2011 round-up - hello 2012!!
Happy New Year, all! May 2012 be a good one for everyone.
I'm not too sad to see the back of 2011. It wasn't a brilliant year for me and I'd like to hope that this year will be better. But there were some good things, so let's see...
2011 brief summary:
The Good
- Jei graduated her Modelmaking BA in Bournemouth with a 1st degree honours in July, and I am soooo proud of her ♥ I still feel sad that I didn't get to go to her graduation because it was at the exact time that my mum got her cancer diagnosis, but I watched it with my mum online on the livestream and it was awesome (: No one deserved that first more than her. Her final major project was designing and creating two fully articulated ball-jointed dolls, and they were incredible!
- I went back to America with her for 3 months and we went on a cruise with her parents down to Bermuda, St, Maarten and St. Tomas, and San Juan, which was a lot of fun and pretty awesome. Admittedly I spent most of the cruise in our room reading because my anxiety was too bad to do much else, but it was an amazing experience anyway, and we managed to get bumped up to a balcony suite due to a leakage problem in our original interior room... so that was pretty sweet!
- Jei and I got a lot done working on our Steampunk webcomic 'Calamity!', which I'm going to post about in another post now that we actually have some material to show. I'm really pretty excited about this. We've been working pretty solidly on 'Calamity!' for around two years now, so it's nice to finally see the fruits of our labour coming to light and we're hoping to get the first pages up pretty soon. Teaser: http://www.calamitycomic.com (:
- We actually managed to have a peaceful family Christmas and New Year with my brother (and his girlfriend) and my dad coming here. This is an amazing thing really, given how things usually go with us all under one roof n.n; I mean, my dad's still an idiot, coming out with racist and ignorant things all the time, and my brother's still a block-headed tease, but we managed not to have any major fights this time around and for once it actually felt really nice to be together as a family ♥ We even managed to play a game of Trivial Pursuit together! Now THAT'S a Christmas miracle.
The Bad
- My mum found out that she has breast cancer and had a mastectomy and is now undergoing treatment which is affecting her physically and mentally quite badly. This is the main reason for 2011 suckiness ): Hopefully she'll start to feel better or at least learn to manage her side-effects better this year and of course most of all I hope the cancer doesn't come back.
- After three years of living with Jei while she was at Uni here, after spending the awesome three months with her in the States I had to say goodbye to her in October, not knowing when I might see her again. if we can muster up the funds, I may be able to see her in February for a week or two, but it sucks going from living together full time to only seeing each other a couple of times a year again ;_;
- My mental health has basically been going down the chute, possibly worsened due to the double-whammy of above circumstances. But I'm trying to get a grip on it and I'm seeing the NHS mental health team in a couple of days so yeah. One of my New Year's Resolutions is to get a handle on this shit so that 2012 can be a productive year.
- I haven't yet been able to get a job, which means I've been out of work for four years now, which means my CV is looking like shite and no one will hire me. But I might be able to get funding to do a course or something to help me be more employable, so we'll see. In the meantime, much as I've been trying to avoid it, I'm probably going to finally get around to throwing some of my rare Sonic merch up on eBay for some quick cash.
So, yeah... 2011 wasn't all bad. The first half was pretty good actually, but the second half got pretty heavy and difficult. Hopefully 2012 will present a clean canvass to start painting a better future now.
In other news, I watched the 2009 movie 'Dorian Gray' and it was terrible. In no way, shape or form did it even TRY to adhere to the book, and it managed to make the title character even more shallow and uninteresting than he already was. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the book, but when you have a character whose main vice is being a shallow and impressionable young man, taking away the things that made his vice interesting is not a good way to go. But I think 'Dorian Gray' deserves a separate LJ post to properly dissect because argh raeg x.x
Also, I got roped into reading Homestuck and basically spent the last four days reading the whole. damn. thing. Yeah. All 6,314 pages plus spin-offs. Again, I think it needs its own post for elaboration, but I'll go ahead and say upfront that I LOVE this story and its characters SO much. I didn't think that I would, but I did. Homestuck is awesome.
