Halo 3: ODST? Halo 3: MLIA.

Bought this game a couple of weeks ago, not long after release date. Left my local Blockbusters with it in my hand at about 5pm-5.30pm. Got home, stuck it on and played it constantly, with a one hour break for dinner and a little TV. Went back to playing, and by 12.30am-1am I had finished it. Great value for money.

Now don't get me wrong, I understand that the on-line experience, plus the challenge modes, are what add value to a game these days, and that playing through the actual story mode of a game is considered only scratching the surface. But frankly, that bothers me. It used to be the case that the story mode, or campaign, or whatever the developers choose to call it, but effectively the actual game, would be what you purchased and what you paid your money for.

Take for example the Wolfenstein series. Return to Castle Wolfenstein was released in 2001, and followed not long after by the release of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. W:ET was an on-line, multiplayer version of the game. And it was given away absolutely free. I'm sure Activision were probably kicking themselves over this, as W:ET proved to be the far more popular of the two. I think the vastly disproportionate success of W:ET over RTCW represents the beginning of the end of the old game model, where you buy an intensely playable, longevous game, and having paid £30+ for it, expect it to last you a while.

Not any more. Now, when you buy a game, you can expect to finish it in no time, and get your money's worth shooting strangers in the face on-line. This kind of quick-fix, pick up and play for five minutes, throwaway gameplay is what has always been associated with arcade games. Now this model is rapidly becoming the norm, while settling down on your own to get stuck into a good old fashioned bit of gaming is on its way out.

Obviously, I realise there are many exceptions to this, but nonetheless, I think the reason I feel so strongly about it is that it's symptomatic of the way most computer games are developed today; style over substance. The challenge, as perceived by games developers today, seems to be by and large to push the boundaries of the platform they are developing for, as opposed to developing a truly engaging experience for the consumer. In contrast, refer for example to Martyn McFarquhar's article, who notes that adventure puzzle games seem to be a dying breed. Don't get me wrong, these games are inherently floored by today's standards, namely, in that they are linear by design, which a lot of gamers find restrictive, and also this fixed nature severely limits their replayability. In spite of this, those of us who played the Monkey Island games, or Broken Sword, or Beneath a Steel Sky, or Flight of the Amazon Queen, or countless others, will always shed a nostalgic tear and mourn the genre's departure.

But that's not to say we can't learn the lessons they taught us. These games challenged you mentally as much as other games do your reflexes, requiring you to solve complex puzzles in order to progress through the game. There are still games with puzzle elements, but in these games the puzzles were incredibly finely interwoven within the overall tapestry of the game, not just a case of walking into a room and working out the correct positioning of some boxes to open a door or reach a window. But far more relevant, especially in the context of the Halo franchise, were the rich storylines, the rounded and engaging characters, the twisting plots, which drew you into the game world, and made you really care about the outcome of the game.

The Halo franchise has always been loved for this. The story about a lone super-soldier fighting for the destiny of not just all mankind, but all life in our galaxy, in a hostile universe, not to mention the shameless political euphemisms, elevated this game to a level above most other FPS games (the notable exception being, of course, Half Life). So when ODST was announced, I was excited. Bungee had already stated that they would not be continuing the Halo franchise in the form of any more Master Chief games, and the lacklustre Halo Wars was a sorry excuse for what was promised to us years ago; an actual, full scale on-line war, consisting of RTS style players on their PCs guiding and commanding individual battles and campaigns, while the troops they commanded would be FPS commandos playing on their Xbox 360s, where each campaign or mission would have a genuine effect on the tide of the overall war. If this sounds like a glorious combination of all the best elements of RTS, FPS, and MMORPG, that's probably because it is, and while this may seem like an unachievable 'Holy Grail' of internet gaming, the technology and capabilities for this are well within our grasp.

Nonetheless, back to the point at hand. Following these disappointments, ODST was announced and subsequently released. I wasn't expecting the all-singing, all-dancing spectacle described above, but what I was expecting was a playable, engaging game, that would at least last me longer than a day. Described as the events of Halo 3, but from the point of view of an ODST, I thought this game would give us a lot more background, and insight into what life is like for an ordinary (well, ok not quite) person living in the Halo universe. And ok, to an extent, this is what we got. Actually, I'll admit the game was a lot of fun, despite being somewhat disorienting to start with (the game is set in two time periods six hours apart, and jumps between them at the end of each level). But it was disappointing. It was highly repetitive, on a level not previously seen in the Halo games, and for such a short game this is astounding.

