Here's a new page of Clematis for the first time in ages. Gah, I can never draw much when I have coursework to do; it doesn't help that I keep drawing fanart instead >_>
And in Flight of the Conchords yesterday, they sung the Lord of the Rings song. It's true! Bret does make a better Legolas than Orlando Bloom! I'll stick by my guns! I want to rewatch Lord of the Rings now, just so I can see the Figwit parts...
Hahahahaha Neil!
NEIL!
No wonder he chose an alias that was clearly trying to be too cool for school.
Bwaha! Maybe the evil!twin (which is a source of hilarity in itself) is called Noel, then they could match.
The other good thing about the episode was Tieria and Setsuna deciding to let their hair down and really go WILD:
Who knew that mealtimes could be so crazy?
In the rest of my life I'm doing lots of reading about how to clean dirty books. Yeah, I'm rocking the party too.
So, maybe you think that the gayest video on Youtube is the What What (In the Butt) song. Well, I used to think so to. Then I came across this one.
Oh go on then, watch this one too.
I...I can't unsee them...
I had, in part, an awesome day yesterday, and a horrific day yesterday.
You see, my flatmates are both away this weekend, and it's really nice to get some space to myself. Also, it means that when I clean the kitchen, it stays clean!
I was very excited to go buy some food yesterday, because I was in a very cookingy mood. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to cook, but I knew it had to have some plain yoghurt in it! So that was great, and then I got home and CLEANED THE FLOORS. I know. I am amazing. I don't normally clean floors, but they were really dirty, and I figured that the best time to do it was when no-one else was in the house to walk all over them.
Only, and this is where it started to go wrong. I unplugged the router to plug in the vacuum cleaner (step one of cleaning the floors), but when I plugged the router back in again, the internets had stopped working! After about an hour and a half of wailing about how I'd broken the internet, and how was I going to do all that internet research for this essay that I've got to write? I then phoned our ISP, who told me that it wasn't my fault, but they'd turned off our internets because the bill hadn't been paid =_=
Anyway, I told my landlord, who pays the bills, and prepared myself to spend all of today in the library and use the internet there.
Luckily, my landlord got onto the case, and our internet got connected this morning (about half an hour before I left for the library). So now I don't have to leave the house after all! It turns out there was a debit card problem or something, I don't really care.
Now I don't have any excuse not to do all that research that I was going to do >_>
The good thing that came out of it all was that
a) we've got clean floors
b) I'm having fajitas tomorrow
c) I was able to reacquaint myself with my tv last night. I watched lots of Who's Line is it Anyway? which is a great show. Why don't they make it anymore?
So I finally got new glasses! Hurray! I would take photos, but I'm having a horrific bad hair day today, and they look just like my old glasses anyway (the rims are ever slightly thicker than the last pair. I chose these because they said 'archivist' to me when I was in the shop; I think maybe because I was wearing my archivist cardigan at the time. WATCH ME STEREOTYPE THE PROFESSION I'M ABOUT TO ENTER).
The problem is that my new prescription now has a correction for an astigmatism on both eyes, but I'm not used to it. My depth perception has gone haywire. I don't touch-type so reaching the right keys on the keyboard is well difficult, as is not walking into things. Also, it feels like my brain is slowly imploding. Being able to read signs and stuff again is fun though.
Now, onwards! I've got to go plan an essay about moulds on old books or something.
I've just completed another piece of coursework! I always get a pleasant feeling when it's all nicely printed out. Now I've just got two weeks to write a 4000 word essay. Ha ha hahahahahaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaargh! ;_;
Mostly I want to talk about Gundam00. I've started calling Sundays 'Gundam-day', although the subs only came out today this week. It's easy for me to forget, but then I remember; this show isn't good, it's hilarious. Did you see the part where Setsuna becomes a huge liability? What about the part where they all decided to have a nice holiday on a boat for no good reason? My thoughts on the Gundam Meisters, let me give you them:
Setsuna: It has come to my attention that Setsuna is a complete mental case. I used to think that he was full of childhood trauma, but, as it turns out, he's just off his rocker. Seriously, I have no idea what he's going to do next. Kill everyone, probably. Ps I like the fact that he's Kurdish - it's not something that you find much in anime.
