1072: Christmas Day

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all had a good one. Mine was nice and quiet and relatively relaxing, which is, I guess, what it should be. There were no kids in the house (despite Andie and my parents' worrying obsession with the Santa NORAD tracker thingy) so it was pretty restrained.

Like I've said before, I sort of miss that feeling of excitement, though; that knowledge that on December 25th you'll have something awesome to unwrap and then spend the rest of the day scattering over the living room floor to play with. I had some pretty great presents over the years when I was a kid, ranging from a Super NES (unbelievably exciting at the time — and which I still own to this day, I might add) to a toy called "Manta Force" that was actually a giant spaceship filled with smaller vehicles and little dudes. On a subsequent Christmas, I got the Manta Force Battle Fortress, which complemented the main Manta Force set with a mountainside base that had working guns. That was awesome, though I never managed to get hold of a Red Venom (the "bad guys'" equivalent of the main Manta Force mothership), which was a shame. Still, the Battle Fortress was great fun to have two-player face-offs with.

This Christmas, I had a few cool goodies. Andie got me the world's biggest My Little Pony poster, which I'm looking forward to assembling (yes, it requires assembly, it's that big) and sticking on the wall of my new study. I got some books and some chocolate and a nice throw for our sofa that won't fit in our flat. And lots of money which I am looking forward to spending — the Wii U I acquired shortly before we came away will doubtless be getting some new game love (I'm thinking Mario at the very least — I haven't played a Mario game properly since Mario 64, I don't think), and I fully intend to pick up a copy of 999 for the Nintendo DS because I really want to play Virtue's Last Reward and everyone says I should play 999 first. So I will.

I've spent a bit of time rediscovering how lovely a piece of kit the Vita is, too. I downloaded a few demos and had a fiddle around with them. LittleBigPlanet for Vita looks lovely, for example, but still has floaty jumping that annoys quite a few people I know. There's a fun "brain training" game called Smart As… that features John Cleese on voiceover duties that seems quite fun, too, so I'm contemplating grabbing that as I always used to quite enjoy the old DS brain training games. (It is £20, though, which feels like a lot for that kind of game in these days of cheap crappy 69p apps, but I understand it has a healthy amount of content in it.)

I've resisted the Steam Sales so far, with a couple of minor exceptions — playing Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed got me in the mood to replay the Dreamcast Sonic Adventure games which I remember being praised quite highly back in the day (and enjoying a great deal) but which everyone seems to hate these days. I also have to play the rest of Sonic Generations at some point, which genuinely is good.

But anyway. I am just rambling away a load of bollocks now so I will curtail that forthwith and simply wish all of my readers a very merry Christmas, and a pleasant holiday season onwards towards the New Year.

1071: Christmas Eve

It's Christmas Eve. Technically it's almost Christmas Day. Exciting, huh?

I've noted this for the past few years, but I find it tough to get really excited about Christmas these days. I'm pretty sure this is fairly common for people once they get beyond a certain age, but it's felt particularly pronounced for the past few years. I'm not sure if it's because I've had a few Christmases that haven't been particularly merry, or because I've had a few years where my life hasn't been exactly what I'd call "on track", but eh. Whatever.

This year, theoretically, I am enjoying a Christmas where my life is getting back to where it should be; to where I want it to be. This is good. It still feels a little difficult to enjoy it though, to find it easy to lighten up, chill out and just accept that things are nice. The holiday season doesn't magically make your anxieties and worries go away, sadly, as these are things that stick with you through the best and worst of times.

But let's try not to be overly negative about the whole thing. Tomorrow is a day for eating to excess, for opening presents, for relaxing and doing as little as possible. It may lack that childish excitement over whether or not there's, say, a Super NES under the tree (largely because I am now old and affluent enough to purchase myself the modern-day equivalent the Wii U if I want one) and it may lack that particular "spark" that believing in Father Christmas involves, but it's a time of peacefulness, of trying to set your worries aside, and of enjoying good food and good company.

