Bleeeurgh

I'm not sure if it's been obvious with the last few posts, but I just haven't been feeling all that up to par these last few nights.  I've felt a little sick-ish (which teaches me to never joke about getting sick, even in the comments of one of Chance's posts) and the overall climate is just interfering with my ability to really process things.  Interestingly enough, I looked back a year and found this post this was basically around the same time (a couple weeks earlier, sure) that suggested a situation much the same as my current one.  I'm going to suggest that it simply speaks to my inability to tolerate climate changes initially, since I'm not sure if there's anything else that would follow a schedule and get me all slumpy like this.  Because I am decidedly in a slump of proportions that I dare not consider, lest I make the hole any deeper than it is already.  That's how slumps work, right?  Right?

Anyways, it's a little more than the weather I suspect and I'll not bore you all with the details (mostly because I don't care to share them), but things have been changing around in my life a bit fairly recently which also might have something to do with my day-to-day.  I got a new job of sorts, which means a newer, shinier flow of cash that has afforded me the ability to actually buy games that I would have otherwise passed up on in favor of games that I simply could not do without.  It's a foreign concept to me at this point, seeing as I've been a regular tightwad the last couple years, but the splurging -has- been a bit therapeutic and will only help myself and my blog in the long run.  In the last week, I've picked up copies of Deus Ex:  Human Revolution, Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2 for the simple fact that FFXIII-2 was on sale for fifteen bucks and I am not about to pass that up since I actually want to play XIII-2.  XIII?  Not so much, but I cannot do things out of order, so I picked it up at the bargain (less bargainy than the sequel) price of twenty dollars at a different store because the one I purchased XIII-2 from was fresh out of copies of the predecessor, much to my chagrin.  And while I was getting XIII, I saw DE: HR and had one of those "Eh, why not?" moments - a literal whim that I have not experienced, or at least not acted on, for months - before grabbing it and throwing down the $40 for the both of them.

I've had my eye on Deus Ex for a while now - probably since before its release on premise and pedigree alone, but I never found the impetus to pull the trigger and I'm not sure why.  It has the aesthetic I crave, it's been touted as a generally pretty good game (aside from a few design flaws) and it offers a level of constrained freedom that I find tantalizing against the more 'actual freedom' design off some of the sandbox games I've been playing as of late.  It is a game that I have wanted, yet I never found the reason to give it that shot.  With any luck, my whim of throwing a twenty dollar bill at it will pay off with dividends and I will be at least half as enthused with it as I was (and remain) over a certain other game that I cannot help but associate with it in my head.  Alpha Protocol was basically -my- Deus Ex in lieu of not being Deus Ex.  The amount of replayability it offered based on making your character different, as most took to doing with Deus Ex thanks to the body mods and such, in the same world to see how it shaped around you was tantamount to wizardry for some back then, just as it remains with Alpha Protocol.

Similarly so with Final Fantasy XIII, I had always intended on picking it up, but I also never really saw a scenario in which I would pick it up for lack of time or desire.  After finding that the shine has, indeed, quickly faded from AssRev, I'm that much more wary of other games that the internet as a whole has similarly disliked, especially FFXIII, as the reasons for its reviled nature are more numerous than several other games combined.  Yet at the same time, those naysayers generally have positive, or at least less damning things to say of XIII-2 which has me intrigued certainly.  Being that I have not actually finished a Final Fantasy aside from 7 and 10 (kind of 6, but it's cheating a little - I played a game from the start of the second half of the game, beat it, and then later started a new game and made it to the point where I picked up my initial play.) and only dabbled in the other titles, who's to say I won't wring some enjoyment out of it?  Aside from common sense and the like.  Yet if I must suffer through XIII to get to its sequel, to the 'fun one', then that's something I'm willing to do.  If I beat Dark Void (well, less beat it and more conquered it with my platinum trophy) for only the sake of spite, than I can muster up enough bluster to soldier through XIII, even if it is a cluster.  (Okay, little forced, but I had to)

With any luck, this little spell I'm stuck in will be gone within the next few days and I can get back into posting things of actual substance.  Seemed to have cleared up last year, at least, so whatever's going on will clear up here as well.  I suspect one of the main problems is my lack of a definite sleep schedule as my job has me getting up and going at times where I would normally be....well, sleeping.  Meaning that I'm sleeping far less overall.  I'm sure I don't have to point out the obvious with that, so add that with the climate change, as well as the thought that I might just have a cold instead of the climate being a thing (or as well as, perhaps) then I suppose it's understandable that I find it difficult to function in the areas that I normally find it fairly easy to function in.  Still, with any luck, I'll get things sorted, but just in case, the next few days might be a little bumpy in terms of what gets posted and when.  Just a heads-up!