1981: Preparations

Andie and I are getting married at the weekend. That’s pretty close!

I’m looking forward to it a lot. It should be a great day. Both our ceremony and reception are fairly straightforward, simple and low-key (aside from the fact the ceremony is taking place in Westbury’s mahoosive church) and that fits us just perfectly. Besides the obvious meaning of getting married, the day will be an opportunity for both of us to hang out with a whole bunch of people we, in some cases, haven’t had as many opportunities to see recently as we both might have liked.

This week is largely about last-minute preparations, then. My best man Tim and I went to go and pick up our suits earlier today, and we both look pretty great in them. (I do need a haircut, though; that’s tomorrow’s job!) Getting sized for said suit was pleasant confirmation of my weight loss, too; while I’m still getting stuff from the “big and tall” (fat and lanky) section, the numbers involved are… quite a bit smaller than they used to be, which makes me extremely happy.

Other things I’ve been up to this week include putting together the music playlists for the reception — one for during the meal, and a more up-tempo one that people might consider dancing to once everyone has finished stuffing their faces. We’re not having a DJ because wedding DJs suck; we both decided that we’d much rather have our own music playing without some braying idiot bellowing nonsense as Vengaboys blasts out from his sound system that is turned up too loud. (I know I sound like an old fart. I don’t care.) Instead, we’re simply having a tablet with some music on hooked up to a PA system generously loaned by my friend Rob. And that means we can have an entertainingly eclectic selection for people to (hopefully) enjoy over the course of the day — something that I feel reflects us pretty well.

Tomorrow is a day for printing things out. Orders of service, table identification card thingies and any other bits and bobs we might need. Andie’s spent much of the evening writing people’s names and the word “Pavlova” on table-setting cards (assuming they’re having pavlova, of course — and what sort of crazy person wouldn’t?) and, once I’ve taken care of business tomorrow, we should hopefully be pretty much ready to go. Hooray!

That’s that, then. Now, having stayed up to extremely silly times in the morning for the last few days playing Heavensward (which, by the way, is magnificent, if you hadn’t figured that out already) I’m off to bed at a vaguely reasonable hour.

1691: Reborn

I had one of those curious epiphanies on the way home. You know the ones. Or perhaps you don’t.

Anyway, I digress.

My epiphany was that I felt like a new person today. I felt like I was in the middle of a new beginning, like I was getting a chance to pretty much “start over” and try again.

Of course, this isn’t strictly true, what with me being 33 and thus on that ever-downward slope towards middle age, old age and eventual death rather than a fresh-faced (I’m not sure I was ever fresh-faced) youth in my early twenties looking forward to the future. But I’m glad I did get this new chance to start again, and I don’t intend to squander it.

The trigger for feeling this way is, of course, the fact that I really have made a new beginning by starting a new job and hopefully a new career. In just two weeks on the job, I feel like I’ve made some new friends, learned some new skills and made a good first impression.

And it’s put a lot of things in perspective, too. Most prominently, my feelings surrounding the echo chamber of social media.

My typical working day now looks very different to how it did when I was working from home. I no longer have Twitter perpetually open on screen or on my phone; I don’t check Facebook at all; Google+ has fallen totally by the wayside, particularly since the Squadron of Shame jumped ship to its own forum a while back; and I spend most of my time either actually doing work, interacting with people through internal emails or speaking with them face-to-face.

And it’s blissful. Blissful, I tell you. You might call it wilfully shutting out issues that need to be addressed; I call it a haven of calm, and I can already feel my mental health improving because of it.

Being constantly bombarded with the noise of social media at all hours of the day — as I voluntarily subjected myself to when I was working from home — is actively stressful, anxiety-inducing and even depressing. It shouldn’t be — it should be a positive thing — but it is.

Part of this is down to who you follow, of course — like real life, putting the people you interact with regularly through a rigorous filtering process until you’re left with the people you genuinely like is important — but with the nature of modern social media, sometimes you get things thrust in your face without you going looking for them. The clearest example is Twitter’s Retweets, which can expose you to people and opinions so far divergent from your own as to create genuine anxiety (and also people who go on to become firm friends, it must also be said), but it also happens whenever Facebook makes one of its inexplicable decisions to show you a post from someone you don’t know that one of your friends commented “lol” on forty-seven comments back from where the argument is now raging.

