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Woo. So yesterday I went to see Inland Revenue Empire, the new David Lynch film. I've not seen any David Lynch before, and I have to say, that my first go was pretty strange. The film is made up of three hours of a bewildering mass of scenes and images, that are often more disturbing than not. The tentative plot was entangled and wound in on itself in a very dream-like manner. I have no idea what was going on, but then again, maybe you're not supposed to understand it. So I'm not sure if I liked it or not, but it did stick in my head. On coming out of the cinema I had the disconcerting feeling that I didn't know where I was, or what was going on; it took a long time to ease myself back into reality; and I still can't stop thinking about it.
Hmmm, I do generally like things that have more that a hint of surreal to them. I find something incredibly fascinating about the subconscious and dreaming, where everything is fragmentary and has no logic to it, yet makes sense while you're experiencing it. And I would like to see the film again, just to see if it makes any more sense the next time around. Maybe I should try some more David Lynch too.

I'm finding it difficult to listen to anything that's not as disjointed as the film. I've discovered that Lemon Jelly have the right kind of tone (especially '64 - '95), and Bell Orchestre are good too.

Okay, okay. So I said I'd try. Mariya asked for Soubi, so Soubi it is:

Soubi is so hard to draw! I tried maybe 4 different times before I came up with a picture that was half-way decent. I'll keep trying though. It's all a matter of practice; I'll nail him in the end.

In other news:

a) My flatmate (and his Mum) moved out today. I now have a new flatmate called James; let's hope his Mum doesn't want to stay too.

b) I have been watching GodTube and getting more and more irate. Take a look at this for example. Rargh! Please understand what you are talking about before you start talking about it. You cannot dismiss mutations as being nonsense when you clearly haven't even heard of DNA, much less how the bases make up a code and are undergoing mutations all the time! And evolution does not state that in time anything is possible; nobody is saying that a cat is going to mutate into a dog, or that a frog that has been mashed in a blender is going to turn back into a live frog. And they're all treating science like it's the big bad. Science is just a methodology, it is impartial; it is not the fault of science that your theories do not stand up to logical scrutiny. Right, right. I have to stop myself here before I go on a huge rant that ends in religion = stupidity. Seriously, do I not learn? Never talk about religion, or politics, or sex; things will just get messy.

c) Dear guy that came to do research at work yesterday. Now I know you're not doing anything, and that you can't help it, but could you please stop looking so cute? I actually couldn't concentrate properly on my work. Do you want me to do my job badly? Do you? Man, I must be suffering from hormones.

You know, I've decided that I quite like putting up scrappy doodles. I try to draw them quickly and not get too bogged down in getting it just so, because that's when you start to lose the wood for the trees. Not inking the drawings helps; I have a tendency to be too precious about a picture, and it's quite liberating to try not to care too much.

So, here's another. Code Geass again.

If you wanted to put some text to this picture, it would probably be something like:

Suzaku: I AM ANGSTING ABOUT MY PAST D:
Lelouch: ........

I think my sense of proportion went out of the window on this picture. Seriously. Lelouch looks like a giraffe.

Other things what I have been doing recently:

1. Listening to The Bravery and Wolfmother and dancing around like a loon. There's nothing better than dancing in the privacy of your own room. Who cares if you look completely stupid? Feel that rhythm! Pull those shapes!

2. Watching far too much YouTube. And this was going to lead into a long soliloquy about how YouTube is great, and the internets is great, because it's all about people doing it for themselves and generating content that is far more diverse and entertaining than anything you can find in the conventional media. And anybody can have a go, and the body of talent that the internet has to draw from (ie almost everyone in the world) is so huge, that this is just what makes this time that we live in so so exciting. But I decided that that would be too boring to write, so I didn't. Seriously though, maybe it's just that I'm not yet old and cynical, but I am geniunely excited when I think about it. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, a lot of the internets is full of rubbish, but it is all a part of the great circle of life, Simba.

So, I'm sure you all want to know how my weekend of sitting at home went.

Death Note: This continues to be as exciting as ever. Also, handcuffed together fist-fights for the win! But, I kinda want the old Light back...

Death Note Live Action Movie: Both Light and L appear to be more morally ambiguous in this one. The best thing about this movie is L, without a doubt. He seems so much more quirky when you see him in the flesh. Aww.

Code Geass: It turns out that Suzaku isn't as boring as he first seems. Lelouch trying to play match-maker with Nunally and Suzaku is quite endearing. But Suzaku chooses the wrong sister! D:
Haha, he's still keeping it the family though. What does that mean for Lelouch???!!!
I don't take this show seriously at all.

Oh I do love watching animation that's of a good quality. There's just something more interesting about watching cartoons than watching live action. Maybe it's the bright colours. Maybe I've never actually grown up.

Speaking of interesting, live action and bright colours, check out this cool music video for The Go! Team.

Onto some scrappy doodles that I wasted my time on last night.

Lelouch. I wanted to try to draw him pretty, like Kamui, because that's the way he's supposed to be. But seeing as I can't draw Kamui pretty like Kamui, Lulu didn't shape up too well.

(Huge Tokyo arc spoilers for the following Fay doodle!)

Full story »

Oh how I love Saturdays! Seriously, I think Saturday is the best day of the week. It's the one day where you don't have to do anything, and you don't have the thought of Monday hanging over you like you do on a Sunday.

Saturday is a day for sleeping in, then taking ages to get ready and putting on your favourite clothes, regardless of whether you're actually going out or not.

This Saturday the sun is shining beautifully outside; but I have decided that I'm not going to leave the house all day. Ahh.

I was originally going to go and explore the city today, because I've hardly been there at all, and considering that it's the oldest part of London, it interests me. But! I have the internets back this week, and that's all that really matters. I've got such a backlog of anime to watch, and I'm going to devote two whole days to watching it :D

Things of note that I will be watching:
a) Death Note live action movie! (I am so excited about this)
b) Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpucho - I'm not sure how this series will hold up. I watched the first episode a while back. Now, the story seems to be completely unoriginal, but the animation was so breathtakingly amazing that I could happily sit and watch it for hours on repeat (also, using classical music at the start and end? yes yes yes!). Hmm, if the animation quality holds up for the rest of the series it will be awesome, if not, then meh.
c) Les Miserables the anime - I've watched the first couple of episodes of this. Now, I don't actually know the musical at all, but is the plot really meant to be so bland and uninspiring? I'm not sure I can watch much more of this. Good job the character design is just as bland and uninspiring as the plot.

What it is that I am listening to at the moment:

Gossip - I can't stop listening to this. A lot of their songs sound very similar, but the lead singer has such a great bluesy type voice. Eyes Open is my favourite song from the album, Standing in the way of Control, by far (it's a shame the song is only 2 minutes long).

David Bowie - I went on a mini David Bowie binge this morning. I have a great affection for David Bowie; I grew up listening to him; he was as much a part of my childhood as Thundercats or My Little Pony. I almost regard him as part of the family, like another uncle, or maybe a godfather (if my family went in for that sort of religious, christening, thing, which they don't). And why? I was named after a David Bowie song; yes, there is a song called Janine, check it out! Still to this day, if I here him singing it:

I feel a little bit special on the inside.
Sadly, I don't own two of my favourite Bowie songs, those being Let's Dance and China Girl ;_;

Here's the cover of chapter 6. And that ends my Clematis updating spree; I've run out of pages so I'm going to have to get my drawing on again before we get any more.

In other news:

Dear work,

Please stop being so stressful. More importantly, please STOP FLOODING. OMFG. Do you want me to have a heart attack at the age of 22? Because I will! Just you try me!

Aaaarghhsakjf!@# >:E

Lots of love,
Janine

Hey!!!!

Let's have another page of Clematis; hey, why not.

Sooooooo. I went to Turnmills last night with Steve and James to see MSTRKRFT. It was pretty goddamn awesome. Seeing as how I am used to Bath, where the closest thing they have to a nightclub is Caddies, or Babs; Turnmills was a bit of a shock to the system. It had five different rooms, and the price to get in was around five times as much as I'd like to pay. Yes! That's right! 5 rooms, for the price of five? Wow.

Standing in the queue there was a guy furtively asking people if they wanted any Es. Man, is this the big city or what? Of course, I'm far too poor and sensible to buy some Es (or whizz for that matter), but I felt quite cosmopolitan for being asked.

The music was a little too hardcore for me, but you could dance to it alright. And when MSTRKRFT came on it was super. I was quite starstruck. Everyone was dancing a-go-go, and when they played Easy Love the whole room cheered. I only wish that they had played some more of their remixes before we left. I actually prefer their remixes to their own tunes; let me explain in algebraic terms:

Handclaps + cowbell + a good bass-line = an awesome MSTRKRFT tune.

Sadly, we were in the MSTRKRFT room for most of the time so we missed DJ sets by Hot Chip, the Klaxons and Gossip. Shoot!

To summarise, I will describe how awesome MSTRKRFT were by using the means of poorly executed computer graphics; it was something like this:

In other news we went to Spitalfields market today and saw lots of cool art and bags and T-shirts and stuff. I didn't buy anything, but I did have a burrito, so it kind of evens out.

Also, oh god, I'm so tired today.

*sobs hysterically*

Oh guys. Oh guys! D:

My internet connection has been broken for the past month!

It was horrible! Oh, utterly horrible! I thought I might die of boredom and trash TV.

