Not Quite One Year

As the title suggests, it's not quite been one year since I posted an update. But it's near enough. Which is terrible, by any measure. Hell, it's not really a blog if it's updated annually. That's an AGM, and I'm pretty sure the one or two people who might actually read this do not qualify as a quorum. Insert pathetic promises to try and update more here.

Work situation first. I mentioned in my previous post about the possibility of a 6-month "placement" via the government. That happened. It was called the Future Jobs Fund, and thanks to my manager at ReBOOT and a bloke named Ivor at my local Jobcentre Plus, I was the first person in Scotland to be on the scheme. It was a great success, and lead to the employment of several deserving people in the same workplace. I even got an impromptu extension of the contract, making it more akin to 9 months of employment.

And then came the UK elections. The Tories won, and one of the first things they did was to scrap the FJF. Because if there's one thing that Tories know how to do, it's cock things up royally. So now I'm a volunteer again, currently battling past a period of prolonged embuggrance. Sore guts, general nausea, exhaustion... nothing very nice. Here's hoping that it disappears and I can get back to the only job I've ever really enjoyed. I'll be fucked if I let the bloody Tories ruin a good thing completely.

Gaming. Aion did not last long, and I'm firmly entrenched in WoW again. It's gotten a lot better since the last time I posted, and the upcoming expansion is looking better every day. Got my Horde characters into the same guild as Dante and Ravus, and my Hunter is pew-pewing through Icecrown Citadel every Monday or Tuesday evening. Lots of fun.
MMOs aside, I'm looking forward to the new Dragon Age, slated to come out in March. Recent purchases have been somewhat scarce, due in no small part to me having no income and the Bank of Scotland deciding that £1 per day is an acceptable overdraft charge (even on arranged, interest-free overdrafts). But hey, this is what my massive backlog of unopened and/or unplayed games is for, right? Some of them are no doubt classics by now.

The only game I've bought in the last wee while has been StarCraft II. Collector's Edition at that. Not opened it yet, of course. Still watching eBay to see if it's worth re-selling at a profit. Couple of months before that, I nabbed Demon's Souls for the PS3, which was fun for a bit. Daresay that I'll come back to it at some point, since it's challenging and fun, but very obscure in terms of storyline and gameplay. I've registered for PlayStation Plus as well, which means I get a steady stream of free PS3 games and PSone classics each month. So far, I've got LittleBigPlanet, WipeoutHD, Destruction Derby and MediEvil. The latter has been the most fun - fond memories of playing that at lunch time in my secondary school years. A friend of mine would bring his copy round and let me play it while he ate his chocolate spread sandwiches. Good times.

Pre-orders? Well, aside from accidentally ordering two copies of StarCraft II (one of which was handily a perfect birthday present for a new friend at ReBOOT), I've got Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep coming in 20 days or so. It should be good, but I imagine it will be shelved. Still haven't played through 358/2 Days yet. Or Dissidia: Final Fantasy... or Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, for that matter. See? Backlog.

Internet next. I'm no longer with O2 Home Broadband, on account of them being massive dicks. They called me in April and said that I was using too much bandwidth. They'd never mentioned anything like this before, and I was under the assumption that my usage had been fairly average for the past 4 weeks (the period they claimed to be analysing). They said that I had used something like 58GB, though, so I took their word for it. Downloaded a bandwidth monitor and installed it on the internet-heavy machines in the house, kept an eye on my usage for another 4 weeks. No call after one month, I figure I'm in the clear.

1 month later (that's 2 months after the original phone call) I get another call telling me that I'd exceeded my usage for March-April. Wait, what? I know that already, you called me in April to tell me. No, sir, that was your February to March usage, and we're only telling you a month afterwards to highlight the fact that you couldn't have actually acted on our one and only warning unless you were, in fact, a time traveller. So they told me I was going to be cut off in one month, but they couldn't even get that right. I was cut off a week too early, and couldn't move over to my new supplier (PlusNet) until the agreed connection date. One week without broadband... dark times. Much Theme Hospital and Final Fantasy VII was played.