Lockon: Lockon hates terrorisms because they killed his family. I've started finding Lockon a lot more interesting now that I've found out that he's Irish. It took me a while, because I'm slow, before I came to the conclusion that he must come from Northern Ireland, or at least close to Northern Ireland. For some reason, the idea of him having a Northern Irish accent is x1000 better than a generic southern Irish accent. Also, I saw a fanart of him on some streets toting a rifle and it was well cool. I wonder if he was a terrorist back in the day; that would give him some issues.
Allelujah: I used to think that Allelujah was the wet blanket of the group. And well, he still kind of is, but Hallelujah makes him more interesting. But if we're ranking characters in terms of hair, and we should be, then Allelujah comes out top with the prettiest hair (that doesn't mean that it isn't ridiculous hair...WHERE IS HIS DEPTH PERCEPTION). Also, I like his boots.
Tieria: You've heard this all before, so I won't repeat myself about how Tieria is awesome because he hates everything. What I will tell you is that I find it hilarious how they give the girliest member of the group the largest Gundam they could find. Seriously. He must rattle around in there. Tieria wins because his Gundam (Virtue...WHY AM I REMEMBERING THE NAMES OF THE GUNDAMS) has the most destructive weapons of the four. I'm sorry Lockon, but sniping the enemy just doesn't cut it when compared with a huge mofo cannon.
And hay, it gets better. Did you see the original character designs?
....The cardigan. She designed the cardigan D:
Although I shouldn't be surprised to see Yun Kouga randomly throwing women's clothing on male characters. I like the kind of cowboy boots she's given him though; why didn't they transfer to the anime? (Also, I am glad that Billy isn't there. Maybe I can persuade myself that she didn't design his awful awful hair.)
Still on the Gundam theme. WHY CAN'T I STOP WATCHING THIS. Patrick is the best.
So Dragonaut seems to be getting worse with every episode I watch. And it started out so promisingly too! Episode 7 was laughably bad. Why are they having a swimsuit episode? Why hasn't there been any plot in all the episodes I've seen? Why are both main characters sickeningly dull? How on earth do the female characters all have boobs larger than their heads? I thought that maybe the best friend was going to be the interesting one. He was certainly cultivating some angst. But what does he do when he's really really down and angry? HE RESTYLES HIS HAIR. There is no hope for this show. I might give it another try, because I'm reluctant to drop something that I've wasted 3 and a half hours of my life watching. But I don't know, if I hear 'Toa!' or 'Jiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnn!' one more time I might punch something.
In other news (and I really need to stop saying that) it's my flatmate's birthday soon. I thought I'd be nice and bake him a cake for his birthday. So I asked him what type of cake he wanted, you know, like a lemon cake, or a chocolate cake, or a victoria sponge...
And he tells me that he wants a giant bourbon biscuit.
...
Thanks flatmate.
So it'll be an impending culinary disaster for your birthday then will it?
And I know I was going to mention something else...
...it'll come to me at 3am most likely (the something else, not the giant bourbon biscuit).
So I got new sunglasses today.
Which is handy. Seeing as it's the beginning of WINTER and all. I should get some actual glasses that will be actually useful to me in about a week.
Right, I have to go do lots of work, and find out exactly what kind of felony John Stringer committed back in the way back when.
So I finished that picture of Ritsuka. Click for big:
Drawn for the Shoku-dan contest. I wanted to try and make Ritsuka look as ridiculously cute as possible, so I added extra pillows, and pyjamas. I like to think he's waiting for Seimei to come to bed. Poor Ritsuka, if only your big brother wasn't a mental case. Then again, Ritsuka isn't exactly the picture of mental health himself. In fact, I'm not sure there's anyone in the whole manga that isn't off their rocker in one way or another.
In other news: I went on a visit to an archive yesterday and got to see their storerooms full of cabinets.
