Archive for 2003
Uneternal Sleep
I can’t remember when I gave up caring, I think it was about the time that I remembered what the three digit PLU code for broccoli was. I think about that time I just gave up giving a shit whether I charged people for one piece of broccoli or ten. When I started my job, I used to get all het up inside when I fucked something up, now, barely two weeks in, I just don’t care. In fact, sometimes I wish I had the devious imagination to do it maliciously, the best I can come up with is pressing down on the scales when weighing bananas. That’s how evil my mind really is.
I wish now, in retrospect, that I had given up my job when I wanted to and just gone down to sheffield, seen rach, been the christmas do, seen ruth and just generally replenished my energy. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t wish I’d never done the job, it has been an experience, and one that I think will in the long run help me (if not for extra reason on gunning down people mercilessly in my later years). But now, I just absolutely despise the job. I like the people, but the job is killing me on the inside. I feel everytime that I go there that a little part of my resolve to do something amazing in this world is taken away from me, and I hate that feeling.
So I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m leaving my job, sooner rather than later. I don’t care what people say, I’ve given up caring whether it is the right thing to do because I know that it is. I don’t really know why I wrote this entry, it only seems to recap everything that I’ve said before, but I somehow felt it needed to be said.
The Holes Will Still Remain
So I’ve had an uber-geek day today. My dad’s new computer components were supposed to arrive yesterday, however I was out seeing LotR: RotK so I missed them. So he went and collected them from the depot today and my mum picked them up. So after work (which was thrilling, no really) I set about putting all the components together. Because Intel decided to, you know, put FOIL on their heatsinks, I tore off the foil and whacked the last of my Zalman thermal grease on there which seems to have done the trick. Anyway, long story short, all the components worked which is a miracle unto itself, and my dad (and mum) now have an absolutely blazing PC which absolutely blitzes mine. Hyper-threading, 3200 DDR RAM, the whole yards of nine.
Now, because of that, I get my old computer parts back, which means that I get to have a server again! At this moment, Kamui is happilly purring away after I reinstalled Debian on it. The 2.6.0 kernel was just released which I may be tempted to try out tomorrow sometime, however, I just got samba working (which was remarkably easy) so that’s enough for one night. My ultimate goal is to set Kamui up as a bridge / route between my computers and the internet, basically using Kamui as a firewall. Of course, all that needs to be done is for my knowledge of networks to increase 10 fold and for me to wrestle with Linux and I’m away!
I recently came into possession of Ico for the PS2. Originally, Gameplay said it would take about a month to get in, so I order it thinking it’ll come after christmas, maybe after new year, but no, they e-mailed me the next evening saying they’d dispatched the bugger. So great… But let me tell you, it was worth every penny. It is a truly stunning game, and I realise now what everyone was bantering about. Sometimes I hear critical praise for a game and it’s like: “Yeah well, whatever,” but this truly lives up to “the hype”. The play mechanics, the animation, the graphics, everything is just sublime, and Ico deserved a far greater audience than it got. Yorda is especially cute, it’s like having one of those virtual pets but you have to physically protect her and drag her about the place. Her chasing after birds and running away from shadow-y spiders brings forth an elation in me I didn’t know existed.