Quick quick! I've updated Clematis as soon as was possible. Over here. I had the time to work up a backlog of a few pages, so I'll probably put a new page up on Sunday or Monday.

So what on Earth did I do without the internets?

- I watched an ungodly amount of the Simpsons
- I watched Gillian McKeith look at fat people's poo
- I read all of Wish, which I had downloaded before
- I read plenty of Loveless (I'd had a lot of this downloaded too)

So, Wish was alright. But you could tell that the ending wasn't as CLAMP had originally planned. What was up with Shuichirou? Don't give me that. Also, since when was reincarnation a part of the christian dogma?

As for Loveless, I'm up to volume 5 now and I'm eager for more Soubi. Also, I love Yun Kouga's art THIS MUCH.

Oh man, but I've got loads of TRC and xxxHolic to catch up on. Tomorrow, tomorrow; I'm too sleepy today (I think I'll have to wean myself back onto the internets slowly).

So tomorrow Steve is visiting and we're going to go see MSTRKRFT. I'm well excited.

Wow. I didn't mean to be away for so long, I just kind of ran out of energy to write on my blog.

So, I wasn't around this weekend because I went to Luxembourg to visit Linda who lives there now (no, I don't know why either). But Luxembourg seems fun, and Linda seems happy, so it's all good. This trip was less sight-seeing-y than our last trip to Luxemboug, and more going-out-y. There was also cheese. Here follows a description of the trip in photographic form:

We saw a Razorlight concert, despite the fact that
none of us are huge Razorlight fans. We're so hardcore.

Steve got hugged by A STAG.

There was some standing around in holes.

...No reason for this photo, I just lkind of liked it.

I've suddenly realised the lack of photos of Linda that I have from this trip. I only have two, and they're both AWFUL. So, sorry Linda, if you're reading. I am a BAD friend.

Since I've been back I've been tired, and also cold, because my radiator chose the coldest time of the year to stop working.

I was also itching to make an AMV because I have finally jumped of the ledge of good upstanding citizen and into the pit of LOSER. I couldn't hold back any longer. I have spent so long trying to get windows movie maker to work this week, it's not funny. When I finally did get it working, it ran far too slow for my needs (God, why do I try to break my teeth on flamenco of all things? Why not an easy ballad?). Anyway, after around four hours I managed to come up with 15 (count 'em) 15 seconds of AMV that is almost not awful, but kind of is, because I commited the horror of all horrors, and used subtitled video clips.

You can download it if you like, in all it's 1MB glory. The file is a wmv though, so I apologise if you don't have windows and can't watch it, because I'm too tired to change it to anything else.

Download here.
Let's see, the video comes from Code Geass, episode 7, the only one I have that I could use. And the music is the intro to an awesome song by Rodrigo y Gabriela called Diablo Rojo (buy the album guys, it's super-duper).

Right, well, I give up with AMVs, they're just too difficult. *wipes hands free of the whole sorry mess*

In the world of everything non-AMV, I started off the day badly today by dreaming about cute little kittens, which DIED. Then at work, I had to deal with two researchers who had been double booked. I'm not sure if the double booking was my fault, or my bosses, but I felt awful for upsetting people, especially because one of the researchers was a kind-of famous old thesbian actor. Gah!

I'm still working my way through The Master and Margarita. I've just got to the part, mostly, where Margarita meets Woland. I like Behemoth, he's almost like the comic relief, aww. Also, I'm sure Woland is not supposed to be attractive, I'm sure (if I repeat that enough I might start believing it) asfhjkadgl.

Guys! Guys! Guys! Guys! Guys!

Do you want to listen to something hilarious? Of course you do. They are playing stand-up from cheeky geordie, Ross Noble, on the radio every Tuesday. You can listen to the show after it's aired by going here and clicking on 'listen' under where it says Ross Noble.
Ross Noble is one of my favourite stand-up comedians (I saw him live about a year ago); he is so random, and he makes almost everything up as he goes along, it's really quite amazing.

Re: my last post
Here's the Subaru fanart I told you about. (click for big yadda yadda)

I wanted to make ammends for my previous Subaru fanart, which was awful, truly awful. So this one is done in a different style. I think I made him look more girly than normal, which I really didn't think was actually possible, but what did I know. Also also, where on Earth are his gloves?! How can you draw Subaru and forget his gloves?! I think I must have passed out or something and missed them.

At work today I got a papercut (more like a card-cut)off of 1988. It was a right deep one too. And it keeps opening up everytime I do anything. Man, what good have the 80s ever done to anyone?

In other news, there'll be more Subaru fanart coming your way later. Aren't you lucky?

Here's a new page of Clematis.