In other other news: apparently some debt collectors will be coming round on Thursday. Great.
And I almost forgot to write about what I wanted to write about, which is. Tsubasa Tokyo Revelations! I have to say, it didn't fulfil my dreams completely. The animation wasn't super duper. But, it was a darn sight better than the TV series, and it was true to the manga too. Don't get me wrong though, some bits of the animation where really nice. Surprisingly, the action was the best part. My favourite scenes have to be the part where Shaoran gets shot in the leg, and the part where Kuro-daddy gets all worried because Sakura stops breathing. Oh, and some of Kamui fighting Kurogane was nice too. The problem with the animation seems to be the direction more than anything. I think that maybe part of the problem is that they've tried to be too faithful to the manga. The whole thing seemed to jump from image I'd seen in the manga to image I'd seen in the manga, with not much cohesion in between. The animation didn't seem to flow quite as well as it should. Sometimes things that look good in a comic don't look so good when animated (although maybe this is because CLAMP just drew it better than the animators). The last five minutes flowed pretty well though; it was all rather exciting.
So, overall, I'm just glad that BeeTrain isn't animating this arc. And I remembered why vampire Kamui is great it's the catsuit. I'm well excited for the Shaoran/Shaoran fight now. Clone!Shaoran was boring until he started eating eyeballs, when he promptly became awesome, and Real!Shaoran is less boring because he does all the cool magic stuff.
Annnd Gundam00 episode 7. I'm loving that this series is trying to be true to life with the locations of the conflicts. The terrorisms makes it much more contemporary; it's an interesting twist. And I like how there aren't any specific badguys, apart from, like, the whole of humanity. Also, the beach fighting was great @Tieria: What's wrong with you? Stop pulling guns on people. No wait, don't stop. It's brilliant.
Hello. Random photo time. I was working a new look tonight; let me show you it. I had nothing new to wear, so I thought that maybe if I threw on enough accessories then no-one would notice. I like to call it 'The Over-Accessorise'.
I was wearing three necklaces! Good God. Lock me up now.
In other news, Ritsuka picture will have to come later. I had to re-draw it because he didn't look enough like a kitten in the first one.
Sorry to all those who find my dreams boring. I don't care. I'm going to tell you about them anyway.
Because last night, well, this morning, at any rate, a few minutes ago, really, I had my first lucid dream in which I didn't wake up straight away \o/
I have found out that, for me, the secret to having a lucid dream is to be really lazy. You wake up in the morning and it's quite a reasonable time to get up and actually do something useful, then you think, 'stuff that, I'm going back to sleep'. It helps if you doze off with the specific intention of having a lucid dream. It seems to work.
Today I ended up having lots of false awakenings. I think I was dreaming about something or other; I was talking to a girl from my course. Then I woke up and started doing normal morning things like shuffling around in my pyjamas and trying to make my hair look like less of a mess. As I was doing this I then woke up again. I thought 'that's odd, I must have had a false awakening' so I checked my clock to make sure that I was definitely awake this time, but the light on my clock didn't turn on, and I realised that I was still asleep. I had to check my clock a good few times though, because it would be awful if it turns out that the battery had just gone and I was actually awake (not something to realise when you jump out the window). I'm not sure why I didn't wake up at this point, as I had before. I think maybe I just wasn't as excited about the whole thing this time.
So I wandered into the kitchen, where my flatmate was sitting with a load of his friends that I'd never met before. He was wearing one of my jumpers, and a beaded necklace. But I thought, 'I don't have time to waste by talking to my dream flatmate', and I noticed that there was a door in the kitchen that isn't normally there, so I opened it. It lead to the outside, with a big set of metal steps leading to a gravel courtyard. There was a girl on the steps; I think I tried talking to her but she wasn't very interesting. So I went down the steps and into the courtyard where there was a van driving around and some pigs at the other end. The van was scary so I chased it off. Then I ran around a bit, to build up some speed, and had a bit of a fly. I started falling out of the air and got a little scared. But then there was this awesome kind of cutscene where I realised that I was just watching myself flying on my laptop and I was actually sitting at my desk. So I clicked on a different video and went in through the computer screen. I forget what happened next though.
