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There Are No Rules, Only Preference

I like to imagine that when opium use was mainstream and there were opium dens across the land, that there were specialty, niche opium dens where the staff lamented the quality of the bog standard dens where patrons didn’t care about anything except where to get their high.

“We do opium right” they might say, implying that everywhere else was doing it wrong. They would meet up and tell stories about customers who wanted their opium a certain way but used the wrong nomenclature, the fools!

This is a metaphor for coffee shops, if you can’t tell.

I don’t really want to get into the whole “coffee is a drug” debate because that will open a whole bunch of doors about drug use and how maybe drugs are totally fine, it’s the legality and secrecy that drives people to crime and bad behaviour and I’ve already said too much on the topic.

I’m not suggesting that society will look back on our use of coffee as a “bad thing” or even make a procedural detective program where the main anti-hero casually uses coffee much to the chagrin of their professional partner and clients.

No, the opium metaphor was merely a light hearted joke, as I’m sure you can appreciate. Opium hipsters, that’s funny, isn’t it? That’s all I wanted those two paragraphs to be, before I moved on to talk about coffee, but I’ve dug myself into a whole here with wanton use of imagery, and I’m struggling to get out of it (like the cycle of drug addiction (oh god, please stop)).

What is a flat white? No one knows. People say they know, and if you go into a coffee shop you can say “one flat white” and get something given to you, but that’s merely language. That’s a shared understanding of what words mean. I can ask you to point to a chair and you can point to a chair, but it’s much harder to describe to me what a “chair” is or what facets of a “chair” you can take away to not make it a chair.

In early 2018 McDonald's ran an advert that changed the face of UK coffee forever. It consisted of various and highly offensive caricatures of flannel wearing coffee shop workers talking about flat whites, and culminated in a patron going into a McDonald's and getting a straight answer of “it’s a stronger latte.” I worked in a coffee shop during this period and over night, people started asking for flat whites.

A large part of me hates that McDonald's advert, portraying those pretentious barista, taking pride in their craft, trying to categorise the myriad ways to steam milk and make espresso. They’re doing it all just to confuse you, to feel superior. What do you mean you don’t know what ristretto is?

The thing is though, the words we have all agreed upon for coffee in the UK are basically gibberish. Before 2018 it was, latte, cappuccino and americano; The Big Three. As words, they don’t intrinsically mean anything. Latte means “milk” because it’s made with milk. Cappuccino is made with milk though, but means something along the lines of “hood” but not because a cappuccino has a “hood” of foam over the espresso but because of the colour and shape of hoods worn by the monks where the drink originated (Germany, not Italy). “Americano” is a very long, drawn out passive aggressive jab from Italians about how Americans are rubes and ruined their coffee by watering it down (being simply espresso and hot water).

A chair is a chair, and a latte is a latte. A chair with three legs is a chair, I guess, and a cappuccino with less foam is a cappuccino I suppose, depending on who you ask.

There’s a joke about how Chicken Tikka Masala doesn’t mean anything and when a survey of UK Indian restaurants was done to try and work out what a “Chicken Tikka Masala” actually was the only shared ingredient was chicken. You can instantly point out the worst kind of snob when they say “umm, actually chicken tikka masala isn’t a real curry.” Yes it is pal, you can order one, you can say the words and someone will make it. You can’t go in and order a “chicken kafumbo talundo.” That’s made up.

As for the flat white, when McDonald’s said “a strong latte” I understand what they were going for, but it muddied the waters. If you added an extra shot to a small latte, you would have a rough approximation, but technically there’s more. It’s these technicalities that get lost on the consumer and it’s that which creates a barrier between the person who wants their coffee fix and is otherwise intimidated by a menu full of latte, macchiato, and cortado. They pick the words they at least know, and “flat white” does at least sound pretty normal, right? It’s not abnormal for someone to say flat white thinking it’s a basic white americano. I’ve had “Who’s on first” moments with customers ordering “two americano, one black, one flat white.”

You’ve also got to remember the kind of person still even watching adverts in 2018. Watching Coronation Street at it’s broadcast time on ITV. Not on demand, not recorded on Sky+, no, actually at the time it says it will be on in the Radio Times. Which is ultimately, who these adverts are for, and why this one was so successful. Having a dig at the younger, trendy types, taking coffee seriously, if you can imagine such a thing. What’s next, you’ll tell me there’s an entire culture of people for whom tea isn’t a tea bag and a kettle? Pish.

So all that being said, I am pretty understanding of things when people say to me “one coffee please” and I say “sure thing. What kind of coffee?” and their eyes glaze over. Those people often want and often get just an americano. Coffee literacy is very, very far down the list of things I expect people to have in a functioning society. There are a few things that annoy me though, of course there are, did you forget whose writing you’re reading right now? Let’s get this section over and done with.

People who ask for their milk based coffees to be “extra hot” or even worse, send their coffees back for being “cold.” Milk is not water. Steamed milk is never going to be as hot as your kettle makes water at home, so expecting your coffee to be as hot as your tea is nonsense. You will either burn the milk, or you will pour scalding milk on to an espresso and ruin it.

People who think they know what’s going on are trouble too. As I’ve tried to explain, no one is expecting you to know what all these words mean, they are basically code. But when you try to blag it by confidently asking for something like “a skinny flat white with an extra shot” you can’t be shocked when your server looks confused. A flat white, among other characteristics, should be a very specific ratio of coffee to full fat milk, which is why there’s only one size of flat white on coffee shop menus.

This is back to the philosophy of language though, because on the one hand I could say to that person “there’s no such drink” as if the coffee machine only works when someone says their strong password of a correct coffee order. On the other hand, I’ll just make them what they want, because ultimately I know what they want from the words they’ve said, even if there’s no Skinny Flat White floating around Plato’s Realm of the Forms.

The truth of the matter is, coffee is not an exact science. Not to the vast majority of people or even coffee establishments. Business have a vested interest in making their patrons think everywhere else is doing it wrong, or that they’ve over complicated it, because in truth, there are no rules, only preference. Coffee is not traditional french cuisine, at least, here in the UK in 2019 it isn’t. It’s fusion cooking, and it’s changing every day. It’s changing faster than the language can permeate through culture.

If you want to “do coffee right” most of that starts well before a shot of espresso even goes near the milk. Adding the milk to the coffee in actuality is a strange place to get hung up on the whole process; there’s a million different decision points before hand where things can go wrong, that ultimately renders being sanctimonious about what we call the ratios of milk to foam to espresso moot. It’s this expertise that your barista is displaying, not simple rote memorization of answers to questions like “what is a flat white?”

