The Realms of Xan

Cognitive Link

2008-06-01T23:47:00.000+01:00

To exemplify a point, here's Cognitive Link:

Indubitably I meandered along the shifting path of stillness as I looked upwards at the flowing floor. With warping sky did I see the fluffy death approaching from behind, but alas, did it miss me with it's velocity and brevity. A spin and spun later and My person arrived at the place I was currently leaving, waving hello to myself as my back waved goodbye. Seeing a circular pillar move sideways defied my logic so I pressed through the door of wall and looked inside.

The swirls around me abated to the neon recesses of a two by four which repeatedly passed through my nasal canal like a goldfish of time. Sneezing the proliferating profusion outwards into the technicolour abyss gave rise to a gargantuan utterance of the ninth level of biscuits. Crumbs my lady, for the crumbs of wrath shall descend upon my being and erode to the core of my temporally misplaced grandeur. With such snippets of edible essence I pressed onwards through the blend of gravity and light that was the passage till I stumbled upon the incorporeal form of tomorrow basking in the darkness of parenthood. What child did I see before me?

"Things are the noise of the void." Gibbering, their forms warped inside around as the light shone through the particles of the tissue plastered on the walls of the cage. Children and mushrooms blend and splice to form the skeletons of the heart, joy ripping apart envy with spurious limbs. Excitedly, I bounced forwards to feel the sight before me as my mind wandered into the next planar existence, looking for a speck of quiet vibration. Instead my mind found a taste too fantastic to reveal, it's nose gazing at the scene of figure skating.

The little critter belched his soul through my skin as it reverberated around the mollusk. Trails of the rainbow glimpsed through a shimmering glaze trampled across the bull as it charged the thoughts of madness. Displacing the objects of royalty came the process of kittens, rampaging amidst the vampires of the Pacific as teeth ripped the carpets of the sinners. Alas, did I know the exaltation of the pygmies as their fires froze the depths of the cupboard. Forsooth, such was the setting awaiting me with its impatience, tapping its mantis upon the stove.

Shards punching through the hoop as the billiard cries out in delirium, shocked by the cable of the glass hat. I watched backwards as the dance folded upon the cards of the sun, hate of the deceiver plummeting through the walls of revolution. To declare, I did see a Newton as it bounced past the ford, trails of death curling around mentors which clucked the tendrils of life. Avast, I forged onwards, hearth berating the jewels inverting around my dilapidated comments and such did I see the scale of the bread inherent within the hose.

The mice chattered as their shapes whirled through the spectrum of mammalian reptiles. Purple fur sprouted forth as the chimes giggled past, a tap dance of phonetics sliding through the inverted landslide. Edging southwards I did see such a waste, a rhythm of a fountain shimmering in the base pixel. Alas, such work came jaundiced, marred by a blessing of the leprechaun as it darted forwards. Darting it did for I took heed of flabbergasting instruments.

Gasp yodeled the mongoose upon the tipsy summer chime, metallic rumours mitigating sweeps of acidic breezes. Did not the crowing of the balloon incite the hysteria of the peeping drivel? Yea, for kooky was the twitter chatter upside the green fender of peaceful handkerchiefs. Gloriously did I stumble through a duck of the vortex bosom, tied vastly underneath yeast sprinkled pine cones. Scents hammered on the door of the lids, furious echoes of whistling igniting water of the walls. Forsooth, verily I did crumble like teeth at the presence of the nothing as several giggled like a stoat.

Aghast, the teaspoon merrily pivoted like a train in a blender, the soothing shrieks melting the planes in a torrent of dandelions. Entranced, the cup slid forwards out of the outside, into the sky of the weather. Tissues abounded in the realm of the twiddly spelunkers. Fizzing weasels larked in the summer house as the catastrophe atrophied in the glare of the nuclear fridges. Alone, adrift was the state of the being in the mind whilst the ball of the sitting spuds unraveled like an orange in moulting season. Through the unpleasantness came the soft wail of the turtle as a spork flitted through the air like a rock on imagination, the drug coursing through the rafters of its logistics.

Silicon tapped the nuance of removal in the yellow blend of the charm bell. Excited spit the morning drill in the essence of the blasphemy candy, a twirl of hollow solidity channeling the revelry of the salon belly explosion. Fish inverted like a canine of the paper, expressed dreams shriveling like the tofu inherent in the synergy. Gone, the usurper was gone into the gates, knots and lines twisting the fabric conditioner of seventh dementia, a cuckoo spiraling death as the blue pane glimmers. Conversations ebb like reapers, faint traces of the gelatin kissing the nights flowers. Cherries exponentially split, the atomic humidity forgotten in the haze of people. Spite runs amok through the entire constellation, a forgotten player in the remembrance of fog and spice.

Expeditions did arise in the meandering local, a herculean fish rapping amidst the slumbering slices. Kettles squawked night tables of which conflagration was an inverse method of higher drowning. Walking forever determined the fractiousness of bespoken personages, faltering within a cycle of a ladle. Spinning frivolity erased the lark of chance as they frolicked aimlessly through walls and clouds of viscosity. The computational gardener archived the assiduous qualities of the voracious delvers, for their candor was not without graceful bawling. As a robust whisper warbled through the glen of misunderstanding, the lewd kelp chattered and, dancing, returned to the provost from whence it held law. Picking up the complete works of the pieces left in deft squares of triangles, the gardener mourned the gaining of insight, the mouldering view untamed by the rigors of temperamental youth. Alas, such wasn't the greatest of nothings that such a vocation, faltering in step without holdings, decried the pagoda of dreams, for it was glorious, yet woke constantly and irrevocably. Misery blossomed from a multitude of wreaths due in whole to jubilant messengers ferrying ideological structures of ducks. Quacking, such quaking, the pure language of the heavenly hedonism evident amidst the divinity of boredom. For, as was wont, sooth was said drearily alongside the threads of everlasting mediocrity lurking between the mushrooms. A laugh of the book derailed the segment of hot time for the digital remembrance questionably forgot the bubbling of the gushing metal strut. Eventually the pass was countered with the crevasse of posts, typicality erasing the nature of the lemming.

Such was the nature of a psychoanalytic warble.

Like a phoenix I am, booyah!

2007-08-08T02:09:00.000+01:00

Wow, it's certainly been a long time eh? Since Februrary very important things have been happening, like still being with my wonderful girlfriend, playing a crapload of Pokémon Diamond, spending a vast amount of time reading Black Library novels, socializing at my University gaming club SWARM where I'm now the Communications and Events officer on the three-man committee and generally living and having a moderate amount of fun. I still work at ASDA and get a respectable rate, so that's not too bad. Another interesting tidbit of information is that I've finished my first year of University. Though I didn't get the grades I was hoping for, I still got a solid happy pass so it's not too bad. Something to work on this coming academic year, no doubt. University was, for the most part, bearable. I reckon my slightly lower grades were probably a factor of complacency, panic and not revising till two weeks before all the exams. Possibly a bad idea, but at least the first year doesn't count towards the overall grade. SWARM itself goes incredibly well and, in my uni week, it's essentially the point I live for and is a hell of a lot more enjoyable. As law isn't exactly a passion of mine and merely something I can do, you can guess it gets a tad... 'wearing'. Oh well eh?

Something rather nifty indeed is the Soul Society has revived after a fashion. There's new blood on the forum, one of whom is an excessive poster of good quality, so that's extremely reassuring to see. The other new comer shows promise, but currently hasn't posted much yet, so I guess I'll have to wait and see how it all develops. I've rekindled my whole riddle fiasco with a series of rapid fire riddles which have gotten more impressive in terms of prizes as more people have begun taking part. Though one forum regular and mate of Skype said the riddles often seemed like they could be about anything I'm hopeful they're not all so confusing and unspecific. Since my characters on the forum are all XPC's now, or rather 'Xanthier Player Characters', I generally don't do much roleplaying myself. I tend to just act as the Storyteller as before, though every now and then I jump in if it looks entertaining. Latenter and pals aren't entirely dead yet, oho no, not close to retirement at all. Once this post is over I'll be updating yet another riddle, so kudos to the people who've got right answers.

I've also spent a fair amount of time on two other forums, those of Earth Eternal and Pokecharms. The first concentrates on an MMO in the making. Google it and check it out, it's pretty cool. I go by a similar alias there and have a small pseudo-Guild set up called 'The Enscaled'. There was a competition to add extra races and I was one of the 3 winners with a reptilian race called the Lisian, based on geckos. They look pretty damn cool, so I formed the Guild with the aesthetics based on them yet open to everyone. It's a gallery of rogues in a sense who all fight for themselves and, when personal gain is possible, for the Guild itself. The other forum, Pokecharms, is naturally about Pokemon and it's a pretty damn cool place. Though understandably there are waves of 'n00bs' every now and then the admins and moderators are pretty sharpish when it comes to warning and banning people. There are two people there who are incredibly good at spriting and one in particular has fulfilled ridiculous numbers of requests, all the ones from me for a start. My entire team is sprited as cosplays by her, she's an awesome friend.

Just to round things up for now, spending time with my girlfriend is utterly blissful. It's been about a year and five months now which amazes me. The fact everything is going so well and we're happy together just makes some aspects of life seem utterly surreal. I must be one of the luckiest people I know, and it bloody rocks.

I also still go down to Games Workshop on Tuesdays, and yesterday I went down briefly. Instead of staying there for the evening, as is the norm, my girlfriend and I decided to come back to mine to watch anime and what not. All in all a pleasant and relaxing evening away from a vast number of young and annoying children in the store, so a good tactical move I reckon. At any rate the riddle update beckons, so I'll be off for now. With luck I may be able to write here once a week. failing that I guess I'll stick with the incredibly sporadic updating schedule. At any rate, 'Yo' to all my friends reading this, and adios. See you all next time.

~ Xanth

Still alive.

2007-02-17T22:07:00.000Z

Well wow. It's certainly been a long time since I last made a post eh? I'm actually only making one now just to keep this place 'alive' as it were, since it'd be a shame to have it die completely. Who knows, as I paint more models I may even start putting more pics up here. One new D&D campaign starting this coming Monday has me playing a Warforged Paladin, and I'm quite proud of the model so far. All I had to alter was the two arms, armour on the front of the shoulders, the weapon and the lack of a shield. Though a mate said the pose looked slightly off, due to the positioning of the feet and arc of the hammer, I still think it looks pretty nifty. At any rate all the robes are (almost) finished, as is the shield. It only needs another thin layer on the cloak for final highlights before it gets a layer of matte varnish to remove some of the ink's shine in the deepest recesses. I still want to try painting Celtic knot work along the edge, but I reckon I'll finish the rest of the model first. At any rate, till next time.

Bleh.

2007-01-07T22:02:00.000Z

So tired.... I don't feel like posting at all, and haven't for the last couple of days. This means I'm likely to reduce the frequency of posting to every couple of days or every week. Blarg, need sleep....

Retrospective.

2007-01-04T23:01:00.000Z

To start with, a smaller post about yesterday as I didn't get the time to write it when I should have -

On wednesday I woke up early and didn't exactly feel amazing. I had a slightly runny nose and a sore throat, so I assumed a mild cold was attacking me. Regardless I was slightly happy as my wireless stuff arrived today - a wireless card for my PC (just in case) and a wireless router. Annoyingly I had to call both my ISP and Linksys to try and set it up thanks to the craptacular Speedtouch USB modem, but neither could really help. They just said to get a modem with an ethernet port. Well bummer. Later on when in uni I spoke to a couple of mates and they said just to put in all the details, such as DNS, in the router setup page and it'd work like a modem but alas, it didn't. When I got home that night I just bought a modem with two ethernet ports anyway, so that'll arrive tomorrow with any luck. Anyway, at SWARM a Magic the Gathering draft was run and so I happily took part. It was only the second draft I'd ever been in but it went rather well. I lost the first round rather annoyingly and in retrospect was even more annoyed when my mate realised I could of won had I remembered a card in my graveyard with a flashback cost. It'd have let me draw a card, another mountain, allowing me to actually play a blocker. Bah! On the plus side I completely flattened my next two opponents in the next rounds with three wins out of three. Accordingly I came third out of eight overall, whilst my friend who beat me came fourth. Oh, how ironic. The two booster packs which constituted the prize weren't fantastic, but it was lots of fun taking part. When I got home I felt crappy, so went to bed.

Today when I woke up I felt abysmal. I had a headache, a very runny nose, a harshly sore throat and stomach pains. I also got that excruciating pain which results in trapped air in the intestines (it's is incredibly 'not nice'), had a nosebleed and generally felt like death warmed up. Not good overall then. Since I felt this way I just went back to bed and slept, or at least wandered between consciousness and unconsciousness, all day till about 11 pm. When I got up again I felt one hell of a lot better, but it does mean I had absolutely no time to revise tort, which is a slight problem. Tomorrow I'll be going into Lewes Court, hopefully if it's open, to prepare my court report then in the afternoon I'll need to revise tort. My plans aren't entirely scuppered, just mildly inconvenienced. Dark_Alex also released firmware 3.03 OE-A for the PSP today and it's incredibly nifty, what with supporting PSX compression. Excellent stuff, excellent. At any rate I'll leave it for that for now as I need more rest to prevent collapse. Till next time.

New Year

2007-01-02T23:51:00.000Z

Right, another New Year's Day has come and gone relatively well for me. Yesterday I slept through the day (as I'd not slept the night before) and as such I woke up at around 10 pm. Resolving to (finally) do some actual law work I started preparing the materials for my tort case note and started work between 10 pm and 11 pm yesterday, finishing at 9 am this morning. Yeah, it took a while. This is probably because I spent large chunks of it playing Guild Wars Nightfall and making sure I got the new Christmas hats. Thanks to a handy 15 minute gap between the celebrations in Lion's Arch and Kamadan (Guild Wars Factions and Nightfall cities respectively) I was able to grab all four hats in just the two sittings. Unfortunately I'd completely missed the Halloween event, but oh well. Not witch hat for me, meh. When I bought Nightfall I actually assumed that since it was after Christmas I'd miss the celebrations. Go figure they ended midnight on New Years Day in some region of America, don't know exactly which timezone. It was pretty handy. At any rate I did get the tort case note done, though as it was only 1,000 words I had to do a ridiculous amount of editing and I was still 42 words over. Bah, working with just 1,000 words is harsh. 1,500 is much easier to handle as it generally needs less pruning.

At 9.50 am my girlfriend arrived which was great, and it wasn't long before she was having a look at Guild Wars (most notably I was showing her the different dances for the professions) and playing Rayman on the Wii. She seemed to despair that she was poor at the minigames without knowing that she wasn't really at the beginning so some of the games weren't supposed to be incredibly easy to pull off first time. Several frustrated dancing attempts later and I directed her to the first ones which she did very well in. It's all about practice really. That ate up most of our day, but eventually we both went to Games Workshop. We had a nice meal together at the noddle place after our game of Mordheim. I used my undead heroes and buffed up a load of human ones for her to use. Her men were generally better than mine, with the exception of my vampire. He won the game for me as he tirelessly ate half her warband on his own. Nifty. I also had a game of Warhammer 40,000 against the Dark Angel player I've beaten 13 times in a row. Make that 14 now. I went first and the poor bugger got annihilated. He lasted till turn 6 however, mostly as stuff was deep striking in, but as stuff appeared it got slaughtered. Poor guy, he needs to seriously rethink how to play his army and how to specialise with it.

Once I got home I had the first episode of Afro Samurai to watch. If you don't know about it, look it up. Suffice to say the episode was pretty damn cool. I'm most definitely going to be following the series. As that wraps everything up, till next time.

Even more skipping.

2006-12-30T22:53:00.000Z

I didn't bother writing posts for thursday and friday as I was far too tired to bother. On thursday I went round to my girlfriend's place for the day, and on friday I supposedly did revision but didn't actually get much done unfortunately. At any rate I'll write a rather brief account of today. I went in to work early as that's when my step mum was able to drive me in, so I actually had a big breakfast which was nice. Work itself wasn't too bad even though it did drag on a bit. During my breaks I mostly had a rest, since I wasn't exactly feeling pumped full of energy, but I got through the day alright. When I went round my girlfriend's place we mostly spent time together chatting, then had dinner and I challenged her to a few more games of chess (continued on from thursday). With time I reckon she'll improve, as at the moment she's essentially a beginner. Even though I made a stupid mistake here and there I still only lost four or five pieces a game, always eroding her down to just a King. It'll be nice to gradually teach her how to improve, as then we can have close matches and what not. At any rate after I got home I watched Kiba and Death Note, and both updates were good. Kiba had an armoured Amil Gaoul, whereas Death Note had Light working for the police investigation. Having the real Kira needing to pretend to be Kira for the cops strikes me as very funny. At any rate I'm tired again, so till next time.

On time!

2006-12-27T23:45:00.000Z

Wow, a post I didn't have to roll back. I'm impressed with myself. I didn't go to bed last night as I didn't think there was much point. I was supposed to get a call from my mate when he left to go to uni so we could meet up, but he forgot to call. He then didn't call for a couple of hours assuming I'd go in anyway, even though I'd pointed out I'd go to uni when he called me. On the plus side thanks to this I got a few hours of rest though I didn't fall asleep. When I eventually did meet up with him it wasn't long at all before the pair of us were picked up by another SWARM friend and we went to (yet another) SWARM friend's house where the four of us, a sister and her boyfriend played a Settlers game. For my first game I did pretty poorly, as a black ship utterly stopped all of my development. Meh. I had an hour or so of rest as I sat away from the game, and I eventually returned to watch them all play Niagara. The dinner there was quite nice, sausages and mashed potatoes. When we took our leave we went back to uni and round my munchkin mate's room where we played a fair amount of Tekken 5. I did rather well, though the guy who hadn't played it at all before became very good with Tina very quickly. It was funny to take part as to begin with we had to keep tweaking the handicaps.

After that it was time to go home and so off I went on the train as the munchkin went to his own home. In my free periods during the day I played more Rengoku II, and annoyingly I died after clearing half a level without saving. This meant I couldn't really just turn off and on again, as I'd lose a load of progress. As such I had to trek back to my room of death to reclaim all the previously equipped weapons. Thank god I keep a load of spares, as it's something I learnt from the first game. Never be without weapons, punching someone armed with several guns and blades isn't really a viable tactic. After getting home I did a few anime and PSP searches but started feeling quite tired, so I'm off to bed now. Till next time then.

Seeing more family.

2006-12-26T23:48:00.000Z

I had to get up relatively early this morning. It was another day planned to spend with family, this time one of my step mum's daughters and her husband. They're really nice people and I've met them quite a few times before, so it was nice going round there and meeting up with them. For the most part everyone watched a lot of TV or generally had a chat, and eventually we all had a big dinner and a large amount of dessert before four of the five of us played a game of 'Deal or no Deal'. It's... not really the type of game I go for, but it was still mildly entertaining when I got rid of the high cash totals. It wasn't too long after that when the time for us to return home arrived, but I spent a fair amount of my time their dangling a cat toy for their two kittens. They're the size of adult cats now, though not quite old enough to really be called adults. They're long haired, and one is a nice smoky grey and the other is mostly black with a grey underside. They're lovely cats. On the way there and back I spent most of my time playing Rengoku II: Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N. since I'd placed it back on my PSP memory stick and I like it quite a bit. I'm a fan of the Rengoku games even though most reviews trash it. I personally like the game music, the levels, shooting the crap out of enemies and upgrading the Adam unit. Some of the weaponry is immensely fun. For some reason when I first got it I played it for about three hours then set it aside. This is probably due to testing other games, but I'm not sure why I didn't pick it back up. At any rate I'm a lot closer to completing the main game now.

When I did get back I quickly checked for anime updates, new PSP news, then updated the forum and added another four new Artifacts on top of the six I added yesterday, and also added another ten purchase-able items. Other than that however I didn't do much else. I only really had more Jonathan Creek running as I went about talking to mates over Skype. Not overly eventful really, so I'll call it a day there. Till next time.

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

2006-12-25T23:51:00.000Z

I decided to skip the post yesterday in favour of writing a post spanning both the eve and day itself. Though I don't believe in Christmas itself, what with the whole religious aspect, I do happen to be a happy capitalist and therefore don't overly mind promoting the consumer angle. At any rate yesterday I had to go into work, and it started off with a mad rush. When I got there early the store had the main doors closed, and there was a fairly large crowd gathered in front of them. It... wasn't overly pleasant to see from my viewpoint. Thankfully as the day wore on the number of customers steadily decreased. By late afternoon, roughly 4 pm-ish, I was only having one or two customers every ten minutes, so that was all good. It made the afternoon a lot more bearable I must say. In the morning I was nearly falling asleep due to only two hours of rest earlier, thanks to the Nintendo Wii. It's a fun console. Anyway, after work I went with the aid of my step mum, who actually drives unlike me, and picked up my girlfriend. We had a Christmas Dinner together with my family then she had a lot of fun playing on the Wii. She's 'fallen in love with the console' according to her own words. I assume, therefore, that she wants one. Considering her dad also wants to get one as he thinks it sounds like a good family investment, things look good for her.

After that she had to go home unexpectedly early for no reason at all, and when I asked her mum today she seemed quite confused. Odd and vexing, but oh well. When she'd gone I felt quite tired so simply went to bed not long after and slept for a long time for a change. Today I got up a short while before midday then got picked up and went to my girlfriend's house till 10 pm. It was great having Christmas dinner with all of them, especially as I got to spend Christmas Day with my girlfriend. Since I'd bought a set of six Marvel DVD's for my girlfriend the pair of us, and her dad, all watched Fantastic Four which they enjoyed. After that was random TV and chatting, and eventually starters and (a few hours later) dinner. In the gap we played the Zombies!!! board game with the whole family minus the mum, as she was cooking, and it was pretty funny. My girlfriend's dad held back and hid behind people all game, letting me throw zombies at my girlfriend's sister as she was nearest to winning, only to run in and steal victory from nowhere. Needless to say the sister was slightly surprised, but everyone else found it funny.

Unfortunately the time did come for me to return home, so with parting goodbyes I did so, having thoroughly enjoyed my day thus far. When I got home I spent some time with my dad and step mum, obviously as they'd get annoyed if I didn't, then popped onto my computer. I actually logged onto Guild Wars for the first time in bloody ages, and was extremely disappointed to see that the Christmas event was exactly the same as last year. The only new stuff was a few more candy cane weapons for the new classes. All the new Christmas quests were for Nightfall only, which completely and utterly sucks. Meh. Giving up on it I went to IRC, then was overjoyed to notice the 3.02 OE-B update for the PSP thanks to Dark_aleX. That guy seriously rocks, the amount of work he's done is truly impressive. He certainly helps define the PSP homebrew community. I reckon I may actually play Final Fantasy VII now, considering it can be run on the PSP. I'll have to think of what other Playstation games I'd want on my little portable gem of a handheld. At any rate for now I'll be re-watching Black Books in the background as I randomly chat to mates, so till next time.

Wrapping.

2006-12-23T23:59:00.000Z

So at work today in my break I did a bit of shopping. I got the final presents for my girlfriend's sister and respective boyfriend, then bought wrapping paper and Christmas cards since I left those a bit late. I'll most likely give all the SWARM group Christmas cards even though I'll be a couple of weeks late. None of them seemed to give any out, so I assume it's all good anyway. Work itself was alright I guess. The same amount of people as usual, just double the usual money totals. I had to do a fair few cash pods, there was a -lot- of money. Damn... So close yet so unattainable. At any rate after work I felt shattered, so when I got round my girlfriend's house I accidentally fell asleep twice. Admittedly not for long each time, but I still felt a bit sheepish. On the plus side the rest did make me feel a lot better, and nearing late evening I felt pretty normal once again. When I got home instead of wrapping presents and writing cards, which was the priority, I tested out the other main item I'd bought today - Rayman Raving Rabbids for the Wii. It's not a coherent game per se, but rather over 70 mini games. What I've played of it so far is pretty cool, especially the dancing stages. I quite like the running one too as it's simple to get to grips with. The cow swining one is bloody harsh as if you get the angel wrong it either goes only a short distance or gets thrown backwards into the surroundings, gaining no points. Bah to that one.

After playing that for a while I made a couple more Wii Mii's then played even more Wii Sports boxing. God I love the boxing. It rocks. Once all that was done then I started with the presents and got them done reasonably quickly. Writing the Christmas cards took longer since I personalised each one (instead of simply writing to and from...) though I left the writing of the main bulk, mostly for the SWARM-goers, for a later time. Probably a day or two before the new term-time SWARM meeting. At any rate that's everything, cutting my post a bit shorter for today. Till next time.

The new arrival.

2006-12-22T23:20:00.000Z

Ah yes, this morning was certainly interesting. I went to doze off at about 8 am for a rest as I'd not got any sleep, and I was awoken a couple of hours later as a large heavy parcel hit me, courtesy of my dad bringing it to me. I didn't pay it much heed though I knew what it was, but I was up by early afternoon and opened it quite happily. Yes, it was my Nintendo Wii. Though I'd paid a bit more for it on eBay I still managed to get it before Christmas which is suitably impressive, and as such I quickly went through my mail, leaving a new White Dwarf magazine for later, and set everything up. The first game I tried was the Zelda one as I'd bought it on the day of release. It certainly worked well, and I played for roughly eight hours without a break before deciding to try something else. It took a bit of getting used to, having to swing the remote to slash, and many times I pressed A or B by mistake (wasting a fair amount of lamp oil.....) but I'm slowly coming to grips with it. The two-part controller is remarkably comfortable for me and I'm looking forward to a good multiplayer first person shooter for the Wii. Ah, that'll be sweet. There are in fact several games I'm looking forward to, but I digress. The second game, or rather games, I tried was Wii Sports. Though they were all quite good, my favourite by far is the boxing. Poor computer sucker barely got a few hits in. Mwahahaha.

All in all I spent nearly nine hours on the Wii, so afterwards skimmed through White Dwarf, updated the Soul Society forum and added a new 'riddle' of sorts in which people had to write the next part of it. I chose the one I liked the best, altered a few bits in the submission and my own riddle, and made a psuedo-anagram from all the first letters of the lines. Thing is, there's 20 lines, and the question is pretty much - 'After removing five lines, form a five word sentence which I picked randomly from my mind with the first letters of the remaining fifteen lines.' Needless to say, it's vaguely difficult for them. On the plus side the prize is huge, being three Artifacts, one of which the winner can choose for themselves. Considering that on the forum Artifacts are items of ridiculously nifty power, this has got the main group of regulars very interested indeed. Other than the forum though I didn't really do much else aside from chat on Skype to the forum regulars, so my day was in fact pretty linear. I may as well be off then as that's all the news for now. I'll just get in a last game of Wii boxing before I go to sleep. Maybe two.... Till next time.

Glitches

2006-12-21T23:42:00.000Z

Hmm, I'm not too sure why, but the posts from tuesday and wednesday weren't showing. At any rate after messing around with the settings they are now, so read them if you like.

As for today, I was woken up in the morning at roughly 9.50 am by my girlfriend gently poking me. She'd been let into the house by my step mum as I was still asleep so when I did wake up it was a surprise, but an incredibly pleasant one. We had decided to go to Brighton for the day to catch a movie and so forth but it was incredibly cold. My girlfriend was incredibly cold from being outside too, so a duvet helped in making her warmer. In the end we pretty much just watched X-Men II and some Family Guy, spending a large part of the day just dozing off together. It was remarkably serene and relaxing, so it was all good. It was especially nice to spend more than just an evening with her again, and she enjoyed seeing the movie as she likes Nightcrawler and found his teleport effects quite spiffy. That actually sums up our day together really. Not overly eventful, but still happy.

