OU blog

Personal Blogs

me

I haven't re-applied for my course.

Visible to anyone in the world

Yet. That is because this is much more important. Right?

essay handed in

So we go from here. 

Me as a pirate at work.

To here. Definitely a blog post in there somewhere.

After I saved teh world from a time travelling squid hell bent on turning the world into a giant sandwich (n.b. Using my eye lasers) I continued on with my summer holidays.

So the world cup, what a bust, I ended up watching England go out and not much else. I love football, I do, but I couldn't be bothered to go to the pub to watch the world cup. I think I actually prefer club football which is a little bit sad. I have also had to give up playing for the BHAFC AITC team too, which is sad. I am just too busy with other things at the moment. One of those things is tennis so I am at least trying to stay active and things. We came third at another tournament and start training on the new pitches at Lancing in September, so I'unno, yay I guess. Long may the team continue. Maybe I'll become a sports journalist writing about football and mental health. Something.

I need some filler here before I get to OU related things. I am planning on making some music! Praise the ancients. Today, in fact. I feel so ill from the last few weeks at work I couldn't face any more work on the home studio so have retreated to the internet cafe to write this. Although, you know, internet cafes no longer have a cafe element. I would love a coffee right now. Or water. In fact, just water. For a while, I'm only drinking water. I had this genius thought on Friday night, 'Just drink some red bull, that'll liven you up'. I remember today why I swore never to do that again. I'll save my philosophical ranting about cocaine/caffeine and the youth of today for another time. But yeah, I have a keyboard, a KORG wavedrum (google it) some extra big-ass speakers. I am even now sporting a hip tattoo. I have no idea what kind of music to make. Or how to start. I need to not feel like I have been beaten up underwater first probably. 

.... I don't have a tattoo on my hip. Hip as in, now, edgy, cool. You know?

So I passed my first year. Champagne fell from the heavens, doors opened, velvet ropes part. I haven't really taken it in as an achievement yet. I don't know that it is. I suppose it's akin to coming second in a race, or sixth, at least you placed in the race but really only the winner celebrates. So yeah, relief mostly. I have yet to re-apply just because I've been busy. I could do it right now but I'm going to procrastinate more first. I will most likely do W200. Just 'cos. I have some really nice law books. Old ones that I was given when I was first studying law. Books by people like Glanville Williams and Denning. I'm going to do a little blog post on them before term starts because I feel like I am starting to remember why I enjoyed law so much at A-level. The whole of the first year OU has been kind of like, finding my feet, learning my boundaries and making sure that I damn well get a pass. Wasting money on that scale is not on my to do list. I learned some stuff, kind of, updated my understanding of law so that it is now longer ten years out of date. I now know we have a Supreme Court for instance. Anyways, I'll go into more detail then.

So yeah, I finished up at the Brighton Centre and at the Stadium. Readying myself for job-hunting since the Glyndebourne debacle. It's worth noting here, that just because Dave is a Christian, it doesn't mean that I view his actions differently. I just find the fact that he is a God-lover makes the story sound better. His wonderful girlfriend Kizzy is in fact going to work at a ministry in the Autumn. Strangely the followers I have on Wordpress are mostly members of a Church Group. Might switch to Wordpress as the main blog at some point. Not today though. Anywho.

So Dave worked this shift at the centre with me, Dave is a WH40K player, Dave knows what FTL is. You know. He might as well have asked me how I felt about Lex Luthors part in Blackest Night. Insta-comradery. So Dave says to me, there might be this job, I'm like yeah yeah cool cool I'm up for it. He then says, on another day, I'm working come see me and bring a CV or something. Which I do. I get an interview and a trial shift. Boo-freaking-yah.

Which is all well and good. But how, I hear you cry, do you go from a trial shift to pirate hi-jinks? Well it's .. I don't know if its a funny story. The funniest part of the story is that in the interview the lady was like, 'So have you done waiting before?' and I'm all, 'Yeah, of course, but its not really my thing'. Because it isn't. She said that was fine. To date, I have done one shift on the bar. Which is fine. Cash money is nice and I'm ok at waiting tables. I don't really know whats been going on to be honest, three weeks have passed and today I feel like I have crossed some sort of invisible line. But yeah, its a job, I cosplayed Luffy for pirate day. Comment if you want more photos. Someone asked me to make them a mojito the other night, its fun.

