Happenings and books I read :o)
Diary: Week of 26/05 Pubs, still more work, Dungeon and television :o)
Monday evening was spent having a pub lunch with Lacuna_Raze and maleficent, which was good. I don't mind being out so much in the evenings; it's only the morning and afternoon I dislike at the moment. The heat can be uncomfortable enough without the sun being intent to beam down so furiously on your face. I know it's cliched, but I really don't understand what gets people so excited by that sort of weather... the only upshot for me is when the sun goes down it doesn't get so cold :o/
Me and Lacuna_Raze went back to mind were we started watching Being Human and didn't stop until an unwise time of the morning, after which we tried to get as much sleep as we could before having to get up in the morning for work :oP Was worse than normal because my parents had gone off to Wales on holiday and thus couldn't give us a lift so I had to take the poor unsuspecting Lacuna_Raze on a bus ride in the morning and point her, best as I could, in the right direction to her work from the bus stop. Poor thing :o(
Got into work to learn that they wanted to extend my contract another week. :o/ I must be the only person at the moment desperately looking forward to being out of work. I guess it's partly because it was always supposed to be a temporary contract and I've been looking forward to some time off for a while now (only to keep having it snatched away at the last moment!). Guess it's good that it's there though, shouldn't really turn down extra money.
Having skipped the Monday, the week went thankfully quite quickly so as to get to the good bit where Lacuna_Raze comes to stay :o)
We weren't originally going to go to Dungeon given we weren't sure who was going and we weren't sure of whether we wanted to bother with the hassle of the bus or the expense of a taxi but we were eventually convinced to go and meet Elegy_Of_Flames and hamsterhotep. Did turn out to be worth it and I managed to annoy a few people with my camera and even got a few of me and Lacuna_Raze together. Okay, so I look a bit drunk in them due to not having my eyes open properly but it's rare for me to manage to get any kind of decent photo of us together so they are now plastered across the web :oP
During the weekend we watched Galaxy Quest, which is brilliant (at least if you're remotely interested in Star Trek anyway) and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (entertaining enough) but the real highlight was finishing the first seasons of Being Human. Before this week, I had only ever seen the pilot and I'm quite glad to have finally watched it, will be looking forward to the next season :o)
Diary: Week of 01/06: Last week of work, Voting, Gamesoc Parties and Kays
Had a very tired week. Been getting up half six every morning in order to make sure I get in and out of the shower before my brother wants it and then staying up too late on the Internet. Bad Jamie :oP Would help if I didn't have an alarm clock from hell; I spent last week with my waking up process being jumping to a sitting position every morning wondering what on Earth was wrong that there was such a loud annoying alarm going off :o/ At some point this week it occurred to me to use the alarm on my phone mind :oP
This was my last week of working. True for form, they waited until the last day of working before offering me an extension to my contract. I think I'd deal with it better if I knew ahead of time how long I had to work rather than getting my hopes up of some time off and a lie in and having it spoiled every Friday :oP
That being said, this time I turned them down. I feel a little irresponsible for turning down the money but I'm off to Scotland on holiday soon so it was this week or next week anyway and I really was beginning to feel the need for some time off :oP If I'm lucky, I might even be vaguely productive with it! :oD
Finished reading the Orcs omnibus by Stan Nichols midweek. Was okay, but not everything I was hoping it to be. More on that later :o)
Voted on Thursday, which was easy as I was already registered and the polling booth was two moments away from me. Quite surprised at the sheer amount of anti-Europe and nationalist parties on the ballot. I guess that's striking a chord for people right now, although I'm not sure what convinces people that the UK choosing to be part of the EU is some secret conspiracy to wilfully give away money and power to foreigners. :o/
I found the results quite depressing when they came in. A conservative majority, a large number of UK Independence Party seats and a couple of British National Party seats just to really take the piss. Given Labour was likely to lose seats I had hoped that the Liberal Democrats would have some success :o( Is mad really, I get people being annoyed by the Credit Crunch and by the expenses scandal but I don't understand why either of those would make anyone think to vote Conservative :o/
I had hoped to go out to Dungeon on Friday, to mark off my last day at work, but everyone was too busy being sucky and skint/busy so I opted for a night in with Lacuna_Raze instead (which, fortunately, is always lots of fun). Between Friday and Sunday we mostly watched Family Guy, but I also had an attempt at getting her interested in Star Trek with 'Meld' (Voyager) but that didn't work as well as hoped :o( We also watched Session 9, which might have been okay if it wasn't so painfully slow... :oP
