I have memories, clouded by sorrow

I hate Christmas. Apart from the fact that it follows hot on the heels of my birthday which I also hate, it's a time when I feel I should be buying presents for my close family, absolutely none of whom I know what to get, at all. I remember how disappointing it was as a kid to open a crap present so I would rather get them nothing than something they don't like, but this just means added pressure. Mostly it's my nephew and niece I want to buy things for but have been given no help from the family as to what they would like. When I was that age I had a long Christmas list, but no, not now apparently.

It's just a load of hassle for no reward. Fed up of it.

Back when I was a regular player of MUDs, the text-based forerunners of Everquest and World of Warcraft, when your character would reach the next level it would send a message to everybody telling you that you had done so, and in return, people would send global messages of congratulations. But there was a feature of their client programs that allowed players to send a command whenever the program spotted some arbitrary text coming in. After a while, people started programming these to spot the 'level up' message on their screen and automatically send a congratulatory message back out, without lifting a finger or interrupting their current battle with a nine-headed dwarf or what-not. Celebration had been automated, to the degree where it meant nothing any more, and where some people didn't even notice that they had actually congratulated someone else on their latest achievement.

And this is what I am reminded of when all these web-stores and mailing lists and online forums insist on sending me 'Merry Christmas' messages, or indeed 'Happy Birthday' ones. Just make it stop! There's no true spirit of congratulation in a line of code written six months ago saying IF date(now).month == 12 AND date(now).day == 25 THEN send_email_to_every_fucker(), so why bother? There are plenty of things in the world that need properly automating - like book shop inventory systems, for example - and sending festive well-wishes is not among them.

Speaking of shop inventory systems, I got rather irritated on Saturday at the complete failure of all the local music shops to actually stock things. SoundControl say "we don't keep them in stock, but can get one for you, in a few weeks". Millennium Music say "sorry, we sold the last one a few days ago". Music Inn say "no, we're all out, and won't have any more until mid January". Does anybody remember the golden days when shops actually had stuff that you can buy? Is it any wonder that internet shopping is taking over? You'll probably still end up waiting 6 weeks for the product since they lie about it being in stock, but at least you didn't have to waste your time travelling to the shop to find this out.

So, I didn't get what I wanted on Saturday. I nearly bought myself a Wacom graphics tablet instead, but managed to hold back on account of me only drawing things about once in every 4 years. Still, that might change if I had one of those. I bought a Christmas present for someone, which is one of only two I bought, because I have no idea what anybody else would want. The people who are getting the presents are not the 2 most important people I know, but are the ones who were easiest to buy for. If I worked on order of importance, there probably wouldn't be any gift giving at all. In the past, I have managed to offend people this way, when one person would be annoyed that they didn't get a present whereas someone less important than them would do. Funny how what is supposed to be a fun time of gift giving becomes a requirement to find appropriate things for a specifically ranked subset of your friends and family. I hate Christmas!