2147: Back to Reality

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Was going to assemble a lengthy post full of Xenoblade Chronicles X tips and tricks, but felt that three days in a row would probably be pushing it a bit, so I’ll save that for tomorrow. I have plenty to share!

So, as Sunday rolls into Monday, our short holiday is over, and we’re both back to work in the morning. The last week has kind of flown by, which is a bit of a shame, but we’ve both had a good time, and it was clearly good for both of us to get out of the house and away from numerous stressful influences so we could just enjoy ourselves.

I actually don’t mind the prospect of going back to work, though. I feel like I’m getting into a decent “rhythm”, for want of a better word — though irregular shifts and hours mean that it’s probably not the best word — and I feel reasonably confident staring down the Christmas retail period. I’m also feeling semi-confident I might manage to stay on after the holiday season is over, but I’ve learned to my cost to not, you know, something something chickens hatching. So I’m not counting on it.

Not a lot else of note to share right now, really; we saw some owls and did some archery at Center Parcs (not at the same time) and lots of swimming. We ate nice food — we set aside a particular day to ignore the diet and treat ourselves, so we’ll see on Wednesday how much impact that had — and enjoyed some peaceful R&R in the woods.

We’re into December now, and the end of the year beckons. 2015 has been another year that hasn’t been all that great for me, frankly, but there have been highlights here and there; this last week has probably been one of them. Let’s hope there’s a few more I can squeeze in before 2015 becomes 2016.

For now, though, it’s time for bed, and back to normality tomorrow morning. Boo.

2139: Black Friday

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I’m exhausted, both physically and emotionally, so I hope you weren’t expecting anything too coherent or lengthy this evening. I’m still here, though, so let’s get this over and done with.

Worked the Black Friday weekend at work (yesterday and today) and was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t as much of a clusterfuck as I was expecting. It was fairly busy, but not to an excessive degree; we didn’t have hordes of customers trampling each other or anything, so that was something of a relief.

I feel I’ve settled into things quite nicely with this job. I’ve established some decent “work friendships” with the people I work alongside — having been burned a bit before by getting too close to certain people I worked with, I have been deliberately distancing myself a bit without seeming too impersonal — and I feel like I know what I’m doing a bit better than I did when I started. I evidently exude something of an aura of confidence in what I do, because a number of the other seasonal temps who started after me keep mistaking me for a full-time, permanent member of staff. This, in turn, gives me a bit of a confidence boost, which I’ve been sorely in need of.

As part of my recent work, we’ve been opening up a new store. This has been really nice, as rather than trying to fit in to an established environment, I’ve been able to take a certain degree of “ownership” over the new place right from the outset. I know where things are, I know how the place works, I know its little quirks and idiosyncrasies. Being much more spacious and better laid out than our previous premises, it’s also much more pleasant to work in generally.

So work’s been going well. It’s just a shame a lot of other things have been so shitty recently, because it’s really getting me down; had a bit of an emotional breakdown this evening when I reached my absolute limit of endurance, and while I think that “release” helped a bit, I still feel a bit crappy.

Still, holiday coming up next week, so I shall do my best to relax and enjoy it, and hope things improve from there onwards. I can but hope.

1901: Good Friday? All Right, I Guess

Today is technically a “holiday”, though when you don’t have a regular job normal days and holidays tend to all blend together somewhat. Still, at least it being a holiday means that I can technically not work and not feel guilty about it, so there’s that.

It’s been one of those days that has just sort of passed by without any particular incident or noteworthiness, and as such there’s not a whole lot for me to talk about today, really. Andie and I both got up late — we were both really tired, so a lie-in until midday was thoroughly needed — and then we’ve both spent most of the day playing Final Fantasy XIV. I’m almost at level 48 on Bard, which will be my fifth battle class levelled to 50 when it’s done — I should hopefully get that finished tomorrow. After that, I have Arcanist and Pugilist to get out of the mid-teens, and Lancer and Rogue to level from scratch. And then all the bloody crafters, though to be honest those aren’t very difficult to level, just a bit time-consuming.

