video games live

over the last few weeks, whenever i looked at the calendar on the fridge i felt a tingle of excitement. video games live was coming up and i couldn't wait for it. so last night was the big night. we were off to the national concert hall, lordkilljoy in dr. who stylings of a suit and cons and me wearing my lolita dress.
the concert was brilliant, between the orchestra, the choir, the visuals from the games and the light show that went along with it. the music was great (even though i didn't really know any of it), the showmanship was entertaining (and totally over the top) and the venue was perfect.
we hung around after to get signatures and gush at jack wall.

saturday night was lainey316's birthday. we went to a lebanese restaurant and then on to a pub. the food was good - it's always nice to try something different. it was a good night, but i was a little too tired and full to really enjoy it. the others went mad dancing - i danced in my chair :)

in other news:
today, for the first time ever, i used rubber gloves to wash the dishes. and the reason? i didn't want to take my gloves off. it's been really cold all weekend - the kitchen got down to 9degrees yesterday afternoon.
i'm a bit worried about nymph. he's kind of stopped eating and i wonder is he a little too cold. but he doesn't look very skinny, so i think he's all right.

short news

i have been 100% freezing all day. when i came into the kitchen this morning it was 14degrees. it's 16.8 now, but the heating is just about to come on, and when it does i'll be hugging the rad.

we went to see ash on wednesday night. it was good to to be at a small rock gig again. concerts are all well and good (and amazing) but its hard to beat a good gig. ash totally rocked out, even adding in some totally cheezy "echo" singing. but i really enjoyed it - singing along to about 85% of the songs.

i'm over the worst of my novel. it's clear sailing from here, as far as i can tell. it's just editing, not rewriting. i'm half way through - heading on to chapter 8 on monday. i think ch. 9 is one of my favourite bits in the whole book. (it's very emo.)

i don't really have a lot of other news, or not that i can think of any.

borderlands

me and lordkilljoy are playing borderlands together at the moment. i may have developed a slight obsession with it - the kind that i've not developed since i played the thief games, the kind of obsession that comes from playing a new kind of game that i've never played before. i'm playing the hunter (sniper), mordecai, and i'm finding it really wierd being a male character. i'm split between feeling i am him and being attracted to him. i think he may have to go into my hall of cool male characters (like garrett and the prince), even though his character isn't nearly as fleshed out as either of those two. but still, the little laughs he gives when he gets a critical hit and the caustic comments he makes give him enough. yea - i think that might be the problem. when playing other male characters (garrett, prince, raziel) i knew they were the character and i was the player, but borderlands is more of a shooter rpg and the character bounds arn't cut so deep, so it confuses my poor brain. (just to note - i've never played a male character in an rpg.)
but anyway - i'm really enjoying the game. when i get crits i laugh right along with mordecai. the funniest thing, though, is that games like uncharted and fallout have led up to this. as i said to lordkilljoy last night - fallout3 is like a gateway shooter. if i hadn't played them i don't think i would be enjoying borderlands half as much because i wouldn't be able to shoot anything.

not much other news - i really need to get chapter 6 finished today. i have so little to go with it. i tried to get it done yesterday, but in a fit of procrastination i cleaned the apartment instead.

i can't think of a subject

this morning i turned on my computer and the second icon to greet me in the notification area was a functional internet connection. and my response was: sweetness insanity! i haven't used that phrase in a long time - i kinda wondered where it came from, what murky depths of my brain did it leap out from when it saw the chance to be at large in the world again.

but anyway, i was very happy to see it. i think it even featured in my dream last night. my dream was really wierd, though. in it, i was told that i had a second dad and he was a trucker who drove to china on a regular basis, which is why he was never around. and he was trying to parallel park an articulated truck (a really big one) with very little success. by dream also featured ambrosia creamed rice, the regular members of my family, a tiny kitchen, and probably loads else that i can't remember.

apart from that, i have nothing else to say, really. i smell like lush yummy shower cream.

it's a bit stormy today - i had to turn on the light getting up (at 8:30) and while i was in the shower, listening to the rain and wind on the window, i had a sudden desire to put up our little fiber-optic tree and blue lights. roll on december :)

internet woes will be a thing of the past

more internet troubles. today my connection slunk out of the computer, crept from the kitchen and quietly flung itself from the balcony. and i was very, very annoyed at it. so between uninstalls, reinstalls, searching for drivers, reboots, more searching, i finally found a driver that is working. and hopefully it will continue to work with no hiccups long into the future.

so that's what i did today, instead of writing. hmmm. i've been on chapter 6 for the last week and a half now. (yes - i am supposed to be half way into ch. 7, but if i don't get ch.6 straight, the rest of it will be crooked too.) i'm getting through it all right, just very slowly. i'm writing all new descriptions for the main human city (i call them humans, even though all the races are human, because these guys don't use magic). it's the same city that zan and kej live in, only 20 years earlier. so it's funny knowing the area, but describing it from zachery's point of view. it's really cool actually - as i write, i'm seeing the place in my head and it seems so familiar - like a city i've lived in myself. it's kinda mad. i guess it sort of helps that i modelled it a little bit on cork city. only slightly, though - the hills more than anything. certainly not the buildings.

i don't really have a lot of news - we watched star trek on blu-ray last night. it is such a good movie. i smiled through most of it - the characters are just so funny.

i reached level 20 in fallout3. it's wierd now to find places and kill things and not get any xp for it. i'm finishing off the side quests and then i'm going to go finish the main quest and hopefully by then the dlc will have arrived (goty edition ordered - thanks to lordkilljoy)

yea - i'm going to go now.