This is why I’m enjoying the peace and quiet of not being permanently plugged in to social media, and why I feel like a new person. I can switch off, focus on the people around me and the work I’m supposed to be doing, and I can enjoy it. It’s pleasant. Very pleasant indeed. And it makes me wonder why the hell I’ve been voluntarily putting myself through all this for the last few years.

And this doesn’t mean that I’ve lost interest in the things I previously immersed myself in. On the contrary, it means I can just enjoy them for what they are. I can enjoy games purely on the virtue of them being great games; I don’t have to give a shit about whether The Internet thinks something I enjoy is terrible and wrong, or whether I find the latest indie darling to actually be rather tedious.

In short, I feel like my rebirth has been a wonderful thing all round, really. I’m still in the honeymoon period, of course, and I’m sure my new life will bring with it a torrent of new things to be anxious about, but for now I’m enjoying it very much indeed; long may it continue.

1671: Whoopsy

The astute among you will have noticed that there was no post yesterday — or at least, there didn’t appear to be. In fact, what happened was that I wrote the post, saved it as a draft, went to do something else — possibly eat dinner, have a poo or go to bed — then promptly forgot to publish the bloody thing. Whoops. Oh well. “Caught up” now — not that the original “rules” of #oneaday really matter now that it’s just me still beavering away at this blog every day.

I’m glad I still do, though, for numerous reasons. For one, it’s satisfying to see that number at the start of each post, and to think that I have been writing something of varying quality every day for nearly 1,700 days in succession. Over the course of those 1,700 days, my life has been through some significant changes. I’ve held several jobs, moved house several times, just about lived through the end of a marriage and the total collapse of my life that resulted from it — seriously, make sure you marry the right person and avoid all that shit happening to you — and now find myself pondering what might happen in the next 1,700 days.

For starters, I have not just a new job but a new career ahead of me — ten days from now, I’ll be starting my new position that I secured a while back. I’m hesitant to go into too many public details at present — never sure why this is the norm, but I’ll go with it for now — but suffice to say that it’s a position that will actually make use of the skills and experience I’ve built up over the past few years, even if it isn’t precisely what I pictured myself doing a few years back. Still, as I noted around the time my position on USgamer came to a close, I’ve come to the conclusion that pursuing your “dream job” is an exercise in frustration that only, in very rare cases, leads to something stable you can do for years to come. Much better to nail down something that you know you can do well, and that will still have a chair ready for you each morning rather than unceremoniously dumping you at a moment’s notice. (At least I hope that’s what I’m going to get with this new position!)

I have a new car, too, but I’m sure that will be the subject of a whole other post some day in the not too distant future. All I’ll say for now is that I like it very much, and hopefully it will be a suitable means of conveying my person from my house to my place of employment on a daily basis, starting ten days from now.

Aside from that, there isn’t really that much interesting going on in my life at present. Which, to be honest, I’m kind of cool with. While “interesting” periods of your life can certainly provoke plenty of interesting things to talk and write about, they’re also exhausting, both mentally and physically. At present, I’m quite enjoying the feeling of “nothing” — the fact that things are slowly falling into place, and I don’t need to do anything else for now. I can just sit back, relax and enjoy myself for a few days — and I think I’ve earned that.

1648: Visiting Hours

Tomorrow, our friends Mark and Lynette — founding members of the Squadron of Shame — are paying us a visit from Canada. They’re not coming over just to see us (unlike the time we went to visit them a while back), but they are spending a few days with us. It has been a good excuse to get the last few bits of decorating done (except the dining room, which still needs repainting, but is fine for now) and to get the spare room into a state where people can actually, you know, stay in it.

It’s a pleasant novelty, having a house that can actually host guests without having to resort to couch cushions on the living room floor or sofa beds. It means we can do things like host international guests for a few days rather than — at best — allowing people to crash if they can’t quite make it home after a big night, and that’s kind of cool.