In the late evening after she had to return home I spent a couple of hours on Achaea killing the populations of small villages. It was immensely enjoyable, and seeing the different fighting style in action was quite good. It means I'm likely to go kill of denizens a lot more now. Once that joy was over I actually watched anime again as I had a few episodes. I went through Bleach, Naruto, Kiba, Welcome to the NHK, Asatte no Houkou and Death Note. Bleach was alright and hopefully the filler arc is much nearer to ending as the main 'bad guy' got killed. Naruto was fairly poor, with incredibly sub-par animation. Sakura held an expression for several seconds that didn't actually look like her. Oh dear. Kiba was cool and had the killing of hostages. Incentive that works I would assume. Welcome to the NHK also started wrapping everything up dramatically so I'm looking forward to the next episode. As for Asatte no Houkou, the little girl in a teenage body ran away and got a job. How angsty. Death Note was, however, my favourite episode of the lot. A second Kira has emerged with quite a different style as the Death Note user took the offer of the Shinigami's eyes. It's safe to say I'm looking forward to the next episode of that too. At any rate sleep calls, so till next time.

A lot of poker.

2006-12-20T22:11:00.000Z

Not much happened in the morning aside from getting ready really quickly then heading off to Brighton to meet up with my 'munchkin' friend. We both met up on the train then proceeded to walk around Brighton to visit the usual shops, namely Dave's Comics and David's Books. I spent more cash I really shouldn't have, buying a few models and a Ravnica booster box for Magic the Gathering. It dented my account, but I figure I'll be able to cope since I've only got a single present left to buy, and can conserve my spending (for the most part...) for a couple of months. After the brief time in Brighton we both went into uni in Falmer and hung out at his place listening to music till SWARM started. When it did the games of poker began. Texas hold em' to be exact. I'd never really played poker before, so when I started I didn't do all that well. I barely kept afloat, though at least I wasn't the first out. During the second game I went out about halfway through, though everyone was kind enough to lend me some chips. I eventually went from strength to strength, admittedly fluctuating in how many chips I had left, to eventually win the game. It was a last gamble on the hand I had, and when my actual good poker player went all in, I decided to call his bluff. It turns out neither one of us was bluffing, but my hand was slightly higher than his. Phew eh?

I quick trip to get a large doner kebab later and there was more poker. I deliberately went out early and decided I may as well have a rest, so I zoned out for a while. Though I listened to them my track of time wasn't the most exceptional in the world, and I eventually got up and started my Paranoia XP game by 7.50 pm-ish. Four people took part which wasn't bad, as there were only another three around. The GM of the D&D campaign I'm in at uni took part, and damn. He was good with words. He managed to get around a good deal of semantic traps I put down and actually only lost two clones in the last ten minutes or so. For a good two hours he was still on the prime. In a 'zap' game, where the average life expectancy is roughly a few minutes if not less, this was of course impressive. Unfortunately he'll be unable to play in later games since he works and D&D runs in the later slot. Oh well eh? After the Paranoia XP game it was time to go home and thus I did, collapsing in bed a couple of hours later, having played Achaea some more. Recently I decided to invest some more time into it, bought a small amount of credits and pretty much redid my whole character, changing him from the serpent class to the monk class. Now he can combo. How interesting. At any rate, till next time.

Painting.

2006-12-19T23:51:00.000Z

I naturally got up late today and then proceeded to paint my gargoyle. I finished him off with a series of incredibly thin and layered dark green and brown washes in select areas. It gave some parts the appearance of mottled stone, slight weathering and so forth. I then added a tiny bit of colour by painting the shield face a subdued turquoise, finishing off overall with a small amount of static grass. Overall I'm rather pleased with the effect. Once it was early evening I went off to Games Workshop and met up with my main two mates there, with my girlfriend turning up an hour or so later. It was nice seeing her again, as even though it'd only been a day since I last saw her I missed her. I'm not too sure if having her on my mind so much is a good or a bad thing, but it's enjoyable at any rate. I ended up showing the gargoyle to mostly everyone I knew in Games Workshop, and thankfully (and rather pleasingly) all the reviews I got were good. One mate I don't see often repeatedly said it was good which was quite pleasing, though no doubt the fact that the model itself is awesome does help a substantial amount. I hung around for a short while after that before my group of mates went to the noodle place. This time it was up to my girlfriend to treat us all, as the rest of us had, over a period of months, bought quite a few rounds of meals.

Once that was eaten we went to the pub and started up the D&D campaign once more. My girlfriend's drow character seemed to be incredibly fearful of my monk and did everything asked without any question and barely any delay. Quite entertaining really. However during the course of exploring my monk got cut by a giant swinging axe and therefore started losing health over time. This was, quite obviously, faintly annoying. s such to finish myself off my monk quite literally dug his own grave then did 50 sit ups. The exertion killed him rather quickly. This leaves me free to write up another character, though I'm not too sure what to go for. I'll most likely end up going for a Warforged fighter or Paladin. It's sturdy, different, and can heal itself (if a Paladin). It seems as good a choice as any. After my girlfriend left the three of us decided to play pool, and I was a 'lucky bastard' as my friend put it. Both games we went down to the black, and both times I got it. The first game I didn't aim per se, but merely got the right colour in often enough to annoy my mate. The second game the black was an inch from the pocket, the white a further four inches away. My mate, to show off, put the cue behind his back. Yeah, he promptly missed and I got the black in. Oh how we both laughed, heh. At any rate, till next time.

A lack of revision.

2006-12-18T23:11:00.000Z

The title is quite self-explanatory, in that today I've not yet even started my holiday revision, and it's already the 18th and past 11 pm. Er, bugger. I'll actually start after this post since I do have to start eventually, so it may as well be today (rather than friday when I should have started....). I actually slept in till about 2 pm anyway since I didn't feel all that fantastic. Not ill, just quite tired and worn out. In fact, 'shattered' is quite an accurate description. Anyway, when I did get up it wasn't long before my dad returned home from the hospital, and he was quite glad to be out of there. It was nice to have him back at home. For the rest of the afternoon I generally put off my revision for a variety of reasons, such as watching more Family Guy, watching more Bill Bailey comedy, generally not doing much, and repainting my gargoyle miniature. I'd already done the dark green stippled effect, but when I started the marble veins it looked, to put it bluntly, bloody terrible. As such I gave the model a very thin wash of black to mute everything and started once more from a near-black base up to a slightly muted grey. I went for a usual stone effect as a) it's traditionally what suits a gargoyle, b) it looks quite nice, and finally and quite importantly, c) I suck at painting marble veins.

Here's the picture of what it looks like so far -

Since it's predominantly stone, most of it therefore counts as finished. There's only the partially buried shield and war hammer to paint up, but to add a tiny bit more colour I'll no doubt add a small amount of static grass to the base in tiny clumps around the base of the pillar. I'm not too sure how else to add colour to a stone model as I'm pretty happy with it even if it does look quite monochrome. I'll probably end up making the eyes red and gem-like, as well as painting the small face on the central part of the buried shield with (incredibly) muted flesh tones. Hopefully the minimalistic style will help the overall impact. It's the main reason why I made the talons, claws, fangs and horns almost white so they'd stand out.

Gargoyle musings aside, my plans for tomorrow generally revolve around going to Brighton in the morning for random shopping, then going to Games Workshop in the evening as per usual. No doubt I'll bring in some D&D stuff and so forth, etc etc. With luck I may even get a few games played, so that's all good. My revision calls, so I'll be off for now. Till next time.

Skipped again.

2006-12-17T23:43:00.000Z

Well, looks like I skipped writing the posts on friday and saturday. To be brief then - on friday I slept in instead of doing revision then my munchkin pal came round at 2 pm and left at roughly midnight. There was a couple of games on the Gamecube, some testing for my D&D gargoyle character, who only managed to kill ten regular gargoyles before he was killed, and some general hanging out together. Yesterday it was the boredom of work, then I saw my girlfriend again. Unfortunately her work isn't exactly good at letting her out on time and she was upset because she ended up being late to pick me up but I didn't mind so it was quite sweet that she was worried about me (as it was cold outside where I wait).

Today was yet again work, but whereas yesterday I was almost falling asleep during the first half of the day, today I managed to cope quite well as I had an extra 20 minutes sleep, not to mention also had a chocolate bar this morning in addition to breakfast. Yay an' all that jazz. I was even put on self scan for an hour or so to cover two breaks, though annoying my own break had actually started a few minutes before midday, meaning I had to work the full four hour period without any gaps. Harsh, and in fact it was only mitigated by the self scan time which I quite enjoyed. Normal tills seem to be much more emotionally draining for me. Meh I guess. After work I got to see my girlfriend again and it was bliss going from work to her. Her job did cause her to overrun again, but this time there was only half the wait of yesterday, most of which I had already been picked up in, so it was all good. When we got back to hers it wasn't long before it was dinner, and not much longer after that Hogfather started on Sky One. Admittedly I found it to be slightly disappointing, since my expectations were quite high, what with it being Terry Pratchett an' all. Overall there were quite a few details that didn't strike me as quite right. The Auditor's whiny voices, Death's appearance (which I feel should have been CG'd like the AWESOME Death of Rats), Death actual weaponry (which so blatantly should have been CG'd to look like the blades were made from blue light), Ridcully being as fat as the Dean, whereas the Dean was quite skinny, Susan having a cool visage yet not having 'The Voice', etc etc. Some people may consider these to be minor details, but to me they're quite important since I like the book so much. Unfortunately it also looked very... non-film-ish. That is to say, it didn't have the expected gloss and professionalism as most films. Since it's probably going to be four hours long, that's a great shame.

Half way through The Hogfather I had to return home, so I caught the rest of it when I got back. Part two airs tomorrow and I'll be around for it, so that's all good. The second half of the book was more interesting, so I'm looking forward to seeing it, even if it doesn't quite meet my hopes. Once it ended I went back to my room and put on some Bill Bailey comedy as I blasted apart another unlucky zombie in Urban Dead then after Bill watched some more Family Guy. As I only have two episodes of anime to watch, Naruto and Death Note, (conveniently ignoring Burst Angel or Garasu no Kantai...) I figure I'll wait a day or two for all the weekend and monday episodes to be subbed to I can have another mini animarathon. With only eight days left till Christmas too I really should get around to getting cards and wrapping paper. Meh, I guess I'll eventually get round to it on time. At any rate, till next time.

Hospital visits.

2006-12-14T23:21:00.000Z

I had another sleep in this morning, which was nice, then eventually got up, made my bed and so forth, etc etc, and finished just as my girlfriend arrived at about 12.45 pm. She went through some NewType USA's and had a look at the miniatures I'd bought and the time seemed to fly by. Before long it was time to visit my dad in the hospital, and so we both went along with my step mum and spent three hours with him. General chat followed and my dad made a few comments about us raising the temperature of the ward. I guess we class as 'affectionate' when near each other. Afterwards we came back to mine and had chicken, french bread and pizza whilst we watched The Matrix as my girlfriend hadn't actually ever seen the movie. After that we watched the first three episodes of The Animatrix before time ran out and she had to return home. Though a fair chunk of time was spent in the hospital I still enjoyed seeing her and spending time with her and I'll see her again during the weekend so I don't exactly have to wait long. After she'd left I generally didn't feel like doing much so put Family Guy season five on for something to listen to as I generally surfed the net. Not long after that one of my mates said he was bored so he popped over and we have three games of Magic the Gathering. I really need to improve my burn deck. It kinda works, but it's quite fast enough to be honest.

Once he had to return home, as he has work in the morning, I figured I may as well watch some of the anime I had waiting to be seen, so I got through Bleach, Kiba, Tonagura, Tokimeki Memorial, Negima, Chocotto Sister and two of Busou Renkin. Bleach was fairly alright, and the Bound's doll has bloody finally appeared. I hope the filler arc ends soon. Kiba was pretty cool, with Amil Gaoul or however it's spelt going into some special form and kicking ass, though the side effect doesn't look all too pleasant. Tonagura had more shenanigans from the pervy guy and a lot of misunderstanding going on. Tokimeki Memorial had the girlfriend trying to actually spend time alone with her boyfriend and unfortunately, for her, failing miserably. As for Negima... Well, the series is just plain weird. I'm not really all that keen on it. At all. I'll probably drop it if the next episode doesn't improve much for me. Chocotto Sister had more potential love worries and a really weird dream for the manager. Busou Renkin had more fighting, though this time against humans rather than homonculi. How interesting. I didn't feel like watching any of Garasu no Kantai or Burst Angel, since .mkv is an effort to watch. I guess that's all, so till next time.

Purchase.

2006-12-13T23:29:00.000Z

Shopping was on the agenda this morning as in the morning I went into Eastbourne. I managed to find a suitable present for my girlfriend's dad, so I just need to buy a combined one for her sister and boyfriend. I already know what I'll get them, so it's a question of finding it. I'll probably just look around closer to the time. I still have to wrap up all the presents, but I have enough time I reckon. After that I came back home, rather hurriedly got everything ready, then went into university since SWARM still runs during the holidays, though admittedly with smaller groups. There were a fair few people still there though, however most of the previous Paranoia XP group weren't around. As such I ran the game with three players, only two of whom had been in the previous game. Even so the new player, who'd been a bit iffy about joining, quite enjoyed it, and afterwards was relating his exploits to other people. Excellent, excellent... There were quite a few games of Magic the Gathering too, and I came to realise that though my decks work I'm not enjoying them as much. This is probably because I have a shedload of ideas for new decks but simply haven't built them yet. I'll get round to it when my next order from Merlin's Games arrives... Then I can build my milling/repeating deck which'll be fun, I'll be able to alter my artifact deck and make a few more, and I'll quite possibly make a sliver/equipment deck. Those should be interesting to play.

One recurring point I kept stating was how awesome my new gargoyle model was. As Game didn't get any Nintendo Wii's in today, which was unfortunate, I went wandering around and popped into Phantasia. There they had some Confrontation miniatures, and when I saw the gargoyle it was immediately mine. I also bought a few lightly armoured skeletons which looked fantastic, but it was the gargoyle that truly called to me. Ever since I really got into Dungeons & Dragons I've wanted a gargoyle character, yet never quite had the model for it and the task of sculpting one was quite daunting. Ages ago when looking through a Confrontation miniature catalog I'd seen the gargoyle model and wanted it, yet had no method to buy it. Well, seeing it today naturally led to the purchase. It's this one - http://www.rackham-store.com/boutique_us/images_produits/UKMVCR04_1.jpg and as you can see, it's pretty nifty. I'll most likely be painting it in a darker marble colour scheme, mostly black and dark grey with veins of green in the stone and weathered edges. I do hope it'll look quite nice, though it'll be moderately hard to do since I've never really tried to paint marble before. I'll most likely get the basing done tonight then start painting it on friday, as well as getting the sculpting on the Diabolus finished then. This means that by next wednesday I'll hopefully have a finished gargoyle and an almost finished Diabolus. It's all good eh? At any rate I'm off to watch more Busou Renkin as I realised I'd been forgetting to get the updates for that series, so till next time.

A day out.

2006-12-12T23:15:00.000Z

I was up vaguely early this morning at 9 am and had a relaxing bath. It didn't help me wake up at all as warm baths naturally make me quite drowsy, but at least I felt better. By 10.45 am my girlfriend turned up and we read a bit of NewType USA before heading off to Brighton. When we got there we did some shopping, and I bought five little anime figure sets for Genshiken and a little lazer ornament from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The little lazer is awesome for my Paranoia XP campaign, so that's all happy and good. My girlfriend bought a Marvel graphic novel and another rather spiffy looking graphic novel with a dude who can control the powers of hell. Lots of goblins and good artwork. After that we briefly popped into Daydream Nations so I could get a new card folder then we headed to the cinema. It was pretty good timing (in theory) as when we got there it was three minutes till the start of Casino Royale. I say 'in theory' as though we got into the screen on time, there were 25 minutes of adverts. Bloody things. The film itself though was excellent and I thoroughly enjoyed it, and so did my girlfriend, guessing from what she said. Afterwards we went to Wokmania for our meal as it was nearby, and the food was very nice. Though a buffet, I only had a single plate, and not much was on it, since a small meal was enough for me. Even so, I'd quite like to go back there again.

Once we'd finished the meal it was back to my place where we watched some anime together, wrapped in a duvet, to complete the day. It was one of the best days I've had n a while, as spending all of it with my girlfriend was really, really wonderful. I'm not sure how else I could express that really, but 'wonderful' is close to the word I'm looking for at any rate. Unfortunately she had to return home as she still has college, so I proceeded to sort through just over 2 folders' worth of rares, sorting them into colour only rather than set and colour. This allowed me to actually get all of the same colour in set areas, which is bound to help when I make more decks. I really should get round to more deck making, but I think I need to find some more land. Hmm. Well at any rate once that had been finished, and thankfully it didn't take long, I ended up doing more sculpting work on my Diabolus fighter's cloak, fleshing the folds out more and so on and so forth. The Borat film was playing as I did this and it's quite a funny film, if a bit odd. My Diabolus only needs another day or so of sculpting and it'll be done and ready to (re)undercoat. Then it'll be the happy job of painting him, so that's all good. That's all for now and I feel quite wrecked, so till next time.

Return of the Animarathon.

2006-12-11T23:27:00.000Z

Sleeping in was wonderful. I got several hours more than normal and didn't get up till shortly past midday. Fantastic sleep, and I generally felt a lot better than I have done recently. It wasn't long before I went to visit my dad in hospital, and he looked a hell of a lot better than before. e still seemed a bit weak, but was sitting up in a chair and was able to speak (reasonably) normally, without having to use the provided oxygen mask much. I spent several hours there with my step mum, then eventually we both left and grabbed a quick meal of fish and chips, though I went for sausages instead. My step mum and I had a long conversation about life in general before returning home, and she went about all her chores and duties, which have got a lot heavier since dad's not in the house, and I went to watch anime after I finished a few small jobs.

I got through 'a fair few' episodes of anime this time round, as I'd said I was going to demolish my anime today, and by the gods I did it. Mwahahaha and all that. At any rate, I watched - three of Bleach, two of Naruto, the final of Zegapain, three of Inukami, Welcome to the NHK, Chevalier, the final of Tsubasa Chronicle, two of Jigoku Shoujo Futakomori, two of Witchblade, The Gargoyle of the Yoshinagas, Mei Otome Zwei, two of Otome wa Boku ni Koshiteru, three of Asatte no Houkou, three of Crescent Love, three of Negima, and three of Tokimeki Memorial. Of course in describing these I'll be ridiculously brief. Bleach was alright, though not amazing. It looks like the arc may end soon which is funky. Naruto was again alright, but I want it to follow the manga soon... The Zegapain final was quite good, if a little odd. meh, I can deal with odd. Inukami was again funny in a vaguely perverted way, and Welcome to the NHK depicted the girl as one hell of a weird delusional freak. She really is more broken than Satou. Chevalier had interesting issues of succession, Tsubasa Chronicle had more fighting and, oddly enough, lots of Sakura's feather unclaimed and Jigoku Shoujo had some wasteful uses of revenge. Witchblade was pretty cool as 'Masamune' looked good in that dress, and Yoshinagas was strange but watchable. Mei Otome Zwei was ridiculously action packed and fun, with Koshiteru also being quite enjoyable as more tension seemingly developed in the background. Asatte no Houkou had more angst with apparent happiness marred by sudden revelation, doubt, and the mystically aged little girl running away. Sill girl eh? Crescent Love was filled with determination for the two the stay together, and Negima was artistically quite strange but I managed to follow it all the same. Last but not least, Tokimeki Memorial is developing quite strongly into a truly harem title, with three girls in the running. Not quite as harem as, say, Shuffle, but then again Shuffle did rock an awesome amount.

Tomorrow I'll be spending the whole day with my girlfriend pretty much, as she'll be round from 10.50 am and we'll be going out for the day together. It's something I'm quite looking forward to. Till next time then.

Ditto.

2006-12-10T23:00:00.000Z

Today was pretty much the same as yesterday, though when I was round my girlfriend's place we both wrapped ourselves in her duvet and watched Hellboy. It was remarkably comfortable and generally quite nice to watch a film together. Once I got back home I tried out a few PSP games, namely Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops and Valkyrie Profile Lenneth. Metal gear was, of course, quite fun to play as in the tutorial I managed to shoot a load of surprised guards. Valkyrie on the other hand was quite boring. Everything was slow, there wasn't that much interaction for ages, and I didn't find it all that enjoyable. Oh well eh? I still have at least two other games to test when I get round to it. For now though I'm off to sleep, and I'm going to savour tomorrow morning as I can just stay in bed for most of the day for the first time in months. Till next time.

Bleh.

2006-12-09T22:59:00.000Z

I had a boring day at work and a happy content evening with my girlfriend. I also caught up in the Air Gear manga, and watched the latest episode of Black Lagoon. I'm too tired to bother saying any more, so till next time.

Happy Shopping

2006-12-08T23:26:00.000Z

Today was incredibly relaxing for the morning, and gave me a good deal of contentment in the afternoon through till the evening. Unfortunately I ended up falling asleep at 3.40 am and woke at 9.50 am, so when I went into Game to check if they had any Nintendo Wii's, the answer was no as I hadn't pre-ordered. Fair enough then. On the plus side they only got consoles in for the pre-orders, so had I queued up in the early morning I would have been disappointed anyway, plus cold. After that I went to see my dad. For the past two days he's been severely ill, and yesterday got admitted to hospital as he'd contracted a virus which gave him a chest infection, then got pneumonia which simply sucks. He still didn't look all too good, but at least he could talk which was a big improvement on two days ago. Once back from there I decided I may as well go into uni, since Falmer is closer to Brighton than Polegate, and so in I went and saw a bunch of SWARMers playing Twilight Imperium. It's a pretty fun game from the looks of it, but I simply didn't have the time to take part, plus it'd been going on for a few hours before I got there. Instead I played a game of Magic the Gathering then hung around. It wasn't overly long before my girlfriend called and I quickly got on the train at Falmer. Thanks to handy planning it was the same train she was on, and seeing her made me really happy.

When in Brighton we popped into a few stores, Dave's Comics and David's Books being the most prominent two. I bought another couple of things, though my girlfriend decided to wait till tuesday before buying much as she got paid today in theory, and hadn't checked her account balance. Since she finished on tuesday at around 10.30-ish am, we'll definitely have enough time in Brighton to catch a movie, have a meal, go look in some shops and so on and so forth. At any rate as it was getting quite dark and we'd decided not to got have a meal out today, we both went back to hers and generally spent time together. It just makes me feel content when I can be by her and hug her. I had planned to walk home (which, admittedly, would've taken bloody ages) as my dad obviously couldn't drive me, but her mum drove me home instead which was incredibly kind of her. Once back I generally didn't do much (as per usual) aside from chatting on IRC as I hadn't been on it in a while. Once I got faintly bored with that I felt like watching something, so I dipped into the reserve of anime I have waiting for me, which I'll demolish on monday, and watched three episodes of Black Lagoon, two of Kiba, three of Death Note, two of Welcome to the NHK, and the final for Black Blood Brothers. 11 isn't bad considering I only felt like watching a few. I was quite disappointed that I didn't have more of those series to watch, especially Death Note and Black Lagoon. In Black Lagoon Rock and Revy seem to be getting on incredibly well, as she's nowhere near as violent towards him as she used to be, and it's obvious she likes him in a guarded way and doesn't really know how to deal with it so seems to stay a bit distant. In Kiba by the end of what I watched Zed was able to summon a glowing red Amil key spirit. Nifty. Death Note was simply supremely cool, with L revealing himself to Light. The plot quite blatantly thickens. As for Welcome to the NHK, the poor guy's lost his otaku friend who had to go home to run his family's farm, the poor bugger. The final of Black Blood Brothers wasn't too bad, and left it open in a way that didn't irritate the hell out of me, so it's all good.

I really should be off now as I have work in the morning and I need sleep. Till next time.

Seeing a friend.

2006-12-07T22:16:00.000Z

Not much happened at uni today, though getting there was an absolute pain. Firstly I slept in, so had to rush like a madman to try and get the right train. I left the house at 10.05 am to catch the 10.11 am train, when it's a 13 minute walk.... What was more annoying is that when I got there the train was delayed, then canceled as there had been a flood in Polegate and a landslide in Lewes. Well bugger then. Furthermore, the next train was canceled too, and the one after that was delayed by ten minutes. Bloody hell... By the time I got to my lecture I was 25 minutes late, and faintly annoyed. This wasn't helped by the fact that the lecturer was merely holding a small quiz, there was barely 40 people there out of nearly 200, people kept randomly leaving, and as I'd handed in my case note the previous lecture I didn't even need to be there. This vexed me, as afterwards I had a two hour long free. Thankfully I met up with a couple of mates from SWARM, most notably the treasurer and president, and hung out with them till I had my lecture. That was quite packed with information and actually overran eight minutes, but he did manage to finish the course. Due to that he said he'd consider canceling the lecture tomorrow since the course was finished, and later on he did email everyone saying it was canceled. Considering I don't have anything else tomorrow that's quite handy.

After uni I went straight into Brighton to do some shopping and bought a fair amount of stuff. The most important was a Cloud figure from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. This was a combined birthday and Christmas present for my best friend since a couple of hours later she turned up and we generally meandered around Brighton. We went to Yo! Sushi and had a meal there was wasn't too bad, but quite expensive. After that we popped into the cinema but as she felt tired we decided watching a film was largely pointless. As such we had a brief stop in the arcade where I shot a lot of people in Time Crisis 4 (which is a fun game) then went back to Haywards Heath and I hung out at her house for a few hours. We had a great conversation since I hadn't spoken with her properly, face to face, for a hell of a long time. It was nice managing to catch up with her again. I ended up getting the last train back to Polegate, which was delayed (surprise surprise...) and got back in about 30 minutes past midnight. Then it was just a question of grabbing more anime updates to add to the pile, and prepare myself to stay awake. After all, I want to be up at 6 am so I can go into Eastbourne to get a Nintendo Wii. It's a bit of a long shot since I didn't pre-order, but meh, may as well try. Till next time.

SWARMing.

2006-12-06T23:34:00.000Z

It wasn't a bad day, not a bad day at all. It was however quite tiring. It started off with a seminar which didn't go too badly considering I barely prepared for it (i.e. basically didn't prepare and only made skeleton notes) then there was an hour gap in which I played Magic the Gathering before I went off to my lecture. In the Tort lecture the lecturer went over by eight minutes but managed to finish the course. I have another Tort lecture on friday, but since he'd finished he said that he may cancel the last lecture. If he does I'll actually have nothing on friday which is pretty cool as I'll be able to spend more time with my girlfriend in the afternoon. Rock on indeed.

After the lecture SWARM essentially started as people were already playing Twilight Imperium and several people were playing MtG, so I quickly joined a game that had only just started and proceeded to annoy my munchkin friend by picking on him. This resulted in him dying first out of the four player, me second as he'd obviously been hitting back, then the other two went on for a while as they tried to wear each other down. A few games later and it was time for the Paranoia XP game. This was played in the 'zap' style, therefore resulting in a rather short life span of each clone. As I'd spent a fair amount of the early hours of the morning planning everything I hoped it would go well and that people would enjoy it, and happily the six players all did. That was comforting as I hadn't spent a shedload of time in vain. After that session it moved to the zombies campaign, and that was quite fun to ZM since I got to scare the crap out of a few people. Entertaining stuff. Last but not least for SWARM I took part in the MtG tournament which consisted of ten people. It was a 'best of three' arrangement in a 'Swiss' style of play. I decided to play all three games each time as my games were quite fast, and in round one I flattened the opponent all three time, in round two I did the same but with more relaxed cruelty, and in the final round I got slapped all over the place. I have a grudging respect for Dragonstorm when it's used to bring four Bogardan Hellkites into play, doing a full twenty damage to me in one go. That tends to hurt. I still came third however and got a Time Spiral booster pack as a prize. Not too bad really, as the entry fee was £2.00, so I essentially paid 25p to take part.

