Former Gifted Kid

There's a label that I have often seen mentioned in my social circles online, "former gifted kid" which in itself is often synonymous with neurodivergence. Perhaps this is because most "gifted" children in reality are simply children who took an early interest in fields beyond their level of academic attainment. An interest which give them a competitive advantage that didn't actually translate into any long term benefit.

Nevertheless this label is something that has been playing on my mind lately spurred on by a meme I saw someone post of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with the caption "Deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable" - with Christmas just a week away the meme is apt to be fitting for this time of year but the season and its nature imbues a certain level of self-reflection and nostalgia.

Tis the Season

Tis the season to be jolly
When careful plans are naught but folly
With a mind that spins a relentless pace
Amidst the rush of the festive race
The last gift wrapped and a want for nary
Remember to breathe, eat, drink, and be merry

52 Goals for 2025 (Update)

Near the end of 2024 as I looked forward to the year ahead and what 2025 might bring, the concept of New Year's Resolutions came to mind. Rather than set a few that I knew I would inevitably fail, I chose to set 52 goals, with the expectation that I would at least complete a few of them. The year isn't over yet but realistically I know that I am not going to achieve the remaining goals.

The idea of casting a wide net proved to be an effective strategy, I managed to rack up quite a few in the early months, then a low productivity period hit and I haven't really recovered from that - the abridged version is that my physical health took its toll on my mental health this year.

Waiting

If you grab a fistful of sand, no matter how tight you clench your fist, the sand will still slip away leaving your hand covered in nothing more than grit and residue, a reminder that something happened but with little to show for it. That's how my life has felt for the past two and a half years.

I don't know what is wrong with me. I have been back and forth to doctors, appointment after appointment, prescription after prescription, test after test. The biggest anomaly in those tests of note was a low white blood cell count but that only showed up in one test, it didn't recur.

Anti-Social Media

The first real social media site I ever used was MySpace, which appealed to me because it was a place to share your likes and interests, with a particular emphasis on music taste. It also appealed because you could edit the HTML and fully customise your profile. When Facebook came along I felt it was a step down in many ways, from the jump it was apparent the site had a "standardised" layout to make collection of data structured. Even when it came to your likes and interests those were structured into pages or groups to make it easier to collate the data.

In hindsight the motivation and the distinction between the two sites is clear, MySpace was a community, Facebook was a commodity, or to be more precise, Facebook was a data collection service and the data itself was the commodity. The community elements of Facebook were a second-thought, they were added over time, and constantly changed, often to the chagrin of the users of the site. The little utility Facebook offered in terms of establishing social connections and meeting people fell away when they opened the site to the general public. The mentality of treating it as an academic network evaporated overnight, I still remember the rush everyone made to delete, detag, and hide everything they didn't want the whole world to see.

ChatGPT - The Private Search Engine

Yesterday Adobe published an article in which it summarised research it had conducted regarding the use of ChatGPT as a search engine.

Two key pieces of data jumped out at me, first is that 77% of overall ChatGPT users in the United States use ChatGPT as a search engine, and that 24% of those users went to ChatGPT first for the answer before they looked elsewhere. The interesting thing about these two facts is that it isn't unique to any given generation, Adobe broke down the figures saying 74% of Baby Boomer users, 80% of Gen X, 75% of Millennials, and 77% of Gen Z users all use the platform as a search engine.

The Root of Knowledge

I used the word 'obsequious' in conversation with someone today and they asked me what it meant, I told them and they asked me where I learned that and for a moment I stumbled because I didn't immediately know the answer. Even now, hours later, I still can't answer definitively because I genuinely can't remember where I read or heard it for the first time. I'm not going to lie, I had a momentary existential crisis where I actually looked up the meaning to make sure I was right which was reassuring in the first instance but still left me feeling more than a little lost.

AI Paranoia

I have a visual impairment, it's caused by a condition known as Nystagmus. The short explanation is that my eyes constantly move involuntarily and because of this it is difficult for me to focus on fine details, the further away they are the harder it becomes. With most things close up I can manage quite well, this is something I have lived my whole life with so as you can imagine it's something I've learned to compensate for or find workarounds.

