Bonkers Dream

Everyone gets weird dreams once in a while, but every so often they throw in something so completely bizarre, so utterly out-of-place, that it can be a quite unnerving experience. Not a nightmare, by a long shot, but unsettling enough to bring the dream - and the night's sleep - to a premature end.

Last night, I had a dream involving a former colleague who, many years ago, made up a story about me that led to several other colleagues treating me with suspicion or being outright scared of me. In this dream, I was hanging out with her and her new boyfriend - whose face I never saw, but she was all smiles and hanging off his arm all the time. There was a third other person, and I spent most of my time talking to her, but I have absolutely no recollection of who she was or what she looked like until the very end.

There was lots of wandering about in an open air location, then it seemed to leap to a train station. As we ascended the stairs from the platform toward the ticket hall, my companion observed that I seemed to have been keeping my distance from the other couple, despite the idea that we were all 'together'. I pointed out that the woman had done me a particularly nasty wrong on the past, and my companion countered that, while that may be the case, I was the one who hadn't moved on.

If that doesn't sound particularly disturbing, I should mention that, at this exact moment, I realised that my companion and the object of my ire were somehow one and the same.

Now you see why it woke me up, right?

Clearly I Have Made Some Bad Decisions

I'm becoming very depressed lately, and it feels very much as though I made a bad choice 18 years ago, when I took on my first ever job.

I'd been unemployed for most of a year since finishing my A-Levels, visiting the job centre every fortnight to collect my benefits. All my attempts to get the sort of job I wanted had failed so, in the end, I picked some jobs at random from their boards and applied for the ones that looked interesting.

Shortly thereafter, I got an interview at a printworks. They needed a junior for their pre-press section, outputting film, etc from an imagesetter. It sounded interesting, so I took the job when it was offered. It turned out there had only been a couple of other applicants, and one of them smelt like a chip shop.

I started small, but learned a lot very quickly and, within a couple of years, had become the go-to guy for just about every problem. I was forced to do overtime on one occasion, because of a particular problem, even though I was on the morning shift, and two other members of staff were otherwise pretty much unoccupied.

The printworks went down the tubes eventually, though, and another branch of the company bought the pre-press equipment and me - by that point the only member of staff left - and shipped us off to a new location, just down the road, to continue providing the same service and learn a whole load of new stuff so I could support my new colleagues when they got busy.

When I left that job, I spent about nine month unemployed because my confidence had been destroyed, and I hadn't a clue what I wanted to do next.

And now, after 11 years in 'the next job', I'm in the same position.

Add to that, while I have an impressive skill set, I am - and always have been - the kind of person no-one actually advertises for, no-one thinks they need until I've been there for a couple of months, by which point I've become indispensable.

But I look through job listings for the sector I've worked in for almost 20 years, and all anyone's looking for is Salespeople, or Designers with experience in areas I've never been near. Employers are laying off people with my background, or just not replacing them when they move on.

I've had one two-day job and one interview from one of the agencies I've signed up with, the other agency told me I'm not suitable for a job I know I could do, and so didn't put me forward for it. As galling as it is to be told I'm not suitable for the kind of job I turned down this time last year because it didn't sound busy enough, it's a huge blow to my already flagging confidence.

Trust me to decide to work in an industry that was only ever going to be downsizing...

Fading In

I have to say that, whenever the BBC announce any kind of Supernatural/Paranormal drama series - other than Being Human - a chill runs down my spine for all the wrong reasons.

The BBC is shit at producing 'Supernatural/Paranormal drama' - other than Being Human.

So, when I read about The Fades in the brochure for the London Expo at the beginning of the year, and decided to sit in on the panel (three stars, the writer (I think) and a couple of other production staff), I was curious, but not very optimistic... and the early stuff they had on show wasn't inspiring.

At all.

But that was early in the year, and the show was due to air this month - started tonight, actually - so I figured I'd wait and give it a chance.

On balance, I'm pretty impressed.

The main character was a little weak in this first episode, but that's not uncommon... Protagonists can be difficult to introduce at the best of times, and this 'mixed up teenager who sees dead people' sounds almost painted-by-numbers. Given time, I think the script and the actor will flesh him out. The best friend is truly amazing, though. The last thing I expected from this show was for any of the characters to have me laughing out loud, so the fact that it happened several times as a direct result of his dialogue - and for all the right reasons - was a huge bonus to the show. As a character, he had a lot more to work with in terms of script... in fact, he probably had the most dialogue in the whole show because he's such a motormouth.