I'm sure tomorrow will be fine. And once the holiday season has passed by, we can really start to look forward to whatever it is the future holds. Hopefully the things that the future hold are good, and I can start enjoying life a bit more. That'd be nice. I would like to enjoy life a bit more.

Merry Christmas to everyone reading this. I hope you have a thoroughly pleasant day tomorrow, and eat your fill of turkey, stuffing, those little sausages wrapped in bacon and sprouts. (My fill of sprouts is "no sprouts". It is not hard to eat my fill of sprouts. Sprouts are disgusting.)

1069: Home

The new place is starting to come together nicely. There are still a few bits of crap lying around the place so I won't share any photos just yet, and there's still a whole heap of crap waiting for us to go and pick up from Andie's mum's at some point soon (plus the rats… I miss the rats) but on the whole, it's coming together pretty well.

I spent a large proportion of this morning sorting out the room that has become my "study". It's significantly larger than the room I was using for a similar purpose in our previous place, and there's a lovely large amount of open space in the middle, giving the whole thing a… well, sort of spacious feel.

The one nice thing about all this space is the fact that I can reconfigure it for various purposes. Perhaps the most exciting thing (exciting to me, all right, I'm sure you don't give a shit) is that there is enough room for my two gigantic and heavy wooden desks to be arranged separately, meaning that the smaller of the two can be a permanent fixture as my computer desk, but the larger of the two can sit at the side of the room as a general purpose work surface for most of the time, but when required it can be pulled out and used as — wait for it — a games table. Finally, the dream of having a Room for Board Games appears to have come true.

I am yet to try it for this proposed purpose, but there's certainly plenty of space available to do this, and there's some spare chairs we'll be able to use. The nice thing about the giant desk is that it's actually bigger than our dining table, which has proven itself on several occasions to be not quite big enough to play the more sprawling games comfortably. The giant desk, meanwhile, will quite happily house Arkham Horror with space to spare — though whether or not it will be able to handle a particularly winding dungeon in The Legend of Drizzt or Advanced Heroquest remains to be seen.

I got my electric piano set up again today, and have retrieved some of my music books. I haven't been feeling that motivated to play for quite a long time, what with everything else that has been going on in my life and all the things I've wanted to prioritise and aim for, but having this nice big room with all my music on display will hopefully get me playing a bit more. It will certainly stop people making pointed comments about how they wish I'd play the piano more. (Or perhaps it will encourage them more.)

Anyway, things are coming together nicely, in short. This is a nice feeling, and it's good to be feeling like this just before Christmas. This has, of course, had the side-effect that Christmas has completely snuck up on me almost without me realising it, but at least I have managed to get all the appropriate shopping done. I think. Possibly. I hope. I'm almost certain I will wake up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve and realise I've forgotten presents for someone important, but we'll cross that particular bridge when we come to it.

It's got to 1am somehow. It's probably time to sleep. Today has been incredibly long in the sense that both Andie and I have got a lot done. Days "feel" longer here for some reason. Perhaps it's a side-effect of being in a nice place that we like. Or perhaps we're just using our time more efficiently. Either way, I'm not complaining!

1066: Doubleplusgood

There's been a lot of hand-wringing over both Facebook and Twitter recently, mostly due to both of them tweaking their terms of service in various ways that some people don't like very much. Me, I don't particularly mind too much because at the end of the day, I'm not paying for either of them, so as the saying goes, "if the product is free, then you are the product" — I accepted this some time back and think back on it any time one or the other of them does something apparently stupid. I use both daily to stay in touch with various people, so quitting either is out of the question.

For those feeling somewhat wary of the big F and the big T, however, I'd encourage you to give the big G another shot. (Unless you're one of those people who irrationally hates Google too, in which case… err, I hear Myspace is coming back soon?) Yes, G+ is still a smokin' hot social networking service that is far from the ghost town the media likes to portray it as. It's an active, thriving community that has only gotten better over time.

