Tosho-Con

So I went to Tosho-Con last Thursday on the 28th!

What's that? What in zee poo is Tosho Con? Glad ya asked. Long story short it's a mini-localized Anime convention that took place at a Library near me that I swear wasn't there before.

So, I was invited to this here convention a few weeks ago (by College friends), and agreed to go without thinking much of it, as it happened it was actually pretty awesome and I would go again in a heartbeat.

Truth be told, I'm not a massive fan of Anime and Manga, I enjoy Yu-Gi-Oh and the occaisional Dragon Ball, as well as trying to get into Death Note, but apart from those three I wasn't terribly familiar with any of it. It turned out that I didn't need much experience to be capable of making friends at an Anime conversation because they are all extraordinarily friendly, in addition to being as mad as a box of hungry cats. Meeting people was, unusually for me, easily my favorite part of the event.

Also, the actual events included watching cosplayers make fools of themselves, which is like watching a man with no legs fall over, whilst showing off their really cool costumes (incidentally, do male Bakura cosplayers exist?). It certainly encouraged me to consider some form of cosplaying in the near future, though I'd definitely not start off with the Androgenous ones first. I should look into that in the future.

Also, there was a drawing session being presented by a chap called Rob Deas, who is a comic artist who specialized in Anime/Cartoony comic style drawing, I'd not heard of him before or read any of his work but after meeting him and seeing what sort of things he's done I am entirely considering giving it a look. His deviantART page is http://rdcomics.deviantart.com/ for those interested, and some of his works include a Manga based adaptation of MacBeth and a strip in the UK based comic book DFC. (plugging over :D)

There was also a fair amount of random hugging, groping and glomping going on, which anecdotes read on the internet tell me is entirely normal, each one of which was performed at me at some point.

Well, that's all I have to say without repeating myself, but in short, Tosho Con was amazingly fun, thanks again guys. :D

P.S. Also it was my birthday on the 30th too.

College, if you can call it that.

Yoeth:

So I finished my first week of College, if I could call it that, and I can safely say that I enjoy it. Allow me to go into uncanny detail about it, since it's the most recent important thingy that happened recently. If you strongly dislike reading incessant ramblings about people's lives then I suppose you can leave your computer and do whatever there is to do there.

Day One:

On the first day, admittedly nothing important much important happened. I walked in and found my room with almost everyone there, since everybody was staring at me I looked for an empty chair is casually as possible and enjoyed the silence. There was definitely of lot of that on the first day since none of us knew each other and my fellow classmates seem like they're capable of being nice to me, which they all have been so far, which is a massive relief.

No actual work on the first day, we just did a mini task where we had to do a quiz about the College for some really arbitrary reason. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are all three hours long, or that's the idea anyway since we finished an hour early that day.

Day Two:

Day two in my humble opinion was rather important to me, to because we did any important work, but because I actually semi made friends among the people in the class I was working near that day. Tuesdays are seven hours long and doesn't involve Animation so it doesn't look like I'll enjoy these days an awful lot, we started out doing some task of such importance that I completely forgot what it was by now. In the afternoon was where the fun really began.

Bottle Rockets.

That's right, Bottle Rockets. What this has to do with the Art of moving images will remain a mystery to me, but it seems that the purpose was becoming familiar with each other, and it worked surprisingly well, especially since many of the people acted the same as and strongly resembled people I knew at my old School, the normal people that is. So me and another dude who's name escapes me made a Bottle Rockets, it wasn't the most well thought out design since its wings we uneven and it span when we fired it into the air, not even my 'go faster' stripes were enough to help, and also out parachute concealed in the nose-cone of the Rocket failed to deploy, likely because we were idiots enough to give the parachute no way of escaping. While the dudes to our right made a Rocket that was also a Ninja Duck for some reason, and still flew better than ours. And the dudes opposite the table made their unnecessarily heavy and complicated by adding a flag to it rather hilariously, which remained intact upon hitting the ground, everyone elses I forgot by now.

Day Three:

This was the day we actually did some honest to god Animation for the first time in several days, it consisted of doing a series of drawings on a strip of paper and inserting it into a Zoetrope and then making it spin around very fast, thus giving the illusion of animation, mine was the best I saw so I'll assume that mine was the best out of everyones. Being three hours long I only managed a total of three of these before packing it in and going home, it was rather fun and easily kicked the arse of most School days, yet I imagined it'd be boring compared to whatever I'd be doing in the future.

