Weekend of Good!

Well, that was a very nice weekend indeed. I could use a couple more days off, but there's a long weekend just round the corner, so I can't complain.
The end of the week was fairly busy, with school and extra-curricular activity. I managed to get my Gamechef entry finished on Sunday morning, which was excellent. It ended up being 14 pages, with some interesting flavours. Not an award winning entry, but not too shabby for a first timer. I'm really keen to look at some of the other entries - I have Mike's game printed off and ready to be perused.

Unfortunately I also have a pile of marking to do. about 45 short stories to mark, which is a painful process as I have to record how many errors the students make, but I'm not allowed to write on their work. *shudder* Student writing can be pretty terrifying at times.

I should have done some marking on the weekend, but I decided to place Gamechef above marking in the priority cue. I also decided to place watching Lost (thanks Jenni and Lee!) over planning, which has actually worked out fine so far. Yay for successful short-prep lessons. There's no way I could have done this last year. Which is to say, when I did this last year it was much less successful :)

So, other awesomeness from the weekend - we Buffy'd, which was cool (although a late start meant that some of us were not as focussed as we could have been). I really like gaming with our Buffy group, and would be really curious to see how we'd go with a different game or GM. Maybe after this season of Buffy we could have a couple of one-offs? I'd be curious to see what the group is like to handle from the GM chair.

I killed a few plants on Sunday, which was satisfying, but now I have to dispose of the corpses. We have a small tarpaulin, and there's ample disposal room down at Debbie's mum's place, so that shouldn't be too complicated.

And, um, yeah. It was a really busy weekend, but I guess a lot of it's not so interesting to write about. It was good. I had much enjoyment. Bill Bailey's Part Troll is excellent. I spent much money on ordering Hithchikers CDs from amazon.co.uk. I like our friends. Weekends are great.

Gamechef is hard

Well, it's actually relatively straight-forward once the idea's in place. It's just work. I've written about 3 pages in the last 3 days. I may have to pick up the pace some!
I shall endeavour to get another 3 pages done this afternoon. Minimum.

5 Minute Review: The English Patient

Always one to be up with the times, I saw the English Patient over the weekend for the first time. I enjoyed it for a number of reasons, and I had a few comments I couldn't help making afterwards. Sadly I've forgotten most of it, but what remains is as follows...
EP is a very pretty movie. Sand dunes and khaki clothing and old planes are all cool. There were a few very awesome characters who I had a lot of sympahty for, and some pretty nerve wrenching scenes. The surround sound in the sandstorm stands alongside the attack on Zion in the third Matrix movie as the most impressive sounding scene I have yet enjoyed in the comfort of my lounge.

I particularly enjoyed the character Kip, who had cool hair and a very Oz-like demeanour. Without the non-sequitors. I also liked his loyal, exploding Sergeant. Seeing Kip attempt to defuse a bomb while an American tank rumbles up the road, threatening to detonate said bomb, was quite hair raising.

As for the romantic leads, I warmed to them by the end of the film, but there were one or two things that caused me to raise my eyebrows incredulously:

*Leading lady slapping Ralph Fiennes about the head, then shagging him, then making him sew her dress. She totally made him her bitch, which was funny but unexpected.
*Cuckolding Santa. I mean, was this scene meant to make you think anything other than "My God, these characters are repulsive uber-villains!". Colin Firth dressed as Santa in the next room being nice to children while his wife is getting jiggy with her bitch?

Colin Firth's awesome plan to paint a target on the windscreen of his plane, paste Ralph's picture on it, and run him over with a plane was pretty cool. I like the way he convinced his wife to come with him.

"Yeah hon, we're going to the desert to pick up your bit... um... that Hungarian guy. Yeah, you should totally come with me."

"Isn't the plane a 2 seater? And why do you have his picture glued to that target? And why are you sharpening the propellor blades?"

"Standard procedure dear. I need to know what he looks like so I can... pick him up. And don't worry about the 2-seater thing, it'll all work out somehow..."

