The penmanship of St. Dreadful

Back in the groove.

So, what have I been up to that’s dragged me away from my LiveJournalling duties? Fuck all, is the answer.

Every three weeks or so I play Werewolf: The Apocalypse (soon to be The Forsaken) with the gang, which is an exercise in snack-munching coke-swigging comically violent geekery and always good fun. Intrigue, danger and romance! I shoot crime on a regular basis. I’m far less crap than I used to be. Speaking of geekery, I helped out a friend by volunteering to play an NPC in a Vampire LARP session he organised (if you don’t know what those acronyms mean — you’re way cooler than me) and, while I felt silly, it was a surprising amount of fun once all the players got into the same celestial groove. I yearn for theatre.

Writing, writing, writing. That is, I should be and today I am. Somebody wrote to me in response to my pennings and gave me the best compliment ever — and I quote:

“I fanboy at you.”

The fact that Google lists no occurrences of those four words in thar order makes this compliment extra special to me and anyone who dashes that illusion I will repay by dashing his (or her, one never knows) skull in.

————

Johnny and Jotun visited this evening so I didn’t get a whole lot of writing done. Nor did I get a chance to play World of Warcraft. Curious thing, my mum has recently lectured me on my addiction to that game because she happened to see me playing it on four or five separate instances. Fact is, I can barely scrape together the time to play it at all, between work, school, friends and — here’s a word Orrin hates, kiss kiss — hobbies I just can’t find the time. I’m lagging behind my fellow gaming chums by a substantial degree and that’s demotivating. Plus, lately I’ve rarely had the opportunity to play for more than half an hour without at least a five-minute interruption, which is hamering my progress as well. Also, I’m really crap at this game.

Hopping on the bandwagon.

1. As a child, got burned by hot tea — but for reasons as yet unexplained, the tea spilled over my side formed a steam bubble under my skin which exploded so instead of becoming a second or third degree burn it ecame simply a patch of bare muscle where the skin could regrow, rather than a dirty scar. Score.

2. Wrote and directed a play for twenty 12 to 18–year-olds using no sets and hardly any props, with a technical manual that turned out to be twice as thick as the already hefty script.

3. Co-scripted, co-directed and co-wrangled a shor film in Belgium located on a small abandoned trainyard owned by a supposed former Nazi war criminal (this is pure speculation).

4. Spent twenty-two and a half hours editing and colour timing said film in order to meet self-imposed deadline, only to realise, when watching the results after ten hours of not working on it, that it isn’t funn and doesn’t make sense.

5. Taught an insightful and popular writing workshop to people who uniformly had far more writing experience than I did and yet ended up worshipping me as a god.

6. Lived in Holland for twenty-four minus one half year without ever, ever smoking weed or trying any drugs of any kind. Not even aspirin, till I was twentyish.

7. Made no spelling mistakes in English or Dutch at all, whatsoever during exams until puberty.

8. Upon waking up and being handed the phone by my mother, I managed to tell my friend Bart that, no, he can’t come around because I’m not at my mother’s place, I’m at Dad’s, so convinced of this that I convinced him. I noticed that I wa s in my own bed, my mother was talking to me and Bart didn’t have my dad’s number, but by the time this information eased into my brain I didn’t connect it with what I said to Bart and I didn’t call him back to tell him I was at mum’s place after all.

9. During school camp, on the last night, when everybody had decided to party through the night and not sleep, left the dormitory where everybody was screaming and talking and laughing for thre minutes and roughly twenty seconds, only to return to find everyone asleep. All other dorm rooms were filled with people asleep in attitudes of misbehaviour. I went around the farmstead where the camp was organised, turning off lights and alarm clocks and spent three hours doing dishes and making breakfast so the morning crew wouldn’t have to get up so early.

10. Screamed so loud when Wolfie, who is a shit-fucker, sent me a link to a truly heart-stoppingly scary Flash movie in the middle of the night that I woke not only everybody in my house, but also set four dogs in the neighbourhood to barking — while I know for a fact that nobody in half a mile of my house owns a dog.

AND YOU.

ALL OF YOU.

KEEP OFF GRASS.

Naked party! Yeah!

The Stormwind Defense League.

If this is the way to the Light, FUCK THAT.

Yup. Mistake.

Woops...

For the Alliance!

Trying this video again...

Two tests, one a simple pic of me and David, the other an actual little videoclip of same, with a little of our friend Antonio thrown in during our holiday in Center Parcs last year!

Here's yours truly, some years ago.

Now here's a picture I dredged up recently. Wolfie, Jotun, David and I falling over each other in an attempt to stay in view of the camera we set to auto-release, after it slipped into a different position on the rain-spattered hood of David's car. Good times.

Okay, now I'll stop.

The Droste Effect!

Glorious self-referentiality!

Testing?

NaNoWriMo.org

NaNoWriMo.org : Home - Breaking News

My new obsession. Already I've been trying to work appointments out of November, trying to get in some assignments so I can do them in advance and just generally trying to free up as much time as possible for National Novel Writing Month, which is an international phenomenon whose goal is to get people to write.

You have one month, November 1 through 30, to write one complete novel, with the focus on quantity rather than quality. It doesn't matter if it's stupid, all that matters is that it gets finished and has at least 50.000 words, by midnight November 30.

I'm so stoked! I'm doing writing exercises, hopefully to improve my handwriting, because it would be supercool if I could handwrite the thing, but we'll see!

Purposes

This blog thing can serve many, many useful purposes. Because it's more a 'log' and less a 'journal' it might be a good idea to start keeping my homework up on here -- posting it here first, then updating and finally handing it in. Similar with summaries of books and things. Very, very good....

For those interested, I'm ostensibly a New Media student, and a rather lazy one at that. I've taken a few courses in Americanistics because, as a European, I like to be snooty and superior and know more about the States than its inhabitants do.