Monday, October 24, 2005

What a wonderful world...

It seems as though all I've been doing this week was watching the blue squares slowly pile up in Azureus and check on DeviantART, Livejournal, Hotmail, MSN Messenger and eBay on a regular basis while pumping Nightwish into my system at the same time. Having to clean my rat's cage out without any assistance from my younger sister didn't help, where I destoyed a pair of my pyjama pants by accident on the job. She wasn't willing to help even on her half day off, or the weekend.

Then I broke my headphones. Should I get music withdrawal, I'd either have to listen publically or borrow my sister's MP3 player plugphones. Both are problematic - my speakers are crap and crackle badly when touched, not to mention that when others are in the house they tell me to turn it down all the time. My older sister and dad are hypocrites, they play their music up really loud and I can't complain - she thinks everything I listen to is shit and has some 'epileptic fit' whenever she hears stuff like 'Pretty Green Eyes'. I think just about the same about the weird crap she listens to, except I don't go all shitty. As for the plugphones, they're too short.

Jesus Christ, it's lunch hour already and I couldn't be arsed to have breakfast, so I'm having both breakfast cereal and a sandwich. Because I'm a fat pig of carbohydrates.

Thankfully at the end of the week I had a little creativity going on. My younger sister recently aquired an MSN Messenger account and has been using it during the late evening, giving me a chance to do some drawing. I've produced for pieces of lineart which I am now colouring, and these will be submitted to my DeviantART gallery as soon as I can.

Another 'amazing' thing I did this weekend was join the family for Sunday dinner for once. This is something I barely ever did, except for Christmas and at the restaurants, and for some strange reason I didn't have a problem with anything but my cousin's 5 month old son, who wouldn't stop crying simply because he wanted his mother to hold him. I much enjoyed my vegetarian 'chicken dipper' pieces and sweetcorn, which I'd usually be eating next to my computer.

What I've been consumed with lately is this BBC New Animation scheme. The end of October is drawing near and I've been hoping and worrying at the same time about what it's going to bring. If I become a finalist, I'd be very happy, seeing as Perry the Puff is the first movie I ever animated. But if I don't, it'll be such a letdown after the hard work, tension and sacrifices I had to go through.

But whatever happens, I've gained experience, I did my best, and that's what matters the most.

Hope to get the artworks done, get a new pair of headphones and learn to take care of myself a bit more in this new week.

Until next time, take care and cheerio!

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Over the hills and far away...

It seems as though life doesn't want to get too exciting for me at the moment.

All that's happened is that is that one of those little dog statues I got from eBay - the Jack Russell - came through to us on Thursday. My mum was very pleased with her new addition to her huge dog collection, but we're still waiting for the Dalmation. On Saturday my James Pond fabric transfer came, all I need for that now is to look for a time to get it ironed on a t-shirt...I don't know how to iron though, that's the thing.

My sister also got me to buy a Rude Dog t-shirt from eBay, she's payed for it with a cheque and we should be getting it very soon.

On Monday I bought a copy of a Nightwish album called 'Angels Fall First' for £8.99, and Count Duckula on DVD. Sadly I only like about 4 songs from that album, including the bonus track 'Return to the Sea', the rest were a bit much for me. That's the huge trouble with albums, you end up only buying them for at least one song and not liking many of the others. I've been meaning to try and get Nightwish's other album 'Oceanborn', but I can't find that one anywhere, neither can I find the Within Temptation album 'Mother Earth'. Wish I could pay to download music legally...

Speaking of downloading, I managed to catch an episode of Invader Zim from Limewire. I did so because I was annoyed with the amount of people on DeviantART who just can't seem to stop going on about how much a godsent the cartoon is. I certain don't think so. From the episode I saw - 'the Nightmare Begins' - I didn't find it as bad as I thought it would be, in fact, I thought it was quite good, but it certainly wasn't brilliant. The word 'doom' was overused, and it had poxy school scenes, which I don't like anymore.

I also caught two episodes of Super Mario Bros 3 cartoon through a torrent, one of them I remember seeing part of it on POP. I did have an episode called 'Reign Storm' on a videotape somewhere, but I lost it apparently. There's a number of reasons why for this cartoon and Sonic SatAM I'd rather use P2P (and possibly get in trouble) that watch it on POP.

  • This POP channel is a Sky only children's channel that is controlled by GMTV (part of ITV). At various points a animated green dragon appears - he was originally called 'Tricky' and was used in a Saturday morning TV show of the same name that dates back to 1997. This was a live broadcast, meaning that he was animated by special software while a voice actor spoke, making it a 'live realtime animation'. The same kind of thing is widely used by Cartoon Network. I have a rip of the original TV show to prove it. The POP version was renamed to 'Rorry', and a new voice actor was used to make prerecorded animations.
  • It started in 2003 with very few programmes. One of them was a dreadful cartoon about vikings. As the channel stayed on air, more cartoons were added to the schedule, including Tube Mice (a very poor cartoon that looks like it was animated by preschool children), the Raggydolls (fair cartoon from the 80's about ragdolls), White Fang, and eventually in 2004, Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons. Most recently in year the 'Snorks' was aired.
  • Super Mario's cartoons aired were the ones based on 'Super Mario Bros 3' and Super Mario World, while Sonic's were 'Adventures of Sonic' - the one where Robotnik was voiced by the late Long John Bauldry - and Sonic SatAM, the one which was set in a futuristic world.
  • When they were first aired on this channel, they were shown 3 times a day. However, more recently they are now being shown only once or twice a day, at very ridiculous times (for me at least), because during the day they play some really rubbish cartoons, such as a remake of 'the Archies', 'Cyberchase' and 'Wheel Squad', as well as a two-hour slot of pop music videos...really bad ones.
  • And the real reason why I'd rather P2P these Sonic and Mario cartoons is because...being the cheapass channel POP is, they have no synopsis of each episode, meaning that you can't tell which Sonic and Mario series is going to be played. At the moment they're playing Adventures of Sonic, a cartoon I now really hate for its sillyness.
So there, POP sucks for many reasons other that Sonic and Mario.