I’ve also been playing some more Hyperdevotion Noire over the last few days, and I’m thoroughly smitten with it. I was initially a little put off by the chibi characters — I prefer more coventionally proportioned characters for the most part — but they actually work well in the battle scenes, making it clear who is where, which way they are facing and so on. Outside of battle, you still get the full-size portraits in story sequences — plus the beautifully drawn event scenes, too — so I’m happy with that. (Also, Chibi Female Solid Snake is adorable. As is the personification of Dragon Quest. As indeed are most of the characters.)

Nothing special planned for tomorrow, it’s looking like a lazy Easter weekend. Andie and her mother are going out to town tomorrow, but I will probably stay in. With money a bit tight at the moment, it’s probably best I stay away from places that sell things I might want to buy. Like, say, PlayStation 4s. That ain’t going to happen until I have some more money coming in, but I’m working on that.

And after that, Sunday is raid night, of course. We will probably be taking our first serious look at the Final Coil of Bahamut, though one of our number still wants to get their own clear of Turn 9, since his unlocking of Final Coil was actually achieved by someone else playing his character. I’m all for that; Turn 9 is a fun, if intense, fight, and the last time we tackled it we cleared it within 3 attempts, making the weeks of practice look somewhat trivial!

Anyway. I’ve spun this post out for long enough without really saying anything, so it’s time to head to bed and maybe play with my beloved Noire a bit. Here’s to boring but peaceful days.

1877: Aaaaand We’re Back

Made it home, though my last flight from Dublin back to Southampton was delayed by two hours and the heating appeared to be broken in the part of Dublin’s airport that I had to wait for my flight in. It was very cold indeed and not the sort of experience I wanted before 7am. But the time eventually passed — assisted partly by Criminal Girls, whose “Education Block” chapter has made the whole experience very much worthwhile — and I got on the noisy shed-with-wings that was to carry me back to my home town, and that was that.

Unfortunately, the two-hour delay meant that I missed out on a few hours of work (and, consequently, money) today, but there’s not a lot I can do about that, unfortunately. I have several hours of work tomorrow, though, so that will help, and from here I can start trying to get myself into some sort of routine, working on various different things over the course of the week in an attempt to (hopefully) make ends meet somehow.

I’m a little worried about the future, to be perfectly honest. Right now it’s quite difficult to determine quite how much money I’ll be able to get rolling in each month, but I guess that’s something I’ll be able to figure out with time — coupled with determining how much time I need to spend chasing paying work up, and how much time I have to pursue other projects which may or may not lead to something. It’s anxiety-inducing, but at least it’s not stressful and soul-destroying in the same way that being systematically bullied out of a “regular” job has proven to be on more than one occasion in my life. So I guess there’s that.

In the meantime, I have some fond memories of the weekend just gone to look back on, and I’m glad about that. We’ve already been confusing people with talk of vampire zombie maids and poisonous war elephants, and it’s clear that everyone had a good time, albeit an exhausting one.

I shall sleep extremely well tonight, I’m sure. At 20 past 10 in the evening, I’m struggling to keep my eyes open; I did the final boss of Syrcus Tower in Final Fantasy XIV mostly with my eyes shut. (It’s quite easy.) So I think it’s probably time to admit defeat to the exhaustion of the last few days that has finally caught up with me, slump into bed and fall asleep. That, at least, is satisfying; while I’m sad to have left my friends behind, it’s also good to be home, and back to my own bed.

1630: Sunday Night

Unimaginative post title, I know, but it’s Sunday night (well, 00:30 on Monday morning, technically) and my brain has pretty much switched off. When I wake up tomorrow, it’s back to the doldrums of being unemployed and looking for work — not that that ever really went away over the weekend, but both Andie and I have kept ourselves busy enough that there wasn’t too much time to worry about stuff like that.