As for what we’ll be up to, I predict a mix of suitably nerdy things (video games, board games and quite possibly a one-shot roleplaying adventure) on the agenda, plus on Monday we’re going for a day out in Oxford for what sounds like an interesting experience — a couple of “escape the room” games, the concept of which several of us are very much into thanks to our enjoyment of the Zero Escape video games Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (or some combination of those three, better known as 999) and Virtue’s Last Reward, which you may recall me talking about a while back.

After that, we’ll be paying Oxford’s board game cafe The Thirsty Meeple a visit, as I’m certainly curious to see how it stacks up to Snakes and Lattes, the board game cafe Mark and Lynette took us to while we were visiting them in Toronto — and a type of establishment I’ve been wishing was more widespread ever since.

I’m looking forward to having visitors and having the opportunity to hang out with friends for a decent length of time. Having been working from home and subsequently unemployed for so long, there are many days when I’ve found myself feeling both somewhat stir-crazy and a bit lonesome. Mark and Lynette’s visit is well-timed; just as I get a new job and just as my divorce is finalised — yes, Andie and I have been living in sin for a while now — we get some visitors. It all adds up to a life that feels like it’s somewhat getting back on track. Normality? That remains to be seen, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

1559: Life Walkthrough: How to Defeat the Big Breakfast

You’ll probably encounter the Big Breakfast on a weekend, particularly if you finish a Friday low on HP, MP or Sanity. If you want to guarantee an encounter with one, do one of two things: either ensure the fridge-freezer is stocked with Bacon, Eggs, Sausage, Hash Browns or Waffles and that you have at least one Beans in the cupboard; or alternatively, ensure that the fridge-freezer and cupboard have a complete lack of the aforementioned, in which case you’ll fight a Big Breakfast in the wild rather than at home. The latter case is slightly advantageous in that you have a little longer to shake off the Sleepy status effect before the confrontation begins, but the former gives you the Home Turf boost.

There are a number of ways to defeat the Big Breakfast, but following this strategy is one of the most effective and efficient. Prepare for battle!

As the battle begins use the SAUCE — either brown or ketchup according to the preference you set during character creation — on Big Breakfast. Using the wrong sauce will provide you with smaller benefits.

Next up, grab the BUTTER and apply it to the TOAST using the KNIFE. Don’t attack the TOAST yet, though; we’ll come back to that later.

Equip the KNIFE and FORK and attack the TOMATO. This is the weakest part of the breakfast, but also has the potential to do the biggest damage to your Sanity. Try and defeat it in two attacks at most.

Follow up by attacking the MUSHROOM. This is likewise weak, and its status effects can be mitigated if you applied the SAUCE correctly.

Once the TOMATO and MUSHROOM are down, you’ll need to begin attacking the SAUSAGES, but don’t jump straight in to pure attacking. Instead, use STAB on a SAUSAGE and then attack the EGG with it — you’ll be pleased that you did. After you’ve done this on both EGGS, you can commence normal attacks. Each attack will drain your MP significantly so don’t be afraid to take a turn or two to rest if you need to.

Follow up the assault on the SAUSAGES by attacking the EGGS. Weakening them with the SAUSAGES beforehand will make this part of the battle much easier.

Attack the BACON once the EGGS have been defeated. The bacon should quickly fall to a concerted assault, but keep a close eye on your MP. You should find that your HP is steadily increasing as you defeat each opponent.

Following the BACON it might be tempting to go for the next target in the list — the HASH BROWNS — but pass them by for the movement in favour of an attack on the BEANS. Characters with low agility will need to take a few turns to defeat these, but they’re nothing too much to worry about.

After the BEANS have been defeated, you’ll notice that they’ve left a pool of BEAN JUICE behind. This cannot be defeated with normal weapons, so instead you must use the STAB move on a HASH BROWN to attach it to either your KNIFE or FORK — preferably FORK, since using the KNIFE carries a risk of damaging your own HP — and only then attack the BEAN JUICE.