So, I liked it, but I didn't think it was very romantic in the middle section. The death scene, with the love-letter that ends in the dark (with messy handwriting?) was quite nice, and the intrigue elements were cool. There was a lot in there that was beautiful and moving - I just don't like my quasi-religious figures to be cuckolded, and was somewhat surprised by the Ralph-beating and general contempt that the romantic leads had for each other at the start. But then there were palaces of the winds, and death-love-letters, and all manner of nice things. Still, the best bit for me was probably Sayeed from Lost.

He was cool.

Game-chef Challenge!

I saw a post from Mike about the Game-Chef challenge - to write a complete RPG in 9 days, based on a set of ingredients announced at the start of the competition - and thought it sounded like an interesting challenge.

The ingredients went up onto the website on Saturday, and I started thinking about it and putting something together over the weekend. The ideas are fairly well in place now, so the big task is going to be writing the thing. I'm optimistic about it really - I feel that I am bound to learn some useful stuff about writing RPGs, the deadline will make me work harder, and the idea itself is one I'm reasonably happy with.

So, I'm one page in, aiming or hoping for about 25 - 30 pages in total? I've done the pencils for some of the artwork as well. Artwork has nothing to do with the judging, but for it to be something I'm proud to show others I want to include a few pictures, and try to format it nicely.

The basic idea:

Invincible Hench, an international team of crack henchpeople, carry out missions for WINE, an evil organisation attempting to overthrow the governments of the Victorian Era.

How to Score

The last couple of days I've been looking at tracking software, the kind that allows you to programme music using samples. Back in the day a friend introduced me to Screamtracker, a fairly nifty little program that let you make cheesy music. I enjoyed using it, and even 'composed' a couple of pieces of music that I quite liked.
I'm not sure that it copes well with Windows, as it was a DOS based program. I have a copy of it, but have yet to install it. There are loads of cool instruments around for it, each one pretty tiny to download. Much fun.

Screamtracker was superceded by the superior Fasttracker, which had exciting possibilities like stereo. I seem to recall that the 486 that Adam had at the time struggled with the awesome computing power required for Fasttracker, or maybe it was just too big to fit onto a 3 and a quarter floppy. Whatever the case, I never played with Fasttracker much.

Now I'm looking at learning how to use Skaletracker, which appears to be the Third Generation of Screamtracker. It lets you load up instruments/sounds into a loop of 64 beats, maybe up to 99 instruments at a time? That would be bass drum, hihat, cymbal, tom... each one as a separate instrument. So a basic drumbeat would be maybe 5 or 6 columns?

Part of why I'm interested in all this is that it would allow me to make music, potentially to use in short films like the 48 hour film. Over the next year I plan to make some music using tracking software, and then maybe ask the music teacher about the expensive and complicated looking set-up here at school. Both options would be good - Skaltracker as a portable and quick tool, and the school set-up for higckerher quality.

The Best of Vibes

Yes, I have been inducted and brainwashed into a smurfy cult. The experiene of the weekend was so positive that I have entered a state of blissful schmaltz. The wonderful full-on Disney vibe is thriving over on RPG Central, and it's all really, really good.

48 Hours: Sunday and final thoughts

SUNDAY
Debbie and I were much refreshed by our 6 hours of sleep, when we awoke and arose on Sunday. We grabbed a quick bite of toast for breakfast, forgot to put the Sushi in the car that I had intended to eat as real breakfast at Jenni and Lee’s, then headed back down to Wellington. We had to stop for petrol on the way, but we made it down by about 9:15.

Some of the cast and crew had already headed off to the Botanical gardens to shoot the Duel Perilous, and the external Fairy Court stuff. I got changed as quickly as I could, a little worried about my left big toe as it was kind of numb, then headed to the gardens.

It was really nice to see everyone looking less tired, and more genki than they had at the end of the day yesterday. Part of this was the pleasant weather and location, but also I suspect that the break / sleep had been good for people.

We filmed a few scenes, including some ‘emotional’ acting from me that was decidedly flat, then wrapped for the shoot. It was pretty awesome to be at the end of the filming stage – a lot of pressure off me, and a real, substantial sense of achievement to boot.