I was like.

the joker

Not much else to report I guess. Pride was pretty un-eventful. People got drunk and stuff. Oh yeah, I'm going to Belgium on Friday! Yatta! Need to quickly book myself some tickets for that and get a haircut and buy a new bag and some sun block. Finish tidying my flat, buy a decent hard bristled yard brush for work, get a new armchair, fix the laptop, give up smoking, become vegan and catch up with the newest batch of comic book movies. Go see my family, pick up this weights bench, play tennis, message this girl and practice the piano. 

I also need to decide whether Larfleeze has replaced The Joker and Harley as my favourite comic villain. 

I'll be back.

Joe

Permalink
Share post
me

Changing Seasons

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Joseph Jensen, Thursday, 15 May 2014, 23:48

animated gif of xmen opening

How many people are not X-men fans? I've not met anyone who has said to me, "Nope. it sucks, its a horrible idea and I don't like it". Some people, you know, they don't like the movies so much. Plenty of people haven't read the comics. But somewhere along the line, most people, have seen some iteration of mutant heroism and liked it. This of course may be because Marvel make sure to put out a decent cartoon of it on childrens TV every few years, during peak Saturday morning time. Marketing cynicism asides, It's a great product.

I used to watch the original cartoon when I was very small, but back in those days it was hard to actually follow the story. Some mornings I would be busy playing Street Fighter or watching Transformers videos. It was a stressful time. A couple of years later, around the time I became a teenager, X-Men Evolution came out which I watched judiciously. I saw about three seasons of it. I never really got into comics or fandom (persay) until I as around twenty or so, I always liked anime though and eventually stumbled across Bleach. It was in the top five most searched things on Google at the time, if I remember rightly, Christina Aguilera, Briney Spears and Paris Hilton were on the same list. I watched it all, then heard it was a comic, which I then read as well (online, legally) which led me into wanting to buy the physical work to support the, well I thought it was to support, the artist. I know now that Shounen is probably as big and corporate as Marvel. Interesting factoid, mildly interesting legal note I should say, the big anime/manga products never got licensed in this country until 2010. Which is how things like Bleach, Naruto and One Piece managed to become so huge. Dragonball even re-made the show which they had originally licensed to UK/US/European TV, then didn't re-license it. At the time it was a really big deal, these giant websites with literally thousands of episodes of anime and volumes of manga, whose flagship was Naruto and Bleach, suddenly took all the big products down (along with a few other choice things) and stayed legal. Though still hugely popular, now, there are lot more series that receive recognition than just Bleach or Naruto. Attack on Titan has been this enormous hit, for instance. Strangely, Naruto and Bleach (and One Piece) have become quite inaccessible to the layman whilst other things, like Attack on Titan or Sword Art Online, are really easy to get into and instantly gratifying.

 

xmen premiere cosplayers

Topic?
Me and a couple of friends went to the premiere of the new X-Men: Days of Future Past movie to try and set a world record for the most amount of cosplayers in one place. I think. Now I think about it harder I'm not sure if it was for X-men cosplay specifically, or cosplay generally. Anyways, we had to get 250, which we didn't so sadly we didn't break the record. We got to go into the cinema at Leicester Square though, did a bunch of photos (my friends are photographers too), did a music video and had a swish after-party at a club in Leicester Square. Where we danced to the X-Men theme tune, which was one of the greatest musical experiences of my entire life. We also got prime position for the whole red (or blue as it was) carpet experience, which we declined to take up. We did something much more amazing instead.

We went ..

speedys cafe
... to Speedys.

Which too was pretty freaking epic. Well, as epic as a sandwich shop could be. Maybe it was because I ordered an epic sandwich. When did epic become a good word anyway? Most epic's are horrible, movie wise. Gladiator is good I suppose. I don't know. Maybe I don't hate epics. Whatever the epic. We had lunch there, still in costume, went to Tokyo Toys and then to Forbidden Planet. Where the whole Marvel/DC section was shut for stock take, not just the products but the comic books section as well. The manga section was closed too. I almost bought a hundred quids worth of DVDs in protest. Fortunately my friends were there to remind me, I have an EMA to do!

