TFC.net

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.

So it turns out that you can watch the first episode of the new series of the Mighty Boosh online (if you live in the UK at least; I'm not sure about other countries). What I mean to say is, I WANNA POUND YOU LIKE YESTERDAY'S BEEF. Possibly the best show in the world. I love baileys this show.

I went to the library today. And then did no other work at all. But at least I went to the library, right? What I did do was spend ages in Habitat looking at all the nice things. THEY HAVE SO MANY NICE THINGS. I wish I wasn't pitifully poor so I could buy something, anything!, from that shop. Is it so wrong to want to put nice things in my flat? (They had this cool crockery set with pictures of stag!people on the side.)

I then bought some Christmas cards. After last years 'let's make them myself!' fiasco, I realised that buying them was the best option. (Seriously, who's ever heard of a Christmas card without a bend in?)

Later I made myself a stew with the some leftover gammon that I had.

The gammon was tasty. But the whole thing was more salty than a wizened old sea-captain in brine. I'm now trying to rehydrate myself like there's no tomorrow. So thirsty!

I have decided that I am not good enough at drawing anything. And so I thought that if I drew from life enough times then the things that actually make people look like people should rub off into my non-from life drawings, if I do it enough times.

So I've been drawing the models in fashion photos.

Second photo down:

Not perfect, and golly that hand is giving me gip, but I'll get there in the end, even if it takes me my whole life (which it probably will).

In other news, I did plenty work today. The aim is to go to the library tomorrow and get this coursework finished off. Booya.

Half-way through reading week now. I'm quite enjoying getting to stay at home every day. My plan is to get this coursework done tomorrow or Friday, and possibly go to the library too. Only, with this coursework to do, I get the urge to do other things instead.

I DEFROSTED THE FRIDGE AGAIN YESTERDAY

I think this explains how desperate I am at the moment. But the fridge is cold enough again (my milk going bad too soon was the final straw). I also want to clean the bathroom and the floors. Maybe if I work hard now that can be my treat later (how exciting).

Also, my flatmate has put up a recipe for bourbon biscuits in the kitchen. I now have an urge to make bourbon biscuits. It would be fun! But also a lot easier just to buy a packet.

In Gundam00 news: I've realised that the series is going to be around 50 episodes long. Good lord. No wonder it seems slow at the moment. The only good thing that's happened so far is finding out that Allelujah is possibly mental (and has magic hair).

In non Gundam00 news: I think that maybe I've got an infection and that I'll have to go to the doctors. I'll see if I'm still in pain by tomorrow.

.
.
.

Coursework preparations commence:
- Lemon Jelly CD playing: Check
- Notes in front of me: Check
- Gone for number ones: Check
- Microsoft word open: Check
Alright! Let's do this!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmA6LDcPVS8

Series 3! Series 3! Series 3!

In list form. For your perusal.

1) Croissant. Followed later by gammon and cheese sauce. Not in the same course mind.

2) It's perfect weather for this kind of year. It's cold and the leaves are brown and the air smells like bonfires.

3) We didn't get twins in Tsubasa. But the Holitsuba AU never lets me down. Fay and Yuui! And Yuui's a chef in Italy? Expect me to fanart this at some point.

4) Being reminded just how funny We Are Scientists are. They're possibly the funniest band ever. They should win an award or something. Make sure to read the whole site.

5) Gee wiz I actually did some work today. Maybe I'll do more tomorrow.

**Not good per se, but still worthy of note: I dreamt I was pretending to be Jewish last night. Is this a sign? I got a free mousemat at the convention; the perks seemed pretty good.

I have been doing coursework today! Only, I chose to do the easy coursework over the hard coursework. Only, the easy coursework involves reading really tiny old handwriting and now my eyes hurt. Tomorrow I will do the hard stuff; for the sake of my eyes!

I have also been spending my time watching Moyashimon. Yup. It's that anime about microbes (although it seems to be mostly about yeast so far). And they're all so cute! It's ridiculous. I've never seen S. Cerevisiae look so cute before. I wonder if S. pombe is going to be in it too? Or maybe C. crescentus? Or perhaps even the good old E. coli? Man, I wish microbes were so cute when I had to work with them; but all I remember was them looking like a load of cloudy water that smelled really bad. Hmmm. Anyway, the microbes are cute and the rest of the story...I don't really care about the rest of the story; I must remember to stop watching this show while I'm eating, because it's kind of disgusting (please, less fermented seagull sucking please); and I've heard that the main character's best friend starts dressing up like a lady half-way through the series?

I have been listening to some more laid-back music today. I was reminded just how brilliant the album 'Lost Horizons' by Lemon Jelly is. It's proper nice; the sort of music that you hardly even notice as it laps across your eardrums and simultaneously presses all the happy buttons in your brain. I was also reminded how boring the album 'I'm Wide Awake It's Morning' by Bright Eyes is. The thing with Bright Eyes is that the music isn't very special at all (I always zone out after listening to it for more than a minute) but the lyrics are very nice. Seriously. If you go by the lyrics then 'First Day of My Life' is quite possibly the most beautiful love song I've ever heard:

Yours is the first face that I saw.
Think I was blind before I met you.
I don't know where I am I don't know where I've been
but I know where I want to go.

[...] this is the first day of my life.
I'm glad I didn't die before I met you.
But now I don't care, I could go anywhere with you
and I'd probably be happy.

In other news. I think I have indigestion. I ate some cheese that tasted a lot like rubber balloons =_=

I actually have nothing to say. But. You know. What's new?

I just had a smoothie, which was warm (eurgh) but tasty. Only, I think they put too much pineapple juice in it, because the citric acid has damaged the back of my throat. It hurts when I swallow! *weep weep etc etc*

It's remembrance Sunday in a week's time. But I have somehow managed to lose two poppies in the space of two days. Seriously. What on Earth is going on? I'm normally good at keeping my poppies in one piece. Now I will look like a heartless bastard but I'm really not! Maybe I'll try and make my own out of salami and toilet paper.

Getting new glasses status = fail
Turns out I need a voucher from my optician first. Goddammit.

But on the good side I went to bed early last night, and managed to wake up early while still getting 11 hours sleep. It felt great. You can't put a price on not being tired. You really can't.

Okay. I garnered a lot of enthusiasm yesterday after finding a motherload of Mononoke fanart sites. I think I might draw for a bit. But I also have to do loads and loads of coursework next week. So don't be surprised if I don't post much, or if I post every five minutes, or if I gouge my eyes out with a spoon.

Hey I did a new Clematis page! I want to do more and more! But I've got a deadline in just over a week, so I should really, you know, actually start writing the coursework *guilt guilt guilt*

Mostly yesterday I watched the film Waking Life. I thought it would be interesting because it's all about a guy who has one long lucid dream. Only, the thing has no plot, and is full of random people talking about really "deep" things, or rather, they would seem deep if you were 15. Mostly the whole film was like having a really long boring conversation, only you can't interject half-way through and say 'this is a load of nonsense, talk about something interesting'. The animation technique is interesting for about the first five minutes, then you realize that you dislike the main character merely because you don't like the look of HIS FACE. Thank goodness I've never had such a boring dream.

I have realised that my new alarm clock isn't so good because it ticks so loudly that it keeps waking me up. Not good, clock. Not good.

In other news: I'm sure I had some other news, but I have forgotten it right now. (Imagine if the newsreader said that on the tv. It would be unprecedented! No-one would know what to do. I think I'd quite like it.)

Oh yeah. And happy Halloween (completely forgot that one).