The office of births, deaths and marriages

A lot has changed in my life over the last few months. Most notable to me anyway, is that I have moved into my own apartment. Friends have announced they are getting married (in countries 10+ hours away by plane), other friends have encountered pretty horrible and debilitating sickness. Things feel like they are spreading out in some ways - people moving further apart, life events seem to have more room to breathe. It's strange to me because my whole life I have had a fairly strong sense of purpose and direction, but I found myself sitting on the couch the other night not really knowing what to do next.

It's certainly not the worst predicament you could find yourself in - I'm doing ok, am comfortable and am grateful for that. It's just at odds with how I have been for the first 35 years. I am comfortable with just sailing along using only the breeze to guide me for a bit. Lets see what happens.

Throughout all the moving and changing social climate and babies I have been playing Yakuza 4 and am now convinced that it is an amazingly underrated and brilliant masterpiece. I plan to write something in-depth on it soon, so I wont go on and on about it here, but the sheer scale of the game is astounding. It has been the only real constant in my life of late - even work is evolving day by day.

One of the many upsides (and there are plenty of downsides) to having my own place now is that my work desk is out of my room and in the living area, placed in a way that will encourage me to start writing, creating, recording a lot more. I also seem to have a lot more time on my hands, so we'll see what comes of it.

That's it for now, easing myself back into regular crapping on. Hopefully I'll have interesting things to say about stuff next time.

from melbourne to anywhere

Floods, locusts, fires, plagues - you name it, we have almost every biblical disaster there is. No angel of death yet, but I look forward to that. My first born son you say? I'm single with no children - stick that up your pew. The floods in Brisvegas were amazing - I managed to ignore them for a few days but was truly astounded by their magnitude - it was like watching a train wreck in super slow motion. What we are left with is several people dead and a huge repair bill. Of course at the same time there were mudslides happening in Brazil, where 300+ people were killed, just to keep things in perspective. Not to be outdone, Victoria is also having a number of floods. Unfortunately I think the public interest in floods is waning - sorry Swan Hill, we just aren't that interested any more.

Several billion dollars is the estimated cost to fix up Queensland, which sounds like a lot - I think I heard Kevin-oh-seven mention 1% of Australia's GDP. Still, compared to other natural disasters, it's not so bad. The city of Kobe was practically rebuilt from the ground up after the 1995 earthquake. 6434 dead, USD$102.5 billion repair bill. Again, perspective. Makes you wonder what will happen when The Big One finally hits California. Lets hope that doesn't happen in May-June this year when I will be over there.

On Friday night, I saw The Fighter starring Christian Bale and Marky Mark. I am no fan of boxing, and while I dont dig on the subject matter, I realise that I can still love a film about boxing if it is a good film (Raging Bull is a great example). This however was not a great film. I think the story was an interesting one - particularly the complex relationships between the family members, but watching the rise to World Champion play out was as boring and predictable as Rocky. Another reason that I find it difficult to warm to this film was Christian Bale. He did a reasonable job of playing his character, but I cant get past how much of a twat he is in real life. That should have no bearing on whether the movie is a good one, but for me I'm sad to say it does. Just like I could never enjoy a film starring Denzel Washington.

On top of everything else, I had seen True Grit only a few days earlier and thought it was a great film - good story, amazing characters and performances - so I couldn't help but compare the two. Apparently The Fighter is getting good reviews, but then so did Titanic.

I have started playing around with some game dev tools for os x. Nothing too involved yet, but I'm excited by the idea. I have a bunch of ideas for interactive pieces, but I'm wondering how far I will get with limited programming skills. In other news I'm still not quite sure where I am going to move to. I basically have till June this year to find a new place to live. I'm going to try and hook something up via an E3 Visa in the US (SF maybe), or the UK. I would still really like to move to Japan too, but have pretty much decided I dont want to teach, leaving me with very little other options for work there. Either way, now that I have completed my degree and have a pretty good pedigree of experience, I'm hoping I can get out of Melbourne for at least a couple of years. It's pretty exciting actually.

In the meantime, I'm working a lot - which is ok I guess. I'm enjoying it at the moment at that is the important thing.