History of gaming

This is really interesting if you get a chance to read it:

http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/video/hov/

Man I'm tired

I don't know whether it's my physical state or just because I'm so stressed at the moment but I'm really tired.
We went to the pub last night (me, russ, laura, reece and vicky) which was quite fun. we got a takeaway after and by the time i had finished that i was ready for bed but unfortunately we were up at the crack of dawn this morning to go see the estate agents.
Hopefully we got it sorted this time and things can start moving forward again. I'm not going to dwell on it anyway because I'm sick of writing about it.
Me, Simon, Dad and Kieran all went for a game of pitch and putt this afternoon which was fun although I totally suck at golf so lost hideously. Kieran won but Dad nearly caught him. Should be going to the pub with Simon tonight before he goes off to Cambridge again.
I'm going to visit him in Cambridge next weekend so bang goes the tournament but it will be nice to see what Cambridge Uni is like.
I took the stadium round to Russ's last night to see about starting painting it but Russ has told me that there are a number of things we can do to it to make it better and although they will take some time and they mean that painting cannot commence yet, I think they will be worth it.
Hopefully I can have a lie-in tomorrow but the problem when you have a kid is that lie-ins become few and far between. Also Dad was talking about going to a car boot tomorrow which would be fun but it means getting up at the crack of dawn again and I'm not sure I'm up for that. I will have to see if my stomach will settle in time.
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Serenity

Well, not quite. But I'm really experiencing the calm after the storm.
I had a good chat with Badger today on icq and got some stuff off my chest. Laura rang me this morning just to tell me she loves me. I think she really gets how upset I was yesterday. She also changed her plans for next weekend so that I can still go to the BB tournament which totally surprised me and I am eternally grateful to her. I texted my mum to tell her about the quote I saw (see archives) and to tell her that I love her.
I'm feeling quite positive today. The whole house thing is still hanging over me like a dark cloud but since I can't do anything about it until tomorrow and since no one is calling me about it today I can pretty much ignore it for today at least.
I know that no one really reads this at the moment but just in case people start reading it in the future, do me one favour right now - call someone, maybe your mum, maybe your wife, just someone, and tell them you love them.
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Things calming down

Things seem to be calming down again now. Things were ok with Laura last night and she even baked a cake to say sorry for stressing me out yesterday.
I will know more about the mortgage stuff after saturday.
Not much else to say at the moment but if there are any updates during the day I will no doubt post them here.
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More news

So we finally seem to be moving forward. I have arranged now with our advisor to add Laura to our mortgage. Due to her (probable) awful credit rating he is having to run a credit check on Laura seperate to our mortgage and then if she passes he can add her to the mortgage which will then hopefully go through.
I advised our snotty solicitor who said that we still have things to discuss. I'm almost certain that Laura's Grandad must have "arranged" with the solicitors to give us all this grief because they think that me and Reece will quite happily screw Laura over. Laura won't even consider the possibility that that could be the truth but if there is one thing I have learned about Laura's grandparents it is that they are more than capable of doing something like this. Makes you wonder if they are paying for the solicitors so that they can help us out or so that they can be in control.
Wedding cake anyone?

What am I supposed to do?

So this is the situation:
We were told by our advisor that Laura could go on the deeds to the house which would mean that she owned a portion of the house. This is apparently untrue. This leaves Laura with no protection whatsoever.
We have three ways out of this.
1. We amend the mortgage agreement. I can't believe that we can get this done for free. Mortgage lenders will charge you for anything they can.
2. We create a contract between me Laura and Reece outlining everything to protect everyone. This means more legal fees.
3. We stay as we are. Laura is not protected and we do the whole thing on trust. Being husband and wife you would have thought that this might be an option but unfortunately it isn't.

So we are basically stuck in a situation where we will almost certainly have to pay more fees just to get this mess sorted out. I will know more after I speak to our advisor this afternoon (if I can actually get hold of him).

This would all be so much easier if I had the support of my loving wife but unfortunately all I can rely on from her is "what do you want me to do about it?"

How great is that?