Saturday I went out to a Gamesoc party called RABIES. By counting the amount of corkscrews I found in my bag afterwards, it appears I had at least four bottles of wine, opps. I liked the house; had a nice garden backed by woods that doubled as a student dumping ground. We went for a wonder and the place is just full of odd stuff; as well as the usual traffic cones there were also three air conditioning units as well as a trampoline and other such stuff. Before turning back we also found a pill box as well, which was strange :oP
After taking a ton of photos (most of which came out blurry, but those that didn't are now up on facebook), I headed off home. Had a very chatty taxi driver who couldn't stop talking about how much I looked like a girl (mixed in with occasional disbelief that I was not), fortunately the alcohol seemed to be good at keeping me chatty back and civil. Eventually got back to Lacuna_Raze in what she assures me to be a fairly drunken state :oP
May not have felt my best on the Sunday :oP
Diary: Week of 08/06: First week off, Star Trek, fb games, Dungeon
Despite being off for the week I still ended up early first-thing Monday morning for a Dentist's appointment. Typical. Same problem as ever, except this time I was told that it was probably because I wasn't sleeping enough rather than being stressed. At least that's easy enough to remedy now I'm unemployed :oP
I spent a lot of the week playing facebook games and trying to get new high scores :oP Some of them are quite rubbish but there are a few that are good. I think I'd already managed to get Lacuna_Raze annoyingly captivated by Ragdoll Laser Dodge :oD Hehehe :o)
Also watched a lot of Star Trek that I'd been downloading. The original intention was to download some of the best episodes in hopes of enamouring Lacuna_Raze to the show, but it failed dismally. I'd already shown her 'Meld' (Voyager) and she'd found it okay but quite boring and then I showed her 'The Visitor' (Deep Space Nine) and she fell asleep :oP Opps. In fairness, I guess the episode is quite slow and tiring (it does start with an old man offering a guest a cup of tea by the fireside...) but it's still one of my favourites. Brilliant stuff :oD
Nearly given up on showing her any more Trek though :oP
I had my job seekers interview on Thursday, which involved the normal demands for irrelevant paperwork (including who paid my course fees at university two years ago, as if that's relevant) but got it sorted out after visiting my bank to get some statements printed out (I'm paperless these days, don't normally see the point in paper statements). Tried trouser shopping whilst in town (running low on decent pairs that fit me) but failed abysmally :o(
Read through the Dark Heresy role-play game book I got ages ago. No particular plans to play the game but had been meaning to do some creative writing by myself so I thought it might be useful. I've no particular hope of churning out anything brilliant but I thought it might be fun to do anyway :o)
Lacuna_Raze was down on Friday and we went to Dungeon on Saturday. Despite it being quite empty due to Download, it was actually quite good and enough of the right people were there to make it interesting :o)
Review: Being Human (spoilers)
I watched the pilot a while ago and, whilst some of it seemed dubious, it seemed like it could well be entertaining.
As it turns out, there is no continuity between the pilot and the series anyway :oP
I was a bit disappointed that they got rid of the original ghost character (Annie). I can see why people might have found her annoying and thus why they replaced her with someone more linkable but she still seemed interesting to me and it was nice hearing a non-standard accent. That being said, the new character seems nice enough anyway. (I just read online that the reason they recast the character was possibly due to the original actress becoming unavailable by the time that the show was picked up on)
Changing the vampire characters from being so clichéd was probably a very good move, especially in losing the annoyingly affected voices. At first, I was a bit dubious as to whether they went too far in the other direction. I like the idea of introducing more 'normalcy' into the characters but they're still blood-drinking vampires of unnatural ages and that's the sort of thing I'd expect to see in the character. We do get a little bit of that later on though (I especially liked the scene with 'Mitchell through the ages')
Mitchell is a nice enough character but it tended to feel like the ever-present insatiable bloodlust that is occasionally highlighted seems to exist only when highlighted rather than being a constant in his character. I don't necessarily mean he should be as moody and mopy as the old Mitchell but I'd still expect something. Lacuna_Raze says I've just been spoiled by too much Anne Rice and Buffy though :oP
They skipped a lot of the groundwork they did in the pilot, including most of the moving in stuff, which seemed a bit of a shame. Also, the sorts of concepts they played with in the pilot seemed more diluted in the seris but perhaps that's only because they intend to stretch them out a bit longer and we'll end up seeing more of them in the next season. :o)
So now I'm waiting for a new season of this and Lost :o/
Review: Orcs Omnibus by Stan Nicholls (spoilers)
I picked up this one whilst in a bookstore with Lacuna_Raze. The blurb was that this was a story told from the perspective of Orcs, which sounded a nice overturning of the traditional approach so I thought it would be fun.