Once I got home there was the second batch of MtG cards and out of the 1,000 about 400 were English, putting the overall total of English cards in the 2,000-ish to be nearly 900. How nifty. I also sold 511 Portuguese MtG cards today for £4.00, so that got rid of some of those. I just have another 644 to sell, probably for £5.00. That'll mean I'd have paid £31.00 for nearly 900 cards which is pretty good. I also sold a Nether Traitor, two Mass Hysterias and Ib Halfheart as another friend is plannng to make a goblin deck, so I'm helping her with some cards (such a goblins from both the Mirrodin and Time Spiral blocks) as well as constructing it. As that about wraps it up for now, till next time.

Heads up.

2006-12-05T23:13:00.000Z

Just to inform, I haven't written a normal post today since when I got home I had to read over 250 pages of RPG rulebook, prepare three tasks for a seminar, and actually print off all the materials for the game I'll be running, as well as making the mission and so forth. I also sorted through over 1000 MtG cards as they arrived today, and though over half weren't English, at the usual price of 10p per card with the English ones in just this lot I actually got more cards than the usual price would allow, counting the cost of -both- lots. Obviously when the second one arrives I'll have more cards and it'll be even better. At any rate, till next time.

Entertaining.

2006-12-04T22:11:00.000Z

Ahh, today I had a good day again, though for differing reasons to usual. After my single lecture I hung around for quarter of an hour before going home, gave myself an hour of rest, finished reading the relevant section of the politics book, then actually wrote my Public Law essay. Yeah, I finished the bastard! Mwahahaha! Not only that, but once it was done I checked my email and there was a new one proposing a small get-together at the Grapevine on uni campus, so I went back into uni and met up with my mate, the SWARM president who's also a mate, and one of his friends. We ended up playing a fair amount of pool and though I was abysmal, there were some close games. Overall it was immensely enjoyable simply hanging out (in a smoke-free pub, excellent) and I came home relatively late at about 10.15-ish pm. I got home by about 11.50 pm and proceeded to lounge around whilst surfing the net. I played some Urban Dead, on which I'm now a level 41 zombie as I purposely died to get all the zombie skills bar Brain Rot. I managed to kill a survivor and get another to three life before I got shot to pieces and ran out of action points. Later on I signed on just to see what had happened, and burst out laughing. It turns out I was at a revive point, as some random guy just revived me. Cool, now I can use guns again. Rock on eh?

I also played quite a few games of Magic the Gathering on Magic Workstation and managed to lose them all. Annoyingly I generally came within either a few cards of milling my opponent to a loss, or a few life (generally two) before I was killed. A string of close losses was a bit frustrating, but one game was simply boring and no fun at all. Brine Elemental combined with Vesuvan Shapeshifter. I never got an untap step after that and almost died from boredom till he hit me for 10 twice. Not a very exciting or enjoyable deck. Other than that not much happened, though the anime is certainly piling up, Jeebus... Now I generally just need to read the whole of the Paranoia XP rulebook and I'll be fine. Hmm. At any rate, till next time then.

A happy day.

2006-12-03T21:56:00.000Z

Since one of my workmates was ten minutes late for work today he was taken off self scan. He was then put on my till, and I took over self scan for the day. That was pretty damn cool actually, since I obviously like working there. The day went quite smoothly overall and the time seemed to fly past as I only have a few problem customers. About six out of each ten got something wrong though, but for the most part it was solved by pressing a single button. This is one of the reasons why I like self scan. Most of the time I simply pressed the odd button, walked around the four self scan tills, grabbed empty baskets and opened bags. Not overly exciting, but incredibly more fulfilling than simply being on a damn normal till of bored death. My break was also quite pleasant as the meal I had in the staff canteen was nice for a change. How unusual. After work I (as usual) met up with my girlfriend and when we got back to hers there was a gingerbread house to put together. She's wanted to make one for a while, and her mum bought a pre-baked and unassembled one for us, essentially so we could try it out. It was quite a lot of fun messing around with it and it didn't look too bad when we were done. I took two pictures of it on my camera before we had dinner, then tried to cut it apart from everyone. As it fell apart by itself I just cut up the sides instead.

Eventually I came home and didn't do much at all. I felt a bit dazed for no real reason to be honest, and hadn't done anything till coming here. I really do need to read some of the politics book I loaned out, then I can start writing the essay. I'll probably start with the functions of Parliament, if vaguely, so I can outline the benefits and drawbacks of it in a general sense. Then I can bring in the concept of reforming the House of Lords, using the House of Lords Act 1999 and the Royal Commission's 2000 report. After that I can introduce the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 as further explanation of the judicial reform of the House of Lords in accordance with the separation of powers. With luck that should be alright. I guess I should be off then, so till next time.

Nifty.

2006-12-02T22:01:00.000Z

I enjoyed today. Admittedly in part this was because I saw my girlfriend and I hadn't seen her since tuesday, but I get ahead of myself. From the beginning then - work went smoothly. The morning was broken up slightly as another girl came and stood beside me and watched, then took over for semi-training. I basically explained all the odd things then she was off after another half an hour. Still, it was nice to simply stand there and watch someone else do all the work. After that it wasn't long till my lunch, which involved a rather sickly, if initially nice, cake. Back to work it was and it was generally normal, though I did get to do the break of self scan. As I like self scan, that was pleasing. It wasn't till late when I had my tea break, but that was fine as when it finished I didn't have much longer to go. After work it was simply a great feeling to see my girlfriend again. I'd really missed her even though it had only been a few days, but being to hold her close was a truly blissful feeling. Regardless of the odd problem which we work out relatively quickly anyway, it's sheer bliss with her. I'm actually quite impressed we're still doing so well. I always assumed my luck would cause most things I get involved in to crash and burn quickly, heh. When back at hers we spent most of the time snuggling, watching anime, chatting, generally being happy and so forth.

Once again, unfortunately, I did have to leave. When I got home I generally lazed around for a while before checking the forum. It's been quite dead for the past few days which is a bit worrying. Hmm. There weren't any more anime episodes to grab, but I have a shedload to watch once I reach the holidays anyway. This coming friday will be my last day before lots of happy happy free time (theoretically.... I do need to read an awful lot of cases, write a case note, prepare a court report and revise for a tort exam...) and coincidentally said friday will be the release date for the Nintendo Wii. Though it's not essential for me to own one I will be going into Eastbourne for 7 am anyway to queue in the slight chance that I may get one. I completely missed preordering one because I'm not desperate on getting one. At any rate it'll be interesting, since later that day I need to get into uni for a tort lecture. It'll definitely be a fun day too, since after the lecture I'm meeting up with my girlfriend. Ergo this coming friday will be an enjoyable day indeed. A possible Wii, only a single lecture and the end of uni for the year, and time with my girlfriend. Rock on methinks. At any rate I still need to read a chapter or two in a law book for my public law essay before I go to bed. I'll also be reading more tomorrow before hopefully starting to write it. Having even just the introduction written before monday will be a huge help, since if I actually get it finished then I'll have tuesday to read the Paranoia XP rulebook. Considering I'm running a game of it on wednesday this may be quite an important task. At any rate, till next time.

Research and reading.

2006-12-01T22:59:00.000Z

It started well today, with the seminar going smoothly. I was a bit quiet as I felt tired, but I did answer the questions I thought I could and was right, so that was all good. The bright light in the room did hurt my eyes quite badly though, so that was a bit of a drawback. In the four hour gap afterwards I had an hour of relation and breakfast, an hour and a half-ish of research for my public law essay, then finished up the time playing Magic the Gathering with a mate as I'd got all the research I need. I ended up with a constitutional reform statute, the House of Lords Act 1999, several sections picked out in two main chapters of my constitutional and administrative law book, a politics book concerning the constitution and a report on constitutional change by the Royal Commission in 2000. That should be enough for a 1,500 word essay I do believe. When I played Magic the gathering I actually used my mate's rather limited selection of cards to make a mono-black deck based on creature resurrection. Though he had a black and red life steal deck I absolutely flattened him. I killed my own creatures a hell of a lot more than he did just so I could keep drawing cards, and I ended up with so much mana and enough critters, compared to his none, to just beat him down. It was especially funny since whenever black spells were played he gained life, yet I still killed him. How entertainingly fun.

After that I had the tort lecture and that passed well enough, though I dozed slightly for a few minutes here and there. I was still taking notes, but almost in a daze. Impressively they still seem to be coherent and, to me, legible. Nifty. When I got home I felt quite tired, so I took a nap till about 8 pm. Afterwards though not quite at full energy, I did feel a lot better,. As such it was then time to go through my research and I went through it all, bar the politics book I'd lent out, highlighting and trying to work out an order. As for the book, I got partway through one of the essays and it was quite useful as it's practically pure evaluation of the House of Lords and their function. Perfect. I'll most likely spend my free time when I get home tomorrow and on sunday finalizing my reading then beginning to write it. To be honest I thought I'd have been able to make a start on it today, but feeling so tired tends to stunt my productivity. I should be able to get it started by monday, and since I only have a single hour of lecture from 11 am till midday I should have more than enough time to finish it before wednesday. Theoretically I could write it during my gaps on tuesday, but that would require me to bring my laptop into uni, so I guess I really need to get down to work on monday. Le sigh. At any rate that';s the end of my rambling for now, so till next time.

Skipped.

2006-11-30T23:01:00.000Z

I didn't post yesterday since I was working on my case note and wasn't exactly enthused to write any more when I did have a break. At any rate, today went averagely well I would assume. I only had a seminar today but that itself kinda went awry. Since my working time has pretty much spent on the case note once I got the contract essay out of the way I hadn't prepared for the seminar. I was in the presentation group this week. So yeah, I ended up confusing some of the relative influences of the ECJ and ECHR which I really shouldn't have gotten wrong. On the plus side the teacher didn't seem to mind and actually, if anything, seemed enthusiastic. According to her she was happy that the issue was raised then instead of having people confused in an exam. That was vaguely encouraging... I think... Anyway, after that I came home then went to get a haircut since it really has been a long time since I got one. Afterwards it was back to the slog of the case note. Though I repeatedly took long breaks, I did get it done eventually. Once that was out of the way I actually relaxed again even though I do have the public law essay still to write, and it's about the reform of the House of Lords. That'll be oh-so fun to read up on, since the main quotation the question is based on is from a book which is currently loaned out of the library, with seven, yes seven, reserves for it. There's only six days to write it in. Quite doable, but I highly doubt the book will be available in that time frame.

I made a new Magic the Gathering deck yesterday, since on wednesday there'll be a MtG tournament. I tested it out a few times on Magic Workstation against my 'munchkin' mate and his red and black life steal/random creatures deck. Out of the three games I decisively won two, and utterly lost one. Seriously, having only two mana is a bad, bad thing. At any rate the deck does seem to actually work, though ironically I didn't actually get many of the combinations out. Ah well, I'll inevitably play test it more later on should I have any spare time before wednesday. Before I actually go to sleep tonight I reckon I'll do a quick search or two for the public law essay to see if I can find the reforming legislation. Tomorrow the general plan will be a tort seminar first (for which I have a good idea of what to say in the group discussion, so that's all good) then four hours of researching for the public law essay. That may not be overly enjoyable. Once that trauma is over it's time for the tort lecture. Lectures are always alright, so no worry there. Once that's done it's back home to actually start writing the essay. Ye gods it'll be a stupendously exciting day. For now though I think I'll be off. Till next time.

Quite overdue.

2006-11-28T23:48:00.000Z

I'm 'many' hours overdue for this post, since when I got home I spent a fair while highlighting a law case for the Frameworks case note, spent some time dozing off, wrote about a sixth of the case note itself even though I was aiming for half, made the zombie poster as I was a day overdue for it (since I usually make it on the monday) then partially sorted through more Magic the Gathering cards. However I've entirely skipped ahead... So, to begin the day -

I got up relatively early since today was a full day and went into university quite tired. Contract went well and in the hour break I had breakfast, bought case books for contract and public law, then milled around for a bit. Public law similarly went well, then I did some work on the case for my case note, i.e. going through just over half of it and picking out important bits. As that bored me I decided, against my better judgment, to find my mates and so I did, played a game of Magic the Gathering then popped into Brighton. I bought a small-ish Spawn Reborn model which simply looked cool, as well as getting a few more core set, Mirrodin and Darksteel booster packs for MtG as well as another Time Spiral fat pack since I wanted the boxes to store the bulk of cards I have still in booster boxes. When the two eBay MtG lots arrive I shall have to find more room to put them all, heh. At any rate after all that I came home for a brief moment before setting out to Games Workshop.

When I got there it wasn't long till I was playing a 1,500 point game with my Chaos marines against a normal Space Marines army. The guy had a unit of nine Terminators which was a bit worrying, till they turned up and got shot to pieces. I didn't really want to let them do much damage to me. Overall the game went incredibly well, as in the end I'd only lost 17 men, and he only had a single man left who, if he moved, was likely to get shot by -many- big guns. Fun stuff. My girlfriend seemed a bit ill and admitted she had a cold, so I hugged her a lot anyway. I rarely seem to get ill, so that doesn't bother me. When she'd left I decided to have another incredibly quick 500 point game against some Eldar who managed to have some annoying Star Cannons as well as some Howling Banshees. 34 models to my 21. Oh dear. My men got absolutely taken apart by sniper fire, heavy weapons fire and got torn apart in combat. However through shooting I did just as much, and at the very end it was down to four Eldar Rangers and my Lord with two men left. My Lord just about made it into combat and duly killed all four with absolutely no difficulty. That was a damn close match and highly enjoyable as each death really counted for a change.

Once I got home I pretty much only did everything listed at the top of this post, though I also typed up and emailed some seminar notes for someone at uni I know since he'd lost his. I still have a load of anime to watch, as I didn't get to watch it yesterday, and probably won't till I finish uni, which is on the 8th. Gah, I'll finish then immediately need to start reading cases and all the textbooks I have. Bah. Till next time then.

Meh..... More work....

2006-11-27T23:44:00.000Z

Le sigh. A strange day today overall. University wasn't too bad to start with as the lecture went well enough. However I went to look for a law case for my Frameworks case note and couldn't find it. That was a bummer so I asked the librarians to help, and they seemed to have it in store, but it wasn't available for collection till 4 pm. Since I was leaving before that, I had to get it reserved. I went to look for another possible case just so I could start, even if on a case that's not my first choice, yet the volume it was in wasn't on the shelf. Well... that was quite annoying. I then found my mates and played Magic the Gathering for an hour or so till I had to come home. When I did get home I pretty much freshened up, burnt some D&D stuff for one of the mates I was meeting for the buffet, then off I went. It was great to see my girlfriend again, and seeing my mates is generally always good. Though I only thought I was 'out of it', i.e. out of energy and quite apathetic, for a few seconds my friends and girlfriend said I was like that for a while. It's a bit strange since I swear it wasn't even half a minute long, but meh. I feel quite bad that I made my girlfriend worry. I hope she didn't feel too anxious. We all ended up playing in the D&D campaign my munchkin mate is running, and there was a room with a puzzle in it. I was quite slow on the uptake, since I didn't have any of my energy back and was doing my best to keep up appearances, but I eventually solved it.

When my girlfriend and one of my mates had to go I remained behind and played a few games of Magic the Gathering against the remaining friend using borrowed decks and it was quite fun. Admittedly one of the borrowed decks I was still a bit unsure of as I hadn't fully looked through it, I'd only played a single previous game with it. Even so I won with it again, then borrowed my mate's white/blue/green odd deck which I'd thrown together for him a while ago. I didn't do too badly and in one rather unfortunate game I was essentially a turn away from winning when he killed me. He was on one life, heh. After that I came back home again and, to my annoyance, I managed to find the case I'd been looking for, but online. It's not a 'hard copy' so it's not got the exact page references I need, but oh well. It is, however, 45 pages long. As such there's no way in hell I'm going through it tonight though I'd said to myself I would. I'll simply go through it tomorrow. With luck I'll be able to go through it and highlight important points, do the secondary research on it, go through all that, and potentially start the research for the Public law reform essay. The research for that may take a fair amount of work. I'll probably end up doing most of the writing this week for the two pieces of work on thursday and friday. I really, -really- have to finish at least one of the pieces this week, as I only have half of next week to write before the deadlines hit. Gah, it's all very stressful. Till next time then.

Work once more.

2006-11-25T22:59:00.000Z

The day started off fine. Then, of course, I had to go to work. That wasn't quite so good, but meh. Nothing bad happened, nor did anything good happen. It was in fact a neutral day, but as I'm not overly keen on work it wasn't the most enjoyable way I could have spent my time, though it certainly was the highest paid. During my lunch and tea breaks I actually went to self scan to help out without pay, since self scan is something I actually enjoy. It was also hellishly busy in that area, and my mate who was the only guy manning it looked rushed, stressed, and downright peeved at the managers stating that only one person should be on it, watching four tills... After work I got to see my lovely girlfriend again, went back to hers and watched another atrocious episode of the 'Robin Hood' series that's currently running, then went onto the main feature. Before I started work I bought two books for my dad at his request, then bought the film Lucky Number Slevin for myself. As such round my girlfriend's place the two of us, and her parents, sat and saw the film together. It'd been a long time since I last saw it, and it was damn good. It's a film I quite enjoy. Not long after it finished it was time for my to leave sadly, but as I'm seeing my girlfriend tomorrow it's still all good.

I didn't do any law research today since I'll be saving the case note research for tomorrow once I get home, then writing the actual work on monday since I have a fair amount of time spare. I highly doubt I'll get it finished, but I'll at least make a start. Monday evening I'll be going out with my girlfriend and two other mates for the second buffet, so that's something to look forward to. With all the planning for that aside, I didn't do much tonight apart from play Magic the Gathering on Magic Workstation with a mill deck, burn deck and my white, blue and green sliver control deck. I had a very reasonably even number of wins and losses, so that's not too bad. My mill deck is simply fun. I've also just made a (technically) illegal artifact deck. It's 'illegal' as it has more than one of each Mox jewel, which are restricted to only one in a deck in DCI tournaments. Thank heavens I'm not in one of those eh? I'm just about to test it, and it'll be funny I reckon. Lots of Mox jewels, some normal land, and damn expensive creatures... Fufufufufu... Till next time.

Sleeping.

2006-11-24T23:44:00.000Z

I had a blissful lie in this morning, not bothering to get up till 11 am. Woo, that's several hours longer than usual. When I did get up Neverwinter Nights 2 was done, and so I installed it and started playing. I only managed to complete the intro tutorial quest thing before I had to leave for university, but it was quite fun. University itself was similarly fun, since I only had to go in for a single lecture and it was Tort, concerning causation and so forth. I actually quite like the topic of causation, so it was enjoyable. After that lecture I came home pretty much straight away as I didn't feel like hanging around. After all, my girlfriend was coming round. When she did turn up I was quite happy, since she had felt ill on tuesday but seemed much better today. We watched some of the Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shambala movie together as I'd encoded it to DVD for her and her family (well, just her dad really) and she quite liked what she saw, so it's all good. After that, and after dinner, we spent a fair amount of time playing Neverwinter Nights 2 together since she likes that genre of game, but as she owns a Mac can't play them. It was great fun being with her as she took control of the characters and tried to get the game camera into the right positions. She did, however, have to go home. As such after I'd escorted her back home I went back to playing NN 2 and started trying out a few cheats to see what happened. It was rather entertaining.

Past that I didn't really do much. I checked the forum to see how the extra Storytellers were doing, and one had actually exp'd a post. Impressive indeed. Once that was all checked I decided to get Magic Workshop. hell, I have all the magic the Gathering card pictures, so why not recreate my decks and play online? I duly downloaded it, looked at it for a few minutes, then recreated my white/blue sliver control deck and my utter pure burn deck. Though there were a few false starts I did manage to get several games in, and got an even number of wins and losses. Not too bad really. My burn deck was the funnier to play, since I was doing damage every turn as well as playing a mana every turn thanks to the way my deck's built. Gee damn it was fun watching opponents trying to counter only to be burnt with exactly the same thing the next turn for even more damage. That ate up a fair amount of time though, which explains why this post is quite 'late'. For now though I need to sleep, as I have work in the morning. Till next time.

Got one done.

2006-11-23T23:22:00.000Z

Mwahahahahaha! Finally. This evening I started actually writing my contract law essay, and finished the bastard. That's one out of the way and I still have half a week in which to get it done. Booyah. It's only 5 pages long (shorter if I were to remove the footnotes from the bottom of the pages) yet it has over 40 reference. Gee damn eh? Anyway, to start from the beginning of my day. Did I go into college early? Hell no, I had another couple of hours sleeping in. It was rather nice, and I damn well intend to sleep in tomorrow too. The lecture was incredibly boring, and bloody pointless. It was inane repetition on how not to write an essay. The lecturer had already told us what not to do in the last two lectures, and we've been emailed the actual projector slides. It was quite aggravating, as if I had simply skipped the utterly pointless lecture I could have finished off the research for my essay earlier. As it was, I went to Brighton after the lecture since I wanted something interesting to do, and I bought another Darksteel booster box. I happily went through it, and lo and behold - another Thought Dissector! Another Sword of Light and Shadow! Another happy happy pristine Angel! I'd also traded away my Sundering Titan and Darksteel Colossus (which is a freaking amazing card) for a lot of rares yesterday, and guess what? Yes, another Sundering Titan and Darksteel Colossus! Another Gemini Engine too! I now have three of those, funky. In fact the only rare I wanted and didn't get was Darksteel Forge (curses!). I want to make an entirely indestructible deck, so I kinda need the forge.... That and some Platinum Angels would be nice, but it'll be a while before I get those...

After Brighton it was back to uni for an hour before my seminar. In that hour I fully finished all the research I needed to do for my contract essay, then I had to go to the contract seminar. Funnily enough the second question to be discussed at the seminar had exactly, and I'm serious, -exactly- the same wording as one of the three essay questions to choose from. Funnily enough, it was the question I was doing. Who'd have thought eh? As such with a few probing questions I got the lecturer to describe the answer in detail, and I was pleased that he mentioned all the cases I'd grabbed. How convenient. After the lecture I pointed out the fact that the question was the same as the required essay, and he seemed a bit surprised. It was entertaining to see the vaguely bemused look on his face, and to hear him mutter, "Oh... If I'd known, I wouldn't have talked through it... I guess it's too late now..." Indeed, heheheh. After the seminar I just came straight home since I didn't feel like hanging around, and thus the procrastination started. I put off doing my essay for three hours, and then when I was doing inbetween every half an hour or so I took a twenty minute break. As such it took about four hours to write all in all, but it wasn't too bad to actually do. The only annoying thing was the sheer ridiculous amount of references I had to write, not to mention I had to write a bibliography even though I used the footnote reference system. Meh. I also easily had enough time to update the forum, and Neverwinter Nights 2 is coming along nicely. I should be able to install and play it by tomorrow. Rock on eh?

Till next time then.

Interesting advancement.

2006-11-22T23:05:00.000Z

This morning I went in to university early but didn't get anything done as I didn't feel all that awake to be honest. The seminar went fine, though as I was tired the beginning was a bit hard to follow, especially as I was the first one to be asked a question. After that though I did a very, very small amount of work then went to the common room and hung around whilst surfing the net on my laptop. It wasn't exactly the most eventful day I'd had by then, but meh. Eventually a mate turned up but I had to go to my lecture. Once back from that I started to play Magic the Gathering. I didn't win, but got close in the main four player game I was in. Had I got either a Deathspore Thallid or Dread return I would have been laughing. Ah well. The zombies campaign went well, and I'm still quite pleased that everyone (as far as I can tell) is enjoying it. There's a lot more going on, with more fighting with each other over small problems and so forth. Essentially there's a lot more role playing going on, more fights, and people are actually playing their characters as gradually getting emotionally strained. Aside from one guy that is, his character is autistic and has practically gone insane. That, added with the autism, means that his inter-character relations aren't exactly brilliant. Next week I'll probably add the next type of 'zombie' or even the next two. There was a chance for them to appear this week, but luckily (for the characters) they didn't roll the right numbers for this to happen. Much hilarity would have been had by me if they had turned up.

Dungeons and Dragons went relatively well too. Though I was standing next to the villain when he 'died' I wasn't able to grab his sword. For a start the guy stood up, started his classic evil speech, stuttered, then exploded. Looks like his sword had a side effect. Regardless I still wanted it, but the dwarf paladin grabbed it first. Well, bugger. That wasn't pleasing at the time. On the way out I ran past the assassin vine again whilst the others went and killed it. Like hell I'm willingly going to fight something I'd managed to run past before. That way I stay alive far longer. When we fully exited the giant dead-ish tree thing the half-orc barbarian and myself managed to safely avoid the giant spider. The paladin was, however, not quite so fast, and the barbarian stayed behind to help him. The rest of the group decided to go back to town since it was practical. As such, the ridiculously huge spider utterly wiped the floor with the paladin and barbarian, and only didn't kill them as they ran off without having done anything to it. Silly people... That's why running is always a viable option. In town I managed to get one of the magic rings we'd obtained, and which my diabolus is now wearing, identified though it won't be till next week till I find out what it is. I also decided to go for some ranks in craft and got a mentor for the skill. In a week's worth of training I'll have a rather nifty masterwork two-ended sword for slightly cheaper than it's normal cost. Sweet. I also managed to grab the slightly shiny black sword the villain didn't need anymore (as he'd exploded) and so that made me happy. From what I can tell it made the Paladin dislike me even more. Meh, I have the sword, I'm happy.

When I got home I was going to do some law work, but the remaining cases I need are all pretty old, so I need to find the hard copies of them in the library tomorrow and photocopy them, as well as finding the hard copy references for the current cases I have. With luck my free time tomorrow afternoon from 4 pm should allow me to get a fair bit of it written. I'll be aiming for around 75% to 90% completed tomorrow, which means I can finish it off either over the weekend after I get home, or on monday. On monday I do need to do research for the case note and second essay. With more luck I'll get all the case note research done on monday, allowing me to start writing it on either tuesday or thursday, as well as starting the research for the second essay on thursday. It's all good to have it planned, I just hope I manage it...

Till next time then.

Tired.

2006-11-21T23:58:00.000Z

Today was generally uneventful for me, if only because I felt quite tired so probably missed stuff. Due to various reading, preparing, forum tasks etc and so forth I didn't actually go to bed till 7.10 am this morning. As I had to get up at 7.55 am this morning, it wasn't exactly a long rest. My first lecture I semi-dozed through, though I did make notes which I found impressive later on in the day. Afterwards I had something to eat and felt better, then had the large two hour lecture which went fine, though in the second hour I was starting to feel tired again. In the three hour gap I played Magic the Gathering for a while before going to do some law work. Unfortunately it took ages for a computer to be free, but I did find the actual hard copy of the article I'd got a title for, so that helps my contract essay a fair amount. I didn't quite finish going through it, but meh. The last lecture was Frameworks and was entirely focused on pointing out lots of bad points about a really, heinously bad essay. I had my eyes shut through nearly all of that and was happily cat-napping as I listened. I didn't bother taking notes however, as I'm confident in my spelling ability and general essay writing skills.

After uni it was down to Games Workshop where I had intended to play a game. Unfortunately when my girlfriend arrived she was feeling a bit ill and didn't look all that healthy, so eventually I managed to persuade her to go home, and I went with her. She had a temperature, headache, pain in her neck and hip and her eyes hurt. That's probably not good all together, though the hip pain was due to straining a muscle earlier in the day as far as I know. At any rate I just stayed with her and we both relaxed, and thankfully she felt slightly better by the time I had to leave. Once home myself I decided to have a bath, update the forum, get the relevant anime torrents (for which there weren't many at all) and read the webcomics I follow. I didn't get round to doing law as through everything which I did I felt intensely tired, so in fact I'm going to call it a day here and go to bed now. Till next time.

Late again.

