TFC.net

My new resolution to actually go to the library this week and do some work. So far the new resolution is not going well. So far I've only spent my time drawing fanart of the Raven King from Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I haven't even posted a form I need to post, because I am too lazy to write the address on the envelope. Oh well. Here's the offending fanart (click for big):

It's kind of quick and lazy, and I was going to draw his whole body, rather than just a headshot, but I lent the book to my Mum, and I don't know how to draw his coat. Also, the symbolism in this picture is about as subtle as a fire-engine with the word subtle painted on the side. I might give it another attempt later, but not if my conscience gets the better of me first, and forces me off to the library.

I drew the picture, in a bout of enthusiasm, to send it off to Cynn Corvus, which, if you haven't visited it (and why haven't you?), is a great fansite for Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which, if you haven't read it (and why haven't you?), is a great book. Go and read them both (although it's probably best to read the latter before the former).

And, on a completely unrelated not, PISS ME, am I ever going to remember to watch Flight of the Conchords? I missed it again today!

So my freaking rent went up by 50 pounds per month. Jesus H Christ.
I've spent the past hour moping on the phone to my parents.

I will run out of money this year. It's completely unavoidable. It's no longer a case of 'if' I run out of money, just a case of 'by how much'. Luckily my parents said they'd help me out if I ran into difficulties. Hmmm...a few more years before I become financially independent then. Oh well. I might be poor, but at least I'm going to be poor and doing a job that I really want to do. That'll stick it to 'The Man'.

I've spent my weekend doing absolutely no work at all. I think that's ok. No one's chided me for it so far. I should probably work out what stuff I need to take to tomorow's lecture though. Next week I'll go to the library and start my course work. I will! What are you looking at me like that for? My conscience deems it ok to slack off in the first week, but subsequent slacking off will be UNACCEPTABLE. In reality this means that I still won't do any work, but I'll feel really guilty about it. I don't care, whatever, bring it on, I say!

Mostly I spent yesterday sleeping. I'm still trying to achieve a lucid dream, and I put special effort in on Friday. Before I went to bed I made sure to read about it for ages, so I'd have it on my mind. And, I woke up slightly in the early hours of the morning, which is apparently the best time to fall asleep and straight into a dream. I tried this technique called FLID or something, where you have to wiggle your fingers as you fall asleep, which supposedly keeps you conscious while you, er, lose consciousness. It started working I think. I could feel my breathing getting really slow; much slower than when you're awake. I think I was almost asleep. Then I panicked, like a loser, and woke myself up, and subsequently couldn't get back to sleep for the next hour or so. And then the next thing I knew it was 11am and I had been asleep for 12 hours, and I had to run around because I had to go to the bank before it closed.

In the evening I went for a meal in Chinatown with Deborah and her flatmate's friends. We went to this restaurant that is supposedly famed for it's poor service. And it's true, the table was not so much laid, but more dumped; the waiter practically threw the plates at us! Good thing they were plastic. It was also noisy and the food was bland. I'm not quite sure why this makes people want to visit over and over again. But it was really really cheap. And right now I like anything that's really really cheap.

Today I watched the first episode of Gundam00. I haven't really watched much anime recently, none of the new series have piqued my interest so far. Seriously, I don't fancy watching anything with a mass of female characters that all look exactly the same, all look like they're about 5 years old, and all look like they'll be very unsuccessful at not letting their underwear show during the course of the series. Of course I'm a hypocrite, because I will download anything that contains more than it's fair share of bishounen, generally differing only in hair colour. Luckily for my integrity, the bishounen series tend to be just as dull as I imagine the bishoujo harem animes to be, maybe even more so, so I rarely end up watching them either.

Anyway, what was I saying? A series full of bishounen? Hello, my name is Janine and I just watched Gundam00. I admit it, you wouldn't believe me if I didn't anyway, I only watched it for Yun Kouga's character designs, which, hopefully, should turn out to be quite nice. I couldn't really see much of the character designs in the first episode, because everyone was covered up in robot-piloting suits, and not even interesting piloting-suits of the tight-fitting kind (hello Suzaku). From what I could see, the main character looks the same age as Ritsuka, but is actually older, which means less shota for me to feel guilty about, but I can't see any Soubi's either, which is a shame, but hopefully one of the characters will have an equally flamboyant sense of dress. The first episode was full of fighting and action, and I had no idea what was going on. I wonder if, having not watched any Gundam before, I've actually bitten off more than I can chew with this one. Also, the problem for me is that I can't think of anything more boring than a bunch of robots fighting each other. I only like robots when they have added disco. Well, I'll stick at it for the character designs. Here's to hoping that the future episodes will have lots of intrigue and character development and less of the robots please.

