giefu

Happy Christmas eve, everybody! As usual my grandparents are visiting my family with all the attendant 'fun' that that entails, but I wanted to pop on here and wish you all a very merry Christmas and sort out a few items of business that fell by the wayside during workaggeddon.

1. Like many others, I have blown the dust of my old Dreamwidth account. I'm giefu over there- I'm already friends with rionaleonhart, and if you have an account, I'd love to see you over there too!

2. Community is awesome and I am late to the party as per usual. I mainlined at least two episodes a day for two weeks and have developed a crush on Abed, it's insane.

3. I finished the main quest on Skyrim and am still dragging Erik the Slayer around in lieu of actually marrying him (he's bugged, alas).

4. Tumblr has eaten my life. Send help.

I got a professional (namely my brother) in to deal with my lich problem in Skyrim- he defeated it in a matter of minutes, all the while deriding my 'skills' and boggling at the quantity of crap I'd been hoarding in my inventory. Maybe one day I'll *need* that potion of weak minor frenzy, brother! And then you'll be sorry! I am tremendously grateful to him for helping me out, though, and the lich dropped a sweet Doctor Doom mask that looks hilarious when worn with my character's usual outfit of leather armour and a big axe.

Anyway, this means that Skuld Wyrmsdottir is now the Arch-Mage and I've spent a few of my in-game hours clearing the room she was given of everything sellable and wasting that money on a really slow horse. Now I'm pursuing the main questline (hoping to get some better dragon shouts- 'calm animal' is for sissies) as well as doing some work for the Bard's College. I hope I can make my character sing at some point! That would be sweet.

Is anybody else getting the mammoth-humping glitch in their game? Whenever I see mammoths there's always one perched halfway up the backside of another. In the half-dawn of a Nordic winter I find it a quietly majestic sight.

I apologize for the current deluge of Skyrim! Soon I will be working and I will have to leave the land of the Nords behind for a while, so please bear with me until then :p

Dear Princess Celestia,





Dressing up is super boss, and next year I am totally going to be Luna.

Your very faithful student,

Twilight Sparkle.

More pictures on my tumblr.

p.s MCM Expo was so fun! I got one of my Wonder Woman comics signed by Gail Simone, I met some other comics writers and artists I admired, I ended up not seeing Adam Howden and Gideon Emery (combination of bad timing and refusing to pay for autographs) and everybody knew who I was and admired the sweatervest. It was amazing. I have completely lost my voice, and want to sleep for a week (and I threatened to barf on poor flying_girl73 on the train home- that's her as bunches!Applejack).

I guess I should tell you guys that I got my dissertation results yesterday! I had to call the office in Cardiff because the system for students who are at home isn't great (blargh) but I got my mark eventually! I got 64, which is a pass- I think it equates to about a 2:1 which is slightly above average.

I can't say I'm massively pleased with what I got: I worked really hard on my dissertation (don't need to tell you guys that!) and I don't really think that the mark reflects the amount of sheer effort I put in, but then I *did* write it on comic books, so maybe I sabotaged myself. :/ To put it in perspective, I got the same mark for my Tolkien essay that I handed in unedited (long story! It involves panic attacks and played out very like Lesson Zero). I'll have a better idea what went wrong when I get the marked version in the post. 

And hey, I'm bandit m.a now, which I guess is nice.

I totally forgot to post about the Doctor Who finale! Which should probably tell you my thoughts on it, I guess. In other words, I was underwhelmed. The fix was completely cheap, I didn't really understand why the Doctor had to marry River, and everything happened way too fast. At least everybody lived, I guess? Merlin was much more satisfying!

Real world wise, I've been applying to jobs left, right and centre and should hear back from 2 interviews I did tomorrow. One of them is something I really want: a job at a gift shop in an historic house. It's only part time and quite difficult to get to, but the people seem really friendly and it's in exactly the sector I want to work in (heritage). Unfortunately my parents don't seem to be so keen: they're more excited about the fact I got offered a 3 month internship in a digital recruitment company writing copy and doing digital things for them. I don't know. Maybe I'm being unambitious but it doesn't appeal to me that strongly at all. And of course I have the interview for this internship on Monday! It seems like a lot of things are happening really quickly and I'm not sure what to do.

Aaaanyway apart from that I've also been enjoying this Pony game. Warning: super addictive!