I meant to draw this yesterday. But I ended up buying Kill Bill 1 and watching it instead. So, I didn't put as much effort into the new page as I would have liked, but I did get to watch Kill Bill again (I can never watch this film enough; it is just so cool), so the outcome was good for me.

I'm watching Final Destination 2 at the moment. It's quite fun to try and work out how everyone is going to die.

I used to watch this before I went up to uni in the mornings. As children's programmes go, this one is quite high up on the really really weird scale. I mean, come on, trying to motivate kids through sport and Euro pop? It is awesome. Also, Sporticus is great and I love him.

It turns out that I'm pretty slow on the bandwagon and that this is all over the internets. So I had some fun on YouTube (watch me jumping on that bandwagon Ma!):

THE definitive song. You knows it.

Possibly the best song ever. WOULD I LIE TO YOU?

Man, I don't think I ever grew out of children's TV. Something about it just holds my attention; it might be the surrealism that is just lacking in most adult TV shows (I think my brain is wired up to enjoy surreal things more than most people), or maybe it's just that I only respond to bright colours.

But of course, in my day, children's TV made a lot more sense, you know, like giant turtles fighting crime.

Hey guys.

I haven't really been up to much at all in the past few days.
Go to work
Come home
Sleep
And repeat

Mostly all I've been thinking about has been Seishirou/Subaru. The more time passes, the more I think this is becoming my OTP. Because, because! It has to be the most tragic romance ever created, ever. Seriously. It's kind of really beautiful, in a really really sad way. I could go on for longer, but I don't want to be flinging out any spoilers; it was only once I'd been through all of Tokyo Babylon and all of X that I realised how heart-breakingly beautiful their story is.

There was only one thing I could bring myself to draw yesterday. Click for big (warning, words can't explain how truly awful this picture is. I apologise):

TRC version! The reason that I'm excited about TRC!Seishirou and TRC!Subaru is the same reason why it was so difficult to draw this fanart: in TRC there is still everything to play for. Let me reiterate: there is still everything to play for! I am filled with some kind of ridiculous hope that CLAMP will humour the fangirls and give these two a happy ending. This hope is ridiculous because even though anything goes in TRC (see: giant worms!), I very much doubt that any incarnation of Subaru is going to get a happy ending. That poor boy is doomed; he'd even be doomed if he was a magical pony, or a rainbow (and I'm sure that in some CLAMPverse, there really is a magical pony!Subaru). But! I'm still going to keep my hopes up! Because we still have no idea what the situation is; I repeat, there is still everything to play for!

What have I been watching recently? Round-up!

- Code Geass 12 - Hellooo uncomfortable fan service! Hellooo heterosexual Lulu! (where on Earth did you come from?)

- Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto - episode 10 and I still have no idea what's going on. I really think I need to know my Japanese history much more (read: at all) to follow this plot. But the fight scenes are just so good that I can't stop watching. But why oh why does Okita Souji always have to be dying in every series he's in? It makes me sad T_T

- Celebrity Big Brother - Brilliant. I love the way that the housemates keep doing Bo Selecta impersontations of Michael Jackson, even though Germaine looks really uncomfortable every time they do.

Today I went traipsing through the pouring rain to buy myself a frame for the batik that Mariya so kindly made me. Take a look:

My wall doesn't look so empty any more! I couldn't place the frame very centrally on my wall because I'm not alowed to put any nails in, so I had to work with the nails that are already in the wall. It's so pretty (the batik, I mean, not the frame)! It's based on Kimono patterns and xxxHolic; the rich colours are certainly very Yuuko, as are the butterflies now I come to think of it. Anway, what I mean to say is THANK YOU MARIYA <3

I had wanted a white frame, but this was the lightest colour (and weight) that I could find in Habitat; it was either this or beech or black (I don't like black outlines on pictures at the moment, I don't know why, I think it may be fashion). Also, annoyingly, Habitat only have paper bags, which is cool and all (and they can be recycled), but completely useless in heavy rain. By the time I'd reached the tube station (maybe 3 minutes walk from the shop) the bag had fallen apart! I had to carry it the rest of the way home under my arm.

I also went to Waterstones and bought myself a copy of Master and Margarita. The girls at the till were very enthusiastic about the book when I was buying it, so it bodes well that this will be a good read.

I'm watching The Sixth Sense at the moment. I've never seen it before. It's quite scary. I can't help thinking that this is what it must have been like for a poor young Watanuki, only without anybody to help him.

There's a new page of Clematis!

Today I decided to try my hand at drawing in a realistic style (I've not actualy tried it before). And what better way to start than with a self portrait (click for big):

I'm pretty sure it's, at best, rubbish; but that's forgivable seeing as it's a first attempt. I went a bit mental with the colouring of the lips (my lips aren't black I swear), and colouring in nostrils, I have decided, is a no-no. And crikey I have a lot of moles on my face.