Day 94: Still

Back from work, massaging my hamstrings that are stretched tight from long bar shifts, sitting in the front room with Jiggs, watching him play Zelda. Another crappy microwave meal for tea, then chocolate and a cuppa afterwards. I still feel low, broken, like whole areas of my brain are closed off. Can't talk to my friends or family who want to say nice things to me, ask if I'm all right. I appreciate the love, I'm grateful, but I can't deal with it now. I don't have the energy to respond. Depression is the breakdown of the mechanisms of love, and it's painful, actually kind of gross, to be offered love and to not be able to receive it. To not have anywhere for it to go.

So I'm sorry, it might seem rude but it is not rude. I just need to sit here drinking tea and staying very still. The depression can't get me if I stay very still.

I'm low, but it's OK. Everything is as it should be. Everything is the only way it can be. Everything is.

There's no point wishing it wasn't so. Feeling I've been doing so well and I shouldn't be right back here again. That it's not fair. That it's a sign of weakness or failure on my part. I don't get to choose how my mental health plays out.

So I'm going slowly, treading lightly, not pushing myself too hard. Drinking my tea, lounging in my chair, watching Jiggs explore the vast and mysterious land of Hyrule. He's just defeated the boss of the first divine beast, after half an hour of trying. We literally cheered and fist-bumped when the creature finally fell. Now he's exploring the lands surrounding Zora's domain, collecting snails from river beds, cooking up dishes to increase his stamina, looking for the hidden headpiece to complete the Zora armour set. And I'm watching, losing myself in his adventure, feeling ... OK.

Long shift tomorrow. Long shift, and beer training to give to the staff. But then I have a day off.

I can make it to then.

Day 93: Day off

We've taken a day off in my house today. All of us. We've taken a day off from the world. Jiggs has sat downstairs with my old Wii U and played Breath of the Wild for eight hours straight. I've sat in the armchair beside him, giving hints, playing Switch with the volume down, eating chocolate. Phace has lain in bed under blankets and watched formulaic detective shows on Netflix and snoozed.

We all work fatiguing low-paid jobs, all struggle with various issues, and life is not easy. So today we've taken a day off from everyone and everything, we've asked nothing of ourselves, we've eaten crappy food and not showered and slobbed about in old t-shirts and baggy pyjamas, and it has been glorious. Another week of this before I face reality again, please.

I still feel down. I don't know what's wrong with me. It's like I've reached 90 days and my brain has folded in on itself. All the negative voices that had retreated to a corner somewhere have flown back out. My skin is bad again, my forehead is spattered in tiny spots. I feel small and untalented and broken.

But I'm not going to worry, and I'm not going to stress. If I feel this way, so be it. I'm not going to ask more of myself than I can currently give. And what I can currently give is: very little.

I think I need lots of sleep, and to be gentle with myself, more than anything. So I'm not going to stay up for hours trying to make this blog post good. I'm not going to work on it until it feels like something of worth.

Sometimes the worth comes from simply not allowing yourself to go backwards. From not slipping any further. From putting your feet up with your housemates and eating junk food and saying, Sorry, world, but not today. I'm off today. Try calling again tomorrow.

Sometimes that's enough.

Day 92: Slipping

So much for early rising. Stayed up till 4am after work last night writing a post, then played Switch in bed, unhappy, until I passed out. Slept until 11, then slouched around bedroom in doldrums, dead-eyed, brain like instant noodles, until time to climb in the shower and go to work again. On shift joking with Katie, mocking Rhi, forcing the time to pass, but back home the bottom has fallen out of everything again.

I feel blue. Goopy black dripping emptiness. Nothing to say and no words and plummeting blankness Just this dull routine stretching to the horizon, a thousand lifetimes of this as the universe pulls apart from itself and all light fades and interminable blackness reigns again.

Fuuush. Going to get some sleep and hope I feel better tomorrow. I'm tired. Treat myself kindly. It's OK to feel like this, but it's not OK to wallow. I'm getting sick with depression, like coming down with a cold, so do what is necessary. Be loving, be gentle, but be firm, accept no sliding, no slipping, no entry point for negative talk.

Write these words, any words, better than nothing. Go to bed. Start again tomorrow.

It's cooler tonight. The air is cooler. My room is pleasant. That's one thing that's nice.

Day 91: Dive bars

3am and 20 degrees, slowly broiling in this bedroom at the top of the house. Both Velux windows are thrown wide, but the thick night air brings no respite from the heat. Home from a late close, understaffed, the kind of shift you set your jaw, stop hoping, stop hating, just grind it out. Time feels like it won't go but it will go, you know it will, you've done this before, just put your head down and watch it pass. Another tray of glasses. Another. Another. Never mind that you're too old for all this, that they pay you nothing, that you're bored to death. Do the tray of glasses. Do them the best you can. And another. And one after that. Suffering is a teacher, you just have to be willing to learn.

Day staff are still drinking in the beer garden, call and joke when you go to collect glasses. They're inside something and want you to enter as well. But you're on the outside, tired, stressed, and you can only reply in monosyllables, turn your body from them, smile awkwardly, walk away. But then come closing they rise and scurry back and forth with tables and chairs, ashtrays and glasses, get it all cleared in minutes, good little worker ants. They go right on scurrying, when there are no more tables they go for you, lift you, by arms and legs, try to carry you off to the next bar. You let them take you halfway down the square. They chant your name, shout that they love you, then hurry away into the night. You watch them go. They're so young. Off swaying into dive bars, stouts and whiskies, bad karaoke, then off down streets and alleys, through moonlit parks, spliffs on hills as the sun comes up. Then bed until the evening, then a bar shift and start again.

That was me not long ago, still desperately searching for a glimmer of the beauty in the nighttime madness, for peace and meaning at 4am.

Now I'm content to sit alone and tap out these words, then do my teeth, do my stretches, and get up tomorrow for it all again.

Day 90: Completion

I mean, three months isn't that long. It's a term at school. It's a... trip, if you go away for three months.

I can't think of anything that's famous for lasting three months. My brain has turned to scrambled egg in this heat.

But three months. It can fly by. I've spent blocks of three months in the recent past just working, drinking, sleeping till late, and it's like I've blinked and the time has just vanished. Dribbled away.

But I tell you what. Stood on the wrong side of three months, looking out into 90 days stretching cavernously ahead, thinking of the prospect of staying sober and writing a blog post every day for that time, it can feel like forever.

But now it's over. I did it.

I got through. There were good days. There were bad days. I wrote serious stuff. I wrote painful stuff. And I wrote stupid stuff. A whole heap of stupid stuff.

Most of the time I didn't feel like doing it. I had other things going on, I was tired from work, or about to go to work, and I didn't feel I had anything much to say, I had to just sit down and force words out, even when they didn't want to come.

But I did it.

And even when I hated it, I knew it was good for me. It's been so helpful in starting to get over that perfectionism thing that has stifled me for so long. Having to put up writing every day that was last minute, loose, unfinished, plain bad - it's taught me that it doesn't matter. The world doesn't end. Everyone doesn't see you as a failure. People barely notice, in fact, regardless of what you do. They're far too busy trying to keep themselves afloat.

And the more I posted, the more I began to see that though, yes, there's a pleasure that comes from putting up something that is edited and polished, having people say nice things about it, that will never be enough to sustain you. That ego stuff is just icing, and no one can survive off a diet of icing. And the more you go chasing that icing, the more sick you become.

Just concentrating on the work, day after day, whether it's going well or not - that's the potatoes, that's the broccoli, that's the fruit salad for dessert.

Does that analogy work? I can't tell if that analogy works. This heat has really got to me.

OK. So doing the blog has been good in getting me into the habit of sketching, trying things out, enjoying the work for its own sake, and moving on.

And it has been great for my mental health, although I've actually been low and tired and in pain for the majority of this process. The thing is, that pain has been there for so long, and I've been pushing it away for so long. But doing this has forced me to face it, a little at a time, over and over, to let it come for me and to stand there and to keep on going.

Doing that is horrible. It really sucks. But it beats the alternative. It's as simple as that. Facing pain is awful, but not facing it always ends up being worse.

- - -

So. The 90 days are over. What next?

A year. That's what's next. I've been learning lessons from the daily blogging, but I haven't learnt them yet. I've been gradually changing habits of a lifetime, but they're not yet fully changed.

So I'm going to keep this up, if I can, every day for a year. I've done three months. What's another nine?

