FU 2012, Hello 2013!

What a dumb year this has been! The fucking expensive Electrolux vacuum cleaner broke for the 3rd time. Groceries became more expensive than ever. Lost more than a night's worth of sleep due to unpaid bills and an uncertain future. Funcom laid off their awesome community manager. My favourite lector is no longer proof-reading my shit. My column about how much the dungeons in Guild Wars 2 suck had caused a medium shitstorm. Our snake died of old age, and one of the beardies lost a foot and most of her eyesight, probably due to the same weird problems, that killed off every last one of her siblings at the shop. We never had the money to have our cats fixed and their horny yowling drove us insane every other week. We haven't been to McDonald's, Burger King or the cinema this year. At all. Oh and some dipshit killed 27 people in an elementary school, because his brother liked Mass Effect on Facebook. The first Skyrim expansion was about fucking vampires, the second one about building a home and settling down with a spouse and kids. The Bioware founders are now brewing beer or some shit. The pandas were real. SWToR is getting more stupid flash points nobody gives a fuck about, got the most retarded "F2P"-overhaul of the century and there isn't a word about any more story-related stuff, even though they had supposedly created enough content in that regard to keep us covered till what, 2015? Lies!
Dexter, Sherlock, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones - tons of fucking great shows, every single one of which aren't running at the moment, forcing us to wait for the new season. ARGH! And the average moron on Black Ops 2 has a YOLO or SWAG clan-tag and a penis, a pony or a pony sporting a huge penis on their player card. This is the new generation of gamers! This is the kind of people the industry is creating their shit for! My PC broke down, I lost a lot of data, then Claire's PC died right after I fixed mine, even more bills to pay, yay!

2013 is just around the corner and it's already looking very promising: I'm looking at the biggest work order of all times, all due in January. To make things even weirder, the deadline is very humane and the whole thing will be paid rather handsomely. None of the usual, "Okay, I'm reserving all this work to you, so we're gonna have to dump the price a bit" or "Can you send me all 30 pages next week?" stuff. You might think I'm joking, but I'm talking about a line of work, where people genuinely ask you to write a 4 page preview about a game, based only on a 5000 characters press release pdf file and two concept drawings.

'Dragonborn', the new Skyrim expansion, is on the horizon (or already there if you play it on the Xbox), so I had a fiddle with the old mods and settings and shit, finally figuring out a way to record some full hd gameplay that doesn't run in mega slow motion. My only problem right now is the horrible Youtube compression. Stuff still looks okay, but it doesn't do the source material any justice. I mean, just fucking LOOK AT EET!

I'm seriously hating this right now. I have a whole lot of work to do, Xmas time is family time, there are four more prestige-ranks I have to gain on Black Ops 2 and then this stupid game looks better and runs faster than ever and is so fucking immersive and breath-taking and more awesome than anything I've ever seen on my PC and it looks so good on the huge-ass LED screen andand... shit!

Speaking of Black Ops - I have found my "mojo". Turns out said mojo is really just the fine art of exploiting shotguns and SMGs. I tried convincing myself that they aren't ridiculously overpowered, that you can master any weapon by just adjusting your play style, blah blah blah. Thing is, if I can shoot an SMG from the hip, at some guy who happens to be half a mile away, kill him and still have 30 bullets left in my magazine, switching to an assault rifle, which requires me to hit the same guy at the same distance about 8 times and seriously sprays all over the place even with a scope, well...

Let's just say my recent super high scores and epic K/D ratios have very little to do with personal skill and are mostly related to the game's weapon balancing. Or lack thereof. I refused to walk the path of the SMG laster sight noob for a long time, but if you can't beat them... well, you get the idea. I'm not really proud of myself here, I like to stand out, be different, do my own thing, but I can only take so many crushing defeats until it gets boring, now I'm topping the scoreboards again. Oh well!

Also, The Hobbit. I'm still worried. They're turning a pocket-book into three super large movies? Yes, they're adding a bit of Silmaril here and there, but... well, all my friends say the first film was fanfuckingtastic, so I can't wait to see it myself. Hopefully sometime at the weekend. It's weird - given our dire situation, we can't really afford going to the movies right now, so I had several people jumping me, trying to force free movie tickets down my throat. I managed to fend most of them off until somebody did a little research, figured out which theatre is the one located near us and just bought a coupon.
I'm grateful for friends like that and getting so much support really makes me happy, but it also confuses me. Let's not sugar-coat this - I'm an asshole. I enjoy being an asshole, I revel in it, I even get paid to be, well, me. Ya know, write about how shit everything is and people give me money.

