JANUARY

Last Day (Night) on the Job

A lot of writers say that they fear the blank page, but not me. The page is very rarely blank for long anyway. If I can’t think of anything else to write down I put the date in the top left corner. Then I write the name of the project I’m working on, and underline it. This year’s project is simply called ‘2026’, which is a date anyway.

As last year was all about launching the Quanta-B Tales, this year is about filling in my time with something else. There are several other projects I am working on, but mainly my time is concerned with moving.

Over Christmas I decided to move back to the family home where I grew up, to live with my mum. I had already semi-retired in 2024, but in January I took that final step into full retirement. I moved to Rugby 24 years ago because that's where all the work was, but now I'm selling my house and will be trying to set up some kind of living arrangement on the top floor of my mum's 17th century farmhouse in Ratby, where I grew up. It doesn't so much feel like a new chapter as a whole new book.

VIDEO GAMES

As I am in the process of moving between Warwickshire and Leicestershire, I am without Playstation, which feels weird. I have hardly videogamed at all over the last month, except for on my infrequent visits home. It's something that I would never have expected I could do, since every waking hour was usually spent gaming, and now I'm not working I'd have thought that all that extra time might have been filled with the long eight, twelve or sixteen hour gaming sessions that I used to enjoy. These were often spent in GTA Online, which was so immersive that I could easily lose myself in my character and their ficticious life for days and weeks, barely sleeping or eating. I actually had a book idea many years ago that was very similar to Ready Player One, except my version was set in England and had the backdrop of a gritty urban dystopia where people worked seventy-hour weeks just to pay for their internet bill.

GTA Online has now kind of ended (funny how so many things are reaching their conclusion at the same time) and while the game itself is all still there, it just feels empty and pointless. When the Mansion DLC came out I had saved over $110 million, which was enough to buy two mansions and some cars (one for each character) and still have about eighty-five million left over. As there is likely not going to be anything else to buy in the game there is now no reason to make any more money, which was the whole point of the game for the last twelve years.

It feels like my characters have retired as well, and moved to big expensive houses with nothing to do all day. I often log in and wander around Los Santos, but my heart just isn't in it somehow and I soon log out to play something else. That something else for the last few weeks has been Snowrunner.

SNOWRUNNER

https://www.youtube.com/live/LYyJGiWlF3E

This is one of the most frustrating video games I've ever played, yet it still manages to hook me in. I sometimes play it for a couple of hours and then log out because I can feel my blood pressure rising to boiling point. The game is set in various real-world regions where some catastrophe or other has rendered the road network useless, leaving only muddy and snowy tracks which are virtually impassable. The player has to take on a series of tasks to restore power, erect bridges and resupply local businesses using a wide range of heavy trucks and off-road vehicles, all of which crawl along at walking speed and frequently get stuck.

The game engine is based on Havok, which is a physics model designed to create the maximum amount of difficulty when trying to move objects around, as the name implies. This is most evident when trying to load cargo with a crane, or trying to recover trucks that have rolled over or got stuck in rivers.

I think it was the difficultly of driving in these driving conditions that first attracted me to it, and it quickly becomes a problem-solving game where there isn't really a right or wrong way to do things. I liked having to build up a garage full of trucks with different abilities and kit them out with various trailer configurations and support equipment. The game simulates damage and fuel and though you can reset any vehicle that gets stuck, doing so will take it directly back to the garage, leaving anything it was carrying behind. With some remote areas located a couple of maps away from base, this becomes very undesirable and so the more vehicles you send out into the environment the more you want to maintain them so they can be used for other jobs.

The game actually recieved an update this month and a few of the mechanics got tweaked, but things really unravelled when I started trying the log-hauling missions. For reasons described by several YouTubers, the logging mechanics in the Havok engine are very broken. Some trailer combinations when loaded with logs are fairly immovable, mainly because the weights being carried are so large and the trailers can get stuck in the ground. There are players who work around this by loading logs individually onto different trailers and then loading them properly when they get to the destination, but this seems like cheating.

My last three sessions in the game involved trying to move three loads of logs over a river, tipping over several trucks and loads in the process, running out of fuel and getting stuck on a hill that had large rocks on it. After about six hours or getting nowhere, frustration finally got the better of me and I deleted the game.

MUSIC

This month saw the launch of a new album by my favourite band Dry Cleaning. I discovered them a couple of years ago and got totally hooked by their unique sound. They have a curiously British vibe, with mainly spoken word lyrics by Florence Shaw, the rock-solid baselines of Lewis Maynard and Marr-esque guitar hooks by Tom Dowse. Their songs are weird, with most of the lyrics being off-kilter snippets of overheard conversations or random sentences that don't fit together. The lack of any real meaning is actually liberating and transforms each song into sort of mood spaces, or tone poems.

Shaw's voice is mesmerising and the music behind it is solid. I find their songs drill themselves into my brain and after a few listens and I fall into a trance where I cannot listen to anything else. It's also a nice feeling to be into something new and current rather than the endless nostalgia loop of eighties and nineties music that I usually listen to. It's good to know that there are still bands; I was under the impression that they had become extinct in the 21st century as every new song I hear on the radio seems to be an endless parade of female solo singers all trying to sound like each other or male performers who are not so much musicians as social media personalities who just look ridiculous to an oldie like me.

(And don't get me started on bloody Taylor Smith!)