A blog by James: Gamer, Father, Geek.

New Years Resolutions. Those promises that nobody really adheres to. They’re rubbish. So I won’t make them, but I am making promises and aims that just coincide with the start of a new year.

For Christmas I got my wife a little book of promises I’ve made to her. I won’t list them (some may make you blush and/or vomit), but the general gist of it and the reason behind it was that with the arrival of Hannah, she has dominated our lives, so for 2010 I have promised to be a better husband, to focus more on ‘us time’. Hannah will always dominate our lives, and rightly so, but there’s no reason we can’t plan to do more couple-y things!

So they are my promises, and here are my ‘aims’. Things I aim for in 2010.

Work: Little and often. It is the habit of a lifetime that I shall never break, but I can try and make a dent into it. It has always been my nature to work on things last minute. I actually perform better under pressure. My job doesn’t help things. With school holidays never more than 7 weeks away at any time, the temptation to leave work until then is great. And of course, without fail, once those holidays do arrive I don’t want to do any work at all. However, if I just did about 30 minutes a day and perhaps more at the weekend, I’d probably easily keep up!

Gaming: I have already started to, but I need to try more things! I play WoW to death and miss out on some great indie games. I also have the terrible habit of buying a game and then not playing past the first couple of hours. I need to get round to doing those games! Mass Effect, Fallout 3 and Dragon Age stare at me with sad eyes from my shelf every time I fire up WoW.

Blogging: More of it. I like writing. I think I am good at writing. Not in the creative sense. I’d struggle to write a story. But I just like composing letters, emails, posts etc. Trying to perfect them. I also miss the glory days of being well known in certain online communities. Those were fun days, but those sites are now dead or dying, so I guess I miss the ‘audience’. I know few people in life with my interests, and I can count how many of those I actually see in person on one hand, and of those that I see more than once a year on one finger, so an outlet for my interests is needed, even if these words fall on blind eyes. Were things in life not as good as they are and I had never met Kat, if I hadn’t decided I want to be a teacher, the idea of being a games journalist/blogger (delete as appropriate to your snobbishness) is a fun one. A dangerous one, I don’t think I could live the freelance kind of life. But it’s fun to imagine what it would be like.  So I think I’ll post more on things that interest and outrage me and just pretend there is an audience.

Lottery: Seriously, I really need to get round to winning the jackpot. I need to stop buying these faulty tickets, they just don’t ever win.

That’s it really! So, imaginary audience, what are your promises and aims for 2010?