Wow
It's a cold, clear amazingly beautiful night tonight. I don't think I've seen a night for star-gazing like it in a very long time, but I have noticed a few things I coulda done a bit better.
Firstly, much as I love my Converses, they are not the shoes to be out in sub-zero temperatures in, cos they aren't even a little bit warm. Secondly, they're not even a little bit waterproof either. Thirdly, I have no idea where my cool big woolly scarf might be, gonna have to find that tomorrow, and fourthly, do I own any gloves at all?
Those issues aside though, wow! The moon is low in the sky, and hardly disrupting the light at all, and the sky is as clear and bright as I have ever known it. There's a little moisture high in the atmosphere making the stars twinkle attractively, but... I really am just lost for words. There isn't a great deal that can just utterly flummox me like that, but the night sky is one of the things that can (and also the one that kinda undermines the phrase 'great deal' as it is in fact the overwhelming majority of the universe). Orion (always my favourite) is huge and majestic, dominating my sky, with detail visible that I hardly recall seeing even when I was a kid. It's just... the most amazing thing.
I guess what I'm saying is that I love the night sky. And if you're one of those people that just doesn't get that, well why don't you go out one night, and look up. It's pretty amazing.
Drowning In A Sea Of Crap
My god this room is a mess.
Not just this room either, the whole house is pretty much of a mess, but this room in particular is a mess because of the awkward way I've got these PC's 'temporarily' networked together, and the detritus from the arrival and installation of the new machine and just a general level of clutter.
I mean look, there're my All-Stars on the floor down there, just to my right, next to all the Xbox games. There appears to be a joypad, a webcam and the packaging the shoes came in down there as well. In short, its a mess. My non-PC desk is looking an absolute shambles too: where once there was, y'know actual DESK surface, there grew slightly prioritised piles of junk. Now the piles have lost all sense of priority and just merged into one big uber-pile... in short this place is a tip!
Guess I'm gonna have to tidy it up, huh?
Maybe another day...
Stupid Is As Stupid Does
So last night, after I'd finished a bottle of Southern Comfort, pizza seemed like a really good idea.
It wasn't.
Normally if I don't have too much gluten in any given period I'm okay, but as I was more than a little drunk I didn't really take into account that I'd already had pasta with a garlic ciabatta bread for lunch (me and Jules went out to eat and have a natter, as seems to be our wont these days), so pizza really was pushing my luck.
Today I feel like crap, and have done pretty much all day. I'm tired and weak, and my stomach just hurts. And I keep being violently ill.
There was something that I really wanted to blog about too, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was... I'm sure it was movie related, or maybe game related...
Okay, what I will write about for a bit is my return to PC gaming now that I suddenly have an ass-kicking new PC. It's kinda odd, to be honest, because I really haven't missed it. Sure Doom 3 looks a hell of a lot better on this machine than it does on my Xbox, but these days I'm a console gamer and I just feel more comfortable sitting over there in a nice chair, looking at a 32" screen, with a sensible joypad in my hand, rather than being huddled over here too close to the screen trying to co-ordinate keyboard and mouse. To be sure my shooting (particularly in Halo) is so much more accurate that its not even funny, but I just don't know if that's worth the sacrifice. And even with the aformentioned scarily ass-kicking PC, you still have set-up and configuration issues, you can't just whack the disk in and expect to be playing - you have to install, patch, set up all your graphic, performance and sound options, then tweak the controls and then, finally you might be ready to game, unless of course you've set your options too high in which case the game won't run properly or at all, and you'll need to tweak and fiddle until you get a happy medium of performance and looks. It just seems like an awful lot of fucking about for no particular reason.
And so a brief discussion of Monolith's F.E.A.R. It is insanely uber pretty, easily the most stunning looking game I have ever seen, on anything ever. It's atmospheric, entertaining and yet even four missions in the game is feeling repetitive. Aside from the fact that I'm TOLD I have to go here and shoot people, I really have precious little knowledge of why I'm doing it, and what it is I'm trying to achieve. The firefights are good, although there are times when the enemy AI seems so 1995 it beggars belief (I've walked right out in front of enemies and they haven't reacted to my presence at all, even after I've shot them a couple of times...), its just that the firefights all kinda seem... the same. Maybe its me, maybe I'm missing something, but without a noticeable story framework to hang all this stuff on it all seems kinda generic. Sure is one good looking game though.