If the HASH BROWN attached to your weapon breaks, use STAB again on one of its remaining companions. Repeat the process until the BEAN JUICE has been defeated. If you fail to defeat it before the HASH BROWNS have been defeated, however, don’t worry, you still have a final weapon up your sleeve.

Unequip the KNIFE and FORK and pick up the TOAST. Equip it in either hand, then attack any remaining BEAN JUICE. If none is left, simply open your Item menu and USE the TOAST like any other item. If you find your MP are too low to be able to use the TOAST, rest for a turn or two until they restore. To restore them more quickly, either use the COFFEE or get up from the table and visit the TOILET. Note that if you pick the latter option you will need to be partied up with at least one other player, otherwise upon your return you will find that Big Breakfast has been taken away, and you will not receive full XP value since parts of it were left undefeated.

Once Big Breakfast has been defeated, sit back and enjoy the cutscene, then save your game. The true weekend begins here.

1111: Oneoneoneone

So today is my one thousand and eleventh daily post on this blog, and the… errr, hang on… (*counts*… 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, 99, 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, 999… 1111) 19th time that all the digits in my post number have been identical, something which, coincidentally, will not happen again for another one thousand one hundred and eleven days.

This feels like it should be significant somehow, but in reality, well, it just isn’t. It’s just another arbitrary post number on a relatively unremarkable day. Regardless, since it feels like it should be something significant, I shall use this post as a permanent (well, as permanent as anything on the Web is) record of exactly what happened today, Saturday the 2nd of February 2013. (Yes, I know the post date probably says February 3rd, but that’s because I played Hyperdimension Neptunia for too long and drifted all the way past midnight… as usual. I’m sure you’re used to it by now.)

This morning I woke up rather late because I’d stayed up rather late the previous night reading my current visual novel fix, a rather compelling (if also rather wordy) tale called Kira Kira. I’ll save any discussion of Kira Kira for another day and instead point you to my “first impressions” post over on Games are Evil if you’re curious, since that’s not relevant to what went on today.

Andie and I eventually got up, had some breakfast (bacon and omelette; Andie added some chilli peppers and onions to hers but branded it ultimately disappointing due to the lack of “kick” that said peppers had; I had a plain one as my digestive tract was already on fire following a spectacularly spicy dhansak at my friend Tim’s on Thursday night) and contemplated what the day would hold.

Andie decided that she was going to look at new cars, as her trusty Nissan Micra “Ratty” had been starting to develop a few flaws and also had an impressive (though purely cosmetic) dent on the rear-left door. (It wasn’t her fault, but it would have cost several hundred quid to fix.) I was going to spend the day editing the much-delayed Squadron of Shame horror-themed podcast, but was requested to come along for moral support on the car hunt, so I agreed. I’ve never bought a car myself before, and Andie hadn’t done it “solo” before, either, so I understood her hesitance to go alone.

We took a drive down to a local used car dealership that was basically a big hangar-type building full of used cars of various descriptions. Andie took a bright red Peugeot 207 and a white VW Polo out for a spin; the Polo was a nicer car but was also several thousand quid more expensive, so that was eliminated from the running after some deliberations. Despite the best attempts of the newbie salesman and his boss double-teaming us and trying to convince us to buy a car there and then, Andie told them firmly that we would be taking a look at some other places before we made a decision. (“Why?” asked the boss guy, clearly only half-jokingly.)

We went and grabbed some lunch at The Crown, a pub I used to frequent as a student at Southampton University. It hasn’t changed at all, though the prices have probably gone up a bit. We both had a “Crown Inn Burger”, which is a burger with two toppings of your choice; Andie went for chili con carne and egg, I went for bacon and cheese. It was tasty — they do good burgers, so if you happen to find yourself in there, I recommend them. (I also recommend the “hill” or “mountain” of nachos, which are super-tasty.)

Following lunch, we went to a strip of car dealerships in the middle of town, opposite Ikea. There was a Hyundai place that looked like it also sold Renaults, a Honda place and a Ford place. Andie was particularly keen to look at the Fords, and I’ve had reasonably good experiences with Fords in the past too. (Apart from the fact that my Fiesta blew up on the way to work one day, and the Escort I subsequently had just flat-out died one day for no apparent reason.)

