Sunday 31 December 2006

Pic of the day: "I made it the best I could" says my favorite girl from the anime Tokimeki Memorial - Only Love. Then again, don't we all make the year the best we can? Not that this necessarily says much.

2006

Even though I don't believe than anything ends, ever, it is still a convenient day to look back at the year we have chosen to call 2006. (Not that most of us had any say in the matter.) Let me write about my personal life, which is probably not very important, but without which the journal would not have existed, after all!

January was completely dominated by my moving out of the old apartment where I had rented for 21 years, at least 19 of those continuously. I had originally planned to move out before the end of 2005, but I kept excavating my books, comic books and magazines. There may have been literally a ton of them. In January I killed off most of my well over 100 old computer games that I had legally accumulated over the years. And I was still not ready at the end of the month. By some minor divine intervention I still got to a new house... not the new apartment I had rented since November but never got to move into.

February was mostly about getting settled in the new house (which is rented, by the way, just like the apartment was). I had to borrow money as unsecured credit, and learned firsthand how usury is still alive today. I have been paying it down (not to mention paying interest) ever since. But despite working only 90% of a rather poorly paid office job, I have been able to keep up my ordinary standard of living while doing all this. I guess we have a pretty good time here in Norway these days, eh? The beginning of this month was probably also the most hungry in my life, as I had worked hard during the move and not eaten enough. Since then, however, it has gone only one way: Fatter and fatter. But from a pretty meagre starting point.

March saw the Sims 2 expansion Open for Business, which I loved. It also saw my so far latest attempt at a Norwegian diary, KaosNodeland. It is written only infrequently, though, and varies between health whines and political statements. Oh well. The end of the month also saw the computer roleplaying game of the year, Oblivion, which should have surprisingly far-reaching consequences for me.

Early in April I got (bought) the new PC, which I nicknamed Oblivion after the game that made me buy it. I later renamed it Monster, but as you've recently read (unless you just started reading, in which case welcome aboard!) there is a certain irony to the name. Before the year was over, I had to return it after it rained sparks on my desk. It became my main computer pretty quickly, and is also the only one able to run Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 at full speed. Not that I had that at the time. I kept playing Oblivion all month.

May is noteworthy in that this is where I discovered Spiral Dynamics, which has gradually colored much of my later thinking, and led me to discover various other attempts at understanding the sweeping changes in the human psyche, past and present and possible. This was where it began, though, where I finally found other people than myself thinking about the historical changes to the human psyche.

June was the beginning of the hottest summer in living memory. The winter had been long and full of snow, to the point where I wondered whether there would be a spring this year at all. But only a couple months later the heat seemed unbearable, and I started to wonder whether we really want more greenhouse effect after all. Then again, this is my first time living aboveground for a generation... I have always lived in basements, after I moved to this part of the country. (Although the basement where I lived most of the time had pretty large and well insulated windows.) July continued in the same way.

August saw me joining Zaadz, a social website for people who want to change the world for the better. I personally have the ambition to change the world just a tiny little bit, but definitely hope it to be in the right direction. It is a place where it is perfectly OK to be spiritual, so I sometimes write about such things in my little blog there instead of writing it elsewhere where it is only seen as hair in the soup. Not that this keeps me from writing the occasional white entry here, but then this is my home on the Net. The month also saw the arrival of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9, the best speech recognition program so far.

In September, the heat wave was finally over, thank the Light. I finally quit the online massive multiplayer game Dark Age of Camelot which had been my main game for some of the years I wrote this journal, but which had completely given way to City of Heroes. In the latter, I joined a supergroup consisting of member of the CoH livejournal community, which proved a good move. I enjoyed the game more and had better social relations to the other players. Not that this says much... the trend the last couple years has been generally toward a more solitary lifestyle.

In October my autist uncle died. We did not really know each other, but he had still profoundly influenced my life without any of us intending for this to happen. My long-lasting fear of "retards" and mirrors and my fascination with the human psyche probably have their roots to my early childhood and the stranger in our house.

NaNoWriMo - the month formerly known as November - was dedicated to writing 50 000 years of novel. As a result, the journal lagged at least two weeks behind at the end, a new record. But it was worth it! I won, for the first time, this challenge. I guess the improved dictation software helped, but also experience, and some luck. Even so, I ended up writing some pretty weird stuff at the end. That's par for the course in this mass writing event, though.

December saw yet another new computer, this time a laptop. The old one at work was growing old and starting to fail, so I took the newer one to work and bought a brand new at home. It was my first Dell machine, and so far I am happy with it. Then again, so far I mostly use it to play The Sims 2, which I have decided is the best computer game ever made, despite the latest expansion pack (Pets) which I hated. The Inspiron 6400 is my first dual-core machine, and this architecture seems quite well suited for this game. On the other hand, my Monster machine "exploded" toward the end of the month in a shower of sparks and smoke.

Of course this is not nearly all I do. But if you want to see every day for itself, you shall have to visit my archive. There is no shame in that: Even I had to do it to write this entry! ^^