Movies! Star Trek was awesome, needed to be said. DVD had this little augmented reality website that you could activate by holding the cover up to a webcam, which was a cool touch. Saw Iron Man 2, which was also awesome. Like the media slave I am, I went and bought the movie tie-in game, which wasn't entirely terrible, to it's credit. Got a hold of several classic movies, and was introduced to several others by PiLoT. Not going to mention them all, but some fun additions to my collection.

Television. The end of Heroes came as a bit of a shock, since it was simply announced that there wouldn't be another season. Which sucks... I feel it could have gotten really good again, instead of the mediocrity we were left with in the last two seasons. But on the upside, there have been some excellent shows to fill the gap. The last season of Lost was fantastic, and if I can afford it, I'll be getting the big six-season box set at some point. It would make a good Christmas or birthday present, come to think of it. Let's hope that it gets released in time. There has also been Hung (funny and sexy, naked redheads are always awesome) and Lie to Me (the Lightman Lean!). House is due back on soon, so that'll get watched. Oh and Fringe... if I didn't mention that in my last blog post, it needs to be said. Fringe is awesome. Recently introduced it to Dante and Ravus, and despite some derogatory comments towards poor Anna Torv's acting skills, they seem to be enjoying it. I can't say enough good about it, and the new season is due out in the Autumn as well.

Speaking of seasons, fuck the Summer. Bloody bees, wasps and moths. Can't escape them. And the heat. Give me a nice, cool Autumn and a Winter with perhaps slightly less snow than December '09 - February '10... that was taking the piss a bit. There is still grit lying around on the paths from that deluge. Though it was sort of cool to see the picture of the entirety of the UK under a blanket of snow.

More TV... got CSI coming back on soon, plus Dexter. PiLoT has also been introducing me to Shameless, which isn't too bad, if only for the hotties in it. Fiona has a bit of a face on her, but that daughter of the crazy bitch is too hot for her own good. Don't anyone have a go at me about names, either; I'm about 5 seasons behind and I don't start remembering names until I've seen about a billion episodes.

The computer is fine; got myself a nice, 26 inch flatscreen monitor. It works like a charm, and gaming on it is lots of fun. Bit big for my desk, since the feet jut out a bit, but it's workable. Think I might have mentioned it previously, but I've got a 9800GTX+ inside it now. My old 8800GTX gave up the ghost with artefacts and all that. But I read an article online about how you can revive them. Thinking it couldn't do any harm, I gave the dead card to PiLoT and told him how to bake it back to life. Bloody worked, too; my old 8800GTX lives once again and it's in PiLoT's machine as we speak. Well... as I type.

Speaking of typing, Dante and I have been working on a new Fan Fiction on FED2k. It's based on the original FED2k Warlords thread started by him and King Sard way back in the day, I may or may not have mentioned it in my various blog posts of the time. It's much more complex, detailed and mature than the original ever was, though, and we've pioneered a new "participation by proxy" method that already has three people being included. Check out the link to FED2k at the bottom-right of the blog, hit up the Fan Fiction board and have a read of "Warlords 2 - Five Years Later" if you want. I won't directly link it... get enough spambots there already.

Not much else to say. Home life has been pretty much same old, same old. No new conquests on the relationship front, but that's hardly news. Not that there aren't candidates for failed advances, I just have bigger priorities now that focusing so much effort on any one person. Better to just test the water with every pretty lady and see what happens. Hell, it almost worked a month or so ago.

That's more or less it. Almost a year's worth of stuff summed up in a few paragraphs. Reading back over the first few posts of my old blog (also linked to the bottom-right of this blog, if anyone's interested) was what inspired me to finally update. It's nice to think that I have some record of what I did and how I felt over 5 years ago. Half a decade of sporadic updates is a damn sight better than nothing at all, and with my memory, it's like a time machine; often can't remember things on their own, but give me a hint - a scene, a word, a smell, etc. - and I'm back in the room. Lots of fun.

No doubt I'll post here again at some point. For now, it's back to my life. Which right now is probably bed. Would you look at the time?