2006-11-20T23:41:00.000Z

Meh, sorry, sorry. Another late post. Anyway, my day went quite well, if not overly productively. I went into uni early and treated a mate to breakfast as I was quite bored. After that it was time for my single hour of lecture, which was quite entertaining. Once that was finished I went to do some law work. Needless to say my motivation wasn't quite brilliant, and so I met up with some mates instead, went into Brighton and bought a few more cards. A black core deck, five core set boosters, a Mirrodin booster and a Darksteel booster. Though most of the stuff was alright, I did get Wrath of God and Worship, two highly nifty cards which I'll eventually put into the white and black deck I've been planning for a while. It'll be fun, heh. When the day hit late afternoon however I did get to doing law work, and got through the main case I'd printed. Once home I put off doing any work for a while as my motivation had died a horrible death earlier in the day. Regardless however I eventually got around to it, did some highlighting, printed another case and got the title of a highly appropriate article. I also got round to coverting the Fullmetal Alchemist movie into a DVD with a rather simple menu. Quite a nice program really and simple to use. Hmm. There was also the forum to update, though I've not managed to do the zombie poster yet. I'll be doing that after this post.

As it's a monday I also got through anime as per usual. I managed to watch two episodes of Crescent Love, two of Death Note, Tokimeki Memorial, two of Zegapain, two of Aria the Natural, Kiba, Naruto, Inukami, Welcome to the NHK and two of Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru. That's 15. Not overly bad, but a bit less than usual as I watched a couple of episodes during the week too. In brief then, Crescent Love had a bit of mutual lovelorn pain but a happy declaration, Death Note was just damn cool. The way Light manages to find out names is entertaining. Tokimeki Memorial was pretty good too, and similarly Zegapain was good though for entirely different reasons. Seeing Sin and Abyss meet their end was fun. Aria the Natural was again quite whimsical, though Kiba was riddled with harsh problems. Getting kidnapped had got to suck. Luckily Zed managed to (mostly) take care of himself so now it's all down to what he does. Naruto was again filler with a vague plot. Inukami had more strange perverted villains, Welcome to the NHK had the main dude overcoming his problem even more from seeing someone worse than him and in Otome there was a ghost. The series was vaguely serious till the ghost. Oh dear... I'll probably keep watching it anyway, meh. Now I really should go and make the zombie poster, so till next time.

Stress, relax, stress.

2006-11-20T00:23:00.000Z

A mixed day really. Work started fine since it was vaguely dead all morning. True, I nearly always had a customer to serve, but there were gaps and one or two were several minutes long. This went on till about 12.40 pm-ish when I had my break, and thankfully I was able to do someone else's break first instead of having mine. What was better was that the break I was covering was on self scan. Excellent stuff, that kept me interested for the half hour it lasted. After that I actually took my own lunch, and ended up spending much of it hanging around self scan and chatting with one of my colleagues there as I didn't really have anything better to do. After that ended it was back to the normal tills unfortunately, and work definitely picked up. It was rather annoying and I wanted to simply leave for a fair amount of the afternoon. Thankfully, as always, work ended and I was able to meet up with my beautiful girlfriend. Seeing her after a (relatively) stressful day at work is bliss. Whilst at hers we spent ages simply chatting, then watched the rest of her Rune Soldier anime DVD. Not the best anime I've seen, but still fairly entertaining. I'll next be seeing her on tuesday at Games Workshop, and I'll be bringing an actual army for a change. Since I recently, and luckily, obtained a Fabius Bile chaos lord model and three chaos Obliterators I'm going to be writing up a new army and seeing how it turns out. I'm hoping I can fit in my Havoks, a small squad of Raptors, the three Obliterators and of course some normal men and the (new) Lord.

When I got home from the bliss and relaxation of my girlfriend it all went to hell as the stress hit home again. I had to really put my mind to law work as I need to write an essay this coming week as well as preferably making a start gathering the resources for my case note and second essay. Bah. As such I printed off the uni guide to referencing and the main case for my Contract essay. I also make a rather incredibly brief essay outline with huge gaps in it. Currently I highly doubt it'd be close to 1,500 words, so I'll invariably end up putting in more than the five cases I currently have planned for it. Hmm, at least it's a start. Tomorrow after my single hour of lecture I guess I'll finish reading the main case, pull a bunch of quotations for it to back up some points, then possibly begin writing the essay. The beginning is simple enough, a brief introduction to what consideration actually is and the supporting three cases which define it. If I can get that written it'd be excellent. Thanks to this work and a desire not to cut down on my time with my girlfriend I'll most likely not see any of my uni friends, as the temptation to play Magic the Gathering would be far too great, and that'd most likely end up wasting a lot of my time and screwing me over. Bah. Bah I say! For the next two weeks at least it seems like I have a lot of work to do, plus after week ten when I start the Christmas holidays I need to start catching up on cases. Bloody things....

Till next time.

Work strikes again.

2006-11-18T22:07:00.000Z

Another moderate day at work. I spent the first couple of hours on a normal till, then was thankfully able to get on the sefl-scan tills for an hour after my first break. I like being on self-scan, as it requires a hell of a lot less work, mainly pressing a few buttons now and then when something goes wrong and couting items. Compared to endlessly scanning items it's freaking great. It did only last an hour though, as I had to go back on a normal till since it was busy. Once back on them the day got a lot drearier and boring. Though it didn't make me feel down or anything, it was still quite mind-numbing. Also the thought of the law work I had to do wasn't encouraging at all. Bleh. After work, since my girlfriend is working longer hours for the Christmas period, I waited for a short while to be picked up. I had time to change therefore, and wore a new Primark shirt. I also bought two t-shirts today at ASDA, as they were having a 20% clothing sale and I have my usual (additional) 10% staff discount. So instead of £6 a shirt they were £4.20. How convenient and reasonably priced eh? I also bought my girlfriend's mum her Christmas present, got some chocolate for my girlfriend and I, as well as some to share with her family, and bought a ream of paper since my printer tends to eat the stuff.

Time today with my girlfriend was relaxing and happy. It was nice being able to cuddle and watch anime together. It was Rune Solider, an anime I've not seen before but which was strange and interesting enough to keep me watching. It was quite fantasy RPG-like and had a fair amount of comedy. The chocolate went down pretty well too and I was invited round to have dinner on Christmas Day since my step mum will be working and my dad will be working during the evening. That's quite cool, I get to spend Christmas with my girlfriend. I can't really think of a better way to spend it, so that's supremely excellent and something to look forward to. I do however need to get all my law work done in the intervening time, so the stress is ever present. Before I go to bed tonight I need to look through it all, pick out which essay needs to be done first, then get relevant chapters, cases and articles for it as well as noting down useful url's for the case note. It's quite a biref task really. Tomorrow after work I'll be starting to read through it, then starting monday I'll be ploughing into the damn work. Le sigh. The excitement never ends eh? I can see my upcoming two weeks filled with a lot of anguish and annoyance, having to read stupid amounts just to get select quotes and so on and so forth..... Bah. Till next time.

Another day passes.

2006-11-17T23:33:00.000Z

The seminar this morning went well surprisingly. Admittedly I didn't strictly prepare for it. True, I'd read the relevant text book chapter, but that was a week ago and I didn't read any of the proposed cases. I still got through it quite well however. If only the exams at the end of the year were so easy, heh. In the four hours of spare time I had till my lecture I finished the text book reading for Contract and Public Law and popped into Brighton. I ended up buying a Darksteel booster box for Magic the athering this time as they're £30 which is still half normal price. No doubt I'll buy another eventually. The cards I got were all quite funky, especially so with the rares. My god some of them are spiffy. I got Pristine Angel, Sword of Fire and Ice, Sword of Light and Shadow, Darksteel Colossus and so on and so forth. I merely listed my favourites. I also bought another Tort law book when back at university about 'The Wrongs of Tort' as it's always on the recommended reading list. That was, roughly, another £20 spent on law. For the hell of it I also got a 'Japanese for Dummies' book since it seemed to be quite good and I've wanted to learn some japanese since I started watching anime and so far I know a couple of phrases. Which kinda sucks. The lecture wasn't too bad either, since I do find Tort to be a hell of a lot more interesting than, say, Frameworks. After that lecture however was a plagiarism lecture about 'what not to do'. The punishments are quite.... harsh, even if it's purely accidental. Gee damn...

Once I got home I was slightly disappointed to learn that my girlfriend wasn't able to come over thanks to college work. Very understandable though, so I got down to my usual practice of surfing for anime updates, playing Urban Dead, despairing about the upcoming law work I have to do whilst utterly avoiding any hint of plagiarism, updating the forum and checking my email. Etcetera etcetera. I also encouraged a guy from the Soul Society forum to start up a PvP against one of my XPC's since I felt in the mood to RP some fighting with an entirely new character. My Darksteel cards were next to me for a while as I intended to sort through them (further than the sorting I did on the train and in uni, which was to seperate all the rares and foils) but I never really got round to it. I've not watched any anime either, though I did watch two episodes of Black Lagoon yesterday after posting. ye gods that series is cool. The way most of the attackers were taken down was just funny and Revy rocks. It was also quite nice to have enough time whilst not feeling utterly stressed to watch anime. It makes a nice change from recent times. As for now I guess I shall be off, since I don't really have anything to talk about now. I can only hope that I'm assigned to self-scan tomorrow at work, since that is a hell of a lot more interesting than being on a normal checkout... Till next time.

Er... dang.

2006-11-16T22:24:00.000Z

Looks like I forgot to post yesterday. That's probably because I got home from SWARM and was exhausted, so I tried reading a bit of law, failed, and went to sleep. To very briefly recap the SWARM experience yesterday, Magic the Gathering went well, though it took longer than I expected, and, without meaning to, I ended up being late to my only lecture for the day. Thankfully as the lecturer frequently spends a substantial length of time recapping the previous lecture I only actually missed the details for three cases. That's not too bad. The zombie campaign went rather well too, and I've got everyone into two groups, one of which is actually entirely made up of original characters. That's quite impressive. The uber-zombie managed to get to both groups, but only went uber on one and generally everyone was alright afterwards. One unlucky bugger got shot in the leg with a shotgun by an NPC as he was caught trying to steal his car. Whoops eh? After zombies I was in the D&D campaign once more, and that went rather spiffingly. Though I got to -9, and thereby was a single hit point away from permenant death, I was luckily stabilised and consequently healed. Not long after that we found the dwarven paladin again, and came across the main bad guy. We killed him just as the session ended, or so we all think. His slightly shiny black sword shall be mine, regardless of what the paladin says.

Today went pretty well too. I went into uni early, intending to read Frameworks as I had a stupid amount to read before the seminar. That kinda failed, as it kept making me almost fall asleep. As such I had a big breakfast, lots of sugary drinks, and felt buzzed. I went to read it again. I nearly fell asleep. Seriously, that book can cure insomnia. I gave up on it but the seminar was fine anyway, as pretty much everyone was quiet and no one at all really asked or answered any questions. Ergo I didn't stand out, woo. The lecture was similarly boring, but more engaging the the text book at least.... After that I hurried home, got ready and so forth then went out to Eastbourne and met up with my girlfriend. We spent the afternoon shopping together and I bought her a rather nice tartan top, and actually bought myself two more shirts, the first bits of new clothing (not counting underwear, socks or my work uniform) that I've got in something like two and a half years. How useful eh? After that we went back to hers and I had a long chat with her dad about work and so forth before my girlfriend and I watched the first Ghost in the Shell movie. Damn that movie rocks. Again it was unfortunate that I had to leave, but with any luck I'll be seeing her tomorrow too if she's not got much college work to do.

My spare time this weekend and in the upcoming week is going to be inhumanly restricted since it'll be week eight of uni on monday, and by week nine I need to have written an essay and case note, and have to write another essay for week ten. On the plus side I don't have Frameworks lectures in week nine, so I have more time then for the public law essay I believe. It also means I'd have thursday entirely off in two weeks. Nifty. That's all for now then, as I'm going to watch anime (and it's not even a monday! Wow!). Till next time.

More sorting.

2006-11-14T23:09:00.000Z

It was the long day of the week at uni today. An hour lecture, hour gap, two hour lecture, three hour gap, hour lecture. The first lecture wasn't too bad, though the new lecturer seems vaguely disorganised - she didn't actually follow the outline in the handbook. Oh well eh? During the first hour gap I basically just soprted through 64 emails which were in my university mailbox. It was only the second time I'd signed in for my uni email account, the first time being during fresher's week. Once that was done it was time for the longer lecture, and that went well as always. During the three hour free I went to brighton with my munchkin friend and another SWARMer I'm friends with and we popped into Dave's Comics then Daydream Nations. I purchased another card folder, for my foils, and also got another two tournament packs for Mirrodin more out of boredom than anything else. I ended up making a deck out of their contents and didn't do too badly in the game played afterwards. It had all three of us in it, and unfortunately I did die first. However the other two were on 1 and 9 respectively, so it wasn't that bad. For most of the game I actually had the most life. Getting whacked by a whole host of critters you can't block is slightly problematic, heh. The last lecture was boring as always, since it was Frameworks. Meh...

After uni I went round to my girlfriend's place and enjoyed seeing her again. The whole evening was taken up with watching the film Shaolin Soccer, which my girlfriend, her dad and her mum seemed to enjoy. That was all good then. Unfortunately that meant that most of the time was spent watching a film. Oh well. On thursday I'll be meeting up with her an hour or so past midday to go shopping, so that's something to look forward to. Though window shopping generally isn't my thing I'll be with her, so it's all good. As for when I got home, I went to actually sort through the most recent Mirrodin booster box I bought. After breaking it down into the main groups, i.e. colours, artifacts, specifically equipment etc etc, I ended up making a Myr and equipment deck. It'll be interesting to see how it plays, since there's only seven non-artifact cards in the deck, four of which are flying creatures (just in case) and the other three enchantments to prevent opponent's attacking me (again just in case). With luck the Myr, equipment and Coat of Arms artifacts will all work together well. I also printed a few more zombie rp character sheets as I know they're needed - several character dies last week after all. I'll also be taking in six MtG decks, so I'll probably get a few games in.

Till next time then.

Back to normal.

2006-11-13T23:06:00.000Z

Aaah, today was a hell of a lot better than all the stress of my weekend, though this post has been rolled back several hours as my day ran out of time and I'm still not finished with everything I feel I need to do. Anyway, to start at the beginning - I went into university early to get some law reading done. I managed to finish both the public law and contract chapters I had to read, so once again I was up to date in the textbook. Note the past tense. I then had my actual contract lecture, and the lecturer managed to finish his topics on time, adding another chapter for me to read, before announcing that starting tomorrow we'd have a different lecturer for the rest of the term. Fair enough then. Of course the addition of another chapter to read wasn't exactly beneficial to my scheduling, but meh. After the lecture I went into Brighton, bought another Mirrodin booster box and entirely failed to get a Platinum Angel. I have therefore given up on booster boxes, and won't be buying any for 'a while'. However I'm still trying to find them, disregarding eBay, so I may end up getting one or two through trades. That'd be nice. I also bought a card folder, more deck protector slips and another triple deck box. They're handy to have. I do however need more card boxes to hold the 1000-ish Mirrodin cards I now have. I also need to sort out through the box I bought today but simply haven't had the time yet.

After my shopping trip in Brighton I came home, freshened up, then went out to Eastbourne to walk around the stores. Unfortunately one of the two stores I wanted to go to was shut, so I couldn't exactly check it out. Damn eh? The second store, Primark, was bigger than I expected. It was also messier, though that was due to the other customers who seemed to have an obsessive desire to pick clothing up, barely glance at it, then throw it back instead of putting it back onto the rails. How considerate of them. After that I hung around for a while, meeting one of the buffet-mates in Games Workshop, and eventually went next door to the pub to meet up with the second mate. A few games of Magic the Gathering followed, and one game resulted in a complete loss for me. Annoyingly I got totally mana screwed, and only having three mana for essentially the whole game was a bit of a let down. However in the rematch I slaughtered him. Excellent stuff. I also played another game against him later, with my altered artifact deck, and won as the match had to end early. He was on 18 life, I was nearly at 60. How handy.

Between the MtG games my girlfriend turned up and it was great seeing her again. We all had the buffet together which was also quite nice. It looked like it'd be a good snack for the full seven people, but as there were only four of us it was a pretty damn good meal. It certainly filled me up at any rate. having 50% off drinks thanks to cards we have was also quite handy. Once the meal had been eaten my munchkin pal continued his campaign, and we managed to get an adventuring job and leave the city. For some reason it took a long time, presumably as we all kept joking around which derailed him quite often. Eventually however my girlfriend had to go home, which wasn't all that enjoyable, but I'll be seeing her tomorrow after uni. I'm making an effort to see her a lot since it makes me really happy, and gets rid of a lot of my stress. Cuddling her simply makes me feel content instead of feeling the usual crushing pressure.

When I got home, after the later MtG games, I had a lot to do. I updated the forum, sent the SWARM emails out for my campaign and a few other notes, made the new zombie campaign poster and put all my rares into the card folder I bought, ready for wednesday so people can actually easily look through my cards. After all that was done it was getting pretty late. By late I mean 'past midnight'. How inconvenient. Regardless of the time I continued with everything I usually do on a monday now, most notably watching anime. I managed to get through the final two episodes of Kemonozume, Bleach, Naruto, the Kashimashi OVA, Kiba, Welcome to the NHK, two episodes of Tsubasa Chronicle, two episodes of Jigoku Shoujo Futakomori, The Gargoyle of the Yoshinagas, Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru, Black Blood Brothers, Asatte no Houkou, Negima, Tokimeki Memorial and Chevalier. 18 episodes once again.

Kemonozume had a good ending in my opinion, and Ooba or however you spell his name was a rather interesting freak. Bleach was not too bad and the animation looked better than the recent few episodes. Naruto again was slightly better, though still filler. It also had some of the most blatant and unstealthy ninjas I've seen in that show. Shame on them. Kashimashi took away the ambiguous ending to the series, so it provided good closure. Kiba had more good fighting, Welcome to the NHK had the joy of multi-level marketing tricking them all, Tsubasa Chronicle had the planar explorers (still...) fighting the dude with god-like powers and Jigoku had more interesting people sent to hell, though one seemed to find it funny. In Yoshinagas the little blond girl essentially got a proper family, Otome had the guy-posing-as-a-girl winning the main election and in Black Blood Brothers at the end Cain the Blue Wolf lived up to his name with a transformation. It was cool. The brother seemed to be fully coming to terms with the situation in Asatte no Houkou, and similarly in Negima more girls were becoming accustomed to Negi being a mage, most notably Nodoka. Tokimeki Memorial had the poor main guy runnng around, again, but it seemes like he's really found a girl he likes. Good for him. Lastly in Chevalier there was more plotting and attempted assassinations. That about wraps it up for the anime I watched then.

I still have an update for Crescent Love to watch, but I won't watch that today as it's so late it counts as early. I still have 14 pages of contract law to read, so now I've written all this I guess I better try and read some of it before I collapse. Till next time.

A bad day purchase.

2006-11-12T23:22:00.000Z

Again it was a bad day, but instead of skipping the post as I did yesterday I figure enough interesting good stuff has happened so I can at least make a short post. Not long after I started work, maybe 30 minutes at most, I was finally moved to the sefl-scan tills for my training. I've been going on at them for a month and a half and I finally got it. Excellent stuff. That lasted till about 2 pm, then I had to go back onto the normal till till I finished work. That wasn't so bad as by then quite a substantial chunk of the day had gone so I didn't mind at all. Also, during my break, I went and bought something I've been whining about getting for the past two and a half years - a camera. It's not incredibly fantastic, but it is 5 megapixel with 4x digital zoom and can record at 30 fp/s. That's rather handy, and the pictures it takes are ridiculously huge and yet still quite sharp. Nifty. After work I of course saw my girlfriend, and it was generally nice being able to cuddle her again. I nearly always really enjoy my time with her, yet when I have to leave as a result I tend to feel a bit low. Thankfully I'm seeing her tomorrow when the pair of us, and two other friends, are meeting up to have a meal together in the evening. That's something nice to look forwards to. At any rate I don't feel like talking about anything else, so till next time.

Crap day.

2006-11-11T23:38:00.000Z

My day went from alright, to shit, to tolerable, to much better, to shit. I can't be bothered to write any of it, and any questions about it aren't likely to be answered.

Till next time.

More cards.

2006-11-10T23:34:00.000Z

Hmm. The past half hour has been marred by frustration at Blogger. I tried the new beta layout, and couldn't work out how to get my banner back at all. After a fair bit of frustration I switched back to the classic template. Meh. Anyway, onto my day. It started well as I popped into Dave's Comics in Brighton first and picked up the All Flesh Must Be Eaten RPG core rule book. Though I have it in .pdf I wanted a hard copy for ease of transport and simply so I can flick through it. It'll also help people in my campaign as they'll be able to look through it without needing my laptop. I then went into David's Books and bought a Mirrodin booster box for £25 (compared to the other sets' booster boxes which were £60... Maybe Mirrodin isn't a popular set or something?) in the hopes of getting a particular card. Unfortunately I didn't, but I did get a feckload of artifacts quite understandably. I guess I'll make an artifact deck or two. It'll be interesting to see if a golem deck will work or if it'll simply be too expensive. After that I went into daydream Nations (I think that's what the store is called) and bought another 200 deck protector card sleeves and a tri-deck box with a nifty dark red undead design. Once all that was done I quickly went to uni to meet up with my munchkin mate who lives on campus. I played a few games of MtG with him, testing out my new burn deck and I even played my Fun With Fungus deck for the hell of it. I won three out of the four games, and the FwF deck flattened him. It was rather entertaining.

The lecture itself wasn't too bad. There wasn't much progress as there were quite a few cases the lecturer had to talk through, but as tort is the only subject I'm actually ahead in as far as text book reading is concerned, I actually knew of the cases when he started talking about them. Though I'm terrible with name I remember the details pretty well, so it was nice actually knowing what he was going to say next. Once the lecture was over I went straight home as I didn't really feel like doing anything else. On the way home I felt a bit low for no reason at all, which was annoying afterwards, and so the walk home from the train station sucked a fair amount. I soon perked up however as I treated my dad and step mum to a meal out, and simply being somewhere else made me feel a lot better. After the meal when I arrived back home I started sorting through the Mirrodin cards again. I'd already gone through them before I played the MtG games earlier in the day, but sorting through them again allowed me to seperate them according to colour, artifact type, rares and notable cards I wanted for other decks. I also picked out a bunch of cards for a potential new deck, though it needs a lot of work and I'll probably end up putting a fair amount of Time Spiral cards in. I think I now know why Mirrodin is cheaper than the other sets. The rares are rather good indeed, but aside from the equipment and spellbombs there isn't really anything overly impressive in the set. true, the Myrs are funny, but aside from provide mana for the most part they don't do much. Many of the creatures are hideously expensive too. I console myself with the rares, equipment and artifact lands. They're all rather cool and Imay end up building a red/black/artifact equip deck. It's interesting to think what cards I could add in from Time Spiral. I could take apart the white/green/red sliver deck I've never used to make a green/red/artifact equip deck and go for big creatures, equipment to make them bigger, and red spells to clear the opponent's field. It's an interesting theory, though questionable as to how well it'd work in practice.

At any rate it's getting late and I still need to read a bit of law, so till next time.

What to do?

2006-11-09T22:08:00.000Z

How should I describe today? Hmm, I guess 'quite good' would probably cover it. University wasn't too bad. Instead of the Frameworks lecture another person was doing it, and it was about European law and so forth, so the first years have a better idea of what it is. It was less boring than Frameworks, and thus was 'all good'. I had two hours in which to prepare for the seminar, and thus went to a mate's as he lives on campus, and played Magic the gathering. Though he would have eventually won, the game ended with me on more life as I had to go to my seminar. That was vaguely funny. The seminar itself went well, as there was ten minutes at the beginning to prepare an answer to the problem in groups. I spent seven of those minutes getting all the relevant cases, and seemingly impressed the two other guys I was with, as they both said they were crap at Contract. It was mildly amusing seeing their expressions as I explained each case actually. The discussion in the whole class went well too, so that was a good seminar and helped me remeber the names of three more cases. Excellent stuff. After uni I had to rush home, as the seminar had overrun slightly, and I managed to thankfully still catch the 3.02 pm train. A hurried shower later and I felt fresh enough to actually see my girlfriend.

It was nice having her round again. Most of the time I go to her's, so it's a nice change to be with her and still have the setting of my room. We watched the rest of Dog Soldiers together, as ages ago we'd seen the first half but never got round to finishing it. She liked that movie too, so that was pretty convenient. We didn't do much else really aside from chat, mostly about how my munchkin mate's campaign is going to turn out. One of my other friends luckily won a meal for himself and lots of other people and it covers my munchkin pal and my girlfriend too as well as me, so this coming monday we're all going to meet together, have a meal, get some cheap drinks thanks to three of us having 50% off on mondays) and then play the campaign. Quite nifty indeed and something to look forward to. At the moment I'm going through the enjoyable practice of taking apart Magic the Gathering decks to make more of them. I'm currently working on a red and black burn and theft deck, and I'm going to make a white and green soon I reckon. Either that or blue and white. At any rate, till next time.

More zombies.

2006-11-09T00:27:00.000Z

I'll only briefly talk about today, as once again I'm quite tired. The seminar I had first thing wasn't too bad, though I wasn't that vocal in the beginning. As for my lecture, that went well. It was ever so faintly boring, but it went well. After that I pretty much went to SWARM and played Magic the Gathering for a while. I won a couple of games, lost a couple. Fairly even really. Once that session was over it was time for zombies, and that's when the real fun really well and truly kicked in. I had several NPC's firebomb all the windows they could see in the university, effectively forcing the group in the Grapevine with the quarantine status to move, and the group of PC zombies caught up to the incredibly well equipped 'zombie hunter' group. The zombie hunter group got annihilated. One of the zombies was inspired, with abilities that'd only work in a miracle situation. Going up against four people with the ability to dissolve zombies would require a miracle for a zombie to win. As such all his abilities kicked in, such as touch of healing, strength of ten and holy fire. It was funny when the zombie ran into the side of the fire truck and threw it through the air then set all of the insides alight with blue fire. Plus there was another zombie inspired with him who had visions and divine sight, so the zombies effectively knew what the hunters were going to do in advance. Yeah, three of the four hunters died, the last one left because she appeared to be infected, so was of no use, and also happened to be in a large puddle of zombie-dissolving ammonium. The zombies weren't exactly likely to touch her...

After that it was the D7D campaign, and the dwarven paladin seperated from the group. From what my character knew the dwarf had possibly been buried, but as the dwarf had been rather cruel and dismissing of my diabolus he wasn't all that bothered to help dig. As such the rest of the group went a different way, coming across some rather harsh vines. Eventually an evil person appeared, and he was holding a nice black sword. Not the same one as before, but I still want it and I swear I'll get it. I also bagged another 50 slivers for £3. I do have them all, but it just means I can now make a ridiculous number of sliver decks, heh. I also got some free films, as one of the members had been given a bunch of The Sun free films and handed them to me, so I took dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead and Gangster No.1. Two free zombie films. Rock on! That does however conclude what I have to say, so till next time.

Nearly there.

2006-11-07T23:04:00.000Z

There was a slight amount of irritation today thanks to my lectures, as they added another twelve pages of contract law to read and three more chapters of public law to read, but other than that the day went well. During my three hour gap instead of reading law I went to Brighton with mates and visited the Daydream Nation card store and bought another two Disintegrate for 50p each. Considering it's X(one red) to do X damage to target creature or player which can't be regenerated, it's handy that I now have three. I'll be altering my red and black deck to have more burn elements in it. It'll be quite fun to have a sliver-ish burn deck which regenerates. After uni my girlfriend came over and I gave her an introductory game of Magic the Gathering. She did quite well with the artifact deck till I got Thelon of Havenwood and Verdeloth the Ancient in play in the Fun with Fungus deck. Yeah, a mass of saprolings kinda overran her... After that we watched the rest of the film Dogma together, as the last time she'd been round and we'd started watching it there hadn't been time to finish. She quite enjoyed the film which was pretty nifty, and though saying goodbye when she had to go home was a bit of a wrench, I'll be seeing her after uni on thursday and I have SWARM tomorrow so I figure I'll be occupied at least in the time we're not together.