But still, fuck these cunts that say “expresso.”

I write very occasionally because even though I enjoy it, no-one reads it. If you did read this and enjoy it, first of all thank you! Please consider letting me know so I can write more things and feel good about it. You can also show your support by buying me a coffee (ha, the irony!) via ko-fi.com/fentonizer!

[fentonizer]

THE SHANEYS SIX STAR PIZZA or “Big Pizza in Little England”

There’s no such thing as a bad pizza, or so the saying goes. I suppose the logic is that pizza, a food consisting of primarily dough, tomatoes, and hot cheese, is impossible to make badly. I can understand the thought there; after all, humans have been making dough since at least the nineteen-nineties, and even then it’s not that difficult. Bung some tomatoes and cheese on there, put it in the oven and boom- like the moon hitting your eye, that’s amore.

I live on pizza. Pizza is fantastic. Every meal that I eat that isn’t a pizza is part of my strict pizza-meal-replacement regiment (doctor’s orders). It’s a millennial thing, you know, along with not really being that fussed about spending the day in a department store, and real-terms wage cuts. When a group of friends and I went away for the night, pizza was on the top of the menu.

We went Champing. This is a portmanteau of the words “church” and “camping.” As a rule, any activity that is a portmanteau is worthy of derision. Moreover, when “camping” is one of the words, it gives off the general vibe that camping is rubbish because people are far too stuck up to debase themselves with tents and mud and disposable barbecues. This is how we got Glamping (glamour camping), no tents, but a hessian yurt, with shower, fridge and gigabit Wi-Fi. You know, the kind of thing that Jo Whiley does when she goes to Glastonbury to maintain the facade that she’s down to earth and relatable (her most recent trick is being on the radio alongside Simon Mayo. Not gonna fly Jo, sorry, we’re on to you).

Champing is not really camping at all, so I don’t know why it’s called that. You sleep in a church, not a tent. They give you each a kind of single bed that you’d more likely see the war-wounded on, and you can bring a duvet. There’s no electricity. There is a portaloo. Glamping is more camping than Champing.

I digress because it’s extremely easy at this point to discount everything that’s going to follow as the mad ramblings of a middle-class, millennial, left-liberal hipster. I mean, I am exactly that, but stay with me here as I tell you my thesis and do not write me off as a yuppie (even if I do have M.E.): this pizza is directly responsible for Brexit.

The church was in Norfolk, specifically the constituency of Broadland which has a population of 128,500 and is 96% White British. 54% of the votes from Broadland were to leave the EU (78% turnout).

Broadland is the pinnacle of Little England, a phrase referencing the idea that England is better off isolated and alone. I’mma a strong, independent country that don’t need no European Union. A sort of reverse manifest destiny, if you like. This is at the core of Brexit, really. The EU makes us do things, they force their rules on us, their immigrants, and we’re not having any of that. England is great, it always was it always will be, we can go it alone. And for these people, I can see why they think that. Everything around there, the small village of Booton where we stayed, and the nearby town of Reepham, it ran on a superficially English infrastructure giving a false-sense of English self sufficiency.

Anyway, back to the pizza, and more specifically, Shaneys. Or Shaney’s, I don’t know, the apostrophe comes and goes. If you want a good rule of thumb for ordering food from an unknown place in the UK, try to avoid anywhere that will sell you kebabs and chips and burgers and pizzas and fried chicken. There was a similar place around here called Four-In-One, so called because you could get salmonella, norovirus, campylobacter and E. coli from a single order. There’s also a place with the highly unoriginal slogan “you ring, we bring” which to be honest, is the bare minimum I expect from food delivery.

Our initial suspicions were put at ease when we looked at the review on popular fast food delivery aggregator Just Eat, whose business model consists entirely of making sure small businesses can’t be found online unless they pay Just Eat to be on the site, and then taking a cut of all their orders. Shaneys had an impressive 4.8 out of 6 stars (NB: I don’t want to get started on the 6 star rating system, but rest assured I think it’s fucking stupid). These high marks were also buoyed by knowing that this was an average of over one thousand reviews. The will of the people is clearly that Shaney’s is a “good place to eat.”

Georgina gives 6 stars and says “Always order from here… Great wraps and the garlic mayo is the best!” Deanne gave 6 stars and says “The order arrived on time and was warm. The food had been well cooked, without being greasy.” Deanne is easily pleased, clearly. Susan orders from Shaney’s for ethical reasons: “Always enjoy pizza and kebabs from Shaney’s, supporting local businesses.” Danny gives a slightly poorer 3 and a half stars (NB: half stars as well!?) and says “it all turned up lukewarm… Food was ok once it was warmed up.” Danny later died of dehydration brought on by extreme and persistent bowel evacuations.

Ok, look, before I carry on, I don’t care that Shaney’s is bad. I don’t care that every pizza used sweetcorn to bulk out a meager selection of toppings, charging me £9.50 for a tweleve inch pizza you bought from the only pizza catering company these kinds of places use. If I wrote a thousand words about every place I’d eaten that was bad, I’d be a sad lonely individual. What irks me much more is that for the people of Reepham, this is fine dining. Shaneys grill is a treat. These pizzas are “good pizzas.” These are the sheltered middle classes that form the vast majority of a populace that needs to be catered to. Politics aims to please these people more than anyone, and they don’t even know what a good pizza is supposed to taste like. They complain when their coffee milk isn’t as hot as just-off-the-boil water. These are the kind of people that the “omelette and chips” option at the back of an Indian restaurant menu are for. The kind of people who think English Breakfast tea is grown in the UK and complain when their hotel abroad “only” has Assam or Ceylon.

I’m exaggerating for effect, of course (except the tea thing, I saw that with my own eyes). Not everyone who has ever worn a tweed jacket is a huge racist, I know that.

The more populated an area in England, the more likely they were to vote Remain in the Brexit referendum. The more people were around a multicultural society, the more they realised what a benefit such a thing really is. Trying new things is how we grow as people, and it’s no shock that traditionalist conservatism feels like such an outdated school of thought to the young. A generation for whom the world has never been smaller, and for which the circumstances of one’s birth, from nationality, race, sex, and gender, is cause for introspection and empathy rather than the basis for natural law.

We spent seventy pounds at Shaney’s. We got a free bottle of 7up and a complementary cheese and tomato pizza, topped with “SORRY” spelt out in sweetcorn. According to the Companies House, Shaney’s Grill LTD (formerly registered as Shaney,s) is owned by one Mr Bikliqi, who is of Albanian heritage. Shaney’s applied for dissolution in May 2018.