Highlights of the morning would have to include:

1. Being pulled out from behind Seraph’s back in the duel – not a physically easy task, but it worked OK (and looked great when edited into the film).
2. Lee’s bear puppetry.
3. Me having to act like I was blowing my nose, and instead actually blowing my nose and ending the scene with a huge bogey hanging out of my nose (and then stuffing the hanky back into Seraph’s pocket).
4. Seeing some of the footage from the previous day edited together on Norman’s laptop (he was editing at the botanical gardens while we were shooting).
5. Seeing Seraph completely wrapped up in a rope.
6. Feeling genuinely moved by the Disneyesque line – “You have a couple of friends who can help you.”

We had finished! Amazing! The feeling of relief and achievement was indescribable.

Debbie and I headed off to buy meat pies on the way to Norman’s, where we needed to be available in case of reshoots / ADR. We also took a wee detour via Rongotai, as I was driving on autopilot and completely failed to drive to the right suburb. We did eventually get to the right place though :)

Sunday afternoon featured a lot of sitting around waiting, not being allowed to go downstairs to watch the editing process. We went out to get food for Norman (and others), rerecorded Debbie’s school teacher line (with awesome voice-coaching from Lee), and a few other random sound effects for the film. We also went on a quick rock search, as the rock used in the duel was too… blue?

It was pretty cool seeing everyone taking a breath, and reflecting on what we’d achieved. Of course, Norman didn’t get to take any such breath, as he was still beavering away like crazy.

I brought in a pretentious art film that I’d made a few years earlier to distract us from the waiting. It got a couple of laughs, and it turned out that Seraph knows one of my old flatmates.

Lee’s mother and sister recorded some excellent sounding violin and flute music for the film, the rock band that Lee had organised delivered their Disneyesque track, and we waited some more.

We started to get pretty anxious as the clock ticked past 6pm, then 6:15pm, then 6:30, then 6:45. We were all primed by the door, ready to go, Luke designated as the fastest driver in the group. Debbie and I went ahead to see how long it took to drive, and we made it with about 30 seconds to spare. Unfortunately we knew that the actual tape would be at least 4 minutes behind us, and that even if Luke was the craziest, fastest driver in the universe, we were probably too late.

2 minutes, 41 seconds.

So we missed by a little, but that wasn’t important. The cool thing was the 7:30pm premiere of our film. We all gathered at Jenni and Lee’s, massive banana splits were made, and we watched our film. Jenni’s speech was very touching (especially the first bit: save my space). Norman’s sentiments were also very heartfelt, as were Hix’s. The atmosphere was triumphant, warm, and wonderful. Such a nice feeling.

As I may have mentioned elsewhere, I usually get teary-eyed with embarrassment when I see myself on screen. Seeing myself in this film was nothing but cool. It looked great, the story was funny, and there was so much going on that I had no time to be distracted by embarrassment. It was excellent.

Now, I’m super looking forward to 2 things:

1. Seeing and hearing an audience’s reaction to the film. Debbie and I need to get tickets for the screening, so anyone who’s buying some, let us know.
2. Seeing the director’s cut. What we saw on Sunday was great, and it’s going to be even better when all of the music is put in and the picture is widescreenised.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The people we worked with were all fantastic. The writing team worked super hard on Friday, with a zany, friendly, positive energy. Norman and Mark were there right to the end, even though they knew that they’d be working like crazy right up to the deadline. Scribes and producers and directors worked like crazy while they were there, and over the rest of the weekend.

The filming was a mad-cap, awesome experience. I hadn’t planned to act in anything more than an extra capacity, but I’m damn glad that I agreed to be Bodil (given that it actually worked out – had it gone badly, it would be a very different story!). The tireless effort and unrelenting politeness and friendliness of everyone involved was outstanding.

The wonderful sense of camaraderie at the premiere was brilliant. We really achieved something special over the weekend, and it was a chance for all of us to show our quality (to quote Debbie quoting LotR). Not one person involved in the project gave less than their all, and the product we saw on Sunday is a result of all that effort and energy and good will.

And to echo Debbie again – I love our movie. I am very proud that we made something that has a heart, as well as laughs. I really wanted Max to get his imagination back, I really wanted the library to be saved.

Was the 48 hour film competition good? Did I develop an even greater respect for my friends, and forge new and stronger friendships? Am I damn proud of every member of our team, and of myself?

Hell yes.

