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A Piece of PIAS

Published 15th March 2026

Computing / Internet / Videogames

I don’t let the old Acorn/RISC OS fanboy in me out very much any more. At least, not in polite company. But I have to admit, when reading a blog post recently from somebody around my age1, which was complaining about how unsafe they felt buying computers from the US due to the Trump administration, a little voice popped into my head, unbidden.

“YOU HAD THE CHANCE TO BUY BRITISH IN THE 90S AND YOU DIDN’T, IT’S TOO LATE NOW!”

Ahem. Slightly unfair, of course – Acorn’s machines had plenty of US involvement, not least with partners like VLSI – but I still think there’s a reasonable point there when it comes to the software stack. And anyway, being slightly unfair is the whole point of being a fanboy.

Still, I should dial this rather unpleasant part of me back to something useful. So let’s travel a little further back in time to my BBC Master days. Specifically the release Play It Again Sam 6.

Play It Again Sam 6 advert

Play It Again Sam 6 advert, from the January 1989 issue of Acorn User

Play It Again Sam was that magic thing: a win for both company and consumer. Take four old games Superior Software had the rights to, package them up with minimal effort, charge the same amount as a single game would, and watch the money flow in. Crucially, if you already had two of the games, the releases were still a bargain. The 8-bit incarnation ended up running for 18 installments between and 1987 and 19932, and sometimes there was even a brand new game included.

So given that value for money, along with loving my BBC Master more than life itself, I owned every single release, yes? In fact, no. I think Play It Again Sam 6 was the only one I owned. And while I had a “healthy” collection of pirate games – including some games which appeared on various Play It Again Sam releases – I certainly didn’t own every game featured on them, legally or otherwise. Nowhere near.

I think maybe this is something that’s easy for us to forget as adults. (Or at least, the kind of adults who read this site.) Recently, I’ve been on a bit of a Jayne Mansfield kick, and have been tracking down as many films of hers as I can reasonably watch. This means obvious fare like The Girl Can’t Help It, through to less obvious films like The Challenge, and onto true obscurities like The Fat Spy.3 This has involved ordering some truly odd DVD releases. As my friend Darrell said: “When you’re onto the Spanish bootleg DVDs you know you’re in deep.”

But as a kid, I didn’t have the resources to do this kind of collecting. And no matter how much I might love any given thing, the very idea of owning every single release of something was just incomprehensible.4 Not only would I never own every single Play It Again Sam compilation, but of course I would never own every single Play It Again Sam compilation.

After all, I was never going to own every single Donald Duck VHS release either. I’d just wear out the single one I had.

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  1. Deliberately left unlinked, I ain’t interested in a fight. ↩

  2. Plenty of websites claim that Play It Again Sam 18 was released in 1992, but I don’t believe this is the case. The issue is blurred by the fact that Superior essentially stopped advertising its 8-bit range in the Acorn magazines the start of 1993; but until then, the latest compliation they were pushing was 17. Given that, the 1993 date feels most likely.

    There was also a Play It Again Sam 19 released in 1997, released by ProAction, but this is distinct from the original Superior Software compilations, in my opinion. ↩

  3. The Fat Spy currently holds the record for the worst film I have ever seen. ↩

  4. The closest I ever came was Blue Peter annuals, and a) you could get them cheaply at boot sales, and b) that was as much pushed by my parents as much as anything else. ↩

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Here’s the Thing:

Published 27th February 2026

Computing / Internet

Seth Godin, “Freelancer empathy”:

“When phone cameras got good enough, portrait photographers scolded people who took their own headshots.

And when the Mac got pretty good at typesetting, professional designers pointed out that people who can’t tell a font from a typeface and don’t care about kerning should avoid it.

Professional translators bring humanity and insight to transforming writing from one language to another, but many people continue to use Google Translate…

Here’s the thing: the translators take their own headshots. Web designers often use translation software. And life coaches build their own websites with Squarespace and put their own selfies on Linkedin. We all make our own decisions, and most of the time, we use tech to do it ourselves.”

Greg Storey has an issue with the above – not the message, but the writing itself:

“What happens when a prolific author integrates AI into their work so much that it turns up wholesale in their writing? Seth Godin – said prolific author – recently posted an argument for hiring freelancers instead of using technology on his blog. While I agree with his message I paused when I began the fourth paragraph which starts with a telltale sign of AI writing.

