Epic blog posts from callmeolive!!!
For most kids, summer holidays meant the best things: hanging out with friends until the sun came down, playing video games non-stop, and travelling abroad. For us, it meant camping. 
 Each year without fail we’d be dragged off to the middle of nowhere and stuck in a field for weeks on end (not fun for a hay fever sufferer). No internet, no TV, and no connection to the outside world. I…
Ah, August. Once again I’ve survived a ridiculously hot July and I’m blessed with a beautiful month where all is cool and the nights are still long. It’s also the time of year where my brain pipes up and says I should be more active, so I hatched a plan: every day in August, I’d disconnect, go out on a walk, and enjoy myself. 
 It was a foolproof plan with one flaw –…
Endings. They’re a fact of life. Sometimes I’ll finish a programme or game and I’ll be content with the ending, other times I’ll upset. But the focus of this post will be when I get close finishing something I enjoy, and then I just leave it. 
 I can’t tell what it is. Have I been burnt out by bad endings? Do I prefer things being open? Do I want to leave things…
Late last night I heard the unmistakable sound of something colliding with a computer fan. Having only cleaned it out on Monday, I was worried that I must’ve broke something. 
 I turned my phone’s light on and had a peek. My computer’s glass panel had some scratches on it, which weren’t there when I cleaned it out. Then the scratches flickered with the current of the…
Jim Nielsen recently wrote how blogging can just be stating the obvious , so here we go Jim: it’s too sodding hot. 
 The last 3 days broke the record for the hottest June day. Yep, 3 days in a row . We’ve had yet another unprecedented heat wave following last year’s, and the year before that, etc. It’s been bloody unbearable. You can manage in the shade, but if…
I always meant to have some major epic planned for today’s post, but alas. What I have instead are some shorter, compartmentalised thoughts on the whole debacle. 
 Why Brexit? 
 There’s a fair bit I could talk about: The evolution of the European Communities to the European Union, worries of the EU overruling domestic decisions, immigration concerns, or decades of weird…
You know the song No Limit by 2 Unlimited, from the album No Limits! ? Ever since I was a kid I’ve always wanted to like this song, but there’s one critical flaw: 
 The song begins with the iconic line “ Let me hear you say yeah ”. What’s followed is SFX of a crowd audibly not saying yeah. Boy I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder. 

The annoying thing about having a blog is that when I see anyone else’s blog, one thought comes to mind: I wish my blog was like this. 
 It could be anything. I see it, I appreciate it, and I want to crib it. Often it’s contradictory: in a single day I could see blogs with a modern sans-serif font, a serif font, or something akin to Comic Sans , and I’d want to steal all of…
If there’s one thing I miss about being a kid, it’s the sheer fervour I had for the media I consumed. Being an adult’s alright, but it kinda sucks knowing that I can’t experience media with the curiosity, wonder, and ability to form wild attachments that I used to have. 
 You get what I mean? Emotional immersion , perhaps? And while I certainly miss the utter joy of…
Yep, Doom 2016 is a decade old now. Time flies. Click here if you want to skip to my thoughts . Also I spoil the game a lot. 
 Doom, retro shooters, and me 
 I mean, it’s Doom , id Software’s seminal title from 1993 that influenced everything else. What’s more to be said? 
 I was born a few years after the original Doom released. I never had the chance to play it as a…
Weird fact about me: I’m cross-dominant (also known as being mixed-handed). Instead of having a dominant hand I use everything with, my hands are… Awkward. There are some tasks which my left hand excels at, and some tasks which my right hand excels at. And I can’t know until I try it. 
 Oh so you’re ambidextrous? 
 This is the question I’m asked every time I…
Let’s cut to the chase: it was a wearable blanket. 
 A wearable blanket? 
 Yeah. It’s a blanket you wear. Went for a tenner in the middle of Lidl, right next to the welding masks. 
 A blanket you wear? 
 So imagine a blanket made of teddy fleece. Give it arm tubes and a large pocket for your feet. Bingo. 
 … Like the ones in those weird American infomercials?…
With Valve recently 1 revealing a new Steam Controller as part of their new hardware line-up, I thought I’d dust off my old Steam Controller and check it out a decade after its launch. 
 If you already know about it and want to skip the faff, here’s what I think about it . 
 From chair to couch 
 In the 2010s Valve had an idea. While console gaming has been casually enjoyed…
Wot happened this year 
 2025. What a complete faff. 
 On the first day a Cybertruck blew up outside a Trump hotel , serving as an omen for the year to come. Nintendo announced the Switch 2, and Elon Musk performed a totally innocuous salute on stage, which just happened to be identical to a Nazi salute. 
 The Netflix show Adolescence took the UK by storm, bringing another year of…
I haven’t been feeling it for the last few weeks. An inability to dedicate myself to anything, a lack of care for the things in my life, and a general malaise about being me. A month into autumn and only now do I recognise and remember this pervasive feeling as depression. 
 Carrying on from last time , summer was hellish. It was the hottest on record with each month having its own…
The last week of April was a bloody scorcher, and today marks the hottest start of May on record. Summer is rapidly approaching, and as someone who shuts off when it gets over 20C… Bugger 1 . 
 I hate summer. Too hot. Too humid. It gets overbearingly muggy outside and going in doesn’t alleviate much either – housing here is designed to keep the heat in; chuck in cramped rooms and…
I’ll let you in on a secret. In my teenage years I nigh-exclusively went to sleep listening to fantasy soundtracks, imagining Tolkienesque characters chasing fame and glory by the sword night after night. It was fun, daft, and dweeby. 
 It was a practice I kept up into adulthood. Not so much the imagination, but I’d nod off listening to the soundtrack of fierce battles, savvy…
I’m writing this while I’m watching Caesar – my cat – partake in his third afternoon kip. Even if he shares his namesake’s arrogance, pettiness, and territorial ambitions, he’s an absolute gem and the light of my life. 
 I could spend the next 10 paragraphs gushing over how much I love him, but I’ll settle for highlighting something weird about him: he has The…
Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories has haunted me since I was a kid. I could go on about the vibes of ancient Egypt, the foggy 3D graphics, or the gorgeous synth soundtrack , but what’s really haunted me is that I never beat it. I’ve returned to it multiple times throughout my life, yet I’ve been defeated each time. 
 So in 2024 I vowed that I’d finally beat the game by the…
I made some solid boring purchases this year. Fingerless gloves, a DualSense controller, and a proper toasty commando sweater. But this year, the best purchase went to a weighted blanket. 
 Yeah, a blanket. It’s got pouches full of glass beads in it. Simple. 
 
