Ah, how I love those Kosh quotes.
This week's been really busy again. Adding the confusion of the preparations for the UK to an already heavily pressured job has not been easy, but I think I'm able to deal with most things reasonably quickly.
Firstly, the flat is now on the market. I've priced it a little high, so I can negotiate down a bit and still make some money overall. It's with a couple of agencies, so now I have to do the whole 'visits' thing - since the cat is around, I don't want a bunch of assholes stomping through the place and upsetting him. I take him down to the courtyard for a wander while they look around, instead. To date, there's only been one visit, from a young guy who wouldn't have bought the place in a million years. You know the sort: arrives in a suit and tie, wants the whole place to be perfect, can't imagine how he's going to invite all his snob friends over and show off since it's not the sixth floor and there's no balcony with a view of the Eiffel Tower, has no clue where he’ll put the big-screen TV and is unwilling to live somewhere without a kitchen like Mummy has...
Secondly, Psycho and I took Biscotte and Pie to the vet last night to start the whole 'animal travel' thing. The UK is one of the only countries in the world that is still rabies-free, so they have a six-month quarantine period for any animals coming in. Just a couple of years ago, they realised that this was difficult for pet owners (and the pets), so they introduced a means of doing all the verifications before going over: no quarantine. Of course, it takes six months to complete the verifications, but that's cool. The vet had to put them both out for a couple of minutes, since the blood test comes from the jugular, and while they were unconscious he cut Biscotte's claws and put Pie's microchip in.
Microchip? Yes... over here we have animal tagging. In France, there's actually a choice between tattooing them (in the ear) or the new method, but to go to the UK it has to be the latter. This involves inserting a microchip under the skin which responds to a scanner with the animal's ID number. Spooky, huh? They even give the owner little bar-code stickers to keep for reference. George Orwell, eat your heart out.
When we got them home, both cats were a bit of a mess: they'd woken up, but were of course scared as heck. Given that their back legs weren't working properly (that's where they'd been injected to put them out), it was quite distressing - for them and us. Still, they settled down quickly enough: by the time I'd dropped off Psycho and Biscotte, dropped off Pie, parked the car and walked back home, Pie's legs were doing better. He was pretty wobbly and looked more like he was drunk than anything else, but he was OK. He spent the whole evening being very quiet, but was back to his loud "Let me out for a walk" meowing this morning!!
I've registered with a few online job agencies, too, despite not really being able to leave France until the cats are sorted. This is mostly to use their email delivery of new positions to track where Psycho can find work. I can work anywhere: given what I do and seven years experience here, I don't see too much trouble waiting on that front (I hope).
Work's been rough this week: three days in a row of VERY long meetings (between four and six hours a day) have knocked me out a bit. It looks like I'm going to have a whole heap of work to do over the coming months, too, but I think the timing might work out really well. If I'm right (and the project manages to stick to deadlines), the analysis phase should be finishing just as I say I'm leaving, which means I won't have to deal with the aftermath of my own work...
Now all I need to do is sort out the flat sale (which will hopefully be quick), move back in with Psycho for a few months to get the cats used to each other properly, save some money and so on, get through the coming months until around January or February... and then resign.
Just received this one by email (spelling mistakes left intact):
I never quite figured out why the men & women differ so much, nor the whole Venus and Mars thing. You know: why men think with their head and women with their heart. I do know the sexual desire gene gets thrown into a state of turmoil, when it hears the words "I do."
One evening last week, my wife and I were getting into bed. Well, the passion starts to heat up, and she eventually says "I don't feel like it, I just want you to hold me."
I said "WHAT??!!! What was that?!"
So she says the words that every husband on the planet dreads to hear... "You're just not in touch with my emotional needs as a woman enough for me to satisfy your physical needs as a man."
She responded to my puzzled look by saying, "Can't you just love me for who I am and not what I do for you in the bedroom?"
Realizing that nothing was going to happen that night I went to sleep. The very next day I opted to take the day off of work to spend time with her. We went out to a nice lunch and then went shopping at a big, big unnamed dept Store.
I walked around with her while she tried on several different very expensive outfits. She couldn't decide which one to take so I told her we'll just buy them all. She wanted new shoes to compliment her new clothes, so I said lets get a pair for each outfit. We went on to the jewellery dept. where she picked out a pair of diamond earrings.
Let me tell you...she was so excited. She must have thought I was one wave short of a shipwreck. I started to think she was testing me because she asked for a tennis bracelet when she doesn't even know how to play tennis. I think I threw her for a loop when I said, "That's fine, honey." She was almost nearing sexual satisfaction from all of the excitement. Smiling with excited anticipation she finally said, "I think this is all dear, let's go to the cashier".