Here’s the thing: nobody writes like this, only the robots. Now, I’m sure there are folks out there who do but it is now so prevalent that it stands out like a statement on a back of a consumer product: Made by AI.”

In other words: using the phrase “Here’s the thing:” makes your product look like the output of AI.

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Add Real Value

Published 23rd September 2025

Internet

I received an email the other day. It was sent to my Substack email address, and was titled “last post thoughts”. It read as follows:

“hi John,

gotta say, enjoyed the last post. the mix of archive nitpicking and
personal notes was kinda brilliant and felt very real.
I dont have a formal pitch, just curious.

would you ever profile a relevant expert in a future piece?

if yes, id love to point you toward someone who’d fit the tone and add
real value. fwiw, cheers — [name removed]”1

I mean, you might think I’m oversuspicious. But I detect just a smidge of AI writing in the above post, I don’t know about you.

Not that we need it, but there is proof. This email was sent by someone – or something – using an email address @podpitchplus.com. And what is PodPitch, exactly?

“Stop wasting time with one-off emails to podcasts. PodPitch is the first and only software that finds, writes, and sends pitches to podcast hosts from your actual email address. Whether or not you’re already pitching podcasts, PodPitch will make sure you get podcast bookings – guaranteed.”

Brilliant work, well done. I mean, I don’t run a podcast, sure, but maybe a “relevant expert” could be profiled in my newsletter, yeah?

Well, except that PodPitch couldn’t figure out August’s newsletter was the last one. But that’s a detail.

  1. Yes, I removed the name. Yes, I’m too nice. ↩

Rescued.

Published 22nd April 2025

Internet / Videogames

Jason Dyer’s All the Adventures project – “Wherein I play and blog about every adventure game ever made in (nearly) chronological order” – is undergoing a particularly amazing time at the moment. So far he’s covered 192 full games from 1982 alone – 32 of them since the start of this year – some of them very obscure indeed, and usually in multi-part articles. It brings into sharp focus those people who simply pretend to write blogs.

Jason doesn’t just limit himself to games which were published. For instance, take Time Warden by Simon Wadsworth, a game vaguely inspired by Doctor Who. Simon wrote about it on his own site:

“This was my second full adventure. I submitted it to Bug-Byte, as I had done with The Scepter, but it was never published. It was written using the same source code structure. I’d forgotten all about this game until sorting through a pile of old cassette tapes looking for my copy of The Scepter.

In this adventure you play the Time Warden. While you have been away on vacation and the Key of Time has been lost on the planet Syrius 5. You have 250 turns to recover the key before the end of the Universe.”

Luckily, Simon didn’t just talk about it on his site – he provided a download link to the game, which Jason used to write his post. Not that you can actually directly download it from Simon’s site any more… or, indeed, even read about it. The site went offline at some point in 2019. You can only access it now through the Wayback Machine.

Meaning that when Jason wrote about Time Warden, he’s writing about something rescued twice: firstly, an unpublished game scraped from an old cassette by its author… and then secondly, scraped from a defunct website through the Internet Archive.

Blogs are dead. Apart, of course, from all the amazing blogs out there.

What a Mistake-a to Make-a

Published 3rd February 2025

Internet / TV Comedy

The other day, I received an email with the subject line “YouTube removed your content”. Oh dear, what have I done now?

“It looks like [your video] didn’t follow our Community Guidelines. We removed it from YouTube.

We think your content violated our hate speech policy.”

What the fuck?

“Content that promotes hateful supremacism by alleging the superiority of a group over those with protected group status to justify violence, discrimination, segregation, or exclusion isn’t allowed on YouTube. We review educational, documentary, artistic, and scientific content on a case-by-case basis. Limited exceptions are made for content with sufficient and appropriate context.”

Right, OK. I instantly appealed, and ten minutes later, got back the following reply:

We reviewed [your video] again and confirmed it’s not allowed under our hate speech policy.

Your video won’t be put back on YouTube.

We understand this may be frustrating, but we’re committed to keeping YouTube a safe place for everyone.

Our goal is to help you succeed on YouTube. We encourage you to take a look at our Community Guidelines and keep them in mind when posting content in the future.

So what was this totally outrageous video on my account?

A clip from ‘Allo ‘Allo, “The Confusion of the Generals”, transmitted on 12th November 1988.

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Blog Questions Challenge

Published 2nd February 2025

Internet / Meta

I sometimes feel Dirty Feed is a weird mix of stuff. Obviously, a large part of my audience comes here for ridiculous minutiae about old television, particularly old comedy. Hello there. I like you.