Unfortunately, it doesn't quite live up to that. Yes, the orcs are recast as good guys but rather than being a reinvention of the orc concept into something more balanced it instead makes them into characters that aren't really that different to humans. Even half of the titles used for the recruits in the 'warband' are borrowed directly from a modern army. Meanwhile, the humans in the book are mostly distinguished by a disrespect for their natural surroundings and being more inclined to ornamentation, that's about it.
So, in short, don't read this book for that reason! :oP
The writing itself is okay. There are lots of fights and skirmishes, which is hard to pull off in a book but it does seem to manage it okay. The only flaw is that they are unrealistically lucky and few of them ever die (in fact, the author goes to the length of introducing orcs from outside the original cast seemingly just to kill them off).
The plot itself is quite a big let-down. Most of the plot is a 'collect the items' type affair that I'd expect more in a computer game rather than a book. The resolution to the story comes from an off-angle but in a way that feels like the themes and hints earlier in the book have been disregarded rather than in a clever twist way.
The villains are awful.
The evil queen fails to work well because she's a caricature that is too focused on being evil to ever achieve any level of depth. Meanwhile, acts of cruelty that are supposed to impress us tend to come off as spiteful and childish, which left me wondering how she ever managed to achieve and sustain such a position of power in the first place. Added to that, the character is ridiculously over-sexualised and the authors treatment of her repeated rapes (and then sacrifices) is just awful - I can't imagine anyone thinking to write about rape that way if it was a male rapist.
The blindly religious fanatic is similarly too simple. It's quite easy to pick up that the author has a strong dislike for fundamentalist Christianity but it is not cleverly done and we're left with a comic book picture of what very religious people look like, act like and speak like.
I would say this book is better written than some things I've written but I have read some awful stuff before so that might not be saying a lot :oP
Link: Silence is the Enemy - articles on rape in Liberia - linky
Monday evening was spent having a pub lunch with Lacuna_Raze and maleficent, which was good. I don't mind being out so much in the evenings; it's only the morning and afternoon I dislike at the moment. The heat can be uncomfortable enough without the sun being intent to beam down so furiously on your face. I know it's cliched, but I really don't understand what gets people so excited by that sort of weather... the only upshot for me is when the sun goes down it doesn't get so cold :o/
Me and Lacuna_Raze went back to mind were we started watching Being Human and didn't stop until an unwise time of the morning, after which we tried to get as much sleep as we could before having to get up in the morning for work :oP Was worse than normal because my parents had gone off to Wales on holiday and thus couldn't give us a lift so I had to take the poor unsuspecting Lacuna_Raze on a bus ride in the morning and point her, best as I could, in the right direction to her work from the bus stop. Poor thing :o(
Got into work to learn that they wanted to extend my contract another week. :o/ I must be the only person at the moment desperately looking forward to being out of work. I guess it's partly because it was always supposed to be a temporary contract and I've been looking forward to some time off for a while now (only to keep having it snatched away at the last moment!). Guess it's good that it's there though, shouldn't really turn down extra money.
