Yup, It’s The New Year Blog

After a long hiatus, it is time to once more foul the airwaves with the rather undramatic events of my life, dramatized with much narrative license so as to make myself sound more interesting.

But first off:

Why I Have Been Silent

Truth to tell, mostly because I didn’t have much to say, nothing much interesting was going on, and I was distracted with games. Lots of games. Tons of games. In fact I’m still playing games at the moment, the current one being the amazing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, but I’ll save that for a bit a later. Suffice to say that I was going to make an entry at a regularly appointed time when blogger suddenly went through a spate of eating my posts (There was an entry I had typed out about how I felt David & Goliath was actually handled by Hassidic PR managers that spin doctored the entire affair, I was rather proud of that…) that got sucked into the ether of the ‘net and shall remain unwritten unless someone bugs me to do it again. I’ve always been a sucker for requests…

Anyway, after having a few such posts eaten, I got a little fed up with blogging for a while and decided to take a break, which got swallowed up into months as work, gaming, DVD viewing, movies and of course, the girlfriend all took up their appropriate hours and days. But here’s what you’ve been missing, which is, admittedly, not much.

The Impossible Has Happened

On October 19th, of 2004, I proposed to my girlfriend and she said yes, so for people that have known me since childhood, or, worse yet, highschool, I am now in a position to have never been so happy to have been wrong. There is at least ONE person on this planet that doesn’t vomit at the thought of spending the rest of her life with me.

No actual date has been set for a wedding, it’s one of those things we’ll probably just sort of do when we feel like it. However, after having lived together for over two years, it’s a safe bet that there won’t be any unpleasant surprises we’ll discover about each other that most couples only come across after they’re married and are forced to see each other everyday. We’ve been doing it for quite a while now and so far no major problems have cropped up.

As a special note, I’d like to add that to childhood friend Francis, I must remind you that I am a man of my word. We once made a bet that I would never get married, and if I ever did find someone crazy enough to do it, you would find yourself $1,000 richer on my wedding day. Well, I’ll pay up to be sure, but since we’re not exactly the richest couple in the world, you’ll have to collect on the bet sometime in distant future, but don’t worry, you’ll get it. That’s $1,000 I’m glad to give away.

On Work

Things professionally have been moving slowly but steadily. I still write reviews and other articles for the Singapore gaming magazine Hardware Zone. Some writing has been met favorably, such as my article on the history of Nintendo. Others have been met not so favorably, with one angry reader calling me a “Moronic Halo fanboy” for giving Halo 2 a perfect score. Oh well, can’t please everybody. I’d be interested to see, however, if the fellow who made such a comment would be willing to say it to my face with other people around, but that’s the ‘net for ya’…

On the Computer Animated series, things are gearing up. We’re working on some early production stuff–and no, I STILL can’t talk about what it is exactly–and for once, it looks like my skepticism about the project may be wrong and that it will actually see the light of day. We’re still going to need a ton of work before we have anything presentable, but it looks like 2005 is the year of the CGI cartoon. I’m curious about how it’ll all turn out. I always said I thought it would be neat to work on such a series and now that I am, I’m finding that my production experience in television over the last few years has actually proved marginally useful. Hopefully by next year there will be more talk about it on the internet and I can actually discuss here what’s been going on, thus dragging in a whole new legion of geeky readers who will want to throw in helpful suggestions on how to improve the show such as “Make it cooler!“

On Writing

Sadly, this has taken a turn for the not so great, but there is still hope.

The novels got turned down by Ace Science Fiction, on the grounds that while they were well written, they were a bit risky as a publishing venture because A) They were huge, B) The storylines felt a bit too “complex and metaphysical” for readers to readily accept.

This greatly amused me–and confounded me–since I had thought the plots were entirely too simplistic what with guys jumping 30 feet into the air shooting lasers out of their eyes and all, but it would seem that first Tor and now Ace Science Fiction have both felt that the story, while interesting and well told, is not mainstream enough to guarantee the sales they’d feel comfortable with.

Oh well, my agent continues to peddle the books and after comments like that (Nice read! Too weird!) I have a feeling they will eventually see the light of day once marketing trends swing the other way around and people are looking for something a little different again.

On Games

I have to admit, I may be losing some steam in the Star Wars Galaxies department. I haven’t regularly played it in a month or so, despite the fact that I got the Jump To Lightspeed expansion, which was very fun. Perhaps it’s my antisocial tendencies taking hold once more, but I’ve found myself of late really enjoying console and offline PC games. Vampire the Masquerade was a novel experience. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater may have the best ending for a video game I have seen to date. And trying to get 100% completion on Final Fantasy X-2 has reminded me of how much I love Square and RPGs in general. But the big kahuna, the one that may very well be the single best game the PS2 will ever see is Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The sheer scope, brutality and relentlessly vicious humor of this game has elevated the game to near god like status in my eyes. One of the big draws of the GTA series in general has always been the idea of a big, living, breathing world that let you
be an amoral bastard who ran amuck and wreaked senseless death and destruction everywhere. Only GTA let you get a sniper rifle, park yourself at the top of a car park, wait for the lunch time crowd of business men and secretaries to start gathering, and blow them all to pieces.

San Andreas takes this to whole new levels. Now I can go to the airport, steal a Lear jet, fly over to the next city, say Los Venturas (ie, Vegas) jump out of the plane to skydive, then parachute onto the top of a building, pick people off with the sniper’s rifle, run from the cops, steal a bike, drive to an abandoned airfield, grab a jetpack, hop over to San Fierro (ie, San Francisco) grab something to eat from the local burger joint, then meet up with my girlfriend to take her dancing go back to her place for sex, then steal someone else’s car to beat up hookers before going back to the casinos to gamble or maybe shoot some pool.

It is, frankly, amazing what you can do in this game.

And that is the update of the rather mundane events of my life. Unfortunately, due to the fact that life is pretty okay right now, my world is monumentally boring, devoid of really good Gothy angst, but that’s the price you pay for waking up in the morning and being more or less okay with the world.

And YES, I will be updating the blog again more regularly, this won’t be another hit and run post that will sink into obscurity for a few more months…