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2017

I’ve never been a big fan of the whole New Year’s faff. Obviously I appreciate how major milestones can offer the ideal opportunity for reflection, but I’ve never been one to make promises I know I won’t keep just because it’s the 1st January. What’s wrong with every other day? When are we going to start celebrating New Month’s Day? Happy four-o’clock everyone!

I must admit, I am glad to see the back of 2017, though. Without being too maudlin, this has been an extremely challenging year for me – in this moment, it feels like it’s been the most difficult 12 months of my life. Maybe with the passing of time I’ll come to reflect on this period and realise it wasn’t as difficult as it first seemed, but I’ve definitely struggled.

There are a variety of factors that combined to make this year so emotionally and physically draining, and even in this personal space, I don’t feel it’s appropriate to open up about them all. The hardest thing has been my health, however, which really stole my focus from February through till the end of the summer – and still isn’t properly resolved. (See my previous post ‘Skin Deep’ if you’re really curious.)

I’m fine, by the way – the issue has never been catastrophically serious. And thus these words are definitely tinged with guilt: I shouldn’t have let an unpleasant but ultimately manageable medical complaint affect me to quite the degree that it has. But while I’ve certainly felt unwell and even occasionally in pain, it’s the mental side that’s really pulled me down.

The problem I’ve had is that the condition has been relentless, and there were certainly points earlier in the year where I reached some of the lowest ebbs I’ve ever known. I feel like I shielded this from most people, and I’m glad I did. I’m not sure anyone could help me escape from the dark places I went to – it’s just something I had to navigate on my own.

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As a more positive aside, I’ve really fallen in love with the NFL this year. I adore the Olympics so I’m no stranger to trying new sports, and I’ve always wanted to give American football a chance but never really bothered. Dozens of matches later – including two live in London – and I’m absolutely hooked on the game. It’s been so exciting learning about an entirely different sport that, until this year, was completely alien to me, and it’s reminded me that I must always maintain an open mind and keep trying new things. I won’t be besotted with everything, of course, but this small anecdote is evidence of why I must try and be as broad-minded as I possibly can – there’s a whole world out there full of incredible things, and it’s down to us to open our eyes to them.

I’m stronger now, and as a New Year tick-tocks ever closer, even I’m finding myself grateful for the reset. Life never slows down, of course, and I can already see new hurdles on the horizon. But the key difference is that I feel like I can clear them now, where I’ve found it difficult to muster the strength to leap for large portions of this year.

I must admit, 2018 does scare me a bit. It means it’s now been 10 years since I left high school, but in so many ways I feel like time has stood still. That’s not true, of course – I’ve changed a lot. And yet I’m not always sure whether I’ve progressed or regressed from the energetic 18-year-old who felt like he had the world at his fingertips. Maybe I’ve been given a reality check – or perhaps I’ve ceased dreaming so big.

Funnily enough, I was having a casual conversation with someone a short while ago, and I was asked: “What would make you happy? What do you consider success?” I couldn’t answer then, and I still can’t answer now. I feel a clawing in the soles of my feet; I feel a nervous energy in the pit of my stomach. They both fuel my desire to achieve. 

But achieve what? And why?

I guess my resolution (New Year’s or otherwise) is to find the answer to that question.

2017 blog

ASMR

I can’t remember the first time I experienced “tingles” – a non-sexual state of intense relaxation that travels from your scalp down to your spine – but I do recall being very young and trying my utmost to prolong the sensation. Whether it was at school or during a trip to the hairdressers, I spent much of my adolescence fascinated by the feeling but blissfully unaware of anything called ASMR.

You probably think it’s weird, right? You’ve seen the YouTube videos of people whispering into microphones, and you’re baffled by the number of views they get, yeah? I would be, too, if I hadn’t spent many years watching ASMR videos that weren’t actually intended for ASMR. Allow me to explain…

The first video I remember watching on loop was a tutorial for Adobe Audition. I was just getting started with music production at the time, so I estimate I was probably 16 or 17. My microphone setup at that time was, shall we say, sub-optimal, and so rather than remedy the situation by investing in expensive sound-proofing which simply wasn’t an option, I decided I’d clean up any audio issues I was having with software instead.