Right, I have to go prepare to fight it out with my landlord. We're signing new contracts this evening, and I am very much hoping that he doesn't want to increase the rent.

Hiiiiii!!!!!! I finally put up a new page of Clematis. *sigh* I never manage to get the new page up as fast as I'd like to. Well, I have been busy recently, but then, there's always an excuse isn't there? Oh well. I'll keep at it. It might be easier to procrastinate on drawing now that I've got homework.

I've got homework! For the first time in forever. It's quite exciting. But it's also quite difficult. My homework is to transcribe this. I can hardly make sense of it! Well that's not true, but it'll take a while. I know that the title says:

In what thinges the use of
the Lawe consisteth

Bwahahaha! People used to speak funny. You can have a go at reading it yourself if you want (the good thing about old stuff is that there is no copyright), but don't tell me what it says! I want to work it out for myself. And I'll get there in the end.

I've just had my first lesson in reading archives, or palaeography. It is really difficult. Seriously, I think I find hiragana easier to read than this. It's quite fun though, and I get to look at old stuff, which is what I wanted to do.

And, here's an interesting thing. Did you know that the β as used by Germans to mean ss, as in Straβe/Strasse, is not actually a beta, but is in fact a contraction of the old way of writing a double s (with a large f-like s, followed by a little s)? See below, for a badly written example:

But what I was thinking about after the class, was how on Earth are people going to cope, who are learning to read some of the stuff created today? I'm not talking about handwriting here, I'm talking about internet-speak. If any blog entries survive, they're going to be completely incomprehensible! OMG and WTF might be easy enough to deduce, but what about ROTFLMAO? Or IAWTC? Or God help them if they come across something like roflcopters or lolerskates. Seriously. It's a good job that none of this stuff is really relevant to society.
...I'm joking! I'm joking!

Wednesday's off! I get Wednesday's off! I'm sure I'll spend them all in the library doing lot's of reading... >_>

But today I'm spending it cleaning and watching the live action Honey and Clover movie. I'd almost forgotten how much I enjoy Honey and Clover. The movie feels a bit short, so lacks some of the character development, but it still has the same feel to it; the feel of summer afternoons, wild flowers and patchwork quilts (and I'm not lying). I love this story. It's about being young and falling in love and finding your way in the world, and it doesn't matter who gets the girl or that in life there are no real conclusions, all that matters is having friends and being together.

Man, Honey and Clover sure makes me sappy doesn't it.

I am drawing Clematis I am. It just needs to be inked and coloured and uploaded now, and I'll do that tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, and so on, and so forth.

Anyway. A quick pop in before I go to bed to say that this is the best image I have seen all day. Do you think it counts as satire?

I thought I'd tell you a bit more about my course. But then I realised that I don't actually have that much to say. The people on the course are all very friendly, the work is so far non-existant, and the site plan of the university was clearly designed to confuse anyone who hasn't worked there for at least 10 years.

Our last event on Friday was to go on a tour of this library. The archivist who showed us round was very cheerful and friendly, and HE REALLY REMINDED ME OF SOMEONE. I couldn't get it out of my head during the talk, but I couldn't work out who he reminded me of (someone on TV maybe?). Then this morning, after I thought I had completely forgotten about it, I was just in the process of waking up, when the answer just popped, unbidden, into my mind. MONTY DON! He looked like Monty Don off Gardeners' World! Well I never.

Today I have been filling in forms to try and get more money off stuff, because that is very important. I, somehow, haven't found the time to draw any more Clematis recently, but I will, at some point, just you wait and see. Although, Clematis does now have it's own wiki, whatever good that will do. I almost got quite excited about it. I'll probably give it some more content later, including character profiles, because I've been meaning to redo the character profiles on the main Clematis site for a while now.

So, since I promised it, here are some thoughts on some fannish things.