The latest addition to the service, and one which could well prove to be a "killer feature" with a little refinement, is Communities. Communities are little mini-networks within G+ that allow members to post content as they would do normally on G+, but keep it all within one community rather than sharing it publicly or having to use the slightly cumbersome "Circles" system. It's a good way of bringing people together who want to talk about the same thing, and it's pretty customizable, too — you can change the community's iconic image, title, headline and basic information, but also create categories for posts to help keep things organised, too. The latter feature needs a little tweaking — you can't reassign a post to a new category if you miscategorise it upon creating it, for example — but the groundwork is there for a solid community system.

And, crucially, people are using it. Google+ may not quite have the same number of daily active users as Facebook, but there are more than enough to make these communities active, vibrant places to hang out. The board games community I joined has over 2,000 members, for example, while there are over 3,500 bronies hanging out in the "Pony+" community. The anime community has over 20,000 members, as do various photography-related communities. G+ is an attractive destination for photographers, as it provides practically unlimited space for high-quality photo storage along with some basic editing tools — and the G+ interface is a nice means of showing off one's work, too.

G+ is built to be used on a variety of platforms, too. The mobile apps for both iOS and Android are quick to be updated with new features and are consistent in their behaviour and functionality. Pretty much everything you can do on the desktop website can be done from the mobile app — and the mobile app has the added bonus of looking rather lovely, too, for those who like that sort of thing.

So if you've got a Google account, give it a shot. And by "give it a shot" I mean do more than just open it up, complain that there's no-one to talk to and then close it down — like Twitter, you need to actually "follow" some interesting people before it starts to show its true value. The new Communities feature will help people find like-minded friends more easily, as this was one weakness of the old version — it was quite tricky to find new people to follow.

Here's some links to get you started. Here's my profile. Here's the Squadron of Shame Community. Here's the "Too Old For This" Community run by my buddies Chris and Jeff. Here's the board game Community.

Now get on there and get chatting! I'll leave you with this, from The Oatmeal.

1065: The Third

Pete slumped down into the chair in front of the hotel room desk and began to type.

"It has been a long day," he wrote. It had been a long day, but not quite in the way he had anticipated when he woke up this morning. He was expecting a day of jury service followed by a bit of heavy lifting as he attempted to clear out the rest of his now-former residence in Chippenham, Wiltshire. Instead, what he got was a whole lot of sitting around in the courthouse until lunchtime before being apologetically told by the judge that the jury were being let go due to the fact that the trial they were sitting on had to be abandoned.

Pete paused, considering whether he should share further details of the trial in question now that he was technically allowed to, but that he wasn't supposed to "publicise" it due to the fact it would be restarting with a new jury at some point in the future. He eventually decided against explicit details, and instead invited his readers to have a chat with him if they wanted to know the dirt. It was a moderately interesting case, after all, and it had left him with something of an interest in the law. He resolved to check whether or not Murder One was on Netflix when he finally got "proper Internet" back in his new place… and then hastily explained to his readers that the trial he was sitting on was not, in fact, a murder trial.

He let out a theatrical sigh and wondered what to write next. This hotel room wasn't the most interesting place in the world, but at least it was warm, vaguely comfortable and had a bed in it, which was more than could be said for the floor he had been sleeping on last week. A "high-tech hobo," he had called himself — essentially squatting in his own house due to the fact that pretty much all the furniture and other stuff had been moved out in preparation for his girlfriend Andie and him to start their new life in Southampton.

The weekend had been pleasant. The new flat was good, and a lot of stuff had already been unpacked and put in its place. His study still needed putting together, but the skeleton was there — bookshelves around the outside waiting for books and the music scores that had been boxed up for a while. He winced as he remembered how heavy the box that contained them was, and reminded himself to take extra boxes to repack them when he went to pick them up from Andie's mother's house.

"Wait a minute," he said out loud, pausing the frantic clacking of his fingers on the laptop keyboard for a moment. "Why the hell am I writing this in the third person?"

No answer was forthcoming, for the room was otherwise devoid of life.

"I really, really need some sleep," he said to himself, clicking the Publish button and flicking on the hotel's painfully slow little kettle for a pre-bed drink.

1064: First Days

It was Andie's first day at her new job today. I don't know how it went yet because she's not back yet as I type this, but I'm sure you'll all join me in wishing her the best, particularly as it was her getting that job that allowed us to move back to Southampton. Woo!

