girlofprey

I have a Playstation 3. I do not have Playstation Network.

Playstation Network is Playstation's online service type thing, for anyone who doesn't know. I don't have it, and generally I'm pretty fine with that. I'm not interested in playing Multiplayer games, I'm not interested in playing Multiplayer mode on any of my current games. I kind of go and play video games to be on my own with an activity, and so I can kick, shoot and run into things with abandon when I'm in a bad mood or just don't care. The last thing I want when I'm playing games is to suddenly be flung into a new one with a bunch of strangers, and have to co-operate with them. Largely. I'm sure the multiplayer experience is lovely for lots of people, and maybe I'd really enjoy it if I actually tried it. But at the moment it holds no appeal for me.

The other main thing you can get through online services is DLC, downloadable content, which is like extra bits tacked onto popular games, or extra items, or sometimes extra - vital - bits of the story that the developers felt like making you pay a bit more for. Again, I'm not really that bothered. I come to most games late enough that by the time I want to buy them, a Game Of The Year edition is out if they've been REALLY popular, which collects the game and all its DLCs onto one physical disc. Awesome.

However, it's starting to look like I might have to get Playstation Network. Because they've started/have continued making things that you actually cannot get anywhere else.

There's a webcomic artist I like and follow on Tumblr, and she was doing some work I think on a game called Skullgirls, or she talked about it a lot anyway. Skullgirls looked really interesting, so I figured great, I'll buy that when it comes out. No. It's a Playstation and XBox exclusive, and you can only get it online! Due to intense popularity, we will be selling it for PCs now! Eventually! 'Eventually', however, means nothing, like it probably sounds. They keep putting the date for eventually back. I literally cannot tell when it will be. Then there's Infamous. I have many issues with the Infamous franchise, but I love the games, and I was really happy that I'd played all of them so at least I couldn't be spoiled for any. But no! They made a new little adventure with vampires! You can only get it online though! No Game Of The Year editions for you! And they might make more adventures in the future! Who knows!!

And then there is Okami. Okami was a game I noticed years ago, before the Playstation 3 was out, before I had a games console. It's about a Japanese goddess fighting demons, who takes the form of a white wolf. I really wanted to play it, but I didn't have a console, le sigh. I still haven't actually used the second hand Playstation 2 I bought a while back, but I did toy with the idea of getting a copy of Okami, so I could play it on that when I did get it out. But then it was okay! I heard they were bringing out a HD version of Okami that you could play on the Playstation 3. So I figured "great, I'll get that!". I trawled the internet looking for release dates, looking for UK release dates. I couldn't find anything. Eventually I got bored of not finding anything and temporarily forgot about it. It was supposed to be in the autumn or winter of this year, and I figured I'd hear about it when it did come out. Then a few weeks ago I saw somebody talking about Okami, and I decided to look and see if it had come out yet, or if the release had been delayed, or if they had some news about when the release date was, or what. It turned out it HAD been released, at the end of October. On the Playstation Network.

So yes. The amount of things I want to get from Playstation Network are sort of piling up, so it looks like I'm going to probably end up getting on it. Even though I've heard many tales of Playstation Network's service being shit and shutting down for weeks at a time. Even though people on Cracked.com keep telling me horror stories about the future of gaming and online security measures (no 5 on that list). To be honest, if those security measures end up happening I'm probably going to need an internet connection anyway, so I may as well get used to it now.

The thing is, apart from anything I thought that getting an internet connection for my Playstation would just be annoying and inconvenient. Having to get wires, having to find a spare phone socket thing, probably have to get dad help me sort it out. It literally only just occured to me this week that we have wifi. And I looked up the Playstation 3 capabilities, and you can totally use wifi on it. So it looks likes it going to be easier than I thought. Assuming the connection works, that is. And assuming it's not too big a drain on our Broadband.

In other news, I totally intended to watch the Text Santa thing last night. But then I didn't. Happily someone had uploaded the only thing I really wanted to watch it for: Snow Whitechapel. A parody and combination of PRETTY MUCH ALL THE CURRENT ITV DETECTIVE DRAMAS I LOVE THE BEST. It is beautiful.

So. Christmas Day and Boxing Day are over for another year, and with them go our obligations to have lots of the family and both kids over to our house at once. And the days themselves were only mildly harrowing. Mostly because my mum was working a night shift at the hospital last night, and my sister sort of took pity on her and left early yesterday and today.

I seemingly forgot how to wrap presents on Christmas Eve, but it all came back to me once I gave up and just started scrunching the paper down. And I managed to get my various bedroom Christmas decorations up before (or around) midnight even. Despite my best efforts to go to bed and get some sleep (at about half 3), my messed up sleeping patterns, being wound up about Christmas and the full bottle of coke I drank only a few hours before going to bed meant I was laid awake until at least ten to seven, but I definitely got some sleep because I woke up, all confused, at nine or so when my alarm went off. I didn't know what my family were doing, because my mum was doing a night shift, but I listened out and they were up, so I got up and went downstairs, with the hopes of getting all my unwrapping out of the way so I could come upstairs and listen to Adam and Joe's Christmas show at 10 o'clock. However, I mentioned it to my parents and because they are lovely and it is Christmas, I guess, they found out how to get it on the TV and let me have it on down there. For three hours. They truly are lovely.

