Raining again. Not that cold, in fact I got too hot wearing a coat to work, so tomorrow I'll just go with the suit jacket and a large umbrella. You start to think that winter is here, and then it gets warm, dry, and sunny for a couple of weeks, then it rains again. No real winters like there used to be when I was a child...
(Anyone that tries to post any comments about global warming will be burnt.)
Got a card from the Australia Post couriers, took half an hour off work, and since I am a contractor that meant forgoing thirty bucks, to find the post office closed when I got there. Just on five maybe. No five thirty or six like anyone running a business. I intend phoning tomorrow and telling them that they can deliver it to my work. I am not going to forgo any more pay because they can't provide a decent service.
One day when I was obviously quite bored I went to the Singapore Expats site and ended up trying their friends/dating sub-site. As I recall it turned out to be rather disappointing. I had thought that it would be full of SPGs trying to catch a good foreign guy, but not a scary of them. Anyhow I just got an email of 'likely matches' from them and one caught my eye; a cute Russian red-head with an interest in anime. Strangely none of the 'mails links worked, so I tried logging on, only to be refused, so I tried the 'resend password' button, only to be told that it didn't recognise my email address. You know, the one it had just sent a 'mail to...
Anyhow, I found a 'contact us' link that didn't require logging on (Steams old problem) and got a very rapid reply. A really stupid reply, but quite quickly provided. This guy wrote, in rather bad English, that I couldn't log on because my address city was not filled in. Just how I had been able to log on previously is a mystery. But a further mystery is how he expected me to log on to change the basic details so that I could then log on...
Also amusing was the bit "you details is not incorrect..." followed by instructions on how to click on my home city from the list of cities in China...
If this wasn't filled in then I am guessing that the list was deficient in the Australia area. (And why is 'deficient' i before e when it is after a c?)
Other than that I have sweet fanny adams to talk about.
Actually that's not true, I recall, just as I am closing, that I do have some politics to rant about.
Rudd, sweet little communist that he is, has decided that to try and balance his budget he is going to add a new tax on the resources industry.
Now you will all be aware that Australia is pretty much the end of the World, and is taking longer to get out of the GFC than most (and Adelaide is the arse end of Australia, which is why my hourly rate is still not up to where it was three years ago). The only sector to come out sooner was the one driven by foreign demand, the resources that we export to everyone else. So they have now got a forty percent tax on them, before they pay interest on their business loans, before they pay their shareholders, and before they pay their normal income tax.
This is justified by saying that the resources that they mine are the property of all Australians and that they should pay for them. A reasonable argument; which is why they pay royalties; royalties to the indigenous peoples and royalties to the state governments and royalties to the federal government.
How many companies will now look somewhere else for their next venture?
How many jobs will Australia forgo because of this?
How much future tax revenue on those projects will now not be received because these prats wanted to grab some more now?
Tuesday, May 25
Saturday, May 15
I am
I am blogging for no reason other than that I am alive, and blogging.
Rounding up reading things, facebooks, emails, chatting online with friends in Singapore, checking other blogs, so I felt that I should write something.
What to write though?
Hmm,
I left Santos and am back at Transport. That is good, not just 'cos I am being paid a bit more than half as much again, as the people have more character and I enjoy being there. Also it is on Leigh Street and has lots of good restaurants. "Lots" and "good" in the context of being Adelaide of course.
I am having the new contract pay into my HSBC account, and when it has something decent in it I will transfer my automatic deductions to it. It has a VISA card as well. Also applied for a VISA card from WestPac; it has an interest free period on the balance that I transfer from the NAB card and it has a loyalty/reward programme with SingAir. I wanted the Citi one, but they no longer have a relationship with SingAir here, they are with Qantas, and how useless is that? Hello, I am in Adelaide and Qantas don't fly internationally out of here, they only fly via other cities, so add on connection and at least half a day, plus at least a few hundred bucks expense, to your trip. So that is all good, moving at last. 'Cos the NAB were so useless when I was overseas.