I write very occasionally because even though I enjoy it, no-one reads it. If you did read this and enjoy it, first of all thank you! Please consider letting me know so I can write more things and feel good about it. You can also show your support by buying me a coffee via ko-fi.com/fentonizer!

[fentonizer]

Anything resembling a taste or flavour

My friend thinks he can eat 6 feet of Subway Sandwiches.

I mean, that is patently ridiculous, right? When I first heard this claim, I was struck by the twin slaps of arrogance and disbelief. This shouldn’t be possible for a human being to achieve, and the fact that he was so confident only compounded my frustration.

“Who do you think you are?” I said to him. “Not only is this physically impossible, it reflects badly on your intelligence that you think it isn’t.”

I was becoming visibly angry at the idea, and worse still that those around me thought it was up for debate. I felt like I was arguing with a young earth creationist, telling me that the fossil record was an elaborate lie, benefiting people somewhere, some how and for some unknown end goal. Presumably keeping it under wraps that the human stomach actually occupies a fourth spatial dimension, and we aren’t to find out lest the earth’s already dwindling usable farmland runs out.

I myself, not more than 5 minutes earlier, had claimed that eating 50 McDonald’s Chicken Nuggets in one sitting would be, and I quote, “a piece of piss, mate.” A stance I stand by. So imagine my shock when the same person who thinks that 100 years of advanced astronomical-physics is incorrect, because actually their stomach is the densest object in the known universe (their mouth of course being the event horizon), thinks eating 50 chicken McNuggets can’t be done.

A single nug, clocks in at a mere 43 calories. 50 of them wouldn’t even be a days worth of calories (2100). A single foot long Subway Sandwich, with the simplest, non-veggie filling (turkey), is 554 calories. That would be over 3300 in total, approximately 75 McNug. This is before you add anything resembling a taste or flavour to your white bread and dry turkey meat.

Secondly, the main ingredient of 50 McNuggets isn’t fucking bread. Have you tried to eat a lot of bread? It’s basically impossible. You’d fall asleep before you’d get full up. But if you’re not convinced by that, bear in mind the caloric content of just the 6 feet of Subway bread, is more than 50 McNug.

Calories aren’t everything, of course. A large factor in eating a lot of food, is not letting your mouth get bored. I see this mistake a lot in people, especially people who like to eat all of one thing on their plate before moving on to the next thing (a.k.a. weirdos). Your taste-buds get dulled to the sensation of what you’re eating until it becomes boring. If you mix up your tastes and flavours, you can eat for longer, much like how it’s better to exercise different parts of your body in turn, rather than do 100 reps of one single thing. This is also the reason why, even though you may feel full, you want that dessert, and polish it off no questions asked.

This is the main drawback I see with the Challenge de Nuggét: mouth boredom. Thankfully, there is some respite in the myriad sauces on offer. McDonald’s actually offer a lot more condiments that most people expect, including but not limited to, sweet chilli and BBQ. Liberal application of sauces should mitigate this hugely.

The other main stumbling block is that when meat gets cold, the fats solidify. This gives that cold roast chicken the next day its dry mouth-feel, compared to its seemingly juicy past self. Cold-cuts often get around this by adding water before the reforming process, but with the nugs intended to be delivered unto thine mouth hot, this is an issue. One way around this would be to order the nuggets in batches, however, this comes with a rather large risk of indignity, as you sit in the restaurant polishing off box after box of, admitted freshly cooked, reformed chicken meat portions.

“Mommy, what’s that man doing?”

“Nothing son, just proving a point for no reason.”

“Why is he crying?”

“The man is empty inside, he hopes the chicken will satiate him. But it will not.”

The Subway challenge would not be beholden to this risk, as they could be purchased, taken off site and consumed at one’s leisure, with any remaining unfinished (I reckon at least 3), put in the fridge for the next day, after the shame has subsided.

This does raise the question of time limits. Of course 6 feet of subway is trivial over a long enough timeline. A previous time limit set for a similar challenge given to an equally over-confident fool was three hours. Turns out 3 hours is not long enough to eat an entire roast turkey (and the carcass remained in the fridge for weeks, the participant successfully destroying their desire for turkey forevermore via a bastardised version of immersion therapy).

3 hours is a token gesture really. There is no way that, should one become full, or with an overwhelming desire to end one’s life rather than insert another chicken nugget into themselves, that the remaining time would change this fact. They say it takes 20 minutes for your brain to get the message that your stomach is full. These 20 minutes are crucial to the heavy-eater, once that wall hits, every mouthful is a trial, each bite is a bitter pill. One will wonder how they will ever eat again after this.

Not to sound grandiose about it, but eating challenges require the kind of mental fortitude comparable to the longest of long distance runners. And there’s also the same risk of shitting yourself.

[fentonizer]

Achievement from the comfort of your pyjamas

Horizon Zero Dawn is a “good game.”

Strap in, folks.

Horizon Zero Dawn is peak “video games.” It is all things to all people. It is an open-world, action-adventure-rpg with resource gathering, crafting and stealth mechanics.

If you were to send one game into space so that if an alien civilisation found it they would know what human beings thought video games were all about, then Horizon Zero Dawn would be it.

None of this is praise, by the way. Not really. If you asked me to give it a score I would say that the game gets seven points out of ten points. Or I would say that it gets three and a half stars out of five stars. Or I would say that it gets sixty-eight percent (because the number sixty-nine is a meme and should be avoided in these circumstances).

Let’s take a step back. Let’s talk about open world games in general.

Open world games are a genre of video game that are as popular as they are maligned. Like most genres (of any medium), it’s kind of hard to pin down key facets that a game has to have to be open world, but I’ll try- if instead of walking the circuitous ground level path to your objective, you awkwardly try to jump up steep hills, trying to catch a piece of geometry your character can stand on, there’s a good chance you’re playing an open world game.

OK, let’s take another step back. Video games are an interactive medium. the most popular games are about either sports or shooting people with weapons. Conflict, basically. Conflict is inherently the easiest thing to make a game about as you can lose, so it’s easy to give the player a lose-condition and therefore motivation.

There are other ways to motivate the player, of course. You can tell them that there are one-hundred of a thing and they have to find a lot of them, if not all of them. This is a pretty base motivation. You could put something really difficult in the game, something that takes study and mastery to succeed at. The problem with this is that it’s much harder to make a system like that than it is to put one-hundred of a thing in a space.

