1366: Modern Life

I'm in a bit of a hurry tonight, so apologies if there's any typos or bits that don't quite make sense.

I'm in a bit of a hurry because in approximately 15 minutes' time I'm going to be watching the one TV show on at present that I will actually watch when it's broadcast — Dave Gorman's Modern Life is Goodish.

I'm a fan of Dave Gorman's comedy, and have been ever since I saw his show from a few years back where he travelled around trying to find all the other people called Dave Gorman in the world. He followed this up with Googlewhack Adventure which, besides teaching me what "Googlewhack" meant, was a similarly entertaining experience. And so far Modern Life is Goodish has been just as enjoyable.

Gorman's comedy is fairly distinctive in that his shows are almost structured like a lecture, complete with Powerpoint presentations, visual aids and all manner of other things. He picks a topic and explains it in detail, taking great pains to provide evidence and proof for the things he's saying, usually in the form of photographs or diagrams. He often lampoons himself, though, by launching into a detailed quasi-scientific explanation of something utterly ridiculous and pointless, yet treating it as seriously as if it were a lecture on, say, global warming, or Shakespeare's influence on modern theatre or something.

Modern Life is Goodish has been particularly enjoyable to me as a lot of his observations are in line with things I think about the modern world. It's always nice to have your own opinions (and irrational prejudices!) validated by someone else, and while I haven't always found myself agreeing with everything Gorman says — particularly outside the context of his shows, such as on Twitter — I've found enough common ground in my limited experience of him to know that he's someone that I like, and that I enjoy listening to.

The absolute highlight of Modern Life is Goodish, though, is his weekly "found poem" feature, in which he trawls comment sections of news stories from a topic he's discussed throughout the rest of the show, then arranges them into, well, a found poem. Not only is this an enjoyable feature in its own right, it brings back incredibly fond memories of an English lesson back in secondary school where we were challenged to create our own found poem using only things we could see around the classroom. Our particular effort was an increasingly urgent exhortation to "Graham Coop" (actually someone we knew from a couple of years above us whose work happened to be displayed on the wall) to put out a fire in the classroom. (Pull out pin, Graham Coop!)

I'm not entirely sure why I remember that particular experience from school, but it's one of those things that's stuck with me for no apparent reason. Graham Coop wasn't even a particularly good friend (though I did borrow Terminal Velocity from him at one point) and I haven't spoken to a lot of those other people from school for a while; regardless, that particular experience has stuck with me, and I'm reminded of it every week when I watch Modern Life is Goodish.

I'll leave you with a teaser from one of the early episodes. If you're in the UK, you can find the most recent episodes on Dave's website.

1365: Your Face

I find myself once again giving serious thought to the closure of my Facebook account. This is not something I should be agonising over as much as I have been, I know, but given that Facebook is such a firmly-entrenched part of modern society, it bears some consideration.

The main thing that's frustrating me with it at present is the fact that the whole "broadcast and amplification" thing seems to be getting far worse than it's ever been. My News Feed at present consists almost entirely of people making ill-informed political statements and sharing the latest scaremongering chain letter that they haven't bothered to fact-check. (Currently? It's an apparent epidemic of "false widow" spiders in the UK — these spiders do actually exist, but it's rare that a bite from one will cause anything more than a bit of discomfort, and certainly not require the amputation of a limb in any cases other than those which have suffered the most severe of allergic reactions.)

The point here is that Facebook's original purpose of communicating and sharing personally meaningful things has all but completely gone out of the window in favour of sharing the latest "inspiring" clickbait from Upworthy (seriously, fuck off, Upworthy, Buzzfeed and all of your fellow content farms), the latest moral panic from Daily Mail-like sources, or the latest "OMG hilarious!!!" video from whatever dark corner of the Internet produces nothing but "OMG hilarious!!!" videos.

The reason I hesitate so much and continually wonder whether cutting the Facebook cord is a good idea is that old chestnut — "it's the only way I'm still in touch with some people." Well, to be honest, a lot of those people for whom Facebook is the only means I can still contact them I haven't actually spoken to for ages, even on Facebook; those people who actually care will probably know how to reach me via other means, or will pay attention if I leave some sort of post with alternative contact information prior to closing down my account. Those people who don't care? Well, I guess they weren't that good friends after all.

