Just finished the first draft on a 40 page report – it’s been sitting around waiting to be written for three months. I finish it in three days. I rule!

(And I’m not making up that ruling part – apparently I am a ‘godsend’. Direct quote!)

The first rule of Blog Club is… Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

So, without more ado or further gilding the lily, here’s my Blog Club submission:

The community for this round is Anime. After history, anime is the smallest community on 9rules with just three blogs. In one respect that makes it a good (and easy) place to start. At the same time my heart fell because the amount I know about anime could be poured into an egg cup and still leave room for a decent sized egg. So I apologize at the start of this post for any factual errors and confusions that are bound to rampage their way through my words.

Japanese movie and television animation, often having a science fiction theme and sometimes including violent or explicitly sexual material.

That’s the definition my dictionary widget provides me. A dig further using Wikipedia doesn’t exactly clarify matters in my brain.

In fact I could spend this entire post talking about what is and what isn’t anime, leaving both you and myself even more confused, and not talking about the pretty blogs I discovered, so I won’t. In my mind ‘anime’ is 1) animation, 2) Japanese. Let’s just leave it at that.

For someone who has held a life long love of science fiction and fantasy, has played one or two role playing games, and watched a fair few cartoons growing up, anime never really figured on my radar. You’d think I had geek credentials enough but clearly not. So when someone says “anime” to me I think straight away to the two Studio Ghibli films I’ve seen (and loved), Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. Then I remember that I got Appleseed out of the library on DVD on impulse and really rather enjoyed it. But that’s it. Three animes (is that an appropriate plural?) in near twenty four years. Ouch. My geek hat is clearly slipping.

As I pretty soon exhausted my own experiences of anime, my thoughts started to wander into territory that isn’t strictly anime: cartoons and graphic novels. In my brain anime, cartoons, and graphic novels all share something, and that is their artwork. It is the artwork that links them all together. I read V for Vendetta in the same spirit I watch anime – sometimes with the words, sometimes without. Each time I come away with a slightly different story because I’ve ‘read’ the pictures differently. For someone who is much more comfortable with words, this is slightly odd, but I can stare at this form of artwork (graphic/manga/anime) for stretches at a time and understand volumes.

With anime pictures really are worth a thousand words.

I love how meaning can be conveyed without speaking. I also love how drawn characters can be more believable and truthful than standard actors.

More than all that though, I’m left with the impression of how frelling pretty anime is. Even when portraying horrific war and destruction it’s… breathtaking.

Now, I’m not saying I’m going to rush out and empty Forbidden Planet of their entire anime stock this weekend, but if anyone has some anime they’d like to lend me (burn to DVD and post me, whatever), I’ll be more than happy to watch it. Look on it as a way to fill in what I’ve just realised is a big gap in my education.

blog club, blog_club, 9rules, anime

So my previous post got just the teensiest bit misinterpreted.

Who’d a thunk it? Just one more example of my own unique blend of British sarcasm, humour and sheer insanity not translating too well to the written word.

Just to set the record straight here, in case y’all are starting to get the impression I am a delicate flower who needs sheltering from the rough and tumble of the real world (don’t you just love it when analogies up and die on you in the middle of a sentence like that?) –
I am not scared.

I never for one moment contemplated jacking in the blogging gig. It would take far more than one moment of internet randomness to make me stop what I’m doing.

I love that I never know who is going to walk through those salon doors next. I love it that someone I haven’t met in a couple of years randomly stops by the blog, reads a bit, and goes “Hang on… She’s familiar…”

I write as “Cas” instead of my real name because, well, I’ve always been Cas online. It’s quicker to type if nothing else. It’s not an attempt to remain anonymous. Frankly, “Cas” is just way cooler than “Claire”.

I’m getting off my point here.

Tristan, you did nothing wrong. In fact you left me with a grin a mile wide on my face most of the day. The whole thing was just so deliciously unexpected. I’d probably say “out of left field” if I was actually in the habit of using baseball metaphors (I think it’s a baseball thing anyroad 😕 ).