Effing solicitors

So I just spoke to our horrible solicitor. She was really rude with me and basically spoke down to me for the entire conversation. It was as if she was saying "I can't believe you didn't know that already" and she clearly thinks that I am the bad guy out to screw over my wife and brother.
Her two main concerns are 1. what if something happens and me and Laura break up or if I die. What does Laura get? and 2. what is Reece getting out of it?
The problem with society nowadays is that there always has to be some ulterior motive for everything. They can't understand that I won't screw my wife over because hey! guess what? I love her and wouldn't do that to her and they also can't understand that Reece wants to get the joint mortgage with me because he is in a position to help out his brother and he wants to do it out of the goodness of his heart. I'm so tired of all this cr*p. And it's only just begun.

Moving house

They say that moving house is one of the most stressful things you can go through. When we bought our house last time I didn't really think much of that saying - we had a fairly easy purchase, the only problem was the solicitors dragging their feet which meant we moved in a couple of months later than we initally thought we would.
This time I've almost given up. Me and Laura are arguing. The house we are buying is potentially lethal. The mortgage we already agreed on is now no good for Laura because her name isn't on it which means we have to reapply and because of Laura's credit rating and the fact that she is unemployed we may get refused in which case we can't get a mortgage. The solicitors are refusing to act for us because Laura's name isn't on the mortgage. Everything is falling apart because Laura isn't happy and at the end of the day, the only reason we are moving is because Laura isn't happy. WTF? I'm sick of it all.
Laura is now not coming to the BB tournament with me and I don't really want to go on my own so I doubt I will go now. Everything is totally f*cked up and I am sick of it all. Why can't things just work nice and easily?
I'm at the stage now where I don't know what to do. Do I ring the solicitors? Do I ring our advisor? Do I ring Nationwide? And what about the asbestos? The effing woman from the vendor's estate agents is trying to fob me off by saying that the percentage of asbestos is so low that it doesn't matter. Oh well ok then - I don't know if what you are saying is true but I'll quite happily put my family at risk because of it. I don't think so.
This is so much b*llocks. Did I do something wrong in a previous life? A bit of effing support from Laura would be nice. I'm desperately trying to get this all sorted out for her and all she can do is complain and make it harder for me.

WWDN

I got this quote from wilwheaton.net
I think it is particularly relevant considering what is going on with my mum and kieran at the moment:

"A mother is only as happy as her saddest child."

Bourne Robot

So anyway, I went to see "I, Robot" and "Bourne Supremacy" last night. As people had already mentioned to me, "I, Robot" contained quite a lot of blatent advertising but overall is was an ok film. The action scenes were the best bits and sadly the story wasn't up to much.
"Bourne Supremacy" was pretty good although I didn't think it was as good as the first one. I can't put my finger on it but there was something missing from the film although overall I think it was probably better than "I, Robot"
I had quite a good night anyway - it's always fun going to the cinema with Laura because we both really enjoy it.
I think I've pretty much given up on the idea of completing my stadium before the tournament. I could probably do it but it would be a complete stress and also Russ can't come over at all to help so I would have to take the entire thing to him which would be awkward.
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The Star Trek experience

It's long been a desire of mine to go to the Star Trek experience in Las Vegas. I dont know much about it but I gather that it's cool.
I just went on the website and I've found out that you can get married there on the bridge of the enterprise. You can have Klingons and Ferengi as witnesses and you can have your reception in Quark's bar.
How cool is that?
I'm willing to bet that only about 0.001% (if that) of the female population would be willing to go along with it though :-)
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Lost? Me?

