59. Gift

59. Gift (30/10/11)

Falen was teaching Kyle the Fae language again. It was late, and they were sitting by the campfire as it burned lower, almost to embers by now.

“And these are the symbols for the elements, Fire, Water, Air, Wood, Metal, Earth, and Essence.”

“Essence?”

“What you would term life, the thing that enforces everything that lives. We go beyond what you would call the traditional four elements.”

Kyle turned back to etchings in the sand, looking back over them, trying to memorise them. He looked back over the Falen, and noticed the firelight caught some bangles around her ankles, making them glow a burnished golden. He noticed some of the symbols one them the he had just been taught.

“Those bangles you wear, they say essence.”

Falen looked down at them. “They were gifts, from my mother. They’re meant to bestow a blessing on the wearer, for long life and good fortune. An ancient magic.” She looked back to the fire. “I treasure them, since they’re likely to be the only gifts I can ever have from my mother now that I’ve been banished.”

Kyle was silent for a little while. “They’re really pretty.”

“Thankyou.”

Monday

Ooops. So there wasn’t as much blogging as I had intended there to be over the weekend. I apologise. Actually I didn’t get on the internet at all yesterday, because there was no internet around IoD venue.

So saturday: woke up, went into town and got a haircut. I like getting haircuts, my hair feels all light and nice afterwards. And then I did a bit of christmas shopping, although the list of people I have to get gifts for keeps on growing and growing. Need several more trips before I’m done I think. And then it was sabbat in the evening. Sabbat was awesome, since we got to finally go and storm the Giovanni’s castle, and I got to do some awesome hacking of the system, and managed to get wraith.exe (we had to shunt a ghost out of the computer and I downloaded him onto a floppy disk – data ghost!) and then we got to go and kill the big Giovanni and we beat him (the final blow coming from hunter who was a ghoul at that point) and then we got to rite of the carmine chalice him and we all got a generation drop from it – 8th gen! I can buy post-advanced disciplines! And I get to learn path of blood so that I can artificially drop my generation. Dominate crazy here I go!

Sunday: IoD day. Woke up, went into town and then got to play mage and changeling all day. My changeling character is so much fun. And my mage is pretty cool, she’s a psychologist who already has some work fixing the mental damage some people did to a young girl who had newly awakened. And my changeling is in a dance production which everyone in the court is encouraged to come and see. Also insanity is the most fun to role play.

December

Hmm. Where has the year gone? I remember signing up to do post a day at the beginning of the year. That didn’t happen. Oh well. Let’s see if I can blog every day for the next week. A reasonable challenge after the one I just did. Yeah, I won NaNoWriMo. Quite proud of that one. And my graphics coursework is coming along nicely, should have everything I need to work working by the time it comes around to my demonstration week 12. Project isn’t going so well, but I have all of the christmas break to work on that. Which reminds me, I need to book train tickets home.

New patch came out for WoW. I love the new content, and I have upgraded my gear so much in the past two days. So many drops and new items for points and I’m valour capped for the week already. And yes, I only expect players of wow to understand that last sentence.

I got my sleeping habits back on track finally. Now I’m waking up at like 8am every morning. It’s just weird to experience long days. I mean, it’s only half 7 now and it feels like it should be midnight or something. Guess it doesn’t help that we’re getting into the middle of winter and it’s getting dark super early now.

After doing work this morning (I don’t slack off all the time) I’ve been pointed towards some new online comics and have spent the last few hours reading through archives and have found them to be a good read. One’s called Girls with Slingshots, and the other is Grunnerkrigg court. Also Order of the Stick updated – yay!

Speaking about order of the stick I’m in a new DnD game being run by Seph. It’s fun since we stated the character together (mostly) and we have a part of teleporting. All of the paladin’s powers involve shifting in some matter, and half of mine do as well. Kiting monsters around the dungeons is so much fun.

Christmas shopping is on the list for tomorrow. Also need to search through charity shops for a couple of finishing bits for Isles of Darkness on sunday. I know, first time I’m intentionally skipping all of LARP to go do something else. LARP’s hit a bit of a rut lately, there hasn’t been any evening adventures in a few weeks now since people come for the morning but then leave in the evening for various reasons. Which is sad, but I have the sneaking suspicion that the universe likes pulling jokes on me, so if I don’t go for a week then something good will happen and it’ll all get back on track again. Either that or my shield will finally turn up in the post.

Sabbat tomorrow as well. I have stripey rainbow gloves I get to wear for Tem. Simple things like that make me ridiculously happy.

23rd November

Oops. Haven’t updated this in a while. My bad. In all fairness I have been busy with work and stuff, and I just got told something really annoying by the UEA which means that I now have a lot more work than I did before. Yay. Sarcasm.

