I was posting a question for the lastest politican to pretend to care about R18+ being introduced and asking what the hold up was and thought it best if he knew my particular bias on the matter. And by bias I mean where I was coming from, i.e my history on the subject. Then I realised something terrible. If you judged by the amount that I play games and the involvement of everything around those games (i.e the goldeneye deathmatches, merchandise etc), I would have be, and it pains me to say this, considered onlya casual gamer*

*I vowed to NEVER play those facebook game apps. I draw the line there.

Ouch! That hurt. Direct hit captain!

Then I think about it. I occassionally do nothing but play games on random weekends when I don't won't to go out, or don't have money too. Occassionally I won't play games for weeks on end. It goes in cycles between my books and my games.

Maybe this isn't all that bad. I get most of the references to games when someone brings it up but can still go out into society and converse as if I am a reasonable, rational adult (I'm not). Surely that would be a good thing, right? Best of both worlds kind of idea.

So I test it out. Normally I resist talking about replaying the Legend of Zelda: A link to the past to my 'normal' friends who only look at me blankly when I mention these. Then I get my geek on when talking to my closest friends who get my fantasy/paranormal romance/horror books or my games. Now I'm not being mean or elitist about the difference between normal, booknerds or gamers, especially as I consider myself the last 2. It is simply fact that if I mention Laurell K Hamilton's latest porn, um I'm sorry I meant to say 'horror' novel to anyone not a fan of paranormal stuff then people start wondering about my sanity and that gets really old, really fast. So sadly I simply stop talking about it when I'm around those people *the world's smallest violin is playing right now*.

So what happens? It seems that popular culture is determined to **** up my system. Thanks to that abomination Twilight (which sadly I have read and own - hey its not ALL bad if you remember that you reading this from the perspective of a 17 year old hormonally challenged MORON of a girl) it seems that Paranormal is 'in' at the moment. This means there has been a plethora of terrible stories that normally, would not have otherwise been released and have allowed to be spawned into the world. Then on the game front Wii got normal people off the coach and onto the Wiifit board and those stupid DS boutiqueyand imagine games got girls into gaming.

At first I thought this would be a good thing since its becoming more mainstream then I maybe I can mention some important things that are important, to me at least. You know, whilst talking to my normal friends slip in a bit about the Mariokart on the Wii and its faults (NO individual battle mode? What were you thinking Nintendo!). Or maybe mention a little about the Tolkein books to my gamers. After all since they made it a film and a huge number of games, surely they will get what I'm talking about when I start mentioning hobbits now?

Um, this did not happen.

At my friends parties (they bought a Wii) I generally beat them, a lot. The husband takes it well but his wife, well how should I put this? Not so much. Maybe if she had my 2 older brothers beating the crap out of her on N64 golden eye for 2 years (after those 2 years I held my own) she would have developed a thicker skin. Sadly even when I don't try too hard it just seems to just happen. Not always but a fair amount of the time. Then my gamer friends were not interested in hobbits and the myths behind it, just the warhammer books and how big the guns were.

Sadly this means that I still have no one person who bridges over 2 of those categories so its back to square one, but things are even worse now. There are crapper books being released in my favourite book genre. Some brat is trying to sell me that DS boutique gameand all my friends think I LIKE that crap!

*Sigh* I 'm going back to my room now. Call me when there is a Harry Potter party on okay?