I'm going to stick with being completely loose, completely amateur. The more the better, in fact. Absolutely anything goes. Any style, any tone, any type of writing. Splash words out of the paint pot of my mind all over the canvas, again and again, experimenting, making mistakes, most importantly having fun.

I want to blog more about getting up early, because this past week waking at seven has been great for me, and I want to ensure the habit sticks. I want to blog about cooking, because my diet is still terrible.

Doing something regularly about mental health would be good, whether just to check in with myself, or to bring awareness to something people don't know much about.

And those gaming pieces were fun, so maybe a weekly post catching up with how I'm doing with my Switch, or anything else games related that's on my radar.

And the same for films and books. I used to be so enthusiastic about movies, but I lost that through depression, and I've been too busy with writing these past three months to get back into them. Literature is impossible when you're depressed, because it requires real concerted effort to get through, but I've been reading more here and there of late, and finding a way to talk about that would be good.

And those writing prompts. I find those the most rewarding of any of the writing I've tried, but they also require touching the deepest parts of me, and those parts ice over when my mental health is bad, and trying to go near them when the negative voices are loud can lead to the worst attacks of self-loathing. But, yes, I want to do lots more of those.

I guess I have nothing but time. There are a lot of days in nine months. A lot of empty space to fill.

I can't wait to get started.

One last thing: Thank you so much to anyone who's been reading this. Thank you for the kind words when I've been down. The compliments when it's gone well. The commiserations when not. Thank you for caring. And thank you for listening. You're all gems.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a Switch to play. Love and smooches xxx

P.S. Here is a bonus picture of my ridiculous face.

Day 89: Switching

I'm definitely going to finish this gaming history tonight. Getting it done.

So this current generation of home videogame consoles is the eight generation. The uniformity between the latest Sony and Microsoft systems is as great as it has ever been. The costs of entry into the market, and therefore the price of failure, is so high at the moment that both companies have played it extremely safe this cycle, with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (nomenclature) sharing similar technical specifications, feature sets, and design language. Both have excellent controllers, sturdy and precise, with the only key difference being that the PlayStation's thumbsticks are, as ever, symmetrically placed, where Microsoft's left stick is pushed northwards, trading places with the D-pad. Meh.

There are exclusives on each console, but most mainstream games come out on both machines, looking and playing virtually identically. With development costs rising exponentially for modern games, and players split equally between the two platforms, publishers are loath to cut out half their audience with an exclusive release.

What I've seen with your eyes

The one major attempt at a shakeup came from Sony's experimentation with virtual reality. With a couple of expensive VR devices coming out recently on PC, and then Google Cardboard and a raft of entry-level alternatives at the bottom end of the spectrum, it looked a year or two ago like virtual reality was finally becoming a, erm, reality. Sony's PSVR was designed to sit somewhere in the middle of the pack, less expensive than the kits on PC, but more involved than the phone-style glasses.

But though everyone who experiences VR comes away impressed, the technology, and the games, aren't quite there yet. The headsets are all clunky, with too many wires. The games are mostly novelties, breathtaking for five minutes, empty after a few hours. The problem with looking through the eyes of a virtual character who leaps and spins through space, as you sit stationary on your chair, is that it induces revolting motion sickness. The most expensive VR kits come with sensors that you set up around a play-space so that you can actually move around with your character - but then your character is limited to only the moves you can pull off, in a metre or so squared arena in your room.

The thrill of doing even this, of course, is still genuine, but the fact is that none of the units have sold enough this generation, PSVR included. Perhaps VR needs a Nintendo to slice away the air of nerdiness and bring out something cheap and accessible to push the tech into the mainstream. Google Cardboard did it with hardware, but there were no killer apps (titles worth buying the platform for) to back it up. VR is still looking for its Wii casing, and its Wii Sports to set the whole thing alight.

Beating yourself

Speaking of Nintendo, while a kind of equilibrium, and even stagnation, has been reached by Sony and Microsoft this generation, the big N have been characteristically unpredictable over the last seven years.

They followed up their Wii with something they were calling a Wii U. Was it an add-on for the Wii? An upgrade? A new system entirely? Consumers weren't sure. Nintendo did a terrible job of explaining the concept, right from its initial announcement, and the thing never took off.

The Wii U was, in fact, a brand new console. It was HD, finally, roughly on par in specs with the PS3 and Xbox 360 (though years too late), and its unique feature was that it came with a gamepad, a big chunky controller that had a second screen built into the middle of it, with touch-controls and a gyroscope. But you could also use your old Wiimotes with the Wii U. And it was backwards-compatible with your old Wii games. And you could buy traditional controllers for it as well.

There was no clear message, no clear concept, when compared to the Wii. You felt that Nintendo had been wrestling with the question of whether to hold onto the Wii brand or move away from it. With whether to continue to court the Wii's casual audience, or attempt to win back the "hardcore" gamer.

The final device saw them grasping backwards with one arm to the safety of the Wii, and reaching forwards with the other for a new gimmick with which to repeat the Wii's success. And in the end they got a firm hold of neither, and fell between the cracks.

The Wii U was the worst selling mainstream Nintendo console since their nascent rise before the NES. After shifting 101.63 million Wii's, the Wii U couldn't even hit a paltry 14 million sales.

Golden age

And yet, while the hardware was tanking, Nintendo's software divisions were quietly putting out some of their best ever work. Not that they've ever exactly had a bad period, but their first-party releases on the Wii U felt like they were coming from a studio at the top of their game. Super Mario 3D World was an absolute riot, mixing elements of the 64 and Galaxy titles with mechanics from the NES and SNES-era games, introducing four-play multiplayer, taking game design cues from Japanese poetry, and generally just bursting with colour and vigour and warmth.

Mario Kart 8 won many "game of year" awards when it was released in 2014. New IP Splatoon was Nintendo's way of taking the ultra-macho first-person shooter and turning it into an approachable yet devious team game. And Mario Maker gave players the opportunity to design their own Mario levels, if nothing else proving how difficult that truly is.

Couple these with some great exclusives from other developers - Yoshi and Donkey Kong games, and best-in-show RPG Xenoblade Chronicles X - and you ended up with a system that, yes, was confusing and somewhat fiddly, but also was markedly cheaper than the competition, and arguably had a handful of games that were better than any handful of games you could take from those rival consoles.

I picked one up second-hand, and never regretted it. I might even have clocked more hours on it than on my PS4.

The wild

Mind you, a lot of that was down to Zelda.

Oh man. Zelda.

So, as I mentioned, Zelda titles had fallen into a slump over the past decade. While Mario had gone from strength to strength, his stablemate was not faring so well. Essentially, the Zelda formula had not evolved since 1998's Ocarina of Time. Majora's Mask, released a year or two after Ocarina, remixed the same art assets into a tale that was darker, more sombre, and rightly adored. Wind Waker then introduced that fresh visual style I talked about. Twilight Princess, four years later, after backlash in some quarters over Wind Waker looking too childish (idiots), retreated into rehashing Ocarina, very much to its detriment. By now what had once been innovative gameplay had ossified into something rigid and constricting. And then Skyward Sword, for the Wii, was filled with motion-control gimmicks, with twee sidekicks, with areas and enemies reused over and over to artificially draw out the play time. It was a small, bitty game, constantly wrenching control away from the player for interminable tutorial cut-scenes explaining game rules, where once the series had thrust a sword in your hand and told you to have at it. The wonder was gone. The mystery was gone. The team behind it - and this I would say was Nintendo at their worst - felt insular, eating out off past glories, refusing to look around at what the wider industry was achieving, and where it was going - namely, into open-world games.

So when the new Zelda was announced, before I got a Wii U, I could barely be bothered to watch the trailer for it. I thought I was done with that rubbish.

But then... hang on. Here was longtime producer Eiji Aonuma discussing how they were throwing out all their templates and starting afresh, with that very first Legend of Zelda for the NES as their guiding light. They wanted to refocus on adventure and exploration, to give players freedom to approach scenarios from any angle, in any order, rather than presenting them with linear sequences to be worked through in the one correct manner. Skyward Sword had been like a fairground ride where you were strapped into a cart; in this new game the team wanted to get you lost in the woods. It would be open-world, huge and expansive. Aonuma showed a clip, and it looked incredible.

Just when you think you're out, eh...?

The game, when it was eventually released, was appositely subtitled Breath of the Wild, and, oh boy, was it good. Really, really good. Like, insanely good. Like, everything I'd ever wanted from a Zelda game good. Like, my dreams as a kid sat staring longingly at the illustrations in the NES Zelda instruction manual now brought vividly to life good. It was good.