Unfortunately I've not had the time to watch any anime at all, though I did manage to update the forum. Also on Urban Dead I have all the 'live' skills and I'm getting close to 200 exp. Once I get 2,000 exp I'll find a group of zombies and die so I can get all the zombie skills in one go. That'll be quite amusing. Of course finding a revivication point afterwards may be a tiny bit of a problem... That brings me to the end of my news today, so till next time.

Pressed for time.

2006-11-06T21:36:00.000Z

So far the day's not gone badly at all, though I do feel as if I'd cope better if days were 30 hours long. I only had the one lecture today, but decided to stay in uni to meet up with friends and play Magic the Gathering. Reading law is all well and good, but a lack of breaks seems to erode at my sanity. As such I deemed it was practical and sensible to take an actual break and break in my slivers even more. I now actually have enough of each type to clone my main deck. How interesting. At any rate I played a couple of games and won them, then ended up switching decks with my D&D munchkin friend. He himself has said that he doesn't have a deck, but rather 'a load of cards put together' and true enough I lost horribly. We had a rematch and I actually beat my sliver deck with his. It was pretty funny. After that it was finally off home for me. I read law on the way back, had read some law during the day, and read more law when I got home. I therefore finished catching up in the textbook for contract, so that was pretty good. I then went and actually managed to enjopy another hobby of mine - anime.

I got through 17 episodes this time, a rather similar (possibly the same, I can't be bothered to check) total to last week. I watched Kiba, Black Lagoon, Tsubasa Chronicle, Naruto, Welcome to the NHK, two 'episodes' (four short episodes actually) of Dai Mahou Touge, three of Kemonozume, Asatte no Houkou, Death Note, Crescent Love, two of Chocotto Sister and two of Tonagura. Kiba had Zed's key spirit returned, though watching three fight at once was quite fun. Black Lagoon simply rocked as it always does. There were no twins, as they'd died, but it was still great fun to watch Revy shooting things. Tsubasa had the King-dude go evil, Naruto had more filler of death, Welcome to the NHK was entertaining as the poor hikkikomori got lured into a pyramid scheme and Dai Mahou Touge had more ridiculous violence which is always fun anyway. The sheer rate of change between 'happy' and 'evil' is great to watch. Kemonozume had more funky animation which I've grown to like a lot, Asatte no Houkou had the brother come to terms with the odd change in his adoptive little sister, and in Death Note 'Kira' sent his killing up a notch by getting one agent to kill a bunch of others. Harsh. Crescent Love had more about the moon princess, and she learnt how to swim incredibly well in three days. Not shabby. In Chocotto Sister Choco felt low as her brother went on a date, but the girl he liked got drunk and said some other guy's name in her sleep after she collapsed. The crying wouldn't make him feel much better either. Sucks to be him eh? Lastly in Tonagura there was an interesting situation for a cold. Odd, but interesting.

That wraps pretty much everything up. I just need to get the new zombie poster done, update the forum, actually eat dinner and then read nearly 60 pages of the frameworks textbook to catch up with that one. Ergo by tomorrow I'll only need to catch up in public law, then I can go onto reading important cases. Spiffy. Till next time then.

Remember, remember.

2006-11-05T23:25:00.000Z

Well I guess I 'forgot' to post yesterday. This wasn't on purpose. My last two hours with my girlfriend ahd been spent dozing off, so when I got home I felt kinda tired. I went to read law and after ten pages felt like having a little 5 minute nap to get rid of some of the fatigue. When I opened my eyes it was 9 am. Hmm. That was vaguely annoying, but oh well. At any rate work went well enough both yesterday and today, and was tolerable in both cases. Nothing overly exceptional actually happened. After work on both days of the weekend I went to see my girlfriend and it was nice being able to spend more time with her. We watched some tv together and so forth, and got to the penultimate episode of Fullmetal Alchemist (I believe). It ended with an untimely death, so it's either the penultimate episode or the one before it. After the series ends next week I'll most likely lend my girlfriend, and thereby dad also, the Cowboy Bebop series simply because it rocks. Once I got home I did a lot to avoid reading law, but eventually got round to it. Instead of reading 90-ish pages I simply finisherd one of the two chapters I had to read, the first one. I still have 50 or so pages to read in the chapter on damages, but I'll be leaving that for a while. No doubt once I've caught up in the other subjects I'll go back and finish it as from this point on I intend to do my best to keep up to date with the reading. Tomorrow I only have a single hour of lecture, so I'll be spending a large amount of time reading law, and should hopefully either finish Frameworks or Contract, depending on which one I bother to read.

Unfortunately again I've not got round to watching anime, and wasn't able to easily grab updates as Tokyotosho was down. Well damn, looks like I won't bother till it's up then. Tomorrow if I manage to get free time at all (unlikely, though I may forgo reading law for a couple of hours anyway) I'll most likely watch the 18 episodes of anime that've piled up in the last week. It shouldn't take too long with any luck, since none seem to be .mkv encodes so it's all good. I do however still have the rest of the Burst Angel and Garasu no Kantai series to watch, and as they're both in .mkv I don't see myself watching those in the foreseeable future. Ah well eh? Naturally I've not had any time to play on my PSP either, so bah in general at that. Once I'm caught up in the textbooks I have to go back and start reading up on cases, so it'll probably be a while before I get much free time again, since as I catch up I also need to maintain an 'up to date' status.... Meh.

Till next time then.

A little late.

2006-11-03T23:56:00.000Z

Sorry for the late post, I spent a great deal of today reading. I turned up to uni early as I had a tort seminar first thing. I'd actually done some reading for it, so it went rather well and I was able to participate a lot. Afterwards I had a four hour gap, so I spent an hour surfing the net and eating breakfast, then got down to reading. I spent two and a half damn hours of that tort text book and got through half of the ridiculously large chapter. The remaining half hour was spent grabbing a snack and heading to my tort lecture, which covered some of the seminar. Looks like the lectures are slightly behind. After the lecture ended, and it felt like it ended mercifully quickly, I was straight away off home. When I got back, can you guess what I did? Read more god damn tort. I spent another three hours or so finishing up the uber chapter of duty of care. Ironically when I finished it I realised I was ahead of the lecture by a couple of weeks. Hmm. I still have another two chapters in the book that I need to finish from previous weeks, so tomorrow and sunday once I get back home after being round my girlfriend's house I guess I'll do more reading. The plan is then to spend 1 pm till midnight on monday catching up in Frameworks and making a good start on contract. Then on tuesday in the hour gap I have between my contract and public law lectures I can read more contract, and in the subsequent three hour gap I should be able to finish catching up in contract if I hadn't managed it already. Then it's on to public law reading! Yeah, it sucks. Once I finally catch up for all the textbooks I need to go through all the lecture notes I have so far and list the important cases and start to read them. It's quite stressful, but at least I'm getting it done. I do realise I should've started this in week one rather than now at the end of week five, but meh.

Understandably I've not managed to watch any anime recently, and I have another big pile of it to watch. Since I'll be doing a lot of law reading on monday I may not exactly have the time to watch it, but I do hope to at least get some of it seen. Hell, it partially keeps me going. That and breathing. Food too. I'll definitely be watching Bleach after this, even though it's late, purely so I can burn another batch to DVD. At any rate tomorrow at work I'll start wearing the new uniform, though thankfully I'm going in early so I'll be able to change the large shirts they gave me to medium. As I seem to be losing weight slowly but constantly I'm now a medium shirt size. That's interesting. I have a few more PSP games, and I've not had the time to try them all which is a shame. When I get a 4 GB memory card for my PSP no doubt I'll end up playing 'a few' of them, heh. I also managed to update the forum today and get another level in Urban Dead, even though I didn't really have much spare time. I simply had to take breaks to keep my sanity. In Urban Dead I only need one more skill and I'll have all the 'live' ones. Then I just need to rack up another 2,000 exp and die so I can get all the zombie skills at once. As it's getting late I'd better be off. Till next time.

Cold and tired.

2006-11-02T23:49:00.000Z

Since I do happen to be cold and tired, this post is going to be incredibly brief. I just want to collapse and sleep.... This morning i went into uni early, got a little bit of research done, then had my frameworks seminar and lecture. The seminar went well, the lecture was boring, then I cam home. I proceeded to curl up in bed instead of get law reading done since I was bloody cold. Just before going round to my girlfriend's house I had a hot shower to warm up. It didn't really work. Thankfully at my girlfriend's place snuggling made me much warmer. Once I got back home in the late evening I was soon cold again and had to rely on a hot water bottle and the heat from my computer (which isn't much) to stay warm as I didn't really know how to put the heating on. My dad has since told me. I didn't get much tort reading done either. I have over 130 pages to read, at least four cases, and various notes. I read three or four pages, glanced at brief notes on the cases from my lecture, and ignored the other notes. At least I got answers to all the questions, and got a rather good quote for one of them. That (briefly) wraps everything up. Till next time.

Converts.

2006-11-01T23:19:00.000Z

It was cold this morning. Since I didn't have a lecture till midday I went into Brighton to the little room above a clothing store which sells Magic the Gathering cards. I last went there yesterday and it was quite cool, and today I actually brought my rares. After trading in some stuff I walked away happily with some handy cards, which had some slivers in them admittedly, a deck box and a hundred card 'deck protector' sleeves. Considering the cards I got it was quite nice. Unfortunately I'd arrived in Brighton at 9 am, and the little room-store hadn't opened till 11 am. When I first got there I was slightly annoyed but went into a Starbucks and sat for an hour after having eaten a slice of cheesecake and simply read my frameworks law text book. I got through about a fifth of the reading as my mind kept getting distracted onto more interesting topics, such as the weather. Meh. After I got the cards and so forth it was back to uni for my actual lecture, and after that it was SWARM once more. Excellent stuff. It started out with Magic the Gathering, obviously, though as I'd brought my rares I ended up doing a series of trades and got several more nifty cards. One such trade, which the club president knew was in my favour, ended up with me getting his three Sliver Overlords. He figured since he wasn't using them, he may as well trade them. It was rather nice of him.

After MtG the zombies campaign started once more. Again it was pretty fun, and this time thanks to the club swap I had a guy from the hockey club joining the campaign, as well as one of the current gamer's friends turning up. There was a lot more explanation as an editor and photographer from (one of...?) the student magazine(s) turned up pretty much to record the experience, so I needed to explain how the whole gaming genre worked. Unfortunately they had to leave early, but I hope they enjoyed their time in the club. It'd be quite bad if they didn't, hmm. The campaign itself is going well, though the large group who were on the downs are progressively getting into deeper and deeper trouble. basically, three of the group are now zombies and actively hunting down a fourth member who woke up to find them homing in on him. Not a pleasant experience for the fourth guy no doubt, heh. The group who were in the Grapevine didn't do anything, and I felt sorry for the three people who had effectively got roped in to my Games Workshop mate's plan for a quarantine. It's quite safe, yes, but they've not really done anything for two weeks, and one of the most fun characters, the ex-Nam guy, is essentially being wasted. I'm going to break into that room of theirs next week for the other people's sake, to get them involved in the campaign.

Once I got home I naturally didn't have time to watch anime as I actually had to get the seminar task for tomorrow done. That didn't take too long but involved a fair amount of page flipping in my text book. Now I just have to update the forum and I can collapse and fall asleep. Hurrah. Till next time.

Oho, another animarathon.

2006-10-30T23:47:00.000Z

Today was a good day. I only had the one lecture, and I saw one of my mates before it. After the lecture itself I met up with him again and we briefly went to Brighton where I bought two more small anime figures and another booster box, and he bought the Time Spiral fatpack. He had asked me to stop him from buying anything, but meh. I wanted to buy the boxes from the fatpack from him, heh. We both quickly returned to uni where I sorted through all my cards and got several rather nice ones and a lot of slivers. By 'a lot' I mean nearly 100 cards that were either slivers or useful in the sliver decks I want to build, such as the Prismatic Lens card. It's handy to be able to change a mana's colour. My mate ended up sorting through my red and black cards and choosing a few to combine with the cards he'd got and thereby made a deck. Not long after two more mates from SWARM arrived and we started properly playing Magic the Gathering. I tried my red and black sliver-based deck and unfortunately lost. It was slightly aggravating as if I'd got one more mana in the last five turns I would have won. How irritating. The game pretty much resulted in me trying to avoid getting swamped by saprolings. The next game involved all four of us however and I was using my favourite sliver deck. I killed all three of my opponents in one turn. That was 'nice', heheheh.

Not long after the games I had to return home in time to call my girlfriend to ask if she wanted to come over. She was happy to, and so we spent some time making a D&D character for me as her drow has been made for a long time, my diabolus fighter is being used in the SWARM campaign, and so for my mate's campaign which he says will be starting tomorrow I didn't actually have a character. Now I do and it happens to be a monk. A human one unfortunately. I wanted to make a warforged one, but some of the drawbacks really didn't suit my thoughts on how I want my monk to act, so it was a bit annoying, but oh well. After the character creation and dinner we basically just snuggled and dozed off together, and it was really nice. When my girlfriend left I got to work on the next zombie campaign poster which I'll be putting up tomorrow morning. I'll be going to Brighton with my mates during my three hour gap, so I'll invariably end up going to David's Books for a little bit, though there's another place which sells card sleeves and deck boxes so I'll be checking that place out. Tomorrow is quite a full day at uni, then I need to rush home and go to Games Workshop to meet my mates and girlfriend and I'll need to remember my stuff for the campaign.

As the title suggests I did finally get round to watching anime. From the looks of things the only real time I have to watch anime is on a monday in the evening when I purposely set time aside to get it all watched. This is rather bad really, as I still haven't bothered setting time aside to work on law. As such I'm really falling behind now... I really need to just pick a day and read for several hours to at least catch up with my subjects in the text books. I'm determined to get some semblance of this done on friday as I'll have a four hour gap inbetween my seminar and lecture and I'll finish at 3 pm anyway, so I'll have all evening. I swear I'll get caught up in at least two subjects that day. I simply have to.

At any rate the anime I watched was - updates for Kiba, two of Tsubasa Chronicle, the Tsuyokiss final, the Innocent Venus final, Naruto, Welcome to the NHK, two of Tokimeki, two of Black Blood Brothers, Death Note, Asatte no Houkou, Crescent Love, Negima, Himawari (as it'd finally been subbed), Chevalier and Jigoku Shoujo Futakomori. 18 overall, which isn't too bad. Kiba was interesting as not only did Zed lose, his key spirit was stolen whilst he slept. This is bound to be inconvenient for him. Tsubasa Chronicle had more feathers and a rather shady character who seems to be almost too kind and helpful. Tsuyokiss had a slightly odd is acceptable ending, though Innocent Venus was left remarkably open indeed. Thankfully it didn't bother me too much as it's not a favourite series. Naruto devolved into a more 'filler-ish' tone with the remarkably quick happy ending, though Welcome to the NHK was funny as it demonstrated the problems with MMO's and character identities. Poor guy, he looked so broken. Tokimeki had some strange sports challenges and a girl suddenly declaring herself to be the main guy's girlfriend. It's sweet in a way, if quite worrying. Black Blood Brothers had more Kowloon Child talk, and their respective death to an extent. In Death Note the book is becoming even more useful to Light, who's beginning to be very clever indeed. I'm looking forward to how the series pans out. Asatte no Houkou finally had a confrontation, though the older brother didn't seem to believe it, which is understandable. Crescent Love demonstrated that the Moon princess is a crappy swimmer. At least she has noble intentions in trying to save a drowing puppy. As for Negima he technically won as Evangeline seemed to give up. Silly vampire. Himawari had yet more 'wanting-to-be-a-great-ninja' action, and Chevalier had even more cross-dressing whilst being a French Knight. Odd, but there you go. As for Jigoku Shoujo, there was another much more interesting punishment for the person sent to hell. Looks like the series isn't quite as tame as the first one thankfully.

That's about it for now, though I still need to watch the rest of the Glass no Kantai and Burst Angel series. I highly doubt I'll be able to watch those for a long while... At any rate, till next time.

Vast improvement.

2006-10-29T22:50:00.000Z

Work started with me on a low ebb, as I really didn't feel like working at all. I just wanted to go home, sleep a bit more, then see my girlfriend. Alas such an option wasn't possible, so I had to tolerate work. As the time passed the stress and emotional low passed as there was the happy knowledge that there was gradually less work I had to get through. Happy, in a sense. During my lunch break I changed my shirt to my normal clothing and wandered around the store, buying a PSP mag to check up on the latest games as well as grabbing lunch. Bacon and egg sandwich, mmm. For the rest of the day work wasn't that bad really. Quite busy, nut nowhere near the hell of yesterday. After work I did of course get to see my girlfriend. We spent some time talking about a few problem issues, but once those had been said the rest of the time with her was fantastic. It was as close to perfect as I think it's feasily possible to get. We spent ages just snuggling together, watch TV, a short amount of tme browsing the net, etc etc. It was really relaxing simply being with her. Unfortunately that did have to come to an end when I returned home, but We kept the possibility of seeing eachother tomorrow open. Since we don't usually see eachother on a monday that's pretty cool. I was looking forward to seeing her again the moment I got home, heh.

Though I didn't have any time for anime today I figure I may have some time tomorrow before my girlfriend comes round (if it's possible for her to do so). I'll most likely end up going to Brighton again after my single contract law lecture as I want to get another booster box for MtG Time Spiral. It's either that of stuff from dave's Comics depending on what they've got in. Choices, choices eh? I may however stay in university for a bit since I want to use my new decks against my mate and his (now hideously and repetetively beaten) simic mutology deck. It'll be interesting to see if he ever wins against me with that deck of his. On another unfortunate note I didn't get to play Bounty Hounds on my PSP today. Le sigh. Tomorrow I'll probably not play it on the train because I (hopefully) will be doing dome more law reading. I really should catch up as I'll be in week five tomorrow... Darn. Since this paragraph isn't structured around anime and is quite random, I guess I should mention the forum riddle. The latest one ended today and surprisingly there were multiple winners for the first answer and a single winner for the second. Looks like half the riddle has to go into a tie-break situation. How interesting. Now I really have run out of news. As such, till next time.

Diabolic.

2006-10-28T23:06:00.000+01:00

The title of this post explains how busy it was at work today. Oh ye gods. I can, with absolute honesty and certainty, say it was the busiest day at work I've had at ASDA since I started over seven months ago. Luckily after the first ten minutes of being on a till I was taken off to help collect the trolleys out the front, as there were dangerously few. I collected them. They ran out. I collected them again. They ran out again. This went on for a while. Every time I moved more back, they were all taken. After a whilte a few others came out to help and I went back in to collect all the baskets. They were being used ridiculously fast. Blimey. I ended up - collecting trolleys, collecting baskets, back to trolleys, back to baskets. Over and over again from 10.10 am-ish till 2 pm. The cool thing about this was that I was allowed to choose when I had my lunch, so I went for one at 12.40 pm. How convenient. At 2 pm however I had to go back on the till, and it was hellishly busy. By the time my second break finished (from 4.50 pm till 5.05 pm) it had finally, -finally- calmed down and wasn't too bad. There was still a constant stream of customers, but the queues of eight to nine people (I'm serious here) had gone. After work I naturally went round to my girlfriend's house.

It was nice seeing her. We watched some of Team America before I felt tired so I spent most of the remainder of the evening resting. Since I wasn't hungry and didn't actually eat dinner my girlfriend was quite worried about me which was sweet if a bit constant. Once I got home I spent a long time talking with my step mum about how life in general is going, and with her help and advice I worked quite a few things out. I have much to discuss with certain people. I didn't get to watch any anime, nor do I wish to at this point. I'll probably end up watching some either tomorrow evening after I get home or during the large amounts of 'free time' I have on monday. Unfortunately that's all the news from today, so till next time.

Timely purchase.

2006-10-27T23:26:00.000+01:00

My time in university was brief to say the least. I got up at around midday and eventually went into uni for 2 pm for a single hour long lecture. When that finished I went to Brighton. Unfortunately Dave's Comics didn't have the new issue of NewType USA in yet, so I went into David's Books and ended up buying a MtG Time Spiral tournament pack. I got a few nice cards and left the store. However something was dwelling on my mind, and as such I went back. I ended up buying a £60 booster box for Time Spiral. Extravagant? hell yes, but when I got home I proposed the idea that it count a the christmas present from my step mum and dad combined, and they agreed to pay me the money for it. That's excellent, though I'll most likely get another one with it.... Inside I got several very nice cards indeed. Combined with the 32 sliver cards I'd won off eBay arriving in the mail this morning, I had more than enough to construct a second sliver deck as well as heavily alter my first one. The first one did have 28 proxy cards in it, now it has five. Quite a bit better really. I now have a green/white/blue main sliver deck, and a black/red/green/white secondary deck with a few 'odd things' in it. The 'odd things' are pretty fun really. I also altered my Fun with Fungus deck, as I'd got more saproling creation cards, another Thelon of havenwook (rock on!) and another Sporesower Thalid (excellent!). That should help boost the army making potential of that deck.

When I got back I rang my girlfriend to see if she was okay, as I was worried about her being ill yesterday. She was much better today and I asked if she wanted me to go over as I also wanted to see her. From the really loud 'YAAAAAY' I heard down the hone I assumed she was rather happy at the suggestion, heh. It was nice being able to see her, not to mention snuggle up with her, and it really improved my day no end. Considering my day had already been pretty good it was like the icing on the cake. Niftah indeed. Though I could only spend a couple of hours with her I'll be seeing her tomorrow after work, and of course after work on sunday too, so I don't have to wait too long till I can see her again. Since I got back vaguely late I didn't watch any anime. My main 'priority' was sorting through the 615 new cards I'd bought. Though I don't really care about collecting a full set, I did want to separate colours, rares, mana and timeshifted cards. That's when I made the alterations to my decks and created the second sliver one. When the slivers I bought from America arrive I'll either change my first one again, or make a third sliver deck which is primarily green and blue. That'll be rather entertaining, basing a deck off of Psionic, Fungus and Watcher slivers. I'd most likely add Sidewinder and gemhide slivers 'to be safe' then fill the gaps with handy white or blue enchantments and spells. It's a cunning plan. I'm also planning to make an entirely anti-sliver deck which has a few slivers in it just to take advantage of the opponent's abilities. Fufufufu. I've widened my plans, now I want roughly seven sliver-based decks, as I'm going to have a wide assortment of the critters and having several sliver decks to choose from is just plain handy.

Oh, I also spent some of today reading up on Tort and playing Bounty Hounds.
Till next time.

Collect the Bounty.

2006-10-26T23:33:00.000+01:00

Uni today was largely uneventful. The seminar in the morning went quite well, as about only three people in the group of twelve or so actually spoke, one of whom was me. I seem to be doing more than adequately in seminars considering the surprising lack of reading I'm doing. I know I really should keep up, but the motivation keep escaping me. At least I'm making a lot of lecture notes and actually using them for the seminars. After the seminar itself I had two hours spare. I spent a chunk of this listening to the Daft Punk song 'Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger' as not only do I like it a lot, it's also the theme music for my Sliver deck, heh. The rest of the time I spent reading a tiny (seriously tiny) bit of law text book, and the vast majority playing Bounty Hounds. Gee damn, Bounty Hounds is a fun game. It's like a cross between Monster Hunter Freedom and Coded Arms. It plays like MHF, with all the armour and gadgetry of CA. Instead of wyverns and reptilian critters, there's ETI's, a variety of alien 'life'-forms (I use quotes as one of the worlds hosts mineral-based creatures seemingly made of rock) which you blow to hell and back. It was fun going round comitting xenocide to terraform a planet. The lecture afterwards was incredibly boring by comparison, as it was Frameworks. Ye gods that's boring now.

When I got home I was excited as I'd soon see my girlfriend. However I heard bad news - it was not to be. My girlfriend's been ill today and had to go to the doctor. I have a very good idea of what exactly is wrong with her. I just hope she's okay and not in too much pain... Le sigh... Since I was going to be at home on my own, my dad and step mum (and one of her grown up daughters) invited me along with them to bingo. Now I don't really like bingo, but going out was far preferable to staying at home and feeling lonely. As such I took my PSP with me and continued to play Bounty Hounds. I kept playing when we all came back home too. In fact, I've been playing the game all evening as it's quite fun. True, it always points out where you need to go and you can't diverge much at all really, but you can certainly have a hell of a lot of fun with the xenocide and arming yourself. Thanks to my constantly changing armour, none of which seems to truly match another piece at any given time, my character looked like the bastardised love-child of a Gundam and Transformer for a while thanks to the helmet, torso and leg armour. It was pretty funny. Plus I'm now level 26, and as such have quite a few interesting skills. One is a field that regains me life and force, used to create the field, each time I hit an enemy. Combined with a slicer weapon, one that hits anything next to me all around dervish-style, I can keep my health reasonably high. How convenient.

One side effect to all this was that though I updated the forum and so forth, I've not watched any actual anime. This will probably rectify itself tomorrow, as I only have a single hour of lecture from 2 pm till 3 pm, so may watch some anime in the morning if I bother getting up, with more anime when I get back. yay for spare time when I should be reading law eh? Till next time.

Contagion.

2006-10-25T23:19:00.000+01:00

Overall a very good day, though it ended on a bit of a low note. My seminar this morning went well. Since I'd focused on the devolution of power in the constitution of Britian for the task I was one of the four called up to talk about what they'd done. All the others were bombarded with questions, though when it came to my turn I was only asked one as I pretty much explained all of it. I would assume that was a good thing, heh. My lecture went fine too. After the lecture it was essentially SWARM time, and I started playing Magic the Gathering. In the early morning between my seminar and lecture I'd played a game and got over 250 slivers in play and did enough damage in one hit to get my mate to -1412 life. That was funny indeed. During SWARM I didn't quite have the same luck. In an eight player game I was harshly picked on purely for having slivers and for four turns I couldn't do anything as my gemhide sliver was bounced twice then countered. That effectively wrecked me for a while. However I managed to persuade the person to my left not to attack me, but to attack the club president. That was funny as she actually did and I was spared for a while. Surprisingly someone else went out before I did, and suddenly the game turned around. I got Sliver Queen and Crytalline Sliver into play. Yeah, I started hitting people hard. In the end I took out the last four players myself and won. I only had three life. Three. ROCK ON.

The zombie campaign is also going quite well. There was the first player fatality too as one of the infected characters deteriorated immensely quickly, and collapsed in a coma just before actual death. As such someone in a group with her put her in a small boat, chopped her head off, soaked her in an ammonium solution and set her on fire, then pushed her off and watched till the little boat broke apart and she sunk. Yeah, that's 'quite dead' for sure. The group on the downs split up slightly, with three going down to get more stuff. It went quite badly for them, as not only were two bitten (though one didn't seem to get infected 'miraculously', heheheh) but the third ended up stabbing one of them between the ribs with a crowbar as they'd damaged his camera. That was... interesting,. One of the downs group is now also coughing up a LOT of blood which is rapidly becoming a dark orange. He's so screwed.... The group who had been doing the best, locked up in hazmat suits in the uni itself, are rapidly getting into trouble. They took in a new girl as she was wearing a hazmat suit (she'd only joined the club today) and they seemed enthused as she wasn't wearing anything underneath the suit. However this was because she'd been attacked earlier, and they noticed the inside of her suit was starting to get a bit... orange... They tried cleaning her as she had orange marks over her body, but to no avail. They even briefly set her on fire to try and burn it away, and succeeded in savagely mentally scarring her. In other words, I had a lot of fun.