I have enrolled in a masters, in accounting. Studying part time to start with, but I would love to work only three days a week and study full time. So I will have a certificate and a diploma and a degree in accounting. How overkill, but unfortunately the way that I have to go to do the things that I want to do.
I was not paying my rent since the manager was not fixing my fridge. This was my third month of not paying my rent, and finally someone called me to ask about that. I said "fix my fridge". It seems that it is finally being fixed, but I am holding back rent until it is done and I have seen it with my own eyes. Lesson learned; don't move in or pay anything until the bastards have got everything perfect, 'cos once you move in they will have no incentive to fix anything. Human nature sucks.
I was online chatting with my friend Javier in Singers last night saying that I have lots of Japanese music (J-pop rules!) but nothing Chinese and she sent me lots of links to clips on you tube. I spent hours watching S.H.E. and Sammi Cheung. Yeah, a few others, but that's where my attention got hooked, so lots of watching Landry shake her butt, and she tried to get me to watch a few that I said were like Chinese Barry Manilow :D So is cool, I got exposed to a new cultural experience, and I like that.
People keep asking me if I am going back to Singapore. Most seem to accept that it is inevitable. I find the psychology of that interesting; they are sad, but impotent, observers in the demise of their own culture and economy, their very social fabric is rending, but what can they do? I say maybe, maybe somewhere else; I can't be sure of how long it will take before I am ready to make the move again, but next time I will have to be independent of the local economy and the market vagaries. And I say that I would love to live in Hong Kong for three months and see what it is like, and maybe Taiwan, and definitely after I finish the degree I would love to get one of those teaching English jobs in Japan for a year and soak up that culture. I don't know which way it will go, I just think that in two or three years I will be at another cross-road making another decision. And right here, right now, I cannot give a firm commitment on what I will want in the future.
And here is the funny thing; I am happy with that, I am comfortable with that.
Like I am comfortable with consulting and working by contract and not having a fixed, guaranteed job.
I have been asked a few times recently what do I do. In circumstances that make answering with "I'm an accountant" seems meaningless, and "business consultant" or whatever seemed not to work either. For example, moving away from the few instances of people asking, the bank asked for my card application, and then asked for my position. Well, my 'position' is director of my own company, but then what follows from that doesn't work well with any of their drop-down lists. My company is just me, but I work in corporations and organisations that usually have a few thousand employees. But how do I describe my crust earning endeavours these days? Used to be easy, now it makes me pause and think; how best to describe it to this person, 'cos different people need different explanations.
So, all in all, I am generally feeling better about things than the last few months, the economy of little ol' Adelaide hasn't quite picked up yet, but it's getting there. And I am comfortable.
Rounding up reading things, facebooks, emails, chatting online with friends in Singapore, checking other blogs, so I felt that I should write something.
What to write though?
Hmm,
I left Santos and am back at Transport. That is good, not just 'cos I am being paid a bit more than half as much again, as the people have more character and I enjoy being there. Also it is on Leigh Street and has lots of good restaurants. "Lots" and "good" in the context of being Adelaide of course.
I am having the new contract pay into my HSBC account, and when it has something decent in it I will transfer my automatic deductions to it. It has a VISA card as well. Also applied for a VISA card from WestPac; it has an interest free period on the balance that I transfer from the NAB card and it has a loyalty/reward programme with SingAir. I wanted the Citi one, but they no longer have a relationship with SingAir here, they are with Qantas, and how useless is that? Hello, I am in Adelaide and Qantas don't fly internationally out of here, they only fly via other cities, so add on connection and at least half a day, plus at least a few hundred bucks expense, to your trip. So that is all good, moving at last. 'Cos the NAB were so useless when I was overseas.
I have enrolled in a masters, in accounting. Studying part time to start with, but I would love to work only three days a week and study full time. So I will have a certificate and a diploma and a degree in accounting. How overkill, but unfortunately the way that I have to go to do the things that I want to do.