With Andie out of the way, this means that it's been my first real day on my own in the new flat getting some work done and it's gone quite well, even with the many boxes that are still behind me, taunting me to unpack them. (I will do it when I get back here on a more permanent basis later this week!)

In other words, I'm feeling pretty good. I took a drive into town earlier on and got the headlamp bulb replaced on my car before I got pulled over for it — there's going to be a lot of driving in the dark over the next few days so I figured better safe than sorry — and grabbed a coffee. My car's decided that it doesn't like the cold again, so is mocking me with its generic "engine warning light" once again just like it did the last time it got really cold. It's a little unnerving, as when it's really cold it gets a bit juddery while sitting still, but once it warms up a bit it runs just fine — it just doesn't like the cold. I mean, who does?

I'm probably going to get rid of my car once I'm settled in this new place. Now I'm in the middle (ish) of a city, I really don't need it that much. While I was two hours away from my friends? Yes, it was a necessity, even if I didn't manage to get away to see them quite as often as I would have liked to. Now, though? It's a fairly long walk, but I can feasibly walk over to my friend Tim, who lives down near the waterfront, and I can very easily walk to the station and catch a train to go and see my friend Sam, who lives in the next town over. I will probably be quite sorry to give up the freedom a car provides, but I will not miss the constant feeling that "I should probably get that [thing that rattles/broken headlamp/light that keeps coming on/brakes that make funny noises] looked at" which inevitably leads to a significant amount of money being extracted from my bank account. I will also not miss paying exorbitant amounts of money for car insurance and tax — instead, I'll contribute to the running costs of Andie's car, which I'm insured to drive and is much nicer than my leaky old banger. (Seriously, sometimes you'll get in after a particularly wet patch and there's a puddle of water on the floor in the footwell. I'm yet to determine where it's actually getting in from, because nothing else seems to be wet.)

I'm off to a hotel later this evening so I can sleep in a proper bed ahead of having to spend the day in sunny Swindon tomorrow — as opposed to sleeping on the floor of my empty previous residence. Then there's things to pack up and load up and pick up to ensure the house is clean and empty and ready for us to give our keys back and everything on Friday. Hopefully my accursed civic duties will be done with by then — if they're not, I literally have no idea what I'm supposed to do. More nights in a hotel, I guess. That or vagrancy in Swindon town centre.

Anyway, as I've said already, once this week is over and done with I can relax. Hopefully. That will be nice. For you lot, too, as it means you won't have to read me moaning about how stressful these last couple of weeks have been.

1063: Disjointed

I'm aware these posts have been disjointed, dull and a bit crap recently and for that I can only apologise, but, well, if you've been paying attention you'll doubtless appreciate that they are not the thing at the forefront of my mind right now! It's been nice to have a weekend "off" (sort of) though, however, even if I have been suffering from plague for most of it. Fortunately, I think I am pretty much over the worst now, so hopefully the impending stress of next week won't cause a relapse or anything.

Next week should — hopefully, anyway — be the last of the stress for the year. Christmas shopping is almost done and dusted, nearly all of the stuff is in the new house and there's just some boxes to unpack into relevant locations before we're "finished" and ready to start living properly. (We need to retrieve our pet rats, too. I am looking forward to seeing them again. I hadn't anticipated quite how much I would miss the little buggers.)

The only real issue we've had is that the lovely new sofa we bought a while back won't go into our flat. Well, it will; it just won't go up the stairs that lead to it. To be fair, the removal people had a try before giving up, but it was at the end of the day after they had lugged all the rest of our stuff up the stairs, so they probably weren't much in the mood to attempt to manoeuvre a three-seater sofa around an awkward staircase. Perhaps it will work better with a fresh outlook — any local friends reading this who would like to come and help try at some point in the near future, please get in touch and let me know, otherwise it's going to be a case of either leaving it in the garage (undesirable) or getting someone to take out a window and hoist it in (probably expensive). Bah! Why are things never easy?