Contemporary, invigorating, exhilarating, bizarre, it drew from outside itself, taking tropes and concepts from many other popular games, improving upon them, adding things no one had thought of, lashing it together into a world that felt fully-formed like nothing else I had played.

It was as if this giant beast within the heart of the franchise that had been slumbering for years had finally awoken, finally stretched and pushed outside its safe bounds, finally gone back on the prowl. As if it had looked at what the rest of the industry had been doing while it was sleeping and said, Guys, that is not how you make an open-world game. This is how you make an open-world game.

It also felt specifically designed for me. I do not play games to get lost in stat sheets and upgrade trees. I play to climb mountains and creep through forests, to stand by ponds in the rain, watching frogs leaping, listening to the splash of raindrops, feeling very much there, very much alive, very much at peace.

Breath of the Wild had upgrades, a robust combat system, reams of side quests - but it also had fireflies to collect at dusk, villagers to pester, horses to tame, fields of swaying grass through which to ride, the music swelling, the land rolling endlessly before you, intrigue and adventure and the unknown waiting out there to be seen, to be touched, to be felt.

This Zelda, more than anything else, has reaffirmed that whatever else I move on to, however old I get, there will always be a place in my heart for videogames. Long live Nintendo. Long live Zelda. Long live Link.

And that is why I'm buying myself Nintendo's brand new, and already more successful than Wii U, hybrid console, the Nintendo Switch, tomorrow. I don't plan to do much gaming any more - maybe writing all this nonsense was a way to get it down and out of my head - but when I do game, I'd like to do it on Switch, with a company for whom that magical flame we all hold in childhood has not altogether been extinguished.

My eyes have gone funny now. It's way too late, once again. But I think I'm done with this. Hurrah. See you tomorrow.

Day 88: Gestures

Carrying right along from yesterday, then.

The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 had achieved a kind of parity. None of this for Nintendo, however. They had looked at the state of the industry, including what had happened to their once most dangerous competitors Sega, and had decided there wasn't room in the arena of the games market for three behemoths. On top of this, they saw the arms race for graphical fidelity as costly, and ultimately of less importance to consumers than the need for interesting experiences. And so, not for the first time in their history, they took a crazy gamble.

Their next console was called the Wii. The what? The Wii. You sure? Yes, Nintendo said. It's like "we", like playing together. But the odd spelling makes it independent of any nationality or language. The two lowercase "i"s look like little people stood beside each other. It's nice. Get used to it.

And everyone went "riiiight".

The Wii was laughably underpowered next to the PS3 and 360. In fact it would turn out to be little more than a reskinned Gamecube. It had no movie playback, few multimedia features. And, most radically, it did away with traditional control methods, asking players to instead point "Wiimotes" that looked like baby's first TV remotes at their screens, shaking and swinging and gesturing to perform actions. To play tennis you swung the Wiimote like a racket. To shoot you aimed at the TV and pulled the trigger on the bottom. To fly an aeroplane you held the remote flat and waggled for pitch, roll and yaw. 

It is difficult to state how outlandish this all seemed to the gaming press, and to entrenched gamers, at the time. Ramping up processing power with each console cycle was just what you did. Consumers all now owned 1080p HD displays, surely, and they wanted a games console that could make the most of them. And joypads had been essentially the same for aeons - perhaps waggling a remote would work for little minigames, but you couldn't control any serious game accurately with such a device. It was a gimmick.

Go your own way

It turned out Nintendo didn't care. They were not aiming for the gaming demographic. Their key audience was: everybody else. They took what was, it must be said, very rudimentary motion technology, and an outdated games console, and packaged it together under a clear brand, and made it approachable and friendly and fun.

They advertised to kids who wanted new and novel toys. To families who would crowd around Nan as she tried her hand at virtual bowling on Christmas Day. To housewives who wanted to get in shape with Wii Fit and its accompanying balance board. To dads who could rock out to Guitar Hero. 

In a way that sounds horribly cynical, and there was an element of manipulating new markets. But from the top of the company down Nintendo also genuinely seemed to believe in the concept of using technology, rather than being used by it, to help people live more meaningful lives. They focused on play and connection. On intertwining gaming with the everyday. On games not as a means to zone out, but to become more present. Nintendo argued that videogames were for everyone. The system just had to be non-threatening enough. The technological jargon had to be peeled away. And the price had to be right.

Nail. Head. Hit. With design language cues taken from Apple, and an affordable price point, Nintendo shifted Wiis in their millions. 101.63 million, to be precise, comfortably the best-selling console of the generation.

Yes, the thing was somewhat throwaway, by its very nature. Units were played for holidays, shown off to guests for a few weeks, then left to gather dust. Plastic peripherals were dumped in boxes under beds. Third-parties spewed out a deluge of execrable minigame collections, with tacky motion controls, to be gobbled up by the less discerning mainstream masses (say what you will about gamers and their penchant for dude-shooters, but they're a savvy bunch, and competition has ensured that dude-shooting quality has gone right up. No such luck in the Wii party-game market).

And, yes, speaking as a card-holding gamer, the Wii's more traditional fare, such as Mario Galaxy (sublime), two Zelda titles (the formula beginning to grow long in the tooth, not staying current as was stablemate Mario), Metroid, Mario Kart and Smash Bros. games, the ultra-Japanese, manga-inspired No More Heroes, and cult-classic RPG Xenoblade Chronicles - these games were few and far between, overwhelmed by twee tat like Petz Sports: Dog Playground, and it was tough to look at the blurry textures and blocky worlds, to look down at the silly plastic sticks in your hands, the tangle of wires connecting everything up behind your TV, the mess of "friends codes" needed to play online, and then to look across at Sony and Microsoft, so slick and sensible and futuristic over there, and not sigh heavily.

But then maybe that's all the point. The Wii was not made for me, although it had a few games to keep me quiet. It was made for people who don't know what framerates are, who don't notice a lack of anti-aliasing, or care about native resolution. It was made for people who were just people, and who, Nintendo felt, still deserved to play games. It was an experiment, an experience, an inclusive, riotous laugh, and there is not one thing wrong with that.

- - -

Hmm, and I think that's already enough brain-spewing for today. Maybe I'll go over the Wii's successor, and the current Sony and Microsoft consoles, and the state of the industry, tomorrow, and then talk about why I think the Switch is such a canny, well-positioned console when I get one.

I was planning to do a sort of diary of my time completing my half-finished games before I traded them in for a Switch, but this history of home consoles thing has run on far too long. I have been playing through those games though, promise. And in fact, I'm off to do some more of that now before bed. 

Toodles.

Day 87: Parity

Sooo let's just plough through this gaming history to the present, because I'd like to spend the following remaining days before the big 90 talking through what I've actually been playing of late.

Yesterday I went into the fifth-generation of videogame consoles, Sega's ill-fated Saturn, the epoch-defining Sony PlayStation, and Nintendo's wonderful, if under-supported, Nintendo 64.

Well the next console cycle would again be dominated by Sony. Their PlayStation 2, bolstered by another huge and classic games library, the popularity of titles such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and the machine's DVD video playback feature, would end up as the best selling console of all time, shifting a ludicrous 150 million units.

Nintendo, Sega, and newcomers Microsoft, were left with only scraps to fight over.

Purple blocks

Nintendo's new console the Gamecube saw the company finally moving to disc format - although, scared of potential piracy, Nintendo went with smaller proprietary discs, once again more expensive than the competition, once again appearing overly idiosyncratic. And the machine was a cheap-looking purple box, like a Fisher Price toy, next to Sony's sleek black multimedia device.

The Gamecube was, however, more powerful than the PS2, and though third-party support was predictably lacking, the system was home to excellent games like Metroid Prime and Pikmin, and the now obligatory Mario Kart, Mario Party, and Super Smash Bros.

The main-series Mario game was Super Mario Sunshine, a romp across a tropical island idyll with a new mechanic involving cleaning up oily globs of graffiti with a water gun, its world filled with steel drums and sunset beaches and tranquil coral reefs, although fiddling with the gun, and transforming it into a hover pack with which to glide over gaps and correct mistimed jumps, negated some of the precision and elegance that had been Mario's hallmark for so long.

Water was also the theme of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, a sumptuous adventure set on the high seas, told through a stylised, cartoony aesthetic that was a breath of fresh air at the time, and has ensured its look has aged favourably compared to many of its contemporaries.