Open world games often rely a lot on finding lots of a thing. I don’t know how I can say this without being rude, but open world games are generally a time sink. Without a well crafted world that you want to see, there’s no more depth in finding one-hundred of a thing in a hedge maze, or block of flats. Moreover, the only difference between an open-world game like this, and a linear story based game (something like The Last Of Us, which is more similar than you’d think) is the extracurricular padding.

Experience points is another good one to motivate people. Start at level 1, kill an enemy, get 10 experience points. Get 100 experience points and you can get to level 2, and then you’ll be strong enough to fight the thing that gives you 12exp. Get to level 5 and you'll have enough points to learn a new skill! Pretty great, huh?

Crafting is good as well. There’s a very popular game called Minecraft that, as well as lots of mining, had lots of crafting. You get some wood and that makes sticks and planks, and with some sticks and planks you can make a shitty pickaxe that can get you a few stone. Some stone gets you a better pickaxe and then you can mine coal and turn enough stone into a furnace, put the coal in it and smelt copper, and so on. The player is enticed by a branching tree of options as they find more and more things, and they are encouraged to explore and forage to build up supplies of these items.

Horizon Zero Dawn has all of this, which is why people like it. Problem is, it never gets out of the kiddie end of the pool with it. It’s the base level amount of a system, and it’s obvious how shallow it is after an hour (that’s why I said “kiddie end of the pool” because that’s the shallow end. Please fund more of this writing on Patreon).

Crafting is just some of a thing to get more space to carry stuff. That’s it. Then you can stop crafting. Levelling up gives you 10 more hit points, and 1 skill point to spend on a skill tree that is basically useless beyond 5 incredible skills that make the game a cake-walk (Double arrows/triple arrows/sneak attack/better stealth/more resources). There’s no weapon customisation beyond some modifications, but there’s no strategy here, just find the best ones (purple, because fucking obviously) and slot them in.

The story is the usual “chosen-one” power fantasy that gets bonus points for at least being about a woman. Robots threaten the world, oh no. Try to stop them ok? Second act (hugely telegraphed) plot revelation, third act triumph, post credits sequel bait. Knocked that shit out in a weekend, mate. It doesn't successfully say anything or mean anything to anyone, despite trying very hard to send a message about the dangers of hubris, or trees being super. If anything, the takeaway message is that humanity is a collection of bumbling savages and should have been consigned to extinction at the first opportunity.

To be fair, games are about systems. At least, all the games people play, are about systems. Maybe, if you want a good story, then do something like read a book, you fucker. A good story in a game is hard to come by, mostly because it’s very difficult to mesh an interactive medium with linear story telling (and even harder to do non-linear story telling).

Systems and mechanics are what keep people hooked, and differentiate the medium. But a game where the systems and mechanics can ultimately be “solved” are boring. This is the best weapon combo, this is the best armour, these are the best mods for the best weapons and best armour.

There’s some good time to be had with the gameplay, as you learn the combat. You can scan enemies and see their components, and you have you actually learn how to fight things. They’re not simply big bubbles of hit points, with a red spot on them that does double damage. There’s fuel tanks you can rupture, or you can shoot off their weapons, or tie them down, or lure them into traps, or apply statuses. And that’s fun! it really is. At least three of the aforementioned three and a half stars I would give this game come from fighting things.

The combat is good because you have to learn how to be good at it. You have to have a plan and an approach. You can’t waltz in with you spear and start whacking shit as you will lose, and personally I think that’s great. Well, fighting the machines anyway. Fighting humans is a clumsy mess, as they are actually blobs of HP with a head that takes lots of damage.

The rest of the game makes me super sad though, because it’s full of all these gamer-contrivances. It’s full of real menial shit that is only in there because most gamers (at least the most vocal ones) are time-rich kids who need something to do. So give them exp to grind, give them a map full of shit to tick off a list, none of which does anything.

Give them main story quests, side story quests, AND THEN errand type quests. Make them walk to a place, start a quest, walk to another place to talk to a person, click the now mandatory button that highlights the things you need to interact with before going to a third place to kill some dudes, before finally going back to the first person who tells you “thanks” and then to fuck off as dispassionately as the whole affair started.

Make every ledge the player character can climb obvious so when you need to scale something vertically, you’re just doing a dot-to-dot that is impossible to fail. And then make other waist-high walls insurmountable because whoever was meant to come around and paint this edge in worn white paint didn’t get here yet.

The world is large but ultimately uninteresting. There’s no sense of place or sufficient landmarks to encourage you to learn where you’re going. You rely entirely on fast travel and the numerous on-screen arrows to get around, never once did I feel lost or small, I felt the opposite. I felt like the centre of the universe, I felt like the whole place was built just for me. Which, again, comes down to the bizarre decision to make climbable objects so obvious, it breaks my immersion, because “a creator” has clearly done something.

It makes me sad, genuinely sad, because this is a “good video game.” People like it because of these things, not in spite of them. They like it because they can sit down for 3 or 4 hours and they will feel like they've achieved something... All I see, for the most part, is the total waste of time that video games are. They are the illusion of progression and achievement. They are the chips of the cultural world; objectively better than nothing at all, but ultimately of no value. No amount of “Triple-Cooked” BS is going to stop them from just being chips (triple cooked = triple-A, support me on Patreon).

If this is the height of games, if this is a masterpiece, then we truly are doomed. We don’t need to strive for better, for more meaning in our games, what we need is a dozen shallow systems that a player can indulge themselves in between school, work and masturbation breaks. That’s what gets the big bucks after all, a psychological trick-room where you’re lauded for “achievement” from the comfort of your pyjamas. You did it! Who’s good player?! It’s you! Yes it is!

And I know, I am being hugely elitist, this is a personal attack on you and the thing you like, and that makes me reprehensible. Maybe I’m just doing this to be contrarian or to be noticed. If this game had gotten bad reviews, I’d say I loved it.

A lot of people put a lot of hard work into this game and I respect that. It frequently looks stunning and... well, I don’t want to delve into consumer advice as a deflection here. It’s fine. The game is fine. It’s a fine game. Did I feel tested or challenged, did I feel I had to improve myself to overcome? Rarely. Do I feel like I learned something, anything, about the world, myself, my fellow man, or even anything about “video games?” No.

7/10. 3.5 Stars. 68%.

[fentonizer]

Identity Unrealised

I’ve been talking a lot with my partner about quitting my job.

If you’ve not read anything else I’ve ever written, then the one take-away from it all is that I am mad. I am full of anxieties and doubt, nihilism and narcissism.

So the seemingly simple question of “should I quit my job?” turns into a labyrinthine flow chart of possibilities, permutations and alternate realities.