I have also had a resurgence in the Silent Hill soundtracks (two and three mainly) which only make me want to play the games again…
I have also started my own Roleplaying board, loosely based around Spycraft, it’s basically a counter-terrorism / ancient cult sort of roleplay. So it’s set in the near future and we get to play with guns ;) I’ve really enjoyed doing it so far, apart from some people who absolutely, flat out refuse to read other posts and then post something perpendicular to what was just said. Still, tis immense fun, and with the start of the first mission, we’ll see how it goes. Pete was recently added to my MSN list and just made me feel so tiny when it comes to knowledge of “real world” military tactics, explaining some of the political and technical ramifications of some of the things I’d described. Just made me feel like I’d just glossed over those parts ;)
hud_saytext_time 0
I neead a t-shirt with that on it (hud_saytext_time 0). Mainly because it’ll make me feel special knowing that only people who know the console of Half Life will get the joke. The joke being that it essentially means that nothing anyone else says will be displayed, kind of like “shutup!”…
I once wrote in this very deadjournal about tedium. And when I did, I referenced Final Fantasy X. Now see, compared to the sort of tedium I’ve been experiencing, that was like fun tedium. At least there was an end to it, like there was a short term goal into doing these things, it got me “cool stuff” in the end. Working at Asda is akin to working in a tedium factory. It repeatedly churns out tedium and pumps you full of it, from the droning announcements of the “store greeter” to the people who decide to spend £250 on alcohol. Of course, being busy at the tills is fine, time passes with relative ease, but it’s days like today when I feel I understand why people go postal at their workplace. I tell myself that I’m doing it for the money, what little pittance I get, but that doesn’t comfort me as I rearrange home and leisure products.
I know I’m better than this. Other people know I’m better than this, but I get this sickening feeling that maybe I’m not that MUCH better than this. Like maybe the reason I’ve got this shit job is because I’m not good enough for anything distinctly better. Then I think that I’m essentially paying off my overdraft, which can only be a good thing, but I’m missing so much. Given the choice, I would be down in sheffield now with Rachel enjoying christmas as it should be enjoyed, with my friends and my loved one(s). But no, I’m stuck up here doing a fucking shit job that I rightly hate.
And then I think of packing it in. Oh how I think of packing it in. Screw the red-shirts, screw the computer based learning, ramp up my credit card debt and fuck it all. That’s what I want to do. How I want to do that and just roll around in my debt like it was a good thing. And then I think, well this sort of tedium is something that I may have to deal with for the rest of my life. The tedium of going to a 9-5 job, doing something that is utterly tedious and the only reason I carry on doing it is because I feel I ought to, to pay of whatever debts I’ve accumulated since then. And that thought more than anything makes me want to slit my wrists and save everyone the effort. Of course, that’s hypothetically speaking, I never actually will commit suicide, my proclivities towards people who do are well known enough that I would never be THAT hypocritical.
But given another day like today and I’m gone. I’m a dot, dust in their face. Fuck how it looks on my CV. I just need to find a way to make my life worthwhile.
Funeral Music
If I die, these are some of the songs I would want to be played at my funeral (which will be a facade considering I want to be cremated and with NO WAKE, just a party to celebrate my life). Generally this is just music that I think is absolutely stunning and brings real emotion to me, plonking it under “funeral music” is just my way of being morbid ;)
RahXephon - The Garden of Everything (Featuring Steve Conté) [ RahXephon - Movie OST ]
Ghost in the Shell - Beauty is Within Us (Yoko Kanno / Chris Modell) [ GITS SAC - OST ]
Texhnolyze - When Reason Fails [ Texhnolyze - OST 1 ]
Bach - Air II (Violen Concerto (I think)) [ Evangelion - End of Evangelion OST ]
Cowboy Bebop - Is It Real? (Yoko Kanno / Steve Conté) [ Cowboy Bebop - Movie Minialbum ]
Gunparade March - Haikyo no Utagoe [ Gunparade March - OST 1 ]
Last Exile - Prayer for Love (Dolce Triade) [ Last Exile OST 1 ]
That’s about all I can come up with right now. It’s late and I should be sleeping.
[Title Needs 3,000 Gold Coins to be Unlocked]
Why, on God’s green earth should I have to unlock features within a game? I mean really, I’m shelling out £30-£40 for a game (for Americans, ‘£’ is a pound sign (British currency), ‘#’ that is a hash) and when I unwrap it to play with all those lovely cars/weapons/levels, I have to sit down and damn well earn them. To hell with earning them, I did the earning part to buy the game, if I want to shoot people with incredibly large guns, if I want to hurtle dangerously around (read: into) corners in stupidly fast cars and I shelled out my money to do just that, why the hell should I have to put in hours to “unlock” them.
