A blog by James: Gamer, Father, Geek.

I have been weighing up whether or not I want to sell my Macbook to buy my iPad. The kicker is that I know someone that I could probably sell it to quickly. As the majority of my internet activity will likely switch to my iPad, the Macbook gets a little redundant. However, I think I just can’t do it. I’ll be selling it for half of what it cost me and saying goodbye to quite a lot of nice software. Plus, 3 years on it’s still a cracking good laptop. So I decided to keep it.

As I have my gaming PC and a netbook I thought there’s not a lot of need to keep my Windows Boot Camp partition about. So I decide to reclaim that space. It did not go well. I’m not sure what I did wrong, but frankly I’m surprised that I was able to fuck things up. That I know of, I didn’t do a damn thing to my Mac partition. Anyway, basically I lost all my stuff.

Enter: Time Machine! It has saved my bacon once before. But I am not very good at backing up. I usually ignore those “You have not backed up in 200 days” style messages. But I decided to do a backup in mid Feb, and for that I am very glad because before that my last backup was August last year! The problem is all my photos and music is obviously digital. You can’t retake those photos and you can’t (in the case of iTunes) re-download the music. I do copy most of my music to my gaming PC but not always straight away. So I could have lost a lot of money’s worth of stuff! Luckily any photos I lost should be on K’s laptop, and the best ones I usually upload to Facebook anyway.

So the moral of the story is, back up your stuff!

When I first signed up for Twitter, my preferred name was already taken, the same as my blog name, revelationspace. It belonged to some guy who was obviously an Alastair Reynolds fan too, but didn’t use Twitter as evident by the 3 Tweets since last August. Well I managed to track him down on Facebook (lucky for me he was part of the same AR fangroup and uses the same avatar on FB and Twitter!) so I asked him if he would mind me having it and luckily for me he was a decent chap and let me have it. So, lo and behold my new Twitter account.

So why a new account and not a rename? Well I guess I like to have a second personality. That’s not to say I don’t like who I am, or am ashamed of anything I am, far from it. But I often feel like the geek side of me yearns for other geeks, and I don’t really know any in real life. None that I have regular contact with anyway. So I just felt like ‘splitting’ my online life a bit, following and talking with like-minded internet folk on a separate account. Although real life family and friends are welcome to follow my new account it’s not for them that I’d be posting things. It’s for Me and people with similar interests. I may switch between the two accounts on more personal things or post on both I’m not sure yet.

I’ve been getting the gaming itch lately. You know, when you want to play a game, you have a huge pile of them to play (including ones you’ve only played for the first hour or two) but none of them are what you want to play?

So reading through the new PC Gamer I read the preview for Supreme Commander 2 and it reminds me I’ve not yet completed SupCom1 or it’s expansion. I’ve played most of SupCom1 and about half of the expansion so for the past few days I decided to finish the expansion, Forged Alliance. It is one bloody unforgiving game, and I have a love/hate relationship with it. I love it because it’s Total Annihilation x 100. Although there are only a handful of missions each one takes me between 2 and 3 hours to complete, which for an RTS is a bloody long time! I’m sure if I wasn’t so meticulous about my base building and actually sent out small groups of units as I went along that I could shave off an hour but that’s just how I like to play my RTS’s, trying to make an impenetrable base is part of the fun and SupCom certainly gives you the tools to try and achieve this. The part where it is rather unfair, is that the maps all start off small and as objectives are completed, the map expands to reveal additional enemy bases. Which wouldn’t be so bad if for the fact that the reveal usually comes along with a new armada heading your way. And even though I know this will happen and you can usually tell which way the map will expand, I still manage to let it catch me by surprise. Last night I’d spent ages building up a base with a couple of small bases the other side of the map, ferrying troops over and taking out the Commander in the south east. Then when I did, the map expanded and a few dozen air units came in from the north and obliterated me. I had not put any defences to the north of my base as at the time there was no north for the enemy to come from. I had plenty of units but they were the opposite side of the map, and for anyone that hasn’t played SupCom, I’ll tell you now the maps are huge and take forever to cross, even with air transports to help you. So I watched my base slowly decay and they finally got my Commander, game over.

I’ll be back tonight though. I think I’ve only lost 30 mins of play, and now I know I can just take out the southern Commander to wipe out his entire base, I will try and blitz him rather than slowly wade through his base, destroying it as I go. Oh and yes, before I do that, I think a few shield generators and anti-air emplacements will be installed to the north of my base!

Looking forward to SupCom2 and also C&C4 which are both out in about a month, so I’m all set strategy wise for the foreseeable future.

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?

I’ve mentioned them plenty, but seriously their debut album is miles ahead as my album of the year. There’s not a single track I don’t love. Don’t be put off by her at times miserable look in the videos (the latest one is better), the music is pure genius. I really can’t get enough of it still.

BUY IT!