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I AM MASHING MY KEYBOARD IN SHOCK

And there'll be more on that story later.

Soo...... Code Geass 22
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! *intake of breath* HAHAHAHAHAHAHAOHGODOHGODHA!
Has Code Geass become a farce now? No wait, don't answer that.
And she had a machine gun!!! HAHAHA!

I feel really ashamed to say it, but Code Geass may well be my favourite anime at the moment (well, tied with Death Note, because Death Note is made of awesome). The problem is that I want to be all high-brow and sophisticated, but Code Geass keeps pulling me back for more. It works because it has a few things:

1. A plot that, while slightly ridiculous, is both engaging and entertaining.
2. Consistantly good animation and nice character design.
3. Fanservice for everyone!

Watching Code Geass kinda feels like being wooed with the cheesiest chat-up lines known to man, and falling for it hook, line and sinker.

Code Geass: Do you have a map? I just keep on getting lost in your eyes.
Me: ... hurhurhur #^^#

I AM GOING TO TELL YOU ABOUT MY DREAM
Now I know that some of you hate to hear about my dreams. But last night's one was fairly vivid, so I'm going to share it here. Hey, you know when you keep remembering your dream during the day, and it makes you a little queasy each time? Yeah, it was one of those.
I think I can work out where part of the dream from; I walked into a bannister the other day, and have quite a large bruise on my upper arm, which has gone through a variety of colours. I haven't had a bruise this large in a long while, so I think it's been playing on my mind. So, onto the dream:

I was still working in science, and was doing a scientific experiment on myself. The experiment involved using a vein that went from the bruise on my arm to the knuckle of my forefinger. The vein was stopped (somehow) so that blood didn't flow through it, and it was filled instead with a sugar solution. The bees and flies were then released. They flocked to the vein on my arm because of the sugar solution; a particular number of them landed on my knuckles. I didn't like this part of the experiment, it was a bit scary, and the bee stings were painful. After a short while, the bees and flies were sucked off with a hoover. The data collection part of the experiment involved counting how many bee stings I had gotten on my hand.

And that was it. What the experiment was testing I don't know. But it still makes me feel a bit funny to think of it.

And now for something completely different:

fhdhjhhfjghfdlsafhahgagjfhgdghfdjghdf1!!!11!11

I MASH MY KEYBOARD MASH MASH MASH.

This is all due to Tsubasa chapter 148. Spoilers ahead:

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I am ALL WRONG today! Curse you British Summer Time! It's all your fault that I woke up at 1:30pm. Because you took away an hour of my life! Seriously, I didn't finish getting dressed until 4 in the afternoon. And now it is half-past 10 and I haven't done anything.

I'm watching Northanger Abbey at the moment. It reminds me of how gay it was in Bath, with all the elegant balls, and the dancing, and the charming young landed gentlemen, and the...oh wait. What about the tourists, and the students, and caddies?
I'm enjoying the costumes though.

Speaking of which, I really am drawing more of Clematis. I really am. But if only I would stop spending all my time drawing Lelouch.

He's looking kind of regal here, which is quite suitable really; I couldn't be bothered to look up an references for his clothing, so I just made something vaguely old-school-y up.
Now, Lelouch is quite a temptation to draw. Because he has a very pretty, Kamui-like, character design, but that doesn't come through quite so much in the anime. So, the challenge is to draw Lelouch as pretty as he deserves; I haven't managed it yet, but I like to think that I'm getting there slowly.

Other things that I have been doing recently:
- Went to Portobello Road market
- Went to go see the Royal Ballet (the first ballet I've seen!)
- Watched the History Boys film

- also, ponced about in front of the camera for a bit:

LOOOSER! Srsly.

Because lists are easier than prose:

1. Went to see my parents this weekend. I got my Mum some books for Mother's Day. Because I'm so thoughtful, I bought her books that I would like to read, rather than take the time to consider what she might want to read.

2. Watched some old-school Marx Brothers at home. Namely, Duck Soup. Here's a clip, showcasing some great physical comedy. It's amazing to think that this film was made in the early 1930s.

3. Also watched The Lion King, which was my all-time favourite movie for almost my whole childhood. I still know parts of it word for word. It's still great.

4. I went crazy yesterday and cleaned the whole bathroom. Then I had a bath, which is very nice on a cold day.

5. The weather is mental at the moment. It felt like summer last week. This week it feels like all the seasons in one. In the past two days we have had, bright sunshine, pouring rain, sleet, snow, hail, loads of wind. I almost thought the world was ending yesterday; and that we'd have to hole up in the library and fight wolves until my Dad came to rescue me; then I realised that we're not in The Day After Tomorrow.

6. I'm going to draw today. I haven't drawn any of Clematis since I got the internet back. But I've no more back-log of anime to catch up on now, so it's drawing for me.

7. I think it's about time I change the layout of this site don't you think? Now I know last time that people were jealous because Nick was my model for the photo. Therefore you now have your chance. If you really want to have yourself on the layout, then send me a lovely picture and I'll see what I can do (within the bounds of my procrastination and laziness of course).

Things to do:

1. Take out a loan for £12000
2. Don't spend any money for the next 8 years
3. ohgodohgodohgod

See also:
Not getting any help towards my course fees next year.

See also:
Oh piss

In other news (I really need to stop saying that) I finished reading The Dice Man today. It was, meh, for a number of reasons:
reason 1 - I did not like the main character at all. He came across as being very arrogant and he just rubbed me the wrong way. I didn't care what happened to him at all.
reason 2 - I'm not old enough to be depressed and dissatisfied with my life, therefore I didn't really grasp the whole driving force for the plot.
reason 3 - Did there have to be so many sex scenes? And in such graphic detail? I'm sure they weren't all relevant to the plot, unless the book was called Luke Rhinehart's Sexual Adventures - Now With Dice! and I just missed it.

Tomorrow I start reading a biography of Samuel Pepys. Alright!

Check out this guy on the YouTube. He is quite possibly the next big thing. Little treats include My Whole Family... and 3.14 Apple Pi, in fact, it's all good, watch them all.

In other news:
When is a candle more than a candle?

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!)

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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?