Sunshine

The changing seasons have a very different effect on you when you're unemployed.  When I was in a job, the only two times of year I paid any attention to were the few weeks of Winter when it might snow, making travel to and from work difficult, and the high spot of Summer when I'd have to spend too much time stuck in traffic in a car without any air conditioning.

Now I pay a lot more attention to the weather.  Cold weather means the house will be freezing as I can't afford to keep the heating running.  I'll need to wear more clothes to keep warm and the cost of laundry will go up as I'll have to use the tumble dryer, since a house full of wet laundry won't dry out what with the heating not being on.

Especially cold weather is the worst.  It means I have to put on the heating to stop the pipes freezing up again, but the heating won't be on enough to keep the house feeling warm.

Today is a good day from the weather point of view.  It's been the first day of the year where I thought that laundry left on the washing line might actually dry out a bit, saving me a few quid in tumble drying costs.  

Next thing you know, I'll be keeping an eye out for the right time to sow onions.

Return to Rapture, via Liberty City

If there's one upside to being unemployed, I've been able to revisit some of the games that I never actually finished back when I was working. Since I can't afford to waste money on Bioshock 2, I have been playing Bioshock instead.

I don't think I "get" Bioshock. I spend too much time looking at the Art Deco furnishings and wondering why they'd be present on a city under the sea apparently built after the second world war. There should be more horrible nylon drapes in burnt orange and various shades of mucus. In a game where I use magical genetic engineering to shoot wasps at people, I stand around in corridors looking at leaks and thinking "At this depth, a pencil-sized leak would fill at around a ton of water per second, filling this infeasibly vast corridor inside of eh, a minute and a half."

Frankly, the sole draw of the game is the ability to hit objectivists upside th' haid with a big adjustable wrench and light them on fire without the concomitant aggro from the police who insist on enforcing the law regardless of the horrible philosophy of the victim. Even then, the combat's rather poor, especially as the game progresses and you need to empty hundreds of rounds into the victim in order to kill them (presumably by crushing them under the sheer weight of bullets), all the while giving it the simultaneous "Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!" to stop them from setting you on fire.

Personally, I would be happier with some sort of beat-em-up; Philosophers of the 20th century vs Capcom, for example. Chomsky versus Ryu, who will win? Better still, Ayn Rand versus Simone De Beauvoir catfight!

I've also restarted GTA 4, which I gave up on due to work pressures and the insistent ringing of my in-game mobile phone as my idiot cousin asked me to take him to a strip club every five minutes. Since then, I've discovered that the in-game phone has a "silent" mode (why yes, I did just spend the past ten years developing mobile phone software, why do you ask?) and have decided to give it another bash.

There's no denying that GTA 4 is a masterpiece of videogaming.  It presents a rich, realistic world for the user to play in, but to me it lacks some of the charm of earlier GTAs, especially San Andreas, along with a loss of fun. I miss being able to tool around in a jetpack or eating so much I become the fattest gangster on the block.  GTA 4 has a depressing sense of gritty realism and even the massively improved physics engine robs you of the sheer joy of handbraking it around every single corner at a hundred miles per hour. Saint's Row 2 for all its bugginess and immaturity was more fun.  

Especially if you picked the English accent for your gangster and made 'em look like a fat Vinnie Jones.

Note to potential employers: This week, I have also been learning about SOAP and REST with regards to web services and am thinking of doing something RESTful to Twitter, but all work and no play blah blah blah.

Yes, I'm acutely aware that at the moment I'm technically in a state of no work, but that's the problem with Aphorisms; they're only approximately correct.