I was not paying my rent since the manager was not fixing my fridge. This was my third month of not paying my rent, and finally someone called me to ask about that. I said "fix my fridge". It seems that it is finally being fixed, but I am holding back rent until it is done and I have seen it with my own eyes. Lesson learned; don't move in or pay anything until the bastards have got everything perfect, 'cos once you move in they will have no incentive to fix anything. Human nature sucks.
I was online chatting with my friend Javier in Singers last night saying that I have lots of Japanese music (J-pop rules!) but nothing Chinese and she sent me lots of links to clips on you tube. I spent hours watching S.H.E. and Sammi Cheung. Yeah, a few others, but that's where my attention got hooked, so lots of watching Landry shake her butt, and she tried to get me to watch a few that I said were like Chinese Barry Manilow :D So is cool, I got exposed to a new cultural experience, and I like that.
People keep asking me if I am going back to Singapore. Most seem to accept that it is inevitable. I find the psychology of that interesting; they are sad, but impotent, observers in the demise of their own culture and economy, their very social fabric is rending, but what can they do? I say maybe, maybe somewhere else; I can't be sure of how long it will take before I am ready to make the move again, but next time I will have to be independent of the local economy and the market vagaries. And I say that I would love to live in Hong Kong for three months and see what it is like, and maybe Taiwan, and definitely after I finish the degree I would love to get one of those teaching English jobs in Japan for a year and soak up that culture. I don't know which way it will go, I just think that in two or three years I will be at another cross-road making another decision. And right here, right now, I cannot give a firm commitment on what I will want in the future.
And here is the funny thing; I am happy with that, I am comfortable with that.
Like I am comfortable with consulting and working by contract and not having a fixed, guaranteed job.
I have been asked a few times recently what do I do. In circumstances that make answering with "I'm an accountant" seems meaningless, and "business consultant" or whatever seemed not to work either. For example, moving away from the few instances of people asking, the bank asked for my card application, and then asked for my position. Well, my 'position' is director of my own company, but then what follows from that doesn't work well with any of their drop-down lists. My company is just me, but I work in corporations and organisations that usually have a few thousand employees. But how do I describe my crust earning endeavours these days? Used to be easy, now it makes me pause and think; how best to describe it to this person, 'cos different people need different explanations.
So, all in all, I am generally feeling better about things than the last few months, the economy of little ol' Adelaide hasn't quite picked up yet, but it's getting there. And I am comfortable.
Monday, May 3
Whatever Again
I guess this is more just to prove that my net connection is working. Since Steam is being such a pain. I went off and left it updating for most of the day so that I could play C&C4, for which you have to be online or you lose your progress, Steam was finally saying that the downloads were complete and that I could play. Why it needed to update so much when the damned thing is only a week or two old is both beyond me and unforgivable to start with. But lo! I click 'play' and Steam instead goes to 'updating steam' mode.
Fuck that!
Log into Steam Powered dot com and, as usual, I cannot log in under my real account name and have to use a shadow account that I created some time ago since every time I log an issue with Valve the site thereafter refuses to recognise my password. Petty little shit of a website that. Six fracking times I have had that password reset. The Valve staff say that the password has to be numeric only, which is crap 'cos the shadow account is an alpha-only rude phrase about Steam and my main account used to work with an alphanumeric until they started screwing with it.
Anyhow, whilst I am here, so the NAB pissed me around with their online help (online, but three or four days later...), they sent me a link and some directions to download a PDF form to lodge a complaint about FriendFinders unauthorised use of my credit card. So I phoned them, but after twenty minutes on hold dropped that idea and decided to go to an actual branch and speak to real people. More than an hour later and nearly fainting from hunger (tip, eat lunch first next time) the woman says that the transaction was in GBP! Britain? I have not transacted with anything UK ever that I can recall, certainly nothing recently, in fact I know that I haven't done anything since I got back from SG nearly a year ago. At first I thought it was something to do with Adult Friend Finder, 'cos I know that company is a credit card thief, but they are based in the USA (like most net crims) not the UK. Puzzling. It will be a race to see whether the NAB refunds the thefts, which they say will take six weeks, or I finalise moving everything to HSBC and shut the NAB card. Either way, they have lost a twenty-year customer.
