BlackD

@dryker: couldn't have said it better myself. I habitually listen through old episodes while going about my daily life. I'm not sure I could bear to do so now. This really sucks and it's affecting me more than I ever thought it could.

My girlfriend started smoking again last year after having quite for a couple of years. It started back up again slowly by smoking at parties or nights out, and then by buying packs to have just one cigarette, and then giving away the rest of the pack. There are lots of things that people do to convince themselves that they can smoke casually, but for former smokers it's a very slippery slope. It's best to avoid temptation by not going outside with friends/co-workers when everyone steps out for a smoke. It sucks and it's ostracizing yourself a little, but to do otherwise is asking for trouble.

Other than that, take the money you got from not smoking for a month and go buy an iPad 2. Or, more wisely, pay down some debt. I'm sure anyone could use an extra $6K a year.

I suppose I should have titled my post something relevant to what I was talking about instead of something that I was looking at...

I work more than full time, and my home life doesn't allow for much game time. I get maybe 3-4 games completed per year now so I need to be really selective about what I play, and for that reason I generally need to stay away from endless black holes like Fallout, Burnout Paradise and Mortal Kombat. Right now I'm trying to finish Arkham Asylum so I can play Arkham City and Uncharted 3. If I'm lucky I'll be able to squeeze Portal 2 in there before the year's end.

I sometimes wonder if I'm trying to hang onto the scraps of something by spending far more time absorbing video games news and views than I do actually playing games these days. I listen to the Bombcast back-catalogue fairly often and I'm thankful that they still take the time to put it out consistently, but I worry that my gaming hobby may be slowly winding down, having been squeezed between the sides of my many other time commitments. And that's sad, particularly because I don't have anything with which to replace it. Maybe I'll get back into taxidermy.

GTA IV, Red Dead Redemption and L.A. Noire all came out in late April/May so I wouldn't be surprised to see this game come out around the same time in 2012. By the time they show trailers of these games they're usually pretty far along in development.