Honestly, I haven't been doing much that is blog-worthy. I've been reading a lot of A Dance With Dragons, even forming my own opinions and theories and whatnot. I'm nearly finished, so once I'm done I can Google everything yayy!
Also, I got three new English students, and they're all from Baulko Year 12 so I've been spending lots of time markings essays since Trials are coming up soon. So fast! I can't believe we're starting Semester Two of Uni when they start their Trials but anyway.
And my guitaring is getting better! My calluses are starting to form, ever so slightly. My fingers are so weak though =[ Maybe it's time to do finger exercises!
I still haven't started drawing yet. I was going to buy some black paper today for my drawing of Tyrion but I forgot and so I guess I'll just have to do it on normal paper.
And speaking of drawing, I re-discovered this book that Alice bought me some time ago.
The entire book is just blank, but there are ideas all over the book on things to draw with blank space for you to draw them. It's kind of weird how people would pay $17 for a book of drawing IDEAS. It's got "refreshingly basic" things, like a paperclip, to "deceptively simple" things, like a bicycle, and even "conceptually mind-bending", like the sound of girlish laughter. What.
After I do the drawings I have already planned, I will attempt to do maybe one drawing out of this book a day? I don't know how long that will last but hey, I could give it a shot.
I also stumbled on this really cool thing.
Look at this picture:
At first, it doesn't seem that amazing... until you realise IT'S A SINGLE PHOTOGRAPH!
This site includes a different angle and a video of the process of creating the image.
Pretty cool right!?! I'm so fascinated by this stuff! But in all honesty, I guess if you think about it... I don't really get the point. Like, it's for an album cover and I just don't understand how that adds to the album but anyway, it's some good artwork there.
Another thing is, my brother has been buying more board games so here goes:
Ticket To Ride
As you may guess, it's based on train lines. I think the original is the U.S.A:
My brother also got the Africa and Asia (including Russia and stuffs) expansions. The Asia one has two sides, and one of them you can play in teams. We haven't tried the expansions, but the original is pretty fun. You are given some routes to complete, and you need to try to collect different-coloured trains to make your routes possible, and others are unaware of what routes you have. You get points based on what routes you complete and how many train lines you put down.
It was rated really well, and some people who have a website and rate board games all rated this as #1, but I didn't find it that amazing. It's fun when you don't want to use too much brain-power but I wouldn't say it's the best. I think it's because those experts can remember all the routes and know roughly where others want to go and try to block the others so they lose points.
Mr. Jack
I love this game! The concept is amazing! So hard to explain, but briefly it's based on Jack the Ripper. It's a two player game, one player is Mr. Jack and the other is the detective. Mr. Jack gets a character (from the eight in total) and that character will be Jack. The weird thing is that there are only 8 rounds, and in each round both players move ALL the characters depending on what their strategy is. Each character has a special power that can help both players in different ways.
The detective's goal is to find out which character is Mr. Jack and catch him, kind of like in Cluedo. Mr. Jack's goal is to NOT let the detective catch him. The way this happens is that at the end of each round, the detective asks Mr. Jack whether Jack is "seen" or "unseen", either seen by a lamp, light or other people (which you would understand when you play). If the detective is good and by the end of the round half the characters are seen and unseen, then he has already eliminated half the players, realising they are innocent. If he keeps halving the characters each round, then he will be able to find out who Jack is really easily.
It's actually a really difficult game and you need A LOT of brain power to work it out. There is a lot of strategy, like in chess. Similarly to chess, it's amazing how the board is always the same at the beginning, but different things can happen along the way and it gets really intense. Usually the detective wins (I think it's 80-20, but with experienced players it's still 60-40 or so) and it's really stressful being Mr. Jack! Each game takes approximately 30 minutes but it's still exhausting.
Out of all the board games my brother has bought, I would say BANG! is number one, followed by Mr. Jack. We haven't even gotten the expansions of Mr. Jack yet!
Oh and when I came home today, I started re-watching Potter Puppet Pals, which led me to rewatching Charlie the Unicorn! DID YOU KNOW NOW THERE IS CHARLIE THE UNICORN 4?!??! It came out just at the end of December last year!!
Honestly though, the first and second are still the best!
Also, I saw on 9gag this post on a Pixar theory that all Pixar movies occur in the same Universe and all effect each other. It sounded pretty interesting so I looked into it and found the original article. I was a bit confused because he jumps back and forth but I saw that he did a timeline of the events he described, which is a condensed and neater version. It's pretty cool, check it out if you've seen the Pixar films and this intrigues you.
Lastly, I'll end on two TED talks. I love TED talks, they're amazing!
This first one is done by a Victoria's Secret (I think) model, and she talks about the dangers of how our society focuses on appearances, how "Image is Superficial" and answers some questions people have about models. I think her message was really powerful and makes people really reconsider how they view things, give it a watch!
This second one is very interesting. It's done by a neurologist that focuses on hallucinations. Here he talks about how visually-impaired (even blind) people can get very striking hallucinations and how this happens. Surprisingly, it even occurs in auditorily-impaired people! It's close to twenty minutes but trust me, it's worth it!
Coming up in the next few blogs:
