Sunday, February 14, 2016

An Update that's Not a Whole Year in the Making

Check it out! It’s only been like... two months?
Christmas was wonderful. We stopped work at midday on the 24th which was a bit of a drag. My brother picked me up that afternoon and we went to see Star Wars Episode VII! It was actually really fantastic! I loved all the references back to the original trilogy. I freaking love BB-8; he’s so cute! As for the new characters though, I kinda don’t really feel anything for them. Except Kylo Ren. I won't say why for spoilers, but what an asshat. I do like the theory though that Rey is a clone of Luke from the hand that he lost when Darth Vader cut it off.
So yeah, Christmas was good. Nearly all the family turned up! Even Aunty Kaylene. She’s not doing well at all. Her cancer came back a few months ago and... it’s been so tough. They told her that after this round of treatment if the cancer comes back again, there’s nothing they can do for her. It’s just... Mum says it’s an awfully disheartening thing for someone to hear that kind of prognosis. So I’m glad we were all together.
Mum finally conceded to me that she has no sense of style whatsoever, so she’s been hoarding all sorts of lovely Christmas decorations over the past couple of years. It was finally our turn to host again and I went all out on the decorating. The tree and the table looked like something out of a magazine. Everyone loved it.

So sparkly...

We had a blast playing all sorts of water sports. We set up a black plastic slide in the front yard and played human ten pin bowling – you could either take a run up and attempt to knock all the pins down, or hold on a rope pulley and your family team could haul you down the plastic. Then we played a relay race where you had to line up and throw water to each other in buckets. The first family to transfer enough water to their end bucket and cause it to drop was the winner. The last game was very broken. There were little basketball hoops on peoples’ heads. Instead of having them catch the little ping-pong balls that came with the game, we switched them out for water balloons. As soon as the blindfolded people started tossing balloons the hoops broke. Eventually there were too many balloons in each net and they broke from the weight. It dissolved into a water balloon fight from there. Throughout the whole day, everyone was blatantly cheating – of course ^_^.
Another star of Christmas was the awesome pinball machine that Dad cooked up. A virtual pinball machine in a custom made cabinet. It has something like 20 virtual tables in it now and I played the hell out of it the couple of weeks I was home. I really liked the Star Troopers and Star Wars tables. Those ones were fun and I was slowly starting to learn how to actually play them rather than just hitting the flippers and hoping the ball didn’t go down the hole. Me and Dad did a great job of decorating it all the day before Christmas too! I stockpiled leftover vinyl from work and we planned out a design and used his CNC routing device with a blade attached instead of a drill bit to cut out the shapes. It was a tough time sticking them all on without application tape. But we got there, and it looks fantastic.

*furiously mashes flapper buttons*
I spent most of my holidays playing ARK. I developed a grudge match with some dude on a PvP Primitive server. I was busy building up my base and trying to tame some dinos when this idiot began accusing me of killing his raptor. He was adamant. I tried to explain that I had done no such thing, but he just wouldn’t believe me. I had to start looking over my shoulder and even keep an eye on the skies. Several times he tried to snatch me up on a pteranadon, but I had been too encumbered at the time luckily. So, the eejit gets an idea. One day while I’m logged off, he goes around and puts his own stone foundations at the four points around my base, effectively blocking me off from expanding. We had a verbal sparring match after that. After I had shouted at him in all caps and realised that wasn’t going to work, I switched tactics and began pretending like he was some little kid, a low level newbie who was sad and lonely. I told him I would collect the white supply drops for him because he was obviously so helpless. This seemed to get on his nerves. He reinforced the foundations the day after that. So, I thought “Two can play at this game...” I made a foundation of my own and put it directly outside his front door. He was pissed... Around that time, I started chatting with a bloke on an online dating site. After a few dates, I introduced him to ARK. He was online one day and was ambushed by the guy. They killed my trike and pteranadon. We were fed up with this guy, so we switched servers. I did log in one last time however and used up all of my wooden signs to write “Fuck You” in front of his base eleven times. I logged in recently too and found much to my satisfaction that someone has raided his base. Hehehe...
So we moved servers. This one has elevated taming, XP and gathering so it’s much more fun to play on. We have a small menagerie. Unfortunately it’s an unofficial server so it’s down a lot. But that has helped me in a way to break the addiction a little bit.