But there’s also a strand of posts here – lessened over the years, perhaps, but definitely still there – which is about writing for the web in general. Some of this stuff occasionally gets quite widely-read if somebody grabs hold of it and links to it. For instance, this piece I published about the indie web actually did much better than any of the posts about TV I published in 2024. I don’t think the two audiences really have much crossover, which means I’m sure I disappoint a lot of archive TV fans when they see a brand new post on here, and it’s just me wanging on about websites rather than telly.

To which people I say: sorry, this is another of those posts. After seeing this post about blogging habits turn into a little chain letter, posted by people like Jeremy Keith, Luke Dorny and Greg Storey, I thought it might be fun to give it a go.

For those of you who couldn’t give a monkey’s tits about my writing process: don’t worry, there’ll be another post about 90s Granada comedy pilots before you know it.

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Badge of Honour

Published 14th July 2024

Animation / Internet

When it comes to anecdotes, it’s always best to poke them with a sharp stick occasionally. That goes double for anecdotes about Walt Disney. No, I promise you: he wasn’t cryogenically frozen upon his death. He really wasn’t. Promise.

A less well-known story surrounds Walt’s political persuasions. By 1964, he was most certainly an avowed Republican. Neal Gabler, in his biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Random House, 2006) tells us the following:1

“…none of his honours may have been greater than the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award the nation can bestow. Walt received it from President Lyndon Johnson at the White House during the 1964 presidential campaign – Walt wore a Goldwater button under his lapel – and it was a measure of his status that among his fellow honorees that day were the poets T.S. Eliot and Carl Sandberg, the novelist John Steinbeck, the urban historian Lewis Mumford, the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the artist Willem de Kooning, the composer Aaron Copland, the columnist Walter Lippmann, the journalist Edward R. Murrow, and Helen Keller. Walt Disney was in the pantheon.”

Hang on, hang on. Back up from that list of names a minute. What was that?

“Walt wore a Goldwater button under his lapel”

So Walt Disney received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat… and wore a campaign button for Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president, during the ceremony? This is very, very funny indeed.

But is it true?

Gabler sourced this particular piece of information from Remembering Walt (Hyperion, 1999), by Amy Boothe Green and Howard E. Greene. In it, there’s the following short quote from Charlie Ridgway, a publicist for the Disney theme parks for over three decades:

“The day Walt went to the White House to receive the Freedom Award from President Johnson, he wore his Goldwater button inside his lapel. Walt had been terribly antipolitical until George Murphy ran for the Senate. Being a friend of George, he supported him and that got him into politics again. From then on he was a rather avid Republican. Johnson did not take Walt’s political commentary with good grace at all.”

It’s a great story, but it also raises questions. For a start, if Walt wore the badge inside his lapel, how did Johnson even see it in the first place? Did Walt flash the badge at him? And if he didn’t flash the badge at him, why would he wear it in the first place? Just for his own amusement? For that matter, how did Ridgway know about any of this in the first place? Did he personally witness it?

It all feels a little too good to be true. Worryingly like an anecdote that people wish had happened, or something that Walt had joked about doing, but never actually did. There’s just not quite enough information in the above quote to truly trust it.

Luckily, somebody else has done the real work. Back in 2007, animation historian Michael Barrier did some research, and wrote this in-depth essay, which is essentially the final word on the whole affair. I won’t quote extensively from that piece; it’s worth reading for yourself. But, incredibly, while some of the details are still difficult to pin down, the story turns out to be pretty much true. Amazing.

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  1. With thanks to Darrell Maclaine for digging out his copy. ↩

“At Best, Misguided”

Published 18th March 2024

Internet

Or: Why Conversation on Social Media Is Often So Tedious, Part #264842.

The New York Times1, “Classified Material on Human Intelligence Sources Helped Trigger Alarm”, 27th August 2022:

“Mr. Trump and his defenders have claimed he declassified the material he took to Mar-a-Lago. But documents retrieved from him in January included some marked “HCS,” for Human Intelligence Control System. Such documents have material that could possibly identify C.I.A. informants, meaning a general, sweeping declassification of them would have been, at best, misguided.”

This section was quoted at the time by a popular account on Twitter, with the following statement attached:

“The way the NYT talks about what would amount to getting people straight up murdered.”

