...whether I should simply make arrangements and move to the Hutt.

After all, that's where all the goddamn admin jobs I might have some chance appear to be.

I know what sort of life I want to lead. Of course, I knew back when I was pimplier that the life I wanted to lead involved a 42" monitor, an apartment on Oriental Bay, and regular sexual activities which were technically, legally and physically impossible.

For me, however, moving into the closer Wellington 'burbs stinks of failure. I don't want to. The Hutt, Mount Cook, Newtown - these were where I lived and worked during my hell year in the mid-90s. Autistic, broke, struggling to Make It from a room in a transients hostel. And Failing.

However. Back then I was optimistic and totally unprepared. If I was to do that again, no hostel life for me!

(Or maybe... $150/week to live above the Empire? Almost sounds fun... except for that shared facilities business. And the general run-down nature of those sorts of places. I want to live in a place that feels cared for and could give two shits about me.)

Welcome to my mid-life crisis™.

Oh - here's another possible job. I'll apply for that tomorrow. It's late and I need to get my ugly sleep in time for tomorrow's mail round.

How are you? I am not entirely happy.

Since I forsook you:

1. YAY! I have managed to kill my Visa!!! It took a windfall of $900 on the pokies, but July was the month that my card finally got paid off and the account closed!
2. Boo. Unfortunately, on the work front, some lazy fuck lost us the contract for delivering the rates bills. I spelled for a guy who couldn't do his, making some extra dough, but I went through that mighty quick.
   YAY! I have new tramping boots, much lighter and not coming apart!
3. Boo. I need to start saving again... maybe after I pay Dad that money I owe him for the new tramping boots.
4. Boo Hiss. I went for a job interview on Tuesday, the first I have had in months. 55 minutes and one questionnaire later, I finally got a 5-minute interview and out the door. The job's supposed to start this coming Tuesday. The deafening silence probably means I've been passed over again. Well, fuck them.
5. Groan. At the same time, I'm now forty. According to various online tests, that means I'm well on schedule for my midlife crisis. So let's see... minimal work experience, old, still living with parents who seem to be going increasingly senile, stagnant employment market, no money...
6. Ugg? I stopped the pills. I didn't like how they made me floaty and unmotivated.
7. YAY! One of my fanfictions, Magic, As Opposed to Magic, got cited on one of the bigger ff.net community lists. I was awash in notifications for weeks!
8. Boo. I've slacked off on the guitar for months. I need to get back into it.

Really though, the unemployment (or rather, underemployment) situation is becoming tiresome. The last time I was offered a job, it was in the Hutt Valley, which is impossible to reach without a long commute by car. With petrol now over $2 per litre, that's costly as well as risky. I don't like rush hour traffic.

At the same time... I may have no choice. Kapiti is a dead little town. I don't have the patience or the people skills for retail of any sort; I'm sick of trying to sell shit to people who either don't know what they want, don't want it, or can't tell what it is even after you explain it three thousand times.

I need to figure out something. But I don't know what.

Ho hum, here we go again with another job interview tomorrow morning.

The weather's closing in, and really as the only one in the house of working age, I need a fulltime jobbypoos. Even if it means having to get up extra early and catch the train with the other commuterpoos. It has to beat cycling all around the town in the windypoos and rainypoos for about twenty-odd dollars gross a day.

We did move house, by the way. Now we have only one neighbour and some road noise, inquisitive pukeko coming up from the lake out back.

And cable. Cable internet is nice.

Depending on whether this interview's successful, that'll mean a bit more money. (Not at first; they charge like front row forwards for month passes these days.)

Oh well. Time to put this computer to bed and get some sleep.

We're moving house in two weeks. That'll mean less neighbours and more room to expand into - and get away from each other. Mind you, I'm finding it stressful. Possible jobs are thin on the ground still, and with both my parents giving up fulltime work, things are likely to become stressful. I'm resigned to enjoying the features of our rail network twice daily, once I land a job in Wellington. Can't wait for all the paperwork to be processed and everything to be moved and we can just go. Once we're there and settled in, I'll be working out where the homebrew kit can go. I've read up on and been thinking about it... well, there'll be room and I'll be interested enough in getting on with it.

 ...just not as badly as I did in 1995.

In 1994, my parents followed Mum's job to Taupo, and if I'd had any sense I'd have gone with them and worked in my uncle's service station or something. Instead I ended up spending two years in a hostel room, barely scraping by after board was paid on whatever shopping didn't get stolen.