In cutting the Facebook cord, then, it will doubtless be sad to effectively cut ties to some university and school friends, but it's also an inescapable truth of life: people go their separate ways following milestones, and sometimes that's for the best. I won't deny that there are people I miss, but I've been just as lax at staying in touch with a lot of these people as they have been lax towards me. It's no reflection on either me or them in most cases; it's simply the fact that our lives have moved on in different directions, and we each have our own different priorities, groups of friends and personal interests.

Typing this out has helped me think a few things over. I'm going to carefully examine my Facebook usage over the next week, and make a decision at the end of the week as to whether or not I'm going to close my account. If I decide to close it — which, right this second, is the decision I am erring towards — I will leave a message up on my profile for a further week with alternative contact information — where people can find me elsewhere on the Internet (primarily Twitter or Google+), or via email — and then close it. At that point, those people who want to get in touch can; those who can't will be confined to the past, likely never to be heard from again.

Anyway. Apologies for thinking out loud. Perhaps some of you are thinking the same things too, though.

1364: Pokey

I'm mildly bewildered by the fact everyone is losing their shit over the new Pokemon games for 3DS. Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge anyone their excitement and I'm sure they're very good, I just feel like I've never really "got" Pokemon.

This is strange, really, because the Pokemon games are effectively JRPGs which, as longtime readers will know, is my favourite genre of gaming. And yet despite a brief dalliance with Red back in the Game Boy Color days, I've felt absolutely no inclination whatsoever to return to the series. I'm sure it's changed a lot since Red — at least I hope so — but honestly, my fairly underwhelmed experience with the original installment in the series was enough to discourage me from checking it out again in the future.

My main reason for disliking Red back when I tried it was that it felt like a "JRPG for kids". This isn't necessarily in and of itself a bad thing, and it's probably actually a fairly accurate description what with the warning on the box informing players that "basic reading ability is required to enjoy this game". However, what this translated to for me was something that played like a JRPG, but which didn't really include many of the things about that genre of gaming that I liked.

Pokemon Red came out in the UK in 1999. I'd discovered JRPGs with Final Fantasy VII back in 1997, and it felt like a big step backwards. Obviously I'm aware that this isn't a particularly fair comparison, what with FFVII being on a CD-ROM based 32-bit machine and Red being on a cartridge-based 8-bit handheld. But even so, limited technical capabilities doesn't prevent you from doing good things with writing and characterisation, and Red just didn't offer that to me. I didn't care about what was happening in the world, I couldn't put myself in the shoes of the mute, personality-free protagonist and there were very few relatable characters scattered around the world. It felt like a game about the grind, and about collecting endless reams of things that you'd never use, rather than the kind of JRPG that I definitely do like: games where there's a cool story to follow and, oh, by the way, here's a bajillion other things to do in this world with these characters you like.

I don't know if the Pokemon series has changed since then, because I've never felt inclined to try another one after that. As I say above, I'd hope it has — surely the long-running anime has shown that people are hungry for some actual characters and story in among the monster-training gameplay — but I remain unconvinced at present. I am almost — almost — curious enough to pick up a copy for myself and see why everyone seems so excited about this latest version, but not enough to spend £35 on a new copy. After growing tired of Animal Crossing a lot more quickly than some other people I know, I'm hesitant to jump aboard another Nintendo hype train.

If, on the other hand, someone wanted to send me a copy so I could educate myself, I would certainly do my best to try and understand the new games' appeal. (Worth a try.)

1363: Near Miss

Whew. Made it. Nearly went to sleep without writing something. Doing so wouldn't really matter, of course, but it's a matter of personal pride by this point. It has been 1,363 days of daily posts (of wildly varying quality) after all.

So now here I am at 1am trying to think of something to write and, in my tired-out state, struggling. So I'll just do some sort of babbling on about what's going on this weekend and hope that's vaguely interesting to at least one person out there somewhere.

Actually, pretty much nothing's going on this weekend. We went out to town earlier, mainly for me to go and look for a course book for my Japanese evening class, but Waterstones failed me so I'm going to have to turn to the Internet, as ever. I don't know why I'm surprised.