I stumbled upon a tutorial about noise reduction on a website called Wrigley Video Productions. I’ve looked, and it only exists in the Wayback Machine these days, but it was a hobby-grade website with various video and audio editing tutorials. And I remember this one plain as day because I must have watched it hundreds of times: the video explained how to edit out the sound of an industrial fan that was causing a distraction in the background of some wedding footage.

This is the Jessie James-Decker video I mention that absolutely isn’t intended for ASMR but had the desired effect on me until I discovered the real thing. This video’s actually a little noisier than you’d associate with a typical “whispers” clip, but I think there’s something relaxing about the way she talks. There are also a lot of sounds here that I’d later learn are considered triggers, like hair brushing and the folding of fabrics.

I’d gleaned the information I needed from the video the first time that I watched it, but over the course of a couple of years I’d go on to watch that clip again and again and again. There was just something about the quality of the voiceover’s microphone and the way that he talked – calm and unrushed – that would prompt the aforementioned “tingles”. And that was my first ASMR video.

Of course, it wasn’t called ASMR back then, but the results were exactly the same: I watched that clip over and over not because of its content but because it relaxed me. Infuriatingly, it seems to have been nuked off the Internet; I’ve looked absolutely everywhere for a mirror of the original, and I just can’t find it. I can still quote parts of it in my head, though – I watched it that many times.

As the years went by, I started to seek out videos that had a similar effect. One of my favourites was a make-up tutorial by country singer Jessie James-Decker, her southern drawl and deliberate movements bringing out those “tingles” again.

I want to be absolutely clear here: the sensation is absolutely not sexually motivated. I know that’s a common misconception among many, but it really doesn’t matter what the topic of the video is or who’s delivering it – successful ASMR lulls you into a state of intense relaxation that you can feel reverberate through your whole body. I honestly feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

I eventually started watching all kinds of personal attention videos, with make-up clips bizarrely being my favourite. I can appreciate the weirdness here: I was a grown man listening to girls talk about eye-liner and foundation on YouTube, but these were the best videos I could find… Until I eventually had a breakthrough.

As soon as I discovered actual ASMR – I think it was Gentle Whispering I stumbled upon first after an unrelated podcast mentioned something about “whispering videos”, which I Googled out of curiosity – I knew exactly what I’d been experiencing all of those years. And the first week of content binging I went through was incredible – every single clip seemed tailor-made to create this intense sense of relaxation I craved, whereas I had to work through a lot of “normal” videos to find what I was looking for.

For as much as I think Gentle Whispering is the absolute best ASMRtist (cringe), it’s this video by Cosmic Tingles that I discovered during my initial binge that triggered me the hardest. I still watch this barber shop role-play regularly – even though I can’t grow a beard to save my life. It’s just absolutely jam-packed with relaxing sounds, and I find her accent and mannerisms intensely calming.

I’d say, a couple of years later, I now spend at least three or four hours a week watching ASMR videos; sometimes I use them as background noise while I do other things, other times they get my full attention. I definitely have favourites that I watch over and over again, much like the Adobe Audition tutorial from all those years ago.

It’s a weird thing because this is the most open I think I’ve ever been about it before; I’ve never really mentioned to friends and family that I’m obsessed with these clips of people whispering into microphones. But I am, and I honestly can’t imagine a day when I won’t watch them; if the content creators dry up, then I’ll just make sure I recycle old videos.

But that won’t happen because ASMR is big business now: there are YouTubers making an absolute fortune from these kind of clips – you wouldn’t believe the number of views some videos receive. Despite it evolving into a phenomenon, though, I always find it funny that I was watching these kind of clips a decade earlier – I just didn’t realise it at the time.