Gonna tie this up now... hope everyone had a good New Year's Eve and I wish everyone the best for this coming year (:
I'm not too sad to see the back of 2011. It wasn't a brilliant year for me and I'd like to hope that this year will be better. But there were some good things, so let's see...
2011 brief summary:
The Good
- Jei graduated her Modelmaking BA in Bournemouth with a 1st degree honours in July, and I am soooo proud of her ♥ I still feel sad that I didn't get to go to her graduation because it was at the exact time that my mum got her cancer diagnosis, but I watched it with my mum online on the livestream and it was awesome (: No one deserved that first more than her. Her final major project was designing and creating two fully articulated ball-jointed dolls, and they were incredible!
- I went back to America with her for 3 months and we went on a cruise with her parents down to Bermuda, St, Maarten and St. Tomas, and San Juan, which was a lot of fun and pretty awesome. Admittedly I spent most of the cruise in our room reading because my anxiety was too bad to do much else, but it was an amazing experience anyway, and we managed to get bumped up to a balcony suite due to a leakage problem in our original interior room... so that was pretty sweet!
- Jei and I got a lot done working on our Steampunk webcomic 'Calamity!', which I'm going to post about in another post now that we actually have some material to show. I'm really pretty excited about this. We've been working pretty solidly on 'Calamity!' for around two years now, so it's nice to finally see the fruits of our labour coming to light and we're hoping to get the first pages up pretty soon. Teaser: http://www.calamitycomic.com (:
- We actually managed to have a peaceful family Christmas and New Year with my brother (and his girlfriend) and my dad coming here. This is an amazing thing really, given how things usually go with us all under one roof n.n; I mean, my dad's still an idiot, coming out with racist and ignorant things all the time, and my brother's still a block-headed tease, but we managed not to have any major fights this time around and for once it actually felt really nice to be together as a family ♥ We even managed to play a game of Trivial Pursuit together! Now THAT'S a Christmas miracle.
The Bad
- My mum found out that she has breast cancer and had a mastectomy and is now undergoing treatment which is affecting her physically and mentally quite badly. This is the main reason for 2011 suckiness ): Hopefully she'll start to feel better or at least learn to manage her side-effects better this year and of course most of all I hope the cancer doesn't come back.
- After three years of living with Jei while she was at Uni here, after spending the awesome three months with her in the States I had to say goodbye to her in October, not knowing when I might see her again. if we can muster up the funds, I may be able to see her in February for a week or two, but it sucks going from living together full time to only seeing each other a couple of times a year again ;_;
- My mental health has basically been going down the chute, possibly worsened due to the double-whammy of above circumstances. But I'm trying to get a grip on it and I'm seeing the NHS mental health team in a couple of days so yeah. One of my New Year's Resolutions is to get a handle on this shit so that 2012 can be a productive year.
- I haven't yet been able to get a job, which means I've been out of work for four years now, which means my CV is looking like shite and no one will hire me. But I might be able to get funding to do a course or something to help me be more employable, so we'll see. In the meantime, much as I've been trying to avoid it, I'm probably going to finally get around to throwing some of my rare Sonic merch up on eBay for some quick cash.
So, yeah... 2011 wasn't all bad. The first half was pretty good actually, but the second half got pretty heavy and difficult. Hopefully 2012 will present a clean canvass to start painting a better future now.
In other news, I watched the 2009 movie 'Dorian Gray' and it was terrible. In no way, shape or form did it even TRY to adhere to the book, and it managed to make the title character even more shallow and uninteresting than he already was. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the book, but when you have a character whose main vice is being a shallow and impressionable young man, taking away the things that made his vice interesting is not a good way to go. But I think 'Dorian Gray' deserves a separate LJ post to properly dissect because argh raeg x.x
Also, I got roped into reading Homestuck and basically spent the last four days reading the whole. damn. thing. Yeah. All 6,314 pages plus spin-offs. Again, I think it needs its own post for elaboration, but I'll go ahead and say upfront that I LOVE this story and its characters SO much. I didn't think that I would, but I did. Homestuck is awesome.
Gonna tie this up now... hope everyone had a good New Year's Eve and I wish everyone the best for this coming year (: