So.. erm.. first thing's first, an apology. It's been nearly a month since the last post (I've had a few people prod me about this blog, which is good), somehow my month filled up ludicrously, to the point where I've had only a couple of free afternoons in the last few weeks, and they've tended to be taken up by collapsing in a chair and occasionally going "argh". Likewise spare time on weekends tends to be taken up by cleaning, shopping, groceries, washing, and all those fun domestic things that need to be maintained.
Turns out that having regularly scheduled events every Monday, Tuesday & Friday evening, and every second Thursday evening, kinda fills up your weeks...
So, plan is to slowly write this entry bit by bit when I get a spare few minutes at a time, and hope to have it up by tomorrow night (ie, have more than one post in July). So if this seems a little disjointed at times, or the writing style shifts a few times, that's why :)
So.. what's been happening. Erm.. let me check my calendar so I don't forget anything (I probably will anyway, but hey, I can try).
Trivia: A group of us (ten I believe in the end) went along to a Trivia night run by the Melbourne Browncoats (a Serenity/Firefly fan group).
That was a very large pile of fun, and the questions were actually varied enough that everyone on our table got the opportunity to be the 'expert' for at least part of a round, which very rarely happens. We ended up coming second, with one or two points between first and second place, which was awesome :D
There was, however, one thing that they.. didn't really think through...
They had one of those "Count the number of Easter eggs in this jar and you win it" things going. Then partway through the knight they announced that for an extra dollar, they'd tell you if the true amount was higher or lower than your guess.
Queue me and one of the others looking at each other, and him announcing that a standard binary number search will only require seven or eight guesses to get the answer..
So we wander up there and start doing a standard binary search:
Aside note: Here's what I mean by Binary Search. Say you've got to guess a number between one and fifty, a binary search is where you just keep splitting the difference. eg:
Number between 1 & 50, so you start by guessing 25
If it's higher, it's between 25 & 50, so you split the difference again, 37
If it's lower, it's between 25 & 37, again, split the difference and guess 31
Then you just keep that up until you're done. Theoretically any number can be found within seven or eight guesses.
So, we start doing that, the guy running it quickly realises we're up to something and declares that there is now a limit of one guess per person. So I grab the rest of the team, we all line up and keep it going. We're two numbers away from the exact guess when he declares that our team is banned from making more guesses for two rounds.
We got there in the end (three people ended up with the correct guess, so the eggs were split). Worth it just for the look on the organiser's faces :)
Definitely a fun way to spend a Saturday night.
Date: I won't go much into details or specifics, but I had a date on the Tursday night after trivia. It was an.. interesting experience. Believe it or not I'd never actually been on a 'date' before, typically having gotten together with people that I already knew, in rather different circumstances, so the whole "go somewhere, meet the person, see if you're interested in a relationship" thing was just.. bizarre.
Still, it was a fun night (in possibly the most cliche thing possible, we went to a movie. The Spiderman remake to be precise. Actually a surprisingly decent movie), we shall see what comes of it once her workload settles down and a second date can be organised.
Brave: Saturday midday a group of us went to see Brave, the new Pixar animated movie. Absolutely awesome! The usual excellent animation expected from Pixar, actual Scottish (and one 'really good at faking it') voice actors, gorgeous scenery that looks exactly like parts of England and Scotlant (I swear at one point they might as well have been mapping the scrubland around Glastonbury Tor) and an excellent story.
Actually, the story deserves a bit extra mention, There are going to be some spoilers here, so just skip to the next section if you don't want to be spoiled (in which case, get out and see the movie ASAP! It's really worth it).
Now, I'm sure we're all aware of the whole "Child/Teenager running away from parental induced responsibility X" type stories (arranged marriages being rather common), typically resulting in a "I'm sorry Son/Daughter, we were wrong, you can decide for yourself/be yourself/do what you want" kind of resolution.
Brave is the first movie I've ever seen where running away from your unwanted responsibility absolutely screwballs everything around you and has repercussions, and in the end the result is *compromising* with family and tradition, rather than breaking it. I know that seems silly, since that's what happens with most arguments etc, but it's pretty rare for a movie to actually show that.
Similarly, I'm sure we're by now familiar with the "Girl who is kickass at all the traditionally 'masculine' things like fighting and drinking, kicks the men's rears at everything, and in general shows that girls can be badass too" type of movie/book/story.