Bad dreams

Sega's bet was on its Dreamcast, released earlier than competing consoles, desperate as they were to get back into the fight after the failure of the Saturn. But this made the machine an awkward halfway house, not sufficiently more powerful than older consoles to warrant an upgrade, and underpowered next to the hotly anticipated PlayStation 2.

The Dreamcast struggled to build momentum, and come the launch of the PS2 was swept away, despite featuring a snug collection of beloved titles such as Jet Set Radio, Phantasy Star Online, and Crazy Taxi. With the commercial failure of this console, directly after the Saturn, Sega admitted defeat and bowed out of hardware manufacture, recasting themselves as a game studio who would release future titles on consoles belonging to companies that had once been Sega's rivals.

Testing the waters

The gap left by Sega was stepped into enthusiastically by Microsoft. Desperate to break into the lucrative gaming market, and with the essentially bottomless pockets of Bill Gates to fund them, they set about releasing a console that would utilise their programming interface DirectX. The console would thus initially be known as their "DirectX box", before being shortened to the slightly less egregious Xbox.

It was a gargantuan machine, basically a mini PC, strides ahead technologically than the PS2 and even Gamecube. It had a wildly ungainly controller, it was not pretty, and Microsoft lacked Sony's urbane sense of style, or Nintendo's established line of exclusive games.

But the Xbox had too much money and might behind it to fail. And it did have some great games. Halo was the best first-person shooter on console since Goldeneye (the genre had thrived much more on PC, where keyboard and mouse afforded greater control). Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory put the capabilities of the machine to the test with advanced lighting and shadow techniques. PC ports like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, were well received. And Project Gotham Racing was one of the most stylish racing games of its time.

So while the crown for market share went decidedly to Sony, by the end of the generation Xbox sales had nudged ahead of the Gamecube's, and Microsoft were left with a solid foothold from which to stride into the next cycle.

A close race

The seventh generation would see Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 (yes, nomenclature) trading blows, staying neck-and-neck, while Nintendo removed themselves from the arena and went to find a completely different fight.

In terms of sales, the PS3 and Xbox 360 carved up the traditional gamer market fairly equally between them. The PS3 made early mistakes, coming out too late, costing too much, and making it difficult for studios to develop for it. The 360 had stellar exclusives in Gears of War and Halo 3, it had a more robust online service, better support for indie devs, and it came with the best joypad yet made for 3D games, with superior thumbsticks and trigger buttons compared to Sony's design.

But then on the other hand the PS3 played Blu-ray films out of the box, whereas the 360 required an adaptor to allow it to play HD DVDs, which format within a year or two was dead in the water. And the PS3 still had those big-hitting exclusives like Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo, Uncharted, Little Big Planet, and The Last of Us. And it had the established brand, and consumer good-will built up over a decade.

In the end, which console you bought often came down to which console most of your friends were playing. And for a lot of the biggest games out there - Grand Theft Auto 4 and 5, Red Dead Redemption, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Fallout 3, all the Call of Duties, all the FIFA footballs - there were versions for each system, and the versions were nigh-on identical.

- - -

Aww maaan, it's almost 3am now, and I reaaaally need sleep. I've written the notes for the next stuff, but I just cannot go on. It's the problem with when I open my brain about gaming, all this knowledge that has been rattling around up there pointlessly for years comes spilling out.

I'll bring this story up to date tomorrow, and go into what I've been playing before I buy myself a Nintendo Switch on Thursday.

Ooosh, so late. Niiiiight x

Day 86: Spliffs

Much coffee is required today. I'm not in work, thankfully, but I'm so tired from yesterday. I turned off my alarm at seven and slept until ten, because I'd only had about four hours, and I was destroyed. Not going to be hard on myself. I can focus on how I've failed to get up early this once, and let the word failure reverberate around my skull, or I can think about how I've succeeded five times, and how much better that is than any week in recent memory- and then I can get back to business.

So, I'm talking gaming history. After Nintendo's unassailable reign in the 8-bit era of the NES (the number of bits handled by a console's processor used to be a rough pointer to its overall power, though with modern machines this is mostly meaningless), and after the gruelling fight for dominance between Nintendo and Sega in the 16-bit era of the SNES and Mega Drive, the next console cycle would see the lines of power redrawn dramatically.

A new contender

Nintendo had been developing a CD add-on for their SNES with Sony, but after the relationship between the two companies crumbled Sony refocused their efforts into a standalone console that they would release themselves, termed the PlayStation.

Based on 32-bit architecture, with games running off CD-ROMs, the PlayStation was to be epoch-defining. It was released in Japan at the end of 1994, then a year later in the rest of the world. Nintendo's next console was still a couple of years away, and so it was to Sega, and their new 32-bit system, the Saturn, that Sony initially took the fight.

Sony gained the upper hand even before the PlayStation's US release. They undercut the price of the Saturn by $100. And Sega's problems just ran from there. The Saturn was rushed to market, and had too few games. Its architecture was more complicated to develop for than the PlayStation, and Sega were still pushing 2D games, where Sony had more fully embraced the move to 3D. And on top of this Sega were still putting resources and attention into their existing Mega Drive and its add-ons, confusing consumers, where Sony were free to push one simple message: PlayStation.

Ravers

But there was something more fundamental at work, something that would ultimately seal Sega's fate and kill off the Saturn for good. Sega still saw gaming as appealing to a version of a teenage boy that didn't really exist, the type of surly kid epitomised by Edward Furlong's John Connor in Terminator 2. This was the image that many people pictured when they thought of a gamer.

Sony, however, adroitly judged that the culture was in flux. They saw that many twenty- and thirtysomethings were using their early adulthood as a kind of prolonged adolescence, working jobs they didn't care about and spending their earnings on rave nights, pub sessions, recreational drugs, and, yes, videogames.

Sony went for the jugulars of these disaffected kidults. They sponsored club nights. They brought in electronic acts such as Orbital and the Chemical Brothers to perform on and produce their games' soundtracks. They handed out PlayStation-branded cards at festivals that were perforated along lines to make for slips in which to dispose of chewing gum - or, perhaps, not that Sony knew anything of this, to be rolled into roaches for spliffs.

The quintessential PlayStation gamer was not John Connor, but Simon Pegg's character Tim Bisley from his zeitgeist-capturing sitcom Spaced. Tim would not have looked right playing Nintendo or Sega games. He watched cult horror movies. Read graphic novels. Listened to underground dance music. Went skateboarding. Smoked joints. And when he sat up for marathon gaming sessions to unfurl his brain after taking too much cheap speed, the controller he clutched in his hands belonged to Sony's PlayStation.

The 90s and 00s saw the rise of nerd culture, and nerd identity, as something that tied to, and in some areas even subsumed, other subcultures like those of film buffs, record-collectors, and stoners - and not only were Sony poised to capitalise on this, they even had an instrumental hand in its development.

The PlayStation was home to an enormous library of diverse titles like the horror-themed Resident Evil, the fighting game Tekken, car-based Ridge Racer, RPG-to-rule-them-all Final Fantasy VII, crime-em-up Grand Theft Auto, rhythm-music game PaRappa the Rapper, and temples-n-tits extravaganza Tomb Raider, starring the perpetually back-strained Lara Croft. Sony had created an institution, and with each of their consoles since they have done little to deviate from the strategy implemented by the first PlayStation.

Yet, as I said before, I was always more of a Nintendo kid. The Nintendo 64, apparently twice as powerful as the 32-bit PlayStation, launched in Japan midway through 1996, and then over here in March 1997.

To the moon and back

In many ways Nintendo made more mistakes with the hardware than Sega. It was an esoteric machine, again difficult for developers to get to grips with. The external design was clunky and cheap and toy-like. Nintendo stuck with the more expensive cartridge format for game storage, when the rest of the industry was moving to CDs. Carts had the advantage of almost non-existent loading times (original PlayStation owners will remember the uniquitous creaking door animations that masked the loading of the next room every time you opened a door in Resident Evil), but CDs could hold far more image and audio data. PlayStation games had full voice-acting, and lavish pre-rendered backdrops, where N64 games had to resort to horribly compressed audio, and more basic textures that were rendered on-the-fly by the machine. And Nintendo still charged exorbitant licensing fees to studios, which forced up the costs of the games even further, and didn't exactly incentivise developers to jump ship from Sony.