We took a look in the Hyundai place first, and were immediately accosted by a smug, smarmy salesman who completely ignored everything Andie said (“I’m interested in a used car,” she said. “Here’s a brand new Hyundai,” he said. “Fuck you,” we thought.) who showed us a car that we weren’t really interested in. Then we tried the Ford garage and discovered that it closed at lunchtime on Saturdays, which seemed enormously counter-productive from a “we want to sell lots of cars” perspective, then discovered that this was apparently not an unusual practice, since the Honda place was also closed.

Eliminating both Honda and Ford from our deliberations, we moved on to a dedicated Peugeot dealership on the very far side of the Southampton urban area. I was flagging a bit and getting a bit depressed and frustrated by this point, but we stuck it out. Andie took a diesel-based Peugeot 207 out for a spin and really liked it, so after a bit of pondering we decided that it would make a good new car. Andie did a bit of haggling (and judging by how little they argued, could have probably got away with more, but it was late in the day and we were tired) and we agreed to part-exchange both Andie’s current car and my elderly Peugeot 106 (which I really don’t need any more) against the new vehicle. (The trade-in value on the 106 is considerably better than the cash prices I’ve been quoted for selling it to places like We Buy Any Car and whatnot, so it seemed foolish not to do that, as we’ll both use the new car.)

Then we came home, and I posted the first of two new columns on Games are Evil (the second came later) then settled down for a bit of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2. I’m closing in on the end of my second playthrough. I still haven’t decided if I’m actually going to play it through seven times, but it’s seriously tempting, plus it will actually minimise some of the “grinding” required to get certain specific endings, so I might; skipping events I’ve already seen lots of times cuts the total time down considerably, and fights are over in a flash when your main fighters are level 90+ and equipped with beastly weaponry. Man, I love that game.

Then, seeing the time stamp on my save game, I figured I should probably come and write this. So I did. After I click “Publish” I’m going to bed. Good night. Happy oneoneoneone day.

1049: Season Finale

Page_1 It occurs to me that while I was spending the last month doing creativey things, a lot of things happened and, being dedicated to blogging 1,500-2,000 words per day of the narrative nature, I really didn’t have the time or energy to devote any blog space to these things that were happening. So let’s rectify that today.

The main thing that has happened is that Andie and I are moving (back, in my case) to Southampton very shortly. And yes, I mean very shortly — our new rental starts on December 10 (pending references) and to be honest I’m not convinced it’s quite sunk into my own mind yet. Hopefully writing this will convince me that yes, it is happening and yes, I need to do that thing with the boxes I hate so much. (Packing them, obviously, not sticking them up my arse.)

Those who have been paying attention and/or following me for a while will know the rough chronology of what happened to me over the last couple of years — my wife and I parted ways; I failed to find a new job; ran out of money; moved back in with my parents; gradually built back up to full-time freelance employment that earns enough to live on; met Andie; moved back out, to Wiltshire this time; witnessed the catastrophic collapse of the second website I’d been a regular contributor to (GamePro this time — the first was Kombo); secured my current gig and, well, here we are.

Both Andie and I had been becoming a little despondent at our relative isolation. Andie was a few minutes down the road from her job, which was convenient, but neither of us really had any friends in the area. We spent a day celebrating the Queen’s jubilee earlier this year in which we got to know our immediate neighbours a little bit, but I found the whole thing painfully awkward and certainly wouldn’t count them as “friends”.

My true friends were (well, are) still in Southampton, as it happened, meaning that any time I wanted to spend time with them there was a 1.5-2 hour drive involved. Andie’s friends, meanwhile, were scattered everywhere from Southampton to Australia, so we decided that looking to move back towards the South coast would be a good idea. (Australia’s a bit far.) Since I can work from anywhere, it was up to Andie to find a job in the area suitable for her talents, and she hates job hunting almost as much as I do. Possibly more. Thankfully, though, she successfully managed to score a position recently, and so our quest to find a new place to live began.