Computers, and technology in general make my life easier, the fact you can change the resolution of a screen and scale fonts to a comfortable size makes a world of difference for me. Existing in a world without the internet when I was a kid was very difficult, accessibility was always an afterthought, arguably it still is, but the assistive technology that exists today to aid me is designed to work with products and services that didn't add accessibility, but that technology enables it nonetheless - magnifiers, screen readers, audio transcription, larger screens, lower resolutions, adjustable DPI to name a few.

Using the internet when I was younger wasn't so easy before browsers added these abilities as features or before operating systems incorporated accessibility features on a native level that actually functioned. In the days of yore, I relied upon expensive third-party software which thankfully I didn't have to pay for as there were government grants you could access at the time here in the UK to gain access to the technology.

Will AI make everyone unemployed?

What is a revolution? You might be tempted to define it as the disruption of the status quo, to say that revolutions break down or destroy something that exists paving the way for something new to take its place. The problem with that definition is that it doesn't hold true when you actually look at human history. Innovation leads to new destinations, new orders, and new paradigms, revolutions do not. A revolution both in the sociological sense and in the geometric sense is basically the traversal of a circle from one point back to itself.

Revolutions throughout history have taken order in society, disrupted it, and rather than replacing it or reforming it, they ultimately return society back to that point of order - in other words revolutions, far from changing society, actually reinforce the behavioural patterns that have become entrenched.

Time is running out

The television as we know it today was invented in 1923 by John Logie Baird, his invention iterated and combined elements of existing technology and augmented them with novel elements. After a series of demonstrations and refinements to the technology, growing public adoption, and regulatory disputes, The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was established - the exact date varies depending on where you begin counting, technically the organisation was founded in 1922 as a company rather than a corporation and covered other forms of broadcasting namely radio, but it eventually became a public body in 1927, the first public television broadcaster, now the oldest in the world.

Fast forward 98 years and we are approaching the centennial of the BBC, there are only a few thousand people still alive in the UK today who are older than the BBC - this is important to note because time is running out.

Your Favourite Game Of All Time

I've touched on Stardew Valley many times throughout this challenge but it's hard to avoid when it is my favourite game of all time, and after idle games whose playtime is skewed, Stardew Valley is the most played game in my Steam library coming in at just under 800 hours of gameplay, that's quite an achievement consider there are over 150 games in my Steam library at this point.

A Game You Thought You Wouldn't Like, But Ended Up Loving

There have been several games over the years where the only reason I own them is because they came with the console when I bought it, or when my parents bought them for me. The original Halo game is one of those games. When I first got an Xbox it was a few years after release, it came with Halo, Midtown Madness 3, and Simpsons Hit and Run. I wasn't expecting to like Halo, in fact it sat to one side for about a week before I actually played it.

Your Favourite Game Developer

Spoiler alert, the last entry in a few days in this challenge is going to be Stardew Valley, I'll explain why in greater detail when that post rolls around. It's necessary to give that spoiler now though because Stardew Valley was developed by Eric Barone also known as ConcernedApe and he is my favourite game developer.

Most Epic Scene Ever in a Game

When it comes to games there's quite a few interpretations of the word 'epic' that I could use as a definition for this post. I'm choosing to interpret this as the scene from a game that stunned me most and left me sitting entranced wondering what did I just see and there's only one option for me, the ending sequence from Manifold Garden.

Best Voice Acting in a Game

“All right, I’ve been thinking, when life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade! Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down — with the lemons!”

A Game You Plan on Playing

Monomi Park is a game development studio that created a game called Slime Rancher that has proven to be a modern classic in the making. In years to come, generations will look back on it with the fondness and nostalgia that I hold for the games of my youth, but a lot has changed since I was a kid. For one, the approach to game development is much more varied, I grew up in a time when games took between 3 and 5 years to develop and save for some minor publicity you didn't get much in the way of a preview of what was to come. Slime Rancher 2 is an example of how far we've come and how players today are much more involved in guiding the creative process.

