Last night we said goodbye to 2007, and good riddance. Not that 2007 did anything wrong, but come on, who wants some old year hanging around when we’ve got a nice shiny new year sitting right here!
Looking back 365 days at the welcoming of 2007, lets examine how my predictions and premonitions worked out…
First, I’m still using electronic billing for everything but my garbage collection, so I can look forward to another smooth date transition as again I won’t be writing enough checks to accidentally keep writing the wrong year on.
Next, I said I’d eat better… and I have… a little… I get salads when we eat out sometimes, and I’m eating more fruits and veggies. Overall, I’ve shed ten pounds that I’ve managed to keep off in the last year. Yeah, I’m still pushing the needle on the scale over to the “hefty” side, but it doesn’t go as far as it used to. Another few years of this and I’ll be positively svelte!
Onward… MMOs and computers… I did actually cave and got new PCs for the wife and I. I did buy the WoW expansion, and messed around with it. I played the Vanguard beta, and it sucked. I bought a Wii. I bought a 360. And I am, in fact, pretty much done with the PC as a gaming platform, sort of. I canceled all my MMO subscriptions and nothing on the horizon is blowing my skirt up. I apply to every beta that I can and I participate in those trying to help them make a better game, but in the end they all end up not interesting me enough for me to make the buy. The MMO I’m most playing right now is actually Urban Dead which is about as far from WoW as you can get without actually dialing up a BBS to play TradeWars 2002 (which is officially 6 years ago now… where is my intergalactic trade federation? huh? when I see a Presidential candidate address that issue, I’ll know who to vote for). For my fantasy gaming fix, my bi-weekly group has continued to meet and our campaigns progress quite nicely. They may not be massively multiplayer, but they sure are more fun than the current slate of MMOs.
Lots of superhero books did come out, almost all of them for established comic book characters, and I didn’t finish any of my own projects.
I said that the business front was “looking pretty good”, my exact words. The key word here turned out to be “looking”. I’ve come to realize that a person whom I have always believed was only smoke and mirrors is in fact only smoke and mirrors, in a manner of speaking, his machinations and manipulations in the end are much ado about nothing. I keep pressing the Escape key, but I’m still here.
So… what does 2008 look like from here, the first day of the year?
S.O.S.
Same Old Shit, ladies and gentlemen. I suspect in 2008 I will write even less checks (garbage company might start taking credit soon), I will manage to drop another ten pounds (at least), I will continue to play betas but not buy MMOs (I’m pretty sure all the games I might buy will get delayed to 2009 anyway), I will play console games (the ones I already play and new ones coming out all the time, why, the Christmas season alone has produced a good eight or nine games I don’t own that I want to play), there will be more superhero books and business will continue to “look good” while actually being anything but (although, this year as new budgets are approved and hiring goes into higher gears I’m actually working with a recruiter, the only one recently to actually get me interviews).
New resolutions? I resolve to actually rake the yard (provided Georgia lifts its burn ban so I can dispose of the leaves myself, bagging sucks). I resolve to finish building the bar (we have the cabinets, now we just need to put them in and make the counter tops). And I resolve to stop buying crap I don’t need (seriously, I spend too much money on stuff when I should focus on convincing other people to buy it and then lend it to me). I’d make more resolutions, but then I will feel worse when I fail to do them all.
Oh, and if somehow Fred Thompson actually becomes President, I’ll eat my hat… and then I’ll begin weekly posts about how he should just round up Lt. Cmdr. Tom Farrell, Jack Ryan, Ray Levoi, John McClane, and the Law & Order guys and go straighten out all this Middle East stuff. But that is the extent of my campaign promises…
So, welcome 2008! Please don’t hit me in the junk!
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