It happened again....

So, my friend Nat kept talking about a show called Supernatural to me. Saying I needed to watch it because it's awesome and that it's my kind of show.

Anyone who knows me knows I'm a fan of sci-fi/fantasy stuff and that my favourite book series is the Dresden Files. They're a series of books all about a wizard P.I. who lives in Chicago and fights all those things that go bump in the night. Solving normal crimes commuted by supernatural beings or means. I read the first 12 or 13 books in 3months...yeah they're that good. Fairly sure I've done a massive review of sorts before so I'm not going do it again now. 

Anyways, the series follows two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester. They are "hunters", they go around hunting and killing supernatural beings. Ranging from your run of the mill ghosts to demi-gods. So yeah, its right up my alley. I haven't quite done what I did when I started watching Castle or reading the Dresden Files with Supernatural, I haven't really been able to. I should have started watching them in the Summer instead of the start of September when I got back to Uni but meh, we live and learn after all. I can safely say I'm well and truly hooked now though. It has this nasty habit of running about 400 different overarching plotlines at once that all intermingle and lock together at the last possible moment, becoming an awesome blend of awesome. I like to think I'm pretty good at figuring out detective-y things, but there've been a couple blindsiding moments from these that have really thrown me off. One of the great things about it is having the two main characters as brothers, means there's a lot of hilarious banter between the two. That and there is a lot of humour in the show anyway not just from those two but you know. I'd love to say more but it'd ruin the plot and that's kinda the whole point to watching it. I'd definitely recommend watching it if you like the whole supernatural beings and stuff.

In other news it was fresher's week this week, meaning time to recruit some new faces to the frisbee family. Went to the sports fair and spent a good portion of the day handing out leaflets and talking to whoever went past and trying to convince them to join. We got a lot of interest and sign ups, that's not the most important part though. The most important part is that we got loads of people turn up to the taster session on Thursday! Quite a few of them seemed really interested in joining and quite a few turned up to Saturday's training session as well! Hopefully most of them will decide to join properly and attend regularly but we'll have to wait and see really.

Aside from that? It's pretty quiet around here. Lectures started again today....I'd forgotten a) how boring they are and b) how warm lecture theatres get! We found out that we're going to be doing just one module for the next 7weeks.....and that module is anthropology.....yay.....

The next 7 weeks are going to draaaaaaaaagggggggggg.....

Catch ya later folks

In fact I don't wanna know...

So I recently bought GTA V, which for anyone who doesn't know the GTA series of games are known for their free roaming open worlds and the ability to do whatever you like. They are massively violent games, you can try to be a law abiding citizen but in Liberty City or San Andreas or wherever else, that never lasts long. A quiet drive along the beach can quickly and easily turn into a massacre and you running for your life from the quickly escalating police force. They have been the source for a lot of video game violence and it's effect on kids debates because of their inherently violent nature.

Most people know that the first thing you do when you buy a new game is play it to death, logging hour after hour on it and blitzing the campaign in the first few days. No doubt there are people doing it now or already have and are playing it through a second time, but I'm not one of them. It's not that I'm not enjoying the game or that I don't have the patience to dedicate time to it so things can start hitting up...it's just for me there's too much to do. Don't get me wrong I hate it when there's a game that has little to nothing to it, you feel as though you're just getting started and then it's over. I like my games to have longevity or replay value, but when it comes to this I don't know....it just seems like in a world where you can do almost anything you like, I struggle to find something to do. There's no clear purpose or reason for anything you do.

I can pick up a game like Legend of Zelda where you're thrown from dungeon to dungeon fighting monster after monster and love it. I'll blast through the game then go back for more! But for some reason I don't seem to be as gripped by GTA V...I like knowing what my overall objective is, what I'm striving to achieve...I'm not sure what that says about my personality but hey...maybe I don't wanna know. I like exploration and finding new things but like I said, in GTA it just seems like there's a thousand things to do and no order to do them in. I think that's the thing that gets me the most...not knowing what I'm supposed to do or when to do it. Yeah in adventure/dungeon crawler games there's alot of exploration and open worlds but there's a semblance of order to things.

After playing it for a little bit more I've started to get into it alot more but it's still very much one of those games I can pick up and play very easily. It's not something I can stay up til 4am playing, you know?

Anyways, fresher's week starts this week. Means that Lincoln is going to start to feel alot more lively, especially at night. Lots of heavy drinking and loud music. Also means it's time to recruit some new members for the club. Hopefully we'll able to pull in a few fresh new faces to go to the beginners tournaments we've got lined up.

Aside from that there's not all that much else to say really. I watched The Big Lebowski for the first time this week. It was awesome! Such a great film! I can't believe I hadn't seen it before! Also introduced the housemates to Reservoir Dogs last night, something they'd never seen before. Ben said that there were a couple moments where he realised "So that's where that comes from...".