That Adobe Audition tutorial really was something else.

asmr blog

Skin deep

You should think yourself lucky.

I’m going to do something I hate in this blog: write about a medical matter. I hate it because posts like this almost always come across intensely whiny; even though I’m sure many will empathise, they’ll never truly understand. And through that lack of comprehension comes a question even if it’s never verbalised: are you just exaggerating?

I’m guilty of this all the time. If someone tells me they’re unwell I’ll always pay sympathy to their plight, of course – but in the back of my mind I’ll often ponder whether so-and-so should just man up. Things can’t be that bad.

After all, you should think yourself lucky, right?

This is what people sometimes tell me when I talk about my eczema. (I don’t, for the record, very often.) I’m not a cancer patient; I’ve not got a life-threatening disease. I’m not disabled, and the skin issues I do have could be worse. Type in ‘eczema’ on Google Images and you’ll be assaulted by an onslaught of awful photos – they aren’t me.

For what it’s worth I am grateful, but the above sentence drives me wild these days: just because things are generally manageable doesn’t mean they’re okay. I don’t feel lucky when I’m in social situations conscious of my blotchy face; I don’t feel lucky when the skin around the back of my legs is so cracked and sore that it stings to walk.

But it could be worse, right?

Well, that’s why I’m writing this blog really. Eczema has, when I stop and think about it, really affected my life; I’ve never been able to just crash on couches and make random trips because there’s a level of preparation involved with keeping things under control. I think back to high school and the number of times I’d avoid social scenarios because of my skin and I do feel a bit upset; I’d hazard many thought of me as antisocial – and I am to a degree – but as a teenager I was so conscious of my red and often flaky skin that the easiest solution was just to prevent people seeing it. Skipping school wasn’t an option, but staying home on weekends was.

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Last year, I got my first very first tattoos. Nothing as elaborate as in the picture, by the way – I prefer not posting pictures of mine on the Internet because it all seems very showy when I consider them a personal thing. I’ve always wanted to get tattoos but, of course, the health of my skin has always been of primary importance. During the summer I felt really good about how in control I was of my skin and so I just went ahead and got my first done. The second followed shortly after. I had intended to add more by now, but with the way things are at the moment I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to. And that’s a huge shame, as I have so many ideas.

I got things under control at about 17. To be clear, I’ve always had a rigid treatment plan: moisturiser twice a day, steroid creams once a day, sensitive soaps and washing powders – the works. A combination of all of these things has by and large kept things under control. Well, up until about five months ago.

Things have gone downhill recently. In November of last year I started to get a terrible flare on my lip, which was diagnosed as impetigo. It then spread to my right eye and was diagnosed as conjunctivitis. It then spread to my other eye, and to other parts of my face. This continued for five days, the final night of which I was in the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life. I’m not going to post the pictures here, but there was literally no skin around my eyes at all – just a weeping, bleeding splodge.

I was eventually diagnosed with eczema herpeticum: a rare disease in which the herpes virus responsible for cold sores teams up with the eczema-induced weaknesses in the skin to do enormous damage. I was informed that the disease had spread to my eyeball, and was a day or so away from being hospitalised. I’ve since been told that if the disease had reached my cornea, I could have been blinded by the scarring that it may have caused.

But I got treatment and it cleared up pretty fast considering how bad it was; I think I was diagnosed properly on the Monday and was able to cover the PlayStation Experience press conference by Saturday.

The problem now is that it keeps coming back. As I write this I’m on my third bout of eczema herpeticum of the year so far; the skin around my eyes is incredibly sore, and while they’re starting to dry out and crust now, there’s still lots of puss on my eyelids that I’m having to be very diligent to clean. It’s gross, I know.

And it’s going to keep happening.

