girlofprey

I LOVE OGLAF.

Also, there are about 5 million films I want to see on at the moment. At last count, Judge Dredd, Lawless, The Sweeney, When The Lights Went Out, Killing Them Softly and Savages, although maybe not Savages, because apparently it's directed by Oliver Stone, and I'm not terribly in the mood for a lot of blood and gore. Unless I am thinking am Sam Peckinpah. But anyway, the fact remains that I don't have time to see them all. I'd still quite like to see Ted, but I think that's gone from cinemas now. Which is nice, because this week it was only on at Xscape at about twenty to nine at night, and Xscape is kind of a bitch to get back from late at night. And maybe the only thing worse than it being impossible to do something, is for it to be possible but massively massively inconvenient.

Also in film-related news, I accidentally saw most of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo last night. The remake in English, but still set in Sweden. I say accidentally, because I came down to have tea, and my dad put it on, and by the time I was finished with tea I wanted to see how it ended. I didn't realise it was about 3 hours long. Anyway. ( Spoilers and mention of rape )

In videogame news, I am quite happily get along with Fallout 3, Overlord and Bioshock. All of which are great. The only 'issue' is that since playing Fallout 3, I'm kind of assuming my characters are female in all other games as well. Or at least in those two games. I don't know, I'm just used to playing as a female character, and characterising my characters as female. I MAY NEVER GO BACK. In Overlord, they call you a man a lot, but you're wearing quite a lot of armour, and you never speak, and your main weapon is your minions who you direct to attack other people. So you could literally be anyone under there. And Bioshock is in the first person, all you can see of your character is your hands, and you have no name so far and you never speak, so it's pretty easy to assume you're a woman there as well. And if people keep calling you 'son' and 'mister' and sort of hitting on you if they're a woman while implying you're a man, WHAT OF IT? Everyone's crazy in Rapture. What would they know?

I'm really enjoying Overlord, also. It's probably actually better than Dungeon Keeper, but I still miss Dungeon Keeper. I think that's the one downside videogames and videogame fandoms have compared to books and films and stuff - when you feel nostalgic over a book you used to love as a kid, you can read it again, but that's not always the case with vidoegames. Or at least PC games. I know there's issues with films and VHS and stuff, but they seem pretty happy to bring out quite a lot of things on VHS back out again on DVD, and with games not so much. IDK, maybe I'm just not trying hard enough. Although talking about nostalgia is sort of making me want to play Morrowind and Ghost Master again. Sigh.

Hello. I've been meaning to post for the past, um, few weeks. But I've been keeping myself on a pretty steady diet of Skyrim, Saints Row 2, rewatching about half of Season 2 of Oz for Peter Schibetta reasons (who I love MORE THAN EVER), and watching American Dad, for humour and intergenerational het incest reasons. THE BEST REASONS THERE ARE. Also, I managed to get onto the jewellery making course in Leeds for a second term, and I've been going to see my employment coach again. Christmas is truly over. Even if all the sales aren't. So I haven't really had a lot of time to do other things.

Some nice things that have happened to me lately:

• My new nephew came home from the hospital on Monday, yay!



• On Saturday in the post I got both a slightly gloomy, but lovely, card from jekesta containing beautiful stickers (thank you jekesta), AND a letter saying I'd won a premium bond, for the amount of £25, including a cheque for it. It was a good day for post.



• I got back on my jewellery making course. I was lucky to do so, really, in a slightly sad way, because I was only on the waiting list, and they didn't call me the morning of the first lesson like they did last term. But I called them and they said yeah, come in, so I went in and enrolled and went to the class. And then the tutor took the register and realised one person - who had also been on the course last term - wasn't on the register, and there were 13 people in the class when the maximum was usually 12. The woman who wasn't on the register said she hadn't signed any forms or spoken to the people running things upstairs, she'd just come back to the class. She and the tutor went upstairs to talk to the people in the office, and then the tutor came back down and said the woman had had to go home, because there wasn't a place for her. So assuming she wasn't on the waiting list like me, I probably ended up with her place. Which I did feel slightly bad about. But not entirely, because assuming I don't win my appeal - which I don't think I will - by the time the next term comes round, I might well have less money to spend on courses, and no concessions, so it would cost £50 instead of £5. So mostly I'm just relieved about it.



• My Oglaf book came in the post today, hurrah!

Some bad things that have happened to me lately:

• Yesterday at my jewellery course, I managed to cut my thumb with tin snips, which if you know anything about tin snips is pretty hard to do, but I managed it. I also burnt my fingers quite a lot while trying to polish things, scraped my elbow on part of my desk, and get hit by a tiny drop of boiling water while someone was quenching another piece. It really was not my day yesterday.



• I got a call from the Tribunals service today (and yesterday). It turned out it wasn't about anything much, though, but still. A reminder that it is coming :(

Hmm. In other news, Skyrim's wicked. The only problem I'm having with it is that there are so many quests, SO MANY quests, and you don't have to take them all, but I always worry that turning them down WILL mean you don't get to still do them, or that I'll forget that people are offering them and miss out on them. But now I have probably about fifty 'to do', and it's sort of stretching my own suspension of belief that people would not be upset that I took a few months to basically take something to another town for them. So I'm trying to work my way through them at the moment. And basically running into and getting more along the way. But still. It's pretty good.

