Words of Wood

Random 2 a.m. musings about Dragon Age: Origins, which I've been playing through again instead of editing my big bang. Steam tells me I just hit 300 hours logged in this game. Oh my god.

( Spoilers, mostly about Alistair )

Your takeaway message: I am using too much logic here and am also now wondering whether Grey Wardens are ever made via STIs. I bet there's fic of it.

I'm in Bristol this week, which is nice and relaxing. I'm beginning to read my way through the Vorkosigan books (part-way through the second now -- I love Cordelia a lot) and playing Skyrim. I can do both these things while working on the embroidery I'm doing, so I can feel productive.

I should probably be writing, but have the slight snag that I left my pen-drive with my Scrivener file on my desk. Where, you know, I had all my plans and prompts and suchlike. Annoying, especially as I think I'm supposed to produce actual plot for the whitecollarhc and the wcpairings challenges.

I want to rec these two fan-made versions of Rue's Lullaby and The Hanging Tree, from the Hunger Games books (no plot spoilers, although there may be in the vid comments). They're beautiful, and I've had them on repeat all evening.

Oh wow, I have totally been neglecting LJ/DW this week apart from to throw protest photos at you and run away again. I'm really sorry to everyone who's only just getting comment replies -- I love love love comments but I can be really terrible at answering them quickly.

Mostly, there's been this magical thing called sunshine! I have been sitting out in it and writing my epic White Collar post-finale fic of DOOM. Okay, when I say epic I mean just under 11,000 words, which isn't that epic, but it's by far the longest thing I've written in literally years so I feel accomplished. Um, I was going to beg for someone to beta-read it for me, but given I'm going to Cornwall on Saturday morning so want to post it Friday night, (I'll have internet access there, but sporadically) I may have left that a bit late.

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In non-fandom stuff, I, as usual, haven't done much :P Started a tabletop Trail Of Cthulhu game tonight with a few friends, GM'd by Fran. We survived a train crash, had a protracted argument about whether the cliffs of Dover have a lighthouse on (Tim triumphantly found via google that they did...in Roman times), and discovered that everyone else in England appears to have been killed by mysterious plants. Also Claire and I not-entirely-seriously pushed to split the party - as a racing pilot and an Oxford don we reckon we have a better chance of survival if we ditch the crazy priest and the incredibly unhinged artist. GM denied this request.

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I have also seen films. The Hunger Games, which I really want to devote an entire post to talking about, and The Most Exotic Marigold Hotel. All I can say about that one is go and watch it, it is fantastic. It has the always, always wonderful and adorable Dev Patel, and also Maggie Smith and Judi Dench and Penelope Wilson and Bill Nighy. Go and see it, seriously.

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Oh, on the subject of things you should see: Hoarders: Skyrim edition. Dead now.

So I'm heading off to a 5 day LAN party tomorrow with about 50 other people (mostly guys).  Because it's the 5th LAN organised by these people I was commissioned to make some "fancy-looking" cakes to celebrate, in return for a £5 discount.  I've spent most of today (I'm not kidding - about 10 hours) in the kitchen making them, and right now I think I might "suggest" that I get a discount to the next one too, because methinks Shazz has no idea how much work baking and decorating cakes is, even amateur ones.  And right now I'm very tired.

Anyway, the cakes!  Top one's vanilla sponge with raspberry jam filling and bottom one's chocolate with chocolate butter icing filling.  The design is based on the game Team Fortress 2, which is the general favourite at these particular LANs.  It's a shooter with loads of classes which are recognisable in silhouette form, so I went about recreating that.  Character choices on the cakes are not arbitary, but contain too many in-jokes for me to bother explaining. Decoration is all fondant icing, apart from the slightly wonky piping which was butter icing, and they're each sitting on a standard size baking tray, to give some idea of size.  They're also higher than they look here, and the glaze is still drying, so they do look better when not camera-flash illuminated!

Just hoping that people like them when I get them there tomorrow!
( The cakes... )

Everyone should go and play Bioshock 2 right now.  Unless you haven't played Bioshock, because you should really play that one first.  I've been playing it for the last two days, and it was really worth me restraining myself from playing it during the last couple of weeks of term, because I didn't want to stop at all.  (I was, however, forced to at intervals by such events as needing food, needing sleep, and the computer crashing.)  It's extremely immersive.  I was so immersed that it was only when the computer crashed that I realised I hadn't thought about such things as actually saving the game for the previous hour.

And creepy.  I mean, the concept of a city called Rapture at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean is creepy enough, but it gets better.
( Major spoilers here... )

This may be my new favourite game.

And then I went looking for Bioshock comms, and found an anon/RP meme comm.  I have not seen this much distilled crack in one place, ever.