Wow, haven't posted here for a while have I?
I have been more regular over at My LJ page and at My Flickr page and I have been busy recently.

*slinks away guilt-ly*

Here's the link for photos from the convention.

Got a lift there and back from tictactoepony  and masterofapath .
My first Redemption and fancon, not my first con though. The lack of
queueing and running on time-ness of things was very pleasing, there
was the embarassment of riches of too many exciting sounding things to
actually attend, at least until I can get my hands on a TARDIS.
What was also nice was knowing so many people attending and getting to spend time with them as tictactoepony , masterofapath , omylouse , lemming_man , luckykaa , beermat , kate and the many fine folk of Lotna were all there.
It was all somewhat overwhelming the first day.
The
only downside was that my hotel room was so smoke-ridden it made my
throat painfully sore, hampered attempts at being able sleep, gave me
an ulcer and generally made me feel really ill and washed out.

I
attended a bunch of panels, well dressed English sci-fi hero, several
writing panels, the steampunk panel and others all of which I enjoyed.
The Tai Chi session which I assumed was actual practise but doing all
the introduction excercises again was nice (especially it's now much
easier than when I first did them). I also checked out the Zocolo and
the Dealer's Rooms and snagged myself a bunch of the original Star Trek
novelisations of episodes, a Babylon 5 book, Xanth book, an original
from an author there Advent by Carrie Seal, The Turing Test which
sounded interesting and had a cool looking cover. I also got an A4
sketch of me as a Manga Character and a Tarot reading on what my next
Fandom will be (quick answer, something with lots of people, a strong
social theme and will have me learning new skills.)

There was
also the anime disco with the slight disappointment that nobody got my
costume, voting for our glorious leader Lethbridge-Stewart and again
and again, Doing the Serenity crew group thing, hanging out with the
Lotna crew on Sunday, all the awesome costumes worn by people, the
absolutely hillarious Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre, funny
election posters, remote controlled Dalek, the Green/Purple Drazi
contest and more.

A great time indeed.

Photos to come later.

Having caught up with chores and stuff after quitting WoW I found myself with free time and pondered on how best to spend it. Simply watching TV and playing other, non-addictive, video games just didn't seem to hold my attention. I decided on actually getting round to doing the creative ideas including the SuperSpecialAwesome ones as well that I've being having.

In the time since then and now, I've done more Editing on my NaNoWriMo Steampunk story, written a Buffy Twilight crossover fic inspired by the T-shirt "And then Buffy staked Edward. The End", nearly finished my faux foam Japanese umbrella, gotten materials ready to try and make my own P-Chan plushie, made a quick and rough audio drama of a short story Samurai Ninja Guinea-pig X!, caught up on the Television without Pity recaps of Dexter and BSG, had some friends round one evening for Dinner a few episodes of the extremely cancelled TV show Drive, organised a Burpham NaNoWriMo reunion, attended a london NaNoWriMo reunion and transcripted the Scary Tales of Science audio drama I heard on Spaceship Radio 5 years ago.

Right, well I started playing World of Warcraft just before Christmas as a friend of mine was hoping to get a mount with the reward gained from a getting a friend to join up with a 14 day free trial and I was interested in seeing what it was all about.

I got a copy and 1 month free trial with that and installed all 3.5 Gigs of it and attempted to play, except it told me it had to download a patch first. Fair enough you might think but the second patch was 1.3 Gigs in size and there was no way to start the game without applying all the patches it deemed necessary. So I left it running over night. Another two patches were then applied which were only a couple of hundred meg (Only!) and then another patch but this was 3.4 Gig! Nearly the size of the installed app from the DVD. This wiped out my download allowance and went expensively into extra time before stopping and refusing to connect any more till the start of the next billing cycle having now racked up £50 in extra charges but not completely the download so the patch failed.

Thankfully, I was spending the festive season at my folks and they have broadband WiFi so cue several nights of downloading and the monster patch and a few more meant I could finally play it! Hurrah! I now had 9 Gigs installed for this game. After inquiring with tech support was pretty much told the patches are mandatory and can be deployed at any intervals and any sizes.

I started playing as a Gnome Warrior with Engineering profession. After a brief period of confusion at most things, read the website manuals as the actual manual has only a tenth of the information and discovered that the "patches" I'd been forced to download were actually the next version of the game, The Burning Crusade and patches leading up to it and onwards. If it had mentioned this I would have gone out and brought it as it would have been massively cheaper and quicker.

I quickly become immersed in it to an increasingly degree. I was soon coming home from work and eating as I loaded it up, checked the status of guild, friends and outstanding quests and then embarking on a quickly devoured evening ending at around 1am. And this was after trying to be sensible and use it sparingly.

So why did I quit when it clearly had it's hooks in me despite the tyrantical stance of any day it could ask me to download any number of gigs in patches and wipe out all my net access for that month?
Well, three things.

° I had explored three lands and found it difficult to find anywhere that had achievable quests that didn't require me to spend weeks grinding up a few levels to be able to stand a chance of achieving them. The long time it takes to get anywhere was one thing but this was too much of a killing time thing for my comfort.

° I realised that the promise of the Engineering profession of being able to assemble various devices from parts acquired was to some extant like the cake meme, A Lie! All the professions seemed to be following the same rote formula. You wandered around searching for items and then when you finally had enough of the various ingrediants you selected the receipe you wanted and it made it. There was no being able to experiment by sticking things together to make your own stuff. Nope, you have to follow the ones they've come up with and by follow I mean earn experience points in that profession and then buy them to find what they are. And what they are is unimaginative and weak. I gave up trying to use them pretty early discovering I could get more damage and effectiveness from standard melee or long distance weaponry and just sold them as they couldn't be used by anyone who didn't have a similar or higher engineering level. All the professions seem to boil down to spend ages looking for this number of item X and this number of item Z some of which are very hard to find and then you make it. Which struck me as very cookie cutter and doing as little work as possible while being able to claim grand things.

° I also realised I was spending time playing the game when I would have preferred to been doing something else that I would have a end result item. Like writing stories, reading books, watching TV Shows, trying to make plushies, crafting costumes, learning to crochet or even sleeping. Stuff you could show someone the end result of or at the very least chat about unlike WoW unless you want to be the preson who drones on about the video game they play to people who don't play it and have no interest in  hearing it.

So that's why I quit it.

Well, NaNoWriMo has finished and I'm still here. It was an interesting month and at times, stressful, depressing and exciting. I'm glad I took part in it. My ability to write has soared from 1K a week to 14K a week and I've gotten an interesting story as well. Need to go over the rough draft and do writerly things to it like breaking it into chapters, sorting out the narrative flow, correcting missing things and stuff. Have the hazy notion of releasing as a real book via Print On Demand.
Also met a bunch of new people, some of whom are local to Guildford area. Hope we can stay in touch.

If anyone is a writer I'd recommned Nano to them as it's good fun, just try to avoid having anything else major take place during that month.

I didn't win though I racked up 35,187 words which is 70% so I reckon next year I can win it.

Also, anyone know how to make plushies?
I've several ideas I'd like to make that aren't bear-shaped so Build-A-Bear won't be any help.

I've just started Nano and am feeling the enormity of the task Ideally need to have 5,010 words done by end of day. Have so far done 830. Bugger.

In light of this I won't be checking MySpace till December, if you want to contact me email or message me on LiveJournal but no promises I'll respond in a fashion that could be perceived as timely.

I've submitted my application to the Evil League of Evil. Am hoping that it makes Bad Horse gleeful, I don't want to be his mare!

You can find it at Johnny Snow.