Your Favourite Classic Game

When I think about classic games I can't help think about my childhood as they are what I grew up with, and when I think about the games I played, the ones that became a phenomenon are those that I think hold the most significance for me even now. The Pokémon franchise at this point is extensive but despite all the games that have been released, the one that still holds pole position is Pokémon Silver, released in 1999 and later remastered as Pokémon Soul Silver.

A Game You Think Had The Best Graphics or Art Style

Released in 2016 after a long and arduous development process where development restarted multiple times, The Witness was Jonathan Blow's long awaited follow up to Braid which was an indie game hit in 2008. The Witness takes place on an idyllic island that is essentially the manifestation of Zen.

A Game Sequel That Disappointed You

The original QUBE game [stylized as Q.U.B.E. despite not being an acronym] is yet another 3D First-Person Puzzle game in my collection. It was an interesting little game, it didn't overstay its welcome, it had a somewhat innovative puzzle mechanic and a familiar art style. The second game in the series, QUBE 2 however didn't carry on that legacy, unticking each of those boxes.

Game With The Best Story

There are some games that I can only describe as "an experience" because giving any other overview never does them justice. These types of games are the ones where everyone who plays them ultimately experiences the same thing but their reaction to it varies wildly. Stray is a game that I fell in love with the moment I first played it, and since then it has also become one of my favourite games to watch people play.

Your Favourite Game Genre

You probably didn't think it was possible for me to be even more nerdy than I come across but I'm going to share something I don't tell people much. I like to write theses (dissertations) for fun. I can hear a million students groan in horror at that admission but it's true. I love gaming and my degree was in Computer Science with Games Technology, despite that combination my actual thesis for my degree was the design of an Encryption Algorithm to replace DES as a competitor to AES. I never wrote a thesis about gaming because it wasn't actually an option surprisingly, there were key tests that had to be met and writing about games wouldn't meet those tests.

Picture Of A Game Setting You Wish You Lived In

When it comes to escapism there's one game more than any other that epitomises time spent in a virtual world and that is Minecraft. I can't remember when I first bought the game or how long I have spent playing the game, but I do know from my main save file I have spent 42 real world days playing which is about 5 months if you play every day for about 7 or 8 hours a day.

Your Favourite Protagonist

From Bowser as my favourite antagonist, you might be expecting my favourite protagonist to be Mario which would follow some logic but it's not. Of the two Mario Brothers my favourite has always been Luigi, from the first moment I got to play as him, which I believe was in Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels.

Your Favourite Game Antagonist

I don't know which Mario game I played first, for the simple reason that the first Nintendo console I ever owned was a SNES which came with Super Mario All Stars + Super Mario World included. What I do remember is that Bowser stood out from the beginning as my favourite character across all games, it wouldn't be until Super Smash Bros on the Nintendo 64 for that I would get the chance to play as Bowser for the first time.

Game With The Best Cut Scenes

I feel like this one is probably going to be obvious, it's probably at the top or near the top of most peoples' lists when it comes to cut-scenes but I'm choosing it anyway. Kingdom Hearts is simultaneously one of the most captivating and yet the most confusing game franchises ever created. From release, to release, to rerelease, to remaster, to port, to related media, the canon of Kingdom Hearts at this point is so complex that even if you have played every game in the series you would probably need to sit down and revise before you could even think about explaining it in depth to someone else.

Post A Screenshot From The Game You're Playing Right Now

Whenever I play a game I tend to get obsessed with it for a time until I either lose interest or until I reach a natural stopping off point. I usually have a queue of games that I want to play but when I have down time or whenever I'm feeling exceptionally stressed I will revert to an idle game because it allows me to almost reach a point of meditation, there's not a lot of complex thought and planning that goes into playing them but at the same time they hold your attention just enough to take your mind off whatever is stressing you out at the moment. Whether it's in pursuit of the state of flow or if I'm just in between games, the idle game of choice for me at the moment is Idle Slayer

Current (or most recent) Gaming Wallpaper

I'm not oblivious to the fact that games like Sonic Generations exist to capitalise on nostalgia but there is a mutual consent at least as most Sonic fans are eager to see old games remastered using new technology to be able to see what might have been if those games had first been released in this era. To be a Millennial is to be in the unique position where your generation came of age at the same time as the technology that we use today so ubiquitously. Most millennials got to experience the tail end of a world without modern communication, the transition, and the end result, we are perhaps the generation most qualified to say whether things really did get better or worse - my personal answer on that is both, some things got better but others got worse.