The point I was trying to make with that post was not that I was knocked back in a bad way by someone I used to know outside of the blogging sphere stumbling across Bright Meadow. Rather I wanted to point out how amazing and wonderful I found the whole thing. You really never do know who is going to read your blog and, far from sending me quaking behind the sofa, it’s made me even firmer in my convictions that getting your audience talking back is a good thing.

So there you have it everyone. I like the random. I celebrate the bizarre. I embrace the unexpected. I like old acquaintances popping out of the woodwork and making themselves known.

People – you’re the reason I blog and leave my comments form open.

I’ve just knocked the ‘coco peeps’ box and the ‘subscribe by email’ box out of the sidebar. The first because it was slowing down an already hefty site to load (I need to go through things an tame K2 a little bit when I have the time). The latter because no one uses it. If you think I’m wrong about either of these decisions, let me know 🙂

… or why it’s time to stop blogging.

Hell, that was a little unexpected! Turns out my Thunderbird knight in shining armour is an old acquaintance.

We’re not talking long-lost-soul-mates here, but still – someone I’ve shared a few cups of coffee and one or two pints with a couple of years back.

No idea how he stumbled across Bright Meadow and you can colour me all kinds of surprised that he recognised me, but it did get to thinking on how the world is far too small a place, especially this little ‘blogging’ community we inhabit. When you’re wrapped up in it is all too easy to think of it as an all encompassing phenomena, but take a step back and really it’s a very small group of people involved. There’s only a finite number of people interested in certain things and like does tend to gravitate towards like.

Still, do the math on the number of blogs in existence, and the number of ex-boyfriends of old friends, and the chances of one of the latter stumbling across my example of the former is pretty slim.

Anyway, it made me wonder what other skeletons might come clanking out the wardrobe. Almost enough to put a girl off blogging 😯

A little question for you –

I use Thunderbird for email (since Mail upped and died on me so spectacularly a while back) and I am getting used to its foibles.

One thing I would like to do however is change the default ordering of the accounts in the ‘folders’ pane of the viewer. I have no idea how the current order occurred – it certainly isn’t alphabetical – perhaps it’s the order I added them? I don’t know. But I would like to change the order.

Can anyone help me?

When we moved into Meadow Towers there was no furniture other than the wardrobes and a dining room table, even though it was listed as “partly furnished”. Being on an incredibly tight budget at the time I had to get the cheapest furniture around – this meant Argos and crappy quality.

The desk I got did the job but it just wasn’t deep enough – 49 cm just didn’t provide enough room for me to get the keyboard far enough away from me so that I could type comfortably (I type slightly oddly with the full length of my forearms supported on the desk) which has meant since moving in back last September, using my computer for any length of time has led to buzzing, shooting pains all the way up to my elbows, an inability to grip, and general ouchiness. I didn’t realize that the problem was the desk till I started full time work in an office that had wonderful deep desks. How come I could type all day at work with nary a problem, yet five minutes on my own computer was enough to have me crying in pain?

Our lease here at Meadow Towers was up for renewal in September and for a while it looked like we might be moving. If that was the case, I’d have put up with the desk for the last few months, then ditched it when we moved into whatever new place we found and got a better desk. Last week we decided we actually really liked it here, lack of outside space and no-pets not withstanding, and that we’re going to stay. As soon as I had that decision, I realised something had to be done about the desk.

After conferring with the Crazy Canalman, we decided the cheapest and easiest solution was to just build an extra desktop with the desired depth and screw it to the existing desk. He came down last weekend to do the necessary with some plywood and I now have a desk that is 80 cm deep – that’s nearly double the area I had before! (And actually about 20 cm more than I needed, but more on that later). Ideally, I would have covered the blank plywood before Farv screwed it to the desk, but I don’t have the tools to do it myself here at Meadow Towers, nor do I have space to store a giant slab of plywood whilst I get around to being creative on it. So he screwed the new desktop down and left me to it. The surface seemed smooth enough, so I figured I could leave it as-is for a few weeks till I knew how I wanted to cover it.