Sadly it's true. I got hammered last night 3-0 by Skaven. I really don't like Skaven - they have all the advantages my team have in less quantities but slightly more powerfully. As an example, I have about half my team with movement 8. He has some team members who are movement 9 but has less of them.
I'm still not entirely convinced by the inducements part of the game. It works quite well when there isn't a large gap in team rating but when there is a large gap it doesn't work quite so well.
Let me explain:
How it works in BB is this - you have a certian number of men in your team, you have certain skills with each man, you also have a certain amount of money in your treasury. You can increase the amount of money you have in your treasury by winning games, you can increase the number of men by spending money and buying them and you can increase the number of skills your men have by playing well with them.
All of these improvements to your team increase your overall team rating so other players can tell how "good" your team is. Obviously a team that has more players and more skills will be better in a game than a team that has less so the way BB works now is by awarding the player with the lower team rating a load of cash to spend in a one off just for this game.
On the face of it this is a really good system because effectively you are always playing against a team with an equal rating. Unfortunately the one thing you can't buy is skills for your men. You can only have 11 men on the pitch at one time so the team with the higher rating will almost always have "better" men on the pitch as they will no doubt have gained new skills.
In a game with two teams who have close team ratings this doesn't matter so much since you are fairly even anyway but in a game where every man on the opposing team has at least a couple of new skills you can almost guarentee a loss.
Add to that the fact that I was playing Skaven and I didn't really stand a chance. It was still fun and as the game ended he only had about 6 men left on the pitch - I had KOd 3 of them and caused 5 or 6 casualties so even with his reserves he only had 6 men left. It's a shame there wasn't another half left since I almost certainly could have taken out his entire team :-)
In other news, Anya is staying at my mum and dad's house tonight so although I had planned to start work on the second half of my stadium, I will be taking Laura to the cinema. It's nice to go to the cinema together as it's one of the few things we have that we both enjoy but it's a little badly timed as the stadium really wants finishing before the BB tournament.
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Lazy days

It's so hot at work today that I'm getting that whole lethargic feeling. The afternoon is totally dragging. Just a couple of hours to go and I will be on my way to play BB. I've noticed that my blog is littered with comments about BB and not many other games. I want to point out right now that BB is by no means the extent of the games that I play. I think I have made passing reference before to a couple of board games, some roleplay and some pc games. My interests in gaming far exceed what I have written about so far but we seem to play games in stages. Right now we are going through a BB phase. A little while ago it was a merp phase. Before that it was a Warhammer fantasy phase and before that it was a B5 ccg phase. Also there are constant board games going on all the time at random intervals. Hopefully as time goes by it will start to be obvious that I'm not so obsessed with BB as it seems but that it's just a phase. Or at least I think it is....

Stadiumish

Made some more progress with the stadium last night - bought some wood and added the wood detail to the back of one of the sections. All that is left to do now is add the other section's wood, add the roof effect (if i decide to use it) and add the tops to the towers. It's difficult to know how to make the towers look good - I have made them way too thin and now I can't hit on the right size for the tower top. Oh also I obviously need to paint the whole thing.
Then I can embark on the second half of the stadium. I really want to get the whole thing finished by the time of the Bearded Snot tournament so I can take it with me but I don't know if I'm being realistic. It's taken me a week to finish this half of the stadium so in theory it should only take a week to do the second half as well. This is ok but the problems arise when you consider painting times. I don't have a clue how long it will take to paint and even though I hope to outsource the painting aspect to Russ (if he has the time) I still don't know if it can be done in time. Also it should be pointed out that Laura seems to be getting sick of me spending every hour I have at home building my stadium. At the moment I'm literally coming home and going straight to work on it and not stopping until late.
The one thing I have in my favour is that I was away for the whole of last weeked. This weekend I can get in some serious hours on it and it's possible I could even finish the second half of the stadium before the end of the weekend which then means that I have a full week to get it painted...
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Badger badger badger badger

Just a quick note to say thanks to Badger. I have been speaking to him quite a bit recently over icq and it's good to have someone to talk to about my stuff. I haven't really been speaking to Russ about my stuff recently because of all his problems with Jo but I have been able to speak to Badger quite a lot.
Plus Badger is the only one who actually reads this blog despite me constantly telling people about it so he gets to see what is really going on in my mind. Probably because he's currently looking for any excuse to avoid doing coursework ;-)
Anyway, cheers mate.

New BB quote

"We praise ye, oh blessed Nuffle, for ye are truly both the one and the six."