House hunting is rubbish, as everyone knows, but we happened to be down in the area anyway last weekend as I’d taken us away on a short break to celebrate Andie’s birthday. We made some appointments and called in at a few estate agents to make some enquiries, and decided that if we found a place that looked acceptable, we would just take it rather than faffing around for weeks. Largely because we didn’t have weeks.

The first place we saw was a reasonable (if rather small) house that was in shitty condition, and probably wouldn’t be ready in time for when we wanted to move in. Next we saw a decent (but, again, small) house with an abnormally narrow staircase that would have been all right were it not for its location, which suffers something of a dearth of parking spaces.

Then we saw The One. A flat in a good, conveniently-located area with awesome large rooms (including a massive kitchen) that looked to be in excellent condition. It costs a little more than we’re paying right now in Chippenham, but that was an expected part of the move, plus given the location I’m probably going to get rid of my car once we’re in place, which will save some money.

It was pretty apparent that The One was The One after we gave it a cursory once-over, but we still had a couple more to see, so we went and had a look just to make sure. One was a nice-quality flat in a great location, but the rooms were far too small. The other was another nice-quality flat in a not-so-great location, but again the rooms were a bit small and the layout was a bit weird.

So, The One it was. Assuming our references come back all in order shortly, we’ll be moving in mid-December, meaning we’ll hopefully be in place well before Christmas. Then, once 2013 starts, we can really feel like a new stage of our lives is starting.

You have no idea how much I am looking forward to this. It feels like things are finally starting to fall back into place. I realise that, of course, I’m probably cursing myself by uttering those words, but what the hell. I can’t wait to be back in that slightly crappy town that I still consider to be “home”; to be near my friends and to be able to actually socialise with people without having to make plans weeks in advance.

I’m extremely grateful to Andie for her major part in making all this happen. Without her, I wouldn’t be back on this path to “recovery”, for want of a better word, so I don’t know, everyone bake her a nice cake or something. Or just come to our inevitable housewarming party! We might have a Wii U for everyone to play with by then.

See you in December, Southampton.

Shit, that’s this month. ARGH

#oneaday Day 843: This World Ain’t Big Enough…

Ever get the feeling that the world just isn’t quite built for you?

It’s a feeling I’ve been getting quite a bit as I’ve got older. I suspect such a feeling is largely age-related, as it centres around the fact that certain things quite simply don’t appeal, because they’re not aimed at me.

It just seems a little odd that “popular culture” is often taken to mean “people under the age of 25 who aren’t that bright”.

Let’s take Britain’s Got Talent, for example, which Andie’s been watching recently — primarily to get annoyed at, lest you judge her harshly for it. Any time I’ve watched Britain’s Got Talent, I’ve got annoyed too, but I don’t find the experience of getting annoyed at it particularly fulfilling or fun. If anything, I just get inordinately frustrated about… well, everything about it. Simon Cowell is a douche, the judges’ comments are vapid nonsense that don’t mean anything, the acts are cringeworthy and the audience is made up of the very worst kind of braying moron who thinks that constructive criticism is a personal attack and thus must be booed.

Take gaming, too. I have zilcho, zippo, nada interest in the upcoming “big” games that are bearing down on us like multi-million dollar juggernauts. I don’t want to play Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed III, Halo 4 or anything like that. (I did recently play Binary Domain, which certainly was a an impressive experience, but one destined for obscurity)

Or the Internet at large. Everything must be social these days, it seems. And long-time experience has taught me that if you make something social, you will generally attract illiterate, ill-informed, angry morons. Just look at the comments section of any website ever. (I often find myself wondering why the most notorious cesspits don’t just close comments forever. It’s rare that any meaningful discussion takes place on them. Obviously I’m excluding my own blog from this because I have a small group of intelligent people who sporadically comment here and are willing to engage in actual conversation, as opposed to a vast community of pillocks.)

Fortunately, any time I start to get frustrated by any of the experiences I describe above, a moment’s reflection simply reminds me that they are not the only experiences out there — just the most visible. And while that can in itself be frustrating in that you have to look a little harder to find people with whom you have things in common, we’re certainly not beyond hope just yet.

