Be Like The Others

What up.
Look, look, 2 in a row! I'm totally getting the hang of this blogging lark.
This is just to say that 2011 is already looking to be a bit less of an arse than it's predecessor 'cos I got me an x-box, all the better to be fleeced to the scalp by Microsoft with...by....something. Hooray for capitalism and in your face 2010. In your ugly face.

Also, it is with absolute ambivalence that I bid farewell to my Nintendo Wii which will soon be winging it's way across the country to disappoint then utterly bore some other human being. We had some good times, the Wii and me...I'm sure......there was that one game that time...Okami? That was ok. I mean, the controls were terrible and OH MY ACHING BUTTON MASHING THUMB the unskippable cut scenes of event horizon proportions. You know, but otherwise a...fine...game.......hmmm....oh there was that other.....No. No there wasn't. No, in my experience, Wii games are mostly terrible.

See, I am a PC gamer at heart. I just can't get enough of those 15 hour installation times for games that inexplicably also require Steam to download files that should be on the disc sitting in your disc drive, that you forked over many, many pennies for. Or the scratting around the internet looking for player made patches that actually fix the 5 hundred million things that are broken in a game that you have forked over many, many pennies for. As far as I'm concerned, it's just not fun if you can pop a disc in and get on with playing a game straight away. Besides once all the pain, sobbing and extravagant swearing involved in getting the stupid bloody game to run is over, you are left not only with a sense of accomplishment but also with, most of the time, an excellent game to play. The Wii lets you pop in Alone in the Dark and get going in moments. But, you know, in the end, you're playing Alone in the Dark.

Ah, but that's how the X-box works sonofajoiner. Plug in and play. Easy and, therefore, by your logic ultimately boring. HA! Not if you want to play the copy of Fable 3 that came bundled with your shiny new console. Or anything else. Nope. You need to set up your console, spend 48 minutes trying to make X-Box live understand that the email address you are using is actually yours, then faff around with your tv and x-box settings over several hours in the hopes that you can make the stupid bloody console play your copy of Fable 2 at the 60hz the game requires, then trawl the internet for over an hour trying to avoid the creeping sense of dread that the problem will turn out to be with your needlessly expensive telly, then discovering that Microsoft have started selling their shiny x-boxes with cables that are inferior to the ones they used to use and blah and blah and blah. It took 24 hours (including 18 hours sleep) to get to a point where I could actually play anything. But you know what? Fable 2 is pretty good so far. So for me, initial hassle seems to equal ultimate happiness. My name is sonofajoiner, and I am a gaming masochist.

So farewell little Wii. You made, and I'm sure will continue to make, an excellent door stop.

Happy New Year

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

What? It could be New Year somewhere. China? Venus, maybe. What are you, racist against Venusians?

So, as I say, Happy New Year. And fuck you 2010. You were a truly psychotic prick of a year. Who knew, for example, the earth could quake so much, and so often? Or that Iceland, ironically, had quite so much fire underneath it. 2010, that's who. And 2010 just couldn't keep it to himself could he? The bastard.
And there were the government decimating plane crashes, and some explosions, and more explosions, and more explosions, and the bloody old man pope popped in to moan on about the sort of things old men tend to moan about, and Ireland started giving away all it's cheese, and Greece something something the euro and Germany was all like, Oi Greece something something don't make me come over there, and some Israeli soldiers went sailing, and there was all the usual flood, famine, war and disease but turned up to eleven. Oh, and of course, 2010 allowed the fucking Tories, and their airbrushed overlord, to win the general election despite the fact that more people voted against them than for them, and have set about selling off the country with unabandoned glee. And everywhere you looked, 2010 kept shoving footage and pictures of a creepy Australian egomaniac in front of you until you just wished Flanders was dead 2010 would hurry up, finish the job and wipe every last one of us out in a quick and legally binding fashion. That'd have been one in the eye for the Mayans!

But also, 2010 seemed to have it in for me personally. Well, not exactly 'have it in for me personally'. More sort of 'seemed determined to annoy, inconvenience, impoverish and upset me and those dear to me for no damn good reason, and at every opportunity because 2010 was a complete, ball-aching, bastard'.
2010 had it all, from repeated expensive car repairs, to making all our hot water piss out of an overflow pipe for 2 weeks before anybody noticed resulting in huge water and energy bills. It featured death, and near death. It doled out illness in quantities the likes of which I had never seen before. It dished out accidents and serious falls, divorces and job losses, nervous breakdowns and paralyzing depression.
So, yeah. I'm not sorry to see the back of that massive turd.

And 2011? I'm onto you mate.