48 Hour Film - Saturday

SATURDAY
We dragged ourselves out of bed, had showers in the cold, cold morning, and stumbled back into the car. We were at the production meeting by 7:15, not bad given the night we'd had. Hix had not slept, so there was an 8 page script waiting for us when we got there.

I had contacted Beau about him maybe acting as Bodil de Rezney, as I am not much of an actor, and my endurance levels are not often high. He was willing but not keen, and then he volunteered to be the boom guy, so that settled it. I was acting. Yikes!

Frantic activity ensued, very organised with lots of fantastic people helping out. There was one quiet read-through of the script, but not for the whole team, just for Jenni. People scattered to collect props and costumes and bananas and all sorts of stuff, and I staggered around in some sort of a daze. The Costume Cave didn’t open until 10am, so we had an agonising wait to find out if we could get the costume pieces we wanted. I tried on a shirt of Lee’s as a possibility – quite tight, I must say, but much less unflattering than I would have expected. Good thing I lost a couple of kilos at the start of term, or I wouldn’t even have been able to button it up!

We headed to Wilton Reserve, to shoot a jungle scene. Thankfully, the hard working and brilliant Luke and Sam arrived on set with a pith helmet, a shirt, suspenders (pants-up-inators) and a cool belt thing. Fantastic! The belt thing was midget-sized, but Sam managed to tape it up into a useful configuration. I had costumage! Huzzah!

I then had the quite pleasant experience of being made up by the Worboys sisters. I don’t particularly like having makeup put on me (especially eye liner or mascara or anything that close to my eyes), but getting to sit down in the makeup chair and not move for 10 minutes was awesome. I also liked the idea that my panda-eyes and general haggard appearance would be ameliorated. I then had my hair styled by Debbie and Puggle (to look adventurous), and finally had to actually do some acting.

At this stage, I considered vomiting, but decided it was not necessary or desirable. There were a lot of people watching the performance, a lot of people involved, Seraph and Regan are both excellent actors, and I was there as some cheesy, comical ham roleplayer pretending to be able to act. Thankfully people were very understanding, as I faked my way through the first few shots. I could hear myself mumbling a couple of times, and tried hard to get the lines out distinctly. Unfortunately I was very, very tired so this didn’t always work that well. I stumbled like crazy over the line:

To leave this land it’s clear to see,
We simply have to…

Not the most complex line in the universe, but I struggled to remember it every time.

Then, the line immediately after that was:

Groom the entire tribe of gigantic howler monkeys – so cute! Make an unusual raft from their fur to sail up the river to find the jellyfish that will lead us through the shark infested water to tickle the trout that will give us the key to the fairy court, where the Fairy King will show us the way out!

I was not terribly confident about that one, unsurprisingly. I practiced a couple of times, with many stumbles and lost trains of thought. Then the camera went on, and action was called.

First take, I pretty much got it. Maybe 1 stumble? Then 2 or 3 more takes, and I managed to get the speech out pretty unmangled each time. I have no idea how, but I got it done. That was a pretty huge confidence boost, as I knew that that was the hardest dialogue I had to deliver, and that I was finished with it early.

The other confidence booster was when I was asked to deliver a line in a more over the top way, and I did a very, very silly version of it to start with. People in the crew actually laughed, which helped to ease some of my tension and self-consciousness.

Two other incredibly cool things that I can remember from the dim haze of that morning:

1. Seraph being pelted with bananas. It was so much fun getting all the banana wranglers around and flinging skins and whole bananas about. It was also fantastic seeing him lying on the ground, covered from the waist up in bananas and skins. It comes across really well on screen too, and was hilarious in real life.
2. The monkey noises, lead by Giffy. Giffy had offered her services as a high quality monkey noise generator, and became the lead monkey in a team comprised of members of the costume and makeup departments, the production manager and a couple of actors and other crew. It was fantastic to fill the reserve with the noise of angry monkeys, so much fun!

More filming, then a quick relocate to another part of the reserve to film the imagination training montage. We were getting towards 1pm by the time we got that shot, so lunch was looming as a need. Luke and Sam raced off to the supermarket to provide some much needed snackables at the next location - the library in Wadestown.