I could hardly contain myself when I blurted out, "No honey, I don't feel like it."
Her face just went completely blank as her jaw dropped with a baffled WHAT??!!"
I then said, "Really honey! I just want you to HOLD this stuff for a while. You're just not in touch with my financial needs as a man enough for me to satisfy your shopping needs as a woman."
And just when she had this look like she was going to kill me I added, "Why can’t you just love me for who I am and not for the things I buy you?"
Every day, I go through this little list of URLs that I like to have a peek at. One of them picks up LiveJournal entries and today, I happened to click on this one.
Classic. Read the first two sentences and spot the person trying to be something they're not. Read the rest and despair at the state of humanity's lack of self-perception. If you really want to discover how puerile people online are becoming, read several other entries in the journal.
Oh dear.
The first day back at work was pretty rough: the piles of emails and work that build up while I'm away are always disconcertingly huge, since no one else ever seems to look after anything for me. On the other hand, it's always great to see everyone in the office again, since they're all so friendly and such nice people.
Despite the situation of being over-pressured and stressed - not to mention unhappy - I still have an oddly good feeling being back in the office. I suppose it's the familiarity of it, the fact that I have something to do and seeing my colleagues again, but it all seems less evil and horrid. Or rather it did, until all the work hit this morning!
I'm now determined to be out of here before the end of the year - sooner, if possible. I'm so sick of it.
Some questions arrived on that last post that made me realise how little I explain myself... so here goes:
wow. this is pretty spooky stuff you're talking about. are you saying that you and psycho would be together (as soulmates) as a couple, back in the good ol' UK?
Nope. I use the term 'soul mate' in its purest sense, not in the Hollywood romantic crap sense. Psycho and I are on the same wavelength and trust each other implicitly. We share a sense of humour and similar loves in life (but not 100% the same, which would be bad). There is no romantic side to that.
ready, after a few days of vacation, to throw it all away, and start all over again? together? is she also feeling that you two are really soulmates? who should be together?
She's been into the idea of being together for ages. I haven't and still am not. This is, indeed, a bone of contention.
Oh, and BTW, WTF is up with that "your comment could not be submitted due to questionable content: "yahoodotcom". My default email is yahoodotcom - what up with that not being allowed
I have no idea: it must be MT-Blacklist being overly protective. Your comments still appear without the need of moderation, though, so I don't really get it...
The holiday's over. In the real sense, a week in the UK and a week at home here in Paris; in a metaphorical sense, I've just come back from two weeks on another planet.
The physical holiday was great: we moved the cats into the same apartment and had found a friend to look after them (and the other animals) while we were away - "we" being Psycho and me, of course. She's part of the family these days, so whenever I head back to my mum's place, she comes along. The journey's quite long: I drive, by choice, so it works out about eight hours if you count a food stop on the way to the car ferry, waiting for said boat and the trip the other side which always involves traffic jams and road works. Strangely, it's even longer coming back, presumably because Parisian traffic jams are worse.
It's always a little strange to go home, back to the house that always used to seem so big. My old bedroom, complete with tiny bed. The beach, the quiet roads, the friendly people, the runny nose from the salty sea air - ah, it's all good, as they say. Of course, I caught a cold, but that's OK. The cats weren’t very happy together, but they didn’t fight and managed to get through the week fine, too.
It was very relaxing to be away from work for a while, even though they called with a drastic, urgent problem (which wasn't a problem at all). A few walks on the beach, several pub visits and a visit to a really cool fish restaurant where the lady remembered us from last year meant I was able to totally disconnect from life here in the rush of the big city and work. Since then, a lot has changed: things have become clearer. Actually, one thing has become very clear.
I am no longer happy with my life here.
Sounds extreme, doesn't it? Well, I should be a little more precise, I suppose. It occurred to me while I was over in the UK that I am getting up and going to work every day, where I am stressed beyond belief, then I come home and have no time to myself, go to sleep and do it all again. I do it because I want to pay for my apartment. I want to pay for my apartment because I need somewhere to live so I can go to work. I'm sick of it: the whole corporate mindset, the game, the rat race. Maybe it's a bit of burnout from seven years of incredibly fast-paced living, working on contract, trying to get ahead. Maybe it's the stress of trying to make ends meet, to wipe out my old debts, to get through each month as it comes along, to survive. Maybe it's part of the changes over the last six months or so, learning why I'm pissed off, why I've been quietly falling apart. Maybe it's the fish and chips.