Then tomorrow we are taking Lucy the rat to the vet. You may recall a while back that Lara the rat wasn't very well and I was worried about her — thankfully she seems to have made a full recovery thanks to some medicine we were given for her, so that's good. Lucy, on the other hand, has suffered with a snuffly nose for quite some time and it seems to have gotten a little worse recently, so we're going to go get her checked out just to see if there's anything we can do. Said snuffly nose doesn't actually seem to bother her all that much, since she's still as energetic and mischievous as ever — she's very much "the childish one" compared to the older, lazier Lara — and so I'm not too worried; I just hope it's not been causing her too much discomfort.

That's about it, really. Andie and I played both Flash Point and Guildhall earlier, both of which are board/card game acquisitions from our trip to Canada a while back. I contemplated teaching Andie the full rules for Agricola, but by the time that was a possibility it was already getting late and my brain wasn't up to the task of medieval German farming, so that's something to save for another day.

Played a bit more Beyond earlier, too. Still very impressed with the whole thing and intrigued to see where it goes. I have a lot more patience for David Cage letting loose than most other people, it seems, but it's been nice to talk to a few people who have also been enjoying it and don't feel the need to ridicule and mock Cage at every opportunity.

That's definitely it now. I'm going to bed because I should have been asleep half an hour ago, so now I'm going to go and do that. Yeah.

1362: Caged Animal

I like David Cage's stuff, and I'm not ashamed to say that.

I shouldn't have to point that out, really, but it seems it's become rather fashionable to bash Cage's work in journalist/critic circles recently and frankly I'm not altogether sure why — it seems to be one of those things that has just become accepted without much argument. Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and now Beyond: Two Souls all have their flaws, sure, but they're also some of the most genuinely impressive interactive stories I've ever had the pleasure of playing through. (I haven't finished Beyond yet, but given that it's had me absolutely glued to the screen for the last several hours, I feel I can say that with some confidence.)

Let's talk about Beyond, because it's had enormously mixed reviews.

Beyond is the spiritual successor to both Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit in that it combines Heavy Rain's realistic appearance with the more supernatural aspects of Fahrenheit's narrative. It's got a peculiar structure in that it jumps back and forth in time rather than unfolding chronologically like Heavy Rain, but there is at least a narrative framing device in place to justify it. (Whether or not you think it's a good narrative framing device is a matter of opinion, but I have no objections to it.)

Like its predecessors, Beyond is an interactive movie above all else. That is, this is largely David Cage's story, and you have the opportunity to influence it along the way with your action or inaction rather than having complete freedom. In this sense, it is more like a fully animated visual novel than a traditional "game" per se, and the experience is crammed full of contextual actions and quick-time events. These are, much like the interactive movie style as a whole, very much a matter of taste.

One of the most common complaints levelled at Cage's work is that he might as well be making movies. He might, since he's clearly a talented director and cinematographer, even if — arguably — his writing skills don't quite match. However, I've still found all his works considerably more interesting, enjoyable and engaging than a traditional movie for the simple fact that even the relatively limited interaction offered by contextual actions and quick-time events means that you're involved in the game. You're physically doing things to participate in the game; perhaps you're not controlling the character with complete freedom, but that doesn't matter — you're determining whether they succeed or fail at something, and you're making choices that actually have an impact. It's the same reason a visual novel, where 90% of the "gameplay" is you pressing a button to advance the text, can still be compelling.

This isn't to put down games with strong emergent narrative or freedom to do as you please, of course — my recent stories about Grand Theft Auto V should be enough to convince you of that — but as a card-carrying narrative junkie, I'd always, always much rather play a game with a strong, pre-composed story and perhaps limited freedom than something where I have the ability to go completely off-piste and run riot.

Short version: if you liked Cage's past work, you should most definitely pick up a copy of Beyond: Two Souls. More thoughts — both here and at USgamer — when I've actually beaten it.

1361: Hajimemashite

A new experience for me tonight as I started an evening class. That's a symbol of being a "grown-up" isn't it? Something like that.

I've actually been looking to do something like this for a while, as I've been missing the experience of learning stuff. And I'm not talking about the interminable tedium of corporate training or the equal horror of teacher training days; I'm instead talking about actually sitting there in a class, learning something that won't necessarily be directly relevant to your life and/or job immediately, but which will provide some sort of knowledge you can whip out on occasion and impress people with.

Those who know me will be unsurprised to hear that it's Japanese I'm learning. My choice of this is partly due to my own interest in Japanese culture, but also for the fact that it might genuinely be useful in the future depending on what directions my career goes in. If I can get good enough at Japanese — this is a big "if", obviously — I'll be able to talk to Japanese developers more easily, or move into localisation (something I'd actually quite like to do) or any manner of other things. The prospects are quite exciting — a hefty period of concerted study away, sure, but still exciting nonetheless.