But Nintendo did have that 64-bit processor, more powerful, as they liked to proclaim, than the computer that sent man to the moon. And they did have Shigeru Miyamoto. And they did had Mario.

One reason the N64 launched so late, in fact, was so that Miyamoto and his team could take another year perfecting Super Mario 64. And the system's controller, with its central joystick, had been built with Mario in mind.

The wait was worth it. Few developers understood how to make games work in 3D before Mario 64. Few, to be honest, have got it as right since. Mario 64 was a marvel to see running, and it was more of a marvel to play. I remember seeing a display cabinet connected to the game in Beatties model shop when I was in town with my mum, then standing in frozen awe in front of this new devilry while my mum left to do the shopping, returned, and finally had to drag me away. I was 26 at the time. I wasn't. I was 11 or something. 

The N64 was the first home console I owned new. The first time I had been involved during the period when games were being released, when the future of the machine wasn't set, when you could buy games magazines and read the previews and dream about what the upcoming games would be like. It was magical.

Chief among the objects of my dreams was the new Zelda. I'd scour every issue of N64 magazine for more news of when it was coming, what it would be like. I'd stare into blurry screenshots printed on the pages and imagine the adventures that awaited me.

Finally, in Christmas 1998, it arrived, and translated the formula of past Zelda titles into 3D as successfully as Mario 64 had done with the platformer. Subtitled Ocarina of Time, its world of sweeping vistas and tranquil towns and ancient dungeons felt so vivid, so dynamic, so alive. It might still be my favourite ever videogame.

Bop the world

Sony sold three times as many consoles in this era as Nintendo, had a games library nearly ten times the size, and helped define what it meant to be a gamer for years to come. Yet the N64 was an important system. It showed the world more confidently than any of its competition how 3D games should be made. It was the home of multiplayer, with four controller ports to the PlayStation's two, and great four-player games like Rare's Goldeneye 007, one of the slickest and most solid first-person shooters of all time, and Nintendo's own Lylat Wars, Mario Kart, Mario Party, and Super Smash Bros.

But more than this, what Nintendo at their best could do was appeal to something fundamental inside us. PlayStation was for adults, sure, hip and sophisticated, but the N64, when they got it right, was for that part of us that exists before sophistication, that part that looks out at the world with fresh eyes of wonder and joy.

The pleasure of playing Mario 64 was the pleasure of being a child, or maybe a Zen master, delighting in things for being precisely what they are. Run through the grass. Leap over the blocks. Head down, arms out, charging forwards. Everything is worth clambering on, poking, twisting, pulling. Bop the world, for the sheer sake of it. We're all going to die. Before then: have fun.

We all have this person deep inside us, and it is to this person that Nintendo, more than any game studio, is able to speak. There should always be enough space inside us to appreciate the inherent glee of the universe. There should always be space for Nintendo.

Day 85: War!

Mangmangmang. That's the noise you make when you've been up since seven writing and walking to town and working a crazy Tramlines Saturday shift and walking home and eating soup for tea and nodding off at your desk and then desperately trying to get a blog on the history of videogames done before you pass out.

I'm seriously too tired to write properly, but I'll do what I can do.

Where were we? Umm. The NES had taken over the world and Nintendo had brought the gaming industry back from the brink of collapse, thanks to some canny marketing and the talents of their wonderful designers, among them the young Shigeru Miyamoto, inventor of Mario and Donkey Kong.

Heyday

So. The NES continued its reign through the late 80s. Super Mario Bros. 3 (the second had been a naff re-skinning of an unrelated title) was a reinforcement and amplification of everything that had made the first unique, with chunkier and more vibrant pixel art, expansive level design, varied enemies and power-ups, and a world map that you traversed between levels, further grounding the sense of journey and belonging.

Then the Legend of Zelda was for the thrill of exploration what Mario had been for the thrill of movement: a capturing of its essence in gaming form. You played as an unassuming lad named Link - it always elicits a sigh and rolling of the eyes when an outsider refers to the playable character of the series as Zelda: the protagonist is Link; Zelda is the princess. As Link you explored labyrinths and collected items and battled monsters. The game was an example of a style of game called role-playing games, or RPGs - although Zelda was iconoclastic enough, like most Nintendo output, to transcend genre. (If you want an RPG on the NES bound by the tropes of the genre, then look to Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest or Mother.)

So going into the 90s Nintendo were untouchable. There was competition from other consoles, Sega's Master System and a couple of machines from Atari, but these were but flies that the NES laughed and swatted away. They had the market wrapped up tight. But they were also developing an arrogance they have ever since struggled to shake off.

Developers had to pay an expensive licensing fee for the privilege of releasing their games on the NES, and Nintendo forced draconian restrictions upon them, such as only allowing each developer to release three games per year. As I've said, these moves were designed to keep a deluge of low-quality software from drowning customers in choice, but it rankled developers nonetheless, though there was little they could do about it.

War!

But then came Sega's new console, their Mega Drive (known as the Genesis in the US). It was decidedly more powerful than the NES, and managed to steal both developers and players from Nintendo. Sega's approach was to release arcade-style games - meaning games originally designed for the cut-throat arcades, where peacocking cabinets all vied for attention and the goal was to wow players upfront, usually with action-oriented gameplay and impressive visuals, to convince them to part with their coins in a pay-per-game format, as opposed to the more slow-burn, measured approach that was afforded on home consoles where the player had already paid and attention was guaranteed.

The NES had been moving away from arcade experiences, but Sega focused heavily on the fast and frenetic approach, as well as marketing themselves as the "cool" choice for sullen teens, going so far as to mock Nintendo's family-friendly image. Nintendo were careful to censor violence on their console, acting as moral arbiters, but Sega were more relaxed, claiming to have more of an adult focus ("adult", of course, as it has done throughout gaming's history, really meaning "for 13-year-old boys").

The Mega Drive did strong business in the US and Europe. Then Nintendo responded with their successor to the NES, the Super NES, or SNES, a year after the Mega Drive had been released. Competition between these two comparable systems through the first half of the 90s would come to be known as the "console wars", a paradigm that has stuck, and been repeated, with a revolving collection of companies, through every console cycle since.

The Mega Drive had the violence and the visceral allure, and it had Sega's new mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog - a spiky-haired spinning blue hedgehog who starred in games that played like Mario platformers on amphetamines.

But Nintendo had the portly plumber himself, who didn't need to speak in precision-engineered teen parlance or wear Michael Jackson-like trainers to win over fans, because he had Super Mario World, one of the greatest games ever made. Mind you, the Sonic games were pretty great as well. But Nintendo had Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Mario Kart, and F Zero, and Star Fox. But Sega had a line of sports games, and shooting games, and thrilling arcade ports, and a much larger pool of available titles in general.

It was a close thing. For my part in the war, I mostly played an independent observer. My parents had always had zero interest in games, we didn't own a PC until we got my grandma's old one years later, and there was never enough money at Christmas or on birthdays to pay for something as extravagant as a home console. Most of my friends had Mega Drives, and I would spend all my available time in their bedrooms playing them. But a few friends had Nintendo systems, and I was more drawn to the worlds of Mario and Zelda and Star Fox, often only from snatched glimpses of gameplay, or even from pouring over instruction manuals sat leaning against beds while the friends collected together all their toys so we could make our action figures fight each other in the garden all afternoon. I felt an affinity with Nintendo, I guess, that I didn't with Sega. I was always more excited by the gestalt experiences and aesthetics of games than the actual skill structures - even now I'll drive up high in GTA and stand looking out at the city spread far below me in preference to beating my high score or winning shootouts online or whatever - and in this regard Nintendo were always the company for me.

I can't tell what words are coming out of my brain anymore, so I need to stop, and I'll continue tomorrow - wherein we'll see how a soured deal over a CD add-on for the SNES led to a complete upheaval in the power-structure of the industry, because the company developing this add-on was Sony, and, spurned by Nintendo, they would take their product away and turn it into their own competing console by the name of the PlayStation...

Day 84: Plumbers

I'm just going to continue waffling about games here, because I started yesterday and it's all in my head now and I want to get it out. Feel absolutely free to tune out for a few posts, if you want.

So yesterday I was talking about the birth of videogames, and how the gaming industry boomed in the 70s and early 80s, and then crashed monumentally. The industry by 1985 was like that newly-hatched monster at the end of Studio Ghibli's film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind: an enormous beast rearing up to take over the world, but not being able to support its own weight, and collapsing back into itself.