Oh my, I think I'm gonna puke again. I hate this so much...
Suddenly... Silence!
I'm in the weird position of just sitting and waiting right now. Jules said we were painting again today, and that means she usually calls early and wakes me up, but today... nothing. So I'm all sitting here in my painting clothes (kinda cool being this scruffy) and clearly not painting anything. So I thought I'd do some stuff with the new PC, but I've run into a bit of a brickwall there too, I need to download some stuff to install (so many things I used to have that I took for granted and only realise I don't have when I want them), so once again I'm sitting and waiting.
Ho hum.
Only another ten minutes until my download is complete though.
Tra la la...
I'm so not used to this all of a sudden, when a couple of weeks ago I could fill endless hours, days, weeks of not really having anything to do.
Its got really cold here in the past couple of days, real wintery. Which isn't exactly unexpected, it is mid-November after all (and we're getting scarily close to Christmas... and I haven't thought one whit about that), it just seems to be taking me by surprise. But then a lot of things seem to be taking me by surprise at the moment...
Bore Of The Worlds
So I just watched Spielberg's War of The Worlds on DVD, and guess what? I still don't like it! All the stuff I said before about it is still true, along with some other stuff that I hadn't noticed first time through. There are those amongst you who will quite rightly wonder why it is I bought a DVD of a movie I loathed so much on its cinema outing, and to those I will say that it was surprisingly cheap in Tesco on Monday. That's about my whole reasoning right there. It's not a lot to go on, but what on Earth were you expecting?
I'm sure I've updated more frequently than this over the past few days, but I obviously haven't as there aren't any actual updates anywhere to be seen. I guess I just write emails late at night, and I can't tell one from the next.
Which leads me nicely into my next (and final comment) which is that it's late, I'm tired and am therefore retiring to the relative warmth of my bed.
Back For The First Time
Wow, been a while again eh? There've been a number of reasons for this: I have a new PC, I've been away for a few days, and mostly (as I think I've hinted at before) one of my best mates has split up with her bloke recently, and it wasn't a nice split and her life is pretty much in turmoil right now. I'm about the only person she trusts, so we're hanging out and just helping her cope and chill out and shit. So many people have turned against her it isn't even funny, and today (which started out okay) took a rapid turn for the worse in mid-afternoon... Poor thing, I wish there was more I could do to help, but in a lot of ways I think I'm doing more than anybody else ever has, so I guess we just have to hope that's enough.
The new PC kicks some pretty major ass, although I've only had it for a few days so far, and it's taking quite a while to get it set up how I like things, especially with hangin' with Jules most of the time. Still, I'm getting there, working late into the night (as you can see) and sometimes early in the morning too. I even bought some serious new speakers for the machine. My reasoning was that I listen to the majority of my music this way, so having a decent sound system was a wise investment. Whether that is strictly true, or whether it was just the shonky excuse I needed, I'll leave you to judge.
Finally (for today, its uber-late and I'm so tired I may just die), a quick summary of the trip to my parents: it was pretty cool, went out drinking with Stu and one of his work mates. This is unusual for many reasons, but most notable of these was the fact that I spent the night drinking beer (which is super cool for me), and that I played my very first EVER games of pool. Even more excitingly (in a way) was that I totally got chatted up by the barmaid, who was pretty much totally my type, but I obviously have a girl of my very own who I would never cheat on, so there was nothing doing. It was just exciting because I have never (to the best of my knowledge) actually been chatted up before. It was pretty cool. And then me and Stu staggered home drunkenly and I actually slept soundly on my parents couch for the first time ever. Even better than all the other things which had been even better, I didn't have a hangover in the morning! I've drunk way less of other things and felt much worse, so this is clearly a Good Thing.
Now it is very very late and I must retire to bed. I'm sure very little of this makes sense, and that I have missed out plenty of important stuff, but I'll try to get back into the habit of regular updating, so I'll fill in the blanks as we go along, okay?
