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Yes, I know it's a feeble title... it seems like an AGE since I last posted anything here, and looking back - it has been! I might have "relaunched" my site this year but I've hardly posted anything at all. Certainly not by comparison anyway.
I've decided I'm not keen on the redesign, as it goes. I think I need to try harder, do something a bit more different. Whilst I quite like what I've done with the underlying technology, it's never really worked properly. I had loads of new stuff planned, some of it even implemented, but I've just not looked at it in far too long.
Sometimes it's better to break things down and start afresh. Whilst I'm not going to completely start again (that'd be mental) I've learnt quite a few lessons from the experience that I hope to use in taking things forward. Whilst I quite like the idea of excerpts leading to full on articles, I don't think it particularly works here. I'm still going to use them, just reserve them for RSS feeds. Nobody will see them, but at least I'll know they're still there. Maybe I'll find another use for them one day. :-)
Lots of things are going on in the background, staying on top of them all is proving... erm... interesting :-) Still, at least I have my health! Speaking of which, I'm still going to the gym four times a week (which I'm still enjoying despite having to get up at 5.30am). I'm around the same weight as I was last year (~70 kgs) which surprised me a bit as I thought I might put some weight on given the exercise and weight training. I guess I must be losing flabby parts I didn't know I had... which is probably no bad thing, really.
Hmm. What else to report?
This will amuse some people: I've restarted work on my game, you know, the one I meant to release before my 30th birthday. Yep, that worked well. To be honest though, I think I may have been a wee bit ambitious given my initial design and my actual real-life programming skills. Learning to run before you can walk may sound like fun in theory, but is, on the whole, a bit of a mental thing to do. Thus, I'm concentrating on something considerably simpler and less 3D. Probably more fun though.
Aside from a few notable exceptions, most games are not fun anymore. At least, to me. Or rather, the fun parts are so spread out, tolerating the dull bits to get to them is no fun at all. One of those "notable exceptions" was Half Life 2, which mostly consists of lots of fun parts stuck together. It's not perfect, some parts are a bit tedious, but on the whole you're never more than half an hour's play from something really cool.
Maybe this is a topic I'll have to come back to later and fill out a bit more.
ID cards as proposed by the government (aside from any kind of civil-liberties arguments for now, which are far better documented elsewhere) are a mind-bogglingly enormous waste of money. If this doesn't get you frothing in aneurysm-inducing anger about the proposals then you really don't understand that there are only two possible outcomes: (a) The card never gets introduced, or what ends up being introduced is something so cut down it is utterly useless and fails to do anything that those who support it say it will, or more likely (b) the project costs 10 times more than the worst Government estimate, it never works properly, and is obsolete within three years of its introduction. And it will STILL fail to do anything that those who support it say it will.
Blunkett's resigning is the best news I've heard in a long time. What an almighty cock that man is. A legend in his own mind. If he had an introspective bone in his body he'd know this. And therein lies the problem. (This is also an affliction shared by all politicians but is particularly notable amongst those who I completely hate the guts of, e.g. Tony Blair, George Galloway, Michael Howard, etc.)
What else?
On a lighter note, I picked up Sam Brown's "43 minutes" on a complete whim a couple of weeks ago. Actually, the reason I picked it up was that I heard Jamelia's somewhat-shite version of "Stop" which I'd always remembered as being quite good (and not just because it's the first song I ever properly danced-with-a-girl to... I'm not going to win this one, am I?) so I hunted it down and gave it a listen. It was utterly fantastic. Boy, that girl could SING. So I read around a little bit and noted that whilst "43 minutes" is considered by her fans to be her best album, the record company didn't want to release it as they hated it (it's about the death of her mother), and so only made about ten copies, released back in 1992. It was reissued less than a month ago.
It's superb. Astonishing. Beautiful. Tragic. Painful. Cathartic.
Go hunt it down. You won't be sorry.