The replies were equally as scathing: “The level of unearned deference”, “misguided?!?“, “Misguided, they said! That was all… Misguided!!!”, “Jfc”, and so on. Or how about:

“Potentially misguided is generally reserved for thing like socks with sandals, not getting informants killed. But, you know, it’s all semantics.”

Here’s the problem: that’s not what “at best, misguided” means in this context at all. It’s clearly not meant to be taken at face value. It is deliberate understatement for effect. And that understatement, to me, reads far more strongly than an angry screed.

This isn’t a difficult thing to understand. Misinterpreting this is a very basic problem with comprehension. “At best, misguided” here simply means “terrible”. A very dry way of putting it, sure, but that’s what makes it grimly amusing. And there is place for such rhetoric in journalism, just as everywhere else, even on unpleasant subjects like this one.

With all the shit going on in the world, we cannot let ourselves be dragged into the idea that there is only one way to communicate. We cannot let pure fire and anger rule the day at all times, no matter how virtuous it might make us feel in the moment. We have to allow a range of approaches in how we write.

We do not win the day by reducing language to its most obvious, boring state at all times. We do not survive by being boring and one-note. Sadly, there are far too many people out there who think otherwise.

It vaguely frightens me.

  1. Disclaimer: I do actually have subscription to the New York Times. I can’t remember why I bought it – I think there was an old article I want to read – but I’m only subscribed to it while it costs me the offer price of £2 a month, as I don’t use it enough to justify any more. ↩

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“Are You OK With This?”

Published 28th February 2024

Internet

Jason Kottke, 21st December 2023:

“Substack explains why they are paying Nazis to publish on their platform. Friends who publish on Substack, are you ok with this? If not, maybe try Buttondown or WordPress or Ghost or literally anything fucking else.”

Greg Storey, 27th February 2024:

“Tumblr and WordPress user data have been sold to train AI, and Automattic intends to do it again moving forward. Content posted on both platforms between 2014 and 2023 was shared without user’s permission. Even worse, the data exchanged included private and deleted posts, private answers, and “content from premium partner blogs” for clients like Apple. […]

If you’re using Tumblr or WordPress it’s time to seriously consider moving on to software made by companies with more integrity. Any integrity frankly is better than what you have now. I can’t say enough about Ghost, Kirby, and Craft.”

*   *   *

It doesn’t matter what I actually think about the above two issues. I’ve come to believe that Substack’s Nazi problem was at least a little overblown, and I’d need to research the WordPress issue more thoroughly before coming to any kind of conclusion. But it’s all kinda irrelevant.

Instead, let’s take a hypothetical example. Some poor soul is running a newsletter on Substack. They read about all the Nazi stuff in December, and try to do the right thing: so they move to a self-hosted WordPress installation, as Jason recommends above. All sorted, right?

Only to now be told this month by someone else that, sorry, you backed the wrong horse. Don’t go with WordPress, they’re the bad guys.

That’s two moves, in the space of two months. I guess our hypothetical person could move again… but will the next service they choose turn out to be the bad guys too? How long will it be before that happens? A month, two months, maybe a whole year?

How long do they get to spend writing, before the tedious admin kicks in again?

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“Plans Change”

Published 2nd February 2024

Internet

Birmingham Live, 30th January 2024:

Jonnie Irwin says ‘plans change’ and issues fresh update amid cancer battle

Jonnie Irwin has said “plans change” as he issues a fresh update from his home amid his ongoing terminal cancer fight. BBC Escape to the Country and Channel 4 A Place in the Sun star Jonnie posted an update from his home amid an ongoing renovation.

Jonnie typed: “I was tempted to spray the remaining windows, but after interviewing someone that actually knows what they’re talking about I changed my plans. This more than any other Reno has been a fluid process! Check out the film we made on Morning Live on @bbciplayer, it’s worth a watch.

Birmingham Live, 2nd February 2024:

A Place in the Sun presenter Jonnie Irwin dies aged 50

A Place in the Sun presenter Jonnie Irwin has died at the age of 50. The TV presenter had been battling cancer for more than three years.

The devastating news of his death was announced on Friday (February 2). The dad-of-three ‘fought bravely’ with ‘unwavering strength and courage’, loved ones said.

A headline which deliberately tricks the audience into thinking a change in some home renovation plans is actually an update about a cancer diagnosis? I have to say, I find that to be one of the most unpleasant pieces of journalism I have read in recent years. There’s yer standard clickbait, and then there’s that.

It’s even more unpleasant when the person you’re writing about dies three days later.

And no, I ain’t linking to any of that shit.

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