They used to be a good bank, but they stopped providing service a few years ago. Started using Indian call centres, even the online is Indian and does nothing but spew lots of words but no help. I reckon it was when they tried being the 'National' and forgot the 'Australia' part, kind of like how Community Aid Abroad merged with Freedom From Hunger and the resulting body was called Community Aid Abroad, surprise, surprise, but the CAA people got promoted, the FFH people got side-tracked, the FFH programs (which actually helped people) got strangled, and the CAA method of programming became the norm. I think you lose your soul with something like that. Yeah, CAA was never a good organisation, they funnel money into socially invasive projects that force their liberal socialist paradigm onto the recipients whereas FFH used to dig wells and build shelters and actually do something useful for people. Hasn't changed with the name change to 'Oxfam Australia' either.
Mind you, if there is one thing that I have learned in life, it is that if you give someone charity then they depend on it. They give up on trying for themselves and start parasiting on society. It is a bad thing to give freeloaders a dime, better to tell them to get a job. Seriously, I know that twenty years ago I would never have thought that I would think this, but it is what I have seen. This country is going down the gurgler with all of this welfare state mentality and the requisite humungous civil service bureaucracy it engenders. Yes, I sound like a grumpy old man, and I am, I know, but it's for their own good.
Fuck that!
Log into Steam Powered dot com and, as usual, I cannot log in under my real account name and have to use a shadow account that I created some time ago since every time I log an issue with Valve the site thereafter refuses to recognise my password. Petty little shit of a website that. Six fracking times I have had that password reset. The Valve staff say that the password has to be numeric only, which is crap 'cos the shadow account is an alpha-only rude phrase about Steam and my main account used to work with an alphanumeric until they started screwing with it.
Anyhow, whilst I am here, so the NAB pissed me around with their online help (online, but three or four days later...), they sent me a link and some directions to download a PDF form to lodge a complaint about FriendFinders unauthorised use of my credit card. So I phoned them, but after twenty minutes on hold dropped that idea and decided to go to an actual branch and speak to real people. More than an hour later and nearly fainting from hunger (tip, eat lunch first next time) the woman says that the transaction was in GBP! Britain? I have not transacted with anything UK ever that I can recall, certainly nothing recently, in fact I know that I haven't done anything since I got back from SG nearly a year ago. At first I thought it was something to do with Adult Friend Finder, 'cos I know that company is a credit card thief, but they are based in the USA (like most net crims) not the UK. Puzzling. It will be a race to see whether the NAB refunds the thefts, which they say will take six weeks, or I finalise moving everything to HSBC and shut the NAB card. Either way, they have lost a twenty-year customer.
They used to be a good bank, but they stopped providing service a few years ago. Started using Indian call centres, even the online is Indian and does nothing but spew lots of words but no help. I reckon it was when they tried being the 'National' and forgot the 'Australia' part, kind of like how Community Aid Abroad merged with Freedom From Hunger and the resulting body was called Community Aid Abroad, surprise, surprise, but the CAA people got promoted, the FFH people got side-tracked, the FFH programs (which actually helped people) got strangled, and the CAA method of programming became the norm. I think you lose your soul with something like that. Yeah, CAA was never a good organisation, they funnel money into socially invasive projects that force their liberal socialist paradigm onto the recipients whereas FFH used to dig wells and build shelters and actually do something useful for people. Hasn't changed with the name change to 'Oxfam Australia' either.
Mind you, if there is one thing that I have learned in life, it is that if you give someone charity then they depend on it. They give up on trying for themselves and start parasiting on society. It is a bad thing to give freeloaders a dime, better to tell them to get a job. Seriously, I know that twenty years ago I would never have thought that I would think this, but it is what I have seen. This country is going down the gurgler with all of this welfare state mentality and the requisite humungous civil service bureaucracy it engenders. Yes, I sound like a grumpy old man, and I am, I know, but it's for their own good.
