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.

1313: Whew

That’s what’s felt like a very long week over and done with. And I’m happy to see the back of it. It’s been tiring and stressful, though I’m not entirely sure why; nothing really specifically stressful or distressing has happened as such, it’s just been… bleh.

I haven’t had particularly restful sleep all week; that’s part of the problem, I think. We appear to be bang in the middle of Flying Things That Like to Bite You About the Arse, Legs and Arms season. I’m not sure exactly what form said Flying Things That etc. are taking this particular year, but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard mosquitoes at the very least. Bastard things.

Trouble is, it’s at that frustrating sort of temperature where if you shut the windows it’s too warm, open the windows and it’s slightly too cold (plus Flying Things That etc. come in uninvited), put a fan on and you wake up with a mouth like a badger’s been sticking its arse in it all night long.

I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this. I think my brain has just plain shut down for the weekend, suggesting that I should attempt to get some sleep and hopefully feel a bit fresher in the morning. After all, it is Final Fantasy day tomorrow — Early Access for Final Fantasy XIV starts tomorrow, which I’ve been looking forward to a lot.

I levelled my Thaumaturgist class to 20 — the level cap for the recent open beta — and made a start on the Weaver crafting class. I’m torn as to what to do when I get back in, though; should I start a new class, or carry on developing the ones I’ve already been working on? I haven’t tried a “Disciple of the Land” gathering class at all yet, and I’ve been curious to.

I guess I don’t even have to decide if I don’t want to. That’s one of the nice things about the new game; once you’ve reached level 10 in your starting class and completed the appropriate quest, you can then switch classes whenever you want simply by swapping out your weapon. This is absolutely ideal for situations where you want to play with friends who are perhaps just starting out in the game — I’d be able to swap to a class I haven’t levelled at all and help them out from the very beginning. For situations where that isn’t practical, the Level Sync function artificially limits your level in situations like dungeons and boss battles to ensure you’re never overpowered and that you always have a decent challenge to take on.

Incidentally, if any of you reading this are planning on playing the game and want to meet up with me, my character’s name is Amarysse Jerhynsson (naturally) and she calls the Ultros server home. Depending on how many of my colleagues at USgamer I manage to rope into joining me, I may start an official USgamer Linkshell on that server; in the meantime, I’m part of the Giant Bomb Linkshell and will continue to be part of that once the game goes live. (A Linkshell is basically a global chat channel; not quite a guild, but a means of a group of people to communicate with one another. FFXIV does have “guilds” in the form of Free Companies, too; a single character can be in one Free Company and, I think, eight Linkshells at once.)

I’m just rambling now. I’m off. Good night all.

1266: Hotness

It’s still massively warm, but at least our Internet is back. (It came back briefly shortly after I wrote last night’s post, actually, but by then it was too late.)

Our flat is like a fricking oven at the moment. All the hot air in the whole building rises, making our place on the top floor unbearably warm, even with all the windows open and fans running. You can feel it as you come up the stairs; pass by our first floor neighbours and ascend the stairs to the second floor (third if you’re American) and you can feel yourself pass through a wall of heat. It’s really quite unpleasant.

It’s times like this that I wish air conditioning — or indeed any form of cooling — was more commonplace here in the UK. Heating is fine — the heaters in our flat are great when it’s cold — but when it gets too warm? There’s really very little that you can do save for sit around in your pants and drink lots of cold drinks. We have been plying the poor rats with bowls of iced water, which they seem to appreciate; Lara, our slightly older rat, particularly seems to be suffering somewhat in the heat. Poor girl.

I’m heading down to Brighton tomorrow to work in the Eurogamer office for a change. It’s nice to have the option to work in an actual office with other people — this is something I’ve not had the luxury of doing in previous games writing gigs, so I intend to take advantage of it every so often, if only to break the monotony of working from home. (Also, hopefully the EG offices have air conditioning, which will save me gasping for breath in this oven of a flat. Also, I owe Chris Donlan a sandwich.)

One thing I’m actually quite looking forward to about the trip to Brighton is having a commute where I don’t have to drive. Finally — finally — I have a commute long enough to play some handheld games on. There will be some Animal Crossing, Velocity Ultra and possibly some Persona 4.

For now, though, there will be a large glass of something cold and wet in an attempt to cool off a bit, then sleep. Or, alternatively and more likely, very little sleep and instead a lot of sweaty tossing and turning as I attempt to get comfortable in an environment which is not in the slightest bit comfortable.

Moan moan moan, I know. At least Andy Murray won the tennis earlier. Supposedly that’s important or something.

1077: New Year’s Honours

I know it’s December 30, but I’m out for New Year’s Eve tomorrow night (just at a friend’s house — I don’t really do obnoxiously loud, drunken parties any more) and probably won’t feel particularly inclined to write a lot tomorrow evening. So I thought I’d look back on the year that was, as is traditional for regular bloggers to do around this time of year.

