Fuckup Fixed

I am sitting at the bank, with their birch veneer desks and faux art deco sofa, waiting to get some sort of mortgage fuckup fixed. I have no clue as to the whats and whys, but I do know I am dead tired of all the various crap I have had to deal with since buying my new apartment.

It started out last autumn, when I bough a spiffy 1920s flat as centrally as central can be. Not the best area in town, but certainly the most convenient one. It ended up losing a lot of value and not exactly being the ideal apartment, so I got a new, smaller apartment in a fancier neighbourhood. Then I did not manage to sell the old one, and both apartments' value plunged, and my stomach hurt, and everything sucked. In the end I lost about €50,000 or so, which was about all the money I owned, but not my sanity. So tomorrow I will, together with my sanity and sans my riches, move into the new apartment. Yay for that.

I read a bit about that idiot kid in Finland who gunned down and set fire to his classmates. What is the deal with including other people in your suicide? And, asks the deranged part of my brain, if someone is purportedly "at war with humanity" or whatever, how the hell do they not manage to off more than ten or so of their completely unprepared "enemies"? How come almost no insane (that is non-religious, non-political) people who hate the world actually manage to kill a lot of people? Or are there political leaders whose career is just there to mask a love of making life miserable for others? I can think of quite a few candidates.

Now, I go move some heavy things. I have seventy moving boxes or so, but I cannot for the life of me understand why. I am not really a "stuff" person in that I save lots of crap. I try to only have useful things and things which are bearers of value (such as nice ceramic items), but I still end up with a mountain of items which are much more trouble than they are worth. I should take this opportunity to ease up on my dragonity and give some of my hoard away to people more dragonesque.

Horror Spory

Spore was promised to be a revolutionary game. It was not. It was shallow, boring and ultimately very unfulfilling. Aside from being able to design rather cute creatures, there was no lasting appeal at all, and only the first stage, lasting all of ten minutes, was actually fun. None of the promised fantastic modifiability was ultimately delivered, and all the stages (except the aforementioned first) were like very, very bad clones of other games. How the hell have they managed to hype this game so much?

Add to this the fact that the game has such intrusive DRM (copy protection, for the untechnically inclined) that many people will not be able to play it at all. The publisher, EA, asserts that the DRM is there to protect Spore from pirates. This is bollocks. The DRM is there to protect from people sharing it within the family selling the game to friends or second hand shops when they have tired, and they will be tired of it very quickly indeed, because Spore takes almost no time at all to complete. The DRM works in a devious way, since it requires activation over the Internet, and you can only activate thrice. If you upgrade your computer, you might need to reactivate. Reinstall Windows? Reactivate. Use it on another account on the same computer? Reactivate! You can phone EA who can give you more activations - at their leasure (and who knows when they decide to stop answering that particular phone line?). This naturally makes the game's value in the second hand market very low or nonexistent, since the buyer has no way of assessing whether the particular copy of the game has any activations left or will be granted new ones. Also, a person owning Spore will be very reluctant to lend the game to friends or family, since any such usage will trigger an activation.

Essentially, what EA is doing is that they no longer sell you a game, they rent it out at an exorbitant price instead. Well, good thing it sort of sucked, because I will not feel I missed out. Never buy DRM crap. Instead, support games with no DRM at all (Sins of a Solar Empire) or unintrusive DRM (Oblivion).

After Dark

Right now I am in the process of moving, so my angry reviews of Spore (major suck) and Crysis: Warhead (minor suck) will have to wait, as will that of the new Charles Stross book I picked up (good one!). So busy am I that I have not even read Murakami's After Dark yet.

This is what we do when the sunlight fades:

Being hugged by the fiancée

The beauty of lazily flapping angels

Being hugged by the fiancée II

Fixing the hairdo with some sort of hand moistening lotion

Public Morals Committee

The last week was spent mostly in bed, having fever dreams about atomic bombs, the public morals committee and an aggravated fiancée. Needless to say, it was not exactly fulfilling. I did read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, though, after having it on my to read-list for ages. It was not exactly a mindblowing experience, but it was a really good book, and I would have appreciated it even more had I been, say, 14 or so instead of 27. I guess the main grievance I had with the book was its lack of depth, but I fear I have been distancing myself a bit too much from "simple" (though not in a negative sense) literature like Ender's Game, i.e. books where you fully understand (or at least believe you do) the plot. I got a bit of an Ayn Rand feeling from the book - the seemingly effortless integration of ideology. Had Rand been able to write like Card, she might have gotten some points across. As it is, I honestly could not even be arsed to finish Atlas Shrugged, and Anthem just left me with an "I want that hour back!" feeling.

So after reading Ender's Game, what else could I do but fire up Sins of a Solar Empire on my trusty old pc? I get this feeling that the game is very much like what Card envisioned, and that the creators of the game have read his books. It is not exactly a fantastic game, but I think I have never experienced another game that saps time so quickly. I played for six hours and it felt like, oh, half an hour or so. When not having a cold and nothing to do, I am afraid I will never have the opportunity or inclination to do that again, so it was a good thing I won.

Next up: lots of pictures, because they are more enjoyable than text.