I went to the Eurogamer expo with flying_girl73 today! It was the first thing of this kind I'v been to and it was pretty fun! I got to try demos of Mass Effect 3, Uncharted 3 multiplayer (no story, boo), Rift for... some reason, Arkham City, Assassin's Creed: Revelations and a bunch of other stuff. I also won a keyring for knowing Mr. Freeze's real name and where Batman's parents were killed, which was both kind of nice and a crippling conformation of my nerdiness.

Mass Effect 3 was the demo that was available in America with no new stuff. I was pleased to see the krogan princess irl though, her design looks great (I didn't realise she was wearing a veil!). I also liked that they retained the different-guns-do-different-stuff thing, so I could switch up to deal with shields and armour. On a more embarassing note, it took me ten minutes to work out how to climb a ladder. Damn those Ceberus fiends and their complicated technology!

Assassin's Creed: Revelations was just the multiplayer, which is more or less the same as Brotherhood multiplayer but streamlined a bit more- choosing ability sets is easier, I found that bleding worked a little better, etc. It's also set in somehwere new (middle east?) and I really enjoyed seeing the new character models. The lady models all look super fun! I wonder if you could cosplay them.

Arkham City was also really fun. Playing as Catwoman was great, and I loved her capoeira-y fighting style. It looked very awesome and graceful, and quite different from Batman's. Batman himself is pretty much as he was in Arkham Asylum! However it looks like he has some new gadgets (got to use a radio scanner) so that'll be fun. There's also more crime scene-y elements (the demo ended with trying to work out a bullet trajectory). They redacted the impirtant plot details during cutscenes, which got kind of confusing!

Uncharted 3 multiplayer was super hard because I am a complete dweeb at that kind of thing, but at least it was pretty!

(I also had a guy hit on me while I was playing Mass Effect 3, which was... interesting.)

I leave you with the only celebrity I met:

So, things I have done recently:

1. Signed on to recieve Jobseeker's Allowance, which was made a billion times more complicated than it needed to be by the byzantine online system. I get it, government, you don't want to give me money, please try not to make the fact quite so depressingly obvious.

2. Reached A Storm of Swords, part 2 in my epic A Song of Ice and Fire readathon. I have a huge crush on both Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen, which I suspect might become awkward in later books.

3. Traded in La Noire (review: Cole Phelps is an annoying little pill) for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood! I am the world's worst assassin (blundering off rooftops is a speciality) but I am having a ball. Ezio remains devastatingly handsome, and if I squint in the Desmond bits it's a bit like playing Uncharted! Also in combat you can kick people in the nuts, which because I am twelve is the most amusing thing ever.

4. Doctor Who is... eeh. I'm enjoying th Adventures in Rory Punching Things bits, and next week's episode looks FANTASTIC. Older Amy with a sword! YES.

5. Worked on various fandomy things (spicyshimmy, check your spam filter!). As AUs go, which one would you guys rather? More Western DA2 or pulp adventure DA2?

So, I didn't get the job. Boo. It was for a Saturday position at my local library, and it would have made my life a hell of a lot easier while I look for other work, but honestly I think I was wildly overqualified (I had the same job five years ago in secondary school) and they probably wanted someone who wouldn't also be looking for a better job. It still sucks, especially because I'm feeling so stressed and unhappy about my Master's work (I haven't slept properly all week), but that's the way it goes. I'll start looking for stuff in earnest in September anyway.

(Honestly, to snap out of it all I have to do is read about the riots. I'm stupendously lucky to have so much stuff)

In better news, flying_girl73 lent me her copy of Portal 2 before she left for Edinburgh! It's really really fun, I've been blasting through the single player campaign over the weekend and am just about to finish it. I think that it's almost better than the original- especially the writing. Sadly I don't have anybody to play co-op with ): Something for when she comes back, I think!

Of course the DDOS attacks ease off just as I'm about to go on holiday :p See you all in a week! I kind of need this break tbh, I can't seem to shake this cold and I want the extra time to try and get into A Game Of Thrones, which I brought to take on holiday with me!

I leave you with a sample of dialogue from Hudson's Legacy playthrough, which was just so him that it made me snort with happy, surprised laughter:

'He (Malcolm Hawke) lives on through what he taught us. And these weird magical contraptions.'

(It's really bad, Hudson is basically my favourite of my Hawkes and he's a sarcastic asshole with ridiculous hair)

Pink eye is more or less gone!


Now I have a cold.

DAMMIT.