Past my bedtime

I got my state refund already. It feels kind of empowering to get earned income credit - nice to know I've actually made some money. Of course I'm still dirt poor but that does not bother me as much as it used to. I feel like if I got rich I'd get lazy and turn into some kind of asshole.

But speaking of money, since I've got such a fat refund coming, I'm thinking of getting an Xbox. Yes, I can finally catch up with all the bratty overpriveledged 12-year-olds on my street in terms of personal propery value. I swear to fucking god kids these days have so much crap, it's worth more than my car. An Xbox seems like the logical choice for a "casual" gamer like myself - all of my friends have Wiis so the few titles I'm actually interested in for that are accessable - and anything on PS3 will most likely be ported to the Xbox, so I can play it without shelling out an extra two-hundred dollars for essentially the same thing. I'm not huge fan of Microsoft but I must say I'm interested in the indie gaming culture that's forming thanks to Xbox Live and XNA. If you are unfamiliar, XNA is a Microsoft-funded game development suite where people who are good in C++ (curse me for learning Java) can program their own stuff and distribute it on Live. Some of the stuff I played with at college was pretty awesome, the running favorite being a title called "In The Pit," a non-visual game, with added bonus points for the silly voice-over.

And speaking of games and gaming, I've come to a kind of sad realization that I have nearly nothing in common with anyone I grew up with anymore. It isn't just the poor thing - while none of my childhood friends are rolling in dough, I end up being the one who opts to keep going in school instead of jumping into a career. And as for interests, that territory has been barren for quite some time. I've stuck with writing, for better or for worse, and writing about stuff other than games, which is all any of them are really concerned with. It isn't that my childhood friends are bad people - I'm lucky as fuck to have had and still have them - but there just isn't that intellectual connexion anymore, and that is sad.

It doesn't help that I have not fully going into the whole internet thing - I'm 26, have been to college, and don't have a Facebook, so people need to go out of their way and email or call me to invite me somewhere (in my defense, if it's really that much of a hassel, fuck off.) I got rid of my MySpace years ago and while there are some rather silly pictures of me still floating around out there on the Interwebs, I don't exist. And these days that makes staying in touch with people pretty damn hard.

But what are you going to do? Everyone has to grow up sometime, and that implies that people can grow apart. It's sad but thats life. And by now it's tme to get the hell over it and move on.

Oh yeah, as far as my projects go, I'm distracted, so fucking sue me. Everyone else is.