 
 

 … You ever tried taking a beauty shot of a grey blanket? 
 
 I’ve heard a lot…
I’ve recently been wearing a Casio AE-1200 . I had a familiar model in my teens, lost it, then bought this a decade later in the tail end of the pandemic. 
 It’s a solid digital watch. Subtle, snazzy. But above all else it’s cheap and practical, filled to the brim with more features than a simple digital watch ever needs: 
 
 Day & date tracking 
 5 alarms 
…
Last night I got an email from Google: My Pixel 4a would be receiving a new update in the coming days. 
 Bit weird I thought, considering this device has been end-of-life since August 2023. 
 It turns out that this update is supposed to improve battery life for the Pixel 4a, but for “some” “impacted devices” this update will “ reduce your battery’s…
2024 felt more like a proper year than the last . 
 Amol Rajan casually dropped the sickest sample known to man , internet rapper Viper got arrested for kidnapping, then an ITV drama brought the Post Office Horizon scandal to the front of public consciousness making us all wish there were TV dramas about everything else wrong with the country. 
 Willy’s Chocolate Experience took the…
There’s nothing better than a good night’s sleep. The problem: I don’t want to sleep, never been a fan of it. 
 The average well-adjusted person’s day looks a little like this:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 My (not average, terribly-adjusted person) day however, looks more like this:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Perpetual…

 This blog post will not be updated to match the site in the future, any mention of how things are will remain that way. 
 
 Firstly, I made this blog with two key influences in mind: 
 
 Herman Martinus ’ Bear Blog for it’s simple & lightweight ethos 
 InvisibleUp ’s unique article banners featured with each post 
 
 I mentioned this prior in a…
The last time my old man saw the northern lights was 40 years ago. A humbling display that made up for the miles spent trudging through the coast of Norway. 
 Tonight we got to see it together, for 30 minutes. And all we had to do was look outside. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 I didn’t have time to dig out my old camera and figure out how to actually use it, but…
I handed my notice in recently. 
 Unlike every other blog post which begins with that sentence, everything surrounding it has been amicable and mundane; I simply want to move onto something that’s more applicable to me 1 . There’s no juicy tale of workplace treachery to be found here, just musings on my insecurities. 
 For the last few years the thought of leaving has been…
2023 was a good year for purchases (materialism ho!), I picked up a Steam Deck, built a new PC from scratch, and at one point I could nab a bag of sour cream pretzels for 50p. But none of them were as valuable as this: 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 To be fair, the pretzels were a close second. 
 