For instance, Project Gotham Racing is a fine game, if not a little steep on the old difficulty curve, however, the top car, the FX50 requires 200,000 kudos points to unlock, I mean, that’s a task that no man or beast should have to undertake. I’ve had the game for a little over a year and a half, and playing on and off has accrued me a total of 8000, only 122,000 to go! That should only take me 23 years at my current rate. What a joke.
I’m not against providing a reward to the player for achieving a goal, it is a valid play mechanic and one which when implemented correctly, can be a boon in extending the longevity of a game. But when a game is castrated and demands intense playing just to unlock what you got the game for anyway, the reward system stops being rewarding. On the complete other end of the scale is Soul Calibur II, a game which, like Project Gotham, is light on features when you tear off that polythene and breathe in that new game smell. But given a cursory play (perhaps an hour so), and suddenly most all of the unlockable characters are unlocked, I suddenly have a slew of weaponry, game modes and battle arenas to play in. Of course, the mechanic for Soul Calibur II is far more finely tuned, and the truly awesome weapons are not unlocked so easilly. But still, given such a volume of rewards for so little play, why not just make them selectable from the start and work from there.
This sort of work that needs to be put into a game to make it worthwhile is a true bane of the modern video game. I’m not a busy person at the moment, but I can envisage myself in a position where my free time is limited to the arse-end of each day and the weekend. So with a video game that requires so much input to make playing it worthwhile, is it worth me buying it when I’m not sure the quality is really there to warrant my time? RPGs are a big investment for me purely in time, and this has caused me to stick to time honoured RPGs rather than other more esoteric ones. I know when I buy a final fantasy game (when they release them, you know, not like a year after the Japanese release) that I’m getting a quality game. I know when I buy a BioWare RPG that I’m getting a quality storyline.
Of course, I am not the market which games are targetted to, even though my age bracket is the primary contributor. Games such as Project Gotham are made for people with disposable time and energy, teenagers who are still at school (and maybe university students doing a business studies degree). In the end, the work-ethic for games is symptomatic of a capitalist outlook on games which I have lamented far too often, rather than a creative one. My time is precious, perhaps not yet to other people, but to me, and I want to know that my time is not going to be wasted endlessly racing and accumulating meaningless digital points just to “unlock that special feature”.
26448
I have been challenged by a person who shall remain nameless (so they cannot be blamed for this literary atrocity that I am about to unleash) to write a deadjournal entry of “shrugs”. The origin of this challenge you can probably guess…
The meaning of the word “shrug” is related to the “shoulder” shrug” or can be another name for a specific type of short jacket or sweater that is open down the middle. The shoulder-shrug involves using the Trapezius and Levator Scapulae muscles to lift the shoulder blades (scapulas), the Trapezius muscle (assisted by pectoralis major, pectoralis minor and serratus anterior) medially rotates (i.e. ventrally flexes) the shoulders, as well. The shrug was hypothesized to originally be a defensive reaction to get perhaps the head and upper body out of harms way. Charles Darwin identified the “shoulder-shrug complex”. It has been noticed that baboons in southern africa have shrugged as a sign of fear or uncertainty, especially when startled.
The shoulder-shrug in humans is a submissive or escapist gesture that is usually enacted to indicate that a person does not know the answer to a particular question, that a person is in disdain of another person or object or that a person is indifferent to a particular situation.
To pad out space, here is a short story about shrugging:
Once upon a time, as all good stories should begin with, there was a small boy called Mestopheles who had the tendancy to shrug as a defense mechanism to any sort of situation. Mestopheles became so adept at shrugging that his shoulder muscles increased to behemoth proportions. Unfortunately when Mestopheles was older and he entered the world wide competetion for shrugging maniacs (WWCfSM), he was summarilly beaten by a young woman from southern Peru. Mestopheles began intensive training to try and beat his upsurper and shrugged at least eight hours a day. Unfortunately, disaster struck, and one day, Mestopheles shrugged his arms off. Feeling slightly miffed at this, Mesopheles never shrugged again.
The End.