Once again, we have a movie where compromise actually exists. Yes, our plucky princess protagonist (there had to be alliteration somewhere, right?) is a fantastic archer, climber and horse-rider, and an at least proficient swordfighter, but unlike most "badass female warrior" archetypes she actually takes part in the feminine things as well (and climbing a rock pillar in a dress is far more impressive than doing it in pants).
Dear gods, we have a vaguely balanced character who learns from their mistakes and comes up with a compromise over the whole movie-inducing difficulties.
This kind of thing should not be rare enough in a movie to warrant special notice!! It's a pretty sad state of movie affairs when something so simple is deserving of high praise.
Lauren's party: Moving on from the movie, later that day was Lauren's birthday party, costume theme of "Video Game Characters". As always her parties tend to be awesome fun, with ludicrous amounts of sugar being consumed, and laughing at my hilariously inept attempts at singing along with the "Singstar" game (hrm. May need singing lessons if I don't want to sound quite so dodgy, and to actually be able to hold a note).
There was also a game of Ghost Stories.... we lost :(
Swordcraft Quest: And then last weekend was Swordcraft Quest! I've mentioned Swordcraft before, it's the 'medieval paintball' thing where you run around hitting people with foam latex swords and such.
Quest is a camping event, Friday night, Saturday night and part of Sunday that was held up at Brittania Park (a guides/scout camp out in woop woop), with much in-character shenanigans, laughing, killing, belting people with weapons and all round good old fashioned fun.
My orange-shell fire cakes went over a treat with my warband (even if it did take one of them an hour and a half to eat his orange, and I had to keep running after him and threatening him with a stick if he didn't eat his orange), and the "dump a liter of cake mix into a foil shell and throw it in the fire" idea didn't actually work too badly.
All in all tonnes of fun was had, next to no sleep was had, and dear god was I grateful for my shower and bed when I got home!
The Bad: Well, that's the list of events and fun things, so I figure I should also mention the less fun things at the moment. It would appear that my desk job has finally caught up with me and is doing my back in. I pulled a few muscles in my neck/leg/arm a month or so ago, and trying to relieve strain on them caused muscle pains in my lower back, which due to the desk job just isn't coming good.
I've been to the physio a couple of times, and he's given me a bunch of exercises to do during the day to try and loosen up my back (apparently my back & neck muscles are stupidly tight), but in the meantime I just have to put up with twinges and soreness when I move or lean :(
Fingers crossed this gets cleared up soon, I really don't like having a sore back!
Milestones: There's a few good things here :)
1) I rather think Swordcraft Quest can be considered something I haven't done before, so awesome work there
2) Weight update! I was 81.5kg with a 40" waist when I started this blog. I'm now 78kg and 38" waist! Weight and size and slowly coming down again! Woohoo!
Turns out that having regularly scheduled events every Monday, Tuesday & Friday evening, and every second Thursday evening, kinda fills up your weeks...
So, plan is to slowly write this entry bit by bit when I get a spare few minutes at a time, and hope to have it up by tomorrow night (ie, have more than one post in July). So if this seems a little disjointed at times, or the writing style shifts a few times, that's why :)
So.. what's been happening. Erm.. let me check my calendar so I don't forget anything (I probably will anyway, but hey, I can try).
Trivia: A group of us (ten I believe in the end) went along to a Trivia night run by the Melbourne Browncoats (a Serenity/Firefly fan group).
That was a very large pile of fun, and the questions were actually varied enough that everyone on our table got the opportunity to be the 'expert' for at least part of a round, which very rarely happens. We ended up coming second, with one or two points between first and second place, which was awesome :D
There was, however, one thing that they.. didn't really think through...
They had one of those "Count the number of Easter eggs in this jar and you win it" things going. Then partway through the knight they announced that for an extra dollar, they'd tell you if the true amount was higher or lower than your guess.
Queue me and one of the others looking at each other, and him announcing that a standard binary number search will only require seven or eight guesses to get the answer..
So we wander up there and start doing a standard binary search:
Aside note: Here's what I mean by Binary Search. Say you've got to guess a number between one and fifty, a binary search is where you just keep splitting the difference. eg:
Number between 1 & 50, so you start by guessing 25
If it's higher, it's between 25 & 50, so you split the difference again, 37
If it's lower, it's between 25 & 37, again, split the difference and guess 31
Then you just keep that up until you're done. Theoretically any number can be found within seven or eight guesses.
So, we start doing that, the guy running it quickly realises we're up to something and declares that there is now a limit of one guess per person. So I grab the rest of the team, we all line up and keep it going. We're two numbers away from the exact guess when he declares that our team is banned from making more guesses for two rounds.