Garfield stuff

A news article following the release of the new Garfield movie:

Aspiring cultural juggernauts could not have asked for a better how-to guide to world domination than Garfield: The Movie, out in theaters today. The film is an example of the kind of product that Garfield creator Jim Davis likes to attach his product's name to: Predictable, unfunny, and eminently forgettable. The movie won't take the nation by storm—in fact, it will probably vanish very quickly—but it will make a tidy sum in theaters and on DVD and then be remembered only by the small sample of tots in the viewing audience who turn into ironic hipsters during their college years.

And that's exactly how Davis wants it. Nothing scares the man more than the backlash that's created by white-hot success. He knows that the flip side to building almost any mass-market culture-industry icon—think Mickey Mouse or McDonald's—is intense loathing by the minority who will despise it. Davis's genius is that he's created the most widely syndicated comic strip in history—with the attendant profusion of plush toys, T-shirts, and themed Caribbean cruises—and yet, through careful brand management, he's largely managed to deflate the naturally occurring cultural counterattack.

Today, Garfield the comic strip appears in nearly 2,600 newspapers around the globe, and its readership is estimated at 260 million. If the readership number is right, then 4 percent of the world's population reads Garfield every single day. Garfield products—sold in 111 countries—rake in between $750 million and $1 billion each year. This was not accidental: Davis meticulously plotted Garfield's success. And part of his calculation was to make the strip so inoffensive that it's hard to hate it even for being anodyne.

Davis makes no attempt to conceal the crass commercial motivations behind his creation of Garfield. Davis has the soul of an adman—his first job after dropping out of Ball State, where he majored in business and art, was in advertising—and he carefully studied the marketplace when developing Garfield. The genesis of the strip was "a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character," Davis told Walter Shapiro in a 1982 interview in the Washington Post. "And primarily an animal. … Snoopy is very popular in licensing. Charlie Brown is not." So, Davis looked around and noticed that dogs were popular in the funny papers, but there wasn't a strip for the nation's 15 million cat owners. Then, he consciously developed a stable of recurring, repetitive jokes for the cat. He hates Mondays. He loves lasagna. He sure is fat.

The model for Garfield was Charles Schulz's Peanuts, but not the funny Peanuts of that strip's early years. Rather, Davis wanted to mimic the sunny, humorless monotony of Peanuts' twilight years. "After 50 years, Snoopy was still laying in that dog house, and rather than getting old, it actually has the opposite effect," Davis told the Chicago Sun-Times last year during the press blitz for Garfield's 25^th anniversary. "It says to all of us, some things in life can be counted on, they're consistent." In In Dog Years I'd Be Dead, a book to commemorate Garfield's 25^th anniversary, Davis calls the Peanuts licensing machine "a template that I could apply to Garfield." In his very first week, Garfield aped Snoopy by declaring, "Happiness is a warm television set."

From the beginning, Davis put as much energy into the marketing of the strip as he did into creating it. (It's telling that he's been inducted into the Licensing Merchandiser's Hall of Fame but not the hall of fame hosted by the International Museum of Cartoon Art.) In 1981, only three years after the strip's debut, he set up Paws, Inc., a privately held company to handle the licensing of Garfield products. Originally, Paws did only the creative work needed for product design, while Davis' syndicate managed the business side, but in 1994 Davis purchased the rights to license Garfield products from the syndicate for a reported $15 to $20 million. Even before that, Davis took an active role in the selling of his creation. Before agreeing to a deal with Alpo to put Garfield's face on a new line of cat food, Davis visited the company's plant, talked to its employees, and spoke with the grocery industry about the company's reputation. In his 1982 interview with Shapiro, Davis admitted to spending only 13 or 14 hours a week writing and drawing the strip, compared to 60 hours a week doing promotion and licensing.

Garfield's origins were so mercantile that it's fair to say he never sold out—he never had any integrity to put on the auction block to begin with. But today Davis spends even less time on the strip than he used to—between three days and a week each month. During that time, he collaborates with another cartoonist to generate ideas and rough sketches, then hands them over to Paws employees to be illustrated.

