The Christmas/Xmas/Hannukah/Saturnalia/BUY OUR STUFF Season

We had a virtual Christmas party which was actually pretty good - it was on Gather.Town, which is a platform where you make your own little avatar and walk around a space to speak to different people - the video chat works by proximity so we could have our own little breakout groups. My boss (who organised it) had set up different activities in different spaces so there was stuff like pictionary and Tetris going on, and we had a Christmas quiz too (where nobody Googled the answers because we're not all lame like your colleague, Jimbob).

My Christmas plans have changed a bit - I'm still going to see my parents but now neither of my sisters will - they'll be spending Christmas with each other. So everyone in our family is still seeing someone, but not for as long as they'd like and a pervading sense of anxiety. I think you summed it up perfectly Cappa.

Gather.Town sounds like the bees' knees! I've wondered in the past, given how poorly virtual chat programmes deal with large numbers of people, why somebody couldn't set up a virtual pub with a proximity-based chatting service. Sounds like somebody's done that! Bang goes my entrepreneurial idea I suppose.

@Jimbob wrote:

On a different note (sorry, I haven't been here for 8 days) we had our office charity quiz thing last week, which was quite good, except on our team was a new guy (who I've never communicated with before now and never seen in real life) who kept Googling the answers, is if we were all going to be on board with him cheating. I don't get that - it's just a bit of fun, and we don't have that sort of competitive attitude at our company.

Pretty sure that's grounds for immediate dismissal.

He sounds like a little turd.

I think he's quite young; I've found a common pattern (therefore this might just be prejudice) of some of the younger team members who perhaps haven't had a long permanent full-time job before, and are used to working in e.g. retail where they are treated as disposable resources, therefore feel no more loyalty to a company while working for them as they would as a customer choosing one place over the other. This I do get, and if I am completely honest may have had that attitude once upon a time. I've seen it with a couple of the newer peeps. Also, I think, going with a programmer-y "clever" mentatility, he was probably also thinking he was clever for finding e.g. the answer sheet from the chocolate bar quiz that the team had used. But we're all aware that we could have done that, but also aware of the feelings of our colleagues.
Not making excuses for him, but I'm hoping that attitude dissipates once he's been with us for a bit; I know some of the guys I've dealt with have gradually got better. Although I never would've cheated on a quiz though.

Have a chuffing great Christmas all! Even Jimbob's colleague.

I'm pretty much all done Christmassing now!

Last weekend I had one of the girl's I'm seeing over and made her an attempt at a Christmas roast with what I could find here.

Then this morning I woke up at 6am to skype the family and open all the pressies I'd received in the post. I followed that up with a trip to the cinema to see the first showing of the new Pokémon movie. Then it was a day at work, albeit with a nice lunch break in which myself and my besties exchanged gifts and made everyone else in the company extremely jealous.

Got lots of Nintendo goods, natch.

Not a bad day, only spent a few hours at my uncles and got this haul from everyone



Not a lot of tat this year and got something I wanted with the Blue Series Controller along with the cash which will go towards some new trainers, maybe a game like Sakuna (Waiting on the Balla report) in a sale or just in the bank hoping for that Monster Hunter Rise Special Edition Switch.

Hope you all had a nice Christmas.

Happy Christmas everyone! In terms of the games, I got Bubble Bobble 4 Friends... just in time for Tier 4 to make 2 of those 4 friends unavaiable.

Tier 4 Christmas is the worst, sorry Jim. Next year...

Tier 4 Xmas could be worse. For example, you could be in the same household as your mother, who works in retail, and discovers that 4 different people in her department have COVID, and therefore has to get a test immediately - and she's also in her 60s, so possibly more vulnerable.
Hm.

...ouch. Hope she's okay Jim, that sounds rank rotten.

Yeah, it came back negative, so we've just got some other shit ailment.