We got there in the end (three people ended up with the correct guess, so the eggs were split). Worth it just for the look on the organiser's faces :)
Definitely a fun way to spend a Saturday night.
Date: I won't go much into details or specifics, but I had a date on the Tursday night after trivia. It was an.. interesting experience. Believe it or not I'd never actually been on a 'date' before, typically having gotten together with people that I already knew, in rather different circumstances, so the whole "go somewhere, meet the person, see if you're interested in a relationship" thing was just.. bizarre.
Still, it was a fun night (in possibly the most cliche thing possible, we went to a movie. The Spiderman remake to be precise. Actually a surprisingly decent movie), we shall see what comes of it once her workload settles down and a second date can be organised.
Brave: Saturday midday a group of us went to see Brave, the new Pixar animated movie. Absolutely awesome! The usual excellent animation expected from Pixar, actual Scottish (and one 'really good at faking it') voice actors, gorgeous scenery that looks exactly like parts of England and Scotlant (I swear at one point they might as well have been mapping the scrubland around Glastonbury Tor) and an excellent story.
Actually, the story deserves a bit extra mention, There are going to be some spoilers here, so just skip to the next section if you don't want to be spoiled (in which case, get out and see the movie ASAP! It's really worth it).
Now, I'm sure we're all aware of the whole "Child/Teenager running away from parental induced responsibility X" type stories (arranged marriages being rather common), typically resulting in a "I'm sorry Son/Daughter, we were wrong, you can decide for yourself/be yourself/do what you want" kind of resolution.
Brave is the first movie I've ever seen where running away from your unwanted responsibility absolutely screwballs everything around you and has repercussions, and in the end the result is *compromising* with family and tradition, rather than breaking it. I know that seems silly, since that's what happens with most arguments etc, but it's pretty rare for a movie to actually show that.
Similarly, I'm sure we're by now familiar with the "Girl who is kickass at all the traditionally 'masculine' things like fighting and drinking, kicks the men's rears at everything, and in general shows that girls can be badass too" type of movie/book/story.
Once again, we have a movie where compromise actually exists. Yes, our plucky princess protagonist (there had to be alliteration somewhere, right?) is a fantastic archer, climber and horse-rider, and an at least proficient swordfighter, but unlike most "badass female warrior" archetypes she actually takes part in the feminine things as well (and climbing a rock pillar in a dress is far more impressive than doing it in pants).
Dear gods, we have a vaguely balanced character who learns from their mistakes and comes up with a compromise over the whole movie-inducing difficulties.
This kind of thing should not be rare enough in a movie to warrant special notice!! It's a pretty sad state of movie affairs when something so simple is deserving of high praise.
Here's my Minsc costume (standing between Link and a Lemming), yes, the hamster is part of the costume.
Swordcraft Quest: And then last weekend was Swordcraft Quest! I've mentioned Swordcraft before, it's the 'medieval paintball' thing where you run around hitting people with foam latex swords and such.
Quest is a camping event, Friday night, Saturday night and part of Sunday that was held up at Brittania Park (a guides/scout camp out in woop woop), with much in-character shenanigans, laughing, killing, belting people with weapons and all round good old fashioned fun.
My orange-shell fire cakes went over a treat with my warband (even if it did take one of them an hour and a half to eat his orange, and I had to keep running after him and threatening him with a stick if he didn't eat his orange), and the "dump a liter of cake mix into a foil shell and throw it in the fire" idea didn't actually work too badly.
All in all tonnes of fun was had, next to no sleep was had, and dear god was I grateful for my shower and bed when I got home!
The Bad: Well, that's the list of events and fun things, so I figure I should also mention the less fun things at the moment. It would appear that my desk job has finally caught up with me and is doing my back in. I pulled a few muscles in my neck/leg/arm a month or so ago, and trying to relieve strain on them caused muscle pains in my lower back, which due to the desk job just isn't coming good.
I've been to the physio a couple of times, and he's given me a bunch of exercises to do during the day to try and loosen up my back (apparently my back & neck muscles are stupidly tight), but in the meantime I just have to put up with twinges and soreness when I move or lean :(
Fingers crossed this gets cleared up soon, I really don't like having a sore back!
Milestones: There's a few good things here :)
1) I rather think Swordcraft Quest can be considered something I haven't done before, so awesome work there
2) Weight update! I was 81.5kg with a 40" waist when I started this blog. I'm now 78kg and 38" waist! Weight and size and slowly coming down again! Woohoo!