This time, however, by 2012 I intend to not only have a job, but a place of my own, close to work.

Maybe something like the one bedroom loft apartment (left), down the south end of Cuba Street. (And top of the building!)

This is pretty much what I'm thinking of: a space for sleeping, a space for living, and spaces for cooking and bathing.

It's close enough to the central city without being unduly affected by too much noise, with Fidel's within walking distance, and maybe the Bristol or somesuch further on. Fully equipped kitchen with own washing machine, broadband, and hot water included in the rent.

That is, if I can find a job where I can afford the $300 a week before it gets rented out, ha ha.

And on the right, we have a nice one-bedroom house in Mt Cook, a little further south, but near Massey. Actually I'd prefer an honest-to-God house, but at the same time I know there's more work involved in maintenance. And on-street parking, which I hate. In town I'd most likely walk everywhere. Hell, the hostel was in Newtown and I'd walk all the way to the New World at the end of Cable Street for my shopping!

What? The range was better.

In any case, living away will probably see more salad and pasta than I'd really like.

Dunno what the broadband situation's like either.

Another option I'd consider is one of the dormitory 'burbs closer to the city; after all I've lived in one - Paremata - most of my childhood. So maybe this bushy view (left) in Tawa might be the ticket. It's even fully furnished. Nice!

But again, there's the issue of broadband. Y'see, I couldn't give fourpence about Sky, or Freeview, or TV in general. Unless I'm using the damn thing as a giant monitor for my PC. All my needs of entertainment are simple: Music; student radio; newspapers; DVDs; and of course internet and computer games.

So satellite TV and parking are less important to me than whether I can get decent speeds through Telecom or Telstra.

There's also a couple of places in Paremata, but they're a bit far from the pub - er, I mean amenities. On second thoughts, being far from the pub isn't all bad; I have to exert myself more to get there and back.

But at the same time, I need to get out more, meet people. I've been getting increasingly short-tempered of late, condemning just about everyone out of hand. That's the problem with suburbs: sure, you get the psychological and ritual distance from your workplace that you need, but do you meet people there? Dormitories...

Good lord - this is actually rather fun, pretending "I can afford it, but would I want to live here?" Maybe I'd better stop now. Got to find that fitting job first.

(I intend throwing up a few friends-only posts as well on other subjects.)

One of the things I've been wanting to do the past year is make a Flash game of my very own. Concepts have ranged from a sliding puzzler (that I overreached on) to a simple Achievement Unlocked-style platformer (that I decided wasn't broadcast quality) and now I'm looking at a sort of puzzler again.

( Potentially project-killing wankage ahoy )

I downloaded the World of Warcraft client today out of curiosity - to see what this game is really like. Currently I believe WoW is almost entirely overrun by sub-adolescents whose entire online existence consists of spawn raping and screaming homophobic and racist epithets, mixed with profanities and garnished occasionally with actual words.

But. Of the ten days of free trial, I now have to pick my nose and wait for 9.something GB of data to dribble down my broadband. Given that we're on the arse end of one of Telecom's bits of baling wire, that'll take a fucking day at least.

I should know. After all, it ended up taking two whole days for both Bioshock and Fallout: New Vegas to gurgle their way down - and New Vegas clogs my CPU. As in, every time I try to run it, the damn thing drops to barely 1-2fps in exteriors. On exit, the system chugs away at 40% usage, but no process is fingered - and it's all on one core. Bizarre. I'll wait for a patch to come my way before trying it again.

So - now it's 8.6GB at just over 30kbps. And no doubt Blizzard's meter is already running. Oh well, I have Oblivion and Bioshock. (Bioshock, by the way, has a good atmosphere going, although it feels oddly bulky and inconvenient. Or maybe it's the unnerving place you're in... or maybe it's the upcoming meeting with Steinberg. I pretty much failed it last time and want to hack everything before shutting the prick down.

---

I've pretty much steamrolled through more money and beer over the Christmas break than I should admit, but then again this is the season of overindulgence. So I've been doing some retail therapy.

I purchased a copy of Dylan Horrocks' comic opus Hicksville, the last one in the shop. Took a while to find but I found it.