The practical upshot of all this began with a conversation in a pub one evening. Psycho and I were discussing how nice it was to be away from Paris, away from the stress, when she suddenly announced that she'd love to go and work in the UK. Now, you have to remember that, despite my frequent annoyance with her, Psycho is my soul-mate. She's very cool and lovely, just infuriating sometimes. She is also the main reason I stay here in France, with its stupidly high tax rates and bureaucratic nightmares. She's also one of the reasons I continue to do my job: to be sure I can be there to help her out if she needs it, as she is for me.
I have to add that we are both very different people once we’re out of Paris and away from the stresses of life here: although this is obviously due in part to the holiday attitude, I noticed it’s also a general change. Once I leave my work behind, I’m happier, calmer and enjoy life much, much more. Psycho, too, is different. The English are less judgemental appearance-wise (note to Scary Ross: yes, really) and she loves the lifestyle. She’s less annoying, partly because I’m less obtuse.
Since she announced this desire, we've discussed the choice a lot. In the UK, her degree would be considered a Master's, which is good. English employers are more flexible than the French, which would allow her to get into positions for which she is not specifically qualified, rather than struggling endlessly to find something here. Large English towns are also centres of commerce, meaning we wouldn't need to be in a huge, expensive city like in France. I could find work quickly, given the experience from the job here and my willingless to do almost anything for cash (note to Scary Ross: I said almost anything): an easier, less stressful job, paying less money since we wouldn't need to pay as much for rent. Without looking only at the good side, life would be quieter, simpler and easier.
This week, therefore, I've been looking at the options: how to sell the apartment here without making a loss (prices have gone up by anything from 10% to 17% already this year, which is great news), how soon we could go, how we take the animals and so on. It's all quite scary, to be honest, but I feel good. Oh, so good. I hadn't realised just how fed up I was with life here, how sick of all the faked ambition and pretending I actually care whether such-and-such an application gets released on time.
Finally, I get to, in the words of Han Solo, blow this thing and go home. Well, the UK, anyway.
Ah, the complexity of computer gaming: so many different genres, so many comparisons, so much prior knowledge assumed. Years of sitting in dark rooms, tweaking DOS and Windows configurations can lead those of us who've been wasting our lives on virtual worlds to forget that there's a lot of people out there who don't have a clue what Elite is, who Microprose were or even what makes Sid Meier so important. Time to redress the balance a bit.
These days, there's a lot of different genres and cross-genre games. The basics include sims, RTS, FPS, tactical, god-games and RPGs. Sims are, of course, simulation games - flight sims, space sims, life sims and so on. RTS is real-time strategy, generally accepted these days as a derivative of (or at least similar to) StarCraft, Age of Empires and so on. FPS is the first-person shooter: Doom, Quake, Counter-Strike, Wolfenstein. RPGs are role-playing games, such as Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights and suchlike. Tactical games are the more 'grognard' ones, realistic wargames and so on. God-games are those where the player has a role as a god or general who oversees everything in the virtual world: Tropico, Populous, Civilization (in a way). Those are my definitions, anyway.
In-genre titles also exist, such as Hidden & Dangerous, which is an FPS but is also a 'sneaker': not based on running, bunny-hopping and rocket-jumping, but on stealth and tactics. Splinter Cell falls into this category as well. MMORPGs such as EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies extend the RPG genre. Games like Privateer and X extend the space sim genre, reaching into character development.
Evil Genius falls fairly neatly into the RTS genre (mixed with god-games): as an overseer, the world is viewed from a fairly distant perspective. The player is concerned with building the base, resource management and their strategy for outside operations. They do not partake of the world form a first-person standpoint. More thought is required, to plan ahead and deal not only with attacks from agents, but also monetary matters and resource designation to different tasks.
In short... no, Jafer, I don't think it's your sort of thing, unfortunately.
One of the few games that I am really looking forward to is about to be released. It's called Evil Genius and is on my "absolutely must buy right now, this instant" list, so on 28 September when it hits the shops, I shall be there.
An absolutely brilliant idea, it's similar in style to Dungeon Keeper, but in this case players take the role of an evil super-villain. The base must be built, minions must be hired and trained, henchmen sent off to cause terror and wreak havoc across the globe... and super-agents captured and ridiculed.
The demo was excellent, although I can see several things that could become annoying, much as DK did after a while. It has that "constant arrival of small numbers of enemies" thing going on that most RTS games have, which is stupid in this case. Still, it'll be bought, installed and played to death!
"So, Mr. Bond, you thought you could stop my evil plan? Little did you suspect that my minions would capture you! You will never escape! There'll be no one to stop me this time! Mwuhahahahahahaha!"
Can't wait.