I head back to Wiltshire tomorrow evening to finish up my "civic duty". I'm really hoping it won't go on for too long, largely because we're supposed to be all moved out and checked out of our old house by next Friday, which means if things go on any longer than that I have a very long commute. Or a stay in a hotel. (I'm actually staying in a hotel for a couple of nights this week because it's infinitely preferable to sleeping on the floor of an almost-empty house with no curtains. A few sleeps on the floor this week probably didn't help with the plague I've been suffering from for the past few days. Blergh.)

Just. Got to. Make it. Through. This. Week. Then everything will be fine and dandy. Christmas will be here, and it will be nice. Then it will be 2013, which will be a good year. I hope.

I feel as if the last few New Years have consisted of me wishing that the impending year was better than the previous one. 2013, despite having a "13" in it, will be a good one, I'm sure. I'm back in the place I want to be, and with any luck things will get nicely "settled" so I can look forward to the future rather than worrying about the past and present.

We'll see, I guess. For now, I'm going to drug myself up and try to get some sleep.

1061: Hell from Week

Well, that's the particularly awful week done and dusted. Sort of. I still have more Shit to Do next week, but hopefully things should calm down a bit from here. We'll see. I am looking forward to a bit of time off at Christmas to just relax and, you know, chill out.

I've been somewhat out of the loop today due to the things I've been doing, but I did managed to catch the awful news out of the States today — for those who missed it, there's been a mass shooting at a school in Connecticut. I don't know all the details so I don't want to comment on it, but it's massively sucktastic. I feel somewhat distanced from it being over here in the UK as I am, but I know enough people in the US for it to carry some degree of resonance for me. Facebook and Twitter are full of messages of support and debates about gun control at the moment. The inevitable arguments are ensuing from the usual suspects. I don't really want to get involved, but it's pretty clear that something needs to be done.

Anyway, that sounds an awful lot like commenting on it, and many people have doubtless done so far more eloquently than I today, and will doubtless continue to do so over the next few days. (Fox News, of course, have been quick to blame video games, but fuck Fox News). So I will leave that there.

I am still ill. I drove for two hours after a full day of "civic duty" today and am now exhausted, battered and feeling like utter shite. Andie seems to think I'm a day "behind" her in this plague, however, so hopefully I should improve a bit from here. I hope so. Obviously I'm not comparing my own pitiful physical state to a tragedy which has unfolded in the US, but, well, this week has just been one of those ones that you get the impression the entire world would like to erase from existence.

I'd be fine with that. Also with a fast-forward button. The end of next week would be nice. KTHX.

1059: High-Tech Hobo

I'm writing this lying on the floor of my now-empty bedroom, covered in a slightly-malodorous duvet and trying not to let the cold of an unfurnished house in to my Secret Kingdom of under-duvet warmth.

Yes, it's that peculiar part of moving house where it's not entirely clear where you're supposed to be sleeping or how, not helped by the fact that my "civic duty" responsibilities in Swindon are preventing me from actually moving in to my new place for the moment.

This is, I'm sure you'll appreciate, somewhat annoying, and it explains why I'm effectively sleeping rough in what is still technically "my" house. I feel like a tramp, albeit an Internet-connected tramp surrounded by technological gadgets and who doesn't have to beg for change from anyone passing by. I am getting memories of my university days, when I used to proudly brag that I could happily "sleep anywhere" and normally could, and frequently spent whole weeks sofa-surfing between several of my friends' houses rather than going home. (Apparently I've always had something of an issue with living too far away from my friends to be quite practical to varying degrees.)

I'm also ill, which is making me grumpy. I have some sort of bunged-up head thing and a nasty cough. My head feels constantly like I'm going to faint or something (I haven't — it's just stuffed up with crap) and every time I cough I feel like my intestines are going to fly out of my mouth. Trying to hold this in while fulfilling one's civic duty is not the easiest thing in the world. Much water has been consumed.

I tried to get to sleep a little while back, but at 10 past 9 in the evening, that's clearly not going to happen just yet. I wish it were possible to just hit a button and shut yourself down — that would be much, much easier than the annoying bollocks the human body normally has to do to get to sleep. I'm not even entirely sure how to make myself fall asleep, but I do know that some people can do it frustratingly easily. As in, you'll be having a conversation one moment, they'll be snoring away the next. I've known a number of people like this over the years, both male and female.

