News.

I really have to stop promising you guys things. However i'm not really in the right kind of "mood" to write about Battlefield 2 or Woman's Hour. Even after riding my all time blogging high after getting feedback from literally three people about how much they liked my previous post. So this week so your going to have to settle for this News round up from the past week. So in the headlines this morning....

DONG!

I start work on the 9th of June, ending my reign of sitting around and sponging off the state.

DONG!

It'll be great to have some money for a change but damn it, why did i have loads of free time when no one was around and now that people are coming back i'll be busy working?!

DONG!

Clare was here most of this week which is always nice.

DONG!

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, despite having one of the worst titles in cinema history is fantastic! Anyone how says that it is a bit too far fetched should look back on the subject matter of the 3 previous films and then realise just how stupid their statement is.

And now the weather.
Scattered showers followed by patchy sunshine is a weather man phrase that basically means; "it could rain, or it might be sunny, or it could just be cloudy." Anyone wanting you no what the "feels like factor" is on that should take a jump.

And finally.
http://rvb.roosterteeth.com/home.php
Red vs Blue have a new preview video up on their site for their up and coming series.

And thats your lot.
You'd think after months of complaining about being unemployed i'd make a bigger deal out of starting work but there you go. I guess the overall feel of the blog will switch from "oh god i'm bored and lonely" to "oh god i'm bored and underpaid". Swings and round-abouts!

Jonbar's Survival Guides: Leaving University.

This is the first in what i hope to be a series of survival guides featuring on this blog.

Our subject matter for today: How to survive leaving university.

First of all, congratulations! You've made it through at least three years of exams, assignments, heavy drinking and building up a sleep debt you may never be able to recover from. Most of you will also have built up a rather sizable monetary debt as well. But what now? You never planned for this (and if you did, your a freak). With my ten steps your lack of forward thinking probably wont hurt quite as much.

Step 1.
Ever thought about doing an MA? Better still go for a PhD. The outside world sucks just as much as it ever did and by doing these you'll gain years of extra time in wonderland. If you stick at it enough you'll quite literally never have to leave university as you'll have become a member of the teaching staff!

Step 2.
Prepare yourself for a lot of goodbyes. You will no doubt have added a lot of people to your friends list on Facebook. Some of these aren't really friends, you just met them once in a bar and added them to look popular. However you will by now have a large number of people that you at least know or might even call your: BFFs, buddies, honchos, pals, companions, peps, doggs (or dawgs), brotherz or even mates. Take a good look at them because without quite a lot of effort you'll lose regular contact over the next few years with at least half of them. You might quite literally never see some of them again. Some of them no doubt are along with you for the duration. Don't fret, this is a natural vetting of your real social network. (As opposed to your "virtual" social network.) Keeping in contact isn't as hard as it used to be, however keeping up regular meet ups will be and requires quite a bit of effort from all parties.

Step 3.
Don't be ashamed of going back home. Housing is expensive, as is renting and if you have the option heading back home for a while so that you have the opportunity to rebuild your finances a bit so much the better. But remember, things will have changed a bit in your absence. Old school friends might not be around as much as before, if at all. The pace of living is also different along with the social life. An important note at this point is a lot of people are very sniffy about people that head back home after university this can generally be put down two factors in their own lives rather than yours: 1) They didn't have a great home life before hand Or 2) They have far to much money for someone their age and doesn't understand why everyone else doesn't have comparable wealth.

Step 4.
Begin the job hunt! If your not royalty or doing a MA and or a PhD then there is no longer any real excuse. Your going to have to get a proper job. Start with the national press, then the local press, then the internet and then the job centre. Some good webs its are:
www.jobsgopublic.com
www.monster.co.uk
www.gradjobs.co.uk
www.insidecareers.co.uk
www.milkround.co.uk
http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/

Those should get you started. However beware that there are quite literally hundreds of thousands of job sites spread across the internet and not all of these are really that helpful. You'll generally have better luck by using the newspapers. The search facilities at your local job center are also pretty good and worth a look.

Step 4.
Enjoy, if you haven't already, your final weeks and days a university. Do the things you've been putting off until now because you might not get another chance to do them.

Step 5.
It is time to get out that hoover! Don't give your land lord (or lady) any reason to skim more than she's entitled to off your deposit. By the way, the dark stuff that has been growing on the bathroom walls and ceiling will come off. Your just not putting your back into it!

