Mynd · Archives

For a long time I’ve been staying away from soaps and series of any kind.
They are usually too unrewarding and taking the audience for fools, having to rely on cliffhangers and absurd plot-twists(if there ever was a plot to twist like a kitten in the first place).
The last series I watched fully was the first season of Rome, which I thought was pretty snappy. Wonderful cast, good sence of history and a decent freshness while not going overboard with dramatics(or, at least that’s how I remember it).

But yeah, there’s an exception: Downton Abbey.
Set at the start of last century, its style is absolutely amazing. I love the detail put in the atmosphere, clothing and attitude as a whole.
Showing the life at a Duke’s household it depicts both the ‘upstairs’ highborn and the ‘downstairs’ servants. Both filmed and displayed in completely different ways. Wodnerful their own, powerfull when the sides meet.
An incredible cast delivers the intriguing contemporary plots in a believable way(women’s rights, industrialization, the change in the classed system and in the new season, the Great war).
So, yeah, there’s something I’ll be looking forward to for the coming Saturdays!

Also:Skysrim!
6 days to go.
Am planning to get a new Pc sometime during this month.
This once had its best time, and I’ll need a new one if it’s going to play the game even decently.

Aaand, the list of books I got during these 11 months of silence.
Green is finished, Blue is started in…yeah.
Don Quichot(Doré illustrated)
De Reuzen(Hellet, Serace, Wijgaard illustrated)
Embyo(Jack Vance) Was giving his Sci-fi stuff a go, these are early works and Dutch on top of that, so…
Een planeet vol Kash(Jack Vance)
The Collected Poems of John Milton
The Children of Man(P.J.James) Am in love with the movie, had to have the book.
Malekith(Gav Thorpe)A Warhammer Black Library title, so meh. Can’t expect them all to be as good as the Darkblade series, still enjoyable.
Redwall(Brian Jaques)a wonderful little story, with a cute and utterly British way of storytelling. A tad too childish for my tastes so I’ve put it down for now. It features an evil rat army though, yay!
Lief Dier(Midas Dekkers) Dekkers never seaces to bring down humanity to the lowest creature on the planet, love it.
The Cycle of Fire(Janny Wurts)Seemed to have a nice writing style and it had battling wizards, so it had to come with me. It doesn’t happen often that you get to buy an entire fantasy series for under €10. Turns out to be a great novel with awesome characters, so this is the one I’m currently I really am steadily reading in. And it’s a singed copy, woop.
Mummies onder het mes(Maarten Raven) Lovely study of some inside peeks at highborn mummies.

So, I’ll keep it to that for now.
Late enough as it is.
Thanks!
Yanik

The one I chocked in.

The last half a year I’ve set down several times to write up something resembling a journal post.
But, somehow, it never came to be. Either because I never finished them, or because a stroke of fait wouldn’t have me(power black-outs and such).
 
But, I’ve got an hour and a half before I’ll have to give a presentation about our project group’s progress of the last few months.
 
So, yeah, it’s been a busy year, with January and February’s internship at Bergen op Zoom’s archeology department. Which ended with a bad flue striking me down for the entire last week making me have still do a total of 6 weeks of intern during the summer break, which resulted in a less than well-rested me at the start of the semester.
We’re closing that one off now, only this presentation and 3 more exams to go. 8 days of exams is a pretty harsh thing.
 
During my stay in January I picked up on Tom Waits; he’s incredible, I can listen to his stuff for days on end.
Also, I started to dig (HAHA PUN! Nevermind) deeper into the blues. After having listened to John Lee for a while now, I really got into Howlin’ Wolf. There are many words to describe his music, but I know that there are few ‘heavy’ bands that can blow you away the way he does.
The earlier 30s/40s stuff has appealed to me incredibly as well. Son House, Robert Johnson and recently Skip James have made an incredible impact.
 
So much so that I’ve started to play my guitar more zealously, practicing every day with a blues book I bought for that purpose(100 blues licks and chops will occupy me for a while). Besides that me and two classmates (Bastiaan and Maarten) are planning to get a practice room to do a sort of jam-band thing. Really looking forward to that, it’s been too long.
 
Since around my birthday I’ve been into warhammer again, me and Leon started around the same time. I got myself a starters set Skaven(always loved the vermin) and he started off Wood Elves.
Named my rat-clan after my favorite rat, Coll-Môr and based their color scheme on his: black, red and tan. I’ve got a pretty big army right now and am contend, so won’t have to buy anything for a long time(since, you know, moenies....). Nadie joined in as well and we got Bastiaan so far to start his Beastmen. Add to that Vincent who already has about 4 full-blown armies(yeah…) and we’ve got a pretty solid gaming group!
Last month I set up a campaign with a ridicules amount of random encounters  for Warband sessions.
We’ve had two so far, but I was incredibly happy to see how well my thing has turned out: every flaw I could think of was backed up in the rules. It’s wonderful to be playing the game, creating the models and creating the story around them; there are so many sides to this hobby.
 
Nadie isn’t in Deventer anymore though. Having waited for two years on the alternative medicine course, she made a decision and has gone to study translation in Maastricht. So, that’s a long journey between us. But the city is pretty damn amazing so I’ll have more reasons to go there often.
She had to pick a second foreign language and chose French…which isn’t really her cup of thea, so we’ll see how that go’s.
 
She obviously left an empty spot, since we just hang out allot. And though I’ve been doing board games, movies and warhammer with classmates and such, there’s nothing that replaces your sister.
Since than I’ve been a bit more introspective than I’ve been for a while(hence the lessened urge to write these things). I’ve been thinking back of the many friends I’ve known throughout the years and how, pretty much every case, it was me who led them down, burning most bridges behind me.
Maybe this is the natural way of things(or worse, mine) , but its left me uneasy.
Only after this caused another flue attack during the autumn brake when I hadn’t slept properly for about a month, was I able to really gather myselve again.
So that’s what you see here.
it’s pieces of me, scupltd into another me!
Or just the same me which I see in another light.
Or not me, but someone else, pretending to be me, but let’s hope that I’m myself, makes thing that much easyer.
I’d love to put down the may books I got myself this year(and how few I’ve actually had time to read!) but that’ll have to wait for a later time.
Presentation time now.
No fretting required!
Really.
 
Thanks,
Yanik