A Game You've Played More Than Five Times

I've lost count of how many games I have played more than five times, I could have picked anything for this post with that prompt alone. I chose to narrow it down just a bit and interpret it as a game that I have completed in its entirety more than five times as that number is a lot smaller. There's one game for the SNES that I came back to time and again both for the challenge and the sense of accomplishment when I finally completed the game, that is The Addams Family.

A Game Everyone Should Play

One thing I love about games is when they tell a story, the medium lends itself so well to narrative fiction that I think it can be more engaging and more captivating than traditional media like Movies and TV. Story-telling in games can be overt and explicit, with grand narratives, or it can be subtle, there for those who are interested and overlooked by those who have no interest in the narrative who simply want to play the game. One game that balances this pretty well is Unpacking, which as the name suggests is a game all about unpacking your life both figuratively and literally.

Your Gaming System of Choice

I spend most of my time now gaming on PC, I haven't ventured into the console arena for some time, although that may change if I decide to buy a Switch 2. Whilst "PC" would technically be my answer to this prompt I'm going to assume people actually want me to pick a console so I'm going with the Nintendo GameCube.

Best Gameplay

I've played a lot of games, on my Backloggd Profile alone there are currently 581 games listed that I could remember off the top of my head when I was filling it out, I am sure there are many more that I have forgotten or overlooked. It's hard to show me a game now with mechanics that I haven't seen before, I am intrigued by novelty and game mechanics that leave me wondering how the developer managed to pull it off. Superliminal is one such game, the core mechanic revolves around perspective, where your perception of objects determines their size, if they look big they become big, and if they look small, they become small, this opens up an intriguing world of possibilities for 3D puzzle solving and exploration.

The Saddest Game Scene

Stardew Valley will make another appearance in this list much later, when it does I will cover the game itself in a little more detail. For now though it is necessary to briefly mention that the game incorporates many different mechanics allowing the player to focus on what interests them most, one of these mechanics revolves around being social and engaging with the other residents of Pelican Town, a small town in Stardew Valley that serves as the setting for the game. As you manage your friendship and potential relationships with the other characters, your progression is broken up into episodes punctuated by Heart Events - the main metric used to measure friendship. One character named Shane has a particularly moving Six-Heart event that I think fits this prompt well.

Best Game Soundtrack

When it comes to Video Game Soundtracks there are many that I could choose from, I struggled to pick one that is the best of all time so instead chose the one I am most obsessed with at the moment and that is the soundtrack to Kingdom: Two Crowns composed by Amos Roddy.

Your Favourite Game Couple

I could have placed Undertale by Toby Fox in many different positions in this challenge but I decided to opt for this one over the others because whenever I think of shipping characters in games this duo is the first that always comes to mind, that is Alphys and Undyne.

The Most Annoying Character

Games are usually an escape from reality for me, so when they get too realistic, either figuratively or literally, it tends to sour the experience. I know some people want realism from their games but I'd rather live out my fantasies. When it comes to the Spyro The Dragon series of games again the original trilogy holds a soft spot for me, the pinnacle of the franchise overall, but of all the characters that appear throughout the three games, it's one that appears in the second and third that is particularly annoying, and that is Moneybags the greedy bear.

The Game Character You Feel You Are Most Like

I love the Crash Bandicoot franchise as a whole but undoubtedly the original trilogy are my favourite games as they started it all. Crash Bandicoot 2 was actually the first game in the series that I played, as it came bundled with the Playstation when we first got it, but of the original trilogy, the third instalment was my favourite, Crash Bandicoot Warped, because in it you got to play some levels as Coco Bandicoot, Crash's sister.

Your Guilty Pleasure Game

I have a particular love of Idle Games, there are quite a few that I could include on this list but chose not to. My first idle game that I ever played was Leaf Blower Revolution, the entire premise is that you start with a green screen representing a field, leaves spawn, and you push them off the screen by moving your mouse cursor, and that's it.