My only real complaint was the very beginning... which presented a woman out on the streets, on her own, walking over to a crumpled heap of possibly-person in an alleyway, asking "Are you alright?" Surely, in this day and age, anyone but the most terminally stupid (or naive) would walk away unless they had someone with them, and would be far more cautious even then..?

There's a subtle hint of Silent Hill to it - dreams filled with clouds of falling ash, rubbery monsters in the intro - and it wasn't especially scary... but it was certainly creepy, foreboding and well worth another look next week.

Played even further into Xenoblade today - I've put in almost a full day now (just over 22 hours, by the game's count). As a means of getting into Colony 6, heading to the very bottom of a mine inside what must surely be Bionis's groin seems a little counterintuitive, and my RPG Gamer's sense tells me there will be a massive Mechon waiting for me right at the bottom, but the scenery getting there has been exceptional... Some of the mine was confusing - the map is small while in walkabout mode, and the area map isn't especially helpful when area labels appear over tunnel junctions, but I didn't get lost for long...

The Wherefore of Who

Well, Stephen Moffat's tenure at the top of Doctor Who's production team continues to impress. While I liked the first series in this contemporary reboot, starring Christopher Ecclestone, and could bear the first of the David Tennant series (before it cranked the creepy hero worship up far too high), when Moffat took the reins from RTD, Doctor Who became a different entity altogether. Time travel became a more central part of the story and, while there's still no shortage of episodes that focus on the Doctor himself, they're handled far more subtly than they were under RTD... and several episodes have been so good, I've watched them twice.

Not because I needed to, I hasten to add. I'm not one of these whiny morons complaining that the plots have become too complicated. I don't need the television to spoon feed me. I've watched some episodes more than once so I can be sure I've seen and heard everything, and so I can be sure I saw/heard what I thought I saw/heard the first time.

Case in point: The God Complex. The TARDIS materialises inside what looks suspiciously like a hotel stuck in the 1980s. The corridors shift, and the rooms contain nightmares. And hiding in this labyrinth is a Minotaur. Naturally, the Doctor, Amy and Rory are not alone... there are initially four other occupants, each unable to account for their presence, and each aware that they're likely to end up dead fairly soon. One of them is already off his rocker, and looking forward to his demise.

Written by Being Human's head honcho, Toby Whithouse, it's an intelligent, touching episode about which the title tells a great deal more than you might at first think. The phrase actually turns up in dialogue to offer one meaning, but there's also the pun of the maze containing a being that was once treated as a god.

The writing in the whole series has offered more genuine insight into the Doctor than anything that's come before (apart from the Chris Ecclestone episode that featured a lone Dalek in a bunker/museum), and the speech he gives Amy about his real reason for bringing her along on his magical mystery tour of time and space is a fine example. You could take it that he's only saying that to break her faith in him... but the ring of truth is far too loud for comfort.

I have to admit that a couple of points left me strangely unsatisfied... David Walliams' character seeemed to serve little purpose other than to offer a certain perspective on events so, when I started forming suspicions about him almost immediately, I was disappointed to find them completely unfounded. Also, the Doctor's dialogue with the Minotaur felt underdeveloped... as if it was the first draft of subtitles, rather than finished dialogue between characters, and not just because all the Minotaur ever actually said was "Raaar!".

There was also one little glitch, returning to the David Walliams character... One moment, he's indicating his home planet to Rory out of a window then, at the end of the episode, he asks for a lift, saying that "to the nearest galaxy would be alright"... So his home planet is close enough to identify it by colour, yet he's asking for a lift away from it, having spent the entire episode whining that he wants to go back home?

Still, I'm hoping Mr Whithouse has a few more episodes of Doctor Who up his sleeves... as long as it doesn't delay (or in any way negatively impact) the next series of Being Human.

Yes, I want it all.

I also managed to cram in a few hours worth of Xenoblade Chronicles, largely exploring and completing quests from the first two areas of the game, filling in the Collectopaedia for the first three areas along the way. Initially, I'd intended to follow the story path a bit further, but the route takes the player through several groups of Mechon, some of which are pretty difficult, and even just wandering the large, open plain that takes up much of the third area - Bionis' Leg - introduces one to monsters whose level rankings are up in the 70s, when mine has just broken into the 20s. Needless to say, they're best avoided until later in the game...

While wandering aimlessly, I noticed on interesting graphical feature in the landscapes. Taking a wide view of an open landscape, the sight of repeating tiles was no surprise, and it's been cleverly minimised. Swishing the camera around, though, it was very strange to see the clumps of grass retain their orientation relative to the camera, not the landscape it's sitting on.