Having skipped the Monday, the week went thankfully quite quickly so as to get to the good bit where Lacuna_Raze comes to stay :o)
We weren't originally going to go to Dungeon given we weren't sure who was going and we weren't sure of whether we wanted to bother with the hassle of the bus or the expense of a taxi but we were eventually convinced to go and meet Elegy_Of_Flames and hamsterhotep. Did turn out to be worth it and I managed to annoy a few people with my camera and even got a few of me and Lacuna_Raze together. Okay, so I look a bit drunk in them due to not having my eyes open properly but it's rare for me to manage to get any kind of decent photo of us together so they are now plastered across the web :oP
During the weekend we watched Galaxy Quest, which is brilliant (at least if you're remotely interested in Star Trek anyway) and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (entertaining enough) but the real highlight was finishing the first seasons of Being Human. Before this week, I had only ever seen the pilot and I'm quite glad to have finally watched it, will be looking forward to the next season :o)
Diary: Week of 01/06: Last week of work, Voting, Gamesoc Parties and Kays
Had a very tired week. Been getting up half six every morning in order to make sure I get in and out of the shower before my brother wants it and then staying up too late on the Internet. Bad Jamie :oP Would help if I didn't have an alarm clock from hell; I spent last week with my waking up process being jumping to a sitting position every morning wondering what on Earth was wrong that there was such a loud annoying alarm going off :o/ At some point this week it occurred to me to use the alarm on my phone mind :oP
This was my last week of working. True for form, they waited until the last day of working before offering me an extension to my contract. I think I'd deal with it better if I knew ahead of time how long I had to work rather than getting my hopes up of some time off and a lie in and having it spoiled every Friday :oP
That being said, this time I turned them down. I feel a little irresponsible for turning down the money but I'm off to Scotland on holiday soon so it was this week or next week anyway and I really was beginning to feel the need for some time off :oP If I'm lucky, I might even be vaguely productive with it! :oD
Finished reading the Orcs omnibus by Stan Nichols midweek. Was okay, but not everything I was hoping it to be. More on that later :o)
Voted on Thursday, which was easy as I was already registered and the polling booth was two moments away from me. Quite surprised at the sheer amount of anti-Europe and nationalist parties on the ballot. I guess that's striking a chord for people right now, although I'm not sure what convinces people that the UK choosing to be part of the EU is some secret conspiracy to wilfully give away money and power to foreigners. :o/
I found the results quite depressing when they came in. A conservative majority, a large number of UK Independence Party seats and a couple of British National Party seats just to really take the piss. Given Labour was likely to lose seats I had hoped that the Liberal Democrats would have some success :o( Is mad really, I get people being annoyed by the Credit Crunch and by the expenses scandal but I don't understand why either of those would make anyone think to vote Conservative :o/
I had hoped to go out to Dungeon on Friday, to mark off my last day at work, but everyone was too busy being sucky and skint/busy so I opted for a night in with Lacuna_Raze instead (which, fortunately, is always lots of fun). Between Friday and Sunday we mostly watched Family Guy, but I also had an attempt at getting her interested in Star Trek with 'Meld' (Voyager) but that didn't work as well as hoped :o( We also watched Session 9, which might have been okay if it wasn't so painfully slow... :oP
Saturday I went out to a Gamesoc party called RABIES. By counting the amount of corkscrews I found in my bag afterwards, it appears I had at least four bottles of wine, opps. I liked the house; had a nice garden backed by woods that doubled as a student dumping ground. We went for a wonder and the place is just full of odd stuff; as well as the usual traffic cones there were also three air conditioning units as well as a trampoline and other such stuff. Before turning back we also found a pill box as well, which was strange :oP
After taking a ton of photos (most of which came out blurry, but those that didn't are now up on facebook), I headed off home. Had a very chatty taxi driver who couldn't stop talking about how much I looked like a girl (mixed in with occasional disbelief that I was not), fortunately the alcohol seemed to be good at keeping me chatty back and civil. Eventually got back to Lacuna_Raze in what she assures me to be a fairly drunken state :oP
May not have felt my best on the Sunday :oP
Diary: Week of 08/06: First week off, Star Trek, fb games, Dungeon
Despite being off for the week I still ended up early first-thing Monday morning for a Dentist's appointment. Typical. Same problem as ever, except this time I was told that it was probably because I wasn't sleeping enough rather than being stressed. At least that's easy enough to remedy now I'm unemployed :oP
I spent a lot of the week playing facebook games and trying to get new high scores :oP Some of them are quite rubbish but there are a few that are good. I think I'd already managed to get Lacuna_Raze annoyingly captivated by Ragdoll Laser Dodge :oD Hehehe :o)
Also watched a lot of Star Trek that I'd been downloading. The original intention was to download some of the best episodes in hopes of enamouring Lacuna_Raze to the show, but it failed dismally. I'd already shown her 'Meld' (Voyager) and she'd found it okay but quite boring and then I showed her 'The Visitor' (Deep Space Nine) and she fell asleep :oP Opps. In fairness, I guess the episode is quite slow and tiring (it does start with an old man offering a guest a cup of tea by the fireside...) but it's still one of my favourites. Brilliant stuff :oD
Nearly given up on showing her any more Trek though :oP
I had my job seekers interview on Thursday, which involved the normal demands for irrelevant paperwork (including who paid my course fees at university two years ago, as if that's relevant) but got it sorted out after visiting my bank to get some statements printed out (I'm paperless these days, don't normally see the point in paper statements). Tried trouser shopping whilst in town (running low on decent pairs that fit me) but failed abysmally :o(
Read through the Dark Heresy role-play game book I got ages ago. No particular plans to play the game but had been meaning to do some creative writing by myself so I thought it might be useful. I've no particular hope of churning out anything brilliant but I thought it might be fun to do anyway :o)
Lacuna_Raze was down on Friday and we went to Dungeon on Saturday. Despite it being quite empty due to Download, it was actually quite good and enough of the right people were there to make it interesting :o)
Review: Being Human (spoilers)
I watched the pilot a while ago and, whilst some of it seemed dubious, it seemed like it could well be entertaining.
