, struggling to keep up with burgeoning corporate behemoths like Facebook and Twitter. I vaguely remembered it taking the place of MySpace in my life for a short-ish period, before all the friends I made started to migrate to newer platforms, or to still-active IM clients like AIM or MSN. What this place was called, I couldn’t remember, such was the plethora of would-be contenders and long-dead services that I moved through in that period as a teenager about to graduate high school and move onto the next stage of my life. I never really gave it much thought.

The other night I had a dream about it. Somewhat predictably, the combination of time and the dreamed nature of this most recent memory caused the details to further fray, each brief remembrance over the past few years blurring the lines between reality and imagination a little more. Did this website really exist? Was I ever actually on there? Are the people I sorta maybe remember even real?

So I stumbled out of bed on Saturday morning, and dug through Wikipedia, trawled the depths of Archive.org, and searched for what felt like hours for what this mysterious website could be. And then all at once it came, a random date picked, a black and grey website, with a handful of featured profiles and there, in the middle, a photo of a girl I'm pretty sure I know. Synapses fire, something clicks. Whether these memories are real or whether the piece of wrinkly, old rubber squished into my skull simply invents them, the sight of that old haunt, makeoutclub, answers my question. Imagined, authentic, whatever, who cares? The weird, inexplicable sense of relief, the recognition, I’m pretty sure, of one of the faces on that homepage, the question feels like it has an answer.

And that brings me to Dreamwidth and my relationship with the internet today, as a man in his mid-30s.

In diving into the murky depths of the old internet, it was coming across old LiveJournal feeds, not makeoutclub, that made me feel the most nostalgic. I used to love LiveJournal. I used to love to write. When I was a teenager, I spent all my free time online, writing journals, roleplaying on forums, creating worlds and cultivating a passion for the written word that I once hoped would, eventually, lead me to a career as an author, or a screenwriter, or something, whatever, just as long as I could write. And while I landed on my feet and am so incredibly blessed to make a living from the arts, writing was not my calling. But writing gave me something as a young person that I never had, growing up in an extremely isolated, rural community. Friends, connection, a chance to feel part of this world.

It was in this glorified virtual dumpster dive effort that I discovered that not only was LiveJournal still extant, but there were tons of forks active as well, Dreamwidth (why do I keep forgetting this site’s name?) among them. There’s something about exploring this site that just feels right to me. It’s basic, nostalgic, devoid of any of the algorithms or AI or data harvesting that plagues modern media platforms, making us all dumber every moment we spend scrolling. I’m the exact right age to have seen every era of the internet, from basic HTML pages to the advent of social platforms, streaming, the move to smart devices and the ever encroaching dystopian nightmare we now face. And honestly, I'm really tired of it.

It’s not fun to be on the fucking computer. It used to be so cool. The internet used to feel like a place of infinite possibility, endless discovery and a never-ending supply of potential friends, lovers and enemies. Now it’s just a machine designed to sell you shit, and then sell your shit.

So, fuck it, man, I’m gonna give it a shot. I’m not on any other platforms. I’ve gone from a teenager and young adult who lived permanently online to being about as offline as a person can be in 2026. Maybe it’s time to try again. Maybe this’ll go nowhere, and I’ll never post here again. Maybe I’ll meet some cool people, and remember why I loved writing, why I loved the internet. All I know is that penning this felt good in a way I can't quite put into words.