We painted the spare room this weekend — something we’ve been meaning to do for a while but haven’t really got around to. Andie’s going to wallpaper two of the walls since she discovered during the initial decorating process of this place that she’s actually quite good at hanging wallpaper. (I, on the other hand, can pretty much guarantee that I will not be any help whatsoever at hanging wallpaper, since I am a clumsy oaf who is not to be trusted with anything that required accuracy and careful placement.) The other two walls have been painted and just need another coat before they’re done and dusted.

We wanted to get the spare room done because we have visitors at the end of the month — my friends Mark and Lynette are coming over from Canada and are dropping in on us for a few days, which will be nice. It’ll be the first time I’ve been able to host visitors and actually offer them a proper spare bedroom in which to sleep, so we figured it would probably be best if we covered over the revolting yellow and dark blue walls the previous occupants left the room with — not to mention the big patch of bare wall where Andie had scraped off some paint having discovered it wasn’t clinging to the wall all that well. (A previous occupier had clearly been a heavy smoker, since the wall behind the paint stank of smoke; hopefully we’ve dealt with that effectively now and won’t have to worry about big chunks of paint falling off.)

Andie also remembered that the inside of the built-in wardrobe in the spare room needed painting, since it was covered in graffiti from what appeared to be a teenage girl. (I guess we know who the smoker was?) The owners before us had had a small child in the bedroom, so I don’t think it was their work — I don’t think they were really old enough to know what “shagadelic” meant, nor do I think that they had such fickle tastes in men as the writer of said graffiti clearly did.

Anyway, that’s been painted (well, primed) over now and should actually look reasonably nice by the time our visitors arrive. Once that’s all done, we just need to do another coat of paint in the toilet and the inside of the house will be pretty much done for the immediate future, though there are bits and pieces we may want to change in the long term, like the rather ’70s carpets in several of the rooms.

The garden is another matter. The previous owners clearly hadn’t had much to do with the garden, as it was rather overgrown when we arrived and has only continued to get worse since we’ve been here. I attempted to tackle the lawn with a lawnmower that my parents helpfully provided, but said lawnmower was regrettably not all that good, flattening the grass rather than actually cutting it, so we have replaced it with a brand new Flymo that should hopefully be a lot easier to manoeuvre as well as actually cutting the damn grass. I’ll have the joy of trying that out at some point in the near future. Excitement.

For now, though, it’s time to head to bed, and back to the job hunt tomorrow morning. I really hope this doesn’t take too much longer; while thankfully I have a bit of “rainy day” money in the bank — and right now certainly qualifies as the proverbial rainy day — I would rather, you know, save that up to spend on something useful and/or nice than just spend it on the boring necessity of, you know, living. Oh well. We shall see; this whole hideous jobhunting process is not something that, in my experience, you can rush, however much you emphasise the fact that you can start immediately and would really actually rather like to.

Fingers crossed that there won’t be too many of these posts before I can joyfully exclaim that I have a new job. And fingers crossed that said new job isn’t rubbish, though with every passing day the fear grows that I will, indeed, end up doing something rubbish.

We shall see, I guess.

1557: Got the Number Right This Time

Can’t believe no-one told me that I’d done three posts with the same number (1554, if you were wondering) — it’s an irrational and largely not-terribly-important fear I have that one day I will completely bollocks up the numbering system on this blog and celebrate, say, my 2,000th post when I’ve actually written 2,003 or something.

Not that it really matters, obviously; the original people who were following this blog as part of the #oneaday movement have almost certainly long since moved on as I’ve continued to babble on for somewhere in the region of 500-1,000 words per day for the last 1,557 (that’s 1,557, not 1,554… I think… I hope) days and I remain here largely talking to myself and the few people who stop in regularly or semi-regularly. (Thanks!)

After yesterday’s rant, I saw a few things today that kind of made me want to go off on one again, but I’m going to resist for now since it’s one of those subjects which will almost certainly be wilfully misinterpreted by certain people on the Internet and shared with the inevitable “THIS IS NOT OKAY” in an attempt to attract the usual crowd of shamers. (And I’m not talking about members of the Squadron of Shame.) It’s kind of disappointing to sometimes feel like I can’t truly speak my mind on certain subjects for fear of inciting the wrath of the Moral Outrage Committee, but having seen a number of friends fall victim to said Committee on a couple of occasions, I’m in no hurry to join them in being publicly shamed for saying something that, frankly, was absolutely fine in the first place. (I guess I’m kind of ranting here again after saying I wouldn’t. Apologies.)