First of all, the plan is to do the thing everyone says not to do, and that is quit before having another job lined up. You see, it’s no secret, at least to those close to me, that my job is eating away at me. It’s gotten to the point of late whereby I want to just leave it, because having no job is better than this job.

I’m also extremely lucky in that years of watching my money, never buying new clothes, having no friends, not having kids, and generally being cheap af, I have saved some money. Money on top of the actual, locked away- in case of emergency, break glass- savings. I also have no brand loyalty to margarine, and just buy the one on offer.

Being a depressive means not feeling like you deserve anything good that you’ve gotten, and I do honestly feel like I shouldn’t quit my job because I am lucky to have it. I’ve been here 10 years and when the thought of moving on comes to me, I get these feelings of “I’m not smart enough to trick anyone else into employing me” or “my skill-set is so narrow, that I was lucky enough to find this one job where using Excel and knowing some keyboard short-cuts makes me a god.”

Already, I know what you’re thinking. “Oh no, rich white boy doesn’t know what to do with himself, boo-hoo.” I totally agree. What a first-world problem, right? I should be eternally grateful for even being able to have this conversation, to not have to work 50 hours a week at minimum wage to feed my children. I do feel some level of guilt for having this stability and these opportunities, and still feeling like this isn’t enough for me. Hey, maybe I should quit so that someone more grateful can take my job? Checkmate, liberals.

I have stayed here for years on the (possibly) unfounded notion that this is as good as it gets for me, because I really don’t know how to do anything else. To be thinking that at 30 years old is frankly outrageous.

There’s a thousand trite platitudes about “life being what you make it” and a book called Eat, Pray, Love (which I assume is a historical synopsis of the Holy Communion). The general outlook of society is that you should do what makes you happy. The unspoken to subtext to that is obviously “so long as it is morally sound, within your means, and at an acceptable level of risk.” I should write a book called Eat, Spreadsheets, Existential Dread, Eat Again, Love.

If anything I should embrace my privilege. I should quit, for exactly this reason. I’m still young, I have no children and my partner is also in full time employment; I should make a big change and just go for it while I still can, before I truly am locked in by some unforeseen turn of events. I don’t want to be here at 35, or god-forbid 40, and think “wow, what did I miss out on?”

The fact that I’ve already been here 10 years should be the alarm. I started when I was 20, and although my role has changed and grown in that time, from lowly Quality Support all the way to Systems Manager, that last promotion was years ago. And 10 years in the same building, the same department, the same tea room, it’s surely time for a change?

But then the neuroses kick in... The job is stable, it pays me well, I get to work with autonomy, I get to use the internet at my desk sometimes, my manager is understanding of work-life balance... I could go on. I am afforded a lot of opportunities here to ensure my life as a whole runs smoothly. Should I let something small like “sometimes this job and the people here annoy me” get in the way of an extremely well-suited enabler of the kind of life-style I want?

It’s hard to know if this is realism or depression talking, and that’s something I always struggle with. It’s often hard to differentiate between your heart saying “this is a bad idea” and your faulty brain is saying “just don’t even bother, path of least resistance, my friend. Then we can go to bed and eat crisps for 5 hours.”

The other thing, and it’s kind of a big thing, so you’ll forgive the bad narrative pacing of this blog post, is that I want to quit to start a business.

This is already “not” “like” “me.” As above, I am either lazy or chronically depressed, but likely both. Giving up my cushy job that makes me enough money to live and buy these “video games” they have now, so that I can start a business and give up all of my free time, money, social life, etc, etc, seems like a very bold choice.

And that’s what I’m struggling with. It is a bold choice, and it will be hard work, and there’s a good chance it fails, so is it a risk worth taking? Is it worth upending my life, to do something that historically I have been bad at (working hard) when I can live a perfectly acceptable life doing the 9-to-5 at the office?Maybe people would look back on that and think “Jesus, that guy worked here for 40 years and then died in the middle of writing a VLOOKUP. What a life.” But this is what people do, isn’t it? They settle down, they make roots. Some people have been working here since the place opened in 1984. They have been here longer than I have been alive. What a life.

This all seems very metaphysical; I am, as a conscious being, asking myself how I see myself, and if there exists an idea of my identity unrealised. That’s what we would define as “happiness,” right? An idea in one’s mind about the life you’d like to live, and seeing that your real life bares a large resemblance.

And ultimately that is the answer. When I imagine this aspect of my life, and I see myself at my desk, doing spreadsheets and answering emails, I don’t see that as a life well lived. I don’t see myself being happy. When I think of myself running this business, doing the thing that the business will do, I think “that will be great.”

It was realising this that gave me the answer; I was waking up not happy, I was going home not happy, because my job, to me at least, is unfulfilling and rote. Sure, I could stay here until I’m 50, and in many ways that would be fine, because I would have money and a routine, none of which are inherently “bad things.” But I would look back on that and regret not trying something else, something that could be so much better than I dare even let myself think about deserving.

[fentonizer]

The Will of The Prevailing Culture

What can be done? What can I do? I’m sat at home and the world is falling apart.

I’m white. I live in the country of my birth, and so do my parents. I’m straight. I’m able-bodied... This sounds like the opening semi-spoken lines to a song in a musical, except one where everything is dandy and no one is an orphan or has a sexually transmitted disease.

My point is, that as far as privilege goes, I’ve got a bingo-card full of that shit. The only privilege I don’t have is being able to type the word privilege correctly on the first try. That is as bad as it gets for me (oh and the unrelenting mental health issues, lol).

So it’s important to hold on to these feelings sometimes, these feelings of being scared and worried about the world when the world, generally, takes it easy on me. Imagine how the downtrodden feel right now, and how they���ve feel every day in a culture that minimises them. And that’s not “white guilt,” that’s empathy. That’s being a responsible citizen. That’s, ultimately, what being a bleeding-heart-lefty is all about. Putting yourself in other people’s shoes and thinking “how would I want the world to react to me if I were in that position?”

The right wing mindset, as far as I can tell (and I am not a smart man), is that people get what they deserve. If they’re poor, they need to work harder. If they can’t work because they had kids, well tough, should have thought of that before you opened your legs (no abortions allowed obvs).

Nota bene: some have a habit of assuming when anyone says “right-wing” they are using it as a pejorative, that it’s a thought terminating cliché. This is generally what we call “projection.” “I’m not right wing! My parents who hate weed and homos, they’re right wing! ...Islam is concerning though, and I don’t approve of Pride festivals. Also, where’s White History Month?"