In the D&D campaign it was found out that my character had the evil runes on his hand, but luckily (and I quite suspect on purpose to avoid my death...) the local head of the Church said I wasn't tainted and that it could actually be a boon. He also gave my character a religious amulet to help persuade people that I'm not tainted and evil. That was calming, as the two other fighters in the group, one of whom is a Paladin, had been threatening me. Whoops eh? During the campaign however I'd been keeping an eye on eBay as there was the auction of 229 slivers that I wanted. In the end I had to bid $70 four minutes from the end as I had to leave uni to catch the train. When I got home I checked, and guess what? Some git had bit $71 about ten, TEN seconds from the end. Well fuck. That really pissed me off, hence my saying earlier that the day ended on a low note. On the plus side I at least have another 58 slivers arriving in the post from various sources. That is at least a small consolation, and the D&D DM has another 50 to 60 he's selling to me for £3, which rocks. That makes me feel marginally better too. I'm now glad I bought a Sliver Overlord seperately as I missed the one in the batch of 229. One day there'll be another such batch, and I -will- get it...

Unfortunately when I got home I didn't really have any time to watch anime, so it's beginning to pile up again.... Dang. Till next time.

Winning.

2006-10-24T23:00:00.000+01:00

Hmm, it was the full uni day today, and it wore me out a fair bit. An hour lecture, hour gap, two hour lecture, three hour gap (which was filled by playing Magic the Gathering) then an hour lecture. After that it was time to quickly return home and then straight to Games Workshop. The spare time I had an uni however which wasn't spent playing MtG was occupied by hanging out with a friend from law. She's been having a people of people trouble so we were chatting about that for a while. In the MtG games themselves I did rather well. I won both of them which is generally good. In the first however I could easily have died, and thankfully due to persuasion I managed to get my mate to attack the other guy and not me, so instead of dying instantly I was able to take him out within two turns with a few handy sliver combos. Quite useful really. After uni when I went to Games Workshop I didn't actually play any games in the store. When my girlfriend arrived we went for a short walk before grabbing food with a mate and retreating to the pub for a couple of games of pool. Largely it was uneventful, but quite relaxing compared to uni. Though uni wasn't actually difficult, it was still quite draining a I had to take notes in the last lecture which was rather boring, and keeping my attention honed was exceedingly difficult.

Though I've not watched any anime today, I did finish the Ghost in the Shell movie yesterday. It was quite entertaining to watch the raid, though Togusa's actions when he was controlled was quite surprising. I didn't expect the outcome as I really thought he'd go through with it. Overall the film wasn't as good as the first, nor as thought-provoking as the second, but it still had a high amount of aestheticly pleasing animation and intrigue. I quite enjoyed it. I also played a bit more Rengoku II, though I'm still on floor three. I also tried out Avatar The Last Airbender and Blade Dancer on the PSP, and though both weren't bad per se, they didn't seem that remarkable either. I'll probably end up trying either Work Time Fun or Bounty Hounds and Mercury Meltdown next when I actually have the time. As it was trying the games today was rather brief at about five minutes per new game. Not exactly time draining. Tomorrow I have a seminar first thing and I really should have prepared... Oh well. I'll probably bring the relevant text book with me tomorrow and read on the train. Not quite the best option, but better than nothing I would assume. After that there's a two hour gap, in which no doubt I'll play PSP and potentially read a bit of law, then my usual lecture before SWARM. I'm looking forward to see how the participants in my campaign will react when I up the campaign a notch in terms of attack frequency... Till next time then.

Hax!

2006-10-23T23:12:00.000+01:00

University was rather quick today. As I didn't bother going to Brighton afterwards, I got the 10.11 am train to uni, had my lecture at 11 am, got the 12.02 pm train back home, and got back to the house before 12.40 pm. All in all, a short day out. Once back instead of doing the sensible thing (catching up on reading contract law, which I'm going to do tomorrow anyway) I decided to play on my PSP some more. Though many reviews say Rengoku II is as shallow as the original, I still like it immensely. Hell, going round as an android and shooting other androids to hell and back is, for me, fun. I'm currently armed with a few types of machine gun. No doubt soon I'll have all kinds of nifty shiz. For a couple of rooms I armed myself with a missile launcher and that was quite fun indeed. After chatting with an old friend on IRC I decided I may as well try the 2.71 SE-A firmware for the PSP. Essentially it's 2.71 which has the homebrew playing elements of 1.50. This is quite convenient as it doesn't mean I have to keep switching between Devhook emulation and 1.50 to get everything to work. All in all it's rather nifty indeed. As of yet I've not tried irshell even though it's been recommended, as I've not seen that much point for me in using it. As I don't currently use my PSP to read ebooks I don't feel I have the need to try it. Eventually I may do.

With lots of free time you'd expect me to have watched lots more anime right? Wrong. I didn't really get round to it as I spent time on the forum, on my PSP, and making the new poster for my zombie campaign 'Thirteen Days'. I did however watch the updates for Chevalier, Black Lagoon and Jigoku Shoujo Futakomori. Chevalier had mercury-filled dogs. They looked kinda cool. Black Lagoon seemed like a happy ending till the very end. That surprised me a fair bit, then made me laugh for ages. The brother and sister were good characters, and the way they went was quite funny. As for Jogoku? It used the same fiery chariot clip which it used over, and over, and over again in the first seires. That annoyed me quite a bit, but overall the episode was quite entertaining. Tomorrow I'll probably not watch any anime due to an annoying lack of time thanks to a full university day then Games Workshop afterwards. Oh well. For now at least I have my spare time filled with PSP goodness and (supposedly) law. With that I've not really got anything else to say, so till next time.

Grargh...

2006-10-22T23:35:00.000+01:00

Work was a bitch. It technically wasn't too bad, in the sense that I didn't start feeling like crap till after my break. This was because my midday break was actually given to me at 2 pm. Considering I start at 10 am, that's the full four hours before I had it. Had I worked asny longer, it would have been illegal. Bloody lack of god damn staff. As such by the time I got my break I was feeling drained, and after my break I was fed up with being there and just wanted to leave. Two hours of desperately wanting to leave doesn't feel good. After work though I got to see my girlfriend, which was excellent even though I felt wrecked from work. We relaxed together and talked for a while, and it was really nice just being able to relax with her after work. I suppose that feeling of bliss makes the stress of work worthwhile, in a way. We also watched Fullmetal Alchemist again, and the series will be ending within a month. Then I can give the movie to my girlfriend as she's been wanting to watch it for quite some time now. Hopefully it won't disappoint her when she does see it, heh. When I got home I checked my torrents, which I'd been very kindly allowed to leave on all day, and to my delight they were all done. Excellent. As a consequence of this I started playing Rengoku II on my PSP. Oh my, it really does rock. The graphics are better, the level (what I've seen of it) is much darker and techno-gothic, movement feels more fluid and the best thing of all is that I already have an automatic crossbow equipped to my head. ROCK ON!

Though I do have time to watch anime, I've not quite managed it yet. I spent a fair amount of time on my PSP obviously, then did my usual search for anime updates and updated the forum. I also wrote a new riddle for the forum and this one has a rather large prize. I hope only one person gets the answer otherwise I'll have to think of a good mini-riddle... At any rate the anime I need (well, qould like to rather than 'need' per se) to watch is a Bleach dub update, Innocent Venus, Black Blood Brothers and Jigoku Shoujo Futakomori. Jigoku Shoujo was pretty fun, so I'm quite interested in how the second series will turn out. One of these days I'll also probably get the Megas XLR and Ultimate Muscle cartoons since I enjoy them and haven't seen them for a while. I'd also like to find some more fun PSP games, though Rengoku II, Tekken, Bounty Hounds, Killzone Liberation, Mercury Meltdown and Spectral Souls will more likely than not easily fill all the time I have not spent reading law books or watching anime. As that essentially covers everything for today I'm going to go grab some food. Till next time.

The animarathon returns!

2006-10-21T23:36:00.000+01:00

Even though I knew I wouldn't see my girlfriend today I did my best to keep the day entertaining. Rather unfortunately I had to go into work over an hour and 20 minutes early, so I did a bit of shopping, buying a book to be a Christmas present for my dad, a DVD of Bugsy Malone (bloody good film) and the Tekken Dark Resurrection game for my PSP. Yeah, I finally caved in and bought the damn game... I spent the rest of the time before work playing Bomberman howver. Damn those CPU players and their ridiculously good bomb-fire avoidance. Bah. Work itself wasn't too bad for the most part as it didn't make me feel low at all. It did however piss me off slightly in terms of my breaks. I had my midday break at 12.51 pm, and my 3 pm break at 4.55 pm. They didn't have enough staff to cover all the breaks in a timely manner, probably due to staff sickness and whatnot, but it was quite annoying. After my shift finished I picked up the new uniform, to be worn starting the first of November, and the new fleece does look a lot better. Instead of being purely lime green it's now predominately black with a few green strips. It's also really warm which is a handy bonus. After I got back home from work I set about changing my PSP. It had firmware 2.6, and the tekken game requires 2.71. However I didn't want to go up to 2.71 even with the reverse devhook for emulation, so instead I went down to 1.5, up to 2.0, then down to 1.5 again to have a 'pure' 1.5 homebrew. Thanks to Devhook I can still play Tekken (and it's damn fun) plus I'm able to use PSPTheme to change the background into a jet black number. How stylish.

The questionably 'good' aspect of not seeing my girlfriend today was quite noticably obvious - time. More of it to be precise. As such I managed to get all the PSP stuff done, the anime update check done, Urbad Dead done (in which I'm now level 14), and get 13 anime episodes watched. That's not bad considering for the past few days I've not been able to watch any at all. They were as follows - Kiba, Inukami!, Ah! My Goddess second season, Bleach, Naruto, Tsuyokiss, Aria the Natural, The Gargoyle of the Yoshinagas, Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru, Negima, Tonagura!, Death Note and Crescent Love. As per the usual 'usual' I'll quite briefly talk about them.

Kiba has more interesting fights, though the way Robes won seemed to show how pathetically rubbish his opponent was. Inukami had more surprisingly good life views from the perverted Keita. Ah! My Goddess had more messing from Hild in a non-manga story. I didn't watch the preview, so no idea if it's returning to the manga plot or not. Bleach had Soi Fon successfully use her Shi Kai. It looked funny, if a bit slow. naruto had some interesting genjutsu, and though the character's didn't look particularly well animated, the paintings did look quite nice in some instances. Tsuyokiss had more angst from the girl about the guy she likes. Aria the Natural had even more heartfelt connections and whatnot to Neo Venezia. The Gargoyle in Yoshinagas evidently doesn't like the magician-thief. Pity eh? Surprise surprise, in Otome wa oku ni Koishiteru the incredibly beautiful girl found out that the man character is a guy, and also happened to have an emotionally damaging past affliction. ye gods, do ALL beautiful girls in anime and manga, idolised by groups of people, have some serious catastrphic accident or something in their earlier life? It's almost contagious. Negima had more cool fighting effects. Though the art is very different to the manga, it still looks reasonably impressive. Even more reconciliation was in Tonagura! and it looks like the pair are back to normal, even if they haven't really told eachother how they feel directly. As for death Note? More coolness. That Shinigami has gained cool points by posing light with a very costly, but beneficial, proposal. I'm liking this series quite a lot. Finally in Crescent Love the Luna Princess doesn't seem to be doing too badly to fit herself in.

It's a good thing I'm not picking up any new series, as I've seen at least five series with their first episode subbed lately. It's so tempting to check up on what they're about, but I'm hard pressed to keep up as it is already. Poor series... No doubt if they're good I'll see them in the future. That's about it for today, and I've not much else to say other than that I'm really looking forward to seeing my girlfriend tomorrow after work, obviously. Now that's all said I'm off to watch another anime update, Welcome to the NHK! Till next time.

Juxtaposition.

2006-10-20T21:10:00.000+01:00

What an interesting day. It started out with a seminar first thing, which went well. Then I went to Brighton, bought some Magic the Gathering cards, and went back to uni. For the rest of the four hour break I read a bit of my tort textbook then dozed. I then had a lecture which similarly went well. After that I returned home. A mate came round and we played a few fun games of MtG and I won them all, rather harshly when I used my Sliver deck. Once he'd gone home I phoned my girlfriend to check if I was indeed going round her house tomorrow after work as per usual, as she has training in Brighton. Unfortunately I finish at 6 pm, and she'll be catching a train back home at 6.30 pm. She probably won't get home till 7.10-ish pm, so I'll not be going round. This made me feel quite low, hence the extreme brevity of this post. As I don't feel like doing anything else, I'll call it a day.

Till next time.

Seminars and lectures.

2006-10-19T23:58:00.000+01:00

Meh. I went into uni an hour early today to read up on the first three chapters in the frameworks of law prescribed boo kin preparation for the seminar, and ended up spending less than 2 minutes on that and most of the hour cruising ebay and various online stores for more slivers. I'm quite liking the stupidly large variety there are. You can practically make a whole plethora of different decks just using slivers and basing play around their abilities. No doubt there are a myriad of ways around them, but they do seem fun. The seminar itself went well, as did the lecture, although the lecture was boring. Once it finished I made my way back home quite quickly as my girlfriend was going to turn up at 1 pm, and I needed to catch the 12.02 pm train back. When I got back I had to quickly collect a parcel from the local post office branch (ah, another anime figure....) so by the time I got home and (barely) settled my girlfriend turned up. I was actually still vaguely damp from a shower. She seems to have impeccable timing - she always arrives five or so minutes before I'm truly ready, it's quite entertaining. As it was she played more Pokemon Colosseum as she'd not lavished it with much time in the recent past, and after that we read manga together then watched some of the Dogma film.

Unfortunately time passed by far too quickly and she had to return home. Bah. Since I happen to have a tort seminar tomorrow morning first ting I figured I should really get round to actually preparing the set tasks for it. I'd already found relevant articles so I printed them out and duly didn't bother reading them. I suppose I should have. I didn't really go through the text book either. Instead I used my lecture notes to answer the set questions, coming up with brief (and quite probably inaccurate) sums for calculating the relevant damages. This, notably, took a lot of time for little work. I guess I just didn't have the relevant motivation. I did however have the motivation to make a shedload of sliver proxies. In case you're wondering, a proxy card is a fake card, a stand-in. Though I've bought some new sliver cards, it'll be a while till I actually receive them. Till then I'll be testing various stand-ins to see which combos really work well and so on and so forth. I've therefore altered my sliver deck to be green and white with a miniscule element of blue. Again gemhide sliver comes to the rescue for other mana. Tomorrow after my tort seminar, and before my tort lecture, I have four hours of free time. With luck I'll get a test game in then, or I'll end up going to Brighton to David's Books to look for more slivers.

Again, I've had no time to watch anime. It's beginning to pile up. Till next time.

Zombies!

2006-10-19T00:26:00.000+01:00

Ahh, it's nice to have an excellent day. It started with an hour and a half of research in the library using the online law resources and during all that time I found six or seven usable pieces for my seminar on friday. After that I hung out with a friend from law lectures for half an hour or so, then quickly popped into Falmer House and met up with two SWARM friends. The three of us went and had breakfast, then it was time for my lecture. It made me feel especially pleased as each one of the statues and commission reports I'd found was mentioned. This means I got the right stuff then. Excellent news. After the lecture it was straight to SWARM where the two friends I'd met earlier were already waiting, and I got down to some Magic the Gathering games. I used my sliver deck in a Two Kings game with another sliver deck on my side. Oh gods it was dirty. My side won, relatively decisively, eheheh. In the second game I played it was all verses all, and as I was slivers I got picked on a bit. It took me a while to die, but I didn't come close to winning. I was the third of eight to go out the game. Once that was over however, the real fun began.

Today was, afterall, the start of my zombie campaign. A few people had to finish up character creation but that went quite smoothly. The campaign itself started as thus - over the past few weeks strange news reports have been filtering in, containing missing people, hysterical accident victims and a supposed epidemic sweeping the country. However there was no visual proof of any of this for the members of the group. Gathered in the library, the various members of faculty and tag-along students had to find out what exactly was going on. Led by a series of 'clues', or rather random student created zombie pamphlets, they came into contact with a strange coughing dude who tried to get them to join his club. Alas it was not to be, as when he started coughing blood he left, and they deemed it was good time to leave also. After doing some research in the various labs, they came to find that in the man's blood was a particularly virulent strain of tuberculosis, and for some reason a practically lethally high level of sulphur. having that in your blood can't be a good thing eh? It was then that everyone fragmented into three groups - the bio-chemists, the small group of friends, and the large group of people intending to survive. The first group was only three strong but all got hazmat suits and completely and utterly locked down a restaurant in the Uni, getting it into total quarantine which was impressive, the second group used a car and loaded up on food and weapons before getting on a boat and staying near the coast, and the third went up into the Downs ( a countryside-ish place for those of you not English), and organised routine watches. Not bad really, though I did of course mess with all of them. Fufufufu.

In the D&D campaign I managed to get the ooze off my face and it was prompty killed to my relief. There was a fair amount of exploration and another two encounters, but I stayed relatively clear and in safety, purely because a single hit from the big critters, or the combined attacks from the smaller ones, would have just killed me. There was also a really evil sword, but despite my best efforts when no one else was looking, I wasn't able to break through the protection. Gee damn I want that shiny black sword.... the rings in the case with it would be cool too. Thankfully I managed to get back to the group without them noticing I'd gone, but the fact that my actions released a stupidly large aura of evil, the Paladin assumed it was my fault as since I'm a Diabolus in the campaign, I look demonic. This doesn't bode that well in terms of being healed and not attacked by party members....

After getting home I naturally had no time at all for anime. Bleh. Till next time.

Bowling.

2006-10-17T22:42:00.000+01:00

Today was meh in general. I've had a headache all yesterday and today, as well as sinus troubles yesterday and today. As such it's felt like the inside of my head, and half my face, is throbbing with a dull acheing pain. It's not that pleasant at all. It's also my busiest day on a tuesday, so that wasn't all that pleasant either. An hour of lecture, an hour gap, two hours of lecture, three hours gap, then an hour of lecture. They passed reasonably enough, and in the three hour gap I played two long games of Magic the Gathering with my Sliver and Unhinged decks respectively. I won both. With the Sliver deck I just slapped my two mates around with harsh damage through simple tapping (yay for Psionic and Watcher Slivers!) and with the Unhinged one I got up to 134 life at one point. That was funny. Once the lectures were over I returned home quite quickly, in order to pick up my girlfriend. She came round mine for an hour or so before we went off to a party for one of her friends. It had lots of bowling, and party food. Oh, and glow sticks. Those provided an amusing distraction from doing badly at bowling. I started off repeatedly missing, then got into my usual form of strikes, spares, nines and eights. I came second in the games I played, and would have come first in the last but I took another guy's bowls for him, ended up getting a spare, and so his points went straight past mine. That was vaguely unexpected.

Afterwards my dad kindly picked us up and dropped my girlfriend off home, before I came home and searched for anime updates as per usual. I now have ten episodes of Glass no Kantai to watch thanks to an update, as well as the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society movie (with subtitles!) and updates for Negima and Kiba. I simply do not have any time for anime right now, as I need to catch up with my law reading and prepare for two seminars later this week. As SWARM will be running from essentially the end of my lecture tomorrow till 10 pm, I'm having to go into university three hours early just to be able to prepare for the friday seminar. Thankfully I've done the library exercise for thursday, but I still have some background reading to do for the seminar itself. Meh. Combined with my feeling crappy and in pain, this isn't exactly appealing, nor is my motivation all that brilliant... ah well. Till next time then.

Moar feegurez.

2006-10-16T22:03:00.000+01:00

University today was quite fun. I only had an hour of lecture, so afterwards I went down to Brighton to Dave's Comics. Unfortunately the anime figure order hadn't arrived, so I went into david's Books and ended up buying a Magic the Gathering Time Spiral fatpack. It came with six booster packs, 40 mana, a life counter (D20 dice), two panoramic art card boxes (which look really nice), a Time Spiral novel, six little plastic dividers with good art and a card list-booklet. All in all, quite nifty. The most important thing however was that I got a fair amount of slivers, many of which were new types. Even though my sliver deck is white green and red, the nifty gemhide sliver meant I was able to put blue slivers in the deck. They're pretty harsh... After that I went back to university to meet up with my mate, and from all the remaining cards he made a deck to fight me with. It went ridiculously well. There was a period of 16 or so turns when I could have completely iradicated him, doing 40-ish damage a turn should I have wished. Instead I beat him down to two and enjoyed the game. To my surprise he managed to play a card which killed off all the other creatures, including mine. This, combined with a spell that did 17 damage and the attacking 3/3 creature meant I died. At the time I though it was fantastic and really funny, but I laughed even harder when I got home later in the day. The spell he'd used to do 17 damage wasn't X mana and a few red, it was -double X- mana, so to do 17 damage he'd have had to pay 34 mana instead of the 17 he tapped. That was pretty funny.

After that match I called Dave's Comics and the anime figure order had finally arrived. I quickly went back to brighton and proceeded to rummage through. After a good deal of fun and disregarding certain models, I had another eight selected for purchase. Four were from Moon Phase, and the other four were from artwork I'd only seen in passing before, created by Satoshi Urashima. That was pretty cool. When I finally returned home I had to spray the second set of four's bases, since they were orange. Black looks better. After I finished admiring my new purchases I went through a bought of MtG deck alteration, making my sliver deck a tiny bit harsher and slightly changing the Fun with Fungus deck. IOut of boredom and curiosity I also made an Unhinged deck. It'll be interesting to see how people react to it on wednesday.

I did also get through a small amount of anime. The updates for Ah! My Goddess second season, Chevalier, Tsubasa Chronicle and an episode of Glass no Kantai (finally). Ah! My Goddess has seemingly branched out into 'fillers' now, as I don't remember Belldandy accidentally gaining a Demon's licence in the manga, nor Keichi being completely messed around by Hild-sama (which was shown in the preview for the next episode). I don't really mind since the new stories aren't completely rubbish, like some of the Naruto ones. Chevalier had odd cross-dressing/possession in it. How strange. Tsubasa Chronicle revisited a world they'd already been to again. The creators must be running out of plausible ideas. As for Glass no Kantai, the poor aristocrat got his ship sold and crushed into a metal cube. Poor bugger. I still have nine episodes of Glass no Kantai to watch, but you can bet it'll be ages before I watch them all.

In other happy news, I got to level 11 in Urban Dead. Head shot baby, yeah. Till next time.

Transmutation.

2006-10-15T23:02:00.000+01:00

Work went from soul crushingly bad to vaguely tolerable in the six and a half hours I worked today. It was a slow gradual change. This morning I just felt awful. Not ill, it was just a low emotional ebb. Considering work tends to get me into such a state, starting in one obviously wasn't a pleasant beginning for the day. However it gradually got better as I was counting down the time till I could bloody leave, and though it didn't feel all that fast, it was nicely constant. Looking up to see only 15 minutes have passed instead of the 30 it felt like may be bad, but the secure knowledge that at least 15 minutes have passed is there. After the stress and thankfully not endless despair of work the sight of my girlfriend made me feel one hell of a lot better. The hugging certainly helped a great deal too. We watched some anime together, namely two episodes of Ouran High School Host Club as she's not seen the whole series yet. I need to get her the rest, as she's now finished watching the first 18 I burnt for her. Fullmetal Alchemist rocked. It was one of my favourite episodes, where Lust attacks a shedload, Wrath is stupid, and Sloth gets turned into ethanol. Supremely funny the way Wrath essentially helped the Elric brothers by trying to be closer to his 'mummy'. Stupid git, eheheheheheh. After that we watched part of the Memories DVD which has on it three short anime films from different directors. Unfortunately I didn't get to see the whole of the first one before I had to leave.

You guess it, I did my usual anime and manga check when I got home then updated the forum. I've still not watched any episodes of Glass no Kantai, probably because none of it is hardcoded and I dislike overlapping subs, not to mention that I can't watch it all that quickly. I do however have another dubbed episode of Bleach to watch as well as the final episode for Kamisama Kazoku and the first two episodes of the new series of Black Lagoon. I completely forgot that Black Lagoon was going to have a second series. Excellent stuff. There's another episode of Tsubasa Chronicle to watch too, but it isn't exactly high on my list of priority anime to watch, simply because by now it's getting incredibly repetetive. Asatte no Houkou needs to be nabbed too. Updates always seem to arrive in groups of 'many'. Slightly inconvenient now thanks to organisational and timetable problems (i.e. lots of law to read...) but I can't really complain. At least I have them to watch eh? Tomorrow morning I'll be going into university an hour early to get an A3 zombie poster, from a zombie survival kit, colour photocopied in the library to put up on the SWARM notice board. Like hell I'm using the real one..... In the spare time I have afterwards, since it won't exactly take long, I'll be doing my best to read more of my law textbooks. I've been kinda... neglecting them. Which is a bad thing. Yeah. Damn.... Ah well, till next time.

Excellent music.

2006-10-14T23:34:00.000+01:00

Currently I'm listening to the instrumentals and songs from the Matrix films. Gotta love atmospheric music. Such dramatic music is strangely calming. Anyway, onto the usual content. Work was fairly boring. This doesn't mean it spiritually crushed me as per usual, oh hell no. It didn't particularly make me feel good or bad, it was just weird-ass neutrality. meh I guess. I did get quite agitated when it was time for me to l;eave. I overran by five minutes, and I hate having to do that since my girlfriend waits outside for me. However three other co-workers near me found it amusing, as they knew why I was getting irritated, and the customer and her teenage daughter also fouind it amusing when they were informed by said staff. That wasn't overly pleasant, but meh. After work time with my girlfriend was naturally comforting and relaxing. We watched a bit of Lost, but it's not really my thing so that didn't last long. My girlfriend also started another one of her mum's Christmas presents with her sister, so I essentially just sat back for that since it didn't really have anything to do with me. The rest of the evening passed pleasantly enough. Since anime is aired on Rapture on sundays there wasn't a Fullmetal Alchemist episode to see, but there will be tomorrow. I'm looking forward to seeing the final homonculi fights against Ed purely because he's learnt a lot with how to deal with them.

Once I got home I spent a fair amount of time chatting with my step mum before coming onto my computer at around 11 pm. I haven't really bothered to update the Soul Society forum yet but no doubt I will do. I've not watched any anime either, though I'll probably watch an episode or two of Glass no Kantai before I finally drist off to sleep. Tomorrow it's going to be boring work once more. I'm lucky to be able to see my girlfriend after work, I reckon it's one of the few things helping me keep my sanity. In the nature of planning ahead I guess when I get back home tomorrow, and on monday before my lecture, I'll catch up on some reading. I highly, and I stress highly, doubt I'll fully catch up, but by any deity you care to name I'll damn well get close. Of course since I'm an atheist such an oath is a bit pointless, but I assume you get my general meaning. With ten episodes of Glass no Kantai that actually need watching I suppose I should really be off to watch a few, so till next time.

Early.

2006-10-13T23:42:00.000+01:00

Three hours early to be exact. I had decided to go into university far before my only lecture in order to have time to start and actually finish the seminar task. This plan worked well, aside from the fact that it only took me an hour to do. This meant that for two hours I was generally just wandering around campus or sitting in Falmer House common room doing nothing. As you can guess, this was vaguely boring. My lecture wasn't too bad though, and once again I didn't take many seperate notes but did do a fair amount of annotation. Afterwards I decided to go to Brighton, and spontaneously bought a Time Spiral 'Sliver Evolution' deck in David's Books as the tournament pack I'd bought before had a fair few sliver cards in it. Unfortunately Dave's Comics hadn't received their anime figure order, so I just bought two more little Rozen Maiden figures to add to the collection. Not counting the little dog model, which doesn't really fit in anyway, I've now completed the set with all seven little doll characters. It looks quite nice really. Other than that I didn't really do much when out and about, and returned home once there wasn't much chance of the delivery showing up. I even started to read my law tort book on the train journey back and, though complex, it was quite understandable. How convenient.

Not much anime was watched today and I can't be all that bothered to list it. All that's left for me to do is to update the forum and, since it's been a while, possibly add a new riddle should I think one up. Tomorrow after work I'll see my girlfriend again, so that's definitely something to look forward to. This lack of news cuts the post shorter than usual, so till next time.

Blissful contentment.