Anyway, the upshot of feeling like I’ve had my lips zipped like this is that I feel… I don’t know, “backed up” for want of a better word, like I need some sort of release. It’s a stressful feeling, and it’s not a pleasant one, but at the same time I don’t want to really let rip because I know it will be ultimately unproductive.

So when I felt myself getting stressed out earlier, I booted up Final Fantasy XIV and escaped for a little while. It worked. I wasn’t alone; I got to hang out with the friends I’ve made in that game and even play some stuff together. (I’m getting quite good at Garuda Hard Mode and slightly better at Titan Hard Mode, but I’m still not great.) It was a nice means of getting away from it all for a little while, and when I was done I was able to log out feeling a little bit calmer about the world. Which was nice.

Anyway, I’m aware this has been a largely aimless post but I didn’t have a lot of things worth talking about happen today, frankly, since my mind has largely been occupied by being stressed and trying not to explode. Which it hasn’t, so that’s good. But anyway. Tomorrow is another day, and, more to the point, the end of another week, and I’m looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend. Apart from the part where I need to go and shout at Novatech because my laptop’s battery has died again for the third time in a not-very-long period of time. Sigh.

Anyway. That’s that. It’s 1:20 and I need to sleep, so that’s precisely what I’m going to go and do.

1539: Winding Up

The weekend is coming to a close, and another week of work beckons. After that, there will be another weekend, and the whole cycle will repeat over and over and over again.

This weekend has been quite nice despite the fact we haven’t really done all that much. Andie and I paid not one but two visits to a nice local restaurant/bar/lounge type place called Trago Lounge that we were first introduced to for a friend’s birthday a while back. We went there on Saturday for one of their excellent burgers — the “Hero Burger”, which also features chorizo, some unidentifiable green goo that tastes nice, chipotle mayo and a pickled chilli in a toasted, crispy brioche bun is delicious — and enjoyed it so much we decided we’d drop in for breakfast today.

Trago Lounge has a substantial breakfast menu, largely inspired by the sort of stuff you’d typically get in an American breakfast-specialist place such as the Half-Day Cafe in Marin County, CA that my parents always insist on going to every time we go and visit my brother. (To be fair, they do do amazing breakfasts.) Today, I tried a stack of eggy bread with crispy bacon and syrup — predictably yummy, though the bacon was a little overdone — while Andie had what was called “dirty beans”, which was essentially a bowl full of home-made baked beans (three different types) with a healthy dollop of barbecue pulled pork and some lumps of toasted ciabatta to dip. It’s not what I would have called “breakfast” per se, but Andie enjoyed it. (It was a little too oniony for me, however.)

After that, we wandered into town for an idle look around and I ended up buying a new television. I recently came into a bit of money, you see, and while I’m intending on saving most of it, Andie quite rightly suggested that it was probably worth spending some of it on something nice that I’d enjoy. After a considerable amount of umming and ahhing — there really wasn’t all that much I want to spent a considerable amount of money on right now, aside from, you know, the house we’re buying — Andie suggested replacing my current TV, which is now a good few years old. It still works perfectly well, I might add, but the new one is significantly bigger, has an almost bezel-free edge, is an LED screen (as opposed to my current TV’s LCD), has optical sound output instead of analogue and has a lot more options to tweak for optimising performance when watching TV, watching movies or playing games. Oh, and it’s 3D, too, because it’s apparently impossible not to buy a 3D TV any more, despite 3D TV not really being anywhere near as much of a thing that everyone tried to convince us a year or two back.

