WHITE WHINE

Its too fucking warm for October.

This is the time of year when things usually start to start going wrong. (They tend to pick up slightly around Christmas time with festivity and jollity and "we-should-totally-see-each-other-more-lets-not-leave-it-twelve-months-again-this-year-ity,"), before becoming entirely awful in January and this should be accompanied by relevant weather. Things like arctic wind, drizzling rain, frost and ice on my car in the mornings when I'm late to work. I should be wearing my black coat (incidentally, the most expensive piece of clothing I own at a reduced price of £140) and dark navy scarf, and trudging along the deserted sea front promenade, watching seagulls fight over discarded kebab boxes and chip wrappers while acting like the brooding artiste figure I am not in reality. Who I think I'm impressing, I don't know.

I've made this Pavlovian connection in my head due to a number of past interactions and relationships taking a nosedive around this time of year, usually after a too-quick Summer of relaxation, socialising and broken plans and promises. This has never been quite the biggest of deals, as I had tended to view life as a raft I had no control over and took things as they came. This laziness, in part, was due to (I now realise) not truly caring about the person I was with. This year is different. This year, I am with the first girl I can honestly, truly say that I love. A person that I cannot imagine ever not being close to, but conversely this makes this seasonal fugue (depression?) so much harder to cope with. Whereas previously I could switch off and seek solace in staying in and avoiding the world with the assistance of computer games and takeaway food, now I cannot will not. The last thing I want to do is bring this person down with me, but I also can't face not being with her and not making her smile or laugh or feel safe. But I'm afraid I will do this.

Most of all though, I hate having these feelings for no damn reason. I'm not some tortured fucking artist that uses these emotions to fill notebooks or sketchbooks or even desktop folders with polemic political rants or photoshop fuckery. I just sit here, chain smoking cigarettes and listening to the overly loud washing machine forcibly vibrate out of its cubby hole and half-heartedly worrying about various elements of life.

A list of things I don't like:

•  I don't like how when my fridge broke down, it was replaced with one with no freezer compartment. The previous freezer compartment one was only as large as a family size box of cornflakes, but it least it was present. 
• I don't like how the old, broken fridge was left in my tiny, undersized "garden" by the landlord's handyman. 
• I don't like my landlord's handyman's family, who happen to live above me and slam my front door and shout and stomp around. 
• I don't like how my next door neighbours (a Chinese takeaway place) cannot conduct a conversation in Mandarin without screaming at the top of their lungs. 
• I don't like the animal that lives in the dead space between my bedroom ceiling and the roof and how it is active and scratching and restless between 11pm and 3am each night. 
• I don't like how I want to move out but cannot afford the deposit on a new place, so am stuck over-paying rent to a landlord who doesn't return my calls. 
• I don't like being close to 30 and still working a shitty data entry job for a pittance because I haven't found a new job. 
• I don't like not finding a new job because I haven't put the effort in to do so, and therefore all my whining on the subject should be mute. 
• I don't like that I kept from my girlfriend things about the girl I was seeing previous to her, when I didn't know I would feel like this about her (my girlfriend). 
• I don't like inadvertently making my girlfriend jealous or upset as a result of my own stupidity and lack of forethought. 
• I don't like feeling posthumously jealous of boys my girlfriend has been with way before I even knew her. 
• I don't like reading her blogs from three or four years back, detailing her struggles in getting over a boy she had massive amounts of feelings for. 
• I don't like feeling that despite what she tells me, I don't cause this level of longing in her. 
• I don't like the hypocritical unfairness I display when I ask questions about a guy she used to sleep with and get upset and indignant when I receive the answers. 
• I don't like me a whole lot. 
• I don't like writing this, as it is an embarrassing pity party. 

Whine whine whine.

What happened to the me that liked cracking jokes and making up rhymes and stories? What happened to the thousand project ideas I had but never wrote down because "I'll remember them"? What happened to the semi-serious plans of writing stand-up sets or raps or maybe both?

I fervently wish that I could hibernate from November to February (maybe wake up from 23rd-27th December) and be done with this goddamned pitiful sense that life isn't as full as it used to be. Fuck it, man up. End. 

Heroic?

I feel like I let game characters down a lot of the time. In nearly every game I play, the character's motivations are not aligned with mine, which makes for a fair amount of cognitive dissonance within the game itself. This is all, of course, an over-complicated and wordy way of saying that I make game characters into total dicks. Here are some of the ways I have made characters act like dicks.

Example #1: Red Dead Redemption. Cutscene: John Marston steps off the train and saunters into a dusty Old West town, a grim look on his face. Gameplay: John Marston runs around chucking bottles at people, lassoing them to cactuses and shooting all the bottles behind the bar.

Example#2: Half Life 2. Gordon Freeman, survivor of Black Mesa and humanity's last hope mostly chooses to spend his time flinging old drinks cans at passers-by and playing on the swings.

Example #3: Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Adam Jensen is the gruff, no-nonsense, cybernetically enhanced head of security for futuristic human enhancement corporation Sarif Industries. After being augmented with devices he never asked for, he lets off steam by chucking vending machines at tramp's heads, squatting in air vents shooting guard's kneecaps and positioning knocked out guards in compromising positions in public bathrooms.

Of course, the worst offender for this kind of cognitive dissonance has to be GTA IV. Theres a mission about three quarters through the game in which Niko Bellic chases down an old friend he knew from the war in Eastern Europe, culminating in a Tough Moral Choice(TM). Should you let revenge take over and kill this gentleman, or will you walk away and let him live? The problem is, I had run over about eighty people on my way to this mission and also shotgunned another five while walking around the area - I don't really think Niko would have had any problem popping a cap in this fool too. Games need to realise that their unique position of offering player choice means that they cannot work as well with traditional narratives or characters. The only game where this has worked, in my opinion, was Saints Row 2, seeing as your (fully customisable) character was an unremitting psychopath anyway, so it feels right to run down the street naked, wildly swing a chainsaw!

Maybe some day, games will realise their unique position as interactive narrative devices and allow for player actions to influence a story in any direction, but until that day I will carry on playing these dudes as absolute douchebags. Because it is empirically funny.