Which reminds me and brings me back to the actual topic of todays blog. Last summer I was volunteering my way out of a life that had careered out of control and into a car crash. I enjoyed my stints at Amnesty and cooking reclaimed vegan curries, but when I got a job in September and started this degree I thought I was starting to move my life in a better direction. Now I've been in work for quite a while, I can still pass my first year as long as I don't fluff the final essay and its time to move on. The premiere, the end of the EMA and a football tournament (which I shall detail in a moment) are kind of the culmination of a year spent trying to piece my life back together. I was hoping to do the treble but sadly we failed to break the record. Which is sort of like losing the FA cup. If we don't win today, the league cup goes too. As long as I win the league though. Its all worth it.

See what I did there? Always love a football analogy. So as far as moving on goes, I want to find a better, permanent and decent-ish paid job. So that I can move out of the place I'm in now, I'm in no great rush to do that, I would just like to be able to pick where I live now that I know Brighton a lot better. Post end-of-the-season I have some good stuff to look forward to in the summer.

So football. Tournament today. In Lewes. Vay exciting. We've been drawn against Palace in the first round. Which for those of you who don't follow strange rivalries, is a big deal. We're actually playing them in the very first match. No pressure. The word is that we're in with a shot, there are maybe four teams who have played together for as long as we have. So that could be great, if we win it'll be a night out at Lewes fireworks, if not I'll be going to boardgame night at the pub. Which is also awesome. Nearly thirty of us going today. Woo-hoo!

Lastly on the EMA itself, I am pretty intimidated by it but hopeful I can get through it. I scraped by or failed the essays so far, but have steadily been getting better. If I put enough time into the EMA I will be able to piece together enough marks for a pass out of it, I think. I actually really like the topic, which is generally a bad sign, as that gets me rambling generally rather than giving a focused answer. Going to actually go to the last tutorial and get all the advice I possibly can. Rather than nipping out for tennis.

That too is another ambition. I would like to play tennis more than once this year.

If you want to see some photos of the X-Men event:
https://www.facebook.com/SandgoosePhotoandDesign

(Shameless plug too XD)


Next time I'll upload a shot of me in costume. Points if anyone can guess who I was in the comments. I'll send you a muffin.

Speak soon!
Joe

 

Permalink
Share post
me

40 marks is a pass right?

Visible to anyone in the world

I got my second TMA back (like I'm sure everyone has) and I'm a little disappointed. I think, mostly, with myself. Fortunately I passed. Barely. I made some bad mistakes, I didn't go through the marking of the previous assignment carefully enough, I made almost all the same mistakes again. Somehow I managed to do more of those mistakes the second time. The other bad mistake is a problem I have with the whole format of answering the questions. I've never written an essay where you don't write from a perspective, I always say that 'I will answer the question-" and so on. I'm trying to get my head around the idea that you are literally just writing facts down, I think that is my new approach. Identify points I need to make to get marks. Write them down as simply as I possibly can then worry about stringing it together into prose later.

The whole prose thing is what I mean by the format being tough for me, I really enjoy writing, generally. Anyone who does knows it can be a pig sometimes. As I'm sure your fascinated, I find it easy to write poetry and am currently trying to force myself to write decent prose. So in answering the question for the assignment (last time) I tried to make sure my answers had a nice narrative feel and made some interesting points. I actually thought I had written a couple of really good answers, somehow I had this feeling I might not even pass though. As I say, that stuff ends now, much simpler approach needed. I'm going to throw out working through the unit. That did me no good. I just found that I had all the information in my head and was comfortable with the material, all that let me do was make worse mistakes as I happily chatted on about what I thought the answer was. The answer isn't something to be worked out, it is written down plainly for you in the material. All that needs doing is transferring it into your assignment. That coupled with using citations and references for each and every single point I make will hopefully transfer into a better mark.

As for the prose, well, I'm fairly confident that it will be at least equally as difficult as learning how to answer the assignments. More fun though. Again, its desparately fascinating, I'm trying to get used to spacing out my language and create a good narrative. I find that basically, my problem, is writing in a simple way that describes the environment and characters to the reader. Like all books do. I'm just ploughing through my idea for a story, making small changes, then I plan to go back and try to make it more readable. I'm only slightly less lazy about that than I am about my OU studies.

