Things that I have been doing
May. 13th, 2005 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chrisvenusYeah, I've not done a real update for, like, forever, so I'm going to try to sum up some of the things I've been doing recently and things worth knowing about my life.
Topmost in my mind at the moment is new house. I'm pretty sure that most people reading this should know that my housemates got married and are now looking for a cosy little home for just the two of them so I've been turfed out. Aided by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
quisalan and Paul (has he got an LJ?) I now have somewhere else that I can call my home.
We picked up the keys last weekend and I'm intending to move lots of stuff over this weekend. The main thing is the bed that I had hoped to move from my current location tomorrow. However, I think I am going to have to move a lot of other stuff so that I actually have room to dismantle it all. My "slow and easy" move is not going to go as well as I had hoped. On the plus side I can take it relatively but the easier I take it the more double rent I'll be paying...
On the plus side though Tristam and Angharad are going to be on holiday from sunday for a week so clearing out bits from my room and piling them elsewhere around the house out the way is a definite option. Though I've started doing that already. I think my current thought is that tomorrow I'll be moving boxes of stuff and then more likely on Sunday the bed will go. I'm not going to be confirming this plan in any way though. :)
Thinking about moving out reminds me that I had dinner at Le Petit Blanc a couple of weeks back. When Matt (a housemate from years back) the house residents decided to go somewhere nice for food and we ended up at Savannah for a very nice evening (with a very expensive bottle of wine). This time as I moved out I suggested we should do something and go somewhere nice. Angharad suggested Le Petit Blanc and it was a good call.
I'm not a big food person usually. I'll eat. Some things I enjoy more than others. But generally food is a take it or leave it thing. Le Petit Blanc opened my eyes to a whole food appreciation thing. The food was aboslutely gorgeous and I found myself unable to stop telling my companions how much I was enjoying the food. On the plus side they were equally impressed by it all. A couple of bottles of nice wine went well with it and it was something I am needing to resist the urge to try to do regularly. Why? Well, at 40 pounds per head the meal wasn't something I want to do too often. It was worth the money but I can't do that often. Still, next time I have cause for a celebration... :)
After the restaurant we ambled to a pub for a bit and then taxied home to play with bongos. You see, I recently succumbed and bought a gamecube. I can't remember what the thinking was at the time. I think possibly to do with the fact that they are quite cheap and have some good games. So I bought a gamecube with bongos. And then another game with bongos. And a couple more cheap games since then. Its great and its been well worth the money it seems.
For those unaware the Bongos mentioned above are basically a rhythm game much like the dance games that everybody and their cat must be familiar with. It plays music at you and tells you whether to hit the left bongo, the right bongo, both at the same time or to clap. Its really good fun. I only have two sets of bongos now. I want to get more so we can have four people playing bongos all at once! :) I also bought Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Its a fantastic game with some really cool atmosphere to it. The mind fucks are great too but lose their effect when you've heard about them before. A few of them have caught me out though and left me goign "what the fuck?". Given it is possible that there are people who haven't heard about it I shall spoiler hide the next paragraph. Hopefully highlighting it with your mouse or whatever will allow you to read it...
One of the core things in Eternal Darkness is your sanity meter and as that goes down it does things to the player to make them think they are insane as well as to the character. From the character side you have things like when you reach a certian level of madness the statues will turn their heads to look at you, you'll hear loud knocking on doors when there is nothing there. Eerie chanting, screams, a man hanging from the ceiling by a rope... From the player side it will do things like when you finish a chapter say "Thank you for playing. Look forward to Eternal Darkness: sanity's requiem, coming soon!". Collapsing the screen down to a dot as if its just turned off or died, volume just turning down on its own (complete with colume bar on TV going down) and when you try to save saying "Are you sure you want to delete?" and even if you click no saying "Deleting save game files". Each of these then just flashes the screen white and returns you back to normalcy. Sometimew ith muttered "This can't be happening" from the character. A couple of my favourites though are when I tried to cast a spell once and My head just exploded and it played the game over music. Or the time when I was just walking along and my head fell off. I still had control of my character and could walk up to my head, pick it up and then get the option to put my head back on at which point it returned to normalcy. If I hadn't been prepared for them I can imagine these things really screwing with my head. I'd heard all about them before though so it wasn't too bad.