 Catch ya later folks

Who said Steam Punk was dead?

So nothing all that much has happened this week really, spent the most part of it recovering from the tournament. That being said I'm still not on full form due to having a stupid cold that won't leave me alone.

This guy wore this all day...

I did go round a mates on Thursday though to celebrate Alana winning her court case. I may have ended up getting a little bit drunk...was a good night though, ended up crashing on Lex's sofa again. Managed to avoid a hangover which is more than I can say for some of them, two bottles of champagne can have quite the effect in the morning!

Saturday however was a little different for me. One of my housemates said to me about it and then someone mentioned on Facebook about a Steam Punk fair going on in Lincoln. So I decided to find out what it was about (aside from the obvious) and discovered it'd be running all weekend up at the castle. Sine I hadn't been out for a play with my camera in a while I decided what the hell, it's not something you see everyday after all. I grabbed my camera and headed up there (I forgot how much of a bitch Steep Hill is...) to take some photos and see what was going on. The weather was pretty good compared to the past couple days of rain that we've had so that was a nice bonus. I also posted Dad's birthday present home to him (Happy Birthday) while I was there...I was meant to do it a couple days before but the envelope sat on my desk staring at me while I neglected to leave the house for a couple days.

Some pretty cool costumes

Anyways, I'm not too big on Steam Punk, I mean I know roughly what it's about but that's about it so I wasn't too sure what to expect. I got there and saw some pretty amazing costumes while there. Some people really put a lot of work into these things I mean this one guy was wearing what looked like a very heavy helmet and just wandering about. Some of the costumes were pretty bizarre for example saw one guy dressed as a blimp (the photo isn't that great so it's not on here)! Some of the other costumes though were actually pretty amazing and intricate, like the picture below, all the pipework and gauges and stuff on his jacket! How cool is that? I love the differing styles of clothing ranging from Victorian era to World War style flight uniforms and stuff.

This is the guy with the heavy looking helmet

 I think it's really quite interesting some of the designs for things people came up with. I saw a lot of people walking around with their take on a steam powered jet pack. No two designs were that similar, obviously they had the common features of having wings and being on peoples backs....but you know what I mean. I over heard one conversation, whilst I was milling about being a massive tourist, where a couple of people were discussing who designed their outfits or aspects of them at least. They kept referring to the designer as an "engineer" which I found quite interesting. Yeah that's not the most interesting thing anyone's ever heard but it's cool how these guys have developed a whole sub culture based around what could have happened if steam power stayed the height of technology.

One of the other things I'd noticed whilst walking around was the number of people carrying around what looked like steam powered weaponry. Some people had really put a lot of work into designing their weapons and others had simply stuck on some steam gauges and copper paint on some toy guns. I mean yeah it's fair enough not everyone has the kind of funds to dedicate to it as some people so at least you guys made the effort, but that doesn't detract from the fact that steam powered weaponry was abandoned for a reason.

These guys made me chuckle

Still I think it's pretty amazing the sheer amount of work people have put into this idea, it's definitely something I'd like to see more of. The fair wasn't exactly huge but there were a lot of people walking about.

I also took the opportunity while I was there to walk around the castle walls and see what I could. Annoyingly some large parts of the walls are under reconstruction work and inaccessible, meaning some of the awesome views around the place were unavailable. There's a particular one of the Cathedral that I wanted to photograph but that section of the wall was closed off. The rest of the way round really gave some breath taking views! From up there you could almost begin to see the curvature of the earth. Just wish I had Dad's super zoom lens with me to take advantage of it all. Ah well!

It feels good to have a couple photos back on this thing, my apologies for the massive lack of them!

Catch ya later folks

Pain.....lots of pain!

Apologies for the absence of last week's post, I was still moving in and tired and it sorta slipped my mind. My bad. I know this week's is late but I've been busy today and after the weekend I've had I'm absolutely knackered!

So this weekend was the weekend of Lads on Tournament....and what a weekend it was! I am practically dead after playing all weekend. First time I've done anything physically active since coming home for the summer and it has pretty much killed me. I've got all of the muscle aches under the sun. I've been looking forward to this weekend for a while now and for good reason. It was a fantastic warm up for the upcoming season and I'm sooooo glad I played. It showed me just how out of practice I've become over the summer and how badly I've let my fitness slip.

Originally I was just meant to be playing for Lincoln....however one of the open teams run by our Captain Jack 'Sparrow' had a bunch of last minute drop outs and so me, Will, Ian and Lex were picked up to play for them. I was also informed I was to be captain for Lincoln this weekend as Sparrow wasn't playing for us and Tomo wasn't present for the weekend. This instantly made me nervous as I'm a terrible leader, especially when playing with team-mates who have been playing for alot longer than me. I mean how can I call the play when the people I'm playing with know what I'm doing better than I do? So I was really only captain when sitting having the team talk with the other team...which would be fine but I generally have no idea what I'm talking about...I felt like I was just rambling for the most part but hey ho. I'm not sure what the other players thought about my performance as captain, hopefully I wasn't too bad.