Being honest, that's a trick I haven't seen since the very early days of 3D games, and it struck me as cheap back then. I know it's unfair to compare Xenoblade's landscapes to those in something like Monster Hunter Tri, because the former deals with far larger individual areas, and the latter employs all kinds of graphical cheats to convince the player they are looking at a vast, continual landscape when they're very definitely not.

That said, anything in a game released in 2011 that reminds me of games I was playing almost 20 years ago cannot be good. Still, looking at the big picture - such as the fact that you can see most of Mechonis from the lookout point on Bionis Knee, including such wonders as Sword Valley (where the battle in the game's intro takes place) - the game is a graphical wonder.

Just as impressive are the loading times in between areas - I've heard horror stories of game maps on the XBox and Playstation taking so long to load, you could make yourself a hot drink in between areas... Not so with Xenoblade. It's not instantaneous, and the cut to a black screen with a glowing Monado in the corner is jarring... but at least it doesn't last long.

Events and Non-Events

And there was me expecting a mostly boring weekend (with the possible exception of tonight's Doctor Who, written by Being Human supremo Toby Whithouse). I popped out shopping in the morning just in time for a rainstorm that - thankfully - had ended before I'd got through checkout. On the way back, I was being lightly rained upon by the most insultingly small and thin cloud I'd ever seen... In fact, looking up, it might well have been nothing but rain that I was seeing, considering it was mostly done before I got back home.

I toyed briefly with the idea of going out again, since my first trip didn't cover all the shopping I wanted or needed, but lethargy got the better of me. Not too long after, I heard sirens. Since there's an ambulance station just down the road, it's not uncommon to hear their sirens. Police cars and fire engines pass through fairly regularly also, so I didn't think much of it until I realised that the sirens had stopped outside.

Looking out the window, sure enough, the ambulance was just working its way in front of a downed motorcycle, and a car that had pulled in next to it - clearly involved in the collision. The rider was sprawled out on the road next to his bike, and crowds were already gathering. Weirdly, I hadn't heard anything that sounded like a collision, and it's not as if I was doing anything noisy. Normally someone would have sounded their horn at least...

Oncoming traffic was attempting to go around the ambulance and, naturally, started coming up against traffic from the other direction. There was one ridiculous face-off between one car circumnavigating the ambulance and another that just happened to be in the right lane. I was surprised I didn't hear more accidents as the day progressed.

Returning to the window every so often, I saw more and more lollygaggers hanging around and, eventually, a police car blocking and redirecting the oncoming traffic. Once the ambulance left, though, the world returned to normal within moments.

Later on, I made a quick trip (well, an hour or so) to the world of the Bionis and the Mechonis... otherwise known as Xenoblade Chronicles. I stopped playing last time around the point I was going to have to face off against a giant spider boss. Spiders being among my least favourite creatures, and giant spiders in particular being my least favourite monsters in videogames of all kinds, I just wasn't looking forward to it. Bolstered by my recent(ish) success with Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and wanting to drag myself out of cold germ-induced doldrums, I decided to pick up the Wiimote again and, at the very least, smash some oversized arachnid in a futile attempt to deny my phobia.

Turned out to be quite an easy battle, even though it does introduce the 'visions of the future' gameplay mechanic, where the main character, Shulk, gets a premonition of an opponent's more devastating attacks, giving the player the chance to avert the inevitable. The only thing that makes this battle more difficult is the number of smaller spiders (though still large by arachnid standards) there are lurking around the behemoth. What's more, if you're lucky enough to kill all of them... a whole bunch more turn up to replace them. Nice.

But once that fight is out of the way, you're unceremoniously dumped back into the wandering portion of the game, and allowed to move on to the next area. I was more than a little nonplussed by this. Once the final blow was struck, that was it... no victory dance, no fanfare, just a slight pause and - bang - straight back into walkabout mode. Sure, Reyn has something to say, but he always does, no matter the opponent.

I wondered if the game had glitched, but the same thing happens only a short time later, when Ryen and Shulk defend the improbably named kid Juju from a pair of Triceratops/Armordillo crossbreeds. Seems like a very strange omission, considering how opulent its presentation is in just about every area.

Or, on the other hand, perhaps the developers should be praised for avoiding excessive use of cut-scenes. By and large, no real purpose is served by the posing and such... and, generally, this style of game tends to just have the defeated monster fade away in some impressive, trippy way. It's not as if they crumple into heaps and just stay there... and the minor creatures occasionally transform into treasure chests upon death. It just seems so odd that all the battles (so far), no matter how important they are to the plot, tend to end without marking the occasion... Somehow it just doesn't fit the pattern...