Whatever
Probably won't be the last time that I use that for a title.
Nearly two and a half months without blogging. It roughly equates to the time I was at Santos, it was kind of soul-sapping. It wasn't a 'bad' place to work, just dull, the people insipid. Okay, the system setup is bad, their account string is cripplingly short, they have just expanded it, to something that is still cripplingly short, their OLAP setup is criminally bad, seriously, the implementation consultant (UXC) should never do that again, and won't, since they have withdrawn from that market.
The other contractors there have told me that they all feel that they get the cold shoulder from the employees as well, one woman transferred to permanent but it took a few months before people warmed to her. They just don't go to lunch together, and don't give the time of day to contractors. It is not a 'friendly' place. Also it is not nice for other reasons; they wank on about their focus on safety, but don't have mirrors on the ceiling at blind junctions in the corridor. Other than that, whilst the building is nice and open, very light and airy; the top floors get very hot and the aircon doesn't cut it. Their elevators have no fan and stay closed all day, so during summer they get very hot and stuffy; I could walk to work very early whilst the day was still quite cool, and then the five minute ride up in the elevator just standing still got me covered in perspiration!
All of this, of course, is on top of the fact that they pay shit.
This is the third time that I have interacted with them, the first time that I have taken a contract with them, and only because I knew that there was nothing else on the market at the beginning of this year. But now I have a week off and then on to something that pays a little more than half as much again.
We have recently voted here in little South Australia. I did my usual draw a little box at the bottom and tick it then write next to it "none of the above". In the lower house anyhow, in the upper house where there are far more options I did my usual start by putting the socialists last and then arrange the other fifty-odd choices in the order they least offended me. Putting people at the front that might provide the most entertainment should they get in.
Steam, ah Steam, it is a good thing to have an app that lets me buy a new computer in a new country and just go online and reinstall a big swag of games. It is a bad thing that I pay for a bunch of games but cannot play them for two weeks because Valve can't be bothered providing the servers required to handle the traffic they force the app to generate. I am seriously thinking about using cracked servers. And I don't particularly like the new look either.
I am coming up on my third monthly rent payment not being paid. I gave up asking for the fridge to be fixed, and being promised by the manager that it was happening soon, and stopped paying rent. I thought that this would get a quick resolution, but this week I will be not paying for the third month. I never saw that coming!
I have had another unauthorised transaction on my credit card. I suspect that it is the Adult Friend Finders company; I joined their site some years ago but did not renew. I think that they have dug through their records and hit old credit cards hoping that they don't get noticed, and in truth it wasn't for a while. Now I am having that battle with the National Australia Bank where they say that they are not involved in any agreements that I make with a merchant for automatic deductions and I have to take it up with the merchant. To which I responded that I don't really know who the merchant is!
I am in the process of moving all of my business to HSBC and will soon close the NAB accounts anyhow, but along the way I wanted to open a Citibank credit account 'cos they had a really good deal with a Singapore Airlines rewards programme, but now that I am actually doing it I can't find it on the Citibank Australia site and the only answer I get from them is that I can transfer my reward points at a rate of 1.5 to 1.0 to any airline programme. The old programme offered 1.5 points for every dollar spent, now they making this generic offer that is worth 0.66 whilst they have moved their main linkage to Qantas. I live in Adelaide, Qantas doesn't fly direct out of Adelaide, a Qantas program does not grab my attention. My friend has opened an account with Westpac because they have a SingAir offer and he is suggesting that I do the same. Certainly Citi is not offering anything that will get my business.
I have gone full vegan; my neice talked me into it over xmas. I am not finding it difficult in that I am not missing anything and I can cook dinner without much hassle (takeaway pizza and grating cheese over pasta are the two biggest loses) but I am noticing that it is MUCH harder to eat out. Well, eat out in Australia, I did comment previously on being vegetarian in Singapore that it would be so easy to go full vegan there, and indeed I did think about doing so. I find this an interesting comparison between our culinary cultures.