Maybe that image is in my head because it was Nintendo, a company very like Studio Ghibli in its focus on the importance of childlike wonder, that would emerge during this period of turmoil to nurture gaming's nascent form and ultimately transform it into the shape in which it still exists to this day.

Great ape

Nintendo had started life as a trading card company in the late 1800s, transitioning into a toy manufacturer in the 1960s, and by the 70s were focusing on the burgeoning arcade gaming scene.

They achieved some success with arcade games in Japan, but America proved a tougher nut to crack, and by 1981 they were stuck with a heap of arcade cabinets for their mediocre shooter Radar Scope that they were unable to sell, and were teetering on the verge of financial collapse. Their president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, tasked a young apprentice designer with converting the wasted Radar Scope cabinets into a new game. That young designer's name was Shigeru Miyamoto, and the game he rapidly came up with was called Donkey Kong.

One of the earliest platform games (a genre involving running and jumping between platforms), Donkey Kong was an immediate and sensational success, and helped reverse the fortunes of the ailing Nintendo. It also introduced the world to its protagonist, a portly Italian carpenter named Jumpman. You might know him, however, by his name in the American translation: Mario. He would go on to become the most recognisable videogame character in the world, and the face of the industry for decades to come.

Nintendo, harnessing the game design genius of Miyamoto, continued to find success in the arcades, through sequels to Donkey Kong, and then a two-player game involved Mario, now a plumber, and his brother Luigi, leaping about the sewers of New York jumping on the heads of turtles and crabs. This game was called Mario Bros.

Entertainment systems

Buoyed by profits from these titles, it was to the home console market that Nintendo now turned. They released their Family Computer, or Famicom, in Japan in 1983. It included ports of their arcade hits, and sold well. But then the North American videogame market crashed, and the industry appeared doomed.

Nintendo, however, simply refused to let this happen. Retailers in the US were loathe to stock consoles on their shelves, believing they wouldn't sell, so Nintendo redesigned the Famicom into a Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES for short, threw in a light-gun and toy robot peripheral, and convinced retailers that this all made for a product sufficiently removed from the consoles that had gone before. Not even a console, in fact, but an "entertainment system". The wave of the future.

And where a glut of knock-off, low-quality games had flooded the market and confused consumers of the earlier consoles, Nintendo set in place a practice, since becoming commonplace, of licensing third-parties to produce games for their system. They stamped these games with their "seal of quality", minimising choice while maintaining worth.

And lastly, bundled with the NES, they gave away Miyamoto's follow-up to Mario Bros. This new game was something not available in the arcades, taking the platforming concept and expanding it into a continuous adventure from left to right, a journey, through varied, interesting levels, with power-ups and collectables and hidden areas. They called the game Super Mario Bros., and it was nothing short of a revelation.

It brought together previous concepts and theories and encapsulated them, galvanised them, into something greater than had ever gone before, with elegant game design, perfectly precise controls, but also a focus on character, narrative, and structure. Mario's new world, the Mushroom Kingdom, was a place surreal yet strangely archetypal. Goombas, Koopa turtles, fire flowers, warp pipes - it was as if this stuff had arrived fully formed, from some other dimension; as if it had, somehow, always existed. You could plonk your friend, your neighbour, your nan, down in front of Super Mario Bros., and they would all instinctively and instantly get it. They would understand what they had to do, and why they had to do it, and they would love it.

Thanks to Nintendo, and Mario, and Miyamoto, videogames had finally arrived.

Day 83: Games

Oh boy, did I not want to get out of bed this morning! Or didn't I not want to get out of bed this morning? Or didn't I not want to not get out of bed this morning? Maybe I misspoke just now. Who's to know?

That's a jab at the lord mayor of Trumpton, Donald McRonald Trump, in case you didn't know. Highly politicised with the lampooning, me.

But yes. I didn't want to get out of bed this morning. I've been putting my phone on the far side of my room the last few days to ensure I'll get up when the alarm goes off, and I was literally crawling on my hands and knees to the thing today. It was like crawling up through hell, shadowy sepulchral arms grasping at my legs and pulling me back.

But I made it, and get this: now I have coffee. Fresh, strong coffee. I must have crawled all the way to heaven. A heaven that trades at hegemonically-determined prices with the poverty-stricken farmers of Latin America, but heaven nonetheless.

Anyway. Day 83. One week to go! Or was that yesterday? Or tomorrow? I don't know how numbers work. Drrrrr. 90 minus 83, carry the two, multiply out the brackets...

The seventh day from today, not including today as one of those days, will be the 90th day. Big times.

I'm going to buy myself a Nintendo Switch to celebrate. I know I was talking about Ivan Denisoviching the shit out of my life yesterday, but I love videogames, I've wanted a Switch since they came out, and I've been using the promise of one as a carrot to coax me all the way through this challenge - a carrot that is now so very, tantalisingly close. Mmmm. Carrot.

I have to play the games I own first, though. That's the deal. I've got a Wii U, Nintendo's previous console, and I want to finish my games on that system before I get a Switch so that, A) I can feel like I've got my worth from them and I deserve an upgrade, rather than simply buying the Switch for its novelty and then throwing it into the giant pile of shame with all the other games I haven't finished once that novelty wears off - and, 2) So I can sell my Wii U to my flatmate guilt-free and recoup a chunk of money for the Switch.

So now I'm going to bang on about videogames for a few posts. Writing about what I'm playing will be a good way to create more accountability to help me see the games through - blogging always helps with accountability - and also I've barely written about games since I stopped doing the gaming blog I used to write years ago, and going back sounds like fun.

Let's start with some history:

In the beginning...

Back when I was the same size as my kitchen counter everyone at school was either a Nintendo kid or a Sega kid. You either owned a SNES, a Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or a Sega Mega Drive. No one had both. It was a true dichotomy; the lines were ideologically divided, and completely non-permeable.

... Though, hang on. Perhaps you're staring at me right now, blinking rapidly, trying to stop your brain turning to soup. If so, let's back up even more.

Even more in the beginning...

For as long as there have been computers, there have been people finding ways to manipulate them into playing games. This is because games humanise technology, they help showcase it, because humans are playful beings by nature, and the universe itself in essence is a state of play. And it's also because computer scientists like to do goofy things on their lunch breaks.

Early games like Tennis for Two and Spacewar! (these names don't get any better) were built onto specific computers - huge, hulking machines with their own displays - and controlled via switches on the cabinets.

As the popularity of games grew, companies began to develop dedicated gaming computers that could plug into your television, with joypads for controlling the action. The home gaming console was born. These devices at first came with one or a couple of games programmed into them, though later systems would allow games to be individually loaded via tapes, floppies, and cartridges, and even later CDs and DVDs, and so on.

During these first embryonic years arcade cabinets, featuring a single game, set up in pubs or rec rooms, dominated the market. But home consoles were gaining in popularity. Simple handheld devices also emerged. And later, when PCs began to be found in every home, people started playing games on these as well. Videogames were spreading like wildfire, or a particularly nasty fungus. Anywhere you could put a computer board, someone would find a way to run Pong off it.

And then, in 1977, the market crashed. The ubiquity of all these Pong clones saturated the market, and bored players. The bottom fell out of the industry. But it recovered quickly, and, by the early 80s, thanks to new games like Space Invaders and Pac Man, more revenue was being earned by videogames than by both pop music and Hollywood movies combined.

But, once again, by 1983 a surplus of near-identical machines playing near-identical games had flooded the market, and North America saw another enormous crash. Personal computers were beginning to take off, and there were too many consoles, and too many low-quality games, available. Retailers didn't have space to stock the stuff, and consumers didn't have the motivation or money to buy it. Many companies folded. Atari, one of the most successful developers of the time, infamously ended up burying 700,000 copies of their E.T. tie-in game that they couldn't sell in a landfill in the desert of New Mexico.

The concept of the home console was dead in the water. Analysts predicted that videogames were a fad, and one which had now reached its end. I almost grew up to be a long-distance runner or a tree surgeon.

And then along came a little Japanese company called Nintendo...

Day 82: Passion

Bleary bus ride at 07:20 down into the belly of the city, arriving at work to a delivery of Tramlines barrels to be squeezed into a cellar too small for them to fit. Hauling casks out of the lift, chipping concrete from the floor, sweating, swearing. Making space where there was no space. Stomach churning. Shirt sodden. Then eight hours doing laps of the bar, trying to stave off boredom, trying to find a rhythm in the monotony. To make the same phrases repeated to the same customers somehow fresh. To see out of eyes that haven't gone all the way dark. To feel that spark of the sublime still flickering, low, low, underneath all things.

