I've been on a bit of a downer recently, due to various personal circumstances and the fact that I'm a little bi-polar. It was also my 22nd birthday on monday, and I spent the weekend dreading its arrival. Now, I'm not usually one for hating my birthday. I know people who fill with forboding at it's arrival and hide under the covers until it has the good sense to go away, but I'm usually not one of them. I usually view my birthday as a joyous occasion on which to get completely fucked with my favourite people. For some reason this year was different, possibly due to forementioned personal circumstances, and I must say I spent some of the time sitting in my room crying. Things just didn't seem that joyful. Still, towards the evening I hustled up some kind of gathering of friends. We went to the park vaults and listened to open mic folk guitarists, smoked spliffs outside two churches and eventually stumbled home drunk and kinda content.

Still, determined to not just mildly enjoy my birthday, but to have a rawkous time (What can I say? I'm a stubborn hedonist) I tried again. Jennie and Sion couldn't make it on monday because they'd already made plans, but we agreed to meet on tuesday for a drink. Me and jennie to met up at a shot in the dark (pretty much the only cool coffee house in cardiff, the rest being corporate chains or dire cafes) with sion to catch up later. We sat drinking kinda pricey house wine (I remember, before they had a proper liquor licence, when you could bring yr own and pay a £1.50 corkage charge... Man, those were the days) on plush sofas talking and waiting. Alas, sion never did turn up, having taken to bed feeling rather ill. Still, we ate chunky toast and jam, and drank our way through two bottles of white. We had a pleasant evening, but I still felt it wasn't enough and I ended up going home kinda blue.

But I refused to give up. I knew a really good time could be salvaged, and the week was not yet finished.

and a really good time was indeed salvaged from the emotional train wreck that was my birthday. The following day in fact, when the three of us finally met up. I'm not gonna go into it though, cuz I'm bored of this whingy 'dear diary' shit and I've got more interesting things to talk about.

Out of the blue, I got a call on friday from my friend Gabriel. Turns out he was in Cardiff and did I want to meet up.

Fuck, I hadn't seen him for months and hadn't spoken to him online for a good couple of weeks. Of course I wanted to meet up!

We met on queen street and went for something to eat. Of course, I was on a comedown, and as such the thought of eating was as appealing as chewing on cloves (which taste vile, but having a numbing effect which is useful when your suffering from major toothache and don't have access to any codiene). Afterwards we ended up in a pub playing endless games of pool and drinking endless double JD & cokes and then wandering off to metros - a shitty rock club renowned through the years for its abundance of 14 year olds (much to my chagrin, but he wanted to go, and had been paying for games of pool and buying me drinks all day, so who was I to complain?). Afterwards we walked the 3 miles back to his house talking about philosophy and meta-physics. Ultimately pointless but terribly enjoyable.

One of the reasons I was willing to walk the three or so miles back to his house, as apposed to the 1/2 mile back to my own (You know, apart from the fact that I hadn't seen him for ages, he was going back to manchester on saturday and I really enjoy his company) was the opportunity to see his sweet new box and to see doom3 in action for the first time.

And boy, was it worth the walk. I haven't really had the opportunity to check out a latest-spec PC and I was overflowing with geekly joy. 3Ghz P4, phat external sound card, oggles of RAM and hd space, and the latest 3D card. Pricey but Yummy.

And now on to doom3.

I'm sure many of you have read all the good things said about id's latest venture, hell, some of you may have even played it, but I'm gonna talk about it anyway.

I've been playing id games for over a decade now. I remember regularly going into a computer shop in ripon (a dire miniscule city that didn't even have a cinema when I lived there) just so I could play the original doom on their PCs. They've always delivered on frenzied first-person shooter action, but with doom 3 they've really come of age.

The story, for one, is actually involving. Little bits and pieces of plot are cleverly revealed through interaction with the enviroment. This I feel is kind of a first for id, who have always put storyline secondary to gameplay (rightly so, I feel).

But the sheer thought and effort that has gone into this game is astounding. The attension to detail boggles your mind.

The use of the flashlight as a tension building device is very clever. The game is very dark and you can't use it at the same time as a weapon. This leads to much wandering around scanning everywhere with your touch, only to have to switch quickly to a weapon when you encounter a demon, then discovering that you can't see what your shooting at, leading you to have to switch the torch again. Hitchcock would be proud. The graphics and dynamic lighting are extremely impressive. There's nothing like hiding around a corner only to see the shadow of the cyberdemon your hiding from moving towards you projected onto the wall in front of you. The AI is also the best I've seen. My only gripes are that the enemy models could of been cooler and the gore is not gratuitious enough for my tastes.

Okay, enough about that.

Time to talk about Gabriel and his adventures at GCHQ. GCHQ is the british equivelant of the NSA and gabriel was lucky and talented enough to score a work placement at their head quarters. Unfortunately, no matter how much I pestered or begged him, he wouldn't tell me what they had him doing (official secrets act and what not). All I know is that it was hackerly and would be somewhat illegal if it weren't for the highly suspicious RIP act, and that on several occasions he was faced with severe moral dilemas, and that they have these cool whiteboards that do print-outs of what you write on them.

Okay, I'm done for now. There's probably more stuff I wanted to talk about in this post but I really can't think of anything else at the moment.

Oh yeah, and Invader Zim is insanely cool.