At some point, I will stop playing with my DW layout. Promise.

Moving on:

I have been ill like an ill thing. I'm getting over the most recent cold-thing now, but ugh. I'm constantly tired at the moment - I will sleep for twelve or fourteen hours a night given the choice, and will still need a two to three hour nap in the afternoon. I'm getting headaches of DOOM that only sleeping relieves, and my antihistamines are not helping with the hayfever the way they should.

In short, feeling very bleh.

Oh, and I failed my driving test on the 30th. Through sheer bad luck, too - my driving was fine, but I had reversing around a corner as my first manoeuvre, and it was a bastard of a corner - it went uphill in a wavy line, so it would be really easy for me to hit the kerb. So I concentrated on the kerb so much I didn't notice two cars turn into the road until the first one was past me. ::headdesk::

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I have this thing I do when I play games of starting one, dropping it when something more shiny comes along, then picking the first game up again and having to restart because I've forgotten what the hell happened in the first place. I usually finish the game on the second try, though not always.

One of the absolute worst games for this is the first Disgaea (Hour/Afternoon of Darkness). Because not only is it very easy to pick back up again, but I am a schmuck and bought both the PS2 version and the PSP version. (To be fair, I bought the PSP version because I knew from playing it on the PS2 that it would be perfect for train journeys to work in the morning.) Disgaea is irreverent enough and breaks the fourth wall enough that you can pick it up whenever and slip back into it. Which only encourages my short attention span.

For the past couple of days, however, I have been playing Disgaea relentlessly, because I have discovered the joy of Specialists. In Disgaea, you can enter items and fight enemies to level them up. In the Item World, there are things called Specialists. If you subdue the Specialists, they add a certain type of power to the item. There are roughly twenty of these Specialists, each doing their own shiny and very useful thing, which makes hunting them down and shivving them entirely worthwhile.

No, really.

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I also got Sims 3 not too long ago. And just as with when Sims 2 first came out, it is bloody addictive. Unfortunately, unlike Sims 2, there are an enormous amount of things that piss me the hell off with Sims 3.

Point # 1: Everybody wants sons!
In TS3, you can influence the gender of a baby by having the mother either eat apples (for a boy) or watermelon (for a girl) during pregnancy. Don't ask me what the link is between them.

This would be fine and dandy. Except. That the game prioritises apples.

Apples cost $5 each from the in-game store.
Watermelons cost $24 each from the in-game store.

You can make dishes, such as pancakes, just from eggs or with various different kinds of fruit added. It will take the relevant fruit either from your Sim's personal inventory, or from the fridge inventory. (You can stock the fridge with stuff you buy from the store or grow yourself.) However, the game priorities apples in the fruit it selects, and it doesn't tell you this.

Apples appear freaking everywhere in the game. You can find apple trees littered around the neighbourhood. I've found eight so far. I have found one - count 'em, ONE - watermelon vine, which is tucked away in one of the most remote corners of the neighbourhood.

There are other bits of gender bias in the game, but that one pisses me off the most.

Point # 2: I refused to play the game until I could get Awesomemod installed, because Awesomemod fixed the BROKEN.
I'm not even going to elaborate on this one. Just go here and take a look at all the fixes Pescado has made to make the game actually work.

Point # 3: If I wanted to spend my life collecting random stupid things to get a shiny prize, I would be playing a Final Fantasy game.
Collecting. 'Nuff said.