The thing that scares me the most is that, being a viral thing, I’m now having to accept that this probably isn’t my last bout. I’m praying that it is, and there’s hope that the disease may burn itself out; my immune system could yet win. But realistically, I have to come to terms with the fact that this is going to happen to me again and again.

I’m so upset because mentally I feel disfigured, and the pain makes it difficult to concentrate on anything else really. Despite writing 1,000 words about my current medical predicament, I’m really not a mardy person, and so I’ve tried to persevere with my normal life to the best of my ability – even though it’s been pretty hard.

But what other option do I have? I’m angry at the world and jealous of everyone around me right now; I just want to get better and back to my best.

Still, I should think myself lucky I suppose.

eczema medical blog

I hate crabs

Anyone that’s followed PlayStation over the years will be familiar with the phrase “giant enemy crab”. Sony’s infamous 2006 E3 press conference included a demo for a PlayStation 3 game named Genji: Days of the Blade, which was, according to lead producer Bill Ritch, based upon “famous battles which actually took place in ancient Japan”. Including, of course, that oft-overlooked one involving a mutant sea urchin.

Apparently, warriors attacked its weak points to inflict massive damage.

Seriously, though, my personal weak point is crabs – I absolutely hate them. I’m not keen on spiders or cockroaches either, but my idea of hell is being trapped in a small room filled with crabs. I could cope with rats (in fact, I actually quite like them), snakes, or most other creepy-crawlies. But crabs. Argh!

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Good grief! According to Wikipedia, the Japanese spider crab has the largest leg span of any arthropod – reaching figures in the range of almost four metres. That’s absolutely massive! Not only that but their bodies also reach 40cm in width, making them both bulbous and spindly at the same time. Just truly the most horrific of creature, isn’t it?

I’m not sure when this “phobia” started, but I remember going to the Sealife Centre as a teenager and being railroaded into holding one of the maniacal monstrosities. I’m the kind of person that gets upset when I accidentally stomp on a snail, so it’s unlike me to have such murderous tendencies, but I remember thinking, when I held that crab in my palm, that I just wanted to throw it against the wall. A horrible thing to even comprehend, I agree, but I just can’t stand them.

What is it that creeps me out the most? The spindly legs. The widely spaced eyes. The way they move on their side. The body armour that encases their flesh. The pincers that click-and-clack searching for targets. I could go on.

I understand, of course, that, as is the case with any living thing, there’s nothing really to be frightened of. Animals generally attack in self-defence, and a crab certainly can’t really help how it looks. But they still terrify me – especially those gigantic spider ones, who I’m convinced live on the bottom of the ocean alongside all manner of Lovecraftian-esque creatures, biding their time before they surface and lay waste to us all.

The moral of this rapidly written blog post, then? Crabs are the devil in disguise.

crabs fear phobia blog

Worrying

Worrying doesn’t take away tomorrow’s troubles. It takes away today’s joy.

I’m not sure who I’m supposed to attribute that quote to, but I’m familiar with it because I recite it every time that I start to feel anxious. And to be brutally honest with you, that’s multiple times per day – even when I don’t really have anything to feel uneasy about.

If there’s one thing I would change about myself, it wouldn’t be my nose, height, or waistline, but my inability to stop worrying. I worry practically all of the time.

I first became aware of it when I was roughly six-years-old. It was a cold winter evening and I’d gone to my friend’s house for a birthday party. I don’t remember much about the gathering itself, other than that my pal’s Mum had made these awesome chicken nugget and chips fast food packs; she put our dinner in paper bags basically so that we weren’t tethered to the dinner table while we ate. It seemed ingenious at the time.

And I remember having a really great evening, up until it was time for my parents to pick me up. This time had been pre-determined, and so I put on my coat ready to leave just as the clock struck the hour that I was due to depart.

No one showed.

Five minutes passed and I started panic.

Ten minutes passed and I was in tears.

Thirty minutes passed and I was inconsolable.

