I feel like I'm done with gaming and it's weird. It's like I'm trying to decide to end a relationship I've been in since I was eight years old, and I'm scared of the hole it's going to leave in my life when I admit to myself that it's over.

I think I already know that it's over, but I'm struggling against my own denial.

80% of my YouTube video recommendations are gaming-related. I've modded Game Boys, and I've hacked a PS Vita inside out, I've swapped joysticks on my Switch. I enjoy the process of tinkering with gaming devices, more than I enjoy playing games at this point.

I really never thought I'd grow out of gaming, but I think that's because I've always seen that as a patronising concept in general. It's not "growing"; I'm not an adult now, and if you're still gaming you're a child. I don't like that attitude in general; it's elitist at best, and elitism is for the insecure.

I think what's happened is I've just changed, but it's arbitrary. When I play games, I'm acutely aware that I'm purely consuming something. There's no creativity. I'm not expanding my mind by playing a game. I'm not getting inspired to make my own game. If I throw myself at something for three hours in Elden Ring, and finally get past it, I haven't done anything other than progress in a video game. That skill isn't transferrable. It hasn't improved my reflexes or ability to read situations under pressure; at least, not in a way that's useful outside playing games. I should just spend three hours reading (if I have to explain why this isn't purely passive consumption then you've probably already wasted the time you've spent getting to this sentence!), or playing guitar (either being creative or learning to be creative), or playing badminton, or committing my confused and meandering internal struggles to parchment.

And I think I'm going to do that from now. I've struggled for the past few weeks with "what shall I do? / I know I'll play a game / what shall I play? / play for 6 minutes / OK I'm over this now / what shall I do? / scroll my Steam library for 10 minutes / go and do something else" and I just need to accept that, at the very least, I need a significant break from gaming to determine whether there's still space for it in my life.

I've had some really nice contact through this site recently. I've put mailto links on a bunch of stuff, just because I never want to have comments again, but that doesn't mean I don't want to talk to people about what I've written here. I don't think I've ever posted anything that I'm closed off to talking about.

I'm glad blogging's coming back, and I hope it continues to grow. I still open Twitter (I will never call it X) occasionally, and I never last more than five minutes. It's so vile how people are on that site now. I see some lovely people still posting on there, but I genuinely don't know how they can bear it. It's weird to think I used to spend a significant portion of my day on that site.

I've seen a lot of criticism about people creating their own echo chambers, but I think people forget that you don't willingly hang out with people you dislike, or disagree with to the point that conversation is impossible, so why would you tolerate that on your social media? I like my echo chamber.

I have been meaning to do this for ages and I was right to put it off because it took so long.

I set up a little area that I guess you can describe as a portfolio but it's just a few categorised sets of my favourite photos from the last 13 years. I spent the last day doomscrolling my own images, and even found a bunch I'd completely forgotten about.

Not sure how I'm going to keep this updated. It's pretty difficult to decide what goes in from now. I might make a rule that nothing newer than 6 months can go in from now but it's more likely that I'll just forget entirely.

Hope you enjoy.

Facebook has started to show me status posts from over ten years ago, and they serve as a delightful reminder of the number of people I've lost touch with. So many orphaned replies; some statuses are just me talking to myself in the comments. Lovely way to start the day; 0/10 do not recommend.

I've added a new Media Diet area on this site.

I have been bouncing the idea of doing this for a little while, and with my new site and nav support for more than 3 links, now's as good a time as any, I suppose.

For those who know, it's obviously pretty heavily inspired by Kottke (and probably heavily featuring stuff I found there!) and Steven Soderbergh, and of course Chris has something similar, but bringing in various genres of link-sharing and other recommendations.

I didn't want to pollute my main RSS feed with this, so if you're interested you can subscribe to it separately. I'm not sure how I feel about the rating system as it might be too esoteric and redundant. It's pretty likely that I won't share anything I dislike there unless it's a film, TV, or a book but maybe that's fine? Clearly I haven't thought it through too much.

Maybe I shouldn't have just stolen Kottke's name for it? I'm probably too small for him to have a problem with it.

I made my new site live. It's likely to be so broken but I just wanted to get it sorted. If you notice something broken and can be bothered, let me know.