I have played through Stalker 3 again, this time choosing to stay and not depart with the military team, and thus enter the free form part of the game, but I am finding it kind of boring. I have the best guns, the best suit, the best artefacts, I have killed the best monsters; what else is there to do? I was pondering just killing all of the bandits. I would love to be able to shoot Sultan, but you are not allowed to draw guns in the bases, huh, what's with that? Also, whilst in the previous ones I tended towards Freedom, I find in this one that I cannot help but work with Duty; Freedom is just presented as bad guys too much, so maybe I will try and take out Freedom. But again, you can't shoot in the base, so how? It took several attempts to wipe out the Duty base in Stalker 2, I had to make sure that I had killed every duty member outside of the base before the base would stay dead. And I couldn't get the bandit base to stay dead at all.
Some of the forums commented that there were no bugs in Stalker 3. Dream on, maybe nowhere as bad as 2, but still more than any other commercially available game that I have ever seen. Yet despite this the Stalker series remains my favourite shooters, despite the huge log of often quite pathetic bugs, and bugs that often seriously impact upon game play, the story line, the setting, the realism, the weapons offered, and the repair/upgrade style all add up to more fun.
I tried playing Wolfenstein recently, I thought it was a copy of Escape from... that I had lying around, but it turned out to be a new game, next in the series, next generation graphics etc., etc. that someone had given me and just hadn't played for who-knows-how-long. But it had a boss level that was too crazy, I hate bosses in games like that, it is a stupid interruption of the storyline. Anyhow I searched and found a cheat to get through it, except that it doesn't work in older windows and I can't play it on my laptop at the moment for various reasons. So that went unfinished.
Anyhow, I should get some lunch, then go down to the bank and ask for the forms to deal with an unauthorised transaction since the link their online people sent me had nothing and their call centre just kept me hanging for twenty minutes. Whilst I let Steam update C&C4, which I have only recently bought and must be onlined to play (it stores your progress on a server, disconnect and you have to start the campaign again!) and yet Steam insists on spending half a day to 'update' before I am allowed to play.
Nearly two and a half months without blogging. It roughly equates to the time I was at Santos, it was kind of soul-sapping. It wasn't a 'bad' place to work, just dull, the people insipid. Okay, the system setup is bad, their account string is cripplingly short, they have just expanded it, to something that is still cripplingly short, their OLAP setup is criminally bad, seriously, the implementation consultant (UXC) should never do that again, and won't, since they have withdrawn from that market.
The other contractors there have told me that they all feel that they get the cold shoulder from the employees as well, one woman transferred to permanent but it took a few months before people warmed to her. They just don't go to lunch together, and don't give the time of day to contractors. It is not a 'friendly' place. Also it is not nice for other reasons; they wank on about their focus on safety, but don't have mirrors on the ceiling at blind junctions in the corridor. Other than that, whilst the building is nice and open, very light and airy; the top floors get very hot and the aircon doesn't cut it. Their elevators have no fan and stay closed all day, so during summer they get very hot and stuffy; I could walk to work very early whilst the day was still quite cool, and then the five minute ride up in the elevator just standing still got me covered in perspiration!
All of this, of course, is on top of the fact that they pay shit.
This is the third time that I have interacted with them, the first time that I have taken a contract with them, and only because I knew that there was nothing else on the market at the beginning of this year. But now I have a week off and then on to something that pays a little more than half as much again.
We have recently voted here in little South Australia. I did my usual draw a little box at the bottom and tick it then write next to it "none of the above". In the lower house anyhow, in the upper house where there are far more options I did my usual start by putting the socialists last and then arrange the other fifty-odd choices in the order they least offended me. Putting people at the front that might provide the most entertainment should they get in.
Steam, ah Steam, it is a good thing to have an app that lets me buy a new computer in a new country and just go online and reinstall a big swag of games. It is a bad thing that I pay for a bunch of games but cannot play them for two weeks because Valve can't be bothered providing the servers required to handle the traffic they force the app to generate. I am seriously thinking about using cracked servers. And I don't particularly like the new look either.