Day Four:

Today, more animation ensued as we did some pencil animations of a wavy thing being wavy, I chose to make mine the tail of a Monkey because I've been watching the original Dragon Ball recently, the second was a bouncing ball, which was solid enough but very jerky not entirely unlike people I disliked from School. And being three hours long again that was all I managed, but we have the option of carrying on tomorrow of we want, which I'll probably do at home since I 'borrowed' necessary equipment. The actual idea behind this animating was pretty much just taking pictures of 16-17 images of stuff in the process of moving and inserting it into a Mac program called FrameByFrame, which I'll download since it's apparently free.

This next bit will be similar to mentioning that rain is wet, fire is hot and Jack Thompson dislikes games in that it's painstakingly obvious for normal people to notice, but whilst trying to talk today, I remembered my prominent fear of doing so and promptly stopped. And if you ever fancy having a chuckle, then you should watch me staring at people and trying to Psychically tell them to talk to me since my voice box wasn't up to the job. Maybe soon will be the day that I talk like a normal person, but there's no way of knowing for sure.

Teh Edn:

Well, that's everything interesting I have to say the for moment, I might give an update next week if anything exciting happens and I'm feeling particularly bored that day. Overall I like my course since it largely involves doing something I like with people I have things in common with (or so I assume).

Until next time none-existant readers, and also xxninjacookie if I've made you read my ramblings again.

Results and College.

Several significant things have happened recently, both in fact on the same day. I finally got my GCSE results and enrolled in College successfully, my results are:

1 A* in ICT

2 A's also in ICT

3 B's in Science, Additional Science and Maths

4 C's in Art, English, English lit and Media Studies

2 D's in Design Technology and French.

Even though I could very easily have guessed those results, I was significantly underwhelmed by the turnout, sure they were useful in getting me into the Animation course I had my eye on, but to say it basically decided my future from that day forward I didn't feel all that excited, maybe I was hoping I had gotten grades higher than a B in some of my better subjects besides ICT (which incidentally, I barely even tried on, go me.), but still I imagine several people I know predominantly got E's in their worse subjects, in fact I hope that the people who I didn't like and never studied got lower than a B at the very least, I deserve at least that much for my efforts.

Another noticeable lack of emotion on my part was that I was leaving my School that I had spent 5 years of my life at, and had several life changing events at, for the very last time. Ok maybe not the last time but the last time I was required to go in, and even then I didn't feel all that upset. Sure I may have been tremendously bullied by people who were under the impression was a giant, verbal 'Kick me' sign for a long time, but I also met several people who could summarily be described as 'friends' there and knew several other people who were very nice to me, I'll certainly miss those guys because I doubt I'll be seeing a lot of the people who aren't going to the same College as me in a foreseeable future.

Significant life event 'numero deux' of that that day (24th August) was me enrolling in College, after the incredible bowel evacuatingly anxious moments of slightly doubting if I'd gotten the right grades, it was a relief to merely worry about having to talk to strangers instead for the whole enrolling process. And to my surprise that wasn't even a huge deal, especially since there were hundreds of other people present doing the same thing as well, so I quite literally was given a raffle ticket and had a random chance of beginning the enrolling process. And I wish I was making that up but it was true. First section was giving personal details to a stranger who might well have been secretly signing me up to a criminal record database for all I know, the second was talking to my Course Tutor and showing him my results, which were thankfully more than enough to allow me in, he then gave me various information, such as my Time Table, which I'll get back to in a sec, starting date and equipment list.

Back to the timetable. If I went back in time and showed the College timetable of the Animation course to my 13 year old self who had literally just discovered such a thing exists, his forehead spots would likely have burst in glee because it's the most easy going time table I've had thus far in my learning experience. To give an example of how big a leap it is, I should mention that the average school day for the last five years has been at least 6-7 hours a day of doing lessons I largely found astonishingly boring. In College it's three hours long on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, and 7 hours on Tuesday, and all of it is stuff I give a toss about, that being Animation and Animation related Paraphernalia. So in short, bring on September 6th!

Well, rambling over folks, I intend to fill you all in my first week on my first Friday off on the 10th of September perhaps.

Until then, seeya later none existent readers!

Phase one of being utterly bored.