I was also nervous about playing for two teams after so long of not doing anything, especially since the team I was playing pick up for was set up by Jack and one of his school friends. Now Jack used to play for a team called Stags, these kids came from a juniors school that teaches ultimate and are arguably one of the best teams I've seen. Jack and Andy (His mate) left the school and the team but decided to make their own team, named Stage 2. So I'm not sure how to feel about being asked to pick up...part of me was nervous as hell, scared that I'd fuck up and bring the team down and the other part of me was a little flattered that I got asked to play. I mean maybe I was just being asked to make up the numbers, or maybe they thought I was good enough to warrant the chance to play for them. I guess I'll never know but still I was scared I'd be a let down. I also didn't want to dedicate myself to playing for them as I was captain for Lincoln so I couldn't go balls out for Stage, they weren't my priority....the strange thing being....I think I actually played better for Stage than I did for Lincoln....

My performance as a player is far more important to me. I don't think I played my best frisbee by any means but it wasn't my worst...which I was expecting to after 3months of not handling a disc. The Saturday was very hit and miss. Had its ups and downs. Mostly downs if I'm honest. We had some awesome moments but also some horrible ones too, which I guess is mostly down to the rustiness of summer and re-adjusting to a new team line-up. There's always some time needed to adjust to a new line-up, learning how each person moves and behaves on pitch. After that I think things picked up and we started to feel alot more familiar with the players we were working with (Lincoln consisted of Me, Will, Cat, Chris, Matt, Alana and Jon. Stage 2 consisted of Me, Will, Andy, Jack, Alana, Ian and Lex). Towards the end of the day the lack of summer activity's effect on my fitness became quite apparent and I started to flag quite quickly. I mean hell, after my first match of the day I felt awful! I guess I was expecting myself to be able to explode out of the gates and hold the same pace all match long but that really....really didn't happen. After that though I seemed to be able to find my pace and the exertions didn't seem to be so bad.

I woke up into Sunday bleary eyed and full of muscle aches already from the day before. I can say that Sunday went a helluvalot better than Saturday. I think on Saturday I managed to score a couple points against BFG, a team who pride themselves on having an average height of 6ft something, which is probably my highlight of the day. Sunday was full of much better times, we won distinctly more games than the day before and we all seemed to be working better as a team (both Stage and Lincoln). The muscle aches were a little more pronounced after a nights sleep on them and playing again hurt for a bit until everything loosened back up and eased back into the familiar movements. That being said I'm in absolute agony right now....but still! We all seemed to be playing a damned sight better and hopefully my performance wasn't too disappointing throughout the day. The Lincoln/Danger game will stick in my head though for possibly one of the most intense games I've ever played! The scoreline was something like 6-3 to Danger by the end and holy hellfire was it a great game! We didn't have Chris for the match as he is one of the Danger lads but even still we gave them a helluva fight. Our defence really gave them something to work around and even though they ran us hard we scored a couple decent points against them (which is an achievement in itself) and stopped them from getting into double figures (which is another achievement). That in itself shows me that I must have improved at least a little bit from when I started, I mean yeah it wasn't all my effort and my teammates are far better than me so they deserve most of the credit, but surely I must have improved a bit to manage to help pull that off.

It got to the end of Sunday's play when I was literally a walking corpse. There was nothing left in the tank and only one game left to play for Stage 2 and I could relax I gave it what I had left. It was the spoon final against Smart Casuals (shortened to Smasuals- pronounced "Schmazles" in my head) and those guys and girls are some speedy little bastards. I mean hells bells did they work us hard. For our last game of the day they were amazingly energetic. They're always a fun team to play against and always a good laugh and a good match. If I'm honest, I've never been so happy to hear the final buzzer in a game before. I was almost asleep on my feet by the time that match ended. We had to iron man the match because Lex and Ian disappeared outside after their match with Lads on Tour just before Stage 2 went on and didn't come back in to sub for us. So we were dying upwards by the end of the match, after playing all weekend for two teams and the last 19min match without a sub we were practically dead. Me and Alana got outside not knowing who had actually won that match. As it turns out we did! Which surprised us both, I'm pretty sure we were behind in that match but I honestly couldn't tell you.

All in all this weekend was pretty awesome, knackering but awesome. A great way to kick of the new season and to get back into the swing of things. I just hope that the teams I played with were happy to have me and were pleased by my performance. I felt that on times I let them down and that I hadn't played my best but we all have our off moments right? Ah well, here's to the third and final year, let's hope it's a good one!

Catch ya later folks