Actually, looking back, I didn’t really do that at this time last year. Instead I apparently wrote a bit about the board game Pandemic, The Old Republic (was it really a year ago I was playing that and actually enjoying it before the move to suffocating free-to-play pretty much removed everyone’s desire to ever play it ever again?), Minecraft and insomnia. (The above subjects may be somewhat related.) This leads me to believe that the year that was in that instance (being 2011) was not something especially worth looking back on.

And is this year? As I’ve been writing these first few paragraphs, I’ve been pausing occasionally to consider this question. Was 2012 in any way notable or interesting? It certainly wasn’t a “bad” year as such — no, 2010 had that pretty much covered and thankfully I haven’t had a year that bad since — but neither was it a particularly exciting year. I guess that’s sort of good, though — if the most you can say about a year as it is ending is that it just sort of passed by relatively without incident, then I suppose that’s a good thing.

There were good things, of course. The fact that I’m sitting in a flat/apartment/whateverthefuckyouwanttocallit in Southampton — a place I’ve been trying to get back to ever since 2010 went and fucked everything up — is testament to the fact that Things Are Going Sort of All Right, Really, and I’ll certainly take Things Are Going Sort of All Right, Really over Things Are Going Really Fucking Terribly and I Just Want to Cry All Day and All Night. I’ve done both, and I don’t recommend the latter.

But yes. The move back “home” to Southampton is a big positive step. I am now within walking, biking or short driving distance from the vast majority of my friends that I would like to see much more often, which makes me feel good. Okay, none of them have come to visit me yet, but I think I can excuse that, what with it being a rather busy and chaotic time of year and all. Also, delaying their arrival a little increases the chances that we will have got rid of the hundreds and thousands of massive cardboard boxes that are seemingly breeding in this place as we unpack stuff and assemble new pieces of furniture. (We now own a new wardrobe. It’s a bit bigger than we initially thought, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the rooms in this place are pleasingly large.)

What else happened in the last year? I did jury service for the first (and hopefully last) time, in which I got to see how the court system worked for a relatively major case which had to be subsequently abandoned and restarted at some indefinite point in the future. It was an interesting experience, though I would have enjoyed it more if I had a regular job in this country I could just easily take time off from, was not suffering with some sort of hideous plague and was not in the process of moving house (and consequently spending several nights sleeping on the floor of a house with no furniture in it). As I predicted it might do, jury service prompted an immediate re-examination of my life and consideration of whether or not law would be Something Interesting to Look Into.

Regarding Something Interesting to Look Into: this is an occasional crisis of confidence I have at various points in my life where I wonder whether or not I’m on the “right” path career-wise. I’ve been back and forth over a few careers, after all — classroom teacher, private music teacher (though that was never enough to support myself on), retail store employee, software trainer, regular contributor on a mainstream video games site, regular contributor on a specialist social/mobile games site — and frequently find myself pondering what next steps might be. Where do I go? Do I want to go there? Should I stay doing what I’m doing — which is comfortable, fun, relatively challenging and something that I’m good at — or should I do some sort of complete (early) mid-life crisis turnaround, retrain as something that I’m not currently and make a career out of that? I honestly don’t know. But now’s not really the time to be thinking about that.

It’s funny. When I titled this post “New Years Honours” I anticipated that I was going to be able to make a list of Specific Happenings in 2012 that were particularly noteworthy, but this has turned into something of a ramble, really. I apologise. Still, it’s something to think about.

All right, let’s make a list of a few things just to round things out.

Best Video Games I Played: School Days HQ, Katawa Shoujo, Trails in the Sky, Pandora’s Tower, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, The Walking Dead

Best Wee I Did: Friday morning this week, it was well over a minute long.

Favourite Technology Purchase: My Novatech laptop, which runs everything from visual novels to TrackMania 2 in relatively portable form without a hitch.

Most Pleasing Restaurant Chain Discovery: Yo! Sushi — I don’t care how authentic it is/isn’t, it’s delicious.

Medium I Abandoned Completely and Don’t Feel Any Regrets About: Movies.

Medium I Embraced Wholeheartedly and Don’t Feel Any Regrets About: Anime. Also visual novels.

Amount I Earned by Emptying my Small Change into the Coinstar Machine in Sainsburys: About £80

Amount I Earned by Music Magpie-ing Almost my Entire CD Collection (Except for the Stuff They Wouldn’t Take Like Spice Girls and Other Stuff That Escapes Me Right Now): About £80

Amount I Anticipate I Will Probably Get for Selling My Knackered Old Car Next Year: About £80

Most Expensive Purchase: New sofa

Most Expensive Purchase That is Probably Impossible to Get Into Our New Flat: New sofa

Meme I’m Most Sick Of: Grumpy Cat

Number of People I’ve Blocked on Twitter for Arguing Too Aggressively or Unreasonably (Not Necessarily Towards Me): Too many to count

Number of Completely Unnecessary Mobile Social Networking Apps I Have Encountered in the Course of my Job This Year: Too many to count

What I Can Smell Right Now: Smoked mackerel

What I am Going to Do After This Blog Post: Make a warm milk, go to bed, play Trails in the Sky.

Why I am Still Thinking of Things to Put in This List When I’ve Clearly Run Out of Ideas: I don’t know.

Good night.

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.