Also I purchased a cable for this Sony Walkman I found during a walk early November, handed in to the cops as lost property, then collected it back because nobody had claimed it. Unfortunately the damn thing hasn't arrived yet. On the other hand the new blades and foil for my shaver came in on time.

Yesterday I went into town, and ended up in Real Groovy, trawling their $5-for-10 CD table. I've picked up some interesting stuff, some of which is iffy, some good, but at 50c per item nothing really wasted.

On the other hand there was the pub. And the Malthouse, at $10 average per beer. But we're talking about Emerson's Bookbinder, a nice porter made with tamarillos (which I couldn't detect, I must admit), and the Captain Cook beer made with manuka and tea tree. So they're not quaffy like DB or Speights...

---

( Time to think about the new year )

I mean, I gave up on comic drawing in 2008 when E Motel crawled off and died.



Please stop me before I set myself up for another fall.

Twelve hours later, and I have Fallout: New Vegas on my box. Hooray! It runs like a gazelle with one leg, and that leg is broken. Boo. Maybe I should wait for Bioshock to finish downloading first, defrag, and try again. Impatient much? Yup.

/me pokes the download - 56% - hurry up damnit!

(In other news, before I made my Christmas day purchases, FO3 was also lagging like a mofo. I'm beginning to think that something I've installed could be lagging the hard disk.)

In 2012 I'll probably get Skyrim out of morbid interest. It's a bit off that we're trucking into the Nordic north as opposed to going in search of the Eye of Argonia or pulling the teeth of the Summerset Isle mob, but never mind.

I've also been converting a lot of my tapes to MP3, particularly the NZ indie stuff like Tall Dwarfs, some Pop Will Eat Itself, They Might Be Giants and so on. Something extra to choose for my iPod, since my choices seem to be circling the BTDT drain.

It's made me think about my musical tastes. Generally speaking, my musical preferences end about the year 2000. Everything after that seems to be as follows:

1. Gangsta rap-by-numbers, performed by people desperately trying to become cartoon characters - and not in a good way;


2. Old songs chopped, bored out, and repainted as dance club themes;


3. Or 'reinterpreted' so that inspiration-less hacks can tap into the 'historically illiterate narcissist youth' market;


4. Output from the nostalgia cyclotron;


5. Band of the Dead;


6. Auto-tune. For fuck's sake! If you can't sing that song in that key, practice, change the key, or find another song you can sing;
   
7. An artful sequence of low frequency noises designed to turn people's heads so that they can watch as your $50 boganmobile is shaken to bits by the $25 CD in your $500+ car stereo.

My rap appreciation begins and ends with De La Soul's Three Feet High and Rising and early Public Enemy.

I don't mind club music; at its best it's aware that all it's supposed to be is a joyous noise, and doesn't try to be anything else.

I got some CD for Christmas: another Ultra-Lounge compilation, and a Spike Jones compilation. Again, these are musics that aren't pretentious; yes, they're wearing costumes, but the costumes are worn in jest, for fun. Not with grim this-had-better-bring-in-the-benjamins expressions.

What was I saying? I dunno. Bioshock just crept past the 70% mark, so I'll just post this dose of gripewater and be done with it.

Jeez, sure is a lot of fat(uousness) there.

I'm seriously thinking of switching to Tumblr. At least those guys allow for much easier image gallery embedding, video embedding, and suchlike.

The actual main reason I ever purchased hosting was for my short-lived ASS shows (which total about 324MB), but even as I write I'm uploading them to a Mediafire account. And it's fairly easy to create a separate page on Tumblr for them.

As for the old, increasingly out of date wiki I made for Carson Fire's Alfheim, well, there's Wikia. It's got to be easier to use than effing about with Perl or PHP or whatever.

Oh - and Tumblr has a rich text editor. I like rich text editors. Especially when it comes to posting long text items with lots for formatting that require FUCKING AGES of manipulation and then you miss a line break or closing tag.

At the same time, I'm aware that I launched the paid-host version of my website under a slew of wrong assumptions. For instance, I assumed I would continue to make ever-so-awesome hour-long show mixes on a regular basis. I assumed that my SubGenius persona was more important (until I realised it wasn't, hence the switch to the .geek.nz domain). I assumed having total dominion over the host software would mean more freedom - which it didn't; just headaches and legacy mess.

And now I'm uploading my ASS, as I said, to Mediafire, and crawling through my website to see what deserves to be transferred.

It isn't much, if I say so myself.