In sum, yes, it was a fun game, and yes, I enjoyed it. But realistically, I found the entire experience very disappointing. This game would have been better off as a cheap (or even free?) download on Xbox Live, not a full priced game, with all the hype and anticipation attached to it that you would expect with the release of another Halo title. It is, after all, nothing more than a highly refined expansion pack. Nonetheless, I don't want this to seem like a review; it's not, it's a rant about the exploitation of consumers by profiteering publishers. But none of this compares in this regard to the PSPGo. More on that to follow.

Face-ache

Woke up this morning, as I do every day, wondering how to fill my currently unemployed life with seemingly meaningful activity and thus avoid the necessity of any kind of real work. Or even the kind of pretend work you do while at home, like re-organising your DVD collection and such. But then I remembered I already had items scheduled into my diary today. I was due at the dentist to have a tooth pulled out.

I won't go into detail about the actual experience to avoid offending the sensitivities of my more squeamish readers (ok so to my knowledge my audience currently consists of myself, but you never know!). Nonetheless, the experience wasn't entirely unpleasant, and the drugs which had been administered to my gums actually completely dulled my senses and precluded any possibility of physical pain. The following few hours were however a little odd, as although I wasn't in any pain, the strange feeling of numbness was quite disconcerting. I also felt overwhelmingly tired, and having had a very good night's sleep, I realised that the bodyshock was almost certainly responsible for this.

Jump forward a couple of hours, and the anaesthetic has worn off. Oh joy. Actually, the dull ache in the side of my face is more an annoying distraction than anything else, but I think the source of my frustration lies in the fact that I would have liked to either sail through the entire experience in a pain-free, manly way, enjoying my heroic victory over physical trauma (if it counts, I've turned my nose up at the offer or painkillers), or to have a dramatic, agonising battle with severe facial injury, and bask in the deluge of sympathy that this would have necessitated. As it happens, I got neither. Another reminder that life is in fact just that, and that for those countless millions of us making up the vast majority of the population of civilised Western society, even an out of the ordinary and novel experience rarely results in the kind of adventure we will regale future generations of our offspring with.

But moving on, I let the fatigue overcome me, and put my head down for a nap. No sooner had my head hit the pillow did a reminder pop up on my phone, alerting me to the fact that I was minutes away from an appointment at the doctor's surgery. Flu jab. Nice. In fairness, my visit to the surgery consisted of 99.9% sitting in the waiting room, 0.05% pleasantries with the nurse who was about to impale me and invade my body with a hostile organism, 0.01% said impalement, and 0.04% goodbyes. Again, an unexciting and completely uneventful part of my day.

Which more or less brings us up to now. This blog entry has been more an exercise for me than anything else, but nonetheless, I live on in the vain hope that someone out there may have derived some small pleasure from reading this.

Japan Announces Orbital Death Ray

Japan unveiled earlier this week plans to build an orbital solar power station. The ambitious plan, costing approximately $21billion, will see a satellite launched into orbit, which will use photovoltaic technology (the same as that found on your calculator) to harness solar power and beam it back to Earth, providing enough electricity to power 294,000 homes over a 15 year lifecycle.

Hold on a minute. Let's break this down, shall we? This project is going to cost $21billion, which is going to power 294,000 homes. That's about $71,429 per home. Over a 15 year lifecycle, that works out at $4,762 a year, and that's nearly $400 a month. Who the hell spends that on electricity? And that's at cost!

Effectively, what we're saying here is that Japan are going to put into orbit a device capable of firing 1.21 jigawatts of electricity at the planet from space, at a cost that they can't possibly justify as being recoupable through their domestic electricity market (which is what they are claiming).

We're doomed.

Wake on LAN: A step by step guide for Windows Users

Sometimes it is extremely useful to be able to turn on your PC remotely. For example, you may be out of the office with some urgent work to do, and although you have VPN access, being the environmentally conscious person you are, you switched your PC off and now can't get access to it.