Step 6.
Clear out the fridge and freezer! If you lucky you'll have enough food to last you until you finally leave. It is amazing what you can find half buried in the permafrost! If there are items gathering mold but not an owner, chuck 'um!

Step 7.
If you can't take it with you, sell it to the next lot of people moving in. There is no point giving them things for free. Also, if you want to make back part of that deposit your land lord (or lady) stole from you, sell the next lot a load of the items that came with the property!

Step 8.
Change your online delivery and address details. Also, you cant run from credit card companies or the courts so don't try the cheap trick of moving and leaving the next bunch to deal with your debtors because they will pass them along to you. (Forwarding addresses or no, you are not that hard to track down.)

Step 9.
Repeat steps 5 and 6 because i know you didn't do a good enough job the first time round!
*And* Make sure everyone gives you back those DvDs etc.. you loaned them. The same goes for you, give them their stuff back!

Step 10.
DONT' PANIC! It'll been fine, you'll see.


Next week: Battlefield 2.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty sucks.

It really does! I know i've been promising posts about Woman's Hour or about Battlefield 2 for ages now but things keep getting in the way. Just like this, so without further ado, i give you the reasoning behind my post title.

Metal Gear Solid was a fantastic game on the original Playstation (or PS1 to all you people who are down with the kids). It was a game of sneaking around and thinking, something that is noticeably lacking in most modern games. It was fun and relatively easy to get into, the hallmarks for me of every "great" game i've ever played. Anyway, about a year or so back (maybe more, i cant remember) Jay, a guy who turns up in the subject matter of this blog far too much, passed on to me his PS2 games collection. Now i've been playing my way through these and have finally got to Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Remembering how much fun the first game was i put the game disc into my aging games console and awaited the menu screen. I then utterly forgot that for some stupid reason the select button in these games is "O" not "X" and proceeded to spend 5 minutes trying to work out why the damn thing wasn't working. Once my spaz attack subsided and the game finally got its way through some rather lengthy opening cut scenes (it appears the makers were going for a Tom Clancy book film adaptation style), i finally got to play the game. After 30 minutes i put it down again, put the disc back in its box and put the box to the bottom of the game pile because, as i've mentioned before, this game sucks. Here's why: First off, the character you play is some annoyingly skinny guy who has ridiculously non-special forces long blond hair and wears a far too tight hi-tech special forces suit thing which leaves nothing to the imagination and makes him look less super-spy and more gymnastics female entry for London 2012. Oh and he has a stupid voice too, which you'll get to hear all the time by the way because, and here's what really pisses me off about this game, there is far to much dialogue. Every 5 minutes, sometimes less there is either a cut scene or some one talking to you over the radio. (All the radio sections are effectively cut scenes as well, turns out our man cant move around or doing anything else when someone is on the phone to him.) Over the radio you'll get a fantastic selection of various boring characters giving you mindlessly trivial exposition about nothing, which also includes a woman who appears to be our boys girl friend, (incidentally, her name is Rose, annoying in itself for me because it always brings back the hours i wasted going to see Titanic at the cinema) and all she seems to go on about is repeatedly asking our guy whats special about tomorrow's date for them and telling him to "be careful" when someone else is trying to radio in important intel. The other thing that made me put this game down are the controls, as for some reason they made using a gun fucking impossible. The new system of having to find a computer terminal to access your personal radar in each different "building section" also takes away much of the fun from the game and as the camera angles are mostly useless this is another aspect i dislike.

Ok rant over about a game that is so old i'm probably the only one that has played it this year in the entire world. Besides, what with my images and all i don't want to ape Zero Punctuation too much! (But the game sucked so much and ruined my day that i couldn't not write about it!)
The real reason i'm pissed off is because i have one almighty ulcer on the under side of my tongue and i cant think for the life of me how i got it. The bongela has since numbed half my tongue and its taking a lot of effort not to choke to death.

So have i heard back from the GSCC? Well no. They have both my references in now so there really isn't an excuse. I WANT MY JOB OFFER DAMN IT!
(I'm calling them tomorrow. Unless of course this post goes out tomorrow, in which case i called them today and you'll get an update next post.)

Next week: Jon's guide to leaving University.
(You will never get that Woman's Hour post! Never! Never! MWHAHAHA!)

Guurrrggghhhhhhcccc......

Guurrrggghhhhhhcccc......