We ate outside, then headed in for a lull in my activity. The library sequence didn't feature Bodil de Rezney at all, so I had a few hours where I could relax. I did lie down for 15 minutes with a cushion under my lower back, which was awesome, then proceeded to make myself generally useless but not in anyone's way. I did get to do some work for the Art Department, making some posters for the storytime area. We wanted to have lots of posters made by kids, of the "Please Save Our Library" kind. Several had been made in the morning, but we wanted to cover more of a wall, so we made a few extras. My favourite (and one I'd like to get as a souvenir) was the "Robo-Hacknor says reading is cool!" poster, with a robot with a lazer reading ray. It was so cool I had to sign my real name on it, rather than a kid's name. Hee hee. Debbie and Sam and others made posters and dressed the set, and then filming started.

I also decided to make a book for Violet (the librarian) to be holding in the first scene. I made a 4 minute book cover for "Bodil de Rezney goes to the moon", which I also had help with. It looked pretty silly, but kinda cool.

Debbie and I decided the time had come for junk food - burgers in particular, so we ducked out and went to Maccers for some salty junkfood. It was pretty good, and kept me alive a little longer. We were back at the library in time to help get our lead into his school uniform for a flashback scene, for which we recorded an audio bit that was hilarious. The last word of the flashback was 'sensible', and was supposed to echo at the end of the flashback scene. Debbie and I thought that it would be hilarious to get everyone in the library to do the echo in chorus. It ended up being even more over the top and silly than that, and it was heaps of fun. And it made the cut, too!

After filming finished at the library, feeling very tired but without the time for any real sort of a break, Debbie and I headed to Turnbull House for a Fairytale LARP that just happened to be on the same weekend. We were pretty shattered, but we scouted the location and found out what rooms we could use. We passed the information on to the production manager, then started to change into our costumes. Jenni called to let us know that people were tired, and needed a break. I made silly comments about 'going like a man', then breathed a sigh of relief. It would have been nice to get set up, maybe rehearse a scene or tow or even record something before the LARP, but it would have been less down time for others and more stress for me, so I'm glad people took a break.

Costumed and V'd up, I spent 2 hours LARPing as Robin Hood. I decided that Robin was a shady criminal who wanted to set up a franchise of Hoods - a hood in every forest! This kept me entertained for a while, but tiredness and seediness started to creep in once I'd exhausted all my immediate ideas (2 hours in), so I ducked out to buy painkillers and a snack. I was gone for about half an hour, and when I got back I learned that people had been looking for me. I even had a rumour reported back to me that I'd gone out for pancakes? The LARP ended a little after 10pm, which was good, and we had a quick debrief and group photo before inviting many of the LARPers to join us downstairs to film the Fairy Court. We had about an hour, and we got what we needed, which was kind of amazing really.

At midnight, security turned up to kick us out, and Debbie and I made a hasty retreat back to the car and back home. We didn't help out much with the carrying, but there were other, less tired people there, and we had the longest drive to get home by a fair margin.

On the way home we talked of many things, mainly to keep me awake. I expressed my wonder at the fact that I was still functioning, and that both Debbie and I were still so genki. We talked about the day's filming, what had been fun and what had been difficult. It was really, really nice to be in a private space, and nicer still to shower and fall into bed. The cat was very pleased to see us, and it was only a matter of seconds between my head hitting the pillow and me falling into a deep, deep sleep.

We had to be back in town at 9am.

48 Hour Film - Friday

The 48 hour film competition was a great experience, and I'm super glad that I was part of a team. What follows will be a rambling account of my experience of the weekend / process.
FRIDAY

At 6:30 the writing team plus Norman and Mark assembled at Svend's house to get some sort of a script written. We'd practiced the first part of the process on Tuesday, and were all keen and ready to go. At about 7:02 the phonecall came through, we received our details, and the work began.

Genre: Disney Family Movie
Prop: A banana
Line: Please don't do that
Character: Bodil de Rezney, an animal lover

Ideas on the genre conventions were thrown onto the table, we talked about what kind of Disney Family Movie we were interested in, and then we started coming up with plot ideas. Pretty quickly, Debz pitched the idea that we all knew was the one right off the bat:

A quirky librarian has to save her library from being destroyed by an evil property developer.

We added a series of books about Bodil de Rezney, written by the librarian and in manuscript form. The evil property developer had to learn his lesson by the end of the film. The books would be portals into magical worlds.