I impressed myself with how much of the first session's content I already knew having picked it up from various places. Anime and games are not always the best place to pick up Japanese since there's often a lot of dialect and deliberately "wrong" mannerisms used (Squid Girl's use of "de geso" at the end of every sentence springs to mind, as does Compa's overuse of "desu" in Hyperdimension Neptunia) that will probably make you look rather foolish if you were to use them in conversation desu.

This evening, we largely focused on things like introducing yourself, giving some basic details like where you're from, what you do and that sort of thing, and asking questions. A lot of it was stuff I'd already figured out for myself from a combination of my own deductions and occasional Internet searches prompted by an "I wonder if…" thought. I was pleased to discover that a lot of things I'd figured out for myself turned out to be correct, so I can now reasonably confidently introduce myself, say good morning, good day, good evening and good night, and say "excuse me" and "sorry" — both rather important.

I felt a little of my usual social awkwardness when we were required to talk and practice with the other students in the room, but no-one bit my head off, yelled at me or called me a prick, so I guess it was successful. I'm sure everyone — including me — will loosen up in the coming weeks, too; after all, the very nature of an evening class means that everyone there actually wants to be there to learn something, so it's unlikely anyone there is going to be a cock deliberately.

So a success for now then. I have absolutely no idea how much I'll learn over the course of the next few months, but I'm interested to find out, and the structure of a class will hopefully spur me on to keep practicing and studying in my own time too.

On that note, oyasumi nasai.

1360: Lord of Spirits

After going back and forth on whether or not I really felt like doing it, I've decided to go for a Platinum trophy on Tales of Xillia. As I wrote some time back, I've started thinking of trophies (though not so much Achievements, for some reason) as a means of showing my appreciation for a particularly good game. Working on the assumption that developers and publishers are looking at trophies and achievements as some sort of metric as much as they're intended as a metagame for players, I'm happy to put in a bit of extra effort to show I liked the game enough to devour every bit of content it had to offer.

My hesitation with Tales of Xillia's trophies is that although the game itself is excellent, the trophy list was rather uninspiring and distinctly grindy. A significant proportion of the trophies consist of "use [x] character's [y] ability [z] times", and there's one frustratingly missable trophy that's going to require a second playthrough to get. (Fortunately, I was intending on doing that anyway, since Tales of Xillia gives you the option to run through the story as one of two different main characters.)

What I've found in the course of going for some of these trophies, though, is that they're slightly more enjoyable than they might have suggested. The most interesting thing about a lot of them is that they're seemingly designed to give you a deeper appreciation of the battle system and how it works — sure, you can knock the difficulty down to Easy and basically hack-and-slash your way through, but go for some trophies and you'll come to understand that each character handles noticeably differently, and has special abilities that are suited to various situations, many of which require actual skill to pull off. Jude, for example, has an ability called "Snap Pivot" where if you block and backstep at the right moment, you'll zip around behind an enemy for some uninterrupted pummelling for a moment; performing the same move with Leia, meanwhile, causes her staff to extend, giving her a greater reach for a few moments.

The way the trophies help you understand the battle system extends beyond the ones where you have to actively trigger skills, though. Each character has a "link skill" that they perform when you're not actively controlling them, but you partner them up with your active character. Achieving some of the trophies requires that you understand how, why and when these link skills are triggered: Jude heals you if you get knocked down (assuming he wasn't knocked down as well); Leia steals from enemies if you knock them down, requiring you to figure out which skills are reliable knockdown providers; Rowen protects you from magic; Alvin breaks guards; and Milla can "bind" enemies.

I've still got a way to go yet — including a whole other playthrough, which hopefully shouldn't take too long, given that I'm cleaning up as many of the time-consuming trophies as possible in the post-game section of my first run — but I'm still enjoying myself, and given how consistently good Xillia has been, I'm happy to show it my appreciation by striving for a Platinum.

1359: Lady of the Wind

I'd been putting it off, but I finally beat the Garuda boss fight in Final Fantasy XIV this evening, renowned by some as one of the harder battles in the game's main story.