I went back to work in January – for only three days XD. On the Thursday of that week, I flew down to Sydney for RTXAUS! I took the train from the airport to the hotel and when I had finished settling in, I immediately got on the train again and headed out to Circular Quay. It was getting super overcast and began to rain when I got there. I found a nice walkway undercover where I was able to get some snaps of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House in the gloom. I checked the rain radar on my phone and saw that a HUGE red and yellow patch was headed directly for me. I watched as the storm rolled in, lightning flashes over the bridge. It was really kind of cool!

The train station had an excellent view

The actual even was very good I thought. Not as good as the Austin one. There were a few teething problems. I felt that the RT people were kind of isolated. I didn’t ever seen them in the VIP room. The event center we were in had all of these cool catwalks, so they were always up there. The main hall was not naturally air conditioned either. There were tons of people who found it much too hot. I thought it was warm, but not overly uncomfortable – but I could see that on the stage under the lights, all the RT folk were sweating like crazy.
I waited all day Friday for some notification of the secret thing they’d teased. They were shooting an Immersion in Sydney that day and I was hoping they’d ask for extras. Unfortunately the way they notified us was through the Rooteeth Facebook page. I was kicking myself. It would have been cool to be a space invader on the shoot... especially with Ryan as a lab rat!
The Lazer Team premiere was AWESOME. I looked fantastic (except someone else at the premiere was wearing the same dress as me) – and my super high stunning white shoes didn’t even kill me that much!
Faaaaabulous darling!

I made a friend in the lobby as I was waiting to hail a taxi and we shared it there. There was some traffic so the driver told us it would be easier to walk the rest of the way. It began to rain and I was wearing heels walking uphill. Wanted to kill the cab driver. (Later on I found that it is actually harder to walk downhill in heels. Man is that hard.) We waited in the line and chatted and became good friends. Her name was Emily and she was from Adelaide ^_^. We milled around for an hour, and then another half an hour because the RT peeps were late – there’d been an accident where Lindsay had cut open her face during the Immersion shoot and she’d had to get stitches.
The movie itself was really, really good. It wasn’t the best movie ever, but I definitely enjoyed it and the humour and hard work and just everything that Roosterteeth poured into it. The twist at the end was fantastic, although I did sort of guess it a little. And it had Michael mooning the audience, which was amazing XD. All of the cameos were brilliant too.
When the movie was done, the cast and crew came out for a Q&A and, surprise, surprise, who turns up? Well, Mr. Michael Jones of course! I was so thrilled! That was one good part about not being an extra on the Immersion shoot I guess. He was a lab rat with Ryan lol.
The after party I thought was good, but a little bit of a shambles. All they had on the tab that was EXTREMELY short-lived was cheap champagne and beer. The venue was MUCH too small and there was a cordoned off area where the special guests could escape. Not saying it was a bad thing... but the Austin VIP party was MUCH cooler. There was nowhere they could ‘escape’ too. I talked to Chris Demaris for a little bit, which was fun and then me and Emily watched in dismay as the crowd around poor Ryan just would not disperse. His audience was like three people thick for several hours – and even when the party was winding down and he was trying to leave, they cornered him outside and it happened again. The poor thing was too polite to get away...

I really enjoyed my time in Sydney. It really is a beautiful city. It also helped that there was McDonalds directly outside my hotel, so I did not have to go without breakfast each day. I explored a bit on the Friday and found my way to a Max Brenner chocolate store, and all manner of shops and markets and stuff. I could seriously consider living there if I had to.
We met up with a lot of Roo Teeth people at King Pin Bowling on Circular Quay on the Sunday night. I had a blast beating all my new friends at air hockey and a game of bowling. We were getting drinks and thinking about leaving when who got in line behind us but Freddie Wong! We had a solid hour of chats where we taught him about the Aussie and Kiwi accents, our money, our education system and the State of Origin. He’s is a super funny dude! The day after he tweeted that he’d had a good time, so I replied to him and told him that if he needed any more special fifty cent pieces (he was fascinated by their shapes and the custom detail on the special editions one) that he knew who to talk to. He actually replied to me! It was super fun.

I made a new shirt for the convention. I did up a super cool vector art piece with Ryan in his GTAV face paint holding his skull mask. It’s kind of creepy. I painted it onto a lovely white shirt and wore it the second day of the con. I didn’t get to show it to him unfortunately.
Lots of black paint...