We ran through a game of Universalis to get a structure done, then brainstormed and problem solved. A second structural run-through gave us our character arcs, the scenes we wanted, and some dialogue.

This took us through to about 11pm. Jenni and Lee had arrived, helped with the problem solving, and made some calls to get actors and locations primed.

After a short break, Hix broke the overview into sections which we divided up and wrote in pairs or individually. We were all super-keen on the idea and structure, and the characters too. Svend had been nominated as the actor to play Bodil, but decided to graciously bow out before it was too late. He nominated me, and I said that I was willing to do it, though I hoped that there'd be a better choice.

The writing went on till about 2am maybe, when we assembled the first draft of the actual script. It was 20 pages long. We did a read-through to see how it fell together - it was pretty awesome. I loved the script. I was well happy.

Then Hix and Norman pointed out that it would cut together to be at least 12 minutes long, and would take us a week to film. The maximum length for the competition was 7 minutes, so we had a lot of cutting to do.

A group savaging got the script down to 12 pages, an improvement but still too long by a fair bit. We lost some good material in that first edit, and Hix warned us that he was going to have to cut another 5 pages to get it down to length. This was about 4:30 in the morning, so we decided to break for the night, let Hix get the script down, and meet at Jenni and Lee's in the morning at 7am.

We drove out to Lower Hutt to stay at Debbie's mum's house. We were there for less than 2 hours, maybe 1 hour of that asleep?

29: Day Two

So far being 29 has been a mixed bag. Some parts have been very good, others not so. This is very similar to being 28, though I currently have a higher proportion of birthdays-per-day-of-being-the-age to not.
I am pretty exhausted, which is for suck. I think there's a very good reason why I'm part of a Thursday roleplaying group, not a Tuesday gaming group. This week will feature the same time commitment as roleplaying on both Tuesday and Thursday, which is a bit rough. It saps my energy and leaves me zombie-like. Moreso than usual.

I suspect that a large chunk of it is the driving. An hour or so each way is a lot of driving to do in an evening, after a day at work. It makes me a tired Panda.

On the plus side, many awesome wishes of wellness and presents and delicious lemon chicken and birthday goodness. And the costume person at school (the person in charge of storing and sorting all the costumes the school has accumulated over the years) has given me a leather vest / waistcoat, a hood, and a couple of tunics to try out for this weekend. Very kind. I suspect that the Toby Belch costume that I made will be more appropriate than the tan tunic as it is green, but it should combine well with the waistcoat and hood. Maybe. I'm going for a low key Robin Hood.

Now I must plan relief lessons, on the off chance that I'm not feeling well tomorrow. I think I have an idea of how to make it easy for myself, which is always a good thing.

There will probably be no blogging until after the 48 hour film contest, as I'm likely to be pretty busy...

Birthday Blogging

So far my birthday isn’t going too badly. My Y9 extension class had the Australasian Science competition period one, which meant that I didn’t have to teach them. Very nice way to start the day. I stayed in Assembly and watched a Y9 band perform (very talented young men, 3 of whom I teach), then mosied over to the office to drop off my register and log in to a computer to blog. I thought that I’d better check in my classroom, just in case I was supposed to be covering a class or something. Good thing I did, as it turned out that 4 students had forgotten to pay for the competition, and were waiting in the cold outside my class.
So, with 4 students in class, I decided to meet their educational needs by getting them to play Dig and Cow. I lost both games (was the outright loser in

, and died 3rd in Cow). Quite fun, and interesting to be playing in a card game alongside students. It’s a little different to playing card games with older, louder, more confident kids. By the end of the lesson there was some sniggering at cards, and some assertive playing, but no smack talk. I guess they’ll learn about smack talk as they get older.

So then I ate hot food at interval, which was yummy, and had milo too, which I always have. It is my hot drink of choice, and helps me get through the day.

My Year 12 class didn’t exactly do much work, or rather some of them didn’t. And now I have to run lunch-eating, then a lunchtime detention, then I’ve got the afternoon free to plan the end of the week.

All in all, not a bad day at work for a birthday.