The last time a friend asked me if I could help him with a problem, I said there's nothing I can do about his fat face and retarded accent. People laugh about this kind of stuff and think I'm joking. Maybe I'm just misunderstood. Maybe they're trying to make me a nicer person by being nice and generous to me or they're afraid to be the next ones to get on my bad side or... eh, fuck it. I'm already overthinking it. I suppose people just get weird around Xmas. So yeah, thanks for the ticket. Should I ever amount to anything in my life, I'll be sure to return the favour someday. But don't hold your breath. Somehow I doubt that browser-based F2P games are gonna make me rich in the near future.
Oh and - to all you fuckers, who are going crazy about this new trilogy, yet never bothered to read the fucking source material: KILI, FILI AND THORIN FUCKING DIEEEE! Eat that! :P

Ahh yes, games. Did you know I used to create a few of those? Nothing spectacular or anything, but... well, take a look:

This stuff is over a decade old and the basic game engines weren't mine, of course. The first bunch of pix are rather obvious RPG-Maker stuff, the rest was made with some fun little tool, which was a complete Zelda rip. But all the levels and landscapes, stories, characters, speech (!), flags, events and shit were made by me. Ya know, if the player triggers this'n'that event, monsters will overrun and destroy the starting village, game moves on, that kinda stuff. Moving, transparent, parallax-scrolling fog. Stuff nobody gives a shit about nowadays, but pretty awesome to me when I pulled it off. In fact, that stuff got me a job offer to be the map designer for America. I refused, because I wasn't done with school back then. Looking back, it was a rather stupid decision, since I never graduated, anyway. Sure, America was crap, but it could have been my first step into "the industry". Oh well.
I dunno. Maybe one day, when I'm really, seriously bored, I'll look into a current version of RPG Maker and create Berserkerkitten - The Game or something. The stuff you can create with these tools may look a bit dull and generic, but a good story, witty writing and fun characters can help a lot. And people are crazy about their retro shit anyway.

Six more days till Xmas. Or seven in the UK. I'm not sure. They have weird shit like boxing day and what not, everyone is sending cards and best wishes, it's all very confusing, even though it's the 3rd time I get to celebrate it all over here. In Germany, it all happens on the night of the 24th, then there's 2 Xmas holidays after and that's that. Around here it's a bit different, kinda, but... I dunno, I'm still getting the hang of it. There's gonna be weird paper crowns and disgusting vegetables that look like potato chips.
The Bear says I should hope and wish for something I really, really want, because the whole family must have chipped in and they have a biiig surprise for me and they wanna give me something cool. I'm pretty sure I know what it is, but then I might be getting my hopes up and it's gonna be something else. And I can't just go ahead and say, "Well, you do kinda suck at keeping secrets and by the way you react whenever I bring it up..." I dunno, wouldn't be fair. But I hate letting things go, I like confrontation, bringing shit up. Gotta shut up and wait another week. ARGH!

"Winter" is a total joke this year. It's seven degrees out while I'm writing this, yet everybody complains about how cold it is. Even British cats are total wussies in that regard. They both sleep on the kitchen heater and flat-out refuse to hang out in the living room. On the plus side, it's also too warm for snow. Don't get me wrong - I love snow. That fun, crunchy sensation when you walk around on it. The way it seems to muffle all the noise, how it sugar-coats everything. And let's not deny the fact that it's incredibly fun to piss on. :P
But I'm waiting for the grocery fucker right now. Nothing fancy, just the usual tomato stuff, which is all we can afford, but it's still food. I like food. I like it even more when it arrives in a timely fashion. And it never does when there's snow outside. In England, snow means instant stone age. The shelves at the supermarket won't get restocked, the mail man doesn't deliver anything, shit just stands still. Because of two inches of snow. In Germany, that stuff can be knee-high, but it won't stop anyone. You can see legions of little Germans with mighty shovels and salt instantly clearing the streets. Monster plows keeping the roads in shape and all that. No such thing in the UK. People see three snowflakes and panic. Rightfully. No salt, no shovels, the shit just freezes over and becomes a death trap.

They're fixing a hole in the roof on the house that's right opposite to ours. It's so annoying and stupid to masturbate when people keep staring through the fucking window all the time. Not annoying and stupid enough to stop me, but still pissing me off. Don't they have a fucking roof to fix? Maybe I should just go have a shower...

-Cat