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Worried Arthur was a book that my Mum bought me when I was very young. The character closely resembled my six-year-old alter-ego, worrying about every possible permutation in life. I think about the book and its penguin protagonist even today. I suppose the story had its intended effect – making me realise that I’m not alone.

My parents showed up soon after and everything turned out fine. But I always remember that night because it’s the first time that I realised I probably overreacted – even though everything ultimately felt out of my control.

This sort of response actually worsened for a few years. I remember my grandma counting to 100 with me each time my parents were late picking me up. She was trying to take my mind off the worry with the counting, but it rarely worked.

As I got older, I started to realise that my parents would eventually come – even if they happened to be a few minutes late. My worries changed with age: teachers, exams, grades. When I was 11-years-old, there was a Nostradamus prediction regarding the end of the world that was pretty widely reported in the media at the time.

I didn’t sleep that night.

All children worry, of course, and I can’t say for sure that anything was different about me – but the thing is that I tend to obsess. At the age of 16 I tormented myself over a personal matter that turned out to be a mere mistake. At the age of 17 I was in a typical teenage relationship that I was unhealthily pre-occupied with. And as I mentioned in my previous blog, I was fixated by the perilous position of my place in my high school band, Slippery Nipple.

But this is when I started to realise that my obsessive nature had an upside. I discussed in my last post about how I found ways to justify my role in the group by doing all of the social media work and ultimately doing all of the music production tasks as well. I sacrificed my spare time to do these things, fuelled by the worry that I was going to get kicked out of the band. But if anything, that doubt in the back of my mind pushed me to make the group more popular than it had any right to be.

The same thing happened at university, too. I remember the fallout from Huddersfield University left me pretty down in the dumps, and I just wasn’t putting any effort into my course at all. I’m generally smart enough to scrape by without really exerting myself, but as the second year modules came thick and fast, I started to worry that a middling 2.2 grade wouldn’t get me a job. That fear propelled me through to the end of the final year, where I worked so hard at bumping my average that I finished with first class honours.

I became utterly obsessed with my course in the final eight or so months actually, strategizing every permutation and possibility of my degree to get the grade I figured that I’d need. It was an example of worrying driving me on and pushing me to extend beyond my best.

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I started running at the age of 17 as a way to deal with my worries, and I still use the tactic today. In addition to all of the positive endorphins that exercise releases, I find that running gives me the time and energy to really analyse my worries and get to the bottom of them all. And when that doesn’t work, I try to “sprint” them out of my body. The harder you exert yourself, the more your mind needs to focus on the strenuous activity that you’re body’s undertaking. It’s a bit extreme, I suppose – but it works for me.

And that’s something that I still channel today. I don’t think Push Square would be where it is if I wasn’t utterly terrified that one day it will all go away. But the truth is that one day it will all be over – and, quelle surprise, I sometimes worry that I won’t have allowed myself to enjoy the ride.

The real negative undercurrent beneath all of this is that I know I have no right to worry about anything at all. The worries I’ve listed – university, work, safe lifts home – are all things that I should be grateful for. There are people in the world who are homeless, penniless, and whose lives are threatened by war, hunger, and disease every single day. And yet here I am worrying about… Well, nothing that really matters at all.

And generally, it’s the things that I can’t even control that get to me the most. It borders on barmy at times. I know from experience that things always work out for the best, so what am I so afraid of?

I have always tried to fight the worrying; I have always battled the churning in my stomach and the uneasiness that exudes my entire being. And I’ve gotten a little better at controlling it with age. But I don’t think it will ever truly go away, because it’s a part of who I am.

I guess I came to terms with that a long time ago. It’s probably a good thing that I’ve found a way to channel it, then, because these days I consider worrying both my strongest and weakest asset all at the same time.

worry worried anxiety fear blog

The day I stopped making music

As I write this, there’s a mini Novation MIDI keyboard nestled against the wall behind me. I last used it eight years ago in a dorm room days before I was due to start a music production course at Huddersfield University. The next day, I packed it away, took it home, and never touched it again.