Further adventures in gender included a quest where I had the choice between taking the side of a woman in hiding or the side of the men hunting her for supposed crimes, and taking her side led to the men accusing me of being fooled by a 'pretty face'. However, ( Minor spoilers for Skyrim, maybe ). So maybe Skyrim/Tamriel really IS meant to be a world where it's perfectly okay and accepted to be gay. In which case, well done, I guess, Bethesda.

Adventures with gender in Saints Row 2 have been slightly more confusing. By and large it's fairly straightforward or not mentioned. But there's an activity you can do in the game called "ho-ing". Which, as far as I can tell, is where you gain respect by going to strip clubs and "pleasing" - strippers, I guess - after which your sexual prowess is known throughout the land, or whatever. I went and did it as part of another job though, and you don't actually get to see any of the act, but you hear voices, and my character was definitely in there with a man. So. I don't really know whether I earned or spent money after that activity. Was it a male ho? Was it just some random guy and we were using a strip club as basically a motel, without paying any of the actual people who worked there? Which is kind of insulting if you think about it. Apparently you can earn money as a pimp by ho-ing, but I don't know how or if I did. But it sounded like a good time was had by all, at any rate. So fine.

Saints Row 2 is getting a bit tricky at the moment in that it's got to that sort of middling part of games, where you're quite good at it, but not super-good at it, so I'm feeling a bit cocky perhaps but the challenges are getting slightly harder and I can't just breeze through them like I could the earlier stuff. Which is a little bit aggravating. But I'm still really enjoying it. Especially now that I've figured out I can steal helicopters if I want to. Even if I can't quite fly them yet. Still.

I haven't really been watching any TV or anything lately. Although I did have dream the other night about hanging out with my awesome nana, before realising, in the dream, that she was actually Rita from Coronation Street. Which led to a weird dream about an alternative Coronation Street, where David Platt had a cat he walked on a leash, and Karen was still hanging around. Good times. Anyway, other than that, nothing really. Other than Oz and American Dad. YOU ARE FREE TO TALK TO ME ABOUT PETER SCHIBETTA OR HAYLEY SMITH IF YOU WISH. I love you guys. x

Hello. I went to jekesta's for the weekend to watch Eurovision with her and cakesy. Which was lovely. I was rooting for Iceland and Moldova and possibly Ireland, but Azerbaijan stormed through. Somehow. Also we watched MANY OTHER THINGS. I can now proudly say I have watched all of the paintball episodes of Community, and the latest Parks and Recreation (I am a fool to not keep up with it), and roughly half of Crusoe. Neither Crusoe nor Friday are kings of Narnia (probably). But that doesn't mean it would have been weird for them to make themselves crowns.

Also jekesta watched Vera with me, which was lovely of her. Now she too knows how lovely Vera and Joe are, and how slightly incompetent at being police they sometimes are. Also I saw some of Summer Holiday for the first time, and was only squicked out by some of it, and while cakesy was there we saw one of the weirdest episodes of Columbo ever. Apparently if you date the main witness of a murder you commit, you can nearly get away with pretty much anything. Also, sharks help solve crime. Fact. Um. Sort of.

Anyway. We also watched So You Think You Can Dance (oh, Rithy), and Doctor Who. Well.

( Spoilers for The Doctor's Wife )

Anyway. I'm back now. I got the Settle-Carlisle line back to Leeds, which sadly now appears to be the Leeds-Carlisle line. It was still lovely though. There were all sheep and lambs in the fields, often getting spooked by the train running past. I quite love the train journeys to and from Lancaster.

In other news, money. After accidentally leaving a gap in my sick notes and not hearing anything from the Department for Work and Pensions about it, I wasn't sure how much I had last week. So I checked just before going to Lancaster, tomake sure I had enough for train tickets and food and stuff, and they had totally paid me, and I had £300. I'm pretty sure I have quite a lot less than that now though. After going straight out to New Look to buy some clothes I'd been wanting but didn't think I could afford, and then some random bits of jewellery from Topshop, and then some t-shirts when Threadless reprinted some designs I'd wanted. But I'm hoping to keep it a bit more under control from now on, and I should be getting paid again on Thursday anyway. Yay.

In other news, next week isn't looking like it's going to be a fun week for me. I was thinking last week that it was going to be tough, because I had a doctor's appointment that week, then my first new counselling session, then my disability assessment, then my confidence course. But then I remembered that no, my doctor's appointment was this Friday, so it wasn't so bad. Then this morning I got a letter from my doctor, saying that sadly my doctor's appointment on Friday would have to cancelled, so could I call up to arrange another. I called up and the earliest they can see me is next Monday. So it is pretty much going to be like I thought it was going to be. Hmph.

Also, re: this week's Oglaf: askdfjklasdfhjkasdfnhj what?