I've also been roleplaying recently of course. Beginning of April saw the end of the Werewolf the Apocalypse game for the Cam. A good weekend national somewhere down near london produced a fantastic end to the chronicle. Very intense roleplay. It was very emotional and not the sucky ending that I thought it would be (no offence to the GMs meant by implying that I thought it was going to suck). I've not started any more cam characters now though so I am effetively not playing cam at the moment. I was going to start up a mage in the oxford mage game but the ST and DC resigned so I had to jump in and take over for the game and since nobody else wanted to run it long term I had the dubious honour of closing down the game. At least it got a final game though rather than just fading out. And I ran stuff and people liked it which continues to fuel this strange thing whereby people say I'm good at running games. :)
I also bought some shiny new exalted books recently. After hearing good things about the Fair folk book I bought it and what I read has been very good. And then "Exalted: the Alchemicals" came out and it is very shiny. I really need to run some more exalted. My planning is going roughly along the lines of when I finish the house move and will thus have more free time then I shall think about a game and order out for players. Not quite sure what I want to run yet though. I have lots of ideas running around my head now unfortunately. :)
Most recently the latest Oxford Society game has started. Wart and his team are doing a great job of running Horizon. I'm thoroughly enjoying my character based on a Final Fantasy-esque stereotype. I'd been thinking a lot about Cloud from FF7 while character genning as well as the comfortable familiarity of the relationships between family (bought home to me by the last part of Sandman's Preludes and Nocturnes when Death and Morpheus are talking) and general fantasy stereotypes. So what I came up with along with some others is a small group of family/very close family friends, my parents were once great adventurers too and... well, there are other players reading this so I won't say too much. However, I will say that I have a sword based on the Final fantasy vibe. I want to try to make Materia at some point in this game... :)
Thinking of the purple eyes in horizon though I recently bought myself some Purple contact lenses. I thought it would be cool as a RP prop and they are *very* cool. I looked around and couldn't find the colour that I wanted anywhere at first and specsaver pointed me at a small local optician (well, they have four branches spread out across the south of england but only four means local in some strange way). They were very helpdul and the guy there was very helpful in talking through the options but warned me that I might have to have them custom made the way they might for films. That would cost £80 per lens though. Eek! No. So after some consultation he came back and said it would cost £100 for custom coloured prescription lenses (no correction for astigmatism though which sucks). I ummed and ahed a bit but at that exact moment some external work came along and I considered this as fate and offset a large chunk of the cost of the lenses against that unexpected income. And so I got them. They took a bit longer than I would have liked but now they are here they do the job perfectly. I just need more excuses to wear them. Wearing them out clubbing is less worthwhile than I had hoped due to the low light levels meaning you can't see them properly. In a well lit room though they are freaky and cool. And although they don't correct my astigmatism I can still see pretty well in them. Well enough to drive certainly and well enough to roleplay in as long as I don't need to see anything in detail across the room. :)
I'm sure there are lots of other things that I've done but they are starting to slip into obscurity in my mind. If anybody wants to prod me into doing a write up of anything that I haven't covered in my journal that I've done then go for it and I'll try to write it up later.
And I'd try to say I won't leave it as long to the next proper update but I'm sure I will. :)
Topmost in my mind at the moment is new house. I'm pretty sure that most people reading this should know that my housemates got married and are now looking for a cosy little home for just the two of them so I've been turfed out. Aided by
quisalan and Paul (has he got an LJ?) I now have somewhere else that I can call my home.We picked up the keys last weekend and I'm intending to move lots of stuff over this weekend. The main thing is the bed that I had hoped to move from my current location tomorrow. However, I think I am going to have to move a lot of other stuff so that I actually have room to dismantle it all. My "slow and easy" move is not going to go as well as I had hoped. On the plus side I can take it relatively but the easier I take it the more double rent I'll be paying...
On the plus side though Tristam and Angharad are going to be on holiday from sunday for a week so clearing out bits from my room and piling them elsewhere around the house out the way is a definite option. Though I've started doing that already. I think my current thought is that tomorrow I'll be moving boxes of stuff and then more likely on Sunday the bed will go. I'm not going to be confirming this plan in any way though. :)
Thinking about moving out reminds me that I had dinner at Le Petit Blanc a couple of weeks back. When Matt (a housemate from years back) the house residents decided to go somewhere nice for food and we ended up at Savannah for a very nice evening (with a very expensive bottle of wine). This time as I moved out I suggested we should do something and go somewhere nice. Angharad suggested Le Petit Blanc and it was a good call.
I'm not a big food person usually. I'll eat. Some things I enjoy more than others. But generally food is a take it or leave it thing. Le Petit Blanc opened my eyes to a whole food appreciation thing. The food was aboslutely gorgeous and I found myself unable to stop telling my companions how much I was enjoying the food. On the plus side they were equally impressed by it all. A couple of bottles of nice wine went well with it and it was something I am needing to resist the urge to try to do regularly. Why? Well, at 40 pounds per head the meal wasn't something I want to do too often. It was worth the money but I can't do that often. Still, next time I have cause for a celebration... :)
After the restaurant we ambled to a pub for a bit and then taxied home to play with bongos. You see, I recently succumbed and bought a gamecube. I can't remember what the thinking was at the time. I think possibly to do with the fact that they are quite cheap and have some good games. So I bought a gamecube with bongos. And then another game with bongos. And a couple more cheap games since then. Its great and its been well worth the money it seems.