Kinda, Sorta Doing Things

I've spent an awful lot of time lately doing nothing. Although, when I say 'nothing', I mean nothing constructive or in any way useful, rather than absolutely nothing.

I have mentioned several times by now that I am fascinated by the YouTube phenomenon of "Let's Play" videos, where someone basically records themselves playing a video game, usually with commentary, and uploads it to the 'Tube for to entertain and edify the world at large.

Some of them are utterly brilliant - I'd strongly advise anyone to look up Helloween4545 for horror games - and some of them are distinctly variable. I've lost count of the number of Let's Plays I've had to give up on, because the player keeps making utterly infuriating mistakes/decisions, or misses something that - to an observer, at least - are blindingly obvious. Yes, I shout at the screen... I'm that kind of LP audience member.

However good or bad they are, though, they are an awful time sink. Far too often, lately, I've got up, done whatever needs doing urgently, then sat down at the computer to watch 'a couple of videos', only to find it's suddenly something like 6pm, and I'm feeling a bit peckish.

Not good.

And, while I'm watching other people playing games, I'm not even making progress on the games I've bought myself... not even the new release, Xenoblade Chronicles.

Also means that I'm not doing some things which, while not 'urgent', as such, are quite important.

Today, finally, I managed to convince myself to get on with some of that constructive work... Though started quite late in the day, so I haven't done as much as I coulda, shoulda, woulda.

In other news, the folks who employed me for two and a half days recently have already asked for me back... tentatively. Last I heard, the dates weren't fixed, but it's liable to be only three days. Still, not to be sniffed at. The same agency had also offered me a 2 week stint at another company, though they have yet to confirm whether or not they want me at all, and there was a possible 6 month contract, though that turned out to be a position far higher up the food chain that I've ever worked before. I figured safest not to, considering it sounded like they needed someone to hit the ground running, and I'd need some training...

Then, today, a friend alerted me to the fact that another agency has a permanent vacancy for a designer at an Estate Agency. I've turned down a job like that before - while I was still employed - because I didn't think it'd keep me busy enough... Now... well... beggars can't be choosers... Income of any kind would be welcome...

My own projects could, conceivably, turn into an income... but it's unlikely to be the kind that could support me for quite some time...

Slump

Things just aren't going according to plan at the moment. I'd hoped that a couple of days in an office would break me out of the lull I've been in but either it's such a deep lull I haven't noticed the difference, or it just didn't work.

I've not been keeping up with any of my online works, and have barely touched any of my art or writing projects offline. I've barely been doing anything, really. Huge waste.

I took advantage of a Toys'R'Us voucher offering 20% off any purchase over the recent bank holiday weekend, and picked up the newly-released TransFormers Masterpiece Rodimus Prime, with it's additional (larger, openable) Matrix of Leadership and so-called 'limited edition' TargetMaster Offshoot and, frankly, I feel cheated, even having paid only £48, rather than the full £60. The main model is what I would call 'overengineered': in an attempt to get the robot looking as much like the 1986 animated movie model, much of it is basically panels that fold in or out during transformation. The upshot of this is that the original Japanese release was... flawed. The Hasbro version is re-engineered to fix some of these flaws, but the end result is still a mass of panels. They just clip together a bit more securely now.

The paint job is rubbish, too... virtually none of the scant molded detail is picked out with paintwork - the rear lights are bare plastic, his wrists are bare plastic... virtually everything is bare plastic... And what little paintwork exists is minimal compared to the Japanese version. It's basically toy accurate, rather than cartoon accurate... which is a very strange decision for Hasbro to have made.

Offshoot fell apart about 10 minutes after I took him out of the box. The piece that connects his gun barrels to his torso looks like it's screwed in place at one point, and should clip in elsewhere. Upon closer examination, it seems that connecting piece on mine is warped (so the clip doesn't reach far enough) and that the screw makes no connection with it at all... so I'm at a loss to explain what function it serves in the model.

This last weekend, I popped over to Uxbridge with a friend to see Cowboys & Aliens... which was about as good as I was expecting (which is to say, not very). For aliens that "don't see well in daylight", they were rather ruthlessly efficient when they needed to be. It was very well played by Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, while Olivia Wilde had very little to do for the most part... It seemed to suggest that Native American mysticism and aliens went hand-in-hand, but didn't really develop that concept, and the end was very disappointing. Still, I didn't actually pay for the ticket - using my Odeon card for the first time to actually buy something - so I didn't really lose anything by it.

There are so many things I want to be doing, and should be doing, but my mind isn't on any of them. I've even got a way to generate some (small, probably) income, but I can't seem to motivate myself to get on with that. Silly, really... Then again, I've always known I'm my own worst enemy...