2006-10-12T23:04:00.000+01:00

It started rather badly. I was woken up at around 7 am this morning by a call from my girlfriend with good news. She's managed to get a job placement at Primark which was fantastic indeed. However as a result she had to go and create a bank account in the afternoon and wouldn't be able to come round. She seemed quite upset on the phone and I was really disappointed, but still happy for her as she'd managed to land a job. After that call I pretty much went back to bed for a few hours till I needed to go to university. The lecture wasn't bad at all, as it was the first, and only, lecture on online research methods and so no notes at all were needed. After all, everything the lecturer said was in the booklet so I figured writing the same thing out again was stupid. After the lecture I rushed home and called my girlfriend, offering to go round her's instead. This made her quite happy, and made me feel a lot better when I got there as she had thought she wouldn't see me today. Pfft, like I'd let a chance to see her slip by without doing anything. We went with her mum and made the bank account, then went window shopping. I tend not to be good at window shopping as I usually feel like baggage since I have nothing to do. When we got back however my apathetic mood eroded quite quickly since my girlfriend was really affectionate and made me really feel loved. It's a wonderful feeling.

Towards the end of the evening we both actually drifted off together, as we frequently doze, woken only when her sister yelled up the stairs that my dad had arrived to pick me up. That was vaguely embarrasing as I don't think either of us meant to fully fall asleep, heh. Once home I did the usual anime updates check and updated the forum, as well as getting even more ammunition in Urban Dead. I also managed to watch the updates for Bleach and Black Blood Brothers. Bleach was pure filler as nothing much happened, and Black Blood Brothers had yet more vampires biting people, but this time with added politics. Interesting. I also have ten episodes of Glass no Kantai to get, as I forgot to check for updates for that series for a long time, as well as the Death Note and Tsyuyokiss updates. It'll probably be a week or two till I end up watching some of them as my workload is getting heavier by the day. Tomorrow morning I'm going to university three hours earlier than my lecture to do the frameworks seminar library task and catch up on a bit of reading. After the lecture I'll also be going to brighton to Dave's Comics as they'll have got an anime figure order in, but that's not 'work' per se, heheheh. I have to have something to keep my spirits up if I'm not seeing my girlfriend right? Heheheh. Till next time then.

Minion horde!

2006-10-11T23:40:00.000+01:00

The day started out vaguely irritating. I'd spent a fair amount of time doing the puclic law seminar task, and due to timetable changes the first seminar is in week four, not week two which is this week. Therefore I've done the task two weeks early. On the plus side I have it done, but on the annoying side I turned up to university three hours earlier than I needed to.... Hmm. The lecture itself was fine and didn't require many notes at all really, since the lecturer was talking about tort statistics which were in the course handbook, so there was no need to write it all out again. Instead I just annotated them and that served well enough. Afterwards I went to SWARM, which I'd been looking forward to, and was quite pleased with the zombie campaign turnout. After helping everyone make their characters I counted the returns and had 13 characters. Considering that I had 12 people signed up, and two had said they couldn't make it, that's a good turnout indeed. Additional people are all good, heheheh. It got slightly hectic a few times, but I spent a great deal of time just chatting with everyone, learning names (which I'm terrible at so I really had to do my best simply to vaguely remember them) and joking with everyone. From the sheer level of enthusiasm which greeted me it looks like everyone's really gearing up for it. It's tremendously encouraging.

At 7 pm though the D&D campaigns started, and the DM explained the setting to the group I was in and off we went. The president of the club, playing a dwarf paladin, ended up being viciously mauled by a black bear and ended the session buried under a remarkably dangerous and camouflaged ooze. My diabolus fighter only got slightly injured by the bear, but unfortunately ended the session with another ooze wrapped around his head. That's not good at all considering he wishes to breathe... Hmm. Lots of serious injuries right from the start suggest that this could be a slightly quick campaign. Even so it's pretty entertaining, so I'm already looking forward till next week to see what happens. Since I have another week to plan my campaign (in very rough terms) I'll be able to tidy up everyone's characters sheets as some are an absolute mess, as well as possibly fully writing out the 13 mini 'missions' for the campaign overall as it's called 'Thirteen Days'. It's going to be a real treat seeing how they all do and how they react when confronted by ambiguous situations, such as an ill limping man (who only has a cold), a tuberculosis sufferer who coughs up a lot of blood, and lots of really hungover students who are unsteady on their feet, grasp a bit and moan a lot. It's going to be a lot of fun simply confronting them with a complete lack of zombies for a short while to see if they get trigger happy.

I've still not got round to watching those three episodes of anime but I will do eventually. Till next time.

Slightly better.

2006-10-10T23:02:00.000+01:00

A slightly busier day. Four hours of lecture for three subjects. Not really much, but the three hour gap between the second and last lecture can get a bit boring. In the future do doubt I'll spend it reading... The lectures themselves went fine and I took adequate notes for all of them so there was no problem there. I also spent some of the gap with two friends and played table football so some of the time passed nicely enough. However by the time I got home and had prepared to go to Games Workshop I was feeling quite low again. My girlfriend seemed quite concerned and worried about me which was sweet, but I didn't really feel like making her worry so I went for a walk outside. It turned out that me suddenly disappearing made her worry more, and retrospectively I can see that simply leaving a stifling store to get some fresh air, but not saying anything to anyone, is possibly a merit for concern. I probably should have thought a bit more about it. At any rate she came out to find me and we sat outside for a while and generally talked. The cool air made me feel a bit better, though my girlfriend made me a lot more relaxed and happy as a whole just by being around. A very quick meal later and I was beginning to pick up, and soon was essentially fine though still a bit quieter than normal.

Once I got home I looked at what I'd be doing for the seminar tomorrow morning and saw I had a task to prepare before the seminar itself. I see. I had to produce a flow diagram for the constitutional structure of Britain, as well and preparing it enough so that I could explain the differing power levels between the states. For this I had to read several chapters in the public law book and I decided to use photoshop to make the diagram itself. It's quite plain, but meh. Though tomorrow I'll not really be doing much work in the afternoon as I'll be seeing my girlfriend, on friday I'll be doing another seminar task, a library one to be slightly elaborative, as well as spending some time in Brighton shopping (thanks to an anime figure order Dave's Comics are receiving) before taking several hours of my evening time (and by several I mean my whole evening) aside to just read up on the chapters I really should have read by now. With luck I can catch up on all the required textbook reading, at which point I'll only need to catch up with cases which I'll probably do on tuesday next week in the three hour free. It's a plan!

Though I have two episodes of Kiba and the first episode of Busou Renkin. Yeah, another new series, meh. With luck I may even get time to watch it. Tomorrow any spare time will be spent reading most likely. Till next time I guess.

Strangely empty.

2006-10-09T22:43:00.000+01:00

I only had a single lecture today so it wasn't that bad really. Afterwards I went to Brighton and bought a few things, namely the first three manga volumes of Cromartie High and first volume of Trigun, as well as a new Time Spiral deck and additional cards pack. Out of the 75 extra cards many looked fun but wouldn't fit in with the deck I bought. I may just make another. The deck itself, called Fun With Fungus looks interesting to play. It's essentially a slow saproling deck in which the fungus can get incredibly harsh. It'll certainly be interesting to use, that's for sure. I also bought the Saviors of Kamigawa fat pack as my mate had given me the money for it and I finally remembered. Hurrah for me eh? I didn't really do anything else in Brighton other than that so I came home and lounged around. For some reason I felt really low and empty inside, and since I didn't know why it felt a bit worse than usual. Hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow morning, since the four hours of assorted lecture I need to go to will probably keep me occupied. Since I didn't have much else to do this afternoon, and as I'm not going to rally get into the law reading till next week, I decided to watch 28 Days Later. It's a pretty good movie, and gives me a few ideas for the campaign I'll be running at SWARM.

I also managed to almost get up to date with my anime finally, so that's all good. Today I watched three episodes of Naruto, the latest update for Inukami and Innocent Venus, five episodes of Tsuyokiss, and the first episodes for Asate no Houkou, Negima and Tokimeki Memorial. Naruto was better than it's normal fillers as the genjutsu moves were quite interesting. As for Inukami and Innocent Venus, magic and double crossing are generally entertaining to watch, so I enjoyed both of the episodes. Tsuyokiss is vaguely confusing since there's a lot of little breaks during the episodes where a character will say 'Tsuyokiss' for no reason at all. It's quite odd. Asatte no Houkou didn't go into much detail in the first episode, but it's basically about a little sister who wishes to be older, and a late-teens/early twenties lady who wishes to become younger. At the very end of the episode their ages switch. An interesting premise to be sure, so I'm looking forward to how it pans out. Negima completely messed with the original manga, so it was quite surreal. The animation style doesn't match the manga either, though the quasi-gothic look with Evangeline's surroundings was quite good. Again, something to watch in terms of how it turns out. Last but not least Tokimeki Memorial was another school anime which again didn't go into much detail in the first episode but seems to be about a guy transfering to a school and falling for a girl. You know the type, beautiful, excellent at sports and incredibly intelligent. No doubt other girls will fall for him as it's set in a school. Ah, complex love connections. I know I said I'd not pick up too many more series, but a shedload have finished so I guess I may just have the time.

I still have the last two episodes of Good Witch of the West to watch (and another series will have finished for me) so I'll be off to watch them now. Till next time.

.....

2006-10-08T23:46:00.000+01:00

Today was boring. Quite boring indeed. Work was tolerable, and alright for the most part as I actually had energy till the last hour and a half or so. Regardless it was quite boring as what else can you really do on a till, within regulations, aside from scan items over and over again? Geh. After work I did get to see my girlfriend which was greatm, but the game her family chose to play was, quite frankly, mind-numbingly boring. Oh ye gods it was bad. It was essentially a game for kids which they'd tweaked the rules to. As such I spent a lot of the time staring at the TV which they'd left on for background noise, trying to hear it and thereby overcome the boredom. I didn't want to say anything because her family seem to get on well together during such 'family games' and I didn't feel like it was my place to speak out against one of the sessions as it would have been hugely rude. Not only that but I wasn't sure how my girlfriend would react, so I did my best to get through it. e gods it was boring.... Unfortunately that game pretty much took up the whole evening other than the episode of Fullmetal Alchemist (a more than welcome diversion) so the boredom lasted from dinner till when I got picked up. It made the evening a lot worse than I'd hoped it would have been. With luck when I see my girlfriend on tuesday the absence of a game I think is bad will mean I'll actually enjoy myself...

Upon getting home, and feeling quite dissatisfied with my day overall unfortunately, I basically ranted to friends and snapped at one of them as their sarcastic remark just got to me. Meh. On the up side I did watch the otaku episode of Japanorama, and it made me laugh a fair amount which did make me feel a lot better. Jonathan Ross is good for that series. Plus the figures that were seen in the shops.... God damn I want to shop there, jeebus... At any rate I have around 14 episodes of anime to watch, so I may as well go and watch them now. Till next time.

Average.

2006-10-07T23:43:00.000+01:00

Ah, another day of work. Truth be told it was pretty average. I can't think of anything notable to say about it really, though there was one mother who seemed like an incredibly bad parent. She wasn't treating her son very well at all, and he wasn't even doing anything wrong. Needless to say, I didn't like her that much, but did my best to be polite anyway. Bah. After work I happily saw my girlfriend and spent a lot of time with her as she played Dragon Fable (I think that's the name...) which is basically a flash-based RPG. It looks kinda interesting, but not really the thing I'd go for. She actually wants to play Online MMO's and so forth (in conjunction with me, which is quite sweet) but as she owns a Mac rather than PC she can't find any that'll work. I also told her of a future plan I have, future being within the next few months, which made her so happy she cried. Whenever she sheds happy tears she really does look phenomenally cute. I'm eternally glad I have such an incredibly girlfriend. No doubt many guys feel the same way, but darn it, I'll keep repeating it anyway. I also spent a sizable chunk of the evening watching Lost with her family. Considering I've never seen any of the series at all before I reckon I asked remarkably few questions. The most notable ones were "So what are the 'Others'?" and "Know what the numbers mean?"

Unfortunately I did, of course, have to return home, but I'll see her tomorrow so that's all good. Once home I updated the forum (as I pretty much always do) then did the usual check for anime updates. Not many of interest, but it all adds to the pile... I also went onto Urban Dead and got another level by killing a zombie and -almost- killing another. Unfortunately I ran out of action points, otherwise I'd have gained two levels. I went for the buying skill just so I can get ammunition easier. Next up I'll got for the final pistol and shotgun skills before I get the health boost skill. It's all a plan! Now I can actually hit with guns reasonably well my exp gain rate is much faster. It's quite pleasing. The anime I still have to watch is the first nine episodes of Tsuyokiss and the update for xxxHOLiC, not to mention the first episode of Death Note. That's eleven, not too bad really considering I've not had much time to watch them. I should be able to finish them off tomorrow time permitting, and, failing that, on monday I should be able to fit them in amidst the craploads of reading I have to do for tuesday. Ye gods I have a lot to read for tuesday.... Wednesday can't come quick enough. SWARM damnit, SWARM! It's easy to see that I want to get character creation done so I can get the campaign started... The main issue I need to work on is how to start the campaign in an involving and exciting way, when the outbreak is a gradual thing... Hmm. There is much to ponder. Till next time then.

Getting a beating.

2006-10-06T23:12:00.000+01:00

Today wasn't bad at all to start with. I went to Brighton and once again to Dave's Comics, buying a Satoshi Urashima artbook (since I think his work is ridiculously good), another small figure, a tiny Oogie Boogie figure (from Nightmare Before Christmas should you be wondering) and a Zombie Survival Kit. The kit rocks, and comes with a fantastic poster which is pretty much perfect for my zombie campaign. If I can find a place which does A3 colour photocopying (and possibly laminating) then I'll be able to put a copy up on the noticeboard since I'm in charge of it. The lecture wasn't too bad too. I took a page of notes which is a lot more than I usually take. One thing that hit me hard however was the purchase of the rest of the law books I need. I'd bought one for £20, but today I bought the remaining three and a year planner/diary and it came to £101. Ow. That stings. At least I have them now, but jesus, expensive bastards.... After the lecture I went round a new mate's house. I met the guy at SWARM and we get on well since we have very similar hobbies. Whilst there we played a fair few console games, hence the title of this post. He's a better gamer than me, but it was still fun trying to beat him. It was also pretty impressive how many corporeal anime DVD's he has. Whereas I tend to 'obtain' anime and burn as data, he actually buys the DVD's. rom what I saw it must be quite financially crippling. Jeebus indeed.

Once I got home I spent two hours clearing crap and random paperwork out of my room and into black bin bags for disposal. This happy task freed up a fair amount of room (making my room look tidier) which was then, neatly, filled with my university books and so forth. I've still not gotten around to watching any anime and it's rapidly piling up even more, so tonight I'll probably stay up for a bit just to get the majority of it cleared aside from the stuff I'm downloading now. I have over 20 episodes to watch again, and this time none of them are full series. Dang, it certainly piles up quickly when a group suddenly mass release. Especially so when several groups all mass release at once. It's not a bad thing, but considering that my free time is beginning to dwindle it means I can't watch all the anime I want to without staying up till ungodly hours unfortunately. That's saying quite a bit considering how late I usually go to bed... As that pretty much covers everything I guess I'll be off for now. On a last note I'm beginning to do rather well indeed on Urban Dead, thanks to lots of gun training. Fufufufufu. Till next time.

Quality time.

2006-10-05T23:12:00.000+01:00

Once again university wasn't bad. I spent the first part of the morning buying the law book for the Frameworks of Law I and II course. Unfortunately the old lady infront of me counted out her change and took bloody ages. As such I was three minutes late to the seminar. Not a good start. Two minutes later, after the lecturer mentioned year three history, I realised I had the wrong room. Well, crap. I went to the -right- room and apologised, and from there on the day was fine. The seminar went quite well, and directly afterwards I had a lecture (both of which were for the Frameworks course). The book actually came in handy during the lecture, so that's quite a good start textbook-wise. After the lecture I pretty much booked it to the train station to get an early train home. Thankfully I managed to catch it, so had a bit of time to relax at home before I went off to see my girlfriend. As she couldn't come over today I simply went to her. It brightened my day even more being with her, and even though the weather was crappy after her job interview I gladly walked around with her in Eastbourne. We spent a bit of time in the Arndale shopping centre before returning to her home for a warm dinner. I'd offered her my coat when we'd been waiting to be picked up as I wanted her to keep warm, but I quite underestimated the cold. In a simple shirt I got very col, very quickly. Meh.

When I did get back home I updated the forum then spent a rather large amount of time looking for Pokemon Leaf Green codes. It's all well and good playing the game on an emulator on my PSP, but quite a drawback that I can't trade pokemon and therefore get the unique critters from the other games such as Ruby and Sapphire. As such I devoted over an hour to finding codes that worked. Needless to say it was annoying, but at least now I have some of my personal favourites such as Gardevoir. I still haven't got round to watching the anime piled up, and I have 13 episodes waiting. Eight of Tsuyokiss and the updates for Bleach, Zegapain, Kemonozume, Black Blood Brothers and the final for Ergo Proxy. With luck I'll get those seen over the weekend before the true workload hits me. I'll most likely not pick up many more new series should they start appearing, purely because I just won't have the time to watch them and stay up to date. It blows, but oh well. I have to work to get my law degree, so sacrifices must be made. Hell, I'll still have time with my girlfriend and time at SWARM, so I won't be completely without relaxation time. For now though I need to be off. Though I don't have a lecture till late tomorrow afternoon I have an agreement to be in Brighton early in the morning, so I need to be up. Till next time then.

Survivors!

2006-10-04T23:06:00.000+01:00

University today was much less work intensive, and a lot more enjoyable. For a start I went in early and spent my time hanging out with people or going on my laptop as I'd bothered bringing it in, and during the lecture itself I sat next to a friend I'd made during Fresher's week but hadn't seen for a few days. Afterwards I went to her dorm building and met everyone there which was pretty cool. University certainly has a lot of interesting people. The only downer was the sheer amount of times the lecturer today told us that we had to pass otherwise we'd either have to leave or retake the year. His repeated emphasis wasn't very encouraging, and the amount of work he said we should be doing (40 to 50 hours of outside reading in addition to the 10 hours of lectures/seminars a week) is quite... daunting. That's straight work from 9 am till 7 pm five days a week. Jesus bloody Christ. I.... don't think I'll manage to keep that rate up without breaking.... It'll seriously kill me. I'm not a person who can do that much work without losing all sense of motivation, and at times, self... Damn. Happily, SWARM was much, much more fun.

There were a very respectable amount of people interested in my All Flesh Must Be Eaten campaign. The two D&D campaigns together got 12 people to play in them (of which I was one). My campaign on it's own, got 12 people wanting to play. Around now I'd insert a casually excited evil giggle. That's a lot of survivors to fight off the zombies. Lots of them are new to RP, and I think it's the whole lure of zombies, and being in a familiar setting at the same time, that drew them in. Not to mention I was adequately load and was seemingly charismatic. It was a fun evening, explaining to them the general premise, how it'll all work, what characters can be and so on and so forth. Next wednesday will be character creation, and, depending on how quickly that passes, the very start of the campaign. In addition to my law work therefore I have a fair amount to prepare and write for my campaign. Oh the work never ends, heh. At least SWARM is highly enjoyable, where as law promises to be quite stressful and potentially confusing. Though I have four episode of anime to watch and several more to get, I simply don't have time. Tomorrow not only do I have to buy law books in excess of £100 all together, but I need to buy a card and birthday present for my Dad as I've simply not got round to it today. God damn it, so hectic. I'm going to have to cut back on all my hobbies just to fit work in from the looks of it. Gah.

Tomorrow I have both a seminar then a lecture on the frameworks of law, so it's essentially two whole hours of a single subject. I have two hours of public law on tuesdays, but the lecturer for that in energetic and entertaining. The lady for frameworks simply isn't... Le sigh. So much to do. Till next time then.

A few lectures more.

2006-10-03T23:26:00.000+01:00

Hmm. Today was busier than yesterday, that's for sure. Instead of a single hour of lecture, I had four hours of lecture. Thankfully I lasted through it quite well, but the sheer amount of extra reading that needs to be done for the subjects is quite daunting. Very daunting indeed. I seem to need to read the equivalent of a few law books as well as some cases already, and it's the first week. Well, dang. In the afternoon I actually had three hours of free time, so instead of buying law books and reading them I went to Brighton again, popping into Dave's Comics and chatting with the manager there for a fair amount of time. I also spent £13 on three small models (one Rozen Maiden, the other two were Samurai Champloo) so it was a much chapear trip than the past two. After that it was back to lecture, and thankfully we were let out just early enough for me to hurry to the station and catch a train which leaves two minutes after the lecture is scheduled to end. That was quite convenient, as I was then able to go to Games Workshop earlier. I used to go on tuesdays just before 5 pm, but now I actually finish college at 5 pm, so that makes it a bit more difficult. In the end I played a small 500 point game againt my 'gnome bard' mate using a very small army comprised of two squads of seven men and a lord. I was up against sixty, so outnumbered four to one. I was quite pleased when I won.

Once home I went to update the forum, and, once that was done, passed into the realm of anime watching once more. I got through the updates for Ergo Proxy, Kemonozume, Ah! My Goddess second series, Kamisama Kazoku, Innocent Venus, Chevalier and a DVD special for Aria the Natural, a series which I really should check the updates for. Ergo was simply cool as it had more of Vincent and Real, obviously. The way Raul died was vaguely harsh, but entertaining. Kemonozume had it's usual sketchy style and a strange private detective. Ah! My Goddess has now reached the 'infinite room' story which was fun whilst it lasted. I can't quite remember what comes next, so at least the series is still fun to watch as it's slightly unexpected. As for Kamisama, Tenko and the main male lead have pretty much admitted how they feel to one another and the end feels near. I can't be bothered to check how many episodes there are going to be... Innocent Venus had a remarkably cunning double cross. It made me grin for a bit. In Chevalier D'Eton is seemingly refusing to let his sister's soul fight through him as it's filled with rage and hatred. I would assume he's going to tame her in time. Last, but not least, the Aria DVD special was a 'video letter' which basically went over a few of the points from the very beginning of the series. It ate up time I guess. I -still- have Ghost in the Shell 3 to get, it's at 90.6%. Not only that but I have the final episode of Ergo Proxy to obtain as well as the first 8 episodes of a new series, Tsuyokiss. Till next time then.

Spending.

2006-10-02T23:42:00.000+01:00

The lecture today wasn't bad at all. It lasted an hour, and the first 30 minutes were spent getting people into the hall, handing out the course booklet, and explaining what was in the booklet. As such there wasn't much actual work per se. If it took half an hour to do that then my 30 minute lecture on friday may not include much actual learning. Since I was going round my friend's house for 5 pm, and finish Uni at midday, I went to Brighton again. Invariably I ended up in Dave's Comics, and spent... a little more. £40 on one figure, £32 on another, £20 on another, £20 on yet another, £10 on two more little Rozen Maiden figures and £15 on the newest Munchkin set. That's £137, bringing my total spent in that store in two visits to £226. Erm, ack? I think I should exercise a -little- more control when I go in there next.... On the plus side I've bought most of their big stuff, so there's nothing overly expensive to lure me. It's all good therefore. Since I'd bought a fair amount, and especially because it was irritating to carry around, I went home before going round to my friend's house, primarily to drop off all the stuff. It took quite a bit of rearranging of the figures I already have to get everything to fit. I need to get some more shelves up, damn... At the moment the desk infront of my monitor has five reasonably sized anime figures. They do look very nice however, so that's all good I guess.

When I did get round my friend's house there was eating of popcorn, and much deliberation on a film to watch. In the end we all walked down to the nearest video rental store and borrowed Underworld Evolution and Karas. Karas simply rocks, but we watched Underworld first. Seeing werewolves and a harsh vampire hybrid is always entertaining, but I really wanted it to end so I could watch more Karas. We eventually did get round to Karas, but I only managed to see one episode before I had to leave with my other mate in order to catch the last train home. A fair amount of the time had been used up with me making a simple meal which never the less took time to cook. Meh. At least it tasted nice. When I got home it was well past midnight, so naturally I had to roll back the time for this post. I did however divert slightly by updating the forum first, then playing Urban Dead to get (yet) more ammo. I want a shedload of it so I can go on a rampage and shoot the hell out of many zombies. As for anime, I currently have three updates downloaded which need watching, which are Kemonozume, Chevalier and dubbed Bleach. I should probably get round to those soon, otherwise I'll end up with a ridiculous amount to watch all in one go. The Ghost in the Shell movie is still only at around 80%. Dang... Till next time then.

Much better.

2006-10-01T23:15:00.000+01:00

I coped today. Yes, I managed to cope. It may have been partly thanks to eating a large breakfast, but I had the energy to maintain a (relatively) positive disposition and thereby avoid the majority of soul crushing that usually goes on in the retail industry. Admittedly the thought of seeing my girlfriend after work did make me a great deal happier, and I focused on her for the most part. The canteen food continues to be free, so I had a rather big lunch too which continued to help me in terms of energy, plus I actually managed to have lunch with one of my main friends at ASDA. She's 18 in two weeks so'll be able to return to the tills. I'm vaguely impressed that she wants to come back... After work seeing my girlfriend naturally brightened my day. Talking about how we're doing would be purely repetetive, so I'll skip it. Full Metal Alchemist has finally got to more revelations about Hoenheim of Light and Dante. It's about time. As for Mezzo DSA, I think it's finished now. I'm not overly sure, but the episode I saw today looked like a final. If not, then it's getting there. Once I got home I pretty much got my bag ready for University tomorrow (for a whole single hour of lecture! Zomg!) then planned my day. I'll end up going to Uni, going to brighton to get more anime and manga figures, then going round a friend's house to watch a movie. It's a solid plan.

After a day-long break I got back to anime. I watched two episodes of Kemonozume and the updates for Kamisama Kazoku and Love Get Chu! though I still have an update for Kemonozume, dubbed Bleach and Chevalier to get. Kemonozume was intriguing, if a little strange. The animation style, as sketchy as it is, is growing on me. Kamisama Kazoku had a demon in it finally, which was pretty nifty. Thoyugh not overly demonic, the girl's eyes were pretty cool. Love Get Chu! had more antics from the potential voice actor, and simply filled up time. The Ghost in the Shell new movie is still under 60% which is a bit of a bummer. Hopefully it'll be done by tuesday since I'm wanting to watch it more and more. As of yet I've not picked up any more series, but considering so many have just ended it's only a matter of time before I bolster the ranks. For now I guess my spare time needs to be used to write up details for the All Flesh Must Be Eaten campaign I want to run at Uni. Here's hoping that I get many people interested. Till next time then.

Soul crushing.

2006-09-30T23:02:00.000+01:00

Work started well in that though I was tired, found it hard to focus, and swayed slightly, I didn't fall asleep. Once I'd had lunch I was much better since I actually had energy. Unfortunately from that point on I noticed the passage of time a lot more, and by the last hour was steadily getting worse. It was simply nasty, as I had no motivation and desperately wanted to go home. Thankfully work does end, and seeing my girlfriend drastically, and I can't stress this enough, drastically improved my day. My evening with her was really relaxing as we spent ages chatting and simply being happy in eachother's company. She means everything to me. I keep reminding myself of just how lucky I am. When my dad came to pick me up I didn't really want to leave but unfortunately the choice wasn't up to me. Once I got home it was a case of going on the usual anime and manga update search, webcomic reading and so forth. Unfortunately the torrent for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society wasn't working, but eventually I found another. Similarly unfortunately there don't seem to be any seeds, so I'm currently stuck on 26.4%. As I said to my mate, I doubt it'll be done by tuesday.