The "Primal" fights that you engage in over the course of the main quest's narrative are genuinely thrilling engagements that reward cooperation, communication and everyone knowing what they're doing. Sure, the fact that there's the possibility of instakill moves is frustrating, but with a good party gathered you shouldn't fall foul of them, particularly if you've taken the time to either discuss the fight with more experienced combatants beforehand, or learned from past mistakes.

The thing I've been most impressed with by the Primal battles in particular but also a number of other setpiece engagements in the game is how exciting they are. This is something I'm not altogether used to in MMOs, many of which are focused on doing things by rote as efficiently as possible. Final Fantasy XIV's combat, while not deviating hugely from the template set by World of Warcraft, requires that you stay on your toes, survey your surroundings and move around the battlefield according to what's going on. In the case of the Garuda fight, there's a lot of cowering behind pillars (until the horrid harpy destroys them all, anyway) and then ensuring that you don't get sucked into the increasingly tumultuous storm all around you during the latter stages of the fight.

I played through most of World of Warcraft up through Wrath of the Lich King and I can only think of a few fights I participated in that elicited the same feeling of heart-in-mouth excitement as these Final Fantasy XIV battles. The difference is that in World of Warcraft's case they were all high-level or endgame content, while Final Fantasy XIV spreads them out over the course of its entire main quest. And then you get to do them all again, but harder, once you hit the level cap. They're some beautifully designed encounters, and I'm interested to see how Yoshi-P and the team intend to top them in the coming content updates.

It's that heart-in-mouth feeling that feels most authentically Final Fantasy to me. I can vividly recall the first few times I beat Final Fantasy VII (because I beat it a whole bunch of times in my teenage years) — every single time I reached that final cutscene before the final boss ("And Sephiroth! … To the settling of everything!" — God bless that game's appalling translation) I would feel real, honest-to-goodness excitement. I'd get a delightful feeling of "butterflies in the stomach" before the screen went all swirly and Birth of a God started playing, and it would continue right through the final fights, even if I was hopelessly overlevelled, which I usually was.

In fact, a good JRPG (hell, game, full stop) these days will still give me that feeling, and if a game makes me feel that way I'll immediately think considerably more fondly of it than those that don't. It'll be a sad day for me when I can't get fired up by a game's final confrontation at all — I hope that day never comes, and I shall continue to enjoy that pleasurably anxious feeling for as long as I can in the meantime.

1358: The Bits You Fast-Forward Through

I'm struggling to remember the last time an advert actually had its intended effect on me — that is to say, I can't really remember the last time I actually bought something or made use of a service based on an advert.

The reason for this is that advertising appears to be getting increasingly infuriating and lazy as time goes on. TV ads these days are actively irritating rather than positive in promoting things, Internet ads are seemingly designed to be as obtrusive and distracting as possible, and print ads barely exist any more.

Consider TV ads, if you will. There seems to be an increasing number of people writing TV ads who seem to think that doing the whole thing as a rhyme is a good idea. No. This is never a good idea, because poetry sounds pretentious and arty-farty even when it's good; get someone without a literary bone in their body to write some sort of rhyme about yogurt or nappies or haemorrhoid cream or something and the result is just embarrassing, like the sort of shit children come out with for the usually short-lived "poetry" project they inevitably do as part of "literacy" lessons in primary school.

Then there's the ads that take a well-known song and "hilariously" change the lyrics to something to do with insurance or plasters or credit cards. Inevitably, the songs chosen are the most horrendously overplayed, clichéd shit that everyone is already sick of, and similarly, the ad itself is inevitably edited by someone who has no clue about musical structure or indeed how the original song actually went, leaving the whole thing feeling like a band of year 9 music students who think they're really good but actually keep forgetting the lines.

Worst of all, I think, are the ones that actively try to "go viral" or become a meme. This is always painful to watch, because it's something you can't force. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that anything that has tried to deliberately "go viral" since the dawn of the Internet has spectacularly failed (is anyone following O2's advice to "be more dog"? Didn't think so.) while anything which did successfully permeate popular culture ("you've been Tango'd", say) did so largely through word of mouth rather than a group of marketing executives specifically trying to make people say things.

I think my least favourite ads in the world are "interactive" Web ads, though. They'll start as a postage stamp-sized version of a TV ad, and then those infuriating words "Get ready to interact!" will appear on the screen. Rather arrogantly, the people behind the ad then expect you to indulge in all the fun of, say, hoovering a carpet or wiping a dirty toilet seat, with your reward being the helpful information that you can buy the product you've just been "using" at all good supermarkets.