Toward the Terra (spoiler free)
I really enjoyed this. It looked like it was going to be a little wishy-washy at some point in the middle, but it was actually very good. I really enjoyed that it had a very good take on the concept. It was very adult in a way; everything was a little gray, and you can't really class anyone as being either good or bad. I like that in a story. The most interesting character was Keith, by far, but I also had a soft spot for Shiroe (because he was far too pretty, and no, I am not a shota fan no, but...)

Tsubasa Chapter 167 (click for spoilers)

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Hiiiiiiiiiii. Sorry I've been a little absent recently. Starting at uni again is quite busy it seems. I'm spending my days in inductions, then getting home and trying to file all the paperwork I've been given/collapsing.

I haven't been sleeping well (which, as you should know, is not what I am trying to do at the moment) because I've been a little nervous. But everything is fine and everyone is lovely, and it is my bedtime so I don't have much time, but I thought I'd drop in and let you know how it's going.

Also, I wanted to say that I went to the freshers' fair this afternoon and scored loads of free stuff, including a really nice canvas bag and some organic marmalade. GETTING FREE STUFF IS AWESOME, even if I don't actually want most of it (hello Gideons Bible).

And I bought my first textbook. I think I might be a right keano and read some of it before I go to bed.

Details about my kitchen, Tsubasa chapter 167, and the end of Toward the Terra should be forthcoming shortly.

Haha. So I did that reading in the end. It turns out that there wasn't much of it, and it was pretty interesting too. Oh well. It's good to fret for no reason.

And then I got to draw Lelouch after all. Yup, I'm in a Code Geass mood at the moment, and I've just realised that there's only a few weeks until the second season starts. Woooooooooooooo. (Click for big)

Golly, I'm going to have drawn more Lelouch than Fay if I keep going at this rate.

Right, I have to go to bed now. I've got to go enrol at uni tomorrow don't you know. (I'm a little nervous about it to tell the truth, because I'm useless like that.)

I'm meant to be reading up on starting uni tomorrow. But I really really want to be drawing. I haven't drawn enough recently; how am I supposed to improve if I don't practise? In any case, I'm not actually doing either. I'm just procrastinating and moping about it.
HELLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOO I haven't had this feeling for a year. Long time no see!

;__;

Oh Jesus I am still so freaking itchy! Those annoying bitey flies! I didn't think they'd do me in for three weeks straight. And everyone's like 'get some anti-histamines, get some anti-histamines', and I don't know, but I'm pretty stupidly stubborn when it comes to medication. It's kind of cheating to take anti-histamines. I should be able to see it out. I mean, surely, my immune system will work better if I leave it alone right? It's only a bit of swelling; that means my body's busy fighting off whatever it needs to fight off.
Unless, of course, my immune system is really over-reacting, in which case, I'll wait until it gets really bad, then go see a doctor. IF I DON'T DIE FIRST.

Anyway, itching aside (even if it's very difficult for me to think of anything else at the moment), I did some proper good tidying up today. Not like the kind of tidying up where things look more tidy afterwards, but the kind of tidying up where you dump all your paperwork onto the bed, then sort it into folders. You don't know how happy sorting everything into the correct folder makes me. I even got that Windows Live Hotmail and sorted all my emails into folders too.

It did take me a lot of procrastinating to get all this organising done though (I'm practising procrastinating for when I'm a student again). I think I've checked my emails and facebook about a million times today. Also, I'm onto episode 5 of Heroes now.

Here's some news, which is probably really old now, but still. So I found out that the new Gundam anime is interesting, because one of its character designers is Yun Kouga! I don't know what's going on this year, but it seems that artists I like are determined to force me to watch mecha by doing the character designs. I don't like mecha; I can tell you that for nothing. I can't think of anything more boring than watching big robots fighting (although if the robots come with electro music a la Daft Punk, then I don't mind so much). Also, I haven't watched any Gundam, ever. Am I going to have to watch this one? I watched Code Geass earlier this year, and liked it a lot, despite myself. Because, if you look past the giant robots, Mecha does tend to come with pretty characters and lots of fanservice.
Hmm, maybe I'll see how much I've got on my plate come October, and then decide if I'm going to watch it or not. The animation might be awful for one, and I can't see any characters that look like Soubi either.

So I watched the first two episodes of Heroes. They were actually quite exciting, but I was quite glad of the parts with Hiro in, because I'm really not used to watching programmes without subtitles any more. The thing that has enamoured me though, was seeing a tribute to the Chinese Backstreet Boys in the first episode. That was kind of awesome, and it tells you a lot about the target audience for the show.