For those unaware the Bongos mentioned above are basically a rhythm game much like the dance games that everybody and their cat must be familiar with. It plays music at you and tells you whether to hit the left bongo, the right bongo, both at the same time or to clap. Its really good fun. I only have two sets of bongos now. I want to get more so we can have four people playing bongos all at once! :) I also bought Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Its a fantastic game with some really cool atmosphere to it. The mind fucks are great too but lose their effect when you've heard about them before. A few of them have caught me out though and left me goign "what the fuck?". Given it is possible that there are people who haven't heard about it I shall spoiler hide the next paragraph. Hopefully highlighting it with your mouse or whatever will allow you to read it...
One of the core things in Eternal Darkness is your sanity meter and as that goes down it does things to the player to make them think they are insane as well as to the character. From the character side you have things like when you reach a certian level of madness the statues will turn their heads to look at you, you'll hear loud knocking on doors when there is nothing there. Eerie chanting, screams, a man hanging from the ceiling by a rope... From the player side it will do things like when you finish a chapter say "Thank you for playing. Look forward to Eternal Darkness: sanity's requiem, coming soon!". Collapsing the screen down to a dot as if its just turned off or died, volume just turning down on its own (complete with colume bar on TV going down) and when you try to save saying "Are you sure you want to delete?" and even if you click no saying "Deleting save game files". Each of these then just flashes the screen white and returns you back to normalcy. Sometimew ith muttered "This can't be happening" from the character. A couple of my favourites though are when I tried to cast a spell once and My head just exploded and it played the game over music. Or the time when I was just walking along and my head fell off. I still had control of my character and could walk up to my head, pick it up and then get the option to put my head back on at which point it returned to normalcy. If I hadn't been prepared for them I can imagine these things really screwing with my head. I'd heard all about them before though so it wasn't too bad.
I've also been roleplaying recently of course. Beginning of April saw the end of the Werewolf the Apocalypse game for the Cam. A good weekend national somewhere down near london produced a fantastic end to the chronicle. Very intense roleplay. It was very emotional and not the sucky ending that I thought it would be (no offence to the GMs meant by implying that I thought it was going to suck). I've not started any more cam characters now though so I am effetively not playing cam at the moment. I was going to start up a mage in the oxford mage game but the ST and DC resigned so I had to jump in and take over for the game and since nobody else wanted to run it long term I had the dubious honour of closing down the game. At least it got a final game though rather than just fading out. And I ran stuff and people liked it which continues to fuel this strange thing whereby people say I'm good at running games. :)
I also bought some shiny new exalted books recently. After hearing good things about the Fair folk book I bought it and what I read has been very good. And then "Exalted: the Alchemicals" came out and it is very shiny. I really need to run some more exalted. My planning is going roughly along the lines of when I finish the house move and will thus have more free time then I shall think about a game and order out for players. Not quite sure what I want to run yet though. I have lots of ideas running around my head now unfortunately. :)
Most recently the latest Oxford Society game has started. Wart and his team are doing a great job of running Horizon. I'm thoroughly enjoying my character based on a Final Fantasy-esque stereotype. I'd been thinking a lot about Cloud from FF7 while character genning as well as the comfortable familiarity of the relationships between family (bought home to me by the last part of Sandman's Preludes and Nocturnes when Death and Morpheus are talking) and general fantasy stereotypes. So what I came up with along with some others is a small group of family/very close family friends, my parents were once great adventurers too and... well, there are other players reading this so I won't say too much. However, I will say that I have a sword based on the Final fantasy vibe. I want to try to make Materia at some point in this game... :)
Thinking of the purple eyes in horizon though I recently bought myself some Purple contact lenses. I thought it would be cool as a RP prop and they are *very* cool. I looked around and couldn't find the colour that I wanted anywhere at first and specsaver pointed me at a small local optician (well, they have four branches spread out across the south of england but only four means local in some strange way). They were very helpdul and the guy there was very helpful in talking through the options but warned me that I might have to have them custom made the way they might for films. That would cost £80 per lens though. Eek! No. So after some consultation he came back and said it would cost £100 for custom coloured prescription lenses (no correction for astigmatism though which sucks). I ummed and ahed a bit but at that exact moment some external work came along and I considered this as fate and offset a large chunk of the cost of the lenses against that unexpected income. And so I got them. They took a bit longer than I would have liked but now they are here they do the job perfectly. I just need more excuses to wear them. Wearing them out clubbing is less worthwhile than I had hoped due to the low light levels meaning you can't see them properly. In a well lit room though they are freaky and cool. And although they don't correct my astigmatism I can still see pretty well in them. Well enough to drive certainly and well enough to roleplay in as long as I don't need to see anything in detail across the room. :)
I'm sure there are lots of other things that I've done but they are starting to slip into obscurity in my mind. If anybody wants to prod me into doing a write up of anything that I haven't covered in my journal that I've done then go for it and I'll try to write it up later.
And I'd try to say I won't leave it as long to the next proper update but I'm sure I will. :)