 This is a Kobo Libra 2, and it’s been serving me well for the…
tl;dr: Having information in text means: 
 
 You can edit & refine it before sharing 
 It provides a clear record of what was said instead of relying on human memory 
 The information sent is verbatim and unchanged by human & technological filters 
 
 
 I’m what folk call a Zillennial , which means I’m not quite a Millennial and not quite Gen Z. But it gives…
2023 was certainly a year . Our Prime Minister got fined for not wearing a seatbelt, Paul O’Grady’s passing left millions of dog lovers and radio fans mourning, and shortly after some bloke got crowned king in a ceremony full of high-definition horse manure. The long-running series of Governmental cock-ups continued as they lost more seats and dithered from crisis to crisis, the usual.…
With the WHO declaring that Covid is no longer a global emergency , we’ve quickly been pushed back to life as it was before the pandemic, with barely a thought given to what things were like for a few years. 
 Life was in no way a fun jaunty romp, but when I look back I find myself amazed at how we acted back then – and how in some ways we’ve went back. 
 1) We did away with…
Part two 
 When it comes to writing, if I can’t keep things concise, I like to keep them entertaining. Unfortunately childhood bullying doesn’t lend itself well to either of these goals, much more when it remains such a raw topic to me. 
 Whilst I’ve already dedicated two posts to the topic, I still have a few things which I either failed to mention, or felt didn’t…
Part one 
 With it being a decade since I was last at school, you’d think I’d be over it. Sometimes I think I am. 
 And then I dream. 
 I’m suddenly back at school, or a face I had forgotten comes back to me, and it all comes back: the powerlessness, humiliation, the anger that someone could hurt me so much for kicks – and finally the horror that I’m unable to…
This June marked 10 years since I left school. 
 I was the weird kid. I don’t know if I was innately weird, or if years of bullying turned me that way. Either way growing up wasn’t fun. 
 When I was 7 years old my family had to move across the country, I landed in a new school at the point where friendships and social dynamics were ironed out – if it wasn’t apparent that…
I had a lovely conversation with my mother this week. I can’t remember what on Earth we were blabbering on about, but as I knelt down to give one of the dogs a hug, she shrieked something unforgettable: Your hair is thinning! 
 I couldn’t tell who was more shocked: my mum at the sight of my head, or myself. Especially when I’ve been buzzing my head for years now. It’s…
After almost a decade of running my current desktop, I’ve hit the point where I ought to cut my losses and start with a fresh build for my needs rather than attempt upgrading. And with a prospective part list and a new build on the horizon, the bittersweet task of backing up files 1 and choosing what I want to carry on to a new computer rears its head once again. 
 Normally it’s…
I work with a lot of materials and substances which come with a warning saying that they have been found to cause cancer in California. 
 Thankfully, I don’t live in California. 

I’m not a linguist. I’d like to say I wish I was , but the thought of spending 4 years at university to call myself one isn’t too appealing. Still, I find linguistics interesting, and based on some observations in the last few years I’ve had something on my mind: 
 Is there a term for when a sudden cultural event highlights a relatively unknown word or term and cements…
If you’re in the UK and you need to access medical help, you can do one of two things: for an emergency you call 999 or walk straight into A&E, and for anything else you ring your GP to get a doctors appointment. It’s a simple process, but in the wake of the COVID pandemic, it’s been buggered into a Kafkaesque circus known as the phone call lottery. 
 It’s a Wednesday,…
Video game genres can be a tad awkward. While basic terms like First-person shooter and Platformer are serviceable for many games, we live in a world where increasingly wilder games are releasing faster than we can apply descriptive genres to them. 
 If you’ve kept an eye on trending Steam games in the last year, you may have noticed the likes of Vampire Survivors , Brotato , and…
You’ve all read long-form posts and threads about Elon Musk’s takeover of and subsequent failures with Twitter, so I’d rather keep this relatively short. 
 Twitter blew up as a unique and extremely simple microblogging site, its lightweight and casual approach made it a great tool for keeping up with friends and sharing things on a whim. But the thing which propelled Twitter…
Original post here . 
 Rumours, hoaxes, conspiracy theories. Like many other teens who grew up on the internet, that part of the web has always captivated me – the hushed tones, fighting the power, uncovering the REAL truth. The subculture of secrets is hard not to find fascinating. 1 
 As I grew up with that seedy underbelly running parallel to everything around me, one thought became…
Dear iPhone users… 
 What if I told you there was a simple trick that would not just improve your life, but also improve the lives of everyone around you? Something you could do right away, with any mobile phone from the last 30 years. 
 Well this may be a surprise, but: 
 CHANGE YOUR DAMN RINGTONE 
 And while you’re at it, change your notification sound too.…
If you’re reading this, we’re live. Or the rootkit you installed is letting you read this as I type it. Either way, hello! 
 Let’s see how long we can keep this going before it all comes crumbling down. <3 
 Alternative title: i am in way over my head