A Game That Is Underrated

Glover was first released in 1998, for both the Nintendo 64 and Windows PC, the game is a platformer with a twist. The protagonist is a magical glove named Glover, the antagonist another glove named Cross-Stitch which is contaminated by dark energy. Unlike a traditional platformer where the protagonist navigates the level and reaches the goal on their own, Glover requires the player to guide a ball or balls to specific areas of the level, either by balancing on top of the ball and running or by picking it up and throwing it.

Your Favourite Game Character

Banjo-Kazooie is one of those games I played as a kid but never owned. By the time the Nintendo 64 was released, more of my friends had started playing games, one in particular would turn into a rival of sorts. There was very little crossover in terms of the games we owned so we would often end up swapping games for a time. Banjo-Kazooie was one of those games and from the first time I played it I fell in love with the world it depicted.

The First Game You Ever Played

The first game I ever played was Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the Sega Master System II, which was also the first console I ever had. At the time I didn't know anyone else with a games console, I was born in 1988 and grew up in the 90s. The aftermath of the Video Game crash of the 1980s had left gaming the pursuit of a minority, partly due to the wider impact of the economic troubles of the 1980s that left a lot of people in the 90s broke to put it bluntly.

30 Days of Gaming

Throughout the month of April I will be publishing 30 posts as I complete the 30 Days of Gaming Challenge. The prompts I will be using are outlined below, at the end of the month I'll come back and edit this post to make each one a link, but for now if you want to play along these are the titles.

The Name Game

Years ago I wrote a blog post on the nature of names and how we like to think we are unique as people, but searching our name on Google or any other search engine reveals how many people out there have the same name as us; sometimes their lives often resemble our own, because people's lives in general aren't as unique as we like to think.

When I first started writing fiction I needed a name to publish it under, my actual legal name wasn't an option at the time for a number of reasons, mainly that the nature of the content I wanted to write about would have conflicted with my career at the time. The name I chose was S J Doran, short for Steven James Doran, the rationale being that Steven was the name my parents were going to call me before I was born, which they eventually decided against, whilst James Doran was the name of my grandfather, whose side of the family I believe is where most of my creativity stems from. The diplomacy and sometimes a tendency to engage in confrontation stems from the other side of the family.

The Imitation Game

Alan Turing was a trailblazer in many regards, there are a few technology related terms that he lends his name to, the most pertinent of our time is the Turing Test - specifically the Imitation Game whereby a human uses a computer to engage with two entities at once, one being an actual human and the other being a machine, with no indication which is which. The machine is said to pass the test if you as a human can't tell which is the human and which is the machine.

This is perhaps the most pertinent of our time because of the rise of AI, or to be more precise, the rise of the Large Language Model [LLM] which is a complex algorithm that uses machine learning to process a large dataset consisting of natural language and then mimic that language. The reason this is distinct from AI is because of the lack of reasoning, something which the newer variants of most of these models are now incorporating and developing at pace. The term "AI" in its purest definition has mostly been abandoned, held onto by Computer Scientists with the same pedantry as the distinction between "The Internet" and "The World Wide Web" which are not the same thing but for all intents and purposes now most people use the terms synonymously and any effort to hold onto that distinction seems pointless at this stage - AI has gone the same way, whether it is "technically" AI or not is now irrelevant.

Ori And My Deep Disappointment

As part of my 52 goals for 2025 one of the goals I set myself was to clear the backlog of games in my Steam account. There were 153 games unplayed at the start of the year and it now stands at 122 so 31 have been played in the last 8 days, some for a lot longer than others. I thought about writing reviews for each of the games but many of them are not remarkable, if I find anything of particular note I will make a post about them.

Ori And The Blind Forest is a game that I played many moons ago, where exactly I can't recall because according to Steam it was unplayed in my library - some posts on Reddit mentioned that it was available on the Epic Games Store but was removed so that's probably where I first played it. Regardless, for the sake of certainty I decided to play again from scratch and I was disappointed.