I do remember, at some point, realising that my arm was really hurting. I thought that my arm was probably going numb because I was sleeping in an awkward position. I really didn't want to wake up, but I did because I just had to shift my arm. 'That was a fun dream' I thought to myself. So I picked up my clock to see how long I'd been asleep, when I found out that I couldn't make out anything on the clock. I could hardly even distinguish one finger from another on my hands. 'Aw hell' I thought, 'I'm still dreaming'. Getting up into the dream world was a bit more difficult this time. I think I was only lightly asleep because I half felt like I was getting up and half felt like I couldn't move at all. So this section of the dream didn't feel as real as before because I was always half aware of my actual body not doing any of the things I thought I was doing. So I went into the kitchen again. My same flatmate tried to talk to me, but I through a box of beer cans at him and walked back through the same door in the kitchen, down the stairs and into the courtyard. This time I went to the other side of the courtyard and climbed a pine tree. There was nothing interesting at the top, so I climbed back down. Then I squeezed through this small gap at the bottom of a building and into an underground car park. Walking through the car park and out onto the street I came across the four 'Gundam Meisters' from Gundam00 (note to self: don't look at Gundam00 fanart just before going to bed). Allelujah and Tieria both had the most ridiculous pencil moustaches; I had a chuckle at that. I followed them into this hotel. In the hotel there was a big painting on the wall. (I've been wanting to run into a painting ever sinced I watched it in Paprika.) I tried to run into the painting but it didn't work, and I ended up following the Gundam boys into the restaurant. It was at this point that I realised that everyone in the restaurant was speaking Japanese and I couldn't understand a word of it. Mentally, I applauded my brain for being able to come up with the Japanese all by itself; it was, of course, just jibberish that sounded like Japanese to my ears. At this point I became quite detached from what was going on, and it felt increasingly like I was watching a cartoon of the events. The gundam boys all changed appearance and I was busy thinking about what a good job the character designer had done, and how the hair was animated really prettily. Then one of the walls exploded and the medicine seller from Mononoke came running in. At this point I was getting quite bored, because I wasn't taking part any more, so I woke up.
It took me about five minutes of checks to make sure that I was actually awake this time. I'm pretty sure I am, because I've just rung specsavers to find out if my glasses are ready for collection (they're not), but you never know.
Anyway. That was all rather exciting for me. It turns out that lucid dreams are just as random as normal dreams, and you just end up going with the flow for the most part. For you it was probably tl;dr, but who cares. I really need to have a lie-in on more occasions.
In other news, I may put up a picture of Ritsuka soon, but there's just something not quite right with it, that I'm trying to figure out.
I am well excited about the new series of the Mighty Boosh. I've even seen the first episode already; that's how excited I am. I am a whole world of excited. I'm so excited that I'm going to spam you with my favourite clips. Well, actually, my favourite clips would probably be just about the whole of the first two series. So I'll spam you with clips until I get bored of looking through YouTube.
I don't like cricket
This is the clip that made me watch this show in the first place.
Tundra Rap
Calm a Llama Down
Topshop
The Moon
Pelt the Rabbit
Love Games
Do you remember I said I done a picture of Tieria from Gundam00? Well here it is. I inked it badly then coloured it. I quite like colouring things shoddily at the moment, for which I apologise, but it's quick, and I quite like the effect it gives. Anyway, the main point of me drawing this picture was that I wanted to try to make the pose as realistic as possible.
It was quite difficult to try and make Tieria look male, especially when he insists on wearing that stupid cardigan. Seriously. I doubt any of the other characters can actually take him seriously when he's wearing it. I know I can't. But the thing I like about Tieria is that he doesn't act like someone who should be wearing a pink cardigan. Mostly he bitches at people for doing everything wrong, and makes Allelujah sit on the naughty step (and I laughed so hard when I saw that).
My current second favourite character from Gundam00 may just be Patrick, the pilot for the AEU, because his ego is hilarious.