I didn't bother watching any anime either, since I'd seen shedloads in the past two days and felt like taking a short break. Once all the updates are done I'll only have five to watch anyway - two episodes of Kemonozume and the updates for Love Get Chu, Kamisama Kazoku and the final for Higurashi no naku Koro ni. Hopefully the Ghost in the Shell movie won't take too long to get, because i'm quite looking forward to it. I'll not be seeing any club-related Japanese media on monday either, since the first club meeting got moved to wednesday. Considering that I'm part of the gaming club SWARM, which meets on wednesdays from 2 pm till 10 pm, I'm not going to be able to go. I will however most likely bring my laptop and a few things to fight games with. That'll certainly be interesting. For now though I'm out of stuff to say, aside from the fact that I had 365 posts as of the last one. That's certainly a full year of blogging. Till next time.

Lots of anime. Gah.

2006-09-29T23:16:00.000+01:00

Today was entertaining, that's for sure. I got to Uni at 9.30 am-ish, thinking my tutor appointment was at 10.40 pm. As such I went 'early' at 10.25 am, only realising when I saw the sign that I'd signed up for 10.20 am. Whoops. My tutor didn't seem to overly mind, but did point out never to be late for a seminar. Whoops. That talk only lasted 10 minutes, so off I went to Brighton to buy my girlfriend's Christmas present early just to make sure it didn't get sold or anything. That was a bit pricey. Thinking I was just going to pick up a magazine I went to David's Books and Dave's Comics and ended up getting... a lot. Vaguely painful financially... A Magic the Gathering Deck for £6, the NewType USA magazine for £8.50, Bleach volume 15 for £5.50, a Genshinken model for £15, four Robot (not a series/manga I've heard of but I have seen an art book on it) small figures for £6 each, two Rozen Maiden Traumend small figures for £5 each, and finally a Capcom Fighter Collection small figure for £5. All in all, £74. Combined with the price of my girlfriend's present.... a large chuink of my wages have disappeared already, and I only got paid today. Not only that but there were 3 more models I had wanted to get, and they were £20, £32 and £40 respectively. The latter two are simply gorgeous. I want them so badly.....

After Brighton I went to Haywards Heath and into my old college. They apparently require a college ID to get in now. Thank god they weren't checking when I got there eh? I met up with a few mates then went to see some of my old teachers. I actually gate crashed my sociology teacher's class, but she seemed happy to see me and told me she'd missed my weekly drawings. It was quite flattering. I think her class were a bit weirded out by me though, she had to explain a fair amount. I also one of my english language teachers, the one who taught me how to write exam radio plays. They're what I'm worst at yet I did one n the exam and got 90 marks. I spoke with her about it and found out that the exam was out of 90, and that before the marks conversion for overall grades it was out of 70 and I'd scored 64. That was also the highest mark in my year for that module. Needless to say I was rather pleased indeed to hear that. It wasn't long before I went back home however as the afternoon was wearing on.

When I did get home I got straight to the anime. Thanks to yet more downloading of updates I had over 30 episodes of anime to watch. I simply cannot, and will not, be bothered to lost them all. I have, however, watched them all and am now pretty much up to date. In short, excellent. I still do have 5 episodes and a movie to download though, the last two episodes for Demonbane, the last episode for Utawarerumono, the last episode for Air Gear and an update for Love Get Chu. The movie happens to be the newest Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society. It's over 1 GB in size, so I'm assuming it's good quality. That brings everything to a close, so till next time.

Mini animarathon.

2006-09-28T23:58:00.000+01:00

Hmm. University today wasn't as good as yesterday. For a start the short ICT talk this morning was quite boring. I ended up spending most of the hour randomly surfing sites instead of following the lecture. Then I had lots of spare time so walked around for a bit, and finally the law lecture was only about the extra curricular law activities, which I already knew about. However the law lecture ended one hell of a lot earlier than described on the Fresher's schedule sheet, so I was able to get home reasonably early at around 2.40 pm. As such I (eventually) got to see my girlfriend since I went round her house. Neither of us thought we'd see eachother today, and so it was really nice being able to turn up and hug her. When I'd called to tell her I could see her there was a fair amount of 'Yay!'s and cheering down the phone to me. It was really sweet and improved my day immensely. She also had the money for some Confrontation miniatures, so I've ordered those for her. I did so quite quickly after I got home, even though it takes a while to process apparently. Being able to spend more time with my girlfriend, especially when I didn't think I'd see her today, was excellent. Simply excellent. It put me in a fantastic mood, that's for sure.

I did have to return hoe however, unfortunately, so updated the forum, did my usual anime and manga update rounds, then proceeded to start watching anime. I got through the entire series of Futakoi, 13 episodes, as well as the updates (and in some cases final episodes) for School Rumble, Ouran High School Host Club, Welcome to the NHK! and Zero no Tsukaima which makes a total of 17. Not exactly huge, but not bad since I started watching quite late. Futakoi was certainly an interesting series, though a potentially incredibly painful situation to be in, loved by multiple sets of twins. Not only is there worrying about hurting one of a pair, but all the other pairs. Ouch indeed. The final for School Rumble wasn't a concrete ending, since the characters spoke of the next term. I do hope there's another series. Ouran had a good ending which wasn't a cliffhanger or abrupt, but which suited the series immensely. Good job there. Werlcome to the NHK! had a nasty revelation for the hikikomori determined to be 'cured' - the girl he liked who whisked him away did so with a group of people planning suicide. I don't think that's quite what he wants. Lastly Zero no Tsukaima was entertaining to watch. Though Saito and Louise seem to be on rocky ground, he found a plane. That has to be handy in getting back home during a solar eclipse. Looks like Louise may have to say goodbye or go with him... That wraps everything up for now, though I still have another 22 episodes to watch before the weekend if I want to reach my target. How hectic. Till next time then.

SWARM!

2006-09-27T23:48:00.000+01:00

University today was excellent. The lecture by Craig Lind was not only thought provoking, but quite fun to partake in. He's good at making little jokes, and twisting student's words back against them, making them look utterly stupid. Thankfully he didn't twist mine. However that was from between 2 pm and 3.40 pm. From 11 am till the lecture I hung out with the SWARM group. I got to the Fresher's Fair early whilst they were still setting up, and signed up immediately. I then spent the rest opf the time chatting with them, and they're all great people with (obviously) similar hobbies to mine. I actually spent over an hour and a half -behind- their table, convining other people to join. One other Fresher actually pointed out to me that he thought I was already an established member, and the president, treasurer and event's co-ordinator also made remarks about me already being a full member. It was pretty cool indeed. After the lecture I ran to the optional Social event for Freshers, grabbed as many bisquits as I could carry, and ran back to the SWARM table. They were all quite surprised and thankful for the bisquits. I also briefly visited the Japanese club (basically anime and manga) and managed to give the girl there some sites for yet more anime and manga. Entertaining considering she uses torrents yet didn't know of the sites.

After the bisquits I helped move a few things to a member's car, then it was to the club itself. Quite handily it takes place on a wednesday from 2 pm till 10 pm, and I usually finish on 1 pm. Excellent stuff. Looks like I'll be spending the full eight hours a week with tem then, heh. We played a few games of Magic the Gathering (in which without my usual deck I was slightly lost, got picked on in the huge multiplayer games and simply died), a Werewolf game, and Bang! which is a cool western card game. My roleplay in the Werewolf game made everyone laugh repeatedly, but I kept getting burnt to death since no one believed me even when I wasn't the werewolf. I already get on well with everyone, and they're just a damn cool group in general. Even more friends! Eventually however I had to get home. I have 37 episodes of anime to watch now, but not really enough time to do so right now. As such I'll leave them for either tomorrow or friday and I'll try to get them finished before the weekend. For now I'll just finish writing this then get some rest since I do feel a bit tired. Till next time then.

Before the update.

2006-09-26T23:02:00.000+01:00

Time to write this before I start working on the forum update, otherwise I'll never manage this on time. I'm aiming to write a fair amount, as I didn't bother for the last two updates, meh. University today was much more fun. For a start when I turned up to the first lecture, there was no lecturer. It was a slight mistake on the wording of the timetable. However because of this I started chatting to several people, and I now have a new solid social group of three others, and an extended group of about four more. Tomorrow's the social club fair so I'll be able to join the Wargaming club for D&D and so forth. Excellent. The group of us went to the business and company-like organisational fair today, and I bagged a ridiculous amount of stuff. Roughly five different posters, ten various pens, a kit bag, a pair of sandals, a table cloth, a bike light, three club music CD's, a bobble hat, two neck-things for holding keys, a wallet and lighter with shedloads of club discount cards (as part of a one year membership for £1 which was pretty cool), a ridiculous amount of flyers and leaflets, several booklets on Brighton and what there is to do, various sets of candy, a small box of popcorn, another lighter from a different bar, and over thirty postcards for various clubs. Compared to my new friends, I easily got over double the amount they did, and I didn't even bother with every stall. It was quite fun indeed, if a little crowded.

The afternoon had a single compulsory lecture, which wasn't too bad at all, and an optional (and ADDITIONAL) welcome speech, so I just skipped that. I've had enough of being told welcome, plus I already knew about the aspects of University the speakers represented, and they don't really matter to me. For example security is a bit pointless as I don't live on campus and already know about personal security. As such I went home a bit early, prepared for Games Workshop, and off I went. It wasn't long before my two usual mates and girlfriend turned up, and as it was the gnome bard player's birthday he chose to have a curry in the other local pub, and ordered a rather big burger instead. How odd. After that it was to our usual pub and the D&D session. I wrapped up the campaign as it was loosing momentum, and I felt like handing over the reigns to the munchkin. Even if he is opinionated and annoying some of the time, he's DM'd before so he's bound to be better (though the feedback I got from the gnome bard player and my girlfriend was really nice. Thanks!). Once I got home when the evening out had ended I glanced at all the stuff on my bed, shrugged, then simply chatted with mates on WLM and Skype. After I finish writing this I'll be working on updating the forum, though I also have 24 episodes of anime to watch, with another 13 downloading. Guess I have a fair amount to do then. Till next time.

Aha! Early.

2006-09-25T20:38:00.000+01:00

Now that post's out of the way, time for this one. This morning my connection still wasn't working, so unfortunately I still was unable to check for updates. Rather harshly, the miniatures I'd ordered from America arrived about five minutes before I had to leave so I didn't get much chance to look at them. A steampunk sorceror, necromancer and 'Mad Hatter' (doctor?) from Wyrd Miniatures as well as the Assassin and Undead Lady from Freebooter Miniatures, the girl Dot from Spyglass and the female Jester who I have no clue where from are all incredibly nifty. That's why I bought them after all. The Undead Lady and Female Jester are -almost- at the awesomeness level of the Forge World Death Korps of Krieg models. Heh, yeah, I really do like the Death Korps models. It's stupidly tempting to do an army of them, though as it is I'll be combining the 20 of them I have with 20 renegade Militia and 25-ish Vostroyans and making a Traitor Guard army using a Lost and the Damned list. A giant daemonic Commissar I hear? Why yes, yes indeed. I'll probably use the Be'lakor model as the base and sculpt the armour clothing, suitably torn of course. Now! To avoid getting side-tracked more, University was vaguely boring.

The introductory talk was a bit... boring. I almost fell asleep actually. Collecting my various student cards wasn't too bad, though they didn't have my main student card as the photo I'd sent had arrived. Thankfully it only took 30 seconds to take the picture and print the card so that wasn't too bad. Since I had a big gap in the middle of the day I went to Brighton and naturally visited Dave's Comics and David's Books. Aside from two manga volumes for my girlfriend I bought nothing. At University however I spotted two William Gibson books and bought them on sight. I own Neuromancer and admire his work. Not much else happened, though I managed to effectively wipe out my 50 pence printing credit as I printed out the timetable for my first month and a few other sheets. At 5 pence per sheet it was ridiculous. Meh. From now on I'll simply use my printer as it's much cheaper. The quiz I stayed for was damn boring, and the people I'd been put into a team with weren't bad per se, but I was still bloody bored. After we handed in the answers I left, as I knew we hadn't come first or last and didn't feel like hanging around. Playing Pokemon Leaf Green on the train journey back home did brighten up my day however. The book I borrowed from the University library, 'Beyond Good and Evil' by Neitzsche is also good. Not a completely boring day then. Plus when I got home my connection worked, so I have a SHEDLOAD of anime to download and watch. It may take several days to get up to date again, heh. Till next time.

Overdue Games Day.

2006-09-24T19:36:00.000+01:00

I'm having to write this a full day late, as yesterday, or 'today' based on this post, my connection wouldn't work when I got home. It made it slightly harder to check for anime updates and so forth, that's for sure. Anyway, onto relating the day. I didn't bother going to sleep since I had to be up by 3 am, so I spent the time either preparing my pack for the day (it had a lot of food in it) or watching various music channels. Eventually I got a tiny bit bored, so quietly grabbed my PSP and glasses and spent half an hour or so playing more Pokemon Leaf Green. I've still not got that far, but then I've got less than six hours of playing time on it and the party are all near level 20 (aside from the starter who's at 22) so it's all good. When it was time to go I woke my dad, and eventually after some organising and picking up my girlfriend and I were at Games Workshop waiting for the coach. We got there early at 3.40 am instead of 4 am. Even so, the store manager was late and didn't get there till past 4.20 am. Typical. The coach journey up was relatively peaceful and quiet, though as my girlfriend was slightly cold I gave her my fleece and bought a rug at the pitstop (prompting the new staff member to make a comment about my age. I guess rugs are reserved for pensioners?).

Games Day itself was pretty fun. I got all my shopping done quite quickly, and my girlfriend was really sweet and kind and repeatedly offered to help carry my stuff, and did so without asking after we'd sat down for a bit to have snacks, since I had a fair amount. It was really kind of her. In the end I got three posters (an A3 one, an A1 one, and one even bigger....) which were free, and a binch of other expensive stuff. I shall elaborate - the Forge World Chaos Dragon at £195. Two squads of Forge World Death Korps of Krieg at £32 each. Two sets of Forge World Renegade Militia kits at £9 each. A two year subscription for White Dwarf (which got me the A1 poster free) for £60. The latest issue of White Dwarf as my subscription had run out for £4. Finally, a box of Cadian Imperial Guard for the Renegade Militia for £18. Overall that's £359. A lot in other words. Or in American, about $683. Yeah, I'm a tiny bit broke. All absolutely incredible stuff though. The Renegade Militia are cool enough, but the Death Korps are made of the resin versions of awesome, win and God. Yes, they rock THAT much. That's why I bought one set, looked at them for a short while, and went back to buy another, heh. Neither my girlfriend or I took part in the conversion competition, though as she wanted to look at the Golden Demon entries (as did I) we went and did our best to see them all. We only managed one side, ignoring the Young Bloods category, since the press of people was a bit too much.

Once we'd done evrything we wanted it was a question of waiting for time to pass really. Though I had pretty models to look at, my girlfriend didn't have much to do, so I tried to perk her up and di my best to ensure she wasn't bored with me quietly going through what I'd bought. It seemed to work as I still got her smiling and laughing. When it came to the Golden Demon awards, though we had good seats we couldn't see the winners that well. For some reason the main screen didn't show close pictures of the entries, but one that had the whole thing in view, with the Games Day and Golden Demon logos, as well as the winner's name and award level (for example Bronze) all underneath eachother and taking up a ridiculous amount of room. As such the pictures were quite small. It was vaguely irritating, but it'll be all good when the winner's booklet comes out with White Dwarf in a few months. The coach journey back wasn't too bad, though my girlfriend can get travwel sick, and when we were almost at the store felt quite bad. Thankfully she recovered really quickly, though was really tired. After dropping her off at her house with a few hugs and kisses, I returned home to find out that my internet connection didn't work. Great. As such no anime for me, and as I felt tired (no sleep then Games Day effectively wrecked me) I went to bed quite early. That's all, so till next time.

Hmm.

2006-09-22T21:13:00.000+01:00

What to talk about? Well, instead of my plans to either paint the Bloodthirster or play Pokemon, I spent all morning dozing off in bed, and the beginning of the afternoon too. A waste of time really, but oh well. When I did get up I didn't really do much. Spent some time reading, a bit playing PSP, lots of time visiting various emulation forums, etc etc etc. Nothing all that notable really. I did update the forum arc, but didn't write any RP for my character Latenter even though he's in the middle of a fight. meh, I just don't seem to have as much motivation to write RP these days. To be honest I've felt vaguely apathetic all day, not really settling on anything for long and not overly feeling like speaking to people. I guess it's just one of those days or something. Meh. I did play as much Urban Dead as possible, and I'm up to 98 exp. Two more and I can increase the accuracy of my pistol shooting, which should make it easier for me to get bloody exp. It can be frustratingly slow at times.

I have watched some anime too, namely the most recent three updates for Innocent Venus, a new series I picked up yesterday, Zegapain, Welcome to the NHK! and Strawberry Panic. Innocent Venus is shaping up to be quite good, though there's still not much information on the little girl Venus after seven episodes, yet everyone seems to be after her. How odd. Zegapain had talk of the final plan which seemed to be quite farfetched, but hey, whatever works for them I guess. Welcome to the NHK! was seemingly the end of the guy's hikikomori lifestyle, but somehow I doubt it. The preview certainly suggested the beach wasn't all that it seemed. Strawberry Panic once again bordered on yuri for a few seconds. It was nice to see Amane remember the person she loves. Looks like all three schools will indeed be able to take part in the Etoile elections. I still have the Demonbane update to watch, but I'm not sure if I'll bother watching it today. Thanks to my mood I don't really feel like doing anything else. I guess that's it for now, till next time.

Whoops.

2006-09-21T22:23:00.000+01:00

Guess I lost track of time. I did go to bed at around 5 am knowing my girlfriend would turn up at 1 pm, and I figured that was more than enough time for me to sleep. It was, most certainly. However I didn't get up the moment I woke, up, so ended up dozing for a while. 'For a while' means 'until my girlfriend rang and pointed out she was outside my house. Erm... whoops. Luckily I wasn't drowsy at all, but I did have to hurriedly change since I was still in my sleeping clothes. We spent some time playing Pokemon Colosseum before she did a few searches for models she could use for her Drow character for D&D. In the end she found two she really liked in the Confrontation range, so later on I guess she'll possibly be getting those. We also watched the Bleach dub together as she was interested in it, and she found some of the voices a bit... odd, just as I did. Overall though I think she liked it. In general spending time with her makes me feel really happy and content, and considering she was round for a fair while, it made my day simply excellent. I'll be seeing her on saturday after work too, not to mention spending all day with her at Games Day, so my week is especially good. If I used emoticons or such in a post I'd have something along the lines of '^^' here about now.

Unfortunately she did have to leave, but I've not got depressed. I'm still on a happy high from when she was here, so that's all good. I managed to get around to watching anime, and so far have seen the updates for Utawarerumono, Naruto, School Rumble 2nd Term and Ergo Proxy. Utawarerumono explained (in a way...) about more of the backstory and the two 'Gods' appeared. They have a long name beginjing with W, and I simply cannot be bothered to try and remember it. Even so, they're quite cool. Naruto has the trap maker arc end, yet another filler seems to be next. Will they EVER go back to the manga? I somehow doubt it. School Rumble was very good, with Harima being the main focus once again. The poor guy's so divided about what to do, but it looks like the next episode, i.e. the final, is going to be very good indeed... Last but not least, Ergo proxy continued to rock. It was rather disjointed, since a fair amount of time seems to pass between each episode, but it's still visually dark and impressive and a treat to watch. I'm looking forward to seeing how things turn out, considering Vincent's just been shot by the anti-proxy gun. I still have the Chevalier update (finally) to watch however, so I'll certainly manage to see that before I go to bed. I'm not doing anything tomorrow either, so either I'll actually get round to painting more of the Bloodthirster (not likely) or I'll end up playing Pokemon all day (very likely). Till next time then.

Sleeping once more.

2006-09-20T22:55:00.000+01:00

I well and truly caught up with sleep today. I didn't actually go to sleep till nearly 9 am this morning, but didn't get up till 3.30 pm, so that was more than enough time really. The only really notable thing I did outside today was buying the first month train ticket for University, valid from the 25th of this month. That saves me buying it nearer the time when I'll be a bit more stressed. I also spent a fair amount of time playing games, most notably The Legend of Zelda: The Minnish Cap and Pokemon Leaf Green. Though I've played Pokemon before (many, many times) Minnish Cap was new to me, and the graphics are pretty damn good considering it's a GameBoy Advance title. It's quite sweet playing them on my PSP too. As for Pokemon I only have 4 of the little critters and I'm yet to challenge Brock the first Gym Leader. I figure I'll spend a ridiculous amount of time levelling up at the beginning, that way I can just walk straight through the first few Gyms. Some people may consider playing this game to be quite sad, but meh, I enjoy them so it's all good. Other than that, my day was pretty typical. I updated the forum where it was needed, and the new forum skin poll is almost over. I'll probably end up changing the skin relatively soon, or at the very least before I go to sleep.

I did also manage to get through some anime, but not much. I've only watched the Bleach and xxxHOLiC updates, as they were all I had at the time. Now I have Zero no Tsukaima and Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, so I'll see those after this post. Bleach was interesting, though there wasn't much fighting at all. The implication that Ishida may randomly explode was entertaining however. In xxxHOLiC Watanuki started coughing up blood because he repeatedly met up with a lady. That's obviously not exactly a good sign... From what I can tell, it's probably due to him and the lady using eachother as substitues for deceased family members. No doubt all will become clear next episode. That draws everything to a close, and considering everything I guess I should get to changing the forum now, as there's 73 diofferent images to host for it.... dang eh? Till next time.

Meh.

2006-09-19T23:08:00.000+01:00

I had another moment of lethargy today, bot bothering to get up and do anything till just past 2 pm, where I went to Games Workshop. I annoyed the manager a little, as my little social group has been going there every tuesday only to hang around and do nothing, eventually leaving to go to the pub to play D&D. After a talk with him he's much happier as we've agreed not to do that anymore unless we have stuff to do. After my mates and girlfriend turned up we went and had a meal at the noodle place as per usual before, yes, going to the pub and playing D&D. The munchkin effectively died, since he got ambushed by wolves and couldn't take them all down. He managed to kill 2 of 4, but the remaining two pounced him and got him below 0 health. Uh-oh indeed. The gnome bard also burnt down the tavern and tried to run away, getting caught, beaten up, getting a leg broken, having all his things taken and being thrown into jail. Uh-oh for him too then. My girlfriend, the catgirl, did much better as all she did was follow my Diabolus fighter character out into the woods for him to get all his stuff that he buried for safekeeping. Unfortunately then my laptop ran out of battery, so all my D&D stuff turned off. Hmm. That ended the session.

My girlfriend and I went back to Games Workshop to hang out till she had to leave, and after that it was back to the pub to play pool. Though I'm usually terrible I did rather well, getting 5 in a row and pulling off shots that I would usually horrendously miss. I still lost however with one of my colour left on the table as the other guy completely cleared up when he got the chance, dang. After I got home the only update I had to watch was Kiba, and it was quite good. I thought the series was ending with 26, but it's not. AniDB doesn't list it as ending at all, and the series isn't anywhere near a conclusion. How interesting. I have have three updates for Muteki Kanban Musume, Tonagura! and Ouran High School Host Club to get, so I'll be watching those when they're done. I will have to go to bed reasonably early though as I need to get up tomorrow to get the train ticket for University, and then afterwards I can go to Games Workshop and do more painting on the Bloodthirster. Since I didn't do any today that'll be quite useful indeed. On thursday my girlfriend will be coming round after college and we'll be reading manga together, and I'm having a free day of friday. All in all a set of good weekly plans then. As I've run out of things to say, till next time.

Even more painting.

2006-09-18T23:17:00.000+01:00

Yes indeed, I got even more painting done today. Zomg indeed. I went to Games Workshop at around 2.15 pm (having done nothing much in the morning)and went to work on the Bloodthirster. In the hours till the store closed I managed to finish off all the flesh, giving it a stronger red tint, repained the wing membranes black in preparation for drybrushing them, and managed to get the fur painted. I also managed to get the armour of my Diabolus fighter painted in the deep red/burgundy I was going for, so that wasn't too bad. I'd hoped to get more painting done, but I didn't actually start till just after 3 pm, and lots of time was spent waiting for the damn fur base coat to dry. Bah. The wing membranes also took a surprising amount of time. Thankfully drybrushing them won't take much time at all, so if I get up early enough tomorrow I could finish the wing membranes and make a decent start on the armour. Depending on how many layers I go for I could get the armour done quite quickly. It's the bone details that'll take the most time I reckon. Hopefully I'll also get my Diabolus fighter pretty much finished tomorrow too, which is handy. Unfortunately however after reading some comedy D&D material (yes, I'm getting even more....) I have a huge inclination to make a mime. A normal human, but a mime modelled on the Jester class, and focus on spells which create invisible objects, for example walls and boxes. Heheheheh.

There wasn't actually much anime for me to watch. I saw the last two episodes of Comic Party Revolution and the updates for Ah! My Goddess second season, Black Blood Brothers and Witchblade. Comic Party was entertaining in a slightly odd way. Considering it's based in the 'real' world with no special powers or anything, it was vaguely odd how the main male character managed to conjure a fake girl from his imagination who actually interected with others. Oh well. It was still a good series to watch. Ah! My Goddess covered the chapters with the evil little tea pot which appears as something the perceiver finds irresistably cute. Quite amusing. As for Black Blood Brothers, the older brother wasn't as impressive as he was in the first episode. For a start he landed in some water whilst avoiding a suppression team, and was immediately weakened. What a stupid mistake to make considering it was a tiny fountain. Meh. Witchblade was just as intriguing as it's previous episodes, with one of the bio-mechanoid freaks still seemingly posessing his humanity. I wonder how that'll turn out, since he's the first of his kind to actually get away from Witchblade. With luck there'll be more anime updates soon. Till there is, I'll continue to read D&D material (as I now have the first 300 Dragon magazines and a few past that number but sporadic) and plan things for my campaign. Till next time. (Gee damn I really want to make a Mime model....)

Blah. Just blah.

2006-09-17T23:39:00.000+01:00

The title describes work today perfectly. To elaborate, it wasn't fun at all, and felt incredibly draining and soul crushing. I was on a normal till but had an endless queue of customers, which always seems to make my efforts feel futile, and I swear I only got through the day thanks to thinking of my girlfriend and counting down the time minute by minute, little segments at a time. It wasn't a pleasant day. At all. On the plus side however as I now no longer work wednesdays I don't need to go to work till saturday, when I'll see my girlfriend as always, then the day after both of us will be going to Games Day. Pretty nifty stuff indeed. Spending time with my girlfriend today was nice and relaxing as always, and, though it didn't get rid of all the stress from work, it certainly helped my demeanour. We spent a lot of time just talking about stuff and us, it was nice to work out exactly where we were and how things were going. Af of tomorrow we'll have been going out for five and a half months, so that's not bad. Not bad at all, and as she makes me really happy I hope it keeps going. We also watched anime in the evening before I went, as it's a sunday, and Fullmetal Alchemist was good as per usual. Mezzo DSA was a bit... odd, but there you go. Overall it's been a pretty strange series.

Not long after I got home I checked the forum and there hadn't been much activity, so I checked for anime updates and there hadn't been many of those either. I finally got around to watching the end of Binbou Shimai Monogatari and it was a sweet, if cliche-like, ending. The update for Blood+ was good too, with the two Queens, Saya and Diva, finally fighting properly. As the next episode is the last, yet the fight between the Queens is over, I doubt there'll be something impressive and climatic. If it ends up being angsty and suddenly becoming the happy ending of everyone's dreams I shall be quite annoyed. A single episode of Comic Party Revolution got seen, and though I enjoyed the episode itself, I found that it's slowness (only twice normal speed instead of four times) irritated me slightly. I guess I'm used to faster episodes now, heh.

My plans for tomorrow will probably revolve around going to Games Workshop to paint the Diabolus fighter and Bloodthirster I've been working on, and then watching anime in the evening when I get back. That's assuming I get up in the morning of course. I'm likely to have a lay in for some time, so it's a work in progress plan I suppose. Till next time then.