On the plus side: 41,668/50,000 words for NaNoWriMo done! Slightly ahead of where I should be at the moment. Which is a good thing, since I have been bogged down with work for the past god knows how many days. I have Zelda Skyward sword to play and haven’t had any time to play it. Also my sleeping pattern is currently messed up. Which is fun. Not.

So have lots of work to do tomorrow in the labs, then a lecture, then home, do some more work and research, stop around 5/6pm in the evening and have some time to myself I think. It depends what film is on at anime really. Hm, something to do with Gurren Langdam. Meh, evening to myself it is!

Went into town today for a couple of costume bits and found a couple of shiny things for my changeling character. Really looking forward to playing IoD when it starts up next weekend. Gonna be good!

Promise a bigger update on my life later, and some of the book I’ve been cramming out all month, possibly. It’s really not been edited, and won’t actually be finished in 50, 000 words, which surprised me when I realised that. Books, apparently a long thing.

Feeling Good

21,020 / 50,000

Feeling pretty darn good about that.

Feeling good about the coursework pieces I got working today (my programmed sea moves up and down).

Feeling good about the dinner I made and ate.

Feeling good because I’ve already started to plan my christmas shopping.

Feeling extra good for making my own christmas wish list.

Feeling good for having actually held an actual conversation with my brother for the first time in forever.

Feeling good for being on budget this week.

Feeling good having done the laundry and tidied my room.

Feeling good about the weekend.

NaNoWriMo

So yeah, I might be trying this. But with precautions – I do uni work from 9am (or whenever I get up) til about 4-5pm, then come home and spend my evenings doing NaNoWriMo.

Oh, for those of you that might not know (although I’d be surprised if there were many) NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month is a challenge to aspiring writers and novelist to write 50, 000 words in a month. Taking place in November you start on November 1st and keep going till november 30th, and by the end of it you should hopefully have a 50k word novel. Of course you can write more if you want, or less. It is a challenge and some people don’t complete it. You don’t win anything if you complete it either, but loads of satisfaction.

It’s day 5 currently and I’m on 7,941 words. To be on track you should be writing roughly 1,667 words a day, which means that by the end of today I should be on 8,333. So I’m on track with quite a lot of today left. Although tomorrow is sunday, and since I’m still going to LARP I want to get a lot more done today so that I don’t fall behind. By the end of tomorrow I should be on 10, 000 words, so I need to get as close to that as possible before the end of today. I can probably get 9000 today, since I am going to Sabbat tonight as well. NaNoWriMo is not going to take up my whole time. I still have uni work and a social life as well. Now I just feel like that instead of procrastinating I can actually do something productive and feel good about it when it’s done.

The story I’ve chosen to write this year is Black Dawn. I’ve got a couple of extracts from it up here on the 101 challenge, the main character’s called Kali. What is it, numbers 1, 28 and 60 are extracts I’ve written so far. I might also post bits of what I’ve written for it up here as well. Please bear in mind that it won’t have been edited at all since the point of NaNoWriMo is creativity, and then say just write your heart out, leave all the tedious stuff like editing til december. So it’s still quite rough writing. But I am having fun doing it, after being lazy about writing for so long.

Anime Screening Week 6

I said I was going to post about the anime we were watching, and I never did. Oops. Here it is, a little late then.

Wolf’s Rain

A series about wolves. Wolves have been extinct in the eyes of humanity for 200 years, but are actually still around, they just appear as human to the humans. The wolves are following the scent of moon flowers to try to find paradise. There are found main characters. The strong silent one, the slightly comic one, and tough city street guy, and then the kid. Also they are all male and it’s a running joke that we call it slash wolves cause it totally is.

Gundam 00

A group of people called celestial being have declared that they want war to end, and they will top anyone who instigates war with the use of there gundam, big robots with super powerful capabilities. Which is hypocritical, ending war with more fighting, but hey ho there we go. We follow the efforts of the gundams as they try to end war in the world.

The World God Only Knows

A school boy is great at getting the girl. As long as she’s digital. He’s the champion of dating games and gets tricked into signing a contract to help a demon track down and save lost souls, who have attached themselves onto girls. Now he has to use those video game skills in real life, to much hilarity since he still hates the real world.

A Certain Magical Index

A girl named Index changes Toumo life when she crashes onto his balcony. She’s part of a church that protects magic, or rather protect people from magic and has an ability called perfect memorization, which means that she can hold every word of 103,00 grimoires in her head. And remember them all. The plot is a little fast, so in five episode we’ve found out that every year Index needs to have the rest of her head that isn’t holding those grimoires cleared or she could die, but in the last episode we found out that may not be true, and the Church probably isn’t all what it seems to be.