I am coming up on my third monthly rent payment not being paid. I gave up asking for the fridge to be fixed, and being promised by the manager that it was happening soon, and stopped paying rent. I thought that this would get a quick resolution, but this week I will be not paying for the third month. I never saw that coming!
I have had another unauthorised transaction on my credit card. I suspect that it is the Adult Friend Finders company; I joined their site some years ago but did not renew. I think that they have dug through their records and hit old credit cards hoping that they don't get noticed, and in truth it wasn't for a while. Now I am having that battle with the National Australia Bank where they say that they are not involved in any agreements that I make with a merchant for automatic deductions and I have to take it up with the merchant. To which I responded that I don't really know who the merchant is!
I am in the process of moving all of my business to HSBC and will soon close the NAB accounts anyhow, but along the way I wanted to open a Citibank credit account 'cos they had a really good deal with a Singapore Airlines rewards programme, but now that I am actually doing it I can't find it on the Citibank Australia site and the only answer I get from them is that I can transfer my reward points at a rate of 1.5 to 1.0 to any airline programme. The old programme offered 1.5 points for every dollar spent, now they making this generic offer that is worth 0.66 whilst they have moved their main linkage to Qantas. I live in Adelaide, Qantas doesn't fly direct out of Adelaide, a Qantas program does not grab my attention. My friend has opened an account with Westpac because they have a SingAir offer and he is suggesting that I do the same. Certainly Citi is not offering anything that will get my business.
I have gone full vegan; my neice talked me into it over xmas. I am not finding it difficult in that I am not missing anything and I can cook dinner without much hassle (takeaway pizza and grating cheese over pasta are the two biggest loses) but I am noticing that it is MUCH harder to eat out. Well, eat out in Australia, I did comment previously on being vegetarian in Singapore that it would be so easy to go full vegan there, and indeed I did think about doing so. I find this an interesting comparison between our culinary cultures.
I have played through Stalker 3 again, this time choosing to stay and not depart with the military team, and thus enter the free form part of the game, but I am finding it kind of boring. I have the best guns, the best suit, the best artefacts, I have killed the best monsters; what else is there to do? I was pondering just killing all of the bandits. I would love to be able to shoot Sultan, but you are not allowed to draw guns in the bases, huh, what's with that? Also, whilst in the previous ones I tended towards Freedom, I find in this one that I cannot help but work with Duty; Freedom is just presented as bad guys too much, so maybe I will try and take out Freedom. But again, you can't shoot in the base, so how? It took several attempts to wipe out the Duty base in Stalker 2, I had to make sure that I had killed every duty member outside of the base before the base would stay dead. And I couldn't get the bandit base to stay dead at all.
Some of the forums commented that there were no bugs in Stalker 3. Dream on, maybe nowhere as bad as 2, but still more than any other commercially available game that I have ever seen. Yet despite this the Stalker series remains my favourite shooters, despite the huge log of often quite pathetic bugs, and bugs that often seriously impact upon game play, the story line, the setting, the realism, the weapons offered, and the repair/upgrade style all add up to more fun.
I tried playing Wolfenstein recently, I thought it was a copy of Escape from... that I had lying around, but it turned out to be a new game, next in the series, next generation graphics etc., etc. that someone had given me and just hadn't played for who-knows-how-long. But it had a boss level that was too crazy, I hate bosses in games like that, it is a stupid interruption of the storyline. Anyhow I searched and found a cheat to get through it, except that it doesn't work in older windows and I can't play it on my laptop at the moment for various reasons. So that went unfinished.
Anyhow, I should get some lunch, then go down to the bank and ask for the forms to deal with an unauthorised transaction since the link their online people sent me had nothing and their call centre just kept me hanging for twenty minutes. Whilst I let Steam update C&C4, which I have only recently bought and must be onlined to play (it stores your progress on a server, disconnect and you have to start the campaign again!) and yet Steam insists on spending half a day to 'update' before I am allowed to play.
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