You scrape the clay from the inside of the glasswash, because it needs doing. Pull coffee beans and hair and stringy filth from the glasswash jet arms. Write a note on a stack of cider bottles upstairs to not use them, to use the older ones first, because you know what people are like. Take the bibs from inside empty syrup boxes and break down the cardboard properly, so more will fit in the recycling. Trade cappuccinos with the chef for a cheaper lunch, because you don't have the money to eat it full price.

The mundane has dimensions, weight, and it can be handled - slowly, with patience, one moment at a time. Routine can be hellish or it can be acceptable. Depends where you focus your attention. Ask Ivan Denisovich. He knows.

Then limping back up the hill, homeward, legs gone, but saving the vital two pounds for the bus - a fortune - because I paid in the morning, and I can't afford twice in one day. Missing the cinema and overpriced sweetened snacks with Arron and Pat, missing craft beers and old fashioneds and shots. Not feeling I'm truly missing anything, apart from the company of my friends. I've tried to assuage my soul's suffering with instant pleasures for too long. So now I trudge home and save my handful of pennies and eat leftovers for tea, and I give myself to words, to sighing evenings of work, to dedication to a thing that is very far off but stretches from this point and can perhaps be felt even now. Not filling myself up anymore but emptying myself out, over and over, until all that is left is space.

While putting out the beer garden this morning Pat and Sam were discussing how kids all aspire to be Instagram models and Youtubers these days. I said that in fairness the ones who make it are singularly driven and dedicated and work so hard, because there are so many of them fighting to stand in that sliver of sunlight we call fame that you have to be tireless to succeed. But I ventured that it's a shame all those children don't feel the same drive to learn to play music or make art as they do to take pictures of their faces for social media.

Pat said yes, but obviously there is money and attention in Instagram, and you could play music for all your life and get nowhere.

And I was reminded of something I'd recently read in an Elizabeth Gilbert book. Gilbert said she was friends with an aspiring musician whose sister once asked this musician what would happen if she never got famous, if she pursued her passion forever and never found success.

The friend's response was this: "If you can't see what I'm already getting out of this, then I'll never be able to explain it to you."

When it's love, the work is enough. You're already here.

Day 81: Speaks

Iya. Turns out it's easy to get up at seven in the morning. You just need to have a training session you're giving at work later that day to be awake for already and worrying about.

By the time my alarm went off I'd been sat up in bed for half an hour running through my presentation in my head. It was only some basic beer training for the staff, going over some fundamentals that I thought they should know, but still, I was feeling stressed about it.

I abhor public speaking. I spent ten years of my life growing up with really severe acne. My skin is still not good. I do not like the spotlight being on me in social situations. Even just in conversations with one other person I've been known to get sweaty and nervous when I sense attention shifting towards me. Having a group of people all focusing on me is my idea of absolute hell. It makes me want to crawl up inside myself and disappear.

But I knew I had to give this training session. I knew it wasn't objectively a big deal. So I tried to be as prepared as I could be in the time I had. I made sure I was solid on all the points I was talking about. I ran over the presentation again and again, muttered it to myself while changing barrels in the cellar, practised key parts over lunch. And in the end it all went fine. Yeah, I was nervous to begin with, but I settled into it, and I think I managed to teach a few things, and hopefully the staff had fun. They certainly didn't seem to hold the same opinions as the negative voices in my head, which like to tell me how pathetic and worthless I am every step of the way.

So it was good. And it was another test that I have faced down and made it through while completely sober. I wanted a slug of whisky so badly before starting, that moment when the staff began traipsing in and I realised I was going to have to actually do it, and I thought of my opening and how unfunny and lame it was and how I'd made the whole thing too esoteric and how I was going to lose my words and trail off and blush and spontaneously wee myself and cry in front of everyone. I really wanted some whisky right at that moment.

But I didn't have any. And in the end I didn't need any. Chalk public speaking up as one more occasion where being sober isn't just possible, but perhaps even preferable. I was present for the whole thing, alert, and I'm not going to wake up tomorrow with a hangover.

But I am going to wake up tomorrow. And I am going to wake up early (for me), and go to work, so for now I will leave this here, and bid you good night.

Good night, lovely people, and take care.

Day 80: Sleeps

Heya cherubs. I've been doing so well with the blogging for these 80 days. So well with staying sober. But one aspect of self-improvement that has fallen somewhat by the wayside of late has been my sleeping pattern. I've slid back into the old routine of staying up till 3 or 4 in the morning (often admittedly to finish the blog post I didn't get time to write during the day), and then sleeping in until midday, getting up finally feeling groggy and lethargic and low, and beginning the process anew.

Which is fine. There's no point getting down on myself. I've been fighting a full-blown war against myself, against my mental health, on multiple fronts for 80 days now, and it's natural that some of those fronts will have been forgotten in the greater chaos.

But now I think is the time to rally my troops and refocus my efforts on these failing battlefields.

Also, somehow I've got away with a full week of opens at work, so I should really take the opportunity to get my body clock back in healthy sync now, while it makes sense for my shifts, while I can.

So I'm going to set myself the challenge of getting up no later than 7am, every day for a week, and see how that goes.

I'll keep you posted with the results. Probably over many, many coffees.

... I would write more now, but it looks like it's about bedtime. Eesh. This is going to be harder than I thought.

See you tomorrow. Night night!

Day 79: Stones

I'm struggling to write at the moment. All my words look revolting and gross. The sentences tumble out disjointed, banal. Or else don't come at all.

I'm hunkered down in my room with Fran. We've been watching the 100, daft formulaic TV. We want noise, commotion, colour, we want plot twists and betrayals and melodrama. We want tropes we understand. Our brains stimulated, but not overworked. Surprises, but only ones that are expected.

Gentle morning earlier with Fran's sister and her partner, seeing their new flat, holding their rabbit, soft as cloud, feeling the skull curving underneath. And then to a cafe for breakfast and coffee, the sun filtering through the tall windows, the wooden tables painted pastel green.

Walking to town through the sleepy streets of Nether Edge, the stone houses bathed in sunlight, the pavements shaded by old gnarled trees.

Falafel wraps with homemade tzatziki for tea, then television loud enough to drown out bad thinking. Fran is having a very hard time, though it is not my place to say.

So we sit watching dumb shows and we eat black cherries from the packet and we spit the stones and stalks onto a dirty plate. We pull down the blinds, we turn up the volume, and we lie back in our little den.

The night passes.

Day 78

At Fran's looking after her. Not sure how much good I'm doing. She's asleep beside me now. Her fan is sweeping the room left to right, right to left. It pauses for the barest of moments half way, stuck, then pushes over the hump and continues on its way. Every time it looks like it won't make it, but every time it does.

Both windows are wide. The night is hot. Outside a solitary car passes on Abbeydale Road, then another, then a truck making late night deliveries. The streetlamp casts a ghostly glow over the surrounding leaves. The world is quiet.

Nothing to say tonight. No words in my head. I'm going to go get some sleep, see what tomorrow brings.

Sorry there's no more, but there's this. I came here for this at least. I'll see you tomorrow. Good night.

Day 77: Fissures

Wait, where am I? What year is this? I remember only a blinding light, a rushing sensation - and pain, indescribable pain. Hold on... Yes, it's... coming back to me. I have journeyed here from the future. My lifeforce ebbs away. Travelling back enacted a great price. I have only minutes before my mind and body crumble. I have been sent to warn you. That thing you are about to do. Do not do it. Please. Do not do it. In the future from which I was sent you doing the thing you are about to do sets in place a chain of events that culminates in a great and terrible tragedy a year from now. But if you act immediately you can change the timeline. My world will cease to exist, but the universal horror that was unleashed will be reversed. My people's lives are but a small price to pay to prevent the darkness, the bloodshed. I only give thanks that I was able to arrive here, in the year 2017, to tell you these things. You do not have much time, but you have some time. You must-

-What's that? It is the year 2018? Oh, no. Oh, God, no. The machine must have malfunctioned. It is too late. The evil cannot be undone. The cracks open even now. The fissures spew forth their agents of torment. The horror begi-- Oh, Christ. I feel myself fading. Oh, it hurts. Ohhhh how it hur...

...

...

Hey there. That's just the introduction I've been doing every post for a while now, as I'm sure you're aware. It's weird, I know, but it's my thing. I like it.