Script Writing Practice Run

We had a practice run through last night as a writing group for the 48 hour film competition. We used a storytelling system called ‘Universalis’, which was pretty cool in that it encouraged everyone to have input, allowed us to resolve conflicts fairly simply, and meant (as Debbie pointed out later) that no one person ‘owned’ the script, or was likely to be offended by subsequent revisions.
The process was pretty smooth, and we had a good outline (second version, having substantially revised the first) with a few lines of dialogue sketched out inside of 3 hours. We’ll obviously be staying up late on Friday to get it nailed down, but the process is a robust one and I’m really looking forward to doing it for real.

As a side note, it was really nice holding the practice at Svend’s place, as he is a very generous host. There were wedges and dipping sauce, chippies, drinks, cheese and crackers, grapes, and all manner of niceties. Very, very pleasant. Kudos to Svend!

Busy Week Ahead

Tonight is the first writers' meeting for Jenni's Angels, the 48 Hour Film Competition group that Debbie and I are part of. We're driving down to Welington to have a practice run at writing as a group, with a set of criteria (genre, prop, line etc.). I don't expect that we'll be home before 11pm, so we're going to have to get work sorted for tomorrow pretty promptly (preferably today - as in I should be doing it now).
Then on Thursday we're gaming with our Thursday group plus 2 guests, playing through a Blue Rose scenario that's being written up for the SDC. Should be cool.

Then the weekend itself, which will probably be crazy busy. There's writing on Friday, shooting and LARPing on Saturday, probably more shooting on Sunday, then going home and doing chores. I am hugely keen on the 48 hr comp, and on seeing our product on the big screen at the Paramount, but it's likely to be a hectic couple of days.

Should be excellent.

Palindrome-a-go-go

I always thought that it was a shame that palindrome wasn't one. That is to say, ever since I was about 10 and actually knew what a palindrome was. I don't think my childhood years were consumed with a passionate regret that linguists had not decided to call them 'palinlap's or even 'palindromordnilap's, which is fun to say.
I am teaching Holes by Louis Sachar with my Year 9 class, and the main character's name is a palindrome. This led to a discussion of palindromes, getting the kids to come up with some, and then bringing in the Weird Al album Poodle Hat today and playing them the song Bob.

It was fun, but I don't think I'll make music a regular part of the lesson - too many complaints / taste clashes / requests to turn it up. Bah humbug I say. More writing, less talking.

Not that I'm at all grumpy about the Monday morningness. Not at all :) It's actually been quite a good start to the week, though the fire drill that's starting in 3 minutes' time may not be fun. Sigh. Maybe I'll go stand on the field now, so as to avoid the painful alarms.

I leave you with the following excerpt from the excellently written Bob:

Rise to vote, sir, do geese see god?
"Do nine men interpret?", "Nine men," I nod
Rats live on no evil star,
Won't lovers revolt now?"
Race fast safe car
Pa's a sap,
Ma is as selfless as I am
May a moody baby doom a yam

Title Field, eh?

So, I just found the Title Field option in blogger. I came across it when changing the comments on Debbie's blog. So now I must post to try it out.
I shall also make this a more... pointful post... by briefly describing my last lesson of the week.

I had a Year 12 class, and we're doing creative writing at the moment. I gave them a pretty standard task - give a detailed list of a character's characteristics, then write a scene using that character. They had to choose from a list for each - Princess, Doctor, Student, Criminal... and Learning a Secret, Eating Breakfast, Driving, Waiting in a Cafe... Pretty straightforward stuff. I had intended to go over some paperwork with them after that, but I discovered 5 minutes into the class (when I wandered off to the English Department to pick the paperwork up, having told them to start on the work), that someone else had stolen all the sheets I needed. Every single one. I couldn't even read the stuff to the kids.

I told them this, and explained that we could move on to the next activity (another writing task) or they could have some extra time to work on the starter. They opted for games instead. Seeing as I wuite like my Y12 class, I said that as long as they ran the games and I could just sit at the back and do marking, it was fine by me. 2 students volunteered, and they ran the class through 2 group writing games. The first was the one where each person writes a sentence, then folds the paper over and passes it on. Very random, and very silly. I quite enjoyed the finished products. They asked me to judge, and my final marks were:

7 and a half cats out of xylophone for Team One
1,326 grapes out of Salad for Team Two

They seemed to have a good time, and they enjoyed my serious marker's comments for their very silly stories.

