anonymityblaize

So, lessons learnt since posting my Inception cross stitch o' doom:

1.) I need to learn to pick better preview images of crafts projects - the number of people who commented to say they initially thought it was just a print of the poster or something implies to me that some people might have scrolled on by never noticing it was made of cross stitch. Which is oddly complimentary but simultaneously frustrating!

2.) Apparently I'm a really fast cross stitcher. This is a revelation given that I was the worst and the slowest at everything in home ec classes at school. I totally Britta'ed that subject. Just a late bloomer when it came to crafts and such, I suppose.

3.) If I don't pay attention I will type "thabks" rather than "thanks" every single time. Every. Single. Damn. Time.

4.) Cross stitch pattern programs are evil. Why does each program need its own file type thus making all of them incompatible with each other? Because they are bastards, that's why. I kinda knew this already but reason #5 made me face this again...

5.) At least two people out there are foolhardy brave enough to want to try this for themselves, which is always very exciting to me. So exciting that I don't even mind doing battle with technology to get something shareable! So here, have a pattern. Do with it as you will, but credit or a link back here would be appreciated, and I'd love to see the results if anyone does stitch it!

( Click for the pattern! )

Hello internet world! I have returned! Our phone line went all wonky again and RL has been well busy and made of stress of late. But everything is tentatively fixed and I'm back again. Did I miss anything good?

I've picked a very weird day to get back into the habit of posting. Community is/isn't/is-in-danger-of-being cancelled and there is definitely/definitely-not a Doctor Who movie actually-happening/not-happening/in-development-with-no-one-attached/in-development-with-David-Yates. It's like Schrödinger's news day. I am confused. Someone hold me. Or perhaps tell me not to rely on tumblr for information.

I've been moving a bunch of pics into a new photobucket account to stymie those dastardly hotlinkers from guzzling up my bandwidth allowance, but it does mean I've broken a lot of my own links. I think I've got most of them fixed on lj and I'm going to get around to doing the same on dw as soon as I can, but if I've missed anything please let me know. Don't want to deny anyone their picspams!

Speaking of picspammage, here's some pics of how the Inception cross stitch is coming along.

( Very nearly finnished now! )( Very nearly finnished now! )

Have returned from my family get-together. It was beyond fabulous. The usual good food, good booze, good company combo with additional aunties and uncles and added drunken dancing and general hilarity.

And brilliantly, after posting about my own amazing childhood birthday parties, my mother turned up with this as her birthday cake.


Mama Blaize for the win!

A pic of the menu from her birthday dinner (complete with wine pairings! I am so spoilt!) under the cut so you can be jealous of our gluttony.

( om nom noms )

I've missed most of the Delicious debacle while I was away, but it doesn't look pretty. I'm going to give things a few days to settle down and then look into Pinboard as that seems to be where everyone is migrating.

Then, as if I didn't already have enough fandom stuff stealing all my attention and freetime, I got into Pottermore this week. I'm RookQueen63 - let me know your name there if you'd like me to friend you. I'm a Hufflepuff (yay!) and my wand is rowan with unicorn core, 14 1/2 inches, slightly swishy. This stuff makes me more excited than a grown adult really ought to be. The site itself is pretty cool - the artwork is gorgeous and I love the way you interact with it, but if it can't handle the number of people on it at the moment, what's it going to be like when it opens fully?

And finally, some more pics of my Inception cross stitch under the cut. Eight out of sixteen pages of the pattern are complete now! But it's more like 3/4 of the way done. And I've still not reached a stage of rage yet! It's clearly a magical cross stitch project.

( stitchy stitch stitch )

Some updates on the state of me!

Building stress: Still stressful, but inching towards completion every day, so my state of mind is distinctly better than it was. Given that the work was meant to be completed in October last year it would be quite good for my emotional well-being if it was finished before October of this year, however.

Telly stuff: Caught up on Leverage in a massive splurge and it was glorious! I don't feel like the show ever dipped in quality or anything, but this season has been really fantastic. They've made me cry at three separate episodes this year and I don't think Leverage has ever made me cry before. All the Parker and Hardison stuff is making me flail around like a flaily thing, as has the Nate and Sophie stuff but for different reasons, and Eliot is still the most adorable killing machine ever. And everyone wants to hug Hardison all the time. As well they should.