On TV, I don’t have to watch Britain’s Got Talent. I can watch Community. My Little Pony. And a whole host of other stuff thanks to the magic of streaming video, giving me access to a whole ton of quality entertainment that doesn’t make me want to throw bricks at my TV. I haven’t seriously watched live TV for ages, a couple of episodes of The Apprentice aside. Instead, I can binge on Star Trek thanks to Netflix, or dig up obscure Channel 4 shows on YouTube.

In the gaming world, I can play everything from Binary Domain to Pandora’s Tower and A Valley Without Wind to escape from the blockbuster insanity. Gaming is now so big that you literally can’t play everything that comes out.

On the Internet, there are mature communities. I have the Squadron of Shame. You lovely people who comment on this blog. Twitter (at least the people I’ve trimmed my “following” list to, anyway). Gamers With Jobs. Fitocracy.

While the world may not be built with me in mind any more, I certainly don’t have a problem living in it for the moment.

Unless you make me watch Britain’s Got Talent. Then we might have a problem.

#oneaday Day 713: Welcome to 2012

So here we are in 2012, wondering how Sophia Hapgood got mixed up with the Nazis. Or something.

As mentioned in my brief, hastily-composed post last night, Andie and I (along with a number of others) saw in the New Year in style by eating our own bodyweight in puddings. (“Desserts” to you Americans out there.) There was a wide selection of gooey goodness on offer, ranging from a delicious steam pudding through an excellent trifle all the way to our friend Ben’s creation, a chocolate tart of such gooey, rich darkness that we quickly dubbed it The Black Hole of Puddings. It brought many a pudding-scoffer to his knees, I can tell you that. At least it did until the late-game entry of the minted lamb pudding (not a dessert, but still a pudding — are you following?) which turned out to be delicious.

But anyway. Enough of the puddings. Let’s look back at the year that was, as that’s traditional to do on the first day of the new year, or the last day of the old as the case may be. As a matter of fact, I did exactly that on the last day of last year.

As I recall, my general reaction to 2010 was “fuck you”. This, I feel, was fairly understandable, given that it was the year I found myself sans wife, job, place to live, money, dignity and hope. It was not, shall we say, Good Times. It was with some sense of trepidation that I began 2011 with only a part-time gig writing the news for GamePro to cling on to, but the year built its way up to if not “awesomeness” per se, then certainly a significant improvement on the previous.

Let’s start with GamePro, since I just mentioned it. I spent a goodly proportion of the year acting as a newshound for the website in question. My work was appreciated and praised by colleagues and readers alike (mostly, apart from one commenter who accused me of being a paedophile for writing a news story about a game which explored LGBT issues — he got moderated, blocked and banned out the ass for that one) and as the months rolled by, I built my way up to being able to make a decent living from the work.

When layoffs started hitting the website later in the year, I figured something was wrong. When your managing editor is out of the door, you start to fear for your position. Things continued as normal for a while, albeit with a slight “edge” to them, but then at the end of November, the thing I’d expected to happen happened. GamePro folded.

This was sad to see for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was my job, and no-one likes having their job scooped out from under them — least of all a job that they actually like. (I felt bad when I was made redundant from the first school I worked in, and that was a shithole. I actually enjoyed working for GamePro.) Secondly, there are family ties to the brand — my brother spend a goodly proportion of time there rethinking the magazine and the website for the 21st century. And thirdly, GamePro is — was — one of the longest-running games magazines in the States, and to see it go under really is the end of an era.

I’m sad to see it go, but I’m grateful I had the chance to meet some great people (mostly via email, but some face to face) and hopefully sow the seeds for some future opportunities. I was also grateful to work for an editor who actually provided helpful feedback rather than simply letting things slip by. I feel my writing has improved as a result. This is a Good Thing.