Well, provided you can gain access to another machine on the network, the steps below will show you how to get around this. This is a first draft, so any comments, additions or questions are openly welcome and encouraged.

1. Download some WOL software. If you don't have admin rights and you can't install it, you need to find one that's an exe that runs without installation. A great one can be found here.

2. Open a command prompt (Click Start, Run and type 'cmd' and press enter)

3. Type

nslookup

and press enter

4. Type

computername.domain.local

where computername.domain.local is your computer name, and press enter. If you don't have the fully qualified name of the computer (e.g. the domain.local bit), you can try it without this; it should still work.

5. This will give you your computer's IP address. Write this down.

6. Type

exit

and press enter. This will take you out of nslookup and back to the command prompt.

7. Type

arp -a xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address you wrote down in step 5.

8. This will display a one line table of information. Write down the 12 digit entry under Physical Address.

9. Keep your command prompt open; you will use this later.

10. Run your WOL software. It will ask you for the IP address and physical (MAC or Ethernet) address. Enter these using the information you wrote down in steps 6 and 8, and click 'Go' or whatever the option is to send the WOL request.

11. Go back to the command prompt. Type

ping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -t

where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of your computer, and press enter.

12. Keep an eye on this for 5 minutes or so. If over that period the output changes from

Request timed out

to

Reply from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx...

then your WOL attempt was succesful and you have turned on your PC. If however after this time the output still says Request timed out, then your attempt to turn on your PC has not been succesful. If you want to continue watching it for a while, then you can do, but at this stage it's safe to assume the attempt has failed.

13. Press 'ctrl-c' to end the ping. Type

exit

and press enter to close the command prompt.

Out of Mind

So far all I've come up with for my latest post is the title, so I'm gonna just randomly type words into my keyboard and see what comes out. Apologies for any randomness.

It's been a weird Christmas this year. I've had my heart broken for the second time this year (it really wasn't that bad - I'm just being dramatic; it was still enough to put a downer on Christmas though) and had a rather awkward and uncomfortable Christmas day too. The entire thing has been accompanied by far too much drinking and me ending up in a state that I am extremely unproud of.

It's funny, but it's a relief to be back at work, even if it is so quiet that I've actually got time to sit here and write this.

Something that made me laugh this Christmas: a message from my sister that ended with '...let me know your number so I can call you'. Top class! She had her 25th birthday yesterday, but is over in New Zealand at the moment, so I'll have to celebrate with her when she gets back. Which works out quite well for her because she always finds that Christmas and her birthday are pretty much over in one fell swoop.

Oh, and some exciting news! My boss got two emails, randomly and completely unrelated, telling how good I am and praising me for my helpfulness. :D

Anyway, I'm gonna end on that happy note; I fell much better just for having finally gotten around to writing something.

Love and peace y'all!

Leopard

I've decided (with some encouragement) that I don't post often enough, so I've decided to write something on here as often as I can. In the past, I've posted random things on here just to keep the old fingers clacking away at the keyboard, and although that's exactly what I'm doing now, this time I'm not going to tell myself it was a pointless blog entry and not post anything again for ages.

So anyway, the new version of Mac OS X came out recently; it's called Leopard. Incidentally, if Apple decide to carry on releasing new versions of Mac OS X before they release OS XI, I can't help wondering what they're going to do when they run out of big cats. Anyway, I've been playing with Leopard at work. At first I thought it was great; it solved so many of the problems in Tiger for Active Directory (Microsoft's enterprise network management tool) domain administrators. So many things seemed to work straight away, and I didn't have any problems upgrading over the top of our existing Tiger installation. I installed it on our IT department's test Mac, a low spec Mac mini, and seeing how wonderful it was, immediately recommended the upgrade for some of our other Mac users. Only once I installed it on machines being used by people day to day for their work did the problems start to show themselves!