I was never a good musician, but like anything I tend to take a fascination with, I taught myself a lot in a short period during the latter days of my teenage years. I was in a band – Slippery Nipple – and, well aware that I was the weakest musician in the group, I started to find other ways that I could contribute to the ensemble aside from sloppily performing basic bass lines.

Unsurprisingly, I became the social media man, then using dodgy applications to increase our MySpace reach in the local area. It worked: a mix of my underlying arrogance and strong computer skills earned us a reputation that we didn’t really deserve; people didn’t come to our gigs to hear our music, but because we managed to build social gatherings around our performances.

Bizarrely, we were a hot ticket in the local music scene, because organisers knew that we’d bring a lot of people everywhere that we performed.

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The front cover for the Slippery Nipple “album” that I recorded. We knew this older guy who was teaching himself photography, and he’d done a few “glamour” shoots with a local girl. I decided that I wanted the album cover to be a riff on Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude, so we took the photos and edited them to get the silhouette artwork.

But I knew this alone wasn’t enough to keep my place in the band, so I started to dabble with music production. I was already familiar with Cubase as I started to record stuff almost immediately after picking up a guitar, so it was no surprise that I wanted to capture Slippery Nipple’s sound for our MySpace page.

Early recordings were rudimentary, but as I familiarised myself with the software, I started to have mental ideas. I wanted to record a concept album, and dreamed up this storyline that would fill the dead air between songs. There were to be car crashes, phone box conversations, and long walks in the rain. Somehow I convinced the band, and we recorded it all.

This didn’t satisfy me, though. As high school crawled to a conclusion and we all started to go our separate ways, I decided that – despite my lack of musicianship – I was going to make it as a solo artist. I recorded an EP named ‘Ladies and Gentleman, This Is Not Nu-Rave’ over the course of a week or so, fusing free samples with my own simplistic synth skills.

It wasn’t very good, but I got the bug.

Jealousy was a track on ‘Ladies and Gentleman, This Is Not Nu-Rave’. In hindsight it was awful, but I’m still proud of how aspects of it came together. I used guitar samples and combined them with live bass and various synths to make the song. The video was shot by my girlfriend at the time on a very cheap eBay camcorder, hence the crazy poor quality by modern standards.

I went to university to study Business Information Technology, but I kept working on music in my spare time. I enjoyed my course, but speaking to my friends who’d travelled all around the country, I realised I wasn’t realising my dream like them; I wanted to make music. So I quit my course after Christmas, applied to do music production at Huddersfield University, and started work on my most ambitious track yet – the one that would earn the respect of my soon-to-be peers despite me not really knowing how to play any instrument.

At the time, I was working in a local pub, and there was a 30-something Kate Moss look-a-like who used to come in and drink gin and slimline tonic. I was in complete lust with her; she used to get me going every Friday that she dropped by. But she was a high-class girl, and she would never, ever show interest in my 19-year-old self. Or my current self, to be frank.

And that became the lyrical basis for the song that I was working on; I felt like a bit of a loser in love, but I enjoyed having a crush on someone much older than me. I spliced up a guitar riff, built a bass line around it, and dreamed up the line: “What would you think if I bought you a drink? I’m kinda strapped for cash, so I better not ask.”

I spent two months on the song. I sampled drum beats from Prince records. I tried to emulate the sounds of a Nintendo Entertainment System. I mixed it for about two weeks straight, and laboured over the chorus. That was the hardest part lyrically, and I’m still not particularly happy with what I came up with. It’s the worst part of the song.

I finished it in April 2008 I believe, and immediately started working on other songs. I dried up a bit, but I was still excited to go to university, and set off in haste later that year.

It wasn’t what I wanted.