Last night was a little more eventful. My grandad was celebrating his birthday round his neighbour's house (who's also my nan's sister I think), and we had to pop in there and say hello and gobble up all their party food. I ate very little other than cucumber, eggs and cake since everything else was meat...they had huge sardines... I had to go in their bathroom to wash my hands from some chocolate cream...wow, their bathroom kicks ass...lovely curtains that look like curtains! To make things a little better, they had 2 pianos, and they let me use one of them. It was so cool, even though the old guys that were there were doing karaoke.

Then I was told that I could stay in my nan's house, on my own. While there, I watched the X Factor (that Chico bloke sucked so much ass) and kept stepping out into the garden to look at the moon. After X Factor finished I had a little nap before it was time to go home. On the way home we stopped for some McDonalds and I carried on torrenting.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

The Good, the Bad and the Yucky

I've had a mix of good and bad times in this weekend:

The Good
  • I have now seen every single episode of the first three seasons of SpongeBob SquarePants, excluding a bonus episode called 'Shanganaied'. The episode that made this complete was 'Christmas Who?', which I believe was never aired over here, but was released on a compilation DVD. It wasn't as brilliant as I hoped it would be, but it did have some funny bits, like when that puppet bird ate all the cookie dough.
  • I went to a boot sale this morning, and came home with a Count Duckula plush. I should have got the Terrance and Phillip (from South Park) plushes as well, damn me. I could have had a lot of fun imitating their fart jokes.
  • A friend on MSN showed me this video of the moment in Catchphrase where everyone mistook Mr Chip's swinging cane for a penis...that had made my Friday night! (If you can't get this to work, try watching it on Mucho Sucko).

The Bad
  • I caught a cold from my sisters late this week, and as a result I had a lot of trouble getting myself to sleep. I had some pretty bad discomfort in my nose on Friday night, that somehow eased if it was filled up with mucus. Thankfully, although I still have a little trace of it left, I'm feeling a lot better now. My poor sister however, has it worse. She works in a very smoky enviroment (she doesn't smoke herself), which I think is why she's got a very course cough. It must feel dreadful. She's OK otherwise. This cold I have isn't as bad as others I've had when I was younger.
  • This morning, after a lot of the usual tossing and turning, my dad turned his TV on. You see, he does this every single night, all night for as long as I can remember, and the noise from it drives me insane! That morning, I got so annoyed, I got up and went downstairs. My mum came down shortly and saw me sulking in the kicthen. She says that I've overreacted and blames my sleepless nights on my excessive computer usage. I tried to convince her that my dad does indeed play a part of my sleeping problems, long before I even started playing videogames. I'm going to take her advice and log off the computer at 9.00PM tonight, wind down for an hour, then go to bed, and see if it really is computers that are making me insomnic.
The Nasty
  • When I got home from the boot sale I was about to give my rat some of his food...but as I was to go about picking out the alfalfa pellets, sunflower seeds and peanuts (rats don't seem to like those pellets, and the latter two I pick out because they're bad for rats), I found a maggot among a handful of the mix! I screamed so damn loud, and threw the half empty bag away, meaning that I now had to give my rat a bowl full of fruit and cereal. He's such a greedy pig, after about ten minutes of placing the fresh food in his cage, it was all gone!
Let's pretend you never heard that ;P

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Joys of eBaying

One night, my dad decided to get me to look up some Beswick dog statues on eBay, which my mum obsessivly collects. We decided to go for a 'Dalmation' dog, and by the time it was in its last few minutes, other people were bidding like crazy for it. I managed to win it fortunately, after about 13 bids, and after a few emails my mum sent the cheque over (my parents don't like the idea of Paypal, so they have to send cheques over.

This here is the first dog I won.

Sweet, isn't it? My mum has a whole cupboard of dogs in the front room. Thing is though the bid went up to £26.50, and including postage and packaging, my dad had to pay £31 for it in total.

And just about half hour ago, I won this dog as well.

I've yet to get this one paid for, the price didn't shoot up as much as that other dog and it's going to cost us £8.50 - I don't know the full amount yet.

Oh yes, then there's this I've bid for myself, I don't think I could ever find any of that other art around on the Internet...I might as well, it was only 99p to start with, and I add just a penny to the top bid! And still, to have James Pond on a T-Shirt would be SO cool!

It'd be so nice if there were more to James Pond things on eBay than just the videogames.