I'm using this as a blog of sorts as I like certain elements of this website and it's something I'm familiar with which is fantastic because anything new is scary.

Life Without Work is a curious thing, as much as you hate your job, hate the poor pay, hate your colleagues with whom the only thing you have in common is how much you hate your job, hate the 3 hour round-walk required, hate the dust you choke on on a daily basis as you unload lorry after lorry of overpriced clothes from Istanbul, hate not getting home till 8PM knowing you have to be up for work again at 4, hate being apart from the person you love for the majority of your time together and hate the fact you're doing it all for £4.20 an hour with a large chunk being stolen by tax and the agency through which you found employment. As much as you hate all of those things waking up knowing what you're going to spend the majority of your day doing is good, waking up knowing how the next 15 and a half hours of your life will play out is strangely appealing, waking up knowing you're a "produce distribution liaison" (executive language is such gobshite) is a satisfying feeling.
Waking up without any of those things sucks. Waking up with no idea what useless tasks to fill your day with is a painful experience. Being able to fill your day with whatever you choose should be the most fantastic feeling in the world, it isn't.
Have you ever wondered why millionaires spend so much time on utterly ridiculous things? (Carmack's rocket anyone?) It's because they wake up every day with unlimited possibilities of how to spend their day, which is not a good feeling. It's emptiness; your day is this complete void which you have to fill. Having someone else (an employer, teacher, partner, child, etc.) fill a good portion of your day for you is fab.

Piracy Is No Longer Worthwhile (for me anyway). When I say piracy I don't mean downloading mp3's, movies, games for yourself. I mean supplying copies of these things which you've obtained for free or very cheaply and selling them onto others for an amount much cheaper then the actual product would cost them. This is normally one of my forms of income while unemployed; my cousin got me into this after years of selling mix tapes (oh the joys of a double cassette player). The radio at work told me that a stupidly high percent of people (I don't remember the exact number) now participate in piracy (the former definition of it as described above). With broadband internet packages now widely available and fairly cheap people have far less need for those of us who at one point supplied them with movies months before they came out, cheap games for their chipped consoles, music CD's for next to nothing and generally saved them shit loads of money while making a little for ourselves. Now however, piracy (latter definition above) is pretty much redundant, which gives me something less to focus my day on while not working. So basically, the internet connection I am now using is the reason my unemployed days are so intolerable, I'd say it was ironic but it seems hard for something to not be ironic these days.

Computer Games Are Just Another One Of Life's Disappointments. The recent "next big thing!" titles don't seem to be doing too well at all, looking at this site for the first time in a few months it seems as if Painkiller never existed and Doom3 is more of an exercise in tweaking then a computer game (although to be honest I haven't played Doom3). I think in general every form of media seems to be getting worse with time. I downloaded Aliens Vs. Predator the movie a few days ago and felt as if 80 minutes of my life had been stolen from me, I feel lucky it was that short as it was fucking awful; there was not a single redeemable feature. This is an all-too common trend appearing in films these days; the average film that comes out is terrible. They're sold to us under the claim that they were "huge in the states!" something that in a recent conversation with someone from New York (who was fantastic enough to give me a place to stay for the night in London) turns out to be completely untrue. People buy into any shite sold to them as "big overseas" or "the next big thing/multiplayer game". Television adverts for music albums tell us of the "smash hits" the album contains, and the music must be fantastic if ten thousand 8 year old girls all rushed out and bought the single in the same week, right?

Exceptions Are Everywhere, though. RTS games are something I haven't really enjoyed for some time, not since Red Alert, Total Annihilation and more recently (to me anyway, I'm unsure of in which order these games were released) Starcraft: Broodwar. Having tried several more recent games (Warcraft 3, Red Alert 2 and the more recent Command & Conquer titles) I've found none of them match up to the older RTS games. That was, until playing the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War beta today. ninemil showed me a screenshot or two of this a few months ago and it really looked fantastic (thanks Chris, you're a star), the idea of an RTS set within the Warhammer 40,000 universe was really appealing even to someone who'd never played the tabletop game (it always seemed really cool, but way too expensive for me). So upon returning to the internet hearing that it was now in a semi-private beta sparked my interest again and thanks to Viol8R for supplying me with a key (by the time I'd had the opportunity to register they'd all gone) I've spent the majority of today playing that. I haven't had as much fun playing a computer game in about 4 or 5 years and that was just the tutorial. Online this game is even more superb, the forced dynamics of the game causing you to always be moving and repositioning and advancing into new areas really give the game a very unique feel, one which no other RTS I've played has come close to. The days of dull base building strategies and equally uninteresting resource management seem to be behind us (thank god!) if this is anything to go on. It's incredibly refreshing to have a new computer game (one that has thus far been relatively un-hyped) actually offer something worthwhile. The cynicism in me says something will go horribly wrong before the release somehow ruining the game, but it'd really have to be a big something to touch this.
I upped my standards while job-hunting today so I could afford the internet when I move out again just based on the few hours I've played Dawn of War. No other game has ever sparked such immediate interest in me.

So anyway, if any of you actually have livejournals it'd be fantastic if you could post them here for me to read (I love seeing someone's perspective of their own lives) or if you're shy about it imsg'ing me with the address would be really ace, too.