Anyway, that’s turning up on Wednesday because John Lewis apparently don’t stock anything above 50 inches in store (it’s 55) so we’re both looking forward to that. And that, really, was my weekend. Oh, I found two Atmas in Final Fantasy XIV earlier on, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that. And people got angry on Twitter earlier on (not at me!), but people always get angry on Twitter and I’m frankly beyond giving a shit about any of it any more.

So that’s that, really. Night night.

1536: Looking for the Calm Lands

I’m having one of those occasional periods where I don’t feel my mental health is in a great place. I’m feeling a bit stressed out (for no specific reason), I’ve been feeling wracked by anxiety before I go to sleep for the last few nights and I find myself occasionally lapsing into depressed feelings during the day, particularly if I stay in working for the whole day.

I think part of the cause is the working from home aspect. It may sound like a dream situation to be able to sit in your pants all day every day tapping away at a computer without fear of interruption from man or beast (well, occasionally from beast if I hear the rats causing mischief in the other room) but in actuality, it’s a ticket to Stir Crazy-Town, and thus every so often I just feel the need to get out of the flat and go work at the coffee shop or something. Somewhere. Anywhere but here.

It’s an underacknowledged aspect of working from home, this stir crazy business. And I think it’s particularly apparent if you live in a fairly small environment such as a flat. In our flat, my study is just one wall away from the bedroom, which in turn is just one wall away from the living room. The temptation is always there to just wander into the living room, flop down on the sofa and stare at the TV for a few hours — or, on particularly bad days, to just go back and lie in bed for a bit. But, as I’ve established pretty firmly for myself, that’s a terrible idea, because if I don’t get up as soon as I wake up, I’ll fall asleep, wake up five minutes before I need to work and make the whole anxiety-depression-stress thing a whole lot worse.

Going out to work at the coffee shop, like I did today, helps largely from the “change of scenery” aspect, and also helps remove a lot of distractions from the immediate vicinity. While distractions can sometimes be helpful motivators — “I’ll do this, then reward myself with [distraction]” — they can also be… well, distractions. You know how it is. Today I felt like I got a lot more done than usual for sitting down, focusing and concentrating on what I was doing, even if sitting on one of Costa’s arse-numbing chairs for most of the day hunched over my laptop isn’t quite as comfortable as working on the big screen of my Mac in my rapidly-disintegrating-but-still-quite-comfy office chair. But at least I can break to get a coffee or a cake or a sandwich when I want to. (I know I can do this at home, too. But I have to make them myself.)

It doesn’t really help that I feel like I have a lot on my plate at the moment. There’s a lot of games I need to cover, and my inbox is full to bursting every day with PR pitch after PR pitch that I just don’t have time to contemplate in the depth they deserve. Pro-tip to anyone eyeing a career in the games journalism biz: reviewing games is the worst part of the job, despite the freebies. Review commitments make it very difficult to play the things you want to play, and in many cases they even make it difficult to explore the review titles in as much depth as you want. At the same time, I feel it is important to give consideration to a lot of the titles I end up reviewing, as many of them are often dismissed outright or treated somewhat unfairly by other critics, so it’s a tough balancing act at times.

Oh, and the air quality around here is shit at the minute thanks to a combination of a Saudi Arabian dust storm (apparently) and a big fire just down the road from us earlier today. This isn’t helping me recover from the plague that laid me low recently.

I don’t know. I’m just having a complain. Things aren’t too bad really, I guess. They’ve certainly been worse. Like I say, it’s just one of those times when my mental health is getting the better of me. I should probably just go sit in bed and play Steins;Gate until I fall asleep or something. That sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?

1515: Bring On the Weekend

I’m having a fairly shitty week. Not only have I not been feeling particularly 100% for a lot of it (though since I took that day off to rest and recuperate a bit, the rest of the week seems to have flown by) but a lot of things have been going frustratingly wrong, too. Nothing major or anything; just a mountain of tiny annoyances that, when added all together, just make me want to throw things.