There were plenty of quite lovely gifts, including a new electric toothbrush which it turns out you have to plug into shaving sockets and charge up and stuff, so that'll be interesting to use, at least. Probably the best present was Jon Burgerman's Pens Are My Friends book, which I've been looking at and meaning to buy for some years, and it keeps going in and out of stock, and I get angry with myself every time it goes out for not having bought it yet. But now I don't have to, since I totally have it. Anyway. But the biggest present was. Well. I'd asked for an iPod, because I have a little MP3 player but it's full now and I like enough songs on it that I don't want to have to be removing a lot of them to put new ones on, or removing ones I want to keep to put albums on and then find out I don't care about half the songs on them. So I wanted something bigger/massive. So anyway, I got through most of my presents, and there was only one big box left. Way too big for an iPod. So I opened it, confused, and it was a brand new laptop. Because I'd been talking about having had this one for about 6 years now, since I first went to University, and it keeps playing up because the memory's too low and there's too much on the disk. But I couldn't really afford a new one. So my dad bought me one for Christmas. This is why it's difficult to hate him properly - he's irritating in a number of ways, but then he occasionally goes and does something like this.

So yes. I have a new laptop. And most of the stuff I actually want to keep from this one is already backed up onto a portable hard disk, as of the other week, when I was finally freaked out enough about the idea of my laptop burning out and dying suddenly that I made the effort and backed it up. So setting that up will probably take up some of my Christmas and New Year. And I've decided to be a bit more hands-on or at least pay attention to it this time, because loving my laptop so much and yet not really knowing a thing about it or what to do with it when it has a problem seems fairly ridiculous as of the last few months. So. That's a decision I have made, possibly a New Year's resolution already, if I'm still setting it up/yet to set it up by then. The problem with my small MP3 player remains, my dad apparently told my mum that he was getting me the laptop instead of the iPod/new MP3 player, and if she got me one he wouldn't get that for me. But one of the happy things about my birthday is that it's only three months after Christmas, so if there's anything I don't get then I can always try again then. Hurrah.

Anyway. So, presents, laptop, Adam and Joe. The Adam and Joe show was lovely, complete with ( Spoilers )

Anyway. After the Adam and Joe show, I found a programme about Morecambe and Wise on the TV and watched it, and thoroughly enjoyed it. They're doing a new programme about the early years of Morecambe and Wise and their friendship, and at first from the picture I thought Matt Smith was going to be in it, but then I found out that no, it's my first strange-faced TV love, Bryan Dick. So I was interested anyway. And it is quite lovely, how much they loved each other, and a lot of the sketches are still quite hilarious, even now. There was a bit of weird homophobia surrounding the stories about/celebrity reactions to the bed sketches. But apart from that it was quite lovely.

Shortly after that I finally got dressed and stuff, and shortly after that my sister, her partner, and the kids appeared, in a haze of wildly ripped off wrapping paper. Someone had had the brilliant idea to get one of my nephews a pretend drum kit, so that made things interesting. Then we had dinner, which was a buffet-type affair, and we couldn't all have it at once because there was not enough space in our fancy new dining room. Which mostly meant my dad had had to have his on a tray in front of the TV before going for my sister, her partner and the kids. But we got through it, and then my mum went upstairs for a nap/lie down before her night shift, and my sister, oldest nephew and I played on a new Wii game for a while. My youngest nephew decided that would be a great time to start playing on his new drum set, and we had a bit of a time trying to explain to him that that was fine, but he had to try to do it quietly, since my mum was in bed and she was working later. To his credit, he did do it sort of quietly. For a bit. But anyway, then my sister and her partner decided it was probably time to go, and did so without too much fuss, and my mum came down, and went off to work, and everything was pretty fine.

I watched the Strictly Come Dancing Christmas special, and it turned out I'd spoken too soon about Matt Baker not dancing on my TV for me anymore. And he looks kind of brilliant red. And even Gavin was there. Hurrah. I don't normally watch the Christmas special, I think, and it was a bit more of a shambles than the usual show, but John Barrowman was good, and I like that the judges like Erin and Vince, even though I thought he was a bit stiff, and it was nice to see Matthew dancing again. Then dad and I watched Murder On The Orient Express, and I don't know what other versions of it are like, but this one seemed to end with the moral that ( Possible spoilers )

Anyway. When that finished I came upstairs and eventually got round to checking the new Yuletide stories. I think. I find the archiveofourown website quite confusing. But I was rewarded with new The Baker story, a new Jonathon Harker from Dracula story, a lovely How To Train Your Dragon story, a lovely Despicable Me story, and a Whitechapel Chandler/Miles story! Don't get me wrong, I see and even quite like Chandler/Kent. But Chandler/Miles is about a hundred times slashier and more beautiful, in my opinion, and I had sort of despaired of anyone else in fandom liking it. SHOWER SCENE. Omg. Anyway. And today I found a Bite Me! story, and a Hark! A Vagrant story. Yuletide does not cover all of my best-loved fandoms, sadly, but it still quite brilliant all the same.

Today mostly involved my sleeping in to catch up on all the sleep I didn't have yesterday, watching bits and pieces of various films on TV, talking to my grandma who I haven't seen in quite a while, and then us having my sister, her partner and the kids over for dinner again. Things got a little bit tense, mostly when my sister and her partner and my mum and dad were eating, after my grandma and I had eaten, and we were left in charge of the kids. But it was all pretty fine. And then, as I say, they left without too much fuss before 9 o'clock, and my grandma had left just before they did, so now it is basically all over. Ah, Christmas.

I was thinking of going out shopping tomorrow, since everyone seems to be going a bit nuts with the sales, and I don't want things I like to disappear before I've even had the chance to get them. I might be knackered though, so we'll see. And I'd like to catch up on the Christmas and pre-Christmas soaps that I didn't see because of various things. And my dad wants to try setting up the new computer maybe, and backing some more of my stuff up from this one maybe. So we'll see. Mostly I am thinking of random bits of jewellery and some scarves from Accessorize that they're probably not going to put on sale until February/March, when it isn't cold anymore. So it's probably not that pressing. But maybe.

In any case - Merry Christmas, to anyone who celebrates it. And just general yay, to anyone who does or doesn't. :D