By comparison, Davis spends nearly every morning working on "concepts for new products," he writes in In Dog Years I'd Be Dead. Paws, Inc. has become a 60-employee licensing behemoth. There's a Garfield Stuff direct-mail catalog that began in 1997 and an online version at catalog.garfield.com. There's a "Garfield Pizza Café" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Nevada's gambling board just approved a slew of Garfield slot machines. Garfield was the frontman for a 24-nation promotion by a grower of apples, pears, and cherries that targeted countries from Thailand to Guatemala to France. The Chinese government uses Garfield to teach English to children.

What's kept Garfield in business for so long is Davis' canny understanding of how much is too much. Garfield had the most successful debut of any comic strip in history. The first strips were printed on June 19, 1978, in only 41 American newspapers. But by 1980, the first Garfield compilation was a runaway New York Times bestseller, and in 1982, Garfield was on the cover of People. In 1983, the strip was appearing in 1,400 newspapers in 22 countries. That year, Davis placed seven Garfield books simultaneously on the Times trade-paperback best-seller list, a feat that's never been repeated. The next year, Garfield got his own balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

But Davis feared overkill. Garfield was veering into the realm of faddishness. In the late 1980s, Garfield plush toys with suction-cup feet were so popular than criminals broke into cars to steal them and sell them on the black market. Davis, protective of his creation's unobjectionable blandness, knew he had to act fast before people began to hate Garfield. "We accepted the royalty checks, but my biggest fear was overexposure," he told Entertainment Weekly in 1998. "We pulled all plush dolls off the shelves for five years."

And that's what makes Garfield: The Movie a perfect addition to Davis' cartoon kingdom. It will be gone before anyone realizes it was there.

Russ and Jo

Just thought I'd mention:
I spoke to Russ on Saturday about him and Jo. It seems they are good friends still which is good because some break ups can be really shitty and this one isn't.
What did interest me though was that Russ said he would probably go back out with Jo if she asked him. I don't know whether that is good or not - I'm sure Russ knows better than me. Perhaps they just need some space and then they can get on with being in love again. Who knows? Watch this space.

I hate Mondays

I think it was Garfield who said "I hate Mondays." It's still true even though I love my job. Sometimes you just need to lie in a bit longer and it's always the worst on Mondays. I heard an interesting story about Garfield that I will write about later.
Anyway, to complete the Saturday night tale - me and Russ went out on Saturday night. We went to the Met in Sale first and had a few pints. We played on the quiz machine for a bit and chatted a bit and it was pretty fun. Our mistake I think was leaving the Met - the evening went downhill from there on. Well actually it went uphill for about half an hour as there was a girl on the tram who had a fabulous pair of assets and wasn't afraid to show them off (my apologies to all women but regardless to what they say, all men look. it doesnt mean we are about to leave you and it doesn't mean that we don't love you. it just means that we are appreciating the beauty of the female form). After that it went downhill. We went to the Mutz Nutz in Manchester which I have been to previously and had a great time. This was different. It used to be £5 to get in and 50p a drink. Now it's £7 to get in and £1.50 a drink. This in itself wasn't too much of a problem - Manchester is expensive. The problem was that almost every person in there was gay. Don't get me wrong - I don't have a problem with gay people. I have gay friends and I couldn't care less that they are gay. The problem was that as far as I was concerned we were out so Russ could pull. It was not going to happen in the Mutz Nutz (or at least not in the way Russ would have wanted).
So we went elsewhere. We went to 5th Ave. I've only been there once before but I had a good night. This time I did not. It was wall to wall - you couldn't move. It was £6 to get in. The men outnumbered the women about 5-1 and they were all lads larging it up.
Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm getting old. I just much would have preferred to have stayed in the Met and had several quiet (although I use the term "quiet" loosely since the Met plays the loudest music ever on Saturday nights) pints and played some more on the quiz machine.
Anyway, we had one pint and then went home. I had to walk from Sale which sucked because it was cold and a long walk when you are mildly drunk is never fun.

Yesterday I did some more work on my stadium - I have nearly completed the first half. It really just needs painting now. Well painting and a roof putting on one of the halves. Oh and I need some wood from somewhere for the back of the pieces. Maybe I've got a way to go yet before painting it.