You can be right wing, that’s fine. It’s an acceptable point of view to not want 70% of your earning to be taxed, especially if it’s going to people who haven’t worked as hard as you, or your parents. Maybe the free-market will decide who can run the best train service or provide the best health care. Maybe even the very idea of right-left politics is dying and we need something new (although I don’t subscribe to this ridiculous “Horseshoe Theory” that states that the hard-right and hard-left are more ideologically similar than they are to the centre).

A rise of globalisation, by definition, attacks the right wing and it’s belief in a natural social hierarchy. Globalisation erodes national identity and so it’s no shock that immigration is the hottest potato, as it’s is seen as a slippery slope to the erasure of cultures and values inherent to the natives (immigration, not potatoes).

We don’t have to look far for examples of this. A so-called “attack on Christmas” in the Christian nations of America and the UK create backlash over the perceived removal of religion and Christ from the festive season. This is inexorably tied to political correctness, whereby it’s not “politically correct” to openly display symbols of Christianity while at the same time feeling like one has to bend over backwards to accommodate other religions.

Mere days before the EU Referendum, I made the following tweet:

As flippant as it was, I do believe it cut to the heart of the debate by humorously rephrasing the question “do you see immigration as a threat to your way of life?” As we all know, a British Exit was The Will of The People, citing immigration as one of, if not the, key issue.

There are some amazing stats here, and I would draw particular attention to the question about “whether immigration enriches or undermines cultural life.” No surprises, that the leave voters heavily said it undermines, and remain that it enriches.

As far as I can see, and this isn’t a new or ground-breaking idea, it’s that people voted to leave the EU because they wanted change. People feel downtrodden, austerity has told them to sacrifice and the dissonance of the message that “there’s just no money” side-by-side with a relentless media barrage of what immigrants are doing hits hard. How can there be no money, no housing, cuts to welfare and a failing NHS at the same time as an open door policy to new people in this country?

And again, that’s my bleeding left heart giving people the benefit of the doubt. I don’t believe calling leave voters racist achieves much, even if there is no doubt some correlation between views on race, immigration and nationalism. 

But where does this leave us? Brexit feels like a small step towards the state of the world today, a referendum fought on false battle lines, won by appealing to a mindset reinforced by a biased media. Which, you know, is exactly what the leave vote will say about my stupid remoaner attitude (”remoaner” being a clever portmanteau of remain and moaner).

And that’s what gets me. That’s the fear and the upset I spoke of when I started this. The sheer polarisation of the talking points, the unwillingness of people to even entertain the idea of news and ideas from places they don’t trust. It’s fake news after all, be that Breitbart, The Daily Mail, CNN or the BBC. They can’t be trusted, it’s all an agenda.

The facts don’t matter now, and all we’re left with is who can shout the loudest, who can appeal to emotion the best, and the right wing are undoubtedly winning that fight.

Please don’t mistake this for some lame “the truth is in the middle” argument implying the only winning move is not to play. This is specifically the opposite. This is specifically about caring about a cause, your convictions, to the point that you are doing yourself a disservice by not talking about them.

It’s about the mental struggle of reading, for example, Twitter, a service that is both polarising and useless for real discussion, seeing a hashtag trending about the gender wage gap, and seeing it full of anime avatars telling you it’s all lies. What do you do about that? Do you ignore them as they’re “clearly wrong.” How does that make me any better than people who cry Fake News on things they don’t want to hear? How can I argue a position of “these people just want to stay in their echo-chamber” when I am not making the effort to try and change minds, to find statistics, to link studies?

It’s about seeing culture, the internet especially, become more and more bold in its championing of blatantly anti-intellectual, populist talkers and being unable to do anything about it.

It’s about having this constant bombardment against my worldview. A worldview that I always assumed I came to naturally rather than being the product of a politically correct, leftist elite echo-chamber, thought-policing me into submission.

It’s about hearing and reading these clearly racist and sexist opinions, and having to then be told that my reaction to them are just emotional and irrational and that I should do some research and stop lying to myself.

And as I said above, this is me talking as a young white guy. Imagine being a woman or gay or a person of colour or transsexual, having had to deal with this shit everyday, being treated as an “other” whose entire zeitgeist is wrong and unimportant when put up against the will of the prevailing culture.

This is truly what is meant when people say cishet dudes like myself should sit out of these things, and I have always respected that because I can never even pretend to know. This is all small fry. Which isn’t the best way to end a thirteen-hundred word blog, but there we go.

I’ll always have Brexit. Anyway, next week: some jokes.

[fentonizer]

Seemingly Endless Permutations

I like having fun. From my time on dating websites, I would read profiles that stated this fact as if it were some kind of rare personality trait. These people would also list “going to the cinema” as a hobby, which is also cheating. Paying fifteen quid to watch a film is not a hobby. Being interested in films is a hobby, but that’s rarely what people meant, they just listed things they did when not at work or asleep and filed them under “hobby.” Other hobbies included eating peas, masturbating, sitting on chairs and skipping ads on YouTube.

I like having fun, I should stress that again. As much as I’m already in a pit of self-loathing for the “angry internet dude” shtick, a style I seemingly cannot distance myself from, fun is definitely a hobby of mine. (Irony is defined as the use of words that are the opposite of what you mean, as a way of being funny - by dictionary dot Cambridge dot org.)

“I like having fun” was my response to the question “Do you want to play Cards Against Humanity?” ��Is that a yes?” was their response to that and my answer was “Yes.”

But it was not fun. Imagine it is the year 2047 and the oppressive regime we must call “The Government” has been so gracious to allow us one cycle in which me may have the mandated activity we once knew as FUN, and that activity would be playing Cards Against Humanity.

The game consists of being given one black card that has a sentence on it with a few words missing, and then you, alongside a group of your peers, each pick one of your white cards to fill in the aforementioned blanks. Once you’ve all done that, you read out the black card again but filling in each player’s white card in the blank, and whoever makes the funniest sentence wins.

Oh, also, the white cards have things like dead baby, AIDS and a nazi jew as phrases. That’s the important part. Because as a game, it’s entirely dull and unoriginal as I made it sound, so to prop up the incredibly meagre premise, the entire thing revolves around the kind of humour that’s only funny because it’s politically incorrect (when it’s not falling back on pop-culture references).

It’s no more creative than flashcards that say cunt.

You and your friends sit around and the game gives you an excuse to say “tranny” and “amputee” and “Kevin Spacey” in seemingly endless permutations of offensiveness. And this, apparently, constitutes entertainment.