The GSCC seem to have commitment issues. Or at least that is the only reason that i can think of as to why they are dragging there god damn feet so much over finally signing me up. I mean come on guys! You said that the references were "basically a formality" and that i would be on the payroll soon. Obviously my definition of soon is different to theirs as it has now been 3 weeks since those immortal words were spoken and although i don't really want to have to directly quote any piece of dialogue that George Lucas has ever written, "I have a bad feeling about this."Anyway, enough about that as i had a fantastic Bank Holiday Weekend! (So good it needed capital letters!)
First off Jason came back from the army for a visit, so in time honored tradition we went to see an action movie, went bowling and had steak for dinner. The action movie of choice was Iron Man, which was actually pretty good. Now i have read quite a few reviews of it and i have got to say they have almost all been a little harsh. Thus a defense of the film is obviously needed. Here it comes.
The first main point people have made is that Iron Man isn't actually a super hero at all, he is just a man in a powered armour suit. Ok, but then Batman was basically a guy wearing a black cape and a modified Halloween mask and you didn't have any problems calling him a super hero.
Secondly they have said that the special effects were nothing special. In fairness i don't think there has been that many films recently where the special effects were really that different from everything else. And to answer all the other points:
- I thought the fight scenes were fine. (And although the fight scenes in Transformers were generally better you cant really compare the two films!)
- Yes, i know its political stand point is very basic when it comes to American foreign policy in Afghanistan but then it is an action movie!
- Robert Downey Jr probably isn't the obvious choice for an action hero role, but then neither was Tobey Maguire. Besides, i found his performance entertaining enough.
- The bit when he frees a group of hostages that are being used as human shields is awesome!
All in all its not a bad movie. It isn't great either, but then very few films are actually any good these days thus we have to take our doses of mediocre if and when we can find them.

Bowling was epic. We totally abused the unlimited bowling deal and went for ten rounds. Jason won 6-4 but i did manage to bowl a "turkey". (Its when you get 3 strikes in a row in the final bit of a game. I don't know what that has got to do with poultry either.) Turns out bowling is awesome upper body exercise as well which is good, but i should think that it comes no where near balancing out the steak dinner. Buddies is awesome.

Not content with that i put another 150 miles on my car and headed to Colchester so as i could see Clare and get me some lovin'! (I am going to get killed.) Highlights included watching the entire 4th season of Scrubs in a day, lying around in the sun and watching a rat see just how close it could get to a student couple without being noticed. Oh and Colchester needs its road infrastructure redesigned because the whole area seems to be some sort of test bed for every conceivable variation of round-abouts road design. Couple that with some interestingly aggressive local driving styles and it makes for some interesting motoring. You'll be pleased to know i held my own.

Next week: Either - 10 things i have learnt from Woman's Hour
OR - A Noobs Guide To Battlefield 2.

Heroes.

Ok, we'll start it where i left off in the last post. The GSCC are taking their sweet time about things, but so long as they give me a job at the end of it (and lets face it they'd better, i've had this coming a while now and too many people know about it for it all to just collaspe at the last hurdle), i'm happy.

Heroes season two, or the second volume as they keep reminding us is the proper way to refer to it in "Heroes Unmasked", is now two episodes in on BBC2. Yes, i know, i'm one of the few that actually bothered to wait for it to come to terrestial, but this is partly becuase i kind of like watching things properly (rather than the poorer versions on the web) and also because we have a pitiful download limit of 5GB here at home and 500MB online videos cut through that like a hot knife through butter. Anyway this is the season that everyone has been calling rubbish and although i can see why, (there isn't the definiate objective of "save the cheerleader, save the world"), i still like it. I'd like it more if they focused more on Hiro, who is by far the most likeable and compelling character, but then i think the show could get along just fine if it were just about him. Anyway from what i gathered, people who didn't like it kept refering to how it was more "complicated" than the last season and how it was "generally harder to follow". Great! Now we can get rid of the stupids, religate them to buggering off and picking their noses in a corner and enjoy a show with a little depth for a change! And if that means we also get questions that are raised and not answered for a couple of episodes, like in say....i dont know, LOST, then so much the better! As it is only when a TV programme strings out things for season after season that i ever have an issue with it. So as long as Heroes keeps bring me my weekly dose of Hiro Nakamura based fun for a while, i'm happy.

Right then, its back to a world of raising food prices, sprialling fuel costs and governments who take from the poor and give to the rich! What a facinating modern world we live in! Maybe we could do with some real life Heroes?