Gin & Tonic was the song I wrote about the nice looking lady who used to come in the pub on a Friday night. I still really like how this song came together: it mixed every musical style that I was interested in at the time. I poorly compressed the YouTube upload so it doesn’t sound as good as it probably should, but I still have the final mixdown file burned to a CD and will likely hold onto it forever. Even though music didn’t work out, I’m proud of how much I managed to teach myself about it – and what my failure at Huddersfield University ultimately taught me about life.

I just hated everything about it. I disliked being away from home, of that there was no doubt, but I also knew from minute one that I’d made a massive mistake. I didn’t want to go partying with people I pretended to like. I didn’t want to live in a stuffy room with paper-thin walls. And worst of all, when it came to the crunch, I couldn’t see myself as the next Max Martin either anymore.

I wasn’t going to be a music producer. I’d been kidding myself.

Within 72 hours I’d left Huddersfield University, re-enrolled on my old course, and pledged never to make music again. I felt like a failure, and music was the fall guy. If I wasn’t going to follow through on my original “dream”, then I shouldn’t play my instruments or dabble with music production either.

And I didn’t.

I recently picked up my guitars again for the first time in order to review a Rocksmith game for Push Square, and, in truth, I enjoyed playing around with them again. I’ve since considered re-installing Reason and faffing around with some synths and drum machines. But I doubt I will.

And if I don’t, then that day where I sat glumly tapping away on my mini Novation MIDI keyboard in the north of England will forever remain the day that I stopped making music.

music music production bands high school blog

Third time’s a charm

I had a blog at high school.

Back then, I made it because I could. I was obsessed with web design at the time, and I suppose that I wanted to give myself a venue to both test myself and show off. None of my friends had a blog back then, of course – well, not with a custom URL or anything. I suppose some might have had abandoned Blogger.com accounts, but mine was tailor made.

I never really posted anything on it. I didn’t renew the domain name.

I rebought the URL after high school and started again. This time, I had a focus. I was going to blog about the things that I liked: music, books, and games. Ah, games. While I did my very best to sing the virtues of Tess of the D’urbevilles and Katy Perry’s debut album, it became clear that I was mostly going to be writing about games.

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My very first blog. Yes, it really was framed like that in the middle of the page. In this entry from 3rd April 2004, my 15-year-old alter-ego gushes over a 19-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo and anticipates the arrival of Project Gotham Racing 2 for the Xbox. There’s also a cryptic reference to ‘Girl A’ – she sounds important, but I honestly can’t remember who she is.

I started Push Square. And I didn’t renew the domain name.

Push Square has grown beyond my wildest ever dreams; it’s unreal to think that thousands upon thousands of people not only read my words – but care about them, too. In fact, there’s a part of me that still thinks when I sit down to write an article that no one will read what I have to say. Why would they?

But they do.

Despite that, there’s been a nagging voice in the back of my head telling me to start blogging again for a while now. Even though my work is read daily by more people than I could ever imagine, I feel more isolated than I ever have before. It’s not a big deal – it’s probably a combination of the bad weather and the high expectations that I set myself. But sometimes I just want to blurt out the bottled up emotions that I’m harbouring.

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My second blog – although Archive.org failed to save the style sheet, which is a shame. In this entry from 16th January 2008, my 19-year-old alter-ego appraises Avril Lavigne’s transition from punk-pop to pop. I reused a lot of the elements from this blog for what would become the first version of Push Square, including the horizontal menu descriptors. In fact, those remained right the way through to the Nintendo Life merger several years later.

And these are words that I don’t necessarily care if people read.

So, this is attempt number three at building a blog. Funnily enough, the things that I cared about at high school – the domain name, the customised layout, the non-Blogger.com setup – mean very little to me anymore. The web has changed. I’ve changed. Well, in many ways. One thing that hasn’t changed is my staying power. As such, I’m confident I’ll eventually abandon this blog like its predecessors.

But that’s all part of the story.

One day I’ll be talking about this Tumblr when I begin my fourth blog from scratch.

blogging web design blog