New Toy - Part Two

It's still cool. I have been listening to music at school, and it is nice. Music makes me happy. I also enjoyed explaining what an ipod shuffle was to an older teacher (in her late fifties) who's a bit of a technophobe - she was entirely startled by the idea that you can fit 90 songs onto something the size of a cigarette lighter, and wanted to know how you get the songs onto it.
Yesterday I had to report back to my department on a course I attended last term. The course was pretty awful - Teaching Gifted Kids in English. The presenter spent way too much time talking about how awesome her children were, and how much the kids she'd worked with were super-beings, and how none of the people in the room could ever hope to understand what it's like to be 'gifted'. That really got a few people frowning! There are some smart slackers who've ended up in teaching, myself included, and being told that gifted students are in a league we can't even comprehend was more than a little patronising and inaccurate. Profoundly gifted kids, the one-in-a-million kind may be a little different, but regular type gifted? That's defined by the ministry as something like the top 10%, which is not that extraordinary. Even the stricter MENSA cut-off of top 2% would likely have included more than one person in the room. Silly presenter!

The course materials were good, and the catered lunch was excellent. I also reported back that I bought a good bookcase at lunchtime from K-Mart, which the department approved of. It was actually quite fun and quite funny - a sort of 5 minute sitting down stand-up routine on how bad the course was. I wonder what the other attendee from the department would have added had she been there? Maybe we'll find out next week.

After school last night was the finale of Season One of Orpheus. Some fairly big changes, and a very enjoyable session. I am looking forward to Season Two, and also to the one-offs that will sit between Seasons. I shall say no more, as spoilers may slip out for other Orpheus groups. Suffice to say, it was good.

New Toy

I am a very happy Matt. Debbie wanted to get me a nice birthday present, and I wasn't sure what I wanted, but I eventually fell in love with a present idea, and now have it (as a slightly early birthday present - a week early to be precise).
My early thoughts were of a new, light-weight digital camera, as I quite like taking photos, but our old camera is a little clunky. Digital cameras are not cheap, however, and we already have one. So I wasn't sure about this.

Then I was thinking about clothes stuff - like a winter coat, as the excellent winter coat I got way back in 7th form is no longer Matt-sized, as 7th form Matt was both skinnier than present Matt, but also less broad in the shoulders. Hence it's not so much a coat that fits me any more.

Then I was thinking about DVDs, such as the awesome Red Dwarf series, but then we decided to buy them for us, sooner :)

Finally, I thought of the present I wanted, and am now listening to - an ipod shuffle! It's neat and little and holds 512mb of songs (well, it's currently set up to be a 100mb flash drive with the rest filled up with music, and the stuff that makes the ipod go takes up some room, but I can still fit many albums of music onto it). It's neat! I like the shuffle feature, and the size of it, and the recharging from the USB port-ness, and the flash-drive use is cool too.

So that's my awesome birthday present from Debbie! I'm so lucky! And she gave it to me early so I can listen to it right now! Huzzah!

Being Back at School is Great!

I've really missed the students, the getting up early, and the pleasant sensation of being woken up by an alarm clock. It's really nice to be back in the saddle again, instead of adrift on a sofa of directionless enjoyment.
That reminds me of Debbie's ambition to become a sofa pirate, surfing TV channels with her first mate Austen, an raiding the land-lubber fridge for snackables. I believe there was even a plan to mobilise the sofa so that it could go raiding other houses, and the video store. Avast!

I am mostly coherent and surviving, which is a nice feeling, though I have 2 more classes this afternoon. I am looking forward to the after-school chilling out, oh yes indeed. Though a student has already threatened to hand in an assignment this afternoon, which was due in during the last week of term. I just finished marking those assignments, and now I have another one? What are these evil children trying to do to me???

Ahem. Now I must go and make up some notes about punctuation for my Y11 class. The number of students who don't know how to punctuate speech is quite terrifying. I'm going to write it in full sentences today, rather than just show them examples. Maybe that'll sink in?

Before you close the speech marks, you must include a piece of punctuation. Commas, full stops, question marks and exclamation marks are common examples.

Sigh.....