I mean, what’s funnier and cooler than saying the thing that society says you shouldn’t say? This is the kind of attitude that got us Brexit. Yes I’m saying Cards Against Humanity is directly responsible for the Brexit. Go on to Reddit, say a racial slur, then have a go at the person who tells you that’s offensive. Tell them this kind of pussy-liberal crybaby attitude is what got Trump elected (or at least find a Card Against Humanity that says roughly that and type it out verbatim).

Now, I know I’m just VIRTUE SIGNALLING right now, hamming up a faux-outrage as to garner favour with my liberal peer group hoping that I may ascend to the rank of Thought Leader, but the truth is the politically incorrect humour is only half the reason I have it in for this game.

The other half is the sheer lack of creativity of it. It’s a bunch of cards in a box that you read. When you take away the fact that you can get grandma to say “anal fissure” there’s nothing left. It’s Mad Libs, and everyone knows Mad Libs are dull as fuck and it’s only a matter of time until you try to inject some life into things by inserting a “penis” (which, incidentally, is the review I got from my date last night. With your mum).

Now, what happened there? I made a “your mum” joke. And it was middling at best, six out of ten, but it came organically (also like your mum). It was the by product of previous events, it had a set-up and timing. It wasn’t the words “Mecha-Hitler” read aloud on cue.

Mecha-Hitler is a weird one because as an idea it has merit. I can imagine jokes and situations where a Mecha-Hitler is funny, but when you print a piece of card with those words on and are forced to use the line, that’s just joyless.

The philosophy of humour is certainly something I don’t have time for here, nor would I say am I properly equipped to deal with it, but I know one thing: printing joke templates in a box and then giving them to people to read out is not humour, it’s barely even fun. And, as previously noted, I like having fun.

Have you ever met someone who is not funny, but as a substitute they quote funny things a lot? Cards Against Humanity is like that. It gives the impression of humour but is in fact arbitrary and empty. It’s Soylent Comedy. At best, and I assume this is primary reason for its success, it allows people who are not funny to feel like they have made a funny and original joke. It makes people feel good, and that would be fine, and indeed admirable, but the cost of that is lazy and offensive jokes, often at the expense of the already downtrodden in society.

[fentonizer]

Standing In Pecking Order

Driving brings out the worst in me. The word I like to say the most when I’m driving is “prick.” Being encased in a noisy metal shell makes me feel safe enough to hurl expletives at strangers who will never hear it. Strangers who in all likelihood would slam my stupid face in if given the opportunity.

The irony, of course, is that I’m never in more danger than when I’m on the road. 60 miles per hour is more miles per hour than god intended when he designed my squishy organs and fragile bones. Cars are actually a good proof for the non-existence of god, as there’s no evidence of any religious scripture referencing travelling faster than a horse. No commandments, no canon-law, or even Dharma. Would the Holy Spirit approve of doing 80 em-pee-aitch on the M1? We may never know.

I get the most annoyed when driving because of the sheer number of infractions perpetrated unto me daily. Not that I am the best driver, but because driving often reveals the prime-error of the human condition, namely “I will do what suits me the best.”

Why would I bother to indicate correctly around this roundabout? I can’t be bothered, it doesn’t affect me anyway, people will get the gist of my intentions after I’ve already started the manoeuvre.

I’m going to drive in the middle lane of the motorway despite the left hand lane being totally empty because I can’t be bothered to move over only to have to move back into the middle at some point in the future. Besides, there’s plenty of room to overtake me on the right if people want.

These people, these bastards, you know the type; the people who ignore the social contract. People who park in the disabled spaces at the local Co-Op because it’s closer to the door and literally nobody will ever call them out on it. Besides, they’re only going in for a minute.

The people who will jump over to the freshly opened checkout next-door, despite being behind you in the existing queue. You know what a queue is, right? You understand the social contract that we’re all abiding by here because we’re decent human beings trying to live together in harmony? We’re not standing in pecking order here. 

Ethics are what we do when no-one’s watching, so imagine the black soul the person in the Vauxhall Vectra had when they blatantly and deliberately cut me up, endangering my life and the lives of other road users. Because that’s the real issue here? Not my banal internet hate, but the fact that every day, a selfish act from someone like this has a real and irreparable human toll.

Technology has, and will continue to drive our species forward at an exponential rate. Self-driving cars, smart fridges, AI doctors, all of these near-future advances will improve our lives for the better, if only because it will remove flawed human decision making. Choices like “I’m going to turn left from the inside lane because I want to get home 30 seconds quicker that I would do otherwise.”

All we’ll have to do then is somehow workaround how people act like utter fuckheads when sex may be involved, and we’ll be really getting somewhere.

[fentonizer]

Zero Value

“You should do some more writing” my girlfriend said to me in what may just be a narrative framing device.

I have always dabbled in writing, and people have always been polite enough to tell me the things that they’ve read that I wrote have been good.

Truth is, of late I have been in a funk. “Funk” being an offhand and slang way of distancing the problem that is no doubt a depressive disorder. Low mood is the symptom, as as far as symptoms go, it sounds benign. Everything is grey a lot of the time, and I do not know where the colour has gone.

I can’t seem to remember the last thing I looked forward to. Nothing grand anyway, nothing more important than a pizza, or a lie in. The days, like much of my writing are a run-on sentence.

I did write a 2000 word, mostly auto-biographical story about the year of my life twenty-fourteen, a year where a lot of “mad shit” happened to me and which I have never fully internally processed to closure. I probably never will.

Here are a few paragraphs from it I feel comfortable sharing with you:

There’s a documented condition called Paris Syndrome; a form of culture shock, the romanticised view of France and Paris specifically, a city of green grass, culture, love and that European free spirit is at odds with the reality of an overpopulated, dirty city, full of normal French people sick to death of tourists.

Depression itself is like Paris Syndrome, but instead of culture shock, it’s existence shock. You’ve been thrown into a world you don’t understand and are trying to cope. It’s not like how you thought it would be, is it? It’s not like how you were told it would be. Everyone else seems to have it together, right? Why aren’t I like that? Why do I go home and want to do nothing but rest in bed? Where do these people find the energy to do all this stuff? See places. Go to things. What am I missing that doesn’t make me feel capable of doing all that too?

The quintessential existential problem is feeling like you don’t belong and having no memory of the place where you do, if it even ever existed in the first place. How can one hope to fit in and find purpose when we have no template with which to work from? This is the void depressives speak of, like being perpetually hungry for a meal that doesn’t exist, the hole is indescribable precisely because nothing will fill it. It is formless, and we try to sleep, eat, drink, love, talk and fuck our way to a fulfilment that doesn’t exist for us.

