So during March last year I was messing about with writing stuff on Medium – mainly about my experiences with going through the cochlear implant process.

I also wrote an article thanking my wife Debbie for supporting me over the years in my ongoing battle and challenges with progressive hearing loss.

However, when it became clear that Medium is no better, and in some ways worse, than other ‘social’ platforms in creating filter bubbles and designing things to keep you hooked and distracted, I dumped it 🙂

Therefore that public expression of gratitude disappeared too 😦

Given the tumultuous events of 2020, which had always been milestone for my previous blogging activities, I’ve since decided to revisit and relaunch my old blog

I started it originally back in 2009 and it was called “2020 Visions – Imagining the World my children will inherit”

As you can see, the reinvigorated blog is called “Beyond 2020 Visions”.

Anyway, coming back to the gratitude, I’ve said many times how lucky I feel to have got my implant operation done via a standby cancellation before the first pandemic lockdown hit us. Given the coverage about the massive backlog of non-critical/essential operations now building up it could have been very different and, quite frankly, soul destroying story.

As it is, the operation at the beginning of last year was just the start of what has been a long process of learning to hear again.

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Once in a decade I have a bit of a binge on computer games.

Ever since I used to bunk off Friday afternoon maths with a few mates to play the very basic, first generation of computer games on my ZX Spectrum I have had a general interest in how games have developed over the four decades since.

Occasionally a game will leap out as being interesting.

In the late 90s I remember watching my nephews play the James Bond ‘Goldeneye’ game on Nintendo and being amazed at how ‘awesome’ the graphics were and how aspects of the film had been recreated in the games.

A few years on I borrowed a copy of Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza to play on my PC and was fleetingly addicted to rampaging around the digitally created tower block killing off the terrorists.

That experience got me venturing into PC gaming for a while when I bought a copy of Half Life for myself.

Latterly, through buying consoles and games for the girls, I have ventured occasionally in first person/multiplayer shooters for the Wii and Call of Duty on the xBox and enjoyed watching Georgia playing Grand Theft Auto and Chloe playing Red Dead Redemption.

So a combination of lockdown enforced downtime and being a bit in limbo following the cochlear implant operation and learning to hear again electronically has created a ripe environment for me to venture into gaming again.

I spotted a while back that Google was experimenting with a cloud based gaming platform called Stadia and having switched more and more to cloud based platforms in many aspects of professional life it seems like a natural and logical path for gaming to follow.

A few minutes of account creation and parting with £40 on my credit card and I was the proud new owner of a Stadia 30 day trial and my own ‘cloud’ copy of Cyberpunk 2077. The promotion also threw in a free Stadia controller set-up, usually priced at £80 – so all in all a decent sounding opportunity 🙂

This spur of the moment purchase means that I approached the Cyberpunk game with no pre-conceived ideas or expectations and the criticism hadn’t gone mainstream at that point so I was pretty much unaware that the hardcore gaming community were not impressed.

I, on the other hand, have been extremely impressed and I’ll go as far as saying that for a spur of the moment purchase that £40 has delivered the best value for money entertainment I’ve ever experienced.

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