The users started complaining about extremely long log in times, sometimes of over three minutes, and also of extremely slow reaction times from the network. After trawling through the Apple forums, I found out why this was. Apple have a little tool called Bonjour which automatically sets up any attached devices for you. This includes printers, so is obviously quite useful for our users who want to connect to all the network attached printers. The problem is, Bonjour is designed to work in an Open Directory (Apple's AD equivalent) environment being administered by an XServe. As such, the .local suffix, used by probably millions of AD administrators over the world, is hard-wired into Bonjour, so if your domain uses it, your Mac will be trying to do all your network authentication through Bonjour rather than through the Directory Utility.

Hopefully Apple will release a patch that will fix this, but in the meantime, the workaraound is to rename your domain and use a different suffix. This is obviously not a viable solution for network administrators running a predominantly Windows environment with just a handful of Macs, so the only other solution is to disable Bonjour. This is also not a problem if none of your devices depend on it, and I think at this early stage in Leopard's life, this is a fairly safe assumption to make.

So, anyone out there having this problem, download iservebox and use it to disable Bonjour. This will solve your problem until Apple find a more permanent solution.

LexCorp SBOX

My modded XBOX so far. Not quite finished, still a WIP. Want to make some changes to the colour scheme. I'll post pics of the finished product when its done. Also want to hack the flubber to come up with the Superman logo at startup.

Changing an iBook Hard Drive

Some time ago, a little over a year maybe, my mother's G3 iBook died on her. She was obviously very upset, as she pretty much ran her entire business on it. Anyway, she went to see a Mac technician who basically told her it had had its day, and after some soul searching she bought herself a new G4 iBook.

Not wanting to see a laptop go to waste, I asked her if I could have the old one. I fired it up, and it seemed to be going OK, until it got into Mac OS 9, and then would just hang. I thought about it, and decided the hard drive needed changing. This was not an easy process, and in fact took months to finish!

What you Have to Do

Well, the first step is physically changing the drive. This is a very, very lengthy and complicated process. I'm no going to go into it here, as I have seen that there are a number of very good websites around with detailed instructions and lovely photographs showing you how to do this. One word of warning (which you will hear repeated anywhere else you look on the subject), this process requires a lot of patience. Clearly, Apple don't want you opening up their computers.

So anyway, what no one else on the Web seems to tell you, is how to get the thing working once you actually have it in your iBook! This is why the process took months for me; I changed the drive, but was not able to use the new one.

When I fired it up, the Mac OS X installer disc would start up, and the installation process would start, but it wouldn't show any hard drives when it came time to choose where to install the disc. This was very frustrating; I knew the drive worked, which left three possibilities. One, I had not connected it properly. I was dreading this one, as it meant opening up the iBook again! Two, the drive was incompatible, or three, the iBook was not sufficient for Mac OS X (I'm not a Mac user, so I wasn't aware of how ridiculous an assumption this is, plus it shouldn't really affect the computer's ability to at least detect the drive).

So eventually, after months of it sitting there, getting occasional thoughts and ideas on how to get the bloody thing working, I tracked down a copy of OS 9. This changed everything. When you boot from the OS 9 disc, rather than boot to an installer, it actually boots a copy of the OS from the disc, and you run the installer from the desktop. I tried this, and same problem as before; no hard drive. But here's what I eventually found.

After some poking around, I came across something called System Profiler. This gives you a hardware list of what is installed on your computer. And to my joy, lo and behold, listed there in the list was my newly installed hard drive. So, I knew it worked, and that the iBook could see it. So why was it not being listed when I ran the OS installers? Well, next to where it listed the drive, were the words 'No Mounted Volumes'. So there was the problem. Although this may seem something Mac users are familiar with, or definitely Unix users (as Mac OS is in fact built on Unix), for a Windows user this might seem unfamiliar. This kind of stuff is hidden away. In older versions, you needed to use the fdisk utility, and there is now the Drive Manager, but anyway, I digress. Back to Mac. So knowing now that the problem was that there were no volumes mounted on the drive, I set about Googling (yes, its a new verb!) how to mount a volume on a drive. Again, no joy. No one out there seems to want to tell you how to do it. And I think this is because its so simple, and so obvious, that people familiar with the environment just assume that users know how to do it. But, as I said, being a Windows user, all this was new to me. So, the short version, of how to get your new hard drive working in your iBook (or other Apple computer) is as follows:

1. Install the drive physically
2. Boot from an OS 9 disc
3. Go to System Profiler to make sure your drive has been recognised by the machine
4. Go to Applications/Utilities and run Drive Setup
5. From here, you can initialise a volume on your drive
6. Install your OS

And voila! I now have a working iBook.