My head is throbbing so I'm going to leave that there for now. This is a rubbish post but right this second I don't really give a toss. I have to be up early tomorrow, then I have work to do in the afternoon with no desk. Which will be nice.

Still, I just have to keep an eye on the long-term goal. When all this is done and dusted I'll be living where I want to be and life will (hopefully) be good. I just wish there was a fast-forward button to jump through this annoying bit.

1058: Badvertising Revisited

[Preamble: I know I said comics would be back, but I realise this was a rather foolish promise to make given that I am in the process of moving house and my Mac (which holds the Comic Life software I use to produce them) is now packed up. So you can live without them for a little while, I'm sure — at least until the chaos of the next couple of weeks is resolved!]

As I grow older, I find myself less and less tolerant to the tactics of marketing people. I can't quite work out if this is simply my own intolerance building up as a result of my advancing years, or if adverts really are significantly more annoying than they were in the past. I have a feeling there's a touch of both, because there's a whole lot of new technology to make advertising more annoying these days.

Specifically, let's consider Internet-based advertising. Now, the vast majority of content on the Internet is available for free (connection charges notwithstanding) so it has to make its money somehow — and it just so happens that advertising is a reasonable way to do that. (Whether or not it's a "good" way is a matter of some debate, as traditional advertising models seem to be becoming less and less effective among savvy Internet users, many of whom use ad-blocking software to make their life considerably less intruded-upon by marketing people.)

I have no real problem with advertising being used as a means of keeping content free. I'll sit through a couple of pre-roll adverts when watching, say, 4OD on YouTube. I'd have to sit through adverts on TV, and there are actually fewer adverts on YouTube than when it's broadcast live on TV. No problem there.

What I do have an issue with is when adverts start to get too big for their boots and start engaging in any of the following behaviour:

Making noise without me telling them to
Monopolising my web browser and/or actively getting in the way of what I'm trying to do
Urging me to "interact" with them
Urging me to share them on Facebook.

All of these things are monumentally irritating, albeit for different reasons.

In the case of noisy adverts, they are a pain simply because they make noise and it's usually difficult to shut them off. And there tends to only be a couple of them available at once, meaning that it's entirely possible that several times in a session you'll hear that stupid woman from the air freshener advert whingeing about being "stuck in bad odours" or something. You can stay there, love.

Monopolising my web browser is something that really pisses me off because it ruins the experience of the site. The most recent example I've seen is on GameFAQs' mobile site, which occasionally gets completely taken over by a Samsung advert. You'll be looking at the page, trying to tap on a link when suddenly these stupid arrows appear, inviting you to "swipe". "Fuck off," you'll say — possibly out loud — until you realise that you can't do anything on this page until you do as it says, and then you're stuck in a stupid interactive "experience" about a phone you probably don't give a shit about. (Alternatively, you refresh the page until it goes away.)

This brings me on to another point: interactive adverts. Why? Why would I want to play your stupid game where I get to actually clean the grime off the filthy worktop? Why would I want to pick which one of your vapid Z-list celebrities tells me about your awful product? "Get ready to interact!" they'll say. "Get ready to fuck off!" I'll say, particularly if, as they so frequently are, are also browser-monopolising and noisy ads.

Finally is the seemingly-obligatory necessity to connect everything to Facebook and Twitter. I've lost count of the number of adverts I've seen recently that include hashtags, Facebook pages or even, in some cases, buttons to share the advert on Twitter or Facebook directly. Pro-Tip: if you click either of those buttons, you are a dickhead. And if you don't know why, well, I don't think I can help you.

Advertising serves a purpose, and if it keeps out of my way I'm happy to let it sit there to help pay the bills for a particular site — I don't use an ad-blocker and will probably keep it that way for the moment. But the moment advertising starts actively obstructing what I'm trying to do, that's when I start thinking about installing one. And that's not going to make me think positively about your product; it means I'm not going to see it at all.