MMXI Week 10–Grand Promises

Okay, I did originally promise something a little special, but due to lack of time (and energy) this will be postponed. What I am going to post instead is a small progress report on my goals and a brief summary of my week (well, mainly weekend).

First up, goals progress:

1) Blog once a week, minimum – Well, kind of obvious here. Ignoring late posts, I am managing to put up one entry per week. Only time will tell if I can keep it up for the whole 52

2) Get a job in Birmingham or Wolverhampton by April – this one has been pushed back until May/June due to going to Hong Kong, but I’ve also expanded it include a job in Guildford, as being closer to Viv would be nice.

3) Get Money for Hong Kong – Done and done!

4) Reach a Gamerscore of 25,000 – Not doing too badly, almost at 21k thanks to dead space. Got Bulletstorm, Portal 2, Mortal Kombat and Mass Effect 3 at the very least to help me achieve this.

5) Complete an Entire Dungeons and Dragons Campaign – This weekend I will be conducting the opening chapter of a small, but complete, d&d campaign. This won’t quite be of the same scope of my current campaign, but I hope it will be none the less fun for my players (many of which are newcomers)

6) Play more Risk and Magic: The Gathering – I’m doing very well at this, having played several games of both, even having a magic build off with Viv. Her Vampire deck thoroughly booted my Chandra deck.

7) Work on a Video Game Project – This one has sadly gone on the back burner for a while now. I have been working on general art work, which can contribute to my portfolio, so not completely frozen.

8) Learn Cantonese – No, not happening, let us not speak of this failure

9) Improve my Blog Design – Again, nothing much really happening on this front. I’m getting by with the current design, but need to work on something more personal.

10) Buy more Books – I haven’t got anything new since Viv got me the first two Discworld books, but I most certainly intend to order the last two Scott Pilgrims very soon, along with perhaps the third discworld book.

Not doing too badly me thinks, perhaps rated at about 60% progress.

As for last week, work was the usual repetition, but the weekend was amazing. I’ll give you a brief breakdown:

Friday: Got train from Bicester to Guildford, arriving late that night. After a change of plans, me and Viv ordered pizza, opened my two Magic the Gathering deck builders toolkits (more on this over at the D Twenty eventually) and watched some stuff on her new TV that I had bought her.

Saturday: After a nice lie in, we headed off into town to get some cables and food for pancakes at some point. We also had milkshakes from shakeaway. Viv had a Dave with cream and I had a Ben with nuttella. Later that day, we went to the cinema to see Battle: Los Angeles (which was very good) and then had take away (again, chicken and chips this time)

Sunday: Woke up fairly early (before 10am) and decided that we would make the pancakes. We used an amazing recipe from the Metro and served them with nuttella, blueberries, strawberries, powdered sugar and butter. There were AMAZING!
Before I caught the train home, we went for dinner at Nando’s, which was gorgeous as usual.

The only down side was my Reading-Oxford train being 10 mintutes late, so I missed the last train to Bicester. Luckily, my brother came and rescued me from Oxford station.

All in all, an amazing weekend. I’ve got to post a few more entries this week covering some magic stuff, time permitting.

MMXI Week 7–Valentines Weekend

The valentines weekend began late Friday night, when I presented Viv with a choice of two of her presents from a selection of three. The selection was two of her books and the Magic The Gathering Phyrexian Poison deck I had bought her. Much to my pleasure, she chose one book and the deck, the latter of which she was very surprised at. It was her first deck of Magic cards and she liked the selection and was happy to have a deck all of her own. I hadn’t bought myself a corresponding new deck, so I tried my luck using one of the older decks I’d brought with me. Needless to say I was trounced by Vivs plethora of poisonous creatures. Poison is an evil ability in magic that I have yet to find an effective counter to. After getting my ass handed to me and then watching a film, we decided to get some sleep as we were both quite tired, Viv more so as she had been at work.

So, Saturday morning, me and Viv rose after a reasonable lie in (until about 9am, when you get up at 6am everyday, 9 is a veritable luxury) and set about the important task of having a thoroughly awesome valentines day. We started by swapping gifts, starting with me giving Viv the remaining book and earrings. She loved the earrings especially as she has developed somewhat of an obsession since getting her ears pierced. But the apex of her present pyramid was contained within this box:

Oooh, shiny

For as long as I could remember, Viv had been wanting a bottle of Diesel Fuel for Life Unlimited. So imagine how happy I was when i found a gift set containing a bottle of said perfume and some skin lotion? She absolutely loved it and promptly spritzed herself. I even got a little something out it in the form of a tester of Fuel for Life for men. It was quite a nice fragrance that I could see myself wearing in the future.
Here’s the sum of what I got Viv this year:

Not pictured are the earrings, which I believe Viv was wearing at the time.