NB One more point for Windows users. You can't just install OS X (well you can but it's not advisable). A lot of stuff needs OS 9 installed to run, so you actually need to install both. Whenever something that requires 'Classic' mode (as its referred to) runs, it fires up a VM running OS 9 and runs your program from in there. I guess that's another indicator of the brilliant simplicity of Apple's OS environment.

Books

I love to read. I just wanted to share that. :)

Why the Pressure?

My ex called me today. It's funny, because she calls me every now and then, and she always wants to make a big thing about how we're still friends, and have to make an effort to see each other, and keep in touch and so on and so forth. The thing is, she can never just call and say hi. She always has to slip in all this stuff about her great new social life, professional life, love life. I sometimes think that she's trying to make me jealous. I mean, she's not stupid, she knows I don't want to hear any of that, about how great she's doing without me, how happy she is, and certainly not about the new man in her life. But the thing is, she's not trying to make me jealous. She's trying to get one over on me. That's weird, isn't it? That kind of macho rivalry from an ex-girlfriend! It's good though, because as much as she's burying herself in all this stuff, it's all a front to hide the fact from herself that she still hasn't actually faced up to any of her problems. She's still a scared little girl trying to make her way through the world with bluff and bluster. And any time anyone gets close enough to start to get a peak through that exterior at the broken and scarred thing that cowers inside, she jumps ship and builds a new false life elsewhere.

So no, she's not doing great at all. She's just running, only this time in another direction. Eventually she'll run out of track in that direction, and have to turn again. Me, I'm facing up to the pain. And yeah, even after all this time it still hurts. But at least I've got my eyes open, and I know that in spite of how much it hurts, and how much I'd love to just sit here and feel sorry for myself and cry until the world swallows me, or do what she's doing, and build up a group of superficial friends and a superficial life, I know that in spite of all that, I'm still getting my shit together and fighting my way through. I'm keeping my eye on the prize, and taking the steps, as hard as they may be, toward where I want to be.

And I'm proud of that.

The New Job

It's far too late and I'm far yoo tired to go into any details now, but I started my new job yesterday, and it's going great so far! I'm glad I chose this one in the end, the people are really nice, and although I haven't really got stuck into the work properly yet, I can see already its going to be much better than it would have been in the other one.

Anyhoo, off to bed now, will write more when I'm less tired! :D

Thoughts today

I don't really update my blog very often, but I guess that's because when I started it I had quite a lot to say very often, whereas now I don't, and also I don't think anyone really reads it anyway. Nonetheless, as I don't keep a journal or anything, I guess its a good way of documenting my thoughts.

I got offered a job today, but decided to turn it down in favour of one that pays less money. There are reasons for this, and they are that it seems to be a much better job, is about a five minute walk from home as oppose to a long journey, and after I work it all out the difference in money is only about £30 a week. So I've decided to go for the one I think I'll enjoy more, and they're going to review my salary after six months anyway.

I also need to add some random thoughts because I keep meaning to put them on here and keep forgetting:

I HATE benches at bus stops that are angled downwards. Why would they do that? It just seems cruel and pointless, to make a bench that you can't sit on comfortably, while waiting what could be up to an hour for a bus!

Superman: Doomsday Trailer!!! :D

Portable XBOX?

Rumour has it that there may be an official announcement made at the E3 show this year about a handheld or portable console from Microsoft. These rumours are nothing new; an article from T3 magazine, complete with an artists impression of what the console may look like was around last year. However, as time has gone on, the possibility of a console from Microsoft to challenge Sony's PSP is starting to look a lot more plausible.

