Birthdays

Yes, there is one tomorrow, but rather than a 'present' I wired my sis a thousand. I know that she needs a hand at the moment and could use it, but somehow it doesn't feel 'right'. I have this thought that I should now buy some useless trifle and gift-wrap it. Odd. Emotional and not logical, I know. I get a tad annoyed at how my father always gives me a few hundred for my birthday, I think that I would appreciate a book (or something) more, even though it costs a lot less and even if I didn't actually enjoy it. But this is a particular situation.

Normally I would say it doesn't seem much, but at this point it is threatening my ability to pay my own rent. Financially I have been having a bad year. I could get really melancholic here...

At the moment my pet hate is cyclists.
The last few days I have been thinking of getting a t-short made up saying something like "When I drive a car I take revenge on the cyclists that make being a pedestrian so dangerous." Seriously, they are pissing me off. Riding on footpaths, blocking pedestrian crossing zones, shouting abuse at you as they cowardly ride off after they nearly run you over, thinking that no laws apply to them. Everything that cyclists like to whinge about car-drivers can be applied to themselves.

I am having a busy time right now. I lost patience with the new dick of a rental manager after the fridge fiasco and so have been looking for a new apartment, which will involve paying eight weeks rent before I get the previous bond returned. And I will soon be studying again and had to pay fees and buy text books. So kind of financial worries. At the point at which I am changing banks and starting new cards and have (still) to move my automatic deductions/charges to new accounts/cards. And Australia Post has been pissing me off all week not being able to give me something that they held at a post office ten minutes walk from me. Took nearly two weeks, eight interactions with them, and a total cost of about eighty dollars to me to resolve.

I have been playing Rome; Total War on this laptop, which runs Vista and the development console doesn't seem to work in vista, so the cheats available in xp are not. Given that the game seems to randomly hit hard with money lost to 'corruption', which you can't do anything about, like hiring constables or such, I resolved to use the money cheat to counteract it. But of course I can't get to it in vista, so I copied the save file onto a flash drive and tried to open it in a R:TW on my desktop (which runs xp), but that crashes the game. I had a similar problem with something else a while ago as I recall, cheats not working on vista. Seems to be not a gamer-friendly os.

Anyhow, I went out last night, Friday night, and walked down the road to the city centre. Initially planning to go to a text book shop in Renaissance Arcade (? I think, anyhow that same arcade that has the vegetarian place at the end near Pultney), but it wasn't open, wasn't open this morning either, sign (which I read at that point) said 9:30 to 4:30 Mon-Fri so obviously they don't want business. Ended up trying the new EB Games shop, not that it is 'new', rather that they have moved into a new store (not too far from Shin Tokyo). I am not kidding you, the only game I could find that vaguely caught my attention was Pharaoh! Marked to only thirty and then with a half price sticker on that. So old, but a fun game - I do not enjoy Children of the Nile, I bought it on Steam only because I forgot that it wasn't Pharaoh, forgot which was which. And every time that I would look through my steam list wanting to play a decent strategy game (an area steam is weak in) I would wish that it was pharaoh and end up playing a shooter. This says something for how weak on story line or original ideas games are lately.

I look at bioshock 2, but bioshock 1 was only a play-once game.
I looked at supreme commander 2, but nothing on the box indicated anything different from 1.
I was so desperate I even looked at civilisation what? 27 or something it is up to now? But I didn't like the first half dozen and couldn't see the latest being worth installing.

Remember when doom 2 was awe inspiring?
We could hookup the old co-ax and play TOGETHER!!!!

Oh, and then dune 2!

These two games defined us.
They gave us meaning.
Dare I say it? They made life worth living!

When fear 2 came out not too long ago my comments ran something like; the graphics are good enough to masturbate to but the story line is nothing much new and the weapons are no biggy, definitely it is not as frightening. Bearing in mind that fear 1 was the most frightening game that I have ever played. Seriously, when you saw that eight year old girl you just shit yourself! Started shooting at her whilst running backwards as fast as you could, knowing that you couldn't hurt her but hoping to slow her down enough until you fell out a window or something and so got away.

That was a fun game!