In the past month, the following things have transpired in no particular order:

• I contemplated shutting down this site. Lack of time, motivation, and overall frustration with not being able to finish my ideas left me feeling like continuing would just be wasting my effort.
• That didn’t last long though. I soon realized that the gaming blogosphere, and weblogs in general are not worth getting worked up over. I should have learned in the past two years that with such a low point of entry crappy blogs only propogate, they don’t disappear.
• I spent a lot of time training (and re-training) our new puppy. I’ve exercised as much restraint as one man possibly can in avoiding the posting of photos, so I figure this small mention should be good enough in staving off the desire to share my dog with the entire Internet.
• Shortly after the last post we lost our cable connection (including internet and TV) to the dog. See, she thought it would be cool if she severed the incoming coax cable to our apartment. It didn’t matter though, because at that point we were getting ready to move again.
• We packed for, and executed, another move – to our final destination in Markham. I feel more at home than I ever have in this brand new house. A brief note to U-Haul: when one reserves a truck two weeks in advance, one expects to get it the day of said reservation, and the size of truck reserved. One does not want to wait in line for an hour and then be given an unmeetable deadline to return it. Also: Bell Canada lost a staggering number of customers in our new neighborhood due to their contractors being on strike. I’m sure FCI Broadband thanks you.
• I didn’t take the news that it would be impossible for me to run the Battlefield 2 demo very well.
• Having minimal access to the internet has ejected me so far out of the gaming news loop that I’m having a hard time determining what’s actually worthy of my attention now that I’m up and running again. Though it is the summer, and let’s be honest here: there are really only four months of the year that publishers and news outlets really care about.
• Baten Kaitos is actually pretty good, despite essentially being a direct adaptation of Tales of Symphonia with cards.
• I purchased and fully consumed Billy Corgan’s new album, TheFutureEmbrace. I had actually started to write a review, but the underlying tone of disappointment left me feeling depressed and unwilling to finish. A good effort, but when I went to the concert on July 2nd I think I was more enamored with the thought of seeing Billy Corgan live, than seeing those songs performed. You lose something when your band consists of a computer, fake drums, and a scary looking backup singer. Though the second opening act, Doris Henson, kicked the crowd into high gear after the abysmal performance of The Crimea. Doris Henson reminded me a bit of Treble Charger in their early days; too bad it’s not 1995. They might have been big.
• I was extremely close to cancelling my World of Warcraft account. After not playing it for roughly four weeks without any mental or physical signs of withdrawal, I thought myself free of its barbed tendrils. This is not true. All it took was thinking about starting a new character, which I will be doing in about five minutes.

In a couple of days things should be back to normal and my writing can resume in earnest. Real life keeps me busy, but the one thing I’ve determined during my time off is that giving up this website would leave me incredibly bored.

let me out