I certainly hope so. I have a PSP, and wonderful bit of kit that it is, there are some flaws which I hope Microsoft will take on board, and also Sony when they release the PSP's successor:

• A distinct lack of decent games! Good games for the PSP are few and far between, and seem to be almost exclusively targeted at the Japanese market.
• No second analog stick! This is a real pain, especially for FPS games, although these are in short supply on the PSP.
• Inadequate support for media files. Converting all my movies to the PSP supported formats is a bit of a pain, but tolerable considering the space saving benefits. But using any standard encoder to convert files of any format to a lower resolution would be much better. Support for QuickTime and DivX would be good, as would support for various audio formats, and the ability to organise media files into playlists and use in a kind of media player application would be much better - although I imagine this would be a given on a Microsoft system.
• Better external peripherals would be a massive benefit. For example, right at the beginning a keyboard was developed for the PSP. This never got released, and the fact that you have an extremely powerful piece of hardware in your pocket whose features you can't exploit for any kind of PDA functionality is very frustrating. Obviously a console is a console, however seeing as it is more than capable of running rings around most PDAs, extra hardware and software to enable you to use it as such would be awesome.

So, Bill, I hope you're paying attention! We'll have to wait and see what happens, but I'm already excited at the prospect of a portable XBOX! Imagine being able to play Halo on the train! :D

Boredom Takes Hold

Being unemployed sucks. I'm so bored! Funny really, because I consider myself to be quite employable. On the plus side, I've had plenty of time to catch up on some reading I've only been ploughing through slowly recently.

Also, I have had some good news. I went to meet a guy at the University of Gloucestershire on wednesday about an MA in film, and he seemed quite keen to have me on the course, and gave me some really helpful suggestions as to how I can deal with it financially. Also, I got given a heads up about a runner position at a production company in London, so fingers crossed, one of the two should pan out!


I'm also getting quite bored of Stroud. It's a lovely place, filled with really friendly people, but I don't really know anyone here, and all my friends are scattered across the four corners of the country. I guess I should give it a chance, I've only been here two weeks! I'm just getting fed up with sitting at home all day reading. I need people, people!

Still, things are slowly starting to look up one way or another. Oh, and I went to see Die Hard 4.0 on wednesday, which was awesome! :D

State of Play

Hi No-one!

My life is very strange at the moment. Last week I moved out of the flat with my ex. It's really strange because I miss her every day. I still love her, despite how much she hurt me towards the end. Without trying to be too dramatic, I've kind of had my whole world ripped out from under me, and I'm floating in a bizarre limbo without any idea of how to claw my way back to the world and start building a life for myself again.

It's not all about her. We met in the third year of university, just as I'd got to a point where I'd started to get used to the idea of being on my own. I was planning to go to Japan for a year after I'd finished my degree to teach English as a Foreign Language, and then just see what happened when I got back. The only thing I've ever really wanted to do was work in Film and TV, but when we got together all that changed. I had a serious girlfriend, and bumming around hoping something inspiring would come along was no longer an option. So, I decided to opt for the nice, stable, respectable career of teaching physics, so that we could build a life together and have a stable home. It was a fiarytale come true; she was going to be a teacher as well, and we'd have the same holidays (15 weeks of them every year!) and spend our time off travelling the world and working on our own creative projects. Everything was perfect.

I lined up a job as a trainee teacher in Bath, because we decided it was a place we'd both like to live. I'm not really that fussed about where I live, because I know that if you don't like a place, you can move and try somewhere else. But for her, it was either Bath or Nottingham, and I just didn't fancy the idea of Nottingham, so Bath it was. After we finished university (our fourth year by this point - she'd had to defer her final year and I started a Masters), we moved into her parents house for six months. This wasn't so bad; I get on fantastically with them and they made me feel like a son. This was great in terms of living there, but not so good in terms of our relationship. As with any new relationship, sex was a staple part of our lifestyle when we first got together, but wild nights of passion weren't really an option at her parents house. At the time I thought that this wasn't that big a problem, and that when we moved into our own place we could bring back the magic. I realise now how much of a strain this put on the relationship, even though I didn't see it at the time. A woman has her needs, and wants to be made to feel sexy and wanted.

But that wasn't the only problem. Once we got into the flat, the preasures of real life started to weigh down on her. She'd never had to fend for herself before, she'd always had a large group of friends around and her parents to fall back on. She just wasn't cut out for the strain of having to build a life for yourself in a new town from scratch, as well as dealing with the realities of responsibility. Meanwhile, I was becoming desperately unhappy on my path to a teaching career. It wasn't something I wanted to do, and with the realtionship breaking down, I was seriously starting to doubt whether or not I could get through it without her love and support, especially seeing as she was making no effort to be a part of our new life together.