Went to see a screening of the first episode of series 2 of The Killing (the Danish version, not the AMC remake) and a Q&A with Sofie Gråbøl and Piv Bernth hosted by Emma Kennedy. It was, unsurprisingly, amazeballs. Going to be a very annoying wait until November for more episodes. Sofie Gråbøl is so ridiculously gorgeous in person, and very funny. And Emma Kennedy is every bit the Forbrydelsen fangirl that she seemed on twitter (the pronunciation was explained to the audience as "Ferb-noise of person puking-son".). And in series two Sarah Lund has a new jumper. It's very exciting.

Cross stitch o' doom progress: Also very exciting. So exciting in fact that I'm putting the pics under a cut from now on until it's done. Which might still be ages away, but it's coming along very nicely. Am still rather suspicious about that.

( Pics of progress... )

Oh, LJ. You poor beleaguered thing. It'd be nice if you could hold things together for longer than about 15 minutes at a time. Maybe this time it's back for the long haul. I feel uninformed and deprived of pretty things without my flist, it's a tragedy.

I'm trying to recreate as much of my flist as possible over on dreamwidth, if you're there and I haven't found you yet, please leave me a nudge in the right direction, or add me yourself - anonymityblaize. I think LJ will remain my primary internet home for the time being, but I want to be prepared to jump ship if that becomes necessary.

And I have dreamwidth codes if anyone needs them, just ask. Anon commenting should be on for this post if you're having trouble staying logged in.

I had thoughts on stuff that came out of comic con, but, other than some serious flailing over Community casting news, I seem to have forgotten it all since I could last make LJ bend to my will.

I also have thoughts on the news but given that there are many people on facebook and twitter saying things about Norway, Hackgate, Amy Winehouse, and/or Somalia that are making me want to get a bit punchy I'm going to keep those opinions to myself and hopefully avoid all fist fights, literal or otherwise.

Finally saw the final Harry Potter film, and cried through most of it, as I expected I would. On the whole I think it was fantastic - I just wish the early movies could have been less craptastic so that I could have a dvd marathon one day. I suppose at least they got all the casting right - those kids have grown up remarkably well. Neville was always my favourite in the books and I think I might have started a riot in the cinema if they had messed up Neville's BAMF moment, but instead they actually managed to make movie!Neville even more badass than book!Neville which was all kinds of fantastic for me. And dammit, Matthew Lewis, stop making me feel like a total perv. Most Triumphant Emergence From Puberty indeed. And Rickman was amazing, as always. And McGonagall! Oh, Dame Maggie you are a national treasure. Sorry, my thoughts are somewhat disconnected apparently. Short version - loved it, even though I have been deeply critical of the movies up until now.

And here's some more cross stitch progress. I am rather excited now that Arthur is mostly done, and you can even see most of the guy falling away behind him. And I've reached both the right and left hand edges now. It's moving on quite quickly. Hurrah!




( One more pic from earlier in the week... )

Yaay! My Inception cross stitch is coming on in leaps and bounds, as is only fitting. I need to take it out of the frame to get pictures now, which is encouraging. You can see a bit of Arthir's head now, and his gun, and I was very excited to realise I've already reached out to the left hand edge. I need to go order some more of the darkest blue thread though - I've already used nearly a whole skein of it, and I'll apparantly use nearly 60 metres of just that colour in the whole piece. Eeep. The angry-making stage of large cross stitch project procedings must be just around the corner...

Maybe this project will be different and I'll lov it the whole way through. Maybe.

Anyway, right now, it's awesome.



Here's how it looked over the weekend:

( Intermediate pic under the cut... )

Zombie meme! Go look at your blog/journal. Find the last Fandom-related thing you posted. The characters in that post are now your team-mates in the Zombie Apocalypse. How fucked are you?

