I finally understand this phrase, which was said to me often back in the mid 90’s. Having had my first run-in with Civ4 last night, I know why people told me they lost girlfriends/fiancés, stopped eating, played for days at a time, all because of this game (or rather, its predecessors). It is all-absorbing, intricate in detail, with a good chat/teaming system and resilience for those with unreliable net connections or a need to leave off a game to be resumed later.
Really gripping stuff. I’m determined not to play too much: too much time needed at the gym, and to get through my current reading pile.
Damn you Matt/Damo, for introducing me to this thing, and Amazon for selling it cheap!
…that its been too long since you’ve gone to the gym. Went for a gentle restart last night, half expecting the gym to have moved in the time since I last visited – and found that had, in fact, happened; well, the entrance, anway.
Felt good to get back there, and hoping to make regular mini-trips to the gym (always shoot myself in the foot by aiming to do marathon sessions and then stiffness and exhaustion provides me with my excuse for never going back again…!). Wish me luck.
Have been excited about prospect of writing, and have spent portions of this weekend responding to emails I received almost a year ago – long overdue catch up on correspondance, which was satisfying in itself, but has depleted my capacity somewhat to do any writing here or on my new WordPress.com blog.
Will hopefully have a bit more time to sit, think and write over the next week, but Christmas is proving to be ridiculously busy — and bizarre that I’m thinking of it as Christmas in November, but hey; the parties have clearly started! Might roast a turkey next week…
Anway: doing lots of interesting reading and thinking at the moment and hopefully will post more substantially when things start to quiet down. Off to India in a couple of weeks, so that should make for an interesting post…
Once again, work has been ludicrously busy and when I’ve got back from it I’ve been committed to finishing Raymond E Feist’s “Serpentwar” saga — lots of lovely pulpy fantasy (although strangely disappointed at the end of this one). I do seem to have that addictive personality type that wants to see things through once I’ve got into them. My Dad always used to say that if he liked an author, he’d read everything by them; I find myself doing the same, and shopping on Amazon to find any oustanding books… Its a tricky one. They should have a “buy all by this author” button…
Normal service will soon resume – have a huge backlog of stuff I want to blog about, and I think I’ll explode if I have to keep it in, or relay it via conventional conversation (yes, some of it is probably only interesting to me and a few odd people around the internet. Well, I hope so – I’m playing the numbers, there’s like a billion people out there on the net).
Chris has made something of a tradition with the photoshopping…
More photos & anecdotes around the evening to follow.
Update: Still too tired to blog today; it was, in short, though, a great party and the innovations / eccentricities (no shoes, plastic cups, etc.) made the clearing up today slightly less painful! Think Damian has as good a time as I did, and much help from Gem, Marion, Louise, Robin, Chris, etc, made light work of preparations and cleanups. Great turnout, small B2L posse in fine form (commandeering my camera for substantial portions of the evening). Many photos posed, I don’t hesitate to add, if you choose to check them out at my photostream (link on right, somewhere…)
Anyway: finally done celebrating birthday, now, so can start thinking about Christmas…
My NAS drive (of which I have recently blogged) stopped working last night, much to my chagrin. With much need of the library of music on it (today in particular), I was quite concerned. Reinstalling drivers, fiddling with Windows hard drive utilities, all did nothing.
Then I ran “chkdsk”, (or, more precisefly “chkdsk /f”) Microsoft’s old disk utility. Fixed it a charm.
