magicaddict | So Long Between Updates...

...I blame chemistry. It's big enough to take the knock and keep on ticking.

The 36hr has been done to death by enough people - I enjoyed the LARPing, the quality time with Emma, and coming up out of the ground just on time to numerically punctuate the sounding off with my damage call, but there were a little too many strong feelings and highly-strung arguments for my liking, and I was probably as guilty as anyone else. It felt more like a theatrical society weekend than a LARP club, which implies a couple of really very cool things, and about an equal number of really very uncool things, but I require a little more proof before I state my hypotheses on it. If you're remotely interested, watch this space.

I hover at the cusp of being within tasting distance of finshing the PhD. My first self-imposed hard deadline of the end of July might not happen, but I want to be handed in before I head down to Barry for the interview I've been offered with Dow on the seventeenth of August. Might be a very useful thing to drop a two hundred and fifty page book on the table and say, "By the way, that thing you were paying me to write? Here's the pre-published proof." The sheer amount of money involved is making it a more and more attractive option as time goes on, particularly as I will be able to make it back to Bath and Emma with less trouble than I thought. I must be close to finishing - I've started patching EQ2 to make sure that the second I hand the thesis in and go to log on, I won't be slapped with the most annoying two hour wait in history.

Marion Raven's album is better than it probably should be, which is a very pleasant surprise. There are a couple of slightly rough tracks (Set Me Free, At The End Of The Day), but mostly good lyrics (take Here I Am out of that, really good song but some utterly flanged rhyming couplets), and a couple of the songs are right out of the top drawer (Crawl, For You I'd Die, and personal favourite Thank You For Loving Me - no, it's not covering Bon Jovi). The one thing that it really falls down, strangely, is the quality of the inlay pack. Some of the lyrics (and in one case, the title) don't match up with what is sung, and there's at least one spacing & punctuation error. Fine, English isn't her native language (for those of you who don't know, she's originally Norwegian - remember M2M off the Pokemon soundtrack? That was Marion and her brother), but I doubt it was her doing the proof reading. HMV are selling it cheaper than anywhere else I've found at £10.95. Worth the money, all things considered.

Emma and Cat are curently at their second showing of the film each, Elizabeth is downstairs reading the new book, and there are less people online on MSN than I have seen in past six weeks.
Somewhere in Outer Mongolia, there's a shepherd who lives on a mountain. He hasn't seen another person for forty-three years, hasn't spoken for twelve, is unable to read and is profoundly deaf. I guess it's just he and me left on the planet who have no time for Harry Potter.

If anyone bats an eyelid when I'm queueing outside Waterstones the morning that A Memory of Light comes out, I will scream "hypocrisy" in their face and attack them with a baseball bat covered in poisoned spikes.