One day and numerous splinters later, I knew something had to be done, and quickly! So this weekend I sat myself down with a pile of torn up newspapers, some PVA glue, and a brush, et voila! My beautiful new desk!

What do you need:

1. A desk. Doesn’t have to be a new desk, doesn’t even have to be a desk actually, just whatever you want to cover.
2. A father willing to cut the wood to size for you and then drive 1 1/2 hours out of his way to attach it to your desk, buy you lunch, then drive 1 1/2 hours back again. Have I told you lately how wonderful my father is?
3. A pile of old newspapers that you got your long-suffering flatmate to lug home, then only use one paper from.
4. PVA glue watered down to roughly 1 part PVA to 3 parts water, though measuring this out is nigh on impossible. Just make a nice watery paste that looks the same colour and consistency of milk. The whole desk took about 125ml of PVA.
5. A 1 inch brush that you aren’t too attached to – don’t get the cheapest in the shop as these molt bristles like there’s no tomorrow, but don’t get the real expensive branded one either. I spent £2.50 on my brush and that only lost two bristles.
6. A tin of water based clear varnish. This is quicker drying, smells less, and won’t react with the pva/paper mix like solvent based varnishes can. I used about 125ml of varnish to get two decent coats on the desk.

What you need to do:

1. Make sure the surface you are covering is as smooth as possible and dust free.
2. Put a coat of the PVA/water mix on to seal the wood.
3. While this is drying, tear up a newspaper into pieces between an inch and two inches square. Don’t make them too even. Also don’t make them too big, or too small. Too small and it just takes an age to cover a large area. Too big and they go all wrinkly and don’t leave a nice flat finish.
4. Once the undercoat is dry, cover the surface using the good-old papier mache technique we all remember from childhood. (Glue on the surface, put the paper on the glue, cover with more glue… rinse and repeat till done).
5. Try to be as random as possible with your pieces. Mix pictures and text. Mix the orientation of the text. Overlap. Higgledee-Piggledee is what you are going for.
6. When that first layer is fully dry – if possible leave it over night to make sure – do a second coat to cover any missed spots and to make the edges look neat.
7. When that was dry, I did a third ‘layer’ of a few pictures and clippings that I really liked from some film magazines. I spread these randomly over the surface of the desk in places where I knew they would catch my eye and not be covered by the computer. Don’t go overboard with these – the idea is to create accent pieces, not recover the entire desk in them – I used ten or twelve such images on the entire desk.
8. When you are certain that is all dry and you like how it looks, do a couple of coats of clear varnish over the whole to seal it and make it waterproof. Instructions for different varnishes vary, so follow what it says on the tin, but do make sure the room is as ventilated as possible!
9. Finally, put everything back on your pretty ‘new’ desk and gloat.

I am definitely gloating over my new desk – I have so much more space and typing is once again comfortable. You can’t really tell from the pictures but my computer isn’t actually pushed all the way to the back of the desk. This is because if it was I wouldn’t be able to see the screen. For some reason Farv got a little confused with the measurements and made it 20 cm deeper than I asked for. This has actually turned out for the best because when I want to do craft or writing on the desk, all I have to do is push the computer to the back of the desk and I have enough space (before I would have to laboriously unplug and move everything).

The desk is ideal for me now as I like to have free space around me as I work – my unorganized mind and rest of my room aside – I hate to have a cluttered workspace. I even got all giddy about my new desk and utilized the extra space to make some earrings and some notebooks.

The whole thing cost around £20 (£10 for the wood). It would have come to less than £20 if I could have found the PVA, brushes, and varnish I had left over from another project, but either way it still comes to less than a new desk. Happy Cas 🙂