Roath will be happy days for me, I think!

Okay, I suppose I deserve a slap on the wrist. Not only have I not been doing anything on the book designs front in the past few weeks, I have also not been doing much in the way of Uni work either, and my 365 page a day project has been neglected for... I'd say around a month. I am a bad, bad girl.

But wait! I have not been doing nothing!

I've been heading out to Cardiff a lot lately, first to find and view and choose a house to live with some friends. There are eight of us, six of which will still be in Uni next year, but we have split up into two groups of four for the purposes of house-finding. I'm going to be living with Claire, Dave and Todd, who I can affectionately refer to as The French Actress, The Dark Dove and The Wizard Rockstar... Really need to come up with some good names for the other four guys. I'm also not sure what nickname I would have, although I've been told by the DarkDove that if I were a Pokemon I might be a Persian, and that the French word for cat is pronounced the same way as the first half of my name. Perhaps I'm The Petit Chat?

Almost us: This image drawn by The Wizard Rockstar includes members who won't be part of the Cardiff crew, and is missing out a couple of people...

We've all managed to find houses and flats in Roath, literally a couple of blocks away from each other, which is fantastic. We won't have a garden in the flat my half will live in, so I was looking up allotments in Cardiff and found some cool things going on.

Then I found out all about the Roath Market, and the Craft Market too, as well as an apparently abundant craft culture in Roath [see here too]. Needless to say, I am now even more excited about the first post-Uni year of my life than I was before!! And unfortunately more distracted from my current Uni coursework....

Come now Petit Chat, don't get too ahead of yourself!

Dissertation: It's Christmas Eve...

... And I'm attempting to work on my Dissertation.

What I seem to be having the most trouble with - just like last time - is choosing what to focus on and write about. I don't have anything in particular to do with games that is deeply and academically interesting me in a positive way at the moment. Instead, the thoughts that are weighing most heavily in my mind are:

1. Oh, this dissertation malarky is hard.
2. What am I going to do for a living next year after Uni?
3. [And everything else I wouldn't be thinking if I were a robot, including "I'm hungry and my feet are cold"]

The result is that I'm spending even more time rejecting the games design scene, probably due to a lack of confidence in myself to succeed, and am instead focusing on things that are less difficult for me... like binding books. When I stand back from how I feel, I can see that some things aren't that hard to do - I can do them, and the only reason I haven't done them is not because I can't but because I've talked my mind out of wanting to do them. It's a bit of actual cognitive dissonance in action.

This blog is a prime example. I used to write lots of stuff. Sure, they weren't particularly academic posts, but they were words and they were posted often. The last post on this blog mentioning any work to do with my course was over a month ago. I've just been writing things down on paper now and then, but most of the time I've just been stewing inside my own head, changing my mind about what to write about - totally at the mercy of whatever I feel is being most pressing - until I gave up a short while ago and spent some days not touching any coursework at all. With a few weeks to go until I have to hand in the first draft, the awareness of the deadline being right after the Christmas holidays has prodded grumpy little me sharply in the back of my skull.

My desire to escape from all things computer gamey revived in me the ideas of pursuing handicrafting. Unfortunately, it's not something I can picture myself writing about academically. I tried, but it got out of hand like watered down PVA glue and ended up being all over the place.

I just want to make stuff.

From what happened with the last essay I wrote, I can see where this is going to end up. I'm going to take the essay I wrote about writing essays and work from that and how I'm feeling about writing the dissertation and end up writing about the difficulties students can face when writing dissertations. As you can see in the picture above, I've already started. Who knows when I'll finish.

And then after I graduate, I will start to feel less pressure from the whole game thing, and I'll start to return again. I will play with all the free software I learned about, and I will make little games, and write up ideas for bigger games, and think about stories for narrative games and come up with mechanics for seriously simple but fun games. This won't happen all at once; it will happen slowly over time, mingled in with numerous other things I like to do and tend to return to, like playing things on guitar and reading about history and magic and learning about science and love and art and me.

This is what I'm hoping. Life was much better when I wasn't worrying about how long I would be able to keep going. I mean dude, I'm not even 21 yet!

Research: Photos

My dad has been building an extension onto the side of our house this summer, and in the process opened up and removed a section of the roof. These are a few images I've taken with my phone of the structure in the roof, might use them as reference images for architecture and textures within the abandoned house.

And a few of the images I took today:

Gyland: "Strange Stone Home Discovered"

If Gyland had newspapers, that's probably what they would have reported today.

Taking a little inspiration from some of the articles I read on dornob about modular buildings and other articles about modular dollhouses, I've added a building to Gyland made of 6 identical pieces.

I literally just plonked them together with one of the textures already in the Standard Assets, paying only a little attention towards making sure they were lined up vertically, and that access to each room was possible. I think I'm going to have to make a few modifications to the module to make each piece link up better, and I'll probably look into creating some linking stair-modules so you can reach the upper modules from the lower ones.

The model of the house is kinda starting to take shape aswell. I've got the basic roof shape modelled, but the upstairs internal walls need to be shrunk down vertically so that they don't stick out from it. And then there's still all the UV mapping to do... Good thing this is just a side project.

The real world roof is getting there too, dad is aiming to get it finished for the end of the month. Here's mum and dad working on it. I did take some funny shots of a local cat chilling out and licking it's bottom while the parents worked on the roof in the background, but apparently mum didn't find them funny enough to display on her FB album...

As for the annoying sister situation: they're all annoying me a little less now. It could be because I'm starting to feel less distressed in general about life... or it could be because it's nearly 2 weeks until I get to go back to Uni...