As for the future jobs-wise, I couldn’t say what will happen next in the long term. Starting on Tuesday, I’ll be contributing to Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps on a regular basis. This will bring in a fair amount of money each month, but ideally I need something more to top that up with. I have an interview for a job I won’t talk about for the moment on January 5, so we’ll have to wait and see how that goes. Otherwise it’s back to prostitution for me. Wait, no, that’s not right…

Outside of work, 2011 brought other Good Things my way, chief among which must be Andie, the lovely lady (though she may disagree on the use of that term) with whom I now live and whom I can hear playing Groove Coaster in the next room at the time of writing.

I shan’t get embarrassingly mushy or anything here, but suffice to say that Andie appreciates me for who I am, doesn’t mind watching me play video games and enjoys playing multiplayer Minecraft with me. She is also a good teammate in a game of Pandemic, willing to try her hand at Dungeon Defenders and makes a mean fried rice. She is, in short, pretty awesome, and I love her very much. She’s also a sign that if things go horribly wrong in your life, then very often there are better times around the corner if you just have the patience to ride out the storms that are thrown your way.

Personally speaking, I still find myself visited by Des from time to time, and it’s still difficult to deal with sometimes, particularly when what had started to feel like a period of stability was interrupted by the dissolution of my job. I’m hanging in there, though, and feeling quietly confident about what 2012 has to offer. It surely can’t be much worse than 2010, after all.

(While we’re here, did 2011 feel like it absolutely flew by to anyone else? It doesn’t feel like that long ago I was writing my “end of the year” post for 2010 going into 2011.)

(Also, happy new year.)

#oneaday Day 541: Kombo Broken

It’s a sad day today as I hear from my good buddy Ryan Olsen that Kombo.com is no more, with the URL now simply redirecting to GameZone.com, who purchased the site a while back.

Kombo.com holds some particular personal significance for me, as it does for many of the great friends I made while working for the site. Compared to many of the grizzled old veterans who had been working on the site since 2005, I was a relative newbie, only joining the team last year.

As most of you probably know by now, last year was Not a Good Year. Having been forced out of a job I genuinely loved by bullying management at the end of the previous year, finding employment in a primary school 40 miles away from where I lived, discovering that yes, Aldershot is indeed a shithole, even when dealing with 8 year olds, I quit my job in March of 2010 to attend PAX East (to this day quite possibly the best few days of my life EVAR) and around a similar time I started contributing to Kombo.com as a news editor. A short while after PAX East, my wife and I separated and I found myself alone in a flat I couldn’t afford with no job and seemingly no prospects of finding one that wasn’t supply teaching — a career path which would have likely ended rather abruptly with me flinging myself off the nearby Itchen Bridge had I pursued it.

As time went on and my finances dwindled, writing for Kombo every day — even if it was at US-friendly, UK-antisocial hours — gave me something stable to cling on to. This was something I desperately needed during those difficult months. There were many days when I found it very difficult to function as a normal human being, so badly was I hurting. But when it came to time to sit down and work my shift at the virtual news desk, that all went away for a few hours. It was just me, GamesPress, a lot of Chrome tabs and the Worst CMS In The World.

One of my favourite things about working for Kombo, though, was the people I had the good fortune to meet as a result, all of whom I’m happy to count among my friends today. All of them have gone their separate ways since September of last year, when most of us departed from the site due to its heading in a direction that wasn’t for us (with some of us forming our anarchic rainbow unicorn collective The Big Pixels, still ably maintained by Geoff Calver). But we all still talk to each other daily — through email, through Twitter, through Facebook, through G+. It’s great to see that Kombo, despite being a relatively small site compared to the giants out there, managed to give a lot of people the foot in the door they needed to pursue a career in various parts of the games industry. Some went into PR. Some went into development. Some still write on a hobbyist basis while pursuing other careers, and I write professionally.

It’s also been nice to see that diverse members of my groups of friends online knew the name Kombo — even people that I wouldn’t necessarily have expected to. The site will be missed, and not just by those of us who wrote for it. It’s the end of an era and — sadly — the end of some people’s portfolios (archive.org notwithstanding) as the old content seems to have vanished altogether.

Kombo.com gave me a leg-up into the industry and it’s part of the reason I write about games as my full time job now. I’ll miss it, and I invite you to doff your caps and raise a glass as its flame goes out for the last time.