Current mood:	cold
Current music:	New Order

Baggy
Again, it's been ages, but not as ages as it has been in the past. I have to wonder if I based most of my work and play on the same computer as my net browsing, would this journal be a little less neglected? I dunno', probably not I guess.

Ended up heading into Sydney proper by myself last night, after having only the one weekend to find someone who knew who Neil Gaiman was, had a vague degree of interest in seeing him in discussion with Wil Anderson, and didn't have any prior commitments. It was nice that I got two free tickets and all, but a little more than a couple of days to try and organize someone to go with would have been nice - not surprisingly, it turned out that everyone I knew who held some form of interest was unable to commit at such short notice. Anyway, not knowing exactly what it'd be about, and admittedly not having read all that much of Neil's work, the talk was pretty interesting and probably worth the solo trip into town. It focused more around his life and career, filtered through with stories of amusing or interesting moments, rather than interrogating any of the works themselves, and I felt less alienated as such. Having a reading of a bizarre but quite likable new short story was kinda nice, too. It's a small shame I didn't bring more money with me (or think to scalp my spare ticket off at a slight discount price) though, as I have actually wanted to try reading one of his novels, and the added novelty of being able to get it signed straight after purchase would have been nice.

Beyond that, and on a focus more entangled with my everyday life at the moment, I've discovered the bloody obvious: that trying to research and write a feature on an entire games scene is really hard. While I'm sure that I can come up with something that'll make the grade to get published, I'm unsure I can satisfy myself with it, and fear that I may inevitably end up largely talking round in circles. I have discovered some really neat games during this highly disorganised research phase however, and its nice that not a single one of them is a first person shooter, but I'm swamped at the same time, caught waist-high in a pile of games that I'd be able to enjoy much more if I were only focusing on one or two of them. On that account I can't wait until I get the feature done (which, sadly, probably won't be for a while) so that I can just wipe the slate clean and focus mostly on just playing Darwinia because I want to. My full copy of that game only just arrived before I went out yesterday, so I've only played a demo version so far, but the first impression (& critical praises) imply that it'll be really awesome. It's one of the games I don't feel guilty about getting for free simply because I know it's going to result in me lavishing praises upon it in the article.

On a note of more casual gaming, the sort that is just for my own enjoyment, I've been having mixed reactions to FFX. Not as mixed as I did towards FFVIII mind, and I can say more comfortably that I like X more overall, but at moments it annoys me. One boss was unfairly hard if you didn't have certain items, and it plays much more into the 'gather a bunch of items together for a big climax' plot structure than any other FF game I've played, which is a shame as the general avoidance of this is something that I've generally admired about the series, even when having issues with other things. If I wasn't borrowing it I'd probably shelve it for a while and come back later, but as it is I'm kinda forcing myself through.

For now, I've wasted my lunch and have work to do. With Total Gamer just having lost it's deputy editor, there's a whole bunch of scraps for everyone else to treat as pickings, and I should probably get on with that freeware bit. There's that Eva thingy I need to do, too.