Eventually, we broke up. There was no arguing or shouting, and although it wasn't so much an agreement that it wasn't working (I still thought and still do think there were so many ways we could have saved it), we had a sensible discussion and agreed to be mature about it and stay in the flat together for the remaining three months of our tenancy. Part of that discussion was an agreement that neither of us would start seeing anyone else while we were still living there. And agreement that I, at least, honoured.

So now we have moved out of there, and I'm staying at my mum's while I try and figure out just what the hell it is I want to do. I know I still want to work in film, but I also want to learn a trade or practical skill to fall back on, as I've got a degree and a post-graduate certificate but no qualifications! I'm not actually qualified to do anything. So where do I go from here? As soon as I figure it out, I'll let you know!

It's a funny old business, this life stuff.

Lies

I hate lies. I used to tell lies when I was young. Some big, some small, some seemed necessary, some were to protect other people, some were to protect myself. But the thing about lies is, they always come back to bite you on the arse. And when you lie to protect other people, you're only hurting them more. The truth will always set you free, and people will respect you for being honest with them, even if they may be angry or hurt by the truth. No matter what you do, people can always forgive you if you are honest with them, and genuinely sorry. But if you are a liar, people won't want to know you; who wants to have someone in their life who they are always second guessing, who they can never be sure is being completely honest with them?

When someone lies to me, I feel like they are poisoning my soul. It makes me feel unclean, even though it is not me doing the lying. Sometimes I can understand it, things like "No, I didn't eat the last chocolate" or "sorry, I didn't forget to put the washing on, but I was stuck in traffic and didn't get back in time". Things like that are unnecessary, because nobody would hold those sort of things against you, but at least they're not harmful lies.

As I said, the lies to protect people, although I disagree with them and think that the truth will be better for everyone in the long run, at least I can understand the why of them. But what really gets me, what really makes me angry, are the completely pointless lies.

Some people make up entire other lives for themselves, complete fantasy worlds that they actually believe they live in. I cannot for the life of me understand why people do this. First of all, it can't be attention seeking, because as often as not these other lives people invent aren't likely to impress anyone; making them too exotic and exciting would just make them impossible to believe and remove all credibility. But secondly, and most importantly, the truth will always come out. Always. And when it does, these people all react the same way. They get angry.

Rather than put their hands up and admit the truth, they get angry. If they would just own up, people would be angry with them and feel hurt, but they would forgive them respect their honesty and eventually learn to trust them again. Why do people not see this? Instead, they get angry, blame everyone but themselves, and then go and form superficial friendships based on lies with another group of unsuspecting suckers, until eventually the truth comes out and they are forced to go through it all again.

It just boggles the mind.

Essential Viewing

Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE, has to see this!!!!!

How To Prevent Destruction of Earth due to Asteroid Impact

1. Amass an arsenal of nuclear weapons
2. Locate and employ Bruce Willis and his rag-tag band of gung-ho, oil-drilling roughnecks
3. Provide said band of roughnecks with said arsenal of nuclear weapons
4. Supply rag-tag crew with space craft with which to deliver 'Hand of God' (nuclear payload) to offending asteroid
5. Instruct roughnecks to poke hole in asteroid with 'Finger of God' (drilling equipment) and to place nuclear payload into the hole
6. The roughnecks are then to detonate the nuclear payload while making a daring last minute getaway from the asteroid
7. All of the above is to be done while churning out witty one-liners at at great personal sacrifice in order to achieve maximum dramatic effect
8. The final stage of this preventative measure involves chugging a cigar in a control room full of clapping and cheering operators while announcing "Well if the good ol' U.S. of A. ain't just the greatest damn nation on God's green Earth!"
9. The destruction of Earth will now have been successfully prevented.
   

A very good day...

1. I passed my driving test today!!!
2. I spoke to a production designer who I am meeting with soon who is going to help me get itno 'the biz'!
3. I know this should always happen, but its the little things...I checked my bank balance this morning and had exactly what I expected!

All in a all, a very good day. And now I'm going to Cardiff for the afternoon!