Christmas jumpers, Marvel cake and Star Trek Discovery #littleloves

I kind of feel like I just haven’t stopped lately. Which is true really, there has been a lot of stuff to fit in. BlogOnXmas filled my weekend with a two day trip to Manchester and some rare alone time for me as well as some very much surrounded by lots of people time. A weekend of extremes…

Read

Sitting on trains and having a hotel room to myself (you have to pay £5 extra for TV at the Easy Hotel so that wasn’t happening) means that I’ve done a LOT of reading this week. And most of it has been apocalyptic fiction as usual – The Sunfall 2 book series by D. Gideon (who is apparently a prepper himself) tells the story of a world affected by a Coronal Mass Ejection – a posh way of saying mahoosive solar flare – which knocks out pretty much everything electrical in the world. I’m always interested to see how these stories pan out, as there is usually some variance in exactly how electrical items are affected, and how long it takes for everything to descend into chaos.

I also read A Fragile Thing by Kevin Wignall, which is a novel all about a weirdly likeable money launderer who becomes embroiled in a whole pressured FBI family problems saga thing which leads to a lot of problems and potential doom. I’m sure the actual book blurb describes it better than that. But I enjoyed it anyway (and there was no mass apocalyptic event, which was refreshing).

Watched

I’m still not really in a watchy mood but I did sit with the Other Half to see what Star Trek Discovery had to offer. The first two episodes were up on Netflix and they were busy setting the scene for the rest of the series, building character history and introducing some pretty pissed off Klingons. It’s been a few years since I watched Star Trek, and it’s not top of my watching agenda but it’s entertaining enough that I’ll keep going. I think the main problem my brain has is that everything is so modern and shiny – Star Trek just seems like it should be a bit more stuck in the past, even though obviously it’s meant to be the future.

Made

It was the WordPress meetup and so I made cake, a chocolate marble ring cake to be precise – although it seems I was misheard when I described it and it’s now known as a Marvel ring cake. Which now I think of it does sound like a good idea – I’ve dedicated possibly a little too much time to thinking about what that might involve, exactly.

Also, there is no photo of cake since I forgot to take one, and people ate it quite quickly.

Wore

Since BlogOn was a Christmas theme, my Christmas jumpers got to come out in force. The launch party saw me wearing my Oh Deer top, and the conference day itself involved my glittery Dear Santa, this year I’ve been NAUGHTY/NICE top, which can be altered depending on my mood, and whether my children are in the vicinity.

Since I got to visit Afflecks Palace, I also had a couple of new items to wear, a tartan Hell Bunny skirt and a top featuring zombies. Completely unrelated to Christmas but still, they are good.

Heard

My headphones have been jammed on pretty much whenever I don’t have to interact with people, and Jace Everett is featuring heavily given the fact that I now have tickets to go and see him live in a couple of weeks. Which I am VERY excited about. He has a new album called Dust & Dirt which has some great tracks, at the moment streaming through my Amazon Prime thingy but I am hopeful I can get a real live old-school CD at the gig itself. Not that I own a CD player. But I think its good to physically own music that I actually like, just in case [of the apocalypse, or ever acquiring a CD player that works].

Played

Things have been a little quiet on the games front this week, although I did manage to fit in a bit of playing Timeline Inventions at BlogOn. Not as much as I would have liked. I do have some playtesting of Beasts of Balance coming up though, which will be interesting as it involves a new battle mode.

And lastly…

Next week it’s time for another blog conference, but this time on a giant cruise ship. I’ve never been on a cruise ship, so I’m very much looking forward to seeing if the image I have in my mind (bigness, and lots of swimming pools, and eating) is what the whole experience actually involves.