dreams of pets

i had an exceptionally wierd dream last night. all my dreams are wierd, but this one was especially strange.

me and lordkilljoy or possibly penelope_stone were at a market kind of thing and this guy was selling lizards that looked like dinosaurs (a brachiosaurus but with diamond-shaped plates along its back) it was cute, yellow and we bought it straight away. but there was something you had to do to it before you put it in a tank. you had to bite its neck. so i did, but i bit too hard and ripped off a bit of skin, leaving a huge hole near its collarbone (do dinosaurs have collarbones?). so we got it home and put it in the tank with yoshi, who was not at all impressed with this newcomer. he attacked the dino-lizard, aiming for the hole in its neck, and somehow managed to pull its heart out. dino-lizard, looking shocked, keeled over and died right then and there.
me and lordkilljoy were equally stunned, unable to believe that our scardy little yoshi had just killed something three times bigger than him.
so, later, i had to clean the corpse out of the tank and nymph was lying on it, happy as anything. i had a job to get him off and the dino-lizard was all stiff and tangled around the branches in the tank.
yea - it was really wierd.


went to see la roux last night - spur of the moment (people couldn't go and gave their tickets to lordkilljoy). it was fun - up on the balcony of the academy. it was strange going to a non-rock gig, though. no rock-out bits and the crowd was very well behaved.

nymph-newtonious has been hanging out in the filter again. i don't know is it the flow of water or the tiny bit of extra heat, or just that it's hidy, but he really seems to love it in there. i think, one of these days, i'll stop taking him out of there. but then i'm afraid that he'll find a way out of the tank altogether. hmmm.

right. enough with the procrastination.

sp3

"It's nice to know that there will still be kittens in the singularity." such a cute quote.

i installed xp sp3 today - i don't really know why i waited so long. when sp2 came out i ordered it (on cd, because my 'net connection wasn't good enough to download it - shock) straight away. but sp3 has been out for ages and i just never bothered with it.
but for these few days i have to keep my 'net connection open and having it crash out every 20 minutes is just not on. so, in a bid to eradicate my connection woes, i updated to sp3. and so far it seems to be working out well.

i've listened to Exogenesis: Symphony Part 3 (Redemption) by Muse 21 times over the last week. i think there's subliminal messaging in the lyrics: let's start over again.

wacom are running a competition on dA with the theme: dreams. i'm very tempted to enter, because i have these amazing ideas in my head, but i just know that if i try to draw them they will fall apart. i can never draw what's in my head. something in my brain messes up the composition, or perhaps images in my head are in 5D or something and don't convert well to 2D.

in other news: i'm back playing fallout3, and listening to a lot of philip glass at the moment.

that is all.

catching up on the weekend

muse friday night were brilliant. we got there just after doors opened and managed to get into the pit (somewhat illegitimately). waited for ages for the support to come on, but there was no support. muse themselves were fantastic - from their stage layout, to lights, and obviously the music. they rocked out quite a bit, but did spare some time for their more mellow tracks. and i could actually see the band most of the time, thanks to a mosh pit that opened right in front of us. it did not impress the security guys, but i thought it the best thing ever.

went to see the men who stare at goats last night. i enjoyed it, laughed lots - some of it was so preposterous, but some of it seemed to hold a grain of truth.

writing's going well. i think i have figured out a way to make chapter 6 work, and this is a very good thing.

i finished uncharted2 on sunday. it was a lot of fun. just gave up in annoyance with the number of guys to kill once. well - one thing that did annoy me was that i carried one particular gun for the last few hours just so i could use it to kill the bad guy at the end, and then the fight started and they just gave me some random default weapons. just cause they wanted me to kill him their way, not my way.
then lordkilljoy had to go to work, so i got to play dragon age: origins for a bit. it's fun, but you really have to have your head on going into fights.

i think that's all my news.

muse

off to muse tonight and i am so excited. i've been listening to the resistance all week, trying to get to know the songs. but i was sabotaged by the last one on the album. i've listened to it in whole 14 times and in part probably over 20. it crescendos so well. i love it.

not really getting a lot of writing done this week. i'm about to hit that dreaded part of the book where i never really figured out how stuff can happen, so it's just happening with no good reason. trying to come up with good reasons, but it's hard not to just ignore it. i've skipped one scene already, and i have a feeling that i'll be half finishing more scenes next week. see, the problem is that the rest of the book hinges on this one little bottle neck, it it has to stand very firmly. right at the moment it's a stilt house on sand, where the stilts are made of twigs lashed together. and it's an earthquake zone too. yea...

i don't really have much other news.

halloween

I have 10 minutes left in lunch and am using it to write a quick post about halloween and how amazingly brilliant it was.

penelope_stone and i dressed as zombies and joined the cork zombie walk, in the rain, i might add. so we were bedraggled zombies, but we had a laugh stumbling towards random people and scraping at restaurant windows. i have pics and i will upload some of them, but not now.
we went to camouflage after the zombie walk and a few drinks in the franciscan well. my neck is still sore from that - they played so many good songs.

the wedding the night before was really good fun too. good food, good music and everyone seemed to have a good time.

i'm still a little tired today, but writing's going well. enough, anyway. i know where this scene is going and that always helps.
nanowrimo started today. for the first year since i started it, i'm not doing it. it feels wierd, actually. i kinda feel like i should be doing it, but work on my novel is way more important and all books in the trilogy are written and i don't want to write another novel until i have all 3 in some sort of publishing shape and hopefully one or two of them off with a publisher.

right, so. i'm going to go again.
i have 5 layers on (counting hat and arm-warmers as one layer) today and my nose is freezing.