But what, you may be asking, did I get? Well, I’m so glad you asked imaginary person. Viv knows me all too well and got me three things I’ve been dying for for a long time now.

Risk 2210 AD, The Light Fantastic and The Colour of Magic

The books were the new cover prints of the first two discworld books, starting my collection proper. But the masterpiece was a copy of the out of print board game Risk 2210 AD. This futuristic adaptation of Risk was first published ten years ago and is very hard to come by, but Viv found me a new, sealed copy and I couldn’t have been happier!

Viv then suggested that we wander into town to check out a comic book store a friend had mentioned. Unfortunately this turned out to just be a Games Workshop, but the trip wasn’t a complete waste, as I managed to pick up Myr of Mirrodin intro deck, to complement and compete against Vivs Scars of Mirrodin deck. I was very excited to try out my new deck, but we had more important things to attend to, namely our 8pm reservation at TGI Fridays! Om nom nom!

As you can see, Viv looked absolutely amazing for the meal;

And the meal looked almost as good!

Just the starter! Soooo good!

Proof of how amazing the meal was lies in the size of Vivs ‘food baby’

Thoroughly sated, we decided to change into our comfiest of jammies and break in my copy of Risk 2210 AD.

First I will wipe out the browns, then the reds will fall

It was a damn fun game, I was so happy that Viv got it for me. I am planning to do a full review over on The D Twenty asap.
I do think my prior knowledge of the rules helped me win the game, but it was still very enjoyable for both me and Viv. The two player rules worked really well, and invading the moon was a lot of fun! Afterwards, we decided to let the urge to hibernate after eating so much take over and crawled off to bed. Snoooore!

Sunday was a very quite lie in kind of day, not doing much except just enjoying not having to do anything. We played another game of Magic the Gathering and in the evening, we ordered pizza and watched Community.

Mozzarella makes for amazing nachos!

That marked the end of our valentines weekend, but we still had loads of time together over the coming week. I couldn’t say this was the best Valentines I’ve had, as every one I spend with Viv is amazing! But it definitely was a weekend I will treasure!

Being Lazy Online

How’s this for being lazy, thanks to inspiration from Mr. Charles, I now don’t even have to fire up internet explorer (oh noes, I don’t use open source firefox/chrome/whatever) in order to blog. I like the thought of this, it’s somewhat pleasant to blog from my computer rather than a webpage. I have no idea why, kinda irrational.

Ooh boy do I have work to do. This weekend I’m going to dedicated Saturday to working on my edu-game, and Sunday will be the day of essays. The joy! I should be more motivated at least to do my edu-game seeing as there’s a £200 to £300 prize in it for me, which I do have plans for, should I win. I can’t give too much away, but should I win, I’ll take it as fate that I should make said expensive and quite significant purchase. Needless to say, I do want to win, so I’m gonna give it my best.

Right now, I’m still listening to copious amounts of Blue October. I don’t know what it is about their music, but it really moves me. I’m giving a lot of play time to Sound of Bringing Heaven Down, with such great lines as “I wanna show you how fascinating kissing is when Earth collides with all the space in-between” and “make love like time and space is ending”, paired with a really moving guitar/drum rhythm, it’s just a wonderfully positive to song to listen to.

I’m such an emo bastard, lol. When I was visiting my girlfriend Viv, I asked her to spray one of my t-shirts with her perfume. Now, this isn’t because I secretly prefer wearing it to say lynx. Instead, I now have said t-shirt inside my pillow case, so now whenever I go to sleep, I can smell Viv as if she’s next to me. It’s the little things like that that make the long distance thing work. That and a pretty much unlimited phone plan on both our parts. And most importantly, being so madly in love ^_^

Now, in my incredibly artistic and intellectual (lol) style, I’m going to wander aimlessly onto another topic altogether. I was having one of my interesting meanders through my own consciousness last night and had a thought. Would the world be a better place without organised religion? I’m not talking no religion, just no organised religion. No churches, no temples, no synagogues or mosques. Just people worshipping privately and with friends, not being told how to worship. Think about, no one idea could ever seize hold because if people didn’t like it, they’d ignore it. You may still get fanaticism, but you get that with cults anyway. I think if everyone worshipped personally and not as part of some herded group, things would be a lot better. That’s just my opinion, feel free to comment (respectfully) about what you think.

It’s getting late now and I should probably think about sleep. After thinking about it, I should probably do some. Got a few GeekPosts and GamerPosts to come, looking at this week in GeekTV and the Left4Dead 2 demo.

Remember kiddies, you should never accept candy from strangers, unless it’s REALLY good candy.