Anyway.

Wet streets outside my window. The smell of rain. Away down the hill, over the rooftops, the nightclub's solitary searchlight clawing at the sky.

I was useless at work today. I was so tired. I snoozed as long as possible this morning, eventually rolled over in a daze and wrenched myself up, my hamstrings tight and throbbing, stood in the shower, somehow made the bus, somehow got to work.

I guess it's nice to be like this though because I'm pushing myself, because I'm holding down a job and blogging daily and trying to maintain the bare bones of a social life, rather than because I'm drunk constantly, or because my mental health is bad.

I mean, my mental health hasn't been great. I've been feeling a bit blank of late, a bit empty. Like I go down to the well of creativity and find the well has an inch of turbid water on the bottom with a decomposing rat floating on the surface, as I think that saying goes.

But it's important, I reckon, to work on separating reality from my opinions about reality. Being tired is not suffering. Going through a trough on the necessarily undulating ocean of creativity is not suffering. Feeling blank, even, is not suffering, if that is what reality truly brings.

It is the thoughts about these things not being right, not being fair, being somehow a sign of my weakness or lack of ability or unsuitability for writing that is the suffering. And I can't do anything about the essential tiredness or the ebb and flow of inspiration or whatever life brings, but I can do something about my opinions about these things.

Not that I can stop them once the thoughts have arisen. And getting worked up about them is just more suffering. They are just more of that essential reality to be accepted, to not be clung to. But it is worth getting used to sensing them, their shape, their taste, their specific emotional valence, and when I notice them arising to remind myself that they are not truth, but value judgements placed on truth.

There is what happens. And there is what you think about what happens. And the two are not the same.

So all is as it should be, then. I've got to go pass out now, and rest up for another day of it tomorrow, but that's where I'm at. All is as it should be. All is good, and bad, and everything in between - and that, it turns out, is all good.

Take care x

Day 76: Sugar water

Oh hey. Hey you. Check you out. Looking so fine. Those delicate legs. That soft skin. Your cracked and leathery wings unfurling from behind. Those mottled cloven hooves pawing at the ground. Those threshing tentacles glistening in the moonlight. You don't know what you're doing to me. Ooh. Ooh yeah.

Right, now that my regular introduction, which I do every post, is out of the way, we can begin...

I've been asleep. I couldn't keep my eyes open when I got back from Missy's birthday. Could not do it. Four hours sleep and then a bar shift and then socialising all evening is not conducive to writing a blog post.

But it was a happy night. I met Fran off a sweltering rush-hour bus and we walked up to Missy and Jake's together. Missy was inside with their new puppy, Hagrid, making sure he wasn't overwhelmed by all the people. Jake and the boys were lolling in the garden. One of our friends, who struggles to sleep and suffers night terrors, was passed out on the lawn. Jake said that the friend often comes round to snooze, and I wasn't surprised: there is something about Missy and Jake's that puts you at ease. I could have gone for some of those sweet, sweet zees myself. Or, as we call them over here, those sweet, sweet zeds.

We found what we thought was an exhausted bee in the grass so we tried to coax it back to life with sugar water, and left a shot of the stuff beside our sleeping friend for good measure. Turned out the bee wasn't exhausted, but dead, which is more difficult to heal with sugar water, although our friend did eventually come around.

We lazed in the last of the sun and chatted. I talked with Cieran about filmmaking and Caspar Noé and Brechtian drama, most of which was Cieran, and about the indie horror It Follows, which I eruditely described as "kind of about death, sort of." I'm great at film criticism.

I got talking to Missy's friend Tom, who I've not spoken to much before, and he suggested a study of everyday life in Britain that's been running since the '50s that I might be interested in, and we made friends on Facebook, and he sent me a link to a cool looking podcast. I like Tom.

And Missy kept wringing her hands asking everyone if they were having a good time, saying she was too anxious to enjoy her birthday because she was worried we weren't having a good time. Were we having a good time? How were we feeling?

I said that I was feeling a bit badgered, to be honest, with all these questions as to whether I was having a good time or not. Completely ruining my night, truth be told.

Ohhhhh, Missy said.

Then she had a bucks fizz and got drunk and became sassy, for a change.

I sat with Jake and talked about games consoles that were, games consoles that are, and some games consoles that have not yet come to pass. And other things. But mostly video games.

And it was all nice. I didn't drink. I came home at 10:30 p.m. I felt a touch of social awkwardness here and there, as is my wont, but I didn't let it spoil my night. And I didn't turn to alcohol to mask it and end up ruining my day tomorrow.

Speaking of which, I really need to go back to bed and get some sleep before my shift. If you're up before me, just leave a sugar water by my pillow. I'll be up and buzzing again in no time.

Ta ra x

Day 75: Stroopwafel

Heya hotpots, it's ya best bizzle Robbie Pizzle here, delivering you the hottest in news, reviews, and ghost ship sightings. Stay tuned for all your ghost ship related chat, right here on this little show I like to call "The Internet".

There, now I've done my regular introduction, which I do every post, it's time to get down to business.

Oh, that's a lie, I don't have any business. I've got nothing today. Absolutely zilch. I was up at 8am to walk to town for a staff meeting, then I went to a coffee shop to hang out and stroke my beard and peruse the New York Times, and to try to concentrate on a bit of writing. That didn't work, so I walked the 40 minutes back up the hill for a nap, then I walked back down for my shift, watched football not come home -- I think it's like a timid cat that got scared off from us all shouting it -- then I got back 20 minutes ago, and I'm back up in five hours to be at work for the delivery in the morning.

I mean, I swapped shifts with Zoe so I'd be off tomorrow evening for a friend's birthday, so I'm not complaining, I'm just saying to you that if you want the reason there's no substance in this post, then that's it.

Umm... OK. Let's do some writing. About...? Drrrr... Ghost ships? No. Yes? Yep. Ghost ships. That's all I've got. It's ghost ships all the way down. What about ghost ships, you ask? Erm. Well. There's... a meeting of ghost ships. Once every six-hundred-and-sixty-six years, when the tide is low and a red moon hangs motionless in the night sky. The spectral vessels drop anchor around a hidden cove on a forgotten island in seas off South America, and if the wind is blowing in just the right way, and the crashing of the waves against the rocks calms at just the right instant, the sound of shrill voices might perhaps carry on the breeze into one's waiting ears...

"Call that a ghost ship? More like a ghost rowing boat, you ask me!"

"Whatever. Which are you from? The Caleuche? Sounds like a particularly violent sneeze."

"Do not besmirch our lady's good name. The Caleuche--"

"--Bless you."

"I am warning you. Our vessel is an ancient and sentient being, crewed by the drowned and the lost, doomed to forever sail the Chilean oceans on her macabre mission. She bewitches sailors. She is captained by mermaids and warlocks. All who gaze upon her know the face of death. She is no mere ship. Do not take the name of Caleuche--"

"--Bless you."

"That is really incredibly irritating."

"Look, how about we all just cool off and..."

"Oh, go boil your barnacles! You bloody Mary Celeste lot, always playing the peacemakers. No one cares about your stupid pansy-named ship, and no one cares about you, pansies!"

"Hey, it's the 21st Century. There's nothing wrong with a ghost ship being in touch with its feminine side, if it so wishes."

"Oh, sorry. I thought it was still 1352. Which ship are you from?"

"Ahem. The, umm, Lady Lovibond."

"Figures."

"And there's nothing wrong with that!"

"Heeeey guys! What is, how do you say, ooop?"

"Oh, no."

"Oh, no."

"Oh, no."

"Yaaaah! It is us, the crew of the Flying Dutchman. You know, the most famous ghost ship in all of the world! Sorry we're late. We were just picking up royalty checks from Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Productions. Have you heard of them? They're rather popular, it turns out. It's actually hard work, you know, being this well renowned."

"Salty Satan, who invited these chodes again? I thought after last time we were going to tell them the wrong meeting place or something."

"Anyone fancy a stroopwafel? Or maybe some weed? I have so much of it, I can't smoke it all myself. I'm so baked right now."

"They're really not doing anything for the stereotypes, are they?"

More is surely said. More ghoulish schemes are surely hatched. More nefarious plots are surely plotted. But at this point the wind chooses to whip up. The pounding of the ocean intensifies. And any further conversation, if further conversation exists, is lost to the ceaseless thrashing of the waves.

And the waves keep their secrets.

The watery bastards.

Good night.