Oh, but what I would do to see Yun Kouga's original character designs. I want to see them so bad. I bet they're beautiful.
In better anime (no, seriously) news. I watched the film Paprika the other day. I enjoyed it. The plot wasn't the best I've seen, but I liked the whole dream logic to it. And you know that I love anything that's about dreams; in this case, about a machine that allows the users to sit in on each other's dreams. And the character design wasn't my favourite (although I loved Chiba's character design for some reason). But. But! Some parts of the animation were just, sublime. The scene where Chiba runs along then turns into Paprika, and the way she runs changes ever so subtly but still perceptibly...I have no words for how much I love that part. There are other parts, but I can't list them all. But the thing I loved most about the film was the theme tune as heard in this trailer. There is something about that tune that I find completely engrossing. I have been listening to it non-stop all day. My problem with the film was that they don't use the theme tune enough D:
So I've been slightly wrapped up in the spirit of the film for the past two days. The chase scenes in the film got me all excited. I spent all of yesterday wishing I could just run through the wall or out of the window or into a painting. But sadly I wasn't asleep, and was in the middle of a lecture, so I don't think it would have gone very well if I had. But I really want to jump into a painting!
On a related note, I think my ability at dream recall is increasing. I mean, I've always been good at remembering my dreams, but recently I've been mentally noting them when I wake slightly in the middle of the night, and now I'm recalling a number of dreams per night. I can remember at least three distinct dreams that I had last night, maybe even four. And I remember parts quite vividly too. (You know, I think that getting more sleep than I used to is really helping). And last night, or this morning rather, my final dream was a lucid one. I'd had a dream that I was at the beach, then woken up and thought something along the lines of 'what a weird beach that was'. After this I dozed off again and found myself back on the same beach. It took a couple of minutes, but then I suddenly remembered that, 'hold on, I was just thinking about this, it's a dream'. I can remember that the thing I really wanted to do in my dream when I became lucid was to go rush into the sea, but I got too excited and woke up. (I was rubbing my hands together to try to stay in the dream, but at the same time, because I was waking up, I could see my hand beside my pillow, and saw that I wasn't actually rubbing my hands together, so it didn't really work.)
Things I learnt from my dreams last night:
- don't throw your rubbish into the sea
- it is possible to kidnap someone on Tottenham Court Road
- an old church converted into a London underground station would be the best thing ever
I have to say that, at the moment, going to sleep is the best part of the day. I actively look forward to it.
Note to self:
Why on Earth did you think that a couple of hours would be sufficient to learn the whole history of English land law?
Note to old dead guys:
Stop making the system so confusing! Legal fictions? Who thought that would be a good idea?
So yesterday, when I was writing my coursework, I used the term 'cross-sectoral', meaning across different sectors. My spell-check, however, didn't like the word 'sectoral' and suggested that I used the word 'scrotal' instead. I found it quite funny. When I mentioned it to my flatmate, he asked me if maybe I had an spell-check for the over 18s only.
And then the idea of an x-rated spell-check wouldn't leave my head. It would be completely useless of course, but it would be quite funny. It took me ages to get to sleep last night because I kept giggling to myself. And so the first thing I did this morning was make this:
On the subject of cocks; this video (warning, NSFW because it's quite sweary) makes me laugh. Oh Prince Philip, what have you done?
One piece of coursework down!
Now I just need to finish the other piece that's due on Thursday, then I'm free to focus on even more pieces of coursework, that I haven't even started yet! Alright!
And I'm paying to be put through this? Good lord.
It is waaaaay past my bedtime. And unlike the last week, in which I was scott free, I have to go in to uni tomorrow, and in the morning too. But I'm too tense to sleep now.
Mostly it took me this long to finish the coursework because I spent a large part of the evening drawing Tieria (and his horrible cardigan). I think it requires inking, so I'll put it up when that's done.
Hmmmm....I've had the same 10 songs on repeat for the past 4 days. I think I can feel my brain melting.
Hurrah deadlines. The feeling is almost nostalgic.