Honey and Clover

A slice of life romance thing set in an art college. I haven’t found much plot in there, but that because I think it’s about the subtlety of romance, and how relationships grow and fade. It’s okay, nbot really my thing but not bad at all.

Madoka Magica

School girls get the chance to get thier greatest wish granted, but in return they have to battle the evil witches who spread corruption and misery everywhere. This follows the two girls who get his chance, and other magical girls, as they ahve to decide whether it is worth thier lives to get thier greatest witche, and thier battles along the way. It’s kinda dark, but good at the same time.

Panty and Stocking

Fallen (sorta) angels have to redeem themselves. Except thier powers revolve arounrd thier undergarments. Panty’s knickers turn into a gun, and Stocking’s stockings turn into swords. It’s crass, loud, hilarious and I love it. Apparently it gets a plot at some point in the near future as well. They have to kill ghosts (evil spirits) to gain heavens (golden coins) to return to heaven.

And that’s it for this year. A good collection and we voted to keep in everything, so everyone else thinks so as well, which is good.

58. Saviour

58. Saviour (30/10/11)

Bethany was sitting in the window of her room, looking out over the grounds of the School and out to the city beyond. The sun was setting over the skyline, throwing warm colours over the entire scene.

The day’s lessons had been an odd sort. History, which was usually a fairly hit or miss subject as to whether it was interesting or not, had instead taken a turn for the weird. Professor Eilbeck had started the topic of prophecies, going over some of the more famous ones that had come true, a couple that hadn’t, and some that had yet to pass. There was one that had stuck with her all day, since she had heard it. It was one of the older ones, fairly traditional in its form. A general end of the world prophecy, thunder, lava, death and darkness. It also mentioned a saviour, one who at the end of the world would step forward and make a choice, to save the world or let it fall. She wasn’t exactly sure why this had stayed with her all day. Some of the other ones had been way more interesting, and less depressing, but she kept coming back to the saviour. Thinking about it over and over, with one question on her mind.

Does this world really need a saviour?

Milepoints

Just finished a bit of work for my 3rd year project. It feels good to have done it, feels like an accomplishment. If only I didn’t have more work to complete. But this does mean I can take a bit of a breather, and go and work on my other piece of coursework which is stressing me out a lot more. Graphics, as I haven’t really done a lot yet and other people have, or at least it looks like they have but when I have a skybox as well I’ll only be a little way behind them.

NaNoWriMo starts today as well. Talking with mum she didn’t think that it was a good idea for me to do it this year, since I have a lot of other work going on as well, which is probably a good idea, but I might try to do some more writing this month anyway, just to get myself back into the swing of it, since I would like to become a published author one day. Either that or I limit myself to an hour a day of it.

Either way, in a bit I’ll be going onto campus, and doing some graphic work, and then going to anime this evening. Anime rules. Thinking about it, I’ll do a post tonight describing all the anime we’re currently watching and what happens this episode. Most of them are pretty good, and if they’re not ym cup of tea then at least they’re meh rather than I hate them, which is good.

57. Shut Up

57. Shut Up (30/10/11)

Natasha flipped the folder back closed, pulled away from the table and left the interrogation room. That was all very calm. Slamming the same folder down and smacking into her chair with and exasperated sigh was less so.

“That’s it. I can’t crack him.”

Chris was looking at the footage from the CCTV cameras in the room. “This is irritating.”

They continued discussing the case as Leah looked at the camera, noticed a particular object on the desk, then looked back to the camera.

“Do you mind if I have a go?” She piped up.

Natasha did a double take. Paused for a bit, thinking it over. “Sure. Go for it.”

Leah got up, and unplugged the phone from the end of the table, and took it into the interview room with her. Natasha continued to talk the case over with Chris whilst keeping half an eye of the camera screens. She didn’t really expect anything to come of this, but it was good to see how the newbie would deal with him.

After a while she noticed that Leah had put the phone down on one end of the table, and was proceeding to play cards with the suspect. It wasn’t something she’d expected, but wasn’t harmful either. The sound was turned down so she couldn’t hear what they were saying. So it did come as a shock when Leah picked up the phone and smacked the suspect round the head with it.

Natasha and Chris both ran into room, Chris pulling Leah back as to their surprise the suspect yelled, “I’ll tell you what you want, just get her away from me!”

Chris pulled Leah out the room, who didn’t resist, as Natasha took over with the suspect. Chris looked at her in disbelief as she pulled out a cigarette.

“What the hell was that?”

“He wouldn’t shut up.”