As you may have gleaned from seeing me talk pretty much most places on the internet, I am extremely bored with having nothing to do. As I have also likely explained, I've been trying to occupy myself by writing, storyboarding and eventually actually animating a Flash animation about a character that I actually made myself rather than endless Sprite Movies.

So far with that, I've written what was meant to be the first draft, but if I know me (which I like to think I do.) then I'll probably end up using that script and just make the dialogue marginally more humourous, which is rather difficult when I'm consciously trying to be funny. The story so far on that is that my main character (named Brockson) randomly avoids getting squished by a Meteor containing a Wizard from Space, it then later revives Brockson from death after having mind controlled him into being dangerous, and thus he becomes a very Charcoal-ish Zombie. More on that in future blog posts perhaps.

Also in my day to day life, I got an iPhone recently, I intend to have it last the rest of my naturally born life because buying the ferking contract for the thing was hard enough the first time around. Aside from that one thing, as well as the instructions for making an iTunes account being as helpful as the talking paperclip from MS Word, I like it, sure it's got abysmal battery and memory compared to some of the ones that are already out but it's surprisingly useful, I found the walking direction to my soon to be College using the SavNav type thing they have on there, granted I got lost a few times, but my map reading skills from playing so many Zelda games proved quite helpful eventually.

In approximately 32 days if my timer is to be believed, I get my results for all the exams and coursework I worked very extremely hard to get, I'm unsure of how well they're gonna be but I'll probably make several blog posts on my various internet holes if they're good. As well as play 'Best Day Ever' on my new iPhone to all my ex-fellow students as I say seeya to them for finally the last time. Then a further couple of weeks before College again and I'll have moved up from 'Doing Sod All' to 'Doing A little Bit More Than Sod All That I'll Enjoy Doing'.

So that's all the news I have to give so far, once again, thanks for reading my indistinguishable ranting non-existent readers. Until whenever I can be bothered to post again.

New crap.

So I had my Art Exam last week, so I'm gonna talk about that.
It was pretty easy, but since the exam was ten hours long over the course of two days it did terrible things to my fingers and will to live by the time I'd finished it. The not quite final piece is up on my deviantArt profile is everyone's interested, although I still seem to be allowed to carry on working on it well beyond the allotted ten hours, and despite my Art teachers claims she couldn't help us, she certainly does an awful lot of that. It was drawn in pencil, pencil crayon, a black felt tip and now acrylic paint apparently. So it's looking pretty good if every vague compliment given by anyone who looks at it is any indication.

In similar school related news, they gave us our current grades today, and apparently I must be better than I thought because if it was my final results then I would've passed pretty much every subject with the exception of French, of course I'm terrible at paying attention to that anyway so I don't hold it against the teacher personally. Surprisingly even my most hated lesson, where I have to venture into that wretched hive of scum and villainy, the Tech rooms, where they forgot to tell the teachers that we're not sweatshop workers who can make a product in five minutes with bleeding, stitched up fingers.

Since shit has apparently hit the fan when it comes to school work, I suppose I should probably not spend every waking moment on the internet talking to friends. Of course, if it's Emma then that makes the choice all the more difficult since I enjoy talking to her more than my lower intestine enjoys breaking down carbohydrates, that previous sentence alone should say that Science is one of the things I need to swot up on.
'till next time non-existant readers!

P.S. Since there's a high chance that nobody's reading this I seem to be treating this blog of mine like an increasingly personal diary rather than an actual blog.

School and other stuff.

So lots of school stuff is happening recently, I got high grades in most of my subjects, one of my classes is changing, I have quite a bit of Media Studies homework to do and my college interview is on Monday.

Seeing as I choose to spend most of my free time on the internet you can probably understand that I'm not a good speaker in real life. So I'm pretty nervous about this interview, any random advice would be helpful. Although I plan to take in examples or arty stuff I've done and just let it speak for itself to avoid actually do talk.

The weather condition that the news is imaginatively referring to as 'The Big Freeze' seems to have ended today, meaning I can once again walk the streets without being worried about falling over or a chav throwing ice at me that they think is snow and laughing at their comic genius.

Back to talking about school, I don't have many months left before I leave there for good. Although I'd never admit it to the face of anyone who goes there, I'll probably miss school and my friends there quickly, even the unhealthy percentage of people who have irrational hatred for me and my friends, even them, so I hope they're proud of themselves for that.

That's all that's on my mind so far, so until next time, Au revoir non-existent readers! Except for YOU!