About 2

Thanks for stopping by and even more so for wanting to read a bit more about the blog and who created it.

My name is Cat, but I’m known throughout the internet as carocat and on Xbox Live under Fear the CAT. This was meant to be a short one month joke Gamertag that I’ve now had for over two years. Many a times I wanted to change it, but it’s a part of me and changing it would just feel wrong.

I was born and raised in Germany, however attending a school in England for a year when I was 16/17 made me realise just how much I love the United Kingdom, the people and just the way of life. Many are fiercely patriotic, others are set on new ways to differentiate themselves from old traditions, but there are still bits that are just so English, such as the amount of people drinking tea!

In July 2003 I emigrated to the UK or rather to a small to medium sized town just 40 minutes away from London. Even though I live that close to the bustling city and love the atmosphere, I tend to avoid going to London and haven’t been there in over a year. I used to visit it more often when I was still living in Germany! Getting used to the life in the UK and more so life away from all safety nets has been interesting. I’ve lived with some crazy housemates and had some rather annoying problems with banks, landlords and well, work has been difficult.

I have been in the same job for about four years which is testing videogames onsite at a company. I cannot talk about my job, so please don’t ask me any questions about it. All I will say it’s not all fun and games and looking at it from the administrative side and how much stress it causes it’s pretty much like any other office job. No glamour in the industry!

Working there uncovered my passion for videogames which is something I never really showed any interest in before. The game that convinced me to buy an Xbox in November 2003 was Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic which to this day continues to be one of my favourite titles. Other highlights have been Halo 2, Deus Ex Invisible War and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II. In May 2006 I bought an Xbox 360 and some of my favourite games include the Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion, Hitman Blood Money and more recently Colin McRae DiRT and BioShock. This year I’m mainly looking forward to Mass Effect, Halo 3 and Assassins Creed.

The passion for games has also made me get involved on some gaming related forums over the years. Currently I’m mainly to be found on ConsoleMonster and a private forum called OD which is a small forum of like minded gamers who respect each other.

Reading and posting stuff on the internet has also made me realise just how important it is to spell properly. One of my biggest annoyances is the so called ‘txt spk‘ which surfaces more and more around the net. Considering that English is my second language I find it very difficult reading anything that isn’t properly spelled and it takes me on average more than twice as long to read sentences written in txt spk compared to proper spelling.

Apart from spending far too much time on the internet I also love reading, even though that’s greatly decreased over recent years from reading on average four books a week to now one. Favourite fiction authors include Patricia Cornwell, JK Rowling and Sophie Kinsella. I read a variety of books though, everything from fiction, to non fiction and short stories. I tried myself at writing my own story years ago and I do have one which is so far just under 95000 words long, however as I’m not perfect in either German or English at the moment, I find it very hard continuing that.

One of the questions I am often asked by people is what music I listen to. I listen to any music really. Everything from classical music to indie, Rock, Official Soundtracks and just so much more. I only listen to Rap/Hip Hop/Trance/Techno/Pop in moderation though, but I’m always up for new songs and am very happy about any suggestions.

This is just a selection of things I am interested in, there is just so much more to me. Please also read the following:

My previous ‘About’ page is located here and includes 27 random facts about me.

Again, thanks for stopping by.

Cat