I should probably just use an adblocker if all this infuriates me so much, but unfortunately I'm all too painfully aware how much of the Internet is reliant on these stupid ads, and there's relatively little I can do about TV ads aside from not watch TV, which I don't really do that much anyway.

Anyhow. Bollocks, piss and fart. I am grumpy so I am going to bed.

1357: Le Chien Noir

Been having one of those "crisis of confidence" days today, for a variety of reasons. It's the culmination of a lot of things, really — a stressful week, tiredness, feeling ill for most of the weekend — and it just gave my sense of self-confidence a bit of a beating this evening. I haven't quite bounced back as yet, so you'll forgive the maudlin tone of this post.

To be perfectly frank, I've been feeling dissatisfied with my life and the several different directions it's been going in pretty much ever since I left university. I launched into a PGCE immediately after finishing my degree because it seemed like a logical thing to do with said English and Music degree, plus I'd done some private teaching in the past. Classroom teaching is not, however, the same as private teaching, as I found out to the cost of a considerable proportion of my mental health. I stuck it out for about three years — dealing with being made redundant at the end of my first year, and suffering a complete emotional breakdown at the end of my third — before deciding that continuing on that path would probably do bad things to me.

I followed this up with some work in retail. This went well. I enjoyed the work, and it involved working with computers and tech — which I love — and teaching — which I also enjoy, when it doesn't involve badly-behaved brats. Unfortunately, it ran into something of a dead end progression-wise, and then I suffered a pretty horrendous amount of workplace bullying that I still haven't really forgiven the people involved for.

I then went back to teaching for a bit. It was a maternity cover contract, so whatever happened, I'd have a relatively easy "out". It was also in primary school, so it was more of an attempt to experiment in that field than anything else. Again, I enjoyed the actual teaching side of things, but the dealing with horrible, badly behaved children (who, in many cases, had parents who didn't give a shit what they did) took its toll on me somewhat.

After that, I did a bit of supply teaching, which was pretty much the most depressing job in the world, and took up an opportunity to start writing for a little, low-paying games site called Kombo. I made some good friends and built up a decent, if small-scale reputation. Kombo eventually folded, sadly, and I was left without work, money or, due to unfortunate circumstances in my personal life at the time, a wife. I moved back home with my parents with great reluctance.

I spent ages looking for jobs, but I have no idea what my real "skills" are besides being knowledgeable about video games, being able to type like the clappers (at least 85 words per minute the last time I tested) and being able to write things very quickly to order. The qualifications I do have are very specialist — my BA is far from being the "good, general degree" I was assured it would be when I was deciding what to do, and my PGCE is pretty much a waste of the paper it's printed on now — and for the things I do know how to do, I have no real tangible means of proving I can do them. Essentially, I might as well be completely unqualified.

Fortunately, after a long and depressing process of jobhunting, I scored a position on GamePro, a magazine and website my brother had formerly been in charge of. This began as a part-time gig which eventually expanded to full-time after I made a very difficult decision between sticking with it and moving to London for what would have, in retrospect, probably have been a considerably more secure job. (But… London. No thanks.) I stuck with GamePro, as I was enjoying the work.

Again, I worked well, built up a decent body of work and a good — if, again, small-scale — reputation… and again, the site folded. This time around, thankfully, I had another job to jump into, reviewing mobile and social games and apps. It wasn't a fun job in the slightest and made me never, ever want to work in mobile and social games, but it paid well. Long story short, that site didn't fold as such, but the majority of the staff left (including me) and I was left without anything to do for a little while… although the possibility of USgamer, my current position, was already starting to bubble.

And, as you know now, I'm working for USgamer. I'm enjoying the work, though it can be challenging at times. On days like today, though, I can't help but find myself worrying a little about the future. Where do I go from here? What's the progression? Is this a "real job"? Should I instead be looking for something boring and joyless but stable with good promotion prospects? I'm 32 and I've never had the opportunity to say "I got promoted." Is that a problem?

I don't have the answers to any of those questions, and I doubt anyone else does, either. I'll probably feel better by the morning, but for now everything's just feeling a bit "meh."

Apologies for the self-indulgent moaning, but it helps to get it out of my head and on to paper sometimes. I'll try and be more cheerful tomorrow.