It depends on what you define as my last fandom post - if the smoking picspam counts then I have 23 handsome men and 2 beautiful women to keep me company, so I think we'd be fine as long as these aren't those newfangled fast moving zombies - so many smokers might get a bit wheezy. But if it has to be a post that specifically mentions characters and not actors, then this post has Bane, Doctor Who, Community, Hawaii Five-0 and Attack the Block. Between Steven McGarret, Troy and Abed, and a bunch of chavs I am totally fine, and that's without even counting on the Doctor to fix that whole pesky apocalyose deal.



And finally, anyone interested in the whole News of the World/Murdoch/News International hacking scandal should check out John Finnemore's blog for a link to the audio of his piece on last Friday's Now Show, and a transcript of the whole thing. It is a rousing bit of invective and I don't think we should let this sorry mess slip away without kicking up as much fuss as we all possibly can.

So, five days with minimal access to the internet seems to do weird things to my head. I am a data junkie, it's appalling. But now that BT have replaced a THIRD section of busted wiring hopefully our landline will hold it together for longer than a few months this time. And if O2 could find a way to persuade 3G signals to penetrate the apparently hefty walls of my building then I would actually be able to communicate with the outside world with all my stupid devices just like their bloody adverts claim. Anyway...

Just five days away has left me with a lot to catch up on, and a backlog of things to post, but on the upside I did get a lot of cross stitching done the past few days so you can actually see some bits of Arthur now. Hurrah!



Some pics of the days in between under the cut.

( Clicky... )

I have begun the Inception cross stitch of doom!

I am excited! But also terrified!

I am clearly an masochist. Look at the sheer ridiculousness of the sixteen (sixteen!) pages of the pattern.



And here's what I managed to stitch on the first day. I appear to have begun with the area underneath Arthur's crotch. Seems inappropriately appropriate.




In utterly unrelated news I would like to tell you about my new hero: Greg from Glasgow Cineworld.

I went to see X-Men First Class again (still awesome, thoughts still percolating) and when I arrived at the screen I encountered a lone Cineworld employee throwing 31 (I kid you not, I counted them) teenagers out of a screening of Kung-Fu Panda 2. He gave them a magnificent speech about how they should be acting like the young adults they were and marched them from the building ignoring their whining and their attempts to throw each other under the bus so that they might be allowed to stay. Already impressed with this lone protector of cinema-going etiquette I wandered in to take my seat and was slightly perturbed by the large number of teens and unaccompanied kids already there. But I shouldn't have worried as ten minutes later while the adverts were playing, my hero strode into our screen and walked straight up to the large group of teens who had commandeered the entire back section. He was very polite to them and told them he didn't want to tar all teenagers with the same brush, but that he had just removed a large number of people from one screen for talking, using their phones and causing a mess, and he was perfectly prepared to do it again. That last bit was still polite but had a definite bite of threat to it. He then insisted on watching them turn their phones off, and wandered down to the front of the screen where a smaller, but still numerous group of quieter tweens/younger teens sat. He gave them the same speech, with the addition that he was sure they were going to be well behaved, but that it wouldn't be fair to talk to the older teens and not say the same things to them. He then moved to the centre of the screen and loudly introduced himself to the entire audience and explained that he intended for all customers to have a enjoyable cinema experience and would gladly throw anyone out who was spoiling it for others and we were to come out and ask for him to be sent to our screen if there were any problems.

What followed was one of my favourite cinema experiences in ages. The audience was noisy in the all the right ways (laughing at the funny bits, ooh-ing at the exciting bits, generally going mental for the cameo with the swearing bit) but not in any of the bad ways. Every now and again some kid or other would start talking or using their phone and within moments one of their friends would hiss at them to stop ("I'm nae getting chucked out cos of youse" was my favourite). Greg had essentially created a situation where the teenagers were policing each others' behaviour. And it was good. I think I love him.

(Also, as my eavesdropping on the way out showed me, even teenage lads from Glasgow think that Charles and Erik are very very gay for one another.)

Somewhat relatedly, I feel the need to make a picspam of Michael Fassbender wearing hats. I'm just warning you now. It could be epic.