It's probably both.

Feng Shui the mould away! [This has nothing to do with Games.. yet?].

I don't know why, but ever since I was little I've been a little into astrology, zodiacs, fortune telling, faeries, runes, and all kinds of old mystical stuff. The human imagination is a fascinating thing. I should probably start a research blog about it, since I return to it so often. I wonder how many people actually make a comfortable living off of it. Anyways, recently I've been focusing on Chinese Astrology, with it's Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches and Yin and Yang and Five Elements and Feng Shui and Four Pillars of Destiny.

It's a lot more complex and interesting than the Chinese Restaurants would suggest, where most people only ever come into contact with a list of 12 Animals. I'm not saying I believe in any of it, but I'd like to sometimes. Probably because I enjoy [and therefore spend so much time] reading about it...

As for Games stuff: Not done a lot. I have been pining away for uni because I miss the lifestyle, and my room here is horrible, cold and mouldy [literally]. I reckon my recent obsession with Feng Shui is just part of my drive to get rid of the mould. The sister I share my room with deals with the mess much the same way as I've read scientists in the past have dealt with strange phenomenon they can't explain: She ignores it. Instead of trying to minimise as much as possible the kind of environment mould loves, she buries her nose in a biology textbook and pretends it doesn't exist. But look what it does to my boots after only a week spent under the bed!!

The picture doesn't do it justice well, but they're supposed to be plain grey. I was raging. My sister probably doesn't care much because most of her stuff hasn't been that badly affected, and she doesn't want to have to do anything about it. I think I'd be more forgiving if she wapped out a powerful microscope now and then to examine the stuff that's started growing on the sides of the furniture, but alas, no...

Maybe I'll tell her that if she gets a microscope, I'll get a telescope and we can share them between us.. At least it would give me more stuff to look at in the RL, and she can feel more like a real scientist.

Happy Mummy's Day

The Internet told me it was Mummy's Day, so I made this video.



I didn't actually spend an entire day making it - it's currently 5:26pm and blue-sky outside, which means I've still got part of my day left to do some texturing and schtuff :)

Grow my pretties, grow!

During the research for Squeak's desk, I found that plants are supposed to help in the area of creativity. Failing a real nice pot plant on the desk, a tree outside the window is supposed to improve mood.


Two of my cooking onions started sprouting. I've put them in cups of water on my window sill to see what will happen. All I've noticed in the past few hours is bubbles appearing and the water turning very slightly brown.


Perhaps if they live and grow, their presence will improve my mood and creativity. Maybe I'll stick googly eyes on them and make a film about them having a conversation.

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Day 2: 11:30AM
The water is now twice as brown as it was, the one on the right being a slightly yellower hue. I've taken photos but for some reason the bluetooth connection between my phone and laptop is failing. [Update: Bluetooth now works..]


Most of the bubbles have disappeared, but I've noticed the one on the right developing lots of furry little hairs. I think it's mould regrowth, because it was starting to go a little mouldy under the outer layer, but I decided to try salvaging it because it wasn't really squishy and had the biggest shoot. It possibly won't survive. I put a tiny bit of antibacterial Listerine in the right one to see what would happen...

I feel like a mad scientist.

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Day 3: 01:00AM
Just got back from AberG, where a massive cookie was made and Father Ted was watched [I now have a song about a lovely horse in my head]. It seems the Listerine hasn't done that much to stop the tiny hairs growing in the right one, as there's now possibly 2 or 3 times as much underwater fluff as there was before. Although it does smell like Listerine, which can only be a good thing. And the water in it has turned a much darker tint, but not cloudy. I wasn't expecting that.

As for the left one, the water level seems to have dropped more than the right one, even counting the Listerine I added [it wasn't that much at all]. I'll take a photo tomorrow morning when it's daylight outside, it might show the fluff better.


12:20pm: I've decided not to put anymore photos up on this post, except for especially interesting occurrences... I will continue to take a picture daily however, and will probably edit them into a video. The right mould-grower seems to be doing fine apart from the mould, I'm fairly sure the shoot is still growing.

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Day 4: 01:45PM
THEY'RE GROWING NEW ROOTS!! ^_^
And both shoots are definitely growing :D My brother suggested I change the water, so I've given them some fresh stuff.

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Day 7: 03:45PM
The one with mould on. She's still ALIVE.


As for the other one, I put it into my bathroom to see if the dark would make it grow a bit faster. It hasn't really. Not sure why.


Day... whatever day the 10th of March is: 10:37PM
BEAST!!

I'm naming her "Medusa" after my brother's odd comment on the subject of growing onions. The other onion is sprouting well now, I think I'll name it "Kaa", after that discussion I had with some friends in which we couldn't remember the name of the snake from The Jungle Books. Cheers, google. I think there's another onion sprouting in the cupboard. I might put it in another cup and try a spot of time-lapse filming on it.

Day... whatever day the 27th of March is: 10:37PM
Haha, and I thought they were beast before.

The new addition is doing well. Kaa seems to be quite small compared to Medusa regarding shoots, but has 3 groupings while Medusa has 2 [nice, considering I live in flat KA3]. I'm thinking of renaming them as Kaaa and Metusa. When it comes to roots, Medusa's seem comparatively short. Oh! And I've only just noticed, by the roots on Kaa and Medusa have started branching.

Since when does it snow in January here? :D

Had a bit of a play in the snow today, got a few nice action shots of my sisters throwing snow at eachother, tehehe :D