Argh, I was totally going to write something about videogames tonight, but I’m actually busy. Maybe tomorrow.
For now: SimCity 2013 is everything that is wrong with modern videogame development, and Far Cry 3 is a failure of caused by lack of focus and writing skill.
So, this is the new thing I’m trying out. Because “New Year’s”. I’ve done this every year, actually, so I don’t have high hopes for this continuing for very long.
Anyway, my idea is to just write for an hour every day. I’m doing overnight shifts at work, and because my body doesn’t like change I’ve been up all night every night. This is mostly fine, I don’t like going out or seeing people; but has meant I see less of Hillary, which has affected me more than I thought it would.
Days that I work, I see Hil for an hour, if I’m lucky, and obviously that’s rough, but even the days that I’m off we only spend 6 or 7 hours together. That may sound like plenty of time, but I’ve been used to spending literally every waking moment with her (for at least a couple of days straight).
My wife is my best friend. I rely on her presence so much that I have a hard time enjoying anything if she’s not in the same room I am. Last night I played a few rounds of Counter Strike until I remembered how terrible I am at it and how not-fun that is, then sat trying to think of something to do, then started Counter Strike again. “But Desire” you ask, “what about those other games you like: Far Cry 2 and 3, Max Payne 3, XCOM 2012, The Walking Dead, Dishonored, Sleeping Dogs, Borderlands 2 (written by the electrifying Anthony Burch), FTL, Skyrim, etcetera?” It turns out, I forget how to have fun without my wife. Weirdly, it seems to scale with how far away she is, physically, from me at any given time. I’m most able to enjoy things when we’re both in the same room, and I’m usually okay if she’s just asleep upstairs but I get a little restless, and when she’s out of the house I sometimes start pacing back and forth.
That brings me to the second way not seeing Hillary has hurt me: being crazy. Less time with Hillary means less time available to talk about my feelings and experiences. Not only do I have less opportunity to talk to my wife to get her to help me through my own emotions, but because out time together is limited, I try to not talk about it so our time together can be as positive and fun as possible.
So, that’s my meandering way of explaining the reason for this project. Maybe just writing something down will help work through issues. Maybe it won’t. Can’t hurt, right?
So what’s Desire been doing? Well we went up to check out the new place, and while it didn’t blow us away, it’ll do just fine. Plus, North Bay is beautiful. Beaches everywhere, and benches, and parks. No decent grocery stores, but at least I’ll have a proper kitchen.
Other than that, I’ve been trying to sort out my Ranma music collection . It’s shocking how much of the music is poorly, or just isn’t, documented. I’m working through Fighting Songs Karuta right now and none of the documentation I’ve found has the complete track titles with the performing character names, and all the pronunciation katakana is missing, and half the song titles are either untranslated (and are beyond my skill) or poorly translated (badly enough that even I can tell it’s wrong).
But getting everything sorted and categorized is a great feeling of accomplishment.
Other than that, I’ve been listening to some old Jesse Dangerously music, particularly “Aww Shucks” from ’07 over and over again.
Phew. Let’s see, what else? Um, I just got around to seeing Avengers. Fantastic stuff. And until last week I’d been playing an ass-load of Skyrim, super excited for Dawnguard.
Anyway, back to Ranma.
So what’s Desire been doing?
Heeeeeeeeeeeey, it’s Desiré again. Update time:
First, I’m officially “Mr. Richards-Campbell” now. It was actually really quick and easy; we went into the Service Ontario, stood in three lines for a total of two minutes, and filled out a couple of forms (that amounted to “what’s your name now? what would you like it to be instead?”). The lines moved so fast we had to excuse ourselves to finish filling out our forms, which were only one page. Continue reading
So, Hillary’s off to Cancun this week (cloudy and still 27°C) so it’s just me and Amelia. I’ve just finished Mass Effect and moved on to Mass Effect 2 (I named my Shepard after my wife but they’re so different it’s weird now; Shepard never smiles and is mean to a lot of people). Continue reading
I’m not sure how I missed this for three weeks.
So, I’ve been working on creating a new personal site for a while now. The main purpose of which was to separate the blog from the other, more static parts of the site.
So, what I ended up doing was move the blog to richards-campbell.com as we had planned to keep a family blog there anyway, and there’s no reason to have two blogs. So desirecampbell.com is just static pages now. Much easier to change content and much easier to backup.
This is the first time I’ve done a whole site in HTML5 with semantic markup (header, section, article, etc). I really like the article and section elements. They allow the code to show content divisions without comment-code.
So the next step is to replace this WordPress theme with one that matches desirecampbell.com. Currently I’m working on adding in the navigation elements (I’m not sold on the side-bar) and a check to switch the colour-scheme for each author (I want my posts to be orange, but the rest of the site to be the current William Morris wallpaper).
New blog is up, obviously. Not much else to say right now. Check out the William Morris background. Nice.
Anyway, here’s Darren Criss’ Harry Potter musical.
Continue reading
Hey. Me again.
So, contract on my last job ended two weeks ago; still haven’t found a new gig. Still hopeful, but it’s getting a bit stressful.
Mostly I’m bummed I’m not playing Skyrim right now. Which is stupid because I’ve got lots of other things to do, like finish painting three canvases before Christmas.
For now this keeps me pumped.
So, what else has been going on? Hillary’s computer died just after my new one got put together, so we just ordered basically the same parts again for her. I’ve got to RMA the PSU before we can get it running though. She’s not happy with being stuck on her netbook for everything, and stealing mine to do dailies.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaand that’s enough for now, I guess. Maybe more within a month? Let’s not get out hopes up.