For one thing, our coffee machine broke. It’s been working perfectly for ages — about 13 months, if our receipt is to be believed — but the other day it just decided that no, it was no longer going to pour coffee out of its spout; instead, it thought it would be a much better idea to pour the coffee inside itself instead. (I don’t even know how or why that is happening; there’s nothing blocking the spout or anything, so I can only assume one of the bits that goes voonkarankachank when you turn it on has stopped moving to where it goes clunk.) Hopefully we should be able to return it to where we got it and get it replaced, though. If not, it’s taking a trip back to Nespresso.

Then my laptop’s battery buggered up again. I only had this fixed back in January, and now it’s stopped charging again. Well, no, that’s not quite true — Windows says it’s charging and it works absolutely fine when plugged into the mains, but the battery percentage never gets off 0%. The Internet says I should try freezing it, but I’m not doing that. Fortunately, given that the machine was repaired not all that long ago, Novatech, bless ’em, are going to take a look and repair it for free. Their customer service has been consistently excellent any time I’ve needed it — which is mercifully infrequently with both my desktop and laptop systems I got from them — and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to others.

Then some documentation I sent off in order to cash in some investment I don’t really understand that my parents had been holding for me didn’t arrive at its destination, which has delayed me coming into possession of a pleasingly large amount of money which I could do with to do things like pay off my credit card and, you know, pay for things with the new house.

None of this issues are “game-breaking” as they can all be resolved pretty easily; it’s just frustrating when all this shit happens at the same time — the same day, in the case of the latter two. Hopefully it shouldn’t take too long to get them all sorted out and I can get back to being pissy at people who won’t talk about anything but Titanfall.

For now, I’m off to bed with Hatsune Miku. On the Vita. Yes.

1453: Winding Down

And so we come to the end of another week, with the prospect of a nice relaxing weekend sprawling out in front of me.

This week feels like it’s been quite a long one. Not really for any particular reason; things have just dragged a little, and I’ve been quite busy. Still, better that than be twiddling my thumbs or wallowing in a black puddle of depression, right?

Not sure how I’m going to spend the weekend as yet. I’m almost certain there will be some Final Fantasy XIV involved, and probably some Danganronpa — which I’m previewing next week for USgamer — too.

I can’t say a lot about Danganronpa at present due to content embargoes and whatnot — though it’s the kind of embargo that says I can’t talk about content in the game after a certain point in the story, not the kind that gags me until a specific date — but I will say that it’s utterly fantastic. If you have enjoyed any combination of Corpse Party, Ace Attorney, 999, Virtue’s Last Reward and adventure games or visual novels in general, you’re going to have an absolute blast with this one — though bring a strong stomach, because you’re going to need it.

Other than that — well, even with all that, really — not a lot of great import or interest has happened this week. I mean, I received my gigantic fabric wall scroll poster of Nepgear from Hyperdimension Neptunia and hung it on my wall having successfully remembered how to use picture hooks after initially forgetting, but that’s not all that fascinating, really. (It is a great poster, though.) And I reached level 50 in Weaver on Final Fantasy XIV the other night by discovering an extremely easy repeatable quest and then simply making forty-seven pairs of woolen tights in order to complete it multiple times in rapid succession — I must have looked funny running back and forth between the Levemete and the quest’s “target” over and over, with the distinctive “level up” flash surrounding me every few minutes. But again, of all the things I’ve done in that game to date, that’s not one of the more interesting things I’ve done.

I’m looking forward to next week, though, since Tuesday is our first official board gaming night of the new year, and it’s my turn to pick what we get to play. Since I’ve received a pleasantly large selection of new games through a combination of Christmas presents and Christmas money, I’m taking along a nice taster selection for us to enjoy — and with many of them clocking in at half an hour or less to play through, we should hopefully have time to get plenty of gaming in over the course of the evening. I wonder which of the games will go down the best — or if we’ll get time to squeeze them all in? We’ll see. I’m particularly looking forward to experimenting with the insanity that is ten-minute real-time dice-rolling game Escape.

Anyway. That is that for now. My working week is over, so I’m going to go and flop on the sofa with a coffee now. Have a pleasant weekend!