Saying that, now that I have no plans to incorporate the reading and activities into an overall scheme, I can just attack the question head on. I'm working out phases for answering the question, identifying points I want to make, gathering references, checking the wording and detail of the question carefully, then putting together an answer. So my other time is free to spend on the other things in my life.

First of those is fitness and sport. I quit the gym. High five. Other gyms are more than twenty quid a month and I can't justify paying that nor can I justify walking forty minutes to the gym to work out for an hour so to then walk forty mintues home, even though I am now essentially out of work again. Thats next other thing. So I have taken to jogging to start off my new fitness plan the same way as I started at the gym. Simple exercise that I am comfortable with. The rowing machine was my bag to begin with and I had dramatically improved my speed and distance in the two months I was going to the gym. Ironically I couldn't take much of the running machine, I don't know why, it was too bouncy and stuff. I definitely did not try skipping or hopping really fast late at night when there was hardly anyone there. Sport wise, tennis is long gone, which is kinda lame. Have to wait until whenever this whole giant storm thing passes us to be able to get back to it. Thats ok though, because football is on the up and up! My wrist, which I nearly broke, I don't know if I wrote that here. Some guy kicked a shot so hard (I play in goal mostly) it damaged the muscles in my hand and wrist so badly that I could even close a fist. I went back to play next week with a wrist brace and strong painkillers. As any reasonable man would. So I have, to put it plainly, been pretty shoddy since the start of December because trying to keep goal with one hand is a little tricky. People have this crazy idea to shoot to that side, positives, I have got a lot better as an outfielder. The good thing is I am getting better and can almost do a press up now. We have our first match next week, very excite, I will let you know how it goes.

And so work, BLAHHHHHHHHHHH. What a jip. I called to see if there was any news on the January shifts, oh yeah they say, this week they say. Nothing at all. No call. No, thanks for Christmas, blah. I missed those shifts because of the train, thats sealed my fate, I'm saying no more. The football stadium however, sweet deal, I now get to work with the players. Well, very near the players, running my own bar. Oh yeah. High five. I obviously don't get paid more but I get to work harder and longer. Yay! Went into the players lounge with an order and I was like, oh thats cool, not sure who half these guys are. Brighton have a famous international goalkeeper, I saw him and I was like, damn. Its a pretty sweet deal, after the game they hang around with friends and family at the stadium and come to our bars. Its better than like, I don't know, the Status Quo fans for instance. Nice as they are.

Lastly I am trying to have some kind of love life. I have been told that if you look for love it doesn't come. I should really explain this a bit, I don't disagree with that. So New Years is New Years, right, it turns out that some lady told me that I was (quelle surprise) a good dancer. I'm like, yeah, sure shes a friend of the DJ and wants us to stay here. She'll say anything. The be-boys were there and I felt like any other raver. So we go out for a friend from works (EVILL WORK) birthday, I get plenty drunk, enough that I am totally convinced I can dance, enough so I don't care if I can't. As all guys know when you go out, there are at least ten thousand amazingly hot/beautiful girls that are way too good for you. Long story short I ended dancing with some of those girls and for a short drunken time I had some self confidence. Go me. I forget how the night ended, oh no, I remember .. yeah, listening to your headphones on really quiet streets does not for a cool situation make.

Thats about it, my comic book collecting is going well, I will sort out some pictures because I know it is so interesting, for next time. I am in the process of going through all the stuff I have in storage (mostly clothes and DVDs) and throwing it out/giving it to charity. Clothes are almost done, the DVDs are a lot harder. I don't know what to do with them. Like, at all. Sell them? But I love them, its worse than with music, if I got rid of a movie that I later couldn't find. I might not of even think of it. Anyway, I don't know, I'm gonna get them all together and go through my collection. I might throw all the cases away and put them in a folder or something.

Heres pulling for all your New Years resolutions to come good, don't forget to join us at https://www.facebook.com/groups/316262468519466/ for light-hearted Facebooking, currently talking Duggan and Burkhas, Birkas, Burkas? I have no idea what that word is. Be cool!

werewolf

Joe

 >> http://watch32.com/movies-online/underworld-awakening-1000 << New Underworld movie, well 2012, as far as quadrilogies go. Its better than Tremors. 

Permalink 1 comment (latest comment by Patricia Stammers, Thursday, 16 Jan 2014, 09:11)
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 169793