As it turns out, there is no continuity between the pilot and the series anyway :oP
I was a bit disappointed that they got rid of the original ghost character (Annie). I can see why people might have found her annoying and thus why they replaced her with someone more linkable but she still seemed interesting to me and it was nice hearing a non-standard accent. That being said, the new character seems nice enough anyway. (I just read online that the reason they recast the character was possibly due to the original actress becoming unavailable by the time that the show was picked up on)
Changing the vampire characters from being so clichéd was probably a very good move, especially in losing the annoyingly affected voices. At first, I was a bit dubious as to whether they went too far in the other direction. I like the idea of introducing more 'normalcy' into the characters but they're still blood-drinking vampires of unnatural ages and that's the sort of thing I'd expect to see in the character. We do get a little bit of that later on though (I especially liked the scene with 'Mitchell through the ages')
Mitchell is a nice enough character but it tended to feel like the ever-present insatiable bloodlust that is occasionally highlighted seems to exist only when highlighted rather than being a constant in his character. I don't necessarily mean he should be as moody and mopy as the old Mitchell but I'd still expect something. Lacuna_Raze says I've just been spoiled by too much Anne Rice and Buffy though :oP
They skipped a lot of the groundwork they did in the pilot, including most of the moving in stuff, which seemed a bit of a shame. Also, the sorts of concepts they played with in the pilot seemed more diluted in the seris but perhaps that's only because they intend to stretch them out a bit longer and we'll end up seeing more of them in the next season. :o)
So now I'm waiting for a new season of this and Lost :o/
Review: Orcs Omnibus by Stan Nicholls (spoilers)
I picked up this one whilst in a bookstore with Lacuna_Raze. The blurb was that this was a story told from the perspective of Orcs, which sounded a nice overturning of the traditional approach so I thought it would be fun.
Unfortunately, it doesn't quite live up to that. Yes, the orcs are recast as good guys but rather than being a reinvention of the orc concept into something more balanced it instead makes them into characters that aren't really that different to humans. Even half of the titles used for the recruits in the 'warband' are borrowed directly from a modern army. Meanwhile, the humans in the book are mostly distinguished by a disrespect for their natural surroundings and being more inclined to ornamentation, that's about it.
So, in short, don't read this book for that reason! :oP
The writing itself is okay. There are lots of fights and skirmishes, which is hard to pull off in a book but it does seem to manage it okay. The only flaw is that they are unrealistically lucky and few of them ever die (in fact, the author goes to the length of introducing orcs from outside the original cast seemingly just to kill them off).
The plot itself is quite a big let-down. Most of the plot is a 'collect the items' type affair that I'd expect more in a computer game rather than a book. The resolution to the story comes from an off-angle but in a way that feels like the themes and hints earlier in the book have been disregarded rather than in a clever twist way.
The villains are awful.
The evil queen fails to work well because she's a caricature that is too focused on being evil to ever achieve any level of depth. Meanwhile, acts of cruelty that are supposed to impress us tend to come off as spiteful and childish, which left me wondering how she ever managed to achieve and sustain such a position of power in the first place. Added to that, the character is ridiculously over-sexualised and the authors treatment of her repeated rapes (and then sacrifices) is just awful - I can't imagine anyone thinking to write about rape that way if it was a male rapist.
The blindly religious fanatic is similarly too simple. It's quite easy to pick up that the author has a strong dislike for fundamentalist Christianity but it is not cleverly done and we're left with a comic book picture of what very religious people look like, act like and speak like.
I would say this book is better written than some things I've written but I have read some awful stuff before so that might not be saying a lot :oP
Link: Silence is the Enemy - articles on rape in Liberia - linky