In other news: no, not the news about those insect bites that I have, which are itching like hell at the moment, in fact, they're itching so much that bathing in hedgehogs sounds like a pretty nice prospect, no, the news about what I was telling you about yesterday, which was Flight of the Conchords. It turns out that you can find the songs that I saw the other day on YouTube, so here they are:
Jenny
Issues
Hiphopopotamus vs Rhymenoceros
Business Time
Albi the Racist Dragon
She's So Hot...Boom!

Well I'm back from a long weekend at home with my parents. I took my laptop back with me and managed to successfully watch the whole backlog of anime that I had still to watch. I think I watched about 7 hours of screen the other day. But, what was good about it, was that I was able to hook my laptop up to our big widescreen tv and watch everything through there. Yeah!

I really must try not to watch so much next season though. I'll have studying to do. Even though I did just steal the whole first season of Heroes from my Dad, which I've got to fit in somewhere.

So, um, not much has happened. I went to see a medieval bridge, and I got some new boots, and I had a dream which would have made a very interesting period drama (with Julian Rhind-Tutt playing the bad guy, and very well I might add). I went to a talk this lunchtime about 18th century men's clothing, which was absolutely fascinating. Did you know that waistcoats used to have sleeves? And that English gentlemen were known for their informal dress? And that partway through the 18th century men started carrying canes because they'd stopped carrying swords? And that the skirts of their coats used to be stiffened with horse hair so they'd flare out more? I was engrossed. I love old-school men's clothing. I tried to store all the information for future use: I need to draw more period clothes.

I have to go draw now in-fact, because I haven't drawn for days and I'm itching.

Edit: So I forgot to mention the most important part. Which was that I turned on the TV to see Figwit on it! Can you believe it? I can't believe it. So his aler ego Bret McKenzie is in the Flight of the Conchords, which is being shown on BBC4. And it turns out that the other member of Flight of the Conchords is only the guy from Eagle vs Shark (which is a very nice film, and you should watch it). I watched the special last night; it was funnier than I thought it would be. Lets hope that the series will be just as funny. Because I'd almost forgotten all about the Figwit saga, until I saw him on my tv. Maybe I'll have to go back and watch FOTR (and ROTK) again.
Haha, I was just looking at the FAQs on the Figwit site and there were even official trading cards with Figwit on them. Brilliant! My inner Tolkien fan is disgusted, but my inner internet fan is jumping for joy.

So. Tomorrow is my last day at work. It's been a year already. Can you believe it? I spent half of the day being pretty zen about it, and the other half moping around and being sad.

I then have 1 (one) week off, in which I will go see my parents. Then I go to uni. Again. For the second time. I have mixed feelings about being a student again. I've just spent hours reading all about enrolling and everything. I'm partly excited, and partly really missing the last time I was a student. I've suddenly realised that I have a horrendous loyalty to my old uni, and feel like I'll be somehow doing it an injustice by enjoying my time at a new university. Which is complete nonsense, of course.
But, I had sooooooo much fun when I was a student before, and met sooooooooo many nice people. And how on Earth can I ever hope to repeat that? (But seeing as I'm going to be a postgrad this time, I'm assuming that it'll be less fun by default anyway.)

And I just checked my timetable for our induction week. I thought it was going to be plain sailing in the first week, with very little to do. But I find out that busy timetable is BUSY. Seriously, I'm not going to have a chance to sit down. And I thought being a student was all about having lots of free time, and jaffing on the internet all day (at least, that's what I remember doing). Oh well, I'D BETTER MAKE THE MOST OF MY WEEK OFF THEN.

I've got lots of cartoons to watch next week. I've just downloaded a load of Loveless to read too. Mostly this week I've been watching nothing but Toward the Terra.
Toward the Terra is great (if it was a little dull in the middle). Surprisingly, I think my favourite character might be Keith, despite him being a complete bastard. I'm just. I'm really hoping that he's going to atone for everything at the end, and come to see that he's been wrong all along. And his relationship with Matsuka is interesting because it's just so contradictory. Personally, I think that the fact that Matsuka reminds him of Shiroe is no small factor in this. Also, Matsuka has pretty eyes.