We cannot ever get a plane out of Paris.

My intuition tells me only one thing here, and that is that because I am actually quite proud of the literary clarity of my mental state in the above, it is likely trite, probably plagiarised, and essentially of zero value.

Maybe you know or even remember that I wrote the allgamesshouldbedarksouls blog. This was a few years ago, before even Dark Souls 2 came out and society hit what we now refer to as “Peak Dark Souls.”

I don’t really want to go on about it, but it’s easily summarised. Remember liking “the cake is a lie” references? Then remember hating them as overdone and shallow, popularised not because of any real love for the art or end result, but because it was coded “in-language” that separated you from “them?” Like drawing a fish in the sand, we understand, and we’re safe here, away from those neophytes. And when they kneel at my feet, saying “Why!? Why didn’t we listen to you about how Dark Souls was an instant classic?” I will shove them aside. They had their chance, and no, I will not lend you my copy of it now.

The writing was good (people were polite enough to tell me) but as far as “video” “game” “writing” goes, it was shallow and I could see that. It was overly concerned with mechanics and more than implied some measure of objectivity in game-design. Plus, I was really tired of the “angry young dude hates every video game for petty reasons” shtick, knowing full well that if you gave me money and a team to design a videogame I would inevitably shit out something milquetoast.

But nevertheless, it was well received and proved that if I had the inclination I could string words together to create something vaguely compelling, although possibly I’m not accounting for the low bar of the subject matter, in this, the medium where you can wax idiotic about your constitutional right to kill a virtual prostitute.

I bring this up not because it’s the one good thing I’ve ever produced and reminisce about it daily, but because it’s yet another unfortunate example of something in my life that I tried, started to get somewhere with, then got bitter about not being handed fame on a plate and gave up.

I noticed this of myself today; (now, look, this is going to get pretty pathetic, but my girlfriend said I should write more (she didn’t), and I’m being open and honest with you, even if that reveals some... truths.) I have very few twitter followers. Not even 150. I use twitter all the time, every day. I say things, I make jokes, I comment on current events. I have tweeted almost 6000 things. I use hashtags, and I use them correctly. I do not, repeat DO NOT, make up random hashtags about my day like #FentonsTeaBreak, which is, like, something everyone who is new to using twitter does in the first week and thinks they are hilarious for doing.

But I am yet to find any more than 150 people who are interested in things I have to say. And 150 is generous as well, I suspect at least half of those are either robots, people who have since died, or people who followed when they signed up because Twitter suggested it might be a good idea and haven’t logged in since.

I actually lose more followers than I gain, and I can assure you that it not because of self-pitying screeds like this (I learnt that lesson about 4000 tweets ago). If you've never felt unsure about your place in the world, imagine the feeling that it is easier to find people who actively regret choosing to listen to you, and you’ve got a good approximation.

Today brought this to the fore as I saw a tweet that was basically the same as a tweet I made, retweeted into the thousands, simply because that person’s audience was bigger than mine. It was weirdly validating, that yes, my thought would have been accepted en mass, but also infuriating like meekly muttering a joke, only to have your confident friend repeat it, louder, to roars of applause (having used better words with a defter sense of comedic timing).

I realise this is incredibly arrogant. People are busy, and the world does not stop when Fenton Makes A Tweet. These days, everyone is a “content producer.” Running the wide gamet of pictures of their cat all the way along to pictures of their latte. There simply isn’t enough internet attention to go around, because mostly, it’s all so fucking boring.

I have come to see twitter more as a diary. A repository of my thoughts so that, like the cold unfeeling robot I am, I can purge the memory banks once this string has been archived, and move on to thinking other things (there is no rider to this joke, I am not going to list two normal things followed by one surreal thing).

For 6 months in 2016, I captured approximately 40 minute chunks of me playing video-game farming simulator Stardew Valley. I uploaded these videos to YouTube and in each I would talk about the game and talk about things going on in the world and it was generally incredibly cathartic. I appreciate there’s not much of a market for what ended up being about 70 hours of unedited video-content of a man, forever teetering on the the brink of an emotional meltdown talk about miking a virtual cow, but goddammit, I produced that content anyway. Fuck the haters (of which there were none).

Someone once said of my brief foray into stand-up comedy, that I was talented but showed an obvious lack of preparedness. That review (3 stars, Milton Keynes SnoZone, 2010) was a more accurate summary of my being than any psychoanalyst has ever achieved. I do not apply myself, and therefore I do not achieve. Even this, these very words that you’re reading right now, I am writing so that I don’t have to practice for a tournament of a game I supposedly enjoy playing and want to be good at.

My entire life feels like a omnibus of half-efforts. Even my job, which I openly loathe, I don’t quit because I do not want to risk trying anything different and have it be worse. I talk myself out of it daily for reasons like “you only know how to do this once specific job anyway” and “other jobs are probably a lot harder.” I give up before I even begin, and then use that same lack of motivation as a self-fulfilling prophecy to convince myself that it was never going to happen anyway, so I’m justified in giving up.

And then, on top of this, the Earth in year 2017 is a shit show to the point that your troubles are pretty small-fry. I’ve drafted tweets, had thoughts, typed internet comments, and then fallacied myself into relative privation by realising “wait, maybe the world doesn’t need THIS JOKE right now, because Muslim’s are being unlawfully detained at airports. Is this really the time for a pun on the word fondant?”

Today is February 2nd. It’s hashtag Time-To-Talk day. And that is as good an excuse as I’m going to get to be this massively self-indulgent and start my commitment to writing more by laying out my neuroses on the shaky pre-tense of lowering the stigma towards mental health.

But please, talk to each other. See your faults, your weaknesses, understand why you feel like you do and then you can start looking at changing patterns and habits that might be bad for you.

Don’t keep this shit locked up. Be brave. Talk. It’s ok. People will understand that you’re a mad-shit. Write a blog post that people will have trouble deciding if it’s too meta or not meta enough.

Society puts so much pressure on us to perform. Be like this. A man should be like THIS, a woman should be like THAT. This is damaging and only serves to alienate.

Mental health is important. My mental health needs constant work. Did you actually read the above paragraphs? That’s my brain all day “Not good enough, stupid weak thoughts, stupid weak job, you’re a failure and it’s no surprise you give up.”

To be Onan just one more time, my mental health is really the only thing I’ve never given up on.

Plus, of course, I have an amazing support network of my partner, family and friends. And if you feel you don’t have this kind of network, then there are plenty of resources which are listed here, the Time To Change website: http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/mental-health-and-stigma/help-and-support or you can drop me a line.