The Wednesday I got back, we had the Lazer Team Tugg screening at the Cairn City cinemas! My brother came along too and he loved the movie. We were sitting in the dark waiting for the movie to start, munching on out KFC, when I saw a pair of people across the aisle. They were older folks and the bloke was wearing a Lazer Team shirt. I stared at them for a while and eventually tapped my bro and said “I think that those are the Dunkelmans.” The Dunkelmans being Barbara Dunkelman from Roosterteeth's parents. They love to go to everything she does and support her. Brother was like “Nah... It can’t be.” I was positive. I had actually sat in the row behind them at the Sydney premiere and said hi after I’d seen the fella hugging Barbara down on the walkway! So I worked up the courage and went over and asked them. Sure enough, it was Larry and his wife! I asked them what on Earth they were doing up in Cairns. Turns out they were sightseeing. They thought if they were going to go to Australia that they would explore a bit at least. It was just so bizarre! It was like they were stalking me lol.
This is the photo Larry took! I'm way up the back.
The first date I went on with the new boy was absolutely wonderful. We met at Grill’d on the Esplanade for lunch and totally hit it off. I didn’t really want to leave. He was so lovely. He was 25, he was taller than me, he had an excellent job (he was going to start uni very soon, but still had tons of savings) and he was ripped as hell man. So, we hung out and continued to chat. We got frozen pine lime slushies from Maccas. We hung out more on the Esplanade itself, walking up and down and sitting on a bench. Eventually, he put his arms around me. It was lovely. As the sun was setting, he kissed me. It was funny; our glasses clashed. I was having a ball. We had dinner on the esplanade too; crepes. And then a few hours later, gelato for dessert. I think we ended our lunch date at 10:30pm!

Unfortunately, due to many different things after a few more dates he told me that he was sorry, but he had to break it off. He just wasn't ready for a full on relationship. He had a lot of valid reasons and... I dunno. I just feel really kind of lonely now. It's hard to get used ot being single again. I'm not alone - I have my friends and my family, but not having that special someone is just making me a bit lonely...

I watched Life on Mars. It was really good! The music was awesome and the concept was rather gripping. I’m a bit undecided about the ending, but it did seem fitting. I’m now watching Psycho Pass. You can blame the two on the Roosterteeth Anime Sponsor-cast.

Work has been okay. I felt a bit overburdened yesterday though. My colleague quickly took a few jobs off me and made it a little better. I’ve been slacking I guess. I’m always checking my phone or I’ve got my kindle out actually. It’s kind of stupid. I should really stop doing it. But I find that I sometimes just can’t concentrate and after a few minutes of it, I can get back to what I’m doing. I hope I don’t get called out for it. I would really hate to get a warning, or even lose my job. I hate warnings. I feel so terrified when people direct that kind of disappointment and anger at me. I think I would rather be injured than disappoint like that. I’ve begun taking record of all the duff ups that I make in an effort to improve. Mum keeps telling me to ask for a pay rise, what with the INORDINATE power bills I’ve been getting and the fact that my brother is no longer living here. He moved out just before Christmas when Mum and Dad could no longer afford to pay his rent because of Dad’s job loss. But, I haven’t had the nerve to ask for a pay rise. It’s just so regularly that I get reports back that I’ve made mistakes and whatnot. I don’t feel like I deserve a pay rise yet. I need one and I think I should have one. I have a bachelor and I’m approaching two years of experience now. I should be getting paid more than what pretty much amounts to minimum wage. But I just... keep making mistakes...

So overall, January has had its ups and downs. RTXAUS was great and I am so going again next year. Alan Rickman and David Bowie both died at 69 and of cancer. That was a real downer. Monty Oum’s anniversary just passed which was a harrowing reminder. I had a beautiful few weeks, and then a sudden crashing reality check with a guy.

It feels kind of nice that I have no obligations at the moment. Nothing to plan for, nothing to look forward to. Just the weekends, curled up in bed, reading or watching stuff. It feels nice to just drift a little – coast along and enjoy the fact that I do have a solid job, I do have a lovely home and I do have enough income to splurge sometimes. I am lucky and grateful. And now I’m hungry. Gonna go eat the rest of my taco mince.
Ciao!

Feeling: I have this weirdly sore elbow. It doesn't hurt to bend it or when I massage the skin, but just resting the tip of it on something - anything, will make it hurt.
Listening to: X Gon' Give it to Ya - The song from the Deadpool trailers. Frikin' Deadpool man... I saw it today and it was BALLS TO THE WALL AMAZING.
Wearing: My Deadpool shirt of course.